NAGPRA Is a Living Relationship: Addressing our Responsibilities and Growing in our Relationships with NAGPRA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent changes to NAGPRA press museums to revisit and update inventories, assemble documentation, and reach out to Native American communities, establishing new relationships or re-engaging with communities in more expansive consultations, all activities that demand investment in time and personnel to handle the complexity of legacy collections. Drawing on experiences working with academic programs, university museums and federal repositories in New Mexico, this poster will highlight recent successes in multifaceted training for museum professionals, emphasizing the legal and cultural responsibilities critical to supporting NAGPRA work with awareness, empathy and respect. Building and sustaining relationships with descendant communities is essential—not only for compliance but for cultivating trust and prioritizing Indigenous voices in the repatriation process. The success of NAGPRA lies in this relationship-centered approach, where Indigenous knowledge and institutions’ data is shared, communication of diverse perspectives is welcomed, and collaboration guides the work, ensuring that repatriation efforts are not static obligations but living, evolving processes in support of decolonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53991