NAGPRA
Definition
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Public Law 101-601, 1990), a US federal statute requiring museums and federal agencies to inventory Native American human remains, funerary objects, and cultural items, and to repatriate them to culturally affiliated tribes on request.
- Full name
- Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
- Citation
- Public Law 101-601 (1990)
- Jurisdiction
- United States federal statute
- Requires
- Inventory and repatriation of Native American remains and cultural items
- Applies to
- Museums and federal agencies
Common questions
How does NAGPRA affect what a forensic anthropologist can do with skeletal reference collections?+
NAGPRA requires institutions holding Native American human remains to inventory them and offer repatriation to culturally affiliated tribes on request, which has led many teaching and reference collections to remove or restrict access to affected remains, changing what material is available for research and training.
Does NAGPRA apply to remains found on private land?+
NAGPRA's core inventory and repatriation duties apply to museums and federal agencies holding existing collections and to discoveries on federal or tribal land; discoveries on private land are governed more by state law, though the ethical principles NAGPRA embodies increasingly inform private and academic practice as well.
What counts as a 'culturally affiliated' tribe under the Act?+
Cultural affiliation means a demonstrated relationship of shared group identity that can reasonably be traced between present-day tribes and an earlier group whose remains or objects are being considered, established through geographic, biological, archaeological, or oral tradition evidence rather than by geography alone.
Related terms
- Bass Donated Skeletal Collection
- A consent-based skeletal collection of over 1,750 individuals at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, established by William Bass in 1981. All individuals...
- Cultural Affiliation (NAGPRA)
- The link, established by a preponderance of evidence, between a present-day tribe or Native Hawaiian organisation and human remains or cultural items...
- Culturally Unidentifiable Remains
- Human remains in US museum and agency collections whose cultural affiliation with any present-day tribe cannot be established by the preponderance-of-evidence standard....
- De Montfort Precedent (2018)
- The return by De Montfort University Leicester of skeletal remains (Asaru-Ojo) to the Ogoni community in Nigeria, conducted voluntarily under the Human...
- Hamann-Todd Collection
- A skeletal reference collection of approximately 3,100 individuals at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, accumulated 1893 to 1939 from unclaimed bodies...
- Population Affinity
- The preferred modern forensic-anthropological term for the relationship between an unidentified individual's skeletal morphology and a modern reference population. Replaces the older...
- Terry Collection
- A documented skeletal collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington DC), assembled from cadavers donated to Washington University's anatomy...
- UNDRIP
- The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (A/RES/61/295, 2007), adopted by 143 states. Articles 11, 12, and 31 affirm indigenous...
- Willed-Body Donation
- The voluntary, pre-mortem consent by an individual to donate their remains to a specific research programme after death. Distinguished from anatomical donation...