Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

NAGPRA Issues in Hawaii, 2020

Coverage of NAGPRA-related topics in Hawaii first came to this website in 2003 when the national NAGPRA review committee decided to devote its national meeting to the Kawaihae (Forbes Cave) controversy. Forbes cave was the most intensively covered topic from 2003 to 2007. But other topics also came to public attention, including Bishop Museum, the Emerson collection repatriated and reburied at Kanupa Cave, the discovery of ancient bones during a major construction project at Ward Center (O'ahu), construction of a house built above burials at the shorefront at Naue, Ha'ena, Kaua'i; etc.

The Forbes cave controversy up until the NAGPRA Review Committee hearing in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 9-11, 2003 was originally described and documented at:
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagpraforbes.html

The conflict among Bishop Museum, Hui Malama, and several competing groups of claimants became so complex and contentious that the controversy was the primary focus of the semiannual national meeting of the NAGPRA Review Committee meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota May 9-11, 2003. A webpage was created to cover that meeting and followup events related to it. But the Forbes Cave controversy became increasingly complex and contentious, leading to public awareness of other related issues. By the end of 2004, the webpage focusing on the NAGPRA Review Committee meeting and its aftermath had become exceedingly large, at more than 250 pages with an index of 22 topics at the top. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagpraforbesafterreview.html

That large webpage became so difficult to use that it was stopped on December 29, 2004; and a new webpage was created to collect news reports for NAGPRA issues in Hawai'i during year 2005. An index for 2005 appears at the beginning, and readers may then scroll down to find the detailed coverage of each topic. For coverage of NAGPRA issues in Hawai'i in 2005 (about 250 pages), see:
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagprahawaii2005.html

For year 2006 another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagprahawaii2006.html

For year 2007, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/bigfiles40/nagprahawaii2007.html

For year 2008, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/big60/nagprahawaii2008.html

For year 2009, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/nagprahawaii2009.html

For year 2010, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/nagprahawaii2010.html

For year 2011, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/nagprahawaii2011.html

For year 2012, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/nagprahawaii2012.html

For year 2013, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/nagprahawaii2013.html

For year 2014, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/nagprahawaii2014.html

For year 2015, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/nagprahawaii2015.html

For year 2016, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/nagprahawaii2016.html

For year 2017, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/nagprahawaii2017.html

For year 2018, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/nagprahawaii2018.html

For year 2019, another new webpage was created, following the same general format. See:
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/nagprahawaii2019.html

NOW BEGINS 2020

================

LIST OF TOPICS FOR 2020: Full coverage of each topic follows the list; the list is in roughly chronological order, created as events unfold during 2020.

(1) February 29 to March 3: Group of Native Hawaiians escorts home ancestral bones from England. OHA and a hui of cultural practitioners received 20 iwi kupuna housed for over a century at the University of Cambridge, ending a decade-long effort to return the Native Hawaiian remains to Hawai'i. Followup article in September describes a new tomb and altar being constructed to inter the skulls in the tourist area at the top of the Nu'uanu Pali overlook, under supervision of Eddie Ayau who gained fame in 2003 for demanding that Forbes Cave artifacts held at Bishop Museum must be reburied in the cave where they were found.

(2) 11-year controversy over Kawaiaha'o Church burials unearthed during construction
(2a) April 24: TV news report says O'ahu Island Burial Council has approved a plan to rebury the remains where they were originally unearthed, next to the church; but project would be expensive
(2b) June 1: OHA monthly newspaper has major article authored by Eddie Ayau, head of Hui Malama i Na Kupuna o Hawai'i Nei, describing history of the unearthing of the 700 Kawaiaha'o Church burials, and unanimous decision of the island burial council to approve a plan for reburial-in-place. Article places pressure on church to accept the plan and to not pursue appeal of court decision that ruled church had violated the law by failing to do adequate archeological study or consultation with biological or cultural descendants.

(3) June 18: New York Times reports DNA analysis of 5,000-year-old bones in royal Irish tomb proves brother-sister incest was done to produce future god-like rulers who would presumably have great spiritual power. Article belongs in NAGPRA webpage because it shows value of analyzing ancient bones to gain historical/cultural knowledge, and it shows that Caucasians are willing to do such analysis on bones of fellow Caucasians (contrary to claim of Hawaiian activists who say that Caucasian archeologists do invasive studies of bones of other races as a way of asserting oppressive dominance). This article was reprinted in the June 19 hardcopy of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, presumably because high-ranking Hawaiian natives engaged in brother/sister incest to ensure high spiritual power in a child who would become a future leader [for example, Kauikeaouli Kamehameha III and his sister Nahi'ena'ena]

(4) August 1, 2020 OHA monthly newspaper has column in both Hawaiian and English by Eddie Ayau, head of Hui Malama i Na Kupuna o Hawai'i Nei, explaining his concept of the spiritual essence of moepu (artifacts buried alongside bones); this topic was the core issue in the controversy 15-20 years ago regarding the Kawaihae Cave (Forbes Cave) artifacts held at Bishop Museum, regarding whether they should be kept for study and education or whether they should be repatriated and reburied never to be seen again.

(5) Aug 10: How a sacred shield from the Pueblo of Acoma turned up at a Paris auction house, and how the tribe fought for its return with help of FBI and U.S. diplomacy. The shield was considered a living being; and tribal elders welcomed its return with ceremony.

(6) Aug 15: Bones found on multimillion-dollar oceanfront lot which is being reshaped into a luxury compound to be owned by Obama, causing tension with Native Hawaiians. The bones were unearthed where a swimming pool and septic system are being built, and they were reburied months later on another part of the property. A state official made the decision to relocate the remains.

(7) Oct 27: When NAGPRA was passed in 1990 it did not apply to the Smithsonian Museum to require repatriation of bones and artifacts. Smithsonian has now decided to comply with NAGPRA voluntarily. News report focuses on Seminole tribal repatriations from Smithsonian, and ambiguity over which tribe deserves specific items.

(8). Nov 16: "The Texas Observer" article "Bringing the Dead Home" describes and laments the fact that hundreds of tribes are unable to use NAGPRA to force museums and archeologists to repatriate bones and artifacts because NAGPRA applies only to federally recognized tribes.

================

FULL TEXT OF ARTICLES FOR 2020

(1) Group of Native Hawaiians escorts home ancestral bones from England OHA and a hui of cultural practitioners received 20 iwi kupuna housed for over a century at the University of Cambridge, ending a decade-long effort to return the Native Hawaiian remains to Hawai'i.
(1a) OHA official website news release;
(1b) More detailed and insightful report in Honolulu Star-Advertiser, with Conklin detailed online comment
(1c) KITV4 television news report closely based on OHA news release
(1d) Honolulu Star-Advertiser article in September describes a new tomb and altar being constructed to inter the skulls in the tourist area at the top of the Nu'uanu Pali overlook, under supervision of Eddie Ayau who gained fame in 2003 for demanding that Forbes Cave artifacts held at Bishop Museum must be reburied in the cave where they were found. See the NAGPRA webpages covering 2003-2007 for details.

-----------------

https://www.oha.org/news/group-of-native-hawaiians-to-bring-home-iwi-kupuna-housed-at-english-institution-for-over-a-century/
OHA official website news release

Group of Native Hawaiians to bring home iwi kūpuna housed at English institution for over a century

CAMBRIDGE, England (February 29, 2020) �� OHA and a hui of cultural practitioners today received 20 iwi kūpuna (ancestral bones) housed for over a century at the University of Cambridge, ending a decade-long effort to return the Native Hawaiian remains to Hawaiʻi.

�The international repatriation of iwi kūpuna, moepū (funerary possessions) and mea kapu (sacred objects) continues to represent a significant priority for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs,� said Sylvia Hussey, OHA Ka Pouhana (OHA Chief Executive Officer). �We extend a warm mahalo to our team of experts and the dedicated community members whose passion and commitment are what made the return of these kūpuna possible. In addition, we thank the University of Cambridge for their respectful collaboration with us. OHA hopes that this unprecedented repatriation by the University of Cambridge can serve as a model for other international museums and collections to return the ancestral remains of native peoples.�

Professor Stephen J. Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge said: �The University of Cambridge is honoured to be able to return the iwi kūpuna to their ancestral home. The iwi kūpuna came to be in Cambridge many decades ago and it is only appropriate that we now do what we can to help them complete their journey. I am sorry that their journey home has been so long interrupted but I hope they may now travel in peace.�

Today�s event is part of a major initiative by OHA and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners to repatriate iwi kūpuna from international collections. Earlier this week, the hui of Native Hawaiians held consultations with six German institutions regarding claims for repatriation of iwi kūpuna, moepū and mea kapu. In 2017, the Museum of Ethnology Dresden in Germany transferred three iwi kūpuna to OHA and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners, marking the first time the eastern German state of Saxony repatriated indigenous human remains.

�Humanity benefits every time human beings agree to restore dignity to the deceased whose remains were removed without consent, which is to say, when we collectively embrace and celebrate �ohana (family),� said Edward Halealoha Ayau, a volunteer member of the hui that traveled to England and a longtime advocate of iwi kūpuna repatriation.

The hui of Native Hawaiians on this trip includes:
* Mehana Hind, OHA Community Engagement Director;
* Edward Halealoha Ayau, former Executive Director, Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawaiʻi Nei;
* Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, assistant specialist, American Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa;
* Mana Caceres, cultural practitioner; and
* Keoki Pescaia, cultural practitioner.

The hui will receive 20 iwi poʻo (skulls) originating from Nuʻuanu, Waiʻalae and Honolulu. The iwi were transferred from three separate private collections to the University of Cambridge between 1866 and 1903.

This will be the first time in the 800-year history of the University of Cambridge that the institution is returning remains based on a request from an indigenous group. The iwi kūpuna are among 18,000 individuals from around the world housed at the University of Cambridge�s Duckworth Laboratory, one of the largest repositories of human remains in the world.

According to Dr. Cressida Fforde, who led historic documentation research efforts on behalf of OHA: �This is an historic moment in the history of repatriation from British institutions. Cambridge University should be congratulated for recognizing the right of Indigenous peoples to the repatriation of their human remains, as is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.�

The Native Hawaiian hui will escort the iwi kūpuna home, arriving in Honolulu on Sunday evening, March 1. OHA will then support the process to identify lineal and cultural descendants by the O�ahu Island Burial Council and State Historic Preservation Division. Consultations regarding reburial will follow.

�While OHA is pleased with the outcome of this repatriation, we recognize that there is much more work to do with other museums across the globe as we continue the sacred work to restore our ancestral Hawaiian foundation,� said OHA Chair Colette Machado.

-------------------

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/03/03/hawaii-news/20-native-hawaiian-skulls-are-returned-from-england/?HSA=2d6f4f865fd199134e3cac0a7298c4965aaff3f4
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, March 3, 2020

20 Native Hawaiian skulls are returned from England

By Timothy Hurley

** Photo caption
OFFICE OF HAWAIIAN AFFAIRS
Twenty skulls taken from Hawaii in the 19th century arrived Sunday, following a long appeal to the University of Cambridge to return the items. A Native Hawaiian delegation also held a consultation last week with German institutions regarding claims for repatriation for other items. Halealoha and Keoki Pescaia look over wood bowls and stone adzes at the talks.

Human remains taken from Hawaii in the name of science have been returned to the islands after more than a century in a museum in England.

Twenty skulls originally from Nuuanu, Waialae and Honolulu and taken from Hawaii in the 19th century arrived here Sunday evening following a 10-year campaign to persuade the University of Cambridge to part with the items.

�This is a long time in coming,� Office of Hawaiian Affairs Community Engagement Director Mehana Hind said Monday.

The homecoming represents the latest effort in a growing initiative by OHA and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners to repatriate iwi kupuna, or skeletal remains, from international collections.

Last week, in a move to bring even more iwi kupuna home, a delegation of Native Hawaiians met with six German institutions regarding claims for repatriation of iwi kupuna, moepu (funerary possessions) and mea kapu (sacred objects).

In 2017 the Museum of Ethnology Dresden in Germany handed over three iwi kupuna to OHA and cultural practitioners, the first time the eastern German state of Saxony repatriated indigenous human remains.

On Saturday a ceremony was held in England marking the latest iwi kupuna transfer, the first time the University of Cambridge had returned remains based on a request from an indigenous group, officials said.

The university acquired the Hawaiian remains from three separate private collections between 1866 and 1903, and they joined one of the world�s largest research repositories of human remains at the Duckworth Laboratory Collection in that institution�s Department of Archaeology.

In a statement, Stephen J. Toope, University of Cambridge vice chancellor, said, �The University of Cambridge is honored to be able to return the iwi kupuna to their ancestral home. The iwi kupuna came to be in Cambridge many decades ago and it is only appropriate that we now do what we can to help them complete their journey. I am sorry that their journey home has been so long interrupted but I hope they may now travel in peace.�

Edward Halealoha Ayau, former executive director of Hui Malama i na Kupuna o Hawai�i Nei, helped to negotiate the return of the remains. Ayau said the most significant thing to come out of the effort was the apology. �They are one of the leading institutions in the world. For them to say that sends a signal to the rest of the museums,� he said.

Hind said Hawaiians are witnessing �an awakening of humanity� among museum directors following many years of persistent badgering. �It took a lot of years of not accepting the answer no,� she said.

Native Hawaiians traditionally believe that the mana, or the spiritual essence and power, of a person resides in the bones, or iwi. For many Native Hawaiians it is important for the bones of a deceased person to complete their journey and return to the ground to impart their mana.

�This is an historic moment in the history of repatriation from British institutions,� said Cressida Fforde, who led historic documentation research efforts on behalf of OHA. �Cambridge University should be congratulated for recognizing the right of indigenous peoples to the repatriation of their human remains, as is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.�

In addition to Hind and Ayau, the Hawaiian delegation that traveled to Europe included Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and cultural practitioners Mana Caceres and Keoki Pescaia.

The next step for the remains is for the Oahu Island Burial Council and the State Historic Preservation Division to identify lineal and cultural descendants, followed by consultations regarding reburial.

----- ** Ken Conklin's online comment, with clickabe links provided where newspaper would not allow them

The repatriation of ancestral bones and artifacts reported here is a very important chapter in a much longer story, with many twists and turns.
Copy/paste this line into your browser or Google for an in-depth analysis:
Hawaiian bones 3 Rs
"Hawaiian Bones -- The 3 Rs -- Rites For the Dead, Rights Of the Living, and Respect for All (Detailed Version)"
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/big60/HawaiianBonesDetailed.html
During the 1980s and 1990s Eddie Ayau created the activist group Hui Malama i Na Kupuna O Hawai'i Nei. He was a staffer for Senator Inouye, and worked with Inouye to create and get Congressional passage of the 1990 NAGPRA law (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). Ayau and Hui Malama have a history of working tirelessly and with deep sincerity to protect native Hawaiian bones and associated cultural artifacts buried with them, and to force "repatriation" and reburial of such items from museums in Hawaii and around the world. In the process Ayau and Hui Malama allegedly engaged in illegal activities, sabotaged the efforts of other Hawaiian groups whose views were different, allegedly misspent government money and allegedly engaged in insider-assisted thefts of important ancient bones and artifacts from Bishop Museum.
To begin finding out about the history of the Hui Malama group, or Eddie Ayau, copy/paste the following line of keywords into your browser or Google as a single item:
Hui Malama Eddie Ayau
"Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawai'i Nei -- Who This Organization Is, and How It Operates"
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagprahuimalama.html
For a more in-depth understanding of the whole topic of repatriating bones and artifacts from museums to the groups or tribal organizations claiming ancestral rights to them, search for the following topic:
NAGPRA Hawaii
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/nagprahawaii.html

---------------------------

https://www.kitv.com/story/41836128/group-of-native-hawaiians-escorts-home-ancestral-bones-from-england
KITV4 television news

Group of Native Hawaiians escorts home ancestral bones from England
OHA and a hui of cultural practitioners received 20 iwi kupuna housed for over a century at the University of Cambridge, ending a decade-long effort to return the Native Hawaiian remains to Hawai'i.
Saturday, February 29th 2020, 7:07 PM HST by Diane Ako

Cambridge, England - A long overdue homecoming for the remains of nearly two dozen Native Hawaiians. Their bones arrived at the University of Cambridge between 1866 and 1903.

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs and a hui of cultural practitioners on Saturday received 20 iwi kupuna or ancestral bones- and are currently on their way back to Hawaii with the remains. They arrive in Honolulu on Sunday night.

"The international repatriation of iwi kupuna, moepu (funerary possessions) and mea kapu (sacred objects) continues to represent a significant priority for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs," said Sylvia Hussey, OHA Ka Pouhana (OHA Chief Executive Officer). "We extend a warm mahalo to our team of experts and the dedicated community members whose passion and commitment are what made the return of these kupuna possible. In addition, we thank the University of Cambridge for their respectful collaboration with us. OHA hopes that this unprecedented repatriation by the University of Cambridge can serve as a model for other international museums and collections to return the ancestral remains of native peoples."

Professor Stephen J. Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge said, "The University of Cambridge is honoured to be able to return the iwi kupuna to their ancestral home. The iwi kupuna came to be in Cambridge many decades ago and it is only appropriate that we now do what we can to help them complete their journey. I am sorry that their journey home has been so long interrupted but I hope they may now travel in peace."

This is part of a major initiative by OHA and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners to repatriate iwi kupuna from international collections. Earlier this week, the hui of Native Hawaiians held consultations with six German institutions regarding claims for repatriation of iwi kupuna, moepu and mea kapu.

In 2017, the Museum of Ethnology Dresden in Germany transferred three iwi kupuna to OHA and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners, marking the first time the eastern German state of Saxony repatriated indigenous human remains.

"Humanity benefits every time human beings agree to restore dignity to the deceased whose remains were removed without consent, which is to say, when we collectively embrace and celebrate 'ohana (family)," said Edward Halealoha Ayau, a volunteer member of the hui that traveled to England and a longtime advocate of iwi kupuna repatriation.

The hui of Native Hawaiians on this trip includes:
* Mehana Hind, OHA Community Engagement Director
* Edward Halealoha Ayau, former Executive Director, Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawai'i Nei
* Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, assistant specialist, American Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
* Mana Caceres, cultural practitioner
* Keoki Pescaia, cultural practitioner

The hui received 20 iwi po'o (skulls) originating from Nu'uanu, Wai'alae and Honolulu. This is the first time in the 800-year history of the University of Cambridge that the institution is returning remains based on a request from an indigenous group. The iwi kupuna are among 18,000 individuals from around the world housed at the University of Cambridge's Duckworth Laboratory, one of the largest repositories of human remains in the world.

According to Dr. Cressida Fforde, who led historic documentation research efforts on behalf of OHA, "This is an historic moment in the history of repatriation from British institutions. Cambridge University should be congratulated for recognizing the right of Indigenous peoples to the repatriation of their human remains, as is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples."

The next step is for OHA to support the process to identify lineal and cultural descendants by the O'ahu Island Burial Council and State Historic Preservation Division. Consultations regarding reburial will follow.

--------------------

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/09/24/hawaii-news/skulls-of-female-warriors-to-be-interred-at-nuuanu-pali-wayside-park-monument/?HSA=b3a14d9bce75d6d0ce6503320b08a04f0efa5efa

Honolulu Star-Advertiser, September 24-27, 2020 [different dates when filed, published online, and then in print]

Skulls of female warriors to be interred at Nuuanu Pali Wayside Park monument

By Christie Wilson

The skulls of 12 female warriors killed in the famed 1795 Battle of Nuuanu will be interred at a monument to be built at Nuuanu Pali Wayside Park, more than a century after they were illicitly removed from the base of the sheer cliff and given to a British museum for study.

The remains were among 21 human skulls repatriated from the University of Cambridge�s Duckworth Laboratory in England in a historic ceremony Feb. 29. The state Board of Land and Natural Resources on Friday unanimously approved an Office of Hawaiian Affairs proposal for the monument to be built on a small grassy area east of the main walkway to the Nuuanu Pali Lookout, a popular visitor attraction.

The monument would include an underground burial vault with an open bottom capped by a 15-by-20-foot stone and cement platform surrounded by eight stanchions resembling Hawaiian spears. Nearby, a 3-by-5-foot stone and cement ahu (altar) would be built to receive hookupu (offerings). A brass commemorative plaque would be installed �to honor the fallen dead and to educate the public on this significant site.�

OHA would be responsible for construction costs as well as maintenance and repairs. The agency said it aims to have the monument built before the end of the fiscal year in June.

When asked during Friday�s virtual BLNR meeting why the skulls were being interred at the top of the 1,200-foot cliff instead of at the base where they were found, Edward Halealoha Ayau, a longtime advocate of repatriation of iwi kupuna (ancestral bones) who advises OHA on such matters, replied it was mainly for �healing� and �to recognize these were warriors, these were people of honor and status who gave their lives for what they believed in.�

In a report to the Land Board, the Division of State Parks said the memorial �would be minimally impactful to the existing park and may help deter visitors from accessing prohibited trails.� The memorial also will add to the historic character of the park by providing �a tangible link� to the Battle of Nuuanu, the report said.

The fierce clash between Kalanikupule, ruler of Oahu, and the overwhelming forces of Hawaii island chief Kamehameha was a pivotal event in Hawaii history. The successful invasion allowed Kamehameha to unite the islands of Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, Maui and Hawaii under his rule. Among the combatants were all-female regiments on both sides of the conflict.

Ayau, former executive director of Hui Malama i na Kupuna o Hawai�i Nei, recounted for BLNR members a major initiative begun in the 1990s by OHA, the Department of Land and Natural Resources� State Historic Preservation Division and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners to repatriate iwi kupuna from international collections.

He explained that as colonialism exerted itself around the globe, European museums had sought to collect human craniums from other cultures to study their shape and size in order to make the argument that Western civilizations were superior. �Museums around the world are finally coming to terms� with that past and their illicit acquisitions, Ayau said.

In the case of the Nuuanu Pali skulls, all belonged to females and were deformed in a manner to suggest they had been subject to the traditional practice among alii of wrapping the heads of infants in kapa so as to flatten the front and back of the skull, he said. The shape was considered attractive and provided immediate recognition of someone as a person of status, according to Ayau.

A general query letter signed by then-DLNR Chairman William Paty and sent to the University of Cambridge in January 1991, seeking information on any Native Hawaiian skeletal remains in its possession, yielded a negative reply. Internal documents later revealed that Cambridge officials had passed the query on to the Duckworth Laboratory, one of the world�s largest repositories of human remains, but no response was received, Ayau said.

When the Duckworth Laboratory published its first online inventory in 2010, a sharp-eyed OHA researcher identified the Native Hawaiian remains. A formal inquiry was made in June 2013, and researchers determined that more than half of the skulls likely came from the base of the Nuuanu Pali and were collected around 1894, according to OHA.

Others were believed to be from the Honolulu and Waialae areas and have already been interred, Ayau said.

In late February all 21 skulls were handed over in a ceremony at Cambridge, with OHA officials, Ayau and other cultural practitioners in attendance. It was the first time in the university�s 800-year history that it had returned remains based on a request from an Indigenous group.

A single skull believed to be from the Nuuanu Pali area that was repatriated in 2018 from a family in Pennsylvania also will be interred at the proposed monument, according to the Division of State Parks.

During Friday�s BLNR meeting, Alan Carpenter, assistant administrator of the Division of State Parks, remarked that discussion of the Nuuanu Pali monument comes at a time when the nation is reassessing monuments honoring Confederate �heroes� and other historical figures whose exploits came at the expense of Indigenous peoples and other oppressed groups.

�We�ve got the toppling of Confederate monuments at this moment when we are doing something like this, and we are also proposing to put a statue of King Kaumu�alii in Paulaula on Kauai, and I think we are sort of on the right side of history here,� he said. �(These things) don�t have to be hidden. These are important stories that I think can promote respect in the long run.�

** Comment by website editor Ken Conklin:
Eddie Ayau is displaying extreme hypocrisy. Back in 2003 he went all the way to annual meeting of NAGPRA Review Board to demand that artifacts from Forbes Cave held by Bishop Museum must be reburied in the dim dark cave never to be seen again, while other claimants wanted the artifacts to be kept available for study and to educate future generations. But now in 2020 Ayau is doing the opposite: building a monument and altar to house these 21 skulls in the place at the top of Nu'uanu Pali overlook where thousands of tourists come, rather than reburying them hundreds of feet below at the bottom of the hill where they originally were but where nobody today would ever see them. In both 2003 and 2020 Ayau seeks fame and political control rather than adhering to principles.

===============

(2a) April 24: TV news report says O'ahu Island Burial Council has approved a plan to rebury the remains where they were originally unearthed, next to the church; but project would be expensive.

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/04/24/descendants-worry-reburial-iwi-may-be-too-costly-church/
Hawaii News Now [3 TV stations]. April 24, 2020

Descendants worry reburial of hundreds of iwi kupuna may be too costly for church
A cultural descendant looks at project site at Kawaiahao Church. (Source: Hawaii News Now)

By Mahealani Richardson

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - Under a new proposal, more than 700 iwi kupuna unearthed during a construction project at Kawaiahao Church would be reburied where they were found � next to the church.

But the plan for the human remains will likely be costly.

The Oahu Island Burial Council voted unanimously to approve the reburial plan.

The bones were removed during construction of a planned multi-purpose center. That plan has since been scuttled, and descendants of the iwi kupuna have been waiting for years for a plan on what�s next.

In the meantime, the bones at the center of litigation and government bureaucracy since 2009 have been sitting in the church�s basement for years. "The ancestral descendants are extremely traumatized that their ancestral burials are not laying at rest," said Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, chair of Oahu Island Burial Council. "The council is very relieved we were able to finally offer them support in the way that they had been seeking us to do," she added.

About 30 families have been recognized as descendants, including Edward Halealoha Ayau, who is a lineal descendant and iwi kupuna repatriation advocate. He hopes reburial could happen as soon as possible, but is worried the church won�t be able to afford it. He estimates it could cost at least $250,000 for the project � so there�s now a fundraising effort. "We are in the process of raising money to do so that it happens sooner rather than later frankly out of fear that the church may not have the funding it needs to conduct the reburial," said Ayau. "I am confident in that they will be reburied back to where their families had originally placed them," he said.

The remains discovered at Kawaiahao were Christian and Hawaiian burials. Many of them were the victims of past plagues. It's one of the largest discoveries of iwi in the state.

The Council�s burial treatment plan goes to the State�s Historic Preservation Divison. HNN reached out to Kawaiahao Church for comment and did not immediately hear back.

** Note from website editor Ken Conklin: See news reports and commentaries about the Kawaiaha'o Church controversy beginning with item #5 in the year 2009 NAGPRA Hawaii webpage and continuing in subsequent years.

-------------

(2b) June 1: OHA monthly newspaper has major article authored by Eddie Ayau, head of Hui Malama i Na Kupuna o Hawai'i Nei, describing history of the unearthing of the 700 Kawaiaha'o Church burials, and unanimous decision of the island burial council to approve a plan for reburial-in-place. Article places pressure on church to accept the plan and to not pursue appeal of court decision that ruled church had violated the law by failing to do adequate archeological study or consultation with biological or cultural descendants.

https://iskh447eqhe3kks2q2rvzg06-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/KaWaiOla-June2020.pdf
Ka Wai Ola [OHA monthly newspaper], June 2020, p.11

OIBC Votes to Support Burial Treatment Plan on Kawaiaha�o Church Grounds

By Edward Halealoha Ayau and Kamuela Kala�i

Kawaiaha�o Church was established in April 1820 during the rule of Kuhina Nui (Queen Regent) Ka�ahumanu. With its love for God and Hawaiian traditions, the Church has been a beacon of hope, love and aloha for many over the past 200 years. The year it was established, the world faced a cholera outbreak which killed millions. Hawai�i was not safe from this pandemic. The Church was there for the people, to pray with the living and to bury the dead.

In the years that followed, Kawaiaha�o continued to be a beacon of light for Hawai�i through the measles, smallpox, polio and Spanish influenza pandemics. The Church has been there through every major disease since, and we believe it is here for us now.

However, at least three times in its history, Kawaiaha�o Church uncharacteristically took actions to disturb the people whose families chose the Church burial grounds as their final resting place. The most recent episode started in 2007 when the Multi-purpose Center Project began with the demolition of Likeke Hall. Most of 2008 involved the Church contriving a way out of having to perform an Archaeological Inventory Survey (AIS), which they managed to do by leaving out a planned underground parking garage. The disinterments began despite a year-long formal ho�oponopono in which we pleaded with Church leaders, including two former kahu, to not disturb the burials on its grounds.

Cultural descendant Dana N�one Hall, former Chair of the Maui/L�na�i Islands Burial Council, filed a lawsuit against the Church, DLNR Chair and DOH Director for violating their own rules by not requiring an Archaeological Inventory Survey prior to issuing a blanket disinterment permit. The lawsuit resulted in a judgment against the Church whereby the Intermediate Court of Appeals determined that DLNR (though the State Historic Preservation Division) violated its own rules by not having the matter of burial treatment considered for formal determination by the O�ahu Island Burial Council (OIBC). The Hawai�i Supreme Court upheld the Intermediate Court�s decision and remanded the case.

Following years of ho�oponopono and soul searching, Kawaiaha�o Church recently indicated that it would no longer pursue the construction of the multi-purpose center. While this appeared to be good news, Kawaiaha�o hesitated to allow the 700+ iwi k�puna to be reburied in their original locations. Instead, the Church requested that the burials be relocated, leaving the possibility of building a multi-purpose center in the future.

On April 22, 2020, after proper notification of the meeting with the Lt. Governor�s Office, and under the effective leadership of Chairwoman Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, the OIBC unanimously voted to preserve all burial sites in place by adopting a Burial Treatment Plan prepared by recognized lineal and cultural descendants. The OIBC�s historic action, which will allow for the reburial of all 700+ iwi k�puna, honors the spirit of aloha, the very spirit of Kawaiaha�o, because it honors the families. Many of the burials addressed within this Burial Treatment Plan were themselves victims of past pandemics, some known by name.

Chairwoman Wong-Kalu stated, �This Council prides itself on being an open, fair and balanced process where all parties are allowed to express their views in a safe environment; where legal rules are observed and cultural protocols are practiced. The recognized �ohana did an outstanding job to organize a burial treatment plan and walked the Council through the legal process in a herculean effort to heal themselves from the kaumaha (spiritual, emotional, physical trauma) caused by the intentional disturbance of over 700 iwi k�puna.�

The �ohana shares in the celebration of Kawaiaha�o Church�s 200-year anniversary. Please join us in encouraging Kawaiaha�o�s Board of Trustees to withdraw their appeal and accept the OIBC determination to preserve in place as the final word in the 13-year effort to rebury 700+ iwi k�puna, which is the only way for the living descendants to release their painful kaumaha and for us to collectively heal as a l�hui. We honor the Church for their courage to make things pono so they can continue to be a beacon of hope, faith and aloha for the people of Hawai�i. Aloha Ke Akua; God is love.

Edward Halealoha Ayau and Kamuela Kala�i represent the opinions of the recognized lineal and cultural descendants with the exception of the Caroline Norman �ohana.

=================

https://bdnews24.com/science/2020/06/18/dna-of-irish-pharaoh-sheds-light-on-ancient-tomb-builders
https://bdnews24.com. [Bangladesh online newspaper], June 18, 2020 Republication of article from New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/science/irish-archaeology-incest-tomb.html

DNA of �Irish pharaoh� sheds light on ancient tomb builders
James Gorman, The New York Times
Published: 18 Jun 2020 10:42 AM BdST Updated: 18 Jun 2020 10:42 AM BdST

A photo provided by Ken Williams shows the central burial chamber at Newgrange, a 5,000-year-old Irish tomb in the valley of the River Boyne, near Dublin. In a new analysis of ancient human DNA from Newgrange, researchers found evidence of brother-sister incest that suggests the existence of a ruling elite. (Ken Williams via The New York Times)

The vast Stone Age tomb mounds in the valley of the River Boyne, about 25 miles north of Dublin, are so impressive that the area has been called the Irish Valley of the Kings. And a new analysis of ancient human DNA from Newgrange, the most famous of the mounds in Ireland, suggests that the ancient Irish may have had more than monumental grave markers in common with the pharaohs.

A team of Irish geneticists and archaeologists reported Wednesday that a man whose cremated remains were interred at the heart of Newgrange was the product of a first-degree incestuous union, either between parent and child or brother and sister. The finding, combined with other genetic and archaeological evidence, suggests that the people who built these mounds lived in a hierarchical society with a ruling elite that considered themselves so close to divine that, like the Egyptian pharaohs, they could break the ultimate taboos.

In Ireland, more than 5,000 years ago people farmed and raised cattle. But they were also moved, like their contemporaries throughout Europe, to create stunning monuments to the dead, some with precise astronomical orientations. Stonehenge, a later megalith in the same broad tradition as Newgrange, is famous for its alignment to the summer and winter solstice. The central underground room at Newgrange is built so that as the sun rises around the time of the winter solstice it illuminates the whole chamber through what is called a roof box.

Archaeologists have long wondered what kind of society built such a structure, which they think must have had ritual or spiritual significance. If, as the new findings indicate, it was a society that honoured the product of an incestuous union by interring his remains at the most sacred spot in a sacred place, then the ancient Irish may well have had a ruling religious hierarchy, perhaps similar to those in ancient societies in Egypt, Peru and Hawaii, which also allowed marriages between brother and sister.

In a broad survey of ancient DNA from bone samples previously collected at Irish burial sites thousands of years old, the researchers also found genetic connections among people interred in other Irish passage tombs, named for their underground chambers or passages. That suggests that the ruling elite were related to one another.

Daniel G Bradley, of Trinity College, Dublin, a specialist in ancient DNA who led the team with Lara M Cassidy, a specialist in population genetics and Irish prehistory also at Trinity College, said the genome of the man who was a product of incest was a complete surprise. They and their colleagues reported their findings in the journal Nature.

Newgrange is part of a necropolis called Bru na Boinne, or the palace of the Boyne, dating to around 5,000 years ago that includes three large passage tombs and many other monuments. It is one of the most remarkable of Neolithic monumental sites in all of Europe.

Of the site�s tombs, Bradley said, �Newgrange is the apogee.� It is not just that it incorporates 200,000 tons of earth and stone, some brought from kilometres away. It also has the precise orientation to the winter sun.

On any day, �when you go into the chamber, it�s a sort of numinous space, it�s a liminal space, a place that inspires a sort of awe,� Bradley said.

That a bone recovered from this spot produced such a genomic shocker seemed beyond coincidence. This had to be a prominent person, the researchers reasoned. He wasn�t placed there by accident, and his parentage was unlikely to be an accident. �Whole chunks of the genome that he inherited from his mother and father, whole chunks of those were just identical,� Bradley said. The conclusion was unavoidable: �It�s a pharaoh, I said. It�s an Irish pharaoh.�

David Reich of Harvard University, one of the ancient DNA specialists who has tracked the grand sweep of prehistoric human migration around the globe, and was not involved in the research, called the journal article �amazing.�

�I think it�s part of the wave of the future about how ancient DNA will shed light on social structure, which is really one of its most exciting promises,� he said, although he had some reservations about evidence that the elite was genetically separate from the common people, a kind of royal family.

Bettina Schulz Paulsson, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said the researchers� finding that suggested a religious hierarchy was a �very attractive hypothesis.�

The paper is rich with other detail, including the discovery that an infant had Down syndrome. The authors believe this is the oldest record of Down syndrome. Chemical tests of the bone also showed that the infant had been breastfed, and that he was placed in an important tomb. Both of those facts suggest that he was well cared for, in keeping with numerous other archaeological finds of children and adults with illnesses or disabilities who were supported by their cultures.

Cassidy said they also found DNA in other remains that indicated relatives of the man who was a child of royal incest were placed in other significant tombs. �This man seemed to form a distinct genetic cluster with other individuals from passage tombs across the island,� she said.

She said �we also found a few direct kinship links,� ancient genomes of individuals who were distant cousins. That contributed to the idea that there was an elite who directed the building of the mounds. In that context, it made sense that the incest was intentional. That�s not something that can be proved, of course, but other societies have encouraged brother-sister incest.

�The few examples where it is socially accepted,� she said, are �extremely stratified societies with an elite class who are able to break rules.�

===============

https://kawaiola.news/i-mana-i-ka-oiwi/hui-malama-i-na-kupuna-o-hawaii-nei-part-4-empowerment-through-education/
Ka Wai Ola O OHA [OHA monthly newspaper], August 2020, p. 5, side-by side Hawaiian-English versions.

Hui Mālama i nā Kūpuna o Hawaiʻi Nei Part 4: Empowerment Through Education

By Edward Halealoha Ayau - July 29, 2020

Another ʻōlelo noʻeau provides that the placement of items with the iwi establishes an inseparable bond between both, in which the items are forever considered moepū (possessions of the dead). �Mai lawe wale i nā mea i hoʻomoepū ʻia,� translates to �don�t wantonly take things placed with the dead.� This makes it clear that the prohibition against disturbing iwi kūpuna extends to moepū.

Maintaining the kuleana to care for the iwi and moepū is a profound expression of our cultural identity as Kanaka ʻōiwi. The time has come for all iwi kūpuna removed from burial sites to be kanu pono (properly buried). By reburying the iwi, the ancestral foundation is strengthened, the interdependence between past and present continues, and the land is re-infused with mana necessary to sustain the ancestors, the living, and the generations to come.

The following achievements are the results of the application of knowledge and instincts gained from ancestry, education, discipline and cultural training. It required our courage, commitment, focus and mana. The work involved the identification, negotiation and repatriation of over 6,000 ancestral Hawaiian remains from museums, government agencies, and private individuals in the United States and abroad. In some cases, we partnered with Native Hawaiian Organizations including the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the island burial councils, and other community organizations and families.

Notable institutions in the United States who collected and housed our ancestors, their possessions and sacred objects included the Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, Field Museum of Natural History, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, University of California Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum, Peabody & Essex Museum, Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History, Dartmouth College Hood Museum of Art, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In addition, 14 international repatriation cases were conducted from such institutions as the University of Zurich (Switzerland), South Australian Museum (Australia), Royal Ontario Museum (Canada), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Statens Historiska Museet and the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), Maidstone Museum, Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Natural History Museum, Science Museum/Wellcome Trust, Oxford Museum of Natural History and the Duckworth Laboratory at Cambridge University (England), and the Museum fūr Volkerkunde Dresden (Germany). Ola nā iwi.

Edward Halealoha Ayau is the former Executive Director of Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawaiʻi Nei, a group that has repatriated and reinterred thousands of ancestral Native Hawaiian remains and funerary objects.

================

(5) August 10, 2020: How a sacred shield from the Pueblo of Acoma turned up at a Paris auction house, and how the tribe fought for its return with help of FBI and U.S. diplomacy. The shield was considered a living being; and tribal elders welcomed its return with ceremony.

https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.8/indigenous-affairs-unraveling-the-mystery-of-a-stolen-ceremonial-shield
High Country News, Aug. 1, 2020 From the print edition

Unraveling the mystery of a stolen ceremonial shield
How a sacred object from the Pueblo of Acoma turned up at a Paris auction house, and how the tribe fought for its return.

by Elena Saavedra Buckley

For most of a century, before the shield went missing, it lived in the Pueblo of Acoma in west-central New Mexico. Acoma is one of the state�s 19 pueblo tribes, with fewer than 5,000 members, half of whom live across four communities on the reservation. The oldest portion sits atop a mesa, which is believed to be one of the oldest continually inhabited sites on the continent � since at least 1100 A.D. by Western measures. It is known outside the tribe as Sky City, and it�s an important part of Acoma�s economy, drawing visitors year-round for its commanding appearance. It�s composed of adobe structures that crowd a risen plane, as if a pillar of earth had shot 367 feet into the air and brought the community with it. The shield lived in a family�s three-story home with six other shields, all tended to by a traditional cultural leader. Their caretaker kept them in a cool, dark room on the second floor, on a wooden shelf built into an adobe wall.

The shield and its siblings were passed down from father to son. The caretaker prayed with them daily when they were not being used as a symbol of protection in ceremonies or festivals, when other tribal members could be in their presence. But the shields never belonged to him alone. According to Acoma law, they were collectively owned; they could not leave the pueblo, nor could they be sold or destroyed. They were considered living beings rather than works of art. Cultural patrimony, unlike possessions, is an aspect of a tribe�s identity as a people � like Acoma land, language and resources, the shield was one piece of the tribe�s cultural fabric, passed down through generations and contributing to the whole.

One day in the early 1970s, the shield and five others vanished from the caretaker�s home. The details are clouded: One day they were there, the next they were gone. The family reported the loss to the tribal sheriff, but, as was typical at the time, he did not keep a written record of the event. No outside investigation took place; for Acoma, and for many tribes, matters of cultural patrimony are meant to be held within the community rather than be exposed to a world that has so often threatened their existence.

When the shields were stolen, the pueblo had already been working for decades to reclaim what had been taken from it. Starting in the 1940s, Acoma litigated and petitioned the United States Indian Claims Commission for millions of acres of territory, reserved for the tribe in colonial land grants but disregarded by the United States. In 1970, Acoma received a financial settlement for its losses, but no actual land. The tribe purchased private property bordering the reservation over the following decades, using its settlement funds to piece together a semblance of what had been.

In 2016, nearly 50 years after the shield was stolen, agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) brought a photo of it to Acoma. The image revealed the shield under fluorescent studio lights, floating in front of a gray digital background: Round and rawhide, it showed a face in its center, with black, low-scooped horns, like a water buffalo�s, and a red-lipped, jagged smile. The rich colors of the paint � emerald green, with red, blue and yellow radiating from the face�s edges � seemed to have survived the years unfaded, even as they flaked and mottled the surface. Two feathers with rusted tips, like an eagle�s, hung at each side, pierced through the leather and strung by their quills. The photograph had been taken in Paris, France, by an auction house called EVE, where the shield was consigned for sale. The auction catalog gave no information on how it had arrived or the identity of the seller. �Very rare war shield,� EVE�s description read. �Probably Acoma or Jemez, 19th century or older.� The auction house placed its worth at around 7,000 euros, or $7,800.

The agents showed the image to the granddaughter of the caretaker, a woman who grew up in the same house as the shields and was one of the last living people familiar with this one�s disappearance. They asked her if the shield in the photograph resembled any of the ones stolen from her grandfather�s home. Yes, she told them, except for the feathers; she was certain they hadn�t been there originally. The shield had a name, she knew, but she couldn�t remember what it was. Still, she would recognize it anywhere.

THAT MAY, EVE HELD A SALE of �Amerindian art, pre-Columbian art, Africa and Oceania� � a type of auction the house holds at least once a year. The shield, one of hundreds of items, hung on a crowded panel in a dark showing room. Navajo blankets were suspended from the ceiling, and a smooth, four-legged slit drum from the Democratic Republic of Congo stood on a wide platform near the back. Cases held masks, baskets and shrunken heads; mannequin torsos wore tasseled and beaded jackets; a complete, limp deerskin, a ceremonial object from the Hoopa Valley Tribe in California, was draped over a display table, its eyes and mouth sewn closed with red woodpecker feathers. The shield was listed as Lot 68.

EVE, which opened in 2002, sells items, often antiques, from a range of continents and time periods, but it has gained a reputation for repeatedly selling sensitive objects from Indigenous tribes in the U.S. When American laws began to curtail the sale of cultural patrimony within the country, sellers turned to European auction houses like EVE. Alain Leroy, EVE�s owner, has justified these sales in the past. �The French market views Native art in a different way than the American,� Leroy told Indian Country Today, in 2013. �In Paris, any collector experiencing an aesthetic emotion, and a direct contact with an item, will buy it. It doesn�t matter whether it�s Maori or Hopi.� (EVE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

When American laws began to curtail the sale of cultural patrimony within the country, sellers turned to European auction houses like EVE.

When the Acoma shield came up for auction in 2016, it was the second time EVE had tried to sell it. The shield had appeared the previous year in the auction house�s catalog at double the price. That time, an Acoma member saw its listing online and notified tribal leaders just days before the bidding began. Acoma knew it had few options, none particularly promising. They could appeal to the auction house directly, but businesses like EVE rarely listen. If they could find out who sent the shield overseas, they could contact them directly, but sellers often exist behind veils of anonymity, making them nearly impossible to track down. Tribes can consider bidding on an item themselves if they have the funds. But all these options operate within the logic of the auction house, beginning and ending with the cultural object for sale. The market remains intact.

Acoma wanted to take legal action, but the French court system denied the first attempt, and EVE went ahead with the sale. But owing to either overzealous pricing or Acoma�s prayers, the shield didn�t get a bid. It remained in the purgatory of EVE�s collection for the next year.

By the time the shield resurfaced in 2016, Acoma�s religious leaders had appointed a new governor. The position is the tribe�s external bureaucratic version of its internal cultural leaders, created by the Spanish crown in 1620 for all pueblo tribes. The term lasts one year, but governors may be reappointed. The man � and it is always a man � spends much of his time flying to and from Washington, D.C. He argues water adjudication cases, develops education and infrastructure projects, and advocates for the preservation of sacred lands, such as Chaco Canyon, that are endangered by nearby oil and gas drilling.

The role begins with a ceremony held on Dec. 29, with the passing of the Canes of Authority. The canes, straight and wooden, capped in silver, were gifted to the tribe by the colonial powers that gradually redefined Acoma life: first the Spanish government, then the Mexican, and finally, in 1863, President Lincoln. In the ceremony, the outgoing governor returns them to the religious leaders, who then present them to the successor, officially beginning his term. The canes are complicated objects, reminders of colonialism yet symbols of sovereignty.

The canes are complicated objects, reminders of colonialism yet symbols of sovereignty.

In 2016, a man named Kurt Riley received the canes and the job. Riley is gentle and relaxed, and he wears his hair in a long braid down the middle of his back. His face easily cracks into a warm grin when he�s off-camera, which is a relatively rare occurrence during a term full of speeches and congressional testimonies. Riley spent most of his career as a pharmacist in Albuquerque, where he grew up. At the beginning, the role of governor, with its constant publicity and travel, felt overwhelming.

His predecessor walked him through his responsibilities, but he emphasized the importance of continuing the fight to retrieve the shield. �This is very, very important,� Riley recalled being told. �Don�t let it be forgotten.�

INDIGENOUS CULTURAL PATRIMONY and human remains have been commodified ever since they became evidence of conquest. Especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these items were taken from tribes like violent receipts, after fatal encounters with the American military, through destructive grave-robbing and looting, and during paternalistic visits from researchers. �Many of the early anthropologists imagined themselves to be heroes engaged in dangerous search and rescue missions,� the anthropologist Margaret Bruchac has written, �recovering cultures from extinction, seeking treasures to fill the halls of the great museums.� In reality, these missions drained Indigenous communities of their cultural resources, while U.S. policies did the same. If items did not end up in museums, they landed in federal institutions and university department basements. Others seeped into the private market and traveled through networks of collectors, severed from the communities they helped define.

Federal laws have attempted to protect these items, although gradually and with inconsistent results. The Antiquities Act, passed in 1906, aimed to quell looting on public and tribal lands, but it was too vague to be enforced. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (ARPA), passed during the Carter administration, increased penalties. It made it possible to put those who loot from public and tribal lands in jail, but only if the crimes occurred after the law�s passage.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which passed in 1990, marked a shift in how Congress handled repatriation. If a museum or institution receives federal funding, it must return any identifiable items in its collection that could be considered �cultural heritage� � sacred, patrimonial and funerary objects, as well as Indigenous human remains. The law also makes trafficking items taken after 1990 a criminal offense, and it offers tribes a platform from which to reclaim a vast array of items scattered across the U.S.

If a museum or institution receives federal funding, it must return any identifiable items in its collection that could be considered �cultural heritage� � sacred, patrimonial and funerary objects, as well as Indigenous human remains.

But no U.S. law prevents these items from being exported. The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a United Nations resolution passed in 2007, affirms Indigenous communities� right to protect and use their ceremonial objects, and requires that countries must resolve situations when objects are �taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.� But it has never been successfully used to repatriate any items to a U.S. tribe. According to the Government Accountability Office, around 1,400 sacred, patrimonial or funerary objects from tribal nations in the U.S., the majority from the American Southwest, were knowingly put up for sale in Paris auctions alone between 2012 and 2017. Half of them were bid on and sold for a total of $7 million.

The sales couldn�t have reached these heights without the internet. Just a few years after a company named AuctionWeb sold a single broken laser pointer for $14 in 1995, the site evolved into eBay and amassed a valuation of billions. Anonymous, powerful online bidding began to redefine older auction houses, including the way Indigenous cultural property changed hands.

In 2006, an attorney named Shannon Keller O�Loughlin (Choctaw) worked as counsel to multiple tribal governments. Some of her clients began to notice their cultural property collecting bids on eBay. What were they supposed to do, they asked her, when the seller could hide behind an account name? �Trying to deal with the quagmire of eBay is really difficult,� O�Loughlin told me. �It�s hard to get to an actual person.� O�Loughlin would contact the site, and sometimes an item was taken down, but the seller �will usually put it back up, and then you get it taken down again.� And so on.

When the fine art auction industry caught on to eBay�s techniques, more sensitive items � such as sacred beaded wampum belts from Eastern Woodlands tribes, once nearly sold by Sotheby�s in 2009 for $30,000 � began surfacing. �That�s where we really started seeing cultural items (for sale) that we had never seen before,� O�Loughlin said.

In 2017, O�Loughlin became the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs. There, she and her colleagues act as a scouting team, closely monitoring auction houses worldwide and posting alerts when sales might include sensitive items. Few tribes, she told me, have the resources to consistently reclaim items; the hope might be to halt a single sale, perhaps without media attention. �Their only goal is bringing items back and returning them to the journey they were on,� O�Loughlin said.

Tribes like Acoma that are able to prioritize cultural resource protection sometimes assign their own employees to scour the web. �It has allowed us to take a peek and see what people have, and to do something about it,� Aaron Sims, an Acoma member and a general counsel attorney for the tribe, told me. Acoma developed a methodology, taking suspect listings from the internet and consulting with religious leadership to determine if the items could belong to the tribe. But as the web brings transparency to these exchanges, auction houses are adapting. Sims has noticed some houses holding sales with vaguer names than they used to � calling items �ethnographic� rather than American Indian � in what he suspects is an attempt to throw off people like him. Even more illicit deals recede further into privacy, especially those involving ancestral remains. �From what we�ve been told from law enforcement, in terms of those significant items, they go black,� O�Loughlin said. �They�re being sold hand-to-hand, or they may be sold on the deep web.�

If not the deep web, Paris. Even when scanning auction sites, tribal officials have few options once an item surfaces outside the U.S. �We only see a sliver of cases,� said David Downes, a Department of the Interior official who works on international repatriation issues with other agencies. �Most of the time, museums are respectful of the values that lead the tribe to make the claim or the request. I don�t think that�s as obvious in what we�ve seen in the auction houses.�

�The issue of cultural repatriation is a big one in France, but it is not one that is associated with Indigenous communities (in the United States),� Philip Breeden, a former official at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, told me. France�s president, Emmanuel Macron, has made public commitments to repatriate items looted from African tribes by the French. But there isn�t a clear structure for the country�s courts to recognize North American Indigenous nations� sovereignty. The U.S. has done little to fight for tribes� international recognition; when a U.N. group signed an agreement on preventing trafficking of cultural property, broadly construed, the U.S. never adopted the export provisions. When it came to trafficked items, �the U.S. was traditionally a destination country, not a source country,� Breeden, an American, said. Americans, the thinking went, were more often the ones buying looted cultural items from other countries � not losing them. �We were the bad guys,� Breeden said. �So, now, the shoe is on the other foot.�

FOLLOWING THE ANNOUNCEMENT of EVE�s second sale, Riley and Acoma�s lawyers had just weeks to attempt rescuing the shield. Since their appeals to EVE had been ignored, they knew that their best option was to demand responses from federal officials whose voices might be heard in France. Riley sent letters to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and dozens of state governors and Congress members. He described how France had rejected Acoma�s attempts to rescue the shield the year before. �Now, we are faced with the same crisis,� he wrote. �Our work, and the laws of the United States are continually being undermined by the action of private auctioneers overseas who portray their establishments as safe havens from the laws of the United States.� He asked the officials for help. Many did respond with their support, but there was little to do � EVE had broken no French laws. From EVE itself, Acoma heard nothing other than an invitation to place its own bid.

Riley flew to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., just days before the auction, for a press conference with leaders from the Hoopa Valley Tribe and the Navajo Nation, who also had items in the sale. The Interior Department and the State Department had helped organize the event, which would be streamed online. Riley was still getting used to public speaking as governor, and he was nervous the entire plane ride. At the museum, a small crowd of journalists sat in front of a podium in the museum�s round lobby. Riley rose to speak, wearing a turquoise and coral necklace and gripping a copy of his speech as he walked to the microphone. One of Acoma�s traditional leaders stood a few steps behind the podium as Riley talked, his hands grasped in front of him, a thumb moving back and forth nervously. Riley called on EVE and the French government to stop the shield�s sale, and he spoke about the domestic issues that started long before France; Acoma was aware of 24 items of its cultural patrimony in the U.S. market in the past year alone. There had to be federal support and legal action to stop the patterns, he said. Riley ended by speaking in Keres, the Acoma language. His voice began to break. He went off script, paused, and began to cry. �For a person in my position, to express my emotion this way,� he said, looking out, �maybe in some eyes, it�s not a role model for males. But this is how much it hurts my people.�

A week later, on May 30, patrons in Paris filed into the auction house, rode up a wide escalator, and sat in the bidding room. A small throng of protesters stood on the sidewalk outside, holding banners that said, in French, �cultural genocide� and �sacred not for sale.� Riley was awake on the reservation, where he watched a livestream of the event. Employees in white gloves handled each object as it went up for bids, and the patrons, mostly men and nearly all white, made their offers. Wooden figurines went for thousands of euros, a mummified foot for nearly 800. A Hopi mask crowned with crow feathers sold for over 43,000 euros. Lot 67 came up: a leather shield of richly tanned bison hide, crimson fabric draped around its circumference, with no tribe named. When the Acoma shield should have appeared, though, nothing came across the screen. The auctioneer said that it had been withdrawn. He moved on to a pre-pueblo Anasazi stone sculpture.

�We were so happy,� Riley recalled. �But, we said, �Now what?� � A cynicism, developed from seeing countless other items disappear in the past, set in: Perhaps the shield had been bought privately, before the auction began, or the seller had changed their mind and kept it. It could already be packed in the back of a car, or stuffed in a box to ship to a collector in another country.

In fact, EVE had quietly removed the shield from sale. The public outcry seemed to have reached the auction house, but only slightly; it sold off other tribes� sacred items, including the Hoopa Valley deer. While the shield hadn�t exchanged hands, more than 5,000 miles of land and sea still separated it from its home. It would be years before it moved again.

ON AN AFTERNOON IN 1995, an Acoma member named Brian Vallo sat in the Albuquerque airport, waiting for a plane. Acoma�s first repatriation under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which had been passed five years prior, was arriving in New Mexico. He was there to pick up the items, which were the human remains of Acoma ancestors. The moment brought up the difficult, uncertain process of deciding how to welcome them home and where to bury them. Much of the time, these decisions are painful, even if the return is a good thing. Where should tribes rebury their dead, if the lands on which the deceased lived no longer belong to their descendants? What ceremonies should a tribe use to welcome back a sacred object if there is no tradition for such a circumstance? Chip Colwell, a writer and museum repatriation expert, has written that �repatriation is not an end point so much as a process. � Each case is a new struggle to meaningfully come to terms with history.�

�I remember the feeling of those first Acoma ancestors coming back,� Vallo told me. �It was a very overwhelming, but also bittersweet moment, of realizing that it takes an effort of many to achieve these types of victories � if you want to call them that.�

Vallo is tall, with Clark Kent hair and a low, full voice that he uses carefully. He�s stylish � rarely without a pair of sleek glasses � and, at 54, looks decades younger than he is. (�Sneaky old,� as one of the Acoma attorneys put it.) As a speaker, he is modest, but he can hold a listener�s attention for hours. At the time of EVE�s auction, Vallo was the director of the Indian Arts Research Center in Santa Fe, but he was often behind the scenes of Acoma projects. He grew up in the pueblo, and most of his family had served in government positions, as had he; his father was governor before Riley, during the shield�s first attempted auction. Vallo�s savvy in and out of the art world has made him skilled in repatriation matters. He is used to mediating between people who see Indigenous patrimony as art, and those who know it as their culture.

�I remember the feeling of those first Acoma ancestors coming back. It was a very overwhelming, but also bittersweet moment, of realizing that it takes an effort of many to achieve these types of victories � if you want to call them that.� After temporarily dropping out of college when called upon to serve as tribal secretary � the youngest person to do so for Acoma � Vallo became an early NAGPRA expert in New Mexico, assisting pueblo tribes around the state with the law�s complex processes. NAGPRA was, in some ways, radical in its ability to actively push federal institutions to repatriate. Decades of work from Indigenous activism leading to its passage, in 1990, brought public attention to repatriation, especially the staggering collections of human skeletons housed at universities and museums.

�Many institutions, including the federal government�s own Smithsonian, did not have good records,� Vallo said of NAGPRA�s early years. �We were seeing quickly that institutions didn�t know what they had.� When the law passed, it was estimated that there were 100,000 to 200,000 Indigenous human remains in museums and federal agencies, along with 10 million to 15 million cultural items. In 2018, the National Park Service reported that it had returned fewer than half of the human remains in its custody and around 2 million of the objects.

�I always hoped that NAGPRA would set the course for the ways in which federal agencies � and I would even go as far as to say Congress and the office of the president � interact with tribal groups,� Vallo told me. But even with its successes, the legislation�s flaws are similar to issues with which tribal leaders are familiar. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, until recently, had slashed budgets for cultural protection work. And, even if proper collaboration is possible, tribal officials face difficult decisions: Are they willing to put their community�s private culture on public display in order to get the items back?

IN THE FLURRY AFTER THE AUCTION, federal agencies tried to help Acoma by learning more about the item in question. The State Department wanted Acoma leaders to describe the shield and its uses. This was a distressing request: One of the main reasons Acoma wanted to get the shield back was to regain its intended privacy within the pueblo, to stop having to describe it to outsiders. During early interviews as governor, Riley sometimes refrained from even calling it a shield, opting for �item� instead. �We said, �No, we can�t do that,� � Riley told me. �They were just at a loss, like, �How do you expect us to help you?� � Riley tried to explain that, to Acoma, the shield was a spiritual being, and there were boundaries, set by religious leaders, about what could be shared outside the tribe.

Riley and the Acoma leadership recognized that they couldn�t move forward without surrendering some control to the federal legal system; they knew, too, that the shield had the potential to amplify the repatriation struggles of many other tribes in the media. After consulting with cultural leaders, they decided to use EVE�s photo of the shield � the one with the gray background � in press materials, and to allow FBI and BIA agents to interview the granddaughter of the shield�s caretaker. They used her memories to write an affidavit, which was attached to legal documents sent to France.

�We knew that it was going to take this level of effort, of information, and really, from the pueblo�s perspective, this level of sacrifice � exposing itself in a way that it otherwise really wouldn�t,� Sims, one of Acoma�s general counsel attorneys, told me.

The etymologies of �repatriation� and �return� suggest a kind of backward motion, an attendance to the past. The idea of the shield being an �artifact� or �very old,� as it and other objects are so often described in the market, implies the same more crudely. But Riley and Vallo have always been clear that, to their tribe, the shield is a matter of the present; bringing it home is not simply about closing the gaps of history, but equipping the tribe with what it needs to sustain itself. It was not a separate fight from securing water rights, language preservation, land. The shield that might return would not be the same one that left; it had experienced many difficult years away from its home, and it would play a different role in ceremonies considering that path. But the tribe had changed, too. It had lived through those same years.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT KNEW OF NO CLEAR PATH to retrieve the shield. �This was the first time that the U.S. was going to ask something from a foreign country,� Riley told me, �and they didn�t know how to do that.� After meetings with Acoma leaders, the U.S. attorney�s office in New Mexico placed a warrant for the shield�s �arrest.� This allowed France to essentially freeze it in place; the shield couldn�t be moved, which was certainly a step, but it was still stuck at EVE.

The tribe asked the auction house for the identity of the seller, but it refused to disclose the name. So Acoma focused on legislative actions. In the summer of 2016, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., introduced the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony, or STOP, Act. It is a bill Acoma enthusiastically supports. It has not yet been passed, but if it is, STOP will help prevent items like the shield from ever crossing the border. Along with increasing domestic NAGPRA penalties, it would prohibit the export of cultural property and create a certification process, which would involve tribal review. It would also create a voluntary return program, so that people can give up items that might violate existing laws without fear of being penalized.

�If the shield never comes back, it has still done its job,� Riley told me. �It brought to light these actions, this awareness, this legislation. It�s a shield. It�s a protector.�

Riley and Vallo began attending different events in Santa Fe to discuss the bill with the Authentic Tribal Art Dealers Association, or ATADA, an organization with whom Acoma has an �arm�s-length relationship,� as Sims put it. The group connects collectors and dealers, many of whom buy and sell at large trade shows in the Southwest, like the Santa Fe Indian Market. It also works to bring ethical practices to an often-criticized industry; the group bans the sale of sacred and patrimonial items among its members and offers authentication certificates, and it has its own program to facilitate voluntary returns of sensitive items that do make their way into the market.

But the group, which is largely white, has also criticized the STOP Act since it was first introduced. ATADA�s leaders say that they support the bill�s concept, but not the bill; they believe that it is vague, and that it would subject all tribal art to a lengthy, prohibitive review process, which would all but kill the market on which they depend. �Can you imagine what the effect will be the first time a tourist has an item seized, not because there is anything wrong with it, but only because it has not been subjected to this tribal review?� Kim Martindale, the ATADA president, said in a 2019 statement. �Once the word gets around at home, that�ll be the last Italian or German tourist that will come to Santa Fe, and that will really hurt the tribal artisans that rely on the tourist market for most of their annual income.�

Riley, Vallo and Acoma�s lawyers all told me that the vast majority of what flows through tribal art dealer markets is fine to sell � and that work by living artists who are tribal members should be encouraged in the industry. Riley is friendly with a few shop owners in Albuquerque�s Old Town, a walkable, touristy section of the city where tribal art is often sold. He likes to wander through their shops, and if he happens to see anything questionable, he�ll let them know. But to catch sacred or patrimonial items more systematically, tribal consultation has to be better integrated into the industry. In Sims� view, this wouldn�t be a radical adjustment. �If you have a question, if you�re not sure if it�s an item of cultural patrimony, just call the pueblo,� he said. But it would shift the structures of control. �That�s not how the market has run for the last 50 years.�

�What makes the ATADA and other older dealers so possessive and rigid is the fact that the market is going away,� O�Loughlin, from the Association on American Indian Affairs, said. She sees many collectors as possessing a colonial, frontiersman-like connection to their collections, which strengthens as the industry withers.

In 2018, Vallo was appointed governor, receiving the canes from Riley. Vallo resigned from his job in Santa Fe to take on the demanding role. But while he was still there, he organized an event over two days with Riley, other pueblo leaders and ATADA to discuss the STOP Act in Santa Fe. Vallo warned his boss that the event might be risky � the School for Advanced Research, the larger organization where Vallo worked, had a donor base that included collectors. If donors heard that Vallo was supporting STOP, they could retaliate by pulling their funding. There were already galleries in Santa Fe in which Vallo wasn�t welcome.

The events were held in a hotel in downtown Santa Fe. For $35, the public could listen to panels about tribal experiences with repatriation and the Indian art market, most of them moderated by Vallo. They took place in the hotel�s ballroom, a carpeted and chandeliered hangar filled to capacity with attendees, the vast majority from the dealer community. �We were overwhelmed by the attendance,� Vallo said.

In the opening panel, auction house owners from Ohio and New Mexico discussed the optimism they have about their industry; it�s becoming more inclusive, they noted, and the number of controversial sales is shrinking. But, in the next panel, leaders from the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Zuni Pueblo complicated the picture. There�s still little communication between dealers and tribal leaders, one said. Another talked about how tribal members, in need of money, occasionally felt pressured to sell to collectors.

When the panel on the STOP Act began, the conflicts became more explicit. Most of the tribal leaders voiced their approval of the legislation, but ATADA�s leaders objected, calling it unconstitutional. While collectors should do the right thing, one ATADA board member said, �we can�t undo the past. We should not be held to the bad decisions of our ancestors.�

IN THE AUDIENCE AT THE HOTEL sat a man named Jerold Collings. He is 77 years old and a rancher from Mule Creek, New Mexico, more than a five-hour drive southwest of Santa Fe. Collings, who is white, grew up on the banks of the Colorado River, where his parents had a fishing resort. He collected arrowheads from the time he was in grade school, scouring thousands of acres on neighbors� ranches. Back then, as he remembered it, the typical tribal art collector would drive a pickup truck fitted with a camper. �He just went from trading post to trading post, buying something at one and selling it at the next,� Collings told me over the phone. His family spent summers in a town with a small pawnshop, where he started purchasing baskets. He admired how much time went into making them. He made connections in Southwest tribal art dealer networks, and the collecting continued.

Collings remembered how easy it used to be to buy large collections, when traders would call him up to come look at what they had. �You might see a table of stuff, and it would all be for sale,� he said. He would save his money to buy whole collections for hundreds of dollars, which he saw as a steal. �Now, it�s much more sophisticated,� he said, �and collectors are looking for the impossible dream.�

When his mother died, in 1984, Collings put cardboard boxes from her home into storage. They remained untouched for nearly 30 years, until 2012, when he opened them. Some boxes held family mementos; others were full of items his family had bought over the years in pawnshops. In a box, by itself, lay the Acoma shield.

Collings didn�t think the shield was worth keeping; he told me he had seen many others like it sold in the past, and that it didn�t strike him as special. �I didn�t have any use for it, and the market in the U.S. was horrible,� he said. EVE told him they wanted feathers on it, so before he shipped it to France, he had turkey feathers dyed to look like eagles� and wove them into the shield himself. �It went through one auction and it didn�t get a bid,� he said, �and in the second auction, all the furor arises.�

Following EVE�s sale, the auction house sent Collings a box with other items he had consigned that hadn�t sold. The shield, still under the warrant�s protection, remained at EVE. The box stalled in customs, and in December 2018, the U.S. attorney�s office summoned him regarding the shield; Collings believes the shipment is how the government got his name.

Collings wrote a formal response through a lawyer: �The evidence of any theft of the Shield from the Acoma Pueblo is based entirely on hearsay and speculation,� his complaint read. �As stated in the Museum catalogue, the Shield has been listed as either Acoma or Jemez Pueblo. � It is also possible that the Shield is not of Indian origin at all.� He requested that the shield be returned directly to him.

Collings told me that, early on, he had attempted to coordinate a transfer of the shield to Acoma through an intermediary, before the government got involved. (The tribe�s lawyers said they received vague messages from middlemen, but none of the offers seemed reliable.) He had no problem with Acoma�s claim to the shield, but he didn�t want to get involved in a legal case with the government, whose approach he saw as �an overreaction on steroids,� he said. Collings remembers going to Santa Fe for the panels on the STOP Act. He remembers Riley explaining the impossibility of items like the shield receiving price tags. To Acoma, Riley had said, they were like family members. How could you put a price on family? �Those are two different views of the world,� Collings said. �And us folks are trying to survive in the middle.�

In the spring of 2019, U.S. officials shared Collings� identity with Acoma. Vallo, now governor, invited Collings to Albuquerque to meet with him and the tribe�s lawyers, including Sims. Collings brought his wife, his attorney and a former ATADA president; Collings is not a member, but he�s well acquainted with the organization. They all sat in a conference room in the law office where Sims worked. For most of the meeting, only the lawyers spoke. Then, at the end, Vallo turned to Collings and explained what the shield meant to the tribe. �To me, it meant nothing more than a reasonably attractive art object,� Collings said. �But, to him, I could tell that it was important.�

For Vallo, the meeting was challenging. He wanted to represent his tribe tactfully, and he appreciated Collings� willingness to talk. But, he thought, why couldn�t Collings have stepped up sooner? How could any repatriation, with all its time, effort and emotion, ultimately boil down to the actions of one person? �It was hard to walk into that meeting and not voice a level of frustration,� Vallo told me. �It was probably one of the hardest things that I had to do this year.�

Soon after, in mid-July, Collings and his wife requested a second meeting with Vallo, this time with no attorneys. They sat for nearly two hours in a small, three-sided room in the law office, decorated with bookcases and a small statue of Po�pay, the Ohkay Owingeh tribal member who led the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish. They shared a plate of pastries and talked about their horses.

Then, Collings told Vallo he wanted to help. The parties signed a document. Collings, as the shield�s consignor, would direct EVE to release the shield into U.S. custody as quickly as possible. An FBI agent would travel there to pick it up and bring it home.

Sims called Riley, only recently retired, to let him know the news. He asked him not to announce it to anyone, but to be prepared to gather when the shield landed in New Mexico. Riley hung up and told his wife he was going for a walk. Outside, he shouted with joy.

THAT FALL, AN FBI AGENT flew to Paris. He picked up the shield from EVE and brought it to the U.S. Embassy, where he swaddled it in thin sheets of flexible foam to keep it snug and dry. At various stops between Paris and New Mexico, he talked his way out of opening the package for customs officials. On each leg of the flight, he bought a second seat for the shield, keeping it at his side.

On the evening of Friday, Nov. 15, 2019, Vallo sat in a seating area opposite of the security entrance in the Albuquerque airport, waiting for the shield, the same place where he had waited for the first NAGPRA repatriation of ancestral remains in 1995. He was accompanied by one of Acoma�s lawyers and the tribal interpreter; they reminisced about previous repatriations, and he held an earth-toned Pendleton blanket he had brought to clothe the shield. When the agent landed, Vallo met him and other federal officials in a private customs room. He watched the man unwrap the foam. �All I could do was cover it with the blanket,� Vallo told me, �just to say, �You are home, and it�s time to go.� � He wanted to get the shield in front of tribal members as soon as possible. He carried it to one of the federal agent�s cars and sat with it in the backseat, singing for it as they drove north through downtown Albuquerque and to the BIA�s offices. Riley, Acoma�s lawyers, Vallo�s father and mother, and members of Acoma�s tribal council and religious leadership stood in a second-floor conference room to receive it. Vallo texted Sims at each step � we have it, we�re in the car, we�re in the parking lot, we�re in the elevator. He finally entered the room with the shield wrapped in his arms.

Sims said that watching the shield be revealed to the room was one of the most surreal moments in his career. It gave off a palpable kind of power. The tribe�s religious leaders addressed it and made offerings, acknowledging the long journey it had just finished. It struck Riley that it was the first time he had knowingly been near the shield, despite years of work on its behalf. �I had seen it in pictures, but to actually see it,� Riley told me. �I was speechless.� Vallo, as he placed it on the table, felt the weight of the moment, especially with his father, who had been the first governor to fight for its repatriation, being there. �I thought I was going to faint, to be honest,� he said. Its colors seemed even brighter against the blanket. �It just seemed so vibrant, and happy, to just be present.�

Acoma leaders spent hours with the shield, praying until nearly midnight. Some gave speeches, in Keres and in English, and expressed gratitude to the agents who had helped return it. Riley placed a handful of cornmeal near it in thanks. The shield was placed in a secure location in the BIA building, and then everyone left. Riley walked out in the dark, to his black truck in the parking lot, and sat in the driver�s seat for a while before driving home. It was hard to believe that, this time, the meetings, testimonies and speeches had succeeded. Later that week, the shield returned to the Acoma Pueblo, and the tribe held a ceremony to welcome it. Snow fell on the mesa as it arrived.

A SINGLE TWO-LANE ROAD WINDS down from Old Acoma�s mesa. It cuts between towers of sandy rock before coming to an Indian service route. At that intersection is the Sky City Cultural Center, which also houses the Haak�u Museum � the tribe�s own record of its art and history, there to educate visitors while they wait to board the shuttles that will guide them through the pueblo. In 2000, the last Acoma cultural center burned down in a fire. Vallo, before he became governor, helped direct an architecture firm on the design of the current one. It is a grand building with a kind of pueblo minimalism, a sleek, modern interpretation of the square adobe structures and wooden beams on the mesa.

Around the time the shield returned, the Haak�u Museum had two exhibits. One focused on the tribe�s pottery, the art form for which the pueblo is best known. Glass cases jutted out from the walls, holding the artists� pots � many round and convex near their openings, like acorn squash, and covered with the thin, delicate lines that Acoma potters have perfected.

The other side of the museum held a display called �Growing Up Pueblo.� It was mostly paragraphs of text, printed onto plaques spaced out around the room: interviews with elders in the community, remembering what it was like to grow up in Acoma in the mid-20th century. �We played in the ditch at my grandparents� house and got in trouble for being muddy and wet,� a quote attributed to a woman named Jolene Mariano read. �My mom would tell us how her mom used to make dough. I inherited all the bread pans after she died.� Many others discussed preserving the Keres language: �Jennifer feels that as a community, there needs to be encouragement and sharing of tradition to help preserve it for the future.� A man named Elardo Garcia mourned the memories he had lost: �I�ve had a lot of health problems over the past three to four years. That�s why I don�t remember any of my childhood,� his plaque read. �It is frustrating not to know, especially when my grandkids ask me how I grew up, and all I can tell them is, �I don�t know.��

In other places at the Pueblo of Acoma, ceremonial items like the shield are placed to rest after completing their journey back home. These are the items that could have been purchased for the sake of someone�s private museum: to hang in their homes, or perhaps to sit in storage, collecting strange value from an outsider�s gaze. Instead, they wait while cultural leaders decide how and when they will rejoin the life and memory of the tribe. What the tribe had on display for the public was, instead, their living members: the pottery that they make, and the memories they tell, or try to tell, their grandchildren.

Elena Saavedra Buckley is a contributing editor at High Country News. Email her at at elenasb@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor.

===============

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/08/15/hawaii-news/bones-found-on-a-property-tied-to-obama-causing-tension-with-native-hawaiians/
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, August 15, 2020

Bones found on a property tied to Obama, causing tension with Native Hawaiians

By Sophie Cocke scocke@staradvertiser.com

EDITOR�S NOTE: This story is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

On a Wednesday morning in early July, the Oahu Island Burial Council logged on to Zoom for its monthly meeting. Members, who are appointed by the governor to oversee and consult on the treatment of Native Hawaiian remains, faced a long agenda. Bones had been found at a variety of construction sites. Some were discovered under a sidewalk, others near a waterline replacement project.

Kamuela Kala�i was there to speak up for ancestors in Waimanalo, a Native Hawaiian community in eastern Oahu. In January, workers had found human remains, or iwi kupuna, as they reshaped a multimillion-dollar oceanfront lot into a luxury compound being developed by Marty Nesbitt, the chair of the Obama Foundation and head of a Chicago-based private-equity firm. The bones were unearthed in an area where the owners were planning a swimming pool and septic system, and they were reburied months later on another part of the property. A state official made the decision to relocate the remains.

Kala�i was furious with the developers. �All over the place, our kupuna, somehow it is OK to sacrifice them for the sake of buildings and cesspools and swimming pools,� Kala�i said, her voice trembling. �It�s not OK. It�s not OK. I will say that until the last breath in my body can say it.�

It�s not uncommon for developers in Hawaii to encounter buried remains. For more than 2,000 years, Native Hawaiians buried their loved ones throughout the terrain, particularly in sand dunes, which are now prime real estate. But the discovery in Waimanalo has added to the complexity of a redevelopment project with ties to Barack Obama. State officials and community members say the former president, who grew up in Hawaii, will be among the property�s future occupants.

>> RELATED STORY: Obama and the beach house loopholes
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/08/15/hawaii-news/obama-and-the-beach-house-loopholes/

Obama�s personal office declined comment on the Waimanalo property, referring inquiries to Nesbitt. A close friend of the former president, Nesbitt declined to be interviewed. In written responses, he would not directly answer questions about ownership, only saying that he and his wife bought the property and were the �developers� of the estate. He said members of the Waimanalo community versed in cultural practices had respectfully reburied the remains.

�It is our goal to honor Hawaiian culture in every way possible and to become good and respectful neighbors,� he wrote. �We look forward to developing a strong relationship with the community of Waimānalo.�

Tensions are already high. The state previously approved an easement for a century-old seawall on the property, allowing owners to keep the structure in place. Now, Nesbitt is seeking a separate environmental exemption from the local government so his team can restore and expand the seawall. A Native Hawaiian community group is opposing the $3.2 million seawall overhaul, arguing that the construction will harm their local cultural restoration project. For the past two years, they have been rebuilding the walls of a historic turtle pond fronting the property and cultivating seaweed.

But for Kala�i, the issue is a more personal one.

Among Native Hawaiians, human remains are believed to retain the mana, or essence, of the deceased. That mana connects the dead with those still living and becomes part of the land, physically and spiritually. But for decades, those remains were removed and relocated as real estate interests carved homes and hotels into the coastline.

The issue came to a head in the late 1980s, when developers on Maui began excavating sand dunes at Honokahua Bay to build a Ritz-Carlton resort. More than 1,100 Native Hawaiian burials, believed to date back to the year 850, were unearthed. Native Hawaiians protested, leading to current day laws and policies governing the treatment of iwi kupuna.

In recent years, the discovery of ancient burials has snarled construction of several developments, with some sidelined for years as parties battle over what should happen to the disturbed human remains.

Concerns about iwi kupuna contributed to Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell�s decision this year to scrap a $1.4 million park project just a few miles down the coast from the Nesbitt property at Waimanalo Bay Beach Park.

Before Nesbitt broke ground on the Waimanalo estate, developers conducted surveys required by state law to check for Hawaiian burials. In 2018, they found the remains of a young boy.

Nesbitt�s consultants presented their burial plan to the Oahu Island Burial Council, and Kala�i asked if she could honor the boy before he was covered back up. At the grave site, she and members of her family offered a pule, or prayer, for their Native Hawaiian ancestor, who long ago had been buried along the coast where local fishing villages once prevailed. After the burial was complete, they placed lei around the grave.

Then, in January, workers found two more sets of human remains as construction began. For months, the bones were stored in what state officials referred to as a �temporary curation facility.� Kala�i, who visited the iwi kupuna on the property in April, said they were being stored in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet inside a construction trailer. She said the baskets containing the bones were covered with black mildew.

The bones had been placed there while wet, said Trisha Kehaulani Watson, a consultant for the owners. �That was not the condition they should have been in,� she said. �And I think everyone regrets that.�

Kala�i, whose former husband and children trace their ancestry to the area, had been urging Nesbitt�s consultants to rebury the bones where they had been found. But that would have required relocating a planned swimming pool, or laying the concrete foundation over the iwi kupuna.

As discussions drew on, Kala�i said, she was poised to perform another prayer ceremony on the property in May. But just days before, Kala�i said she found out the bones had been reburied elsewhere on the property.

�You don�t just dig them out of the ground and put them in the bottom of a filing cabinet and forget about them,� she told the Oahu Island Burial Council last month. �And then you don�t come to me and ask me to help you figure out the solution and then cut me off and go and pour the fricking concrete in the swimming pool so we cannot put the kupuna back now.�

Watson, Nesbitt�s consultant, said weeks of discussions with Kala�i to find an agreed upon solution were unsuccessful.

Nesbitt did not address Kala�i�s claims directly or respond to a question about whether he considered redesigning the pool so that the iwi kupuna could be put back. But he said his team listened to community feedback.

�Certain individuals have lobbied to insert themselves into the process and advocate for their preferences in the treatment of the remains,� he wrote. �This input was appreciated and incorporated as appropriate, and the project proceeded in strict compliance with the law and in cooperation with area practitioners.�

Kukana Kama-Toth, vice chair of the Waimanalo Neighborhood Board, who helped reinter the remains, said they were treated with respect and protocols were followed.

The decision to sign off on the removal of the iwi kupuna from the ground was not an easy one, said Regina Hilo, a burial specialist for the state. While she typically advocates for preserving iwi kupuna in place, in this case, she said the owners were not only planning a pool in the area, but a septic tank for the treatment of the property�s wastewater. That waste then flows out into an underground leach field where it is absorbed into the ground. �I don�t think keeping kupuna in a situation where they are adjacent to a leach field or a septic system is ever acceptable,� she told the council.

Kala�i now worries more Native Hawaiian burials will be unearthed, particularly if the owners get permission to break ground on the seawall renovation. In June, the burial council officially recognized her as a cultural descendent of the area, and consultants say she will be notified if any more remains are found.

The chair indicated the iwi kupuna at the Waimanalo estate would be on the agenda again for this month�s meeting on Aug. 26.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica are spending the year investigating the state�s disappearing beaches. Please get in touch with reporter Sophie Cocke at scocke@staradvertiser.com or 808-295-1851 if you have information you want to share about seawalls or other shoreline hardening structures.

Sophie Cocke is a reporter with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. She has covered government and politics in Hawaii for the past decade.

==============

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-ne-seminoles-reclaim-stolen-ancestors-artifacts-20201027-hsty6sr5wrcz3gqyslqs676dfq-story.html
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, October 27, 2020

Florida�s Seminole Tribe wins fight to reclaim ancestors and artifacts

By BROOKE BAITINGER

For decades, Florida�s Seminole Tribe has been fighting to reclaim their ancestors who were stolen from burial sites across the state during the height of colonialism in North America. Now, thanks to a brand new policy at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, they�ll have the chance to bring their ancestors back home.

The conflict stemmed from imprecise labeling and record keeping when the remains and artifacts were exhumed from burial grounds. Throughout the 1900s, the Smithsonian obtained human remains and archaeological artifacts through donations and acquisitions � including nearly 1,500 Seminole ancestors and tens of thousands of archaeological artifacts that had been exhumed from burial sites across the state, according to the tribe.

In some cases, archaeologists said they weren�t sure which native tribe the remains belonged to. They labeled them �culturally unaffiliated.� Those remains ended up on display at the Smithsonian but weren�t tied to any specific tribe. And because legislation such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act didn�t apply to the Smithsonian when it was passed in 1990, the museum didn�t have to set up a framework for native tribes to reclaim their ancestors to bring them back to their rightful resting place, according to the Seminole Tribe.

Facing mounting pressure from many native tribes, including the Seminoles, the Smithsonian changed course and decided to allow the tribes to reclaim their ancestors, even if archaeologists hadn�t said the remains came from a specific tribe. The victory opens the door for native tribes to begin that process and remedies some of the damage inflicted upon Native American tribes by the legacy of colonialism, said Paul Backhouse, historic preservation officer for the Seminoles. �It�s hugely significant right now for Indian Country in general and for the Seminole tribe in Florida,� he said. �It�s a huge victory for indigenous rights.�

Other native tribes have also been fighting for the change, Backhouse said. The policy needed to be updated to give equal weight to tribal knowledge and oral histories that could identify their ancestors, even when archaeologists could not. �That�s a big issue for Native American tribes who always have known who they belong to, because they�re their ancestors,� Backhouse said. �Just because there wasn�t an object buried with them that indicates they�re Seminole doesn�t mean they�re not ancestors of Seminole and Miccosukee populations that still live in Florida.� For years, Native American groups have been seen as the �other,� as objects of examination rather than characters in their own story, Backhouse said.

Many other tribes have fought for the same goal for years, but the Smithsonian turned them away, said Bill Billeck, the museum�s head of repatriation. Now that the Seminole Tribe has won, the museum will inform the rejected tribes of the policy change, he said. The new policy, officially adopted Oct. 5, affects Native American tribes, Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian organizations.

As for the archaeological artifacts, those could be anything native-made or even trade items from contact with Europeans, Billeck said. Backhouse said it�s anything that the ancestors had with them when they died. That could include pottery, jewelry, hand-carved bone tools, arrowheads, and wooden effigies.

The Smithsonian has returned about 6,200 ancestors and over 200,000 artifacts that they know belonged to certain tribes and were so deemed �culturally affiliated� with that tribe. Now, when tribes request to reclaim their ancestors who have been labeled �culturally unaffiliated,� Billeck�s staff will have to handle it on a case by case basis, he said.

Tina Osceola, a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and associate justice for the tribal court, said the victory had been a long time coming and was generations overdue. �I hope that the nation and world will shift their beliefs that our culture and people are only valuable when owned, displayed or studied,� she said.

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Museum in Clewiston posted about the victory on Facebook, and shared a photo from when tribe members visited Washington, D.C., to push Congress to change the policy.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl-seminoleshistory-story.html
They shared the social media hashtag related to their efforts:
#NoMoreStolenAncestors.
In the Seminole language, Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki means a place to learn and a place to remember.

================

https://www.texasobserver.org/native-american-graves-protection-repatriation-act-texas/
The Texas Observer, November 16, 2020

Bringing the Dead Home
Thirty years after Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, only a fraction of human remains held by Texas� museums and universities have been returned.

By Amal Ahmed

Ram�n V�squez can�t tell you exactly how many of his relatives have been dug up. He can�t tell you how many are now stored in climate-controlled rooms at museums or universities. And he can�t tell you how many more will be unearthed when shovels hit the ground at construction sites in and around San Antonio�s historic colonial missions. V�squez is a member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, a tribe that still calls South Texas and Northern Mexico home. When Spanish colonizers arrived in the region in the 18th century and met the Coahuiltecan tribes, they didn�t violently force them off their lands or kill them on sight�for the most part. Instead, the Spanish built missions like San Juan and Valero, more commonly known as the Alamo, and attempted to convert Indigenous communities to Catholicism. Some were then buried on the mission grounds as Catholics.

By the 20th century, archeology and anthropology students in Texas were taught that the Coahuiltecan were extinct. In fact, a popular university-level textbook published in 1961 and widely used for several decades stated that the tribes had �dwindled to almost nothingness� and been �destroyed by disease or absorbed into the Mexican population.�

Yet the Coahuiltecan remain. The tribe has never been recognized by the federal government and the State of Texas doesn�t have an official process to designate tribal recognition, leaving V�squez and other tribal members in a legal limbo when it comes to repatriating the remains of their relatives. Under a federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990, institutions such as museums and universities that receive any federal funding and hold Indigenous remains in their collections are required to repatriate them to the tribes they belong to. But while such institutions are required to work with federally recognized tribes, NAGPRA does not mandate they work with tribes without recognition. Therein lies the rub: In Texas, many of the remains belong to tribes that are not federally recognized, which means that federal law doesn�t apply to them. People like V�squez are left to the whim and goodwill of university and museum curators.

V�squez is the executive director of American Indians at the Spanish Colonial Missions, an educational and advocacy nonprofit working to dispel the myth that the tribe has disappeared while pushing for the return of its ancestors� bones�whether dug up through archeological research excavations or, more recently, during construction projects. V�squez says the work takes much of the organization�s time. �It was never meant to be our job,� he says. �But it sure did turn into that.�

Thirty years after Congress passed NAGPRA, the vast majority of human remains haven�t been returned. Instead, collections have been moved to climate-controlled facilities while institutions muddle through the process of identifying thousands of remains and tribes struggle to find the funding needed to repatriate and rebury their relatives. The NAGPRA office doesn�t track the number of remains actually reburied, but of the nearly 200,000 remains held in federally funded collections nationally, only 40 percent have even gone through the process�a low standard indicating that the institutions that own the collection have, at the very least, attempted to consult with tribes to determine the cultural affiliation of said remains. In Texas, the proportion is lower: Just a quarter of the state�s nearly 5,000 Indigenous remains have gone through the NAGPRA process. The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at the University of Texas at Austin, by far the state�s largest archeological repository, holds the remains of 2,000 Indigenous people, the vast majority �culturally unaffiliated� with any tribe. To date, the remains of only two people have been returned from UT�s collections.

Until Congress passed NAGPRA it was legal and, for the most part, academically acceptable for archeologists and anthropologists to excavate burial sites and conduct experiments on human bones, pottery, and funeral items, or to use them as teaching tools. �Native people were considered archeological objects, like pots,� says Jackie Swift, a member of the Comanche and Fort Sill Apache tribes and the repatriation manager at the Smithsonian�s National Museum of the American Indian. �In the 19th century, there was this epiphany, like, �Oh no, the Indians are vanishing, so we need to take everything we can in order to preserve them in museums.�� This, despite the fact that the U.S. government engaged in ethnic cleansing and outright genocide to remove Indigenous communities from their homelands.

In the 1980s, archeologists were often hired by private developers for cultural resource management prior to construction projects, meaning that tribes to whom remains belonged may never have known that their ancestors had been dug up. NAGPRA provided the first legal pathway for Indigenous peoples to reclaim human remains held in these collections. The law required institutions to take human remains and funeral objects out of display cases or research labs and to create inventories of them. Tribal representatives could then access those inventories, make claims for repatriation, and finally rebury their dead. For the first few years, NAGPRA exclusively allowed federally recognized tribes to make repatriation claims but was later revised to allow others, like the Coahuiltecan, to submit claims when no federally recognized tribe claimed the remains.

But ultimately, universities and museums have the final say on whether or not to engage in consultation with tribal nations. When remains are culturally unaffiliated�meaning that the curator of a collection can�t definitively determine which tribe the remains should be returned to�progress comes to a virtual standstill. The lack of affiliation, whether it�s because the remains are deemed too old or there�s no concrete evidence, can be used as a reason to deny consultation�particularly with non-federally recognized tribes.

This July, the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory turned down a repatriation request from another Coahuiltecan community, the Miakan Garza Band, which claimed that UT�s collections included several of their ancestors who lived in what is currently Hays County. Brian Roberts, the center�s director, said that the band hadn�t provided enough evidence. When the tribe appealed the decision to the university president�s office, Carlos Martinez, the former chief of staff, wrote that �the law requires that certain standards be met, and, in this case, the facts simply cannot justify the requested repatriation. The law does not allow repatriation simply because a group is willing to rebury the remains.� Then, after pressure from faculty, staff, and students, UT reversed course in late September and announced it would seek approval from the National Parks Service to transfer control of the remains to the tribe.

�UT, which has repatriated remains in the past, has sought all along to follow best practices and federal law,� J.B. Bird, the university�s spokesperson, said in a statement. �Consulting the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act Review Committee offers another way to do that.�

Despite its flaws, NAGPRA is championed by Indigenous peoples as a crucial, if incomplete, first step toward undoing centuries of plunder. But it�s been a slow process. The inventories, required after the law was passed, were not due until 1995, says Melanie O�Brien, the manager of the NAGPRA program, and �that was the extent of the proactive requirements on a museum [or university].�

Many institutions are still making up for decades of poor record-keeping on remains that ended up in their collections. Southern Methodist University in Dallas, for example, submitted its required inventories in 1995, only to discover in 2013 that some of the collections, which had been closed due to budget cuts or put on loan to other institutions, were never reported to the federal government. It took two more years to raise funding and complete the inventory and determine the cultural affiliation of the remains, says Sunday Eiselt, an anthropology professor who oversees SMU�s repatriations.

Then there�s the issue of where the remains came from. Some universities, like Texas A&M, have dedicated NAGPRA coordinators, typically professors, who work on determining cultural affiliation. �People do not randomly bury their dead; even today, burial grounds are sacred sites. They can tie you to a homeland and define your identity,� says Heather Thakar, A&M�s NAGPRA coordinator. It�s her job to piece together the identity of the remains held at A&M. But in the past, some were donated to universities by private citizens who offered up little information. Fifty years ago, for example, a rancher donated the bones found on his land to A&M for research. No location as to where they were found was provided and no other information exists, making it nearly impossible to pin down any tribal affiliation. Carbon dating or DNA testing would destroy parts of those bones, so archeologists and tribal officials are usually hesitant to conduct such analyses. Without a sense of where the human remains were dug up or how old they might be, it�s difficult to know which tribes must be consulted. In some cases, the funerary objects buried with the dead can provide clues, but those items often disappear to private collections or are sold in lucrative black markets.

�It�s a mess. There�s no two ways about it,� Thakar says. �We were grave robbers.�

Even when remains can be identified, it doesn�t always mean that they can be reburied properly. In 2010, the anthropology department at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, consulted with the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and determined that all of the school�s remains and funerary objects belonged to the tribe, having been excavated from burial mounds in Caddo homelands in East Texas. But today, those remains are still on shelves at the university, despite having been legally repatriated on paper.

�The Caddo let us know that they wanted to rebury the remains and the vessels, and their practice had been to rebury them as close to where they came from as possible,� says Jerry Williams, a sociology professor at the university who was involved with the repatriation process. But the original burial mounds were in a public area, which could have become a target for looting yet again. A viable reburial option has yet to be worked out and would require funding for a new burial site or purchasing a plot in an existing historic cemetery. �That�s one of the real weaknesses in NAGPRA,� Williams says. �It is kind of like if a scientist went and dug up your grandmother and put her in a repository�and then asked you to fund reburying her.�

In 2016, the Miakan Garza band successfully repatriated one set of human remains from Texas State University in San Marcos that had been unearthed during construction on campus. Initially, the remains were labeled culturally unaffiliated. But Maria Rocha and Mario Garza, the husband-and-wife team who run the nonprofit Indigenous Cultures Institute, say that their relatives have lived in the San Marcos region for thousands of years, leaving little doubt in their minds as to the affiliation of the remains.

But during the review process, tribal representatives from the Caddo Nation and the Mescalero Apache questioned why the Miakan Garza Band had seemingly sprung up overnight�Garza and Rocha founded the Indigenous Cultures Institute in 2006, but before that, there was virtually no record of the band having existed. �We have claimed that area for quite some time,� Holly Houghten, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Mescalero Apache Tribe, said in a 2015 meeting. �It�s documented in the historic record. There�s treaties that are signed.�

Pushback from federally recognized tribes leaves non-recognized tribes at a disadvantage, as they constantly have to prove their authenticity or attempt to meet federal standards for recognition�a process that can take 30 years or more. Institutions can also choose to write them off, reducing the number of tribes they must reach out to while also reinforcing colonial definitions of Indigeneity.

But Bryant Celestine, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe�s historic preservation officer, says that repatriation runs into the issue of tribal sovereignty. �The ultimate goal for us as a tribe is to try and get all human remains out of collections, because they are not artifacts,� he says. �But [non-federally recognized tribes] have no right to insert themselves into government-to-government consultations.� Celestine and other tribal historic preservation officers have often advocated against institutions working with non-federally recognized tribes, which is one of the reasons that the Tap Pilam were entirely locked out of discussions regarding human remains unearthed at the Alamo during renovations last year. According to the Alamo Trust, the nonprofit that manages the Alamo�s operations, a third of the remains have been identified as �Coahuiltecan-speaking Indigenous� people, and a few more as �possibly� Coahuiltecan.

However, no Coahuiltecan representatives were invited to participate in the Alamo Mission Archaeology Advisory Committee. Only federal tribes, like the Caddo, Alabama-Coushatta, Seminole, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, were asked to join. The remains at the Alamo do not fall under the jurisdiction of NAGPRA, since the Alamo Trust doesn�t receive federal funding, but the organization said in a statement that it is consulting with the federal tribes �in the spirit of NAGPRA.�

In February, Ramon V�squez and the Tap Pilam sued the Alamo Trust as well as the city of San Antonio, the Texas Historical Commission, and the Texas General Land Office, which are all involved in redevelopment plans for the area. The lawsuit claims that excluding the Tap Pilam from repatriation consultations was discriminatory and denied them the right to perform religious reburial ceremonies for their ancestors.

�It�s like you�re saying, �All these Indians are the same,�� V�squez says. Not all of the federally recognized tribes involved with the advisory committee had historical ties to the Alamo or the wider San Antonio region, but some tribal representatives wrote to the Alamo Trust reiterating that they view the Tap Pilam as a �socially constructed group,� which mean it does not have the same legal standing as federally recognized tribes. A federal judge dismissed the suit in late September.

The remains that have been unearthed at the Alamo are only a few hundred years old; V�squez says they could even belong to his great-great-grandmother. �It�s kind of upsetting that [the federally recognized tribes] would take the position that they have the sole authority over our people, when that recognition is a political act,� he says. �It doesn�t determine who�s Indigenous.�

Yet to date, the Tap Pilam have repatriated dozens of human remains, some through NAGPRA and some through channels like the Catholic Archdiocese, which oversees many of the historic Catholic burial grounds where Indigenous people were buried.

For all its flaws, NAGPRA does provide a pathway for repatriation that simply didn�t exist 30 years ago. �NAGPRA is the floor, not the ceiling,� says Shannon Keller O�Laughlin, an attorney and the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs. �There is no limitation set by NAGPRA�you can go above and beyond what it requires.�

This month, the California Legislature passed a bill that would expand the right of non-federally recognized tribes to repatriate remains in the state. Since 2001, the state has had its own version of NAGPRA: State-funded institutions are required to create inventories and consult with California Indian tribes who seek to repatriate and rebury the remains of their ancestors. The state law was intended to account for the fact that many tribes in California lost their federal tribal status through the forced assimilation policies of the 20th century. It also covered state-held collections, which wouldn�t have been covered by NAGPRA. The law expands the number of tribes that qualify for state recognition through the Native American Heritage Commission and require universities to hire a coordinator to consult with tribes.

In Texas, the state government has barely addressed tribal affairs since 1989, when the Legislature dissolved the Texas Indian Commission, ignoring recommendations from the state�s Sunset Commission to restructure and strengthen the agency.

Recognizing tribes in Texas could go a long way in addressing long-standing inequities in issues like education, housing, and access to health care. At UT-Austin, faculty and students are now urging the administration to step up and engage with Native communities: In September, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program presented a land acknowledgement to the UT�s Faculty Council, which represents more than 3,700 professors and staff members. The proposal asks the university to recognize that the campus sits on stolen land and to commit more resources to Native American students. The program has also asked for UT to repatriate all the remains held at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory.

Despite the bureaucracy that has held up repatriation for so many years, Indigenous people like Ramon V�squez intend to keep doing the work. V�squez doesn�t want his son and grandson to have to repatriate and rebury their ancestors. He�d like to finish the task during his lifetime. The process is a constant reminder, he says, that even in death, Indigenous people are considered less than human.

�This has gotten so bad for our community that people are changing their wills, from being buried to being cremated,� he says. �They don�t ever want to be dug up.�

Indigenous Affairs stories are produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the number of remains that had been repatriated by the Miakan Garza Band from Texas State University. The number is one, not six. We regret the error.