Honoring ancestors

Patty Franklin had one goal in mind when she stepped foot into a small college classroom where 15 cardboard boxes, filled with Native American human remains, sat spread out on tables.

“I wanted to make sure those bones were put to final rest,” she said.

Weeks prior, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Calif., had left multiple phone messages with Franklin’s tribe, the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians, stating the bones could belong to them. Franklin, her aunt, and a cousin decided to drive two hours to see Diablo Valley’s collection. But the visit didn’t last long.

“I started crying. … I couldn’t even stay in there to look at all of them,” Franklin said of the 2020 meeting in a recent interview. “There were babies’ bones, adults, pieces. I kept thinking, ‘Who was this?’ They didn’t know. They didn’t keep good records.”

Academic institutions and museums across the country are increasingly seeking to repatriate Native American remains and artifacts they have held for decades. Many tribes have fought for years for the unreturned items. But new legal changes are likely to ramp up the repatriation process.

In December, the Biden administration announced new regulations that institutions must follow to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). That 1990 law sought to put an end to grave looting and called for remains and artifacts excavated from gravesites to be returned to tribes.

Under its new rules, effective Jan. 12, the Interior Department gives institutions a limited five-year window to consult with tribes and update their inventories of Native American remains and artifacts that might be repatriated. The rules also remove a legal loophole that allowed organizations to put off repatriation.

Last year, a ProPublica investigation found that more than 600 federally funded U.S. institutions—including the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Field Museum in Chicago—have reported holding items that could be returned under NAGPRA.

By the end of 2023, U.S. museums and universities had yet to repatriate 97,000 Native American remains, down from more than 110,000 at the start of the year, according to ProPublica. About 180 museums that reported holding Native American remains have not started repatriating at all.

Dino Franklin Jr., Patty’s husband, is the secretary for another tribe, the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria. The Ukiah, Calif., couple are professing Christians, and Patty says their faith has led them to value and seek to redeem their cultural heritage, not reject it.

Recently, Dino’s tribal leaders ­visited UC Berkeley to view artifacts belonging to their tribe. They examined hundreds of items, including ­baskets, tools, and dance regalia.

UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum has been closed since 2020 to prioritize repatriation. Last October, the university filed a notice with the Federal Register that it was committed to repatriating the remains of 4,440 Native individuals and nearly 25,000 items it says were excavated from burial sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a statement, the school said that in years past, it had “privileged scientific and scholarly evidence over tribal interests.”

Many institutions blame poor record keeping, saying that establishing a specific tribe’s link to artifacts (or “cultural affiliation”) is often difficult. In some cases, institutions relied on NAGPRA’s “culturally unidentifiable” category to delay or avoid relinquishing their holdings to Native American tribes. The Interior Department’s new regulations remove that category as an option, stating that “in most cases, ­sufficient information on geographic origin and acquisition history exists.”

The Association on American Indian Affairs fought for more than a decade to see the new changes, chief executive Shannon O’Loughlin said. Now, institutions must defer to “tribal nation expertise … tribes have been given primacy, not museums,” said O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. “Institutions can’t just exhibit items that don’t belong to them.”

The revised rules could speed up repatriation, but how the process will play out still raises concerns for some Native Americans.

Patty’s tribe is small and landless, making the manpower and cost involved in the repatriation process especially difficult, she said. More broadly, she worries about tribal disputes when repatriation involves valuable items or contested land.

“Not all tribes are prepared with the infrastructure to be able to take those things back,” added Dino. Within his Kashia tribe, opinions differ about what to do with the items from UC Berkeley. For now, the tribe is devising a plan to maintain control of the items but allow the university to store them.

Regarding the bones Patty saw in Pleasant Hill, her tribe ultimately learned they were also tied to another larger local tribe and decided to concede them to ensure they were put to final rest. She hopes that will happen soon.

This story has been updated to clarify the status of the bones Patty Franklin examined at Diablo Valley College.