Under new federal rules, some of America’s most esteemed universities and museums, including UC Berkeley and other Bay Area institutions, must finally comply with a 34-year-old law designed to address a disturbing and long-prevalent practice of Native American grave looting.
For the institutions, it has meant stepping up efforts to return thousands of skeletal remains and cultural artifacts taken from Native American burial sites from the late 1800s through the mid-20th century. Some museums have had to close temporarily, and exhibits have been covered.
For Native Americans, it means a resolution of a painful and infuriating, decades-long effort to be reunited with their ancestors and their precious objects.
“It’s very personal and emotional for a lot of us,” said Gregg Castro, cultural director for the Peninsula-based Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, whose people were decimated during the colonizing mission era. Native people have been haunted, he said, by the idea that their ancestors, and the sacred objects they crafted and were buried with, have been “stuck in a box somewhere.”
For decades, hobbyists, collectors and prominent academics, funded by wealthy benefactors or at the direction of major universities, took part in the desecration of Native American burial sites, looking for skulls, bones, baskets, beads and other artifacts to sell, display or use for teaching and research.
In the Bay Area, tens of thousands of remains and objects belonging to Native Americans ended up in collections held by UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, as well as San Francisco State, San Jose State, Stanford University, the Oakland Museum of California, the state parks system and and other colleges and museums. Some 10,000 remains are still in Bay Area institutions, the vast majority at UC Berkeley.
Native American leaders say the changes resolve a personal as well as historical injustice.
“It’s like the grandparents who raised you — and you got orphaned away from them, which literally happened in this country — you think they’re long gone, but they’re not,” said Castro, who has been working with San Francisco State on repatriation claims.
The new Biden administration regulations update the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that required all federally funded museums, universities and government agencies to work with federally recognized tribes to return remains that belong to them. California enacted its own version of the act in 2001 to allow non-federally recognized tribes — many reside in the state — to also make repatriation claims.
Both laws have long been hampered by the lack of funding, staffing, institutional will and consequences for noncompliance, according to Castro, state audits and Pro Publica’s Repatriation Project. Many universities and museums were reluctant to relinquish Indigenous remains, often under the banner of teaching, science or cultural posterity.
According to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the new rules should “strengthen the authority” of Indigenous communities on repatriation claims. Those rules direct institutions to defer to tribal knowledge to prove tribal affiliation with remains and artifacts, pushing back on institutional claims that oral histories and other tribal knowledge didn’t offer sufficient proof. Institutions and museums also must consult with tribes before using cultural objects in displays or remains for research.
While the new rules forced some museums around the country to suddenly close — New York City’s American Museum of Natural History closed two exhibit halls, for example — Bay Area institutions, to varying degrees, have long been in the process of responding to growing pressure to comply with the federal requirements. UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology has been temporarily closed since 2020 to step up repatriation efforts. The museum still holds some 9,000 remains — one of the largest collections in the United States — and has identified 4,400 that are available for return.
San Francisco State, San Jose State and Cal State East Bay also are stepping up efforts to return items after a June 2023 audit found that California State University campuses returned less than half the remains and items in their collections.
Meanwhile, Stanford University was way ahead of federal requirements in certain ways. It returned the remains of some 1,100 people to the Bay Area-based Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in 1989 and 1990, said archaeologist Laura Jones, Stanford’s director of Heritage Services. But the new regulations have prompted Stanford to cover some items on exhibit in its Cantor Arts Center as the university reaches out to tribes to determine whether those artifacts meet the definition of cultural objects under the law.
Since 2006, the Oakland Museum of California has worked with a Native American advisory council to consult on such issues and help curate exhibits, such as “Taking Native Lives and Lands,” which illuminates the realities of the Native American experience in California, including White settlers’ genocide of Indigenous people after the Gold Rush.
But the museum, like others, must contend with its part in this “colonial” history of American cultural institutions, said executive director Lori Fogarty. The museum currently safeguards the remains of 28 people, which were inherited from a collection housed in the old Oakland Public Museum.
“It’s very sad that it’s even part of museum history,” said Fogarty, who called the grave-robbing practices of the past “horrifying.” “It’s one we handle with as much humility and honor as we can.”
For UC Berkeley, the issue has been especially contentious and rooted in campus history. Its first anthropology professor, Alfred L. Kroeber, encouraged excavations of Native American burial sites. Even after the passage of the federal act in 1990, the campus was known to routinely deny requests to return remains, but it overhauled its compliance efforts, starting in 2018, a spokesperson said. Since 2019, Cal has not denied any repatriation claim and has overturned previous denials. In one example of UC Berkeley reforms, the school in 2022 repatriated the remains of at least 20 members of the Wiyot tribe in Humboldt County who were victims of an 1860 massacre at the hands of White men.
Castro said a number of factors, including social justice movements and new leadership at institutions who “actually care,” came together to spur the new federal rules and to provide hope that tribes will finally be able to bring their ancestors home and rebury them. With the new federal regulations, he said, “The road is now there, and we’re paving it as we walk it.”
