Still Having a Bone to Pick With NAGPRA

Tribal paper The Cherokee Phoenix reports that that National Park Service has doled out $1.6 million in grants to carry out projects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The vast majority of it will go to 21 museums, tribes, and organizations to help with documentation of objects covered by the Act, with a small six-figure sliver going toward costs for repatriating remains and artifacts.

There shouldn't be anything controversial about this. But some observers, like a blogger at the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, seem to take this as a bitter reminder that Native Americans enjoy the respect of protection that non-Natives don't, since there's no blanket federal law against possessing and selling human remains.

Human remains at Mildenhall Air Force Base

"What’s this mean for our values as a culture ... when one segment of the American population receives legal protection but the rest does not?" asks CPAA's Mark.

It means we're on the right track as a civilization when we begin to honor the biological objects we leave behind when we each depart this mortal coil.

I think Mark and I share the same sentiment -- that the spirit of NAGPRA should be applied to all people. Imagine if poachers were allowed to spade their way through the likes of Arlington National Cemetery. But we have to start somewhere, and it only makes sense that we begin by protecting those remains that are the continent's oldest -- and, yes, most revered by their descendants. Why should scientists be permitted to dismiss that?

Now it's true that their age is what makes these remains so historically and scientifically significant, and by having to get permission to study them, they've gotten a lot less study than they did before 1990. But NAGPRA doesn't make it illegal to study them; and anyone who has worked with tribes understands that Native issues begin and end with sovereignty. It's as much a cultural and political issue as it is a scientific one.

Trying to reframe the debate as a matter of rights is a false economy.