A U.S. Senator Is Shaming Universities Into Returning Native American Human Remains

WASHINGTON – A couple of months ago, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) walked onto the Senate floor with an unusual plan: public shaming.

Speaking to the C-SPAN cameras, Schatz began listing off the names of universities and museums with large collections of human remains and sacred funerary objects that belong to Native Americans. They were supposed to have been returned decades ago but weren’t.

“These museums and universities are everywhere,” Schatz fumed in his floor remarks . “The University of Tennessee. The University of Kentucky. The University of Alabama. The University of Arizona. The University of Florida. The University of Missouri-Columbia. The University of Oklahoma. The Center for American Archaeology in Illinois. The University of Texas at Austin. The Milwaukee Public Museum.”

More than 70 institutions around the country areholding on to tens of thousands of human remains — not to mention hundreds of thousands of cultural items — that were largely taken from Native American burial sites in the late 1800s and are now parts of academic collections.

The National Park Service has a public database of which colleges, museums, universities and historical groups have such items in their collections, and how many of each. As of last month, these institutions collectively held the remains of nearly 58,000 Indigenous people.

They appear to be violating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, or NAGPRA, a federal law demanding the “expeditious” return of these items. And some of the institutions with the largest collections are universities that proudly espouse progressive values, like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The questions are obvious: Have all of