In early 2024, the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York City closed two major halls of Native American objects covering roughly 10,000 square feet. Its president wrote that the halls were “vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.” Around the same time, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others covered or removed Native American displays.
They did so to comply with legislation Congress passed in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The goal of the legislation was to end more than a century of museums and collectors digging up and warehousing the Native American dead. For generations, private collectors, museums, and federal agencies had assembled collections of Native skeletons and grave goods taken during expeditions across tribal homelands.
NAGPRA required museums and agencies that take federal money to identify Native remains and cultural items and return them to lineal descendants and affiliated tribes. It was, by design, a compromise. Identifiable ancestors and genuine sacred objects would go home, while ancient or unaffiliated materials would stay available for research and public education.
But the law has spiraled wildly beyond its purpose, says anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss in a new podcast, and now reaches objects no one would call an ancestor. Consider a fragment of a Chinese bowl. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, catalogs a Ming dynasty porcelain bowl base fragment made in China around 1595. Its own record says the piece was presumed salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Agustin, which sank off Point Reyes, California, in November 1595. The museum files this Chinese trade fragment under its Native California department and has hidden it away.
The law has even led anthropologists and curators to treat photographs and recent books as Native American artifacts. In a notice published in January 2026, the Fowler Museum at UCLA moved to repatriate photographic negatives of petroglyphs from Black Canyon in San Bernardino County. A separate notice that same month listed 146 objects that Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding would repatriate, among them Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, a book the City of Redding bought for a museum reference library in 1981.
Weiss says the skeletal collections now disappearing are what train the people who read bones for a living, the forensic anthropologists who identify crime victims, and the anatomists who teach in medical schools. “There is a real danger,” she said, “that we’re going to lose some skills that are really essential to medicine, to forensics, and who knows what else.”
