Two million Indigenous remains remain unreturned despite NAGPRA

Evidence

Despite the passage in 1990 of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), some researchers under the cloak of science have fought tooth and nail not to release the remains and burial offerings of some two million Indigenous people held in storage, much of it uncataloged, in the Smithsonian Institution and other museums and by universities, state historical societies, National Park Service offices, warehouses, and curio shops. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 592

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing current figures on how many remains have been repatriated since publication.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 592
• XREF: connects to: More than 116,000 Native American human remains still held in museums and collections — Efforts to Protect and Repatriate Native American Cultural Items and Human Remains; 870,000 Native American artifacts including nearly 110,000 human remains still held by institutions nationwide — More than 1,500 artifacts from ancestral remains to be returned to Oneida Indian Nation; Human remains hold a certain sacredness and professional ethics and law (NAGPRA) require they be treated with dignity and respect regardless of the deceased’s ability to hold rights. — Ethical Reflections on the Archaeology of Human Remains