Almost 40 years have passed since members of the American Indian Movement hijacked an archaeological field school in Iowa to protest the treatment of their ancestors (McGuire 1997 Watkins 2000), thereby inaugurating the repatriation movement as one of moral, spiritual, and political action in Native American communities. In the 1970s, Native American and Hawaiian people, long and angrily aware of the collecting practices of anthropologists, began to request-and in some cases demand-the return of artifacts and skeletal remains from museums and universities (Fine-Dare 2002). federal law of a movement in Native North America with a deep and complicated history (Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2010). In 2010, 20 years had gone by since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, PL 101–601), the instantiation into U.S. Repatriation in Bioanthropological Discourse: A Partial History

In this article I will explore new theoretical foundations for repatriation and “repatriatables” that bring Western and physical anthropological conceptions into greater symmetry with indigenous perspectives regarding the active social power and potential subjectivities of skeletal and material cultural remains. Moreover, although it is a productive legal, sociopolitical, and cultural strategy for many indigenous groups, repatriation as practiced still struggles to fundamentally transform anthropology’s relationship to indigenous peoples, at least in the United States.

The epistemological gap between Western scientific and indigenous or Native American perspectives-however crucial to bridge in the process of consultation and achieving mutual agreements-is likely to remain. Even though repatriation has been a legal and practical reality for over 2 decades, controversies between anthropological scientists and repatriation proponents still often dominate professional and scholarly discourses over the fate of Native American human remains and associated artifacts. The policies and politics around the repatriation of ancestral human remains and biological materials to Native North Americans and other indigenous peoples have largely been rooted in attempts to reconcile divergent worldviews about cultural heritage.

Skull wars by david hurst thomas