NAGPRA updates

 

Pinal Apache Child Returning Home to San Carlos After More Than 150 Years

July 13, 2026 - by News Director

SAN CARLOS — More than a century and a half after losing his life during military operations (uh, massacre) in the Pinal Mountains, a Pinal Apache child will finally return home to the San Carlos Apache Reservation.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, has officially published a Notice of Inventory Completion in the Federal Register.  The notice, issued under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), clears the final legal pathway for the child’s remains to be returned to tribal leaders.

Historical Records Document Tragic Timeline

According to federal inventory records, the child — believed to have been under 12 years old — was killed in July 1870 in Arizona’s Pinal Mountains.  The death occurred during military operations involving scout units serving under U.S. Army Lieutenant H.B. Cushing of the 3rd Cavalry’s F Troop.

Historical documentation reveals that the child’s partial cranium was transferred to the Army Medical Museum in April 1872 by Acting Assistant Surgeon W.B. Dods via U.S. Army Surgeon C. McCormick. The remains were held in federal institutional collections for 154 years.

Path to Repatriation

Following formal consultations required under federal law, officials established a definitive cultural affiliation between the remains and the San Carlos Apache Tribe of the San Carlos Reservation.

The publication of the federal notice satisfies the statutory waiting period under NAGPRA, thereby legally permitting the physical transfer of the remains on or after Aug. 3, 2026.  The repatriation will allow the San Carlos Apache Tribe to reclaim the child and conduct traditional resting ceremonies according to tribal customs.

For Indigenous Nations across the country, the repatriation process represents a vital effort to restore dignity, heal multi-generational wounds, and honor ancestors whose graves and remains were historically disturbed.

https://gilaherald.com/pinal-apache-child-returning-home-to-san-carlos-after-more-than-150-years/

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Sen. Schatz Presses Harvard Over Delayed Return of Native Ancestors

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology was founded in 1866. U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz pressed Harvard this month to explain delays in returning Native ancestors and cultural items held by the University. | By Barbara A. Sheehan

By Shalini N. Ramchune, Crimson Staff Writer

June 24, 2026

United States Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) pressed Harvard earlier this month to explain why Native ancestors and cultural items remain in its possession, renewing calls for the University to speed up its repatriation efforts under a federal law requiring their return.

In a June 8 letter to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, Schatz asked Harvard to provide updates on its compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires federally funded museums and agencies to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to their descendants and affiliated tribes.

Harvard was one of 15 museums and universities that received letters from Schatz, the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The letters asked each institution to provide updates on its NAGPRA compliance and detail barriers to repatriation.

“It shouldn’t take this long to return Native remains to their communities,” Schatz said in a press release. “Indigenous people have waited long enough. It’s time for these museums and universities to stop the delays and finally do the right thing.”

In his letter to Harvard, Schatz asked Garber to account for the University’s progress on repatriation, including how many ancestors and cultural items have been returned and how many still remain in Harvard’s collections.

He also pressed Garber on whether Harvard had met its pledge to complete the “disposition of ancestors and their associated funerary belongings” by 2025, and asked the University to explain any new allegations of non-compliance since 2023.

Schatz’s letter also asked Harvard to provide an update on a Department of the Interior investigation into the Peabody Museum’s handling of the Woodbury Collection, which includes hair clippings from roughly 700 Native American children at U.S. Indian boarding schools in the 1930s.

He also asked when the University applies the “preponderance of the evidence’’ standard, a legal threshold used to decide whether a claim is more likely than not to be true. Under NAGPRA, the standard can affect disputes over which tribe or Native Hawaiian organization has the strongest claim to ancestors or cultural items.Bottom of Form

Schatz gave Garber 30 calendar days to respond. A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter marks Schatz’s latest effort to pressure Harvard and other institutions over what he has called slow compliance with NAGPRA.  In a 2024 speech on the Senate floor, Schatz said that more than 70 institutions still held nearly 58,000 Native ancestral remains. He also singled out Harvard as having the third-largest collection of Native ancestral remains and cultural items in the country.

“If you say you’re for equal justice, for doing right by the people of all backgrounds, then act like it,” Schatz said in the speech.

The other institutions that received letters from Schatz include the Ohio History Connection, Illinois State Museum, University of California, Berkeley, Indiana University, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Kentucky, University of Alabama, University of Arizona, University of Florida, University of Missouri, University of Oklahoma, Center for American Archeology, University of Texas at Austin, and Milwaukee Public Museum.

In recent years, Harvard has taken steps to accelerate its repatriation work, including creating a department dedicated to NAGPRA at the Peabody and more than doubling its NAGPRA-dedicated staff.

But the Peabody failed to meet its 2022 pledge to complete the disposition of all ancestors and associated funerary belongings within three years.

As of Dec. 31, 2025, the Peabody had repatriated 5,464 ancestors and more than 20,000 funerary belongings, according to data on its website.  Still, 2,482 ancestors remained in active consultation with tribes, and another 2,161 were pending consultation — leaving 4,643 ancestors in the museum’s possession after the target deadline.

The Peabody has since extended its timeline by two years.  The museum’s NAGPRA dashboard has yet to be updated with June figures, though Harvard has previously said the dashboard would be updated twice a year, in June and December.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/6/24/schatz-presses-harvard-nagpra/ 

 

Every time I see stories about this, I am imaging diggers looting graves - for money, prestige, titles,  but they are still thieves.... Trace

Harvard’s Peabody Museum Keeping Native Remains Is Just One Attack on the Rights of Indigenous Children

Harvard’s influence on this tragic story cannot be understated.  It stands as a symbol of the early stages of colonialism in America and has not fully reckoned with this past.  In October, Native alumni of Harvard Law School called for the immediate return of more than previously announced 6,500 Native remains in a letter to the president of the University, stating that the institution should “dedicate the resources and place the priority on returning them to the appropriate places and relatives. Not sometime, not soon, but now.”

As with Harvard Medical School and Indigenous health, we believe Harvard Law does not provide its law students an adequate education on Indian law, even though the Supreme Court has decided an average of 2.6 federal Indian law cases per term since 1959.  Three such Indian law cases are currently underway for the 2022-2023 term.  The future of our Native Nations lies largely in the hands of  legal scholars who can graduate from top law schools like Harvard without ever having to take an Indian law course or even hearing the words “tribal sovereignty.” 

We do appreciate the Peabody's recent transparency, and celebrate the announcement of Harvard University’s new president, but we hope to move beyond apologies and toward action that addresses the erasure of Native Americans and Alaska Natives at the University, and the burdens they carry as a consequence. Whether it's the Peabody having Native children’s hair or Harvard-trained Supreme Court justices deciding on the Indian Child Welfare Act, the fate of future generations of our tribal Nations — our Native children — remains bound up in Harvard's history of colonialism and the legacies it leaves behind, legacies Native students here feel every day.

KEEP READING 

Harvard announces return of Native hair samples #ScientificRacism

Cutting hair symbolized the beginning of assimilation for boarding school students

By: Mary Annette Pember, ICT - December 2, 2022 

Murals on the rear side of the abandoned Concho Indian Boarding School in El Reno, Oklahoma, were painted by Steven Grounds of the Navajo and Euchee tribes. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember / ICT)

WARNING: This story has disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the US. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline in Canada can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

Tucked in hundreds of envelopes is the hair cut from Native children as they arrived at boarding schools. Hidden away for nearly 100 years in the recesses of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the collection of hair samples offers tangible evidence of the trauma of assimilation.

According to the hygiene of the day, cropping hair was the surest way to avoid lice among the crowded populations of children coerced to attend the nation’s Indian boarding schools.

For boarding school survivors, however, the haircuts came to symbolize the harsh introduction to the process of assimilation, a gesture disregarding their culture and families wishes.

Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, wept as she described her reaction to hearing about the museum’s findings.

“I began to shake and weep, especially thinking of how deeply boarding school survivors may take this news,” said Lajimodiere, co-founder of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and author of “Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors.”

Some of those sampled could still be alive today, Lajimodiere said.

The Peabody Museum recently discovered the box of human hair among its holdings. Gathered nearly a century ago, the hair was taken by an anthropologist from the heads of hundreds of Native children who attended Indian boarding schools between 1930 and 1933.

Museum leaders released a public announcement on Nov. 10 about the findings.

“I imagine that many people, especially non-Natives, hardly gave it a second thought,” said Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe.

“But for Native people hair represents cultural and spiritual connections to family and place. Our hair is part of our strength.”

The United States is trailing Canada in addressing its history of government- and church-run Indian boarding schools.

In 2006, Canada created the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program as part of the country’s Indian Residential School Agreement.

Although the Department of the Interior under Secretary Deb Haaland’s leadership recently released the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, there are currently no services or support for survivors in the U.S. Haaland is the first Indigenous person in a presidential cabinet.

But more needs to be done.

“There’s no mental health support for our survivors in the U.S. unlike in Canada,” Lajimodiere said. “How do we begin to heal when the trauma doesn’t stop?”

‘A spiritual violation’

When children first arrived at boarding schools, authorities would routinely cut their long hair into short, uniform styles, an experience that has left many survivors as well as their descendants suffering from negative physical and mental impacts, according to researchers.

Basil Braveheart, Oglala Lakota Nation, still vividly recalls the shock of having his long hair cut more than 80 years ago, when he first entered the Holy Rosary Indian Mission on the Pine Ridge reservation.

“They cut my hair, a spiritual violation,” Braveheart told ICT and Reveal in an earlier interview. “In our culture, only the maternal grandmother had the right to cut our hair. When they let my hair fall to the floor and stepped on it, I felt disrespected.”

No hair samples from Holy Rosary were among those discovered at the Peabody Museum, and the names of those whose samples were discovered have not been released. Holy Rosary has now been renamed Red Cloud Indian School and is no longer a boarding school.

The Peabody Museum published an apology from Director Jane Pickering and a promise to return the hair to families and tribal nations.

The museum also created a website dedicated to describing its process in addressing the hair samples, which were originally collected by George Edward Woodbury, curator of the State Historical Society of Colorado.

The acknowledgement section of the website reads, “It is impossible to talk about hair taken from Indigenous people and its possession by the Peabody Museum without acknowledging the ties between early anthropological practices and colonialism, imperialism, and scientific racism — the very same systems of dispossession and assimilation that led to the establishment of Indian boarding schools.”

Woodbury and his wife Edna collected more than 1,500 samples of Indigenous peoples’ hair between 1930 and 1933 from North and South America as well as Asia and Oceania. They donated the collection to Harvard in 1935.

A spokesperson for the museum told the The New York Times that the collection has never been displayed. The samples include about 700 clippings of hair taken from students at Indian boarding schools and have been stored in envelopes labeled with names, tribal affiliation and locations of collection.

Although the museum has released information about tribal affiliation and location, it has not yet published the names of the owners of the hair.

According to its website, the museum has reached out to some tribal leaders regarding the process of repatriation and is waiting for feedback before releasing individuals’ names.

The Harvard University Native American Program wrote an email offering emotional support to the school’s Native students the day before the museum publicly announced information about the collection of hair. According to the email, shared with ICT, “There are over 90 community members (students, staff and faculty) who have family names or tribes associated with this list of relatives.”

In the only article published from the research, “Differences Between Certain of the North American Indian Tribes: As shown by a microscopical study of their head hair,” Woodbury described texture and color differences among the samples and noted “when these North American Indian hair specimens were compared with Mongoloid and White (European) hair specimens it appears that the Indian exhibits a stronger affinity toward the Mongoloid group.”

Regarding the scientific practice at the time the hair was collected, the museum wrote, “Much of this work was carried out to support, directly or indirectly, scientific racism.”

Descriptions and measurements of hair types were used to justify racial categories and hierarchies.

– George Edward Woodbury

NAGPRA regulations

Although several Native people contacted by ICT lauded Harvard for its repatriation efforts as a good start, many were critical of the process and questioned why the institution had waited so long to take action.

“The website is a good starting point; it helps us understand a little bit of the history of the researcher and the collection,” said Meredith McCoy, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe descendant and assistant professor of American Studies and history at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

“But there’s so much more we need to know; clearly the researcher had an extensive network of boarding school employees willing to send him samples of children’s hair without parental permission,” she said.

“This type of research is deeply unethical.”

Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, believes that Harvard has known about the Woodbury collection for a long time.

“I believe they’ve known about it for years but just didn’t know what to do about it,” she said.

It’s so sad that institutions like Harvard would hold onto and support this type of thing.

– Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

After the remains of 19 enslaved people of African descent were discovered in the museum’s collection, Harvard created a Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections in June 2021. A report by the committee, leaked to media in June 2022, states that the school holds the remains of nearly 7,000 Native Americans in its collections.

Although some of the remains fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, Rachel Dane, spokesperson for Harvard, wrote in an email to ICT that the hair in the Woodbury collection does not fall under the federal regulation.

Shannon O’Loughlin, Choctaw, attorney and chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, disagrees.

“Under NAGPRA regulations, human remains are defined as the remains of a body of a person of Native American ancestry,” O’Loughlin said.

“Although the law doesn’t apply to portions of remains shed naturally or freely given, children didn’t have agency to consent to the hair collecting; they weren’t at boarding schools of their own free will.”

O’Loughlin also criticized Harvard’s stated intentions of collaborating with tribes in determining how the collection will be handled. She noted that a process is already in place under NAGPRA that clearly outlines how institutions are to collaborate with tribes in repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items to appropriate parties.

“There is little transparency,” she said. “I don’t hear Harvard say they are going to work with tribes and determine what tribes want to do. Instead they announce they’re going to start a whole other process and do it themselves.”

The Northern Arapaho Business Council issued a statement on Nov. 21 demanding that Harvard and the Peabody Museum return hair samples improperly taken from Native children, including some from the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming.

“It is impossible to undo atrocities committed against Native children ripped away from their families as part of the federal government’s forced boarding program,” the tribe said in a statement, “but Peabody Museum can and must cease its role in this abuse by returning to appropriate tribes any hair samples taken from these children.”

The statement continued, “It’s long past time that museums, universities and other institutions apologize for their objectification of Native people and culture and return to rightful owners the sacred artifacts stolen from Indian Country.”

Boarding schools as laboratories

In 2018, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada on behalf of thousands of Indigenous children used as research subjects between the 1930s and 1950s in that country’s Indian residential school system. The suit also accused the government of “discriminatory and inadequate” medical care at Indian health institutions.

Ian Mosby, assistant professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, has published research showing numerous examples of Indigenous children being used as subjects of experiments to test tuberculosis vaccines. Mosby also found that government agencies conducted nutritional experiments in which children were systematically starved in order to provide a baseline reading in testing the impact of vitamin and mineral supplements and enriched flours and milk. Dental services were also withheld in some schools to provide test data.

The Canadian lawsuit also includes other medical experiments performed on Indigenous populations without their consent, including skin grafting among the Inuit in the 1960s and 1970s, birth control and forced sterilization of women from the 1920s to the 1970s.

So far, there are only a handful of verified examples of similar research and testing have been found on Native populations here in the U.S.

In 1976, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that Native children in government boarding schools were used as subjects in researching trachoma, an eye disease, without parental consent. The investigation, ordered by U.S. Sen. James Abourezk, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, also showed that more than 3,000 women were sterilized at Indian Health Service facilities without adequate consent.

As the investigation into U.S. boarding school history moves forward, many predict that more examples of government sanctioned research and experimentation will come to light.

Native people have long been the subject of research influenced by colonialism, race-science or eugenics, including Samuel Morton’s infamous 19th century Cranial Collection consisting of the skulls of around 1,300 people from around the world. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, there are an estimated 500,000 Native American remains and nearly 1 million associated funerary objects currently held in U.S. museums.

“We weren’t considered to be human to white settlers,” said Lajimodiere. “Our bodies were just part of the fauna, available for exploitation.”

The museum shared information about the collection with leadership at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and Lajimodiere and Azure report that they recognize several of the names listed among the Woodbury collection.

“I can say that the museum has been extremely helpful and willing to do whatever we feel is right to get the remains back to the family,” Azure said. “There is a little bit of a silver lining to this; it’s bringing people together to talk about not only the significance of the hair but also finding a way to bring it back to the community in a good way.”

Azure noted, however, that tribal leadership has been unprepared for the mental health challenges associated with growing awareness about the boarding school era.

“Some survivors have opted not to attend our events and commemorations,” Azure said. “They find it too triggering.”

Where are the resources?

The lack of mental health resources for boarding school survivors and their descendants continues to be a problem.

I wonder how many other institutions are digging around in their dark basements and will find similar things in the future.

– Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa

Parker, with the boarding school coalition, noted that although the coalition can direct survivors toward mental health resources, there aren’t nearly enough. She noted that according to a 2018 GAO study, the federal government allocates twice as much money per Medicaid recipient as it does for Indian Health Service patients.

“In Canada they have the residential school healing line; I think that’s something we need here as well,” she said.

Parker and the coalition are also pushing for passage of a federal boarding school truth and healing bill, which would create a commission to investigate the history of schools and provide trauma-informed resources for survivors and descendants.

“The government and institutions like Harvard should bear responsibility for the harm inflicted at boarding schools,” she said.

Stacey Montooth, Walker River Paiute Nation, executive director of the State of Nevada Indian Commission, agreed.

“How many times do we have to be traumatized by news like this?” she asked during an interview with ICT.

Montooth’s office is located in the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City, Nevada. The federal school operated from 1890 to 1980 serving children primarily from Nevada’s Great Basin tribes — Washoes, Paiutes and Shoshones.

According to its website, the organization’s mission, which opened in 2020, is to tell the story of the thousands of American Indian children who were educated at Stewart. The campus is also a hub for Native art, lectures and other public programming and educational activities.

Montooth expressed surprise that Harvard did not reach out to the center and museum about the collection of hair.  Stewart Indian School is listed among the collection locations and many of Nevada’s tribes are among sources listed for the hair samples.  She heard about the collection from a colleague in another state.

“Harvard needs to open up their checkbook and not only pay for, but help us identify, the very best psychologists, counselors and others who are best equipped to help our people,” Montooth said.

ICT asked Harvard officials if the university had any plans to provide such funding or services.

“We do not have a comment,” was the reply.

This story was originally published by ICT. It is republished here with permission.

 

City seeking information from anyone connected to Albuquerque Indian School

Harvard Museum Says It Has Hair Clippings from 700 Native Children Who Attended Indian Boarding Schools

• SOURCE
  

Harvard's Peabody Museum (Photo: Public domain)

By Jenna Kunze

November 10, 2022

**This story contains disturbing details from U.S. Indian Boarding Schools. For support and mental health resources, visit The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition’s list of resources.** 

Harvard’s Peabody Museum has hair clippings taken from the heads of about 700 Native American children while they were attending U.S. Indian Boarding Schools, the institution announced this morning.

The clippings from Native children are part of a collection that includes 1,500 total hair samples from people across Asia, Central America, North America, Oceania, and South America. It was assembled by anthropologist and former Harvard professor, George Woodbury, between 1930 and 1933.  Woodbury took “the vast majority” of samples from living people across the world to study racial hierarchies, The Peabody Museum wrote online.

Woodbury obtained the samples by enlisting the help of “other anthropologists and archaeologists, as well as administrators at a wide variety of U.S. Indian reservations, U.S. Indian boarding schools, and Canadian hospitals as well as missionaries worldwide,” Harvard wrote in an online statement published at 9am on Nov. 10. The collection was donated to Harvard and accessioned in 1935.

According to Harvard University spokesperson Rachael Dane, when the Peabody began organizing its collections in a database in 2008, the location of the Woodbury collection was marked ‘unknown.’ In April 2022, Peabody Museum staff cataloged the Woodbury Collection and determined its contents. 

Many of the samples have the names of the children whose hair was taken, as well as their tribal affiliation.  Approximately 300 tribal nations had samples taken from their kids from at least 21 boarding school locations, plus an additional 12 “collecting locations” noted by Harvard.  The most samples, records show, were taken from 138 children at The Fort Totten Indian School in North Dakota, and 122 children at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California.

“I just cannot for the life of me wrap my head around something like that,” Rosebud Indian Reservation’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Ione Quigley told Native News Online. She learned that hair samples were taken from her relatives in an email that came through from Harvard late Monday evening, she said. “Why would somebody want hair samples … from little ones? That's a human remain that, for us, holds so much sacredness.”

Harvard says it will return all of the hair samples, and that it contacted tribal chairs and tribal historic preservation officers by email to let them know about the samples, though it “did not have all the emails,” Dane told Native News Online.

“The Peabody Museum apologizes to Indigenous families and tribal nations for our complicity in the objectification of Native peoples and for our more than 80-year possession of hair taken from their relatives,” the museum’s website reads.

Nowhere does Harvard acknowledge that it likely broke a federal law that’s been in place since the ‘90s, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatration Act. Under NAGPRA, institutions are required to catalog and return their collections of Native American human remains and their burial objects. Human remains are defined by law as “The physical remains of the body of a person of Native American ancestry.” The term excludes remains or portions of remains “that may reasonably be determined to have been freely given or naturally shed by the individual from whose body they were obtained, such as hair made into ropes or nets.”

This year alone, at least three institutions have completed reparations of human hair to Native tribes or Native Hawaiian Organizations, according to federal register notices. But Dane told Native News Online that, “the Peabody Museum understands that this type of hair sample, which can be found in many museums and federal agencies, is not subject to NAGPRA.”

“I don’t see how they could argue that [collecting hair samples from children can be done with] consent,” Association on American Indian Affairs chief Executive and attorney Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw) told Native News Online. “Human hair is considered remains that require inventory and consultation. My first reaction, because there was hair from a Choctaw child included in there, is…what in the world? How did they not know this existed for so long? It’s so disappointing to see Harvard just not getting how to work with Native Nations.”

O’Loughlin said that the Association intends to hold Harvard accountable for requesting proper tribal consultation, instead of merely asking tribal representatives to fill out a contact form online to be notified when further information on return “becomes available.”

From from 1819 to 1969, the federal government operated more that 400 Indian boarding schools where Native kids were forced to attend with the express purpose of cultural assimilation that coincided with Indian territorial dispossession. At these institutions, the government employed “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies” to assimilate Native children through renaming them, banning the use of their language, and cutting their hair, a federal investigation into the government’s role in the schools released in May 2022 noted.

Quigley, the Rosebud tribal preservation officer, is a boarding school survivor from St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.  She can attest to the lack of consent in Native kids having their hair cut at boarding schools—she lived through it. When she arrived at St. Francis Indian School as a sixth grader, nuns forcibly cut her hair.

“It was very very traumatic for me to have my hair cut like that,” Quigley said. “No affection, no care, nothing. There’s something really wrong in that.”

“Does it seem reasonable to you that this hair was freely given or naturally shed?” Melanie O’Brien, who manages the National NAGPRA Program, wrote in response to questions from Native News Online. “That is the ONLY exception to human remains under NAGPRA.”

O’Brien said that she can’t say if Harvard has failed to comply with NAGPRA unless any person alleges it, and the Department of the Interior investigates it. 

“If this were determined to be a failure to comply with NAGPRA because these human remains were not reported in an inventory, the penalty amount would be $7,475 times the number of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, or NHOs involved,” she wrote. If Harvard were found to be out of compliance with NAGPRA for its collection of inventoried 700 hair samples, it would owe more than $5 million.

Harvard University has one of the largest collections of Native American human remains in the country, according to the inventory it did report in the 90s. Currently, the institution holds at least 6,162 ancestors. Harvard received five federal grants totaling $287,430 from 1994 to 1997 to complete its inventory. It also received two extensions to complete their inventory in 1998 and 2000, public records show.  

This is a developing story.

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