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.

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

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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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