The University of North Dakota (UND) president Andrew Armacost announced today that it has at least one Native American ancestor that was used for research at its School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Today, the Federal Register published a proposed rule to rewrite the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in order to expedite and simplify the process for tribal nations seeking their relatives’ return.

NEW BUFFALO, Mich.—Paleogenomics, the study of ancient ancestors’ DNA to understand the past, is a practice with a fraught colonial history.

NEW BUFFALO, Mich. — Who owns Native American ancestral remains? What’s the spiritual role of repatriating them, and how can the federal government better facilitate their return? These were some of the high-level questions answered at the Association on American Indian Affairs’s 8th annual repatriation conference, which kicked off yesterday in New Buffalo, Michigan. 

The Founders Museum in Barre, Mass. will return 151 sacred Lakota artifacts to their rightful owners after more than a century, museum officials announced today.

The Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA)—a national nonprofit advocating for tribal sovereignty and culture—is holding its eighth annual repatriation conference in New Buffalo, Michigan this October 11-13. 

Last summer, the Department of the Army, which controls the site of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, said it “stands ready” to assist any tribe or family member who wishes to disinter their relatives and bring them home from the cemetery there.

Today, the University of North Dakota (UND) announced it discovered “dozens” of Native American human remains and “several hundred objects taken from Indigenous lands and communities” that the school is working with tribal nations and federal officials to catalog and return.

Last month, the Wiyot Tribe of Northern California reclaimed nearly 50 acres of their ancestral homelands from a private owner.

Descending from the sky, the remote village of Old Harbor, Alaska, appears in vivid color, dwarfed between a screaming-green mountainside and a spit of ocean. Anastasia Ashouwak was away at Indian boarding school for 121 years before the wheels of our propeller plane carrying her remains touch down in early July.

On June 18, the remains of 13-year-old Wade Ayers were set to go home to  the Catawba Nation in South Carolina for the first time since he was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1901. But at the disinterment ceremony, U.S. Army archaeologists excavating under Wade’s headstone found remains inconsistent with those of a 13-year-old boy, which were “instead found to be that of a girl of the approximate age of 15-20.”

Twenty years after they first spotted the name of a relative on a tombstone at one of the nation’s most infamous Indian Boarding Schools, two Catawba Nation tribal members are preparing to finally bring him home.

The remains of approximately 200 Lenape ancestors and associated funerary objects that had been held by universities and institutions across the country were reinterred to final rest on their homelands near Philadelphia on April 11, after being returned to the five Lenape tribes.

Indigenous grave protectors in Long Island say their town—among the wealthiest zip codes in the United States—isn’t doing enough to protect their buried ancestors, despite a Southampton fund specifically dedicated to buying land for preservation.

Eleanor Hadden (Tlingit, Haida,Tsimshian) told viewers of Native News Online’s An Indian Boarding School Discussion - Why Repatriation is Important  this past Mohday the poignant story of how her family has spent over five decadestrying to bring back the remains of her great-aunt Mary Kinninnook, who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, the nation’s first off-reservation Indian Boarding School, back to Alaska.

When two Oyate boys, Edward Upright (Spirit Lake Nation) and Amos LaFromboise (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), left their homes in the Dakotas in 1879, they were 13 and 12 years old, respectively. They were each the son of a powerful tribal leader—Amos of Joseph LaFromboise, a founding father of his tribe, and Edward of Chief Waanatan—in line to become hereditary chiefs of their respective tribes when they grew older. Instead, they never left the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania: They both died before they turned 16, and remain buried in the cemetery beside the former school grounds.

The Department of the Interior announced this week it hired a full-time investigator to ensure museum compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act for the first time in the law's 31 year history.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs will host oversight hearing on Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 2:30 p.m. titled “The Long Journey Home: Advancing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act’s Promise After 30 Years of Practice.”

In the more than 30-year battle between tribes seeking the repatriation of their ancestors’ remains and cultural items, and the institutions holding them, there are several excuses institutions use that do little to facilitate respect for tribes and compliance with federal law. 

Earlier this month, a federal committee determined that at least 5,892 human remains held in The University of Alabama’s museums collection are culturally linked to seven present day Muskogean-speaking tribes located throughout Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida.