Key Federal Agencies Not Fully Complying with NAGPRA

Despite having about 20 years to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, key federal agencies still have not completely complied, a report published last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded.

The 106-page report focuses on eight federal agencies: the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NPS; the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

These agencies have significant collections of historical objects that were acquired before NAGPRA’s enactment in 1990 through various means, such as construction projects and archaeological excavations. The number of items in each agency’s possession is in the millions.

The law requires federal agencies and museums to “return certain Native American cultural items — human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony — to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”

It established a process to return the remains and objects. Agencies and museums were to identify cultural items in their collections that are subject to NAGPRA and prepare inventories and summaries of the items; consult with lineal descendants, tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on the identification and cultural affiliation of the cultural items in their inventories and summaries; send notices to lineal descendants, tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations describing cultural items and lineal descendancy or cultural affiliation and stating that the cultural items may be repatriated (the Secretary of the Interior is required to publish these notices in the Federal Register). The inventories were to be done by Nov. 16 1995, and the summaries were due two years before that.

As the report reveals, there may have been too much work and not enough time to do it.

“Many federal agencies faced a monumental task in trying to identify all of their NAGPRA items and culturally affiliating them, to the extent possible, within the statutory deadlines. The difficulty of the task was compounded at some agencies by overall poor management and oversight of their museum collections over the years,” the report said.

Among the issues, there have been delays in publishing notices of inventory completion, and some agencies have not published all required notices, which have complicated efforts of Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations to make repatriation requests.

The report said that as of Sept. 30, 2009, only 55 percent of Native American human remains inventoried by agencies had been published in notices of inventory completion.

“While agencies compiled hundreds of summaries and inventories, generally by the statutory deadlines, the amount of work conducted and the quality of the documents prepared varied widely and in some cases did not provide reasonable assurance of compliance with the act,” the report said.

Overall, the report found, the Corps, Forest Service and NPS did the most work to identify their NAGPRA items; BLM, BOR and FWS did some; and BIA and TVA have done the least amount.

The report said that policy makers will have a tough time determining how much work agencies have left to be in compliance because the agencies themselves don’t really know, nor do they know what they need in terms of staffing and resources to complete the required work.

Jack F. Trope, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which had a part in the drafting of NAGPRA, said of the report: “I knew that not all agencies had fully complied with NAGPRA, but was surprised by the extent of the lack of compliance by some of the agencies, such as the BIA and TVA.”

Trope also said that one issue the report did not address is how well the process is or is not working for new discoveries on federal lands, particularly inadvertent discoveries.

The report is on the agenda for the 12th annual meeting of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, which will be hosted by the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin Aug. 9-13 in Green Bay, Wis.

Representatives from the GAO, including lead auditor Jeff Malcom, assistant director of the GAO Natural Resources and Environment Team, will be there on Aug. 11 to discuss their findings, conclusions and recommendations.