By Meagan Day

A pair of ancient skeletons found in La Jolla, California has been the subject of heated controversy for decades. Researchers from the University of California want to study them, while Native American activists want them handed over to a council of regional tribes. After over a century of clandestine grave robbing, Native Americans are fed up with non-tribal control of their ancestors’ remains.

“The university hasn’t done well in the past,” said Steve Banegas, spokesman for the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, explaining the tribes’ resistance to leaving the bones in researchers’ hands. “They’ve treated the remains wrong. They disregard our beliefs, our ways.”

This year, anthropologists hoped the US Supreme Court would block the pending removal of the bones from the San Diego Archaeology Center. But on January 29, the court denied the researchers’ appeal, ensuring that the Kumeyaay council will soon take possession of the 9,500-year-old skeletons.

“It’s hard to describe how bad I feel,” said Robert L. Bettinger, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Davis. “To have them slip through our fingers this way is a tremendous loss for science,” he told the New York Times. Anthropologists had been hoping to study the bones using newly developed forensic DNA technologies.

The Kumeyaay council requested the transfer through a set of legal procedures set up by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which was passed in 1990. Prior to the legislation, Native American bones and burial sites were pretty much fair game. For much of American history you could dig them up, sell them, buy them and display them with little impunity or regulation.

In the 1880s, amateur collectors and opportunistic grave robbers started to descend on Native American burial grounds around the country looking for precious artifacts. They often snatched the human remains and sold them to museums, which put them on display, or research universities, which studied them. By 1990, when the NAGPRA legislation first forced the federal government to take stock, federal agencies and museums reportedly had the remains of between 100,000 and 200,000 Native Americans in their possession.

The first decade of post-NAGPRA repatriation proceedings was “replete with horror stories about dusty, rat-infested collections” of Native American remains. But Native American advocacy organizations learned how to work the system, and the remains of over 50,000 individuals have been returned and buried by members of their tribe or a related tribe. Many Native American activists consider repatriation a healing process, and even liken it to the “return of prisoners of war to their home country.”

Native American skeletons in the private collection of Ralph Glidden, Santa Catalina Island, California. After he died in 1968, the bones went to a local museum.

Consider the case of Ishi, a Native American man from Northern California’s Yahi tribe. Ishi lived through the massacre of the Yahis, and hid out for five years alone in the wilderness before emerging in 1911, at the age of 50. Imagined by many to be “the last wild Indian”, Ishi’s final years were spent as a living museum exhibit on a University of California campus. After his death in 1916, his brain was sent to the Smithsonian Institute, where it was warehoused in a vault.

NAGPRA gave Northern Californian indigenous groups a legal avenue to advocate for the return of Ishi’s brain. “We intend to honor our Elders’ spiritual and traditional wishes that Ishi’s spirit will at last be at rest and free in joining with his ancestors,” said a tribal leader, defending the transfer. In 2000, members of a closely related tribe were able to recover Ishi’s brain, reunite it with the rest of his remains and give them a proper burial according to traditional custom.

Many members of scientific and research communities have opposed NAGPRA since the beginning. Repatriation of Native American artifacts and remains, wrote anthropologist Charles Meighan in 1994, is “the equivalent of the historian burning documents after he has studied them. Thus, repatriation is not merely an inconvenience but makes it impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory.”

A culture vs. science binary has informed the thinking of people on both sides of the debate — but it doesn’t have to be this way. In the case of the La Jolla remains, the Kumeyaay have not ruled out scientific study of the remains. “That’s not off the table,” said Banegas. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re closed off.” What Native Americans do want is to be the ones to grant permission for scientific study. After centuries of plunder, NAGPRA makes it possible for indigenous people to contribute to science on their own terms.