“When in doubt, call,” says Richard M. Begay, director of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department. If you are in possession of an artifact from a tribe or people not your own, offer to return it, especially if it appears to be old and you’re not sure of its origin story. You will be asked to describe it, and often to submit a photo. The Navajo Nation is most interested in repatriating human remains, funerary objects and ceremonial items known as jish, which might include buckskin bags, masks, medicinal plants, carved wood and anything with eagle, blue bird, owl or turkey feathers attached.

If you work for a museum that receives federal funds, you are required under a 1990 law to inventory all such items, alert tribes and descendants and initiate the process of relinquishing them. Since the law’s passage, more than 1.7 million funerary objects and more than 67,000 human remains have been returned, many looted from tribes after they were forced off their lands and onto reservations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Countless more exist in private collections. Begay’s team is focused less on recovering jewelry or blankets that were made to be sold (although you can donate them to the Navajo Nation Museum). Earlier this year, a Massachusetts woman turned over an original copy of an 1868 treaty that an ancestor helped negotiate between the tribe and the federal government that returned the Navajo to their Four Corners homelands.

Just because there’s a market for something doesn’t mean you should sell or buy it. “We’re in a make-money, get-money world, and that’s a problem,” says Begay, whose department does weekly searches of online auction sites like eBay for Navajo items and often works with federal law enforcement officials to remove them. Don’t make Begay’s tiny team hunt you down. Recently, a member of Begay’s staff drove from Arizona to Colorado to pick up a cardboard box with “Navajo” scrawled across it that a white woman uncovered in storage. Inside were ceremonial items thought to have been acquired by her deceased grandfather. “Who knows what the real back story is,” Begay says. “We don’t care as long as we get it back.”