Overview
- Within days of each other, President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued Native American Heritage Month statements that praise perseverance but frame Native peoples as contributors to the nation rather than sovereign governments.
- Scholars argue that heritage-centered rhetoric obscures ongoing tribal authority, skewing public understanding of responsibilities to tribal nations that manage forests, rivers, education, health, and climate projects.
- Museums and universities amassed hundreds of thousands of Native ancestors’ remains and millions of cultural items over more than a century, and much of it remains in storage with poor care and limited public access.
- NAGPRA (1990) and California’s 2001 law established repatriation pathways, and federal rule updates adopted last year require tribal consultation before items are displayed or studied and are intended to remove procedural barriers.
- Following the rule changes, some institutions have increased consultation, used hold-in-trust agreements, and embraced community-led archaeology, exemplified by the Agua Caliente Band halting construction in 2018 to recover and curate artifacts in their own museum.