Repatriation battles.

• Author: Emspak, Jesse
• Position: Native Americans

In 1993, Tom Kolaz took a group of Native Americans into the bowels of the Arizona State Museum, to a room full of thousands of human bones. The tribal chairman stopped, picked up a small bone, and turned to Kolaz. Crying, he said, "I can hear the spirits here. They are asking us to take them home."

"It really showed what we are dealing with," Kolaz says. "They see the bones as having life."

As the assistant ethnographic curator of the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Kolaz's job is to help his museum comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Under the Repatriation Act, every one of the thousands of museums in the country that receive some kind of federal funding must catalog and return human remains and sacred objects at Native American tribes' request. The museums also had to send out summaries of the collection, explaining what they had and inviting the various tribes to come and decide what they wanted back. The summaries were completed by November 1993, and since then tribes from all over the country have asked museums for information about how to get back their sacred objects.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is the first law to apply a set of national standards to new archaeological work and set up a system for return of objects. It also makes trafficking in Native American artifacts a federal crime, punishable by up to a year in prison.

"This law came up because of the way we as scientists acted for so long," Kolaz says. "When people think of archaeologists, they think of Indiana Jones. But this never really happens anymore. . . . Nowadays, we're really interested in people's garbage."

But the law may run into the same problems that have plagued the Bureau of Indian Affairs for years: lack of funds, lack of understanding of Native peoples, and resistance from conservatives.

Museums are supposed to finish returning all of the art affected by the law by November 1995. There is a provision in the law for filing for extensions, which most museums are likely to do, since funds are tight. And Republican budget axes may hurt chances of further progress. Museum authorities estimate the cost of a nationwide repatriation program could be as high as $40 million. Congress only allotted $2.3 million for fiscal 1993. For the tribes, the problem is getting the collections physically home. Shipping is sometimes not a good idea for delicate artifacts, and the...