More than 30 years ago the United States Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, ordering that Native American human remains be returned to their tribes.
The Repatriation Project, a database run by not-for-profit new organisation ProPublica, has found that Texas institutions, schools and research centres continue to hold three quarters of the 4,400 human remains recorded in their collections.
The database, which tracks the movement of Native American human remains and which institutions retain them, found a stark failure by Texas institutions to return remains to their tribes.
University of Texas at Austin Archeological Research Laboratory, for example, still has 1,905 Native American human remains in their possession, having made 341 remains available to return.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act stipulates that an institution must establish a connection between indigenous tribes and the remains of indigenous persons, then must create a list of tribes eligible to make a reparation claim and make them remains available for return.
ProPublica reports that once a tribal claim is made, physical transfer may occur.
"Many remains have been physically returned to tribes, but data on this is spotty because the law does not require institutions to report when these transfers occur," wrote Ash Ngu and Andrea Suozzo, who work for the group.
The Repatriation Project has found tribes across the United States have struggled, in part, to receive the remains because of a lack of federal funding to make a reparation claim, an intensive process. It also identified a lack of consequences for institutions that refuse to return the remains as a hurdle.
While penalties exist for breaches under the Act, a written complaint must be made followed by an investigation by a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Enforcement Coordinator.
According to research conducted by ProPublica for the project, major national institutions in the US including museums, public universities, and research centres claim they have kept the remains for scientific research.
In the 609 US institutions which have reported having indigenous remains more than 52 percent of remains have not been returned to their tribes.
The sheer volume of Native American remains held by these institutions is staggering. University of California at Berkeley alone still holds 9,705 sets of indigenous human remains.
According to the 2021 US census, 8.75 million people in the country identify as American Indian or Alaska Native; 2.6 percent of the population.
Credible historical sources estimate European colonisation killed more than 100 million indigenous people in the Americas.
