For nearly a decade, there has been recognition of the need for an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (AAGPRA) or similar legislation. Experiences from implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) have shed light on challenges that prevent practitioners from achieving the informed, respectful, and expeditious return of remains. Given the likelihood of federal legislation addressing the repatriation of persons of African descent and acknowledging the hurdles that practitioners may face if and when it is passed, we offer a practical model, START, to reorient our understanding of success to recognizing that incremental progress is still forward movement. The model is organized into five stages and is presented with context from NAGPRA, along with suggested steps that practitioners can take at each stage to help build on their success. The START model is a straightforward and practical checklist approach that helps practitioners recognize the victories achieved in small steps that could be hidden or prevented by misguided but well-intentioned attempts at perfection. It is directly applicable to preparation for repatriation but has utility for any curation or collections management context.

In November 1995, the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia submitted inventories and summaries of Indigenous ancestors and funerary objects in its holdings to comply with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). However, after this submission, the Laboratory attempts at consultation with federally recognized descendant Tribal communities who have cultural ties in the state of Georgia were not successful, and NAGPRA-related activities essentially stalled at the Laboratory. Beginning in 2019, the Laboratory's staff recognized a lack of formal NAGPRA policies or standards, which led to a complete reevaluation of the Laboratory's approach to NAGPRA. In essence, it was the Laboratory's renewed engagement with NAGPRA and descendan tribal communities that became the catalyst for change in the Laboratory's philosophy as a curation repository. This shift in thinking set the Laboratory on a path toward building a descendant community–informed institutional integrity (DCIII) level of engagement with consultation and collaborative efforts in all aspects of collections management and archaeological research. In this article, we outline steps that the Laboratory has taken toward implementing meaningful policies and practices created with descendant Tribal communities that both fulfill and extend bounds of NAGPRA compliance.

The hope has long been that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) would finally bring ancestors and their cultural items home to their communities to be reconnected and rest. However, 30 years later, museums and academics still fear losing control of research and access in their intellectual pursuits. Far from true, museums have benefited in working with tribes in telling stories around their cultural history, present and future. This article shares experiences over the authors’ careers and counters the alarmist calls to arms against compliance with NAGPRA.

The issue of pesticide-contaminated archaeological collections has generated concern among staff in collecting institutions. Pesticides have long been used, but the awareness of their unseen persistence and their potential as a human health hazard is a new aspect of preventive conservation. Background information and guidelines for developing a pesticide history are provided for repositories, museums, cultural resource management companies in the private and public sectors, academia, and other public collections.

There has been—and continues to be—tension between Native peoples and museums in the United States due to past collecting practices and exhibitions that strive to interpret their culture and history without their involvement. Previously, many of these exhibitions stereotyped and lumped Native peoples together, depicting their cultures as static and interpreting them and their material culture from a Western scientific perspective. Changes are being made. Collaboration between Native peoples and museums in all areas of museum work, including exhibitions, is beginning to be considered by many as a best practice. Exhibitions developed in collaboration with Native peoples, with shared curatorial authority, decidedly help ease the historic tension between the two, and they are much more vibrant and accurate than when collaboration is lacking. This article will provide three examples of collaboration, defined with our tribal partners, to develop exhibitions at History Colorado, the state history museum, concluding with lessons learned.

Over the past few years, the lead author has had the opportunity to excavate multiple large sites in California, working on behalf of developers to keep their projects in compliance with their permits. She also worked in conjunction with local tribes to resolve burial issues with each excavation. During these excavations, she observed the challenges that the tribes encountered when dealing with fast-paced cultural resource management (CRM) projects where burial retrieval and a shortage of resources were the norm. For many years, archaeologists have viewed CRM as only dealing with the material culture of the past; however, archaeologists also consult and work with living cultures. This article will address the endemic problem in CRM that stems from a lack of planning, preparation, resources, and training and how it affects the burial excavations that archaeologists and tribes encounter in the CRM setting. It will also look for solutions to remedy a long-broken system that continues to ignore existing laws set in place to protect resources, as well as the relationships between the Native American community, agencies, researchers, and land developers.

This article will show how institutions and cultural values mediate changes in the governance of repatriation policy. By examining ownership paradigms and institutional power structures and analyzing the changing discourses before and after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, it is possible to understand the ramifications of formalizing repatriation. The current binary of cultural property nationalism/cultural property internationalism in relation to Indigenous ownership claims does not represent the full scope of the conflict for Indigenous people within the Western legal interpretations of property ownership. Inclusion of a cultural property indigenism component into the established cultural property nationalism/internationalism ownership paradigm will more accurately represent Indigenous concerns for cultural property. Looking at the rules, norms, and strategies of national and international laws and museum institutions, this article will argue that there are consequences to repatriation claims that go beyond the possession of property and that a formalized process (or semi-formalized approach) can aid in addressing Indigenous rights.