The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 was a landmark in the relationship between museums and Native American communities, but the law’s implementation in the decades since has been uneven in ways that matter for understanding the context of the Sitting Bull repatriation.

NAGPRA established a framework for consultation, inventory, and repatriation, but it did not establish enforcement mechanisms strong enough to compel compliance from resistant institutions.

In the years following the law’s passage, many institutions moved slowly — completing inventories over years or decades rather than the shorter timelines the law contemplated, defining “affiliated” in narrow ways that excluded communities with genuine cultural connections, and in some cases actively resisting repatriation claims on grounds that the evidence of affiliation was insufficient.

The result, more than three decades after NAGPRA’s passage, is that substantial quantities of Native American human remains and associated objects remain in museum and federal agency collections awaiting repatriation.