The standard of practice was that once remains were found and excavated, they belonged to science — which in practice meant to the institutions that studied and stored them.

The objections from Native American communities were long-standing but largely unheard until the political context of the civil rights era and the subsequent emergence of Indigenous rights movements created conditions in which those objections could be heard and acted upon.

Native American activists and community leaders had been arguing for decades that the treatment of their ancestors’ remains as scientific objects was a continuation of the colonial dispossession that had taken their lands, suppressed their languages, and disrupted their communities.

NAGPRA, signed in 1990, embodied a recognition that those arguments were correct in a fundamental moral and legal sense.