The bones have been sitting in drawers and storage cabinets at UC Berkeley for decades. Some were pulled from burial sites in the 19th century by anthropologists who called it science. Others came through donations, estate sales, or excavations nobody would greenlight today. Now, after years of legal pressure, public shame, and internal reckoning, Berkeley is moving to return 36 lots of Indigenous human remains to the communities they came from.
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Sounds like resolution. It's never that simple.
Repatriation — returning ancestral remains and sacred objects to Native peoples — is one of the least glamorous, most bureaucratically knotted acts of cultural repair in American life. UC Berkeley has been at the center of it, and at the center of the criticism surrounding it, for longer than most people realize.
The Law That Was Supposed to Fix This
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. NAGPRA, as everyone calls it, required museums, universities, and federal agencies to inventory Native remains and cultural objects in their collections and return them to affiliated tribes where possible. Landmark legislation. Also, from day one, chronically underenforced.
UC Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology built one of the largest collections of Native American remains in the country: tens of thousands of individuals, gathered across more than a century of fieldwork in California and beyond. The university spent years compiling inventories. It spent more years not acting on them. By the early 2020s, federal regulators had flagged Berkeley as among the most delinquent major institutions in the country when it came to actually completing transfers.
The 36 lots now moving through the process represent a fraction of what Berkeley still holds. But for the tribes waiting on them, fractions matter.
What a "Lot" Actually Means
The word "lot" is bureaucratic shorthand that papers over something profound. A single lot might contain one individual's remains. It might contain several. It might include funerary objects — items buried alongside the dead, meant to accompany them into whatever comes next — that were stripped away at the same moment the body was removed from the earth.
For many California tribes, the people in those storage boxes are not abstractions. They are ancestors. Their removal from burial sites is understood not just as a historical injustice but as an ongoing spiritual wound. Repatriation is less a transaction than a ceremony, and the logistics surrounding it — federal paperwork, tribal consultation requirements, disputes over cultural affiliation — can feel grotesquely at odds with that gravity.
California tribes have been pushing this fight hard. The state has its own repatriation law, CalNAGPRA, strengthened significantly in 2021 and again in 2022, giving tribes additional leverage and tightening deadlines for institutions that had been running out the clock on federal rules for three decades.
Berkeley's Long Reckoning
The Hearst Museum has not been a passive actor here, and that's worth saying clearly. Staff have worked for years on consultations, inventories, and transfers that never made headlines. The institution has repatriated thousands of items over the years. But the sheer size of the collection, combined with past administrative slowness and the complexity of establishing tribal affiliation for remains collected before modern record-keeping, left Berkeley sitting on an enormous backlog that became impossible to defend publicly.
In 2023, federal agencies suspended Berkeley's ability to acquire new human remains or cultural items — a significant sanction that made plain how seriously regulators viewed the delays. The university responded with commitments to accelerate the work, dedicating more staff and resources to the process. The current 36-lot transfer is part of that push.
The university has acknowledged, in various statements, that the pace of earlier repatriation efforts fell short of what tribes deserved. That's not nothing. It's also not enough, according to tribal advocates who have spent careers pushing institutions toward accountability.
The Harder Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Even when the will is there, repatriation runs into genuinely hard problems. Some remains in Berkeley's collection come from California tribes that no longer exist as federally recognized entities. Others were collected in areas where multiple tribes have overlapping ancestral claims. A few lots involve remains so old, or so poorly documented at the time of collection, that establishing cultural affiliation requires extensive genealogical and anthropological research — the same kind of research that, in a different context, is exactly what put these remains in a university drawer to begin with.
Real irony in that. The science that disturbed the dead is now, in some cases, the only tool available to figure out where the dead belong.
Tribal leaders and repatriation advocates have pushed back hard on what they call "affiliation gatekeeping": using scientific or bureaucratic standards to slow or block transfers that tribes believe are straightforwardly their responsibility. The 2022 California law addressed some of this by shifting the default toward tribal claims rather than institutional discretion.
What Comes After the Transfer
When remains are returned, tribes handle reburial according to their own protocols. Often private, often on tribal land, almost never accompanied by press releases or cameras. That's deliberate. The return of ancestors is not a photo opportunity.
What repatriation does do, slowly and imperfectly, is change the relationship between research institutions and the communities they spent generations treating as source material. Berkeley is a long way from closing out its obligations at the Hearst Museum. The 36 lots moving now won't be the last, and the debates over affiliation and process won't disappear when they do.
But somewhere, a family that has been asking for the same thing for 30 years is about to get an answer. That's not nothing either.