For decades, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the UC Berkeley campus held one of the largest collections of Native American human remains in the country. Stored in drawers and boxes just off Bancroft Way, they sat while descendants of the dead waited, sometimes for generations, to bring them home. This week, the university confirmed it's repatriating 36 lots of indigenous remains, according to wire reports. A small step. A pointed one. And part of a story that stretches back to Berkeley's earliest anthropology digs in the late 1800s.
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No red carpet. No press conference with cameras rolling. But for tribal nations across California who've spent years wading through federal paperwork and university bureaucracy to reclaim ancestors dug up by academics decades ago, this is the kind of news that actually changes something.
The Hearst Museum's collection didn't happen by accident. Berkeley anthropologists spent the early 20th century excavating shellmounds and burial sites up and down the state, from the Emeryville shellmound near the bay shoreline to sites scattered across the Central Valley, hauling remains and funerary objects back to campus in the name of science. For generations, those remains sat in storage, catalogued and studied, rarely returned.
A Law That Took Decades to Bite
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, requiring federally funded institutions to inventory Native American remains and cultural items and work with tribes to return them. California followed with its own version, CalNAGPRA, tightening the requirements and pushing universities to move faster. UC Berkeley, sitting on one of the biggest collections in the nation, became a symbol of exactly how slow that process could be.
Audits and reporting over the years painted a picture of a university that classified thousands of remains as "culturally unidentifiable," a designation that let institutions dodge repatriation obligations for years. Tribal leaders and advocates argued the label said more about institutional inertia than genuine scientific uncertainty. Congressional pressure, lawsuits, and public criticism eventually forced Berkeley to overhaul how it handled the collection, appointing new staff and pledging faster timelines.
The 36 lots now heading back to descendant communities represent one increment in that long-promised acceleration. Not the whole collection. Not even close. But proof that the machinery, slow as it's been, is still grinding forward.
What A "Lot" Actually Means
In repatriation terms, a "lot" isn't just one set of remains. It can represent a single individual or a grouping tied to a specific excavation site, often bundled with funerary objects recovered alongside them. Each lot has to be traced through museum records, cross-referenced against tribal claims, and verified before anything moves. That process alone can take years, especially when excavation notes from the early 1900s are incomplete or vague about exactly where something was dug up.
For tribes filing claims, the paperwork is its own ordeal. Federally recognized nations have standing under NAGPRA, but many California tribes remain unrecognized by the federal government despite deep, documented ties to specific sites. That gap has complicated repatriation efforts statewide for years. Advocates have pushed for reforms allowing non-federally recognized tribes to file claims more easily, arguing that federal recognition status has nothing to do with whether a set of remains actually belongs to a community's ancestors.
Kroeber's Shadow
Berkeley's anthropology building carried the name of Alfred Kroeber, the pioneering scholar whose early 20th-century fieldwork helped build the Hearst collection in the first place. Kroeber Hall became a flashpoint of its own, with student and faculty pressure eventually leading the university to strip his name from the building over his role in the treatment of California's indigenous communities, including his documented handling of Ishi, believed to be the last member of the Yahi people. The renaming didn't resolve the underlying collection issue, but it signaled the campus was willing to reckon, at least publicly, with the anthropological practices that built its museum's reputation.
That reckoning is still playing out one lot at a time. Every repatriation requires sign-off from tribal representatives, museum staff, and often outside consultants, a process that moves nothing like the speed of a news cycle. Wire reports on this week's transfer didn't specify which tribes are receiving the remains, but the broader pattern is familiar to anyone who's followed Berkeley's repatriation record: incremental progress, welcomed by the communities involved, measured against a backlog that took a century to build.
The Long Wait Isn't Over
Berkeley isn't alone. Universities and museums across the country, from the Smithsonian to smaller regional institutions, are still grinding through their own backlogs under the same federal law. But few carry the symbolic weight of Berkeley's collection, given the university's outsized role in shaping American anthropology and the sheer number of California ancestors it once held.
The 36 lots leaving campus this month won't make headlines outside California, and they probably shouldn't have to. For the families and tribal communities on the receiving end, it's not about the news cycle at all. It's about finally getting to bury someone who should've come home a long time ago.