The Largest Holder of Native American Human Remains is Preparing to Return Thousands of Indigenous

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Ancestors

The single-largest holder of Native American human remains—a federally-owned power company in Tennessee—is taking steps to complete the decades-long repatriation of more than 14,000 Native American ancestors who were unearthed in dam construction projects across the Tennessee valley from the 1930s through the 1970s.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federal agency created by Congress in 1930 to deliver electricity to Tennessee and 10 surrounding states. Nearly a century ago, in preparation for its construction of large dams to prevent the valley from flooding, TVA partnered with archeologists from local universities to conduct salvage archeology and “remove everything of cultural nature,” Meg Cook, an archeologist and NAGPRA specialist for TVA, told Native News Online.

In 1990, Congress passed legislation—the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)—that directs federal agencies and museums with possession or control over holdings or collections of Native American human remains and funerary objects to inventory them, identify their geographic and cultural affiliation, and notify the affected Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organization.

But TVA—along with other institutions across the country—took 21 years to culturally affiliate ancestors and begin returning them to their present-day tribal nations. The TVA didn’t return any ancestors until 2011, after they were specifically called out in a Government Accountability Office report that noted that “almost 20 years after NAGPRA, key federal agencies still have not fully complied with the act for their historical collections acquired on or before NAGPRA’s enactment.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/largest-holder-native-american-human-000000804.html