The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), signed into law in 1990, provides a legal framework within which federally recognized Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations can request the return of ancestral human remains and certain cultural items—funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony—from federal agencies, museums, and other collection-holding organizations that have received federal funds.

NAGPRA required collection-holding institutions to meet two reporting deadlines, the first for summaries of cultural items due in 1993 and the second for inventories of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects in 1995. In 1993, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, sent written summaries of cultural items to more than five hundred federally recognized tribes. In 1995, an inventory of human remains and associated funerary objects was completed and submitted to the National NAGPRA Program, and several "Notices of Inventory Completion" have since been published in the Federal Register.

To learn more about Dartmouth's ongoing NAGPRA work, please visit the Hood Museum's NAGPRA website which documents recent updates, news, and stories.

For further information, contact Hood.NAGPRA@dartmouth.edu.

For more information about this federal law, visit the National Park Service NAGPRA Program website.