University of Oregon still has 73 Native American remains and 188 funerary objects that have not been made available to be returned to tribes in its Museum of Natural and Cultural History, according to a ProPublica database.

ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism, created a database of Native American remains held by 609 federally funded institutions across the country. Those institutions, including universities like UO, report those remains to the Department of the Interior.

UO ranks low on that list compared to the number of remains other universities have, since it has made upwards of 86% of the more than 500 remains it reported available to tribes. The highest on the list, the University of California Berkeley, reported having over 9,000 Native American remains.

UO has made more than 400 Native American remains available for return. ProPublica defines “available for return” as establishing a connection between tribes and remains and publishing a list of the tribes eligible to make a repatriation claim. Once a claim has been made, the return of remains or artifacts can occur. 

In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted as a federal law. NAGPRA requires institutions, like colleges, to return Native American cultural items including human remains to their respective Tribes.

Pamela Endzweig, director of the museum’s anthropological collections, said those listed as “not made available for return” include ancestral remains where consultations with affiliated Tribes are still ongoing. This includes any cases involving a question of jurisdiction and human remains that are believed to be from Oregon but with no specific provenance.

UO did not comment on which tribes it has ongoing consultations with. 

On Feb. 24 the Museum of Natural and Cultural History published a Federal Register Notice which made an additional 37 individual remains and more than 1,000 objects available for return following a 30 day waiting period. The notice states that requests for the remains and objects can be made by members of a tribe identified in the notice, lineal descendants or tribes that are culturally affiliated with the ones in the notice.

The museum is responsible for sending a copy of the notice to the tribes identified in the notice.

The map available on ProPublica’s Repatriation Database shows that both Columbia and Curry County in Oregon have not had remains returned to them. UO has reported the remains of one Native American from Columbia County and reported 73 remains in Curry County. Only 23% of the remains belonging to Curry County have been returned by UO.

UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History continues to work with tribes, according to Endzweig. 
“[The museum] has responded to all requests for repatriation in a positive and timely manner,” Endzweig said. “We continue to move forward.”