Two of the country’s largest collections of Native American human remains are held by museums in Illinois.
To the director of one of the museums, the work to rebury those remains at the behest of a tribal nation or send them to the tribe is an emotional process necessary for correcting historic wrongs – but it also includes a lot of bureaucratic paperwork that can take months to years to process.
And it takes so long for a reason.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, is a federal law that requires a museum or institution to publish public notices if any human remains or funerary objects it holds belong to a tribal nation.
NAGPRA has existed in a couple of forms since 1990 when Congress first passed it.
By December 2023, the U.S. Department of Interior gave clarification about the now-35-year-old law: Museums and institutions with human remains must reach out to the tribal nations first – not the other way around.
Different groups noted this update to NAGPRA is particularly important – before this, institutions did not have to reach out to tribal nations first, although some institutions were already doing so, like the Illinois State Museum or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
But even with the change, tribal and museum representatives note the return process is slow.
Raphael Wahwassuck, a council member and citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Illinois’ only federally recognized tribe, said that when he started as the tribe’s point of contact for NAGPRA, he was initially greeted by stacks of paperwork.
“I had bankers boxes, probably four high, 10 rows deep, of notices that come in,” Wahwassuck said. “Since that time, we've cleaned up our internal processes to where now we're asking for a lot of electronic notices. … I could probably check my phone right now and have maybe 50 (notices), and, it’s just – I don't know that it will ever slow down.”
Two state-run museums and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are making progress on their repatriation efforts with the help of recent legislation, but a small nonprofit museum near the state's western border has been slower at complying with the repatriation process.
Institutions have until 2029 to publish all of their notices. If they don’t, they can face civil penalties from the U.S. Department of Interior.
A base penalty was established by the DOI for thousands of dollars, which can be increased based on damages tribes suffered or on the historical, commercial, ceremonial, cultural or archaeological value.
Before the most recent NAGPRA revision, the DOI collected about $60,000 in civil penalties between fiscal year 1990 and fiscal year 2024.
Illinois State Museum and Dickson Mounds
The Illinois State Museum and Dickson Mounds Museum are both divisions of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The Illinois State Museum is located in Springfield just beside the state Capitol. Dickson Mounds, a museum built atop burial mounds, is in Lewistown, southwest of Peoria.
Combined, the two institutions hold the second-largest collection of Native human remains of any institution in the country.
Of the 5,789 remains it holds, about 26% have notices published in the federal register; last year, over 1,000 notices were published all at once as part of a multi-year effort.
Both locations have been home to controversy over the years, as they had human remains of Native Americans on display for public viewing in decades past, which modern-day American anthropologists would generally consider unethical.
Logan Pappenfort, the director of tribal relations for the Illinois State Museum and formerly the interim director of Dickson Mounds Museum, has been doing NAGPRA work for years.
Before living in Illinois, Pappenfort was the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma’s director of cultural preservation, where he is also a citizen. The Peoria Tribe has historic ties to central Illinois, having lived for centuries in the current-day Lake Michigan and St. Louis areas.
He said the reasons it takes so long for remains to be returned and reburied are complicated.
Pappenfort said excavation of human remains wasn’t consistently regulated for decades. NAGPRA’s passage created some regulations for excavating on federal land or land near federal tribes, but it was still up to states and even counties to designate guidelines for remains found on private property.
At the Dickson Mounds Museum, a chiropractor named Don Dickson dug up some burial mounds on his property in the 1900s and built a museum on top of it so people could see into the ground below them. The state acquired it in 1945 so it could be turned into a state park.
Native Americans widely protested the museum for decades, as it previously displayed human remains until 1992 when it closed to remove remains from display at the behest of former Gov. Jim Edgar, then it reopened in 1994.
The state hasn’t published notices for about 74% of the remains held by ISM and Dickson Mounds, and Pappenfort acknowledged there’s still work to do.
However, he said it’s unlikely that the state ever reduces the number of remains in its care to zero.
The main reason: The Illinois State Museum serves as a repository for any remains found in other institutions within state borders that can’t be identified.
Wahwassuck said remains can sometimes be found unexpectedly across the state.
“I was just at another institution the other day, and when I first met with them, they assured me that they didn't have anything in their collections,” Wahwassuck said. “Well one of their long tenured employees retired, and as they were cleaning out their workspace, lo and behold, they found a box, and within the box was remains and other items, and so then that caused them to do a complete overview of their entire organization and, sure enough, they found that they had many, many ancestral remains and other items. And it wasn't anything intentional by the organization, per se.”
30 years of relationship building
The state has been trying to make sure that remains can be reburied swiftly to keep up with federal law and be respectful to Native communities. That’s why the General Assembly gave IDNR the power in 2023 to control a private cemetery so reburial could be a valid option.
Now, Pappenfort said most tribes opt to rebury ancestors in IDNR’s private, secretive burial site instead of taking them out of the state and reburying them there, which can be seen as akin to removal all over again.
“In the ‘90s when NAGPRA was new, my tribe, we brought ancestors back to Oklahoma from Illinois because we did not have the confidence at that point that they would not be disturbed again if they were reburied here,” Pappenfort said. “Now, through agreements, legislation, relationships built, there is a confidence that this is where they will be if they are reburied here.
“And so, that's been one of those things that's not been overnight. I mean, this has been a relationship-building exercise 30 years in the making.”
Sen. Mark Walker, D-Arlington Heights, who was trained as an anthropologist, helped pass the bill that would allow Native American remains to be reburied by IDNR.
Walker said reburial was something he found people were open to because it avoided remains “retracing the Trail of Tears” by leaving the state to somewhere else.
“(The bill) allows us to gather those remains and put them back where we got them, to reinter them, to have their own cemetery, to bury them with honor,” Walker said at the time.
Read more: Pritzker signs bills expanding protections for Native Americans
Center for American Archeology
The Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, which has the second-largest collection of Native human remains in the state and 13th largest in the country, has not published any public notices to the federal register despite holding almost 2,000 remains.
The museum in Calhoun County on the state’s western border is a nonprofit that receives federal grants, making it subject to NAGPRA. It’s been operating since 1953.
The center’s director said its collection came from excavations since the 1950s.
According to its website, due to multiple floods and the COVID-19 shutdown, the museum closed until a new building could be built. But the rebuilding project has been “put on hold indefinitely” because of a federal freeze on awarded Federal Emergency Management Agency grants.
The director of the center, Jason King, told Capitol News Illinois none of the remains were damaged during the floods because none of them were publicly displayed. He also said he has reached out to 25 tribes since the updates to NAGPRA.
In 2023, before the update to the law, King told ProPublica, “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”
ProPublica’s series published in that year identified how “America’s museums fail to return Native American human remains,” identifying how Illinois was one of the worst states for repatriation.
King, who has served as director of the Center since 2017, noted that it doesn’t have the resources of larger institutions.
“The nature of how this operates has changed over time, and my read on the center’s history and what we’re doing now is that we are a different kind of organization than a university or the state system,” King said. “We are making a good faith effort to do the best we can to move this process forward.”
King said the bulk of the remains the center holds are from field excavations from various research programs over the years. Nowadays, the center conducts field research after receiving permits from the state to excavate what were once sites of homes or refuse pits.
Notices are published closer to when remains are ready for repatriation; so while the center has reached out to tribes, it’s unclear whether those conversations will bear fruit until notices have been published in the National Park Services’ NAGPRA database.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
In central Illinois, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign created a NAGPRA office in 2020 to do the kind of work that was eventually turned into a requirement of the law.
“Since the university created the NAGPRA office and has actually dedicated time and staff and resources, things like that, to NAGPRA, that's part of why we've been able to so greatly increase our activity in the last few years,” said Krystiana Krupa, UIUC senior program officer for NAGPRA.
Since the office’s creation, there’s been a significant spike in notices made by the university with 70% of its 192 total notices being made since 2020.
Krupa said most of the remains that UIUC holds come from the anthropology department going on faculty excavations over the decades.
Of the 760 human remains held by the university, there have been 192 notices sent to tribes. The majority of those notices were sent after the university started its NAGPRA office.
An endless ‘emotional toll’
Another complicating factor is that many remains are considered “culturally unidentifiable.” In the original NAGPRA text, remains could only be repatriated or reburied if they could be definitively linked to a specific tribal nation – without a direct, definitive tie, the culture couldn’t be identified.
For tribal nations, this could be tricky because of how frequently people were forcibly removed from the land; and before European colonialism, land control varied over the course of history.
So, finding out which tribe was somewhere at a certain time could sometimes be complicated, which is why the update to NAGPRA’ definition of “cultural affiliation” can be important.
The U.S. Department of Interior said a tribe’s cultural affiliation to remains could at least be reasonably identified “by the geographical location or acquisition history of the human remains or cultural items.”
With just the preponderance of a cultural connection required, remains that couldn’t definitively be linked to any single tribe are going through the NAGPRA process instead of staying stuck in collections.
Pappenfort said preparing remains for reburial is a delicate – and emotional – process.
“Every day I was doing that work was a toll emotionally for me because I am essentially preparing people I think of as my ancestors for burial. All of us have a handful of times in our life that we experience grief; and in a day, I could experience that same grief a hundred times,” Pappenfort said. “I remember there are a couple days that I even had to step away and collect myself. And so that type of work is hard work, but it's also heart work. And it has to come from somewhere in here.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.