Salinan Tribal Councilmember Robert Piatti remembers when he realized that what was sitting beneath a university campus wasn’t just archival material—it could also be people.
“I was a reporter at Cal State Long Beach,” he said. “In the humanities building, down in the basement, there were boxes and boxes of bodies. And it was awful, really awful.”
Those boxes held Native American ancestors—human remains taken from their graves and stored in university collections.
That experience never left him. Decades later, Piatti, a member of the Salinan Tribe of Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties, has worked through the slow and often frustrating process of bringing ancestors home so they can finally be laid to rest.
What Piatti saw at Cal State Long Beach wasn’t unique. For generations, Native American remains and cultural belongings were stolen and stored in museums, universities, and institutions across the country.
In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed to ensure that these ancestors and other tribal items no longer sat in institutions. The law created a framework for tribes to reclaim human remains and cultural belongings from federally funded institutions. But compliance moved slowly.
The remains of more than 110,000 Native Americans were still in institutional collections more than 30 years after that federal law required their return, according to a 2023 ProPublica analysis.
By 2024, the law was updated with new regulations imposing stricter regulations, deadlines, and penalties for not repatriating—or returning—these people and tribal belongings.
“NAGPRA is, at its core, a human rights law,” Jonathan Malindine, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s NAGPRA officer, told New Times. “We’ve always had, as white people, protections about desecration of our ancestors’ graves. You know, there’s laws about that. And for a long time, Indians weren’t afforded that benefit. And so their bones were dug up and brought all over all corners of the world into museums and universities.”
At Cal Poly, the remains of 10 Native Americans had been in the university’s possession for years. The university returned all of them to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians within the past year, Cal Poly confirmed on May 13.
Other California public universities have more to do when it comes to returning Native American remains and objects to the tribes they belong to. UC Berkeley, for instance, has the fourth largest collection in the country. The institution has reported that the remains of at least 4,700 Native Americans have not yet been made available for return to tribes.
Kathy Marshall, vice chair of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians Elders Council, has seen the shelves there and at other institutions that are kept out of public view.
“When [I] visit schools and universities, [I’m] just like, I bet none of these kids know that they are walking by, you know, 300 of our ancestors sitting in a room downstairs,” she said. “These were mothers. These were fathers. These were grandparents. These were babies. You know, I mean, there were so many babies in collections. It’s just horrifying.”
Marshall described the storage spaces as feeling like waiting rooms—places where ancestors remain long after they were meant to be at rest. For her, these are not distant histories but family members still waiting for return.
“There’s no reason to keep our ancestors sitting on these shelves,” she said. “Some of them are just in plastic in boxes. Some of them are just sitting on shelves, exposed. It’s not OK, and it’s hurtful, and it takes a lot out of us.”
Confronting history
The work of bringing ancestors home asks tribes to carry a difficult truth that generations of people accepted: It was OK to unearth certain human beings and keep them.
Language itself can sometimes create emotional distance from this reality, said
Mona Tucker, tribal chair for the yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini (YTT) Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County.
“When we say ‘human remains,’ sometimes I think people’s mind goes to the abstract,” Tucker said. “These are human beings. They’re not just the remains. They are people who walked here in their homelands in California. They had families. You know, they had loved ones, and they were buried with dignity, respect, and ceremony.”
That dignity was disrupted by a long history of grave looting and archeological collection practices that treated Native ancestors as objects of study rather than people.
Marshall said Chumash burial sites became particular targets because ancestors were buried with belongings intended to accompany them after death.
“For Chumash people, we were buried with all of our items. So we were prime for these grave looters to come, and they knew, they knew we had a lot of stuff in our graves,” she said.
‘These are human beings. They’re not just the remains. They are people who walked here in their homelands in California. They had families. You know, they had loved ones and they were buried with dignity, respect, and ceremony.’
–Mona Tucker, yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribal chair
Those burial sites drew collectors and explorers searching for “artifacts.” Marshall pointed to the history of French ethnographers Leon de Cessac and Alphonse Pinart, who excavated Chumash sites and removed belongings and ancestors.
“Actually, a lot of Chumash collections are in France,” Marshall said. “They just came and just really … ravaged through all of our cemeteries, and they were greedy.”
Marshall said she still struggles to understand how generations of people allowed it to happen.
“I think people thought of us as really not being human,” she said. “I don’t think that they would allow anybody to go through their graves in their cemeteries in France or in anywhere in Europe.”
Tucker said the motivations behind early collecting practices reflected broader ideas about Native people.
“One of their goals was to examine Native people, to try to prove that there was a gap between the ‘species’ of Native people and Europeans,” Tucker said. “That was a hideous endeavor.”
The legacy of those actions remains deeply personal. Marshall said repatriation work forces tribal communities to repeatedly confront difficult questions.
“How did they let this happen?” she said. “I mean, it’s just insane, and why has it taken so long to get these ancestors back?”
NAGPRA’s passage didn’t budge many institutions, which resisted repatriation efforts, Tucker said.
“Institutions with a lot of money, a lot of power, have said no to repatriation since 1990,” she said.
Still, both women described signs of change. Marshall said the updated federal rules and shifting attitudes have created what feels like a new era.
“There is this revolution of, ‘We understand these are yours,’” Marshall said.
That shift matters because repatriation, Marshall said, isn’t about possession. It’s about return.
“We are just caretaking, and we are the venue and the avenue to getting these ancestors back to where they need to be. My focus is reburial, putting them back where they belong,” Marshall said.
“That is the ultimate.”
Compliance push
In November 2025, the California State University (CSU) system adopted its first NAGPRA policy, creating a standardized approach for all 23 campuses to return ancestors and belongings. It also prohibits using Native American remains and cultural items for teaching, research, and public display.
To support the changes, the CSU allocated $3.7 million during the 2025-26 fiscal year to campuses with Native American collections. The funding supported repatriation coordinators, tribal travel reimbursements, reburial costs, and other expenses associated with returning ancestors and cultural belongings home.
The CSU policy came in response to Assembly Bill 389—a 2023 amendment to California’s own NAGPRA law—and recommendations stemming from a state audit that found significant problems in how the CSU system handled repatriation.
Before then, repatriation efforts had largely been left up to individual campuses.
“Tribes were getting very frustrated that every campus was kind of doing things slightly different,” Samantha Cypret, executive director of the CSU Office of Tribal Relations, told New Times. “They wanted something that was more consistent and streamlined in compliance.”
Following the federal NAGPRA update in 2024, Cal Poly hired Dr. Kent Spiers to coordinate the university’s compliance with the law.
In April 2025, Spiers completed an inventory of Cal Poly’s collections and identified the remains of eight Native American individuals.
According to a notice in the U.S. Federal Register, “the human remains are presumed to have been unearthed in downtown San Luis Obispo, CA, as noted in a newspaper clipping from 1958 that was provided with the human remains and given to Cal Poly.”
A second inventory was completed on Feb. 11 of this year, identifying two more ancestors in the university’s possession. Both inventories determined the remains were culturally affiliated with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
The university submitted a repatriation statement to the national NAGPRA database, Cal Poly spokesperson Keegan Koberl told New Times, though the public-facing records aren’t yet updated.
“Once this is done, it will show that Cal Poly has repatriated all known ancestors in our campus NAGPRA collection,” he said.
Cal Poly still possesses three Native American cultural items that are in consultation for return.
Historically, Native American remains and cultural belongings entered university collections through archaeological excavations, field schools, donated private collections, construction discoveries, and materials acquired for teaching or research purposes, Cypret told New Times.
Systemwide, according to the most recent CSU collection inventory, campuses collectively hold the remains of more than 2,000 Native Americans and more than 1.57 million cultural items. Another 500,000 items remain in storage awaiting tribal review and cataloging.
“We recognize the harm that we have caused in our lack of compliance and that we continue to cause,” Cypret said. “We are still causing harm by having ancestors in our possession, on our shelves, and we are actively working to really change that.”
The ‘good way’
Whiteboards crowded with titles and case numbers loom behind Malindine’s desk at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The NAGPRA officer has underlined some in red and circled others in blue.
“We’ve got, I’d say, 40 cases that are ongoing,” he said. “It’s a lot of keeping plates in the air.”
Each case holds a different history to untangle: decades-old records, fragmented documentation, and questions about where ancestors and cultural belongings should return.
“The process is, we reach out to the tribes, we have these materials, we think they’re eligible,” he said. “We talk to every tribe, make an agreement on who’s going to take the lead, write up the paperwork, send it to the feds. They publish it online.”
“Consultation, consultation is the key to all NAGPRA work,” he said.
Repatriation succeeds only when institutions build relationships with tribes, he explained, as opposed to treating returns as paperwork or a legal obligation. Instead of waiting for tribes to reach out, Malindine often initiates those conversations.
He did that with the case of beads recovered from a cave in Indian Wells near Palm Springs. The museum wasn’t quite sure how the objects were used by the tribe in question, so he reached out.
The tribe told Malindine that there was a cremation site roughly 1,000 feet away suggesting the cave had been used in burial practices.
“We think they were using that cave to prepare the ancestors, and those beads have been found in graves. So we repatriated it,” Malindine explained. “They now have ownership and control, and they requested that we curate it on their behalf until they’re ready to pick it up. So it still hasn’t left the building, but ownership has been transferred.”
At the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, he said, this sort of approach has shaped the pace and scope of repatriation efforts.
“Our museum collections were primarily Chumash—have always been,” he explained. “So we had about 2,000 ancestors here, probably 98 percent of those were Chumash. Those are already returned. We’re 100 percent in compliance now with the feds and with ProPublica. We still have a few ancestors … that I’m working to repatriate.”
In 2023, ProPublica created a database tracking the number of ancestors that institutions around the country hold in their possession. The data highlighted institutions out of compliance and put public pressure on them to get up to date.
Malindine puts a lot of time and care into repatriation, making sure it’s done the “right way.” When preparing ancestors for return, for instance, Malindine uses all natural materials.
“Most tribes want the ancestors to be prepared using all natural materials,” he said. “No plastic. None of this foam stuff.”
He hand sews pillows from unbleached cotton muslin, uses cotton string and paper tags, crumpled-up paper, wood, and cardboard.
“It just shows respect,” he said. “We don’t want [to use] anything that wasn’t around when they were [alive].”
The approach reflects a philosophy Malindine returns to repeatedly. It’s not simply about complying with regulations or closing cases.
“We’re trying to do these repatriations in a good way,” he said. “Not just do a repatriation—do a repatriation in a good way.”
Access Barriers
Piatti, from the Salinan tribe, thinks NAGPRA is a good concept, but he also believes that the reality of its inner workings is complicated.
“It’s a great idea,” he said. “Things should be returned to the people and put back the rest. That’s really what we’re striving for.”
In practice, Piatti said, the system determining who those people are is more constrained than the law’s intent suggests.
Under federal NAGPRA law, institutions receiving federal funding must consult with and prioritize federally recognized tribes when human remains and cultural items are identified in collections. That requirement effectively excludes more than 50 non-federally recognized tribes in California from direct repatriation authority, even when they maintain cultural and ancestral ties to specific regions.
For instance, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians is a federally recognized tribe, while the Salinan and YTT tribes aren’t.
California’s parallel law—CalNAGPRA—was created to expand and strengthen repatriation within the state. Passed in 2001, CalNAGPRA requires state agencies, museums, and universities to work more broadly with California tribes and, in theory, offer more inclusive pathways for consultation and return. But Piatti said federal funding rules often override that flexibility.
“If there’s any federal money tied in anywhere, they have to default to the federal NAGPRA law,” he said. “So every university … has to follow the federal standard because of the money involved.”
That hierarchy, he explained, shapes everything from who gets notified to who ultimately receives the ancestral remains.
“Federal recognized tribes first and foremost, they get priority,” Piatti said. “Because of the money involved.”
The result is a repatriation landscape where legal recognition can matter as much as geography or cultural continuity. Across the Central Coast, multiple tribal groups often assert connection to the same sites—places like Morro Bay and Cuesta Ridge—where archaeological and oral histories overlap.
“Who belongs where? And whose remains are you looking at?” Piatti said. “Who do they belong to?”
Those questions determine whether a tribe is included in decision-making.
In many cases, Piatti said, institutions provide tribes with massive digital inventories of remains and artifacts—sometimes tens of thousands of entries—without clear provenance.
“You get to go in and play with the record that is your record and yours alone,” he said. “Everybody else puts you into a big collective comprehensive pot and lets you choose and pick and fight and argue amongst yourselves.”
In addition, origin stories for the items or remains are often incomplete.
“It just showed up at their university one day,” he said. “Nobody knows where it came from.”
For non-federally recognized tribes like the Salinan, the barriers extend beyond access to records. Capacity also becomes a limiting factor. Without museums, dedicated funding, or storage facilities, even successful claims can raise the question of what happens next.
“We’re a landless tribe,” Piatti said. “We have no real funds to put forth to the effort to not only collect the stuff, but to curate and house it.”
In practice, that often means different outcomes for different materials. Cultural objects may be divided among tribes or retained for education. Human remains, Piatti said, are ultimately returned to the earth.
“Human remains go in the ground. They just do,” he said. “We have dedicated spots … where we can put people back in the ground.”
But even reburial is shaped by legal and institutional determinations, including “most likely descendant” designations and disputes between tribal entities.
“It really is a troubling issue,” he said. “Who has the right to it, who’s going to pay for it, what’s going to happen to it.”
At its core, Piatti said, the issue is about belonging, authority, and whose histories are treated as actionable.
“It’s a great concept,” he said. “There is something here that needs to be done, and they’re trying to do right. But it’s way more convoluted than they’re thinking.”∆
Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in May 21-28, 2026.
