The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is one of the most important pieces of American legislation affecting Native Americans. NAGPRA provides a process by which museums and other federal agencies use to return certain Native American human remains and grave goods to lineal descendants, and culturally affiliated Native American tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations, if they can be determined.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law by US President George Bush in 1990. It was created to protect cemeteries on federal and tribal lands, and to provide a way to return the human skeletal material and associated funerary objects in the nation's scientific and museum collections to culturally affiliated tribes. While NAGPRA is not a perfect document, it is the first enacted legislation of its kind, and it is the direct result of a decade of political activism at the heart of what could be termed the Native American repatriation movement.