Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series. The second part is scheduled to run July 9.
Some of the shelves at UC Berkeley and other institutions are kept from public view, but Kathy Marshall has seen them.
“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,” the vice chair of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians Elders Council 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.”
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.
‘NAGPRA is, at its core, a human rights law.’
—Jonathan Malindine, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
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 guidelines, 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 the Sun. “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 in San Luis Obispo, 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.
Marshall described the university 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.
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.
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.”
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?”
Still, 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. 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 the Sun. “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.
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 the Sun.
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.”
Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in June 25 – July 2, 2026.
