Welcomed Home — A New Exhibit about NAGPRA at the State Indian Museum

Alison Parks, District Interpretive Coordinator, Capital District

Empty exhibit cases aren’t the best look for a museum. This is something the State Indian Museum has been grappling with for years. The beautiful cultural items in the collection are primarily made of organic, natural materials and our casework dates to when the museum originally opened in the State Capitol building in the 1920s. This combination means that items are susceptible to pests, humidity, and other environmental effects.

The new NAGPRA exhibit at the State Indian Museum replaces a previously long-empty display case and is immediately visible to guests as they arrive.

There is another reason many museums with Native American cultural items on display have empty or covered cases. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a federal law enacted in 1990, aims to return sacred, funerary, and cultural items, as well as Native American ancestors, to their modern-day relatives. This can be a slow process, requiring cultural institutions to know what items they have, where they came from and how they were obtained. Then the process of consultation with relevant Tribal members can take time as well. Unfortunately, this slow process has been a barrier for Native people and continues the already fractured relationships between Indigenous people and cultural institutions.

One of the new panels at the State Indian Museum explaining the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or “NAGPRA”

An updated “Duty of Care” clause of NAGPRA that went into effect in January of 2024 requires any exhibit containing Native American or Native Hawaiian cultural items or ancestors to “obtain free, prior and informed consent from lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations prior to allowing any exhibition of…” these items. Images of famous museums like Chicago’s Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York with covered display cases began to show up in the news in early 2024. The exhibits in these museums (and many others) had never been consulted on with the Tribal members whose items were on display. The interpretation of the items, how and what was on display, had not been discussed with members of the culture they belonged to. Fortunately for the State Indian Museum, there was a level of consultation done when the current exhibit was designed and installed in the 1980s. While we do not need to cover exhibit cases, there are many other reasons why items might be removed, primarily due to repatriation or conservation efforts.

One of the new panles in the State Indian Museum explaining the connection between NAGPRA and some of the museum’s otherwise conspicuously empty cases.

After surveying the public, we found that very few people know or understand NAGPRA. This gave us a starting point for our new exhibit, which was installed in May 2025. The small display seeks to educate the public about NAGPRA and its impacts on the State Indian Museum. The two panels pictured here hang on the North wall of the museum, near the front counter. The purpose is to outline the problems associated with Native American collections and what NAGPRA seeks to do to correct those problems. We also direct visitors to look for silhouettes of items previously displayed in the museum that are in the process of being repatriated.

Visitors, volunteers, and even staff have shared their frustration at seeing empty spaces in our exhibit cases, but with the new interpretive panels we hope to convey the joy and rightness of repatriation. Why would I want my institution to hold this person’s family captive? How might the visitor feel if it were their ancestor or something their grandmother made that is being held in the collection? The questions we pose with the silhouettes in the cases aim to draw empathy from the viewer and, even better, create advocates for the work of repatriation.

Small interpretive panels go along with the silhouettes and give context to the visitor if they have not read the larger NAGPRA panels.

Our team hopes to add additional articles and information so that interested visitors can take a deeper dive into the history of Native American collections and what repatriation looks like on a more personal level. A huge kudos to my colleagues in Capital District’s Cultural Resources Program—they lead the charge on this new exhibit and have been doing wonderful work to consult with Tribal members and assist the Tribal Affairs NAGPRA team to repatriate items from the collection.