Interior Will Return Remains of Indians to Tribes, Lujan Says

Saying the skeletal remains of Indians belong to their tribes, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. on Tuesday ordered plans drawn for returning to tribes the bodies from thousands of Indian burial sites under the jurisdiction of five Interior agencies.

He also called on the Defense Department, the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to join in helping prevent further looting of Indian burial grounds on public lands.

“From now on, our policies will affirm the rights of American Indian groups to determine the handling of their remains,” Lujan said.

As much as a change in federal policy, Lujan’s announcement was intended to stress disapproval of the public display of Indian remains by thousands of privately owned museums across the country.

Lujan ordered the National Park Service to develop specific steps to implement the policy and called on each Interior agency to inventory remains in its custody. The remains of perhaps thousands of Indians are held by the five agencies: the Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Leaders of the Indians’ movement to recover the remains took Lujan’s announcement as a positive step but suggested that a new law will be required before all the federal agencies return the remains.

Under a 1979 statute, such remains are considered “archeological resources” and are required to be permanently preserved in a suitable public institution. Three bills now pending before Congress would remove the bodies of Indians from the archeological resource category.

Walter Echo Hawk of the Native American Rights Fund estimated that federal agencies may have the remains of as many as 100,000 American Indians, many of them in agencies such as the Agriculture Department and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which are beyond the reach of the Interior policy announced by Lujan.