Texas Standard: Activists hope repatriation of Indigenous remains in Big Bend region is just the beginning

Over a hundred people gathered around a burial site in Presidio on the first of this month, but it was not your typical funeral.

This ceremony marked the return to the earth of Indigenous remains that had been excavated years prior.

Big Bend Sentinel reporter Sam Karas said it was the end of a journey that began more than two decades ago.

“These remains were discovered in Presidio about in 2003 when a city works crew that was digging a trench accidentally hit a burial pit adjacent to an established and protected archeological site,” she said. “The Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University sprang into action a couple of years later and excavated the remains and the funerary objects in the pit for their protection.”

But once these items were in the university’s protection, there were a lot of really complex laws about who those remains can be given to and where they can be reburied.

“They’ve been at Sul Ross State University, I believe in basement storage,” Karas said. “So the people who have been advocating for the remains to be returned are part of a larger cultural and political movement, arguing that the way that native remains and native objects in general in institutions’ possessions should be treated with a lot more respect.”

These laws are tied to the 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act.

“Over the course of about a decade, it’s estimated about 2,100,000 objects and people that were in collections around the country would be returned to Indigenous tribes. The issue is that a lot of communities have trouble accessing the political power to repatriate these remains,” Karas said. “This was the case for this group in Presidio. An elder with the People of La Junta for Preservation, which is an Indigenous-led organization here in Presidio, advocated for their return for over two decades.”

But laws dictating repatriation of Indigenous remains favor tribes that are federally recognized. A lot of Native American people in the borderlands know that they’re native, but their ancestors were originally colonized by the Spanish, Karas said. So their legal status in the United States has been different over the past couple of generations.

Karas said the return of the remains was an emotional community affair.

“It was absolutely amazing where both the spiritual and religious and the physical work of returning these remains to the earth was a community effort, both by the archeologists who helped to return these remains, by the Native people who advocated for their return, and for neighbors and friends and family and everybody in town,” she said. “It was a really amazing event.”

And while this advocacy was successful, Karas said federal laws still don’t make it easy for this kind of repatriation to occur.

“It’s now my understanding that it’s even more difficult for tribes and for individuals without federally recognized tribal status to access and to advocate for the repatriation of remains. But people here in Presidio are hoping that they’re helping to change things because there are still dozens of ancestors from the Big Bend in collections around the country,” Karas said.

“There’s people from Presidio County at Harvard University, for some reason in Nassau County, Florida. They’re hoping that this is kind of a drop in the bucket towards a broader systemic change.”