By Kelsey Brown / Photo by Kelsey Brown

December 2, 2022 – Link to article

The walls of the Native American Grave and Repatriation Act lab at Cal State Long Beach are lined with storage shelves crammed with beige boxes, each labeled with archeological trinomials. Though the boxes appear plain, inside are Native American remains, artifacts, and other burial-related goods.

Cindi Alvitre, the NAGPRA coordinator, estimates the Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony has about 600 boxes of cultural material, including ancestors who range from 100 to 500 years old. The committee aims to restore and return every item to affiliated tribes. 

When asking Alvitre, a full-time lecturer in American Indian studies at CSULB, why NAGPRA at Long Beach State hasn’t received more attention, her answer is simple. 

“The skeletons in the closet?” Alvitre quipped.

Despite CSULB residing on Puvungna, a sacred village site for local Indigenous tribes,  the lab is a modest room in the Liberal Arts 5 building. There is no fixed budget for the committee; Alvitre receives assigned time and submits annual project-based proposals. The space consists of a makeshift photo lab and a DIY light box, where three to five hundred-year-old bowls encrusted in shells and coral await to be studied. Though Alvitre says the committee has 60 to 70 pieces of pottery, they aren’t staged because there isn’t space.

Passed in 1990, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act is federal legislation requiring federally funded institutions or agencies to return Indigenous human remains and other cultural items removed from federal land to affiliated tribes. Since 1996, the Committee on Native American Burial has existed at CSULB. However, no official, full-time NAGPRA positions exist.

“Being here by myself and having allotted time, which is less than half time, and to oversee everything that has to be done— there’s no way possible I could ever go into a box-level inventory of over 600 boxes,” Alvitre, who is Gabrielino-Tongva, said. “It really requires a team.” 

The committee consists of Alvitre and her 11 colleagues. Alvitre has the anthropological experience, museum training, and collection experience to do the bulk of the work. However, restoring and repatriating the collection requires osteologists, archaeologists, and researchers. 

“There’s a lot of resistance, budgetary resistance, and that slows us down,” Alvitre said. “The biggest challenge is campuses don’t know how to deal with something as sensitive as human remains…This is something highly sensitive, dealing with something that [has] a tragic history and trying to recover from that.” 

Beyond the sensitivity of the work they do, the process is overly complicated. The committee must complete inventory in consultation with the tribes, who ultimately have control. They instruct the committee on how they want their ancestors treated—with minimal handling or examination by an osteologist—and how they are stored. The committee must go through all the inventory to ensure no human remains have been misplaced.

When Alvitre took over the lab in 2014, she was confronted with  “human remains in old, dirty boxes” collapsed on one another. The boxes were filled with a massive collection of human fragments—hundreds of femurs, tibias, and other bones—thrown carelessly together. Through the use of archeological, cultural, and historical evidence, the committee works to analyze the individuals’ biological sex, age, and pathologies present at the time of death before returning them. After determining which tribes they will repatriate to, they file paperwork and initiate the legal process. 

Alvitre sees the committee’s work as healing “transgenerational unresolved historical grief.” Putting an ancestor in the ground is sending them home. Alvitre says that this is an opportunity for the university to demonstrate to other universities, tribal communities, and the public, that CSULB is committed to righting these historical wrongs. 

In 2016, the committee did its first reburial on campus of ancestors related to Puvungna. With proper funding and resources, Alvitre hopes to complete the second and final round of reburials by the end of 2023. CSULB is unique in having an on-campus reburial site, but Alvitre says other than that, the university isn’t distinct. 

“Nobody is immune from this,” Alvitre said. “If our university gets sensitive to this, my message to them is: You’re not that special. Every university in this state has this same situation.”

Beyond complying with the NAGPRA legislation, the university must abide by CalNAGPRA, a 2001 state legislature that covers the gaps of NAGPRA. While NAGPRA specifies that federal institutions and agencies return human remains and related-items to federally-recognized tribes, CalNAGPRA expands this to include non-federally recognized tribes.

Upholding CalNAGPRA, universities in the Cal State system prepare for an audit of their collections, ensuring the committees are proceeding in accordance with the law and consulting the tribes. Alvitre is hopeful the audit will instigate funding for the committee to effectively and efficiently continue their work. 

“It’s always a battle over money,” Alvitre said. “How do you budget historical tragedies?”

 On average, the CLA department gives 50 to 60 thousand dollars to the committee for assigned time, according to Dhushy Sathianathan, Ph.D., the vice provost for academic planning at CSULB, though this varies based on the work the committee is doing. This year, Sathianathan says they’ve spent over a 100 thousand dollars to hire a contractor to help the university comply with the audit mandated by AB275. Sathianathan explained that because the committee is a Senate subcommittee, none of which have a fixed budget, faculty work is on a volunteer basis. 

Dr. Theresa Gregor,  an American Indian Studies professor from the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation, believes the university is acting with a minimal amount of compliance and resources. 

“We’re at a really big institution in a really wealthy city, county, and state,” Dr. Gregor said. “There should be no source that’s not offered until this is fully resolved.”

This is part of the university’s legacy, and Dr. Gregor explained that though “none of the people in administrative positions today are the ones who acquired the ancestors or items, as an institution of higher learning, we should know better and do better.”

Dr. Gregor has been involved with NAGPRA since 2016. She was recently nominated as the provost designee, acting as the head facilitator for the institution and the committee.  Dr. Gregor describes their work as human rights, social justice, and restorative justice for Indigenous people. 

“However you feel about death and your faith and your spiritual belonging,” Dr. Gregor said. “Most people believe there should be some finality to end of life, and respect and dignity granted to those people. It’s unfathomable to me that there can be disputes in perspectives about what the right way to do things should be.”

Dr. Gregor mentioned that a former student of hers acquired a NAGPRA job and returned to speak to her class. Through the process of repatriation, the former student learned that an infant’s remains fit in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Dr. Gregor acknowledged that this is pathos, but also the reality of what the work entails for people like Alvitre and other NAGPRA coordinators across the country. 

CSULB has the oldest established NAGPRA program, but universities like Cal State Fullerton, Cal State San Bernardino, and Cal State Bakersfield, have all hired full-time NAGPRA positions.

Sathianathan shared that he believes inhibitions of success of the committee are based on lack of time, not resources. According to him, the financial needs of the committee have been met and “it depends on the faculty’s willingness to work on these projects.” 

“It’s not just throwing money at it,” Sathianathan said. “It’s really the commitment from the people involved in order to make it happen. It’s not only resources. Resources alone can’t solve this. We need to have people who are really determined to do the work.” 

Dr. Gregor mentioned how accomplished the committee is despite its small size. Only a few people are doing the heavy lifting. All the work, like the reburial of 2016, is credited to the dedication of people, like Alvitre. Dr. Gregor said it’s a shame that people don’t see the “breadth, scope, and impact of their work.” 

A resolution to the lack of time would be a full-time NAGPRA position at CSULB, which Alvitre sees as an investment and a commitment. An actual repository and a hired team to assist them would ease their workload. Though space and money are sought-after commodities, the committee needs them to continue and complete their work.

“This country was built on the blood and calcium of [African Americans and Native Americans],” Alvitre said. “There’s a lot that needs to be done to correct the violence and the tragedies that were imposed onto the people that the descendants of those survivors, and the people that didn’t survive, still suffer from.”