Audit finds agencies fail to identify, repatriate Native American remains

WASHINGTON — A yearlong audit released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office said no federal agencies with significant historical collections of Native American remains or associated sacred objects are in full compliance with a law mandating documentation and repatriation of the remains, despite passage of the act nearly 20 years ago.

Since the early 1800s, federal agencies have amassed archaeological collections numbering in the millions, with the Department of Interior having an estimated 146 million objects relevant to archaeology and other disciplines such as zoology and art.

Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service are required to identify the items covered under its provisions, establish cultural affiliations whenever possible, publish required notices and repatriate the items to the tribes.

Among those entities listed in the report are Utah's Dinosaur National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Hovenweep National Monument in the Four Corners region.

The report found that through fiscal year 2009, 55 percent of the human remains and 68 percent of the associated funerary objects that had been recorded in published notices of inventory completion had been repatriated.

However, the auditors also noted that the "amount of work conducted and the quality of the documents prepared varied widely and in some cases did not provide reasonable assurance of compliance with the act," the report said.

Of the eight agencies surveyed, the Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service and the National Park Service did the most extensive work to identify items covered under the act, and therefore had the highest confidence level that all items were included in inventories and summaries, according to the report.

Once those inventories are complete and cultural affiliations are determined, agencies are required to submit those for publication in the Federal Register.

That process of publication, the audit found, was fraught with "significant delays" that often complicated efforts of tribes or native Hawaiian organizations to make repatriation requests for the items.

The report identified a number of areas throughout the country for which agencies had not published notices of inventory completion, with one reclamation region tagged for not reporting 61 human remains and Utah's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area noted for its failure to report 13 human remains. Dinosaur National Monument was listed as having eight remains — notice of which was later withdrawn because they were culturally unidentifiable. Hovenweep had four, which were covered in a published notice.