Illinois spent decades refusing to repatriate Native American burial remains

Illinois’ state museum system holds more than 7,000 burial remains taken from Native American mounds and other sites. Yet, despite a 1990 federal law that required museums start returning remains, Illinois did “close to nothing” for more than 20 years, according to a new report by ProPublica.

The report, published last month, is part of the news organization’s Repatriation Project, which found that around half of the 210,000 Native American remains in the possession of museums have yet to be returned. The reporting project’s introduction noted, "Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet."

But there are signs that this pattern is changing, said ProPublica reporter Logan Jaffe.

“Only 10 institutions throughout the country hold half of the human remains that have not been repatriated,” she said on Tuesday’s St. Louis on the Air. “Part of how these institutions have managed to hold on [to the remains] is by claiming that, like the Illinois State Museum, that the vast majority of these collections are ‘culturally unidentifiable.’”