or years, people traveling through Alaska—whether as prospectors, military personnel, academics, or tourists—have taken pieces of its history home with them. In many cases, these artifacts belonged to Alaska Natives, who, despite being the rightful owners, were not able to bring these items back to the 49th State and return them to the tribes and villages where they belong.

Since the establishment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, however, greater attention has been given to this issue. More and more people recognize the cultural significance of these items and are working to return them to their proper homes.

“Because there have been national articles written on the subject, as well as information shared on social media, people are starting to understand that these items need to be returned,” says Monica Shah, director of collections and chief conservator, Anchorage Museum. “Twenty years ago, this was rarely done.”

According to the National Park Service, NAGPRA provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. These items include human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony (objects possessing continuing cultural, traditional, or historical importance to the heritage of a group).

The latest numbers from 2016 show that NAGPRA has been responsible for the reclamation of the human remains of roughly 58,000 individuals; more than 1.7 million associated and unassociated funerary objects; 5,136 sacred objects; and more than 8,000 objects of cultural patrimony.

In addition to provisions for the discovery of Native American cultural items on federal and tribal lands, NAGPRA also includes penalties for noncompliance and illegal trafficking and authorizes federal grants to help tribes and museums with the documentation and repatriation of Native American cultural items.

“When NAGPRA passed, it affected Native artifact reclamation in a big way; our museum was very active completing a lot of repatriations through that legislation,” says Scott Shirar, archeology collections manager for the University of Alaska Museum of the North, located in Fairbanks.

“We are still doing repatriations today,” he adds. “Outside of NAGPRA, as people are becoming more culturally aware of the importance of these artifacts to indigenous communities, we are seeing an uptick in interest in other types of collections. NAGPRA got the ball rolling, but the conversation is now turning to other items that don’t fall within NAGPRA, like art and ethnographic collections.”

Shah agrees that more people have been coming forward as word has spread. “Within the museum profession, we became more aware of repatriation issues in 1990 with NAGPRA; since then, the topic has been in the public eye and gained even more attention, which is wonderful.

“Alaska also now has a lot of cultural centers that it didn’t have before 1990,” she adds. “With these becoming operational, there are more people who know how to fill out the paperwork for donations of this type, including the legal implications. These places are now welcoming their objects home.”

In many cases, items that have been taken from Alaska are now being returned by family members of those who once lived or worked in the Last Frontier.

“We used to get a lot of calls when I first started here eight years ago, but they have tapered off,” says Shah. “Personally, I think it may have to do with people of a certain age passing on.”

Shah says that she most often hears from two groups: the first is family members of people whose grandparents or great-grandparents were in Alaska during the Gold Rush or who traveled in the area from the 1910s to the 1930s.

“Some stayed and some went back, but their grandkids or great-grandkids don’t have a lot of information about the objects they want to donate; they just know that they came from Alaska,” she says. “There were a lot of things collected during those times, especially by travelers or tourists, including ivory carvings, mittens, boots, and parkas. It was very much how people back then participated in the cash economy; you could buy these things in the villages.”

Shah also hears from family members of WWII veterans who were stationed in Alaska. “When Alaska Natives were interred during the war, the military occupied their villages and stayed in what they considered abandoned homes,” she explains. “When the Aleutian Islanders returned, many of their homes had been looted. We’ve had donors who have learned where these items came from and have contacted us, and we’ve put them in touch with the Museum of the Aleutians in Dutch Harbor so that they could return what was taken.”

According to Shah, in many cases, the Anchorage Museum works with smaller museums to try to return the items to their rightful homes. “We try to pass these items onto smaller museums in the region, such as in Nome, Barrow, Bethel, Dutch Harbor/Unalaska, Cordova, Kodiak, Valdez, and Southeast,” she says. “It’s a small state, and we are all very collegial. It’s important to us that these artifacts get returned to the tribal centers or cultural centers of the communities that owned the items, so that they truly get back to where they came from.

“We don’t want to be a big storehouse like the Smithsonian,” she adds. “We don’t need to have fifty of the same items.”

Shah gives the example of a family in Illinois whose parents used to teach in a village school. “The daughter contacted us after her parents passed away and she found suitcases full of Alaska materials,” she says. “There was a variety of things, but what stuck out to me was a doll that used to be her sister’s that was made by a Native woman.

“Ironically, the mother of the family taught a variety of classes, including Home Ec in the 1950s, which included sewing,” continues Shah. “Most young girls in the villages during that time period were already sewing by the age of four; I find it humorous that she was teaching girls who were better seamstresses than she was.”

Within the collection of items was a booklet of what students made. “Their work was phenomenal; the stitches were perfect,” says Shah. “The level of craftsmanship was amazing, especially considering that the girls were stitching seal hide and the thread was sinew.”

The collection also included a lot of the parents’ clothing, which while not pristine, gave a good idea of how people lived and dressed in the 1950s in that particular village.

In many cases, people may know that the items they have originated in Alaska but not the exact location. “If people send photos, I can sometimes recognize the region, though not the specific makers,” says Shah. “For example, if the work is [Ińupiat], I know it’s from Barrow, even though it might have been bought in Anchorage. The same goes for Tlingit and Haida items from Southeast.”

While some people can receive a tax write-off for donating goods, the majority of them choose to return items to Alaska because it’s the right thing to do. “Most people want to donate because they have generous hearts; their primary goal is not to make money,” says Shah. “And some things have a higher value that is not financial; they are valuable because of what they symbolize. The financial value does not equate with the larger impact that an item can have on a community.”

In the case of museums like the Anchorage Museum and the Museum of the North, facilitating the return of an item to Alaska is more than just a chance to increase the state’s collections.

“Most of the archaeology collections we hold, we don’t own,” says Shirar of items that can range from chipped stone and ground stone to more fragile ivory, whale baleen, and wood. “Whoever owns the land where an item was found is technically the steward of that collection; in Alaska, for example, there are state-owned lands, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Fish & Wildlife, and Forestry lands. We have agreements to act as a repository for those collections, based on legislation from the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

In addition to government-owned lands, there are also individual villages and regional corporations that are affiliated with collections.

“Chugach has its own repository as a regional corporation and they take on the role of caretaker for items found on their lands around Anchorage,” says Shirar. “There are also a number of tribal communities that want to establish their own museums but don’t have the facilities yet. We hold their items in trust until they are ready for them.”

As the caretaker of such valuable objects, the Museum of the North monitors humidity and temperature and limits items’ exposure to light in order to preserve the artifacts for as long as possible. The museum is only able to accept donated items, as it is forbidden to purchase artifacts.

“A lot of the time, someone’s son or grandson will come to us and say that the person lived in Alaska and the item was handed down to them,” Shirar says. “Sometimes all they know is who collected it—not where it came from. Sometimes it’s ‘North of the Brooks Range,’ or even ‘somewhere in Alaska.’ So there’s no way to tie it to an owner.

“If there is good information, we’ll pass that on to the local village that has land ownership,” he adds. “If not, it may end up in our teaching collection or being used in outreach programs for youth.”

According to Shirar, the timeframe in which an object was collected can be important, too. “There is a gray area prior to ANCSA when certain lands were owned by the federal government or the Department of the Interior, and things were kind of fast and loose,” he says. “Sometimes archeology was permitted on the land, and sometimes it wasn’t. Working through NAGPRA to go after items and to get them repatriated to villages can get contentious, especially if an item has been in a museum for 100-plus years. They may be tied to the idea of owning it, especially if they financed an expedition to Alaska or somewhere else.

“If you can prove an artifact was collected after the time when regional corporations became owners of the land through ANCSA, it makes a difference,” he adds. “If a researcher or museum was on the land, they needed a permit to legally be out there and permission from a government agency or tribal council to do any excavating.”

While the goal is always to return artifacts to the indigenous owners, the museums also make it a priority to preserve the objects themselves.

“It’s an important part of our responsibility as caretakers of the public trust,” says Shah. “When we are able to facilitate the repatriation of a Dena’ina Athabascan object, we feel like we are doing our job. We are only caretakers of these items for a short period, for one moment in time. But hopefully, these items will be around long after we’re gone to be appreciated and utilized by the community.”