The resulting collections were enormous. Tens of thousands of Native American skeletal remains ended up in museum storage across the country and in Europe. These were not abstract materials. They were the bodies of people whose families knew they were gone, who had ceremonies that required attention to burial and to the proper transition of the dead, and who were now denied those ceremonies by institutions that did not recognize their claims.
The political movement to change this began to gain force in the 1980s. Native American communities and their allies argued that the collection and retention of remains was a violation of basic human dignity, and that the proper disposition of those remains was a decision that belonged to the descendant communities, not to the museums.
The National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989 and NAGPRA in 1990 were the legislative results. Both laws created frameworks for return, but neither created a simple or quick process. They require institutions to inventory their holdings — a task that in itself took years — and to consult with tribes and descendant communities about each category of material. The processes are slow, often bureaucratic, sometimes adversarial.
The Smithsonian’s return of Sitting Bull’s hair and leggings in 2007 took place seventeen years after the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act, and involved five-plus years of research by the museum’s Repatriation Office. This is actually a relatively smooth outcome by the standards of repatriation proceedings. Many cases have dragged on for decades longer, or remain unresolved.