For Augustine and her colleagues, few things were more frustrating than knowing that NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) had empowered museums to decide whether Indigenous people had a valid connection to their ancestors. These were the same institutions that had collected the human remains and objects from ancestral burial sites. Despite NAGPRA’s intent to give Indigenous people say over ancestral remains, institutions still made the final decisions on whether to repatriate.

Harvard in recent years has apologized and promised to speed repatriation, saying it aims to repatriate all Native American remains and the items once buried with them within the next three years and recently doubled staffing in the Peabody Museum’s repatriation office. However, the school has yet to return more than half of the human remains it reported holding under NAGPRA, according to federal data from November. Only two institutions, of the hundreds that must comply with NAGPRA, hold more human remains than Harvard (who have 5500).

“The wolves are in charge of how to deal with the sheep,” said Darrell Newell, a former vice chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who helped create the Wabanaki Intertribal Repatriation Committee to accelerate negotiations with the institutions. “It’s just not a good way.”