Students, faculty and community members gathered at the MSU Museum on Friday for a campus-wide panel centered on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law requiring federally-funded institutions to return Indigenous remains to federally recognized tribes.
The panel, titled “Bring Them Home: A Tribal Panel on NAGPRA, Repatriation, and Collections Across Campus," was held in observance the week of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and featured Rebecca Rupe, archives and collections coordinator and NAGPRA representative for the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi, and Marie Richards, an archaeologist and citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Panelist William Johnson, curator at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways and NAGPRA designee for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, was unable to attend because of travel delays.
The discussion was moderated by Dr. Jessica Yann, the NAGPRA program manager at the MSU Museum.
Opening the panel, Yann recited Michigan State University’s land acknowledgment. The statement recognizes that MSU occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg — Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Pottawatomi peoples — and was funded in part through land dispossession under the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act.
Addressing how land-grant institutions connect to NAGPRA, Rupe emphasizes that the university's responsibility goes beyond legal compliance.
“For me, I think it goes past NAGPRA,” Rupe said. “You guys have great big collections, unethically usually sourced. So transparency and community (are vital when) working with tribes, especially removed tribes.”
Rupe also mentioned that transparency regarding campus holdings is critical for the day-to-day well-being of Indigenous students who may need to take specific cultural or spiritual precautions when near ancestral remains or sacred belongings.
“I think that would be something that universities, not just that Michigan State, but across the nation, can really just be transparent with their students, especially their Native students who come from potentially cultural backgrounds where we have to take precautions when we’re close to things like that," Rupe said.
Expanding on what true institutional accountability looks like, Richards said repatriation requires shifting away from traditional concepts of university ownership and focusing instead on long-term relationships and care.
“Ownership isn’t a possession, but how you treat individuals that live on the land,” Richards said. “We own the responsibility of care and not necessarily something that is titled in possession.”
