Are You In the NAGPRA "Know"?

If you work in a museum or collecting institution, chances are you've heard of NAGPRA. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted on November 16, 1990, to address the rights of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.

The National NAGPRA website is chock-full of information and resources, including webinars. These training presentations prepare us collections folk to implement NAGPRA at our institutions. To see their future offerings, go here. And, fortunately for us, they're (wait for it...) FREE!

Not only can you register for upcoming webinars on their website, you can also watch a variety of past webinars, which they started recording in 2012. The list of these options is here, and includes a range of educational training videos for every level of NAGPRA knowledge, from "NAGPRA Newbies" to those who need to delve a little deeper into the policies and process.

The archived videos are between about an hour up to over two hours. However, because they're hosted by YouTube, you can pause them as needed. Which, in my experience, you'll have to do pretty frequently. Have your notepads handy, because these presentations can get pretty dense and you'll want to capture ALL of the information. The downside to the recorded webinars is that they don't include PDF copies of the presentation, which are sent to those who register for the upcoming webinars. Pro tip: take screenshots of the really wordy or image-heavy slides (or every slide, if you want!) and pop them into a Word document or PowerPoint that you can print out later to supplement your notes.

Because it's so important for you, as a professional in the museum field, to know about NAGPRA and how it will affect your collection, I highly recommend you take advantage of this free resource. Be in the NAGPRA "know"!