Between Letter and Spirit: Introducing Kinship Relations into the NAGPRA Consultation Process

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990 to return Indigenous ancestral remains and sacred objects, was amended in 2024 to address institutional non-compliance. These changes, however, risk undermining tribal sovereignty and perpetuating epistemic injustice. The new five-year compliance deadline creates a crisis-driven framework that pressures Indigenous communities into rushed consultations, often lacking adequate resources and respect for traditional knowledge systems. Using Kyle Whyte’s framework, which contrasts the dominant ‘epistemology of crisis’ – a mode that prioritises urgency and reaction – with an ‘epistemology of coordination’, we critique the NAGPRA consultation process. We suggest that by embracing the features of Indigenous ways of knowing and addressing structural power imbalances, the implementation of NAGPRA could better fulfil its original intent of justice and healing. Further, we claim that without such reform, NAGPRA risks reproducing the very harms it was meant to repair.