Fort Lewis College is working to give 43 Native American human remains and 51 funerary objects to the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes for reburial to abide by a decades-old federal law.

“This is a really important ethical obligation,” said Kathleen Fine-Dare, chairwoman of FLC’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Committee.

NAGPRA was passed in 1990 and requires federally funded institutions to return Native American artifacts to their rightful owners. The transfer of the remains is expected to happen in 2020 or 2021, she said.

Fort Lewis College Board of Trustees Chairman Ernest House Jr. said returning the remains and objects in accordance with NAGPRA is an important step for the school, especially because a third of the school’s population is Native American.

“We should, in my opinion, be holding ourselves to a higher standard and following the letter of that law intently,” said House, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Towaoc.

The college started the process of repatriating the remains and objects in the 1990s, but the project was never completed because of funding problems, institutional attention to other priorities, and misunderstanding and disagreements about the requirements of NAGPRA, Fine-Dare said.

For years after NAGPRA passed, many people, including some FLC staff members, believed human remains that are culturally unidentifiable did not have to be transferred to the Native American tribes, Fine-Dare said.

The law has since been clarified, and a process was created to return culturally unidentifiable human remains.

Forty of the human remains slated for reburial and all the funerary objects are culturally unidentifiable, she said. The remains of three other individuals are affiliated with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute tribes, she said.

It is unknown how the objects and remains in the NAGPRA process came to the college because FLC does not have historical records about their donation, Fine-Dare said. The objects and remains are not part of the Center of Southwest Studies collection, and they are stored separately, she said.

It is difficult to identify what cultures the individuals may have belonged to because, in some cases, the remains are fragmentary, she said.

“Native American consultants very knowledgeable about their own physical and spiritual ancestry have reviewed the remains in person and come away with certainty that they are Native, although from exactly where they cannot say,” she said.

The NAGPRA process is lengthy, in part, because the school is required to consult with Native American experts to review collections and ensure tribes with historical ties to Colorado are supportive of the process, she said.

In 2013, FLC transferred remains of 91 individuals and 147 funerary objects to the San Juan National Forest, which gave them to the Hopi Tribe for reburial. The process was never made public to protect the remains and objects, Fine-Dare said.

“NAGPRA is about the rights of Native people first and foremost,” she said.

mshinn@durangoherald.com