 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Connor Goodwin. I'm the communications manager here at ProPublica and I'd like to thank you for taking the time to join us today. Last week, ProPublica launched the Repatriation Project, an investigative series that found some of the nation's most prestigious institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard University, have failed to return or resisted giving back indigenous remains and burial items, long after the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA. Three decades later, more than 100,000 remains are still held by museums, universities, and federal agencies. ProPublica wanted to learn why this was the case and we're not alone. That's why you're here too. Our reporters wanted to help enable journalists and NAGPRA practitioners to research which institutions still have Native American remains using ProPublica's Repatriation Map and Search tool. Today's webinar is intended to show you how to use the tool and offer guidance on how to report on this issue. Today's program is split into four sections and each section is Q&A time built in. So if you have a question at any point, please send it our way and we'll do our best to get to it. You can do so by clicking the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to typing it there. In the first section, we'll give an overview of the repatriation project, explaining what NAGPRA is and how the repatriation process works. In the second section, we'll offer a detailed walkthrough demonstration of our map and search tool. And if you'd like us to consider covering a specific institution or geographic area, please feel free to submit those in the Q&A box as well. And then in the third section is designed specifically with journalists in mind. So our reporters will offer tips for reporting on this issue, including cultivating sources, useful records and how to obtain them, and best practices for covering this issue of sensitivity. And the final section is devoted to answering questions from the audience and we'll do our best to address all of them. So once again to submit a question to Q&A icon and type it there. And now allow me to introduce you to some of the reporters who spent more than a year working on the repatriation project. Ash Nou is a reporter, designer and developer with ProPublica's News app team. Graham Lee Brewer is a national investigative reporter at NBC News covering Indigenous communities. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and vice president of the Native American Journalist Association. Mary Huditz is a reporter for ProPublica's Southwest Unit focused on tribal issues. She is a pro tribe member and former president of the Native American Journalist Association. And Logan Jaffe is a reporter for ProPublica's newsletter team. Before I hand it over to the reporters, I'd like to make just two requests. First, please sign up for the repatriation newsletter. We have more stories on the way and that's the best way to stay updated on the series. I'll share a sign up link momentarily. Second, we'd love to hear how you used our data, whether that takes the form of a news story or a lesson plan for students. Please share the final outcome with us by emailing events at ProPublica.org and mentioning repatriation in the subject line. Thanks again for joining us. I'll let Mary take it from here. We're really heartened that so many of you are joining us for a conversation on how to respectfully report on repatriation. Already we started to see outlets pursue their own stories in their own region and we're really, really glad about that. I think the very best place for us to start is to look at the law of NAGPRA itself. And I'm going to hand it over to Logan to guide us through that. Thanks, Mary, and thanks everyone for being here. So NAGPRA, some people will tell you it's complicated. Some people will tell you that it is not complicated. But just to shortly explain it, NAGPRA stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It's a federal law that was passed in 1990 after a long indigenous movement to find a way to get their ancestors and cultural items returned back from institutions and also to protect them on federal lands. And the law lays out a process for that to happen. And who NAGPRA applies to is any institution that has received federal money. This, you know, could be in the form of a grant. We're recently we've been learning that this can also apply to institutions that have received PPP loans over the pandemic. There are lots of different ways that an institution can become subject to NAGPRA. And sometimes actually institutions might not even know that they are now subject to NAGPRA after using a particular, you know, pot of money from the federal government. So, and I should say under the law, also the an institution, the law just refers to them all as museums. We keep using the word institution and our reporting to just say, you know, if you, you know, do more reporting on this and come across it. The word museum applies to all of these sorts of institutions. And what there's a couple things that the law requires these institutions to do. Two of them that are kind of, you know, front and center here is what those institutions have to do is report to the federal government. And in this case, it is the national NAGPRA office, which is under the Department of the Interior. And after report all Native American human remains and cultural items that it holds, and also to notify or consult with descendants and tribal nations about those holdings. There's a couple different, I guess, eras of NAGPRA. And, you know, some of you might know this very well and some of you might might not but it's good to know. So, kind of the way that we've been thinking about it is NAGPRA from like 1990 to 2010. And in this era of NAGPRA, repatriation was very, I guess contingent on this phrase cultural affiliation. So institutions were required to repatriate or return belongings only when it can establish what the law calls cultural affiliation between descendants or a tribal nation and ancestors or belongings that were in that institutions collections so in this cultural affiliation, the, like there's a lot of different forms of evidence that the law lays out for how to, but what's, I guess, acceptable forms of evidence and this was meant to be, you know, very inclusive of a lot of different forms of evidence from like oral history, linguistics, historical evidence such as maps, geographical evidence, biological evidence, and basically you could only repatriate when an institution and a tribe agreed that that tribe was the sort of rightful owners of these belongings and ancestral remains. And after 2010 the law changed a bit, and the law created a pathway where repatriation or return wasn't necessarily contingent on cultural affiliation, and it kind of started this newer movement that that we're seeing where multiple tribes could, you know form coalitions and tribal councils and kind of approach repatriation in a bit more of a collective way. So, we can go into a bit more detail about some of this later if you if you all are interested but I guess one thing to note right now is that it is a really interesting time to be reporting on NAGPRA. One, because there are new regulations in that are kind of being proposed and hashed out and discussed right now. And that conversation has been going on for a long time but one thing on the table with those proposed regulations is just eliminating the use of cultural affiliation altogether, among some other changes that are really important to know about too. But also that we really do seem to be in an era of like a newer generation of NAGPRA. There's been turnover in staff, some younger archaeologists curators, new generation of tribal historic preservation officers in some cases are coming about this law and often like not knowing anything about it and you know one day they are they realize they have to you know comply with this and that has been changing a lot of the ways that institutions have been going about this so and we'll talk about that a little bit later as well so hand it back to Mary. So I'll like bring up a really important point that I think in our news organizations were often asked like why we're reporting on the story now and our readers wonder that too. I think it'd be helpful. I'll just note for the audience also that I think as we did this reporting, at least each of us were asked at least once by sources when we first met them why. So the question which is why we are reporting on NAGPRA what has drawn us to the topic, why do you think it's important. And I think it's valuable as reporters to kind of consider that as you pursue your stories to. I would say, for us, our group, our entry points, I think we all had different entry points to the topic. Yeah, Logan for instance, I recall, I recall correctly, I hope that correct me as that you had heard about the story from a story. I'll work while working on or the topic from a source to work on another story. And I had covered repatriation though in a bit of a different context than us museums will ever put at the AP. And those were had mostly those stories had mostly been spot stories. And then beyond that, I think I understood as I think a lot of native people do that. That museums have just had our ancestors for a very long time and their belongings and tribal like culture culturally sacred items. And so I think I also entered into this understanding that that is a reality that is a part of native life or a reality for tribes. And one other thing, one thing that we I think we did have in common as entry point to the story was some of the like basic overarching data. So, for example, we knew that it's we each knew, as many of you do to an audience that institutions hold 100, more than 100,000 ancestral remain, and in 30 years since that was passage, less than half has been repatriated back to tribes. And so, asking why the promises and that had not yet been fulfilled after so much time was a clear and obvious central question I think that guided a lot of our work. Another thing that guided I think our work from the outset was the consensus to practicing cultural sensitivity at every time. And much of those discussions revolved around the images we would use I think our photo editors, I'm grateful, decided that we would not show images of an festival remains with our story. And then I think as reporters and writers, and those of us producing text also made the decision. I've made a lot of decisions and had a lot of conversations around the language we chose to use. And so I think we can go to the next slide and just do a quick overview of that before we get to the data portion. I think, Logan, you had a lot of really thoughtful, I think conversation with sources about terminology and human remains and wondered if you would. Yeah, of course so so I guess like generally speaking. You know we tried to recognize when I guess sort of when language was veering to be your kind of originating from this more like seemingly objective but really kind of coming out of the science science and research world so you know we avoided. Definitely avoided words like specimens which is totally which is dehumanizing when you're talking about this in terms of. I mean, in any terms but particularly I guess with Niagara. And really trying to center the fact there are all these other terms for how human remains are talked about into law. Trying to avoid. I guess separating their, those ancestors humanity. So just being really mindful of what sort of words using to describe those individuals, the law uses this term and I, which, you know, technically means minimum number of individuals. So it's, that's how all of our numbers are represented in part because that is how NAPRA counts those so those could be, you know, partial human remains, but they are all counted as as a single individual so that we wanted to kind of base a reporting on that too. Yeah, I would say that's one thing I, you know as you look at different data, like. Well, I think I've been thankful that the law, or the federal data has had this uniform approach to like counting ancestors as people. And then I would, in addition to talking about human remains, of course, items are a big part of the law to and you'll see a lot of terminology as far as like, I think, affiliate funeral objects is listed in the data or the funeral objects, and those are very technical term, and I suppose I need to be. But when we're talking about writing, then I think you kind of have the same sort of thought process of what does it take to make sure that what we're discussing is relatable, belong to a people and so belongings started to feel like the most appropriate word. So there's others that I think work, I think funeral objects is accurate so is cultural items, sometimes sacred items if that is in fact what you're discussing. And then there are also terms that we avoid when we're talking about objects which I would say first and foremost would be sort of the more antiquated ones but that you still might be in documents if you're reviewing historical documents which are like great goods, burial goods which kind of commercializes things, items that are very precious to people. And then, I think, well not an accurate also, we would use artifacts less so because I think that is, it sort of just other rises, I think, these, these different items that, again, were very precious to different people at different points in time. And then I guess we also, there's other rounds I think when we talk about place, and then also talk about tribes themselves. I think Graham can offer a lot of good guidance on that on tribal nations. So just be really specific, like hyper specific at every opportunity. That's actually a lot of people don't realize this now but that's actually been an recent update to the Associated Press's style guide is that you wouldn't say Native American when you could be a specific about tribal affiliation. But also just that doesn't always, not every tribal indigenous community that you're going to deal with when it comes to the repatriation of ancestral remains or funerary objects is going to necessarily be a federally recognized tribe you're going to deal with a lot of state recognized entities and tribal groups and tribal nations that don't have the same level of, they don't have the same power under the federal law. But all that is to say that you're also going to be dealing with Native Hawaiian organizations, Native Alaskan corporations. So, there's no real one catch all here you have to be, you know, each story is going to be on a case by case basis, but also just trying to avoid some of the language, you know, instituting tribal nations and when you can say, instead of the word just tribes, you finding ways to respect their sovereignty when you speak about them just the same that you would do for any state or federal entity and you're reporting otherwise. Really technical, but important language. Mary, did we want to take the question that Connor put in the chat? I can answer the first one. I'll just read the question out loud it's as many tribes either lack federal recognition or have had their status terminated. How does that play into institutions resistance to return remains. That's a good question. So, under NAGPRA, non federally recognized tribes and groups are treated, not on an equal level to federally recognized tribes. Oftentimes, if you are not a federally recognized tribe the institution will not engage with you, depending on their policies. So federally recognized tribes might have to work with a federally recognized tribe to partner with them and get remains for our scenery objects for pay traded. So it's a definite hurdle, especially in states where there aren't tribes with federal recognition, or there are substantial number of tribes that, for instance, in California that don't have federal recognition. Unfortunately has a separate state law, Cal NAGPRA, which is more inclusive of non federally recognized tribes. All to say that it's, there's a lot of wrinkles to NAGPRA there's a lot of different groups that it encompasses and are involved. Unfortunately, as the law stands right now, non federally recognized groups get sort of drifted on that end. They do and I just want to add one quick thing to that ashes that there is a way through the law for tribes without federal recognition to appeal specifically to this committee that the law has, it's the NAGPRA review committee. So through a kind of like special permission. You know you could pursue repatriation that way but that is completely reliant as Ash was saying basically on that institution and whether they want to even work with you. And then I think maybe the second question in that group of questions was how did institutions acquire remains and other important objects from date. I think that they, the institution is not in itself. Arizona State Museum having remained from California or Washington or Texas. And it definitely varies from institution to institution. But the basic premise was that people were doing archaeological expeditions or other. Maybe somebody donated remains donated being the word being used in a lot of these these records. And maybe they took them across state lines. There's a lot of trading that happens within academic circles or research purposes. And it all is just to sort of, I think, especially early on in the history of of America. A lot of these institutions were just trying to collect whatever they could from all across the country so that they could have sort of an encyclopedia within their own institution. So, it's not just like California institutions will have California remains there are quite a few institutions that have remains and objects from all across the country. And that's one of the things that we think is really surprising about the maps, just showing the scope of a lot of these institutions holdings. And so I guess I'll move on from thanks for the introduction, Mary and Logan. I'm Ash knew the news apps developer, along with my colleague Andrea who's not here right now we developed the tool that we're talking about today. And before we dive into the tool I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the language that we're using, because it is something that I spent a lot of time on. One of the things that comes up a lot this sort of info box that we have which says what does made available for a term name because that's the dominant phrase that we're using colloquially as I think Mary and Logan have said return or to create is a very common or affiliate is a very common verb to use less colloquially but more accurately there's to complete the nag pro process or to transfer control. And in our work we've been really striving to hit that balance of accuracy but legibility to the public. And that's sort of how we landed on the made available for return language. The data that we have relies on the notices that are published when institutions have determined a connection between tribes and remains. And these notices don't actually tell us whether or not remains were physically returned. And they say that the tribes are able to claim these remains that the remains are available for return. So, you might even see some of these institutions have 100% that were made available for return. For some institutions, that could mean that they're holdings they have none of the remains physically inside of their institution anymore. For some institutions, it could mean that some of them are still there and some of them are not. And so we've really tried to be delicate with the language here and use that made available for return language which we've worked on with and consultation with practitioners who are in this space. And then the other thing that I'll say. I think my notes here. So the notices, when we say that it made available for return to a tribe. Oftentimes, the remains are made available for return to multiple tribes. And maybe only one tribe will take the lead on their patriation or actually do the physical repatriation. So that's just something to be cognizant of, especially on some of the pages that we have for the tribes. You might see a really large number like oh 2000 remains that were made available for return to the tribe. In a lot of cases, the tribe is not actually going to have received all of those remains because they're in these groups of affiliation. And so there's some nuance there to be had. So I'll move on to this slide which talks about who this database is for and I think we've been looking at some of the email on names that we've been getting in as you know people who signed up for this webinar. And it seems like we're excited, you know, we're excited to have members of the public we're excited to have reporters we're excited to have people who work on NAGPRA. And for tribes, I think we are now running a poll about what your affiliation is. And so this is really for all of those groups. You know, in building this tool we saw an opportunity to make some information much more visible in public. That would help with as sort of an accountability measure to let people, especially the public look up museums and universities near them that might still have Native American remains. And I think that really gets to the heart of the awareness question, which is, you know, a lot of people don't know that this log this, a lot of people don't know that this practice occurred. And the more people know about this possibility of repatriation, you know, the more people could, you know, learn about the law learn about maybe, maybe you volunteer at a local historical society or you have a friend who works for a museum or a university. And the more people who know about this, the more eyes there are on the ground who could say hey, we think that this might be subject to NAGPRA. So that's one thing that this tool could be for. We also wanted to just sort of help facilitate repatriation by making this information really easily sort of accessible for folks who say that they work for a museum they don't have a lot of resources a lot of time to do the research to figure out which tribes might be connected to remains that they might have. And you can pretty easily look up if you know the county or the state that their remains were from, you can figure out. Okay, these other tribes have previously been affiliated to remains from this area. I might not mean that that tribe or those tribes may have a claim or interest in the remains that your institution has but it's a first step. And I think that's one of the hopes that we have for this tool as well. And then if you're a porter as well. We are able to show you sort of the institutional track record. And the institution's done over time which is really fascinating. And I'll dig into that more as we live share. Some caveats to the data because I am apparently all about the clavius and the asterisks in this project. And the data is self reported so it has some quirks, you know, their institutions who have reached out to us and have said that their numbers are outdated or they're inaccurate. And we really welcome them to update their numbers with national NAGPRA because that is the only way that we can sort of keep track of things from the national bird's eye view. I think, like Marion Logan said, our minimum estimates. So, you know, museums when they're doing counting it. They might not be very detailed in a first pass and when they're getting closer to repatriation, they're able to more readily identify the number of individuals that might be represented in a group of remains. There are also some institutions that are subject to NAGPRA that haven't reported we've heard anecdotal evidence of this occurring. And they might not be in the, if you type in a name and your institution doesn't show up. It doesn't mean necessarily that they don't have Native American remains it might mean that they just haven't reported them. And so these numbers are best taken as estimates and sort of as a preference, we like to try and round the numbers because the specificity that is provided is oftentimes it makes people think that the numbers are way more accurate than they might actually be. So that's something that you can think about as your report to use phrases like at least more than rounded number, or like this is the reported number of remains instead of saying it just is the number of remains. And those I think are all the caveats and move on to the pages that we have and I think they got maybe a little bit mixed up the homepage is the first page that we have. And it shows the bird's eye view of the whole nation with this big map. It has a list of all the institutions and all the tribes that have been involved in this process. It's a good place to start it has the search box to, although every page has the search box. It's a good place to start and then we also have institution pages which, you know, you can look up a particular institution, like, I think some of these screenshots are UC Berkeley. And I'll go a little bit more into depth on each of these. We have tribe pages, which are pretty unique in that National Nag Pro before doing this project. They were not able to search that pre records by tribe. We've done some data work to be able to do this, using all publicly available data, and we're able to really show through for petrification over time from the tribal perspective as well and demonstrate the scope of work that these tribes have been involved in since the 1990s. And then we also have state and county pages, which for some of our reporters who are based in a specific region can be really helpful starting points as well. So I'm going to go ahead and switch to the live share. And I'm just looking at some of the questions would I be able to share where you obtain data on the amount of remains made available. So data sources conveniently are my next slide. The data sources are National Nag Pro, and also the Federal Register. And that's really it. The National Nag Pro is the group that maintains all these records nationwide. And I think your info is right there. So switch right over to the app here. Thanks, see that great. This is just a little bit of intro I think probably most folks have seen that to give context as to what we're getting into. If people have specific, you know, states or institutions or tribes that they'd like me to look up please feel free to try and pop that in the UNA and we'll see if we can do that. I'll just start here with, I think the University of Berkeley, because they are the institution that has the largest amount of Native American remains still in their holdings. You can also type in anything that you like really, you know, California. And you can search just for things in California and you get a whole list here. I'll go to Berkeley. If you're looking into a particular institution, obviously the summary here will give you the highest level of information that you might want. If you're looking for more detailed information on specific counties, the specific holding of the institution and maybe areas where the institution has successfully repatriated and areas where the institution has not. The map is a really good place to start. So the University of Berkeley University of California Berkeley is interesting because they have a lot of remains from California. But even outside of California, they have some remains and you can hover over each of these for more details. You can even click in further if you'd like to get to a state or a county page. One thing to note about these maps. There are some remains that have no location information. So they're not actually visualized. And that's what's in this note here. The timelines I think are really interesting. You can see whether or not an institution has done a lot over the past 30 years or not. Here we have an instance of Berkeley. You see that they have started to do some repatriation after something like a decade of relatively small action. And all of these remains are for the most part, most of the remains have been returned through the cultural affiliation clause, which is, you know, they've made a very specific affiliation to set of tribes. There are some institutions, for instance, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which you see this big stack of gray, they've mostly done their repatriations through disposition. And that is sort of, I would say, a lower bar. It's like related to geographic affiliation oftentimes. And oftentimes involves larger groups of tribes. You know, it's really interesting that TVA around the 2015 2012 era started to really move on repatriation. And so as a reporter, when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, okay, what changed for TVA it was a government audit. They, yeah, there was a government audit, I think from the GAO that published around that time which sort of spurred some reform there. And there are other institutions, I think, we've got exactly which one is, I think it might be Michigan. Yeah, Michigan State, Michigan State University almost 100% made available for a turn. You can also see that in the past sort of two years, three years, they've done a lot of disposition work. So perhaps if you are a reporter in the Michigan area, talking to the NAG Pro coordinators there and learning about, you know, what's changed, why has there been this sort of increase in repatriations after relative stagnation over the past couple of decades. And another great thing about sort of the institution pages is that you're able to see which, which tribes the institution has made Native American remains available to. As well as potentially, if we have a response from them, some institutions have emailed in a little bit more background from the university itself or the institution itself, describing, you know, their response to the data that we're presenting here. And so, one thing I think that might be interesting for reporters specifically. Some institutions in or in some counties there are institutions that have repatriated remain, and there are some institutions that haven't just within sort of a specific county. And, you know, these decisions are nuanced, it's not necessarily to say that every institution in every that's in the same has that has remains from the same county should have the same repatriation decision. It's interesting when you see counties where, for instance, there's different, different determinations from institutions, so let me just find. Where is Wasco Oregon. What is this problem with being able to identify. So in Wasco County, you know, 81% of the Native American remains that were taken from this county have been made available for a turn. And that's kind of an interesting. It's not neither 100% or 0% there are some institutions that have in some institutions that haven't. And we can kind of see in this list here. These are all the institutions who have remains that were taken from Wasco County. And they have not made the remains that they have from this county available for a turn other institutions, including Yale, the University of Wyoming, the American Museum of Natural History have. And so in these counties where you have some institutions that didn't some that did not. One could argue, if you do more research talk to more folks. One could say that their examples of repatriation happening in this county. And in this county it seems like the repatriations have been primarily to these three tribes. So, you know, maybe you're interested in this specific county or interested in this specific state you're able to be all the different players who have sort of operated in this space. And as a reporter hopefully it gives you more quick leads through the contact. And then we'll talk over to the tribe page. I'll just click one of these. So this is one of the tribes that operates in the Pacific Northwest region or is based in the Northwest region. And we can see sort of a summary up top, we can see. One of the areas where Native American remains were taken from and then later returned made available for a turn to this tribe. And you can see that their territory sort of spans all the way down California and Nevada. You can see which institutions this tribe has been in consultation with and then had remains made available return from the Department of Defense for this tribe has been in contact them. And similarly you can see a timeline. For tribes, I think there are some tribes where they've had pretty consistent repatriations year over year, for instance, the hope be the Zuni, a lot of tribes that have substantial resources. And there are some tribes where based on tribal capacity based on a number of things maybe they are working on repatriations maybe they're not. And those tribal historic preservation officers who work on NAGPRA often are quite underwater with a lot of requests and a lot of work and so tribal capacity really varies for repatriation. And lastly, for tribes. This is a table that kind of puts together the list of institutions that might have remains that are potentially of interest to this tribe. And this was put together using the counties that the tribe has already had remains made available. The language is really difficult. This is basically areas where tribes had remains made available. Nope, still, still getting it wrong. So, the institution, the institutions on this list have remains that were taken from counties of interest to the tribe. And these are counties where they have previously been eligible to claim remains from as well as counties that the tribe sort of has indicated interest into the federal government through this other data source. So we have the University of California Berkeley here that has not returned 268 remains, and these are coming from counties that might be of interest to the tribe. So this is a starting point for tribal historic preservation officers or other tribal representatives to start thinking about which institutions might have remains that could be relevant to them. I think that's sort of it, and I'm sure there are a lot of questions. So I'm going to stop talking at this point. Good number of them as I think one of them, some of you sort of just touched on a little bit, but asking what the differences between disposition and the repatriation process. Yeah, so we mentioned earlier there's sort of this two stages of magpra or two areas of magpra. Cultural affiliation is a higher standard. I forget the exact phrasing, but there is essentially a preponderance of evidence that this group has a shared identity with the individual represented by the remains. And the preponderance of evidence standard is 50% or above, I believe. Disposition doesn't require that level of evidence. Disposition can happen through geographical affiliation. So this tribe we know as historical roots in this area. And we know that the remains came from this area. And so it's much looser. And therefore, in many cases, the disposition groups are much larger. So you might have five, 10, 20 tribes, depending on the region in the country that are dispositioned to the remains. But it's a clarifying question and says earlier in the opening, you said that less than half of objects have been returned. And so I think it is what is the source of the data that indicates 50% of objects have been or not been recreated. I think I was the one who mentioned that fewer than half events or so remains have been returned and if, if I, if I did say that it was items to or alluded to that I'm sorry we'd have to check the data real quick to know what the status is on items. And so a lot of our reporting is prioritized remains. And I can't, but is that correct Ash? Yeah, objects are different. And they're hard to count. So for instance, one museum might count a necklace as one object, another museum might count every bead in that necklace as several objects. And so I've been sort of told by experts to think of the objects number is much more loose. So the associated funerary object, they're associated to the remains and so if that remains percentage, if the if you know all the remains that are out there sort of get repatriated. So to will all of the associated funerary objects but it might not be, you know, 50% 50% for both of those things those categories to be moving together at any point. So a lot of remains are one set of human remains for one individual might come with several dozens hundreds of objects, or just one and so it's, there's not exactly a correlation. Okay. So a lot of more questions. And, and certainly Fiona jump in as if any prioritized to you but that maybe we could get to the sources that we work with also and the documents and then I would love to answer some of these questions because there's really good ones about museums past of collecting outside the United States as well. So, what to cover. I don't have very much more to say about sources other than the federal register or sir dot gov has more detailed information about remains and objects that were repatriated. And if you're doing something very specific about this institution or tribe. They have a search engine. You can search for what you need there. So, yeah, if you are looking for a very up to date data or more detail, getting in touch with national nine pres is moved there. We want to move on to, should I take some questions Mary did you want to move on to the next section. Well, and we can move, maybe I can give you one more and then what we should move on to sources and docs real quick. I'd love to answer all these questions. And then wrap the whole thing up. And a good one. And again, I don't know if we have to look at the data to answer this, but of the portion of remains that are held what percentage or how many of them don't have location information. 13% but there's sort of different number. There's a different number between like some don't have counties, but they have states, some don't have counties or states. And this just gets down to the problems information that a lot of institutions are missing. So Mary says institutions reported. Yeah, so we have some of those numbers available right under the map. So we jump to sources. Oh, sorry. So yeah, Ash cover the data sources and now we want to talk about, of course, like the people who have been, we found to be very helpful in our reporting and I think represent types of institutions that might exist in all of your area. And so I'll just say really briefly before handing over to Graham about like method like ways to cultivate sources. I think that I just, I think as we did this reporting we all started to think about magpie as a landscape. That is kind of covers a breadth of different types of agencies and institutions and governments. So, certainly for starters there are tribes and within tribes, you may your point person may be a trial start preservation officer, or someone with the title of cultural director. And sometimes if it's a deep personal priority or just a leadership priority for the tribal leaders such as a chairman governor or president, then you may be speaking to the head of the tribe and when I speak to with with those with tribal leaders specifically I do try to keep in mind. I tried to call as early as possible keeping in mind that they are also managing many different parts of running their governments, making sure people have fun, like they're that they're spending for basic services. And then that we also found that in a lot of regions of the country, because of the way I think institutions have interpreted they put that there are cultural like, or intertribal coalitions, which might be a whole, like a group of a dozen tribes or tribes that have decided to pursue repatriations together so that an institution can't say we can't repatriate to you because we can't repatriate to a single tribe because there's 12 other tribes in the region that they come together with their voice, then they can pursue repatriations to their region as a group. And then I think within institutions, it can also be quite a range. I think hopefully an institution has a NAGPRA staffer, at least one if they don't I think it's worth sort of keeping, keeping note of that because it says something about that institution and whether they're prioritizing this work and funding it. And then also curators, collections managers, professors might be on committees that that campus repatriation committees or they may have an expertise in this area as well. And then I'd say, maybe most importantly, we talked a lot about the National NAGPRA office, Melanie O'Brien is the, is the director of the leader of that office. And it's been a resource herself, she and herself have been a good resource, or enough, most of all I think also the documents that they provide on their website. I'm excited. I think, Graham, you're, I think you're a good report, a good reporter and let your, I think, I just admire the way you cultivate sources and so I wonder if you can go over this for us. Yeah, I appreciate that. I often tell reporters who are new to Indian country new to covering indigenous communities that that you are kind of a diplomat as well as a reporter. You have to be willing to acknowledge, not just industry wide failures of covering these communities but probably your own publication you work for. Keeping that in mind. And just trying to be as patient. While you're being persistent, like Mary mentioned, reaching out to these tribal reps early and cultivating those relationships is good. Because not only are they like Ash mentioned, are they really overburdened, especially if they're a smaller tribe with fewer resources. And also, you know, like a historic imbalance and inequity at play. We're dealing with a human rights violation here in many cases and are in many regards and so I think just being very thoughtful in the language, and how you approach these sources the things that you're looking for. Like I said, just trying to reach out as early as possible. I don't think it's at all unlikely that someone you might approach. If you've never reported about their tribe or their community before might perceive this as another, you know, kind of form of parachute journalism which is been a huge ethical issue when it comes to coverage of indigenous communities. So just keeping all of that in mind, really trying to, you know, come to the table with a willingness to listen and show up. I know that for a lot of us reporting in these communities being physically present isn't necessarily an option. But even outside of your reporting on NAGPRA I would just encourage you as reporters to be working on these relationships by just being present in those communities and this will lead you to other story ideas to not to get too much off topic but these tribal historic preservation officers deal with a lot of things other than NAGPRA they deal with language specialization with disputes over access to land and where the borders of some of those lands lie. They're very, very tapped in people and they are a wealth of knowledge outside of this field too so all that is to say that cultivating these relationships can be very beneficial for you outside of covering NAGPRA. If you're interested in really truly improving your publications coverage of these communities. And I'm trying to think if there's anything else. And then just understanding that there, this has been mentioned before but there's a really, really stark differences in how a lot of these tribes tribal nations and communities approach repatriation for many smaller tribes, even though the something a funerary object for instance, might have been made available for return the tribe might not have the capacity to take care of it. And so they develop these relationships with universities where the universities kind of become the caretakers of these items. And so, a lot of these I guess all does say that a lot of these relationships between tribal nations and the institutions they're dealing with are are really different from each other. And so, yeah, I would just encourage you to show up. And I'll be honest, a lot of the leads that we got for these stories were just because we were paying attention to committee meetings, whether those are state committee meetings or tribal council meetings, and, and always being the only reporter in those rooms or the only reporter paying attention to those transcripts and proceedings. And so a lot of you'll find a lot of these things that you're looking for already right out in the public it's just that we're paying attention to documents. And as we do that I was just going to note, in addition to call ways we cultivated sources we had issued a call out for leads as a way to listen to people and, and also figure out and help us figure out the stories to pursue. So that was immensely helpful for us as well. So, record, I think go back one more. We're going to go over records. We're having a little bit of trouble. There we go. Yeah. Well, I can talk about records. So, there were, and are a lot of different sorts of records involved with the reporting that we did and then, and also the reporting that we are working on and are planning for the future. And there are a couple, I guess, kind of base documents that we've all found very helpful. The first sort of document are the earliest inventories that you can get of an institution's holding so after the law was passed in 1990, the first deadline for institutions to submit to the National Park Service. But like an inventory of all of their NAG pro collections was 1995. And a lot of institutions probably most didn't make that deadline. So, in this. So there are two things to look for here one, did that institution one make their deadline. And if they did not, did they ask for an extension of their inventories from the National NAG pro office and then if they did that sort of, I guess like we can consider that a lead into why, what was the reasoning that they gave for why they needed an extension, or why they couldn't meet that earliest deadline. And then for the institutions that did meet that deadline, just getting their report that they submitted to the National NAG pro office those are public records. You can either ask the institution for those directly, you can for the institution if it's a public institution, or you can also, you know, get them from the National NAG pro office, but looking through those early reports. As a reporter it gives you a lot of context and information about where that institution's head was at like, how did they approach even having to do NAG pro in the first place. And it also gives you a lot of numbers. It gives you a lot of information about. So they can give you very specific information about which tribes they consulted with or claimed to consult with, and which ones they, they did not. So, you know, looking for that element is really important. And then any sort of like correspondence that you can find between an institution either kind of within itself like within it's, you know, a few institutions actually have their own sort of full, full fledged NAG pro departments but if you can find correspondence or people at an institution and people in at the National Park Service and kind of back and forth of, you know, oh we, we, we found this that we this, you know, item in our collections that we didn't know that we had and sort of getting an idea of what these conversations are like can give you as a reporter, an understanding of how, how nuanced and sometimes how complicated it can be. So looking for that and then also this is this is a really big one for us. So, the law has been around for more than 30 years. There is a NAG pro review committee that meets a couple of times a year, and this has been happening since I think like 2012 is when they were first talking about and trying to write the regulations about like how the law would actually work in practice. All of though I think that they're all still available online. Transcripts are all available on the National NAG pro office website. So you can go back in the archives like meeting by meeting, and there are there are so many but you can download the folder of that meeting, get the transcripts and then also I think in, in, in most meetings you can also get any attached meetings materials that were included with that so what we did is, you know, compile all of these transcripts transcripts into a search, searchable database, so that we can quickly look up an institution or even a theme and kind of get a sense over time of what the conversation, at least in the NAG pro review committee, what that conversation was like and how that evolved and I should say the NAG pro review committee. There are generally, you know, meetings that the public can come to, and they're meeting of forget how many people are actually on it but I think it's, I want to say seven. You know kind of representatives of various like interests in the network process so some might be from like on behalf of the Society for American archaeology. Some of them will be tribal leaders some of them are government officials or federal agency representatives so this is supposed to be a committee that can hear any disputes that a tribe might might bring to them about, you know, what's going on with how they are, you know, trying with their institution so we can hear disputes that can, you know, implement new regulations, and just like, you know, talk about like particular cases and particular instances that are kind of of tricky to navigate. So that was a really useful resource for us and those are publicly available online. And another pretty important bucket that is fairly easy to to get information about is the NAG Pro grants program. So it's actually part of the law that the I don't know if they specify which agency but there is a bucket of money that Congress makes available that can be distributed to both institutions and tribes for consultation and repatriation, and the government can give you these, you know, these different like buckets of money for different repatriation or consultation projects, and if you are, you know, reporting on a particular institution and their their return rate or their relationship with the tribe. So you should definitely get a sense through this information. If they have applied for national mad programs before if so what were they trying to work on, did they get that money or not because the national mad program ash, like it keeps track of declined grants as as well. It's just good to know what they were what an institution was trying to do or what a tribe was trying to do because there is every year there's been. I believe more tribes institutions like looking for money than they act than the national network program actually has available. So this is also a big hang up in in in the law itself. And as a recorder it's important to familiarize yourself with what has happened with that institution and tribe in the past. There's a lot more, but that's, that's, I'll keep it to that for now. And I'm happy to answer questions, I'll answer questions about this later too. I'm going to slide and show it. I think it's a great place to end and just keep in mind, I think, as some of the some of the things that I think we tried to adhere to through our reporting. I think we're getting some behavior kind of started with cultural sensitivity. And while that's posted there I think we're going to go ahead and jump to questions since we're limited on time and there are so many of them. That's okay with with the team. So let's see. Let's get to, there's a lot of good ones. I thought this was really a thoughtful question. What are the characteristics of successful repatriation efforts, both on the tribal side, and the institutional side. Are you museums more likely than other types of entities to return remains and I think maybe we could just summarize some of what we've heard from sources of what's what's worked well and not. I can go first briefly and just say on the tribal side. It seems that when I think a tribe feels that their claim to their ancestors is not dismissed. Especially if they're citing tribal knowledge and their histories and cultural information that is considered successful and also successful when an institution does not press them for maybe especially delicate private and sensitive cultural information. And then also I think when the tribe feels that they've had a chance to be at the table with the institution and be heard. The others have. Yeah, just to add to that. One thing that I've that I've heard that has been successful with institutions is when, when a curator or NAG coordinator, whoever's doing NAG Pratt, you know whatever museum. They don't withhold any information from tribes. And museums have tons or sometimes sometimes they have nothing but but sometimes there's tons of information available about particular collections and even, you know, notes from the person who excavated, you know, this, you know, these human remains and other objects. It's, I've heard of institutions just basically making a gigantic drop box or Google Drive or whatever file sharing the capability you have and just trying to upload everything you can so you know that you are having these conversations or consultations with that that are a bit more transparent that everybody has access to the same sort of information. I think tribal consultation is like this such a huge key to a successful repatriation, like relying on traditional tribal like knowledge whether that's geographical historical cultural whatever that might be, and giving it equal footing I, I would point to. I think it'll still be years before I could answer the question of whether or not it was successful or how successful it was of course, because it takes a long time but what the University of North Dakota did recently with their discovery. They found I want to say it was like 70 remains and some pretty terrible conditions and boxes and storage no one really knew they were there because no one had really looked since pre NAGPRA. It was a really really like horrifying and tough situation, especially for the tribes in and around the University of North Dakota. If you go look at the University of North Dakota is like, they created a whole website to answer questions. They really made efforts to be as transparent with tribes as possible. And I think like they showed that if they can do it that it can be done in a really thoughtful way. And so, yeah, I think reaching out to tribes, very, very early for consultation and advising guidance is a really is a really important one. I think I make note of being proactive I think there's the question of what the law, the letter of the law expects and what the spirit of the law is. There are some institutions that have said you know we reached out to the tribes in 1999 we didn't hear back from them since then and you know our legal obligations are filled. And that doesn't, you know, maybe true. So that doesn't get to the spirit of the law. And I think a lot of the tribes are getting mail from all across the country from correspondence from institutions across the country and keeping track of that all can be difficult so just being proactive I think is something that has been proactive and consistent is something that has been brought up on the institutional side. And then, in terms of which types of entities are more likely to return remain. Just sort of anecdotal and objective, but you can sort of see geographical patterns. There have been areas where there are tribes that haven't had have had been displaced less than perhaps other populations I think there's been more continuity of traditions of communities of history and many of those tribes have had some success in having their ancestors returned, and also are just able to more readily cultivate relationships with institutions in their area because they have physical presence. And they don't necessarily need to get on a plane every time they need to talk to an institution. Those are some of the trends that we've seen the federal government also is itself subject to the law, and in many ways. Some of the National Park Service units have pretty close connections to tribes that operate in their area. And some of those sort of agencies have seen some success. The institutions have a history of of scientific research and interest and holding onto remains for those reasons and you'll feel fine sometimes lower numbers and repatriation, lower repatriation numbers at those institutions. I'll turn this next question to Logan, or start off with you. And what do you see is the biggest denial of why institutions such as public universities may deny records requests. And how do you suggest what our partners. You know, we've run into institutions even though something is technically a public record. They, some institutions are hesitant to reach to give you those records, because they might be in consultation with various tribes and they feel uncomfortable giving you that information and you know, rightly so. Just from personal experience, institutions have been less hesitant, if it's something from, if you're asking for records from a while back, and their institution has showed some signs of change so if it's kind of dependent sometimes on how much staff turnover they've had. And, you know, and how you, how we've gotten around that. I don't know if you've like, if we've really gotten around a lot of these issues but I would say, if you can try to have a good relationship with whichever tribes are in consultation with that institution. And the whole other sort of aspect of this reporting is, is your relationship with various, with various tribes. Because sometimes, you know, an institution will tell you that they don't want you to have certain information because it because the tribes want to keep it private but then various, you know, tribal leaders are historic preservation and people will just, you know, either send them to you or say I don't know why they, why they want to keep this from you. You know, in some ways, part of the reason why there's this backlog is because of a lot of, you know, kind of secrecy around this so, but that's not, that's not to say that, you know, tribes aren't going to, you know, tell you that that this is private and I think as a reporter. There's more than probably more so than any other, you know, stories that I've worked on when somebody says that they don't want to talk because they're inactive consultations. I haven't pushed it. You know, like that's that's pretty serious that that can be very sensitive and you actually have a lot of, I think like, you know, like in potentially a lot of influence or power as a reporter if you are if you are this like external factor that is poking your nose into this very sensitive dynamic and a lot of times to try to like rebuild relationships so I guess just making sure that a tribal leader who's ever whoever is involved with consultations knows that you are there and that you are interested and, you know, sometimes I have shared public records with various tribal leaders to show that you know this is information this might be, you know, of interest to you. I'm saying I'm, I'm around and check in every couple months like you would do but and but letting people know that you are not actually going to repeatedly be getting in touch with them as you might for some for, you know, a different topic. So off topic there but I think I answered two people's questions with that one so I think so yeah and I would just agree with those points repatriation is. Well, I think museums with holding ancestral remains is very can be very painful and sometimes I think a tribe wants to go through that privately. And in which case we keep the door open but respect their wishes. Do we have time for one more. Mary, can I just make a point that one, one thing that we've heard from some tribal historic preservation officers is maybe they don't want to have stories out about specific repatriations or consultations with institutions that are ongoing. But a lot of, I think tribal historic preservation officers are interested to talk about funding and being able to get more awareness around the, there's sort of inability to do the work that needs to be done because of the high levels of turnover and a lack of resources. So it might be about pivoting the story to not be focused on the numbers or specific institution to tribal relationship. And something that comes from just talking with your sources about what is top of mind for them. I'll go to the next question. Thanks for that Ash. Graham, I'll direct this one to you. What are some of the potential pitfalls you see or could see journalists encountering with the story. I think there's a lot but I think some of them can just be your, your word choices, your language in the story. I think it's important to remember that like you're not just writing about like a failure to follow a federal law, you're talking, this is, you know, this is generations of, you know, treating these communities with with disrespect to like a pretty high degree. And so I think it's important to just like make sure that you're representing that the inequitable circumstances that play in your stories these are some really powerful institutions that some of these tribal nations have to take on with, like Ash just mentioned like very limited staff right. And so, and then I also think it's just like applying like the same ethical standard to these communities that you do your own. Mary and I talked a lot about the word sacred she knows how I feel about it. Like I think it can be a really useful word but I also think it gets thrown around in a kind of a lazy way by reporters. When you could be explaining things like in more with more specificity, or just the idea that, you know, these remains are important to native nations because you know, our ancestral remains are sacred to us and it's kind of like everyone's debt is sacred to them like this is a universal. I think a problem that is universally understandable no matter where you're from. And then. Yeah, I think just just being cognizant of those of those that the historical inequity, because the inequity also isn't just something that's in the past. It's present day like these the information that is gathered thinking particular funerary objects, cultural information things like that. I guarantee you most of the tribes that you talked to are going to tell you that the things that were collected the research that was done. That wasn't shared with the people it was taken from. And so it begs the question of like, you know this indigenous data sovereignty question of like where does this data go. Who has access to it. And what is it being used for. One of the points that we made in our story about the University of Alabama in particular was that when when they told the tribal nation, the Muscogee and speaking tribes that were that were trying to force a repatriation is that what we need to re inventory them do CT scans to gather new research and tribes were not okay with that that's the, you know, how having access to their ancestral remains and what you what these institutions do with that access is also an important question to be asking items. You know, the United States, but that are excuse me are currently in the United States or in US institutions that have come from Canada, and, or also asking about what European institutions hold. So, do you mind discussing the extent to which the data of the limits of the data on that front. Yeah, well, sadly, the limits of the data are the US national boundaries. NAGPRA only extends to that realm and only is only US federally funded US institutions that are subject to it. One thing that we tried to do on the maps was sort of, instead of just having the US map hovering with no sort of other land masses around it is just demonstrating that, you know, Mexico and Canada or connected land masses and the tribes that cross the boundaries that we presently have in modern society. I don't have very much more to say on that topic. It's sort of a frustrating part of sovereign nation. Existences, but that's how it is now. We have a question I think I can answer directly or briefly but it is that I've run into trouble of finding Native American organizations speak to in Louisiana. Any advice on how to find these sources. I have not reported in Louisiana however I think just generally speaking about finding sources in your region. We've shared the list of typo organizations I believe in the comments and of course, give the caveat that I think they have limited resources and maybe available to talk but there can be a resource. And then I think obviously reaching out to the tribal nations, and then in addition, I think you can maybe look for nonprofits and that would be another tool they use using the nonprofit explorer to find potentially try to find nonprofits that serve Native people. So, and I can now jump to the next question. I think we have time for one more at least and this one can be for all of us. What is the biggest takeaway or this is very broad but probably is also very important. What is the biggest takeaway or most important thing reporters should know or understand as they go about reporting on this story. I would direct to I think the last slide we had on sort of. I didn't like which I think is our list of sort of values that we always wanted to keep on mind while doing the story, understanding that first and foremost you're writing about a human rights issue or neck has written recognizes human rights law, but I'd love to hear from my colleagues. I think for me. A lot of this reporting is just challenged so many assumptions that I didn't even realize that I was making. You know, it's not, it's, it's important to keep in mind as you're reporting all of this that it's not that every tribe doesn't have the same sort of preferred outcome of how they want the repatriation process to go and what should happen it completely so don't just assume that there's that there's one sort of pathway and that that pathway ends with always ends with. We burial I mean often it does but sometimes it doesn't make sense at that time so I guess just being open to that. And then also, I guess like being pretty mindful of how a lot of I guess like interests are sort of fields of this really intercept like there are. You know like tribal archaeologists there's cultural there like science and tribal interests are not mutually exclusive and I think that that is sort of like the cleaner wrong narrative. But they intersect and bounce off of each other in ways that are really worth paying attention to. I could jump in. What I was going to say was fairly similar to what Logan was saying. You know as someone who's not native coming into this project we really did try and go slowly and do our due diligence and talk to people who have been doing this for decades. Some on a volunteer basis some as their careers. And it's not just you know now pro is past 30 years ago but it's really covering a like 10,000 years in some cases of human history on this land on and I sometimes I feel sort of complicated about being a data reporter because numbers don't tell the full story. And so I think the hope that I would have for local reporters who are interested in doing something on this is to maybe not necessarily turn around a quick story that's pretty I think it's a good place to start and can give you a sense of patterns and relationships but developing sources, getting in touch with people who are doing this work on a regular basis and learning about the stories behind the numbers. Because that's, I wish we could have provided more of that. But we've read so many instances of all kinds of ways that remains of Native Americans have ended up in museums. And I think those stories are what gives repatriation a lot more life past just the numbers basis. One thing I agree with everything so the only thing that I would add is that that the law exists today because of generations of indigenous activism and like asserting our humanity and are you know the fact that we deserve basic dignity and respect. People like Maria Pearson in the 70s and Walter Echo Hawk, who's still alive today and the work that he did and the law didn't happen because the United States suddenly decided that it had been doing something horribly wrong, since its inception, it did. The law was put in place because indigenous people forced it to be put in place. So it's a great place for us to wrap things up. I want to start by thanking all of our speakers, Mary Logan Ash and Graham you guys all did a tremendous job thank you for lending your reporting expertise and insight on this prescient issue. Thank you to all of you in the audience. Again, you know we're excited to see what you do with this data we'd love to know about it so if you could please send us your news stories, or whatever outcome might come of this by emailing events at ProPublica.org, and putting repatriation the subject line. We'd love to see it from all of us at ProPublica. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.