Dozens of indigenous remains were taken from SLO County. Getting them back is not easy

When James Terry came to San Luis Obispo County in 1875, he did not leave empty-handed.

Roughly 15 years later, the five human skulls his expedition took from indigenous burial sites across the region would resurface more than 2,500 miles away in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The remains would stay in the museum for more than 130 years before the process of their return home finally began earlier this year.

With the remains deemed “culturally unidentifiable” until recently, the museum has begun work with local Chumash tribes to review, inventory and return the remains, as well as others belonging to additional tribes across the country.

It’s a complicated and often exhausting process, especially for tribal representatives tasked with navigating a maze of red tape as they try to reclaim ancestors from the sterile museum displays, storage, labs and universities where they have been kept.

“This work is really hard,” said Nakia Zavalla, the tribal historic preservation officer and cultural director for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. “There are only so many of us, and we, unlike the museums and the universities, are not getting paid to do this.”

In total, the skeletal remains of 170 Chumash people were taken from burial sites in San Luis Obispo County to be studied and displayed by 11 different academic institutions across the country, according to documents from the National Parks Service.

Many have been returned, but today, the remains of 39 individuals still wait to come home.

Tribune interviews with tribal leaders, repatriation specialists and museum employees reveal how despite recent improvements to legislation governing the return of indigenous remains, the return of those remains is still complicated by a cost-prohibitive process that restricts tribes’ abilities to participate in the return of their ancestors.

What remains were taken from SLO County, when and how?

According to records from the Park Service, after James Terry, the next recorded excavation in San Luis Obispo County took place in 1929.

The group, led by Dr. Van Bergen and Howard Woodward, who was the history curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, took the remains of an estimated 15 people who were buried near Avila Beach.

Records show that along with human remains, the excavation also unearthed 742 funerary objects, including the skeleton of a dog.

According to the museum, these excavations were done on private property with the permission of the owner.

While little record of the researchers’ time in SLO County remains, an academic review of the museum archaeologist’s work in other parts of California includes notes kept by researchers during an excavation in Southern California, near Santa Monica.

The notes show that during excavations, museum employees noted the sex and apparent age of the remains, even jotting down the direction their heads faced.

The remains and artifacts taken from SLO County were only a portion of the 122 sets of human remains taken by Van Bergen’s excavations across California.

SLO County has long history of archaeological digs that displaced Chumash graves

By the time Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the remains of thousands of indigenous people had been displaced.

Often, the work was publicized as it was ongoing, feeding a fervor that pushed many an amateur archaeologist to take to the hills to see what they could unearth.

A June 1968 article in what was then the Telegram-Tribune detailed how another archaeologist with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Roberta S. Greenwood, conducted a dig at what was slated to become the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

That group unearthed more than 1,000 Chumash artifacts during the PG&E-financed dig, all of which were then taken to “laboratories in Los Angeles for detailed study,” according to the article.

The article did not specify whether any human remains were found, though a photo published alongside it showed Greenwood holding a bone dagger. An article published in the Arroyo Grande Valley Herald Recorder around the same time indicated the Greenwood dig had found roughly a dozen human skulls.

The remains found during the construction of Diablo Canyon were eventually reburied at the Red Wind Native American settlement outside of Santa Margarita despite a push by tribal groups to have them reburied on the Diablo property, according to a September 1979 article in the Telegram-Tribune.

A year after the Diablo Canyon dig, another on a knoll a few yards from Highway 101 in Pismo Beach unearthed “a few bone fragments” as members of the San Luis Obispo Archaeological Society and a slew of Cal Poly students excavated the hillside, according to a July 1969 article in the Telegram-Tribune.

The site was picked because of its proximity to other indigenous burial sites, and analysis at the time did indicate there were burials on the mound, according to the article.

The article noted the findings from the Pismo Beach dig would join those found in Shell Beach the winter before. Those included the skeletons of a woman and a dog, the article said.

It is unclear where the remains found during those digs ended up.

The July 1969 article noted that findings were being stored in that garages of San Luis Obispo Archaeological Society members until Cal Poly’s archaeology school — which had not yet been established — could store the items and potentially set up displays.

Further information on the Shell Beach dig could not be found in The Tribune’s archives.

Remains of 39 people have yet to be returned to SLO County

The artifacts and remains taken from San Luis Obispo County are estimated to be a small share of the thousands of remains designated in federal records to have been taken from Chumash lands.

According to documents from the Park Service, over a thousand remains thought to have been taken from Chumash lands in central and coastal California have yet to be returned to the tribe.

Counts of remains can consist of whole skeletons, bones, or parts of skulls, and even bone shards.

Of the 11 institutions that once possessed remains from San Luis Obispo County, all but five have returned them to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. Of the three Chumash tribes on the Central Coast, only one — the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians — is federally recognized and can receive repatriated remains and artifacts under NAGPRA.

As of October, the remains of approximately 39 individuals from San Luis Obispo County were still being held by these institutions, according to NAGPRA data.

Those were:

• California Department of Parks and Recreation: 12 individuals
• Cal Poly: eight individuals
• Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County: six individuals
• American Museum of Natural History: five individuals
• UC Santa Barbara: four individuals
• UC Berkeley: three individuals
• California Department of Transportation: one individual

How do remains get returned to California tribes?

Much of the reclamation work falls to tribal leaders like Nakia Zavalla, the tribal historic preservation officer and cultural director for the Santa Ynez tribe.

According to Zavalla, the work of coordinating the return of remains is taxing, both financially and emotionally.

Zavalla said tribes are able to apply for federal grants to help cover the cost of travel, which she said sometimes includes multiple trips to a singular institution to review and coordinate the return of a group of remains.

But more taxing than the cost of trips, Zavalla said, is seeing the conditions that ancestors have been kept in, which can be gut-wrenching.

Zavalla said after wading through layers of red tape to get remains returned, it can be disheartening and disappointing to see how poorly they have been taken care of over the decades.

“We have had cases where we are returned bags of powdered bone,” Zavalla said. “Because they have been using our ancestors for experiments and to study them without permission from the tribes.”

However, she said, cases that extreme are few and far between. And in many cases, relations with institutions that hold remains are improving.

According to Zavalla, recent changes to NAGPRA that required institutions to revisit remains formerly labeled as “culturally unidentifiable” has helped expedite the return of some that museums may have set aside many years ago.

Leaders like Zavalla who head federally recognized tribes often work with the non-federally recognized tribes when an organization has remains that are poorly documented but known to belong to a large area that is under the territory of more than one group.

Cal Poly holds indigenous Chumash remains

Universities have been some of the largest holders of indigenous remains and artifacts — and despite numerous state and federal laws requiring those be repatriated, many have yet to return any in their possession.

In 2023, an audit requested by Assemblyman James Ramos, D-San Bernardino, revealed California State University campuses had repatriated only 6% of the 698,000 artifacts and human remains in their possession, according to a June report in The Fresno Bee.

Of those, 12 CSUs were found to have not returned any artifacts or remains, including Fresno State and Cal Poly.

An audit of University of California campuses in 2020 found similar circumstances.

According to the CSU audit, Cal Poly’s collection of artifacts was estimated to be less than 100 items. NAGRPA documents indicate the university had the remains of eight individuals in its possession.

According to university spokesperson Keegan Koberl, Cal Poly’s biology department received the remains through a donation approximately 65 years ago.

At the time, he said, the university did not keep close records. As a result, the remains were designated as “culturally unidentifiable” for many years, he said.

Koberl told The Tribune in recent years the university has worked with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe to identify and inventory the remains.

Koberl said in accordance with the wishes of the tribe, Cal Poly will continue to store the remains in a secure location not accessible to the public.

Incomplete records and confusion delay return of remains

Tribal leaders and NAGPRA coordinators told The Tribune that there are a variety of reasons why many remains have not yet been returned to tribes.

One of these is inconsistent and incomplete documentation of the remains.

While many of the remains that have not been returned to San Luis Obispo County are inventoried in the national registry, the records of others are harder to locate or do not exist.

Some, like the remains held by the American Museum of Natural History were until recently considered “culturally unidentifiable” and have not been inventoried.

Kendra Snyder, a spokesperson for the America Museum of Natural History, told The Tribune it was undergoing a re-evaluation of all remains that have been labeled unidentifiable, including those from San Luis Obispo County, in accordance with the changes to NAGPRA regulations.

Zavalla said instances like this are common and it is not unusual for a museum to complete multiple rounds of returns to the same tribe as more remains are discovered and identified.

Other tribal leaders found the record-keeping system to be so confusing that sometimes disputes erupted between tribes and museums over artifacts not even officially covered by NAGPRA.

Because of this, most of the records kept by museums, academic institutions and the federal government say guesses on the number of remains taken from tribes are a minimum estimate, and these institutions could in fact hold many more.

Zavalla told The Tribune that no matter the struggle to bring ancestors home — or how many are still missing — the most important part of the journey is the homestretch when tribes can rebury those whose graves were disrupted decades ago.

Out of respect for ancestors, Zavalla declined to share specific details about the reburial process but said the tribe tries its best to re-inter human remains as close as physically possible to their original resting places.

“The babies, the children, the elders,” Zavella said. “They were already laid to rest for the first time, and now we have to do it again.”

This story was originally published October 27, 2024 at 5:00 AM.