The nine-member Native American Heritage Commission (NAHC) oversees Native American graves and sacred sites in California, making sure they are protected from destruction, notifying tribes when human remains or grave goods are found, and in case of ancient graves, determining which Native group will become custodian of human remains and artifacts. The commission also watches over shrines, churches and other sites sacred to Native Americans that are on public property, and maintains a list of these sites. Besides the nine commissioners, a salaried executive secretary is appointed by the governor.

For decades, the state of California and many counties had laws protecting cemeteries –defined as any spot where six or more bodies were buried – but  the laws were largely ignored when it came to Native American graves. Into the 1970s, treasure hunters were rarely stopped from digging and taking what they found, even when they left human remains scattered on the ground. A contributing factor to the problem was that most tribes did not fence or otherwise mark sacred sites, believing that this would simply draw more looters to the sites.

The creation of the state’s Native American Heritage Commission was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on September 29, 1976. The nine-person commission, five of whom must be Native American, is tasked with identifying and cataloguing places of cultural significance to Native Americans. The bill signed by the governor (AB 4239) also forbade anyone from inflicting “severe and irreparable damage” to sacred sites on public land.

The following June, Governor Brown appointed Stephen Rios, a member of the Juaneno Band of San Juan Capistrano Mission Indians, as first executive secretary. Nine other commission members were appointed, who remain unpaid except for expenses incurred attending meetings.

In the summer of 1978, the commission involved itself in a controversy over a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Point Conception, to be built by a subsidiary of Pacific Gas and Electric. While 60 Native Americans camped at the site to prevent surveys and bulldozing, the NAHC held an open meeting at the University of California,  Santa Barbara, allowing speakers from at least six tribes to describe the sacred nature of the land at Point Conception. The NAHC stated that it would appeal to the state Supreme Court any decision by the Public Utilities Commission to go forward with construction. Environmentalists were also against the project, and after years of delay, all plans to build an LNG terminal at the site were dropped in 1986.

In 1982, the commission was authorized to identify “most likely descendants” of Native American remains. Those designated by the NAHC then had legal authority over treatment and disposition of the remains.

The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 strengthened the commission’s hand by emphasizing the moral right of lineal descendants to claim stewardship of the remains and artifacts of their forbearers. Specifically, the law establishes the ownership by descendants of cultural items excavated or discovered on federal or tribal land. It also requires each federal agency, museum or institution that receives federal funds to prepare an inventory of remains and related burial objects. The act provides for repatriation of these items when requested by the appropriate descendant of the tribe.

A Short Overview of California Indian History (NAHCA website)

Native American Heritage Commission History (NAHCA website)

From its inception, the NAHC has identified and catalogued sites of religious or social significance to Native Americans on private and public land, including known graves and cemeteries. The commission reports on this list to the Legislature and gives its recommendations on preservation of, and access to, the sites.

The commission is notified by a county coroner whenever a suspected Native American grave is found. The commission then determines which Native group is the most likely descendent and notifies them. The NAHC arranges or demands inspection of the site and can impose standards for the treatment of the remains and artifacts.

In the case of privately-held property, the commission notifies landowners of cemeteries or graves on their property, and determines which Native American group is the most likely descendent of those interred and will therefore serve as custodians. Where sites sacred to Native people exist on private land, the commission makes recommendations for acquisition by the state or a public agency in order to grant access to the site for Native Americans. The commission can mediate disputes between property owners and Native American groups relating to Native American remains and grave goods on the land. It also makes recommendations to the state Legislature to encourage property owners to preserve and protect such places, and to allow access and ceremonial activities.

The commission has the power to investigate and bring legal action in order to prevent damage and ensure access for Native people to any Native American site—cemeteries, shrines, or sacred places—located on public lands. It can request an injunction to prevent damage to the site. The state Attorney General represents the NAHC during most litigation, and the commission may present evidence to prove the sacred nature and/or cultural significance of a site. If the Attorney General is representing another state agency in the litigation, the NAHC may seek other legal counsel.

The NAHC makes recommendations to the director of the state Parks and Recreation Department and the California Arts Council about the California State Indian Museum and about any programs related to Native Americans. It assists state agencies in negotiations with federal agencies regarding sacred sites on federal lands. The commission can hire clerical staff and accept grants and donations to carry on its work.

Strategic Plan (NAHC website)

All but $6 million of the Native American Heritage Commission’s $703,000 budget  is paid for by the state General Fund. The rest of the commission’s money comes from reimbursements. Operating expenses account for $204,000, and the rest is used for salaries of clerical workers and the executive secretary. No infrastructure expenses are noted.

3-Year Budget (pdf)

Sacred Sites

Until the passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, the Native American Heritage Commission’s actions toward protecting sacred sites were controversial and met with resistance. Since NAGPRA made it a federal offense to destroy such sites, the controversy with state agencies died down. The commission had also strongly urged museums, universities, and other agencies, like the state Parks and Recreation Department, to return the dozens and sometimes hundreds of skeletal remains in their possession, for reburial by Native groups. Again, the commission’s actions were resisted and resented. Archeologists protested angrily and accused the commission and other groups of being anti-science. However, NAGPRA mandated the repatriation of Native American bodies and grave goods on a federal level. The angry editorials and arguments were now directed at the federal government, and eventually died down.

But they didn’t disappear entirely.

La Plaza de Cultura y Artes – Construction of a $24 million art center in downtown Los Angeles honoring Mexican Americans hit a roadblock in October 2010 when construction workers found bone fragments on the site of what had once been L.A.’s first Catholic cemetery. The church was built in 1822 on the site of a Gabrieleno/Tongva Indian village, but the cultural center developer had assured everyone in a 2003 Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that all the site’s remains had been relocated after the cemetery closed in 1844. The director of the county coroner’s office assured everyone that even if there were cemetery remains still there, they weren’t Indian remains because it was a Catholic cemetery. Since there was no need for the Native American Heritage Commission to get involved, the developers quickly moved forward, with the support of the project’s main supporters, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and the La Plaza Foundation, to bag and box the remains of 118 people that were almost immediately unearthed.

Bad move. The EIR from Saphos Environmental Inc. was wrong. The downtown cemetery had apparently been confused with a cemetery miles away and remains had not been relocated. And the coroner office director was wrong. Many Indians had converted to Catholicism and were buried in the cemetery. But it wasn’t until December 29 that an archaeological technician working for the developer, Sanberg Associates, ratted his bosses out and alerted the commission that he believed the site had Indian remains. On January 6 the commission asked the county coroner to suspend the work until an investigation into the remains could be completed.

After a week’s delay and heated exchanges between the commission, La Plaza Foundation, Supervisor Molina and the county coroner, the foundation on January 14 ordered that work stop on the small portion of the center’s 30,000-square-foot garden area that was in dispute.

In late March, Molina appeared at a commission hearing and apologized profusely. “It's a huge mistake. What else can you do when you make a big mistake but apologize? Some will accept it, others won't. ... But it wasn't done by intent or by design.”

Gabrieleno tribal chairman Andy Salas wasn’t buying it. “They knew what they were doing. They took the bodies – most, not all of them – out of the cemetery by Elysian Park, called Old Calvary, not out of the one at LA Plaza.”

And commission staffer David Singleton noted that it would have been easy to learn the truth by consulting the Huntington Library's Early California Population Project, which shows that 399 of the 696 burials downtown were of Native Americans. Elizabeth Miller, an osteologist hired by the developer Sanberg, said the Saphos EIR was “incredibly poorly done. I do not see how you can do a legitimate assessment of a site where you know there was supposed to be a cemetery at one time, and not find any trace of the over 100 individuals that ended up being excavated. I'm completely at a loss.”

When the dust finally settled, the cultural center opened in mid-April 2011 and work began on the difficult job of finding a new home for the remains being housed at the Natural History Museum. To handle such a sensitive task, the county turned to a company it trusted and relied upon, Saphos Environmental, Inc.

Construction Unearths Disputes (by Emily Bazar, USA Today)

Letter to the L.A. Department of the Coroner (by Dave Singleton, analyst for NAHC)

Native American Group Seeks to Stop Downtown Project (CBS Los Angeles)

Letter to Larry Myers (from Robert Garcia, The City Project) (pdf)

Los Angeles: Halt the Removal of Tongva Remains (Mediations on the Collapse blog)

What to Do About the Olvera Remains (Los Angeles Times editorial)

Work Stops on Excavation at Old Cemetery in Los Angeles (by Carla Hall, Los Angeles Times) 

Los Angeles Mexican-American Culture Center Stops Work over Found Remains (by Jacob Adelman, Associated Press)

LA Plaza De Cultura Y Artes Could Miss Out On Federal Grant Money (by Jacob Adelman, Associated Press) 

An Apology Comes Too Late (by Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times) 

Unearthed Angelenos a Lesson for Their City (by Ed Fuentes, KCET) 

Bone Bungling at L.A. Cemetery (by Arnie Cooper, LA Weekly)

El Pueblo Campo Santo Human Excavations “Welcome-Share Community-Redefine Pride.” Really? (The City Project)           

Playa Vista – Everyone knew it was coming. The 2003 Environmental Impact Report on the coastal area around Ballona Creek in Los Angeles explicitly noted that developers of the $4 billion Playa Vista development were bound to stumble on the remains of Indian tribes that once lived there. The land was home to the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe from 3,500 BC through the 1820s and people had been finding their remains since at least 1991.

But when workers uncovered a 200-year-old Indian cemetery containing the burial features of at least 160 people in October 2003, they kept on working. The Native American Heritage Commission sent six letters asking them to stop removing the remains, which workers continued to find every day. In February 2004, commission Executive Secretary Larry Myers wrote, “It is vexing that these activities can continue in what can be interpreted as an ethnocentric disregard of Native American cultural concerns.”

Playa Vista officials pointed to an agreement they had signed 13 years earlier with representatives of the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe permitting the excavations and detailing procedures for handling artifacts and remains. But the commission said the agreement never anticipated such a large-scale finding and wanted it reworked.

Environmentalists had fought for years against construction of Playa Vista, which lies just south of Marina del Rey. The project has been called the most rancorous real estate development in modern Los Angeles history. Howard Hughes had built a manufacturing facility and airport (where he housed the Spruce Goose) in the marshland half a century earlier and developers had eyed it for years. So did environmentalists who hoped to preserve one of the last open space wetlands in the area and tamp down growth, traffic and pollution that were threatening to strangle the Southland?

“The people who are making the ruckus here are long-standing opponents of Playa Vista who have always done the same thing: to say and do anything to hurt the project,” said Steve Soboroff, president of Playa Vista.

Divisions emerged among the tribe, with some supporting Playa Vista and others denouncing it. The commission appointed Robert Dorame of Bellflower as “the most likely descendant” of the burial site, a technical legal designation that gave him authority to recommend how the remains should be handled. He recommended the developer leave them in the ground and change the development plans. But he could only make recommendations, which the developer chose to ignore. Martin Alcala, a member of the Santa Monica branch of Gabrielino-Tongva, who had been monitoring the excavation, said he believed the remains were being treated with respect. “In a perfect world, I would love for my ancestors to just stay there. But it's not a perfect world; they have to move in this case.”

Dorame lost the struggle to have the remains left untouched and four years later the commission was still fighting to have them repatriated elsewhere. “We tried to meet with Playa Vista and tried to meet with the Army Corps and said, ‘Let's speed it up,’ ”said commission secretary Myers. “We said, ‘We can't let this go on.’ ” Finally, in December 2008, 1,000 Native American remains were covered with seashells and reburied in a sacred ceremony on the Westchester bluffs not far from where they had been unearthed.

“The ancestors have been sitting in cardboard boxes in shelves on a trailer for a lot of years,” Dorame said. “We're happy it's finally come to an end.”

Responses to Comments (2003 Playa Vista EIR) (pdf)

State Decries Removal of Remains (by Sara Lin, Los Angeles Times)

Finding a Resting Place for the Gabrieleno-Tongva Ancestors (by Kristin S. Agostoni, Daily Breeze)   

Restoring Harmony with Reburial (by Tami Abdollah and Jason Song, Los Angeles Times)

Steve Soboroff Moving on from Playa Vista (by Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times)

Life at the Nexus of the Wetlands and Coastal Prairie, West Los Angeles (Society for California Archaeology)

Tribe vs. Tribe (Lost Village of Encino) – The commission has been authorized since 1982 to identify “most likely descendants” of found Native American remains. It is a critical distinction, and sometimes a point of contention, because those descendants then have legal standing over treatment and disposition of the remains. This power of designation has led to controversial decisions, such as the one over the “Lost Village of Encino.” A team of 75 archeologists and assistants unearthed about a dozen Indian remains and a treasure trove of artifacts, including 7,000 arrowheads and 50,000 beads, in the northern Los Angeles suburb of Encino in July 1984. Overall, an estimated 1 million artifacts were discovered at the site of an ancient village thought to be 3,000 years old.

The developer, by law, is entitled to keep the artifacts, but when it came time to designate a most likely descendant, three different tribes put in claims: the Chumash, the Fernandeno and the Gabrieleno. Fernandeno leaders claimed that the settlement was in an area they had inhabited for centuries. Chumash representatives cited reports by two consulting archeologists that found evidence of Chumash-style burials in the village. But the lead archeologist, Nancy Whitney-Desautels, said the artifacts were the handiwork of the Gabrieleno and the commission sided with them.

Four years later, bags and boxes were still sitting in a warehouse while the developer and the archeologist battled over whom was going to pay the multimillion-dollar storage and cataloguing bill that had been wracked up. Descendants also had a stake in the outcome because cremated remains were also thought to be mixed in with the artifacts. The developer had indicated a willingness to give the artifacts to museums (they would net a tax break), the archeologists wanted to study them further and the commission wanted to rebury them.

The suit was settled in 1989, Whitney-Desautels got to study the artifacts for three years, and some of the artifacts began to be doled out to museums in 1994.

Indian Tribes to Demand Reburial of Ancestors (by T.W. McGarry, Los Angeles Times)

Tribes Question Which Will Rebury Ancestors' Bones (by T.W. McGarry, Los Angeles Times) 

Indians Move Bones to Secret Park Grave (by T.W. McGarry, Los Angeles Times)

Lost Village of Encino's Artifacts in Legal Limbo (by Patricia Klein Lerner, Los Angeles Times)

After Years of Controversy, Native American Artifacts Will be on Display (by Timothy Williams, Los Angeles Times) 

Burial Sites

Historians disagree on the numbers, but some estimates put the pre-European Indian population in California at 300,000—other estimates are more than three times that. During the period between 1850 and 1900, 90% of the California Indian population died, often from disease, starvation, poisoning or gun shot wound. By the 1900 census, only 16,500 Indians were recorded in the state. The commission is committed to providing protection to Native American burial sites and, while it often finds itself in conflict with property developers, it also bumps heads with academics who would rather excavate  sites and study their remains and artifacts. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 fundamentally changed the relationship between scientists and Native Americans, giving the latter a much larger say in how burial sites are treated. But it continues to be a dynamic relationship that incorporates a measure of begrudged cooperation to be worked out on a case-by-case basis.    

Let Them Rest in Peace

 “If they had dug up George Washington or another person closely related to this country, they would be screaming like a son of a gun.”  Larry Myers, executive secretary of the Native American Heritage Commission, probably wouldn’t get much of an argument about that sentiment. “It's a human rights issue as far as I'm concerned, not a scientific issue.”

For many, the study of indigenous remains is disrespectful, unethical and even racist.

It may also be a question of conflicting viewpoints. Archaeologists tend to see the past as everyone’s heritage and seek to explain it through study. Not everyone necessarily agrees. Cecil Antone of the Gila River Indian Tribes, at a conference on reburial, said, “My ancestors, relatives, grandmother so on down the line, they tell you about the history of our people and it's passed on. Basically, what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that archaeology don't mean nothing.”  While archaeologists may think that they are helping Native Americans recover their past, the message they send may be that without the historical artifacts, Native Americans don’t exist.

No one likes to see their personal history interpreted and retold as fact by strangers, so who is to be believed when the oral history of Native Americans conflicts with the scientific record?

At a 1982 conference of the Australian Archaeological Association, Australian aboriginal Rosalind Langford disagreed with the premise that archaeologists, because of their special skills, are most capable of interpreting and preserving the heritage of people. “You ... say that as scientists you have the right to obtain and study information of our culture. You ... say that because you are Australians you have a right to study and explore our heritage because it is a heritage to be shared by all Australians. We say that it is our past, our culture and heritage, and forms part of our present life. As such it is ours to control and it is ours to share on our terms.”

NAGPRA didn’t put an end to scientific study of indigenous remains; it simply laid down ground rules for archaeologists and included Native Americans in the process. Reburial still allows for excavation and analysis of human remains and artifacts. 

It’s a Waste of Time

Human remains and artifacts provide archaeologists with a vital source of information about past lives and material culture. It’s knowledge that benefits mankind in general and is impaired when the parochial interests of a single group are made paramount.

Clement Meighan, a UCLA anthropologist and chairman of a national group called the American Committee for the Preservation of Archeological Collections, cheered when Governor George Deukmejian vetoed a bill in 1990 that would have returned thousands of excavated human remains and grave artifacts to American Indians. The University of California, Berkeley had the third-largest collection of Indian bones in the country at the time and wanted to have final say on any attempts at repatriation.

Meighan said he hoped it signaled a weakening of efforts to repatriate Indian bones and artifacts. “Even if you agree archaeology is useless, then how is the lot of Indians going to be improved by dumping these collections?” Meighan said. “The only thing you've done is wipe out a big chunk of potential information we could have on Indian history,” he said. “The Indians are the losers in this.”  

Meighan saw reburying bones and artifacts as “the equivalent of the historian burning documents after he has studied them. Thus, repatriation is not merely an inconvenience but makes it impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory.”

Issues in the Reburial of Human Remains (Archaeology and Contemporary Society)

Debating NAGPRA’s Effects (Archeological Institute of America)

Native Americans and the Practice of Archaeology (by T.J. Ferguson, Annual Review of Anthropology)

The Battle for Bones (Dustin Johnson, Michigan State University)

Curator’s Aim: Tell All Sides of Mission’s Story (by Michelle Locke, Associated Press)

Governor Sides with School in Bones Debate (by Leslie Berger, Los Angeles Times)

Land Developers Face Dispute over Indigenous Cemetery (by Charlene Muhammad, Final Call)

Commission Description (NAHC website)

Larry Myers, 1987-2011  

Paul Gary Beck, 1984-1987

Loretta Allen, 1983-1984

William Pink, 1980-1983  Pink aggressively pushed state, local, and federal agencies, as well as universities and museums, to return Native American remains to tribes for reburial. His first big success was the California Department of Parks and Recreation, which agreed to return over 870 skeletons. That return was blocked by the courts for years, but Pink’s efforts were vindicated with the passage of NAGPRA in 1990.

Stephen Rios, 1977-1980