Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Pub. L. 101-601)

This is the United States Congress's own text of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Public Law 101-601, enacted in 1990 and read here from the National Park Service's own hosted copy of the statute. Its strength is that a federal statute is the primary legal record of what NAGPRA actually requires, museums' and federal agencies' duty to inventory, and where warranted repatriate, Native American human remains and cultural items to lineal descendants and tribes. Congress's own text carries no interpretive gloss; disputes over how a museum applies it belong to the case law and agency guidance that followed, not to the statute itself. Its limit is that the act states obligations rather than settling every contested repatriation, and specific claims under it have produced real, ongoing disagreement between institutions and tribes over cultural affiliation; a claim about how a particular case was resolved needs the case record itself, not this text alone.