For decades, museums, government agencies, and archeologists have reclaimed Native Americans’ remains. This culture has partially rendered native people and their culture extin

For decades, museums, government agencies, and archeologists have reclaimed Native Americans' remains. This culture has partially rendered native people and their culture extinct and overlooked the cultural and religious value of these remains. Ownership of native remains yields great controversy regarding who should be the rightful owner of these remains. On the one hand, Native Americans have a right to reclaim native remains. On the other hand, there is a need to study the origins of the first Americans. Native American tribes hold that native remains constitute valuable cultural symbols, and museums and scientists argue that the remains should be used for public display and objects of study. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 to enable Native American tribes to reclaim burial remains (Mountain, 2017). Although the law has led to the repatriation of thousands of remains to their respective Native American tribes, culturally unidentifiable native remains are still possessed and owned by museums. This paper argues that rightful ownership of native American remains belongs to the Native American tribes because they inhabited the areas where native remains were found, even if the objects are not culturally identifiable to modern-day tribes.