Some of the human remains and objects subject to legal repatriation were obtained appropriately, with the permission if not actual support of American Indians at the time. Many, however, were not. The fact that many of the human remains and objects were obtained by grave robbing, theft, and fraudulent acts adds to American Indian discomfort and further legitimates claims for repatriation.

Virtually all of the 4,000 crania at the Army Medical Museum were eventually transferred to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, to be added to the remains of approximately 14,500 other American Indians, along with non-American Indians. This, supposedly, represents the largest single collection of American Indian remains in the United States, followed by some 13,500 held by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The University of California also has a very large collection. The Hearst (formerly Lowie) Museum at its Berkeley campus has “the third largest number of catalogued skeletal entries in the United States (more than 11,000), representing many more individuals. The majority of remains are those of California Indians from the Northern California coast and the Sacramento Valley (representing more than 8,000 individuals). …[and there are] roughly 1 million or more pieces [of artifacts at Berkeley].”¹³

Research on American Indians’ skeletal remains has generated much important knowledge about such diverse topics as population size and composition, cultural patterns of tooth mutilation, diseases among populations and customs of treatments for the diseases, life expectancies, growth patterns, population affinities, origins and migrations, and diets, including dates when corn was introduced into the diets of the native peoples of North America (Buikstra, 1992). From studying human remains of American Indians we now know, for example, that tuberculosis was present in this hemisphere prior to European contact, as were some other infectious diseases, especially treponema infections; that certain native groups had serious iron deficiencies from a diet heavily dependent on corn;¹⁴ and that among some groups, males with more social prestige—as reflected by burial objects—were physically larger than males with less social prestige (perhaps because they had better diets, perhaps because bigger men were simply given more prestige).