Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: The Niimiipuu campaign to repatriate their exploited heritage By Trevor JamesBond, Pullman: Washington State University Press. 2021. 216 pages. $24.95 (Paperback)

Abstract

We seem to be gaining steam. In January 2023, investigative journalism organization ProPublica released the findings of its "Repatriation Project" in which some of the nation's largest museums were held to account for their holdings of ancestral remains and sacred belongings. In mid-2023, the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums announced the launch of its Andrew W. Mellon-funded Going Home Fund: Returning Material Culture to Native Communities project to support community funding and networking around repatriation. Two months later, the Smithsonian came under fire for its Hrdlicka collections in a detailed exposé by The Washington Post (https:// www. washi ngton post. com/ histo ry/ inter active/ 2023/ smith sonia n-brain s-colle ction -racia l-histo ry-repat riati on/ ). A scroll through X (formerly Twitter, if you haven't jumped ship) will yield memes galore about the British Museum and the long history of colonial looting in seats of power. The public is right with Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) when he asks in the opening scene of Black Panther, "How do you think your ancestors got these?"Repatriation is the legal return of objects, belongings, artifacts, or documents to communities or nations of origin. There are evolving legal frameworks for undertaking museum repatriation, some of which stem from international policy, such as the UNESCO Convention of 1970, or the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Highly debated and publicized cases such as the Parthenon Marbles or Benin Bronzes have largely evaded the purview of such policies or international law (Clark, 2021). In the United States, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (and its immediate predecessor the National Museum of the American Indian Act) established law for the return of ancestral remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to descendants in federally recognized tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. Despite its limitations, NAGPRA heralded many proactive and more collaborative movements in the museum field (Nash & Colwell, 2020).Amidst this wider sea change in public attitude and institutional reckoning, Coming Home to Nez Perce Country is a beautifully detailed account of the struggles of one nation to return their belongings to their community. For the community, the collection holds some of their