The end goal: Tribes want Native American ancestors re-buried on tribal land with their belongings in order to give them a final resting place.
Some 8,300 Native American cultural artifacts are housed at California State University, Fullerton. These items range from grinding stones the size of a folding beach chair to much smaller sea shells. The university also holds the remains of 211 Native Americans.
None should still be there.
Under federal requirements in place for more than 30 years, Native American artifacts held by institutions receiving federal funding must be returned to tribes. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, has been in place since 1990. Since 2001, California has had a state law in place meant to cover gaps in the federal law and establish more oversight of institutions.
So what's taking so long?
The challenges Cal State Fullerton has faced in meeting this shift -- as well as recent successes -- shed light on a key moment in the repatriation of Native American holdings. It also underscores policymakers' efforts to push institutions to return those items quicker.
The long push to repatriate the artifacts and human remains also points to a sea change in the ways non-Native American institutions view cultural artifacts and human remains: From sought-after collectibles to study and display, to cultural items to be returned to tribes and evidence of the historic mistreatment of Native Americans.
The items at Cal State Fullerton can be found in the basement of McCarthy Hall, a six-floor building that's one of the oldest buildings on campus.
"This is the archaeology lab... and this is next to the facility where all the ancestors are currently housed," said Megan Lonski, the coordinator for the university's effort to house and return the holdings. The university hired her in 2022.
Ancestors is the preferred term for the human bones in storage.
"It is how we try to refer to Native American human remains, understanding that there is a familial relationship that exists," she said.
One of the largest groups in Cal State Fullerton's holdings is labeled ORA 64. That stands for site No. 64 in Orange County. The contents are in hundreds of boxes on shelves in this basement.
"That was the big one... we have more material from that site than we do any other site," said Carl Wendt, a professor of archaeology at Cal State Fullerton who oversaw the repatriation effort before Lonski, the full time coordinator, was hired.
Wendt said the cultural artifacts and ancestors in ORA 64 came to Cal State Fullerton after they were unearthed during construction in Orange County in the early 2000s. Archeologists were hired to catalogue and move the items for safe keeping.
"About 900 of our boxes are from one site that was located in the Newport Back Bay," he said.
There are 50 ancestors in the ORA 64 group of holdings, according to Cal State Fullerton's online listing.
"Our tribal goal is to gather the ancestors and their belongings which are in a variety of institutions... and bring them all to one place so then we put them back into the earth, [where] they will all be together again," said Joyce Perry, a member of Cal State Fullerton's repatriation advisory committee. Perry is also the cultural resource director of the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation-Belardes.
It pains her to call what's in the boxes "collections." She says the vast majority of the items and the ancestors that were dug up had already been buried according to Native American rituals.
Lonski said there's now forward momentum and an action plan for returning all 50 ancestors that came from ORA 64 site to tribes.
But it's a painstaking process, she said, as it involves several tribes.
"We didn't have a good idea of how mixed some of the boxes were... we were going to return the entire site collections with their ancestors all in one go in what they call a 'lot' approach," she said.
But doing so, tribal consultants told her, might mean items that belong to different tribes are missed. So now Lonski and her staff are verifying what's in the boxes to make sure tribes are "getting back their ancestors and their belongings, all of their belongings," she said.
In 2022, the California State Auditor faulted the University of California for failing to prioritize compliance with state repatriation laws. A separate audit eight months later found even bigger gaps at the larger California State University system.
The audit found that there are 5,800 remains of Native Americans housed on the various California State University campuses, as well as 692,400 Native American cultural items.
Cal State Fullerton was one of only four campuses in the 23 campus system to have independent tribal members on their repatriation committee. In early 2023, those tribal members and the rest of the repatriation committee were working with two university administrators to create a robust repatriation plan that included the use of a large part of a floor in the university library to house the cultural artifacts and ancestors alongside rooms for Native American consultation and prayer.
"The provost at the time, said... this is really, really important in terms of social justice, in terms of treatment of Native Americans... we need to do this," Wendt said.
Then in the spring of 2023, the two university administrators were removed from their positions and the promise appeared to die on the vine.
"We're so accustomed to that... it almost goes without saying in almost any institution that we work with," Perry said.