'Drawing back culture': The Makah tribe's struggle to implement the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

This thesis explores the Makah Indian Tribe's implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Tribal members' efforts to "draw back" cultural objects have given rise to two primary struggles with a shared theme of ownership. The externally oriented struggle derives from NAGPRA itself, which assumes that non-sacred objects most significant to tribes were communal and thus that all tribes had communally owned objects. This assumption directly confronts individualistic ownership patterns in Makah culture. Makah tribal members are displaying great ingenuity and agency as they negotiate a fit between their material culture, and the legislation. This negotiation is simultaneously taking two approaches. On the one hand, they are trying to re-interpret NAGPRA definitions to incorporate their significant material culture and intellectual property. On the other, they are presenting alternative readings of past ownership practices to fit Makah objects into NAGPRA definitions. Problematizing the concept of "ownership", as other anthropologists have done, illustrates its malleability thereby clarifying these re-readings.;The second struggle engendered by implementation is internal to the tribe, where ongoing discussions over the fate of repatriated objects weigh the rights of individual families to objects (the traditional pattern) against the potential benefits to the entire community through repatriation to curatorial facilities at the Makah Cultural and Research Center (a modern, institutional form of communal ownership). The problematic site that the Center occupies in community life reflects this struggle, as its staff balances the needs of the community as a whole against the desire of families to safeguard their private possessions within its walls. The underlying cause of this internal debate, explored through the structuring framework of legal pluralism, is rooted in the tensions between lingering private ideals of ownership from 19th century practice and a communal form initially introduced with the establishment of the Makah Reservation.;The thesis contextualizes these contemporary struggles in relation to: NAGPRA implementation nationwide; Makah cultural and political history in the 19th and 20th centuries; the history of ethnographic collecting on the Northwest Coast; and other efforts on the Makah Reservation to "draw back" culture, including the Ozette excavations and whale hunting.