Somewhere in a climate-controlled storage facility on the UC Berkeley campus, past locked doors most students never see, sit the remains of thousands of California Native people, dug up over more than a century of digs, surveys and salvage operations. This week, the university announced it's repatriating 36 more lots of those remains. The latest chapter in a reckoning that started long before Sacramento got around to caring.
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It's easy to miss how this happened. Berkeley didn't set out to become the custodian of the largest known collection of Native American ancestral remains held by any university in the country. It got there one grant, one dig, one box at a time, bankrolled by one of the richest women in California history and driven by a science that treated the dead as data.
Phoebe Hearst's Museum and the Birth of a Collection
The story starts around 1901, when Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of mining magnate George Hearst and mother of William Randolph Hearst, began funding anthropological expeditions out of UC Berkeley. She financed digs across California and beyond, and the university built a museum around what came back. It eventually took her name: the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
Those early expeditions were not quiet academic exercises. Crews excavated village sites, shell mounds and burial grounds up and down the state, often with little regard for the descendants still living nearby. The goal was salvage anthropology: the belief that California's Native cultures were vanishing and that scientists had a duty to collect everything they could before it was gone, including the bodies of the dead. Skeletal remains got cataloged alongside baskets, tools and pottery, filed into drawers as specimens rather than returned to families as ancestors.
Kroeber, Ishi and the Cost of the Collecting Impulse
No name is more tied to that era than Alfred Kroeber, the Berkeley anthropologist who became the public face of California Indian studies for decades. Kroeber is best remembered for his relationship with Ishi, believed to be the last surviving member of the Yahi people, who walked out of the foothills near Oroville in 1911 starving and alone. Kroeber brought him to live at the university's museum in San Francisco, where Ishi worked, demonstrated Yahi skills for visitors and spent his final years as something between a research subject and a ward of the institution.
When Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, his brain was removed and eventually shipped to the Smithsonian Institution for study. No one asked his consent. The decision shadowed Kroeber's legacy for the rest of his career. It took until 2000, after sustained activism from Northern California tribes, for the Smithsonian to return Ishi's brain so it could be reunited with the rest of his remains and laid to rest. That case became a preview of the much larger fight still coming over everything else Berkeley had locked in its vaults.
NAGPRA and Three Decades of Slow Motion
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, requiring universities and museums receiving federal funding to inventory Native American remains and cultural items in their collections and work with tribes to return them. On paper, it was supposed to end exactly the kind of hoarding Berkeley had been doing for nearly a century.
In practice, compliance dragged for decades. Berkeley became known nationally as the institution holding the most ancestral remains of any university, with thousands of individuals still uncatalogued or unmatched to identifiable tribes years after the law took effect. Tribal leaders and researchers repeatedly criticized the university for moving too slowly, pointing to bureaucratic hurdles, disputed cultural affiliations and a museum system that had never been designed to let anything go.
The pressure intensified after 2020, when scrutiny of NAGPRA compliance nationwide put Berkeley in an uncomfortable spotlight. The university overhauled its repatriation policies, created new committees involving tribal representatives and began publicly committing to speeding up returns that had languished for a generation.
The 36 Lots: A Small Number With a Long Shadow
That's the context for this week's announcement. Thirty-six lots of remains headed back to descendant communities is a modest number set against a collection built over 120 years. But each lot represents a person who was excavated, cataloged and stored, sometimes for a century, before finally going home. For the tribes involved, the milestone isn't really about the number. It's about a university finally treating ancestors as ancestors instead of inventory.
Berkeley has said more repatriations are expected as the university works through what remains in its holdings. Nobody involved pretends the process is close to finished. The collection took a century to build under Phoebe Hearst's money and Alfred Kroeber's science, and undoing it has turned out to take almost as long.
What's changed is who's driving the timeline. For most of the 20th century, the anthropologists decided what got kept. Now the tribes decide what gets returned, and Berkeley, for once, is the one waiting on the answer.