Comment on FR Doc # E7-20209

To Whom It May Concern: Dealing with culturally unaffiliated and unidentifiable remains has been an issue with NAGPRA. Anthropologists have consistently pointed out to federal legislators and Native Americans that NAGPRA?s intent was not to deal with unaffiliated and unidentifiable remains. Anthropologists and others have pointed out that the actions to repatriate unaffiliated and unidentified remains counter the original intent of NAGPRA. The initial intent of NAGPRA was to repatriate ancestral remains to federally recognized affiliated tribes. There is no definition of unaffiliated or unidentifiable in NAGPRA. Thus, NAGPRA?s original intent was to return remains that were ancestral to modern peoples. This is not about taking all remains and burying them, even though sometimes that is the outcome. The National NAGPRA Office claims that there are around 140,000 unidentified or unaffiliated remains in universities and museums in the United States (Native American Times, March 2007). The NAGPRA Review Committee has recommended regional cemeteries for these remains. With the scientists? interpretation, we could at least keep on studying remains that had no present day affiliated group. However, the scientists? interpretation is the one that is most often faulted and, thus, remains are being repatriated with real affiliation or not. Human remains with no provincial information can be useful in understanding the past and present of bone biology and health, how to identify sex and age in fragmentary remains, (which can be used in forensics), and much more. Furthermore, the likelihood that in prehistory there was only one migration into the New World is extremely slim; this is not what we ever see in the fossil record, in animal migrations, and in modern human behavior. This hypothesis of multiple migrations is controversial because it suggests that modern Native Americans replaced Paleo-Indians and, therefore, are no better than the later Europeans who ?stole their land.? Furthermore, if the Paleo-Indians have been replaced by later groups, then modern Native Americans should have no more claim to their remains than modern Europeans. Elizabeth Weiss, Ph.D. eweiss@email.sjsu.edu Dept. of Anthropology San Jose State University