The CSU has adopted a systemwide policy that ensures each of the 22 campuses will comply with federal and state Native American reparation rules, in what the CSU calls a “landmark step in fulfilling the university’s responsibility to honor Tribal sovereignty” and address “historical harms” in mid-November.
This is a part of a renewed effort to be in compliance with both the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) which was passed by Congress in 1990, and CalNAGPRA, which is California’s version of the federal legislation.
CalNAGPRA was signed into law in 2001. It mandates that native artifacts and ancestral human remains that have been taken from sacred burial sites over the last several decades by anthropological excavation teams across the CSU system and other institutions, are returned to their original homes and burial sites.
“This policy represents a solemn commitment to do better, but the work is not finished. Tribal guidance shaped every stage of this policy, and we will continue to center consultation with Native voices as we move forward with repatriation across the system,” Samantha Cypret, a member of the Mountain Maidu Tribe, and executive director of the CSU Office of Tribal Relations said in the announcement from the school system.
The commitment to having a Native presence on campus can be a driving force itself, President of the American Indian and Indigenous Student Alliance (AIISA) at Cal State LA, Jesus Escandon said. His family comes from the Nauha and Purhepacha indigenous groups in present day Central Mexico.
“A lot of the time, our presence is enough to push momentum,” Escandon said.
The human remains that have been taken from burial sites are considered sacred and in documents and elsewhere are referred to as ancestral remains, in order to honor the significance of burial rituals in Native American culture.
“You’re harming the spirit when it’s trying to move on from the past and now you’re just adding more trauma into the afterlife,” AIISA Historian, J’Dyn Scruggs said. “With repatriation, I feel like it’s just healing and just sewing back up those old wounds and making sure that they heal properly, really for the spirit itself and also for the community as well.”
The CSU system has over 698,200 native artifacts and ancestral remains in the possession of the university system, according to a 2023 state audit by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that analyzed the shortcomings and statutes of compliance with both federal and state level repatriation rules. As of this year, it is unclear how much of that total remains in the possession of schools across the CSU.
Compared to most CSU campuses, Cal State LA has, in comparison, one of the smallest collections of native ancestral remains and funerary objects. Both Sonoma State and Chico State top that list with the largest collections.
CalNAGPRA “requires all agencies and museums, which is defined to include higher education institutions, that receive state funding and have possession or control over collections of California Native American ancestral remains and associated funerary objects to inventory those remains and objects for repatriation to the appropriate” native tribes, according to an overview of the 2001 law.
The implementation of this policy is a part of the CSU working to address the findings of the 2023 audit and return both remains and funerary objects. The CSU over the last two fiscal years has committed $3.7 million to the 22 campus system. This includes $150,000 annually in that same timeframe for Cal State LA to carry out reparations and the inventories of remains in the possession of the school, and for each campus to hire a CalNAGPRA / NAGPRA coordinator. At Cal State LA, Gregorio Pacheco has held that position since last year.
Victor Rojas, who is the chief of staff in the president’s office at Cal State LA, was appointed by School President Berenecea Johnson Eanes as the CalNAGPRA / NAGPRA designee at the beginning of the fall 2025 semester.
The federal law that passed in 1990 mandated that any federally funded institutions were required to create an inventory of Native American artifacts and an offering to Native American tribes to repatriate ancestral remains, sacred objects, funerary remains and everything included near or at the burial site as an offering or were “intentionally” placed at the time of passing, according to the National Parks official NAGPRA page.
However, both laws have their unique differences: for example under the federal NAGPRA act, only federally recognized tribes can make claims, but as of 2020, under AB275 in California it now stipulates that “California Indian tribes that are not federally recognized may file claims with agencies and museums for reparations of human remains and cultural items.”
However, items that are still under federal purview, even if they were found in California, are still subject to the limitations of NAGPRA and tribes that are not federally recognized may make claims, but those have to be made through tribes that are identified as federally accredited.
Both Rojas and Pacheco said that neither of the laws mention anything about strong working relationships with either “federally recognized” or “non-federally recognized” tribes, but it is important that these native groups know that this is also “their campus.”
“They can come to us, whether it’s for the retrieval of a spearhead or whether they want to set up a native garden, or they want help in research, or whether they are looking for an expert, they can come to us,” Rojas said.
A bill signed in fall 2023, AB389, outlawed the CSU and other public higher education institutions across the state from using Native American artifacts and remains in their teachings, research, or exhibition in public areas of a university.
The bill that was signed earlier this year, AB977, which expanded on AB389 to include specifics on what the reparations process should look like. This included specifying how the CSU has to repatriate the remains and ensure during each step of the repatriation process is in direct consultation with the native tribe that made the request to get the remains and objects returned.
In an earlier version of AB977, earlier amendments of the legislation had said that the CSU and tribes had to designate three burial sites across the state; one in the north, one in the central portion of the state and one in the south.
The legislation also requires that the CSU bury these remains on land owned by the university system, and that this is also done in consultation with the Native American tribe and their burial customs that the remains and other sacred objects belong to.
The CSU system has until Dec. 31 of this year to comply and inventory their entire collections to be up to date with the 2023 state audit that found many of the CSU campuses out of compliance with both the federal and state reparation rules. As of November 2025, Cal State LA did not have an exact percentage of its collections inventoried, however both Rojas and Pacheco said that a full inventory of their collections will be complete by the end of the fall 2025 semester.
The closest federally recognized tribe to Cal State LA is 60 miles away. It includes groups like the Morongo Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians, the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation and other groups located in present day San Bernardino and the Inland Empire. No federally recognized tribes exist in LA County, according to Rojas.
This is one of the reasons that Cal State LA does not have a robust or large tribal relations office on campus, compared to somewhere like Chico State or California State University, San Bernardino, who are both close in proximity to tribal lands and reservations, Pacheco said.
On the Cal State LA campus, the Chumash, the Gabrielino-Tongva, and Kizh people are shown as the first nations in the area, according to a map maintained by Native Land Digital. None of these tribes are federally recognized.
There are limited, if any, consequences at all for not following the act nationwide. Responsibility was fully placed on the individual institution to identify and present artifacts to federally recognized Native American Tribes for repatriation. Institutions also had to make their own financial commitments, with no funding made available on a federal level or in California, according to the The Repatriation Project, first published in 2023 by ProPublica.
Now, at the CSU, the Office of Tribal Relations will be responsible for overseeing the “implementation of the policy [CalNAGPRA] and provide direct support to campuses,” the announcement from the school system said.
“In comparison with the UC [University of California] system, we’re actually doing really well,” Pacheco said. “We’re more in compliance. We’re not there yet. We’re doing much better.”
Cal State LA has been taking inventory of native remains since July 2023, a month after the state audit was released.
Some of what was held by Cal State LA that was not under their purview was returned in 2024 to the Bureau of Land Management, the California State Department of Parks’ Santa Barbara Collection and Santa Monica Mountains, but some artifacts and ancestral remains on campus, including a collection owned by the U.S. Navy, according to Pacheco.
The remains and objects that the Navy currently holds possession of came from a 2010 excavation of San Nicolas Island in partnership with a team in the Cal State LA Anthropology Department.
The first round included two ancestral remains that were returned to their original burial locations in Mariposa County, California, where, according to the notice, they had been removed in 1972 by a team from Cal State LA and Fresno State. These remains are suspected to have been on campus since.
In a separate notice, the 45 funerary objects that were found with these same ancestral remains include flaked stone tools, stone ornaments, worked clay objects, ground stone artifacts, trade beads, soil samples, bone tools, shell beads, charcoal, plants and unknown bone fragments.
In a later notice of inventory from September 2023, a “minimum of two” ancestral remains were excavated from Clark County, Nevada in the 1970s, and have been at Cal State LA since. A separate notice said that funerary objects were also identified at the site, and included bones of a single bird humerus and a distal left tibia of a ground squirrel.
Through carbon dating, those ancestors in Nevada were discovered to have been in that location since at least the year A.D. 680, according to the federal register.
In another instance of what was found to be at Cal State LA included at least two ancestors that were removed from a site known to be a location where a Gabrielino-Tongva village was, in present day Carson, California. The village was lived in by the Gabrielino-Tongva people for at least 600 years between 1200 and at least 1800. It was later excavated by multiple local universities in the SoCal region in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was at that time those ancestral remains that were removed ended up at Cal State LA, according to the notice during the inventory process.
No ancestral remains or other artifacts were transferred over to tribes in 2024. One cultural artifact has been requested for reparation this year, a “willow conical basket with a leather tip,” but no records on its origins exist, but it was determined by experts to either be from the Havasupai which are in present day Arizona or the Paiute Tribe with origins on the land of present day Utah, according to the notice in the federal NAGPRA database.
However, some of what is on campus is not under Cal State LA’s purview and is owned by the Navy, and they have yet to have a plan in place to return those items to the off-campus agencies, but it is part of the university’s efforts to return these objects to their rightful home, according to the school.
Additionally, some of the collections that continue to be under Cal State LA’s mandated inventory process cannot be completed until Tribal consultation occurs, with any given tribe.
Over 60% of Cal State LA’s items and ancestral remains are still in the university’s possession, as the process moves forward, while 40% of what is on-campus and owned by Cal State LA since its inception as a college has been returned.
“I think by next year, if everything goes according to the consultations that we’re doing, I think we will be able to repatriate a big portion of the collections that we have,” Pacheco said.
