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The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act certainly has its flaws. But museums and Native cultural organizations look to the future of digital collections and repatriation.
The Alutiiq Museum, which is based in Kodiak, will begin to digitize its collection with the eventual goal of expanding and digitizing collections from other museums.
Museum collections curator Amanda Lancaster says they’re already using a database and have most of their object’s catalogued.
"We use a database called Collective Access, and they are designing. So we already have sort of the back end where we have all of our objects catalogs to some degree. And so “We'll be adding our ethnographic objects to this very specific part of the database. And then later, we'd like to add Alutiiq collections that are around the world, so there's some at the Alaska State Museum all the way to France and Finland and beyond. And so we'd like to just make all of these collections available to people to be able to look at in one central place."