At the Bethel Memorial Cemetery at the edge of the tundra, a large wooden cross protruding from a single gravesite bears only the words “Four Yupiit Ancestors.”
In November, the partial remains of four Yup’ik inhabitants were finally laid to rest by Bethel’s tribe, the Orutsararmiut Traditional Native Council. They’d been stored at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for more than a century.
The repatriation is the product of a yearslong process under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law has facilitated the transfer of the remains of tens of thousands of Native Americans stored in museum collections and laboratories back to federally recognized tribes since its passage in 1990.
Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of remains and sacred objects still remain in the possession of museums, universities and federal agencies across the United States.
At the request of ONC in November 2024, the City of Bethel agreed to dig a gravesite for the remains at the Bethel Memorial Cemetery. In a meeting of the Bethel City Council shortly after the burial, acting Bethel City Clerk Kevin Morgan shared an email sent to the city by the tribe describing the remains.
"It was an adult male, the cranium and mandible, mandible of a female, mandible and part of the skull of a female, and the cranium and cranial bones of … about a 15-year-old female," Morgan said.
Notice of the ancestral remains as required under NAGRA was first made by the National Park Service in late 2022, though it is unclear when Bethel’s tribe received the remains. Tribe officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Little is known about the four recently buried Yupiit ancestors, but according to the federal register, the remains were removed from a site near Bethel in September 1907 as part of a Western Alaska expedition led by Penn Museum’s general curator of American archaeology, George Byron Gordon.
That same year, Gordon collected and removed hundreds of cultural items from the region as part of a canoe expedition of the Kuskokwim River that brought the anthropologist to Bethel.
According to The Repatriation Database, a project by nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, the remains of at least one person of interest to Bethel’s tribe are still being held by the Alaska State Medical Examiner's Office, but have not been made available for repatriation.
The Penn Museum did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the history of the remains while in the museum’s possession.
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