BLM ties remains of at least 35 people held in Arizona to Native Village of Akutan

The remains of at least 35 people removed from two eastern Aleutian islands more than 50 years ago, and now held at Arizona State University, could be returned to the Native Village of Akutan starting Dec. 12.

The Bureau of Land Management has determined that the remains are Native American and reasonably connected to the tribe, according to a federal notice filed Tuesday.

The ancestors were excavated or collected between 1970 and 1973 from four sites on Akun and Akutan islands: 20 from Chulka, 10 from Saa, two from Amatanan, two from Siskena and one from either Saa or Siskena. The notice lists no funerary objects with them. Some of the remains were coated with a clear substance that may be polyvinyl acetate, which the university's anthropology lab used in the 1980s, the notice says.

The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act sets out how federal agencies and museums return Native remains to the tribes they are connected to. BLM based the connection on where the remains came from or how they were acquired, and on consultation.

The tribe can now ask for the return. A lineal descendant or another tribe can also make a request if it shows, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it is a descendant or culturally affiliated.

In June, a BLM notice tied two people removed from Unalaska Island in 1973, and later deposited at Arizona State, to the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska.