ABSTRACT
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) is often referred to as a leader in the modern repatriation movement. As the fourth-largest natural history museum in the U.S., it has proactively consulted on all of the human remains in its collections and has returned hundreds of sacred objects. This chapter tells the full story of the DMNS repatriation program for the first time – framed around five provocative vignettes that capture the moral and practical complexities of returning Ancestors to the earth and sacred objects to their communities of origin. The central message is that repatriation is a long and tangled process – not merely an endpoint of reburial or return.
