• In October 2022, after years of consultations and planning, representatives and lineal descendants from the Village of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska traveled to New Haven to retrieve the remains and cultural items of their Nunamiut ancestors. While at the Museum, Elders, the Tribal President, and a high school student from the Village worked with Peabody staff to properly pack the repatriated collection for transportation, a trip that required traveling two days each way between the Village and Connecticut.
• In June 2018, the remains of 7 Māori ancestors were repatriated to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A public ceremony at the Peabody brought together the delegation of Te Papa representatives, Peabody staff, Yale faculty, students from Yale’s Native American Cultural Center, and Chief Many Hearts Lynn Malerba of the Mohegan Tribe.
• Hundreds of cultural objects have been returned to the Mohegan Tribe and Tantaquidgeon Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut. In 2018, Mohegan Chief Many Hearts Lynn Malerba stated: “Today with the return of these sacred objects, wholeness has been restored to our Mohegan people.”
• In 2016, a gut-skin parka from Makarka Point, Alaska, was repatriated to the Chugach Alaska Corporation. The parka will be used by the Chugach people for educational and cultural activities and will be on display in the Native Village of Eyak Cultural Center in Cordova, Alaska.
• Since NAGPRA’s enactment, the Peabody Museum has taken several other steps to meet the letter and spirit of the law, including completing inventories and summaries of Native American remains and cultural objects and submitting these to the National NAGPRA Program of the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. The Museum has published 20 Notices of Inventory Completion and 8 Notices of Intent to Repatriate in consultation with tribes.

Ongoing partnerships with tribes and tribal members through collaborations with artists at the Museum are part of the Peabody’s efforts toward sustaining relationships with descendant communities. Some of these include:

• Internationally acclaimed Native Kwakiutl artist Richard Hunt (Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw) carved his Sea Monster Mask, now in the Peabody’s collections, during a public event at the Museum in 1999. Hunt returned to Yale in 2019 for a student-curated exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery where this mask was displayed, the first campus exhibition of Indigenous art to bring together objects from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum, and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Traditional potter, and professor, Clarence Cruz (Khuu Khaayay)—Tewa from Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan Pueblo)—gave a talk and demonstration at the Peabody during a visit to Yale in 2017 about his work that continues the living traditions of Pueblo pottery.

• Documentation of remains, funerary objects, and ethnographic items in consultation with the 5 federally recognized Chugach villages in Alaska.
• Determination of the cultural affiliation of ancestor remains and identification of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, in consultation with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma and the Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
• Documentation and photography of Plains-attributed ethnographic items to facilitate consultations with a consortium of tribes.
• Repatriation of cultural items to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes in Alaska.