For our final project, we decided to focus on Native American artifacts in public institutions, with an emphasis on UC Berkeley. We understood that after the Native American Grave Protection Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990, museums and educational institutions nationwide were mandated to put more of a priority on repatriating culturally significant Native American items and remains, including UC Berkeley. However, the repatriation process sparked by NAGPRA has not been duly enforced, leading to the updated NAGPRA regulation passed December of 2023 which articulated that all unrepatriated remains and artifacts must not be put on public display without explicit permission from the tribe they belong to. Berkeley has an (underfunded) team of five NAGPRA representatives to lead the repatriation process of the 9,000+ Native remains/artifacts stored under the Hearst Gym. Thus, we hope to make a collection of news articles, interviews, and pictures relating to public education institutions repatriating their extensive collections. Other than making the collection based on available web resources, we plan to make the archive based on the exclusive resources provided to us as a student at UC Berkeley. We plan to visit UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Library, which we understand has resources and texts relating to our topic. Andy will be taking care of the Native American artifacts based on available web resources (particularly the Midwest). Elle will take part in adding news articles on Berkeley’s repatriation efforts, a video interview with a NAGPRA representative, and ensuring accurate metadata on each archival item upload. Wish will visit UC Berkeley libraries (particularly the Ethnic Studies Library) to find resources regarding the topic, as well as working on web accessibility.

As to how we’ll evaluate the project, we will have at least 50 objects/resources regarding buildings and artifacts relating to Native Americans. We hope that our website can be neatly organized through different categories by location (e.g. Berkeley Native American resources) so that they can navigate the site easily. We plan to use Omeka to structure our website, giving the most comprehensive overview of Native American artifacts, as well as using HTML/CSS to change the aesthetics of the website. Ideally, our project site will be cleanly organized such that it’s easy to navigate the archive site itself. We will choose a color palette that would be helpful for people to view the site, specifically a color palette that would be color blindness friendly such as this shade of yellow and teal pictured below.

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