Why would NAGPRA apply to most historic sites, if there were no Native 
American features associated? One of my concerns with NPS interpretation of NAGPRA 
law (as it appears to me) is that someone high in NPS seems to think that 
Native American means everything that was in America before Columbus still belongs 
to the people who were here (or their descendants who are here now) when he 
arrived. Some Army Corps of Engineers personnel have taken this strange belief 
to extremes, up in the Northwest for example. I find this belief/policy 
uncomfortably close to religious belief and therefore unconstitutional (in my mind) 
and have wondered how it would play at the Supreme Court? Where are the rights 
of American citizens born after the American Revolution and under the U.S. 
Constitution?  By this, I mean public resources on federal land, state land, 
local government land, and on private land (do we simply have use rights to 
property still owned by Native Americans?). This brings us back to historic sites 
since 1492, which may have been created by people unrelated to Native Americans. 
It might also include prehistoric European (Viking, Solutrean, Siberian, 
Polynesian, etc.) sites by people genetically un-related to the ethnic Native 
American people who are here today. While it seems the Secretary of the Interior 
has leaned in the direction that not all things that were created before 1492 
belong to Native Americans of today, there remains some very interesting 
philosophical and constitutional questions about who owns what, where they own it, 
when do they own it, and whether or not we simply have tenant use rights and 
not true ownership.

Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.