This was the just the beginning of prolonged curosity of trying to establish some kind of ethnicity that linked Kennewick Man to a specific group.
After the government heard about how old Kennewick Man is, they took him from Chatters and tried to find a modern-day Native American tribe that could claim him. They found five Native American tribes that claimed him as their ancestor. One local tribe, the Umatilla claimed that he was theirs because the land he was found on was formerly theirs. This later was found false; the land did not belong to them (Barkan 173). They were able to do this through NAGPRA, because the land that Kennewick Man was found on Federal land (United-2 1). This act was passed to protect Native American remains in museums and Universities that were taken from burial sites across the United States. The act itself poses a controversy also. In 1997, Republican Doc Hastings introduced a bill to amend NAGPRA. His focus was to eliminate the determination of ownership of human remains based on land and to allow studies to find biologically reasons instead, it was thrown out (Barkan 166). .
There are positive effects about NAGPRA, but most of them can be argued. The growing list of objects in museums and federal agencies are now available for repatriation (Barkan 170). This procedure is extremely expensive and it causes delays and backlogs. It costs ten million dollars per year to suport tribal repatriation offices; this is coming out of the taxpayers" pockets. Every museum and university are required to provide the government with an inventory sheet and the returning of control of the information to tribal offices. However, there are more inventories notices than the government can publish and it causes delay for tribal offices to respond. Another problem with this is that NAGPRA does not cover remains that have been transferred or sold to other museums or universities outside of the United States (Fine 142-43).