SYNTHESIS Biological samples taken from Native American Ancestors are human remains under NAGPRA Alyssa C. Bader 1,2 | Aimée E. Carbaugh 3 | Jenny L. Davis 3,4 | Krystiana L. Krupa 5 | Ripan S. Malhi 3,4,6 1 Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 2 Department of Culture and History, Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, Alaska, USA 3 Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA 4 American Indian Studies Program, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA 5 Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, USA 6 Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA Correspondence Alyssa C. Bader, Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 2T7, Canada. Email: alyssa.bader@mcgill.ca Krystiana L. Krupa, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 601 East John Street, M/C 304, Champaign, Illinois, 61820, USA. Email: klkrupa@illinois.edu Funding information Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, Grant/Award Number: SMA-1911813 Abstract In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) provides a specific framework for the disposition of Native American Ancestral remains within its purview. However, samples such as a bone fragment, tooth, or other biological tissue taken from the remains of these Ancestors have been treated by institutions and researchers as independent of the individual from whom they were removed and used in destructive research such as paleogenomic and other archaeometric analyses without consultation, consent, and collaboration from Native American communities; are not cared for in keeping with the current best practices for Indigenous Ancestors; and are not likely to be repatriated to their communities. Here, we demonstrate that any biological samples removed from Ancestors who are covered under NAGPRA must also be handled according to the stipulations defined for “human remains” within the legislation. As such, we are not proposing a change to existing legislation, but rather best practices, specific to the context of the United States and NAGPRA, relating to the use of and care for biological samples taken from Native American Ancestors. KEYWORDS archaeometry, biological samples, NAGPRA, paleogenomics, research ethics 1 | INTRODUCTION Passed in 1990 and amended in 2010, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (43 C.F.R. § 10, 1995; NAGPRA; 25 U.S.C. §§ 3001 et seq., 1990) requires any institution that has received federal funds to, in part, inventory and repatriate the Ances- tral remains of Native Americans. To date, the focus of NAGPRA com- pliance has been on the inventory and repatriation of Ancestors held within curation spaces. However, laboratories for paleogenomic and other archaeometric analyses have also become sites of temporary Received: 18 October 2022 Revised: 28 January 2023 Accepted: 5 March 2023 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24726 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Authors. American Journal of Biological Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2023;1–8. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ajpa 1