On Saturday morning, over 100 people gathered in Presidio to watch history in the making as seven sets of remains unearthed long ago by archaeologists were reinterred closer to home. The Big Bend Conservation Alliance (BBCA) and Indigenous-led organization the People of La Junta for Preservation hosted the ceremony, which featured representatives from Native groups across the state of Texas and invited the entire community to take part.
Five of the seven remains came from an archaeological site in Presidio known as the Millington Site, and two were repatriations from private landowners, one set from Jeff Fort of the Pinto Canyon Ranch and another who declined to be publicly recognized.
Saturday’s ceremony was a blend of traditions. Father Mike Alcuino of Santa Theresa Catholic Church was present to offer his blessing before a team of female pallbearers carried the remains to their final resting places. The night before, descendants gathered at the cemetery, praying and keeping watch while they wove mats from native grasses to cushion the deceased. Then the entire community came together to do the physical work of digging each grave and placing centinelas, or sentinel stones, over the top.
The return of the “Millington Five” is a story over two decades in the making. In 2003, a city works crew in Presidio accidentally unearthed part of a burial pit adjacent to the archaeological site while digging a trench. The Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross sprung into action, launching an investigation into the site in 2006. The remains from this pit and a number of funerary objects ended up in Alpine, where they remained in storage at the university until this year, when a lengthy federal legal process established Xoxi Nayapiltzin, an elder with the People of La Junta who had been advocating for their repatriation for two decades, as a lineal descendant.
Ramon Deanda, a professor at Sul Ross and the newest board member of the BBCA, was a sophomore at Presidio High School when his biology teacher, Patt Sims, told the class that there were bodies being excavated down the street.
“A full-circle moment”
By “down the street,” Sims was of course referring to the Millington site, which is just a stone’s throw away from the high school. Deanda and his classmates shuffled by in a line as archaeologists worked in a trench to carefully unearth each fragment of bone. “As a kid, I didn’t realize the magnitude of what we were witnessing,” he said.
Deanda’s younger self was mostly just happy to have an excuse to get out of the classroom for a little while, but the experience stuck with him. Like many people who can trace their family back generations in the Big Bend, history books had little to tell him about what life was like for these early residents of Presidio. “Our ancestors had lived there forever,” Deanda said. “All we knew was that the Spanish came and claimed to civilize them.”
Almost exactly 20 years later, Deanda was invited to participate in the ceremony to return these remains to the earth, at El Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes, which was revamped and protected by members of the BBCA and the Ornelas and Aguilar families over the past few years with the intention of setting aside a space for repatriated remains. “I’m living a full circle moment,” Deanda said.
‘Archaeology starts to mean something’
While many twists and turns in the story are uniquely Presidio, the individuals laid to rest on Saturday morning are part of a larger national reckoning. Indigenous groups in the United States have vocally objected to the collection and storage of human remains by universities and museums for time eternal, but it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that the government started to take them seriously.
Repatriation of Indigenous remains became a hot-button political issue in the 1970s, when the American Indian Movement interrupted excavations at archaeological sites to protest what they felt was state-sanctioned desecration. Archaeologists—hailing from a field, especially at that time, dominated by Anglos—objected, many arguing that remains lost their research value when placed back in the ground.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990, which required all institutions receiving federal funding to complete inventories of human remains and funerary objects in their collections by 1995, in hopes of returning them to their lineal descendants. That deadline turned out to be too tight for many institutions, some of whom—like UC-Berkeley and the American Museum of Natural History—had thousands of people and objects in their possession. Individual deadline extensions were granted and indefinitely extended, meaning that by the time the issue resurfaced in the press in the 2020s, many universities and museums still harbored Indigenous remains.
In 2023, ProPublica reported that about half of the 210,000 remains catalogued through NAGPRA had yet to be returned. The data collected by ProPublica suggests that—locally, at least—the return of the “Millington Five” is a good start, but there are many more Big Bend ancestors waiting to return home from collections around the country.
The Museum of the Big Bend, just a few steps away from the Center for Big Bend Studies, still has 30 sets of remains in its collection. The bodies of Indigenous people from the tri-county area have ended up as far away as Harvard University and Nassau County, Florida. The Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at UT-Austin also has a number of local remains, including 18 sets from Presidio County that have not been made available for return under NAGPRA.
Former Center for Big Bend Studies Director Bryon Schroeder worked closely with anthropologist and DNA expert Meradeth Snow at the University of Montana over the course of several years to establish the physical tie between the remains and living, breathing members of the community. “I feel like it’s our responsibility,” Schroeder said. “It feels good to make sure that we came through with it.”
NAGPRA’s complex regulations heavily favor tribes who are federally recognized, leaving many communities in the borderlands—whose ancestors were colonized first by the Spanish, not by Americans—in a difficult position. The group’s hard work eventually paid off. Days after the ceremony, Schroeder was still processing. “I’m an archaeologist, and things in my field are kind of abstract,” he said. “Then there’s a living descendant community that these abstractions can be tied to, and archaeology starts to mean something completely different.”
Christina Hernandez, executive director of the BBCA, celebrated the return of the remains to Presidio from Sul Ross. “This reburial is a testament to what can be accomplished when the community leads with heart, humility, and respect for the sacred,” she wrote. “The ancestors are home again—and through their return, our people are made whole.”
