A sacred object catalogued as a museum holding usually arrived there through acquisition, not through the choice of the community that made or used it, and a considerable share of what sits in museum collections worldwide left its origin during periods of colonial rule, military conquest or unequal exchange. That history has produced one of the more actively contested arrangements this atlas records, and the contest now has a real legal shape in several jurisdictions rather than remaining only an ethical argument.
In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, signed into law in 1990, requires federally funded museums and agencies to inventory human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony in their collections and to return them to lineal descendants or to culturally affiliated tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on request, the first time federal law treated an object's standing within its community of origin, rather than the museum's title to it, as the governing question. Comparable claims outside the United States rest on a patchwork of national law, museum policy and negotiated agreement rather than one statute, and outcomes vary widely: some objects have been returned, many claims remain open, and a museum's willingness to inventory and disclose what it holds, not only to display it, has become part of how its custodianship is now judged.