INTRODUCTION The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has fundamentally changed the relationship between museums and tribal peoples. Since 1990, thousands of human remains and funerary objects and hundreds of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony have been repatriated to tribes. Human remains and funerary objects have been reburied, and sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony have been returned to tribal centers and/or reincorporated into traditional ceremonies. Tribes and museums have also made significant organizational and cultural adjustments in order to incorporate the repatriation law into their activities, including integrating extensive consultation efforts and comprehensive reviews of documentation into their operations. After seventeen years of NAGPRA, many in the museum and tribal worlds have become proficient in the “nuts and bolts” of the law and embraced the positive changes it has brought about. Many museum and tribal staff have learned to live with the law’s ambiguities, inadequacies, or as yet undeveloped sections; although others, mainly in the tribal world, are more critical of NAGPRA’s ambiguities and frustrated with the length of the repatriation process. In many ways, the tribal and museum experience of implementing NAGPRA has also highlighted an often unrecognized commonality between these two communities: tribes and museums are constantly changing in terms of leadership, membership, funding, and institutional and programmatic priorities.

Indigenous activist movements are often articulated through the concepts of struggle, resistance, and resurgence. Indigenous women activists often tie these concepts to vocabularies of responsibility and obligation. Nelson examines the root meanings, contested uses, and pragmatic roles of struggle and resistance in Indigenous women’s activism, including her own experiences as a Native woman and scholar-activist. She articulates this struggle through the concept of “wrestling with fire,” which serves not only as a metaphor for activism, but also as a unique approach by Indigenous women who have specific responsibilities to the natural elements. Real fire and the fire of activism can bring both destruction and renewal, and these interrelated and complex processes have always played important roles in indigenous land management, culture, and spirituality. An ethnopoetic analysis on the role and power of fire in ecological processes and Indigenous oral literatures concludes the essay, with a proposal for how to incorporate Indigenous ways of being in reciprocal relationship with the regenerative power of fire.