WHY WE DO THIS

Cultural resources are the people, places, objects, and practices that carry a community's knowledge, memory, and identity. They include both tangible and intangible heritage that sustains cultural life across generations. Tangible cultural resources are the physical materials that communities create, inherit, and care for. These include artifacts, artworks, historic sites, cultural landscapes, manuscripts, and objects of everyday life. Intangible cultural resources are the living practices, oral histories, languages, songs, ceremonies, and knowledge systems that communities embody, transmit, and perform. Both forms of cultural resources anchor people to place, history, and belonging.

For centuries, cultural communities across the United States lost access to their cultural resources through government action. Sacred materials, historic artifacts, ancestral lands, and sites of memory were seized by federal agencies, museums, and academic institutions. Items were reclassified as federal property without due process, consultation, or consent. Families, elders, and community leaders who carried intangible knowledge were displaced, silenced, or separated from the resources that sustained their lifeways.

Despite these demoralizing hurdles, cultural communities worked tirelessly to protect their heritage. Indigenous, African-descendant, Latiné, AAPI, and other communities partnered with federal agencies, negotiated the retrieval of sacred objects, and demanded public acknowledgment of their stories. They fought to ensure that cultural resources held in public trust tell fuller, more truthful narratives of their joys, pains, survival, and thriving.