 According to some understandings of cultural property, the tight link between cultural property and cultural identity renders such property inalienable. Closer to the idea of what is sometimes called “cultural patrimony” such property might be described as “not something owned by a people, but something of them, a part of their defining collective identity” (Cuno 2001: 85). This is one of the categories of objects, for instance, subject to the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a federal law meant to facilitate the return of Native American remains and artifacts from federally funded institutions to Native tribes (Coleman 2010; Lackey 2006; Trope &amp; Echo-Hawk 1992; Harjo 1996). If cultural property is inalienable, then holdings in cultural property by those outside the cultural group are ipso facto illegitimate.