National Eagle Repository

The National Eagle Repository is operated and managed under the Office of Law Enforcement of the

for use in religious and cultural ceremonies.

Mandate

Distribution is authorized by the

.

History

After the legal protection of the bald eagle, Native Americans had no access to feathers and other parts of the birds they need for certain religious and cultural activities. The best known use is in war bonnets and other feathered headdresses. Some continued hunting and considered it legal on reservation grounds as hunting and their cultural self-determination was guaranteed in treaties. In the early 1970s the National Eagle Repository was operated out of Pocatello, Idaho and in the 1980s distribution was out of the USFWS Forensic Lab in Ashland, Oregon. The office collected birds and distributed them further. But the process was slow and the numbers of birds low.^[2]

In 1985 a lawsuit over the prosecution of Dwight Dion Sr., a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, for poaching and selling of four bald eagles reached the Supreme Court. In United States v. Dion the court upheld the conviction and confirmed that historic treaty rights could be amended and abrogated by legislation of Congress.^[3]

President Bill Clinton signed an executive memorandum on April 29, 1994, after meeting with 300 tribal leaders at the White House. He reformed the National Eagle Repository and obliged all federal agencies to send dead eagles to the repository.^[4] Following this memorandum, in 1995 the repository moved to the Denver area and got its own offices at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

Literature

• Bruce E. Beans: Eagle’s Plume: The Struggle to Preserve the Life and Haunts of America’s Bald Eagle. Scribner, New York 1996,
  ISBN 0-684-80696-7
• Alison Renteln: The cultural defense. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004,
  ISBN 978-0-19-515402-3
  .

References

External links

• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: National Eagle Repository.
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Questions and Answers about the National Eagle Repository.

39°49′41.7″N 104°51′31.5″W / 39.828250°N 104.858750°W / 39.828250; -104.858750