These artifacts are part of a collection of 1.3 million items taken from Hopi and Navajo land by Peabody Energy. Photo from Black Mesa Archaeological Project / Facebook

Peabody Energy, the largest mining company in the world, took hundreds of ancestors and millions of artifacts from the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation.

The remains of about 200 ancestors are being held by the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. How they got there is somewhat of a mystery -- a report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said they were loaned to Hampshire College in Massachusetts but that institution claims it never had them.

“I am incensed that my ancestors were dug up, ground up and send off to universities to be studied,” Vernon Masayesva, a former Hopi chairman, told The Guardian.

Peabody also dug up 1.3 million artifacts from the Black Mesa mining site. The collection is being held by the University of Illinois in what the Army Corps said were "substandard" conditions, the Guardian reported.

Members of the two tribes, along with the Sierra Club, are suing the federal government in hopes of protecting burial and sacred sites from future damage. They also want their ancestors returned under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act .

"Digging them up was a violation of natural laws. They were never meant to be in a museum," Norris Nez, a Navajo medicine man, told High Country News last December.

Peabody is seeking to renew its federally-approved leases for the mining site.

Get the Story:
Black Mesa mines: Native Americans demand return of their ancestors' bones (The Guardian 12/10)