Civic education, especially when it is interactive and involves discussion of current issues, is an important way to develop the skills that young Americans need to succeed in the 21st Century workforce. Students who experience interactive discussion-based civic education (either by itself or in combination with lecture-based civic education) score the highest on '21st Century Competencies,' including working with others (especially in diverse groups) and knowledge of economic and political processes. Students who experience neither interactive nor lecture-based civic education have the lowest scores on all of the 21st Century competencies examined. This group, which comprises about one-quarter of all American students, shows not only low levels of knowledge but also a relatively low level of willingness to obey the law.

A proposed change to American repatriation law provides an opportunity to reexamine the assumptions on which the original statute was built. For their justification, NAGPRA and the NMAI Act rely on the supposition that bounded communities proceed through time along a unilinear path—a misconception stemming from both universal, identity-forming processes and the discipline of archaeology itself. A case study involving the National Museum of the American Indian's 2003 repatriation of human remains to a rural village in Cuba demonstrates how various identities can manipulate the transfer of archaeological material to fit their own symbolic needs.