The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 compelled museums and other cultural institutions and federal agencies to repatriate all human remains and funerary, sacred, and cultural objects to their descendant communities and organizations in a timely and respectful manner. Considering the relative success of the act in these past thirty years, as only slightly over 50% of all reported human remains have been repatriated by 2023, new rules to strengthen legal enforcement and simplify repatriation went into effect in January 2024. These regulations include a five-year deadline to complete consultations and inventories, as well as civil monetary penalties against institutions that fail to comply with NAGPRA, among others. This constitutes a turning point in the history of North American museology that demands evaluating how NAGPRA has radically affected the mission, priorities, and dynamics of national museums. In this paper, I first discuss the origin of NAGPRA and its current state. Then, I delve into the impact of this law on museum management, administration, and curatorship. This section also includes a discussion on the difficulties that museums have faced in enacting the law and the ethical and moral dilemmas that have emerged from it. Finally, I explore the opportunities that NAGPRA offers to museums to become the ideal arena for intercultural dialogue and reconciliation between institutions and stakeholders. I illustrate this with my personal experience. This paper is relevant to the anthropological scholarly community because it highlights a present cultural and scientific matter that is active in the social fabric of the US and has international implications as it sets legal precedents.