Heritage Preservation
NEPA · NHPA · Section 106
""Cultural Heritage is a Human Right""
Practice Overview
Heritage Preservation Practice: Protecting Cultural Resources, Sacred Sites, and Community Heritage
Cultural Heritage Partners represents Tribal Nations, local governments, nonprofit organizations, descendant communities, and grassroots coalitions seeking to protect historic, sacred, and culturally significant places threatened by federal or federally permitted development.
Our Approach
How We Work
When agencies reduce compliance to a box-checking exercise, both cultural resources and project proponents face serious risk. We help correct the record, recalibrate the process and ensure accountability.
We focus on ensuring that federal agencies and private developers comply with the National Historic Preservation Act (“NHPA”), the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), and related legal obligations before irreversible harm occurs. When agencies treat these statutes as procedural formalities rather than meaningful safeguards, cultural resources and community trust suffer. Our role is to enforce accountability, strengthen consultation, and secure durable, legally grounded solutions.
Cultural heritage is not incidental to development decisions. It is legally protected and deserving of rigorous review.
Why Cultural Heritiage Partners
What Sets Us Apart
Multidisciplinary Team
We bring attorneys, archaeologists, historians, and cultural resource specialists to the same table. When cultural resources are damaged, when sacred sites are threatened, when repatriation is being resisted, the legal case is only as strong as the cultural record behind it. We build both.
Cultural resources and Historic Preservation law depth
Our practice is led by attorneys with decades of success at both Tribal and Non-profit governance, legal and political advocacy, and holding agencies and developers accountable, courtroom experience in both federal and state courts, and published scholarship on Cultural Resources law. We bring the same level of depth to every engagement.
Services in this Practice
Our Expertise
The National Historic Preservation Act
The NHPA requires federal agencies to identify historic properties, consult with appropriate stakeholders, assess adverse effects, and seek to avoid, minimize, or mitigate harm.
Too often, identification efforts are narrowed, consulting parties are excluded, and adverse effects are understated.
We assist clients in:
- Evaluating whether agencies properly identified historic properties and consulting parties.
- Assessing whether consultation has been meaningful and procedurally sound.
- Challenging unsupported findings of no adverse effect.
- Addressing failures to avoid, minimize, or mitigate harm.
- Strengthening advocacy during active Section 106 review.
We approach Section 106 strategically. We help clients develop a clear evidentiary record that documents cultural significance, procedural deficiencies, and unresolved impacts. A well-developed administrative record is essential both to securing better outcomes during consultation and to preserving options for further review if necessary.
The National Environmental Policy Act: Cultural Expertise Within Environmental Review
NEPA requires federal agencies to take a hard look at the consequences of proposed actions. While often framed as an environmental statute, NEPA expressly encompasses cultural, historic, aesthetic, and social impacts.
Our particular strength lies in identifying and developing the cultural foundations within NEPA review. We focus on ensuring that agencies:
• Fully analyze impacts to historic properties and cultural landscapes.
• Consider effects on sacred sites and traditional cultural properties.
• Evaluate cumulative impacts to community character and heritage resources.
• Disclose indirect and long-term cultural consequences.
• Rigorously assess alternatives that would reduce harm to cultural resources.
We work closely with clients and both internal and external subject matter experts to ensure that cultural impacts are properly documented in Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements. We pay careful attention to technical studies, agency assumptions, and internal inconsistencies that may undermine the sufficiency of review.
By building a strong administrative record centered on cultural harm, we position our clients to demand meaningful reconsideration where agencies fall short. When appropriate, we evaluate whether agency decisions can withstand judicial scrutiny under governing standards of review. Our goal is to ensure that cultural concerns are not marginalized but fully integrated into legally defensible decision making.
Federal Permitting and Cultural Resource Accountability
Major infrastructure and energy projects often require federal permits, approvals, funding, or rights of way. These projects may include pipelines, wind farms, solar farms, transmission lines, data and logistics centers, mines, bridges, and dams. Frequently, they are proposed in places that communities value deeply.
The impacts are often profound. Development may disturb sacred sites, encroach on cemeteries, damage archaeological resources, alter historic landscapes, or permanently change culturally significant views.
Cultural Heritage Partners assists clients when a federal agency is considering granting, or has granted, a permit without properly consulting stakeholders or adequately assessing impacts under NHPA and NEPA. We work to ensure that consultation is meaningful, impacts are fully disclosed, and statutory obligations are satisfied before approvals are finalized.
Where projects have been permitted and construction has commenced without adequate compliance or consultation, Cultural Heritage Partners PLLC helps clients seek accountability and compensation for damages through creative mitigation solutions and litigation.
Strategic Resolution Following Flawed Permitting
Communities sometimes discover procedural failures only after permits are issued or construction is imminent.
We work with clients to pursue equitable solutions in the face of threatened or actual damage to critical cultural resources. This includes identifying procedural defects, leveraging administrative and legal vulnerabilities, and developing strategies that can lead to improved mitigation, revised approvals, or negotiated resolutions.
Our objective is not delay for its own sake. It is to ensure that development proceeds, if at all, only after the law has been followed and community interests have been respected.
Civil Accountability and Related Legal Protections
In appropriate circumstances, additional legal protections may apply alongside NHPA and NEPA.
We advise clients on:
• Civil rights protections where government action disproportionately burdens protected communities or infringes fundamental rights.
• Due process concerns arising from exclusionary or inadequate consultation.
• Legal remedies addressing damage to property or interference with legally protected interests.
These tools are evaluated carefully and integrated into broader advocacy strategies when they strengthen the protection of cultural resources.
Work With Us
Work With Our Heritage Preservation Practice
If your community is confronting a proposed or approved project that threatens historic, sacred, or culturally significant places, we are prepared to assist.
We partner with Tribal Nations, local governments, nonprofit organizations, descendant groups, and community coalitions to:
- Evaluate the legal sufficiency of agency review.
- Strengthen consultation and documentation.
- Develop culturally informed advocacy strategies.
- Preserve issues for administrative appeal or judicial review where necessary.
Our work is grounded in legal precision, respect for community knowledge, and a commitment to ensuring that cultural heritage receives the protection federal law requires.
Marion Werkheiser
Partner and leader of Cultural Heritage Partners’ Heritage Preservation Practice
Also Practicing
Cultural Heritage Partners PLLC represents clients across the United States in matters involving federal permitting, consultation, and cultural resource protection.
We understand that heritage preservation disputes involve identity, history, sovereignty, and intergenerational responsibility. Our role is to translate those values into precise legal arguments, carefully developed records, and strategic advocacy grounded in federal and state law.
Nationwide Practice, Community-Grounded Approach
- Explore Our Other Practice
Our Heritage Preservation Practice is complementary to our Tribal Nations Practice. For matters focused on Tribal sovereignty, Tribal governance authority, or the exercise of inherent jurisdiction, we encourage clients to learn more about our Tribal Nations Practice and its focus on strengthening Tribal law and sovereign enforcement mechanisms.
Also Praticing
Tribal Nations Practice
Advising Tribal governments, attorneys, THPOs, and land departments on sovereignty, governance, enforcement, and the protection of Tribal lands and cultural heritage.