WARNER, N.H. (AP) – Despite efforts by museums around the nation to return more than 330,000 objects looted from Native American burial grounds, the Mount Kearsarge Indian Museum has no plans to check its own collection.

Federal law requires museums that receive federal money to identify where their collections came from and return objects that originally were part of burial grounds.

But Mount Kearsarge officials say that because their collection came from the private collection of a local resident, they need not adhere to the federal guidelines and compile an inventory of its more than 1,000 objects.

The museum’s collection originated with founder Bud Thompson during a period when grave-looting was so widespread that even the best-intentioned collectors may have unknowingly run afoul of burial rights.

“When he collected pieces, he primarily purchased from dealers. Beyond that we don’t know the provenance of many items,” said Krista Katz, executive director of the museum.

“If we’re offered anything in the form of donations and bequests in the future, we will adhere to NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) findings,” she said.

Thompson, 81, first became interested in Native Americans when a Pequot chief visited his second-grade class in Rhode Island. He came across his first arrowhead not long after, an unexpected find in his grandfather’s cornfield.

Thompson’s collection grew while he traveled as a folk singer. He said he would pick up pieces from local antique shops and dealers he would come across.

Thirteen years ago, Thompson established the Indian Museum at the base of Mount Kearsarge. The museum receives about 30,000 visitors a year, including about 9,000 schoolchildren. There are no human remains in the collection.

“My hope is to touch the lives of children who come here and live in a more harmonious way with the earth around us,” Thompson said. “I’m not Indian myself and am very careful not to do anything that would offend anyone.”

But Repatriation Coordinator Donna Moody of the Sovereign Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi in Vermont said there is a “high probability” that a collection of this size contains an artifact that at one point belonged in a burial ground.

Moody said looting extended well into the late 1970s and continues even today.

Katz said that repatriation efforts sometimes sound better on paper than they work out in reality because groups that receive the artifacts may not be able to care for them as well as museums.

“NAGPRA is a very sticky and very touchy and very volatile issue,” she said. “No one has said to the Greeks, ‘You can go into the Louvre and take out pieces of the Parthenon that were taken from wars.'”