The New York Times

March 29, 2006
Connections


Protection for Indian Patrimony That Leads to a Paradox
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

IN April 1998, the Army Corps of Engineers dumped 600 tons of boulders and
dirt over an area near the Columbia River in Washington where, two years
earlier, the oldest known skeleton in North America - dubbed Kennewick Man -
had been found.

If there were other 9,200-year-old bones under the rubble, if there were
any other artifacts that might have given clues about events in North
America millenniums before written history could provide an account, now
they would be safely interred.

That was just what five Indian tribes in the area preferred. Though the
skeleton was found on federal land, the tribes claimed it as ancestral,
rejecting assertions that it had no connection to them and refusing to allow
scientists to conduct an examination. They insisted the bones be turned over
for immediate burial, invoking the 1990 Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act. The United States government agreed with alacrity.

In such circumstances, why stir up more trouble? Better to bury the entire
site. The Corps of Engineers said that it was engaged in an act of
conservation; it wanted to protect the site from erosion. Its rush, the
corps said, had nothing to do with the fact that Congressional bills
forbidding it from disturbing the archaeologically important area had just
been passed but had not become law yet. It hurried, it said, because salmon
protection regulations would have prevented shoreline work after April 15.
The dirt-dumping was also supported by the Advisory Council on Historic
Preservation, a federal agency that describes itself as seeking to preserve
"our nation's historic resources."

A strange sort of protection and conservation indeed! Don't reveal the
past, bury it; don't seek information, protect yourself from it; don't add
complications, welcome simplification. But stranger still is that these
actions were not really out of character with the impact of the protection
act.

The law requires federal agencies, and museums that have received federal
funds, to survey their collections, identify Indian remains, funerary
objects, sacred objects and other objects endowed with "cultural patrimony,"
consult with Indian tribes and "repatriate" them if requested; newly
discovered remains could be claimed by tribes showing a "cultural affinity"
with them. The law was meant to provide a form of cultural and material
restitution. But beyond any imagining, it also transferred intellectual
authority over these objects to the tribes, increased the reluctance of
curators to act as autonomous interpreters and diminished the stature of
independent scholarship and scientific inquiry.

In the Kennewick case, scientists sued the government and ultimately won
the right to examine the bones, something that is now taking place. (DNA
testing has not demonstrated any genetic connection between the skeleton and
contemporary peoples.) But museums have taken a different course: they are
transforming themselves under the law's pressures.

According to federal statistics, by 2005, remains of more than 30,000
individuals had been "deacquisitioned," along with more than 500,000
funerary and sacred objects. The effects have been profound, not because of
the loss of the objects from museums, but because the law enforced a way of
thinking about them. In the protection act's version of "cultural
patrimony," it is not just ownership of an individual object that can be
called into question, but the possession of all objects from an Indian
culture. The "repatriation" has also led to consultations in which tribal
leaders become involved even in the treatment of objects that are not
repatriated, able to help mold their interpretation, to guide research about
their pasts and to influence how they are displayed.

To some extent, this sea change in museum life is part of an international
movement advocating for "aboriginal" or "native" cultures and formerly
colonized nations. This month, for example, Peru announced it would sue Yale
University over its claims to ownership of objects related to the
exploration of Machu Picchu by a Yale explorer, Hiram Bingham, in 1912.

The change also involves more than objects. In Australia, as the
anthropologist Michael F. Brown reports in his book "Who Owns Native
Culture?," Aboriginal militants have claimed that images of the emu and
kangaroo were the property of the Aboriginal people. Some Australian
curators have accommodated Aboriginal demands that female curators can't
handle their objects.

Mr. Brown points out that the Hopis in New Mexico have been trying to
restrict and control important historical photographs documenting their
secret religious ceremonies; they were made by the Mennonite missionary
Heinrich R. Voth at the turn of the 20th century, after he had been given
access by Hopi priests. (Later priests have consulted these detailed
photographs to try to restore frayed traditions.)

Sound recordings have also been challenged. In 1907, the ethnomusicologist
Frances Densmore set off on a series of expeditions for the Smithsonian's
Bureau of American Ethnology, ultimately recording 3,000 wax cylinders of
songs from 30 Indian tribes. But in a play, "SongCatcher," by a White Earth
Anishinabe playwright, Marcie Rendon, Densmore's recordings lead to death
and despair. "My songs, my wife, my religion," the main character accuses
her. "You took them all."

As Mr. Brown points out, in such instances even immaterial things - images
or songs - are claimed as property; their documentary and historical value
is dismissed in theory if not in practice.

Often, all outsider knowledge is treated as a kind of trespass. The
implications of this are troubling. Outsiders' written accounts may have
been distorted or false, but they can be examined and put in context, and
archaeological and scientific data can lead in new directions. But most
aboriginal cultures did not even possess sophisticated written languages,
while their oral traditions have been disrupted by trauma, massacre and
disease. Insistence on the absolute truth of those traditions, regardless of
evidence, turns into a variety of fundamentalism.

One Umatilla tribal leader, for example, scoffed at suggestions that
Kennewick Man was unrelated to contemporary tribes, arguing that the Indians
had been the region's only inhabitants and that, in proof, the tribe's oral
history goes back 10,000 years: "We know how time began and how Indian
people were created." The protection act has helped institutionalize
deference to this kind of assertion.

One reason for all these problems, is the brutish past. In his book "Skull
Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology and the Battle for Native American
Identity," David Hurst Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, argues that "the American academic
community - led by grave-digging archaeologists - has robbed the Native
American people of their history and their dignity."

He points out that after the horrific 1864 massacre of hundreds of Cheyenne
at Sand Creek, Colo., corpses had their skin removed and were "carefully
crated for shipment eastward to the new Army Medical Museum in the nation's
capital." The bones were exhibited at the Smithsonian and elsewhere.

Indeed, it may be that one reason why the protection act has been so widely
accepted is that its title emphasizes "Native American graves." Human
remains are the least ambiguous artifacts of the past: their possession is
typically the result of murder or theft. Hundreds of thousands of Indian
remains are said to be in American museums.

The law's extension to other objects, though, raises more questions. Though
there is a procedure to determine each object's fate, the law is not
primarily designed to trace ownership. The presumption is that a museum's
possession is a violation. The main issue is whether there is enough
"cultural affiliation" so an Indian claim can be established. Communal
ownership and communal grievances become central.

A sense of grievance is surely justified, but there is also an impulse to
try to restore some primal past, one free of looting and abuse, that
presumably existed before museums and colonization disrupted the social and
cosmic order. One result has been to revivify the old romantic myth of the
Indian as a pastoral figure with no active role in the globe's pockmarked
history of plunder and enslavement. The Indian is only a passive recipient
of its worst injuries. Tribal conflicts, slavery and wars, evidence of
pre-colonial migrations - all the complications of historical actors are
stripped away. The myth reigns.

Even exhibitions must now provide a form of repatriation: if, in the past,
museums had erred with a limited understanding of tribal perspectives, now
they are heading in just the opposite direction, pressured by tribal
consultations, the threat of repatriations, and a desire to transcend past
guilt. A tone of self-promotion can come into play.

This is the dominant tone, for example, of the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of the American Indian. Tribes tell their own stories, not
because they are most knowledgeable but because finally, they have control.
One tribe, asked to name the 10 most important events in its history,
included "birds teach people to call for rain," and a recent "desert walk
for health." "Honesty, love, courage, truth, wisdom, humility and respect,"
are the values promoted by one tribe. "Respect and sharing of your self is
very important," says another. Any specific sense of tribal history or
meaningful description of particular beliefs is difficult to find in the
haze.

Serious scholarly exhibitions also fall prey to these sentiments. An
exhibition of early American Indian art last winter at the Art Institute of
Chicago, for example, began with the words of a tribal leader expressing how
these objects will help his people realize they were descended from "a
wonderful and great culture" - an assessment echoed in other exhibition
texts. And if some objects suggested the importance of weaponry, enslavement
and "trophy scalps," to these ancient cultures, their implications were
studiously ignored.

One reason for the Kennewick Man controversy is that it threatens to upset
this model. If the skeleton is not directly connected with contemporary
tribes, the very premises of the aboriginal world view, with its nativist
claims, and its assertions of unique historical trauma, must be modified. It
would imply that Indian tribes had a past that was neither as primordial nor
as pastoral as oral histories assert, that other groups had come and gone,
and other struggles had taken place.

Hence, the Indian anxieties over a skeleton. Already, hundreds of
less-renowned prehistoric skeletons have been turned over by museums for
Indian burial. The lawsuit over Kennewick Man gave hope that perhaps the
standard of proof for repatriation would be raised. But there has also been
an attempt to establish through fiat what has not been established by fact:
last year, Senator John McCain of Arizona, on behalf of several tribes,
proposed an amendment to the protection act; it would ensure that ancient
remains would automatically qualify as Indian remains, without requiring
ancestral proof.

But that idea, like the premature burial of the site itself, is a sign of
how readily contemporary exhibitions and investigations of the Indian past
are now characterized by the desire not to fully explore but to fully
appease.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other
Monday in the Arts section.

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