>Date: Mon, 09 Mar 1998 19:44:42 -0700
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: "Brian W. Kenny" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: One-Woman Campaign Sparked Nat'l Repatriation Cause
>Cc: [log in to unmask]
>
>[ AzTeC / SWA SASIG ] :
>
>http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovmon.htm
>
>03/09/98
>Return of Indian remains bogs down
>
>Eight years after Congress ordered the "repatriation" of uncounted
>thousands of Native American remains, tribes are still at war for the bones
>and burial relics of their ancestors.
>
>Some disputes set tribe against tribe, with competing claims for artifacts
>and skeletons that have gathered dust in museum vaults for more than a
>century. Many others pit Indians against non-Indians over bureaucratic
>delays and even refusals to hand over bones and grave objects claimed as
>sacred by the tribes.
>
>But all hinge on the difficulty of determining tribal links to
>centuries-old items whose exact origins may be lost in the mists of time.
>In short: Who is related to whom?
>
>>From a 1,400-year-old grave in the Grand Canyon to shellheap tombs on the
>Maine coast, thousands of skeletal remains, burial objects, sacred articles
>and "cultural patrimony" items of historical importance to tribes already
>have been returned under the Native American Graves Protection and
>Repatriation Act. The graves law, passed in 1990, requires federally funded
>institutions, from the vast Smithsonian to small-town museums, to inventory
>and offer items for return to tribes who can prove "cultural affiliation."
>
>So far, the remains of more than 110,000 individuals and hundreds of
>thousands of artifacts have been counted. But only some of these bones of
>contention have been given back. Indian activists also claim the total
>number of remains is far higher, since the law doesn't cover private
>collectors or institutions.
>
>The variety of completed or pending returns is extraordinary: A single
>human tooth from a Miccosukee site in Everglades National Park. The scalp
>of a Cheyenne victim of 1864's notorious Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado.
>The bones of 1,582 Hawaiian natives dug up on a Marine Corps base at
>Kaneohe Bay. Paiute ceremonial beads and stones found on the government's
>Nevada Test Site atom-bomb range. Exactly 31,651 Itskari, Loup and Pawnee
>burial objects from 14 Nebraska archaeological digs.
>
>But the lineage is less clear for most of the artifacts and remains. "When
>you're talking about materials that may be 2,000 to 10,000 years old,
>you're fishing in the dark," says Stephanie Damadio, a curator for the U.S.
>Bureau of Land Management.
>
>Many were excavated and collected scientifically. But many more were simply
>dug up, stolen, picked up, displayed or sold repeatedly as curios or art,
>often erasing the historical trail. For America's indigenous peoples, it is
>an insulting legacy of sacred tribal objects treated as lucrative
>collectibles and the bones of Indian forebears displayed as tourist-trap
>curiosities.
>
>"It's grave robbery, pure and simple," says Yankton Sioux grandmother Maria
>Pearson, whose one-woman campaign over the 1971 desecration of an Indian
>grave in Iowa sparked the national repatriation cause.
>
>"Why should anybody own anybody else's bones, especially when they were
>taken in the fashion they were?" adds Pearson, 66, who is now the
>governor's adviser for Indian affairs in Iowa, the first state to pass a
>law protecting Indian burials.
>
>"There are 769 entities, tribes, Alaskan villages and corporations, and
>native Hawaiian groups that have standing," says Tim McKeown, the federal
>project manager for repatriation. "And there's about 769 different
>approaches to it."
>
>The repatriation act requires that custodians of bones and artifacts
>consider more than just "hard" science in determining which tribe gets
>ownership. They also must weigh cultural evidence: folk traditions, tribal
>beliefs and oral history.
>
>Still, much of the material could end up classified as "unaffiliated,"
>stuck in legal limbo until the secretary of Interior drafts rules on what
>to do with remains and objects for which specific ownership simply can't be
>established. Solutions could range from leaving bones and grave artifacts
>in museums to reburying them en masse in regional graves.
>
>Repatriation "is taking much longer than any of us thought it would," says
>Rick West, a Southern Cheyenne who heads the Smithsonian's National Museum
>of the American Indian, which has returned about half of the 470 sets of
>remains in its collection. (Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural
>History, whose 18,000 sets of bones constitute the largest such collection,
>has returned about 3,500 sets so far.)
>
>Mandan tribal activist Pemina Yellow Bird, who calls the Smithsonian "the
>biggest Indian cemetery on the planet," contends that the remains of more
>than half a million Indians may have been dug up over the years. She notes
>that in the 1860s, the surgeon general ordered Army field officers in the
>West to send back Indian skeletons so he could study whether natives were
>inferior to whites.
>
>"The drive was for collection, for stockpiling - grab, grab, grab," says
>Yellow Bird, who wants any and all remains returned for reburial.
>"According to the white man, they are 'unaffiliated.' But to us, they're
>our relatives."
>
>Yellow Bird even suggests some delays may be the work of stubborn
>scientists unwilling to part with their trove of study "specimens." But
>officials trying to comply claim the repatriation law actually has
>accelerated the study of bones long kept in storage because scientists
>realize they won't be available much longer.
>
>"This statute has single-handedly sparked more analysis of human remains
>and funerary objects in the last eight years than was done in the last
>100," McKeown says.
>
>Native Hawaiians have been so insistent in seeking repatriation so that all
>known remains and burial objects once held on the mainland are now back in
>the islands. Also aggressive are tribes on the Northern Plains, who helped
>spearhead passage of the graves act. They and others now are fighting
>against proposals to loosen the law in the wake of the controversial battle
>over the bones of "Kennewick Man."
>
>In that high-profile standoff, a 9,300-year-old skeleton from Kennewick,
>Wash., lies locked in a government vault as eight anthropologists sue for
>access to study its apparent "white" physical features. (An
>anthropologist's reconstruction looks like actor Patrick Stewart, though
>skeptics suggest it also resembles the Iroquois, an East Coast tribe.)
>
>Seven Northwest Indian tribes want the bones reburied without further
>study, which they scorn as "a violation of our most deeply held religious
>beliefs," says Cayuse religious leader Armand Minthorn. They claim the
>"Ancient One" as their ancestor because their oral histories in the region
>go back 10,000 years.
>
>The Army Corps of Engineers, which took custody in 1996 after the bones
>were found in the muddy bank of the Columbia River, is caught in the
>middle. When the corps sought to give the remains to the tribes, a federal
>magistrate last year halted the transfer for a closer look. In January, a
>top government archaeologist advised the corps that scientific study is
>allowable to determine if the skeleton is, in fact, American Indian.
>
>"K-Man" isn't alone in controversy. Other recent cases:
>* A southeastern Utah couple escaped felony charges last month for digging
>up bones of prehistoric Anasazi Indians while hunting for artifacts on
>state land, where the federal graves law doesn't apply. To charge the pair,
>prosecutors had invoked Utah's century-old statute against grave robbing.
>But in a surprise ruling that outraged tribes the state appeals court ruled
>Feb. 20 the law doesn't apply because prosecutors can't prove the ancient
>remains were intentionally buried there in the first place.
>
>* The city of Providence, R.I., owns a carved wooden spear rest that
>Hawaiians consider a spirit-filled religious object. Brought home in 1810
>by a seafaring Rhode Islander, the figure once cradled weapons on the
>gunwale of a native canoe. A federal review board for such disputes
>recommended that the figure be returned. But Providence, which wanted to
>sell it for $250,000 or more, claimed it was merely a historical
>collectible and sued. After negotiations last month, the two sides are
>close to settling their dispute but won't give details.
>
>* The Oneida Indians split into New York and Wisconsin bands in the 1830s.
>Now, both claim an Oneida belt of shell beads, or wampum, to be returned by
>Chicago's Field Museum. That dispute also is under negotiation.
>
>* The USA's second-largest tribe, the 225,000-member Navajo Nation, has
>declared ownership of all "cultural resources" on its 27,000-square-mile
>reservation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. While the repatriation act
>allows that, the Navajos' blanket claim riles neighboring Hopi, Zuni and
>other Pueblo peoples. They argue that they, not the nomadic Navajos, are
>the true descendants of the early and mysterious Anasazi cliff-dwellers who
>inhabited those lands centuries ago.
>
>While many tribes aggressively demand the bones of their ancestors, some
>shy away. In southeastern Alaska, the Tlingit tribe's ancestors
>traditionally cremated the bodies of all but their shamans, or medicine
>men. Now, McKeown says, museums that hold remains from Tlingit territory
>find the tribe is reluctant to take them back "because of the power that
>those shamans had."
>
>Many Southwest tribes are reluctant even to talk about the dead, let alone
>deal with their bones. They believe once the dead are buried, there's no
>process for reburial. "Many of these cultures believe you can get
>spiritually ill from (contact with) dead bodies," says Damadio of the
>Bureau of Land Management.
>
>In a quiet ceremony in Grundy County, Ill., last month, tribal elders
>removed a fragment of jaw, a braid of hair and a piece of skull from public
>view in the county courthouse. Under glass for 70 years, the remains of a
>5-year-old Indian child were the last known specimens on display in the
>state, says repatriation activist Joseph Standing Bear.
>
>"We pray for the three R's - respect, repatriation and reburial," says
>Standing Bear, an Ojibwe who is helping organize a national observance on
>May 2 for the speedier return of ancestral bones. "Native people have
>waited a long time. The time for a good conclusion is at hand."
>
>By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY
>Contributing: Kristen Hartzell in Durango, Colo.
>
>
>-----
>Archaeology, Anthropology and History of the American Southwest
>Southwestern Archaeology (SWA)  -- got caliche??
>http://www.swanet.org/
>telnet://aztec2.asu.edu
>
>Brian W. Kenny; P.O. Box 61203 Phoenix AZ 85082-1203; [log in to unmask];
>(602) 227-3154 voice msg pager
>
>
Anita Cohen-Williams
Listowner of HISTARCH, SUB-ARCH, SPANBORD
Co-listowner/Manager of ANTHRO-L
Contributing Editor, Anthropology
http://www.suite101.com
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]