There is, obviously, a major struggle going on between AmericaÕs First Nations—the Indian people—and the intellectual establishment. Alongside the other struggle, between sovereign people bound to the United States by treaties that have proved as durable as tissue paper, I mean.
Back in 1990, an act, known as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) was born. This was an attempt to right one of the grossest of ongoing historical legacies, that of Indian bones and cultural remains being warehoused by colleges, museums, and historical groups. Imagine the scene in ÒRaiders of the Lost Ark,Ó when the Ark of the Covenant, encased in a bland wooden crate, is carried off into storage in a warehouse the size of a shopping mall—that, figuratively, is what has happened to hundreds of thousands of Indian remains and artifacts. NAGPRA mandated that the institutions holding such remains inventory these items, determine the cultural affiliations, and return them to Native nations for proper burial and disposal. Many Indian nations are still waiting. Many museums still hold thousands of items. After ten years, it is estimated that 200,000 remains still await repatriation. Two Hundred Thousand! (It is interesting that America's national museum, the Smithsonian, and any other federal agency were specifically exempted from this act. Some institutions are more equally treated than others, I see..)
In the last several years, particularly since the discovery of human remains at Kennewick WA in 1996, a loud and often antagonistic conflict has been growing between Native Nations and the "scientific community" over who is entitled to cultural remains. That, is, who is going to return them to their rightful mother, the Earth. This is due to the more-or-less established historical belief of the migration of Indian, or proto-Indian, people into North and South America via the Bering Land Bridge. While the vast majority of anthropologists and archeologists, and maybe even the majority of American people, hold this to be an accepted revealed truth, another very relevant group—the Indian people themselves—argues otherwise. "We have always been here," they say. "We came out of this land; this land is our Mother." The remains found at Kennewick, Indian people say, is an ancestor. The archeologists disagree. The remains have been dated at about 9,500 years before the present. A model of the head of Kennewick man, constructed by a forensic anthropologist, shows features many believe to be classically European—maybe Captain Picard of the starships.
Others disagree. "He looks like Wes Studi, the actor, a Cherokee," said one Lakota man.
A similar argument has developed over a mummy found in the 1940s at Spirit Cave, Nevada. Recent carbon dating of the mummy has shown the remains to be nearly contemporary with Kennewick Man. A model of Tule Springs man has shown a face and skull to be more European than Indian. Another find, from Prince of Wales Island, in south-eastern Alaska, carries a date from 9,200 years ago. The oldest dated Skeleton from the U.S. was a woman, called "Buhl Woman," was found in Idaho, and given an age of 10,600 years before the present. She, however, was turned over to the Shoshone-Bannocks for reburial, so little was done on/to her. The repatriation of her bones, however, may point to some ongoing resentment by the anthropologists toward NAGPRA. Yet neither of these are as old as the oldest skeleton from the New World, "Luzia," a woman's remains found in Brazil and dated at 11,500 years back. Non-human, but dated, archeological sites in the New World go back considerably farther. The Koster Rock Shelter in Ohio claims dates of 14,000-plus years ago; another site, although disputed, in Southern Chile, goes back thousands of years more.
The archeologists, who for years had accepted dates of not much recent than 14,000 years before present as the time for the migrations across the Bering Land Bridge. Geological evidence indicates the glaciers blocked both eastern and southern routes through Alaska and Canada until about 11,500 years ago. People cannot travel this fast: it would mean that as soon as the ice cleared, people got to South America. A newer theory posits that the incoming population moved down the coast, by boat. The receding shoreline over the last ten to twenty thousand years means that there is no way to gather evidence of this route. There is little evidence in either Siberia or Alaska that the land bridge was used, as well. The problems exist.
In the 1980s, the book American Genesis appeared. This argued for a radical, very radical, alternative to the standard theories. The author, Michael Goodman, argued that modern-- "Cro-Magnon man" originated in the New World. This theory was greeted with thunderous silence. Only a few scholars would go along with this. If one wanted a career in anthropology and/or archeology, there is a canon of beliefs that must be held; otherwise, no career. I don't mean this has a condemnation of anthropological studies: all academic disciplines have an acceptable canon, just like religions, nations, and corporations. There are both spoken and unspoken canons. Its the way it is.
What have we got here? We have a belief, on the part of the Native populations, on the truthfulness of oral and traditional versions of history. On the the Euro-American side, we have a belief in evidence: hard, factual, tangible. One friend suggests that as Indians become more involved in anthropology and associated sciences, they will lessen their opposition to forensic studies on the remains of their ancestors. Intellectual assimilation, if not cultural, if that's possible. However, the cultural differences include a different mode of intellectualizing about the world. One of the problems with Euro-based models of the world, how it is, was, works, etc., is that it doesn't make sense in the historical matrix of European thought. "Man"— "humankind" I should say—has become an isolate, alone and afraid, in a world he/she never made, as someone put it.
Other cultures, I'm thinking of the Native Nations, don't have this separation, for the most part. Humans are merely one part of the whole, integral to it, but only equal. The concept of Original Sin, and displacement from the Garden of Eden, "Man's fall" doesn't apply. There is no theme of dominance over creation. In a way, the world already makes sense, and weÕre just co-products of creation.
And, you know, it is about belief systems. The biggest problem is that the Euro-American belief system is dominant, and it attempts to impose itself on all other systems. Not that this is unusual, no—the winners write the history; the golden rule is that the people with the gold write the rule. Some modern social critics call this "cultural imperialism." There is an inherent friction in the Euro-American v. Native cultural beliefs. It's going to require a certain amount of compromise and acceptance, concensus rather than adherance to one doctrine. It would be nice, as one friend put it, "If they'd just declare a moritorium on studying these remains, and let the Indian people decide."
This is a hard one, folks. I believe Indian people have been here long enough to be the original occupants; the human remains from the distant past are, in effect, Indians. Period. Besides, there must be enough dead other kinds of folks to study for a while.
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