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 Editorials | At Issue | August 2005 
How Many Dead Indians Will Satisfy Feds and Scientists?
 Suzan Shown Harjo - Indian Country Today
| | In 1996, two chums found the skeletal remains of a prehistoric human while fishing in the Columbia River near the Tri-Cities. Using forensics, anthropologists have dated the bones to roughly 9000 b.c. - making them possibly the oldest known remains found in North America. Scientists are baffled due to the fact that the bone and teeth structure appear Caucasoid or Eurasian. Many Native tribes believe that further examination of the remains is sacreligious and that they should be reburied. In the meantime, the Kennewick-Man will remain in a Washington state museum. |
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is fighting an uphill battle to defend its 1990 national repatriation law and to clean up the mess created by activist judges who overrode congressional intent in 2004 and wrote their own law.
The committee is attempting to fix the problem by making a small change to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act's definition of "Native American."
First proposed in the committee's public hearing on July 14, 2004, the amendment would add "or was" to the definition, so the term "Native American" would mean of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is or was indigenous to any geographic area that is now located within US boundaries.
Federal and federally funded scientists have held up the amendment for over a year.
These are the same scientists, including plaintiffs in the "Kennewick Man" case, who fought to keep repatriation agreements from being enacted and have been trying to dismantle them since NAGPRA was signed into law.
Their present goal is to play for time to get Interior Department regulations that would extend the Kennewick decision beyond the Ancient One, who was the only person at issue in the litigation, and would lock up hundreds of thousands of Native human remains indefinitely for unspecified "studies."
The problem arose when judges in the "Kennewick Man" case simply declared that the Ancient One could not be buried by his cultural descendants because he was not a "Native American" under NAGPRA. By declaring that he did not meet the NAGPRA definition, the judges were able to sidestep the very law that Congress wrote to protect the Native dead, known and unknown, and their relatives.
Their decision meant that federal and federally funded scientists could drill more holes in the Ancient One, but this is an elaborate charade in the name of scientific discovery about who populated this hemisphere when.
In fact, the tests were concluded many years ago, demonstrating that the Ancient One is related to Native people here and is not from France or other foreign places, as the scientists have suggested to judges, bureaucrats, congressional staffers and reporters.
Interior is bowing to the "Kennewick" decision as the law of the land, even though none of the other judicial circuits have misread repatriation law in the same way. This paves the way for regulations that the scientists want to protect their "studies" on the myriad dead Indians they view as their property.
The Indian committee held another oversight hearing July 28. Interior opposed the amendment because it "would broaden the scope of what remains would be covered under NAGPRA from the Court's decision ... that the remains must have a significant relationship to a presently existing tribe, people, or culture in order to be considered 'Native American."'
Interior's views on this important Native American human rights law were presented by a deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, Paul Hoffman, who testified:
"We believe that NAGPRA should protect the sensibilities of currently existing tribes, cultures, and people while balancing the need to learn about past cultures and customs. In the situation where remains are not significantly related to any existing tribe, people, or culture they should be available for appropriate scientific analysis. The proposed legislation would shift away from this balance." The balance to which the Interior official referred was a balance struck by Congress in developing public policy on this issue.
Congress considered the human, civil and religious rights of Native Americans, living and dead, and the scurrilous ways - most of them in the name of science, art and "civilization" - that hundreds of thousands of Native people and property ended up in public institutions and collections, and the nightmares modern Native people encounter when interacting with those entities.
Congress also considered the interests of museums, scientists, researchers, art marketers and traffickers in human remains in using dead Native people and living sacred and cultural items for their "studies," displays and profits.
The repatriation laws were the result of Native American negotiations with various entities and congressional considerations of the views. Congress struck a balance in the public interest.
Now, a tiny, elite and exclusive group wants to own and control greater and greater numbers of dead Indians and does not mind overturning and discarding public policy, American Indian rights and federal laws in order to get their way.
Organizations representing scientists who were part of the agreements reached and balances struck in NAGPRA presented careful testimony for the July 28 hearing about supporting the amendment, but opposing the process and wanting more time. One, representing the physical scientists who opposed any recognition of Native American human rights in NAGPRA, bluntly stated that Congress should not act until Interior has published its regulations.
A statement supporting the amendment was offered for the hearing record by Armand Minthorn, who is a relative of the Ancient One, chair of the cultural resources committee and a trustee of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon.
Minthorn testified that the Umatilla Tribes support the amendment "so that all tribal ancestors are protected under the law, not merely those determined by agencies, museums and scientists to be related to existing tribes." He stated that they lost their nine-year "painful battle to return these ancestral remains to the ground" on a "technicality [which] creates a loop-hole that eclipses the law and must be corrected."
Minthorn also decried Interior's decision to pay "Kennewick" case attorneys' fees out of NAGPRA grant monies: "Adding final insult to injury, to take the money away from tribes and museums who implement NAGPRA to pay the attorneys fees to those who sought to and succeeded in eviscerating the law is beyond the pale. Tribes and museums need those grants to pursue repatriations of ancestors long-denied their rightful home in the earth."
The positions of Interior and the scientists in this matter are reminiscent of the days when the United States would make treaties, then break their promises because they wanted even more land.
Interior once cleared Indian title and territory for westward expansion. Today, as public and private developers want more Indian lands for gold mines, oil pumps, border fences and shopping malls, Interior is in the business of clearing Indian claims to burial grounds by declaring that the people buried there are not Native Americans.
No amount of bodies or acres will satisfy the feds or scientists who are opposing the NAGPRA recalibration.
It is time for Congress to stop this sacrilege and indecency, and to let Native people rest in peace. |
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