Bury my bones at Wounded Knee

Clement W. Meighan

BACK AROUND the turn of the century, when the spectacular ancient cliff-dwellings of the American Southwest were coming to public attention, concerns were voiced that all these places would be plundered and looted for marketable relics. These concerns led Congress to pass an antiquities act in 1906, decreeing that archaelogical remains were part of the national heritage and the property of all citizens, and requiring permits from the secretary of the interior to conduct excavations in ancient sites on federal land. After World War II the laws were extended to include state and private lands as well, primarily mandating that when a location was scheduled for destruction, there should be some investigation of what was to be destroyed before the bulldozers got there. All this legislation had as its basic premise the idea of public ownership of public resources, as well as a recognition that the history of the United States included the history of the people who had inhabited our territory for thousands of years prior to 1776.

In the 1960s, a new view of ancient history was put forward by activists and Indian politicians, who decreed that Indian politicians, who decreed that Indian history was owned not by the nation, but by various Indian groups. Of particular concern were the skeletons of ancient inhabitants, which had been dug up and kept in museums. Sit-ins were held around the country, objecting to any of these bones being displayed to the public. Most museums conceded that visitors should not be allowed to look at bones if it was offensive to Indians, and took all such exhibits out of circulation (a big disappointment to children, who go straight to the Egyptian mummies and other remains of dead people and find these the most interesting of all museum exhibits).

Friend or Foe?

ARCHAEOLOGISTS and museum personnel are in general very supportive of Indians. Many of these scholars devote their lives to the study and publication of Indian history. They have always been willing to testify for the Indians in land-claims cases and think of themselves as friends of the Indians. It took them quite a while to recognize that in the eyes of some Indians they were not friends but merely another faction of the hated exploiters.

The original concession by museums quickly proved to be a big mistake. In accepting the notion that any self-proclaimed Indian could speak for all Indians everywhere, and for all time periods back to the date the first person entered the New World thousands of years ago, the museums opened the door to escalating claims, and these were not long in coming.

The next step was to demand the return of all bones in museums so that they could be reburied. Many museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, voluntarily returned the bones of Indians who could conceivably bear some relationship, however distant, to the claimants. Soon, activits who claimed 1/128 ancestry from tribes on the Eastern Seaboard were making demands for eight-thousand-year-old skeletons in California. Had the ancestors of these people somehow made it to California in ancient times, they would have been treated as enemies and killed by the residents, the slogan, "All Indians are brothers," not yet having been put forward. Even so, such claims were taken seriously by many people, and were seen by a fair number of politicians as an issue made in heaven.

Of course, no political action is cost-free, and tax dollars soon got committed to the effort in many ways. The state of California, as part of its legacy from Governor Jerry Brown, decided that it was a moral imperative to rebury some eight hundred skeletons and ten thousand artifacts (beads, ornaments, etc., which were claimed as sacred objects accompanying the sacred bones) from collections housed in the State Indian Museum in Sacramento. Ignoring its charter to preserve collections (the main reason that museums exist), the state acted as rapidly as possible to rebury the collections, starting with one lot in Patricks Point State Park in northwestern California, and another in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in San Diego County. At this point a class-action suit by the American Committee for Preservation of Archaeological Collections got an injunction preventing further loss of publicly owned collections.

The reburial in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, involving materials maintained in a small museum at the park, became a comedy. The collection included cremated bones in pottery vessels, as well as many artifacts, collected in the 1930s by George Carter, a famous specialist in early-man studies. Disposition of the collection was carried out by bulldozing a hole, dumping into it the bags, boxes, and their specimens, and filling in the hole. The present-day Indian descendants who were in attendance promptly sued the state, claiming that the ceremony had not been properly conducted according to Indian ritual, and got a court order requiring the state to dig up the relics and do it all over again.

The next step for California's Native American Heritage Commission (created by Jerry Brown as a state-supported lobby) was to prevent future archaelogy from going forward except under the paid supervision of Indian "monitors." Legislation was passed requiring notification of the local coroner in the event that any fragment of human bone was encountered, regardless of the context of the find. Coroners, of course, consider archaeological remains to be a distraction from their job. However, the new code requires the coroner to notify the Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento, which body will then decide (on no scientific basis whatever) who the "most likely descendants" may be, and those politically designated Indians will have authority to decide what is to be done with the archaeological finds. The legislation has been extended to include not just human bones, but all objects found anywhere nearby, and in some cases to all objects found in the ancient site, on the grounds that everything in such a context is sacred.

Conflict of Special Interests

THIS SET of laws proved to be neither intelligent nor functional, and it soon came into conflict with another set of regulations requiring environmental-impact reports on ancient sites scheduled for destruction in the building of reservoirs, freeways, or subdivisions. Such projects are generally done under serious time constraints--the project supervisor wants the archaeologist to get in, do his work, and get out as fast as possible. But if the archaeologist encounters a small fragment of human bone in a gopher mound, all work stops until the coroner and the politicians in Sacramento decide what is to be done. The coroner does not respond immediately, if at all. In one case, a deputy assistant coroner responded to an archaelogist's telephone call with "We don't want that s---, honey!" If the word does get to Sacramento, the Native American Heritage Commission also does not always respond immediately and sometimes does not respond at all. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars a day may be lost in construction delays, whatever research is needed cannot be conducted, and the intent of cultural-resource laws--to identify and study significant ancient remains--is completely thwarted. This puts the archaelogist between a rock and a hard place: if he fulfills his professional obligation to report and preserve his evidence, he is subject to prosecution; if he conceals his evidence, he is violating his code of ethics as a scholar and faces serious sanctions from his professional organizations.

Archaeology as Felony

THIS CONFLICT was brought home to David Van Horn, a PhD contract archaeologist who was used by the attorney general of California for collecting two broken grinding stones, found in a cairn of rocks piled over a grave. The bones were duly reported and deposited in a museum, but the local Indians claimed that the broken grinding stones were mortuary offerings and therefore had to be given up for reburial. Van Horn, as the archaeologist who was on the spot and knew the context, claimed that the grinding stones were merely among the the miscellaneous rocks piled over the grave, and that they were neither ritual objects nor mortuary offerings. This case of the "sacred metates" dragged through the courts, with the taxpayers paying the state prosecutors and the archaeologist defending himself at his own expense. Eventually the state won the case. The sacred metates, deposited for safekeeping in a museum, have now been there for over a year past the end of the court proceedings, without any Indian expressing any interest in reclaiming them for appropriate funeral ceremonies.

Having identified himself as a troublemaker, Van Horn was targeted for further persecution by the state attorney general's office, which filed a felony suit against him for a subsequent project. His crime: during a contract study bits of burned bone were found near Indio; these were sent to a laboratory for identification and some were identified as parts of a human cremation, at which point Van Horn sent all the materials to the property owner and notified him of his obligations to the Native American Heritage Commission. The Riverside County prosecutor argued that archaeologists had no legal right to remove or study any human remains, and that the archaeologist and his employee were therefore guilty of a felony, even though their study was compelled by another set of laws and their contract was to comply with those laws. After a three-day hearing, Presiding Judge B. J. Bjork ruled that there was no eveidence of a felony, and the case was thrown out. However, the archaeologists are out the thousands of dollars they spent to defend themselves (once) again the Indian interests were entirely supported by the taxpayers).

California is as usual in the forefront on this issue, but several other states have legislation governing Indian claims for museum materials, and President Bush recently signed a federal bill dealing with this matter. It may be that the federal legislation will reach a middle ground addressing the legitimate concerns of all factions. However, the basic question remains whether evidences of ancient history are to be preserved in the public interest, or whether they are private property--or exclusively the property of special-interest groups.

Mr. Meighan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA.

COPYRIGHT 1991 National Review, Inc.
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