Glynn Custred. Academic Questions. Volume 13, Issue 3, Summer 2000.
On a hot July day in 1996 two young men took a walk along the Columbia River after attending the annual hydroplane races at Kennewick, Washington. As they waded in the shallow water near the shore they came across a human skull. The men notified the authorities who sent an anthropologist to investigate. Anthropologists are routinely consulted for the identification of skeletal material. This case, however, was far from routine since it soon attracted national attention and by October had landed in a federal court.
The litigation here involves a conflict between two antithetical sets of principles and interests. On one side are the principles of open debate, freedom of scientific and scholarly inquiry, and the primacy of rational procedures in public policy. On the other side stand the narrow interests of identity politics, “postmodern” revisionism, and an increasingly anti-science bureaucracy. Such a conflict has been going on in educational and other cultural institutions for a long time. The Kennewick case, however, marks the first time that it has appeared in such a direct manner in a court of law. It also clearly illustrates the increasing politicization of culture in this country, and reveals how scholarship, scientific research, and the public good will fare if this politicization remains unchallenged.
Anthropologist James Chatters had helped the coroner with such cases before. After receiving the skull, he went to the place where the cranium had been found to look for other pieces of the skeleton. In nine separate visits he was eventually able to collect three hundred and fifty pieces of bone to assemble the almost complete skeleton of a male about five feet eight inches tall, forty to forty five years of age, and exhibiting features consistent with those of a Caucasoid. The bones were not fresh. Chatters estimated that they were at least a few decades old and probably much older. A more accurate estimate was impossible at the time since the condition of such skeletal material is more a factor of the soil in which it has lain than it is of age.
While examining the bones, Chatters found a stone projectile point lodged in the illium. It had obviously been there a long time before death since the bone had partially grown around it. Chatters also found some scattered nineteenth century artifacts at the discovery site that he assumed were associated with the skeleton. Given the apparent age of the bones, the stone projectile point, the artifacts, and the Caucasoid features, he at first thought he might be dealing with the skeleton of a nineteenth century pioneer.
Chatters sought a second opinion from anthropologist Kathrine McMillan of Central Washington State University. McMillan concurred with Chatters’s initial assessment as to the individual’s age, sex, height, and racial characteristics. What surprised them, though, was that the projectile point embedded in the skeleton’s pelvis turned out to be a type used in the Pacific Northwest not during the nineteenth century, but rather thousands of years earlier. A small portion of bone was then sent to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating. The results showed that Kennewick Man was approximately 9,300 years old. By now it was clear that the coroner was not dealing with a forensic case, nor even with a case of local antiquarian interest, but rather with an important archeological find.
The public has always been fascinated by archeology. Any news of Neanderthal Man, for example, is guaranteed a front-page story. Because of his Caucasoid features, Kennewick Man received even more attention than usual, especially since photographs of a facial reconstruction were widely published along with the news reports. Those pictures showed a middle-aged man who looked more like a European accountant than he did a Paleoindian hunter.
Diversity in America Eight Thousand Years Ago
Caucasoid however is not the same as Caucasian. Eventually anthropologist Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico was allowed to examine the skeleton. His conclusion was that Kennewick Man was not European but rather resembled south Asians and the Ainu of northeast Asia more closely than any living population. The Ainu are a rapidly disappearing people who live on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands to the north. Their features are close enough to those of Europeans that earlier anthropologists thought they might be related. More recent genetic tests, however, have failed to show any such relationship, and the genetic affiliation of the Ainu remains unclear.
Kennewick Man, however, is not alone in differing from modern Indians. In fact, skeletons found in the Americas that are older than 8,000 years resemble the Ainu and south Asians more than they do any other population, while modern American Indians show a strong resemblance to their closest relatives in north Asia (Siberians, Tibetans, Mongolians, and northern Chinese). Moreover, there is greater physical variety among the ancient skulls than there is among the crania of modern Indians. In fact the oldest skull so far discovered, found in Brazil and dubbed Luzia by anthropologists, is said to exhibit some features consistent with those of modern Africans.
These differences suggest that a shift in physical types took place around 8,000 years ago in both North and South America, thereby indicating a major genetic shift in the ancient populations of both continents. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the earlier population suggests that it had been in the Americas for a long time, long enough that genetic drift operating in small populations, and under different adaptive conditions, had already produced biological variety. The question is, What happened to that earlier population?
One possibility is that gene flows from north Asia into the New World eventually resulted in more uniform physical features on both continents. Another hypothesis holds that a more recent wave of colonizers (the north Asian ancestors of contemporary Indians) replaced the earlier aboriginal population. There are analogies elsewhere in the world that support the latter hypothesis. In ancient times a portion of northeast Asia, including all of Japan, was inhabited by people who were physically different from the Mongoloids who live there today. In Japan the Jomon, as they are called, were replaced about 3,000 years ago by ancestors of modern Japanese who brought rice cultivation to the islands. The advantages of agriculture over hunting and gathering was the adaptive edge that accounts for the eventual disappearance of the aboriginal Jomon. The Ainu remained on the remote northern islands well into modern times as a relic population retaining Jomon physical traits as well as a hunting and gathering way of life.
At about the same time, Negroid Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa began to move outward from an equatorial homeland to occupy most of sub-Saharan Africa. The Bantu’s adaptive edge was millet and sorghum cultivation and metal working. As the Bantu expanded, they replaced physically different hunting and gathering aborigines. The exception is South Africa where the descendants of the earlier population still live. These are the hunting and gathering Bushmen and the goat herding Hottentot (now collectively known as the Khoisan people) who survived in areas beyond the regions of Bantu adaptation.
The latest example of replacement and marginalization of aboriginal peoples is the global spread of Europeans that began around 1500, and which greatly altered the demographics and the cultures of vast regions of the world. The archeological record in the Americas, still very sparse and inconclusive, suggests that something similar might well have happened here around 8,000 years ago. Hunting and gathering cultures are extremely diverse. The adaptive edge necessary for the replacement of one group (as represented by Kennewick Man) by another (modern Indians), if in fact it happened that way, may have been more productive food gathering strategies, more efficient weapons, better basketry, or cloth making, anything in other words that gave one group more effective control of resources over the other.
Loring Brace is a physical anthropologist at the University of Michigan and an expert on ancient Asian populations. Brace believes that people related to the Jomon (and thus ancestral to the Ainu) arrived in America at an early age. A later wave of colonizers from north Asia, ancestors of modern Indians, gradually replaced them in most areas, but absorbed them in others. These processes, he says, produced two varieties of American Indian, one closely resembling their north Asian cousins and another with traits similar to those of the aboriginal population that it had absorbed.
Hence, Brace told reporters at the February 2000 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that “some Plains Indians don’t look like Native Americans at all.” Whatever happened, the archeological record is beginning to reveal an American prehistory far more diverse and far more complex than previously believed, thus further complicating the already puzzling story of how, when, and by whom the Americas were first occupied.
The Mystery of the First Americans
The peopling of the Americas is one of the most puzzling mysteries of archeology. For fifty years, the textbook theory held that during the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, hunters following herds of big game wandered across a land bridge that joined Asia and America, moving southward through ice-free corridors to warmer climates. Within a thousand years their descendants had reached the extreme southern tip of South America. In this way one founder population was ancestral to all American Indians on both continents at the time of European contact. In the 1980s, however, this theory was amended to include the possibility of later waves of north Asians, the last being the Eskimo who probably arrived around 6,000 years ago.
The textbook theory was supported by the close resemblance in physical traits
between north Asians and modern Indians, and by the archeological record that showed no evidence of human occupation in North America earlier than 11,500 years ago. The centerpiece of this evidence is a distinctive fluted projectile point typical of big game hunters. Since this type of point was first discovered near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1932, the people who made it and their culture have since been called Clovis.
Now, however, new archeological evidence from both North and South America shows that man has been in the New World longer than the Clovis chronology permits. First there is Luzia, the oldest human remains yet found in the Americas, discovered in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and dated at 11,500 years. Also, a number of sites in North America have been discovered which are probably older than Clovis. The most securely validated pre-Clovis site, however, is Monte Verde in southern Chile that has been dated at 12,000 years. This is 500 years earlier than the oldest Clovis site and 6,000 miles farther south.
Furthermore, the route of entry taken by the first Americans has been questioned. Recent studies suggest that the ice-free zones of North America during the late Pleistocene were not capable of supporting human populations. In addition, evidence about the paleoenvironments of Siberia, North America, and Beringia (the land bridge that joined the two during the Ice Age) indicates the presence of flora and fauna along the coast that could have sustained human populations. There is also evidence of boat use in north Asia around 30,000 years ago or earlier, and sites in Siberia reveal settlements that show that humans at a very early time were more mobile and more capable of dealing with extreme cold than once thought. It is therefore highly probable that ancient people with an Arctic maritime adaptation moved on numerous occasions from Asia to America exploiting littoral resources as far back as perhaps 40,000 years ago. Since sea levels are higher today than in ancient times, archeological sites that might prove this hypothesis now lie underwater. Prospecting for sites along water courses further inland, however, may reveal the presence of early seafarers. In fact Monte Verde might well be such a site itself.
If the peopling of the Americas occurred in multiple entries by sea and over such a long period of time, then Clovis was not the culture of the founder population, but was instead one of many cultures appearing and disappearing in America’s long and diverse prehistory. Recently Denis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and his colleague Bruce Bradley have suggested a strikingly different interpretation of Clovis and its significance. First, Stanford and Bradley observe that there are no Clovis antecedents in Siberia. Second, the earliest and the highest concentration of Clovis sites is found in the southeastern part of the United States indicating a northward and westward expansion of Clovis culture, rather than an eastward and southward expansion out of Siberia.
More important, though, is the strong similarity Stanford and Bradley have found between Clovis and Solutrean artifacts from southwestern Europe. This similarity holds not only for the blades themselves but also for their contexts. Stanford and Bradley have thus made the bold statement that Clovis may have come into the New World not from Siberia but rather from Iberia. The problem with this theory is that Solutrean culture is older than that of Clovis. Also, there is the problem of how ancient Europeans might have made it across the Atlantic to America. Given what we know about seafaring in skin boats in arctic conditions, Stanford and Bradley say that it is not impossible that ancient Europeans might have crossed the Atlantic hugging the ice-free margins of Greenland and Canada. Thus, they speculate that, while ancient Asians were entering America from the east, ancient Europeans were arriving in much the same way from the west across the Atlantic. This theory is speculative, based only on the resemblance of artifacts. Yet, Stanford and Bradley are not the only archeologists who are intrigued by the similarity of Clovis and western European assemblages and the possibilities it raises.
Genetic research may one day help solve some of the problems involved in understanding the earliest peopling of the Americas. At present such research is difficult and in its infancy. Yet, Theodore Schurr of the Genetics Department of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas, has established some interesting facts about the genetic make-up of modern and ancient populations in the New World. Shurr reports that 95 percent of living American Indians can be divided into only four mtDNA lineages. As one would expect, variants of the mtDNA found in those lineages can also be found among present day north Asians. A fifth lineage called X has also turned up among some living American Indians as well as in the remains of some prehistoric American people. Lineage X, however, is not found among Asians, although it does occur among Europeans and among some people in the Middle East.
The presence of lineage X in native America does not mean, of course, that a direct prehistoric genetic link exists between ancient America and ancient Europe (between Solutreans and Clovis people, for example) although the possibility cannot be ruled out at this point. A more probable theory, says Shurr, is that lineage X may have originated in ancient times somewhere in Eurasia. In this scenario, some carriers went west into the Middle East and Europe while others went east into Asia where lineage X eventually disappeared except in the genes of an ancient population that eventually found its way to the Americas.
One thing is certain. The more we know about America’s prehistory, the more puzzling it becomes. Data, especially human remains, are scarce and spotty. For that reason the discovery of the nearly complete 9,300-year-old skeleton of Kennewick Man was recognized as a valuable find. The Benton County coroner sent a bone sample to anthropologist David Glenn Smith at the University of California, Davis, for DNA studies. The coroner also planned to have the skeleton sent to Douglas Owsley at the Smithsonian Institution for proper curation and for further investigation. These plans, however, were stopped dead in their tracks when other more powerful forces intervened.
Who Owns the Archeological Record?
When news got out about Kennewick Man, a coalition of Indian tribes in eastern Washington State (the Umatilla, the Nez Perce, the Yakima, the Wanapum, and the Colville Confederation) demanded possession of the bones claiming that Kennewick Man was their ancestor. They made this claim despite the fact that native peoples, like populations all over the world, have moved from place to place over the last 9,000 years, and despite the obvious biological differences between Kennewick Man and ally Indian group now alive. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the discovery site, ordered the coroner to transfer the skeleton to the Corps’ facilities. From there they planned to turn the bones over to the coalition for immediate burial. The Army Corps, however, went even further. To the consternation of the coroner and the county attorney, they also demanded possession of all reports relating to Kennewick Man. Since then, they have not responded to freedom-of-information-act requests relating to this important archeological find.
The tribal coalition’s claim was made under the provisions of a law passed by Congress in 1990 called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. This law requires all institutions receiving federal money to inventory their collections and then turn them over to any tribe that can prove “cultural affiliation.” Once in the tribe’s possession, the tribe can dispose of the material in any way it sees fit. Thus the National Park service has arbitrarily declared that any cultural material older than “1492” is Native American and the property of whatever tribe lives in the vicinity of its discovery. Cultural affiliation has not been legally defined, and federal law draws no line beyond which claims can be made. It was only under the National Park Service’s interpretation of NAGPRA that the coalition made its claim.
NAGPRA expressly provides that scientific data may be used to establish cultural affiliation. The tribal coalition refused to permit such scientific study of the skeleton on “religious” grounds maintaining that physical tests would be intrusive. Several scientists then petitioned the Corps for permission to examine the bones before they were buried. The Indians protested and the Corps denied the scientists’ request. The scientists then wrote a letter to the Umatilla in an effort to open a dialogue about study of the skeleton. The Umatilla ignored the letter. The scientists, therefore, had no other choice than to sue, which they did in October of 1996. The case has been in litigation ever since. The issue to be resolved is whether scientists have a right to study archeological material discovered on public land.
This marks a radical departure from public policy that goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century. According to this policy, cultural material was considered a part of the public patrimony to be preserved in museums, open to the public and accessible to scientists who were encouraged to study it in order better to understand our national and our common human heritage. NAGPRA, together with similar laws on the state level and subsequent bureaucratic interpretation, has reversed this policy by reassigning cultural resources from the public domain and declaring them now the private property of the tribes.
There is wide agreement that tribes have a clearer claim to artifacts that form a part of their histories. Also, many Indian remains in the hands of museums are, as one anthropologist puts it, “ill gotten gains” scavenged from battlefields and looted from cemeteries in an earlier age. The intent of NAGPRA and other such legislation is thus to redress these wrongs and to recognize the proper role of the tribes in dealing with cultural resources. These principles are contested by practically no one. What is at issue is the way NAGPRA has been interpreted to cut out all interested parties except tribal activists, and the way this legislation has been extended to include culturally unaffiliated material from ancient times. This is why the Kennewick case is important and why the plaintiffs are so vigorously opposed by the federal bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic Obstruction
Since 1996 the bureaucracy, first the Army Corps and now the Department of the Interior, has done everything it could to stall and obstruct the litigation. The bureaucrats have engaged in double talk, contradiction, obfuscation, and eventually in the destruction of evidence in an attempt to prevent any scientific study of Kennewick Man and his discovery site. While the skeleton was in custody of the Army Corps of Engineers, scientists were barred from all access to the bones, yet Indians came and went apparently at will purportedly to perform “religious ceremonies.” It was eventually discovered that parts of the femurs were missing and that some bones had been “unintentionally turned over to the tribes.” Finally in October 1998, a year after its discovery, the court ordered the skeleton sent to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington for safekeeping.
In February 1996, the court rebuked the Corps of Engineers for its decision to turn over the skeleton to the claimants without first performing mandatory tests to establish cultural affiliation. The judge also noted that the Corps had refused to permit access to the scientists because of the Corps’ “commitment to the coalition.” In other words, the Corps complied with the wishes of the claimants in direct defiance of the law. The judge thus vacated the Corps’ decision to “repatriate” the skeleton and called for further review. He also issued guidelines for future action by the government. In March 1997, the government further complicated the case by splitting the decision-making process between the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior. The Department of the Interior then delegated its portion of the case to the National Park Service. Francis McManamon of the Park Service was named point man in the case for the Department of the Interior.
The White House Weighs In
The context of an archeological find is important. Scientists, therefore, requested permission to examine the Kennewick site. The Corps (which at that time exercised authority over the bones) refused the request. The tribes, however, were given permission to conduct a limited excavation. Then in December 1998, the Corps conducted its own excavation, which one observer has described as superficial. The Corps also refused to release any information about its excavation until forced to do so in January of the following year. The report, when finally released, contained only inadequate and conflicting information.
The Corps of Engineers then announced plans to destroy the site. The reason they gave was to stabilize the shore. The site lies in the congressional district of Congressman Doc Hastings who until a short time before that had lived nearby. Like others familiar with that stretch of the river, Hastings said that the bank did not need stabilizing. Moreover, the site had been registered as a national landmark and thus fell under the provisions of the National Preservation Act. Hastings then introduced a site protection bill that passed both houses of Congress. The legislation was awaiting the end of the congressional recess for action by the president when the Department of Justice summoned the Corps of Engineers to the White House to discuss what should be done next.
In April 1998, despite the passage of the site preservation bill and despite a report from the Corps’ own archeologist advising against it, the Corps dumped 500 tons of rock and gravel on the site from helicopters and layered the shore line with more than 300 tons of dirt and logs. They then planted trees on top of the newly configured terrain all at a cost to the taxpayer of $160,000. Geologist Tom Stafford said of the work that “the Corps destroyed as much of the site as fast as possible. It’s like they hit it with a nuclear bomb.” In this way the federal bureaucracy effectively shut down one line of investigation into America’s prehistory.
Misdirected Science, Harassment, and Intimidation
The court finally forced the National Park Service after much stalling to conduct the tests mandated by NAGPRA to establish cultural affiliation. Cleone Hawkinson, the court monitor for the plaintiffs, said that some of the personnel selected were inexperienced with ancient human remains, that wrong samples were taken, and that the operation was badly handled. In fact she called the entire affair a case of “misdirected science,” adding to the cost to the taxpayer a running tab of well over a million dollars and rising.
In January 2000, the government, which had blocked radiocarbon testing for almost four years, claimed that its radiocarbon dates had confirmed that the skeleton was prehistoric. The National Park Service then proclaimed that the bones were “Native American” since they are older than 1492, thus vindicating their original decision. The Park Service also ordered DNA tests, which it had resisted since 1996. The bureaucrats hoped, it would seem, that enough genetic material could be found in Kennewick Man that is consistent with that of contemporary Indians in the area that the Park Service could justify its original decision. To hedge their bets, though, McManamon told the press that the tests would be “complex and time consuming and will not provide conclusive data.” It was the tribal coalition’s turn now to complain, and complain they did, for the activists wanted no information whatsoever to become public about Kennewick Man.
James Chatters was also complaining. He claimed that he had been personally harassed by the government, intimidated by their lawyers, questioned by the FBI, and subjected to a campaign designed to ruin his business, all because he has spoken freely on an issue that an ethnic interest group with friends in high places wants to suppress. Chatters’s collection of the bones has also come under fire from some of his colleagues. They depict Chatters’s action as unprofessional because he failed to follow the strict protocols of an archeological investigation. In fact Chatters was faithfully following the very different protocol of a forensic investigation as required by his contract with the coroner. Another accusation floating around is that Chatters is a white supremacist who has perpetrated a fraud in an effort to show that whites were here before Indians. Chatters is not the only one, however, who has suffered harassment in clashes with Indian activists and their academic supporters. Another example is the case of Spirit Cave Man in Nevada.
Ethnic Politics and Censorship: The Case of Spirit Cave Man
The skull of Spirit Cave Man was discovered in a rock shelter in western Nevada in 1940, and was radiocarbon dated in 1994 at 9,400 years. Like Kennewick Man, physical features of Spirit Cave Man are different from those of modern Indians. This is revealed in a facial reconstruction that was displayed at the Nevada State Museum. Some members of a Nevada tribe, the Fallon Paiute, demanded possession of the skull. They also demanded that the museum withdraw the facial reconstruction along with all educational material relevant to the cranium.
In response, the museum administration asked staff anthropologist Amy Dancy to research the question of cultural affiliation. She found ample evidence that the Fallon Paiute had not always lived in the area, but had in fact replaced an Indian community that had lived there before their arrival. A similar story was also found in some of the tribe’s oral traditions. This is relevant since oral traditions are considered evidence in establishing cultural affiliation. Thus, Dancy concluded that there was no cultural affiliation and that the Fallon Paiute had no legitimate claim to the skull of Spirit Cave Man.
At first the museum accepted the report. Then a new governor took over the state house and the political climate began to change. Dancy was first asked to alter her report, and when she refused to do so the report was ignored. Dancy was then removed from her job and consigned to the cataloguing department. She was also prohibited from talking to anyone about the scientific facts of the case. Indian activists called her a “cultural predator” and a “racist,” and she was shunned by most of her colleagues. Finally, after twenty-nine years of service, she left the museum in frustration.
The New Regime
The shift in public policy away from public to private ownership of cultural material has created a new and expanding domain of political entrepreneurial activity at the expense of the taxpayer. For example, the federal government is paying out $2.5 million a year for “repatriation consultants” who go around the country removing items from the collections of the nation’s museums in what some regard as federally subsidized looting.
Public funds also support an army of cultural commissars who monitor excavations, censor reports, prevent the publication of photographs and data they find “objectionable,” confiscate scientific evidence, and at times impose bizarre and capricious conditions on scientific activities. Clement Meighan tells of the excavation of a 2,000-year-old Adena site in West Virginia. The authorities there agreed to turn over everything of scientific value to tribal claimants within a year. This included not only cremated human bones and artifacts, but also pollen samples, food refuse, and chipping waste. The monitors also demanded that no human remains or artifacts be touched by menstruating women and that all human remains be covered with red flannel until they could be reburied.
The latest extravagance is a demand made on behalf of the Grand Ronde tribes in Oregon for the “repatriation” of a meteorite. This is a first, since only human remains and cultural artifacts have so far been demanded under NAGPRA. If successful, this latest augmentation of the law will initiate a further expansion of demands. In fact, there is already talk of “repatriating” a copper boulder now housed at the National Museum of American History. The “Willamette Meteorite,” claimed by the Grand Ronde, is presently the center piece of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a new wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To “repatriate” the meteorite, the largest ever found in the United States, the museum would have to knock out one wall of its new building. It has thus filed a lawsuit to establish its ownership of the meteorite.
Claims made under NAGPRA have so far rested on “religious” grounds, including claims for the meteorite that, the repatriation consultant says, once had ritual significance. Most observers, however, recognize religious claims as a red herring, and one Indian activist has bluntly stated that claims on religious grounds are “B.S.” The real issue to him and to many others is sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the federal government treated the disparate bands of Indians along the settlement frontier as separate entities. As the land was settled treaties were made with many groups, and eventually reservations were set aside for their exclusive use. As the administration of Indian lands developed over the nineteenth century, a kind of limited sovereignty emerged similar to that enjoyed by county and municipal governments. In recent years court cases have begun to redefine and sharpen this concept in the direction of greater tribal autonomy.
One very lucrative advantage so far has been a 1987 Supreme Court decision that allows tribes to run gambling operations on reservation land regardless of the laws of the states in which the reservations are located. There are also indications that legal action might be undertaken for further redefinitions of Indian sovereignty potentially involving commercial fishing advantages (already a contested issue in some places), land ownership, and, in the western states, water rights. In the meantime, by vigorously pressing claims on cultural materials, the concept of sovereignty is affirmed, thus eventually strengthening claims yet to come.
Political activists, however, form only one segment of the Indian population. Indeed many tribal leaders accept artifacts and human remains only if they can be convinced there is a cultural affiliation. Other tribes simply refuse to accept such material explaining that they do not have the proper facilities to deal with them, or that higher priorities occupy their attention and the use of their resources. One measure of this indifference is the increasing amount of human remains accumulating in California’s Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento. Once cultural affiliation is established, tribes are notified where the material is stored, yet so few show up to collect it that space is becoming scarce. This has prompted an anthropologist at one of the California State universities to offer storage space at his institution to help ease the problem.
Motives for “repatriation,” especially of human remains, are not limited to political activists. Some Indians support these claims no doubt out of genuine spiritual concerns. The driving force behind the “repatriation” effort, however, is primarily political, involving the most literate, the most assimilated, and the most politically aware members (and would-be members) of the Indian population. For them and the advancement of their interests, value lies not in knowing what really happened in the past, but rather in an image of the past which best serves their purposes. In short, the interests of such activists lie not in science but rather in the defense of a political myth.
The Primacy of Myth
Any population defined as ethnic exhibits internal variability, forming in many cases nothing more than a demographic category characterized from the outside by certain cultural features. Such ethnic categories become cohesive interest groups only when a significant number of people within the category view themselves as members of a coherent ethnically defined community. At the core of such communities lies a combination of myth, memory, and symbols. Symbols mark ethnic boundaries and give visible substance to the ethnic community as it is imagined by its members. Memories are the shared body of narrative depicting the history of the people as they prefer to see themselves. And myth locates the community in time and space, explaining the present in terms of the past, and projecting both past and present into the vision of a common destiny.
Myths, memories, and symbols, therefore, serve to unify the ethnic group and to mobilize its members in pursuit of agendas advanced in its name. Myths, however, are not inherently false. What give them their mythic character are their simplicity and the manner in which they evoke emotion and promote group solidarity. Thus, it is the processes of selection, redaction, and arrangement that turn facts into myth, and history into ethnic memories.
The Indian population is divided by tribal identities and often competing tribal interests, by degrees of assimilation (usually correlated with age), by occupation, and by a growing disparity in wealth. In order to pursue ethnic politics, the demographic category “Indian” must become the new political ethnic community of “Native American,” with its own unifying myth and body of shared memories. These myths and memories are shaped from the very real historical facts of conquest and marginalization that all tribes suffered and that no Indian has entirely forgotten. Indian activists observed the success enjoyed by black political entrepreneurs who shaped their own historical grievances into a living political myth and shared memories in pressing ever expanding claims against the dominant society. Justification for these claims rests on the twin themes of permanent white guilt and perpetual minority victimhood. Indian activists thus adopted those same two themes in the same way, together with prior occupation of the land, to assert the constitutive myth of a new pan-Indian ethnically based political group.
The premise of prior occupation, however, is clouded by talk that Europeans might have been in America at the same time, or even before, modern Indians. Indeed some activists fear that such suggestions might lead to the perception that Indians are just another immigrant group, thus weakening their claims to land and natural resources. Also, the prospect that modern Indians, like Europeans, may themselves have been colonizers who replaced a racially different aboriginal population undermines both their own victimhood and the uniqueness of white culpability. Archeologists and physical anthropologists thus become very real political enemies when different possibilities of the peopling of America are discussed in an open forum. They are thus vilified and demonized as “culture vultures,” “cultural predators,” and, of course, “racists” who must be actively contested for the ownership of America’s prehistory.
Assault on Science
The essential nature of myth is that of a closed explanatory system that must remain unquestioned, stable, and invariant in its focus. Science, on the other hand, is an open system where multiple hypotheses are encouraged, where evidence is continually scrutinized, and where different theories compete with one another in an open forum of free debate. Science can therefore become detrimental to anybody’s myth. This is why defenders of political myth, when the stakes are high, must resist not only the facts and theories of science, but they must also discredit and marginalize science itself. Here is where identity politics and “postmodern” revisionism join forces.
The “postmodern” assault on science has been articulated in behalf of ethnic politics in a number of cases. Most explicitly relevant to the Kennewick case, however, is a law review article written by Indian activist Rebecca Tsosie from the College of Law at Arizona State University. Tsosie says that science constitutes only one way of knowing. Given “the multicultural nature of our democracy,” she says, the “values of science are to be considered along with the cultural and religious values of citizens in making legal determination that affects our mutual interests” (618). However, since science views “the pursuit of knowledge as of paramount value,” science indicates “a judgment” that “other values are less relevant” (617), placing Indian claimants at a disadvantage.
This includes claims made by Indians to ancient material that are not premised on science but instead on “a complex intersection of values which implicates those of religion, cultural identity and political recognition” (614). Since science “largely serves the interests of the majority society and will impinge on divergent interests of minority groups” (618), it is therefore unfair to require Indian claimants to “articulate” their claims within the “Anglo-American cultural institutional framework.” Moreover, the “burden of proof appears to rest with the contemporary tribes,” which “suggests a level of archeological corroboration that is likely beyond the tribe’s ability to prove” (603). In other words, when it comes to Indian claims, the rational basis of both science and the law should be set aside so that they can win an otherwise unwinnable argument.
It gets even worse for science, however, for it turns out that science is actually “a tool of Western imperialism” which has been used to “subjugate and oppress racial groups throughout history.” Archeology as a science is thus tainted since it developed “in a context of colonialism” (629). Claims that ancient cultural material belongs to our common human heritage are, according to Tsosie, also oppressive since “this type of claim constitutes an imperialistic endeavor that seems more consistent with the colonial history of science than its modern-day proponents want to admit” (632). Thus “an equal playing field is possible only if scientific claims are not broadly privileged” (631). What began as a plea for parity based on the “postmodern” premise of extreme relativity has emerged as a plea for discounting science altogether when it interferes with the agenda of identity politics.
But what about the Indian premises of “religion” and “culture” when claiming ancient material? In this respect, Clement Meighan observes that “most Indians no longer hold these beliefs,” and their “knowledge of the traditions and beliefs of their ancestors is derived in large part, though not wholly, from the collections and scholarship that the activists among them are seeking to destroy.” Post hoc revisionism based on scientifically derived knowledge also makes an appearance when useful.
For example, Ryan Heavy Head, the consultant claiming the Willamette Meteorite for the Grand Ronde tribes, says “the meteorite is very significant to their religion. Every time a new crop was to be brought in, whether it was salmon or acorns, the participants would have to bathe in the waters [which had collected in the crevices] of the meteorite.” He goes on to say, “the meteorite was from space. It was considered such a holy place because it embodied all three realms of creation: earth, water and sky.” Naomi Schaeffer, however, asks how Indians in Oregon thousands of years ago knew the meteorite came from space, since it fell in Canada and was eventually carried to Oregon by glacial action. Since no one in Oregon saw it fall, and since there was no crater to indicate that it had fallen from the sky, Schaeffer says that “Heavy Head and his colleagues are drawing on modern science to retroactively attach cosmic significance to the Willamette Meteorite.”
Some have suggested that the meteorite, if “repatriated” will end up as the centerpiece of the Grand Ronde casino. Heavy Head assures us that this will not be the case, although there is nothing to prevent it from happening once the Grand Ronde take possession. There are also accusations that some “repatriated” material has found its way on to the collector’s market. This accusation has not been substantiated, yet it certainly bears looking into in an effort to find out what happens to cultural resources once they leave the public domain and become privatized.
The supremacy of tradition and invented tradition over science is not some theoretical suggestion argued in a law review, but, in fact, it defines current policy. A candid admission of this fact is found in a response to a letter that Clement Meighan had written in 1993 to the Resource Management Division of the California Department of Parks and Recreation complaining about the neglect of science and historical fact in repatriation decisions. The division chief wrote back: “You have pointed out that many of the decisions made in respect to repatriation are not based on valid, scientific principles. We have not claimed they are; the repatriation decision itself is based on political, religious, and ethical issues.” Indeed, we have seen in some detail just how this policy has been pursued by federal bureaucracies in the case of Kennewick Man, and, on the state level in the case of Spirit Cave Man. These, however, are only the most publicized cases of what has become the standard operating procedure for the new partnership of identity politics and bureaucratic government.
The Role of the Bureaucracy
It is clear why ethnic political entrepreneurs seek to undermine the rational procedures underlying both science and the law. The question is, why are government bureaucracies so intent on helping them? There are several answers to this question. First, some administrators are quick to comply with, or even act in anticipation of, demands of political entrepreneurs simply to avoid trouble. This was apparently the case at the Nevada State Museum in the Spirit Cave Man incident. Avoidance of trouble may also lie behind the rapid unilateral divestment of valuable collections in 1988 before any demands were made, a move led by Stanford University and soon followed by the Universities of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. In such cases it appears that many administrators regard the management function of cultural institutions as more important than their service function. In other words, defending the institution and its mission is simply not worth the administrative hassle.
When management problems outweigh capitulation, one would expect some resistance from cultural institutions. This is apparently what happened in the case of the Willamette Meteorite since “repatriation” means that the American Museum of Natural History will have to knock out an entire wall of their new $210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space in order to comply. The “repatriation consultant” who filed the claim, however, knows the game very well and has promised to keep management hassle as high as possible for as long as he can by threatening a civil suit if he loses in court.
Another reason for bureaucratic compliance was clearly articulated by Frank McManamon, point man for the government in the Kennewick case, and by Lois Schiffer, attorney for the United States Justice Department, who spoke at a session on public policy and archeology at a conference in October 1999. McManamon explained that ever since the Antiquities Act of 1906 federal policy had given priority to science and education in dealing with the past. Under this long-standing policy, he said, cultural materials were open to public view in museums and scientists were encouraged to study them and expand our knowledge of the past for the common good. Today, said McManamon, that primacy is challenged by other interests that are also making claims on the archeological record. These claimants, he said, include not only Indian activists but also “high end collectors” of Indian artifacts for the lucrative international market. Lois Schiffer seconded this observation when she said that today there is a “multiplicity of competing interests which policy must take into account.” The controversy that archeologists now face is a direct outcome of this new competition, she observed, and the ownership of the past is at stake.
These statements are a clear admission of the fact that the public good has been abandoned in federal policy, and that science and education have been demoted to the status of competitors forced to scramble alongside narrow commercial and short-sighted political interests for whatever they can get from the bureaucrats. Speaking in the same session, Alan Schneider, attorney for the plaintiffs in the Kennewick case, observed that this new arrangement has placed bureaucracy in a pivotal position in a dynamic in which science is at a decided disadvantage. The scientific enterprise, he says, involves verification, competing hypotheses, and peer review in order to arrive at sound conclusions. The process of bureaucratic selection of scientists and projects therefore disrupts this enterprise, often leading to distortion and to unsound conclusions.
Business and other special interest lobbies often form policy networks with bureaucracies, associations that take on a dynamic in pursuit of mutually beneficial interests. Bureaucracies benefit in such arrangements since bureaucracies, by their very nature, have a tendency both to expand and to strengthen their position within government. Expansion is achieved by multiplying the responsibilities already mandated by the original mission, by incorporating new responsibilities into the old structure, and by a combination of the two. In this way bureaucracies strengthen the relationship within government (what Max Weber called Satrapenherrschaft) and bureaucratic behavior tends “to find its own goals and enlarge its discretion at the expense of its sovereign, the body politic.”
Examples of how this works to the detriment of the public is seen in policy networks between industry and regulatory agencies and in the case of bureaucracies that fund research. In the latter case, a certain theory or paradigm can become quickly entrenched in which grants to test hypotheses or gather data that might challenge the paradigm are denied. In the areas of medical research and public health and safety, the networks created by regulatory and funding agencies with outside interests can become a public danger.
The politicization of culture has indeed opened the door to bureaucratic expansion creating what Meighan described as a “corps of bureaucrats to interpret and administer the legislation.” It is also creating a policy network of regulators, funding agencies, and practitioners of identity politics to form a bureaucratic complex with a strong postmodern ethos.
What Can Be Done?
If the plaintiffs in the Kennewick case lose, the ethnic political entrepreneurs and their bureaucratic allies will be unrestrained and this branch of scholarship will eventually be shut down. If the plaintiffs win, the bureaucratic complex will simply adapt its politics of identity to find another way to advance its interests, employing the unlimited resources provided by the taxpayer. For those alarmed by this new reality and willing to contest it, the first thing to do is to recognize what is happening, what is at stake, and what the opponents of this new trend are up against. Scholarship and science are guaranteed losers in the world of politicized culture unless at least some scholars and scientists respond to new conditions. This means action in the courts, as in the case of the current litigation over Kennewick Man, and lobbying for more equitable legislation.
Most academics pay so little attention to what is going on around them that ground will shift before they realize what is happening. Moreover, the sophistry of those within the academy arguing from the postmodern perspective can be made to sound reasonable enough. Scholars so numbed by the deceptive drumbeat of cultural relativism may actually support in specific cases what they would reject if they realized the long-term consequences. Others in the profession are reluctant to speak up for fear of jeopardizing current or future funding. For those archeologists employed by Indian tribes, by the bureaucracy, and by cultural institutions susceptible to political pressure, silence or active support of identity politics is a simple matter of job security. And then, of course, there is the constant “deconstruction” of science and sound scholarship by those in the academy who reject rationality for the pursuit of pure ideological politics under the rubrics of “postmodernism” and “multiculturalism.”
Those willing to resist the politicization of culture, and the new regime it is creating, cannot look to their colleagues for much help. Their real strength lies not in their profession, in their professional organizations, or in the academy, but rather with public opinion. The vast majority of the public strongly supports a policy of public access and freedom of inquiry. This includes many Indians who want their children and grandchildren to know who their ancestors were and to hear the fascinating true story of how they lived. Moreover there are thousands of avocational archeologists across the country who are strong supporters of academic archeology, people who would no doubt volunteer resources and their active participation in defending our common human heritage against exploitation by ethnic political entrepreneurs and self-aggrandizing bureaucracies.
Concerned archeologists and anthropologists might begin by establishing a new professional organization dedicated to advancing objective science and scholarship and thus the public interest. This they can do through legislation, as well as in the courts of law and public opinion. The Kennewick case is so clearly defined and so well documented that it could become the starting point for such an enterprise. This and similar cases could also become an issue for those concerned about political correctness, postmodern revisionism, and multiculturalism in the university and increasingly in the primary and secondary schools of the country. The same transforming forces are at work in both places—in public policy and in the nation’s system of education—to control the past in the interests of a political myth of disunity and divisiveness. If left unchecked these trends will eventually result in a dumbed down population, an increase in social tension, and an enhanced bureaucratic government to the detriment of everyone concerned except of course the political entrepreneurs and bureaucrats.