Sunday, Dec. 26, 1999

Politics of the past: Scientists, tribes still at odds over Kennewick Man bones

By Mike Lee Herald staff writer

In the end, Kennewick Man's bones are about power.

After all the lawyers, archaeologists, tribes and judges have had their say, the ancient remains found in the Columbia River three years ago are about politics.

They are about who owns the past.

And they are about who will control the future.

"There is a political and moral significance to the controversy over Kennewick Man that goes to the heart of intercultural relations between Native American and non-Native American people in the United States," said Rebecca Tsosie, executive director of the Indian Legal Program at Arizona State University.

"The ultimate disposition of Kennewick Man will say a great deal about the status of Native American peoples in this country."

In the meantime, the Kennewick skeleton - discovered accidentally in 1996 and dated at 9,200 years old - has disrupted an uneasy power balance in a discipline that's attempting to understand New World origins.

While there are certainly instances of cooperation, Bonnichsen said there are a number of "red hot cells" where friction between different groups, disciplines and purposes threatens future study of the past.

Joe Watkins, an archaeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in Oklahoma, agrees. "The archaeological and American Indian communities are tied tail-to-tail like two wildcats, screeching and fighting and spitting while attempting to inflict damage on each other," he said.

'Vulture culture' reformed?

In the mid-1980s, American archaeology was on the outs, largely because of its sins of the past. For decades, archaeological ethics paid little attention to American Indian beliefs or values and archaeologists found themselves vilified in a society increasingly concerned with multiculturalism.

Bradley Lepper, curator at the Ohio Historical Society, admits some historical archaeological practices amounted to "little more than grave robbing."

It's also widely held that some white scientists of the past maintained that American Indians were inferior to justify U.S. wars and treaty violations.

Bonnichsen, in contrast, downplays the political nature of his discipline. "Science should be conducted to uncover the truth for all people for all time," he said in a court document. "It should not be used for political purposes or to validate a preconceived position."

Whatever the intentions of scientists, American Indians protested in the 1970s against the "vulture culture" of science and the perceived threat to their ancestral remains.

That anger produced some results in the 1980s, and in the early 1990s it resulted on the national level with passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA.

Tsosie called it "one of the only statutes in the history of the United States to affirmatively recognize and protect the cultural claims of Native people."

But what many viewed as a basic human rights law didn't end the matter - either ethically or legally.

The spirit of the law hasn't filtered down as far as it should, said Keith Kintigh, president of the Society for American Archaeology. "There remain significant numbers of scientists who still don't get it," he said. "They just don't get the fact that Indians are sincerely concerned about issues surrounding repatriation and must (be) taken seriously as interested parties."

On the legal front, the government still has not adopted standards for what to do with remains that aren't culturally linked to modern people - the very issue that Kennewick Man appears to demand an answer to.

Federal agencies dealt with the easier aspects of the NAGPRA law first, deferring regulations on unaffiliated remains to the end. Until that work is finished, the controversy remains.

Deb Huglin, a California archaeologist who works with tribes to protect and obtain remains, says "displacement genocide tactics" are still at the core of American archaeology practiced by agencies and universities.

She said having the Department of the Interior oversee NAGPRA was like giving an abused child to a pedophile for protection.

"Most of what goes on in anthropology ... is entirely hypothetical," Huglin charged. "They are running with their imaginations ... and making up these stories ... to support this propaganda that there was a migration. They are trying to say that if somebody else migrated, it's OK for us to migrate and invade."

In other words, if American Indians displaced the original New World residents, their legal claims against the whites who displaced them theoretically would be weakened.

"Some tribal groups see (the Kennewick Man case) as another attempt to take our standing as aboriginal," said Watkins, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "They see it ... as a political move to make them second-comers."

Public policy draws fire

Federal officials and lawyers are at the center of a building storm over policies for handling ancient remains.

The most complex and controversial question is how to handle ancient remains like Kennewick Man, which probably can't be culturally linked to modern people. That's the category where the government doesn't have answers.

Even if it did, chances are good that those rules wouldn't settle the matter. Scientists say federal officials read the law how they want to, while tribes complain that the government tells them what they want to hear and then does something else.

"Each of the communities thinks the fight is unfair and each thinks the public policy has given the other the advantage," said Jo Ann Harris, a Manhattan trial lawyer and anthropology expert.

"Please do something," Harris asked of government officials in late October during a large archaeology conference in Santa Fe, N.M. "Do something that makes sense to all concerned."

Frank McManamon, chief archaeologist of the National Park Service, said his agency is trying. And he said disagreements about the interpretation of congressional rules haven't stopped archaeology. "Science, even within the context of NAGPRA, still gets done," he said.

One of the major criteria to determine ownership of ancient remains is based on time, something many scientists say is clearly unreasonable, but which tribes maintain should remain the basis of the law.

Remains older than the arrival of Columbus in 1492 are considered by the government legally "Native American" and property of the tribes - even if they don't show a biological or cultural relation to modern people.

However, he said, "Our current understanding of biological and cultural evolution calls into question the validity of any claim to a relationship of direct descent between any particular modern person or group and human remains older than 400 or 500 years."

Religious leaders of Northwest tribes don't have any doubt. They claim their people were created on the land and have always been here. That, of course, pits two fundamental American values - freedom of religion and freedom of inquiry - at odds in this case.

"In some quarters," said Alan Schneider, lawyer for the scientists who want to study Kennewick Man, "science is viewed as merely another means for generating and asserting power. However, the critics of science have yet to propose a viable alternative that is not simply a pretext for fantasy and unverifiable storytelling."

Don Sampson, former chairman of the Umatillas' board, said in a 1997 paper that the tribes don't reject science, but use it "every day to protect our people and our land." The Umatillas, for example, helped create a training program at Hanford's Hazardous Materials Management and Emergency Response training center.

The multifaceted HAMMER program is designed as a training ground for amateurs and a challenging course for accomplished scientists - plus police officers, government agencies and tribal members who want to learn about locating cultural sites using cutting-edge technologies that don't disturb the soil.

Discoveries multiply unrest

Into this unrest around American archaeology jumped Kennewick Man and a host of other ancient skeletons - about 20 of which are dated at more than 8,000 years old.

Most off those, said Bonnichsen, contain too little information to be useful, and only one has as complete of a cranium as Kennewick Man. That makes him a Rosetta stone to archaeologists, many of whom agree with Bonnichsen that "every possible piece of information must be obtained and evaluated" from the skeleton.

So it's hardly surprising that scientists are willing to dig in and fight for Kennewick Man.

Early this fall, two skeletons - known as the Minnesota Woman and Browns Valley Man - were turned over to the Sioux in Minnesota, along with roughly 1,000 other remains, some of which dated back 9,000 years, said Cleone Hawkinson, a physical anthropologist in Portland who helped form Friends of America's Past.

Many scientists strenuously objected to the September action because the Sioux are relative newcomers to the area and the bones - much like Kennewick Man's - were not shown to be related to modern people.

"They are the ultimate opportunity to learn from our elders," bemoaned Doug Owsley, head of physical anthropology for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

But for American Indians, such events mark major victories. Since NAGPRA passed, museums have started to repatriate more than 100 collections.

In May, for instance, the remains of more than 2,000 American Indians and "scores of cultural objects" were returned to the ancient pueblo of Pecos, N.M. According to the National Park Service, it was the largest repatriation in U.S. history, drawing hundreds of people to celebrate the reburial.

For the 17 tribes represented, it was a high point for NAGPRA - especially after the school admitted that as many as 20,000 Indian bones has been burned in an incinerator for diseased animal bones, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

Concerned by what they perceive as threats to study of the continent's prehistory, Friends of America's Past formed in 1998. "If we remain silent, we will never see the full or fair picture of the past," Hawkinson said. "If we remain silent, government bureaucracies will continue to block the studies that are important to our understanding of prehistory."

At least some tribes don't buy the scientists' line that NAGPRA threatens archaeology. "In reality, it only requires them to work with the tribes, not exclude the tribes as in the past," Minthorn said.

Scientists, tribes seek link

If the Santa Fe conference was any indication, tribes and scientists have quite a ways to go before joining hands. Watkins was the only American Indian asked to talk about the peopling of the New World, and he figures he's probably one of only a dozen American Indians with doctorates in archaeology.

Kintigh, with the Society for American Archaeology, said the lack of American Indian voices hurts science. "It is not that Indians need a forum," he said. "It is scientists who will benefit from listening to them."

Regionally, Watkins said, tribes and archaeologists have generally solid working relationships, and the talk in Santa Fe seemed to favor follow-up regional meetings to bring the parties together.

But it will take a deep commitment by both sides to forge a national trust.

For one reason, there is no single American Indian view of ancient remains. Northwest tribes demand that Kennewick Man be reburied, following their customs. But the Choctaw put skulls of their elders on display in charnel houses, or crypts, as a way for the living to meet with the dead.

Also, there are significant differences in how tribes deal with NAGPRA. For instance, Doug Owsley, one of those who sued the government for the right to study Kennewick Man, has studied remains for several tribes who want to know if they are related to ancient finds.

To complicate matters, tribes with potential claims don't always agree about what should be done, nor do tribal members necessarily agree with religious and political leaders.

All the differences are magnified in the Kennewick case, in which each side has too much invested to ever back down.

Said Forrest Fenn, organizer of the Santa Fe conference, "The answer that we get here is going to tell us what we are going to be doing for the next 50 years."