Bury my bones at Wounded Knee

National Review, May 27, 1991 by 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.