American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On his very first day in the New World, Christopher Columbus introduced Europe's long heritage of religious intolerance into this hemisphere. He reported on the native inhabitants he encountered on 12 October 1492: They ought to be good servants and of good intelligence. . . . I believe that they would easily be made Christians because it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, I will carry off six of them at my departure to Your Highnesses, in order that they may learn to speak. Although Columbus did not tarry long to learn more about these native people ("I do not wish to delay but to discover and go to many Islands to find gold") his legacy of Old World insensitivity toward the indigenous religions of the Western Hemisphere remains a model of behavior followed by his cultural descendants in their relations with American Indians to this day. Five hundred years later, Native Americans are still defending themselves against religious intolerance as a matter of cultural survival. Two recent Supreme Court decisions have created a growing crisis in religious liberty throughout Indian Country. These cases deny First Amendment protection for tribal religious practices that predate the founding of the United States! Many people are genuinely surprised to learn from the Supreme Court that no constitutional or statutory protection can be found for native religious freedom under American law. After all, our society prides itself on protecting individual liberties, and worship is a freedom that most Americans take for granted. By excluding tribal religions from the First Amendment and placing them in an unprotected class, these two decisions have become benchmarks in the struggle that began on 12 October 1492 between two vastly different cultures. Even now-as tribal leaders prepare to go to Congress to seek statutory protections in the legislative arena-this cultural conflict undoubtedly will cause many Americans to consider whether they want to remain the cultural descendants of Columbus or whether, after five hundred years, they should adopt some indigenous values and become more ”native” to the hemisphere in which they live.

In 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Resolution. At that time, most American Indians believed that the status of their right to practice their traditional religions was protected by that special legislation, even though in floor debate congressman Morris Udall had specifically stated that no major laws were being changed and no disruption of the existing state of affairs would take place. In the decade-and-a-half since then, Indian litigants have cited the religious freedom resolution as an indication on the part of Congress that it was federal policy, to be followed by all federal agencies, that the particular needs of traditional religious practitioners would be accommodated. In 1988, the Supreme Court turned aside the Indians of northern California, refusing to prohibit the building of a minor logging road that would ruin the high country where they held vision quests and gathered medicines (Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Assn., 485 U. S. 439 [1988]). In the spring of 1990, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Oregon did not have to present a compelling interest in order to pass legislation that would have the effect of virtually eliminating a religion, in this instance the use of peyote for religious ritual purposes (Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, -U. S.-, 108 L. Ed. 2d 876 [1990]). The consternation that has arisen among American Indians since these decisions is genuine, and many people feel betrayed by both the Congress and the Supreme Court.

Responding to a question directed to him by Francois Barbe Marbois, secretary of the French ligation in Philadelphia, regarding Indian monuments, Thomas Jefferson wrote of his investigations in opening an Indian burial mound, "I conjectured that in this barrow might have been a thousand skeletons." Although Jefferson may have been the first to dig into a burial mound, both Americans and Europeans were preoccupied with the study of racial differences between American Indians and Caucasians. The search for answers led, especially in the nineteenth century, to the collection of Indian remains and the development of American archaeology and physical anthropology. So any story about collecting Indian remains is also a narrative about these two sciences and the shifting, value-laden cultural context in which they developed. Historian of science Donna Haraway reminds us that physical anthropology is a political discourse about the body, with multiple representations; to a lesser extent, this description also may be attributed to archaeology. Accordingly, both physical anthropology and archaeology produce multiple narratives "adapted to engage in particular kinds of social struggles . . . ." Both fields create "contentious constituencies'' where, at times, certain stories or plots are privileged, while others are no longer acceptable.In recent writing, anthropologist Clifford Geertz holds similar views and acknowledges that anthropological stories-perhaps even text building itself-should be subjected to critical scrutiny. According to Geertz, the epistemological foundations of anthropology have been shaken “by a general loss of faith in received stories about the nature of representation,” and he speaks of “ethnological descriptions” as the ”describer’s descriptions, not those of the described.” The narratives produced by physical anthropology and archaeology also are the “describer’s descriptions” and are constructed out of the political and scientific discourse of an age. These narratives were considered necessary because the Indian had to be ”correctly” described and placed into the context of Western civilization. Such descriptions, however, reflected Western attitudes and Western conceptions of what it meant to be civilized. The gathering and interrogation of Indian remains-the work of nineteenth-century physical anthropology and archaeology- can be discussed only briefly here and focuses primarily on the gathering process.

Indians have a humorous story for just about every difficult situation in life. About ten years ago, when the reburial issue seemed insoluble, when Indians felt almost completely powerless in the face of the archaeological establishment and there was intense anger and frustration among both Indians and archaeologists, a story surfaced at one of the meetings held between the groups. In the story, several holy people from different tribes got together to discuss the “bone lickers”-those bizarre creatures, the archaeologists and physical anthropologists who study Indian bones. One of the undercurrents of the meeting was an often expressed fear that when the holy people themselves died, archaeologists would be especially interested in studying their bones. After some discussion about burial practices that might keep the bones from falling into the hands of the “arks,” most of the participants were at a loss as to what to do. Cremation was not the answer; for some it was a kind of spiritual suicide. No one believed hiding the bones would work either, because the ”arks,” after all, were pretty crafty about finding bones. In the end, with some resignation, the holy people concluded that, if nothing else, they at least could “get in the last word.” They all agreed that instead of being buried in the usual way, they would be buried face down, and they would have signs put on their rear ends reading, ”Archaeologist! Kiss my ass!”

As dusk fell on the evening of 4 August 1989, several Indians gathered in the courtyard of Mission San Diego. They congregated on the east side of the mission grounds near a visit a that had been built earlier that day. Inside the brush lodge, a few Indians and a priest prepared to light candles and say a rosary. One of the Indians attending the ceremony wandered off to be alone and pray. He walked into a sandy, barren Indian cemetery pocked here and there with holes and piles of earth. He stood on the south end of the holy ground to pray and to place an offering into the earth for the spirits of those Indians who had been disturbed. The sacred offering of native sage, tan sinew, and blackbird feathers was left at the site of an unfortunate event-the exhumation of approximately sixty Indian people by the Catholic church to make way for a new parish hall. The evening ceremony and night-long vigil of Kumeyaay Indians and their friends marked the beginning of the end of a heated dispute between the Indians of San Diego and the Catholic church. The controversy had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, when the parish church at Mission San Diego and the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution, began an archaeological dig on mission grounds. Professors, staff, and students at the University of San Diego inaugurated an archaeological project in 1966. Over the years, many students participated in the digs, uncovering an untold number of artifacts and pieces of bone, including those of humans. However, the church and the university repeatedly denied publicly that any human remains had ever been uncovered, despite the fact that one of the first priests-probably Luis Jayme-and at least eight soldiers of the United States Army had been unearthed. Significantly, this denial would lead church authorities and some scholars associated with the University of San Diego to claim publicly that the area of the proposed building site contained no ”cultural remains.”

Native American societies throughout the Western Hemisphere have evolved diverse practices and complex traditions around the disposition of human remains. In the Central Plains area of the United States, Indian societies historically have buried their dead on scaffolds, among the branches of trees, and in the earth. For an unknown span of centuries, the Pawnee dwelt in the Central Plains, residing in earthlodge towns along the rivers of Nebraska and Kansas until their removal to Oklahoma during the 1870s.The four bands of the Pawnee Nation once existed as separate tribes of Caddoan Indians: The Chaui, Kitkahahki, and Pitahawirata are sometimes collectively termed the South Bands; the fourth group, the Skidi, differ from the other Pawnee bands in certain aspects of their cultural heritage. Mortuary practices and associated religious traditions may have varied among the four Pawnee bands, but available information indicates the prevalence of basic similarities rather than substantive differences. Ethnographic literature, Pawnee traditions, and historical records all were consulted during preparation of this paper on the treatment of the dead by the Pawnee people. These sources show a complex heritage at work, a heritage that continues as an active presence in the lives of the Pawnee today.

INTRODUCTION Gaining equal burial protection under the law is a great concern of American Indians. The loss of this fundamental human right and the theft of tens of thousands, if not millions, of native bodies comprise only one segment of a larger pattern of mistreatment that has occurred simultaneously with forced removals, coercive assimilation, and genocide. While depriving Indians of burial rights, white society has jealously guarded its own dead through the statutory process. Until the 1970s, when growing opposition among Indians and other concerned individuals began to curb grave desecrations through the enactment of laws, many non-Indians saw nothing wrong with the practice of taking bodies and burial offerings from Indian cemeteries for scholarly study and museum display. This attitude was deeply rooted in the American past, a residual from an era of racial arrogance and ruthless territorial expansion. Yet a life story-complete with birth, kinship ties, societal roles, individual aspirations, and death-is connected with each Indian remain, regardless of whether it has been disinterred or lies within the earth. This is one of the reasons why most Indians view deceased bodies as representing human life, not as scientific data to be exploited for profit and professional development.

The policy of removing American Indian people from their traditional homelands to other locations considered by non-Indians to be more suitable forms a long and painful chapter in the history of Indian-white relations. The word itself-removal-is a negative term describing a volatile situation between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless, between the "removers" and the "removed." For the Pawnee, removal from Nebraska to Oklahoma created tremendous stress and dislocation. As the years passed, they adapted to their new home; ultimately, however, removal came to have another, even more dreadful meaning for the Pawnee than any of them could have imagined. Once they had departed Nebraska, non-Indians began removing the contents of Pawnee cemeteries, looting graves of Pawnee remains and funerary goods. Grave robbers and trophy hunters sought out abandoned Pawnee villages and included their cemeteries in their "treasure hunt" for what remained of Pawnee life in Nebraska. Amateur archaeologists continued the cultural plundering in the 1920s, systematizing their searches-even purchasing parcels of land believed to contain the remnants of Pawnee villages. In the 1930s and 1940s, Work Projects Administration personnel joined with the Nebraska State Historical Society to professionalize the activity, labeling their work archaeological excavation. By the 1950s, the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln had in its possession between five hundred and one thousand Pawnee bodies and thousands of funerary goods taken from their graves. In this sense, the Pawnee of Nebraska were “twice removed” from their homeland.

INTRODUCTION This article explores the cross-cultural repatriation conflict between Indian tribes and the museum and archaeological communities in Nebraska during the 1980s and early 1990s. It seeks to provide an understanding of the issues (and nonissues) surrounding the enactment of the nation’s first general statute requiring public museums to repatriate Indian skeletal remains and burial offerings to Indian tribes for reburial. The focus is a case study of the bitter, widely publicized dispute between the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, an indigenous Nebraska tribe. The first part of the article is an overview of the competing interests of Indian tribes and the museum and archaeological communities, as manifested in the cross-cultural conflict. The second part delineates the legal foundation of tribal repatriation efforts and Nebraska’s landmark repatriation legislation. The third part presents an overview of the processes and politics that led to the enactment of the human rights law designed to resolve the cross-cultural conflict. The fourth part summarizes the provisions of the watershed legislation. The last part focuses on the implementation of the repatriation provisions of the statute in the context of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Nebraska State Historical Society.

The carriers of cultural tradition have been the unsung heroes and heroines of Native American history. Seldom in the historical spotlight, these ordinary community members somehow managed to pass cultural traditions to the next generation, despite the political and cultural oppression surrounding their lives. We rarely read about their extraordinary accomplishments, and we know little about their motivation except that they were powerfully moved by their cultural experience to keep what they could of it alive. What survives of native heritage we owe to them-the "cultural sovereignty activists"-who believed that the death of the culture also meant the death of the people. Without their efforts, much of what is happening today to preserve and develop native culture and win respect for and protection of native cultural rights and resources would not be possible. In the past, United States policies with respect to Indian cultural rights and resources reflected the interests and assumptions of the larger society. These policies fluctuated between deliberate attempts to destroy Indian culture and efforts to use Indian language and culture as a foundation for eventual assimilation into American life. Accepting the widespread belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Indian culture was destined to disappear from the American scene, museum professionals, academics, government officials, and many Americans assumed that Indians possessed few, if any, cultural rights that needed to be recognized or respected. Similarly, Indian cultural resources were viewed as part of the public domain, for scientific study and educational purposes. As a result, collections of Indian human remains, funerary objects, sacred materials, and other cultural items came into the possession of cultural, educational, and governmental institutions, often without the knowledge or consent of native communities. However much these practices resulted in the preservation of Indian culture that might otherwise have been lost, another reality intervened-that Indian cultures changed over time rather than disappearing, and Indian tribes survived into the present century as legal and political entities with a legitimate interest in native cultural rights and resources.