RETURN OF THE NATIVE?

ORIGIN OF SOME ARTIFACTS CLAIMED BY INDIANS HOTLY DISPUTED

Teddy Totem's return to his ancestral village was a solemn and joyful occasion.

The bear totem pole from the Tlingit village of Angoon, Alaska, vanished from there around 1908 and by 1914 it was installed as a campus mascot at Colorado State Teacher's College in Greeley, now the University of Northern Colorado. Students began calling it ``Teddy Totem.''

In 2001, Teddy Totem's origin was identified through an old photograph showing him in front of a house in Angoon, and preparations began to send him home. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, Indian tribes are entitled to ask for return of cultural items, including ``human remains, funerary items, sacred items or objects of cultural patrimony,'' as the National Park Service says on its NAGPRA Web site.

Whether or not NAGPRA strictly speaking applies to team mascots -- Teddy wasn't in a museum, he was in the atrium of the student center -- he clearly had a home to go to, and it was entirely in the spirit of the act to let him go. A Tlingit delegation came to Colorado in October to fetch him, and they took home as well a shaman's oyster catcher rattle, an eagle dagger and a blanket with a raven design, all from the Koshare Indian museum in La Junta, and a ceremonial headdress from the Logan Museum in Beloit, Wis.

The incident is worth recounting because it illustrates both how the Repatriation Act was intended to work, and how it does work when the items in question are clearly linked culturally to a particular tribe at a particular time.

However, it doesn't work at all well when the link is unclear or nonexistent. There are several examples, but the best known is Kennewick Man, a nearly complete skeleton discovered in 1996 along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash. Forensic anthropologist James Chatters did the initial analysis of the remains, and observed that the characteristics of the skeleton were unlike those of the Native Americans who live in the area now. In fact, the contemporary people who most closely resemble him are the Ainu in Japan.

He also noticed that there was a 2-inch-long spear point embedded in the hipbone, which led the local coroner to have the bones dated. They proved to be 9,300 to 9,500 years old. Only a few skeletons that old have ever been found in North America.

Chatters has written about the discovery in a book, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans. Just days after the unexpected scientific results came back, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took the bones into its possession. Several local Indian tribes demanded the bones be turned over to them for reburial, under NAGPRA, and Corps officials announced they would do that.

Scientists sued for the right to study the body, and Kennewick Man has been in court ever since. In 2002, U.S. Magistrate John Jelderks ruled in favor of the scientists, saying that the law required proof of cultural affiliation with a tribe, and the government had not met that standard. (There's an account of the trial in No Bone Unturned, by Jeff Benedict.) Jelderks' decision is on appeal. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco held hearings in September, and is expected to issue its ruling next year. Meanwhile, research is on hold.

``It's taken six years, and lots of money,'' said Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, ``to do something we could have done in two or three days.''

Of course, if DNA studies had been done six years ago, they would not have been as informative as they would be today, and less so now than in the future. For that reason, Stanford says, even if the bones are eventually reburied, samples should be kept for further analysis as the science develops.

But if the bones are not in fact associated with a particular tribe, they aren't covered by the Repatriation Act, and there is no reason to hand them back to anybody.

The tribes naturally do not accept that argument. NAGPRA allows for ``cultural evidence'' of affiliation, which can include oral tradition.

Armand Mintour, a Umatilla, has said, ``Our oral history goes back 10,000 years. We know how time began and how Indian people were created. They can say whatever they want, the scientists. They are being disrespectful'' (quoted in Skull Wars, by David Hurst Thomas).

But that is an absurdly broad definition of ``cultural evidence.'' Oral history is seldom reliable over millennia, and though people have every right to believe it for religious or spiritual reasons, they don't have the right to impose their beliefs on others who don't share them.

You will often read that the federal government has determined that Kennewick Man was a Native American, and thus a proper subject for NAGPRA. But that's a misleading way of stating the matter, because the government implicitly defined ``Native American'' as anyone who was here before Columbus arrived in 1492.

That's a preposterous definition. The Vikings were in North America before Columbus, and if one of them is one day unearthed at L'Anse aux Meadows he will still be a Viking, not an American Indian.

The law says that Native American ``means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States.''

Clearly the law applies to Totem Teddy's people, the Tlingit, and it was the right thing as well as the legal thing to return him to his people. Equally clearly, there is no evidence that Kennewick Man, whoever his people were, is related to any tribe or culture that is currently indigenous to the United States. He and his story should belong to all Americans.

INFOBOX

For further reading

No Bone Unturned: The Adventures of a Top Smithsonian Forensic Scientist and the Legal Battle for America's Oldest Skeletons. By Jeff Benedict. Harper Co1llins, 2003.

Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans. By James C. Chatters. Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Riddle of the Bones: Politics, Science, Race, and the Story of Kennewick Man. By Roger Downey. Copernicus, 2000.

Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. By David Hurst Thomas. Basic Books, 2000