When I die I do not care what you do with my remains. Trash pick up is Friday.
I do care what other folks care about their remains and that of their ancestors and Museums and such who have already studied the remains and will not give them up.
Because I don’t give a shit about certain means I do not have the right to tell other folks how to think or believe.
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No, they are anti-science. They argue from religion and emotion, and explicitly oppose scientific study—especially when it threatens their creationist beliefs. I’ve been following this issue since before NAGPRA. I’ve seen these folks in action for more than three decades now.
And today scholars are even getting canceled for advocating the pro-science view. It’s sad to see TPM promote this nonsense.
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I am not talking about a willy nilly approach to doing this. Putting a bounty on remains and artifacts was definitely an incentive to work in quantity and not quality. If that is a current approach, it is as wrong as it gets. I feel that remains can inform us including solidifying a cultures past so it may be recognized. But sensitivity is an absolute requirement.
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You are apparently unaware that this happens all the time, right? I mean, not specifically by Native archaeologists, of course, but archaeologists excavate gravesites and remains of ancient white people all the time. Any 9,500 year old corpse that turns up in Europe is going to get excavated, preserved, and studied. If a bulldozer in England uncovers a Roman-era cemetery, everyone’s getting dug up and handed over for analysis before the car park can be completed. If the Mayor of Rome shows up to claim the remains, he’s gonna get refused.
Hell, they just excavated Richard III’s battlefield grave site a few years back and studied his remains to their heart’s content before re-interring him in Leicester Cathedral. The Queen offered no complaint.
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Three WHOLE DECADES!! ZOMG. All the way back to the 1990s? Well, gosh, so glad no tribal issues of respect and ‘oppose the white man because :reasons:’ date back any farther than that.
Seriously, no. This is not about science, it’s about resisting further encroachment and abuses wherever they can. The religious angle is the one they’re using because it’s the one they have. You can’t push back through the legal system without using an angle the legal system can be forced to respect.
And you still haven’t demonstrated these museums have any ‘close familial connection’ that would give them a right to these remains in the first place.
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Yeah, but remember, England’s the people who refuse to give back legitimately stolen (within the last 150 years) pieces of national monuments the world over.
(Also, in case it’s not clear, that’s a bit of a jest.)
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Go see the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg sometime. It’s got one of the greatest collections of looted paintings in the world.
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One of Tony Hillerman’s novels, Talking Gods, begins in the office of a Smithsonian attorney/pr person, who has recently explained on TV the policy of “we’ll give remains back to the tribes if they can demonstrate that they’re related”.
She comes back after unpleasant publicity with Indian remains to find a Fedex box with the remains of her grandparents on her desk.
It’s one of my Hillerman favorites.
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We seem to agree that religion and emotion is driving repatriation. The difference between us is that I see that as a dangerous precedent for govt policy, and demonstrably bad for science.
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Emotion, yes. I, however, see religion as the means, not a driving factor.
And I see the government respecting the religions beliefs of its people so long as they don’t hurt anyone else, even if they think those beliefs are wrong and a little nutty as… well… The First Amendment.
And I see defusing tension as much as possible as demonstrably necessary for science, especially among populations where ‘science’ has historically been used as an excuse for extermination.
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I’m pretty certain the British Museum is on record as saying if they had to give back all their looted treasure, their museum would be empty. (Not to mention the Crown Jewels centerpiece returning to India).
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It is entirely possible those museums do NOT know enough about the remains to properly identify them, short of genetic testing. The history or details of where or when they came from might not be very useful - details weren’t the strongest suit of the era. I know there is resistance among Native Americans to genetic testing, but that is a way forward.
Another way is some sort of collaboration between institutions, the US Government, and various Nations to have some sort of central memorial, burial place, or mausoleum? This is fraught with distrust, but might work better. It would be a central Native American memorial for all tribes and our nation to help remember.
One category that I might resist are the truly ancient remains, those thousands of years old. I have a difficult time getting to ancestral ties that far back. The Native American nations and mythology and family lines almost certainly changed dozens of times since then. How many direct descendants of the Hittite empire do we have, or early Indus civilization? The unknown societies 6000 years before them? Who can claim a relationship to Otzi? At some point you need to call them world heritage treasures or artifacts, belonging to all of humanity.
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Yup, they are.
Yup, that’d absolutely be a way forward… but you have to overcome resistance that’s born of government eugenics agendas from the end of the 19th century, and the history of using very biased science to push the white supremacy agenda by the United States.
Which is also part of my point about ‘be respectful now, because you don’t know what the future holds’. Part of this current mess is a result of people in the past taking the ‘we don’t need to care about your wishes, this is for SCIENCE!’ approach.
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this
but not this - in europe they’re digging up bones all over the place and dissecting bog bodies and bombarding them with x-rays and figuring out cause of death in mass graves - europeans don’t seem to have a problem with it, because they want to find out stuff The harm is done when whites don’t want to understand that not all cultures see it that way.
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The law is poorly written, but I would call good faith effort towards compliance with its intention would be for these museums to proactively contact tribal representatives to identify who they should return the remains. If there are ambiguities or competing claims, then a collaboration group could be put together to resolve the issues, like what they do in Alaska.
Exploiting the law to retain the remains screams bad faith, but technically legal, compliance to the requirements.
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I’m not sure the example of a museum in a country currently trying to loot another one is exactly the best comparison we want to make?
Also, just cause looting another countries valuables was a very common practice up until very recently means that we should look the other way today. There were many common practices (human sacrifice, slavery, colonialism, etc) that were very common, but which we have decided to outlaw today due to how damaging they were.
Keeping looted cultural artifacts, particularly if they are human remains, is one of them. They should be returned to the descendants of the people they belong to as much as possible.
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Respect
Right, but my statement was in the context of a culture that doesn’t want their bodies disturbed—and making the point that, you know, if not for a history of centuries of disrespect, they might be a hell of a lot more willing to do so.
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Considering it was a comparison to the Royal British Museum, purveyor of fine stolen artifacts from all over the world, and active denier of ‘please return our crap’ requests… I’d say the comparison’s apt. He’s being critical of the Royal British by comparing them to the Hermitage.
Right, but some of those ‘ambiguities’ present as ‘there is seriously no way to tell which of you we should be contacting’. As for a collaboration group… that’s clearly the way forward, but sometimes people don’t want to work with folks who have competing claims… which is especially frequent once you get to remains that are more than like 7-800 years old.
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