How A Tourist Attraction Displaying The Open Graves Of Native Americans Became A State-Run Museum

[jnbenson]

Disinterred is one thing. There could be any number of reasons why persons remains would need to e disinterred. I don’t even have to much trouble with studying the persons remains. But displaying them has always seemed like un-needed disrespect. Most of us know what skeletal remains look like, note that human remains were found keep it private and return the remains to the most appropriate local authority. This kind of activity has made Native Americans rightfully hostile to allowing examination of remains in all cases. Which makes it harder for us (all of us) to understand that pre-history.

What happened here is very much like the display people in the Victorian era. Villages of “primitive” people displayed for entertainment and to make the viewer feel superior.

[docmoore]

Exceptionally inappropriate, certainly by today’s standards (not to mention the standards of the 1990s), is the legacy of sooooo much of our history.

[bitinginsect]

My family visited here in a trip when I was a kid. The experience was what I imagine visiting the Egyptian pyramids must be like. I’d seen mummies in museums before and this seemed similar. Not excusing this display in any way. Different time.

[lastroth]

Elvis at Graceland. And yes I’ve been to Graceland, what surprised me is how much that house reminded me of my grandparents’ house. Bigger, but the color scheme and some pieces were the same. I can pretty much say unequivocally that they weren’t copying him.

[globalguy]

@discobot

“The burials were in my backyard. I liked those people.”

How to be racist without realizing it? Systemic Racism!

[dont]

@greenman66

His kids will probably bury him on the golf course next to Ivanka and charge admission. There are millions of people in this country stupid enough to pay for it.

Will there be an extra charge to pee on his grave? Asking for a friend.

[glowgirl]

@lastroth

We have to remember that attitudes and practices around cemeteries have changed through the years.

Yep! The West has a long and fascinating history of mucking about with the dead, and we’ve always displayed them for public consumption–even today, we still have open casket funerals. Oh, did you know that a common pastime in fin-de-siecle Paris was to stop by the city morgue to look at the bodies fished out of the Seine? People are weird.

It seems to me that this particular display of remains did not spring from racism so much as this human fascination with death. I also suspect that the important issue here was the age of the remains, rather than the cultural origins: that is, these people had been dead long enough to not seem real.

Had this family stumbled across the graves of a bunch of super-wayward Vikings, I doubt that they would have had any compunction about putting those remains on display, either, because once you’ve been dead hundreds of years, you’re no longer one of us.

We need to remember that white people have had no problem putting white people on display, either, although the particular contexts for this have varied over time. Basically, this is a culture clash between two different philosophies over the proper handling of the dead, and I think we need to avoid the tiresome lambasting of Western traditions simply because they are Western.

In any case, the Dixon Mound remains probably have no archaeological value anymore, so it seems to me that reburying them in situ should be an easy decision to make.

[lastroth]

After my Mom died I was going through some really, really old family photos from her side of the family. There were pictures of dead relatives laid out in the parlor of someone’s house. I asked my sister if she’d was OK if I destroyed them. I remember seeing them as a kid and they creeped me out then, but since these folks were 3 generations removed from me I didn’t feel the need to keep them.
I did keep the pictures of their cats. (cats were alive in the pix)

[glowgirl]

@ealleniii

The entire idea of the dead being disinterred and put on display is wrong.

Why? We have a long tradition in the West of disinterring saints in order to venerate them–the bone chips of an ancestress of mine are on display somewhere (the British Museum?) and I think it’s awesome.

And here’s a quandary: is it only bad when Westerners dig up and display bodies, or will the same level of opprobrium be leveled at non-Western traditions, such as those of the Toraja people? What about shrunken heads? They were always meant for public display, and the dead certainly didn’t consent to any of it, so why is it okay for the headhunting tribes to display them, but not Western museums?

Displaying the dead is not a simple black or white issue, and there are a lot of different cultural issues at play. And once we have piously stripped the museums of all remains (plenty of people will cavil against the display of animal remains as well), will that be enough? What about photos? Are photos of these remains also disrespectful, or, given their remove, are they okay? What about photos of bodies that are displayed in museums, even if the bodies themselves were buried?

Our ancient tradition of memento mori–keeping Death before our eyes–is at war with our modern impulse to scrub death out of our lives as thoroughly as we can. I don’t see how allowing either side a total victory is beneficial, so it seems that the trick is finding accomodations: we’re not going to dig up our relatives and live with them, nor are we going to pretend that death is a neat, sanitary thing that happens when no one is looking.

[glowgirl]

@lastroth

I asked my sister if she’d was OK if I destroyed them.

Oh, man, those were some awesome historical artefacts that you destroyed. Victorian death rituals are very interesting, especially how they used newfangled technology to memorialize the dead (which was not considered morbid Back In the Day).

Were they by chance the only extant photos of those relatives? Given the expense of formal portraiture, it was not unusual that the only photo ever taken of someone was at their death–even shots of entire families with, say, a dead sibling in a coffin.

It was all part and parcel with other awesome traditions such as hair art, which strikes me as actually being more morbid than decorously arranged family death photos. I suppose because the hair once belonged to living people and photos are just witnesses?

I once told my husband that I wanted to buy some Victorian hairwork and he absolutely shut that down immediately: even if it were never displayed, just knowing that it was in the house would be enough to creep him out.

So, I knew that the 19th century wicker cooling coffin was out of the question–plus, I wasn’t sure how I would display something so unwieldy, so I guess it was just as well?

[lastroth]

No we did have pix of when they were alive. But the funny thing is there are more cat pix than live or dead people pix. How long has this Hive community been around?

[john_adams]

Don’t forget that it is possible to be an exceptional asshole.

[john_adams]

Just pee?

[ekcambridge]

@glowgirl

And here’s a quandary: is it only bad when Westerners dig up and display bodies, or will the same level of opprobrium be leveled at non-Western traditions

I know your focus is on the different rituals around death in different cultures, but I think the salient fact is that Mr. Dickson bought land from someone who claimed ownership of it only 3 years after the native occupants were forcibly removed by the US government under threat of annihilation.

Whatever death traditions Dickson may have believed in, there was NO WAY any of the white people involved were not aware of whose remains they were displaying.

[darrtown]

Thifs is a difficult story to comment on.

[tacoma]

yup…just like people who travel to graceland to worship ELVIS…an entertainer.

[tacoma]

@glowgirl

Basically, this is a culture clash between two different philosophies over the proper handling of the dead, and I think we need to avoid the tiresome lambasting of Western traditions simply because they are Western.

IMO. cremation is the most civilized way to deal with a corpse.

[tacoma]

@ekcambridge

Whatever death traditions Dickson may have believed in, there was NO WAY any of the white people involved were not aware of whose remains they were displaying.

yes, if they hadn’t been dead natives…i doubt he would have displayed them.

[tacoma]

@jnbenson

Sometimes I find it hard to reconcile our “exceptionalism” with human decency.

Americans are ‘exceptional’ only in their own minds…

[darrtown]

@jnbenson

Sometimes I find it hard to reconcile our “exceptionalism” with human decency.

Simple human decency is in very short supply, especially in two areas… politics and international relations.