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

[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.

[laparque]

As a teen I visited several Ohio "mound builders* sites, luckily w/o human graves displayed. The narrative in the 70s-80s was still that these were a different, lost civilization, rather than the direct ancestors of the peoples that were removed in the early 1800s. Why? Because they had developed permanent sedentary communities and even ritual burial structures, something that no one saw the Shawnee do. In other words, cultural practices were seen as inherent in a race and defining of that race, rather than as practices that are adopted or abandoned as circumstances require. But we now know that Spanish-brought epidemic disease wiped out most of the native population of places like Ohio 2 centuries before English settlers started drifting in. Obviously that caused some major lifestyle changes for the comparatively few that were left. My point: even those who respected and honored the mound builders perpetuated a false “lost civilization” narrative that was in effect an act of forced erasure of indigenous history and a denial of the sophisticated cultural heritage of the indigenous societies that were removed. It was as if we decreed that no descendants of the Romans survived the fall of Rome, and that the people of Italy were some different race, incapable of having built Rome.

[ekcambridge]

@tacoma

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

I plan to go with human composting if it’s still an option. To heck with “plant a tree”, I want to be a tree, at least metaphorically.

[bob_y]

I grew up in Peoria, Illinois, which just north of Dixon Mounds. In 1963, my seventh grade class took a field trip to Dixon Mounds and then onto Springfield for the Lincoln sites.

The graves were open then. I have no memory that anyone thought this was inappropriate. In fact, I thought then that life along this part of the Illinois River was pretty good: good farm land and the Illinois River was one of the most productive fresh water fisheries in his part of the world.

Of course, it was inappropriate. I’m glad to see them closed to the public. I find the new museum excellent. It not only discusses what life was like along the Illinois River before the Europeans came but notes what was happening in the rest of the world.

[Horsewhipple]

on PBS Rick Steves did a segment on Italy. He took a tour of catacombs and one featured hundreds of fully clothed skeletal remains of priests and others, set along walls, upright, standing. And rows and rows of skulls. The rector guiding the tour proudly claimed that he venerated the occupants and visited them daily.
I am reminded of one of Hemingway’s stories where a husband kept his recently decdeased wife through the winter in his shed, and visited her…not wishing to part company while the winter cold kept her remains tolerably well.
The key differences here were that these actions were done by the survivors…not some hostile race who dug them up.

[waldenpond]

I was a teenager growing up in Galesburg, IL in the 1950’s and remember well the field trips to the Dickson Mounds. Interestingly, we all thought they were the “Dixon Mounds,” even though the mounds were over 150 miles from Dixon, IL and had nothing to do with that town. My memories of the mounds exhibit are ones of disgust and horror at the baring of those graves, exposing hundreds of skeletons of human beings. In those days, of course, Indians, like other people of color, were considered subhuman and the field trips were viewed as a fun outing and a chance to see something “cool.” At least, however slowly, we are making some progress in civilization.