Native Americans have their own agenda. It may not have been one with which we felt comfortable initially, but we soon saw how important it was to them. Some Native Americans recognise the political strength the new laws on repatriation of their ancestors ’ bones have given them, but, for the most part, it goes deeper than that. The pain and anguish they feel over the appropriation of their tribal remains is very real.
Scientist are not blind to this. What we wanted to find out was how they could reconcile their beliefs with those of the Indians.
Danielle Peck and Alex Seaborne
Producers
NARRATOR (SARA KESTELMAN)
In the back rooms of museums and universities across America lie the hidden reminders of genocide. Over the past 150 years the bones of tens of thousands of American Indians have accumulated in the name of science.
SUZAN HARJO (National Congress of American Indians, 1984–1989)
We were treated like collections of toy whistles and butterflies, and we were simply pressed between pages of other people’s history.
NARRATOR
During the colonisation of North America, the bones of its original inhabitants were regarded as little more than scientific curiosities. Archaeologists and anthropologists have collected and studied them at will. Now the Native Americans want their ances
tors back.
DR ETHNE BARNES (Wichita State University)
This is going to be a terrible loss of knowledge. To me it’s just like burning books.
DR KARL REINHARD (University of Nebraska)
The message is that anthropologists have been deaf for too long to Native American concerns, and now they’ll have to listen.
MARIA PEARSON (Yankton Sioux)
This is where it all began, back in 1971. My husband, John Pearson, was construction engineer in charge of rebuilding Highway 34, and it was when they found a cemetery. It was part of a village at the turn of the century. My husband came in from work and
he says, ‘Honey, you’re going to be really upset when I tell you what happened at work today,’ and he told me that they had taken 26 white people out of the graves. And I said, ‘Who did that?’, and he said, ‘The state archaeologist.’ He said, ‘That’s his
job, and we called him in to do this. He took them in new caskets to the local cemetery for reburial.’ But he said they took the Indian girl and her baby and put their remains in a box and took her to Iowa city for study. And I said, ‘That’s discriminatio
n. If they were all buried at the same time then they should have studied the 26 white people too.’
When I went out to pray that night I heard a tingling sound that came through almost like crystal, and I heard my grandma saying, ‘I told you, girl, you would have to stand up for what you believe in.’ And she said, ‘You must protect where your ancestors lie.’
NARRATOR
The following morning Maria made the journey to the state Capitol to see the Governor of Iowa.
MARIA PEARSON
If I was going to go for advice to anybody I would have went to my chief, and he is supposed to be the chief in charge of everybody in Iowa, so I went to see him. I walked right into the Capitol building and right up to the Governor’s office. I happened t
o look up, and the Governor was peeking at me around the corner of the door, and I thought: well, he can’t be too bad. When I entered the room the Governor was standing in front of his desk, and he said, ‘Well, Running Moccasins, have a seat.’ And I said,
‘No thank you, I can stand for what I have to say to you.’ He said, ‘Well then, how can I help you?’ I said, ‘You can give me back my people’s bones and you can quit digging them up.’
NARRATOR
Maria Pearson’s personal battle caught the public imagination, and in
1976 the state of Iowa passed the first law in America protecting Indian
burial sites. Law after law followed in other states, but the legislation
was particularly tough in California.
DAVID VAN HORN (Consultant archaeologist)
In 1989 I was contracted to conduct an archaeological survey in Indian Wells, California. We discovered a charred area in the desert sand, maybe 18–24 inches across, and we didn’t know what it was. It clearly contained charcoal, little bits of pot shards
and tiny bone fragments. We weren’t able to identify any of the bone fragments, and so we sent them to a specialist who reported to us that those fragments were human.
Well, in the state of California we have a statute that prohibits obtaining or possessing Native American human remains or any associated artefacts, so when we found out the bones were human we went, ‘Great.’
NARRATOR
Van Horn hurriedly sent the bones back to the landowner. That, he hoped, would be the end of the matter. But a few months later he was sitting having breakfast with his family.
DAVID VAN HORN
And suddenly several figures appeared and identified themselves as agents from the District Attorney’s office, and they informed us that they were cordoning off the property and that they were going to conduct a search. They proceeded to ransack the entir
e house – they went through all of our artefact collection, all of our computer discs, and they confiscated a few archaeological materials from the laboratory. Finally, after about four hours, they left.
NARRATOR
David van Horn was charged with criminal possession of Native American remains. The crime carries a prison sentence of three years. In his defence he called expert witnesses. They testified he could not possibly have known the tiny bone fragments were hum
an just from looking at them on site. The judge eventually agreed, and the case was thrown out of court.
DAVID VAN HORN
I paid USD 18,000 for my own defence, plus I lost the archaeological collection, and this made me think to myself: why am I even trying to do archaeology? And ultimately I concluded that I should probably leave archaeology, because Californian law was act
ually hobbling archaeological research to such a serious extent that it was no longer worth doing.
NARRATOR
So David van Horn gave up. He left archaeology to run a bar on the East Coast.
The laws that drove him out didn’t just cripple field archaeology, they also switched attention to the thousands of remains held by museums across the country. Some of them had been collected during the very earliest days of colonisation.
PROFESSOR LARRY ZIMMERMAN (World Archaeological Congress)
Sometimes it’s said that American archaeology is a colonial archaeology, and in fact I think from some perspectives it really is. When the colonists came they encountered people they didn’t understand, were puzzled about, and those people were in the way.
So archaeology became part of the whole structure of the American colonies. And one of the things that they had to do was to try to move people off the lands, and in order to do that they had to somehow declare that these people were not the owners of th
e land.
NARRATOR
As the settlers moved west, they discovered hundreds of mounds and other sophisticated earthworks. All sorts of improbable theories about the mound builders sprang up: they were survivors from the Lost City of Atlantis, or Hindus; the Egyptians, Phoenicia
ns or Mongols. Every ancient culture could have built the mounds, it seemed, but the Native Americans themselves.
Soon people began to dig up the mounds to test these ideas, and the remains they found were collected. In time, they were forced to accept the Indians were the mound builders, but by then, another more racist line of research had been conceived.
LARRY ZIMMERMAN
Samuel Morton, who was a medical doctor hired by a hospital in Philadelphia, began to study the remains that he was finding – not just of Indians but of other races as well – and began collections to try to figure out what the levels of intelligence were
of the peoples that were living around the world. So he put out calls to a number of different individuals and institutions asking them to collect remains for him, but particularly the skulls.
NARRATOR
Morton argued that bigger brains meant greater intelligence. He made hundreds of measurements, but his results were totally predictable: Caucasians came out on top, Indians were ranked third, and Africans were dismissed as the least intelligent of all. Hi
s work had a major influence on the collection of Indian remains. And following him, in the name of science, came the army.
EXTRACTS FROM SURGEON GENERAL’S LETTER
The officers of the medical staff are informed that a craniological collection was commenced last . . . The chief purpose had in view in forming this collection is to aid in the progress . . . will evince even greater zeal in collecting for their own muse
ums . . . It is chiefly desired to procure a sufficiently large series of adult crania of the principal Indian tribes to furnish accurate average measurements. By order of the Surgeon General, September 1st, 1868.
NARRATOR
That single request resulted in the collection of some 4,000 skulls.
Brought to the point of destruction by starvation, war and disease, Native Americans were seen as a doomed people. A collecting frenzy began, driven by the romantic notion that a vanishing culture could be saved. Dozens of museums were built to house the
collections, where the remains have rested until now.
SUZAN HARJO
I began working with various museums, not for them, but approaching them to attempt to recover some of these people and objects, and to do decent things, just on the principle that people have a right to get buried and stay buried, and people have a right
to worship with the objects that help them achieve their religious goals.
NARRATOR
In 1985 the Smithsonian Natural History Museum began an inventory of its human remains. The results were staggering. It held the bones of more than 18,000 Native Americans.
SUZAN HARJO
That provided great impetus for me to – at all costs – have these people put to rest. As a matter of strategy it seemed that the Smithsonian was king of the hill, and that if we went for the giant then others would fall, which is eventually what happened.
We struck an agreement with the Smithsonian in 1989 on repatriation, and 11 months later we were able to strike an agreement with the ten major museums with Indian collections, and with the scientific community organisations, that resulted in the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
NARRATOR
The new law is beginning to bite. By the end of 1995 American institutions must have scoured their collections and published inventories. This isn’t an academic exercise. The most controversial part of the law is repatriation: the bones have to go back to
the tribes. The fear is when they go, so will a valuable database.
ETHNE BARNES
I think this is a very dark age for science, for anthropology, right now – and for the Native American. And I really sympathise with the Native American. I feel like they’re losing a part of their history.
NARRATOR
For decades anthropologists have been trying to understand how Native Americans first spread across the continent. Their complicated migration routes are still uncertain, but a new way of looking at the bones may help resolve the question. It focuses on m
inor genetic defects.
ETHNE BARNES
For instance, in this sacrum – the sacrum is the base of the spine, that the hip bones connect to – you notice that there is an opening on the back which extends all the way through. Well this shouldn’t be there, because normally these two edges will come
together and fuse. In this normal sacrum you can see that’s what has happened. We do know that this opening is genetically controlled, so therefore this makes a very good genetic marker when we’re looking at populations and comparing them.
NARRATOR
There are about 80 such defects, all controlled by genes. The theory is: if one group of people share a pattern of defects with another group, it means they share the same genes, so they have a common origin. To test her technique, Ethne Barnes started wi
th four villages in the American south-west where other evidence suggested their inhabitants were related. But did the bones agree?
ETHNE BARNES
What I found was that they did share a number of defects, similar patterns, showing that they were genetically related. For example, the back of the skull: normally you don’t see so many little, tiny bones in the suture here. This should be maybe just a f
ew or none at all, and this seemed to be a common trend between these four villages.
This is just the beginning – since I’ve developed this technique of looking at these minor defects. And I’ve only looked at a small number of the south-west populations. But unfortunately, because of the repatriation issue, I’m not able to proceed at this
time.
The information that we can gain from this kind of study, to me it’s very important – not only to me, to science; and I think it would be important to the Native Americans to know exactly what is going on out there, as well as across all of North America, and how do they fit in with the rest of the human community?
BRONCO LEBEAU (Repatriation Officer, Lakota Sioux)
The world view that we have for the Lakota is that we have always been here, we didn’t migrate here, we didn’t evolve here, we were created in our lands in the Pahatzapa, the Black Hills, at Wind Cave, and we reject the dominant society’s world view of th
e migration theory. When you’re talking about theories of evolution, the Lakota don’t believe in that – they believe in creation. If we want to discard – I say ‘discard’, not ‘discredit’ – discard the dominant society view, we have a right to do that. We’
re people too. We’re not biological specimens, we’re not anthropological specimens – we’re people.
NARRATOR
Repatriation is happening now, but it’s taking time. There’s a fundamental problem: where are the bones supposed to go back to?
LEON SIMPSON
(On telephone) Repatriation, how may I help you?
NARRATOR
Working out tribal affiliations is a monumental task, a full-time occupation for archaeologists: 500 recognised tribes, scores of institutions, tens of thousands of bones to be catalogued and documented.
KAREN MULDER
(On telephone) . . . I hope that they provide some information about the burials from the Seward Peninsula area, because we haven’t sorted out yet the cultural affiliation of the people that were buried there . . .
NARRATOR
It takes time. But some tribes just want the bones returned as soon as possible. In the past that conflict of interests has erupted into acrimony and accusations.
PROFESSOR RICHARD JANTZ (University of Tennessee)
We were doing an assessment of material to be repatriated, and our analysis was to assist the Smithsonian in making a decision about whether remains should be repatriated. We conducted an analysis and the results were made available to the American Indian
community, and it resulted in some very severe criticism. The analogy was made that what we had done was like what Nazi scientists had done – that we had studied material without the permission of the particular tribe. But that’s an ironic point, because
the purpose of our analysis was to ascertain whether the tribe could claim it in the first place.
DR DOUG OWSLEY (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)
It’s horrifying, because the studies that we are engaged in, we feel, can contribute a great deal of information that, if it will benefit anyone, certainly will benefit Native Americans.
NARRATOR
Despite the tense atmosphere in which many scientists are working, establishing the tribal affiliation of the remains is the top priority. Often the only evidence is from the bones themselves.
DOUG OWSLEY
One of the things that we’ve been doing in the Great Plains is working with a number of museums to document their collections before they’re reburied. There was one skull included in that collection that the documentation they had [said] that it came from
a known, tribally identified historic site. It was this skull here, and my colleague Richard took a series of measurements on the skull. Using landmarks, it allows him to accurately describe the shape and the size of the cranium.
NARRATOR
The measurements were compared to data from other skulls: white, black and American Indian. The greater the similarity, the greater the probability the skull belonged to a particular group – and in this case the skull was not Native American, it was white
.
DOUG OWSLEY
What this shows is that we need to examine each set of remains prior to repatriation so that we can accurately assess population affiliation.
NARRATOR
But the analysis can do far more than just pick out the big differences between Euro-American and Native American skulls. Even individual tribes have characteristic skull shapes. Measurement of a particular skull can identify which tribe that person proba
bly comes from – at least, that’s the theory.
DOUG OWSLEY
Recently we received a skeleton that was sent in by a police department in Nebraska, and it came from an area that was historically identified with the Omaha tribe. But when I examined the skeleton it showed a number of features that suggested it was much
older. So we took the measurements on this, suspecting that it was not associated with any of the modern groups in this area, and sent them to Richard for analysis.
NARRATOR
This time Jantz compared the skull with those from tribes now found in the Great Plains. If it matched any of them, the problems of identification would be solved.
RICHARD JANTZ
But in this case, nothing very clear popped out.
DOUG OWSLEY
So we don’t know the connections between an individual like this and how it relates to the modern groups. We don’t have a place that the remains could be sent.
BRONCO LEBEAU
There are places, there are Indian nations, that will accept what they tried to label as ‘the unclaimed’. The Lakota, my reservation, will take any and all ancestors regardless of what they say their cultural affiliation is. That’s one of the biggest cont
entions among Indian people with the scientific community, because in our culture, in our traditional ways, in our expressions of our spirituality, we have ceremonies that can identify these ancestors.
When science says, ‘You’re not related, and we can tell you why you’re not related,’ to us it’s a bunch of bunk. Where do they get off telling us who we are, are not related to? You don’t know us, you don’t know how we think, you don’t know how we feel, y
ou don’t know the justifications that we use to determine our relationships. Our relationships are developed by us, they’re held by us and they’re used by us, and we get very – I’ve got to watch my language – we get very, very angry when somebody from the
East Coast, a scientist, says: ‘No, you’re not related – I can prove you’re not related, because your skull doesn’t measure like the skull of a Blackfoot man. It’s a very, very arrogant statement to make.
NARRATOR
Arguments over tribal affiliation are a symptom of a fundamental divide. Native American culture is clashing with another set of equally entrenched beliefs.
LARRY ZIMMERMAN
Archaeologists see the artefacts as markers, and we believe that if we lose those markers, if they’re reburied or returned, we’ll somehow lose the past.
JEROME KILLS SMALL
(Giving talk to students of the University of South Dakota and children from the Dakota Sioux Red Leaf Singers) The story begins in the south about four rivers down . . .
LARRY ZIMMERMAN
Native Americans learn their past not by discovery, not by excavation or exploration, but through oral tradition. Things are passed down to them through their grandparents or other elders in their tribe.
JEROME KILLS SMALL
. . . it’s because we care for our environment. However, sometimes we overuse our medicines and our fruit, and when that begins to happen, then we have indicators that we call shungamani tutcaoyate, coyote food. It means that plants start to get bitter, o
r they’re not right to eat. It is time to move away, to let the earth replenish itself.
LARRY ZIMMERMAN
They know what their lives mean because of the oral tradition. They don’t need to try to understand what their lives and their past were like through some kind of activity like archaeologists do.
JEROME KILLS SMALL
. . . we also have the keyapi wicoyake. Most of the times nowadays we call them gossip or news or community events, maybe even just the weather. But some of them are outstanding, so we use them as our historical markers. We have ahunkankan. The ahunkankan
stories are very, very short . . .
NARRATOR
For many Native Americans the oral traditions contain all the knowledge and information they need. They simply don’t want what the scientists are offering.
SUZAN HARJO
Let’s keep in mind too that we’re not talking about rocket scientists, we’re not talking about brain surgery here, we’re talking about science in the nature of storytelling.
NARRATOR
The scientists argue their work is doing much more than merely telling the story of mankind. It’s not just a blind quest for knowledge. One line of research, they claim, does have real potential, and real benefits.
ETHNE BARNES
We’re not talking about a bunch of bones, we’re talking about living human beings that lived in the past. They aren’t here to tell their story. All we have are the human remains and the cultural items that were buried with them. From this we can reconstru
ct the living image of them, so to speak. We can also reconstruct the health problems that they had, and this can be associated with public health measures today.
NARRATOR
Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together the history of diseases by looking at the traces left on ancient bones. This discipline is known as paleopathology and it’s attracting a growing number of doctors and archaeologists from around the world. By und
erstanding the longer historical picture, they hope to gain a better insight into diseases of today. The most obvious place to start is with diseases which attack the bones directly.
There is no cure for rheumatoid arthritis and no clearly established cause. It also appears to be a modern disease, because there’s little evidence for it in Europe before the 1800s. But in America, Bruce Rothschild claims to have found traces of rheumato id arthritis on Indian bones thousands of years old. He examined Native American remains from sites all over the United States and noticed something very peculiar. Most of the oldest bones had no signs of rheumatoid arthritis at all. Those that did came f rom a well-defined area on the Tennessee river. Rothschild suggests that the disease remained there until the 14th century, when it spread and was carried back to Europe by white traders.
DR BRUCE ROTHSCHILD (The Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio)
There’s only one thing that can work of that type of pattern. Genetics doesn’t work that fast. Genetics may affect to some extent who gets the disease, but only to a limited extent, and it is really a matter of being in contact with the appropriate vector
. Now whether that’s a micro-organism, or whether it’s a allergen, is a question that is the question, I believe.
NARRATOR
If he’s right, examining this area may reveal the vector that triggers rheumatoid arthritis. A discovery like that could lead to a vaccine. But as yet his basic premise is still open to doubt.
Paul Dieppe and Juliet Rogers think they’ve found tantalising evidence of rheumatoid arthritis in British skeletons dating well before trade links with America were established. If they’re right, Rothschild’s theory would be demolished, and the value of h
is work on American Indian remains would evaporate.
PROFESSOR PAUL DIEPPE (Bristol Royal Infirmary)
I would be a bit sceptical that in just one part of the States this thing suddenly arose. We’re looking at a lot of other issues here. There’s intriguing data from Africa and from other places about the way that rheumatoid arthritis might be evolving and
changing, and I think the idea that just one thing happened suddenly in one part of America is actually a bit naïve.
NARRATOR
The problem with paleopathology is that it’s open to disagreement. Put two scientists to work on the same bone and they could easily come to completely different conclusions. With this uncertainty in the science, it’s not surprising that Native Americans
are sceptical. They’re not convinced that research on their ancestors will help them. But it’s hoped a recent breakthrough in England might finally persuade them of the value of research.
DR MARK SPIGELMAN (University College London)
What we did – and we were the first to do it – was to find and extract bacterial DNA from ancient bones, bones that had been infected in the past.
DR JOHN STANFORD (University College London)
And it was really the signs on these bones that they had been infected with tubercle bacilli, or TB, that led us to particularly consider looking for these particular organisms.
JOHN STANFORD
We looked at the bone and thought how could we take samples without spoiling them as museum models. The idea of pushing a fine probe or needle into the middle of the bone from a rather worn area on the outside, and then tapping dust out from inside and an
alysing that, seemed the obvious approach.
(In the laboratory) A really important piece of scientific apparatus – one of my paper clips.
(Interview) We had a go at first with a paper clip and then with something more sophisticated, and came up with a simple technique for getting a sample and yet still leaving a good museum specimen.
MARK SPIGELMAN
(In the laboratory) Going to have a bash at it? . . . That’s it.
JOHN STANFORD
Yes, that’s quite a good sample.
MARK SPIGELMAN
Bit more there. Excellent. That’s probably all we need.
(Interview) In retrospect I must tell you I think the paper clip is the ideal instrument.
The importance of the work is that we are now able to look at and examine even small pieces of ancient bacterial genetic material. It means we can now compare and contrast the ancient with the modern – we can look for things like how things have changed i
n the bacterium, because bugs happen to have a fluctuating level of infectivity. And if we can show that there are specific changes during periods when the organism is more infective, there is hope that this may be applied in a therapeutic sense one day.
BRONCO LEBEAU
For the Lakota to even consider a benefit in the DNA analysis of our ancestors, all we’re asking is: show it, prove it. Who are you going to save, that’s the question? Why would you try and offer something to us that (1) we believe has no merit to us, (2)
it has no relationship to us, and (3) we simply don’t want it. We keep saying no. What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?
NARRATOR
Today almost everything possible is done to avoid digging up Indian remains, no matter what the cost. In Iowa, the transport department has just completed the biggest archaeological survey in its history. In the course of expanding Highway 61, they uncove
red a Native American village that had once been home to nearly 500 people.
DALE HENNING (Consultant archaeologist)
When we located the cemetery area we skimmed it off, and we uncovered the upper edge of 56 burial pits, none of which were excavated. The highway itself is going to go to my right and it will pass directly over the village site.
NARRATOR
The excavation has taken three years and more than $1.25 million to complete. Every step has been made in consultation with the Governor’s personal adviser on Indian affairs, Maria Pearson – the woman whose actions began the transformation of American arc
haeology back in the seventies.
MARIA PEARSON
(At the site) Do you have any more burials than the ones that were reported?
DALE HENNING
No, we haven’t uncovered any more at all.
MARIA PEARSON
That’s good.
NARRATOR
In line with Indian wishes, all the burial sites have been left untouched and the route changed to avoid the cemetery altogether. The graves should have been safe. But while Horizon was filming, Maria found one grave that had been vandalised.
MARIA PEARSON
This is the very story that you came to find out about – this is the desecration of one of our graves. This type of thing hurts. It’s like ripping your own heart out, and you stand and you have to watch, and you have to justify the generations . . . that
we are told to teach our children the respect of the graves. I look at this, I’m appalled – I’m not appalled but I’m devastated by the fact they could treat my ancestors like this. And then what does that mean? That we are less than human, that we have no
feelings?
NARRATOR
For the Indians of the Great Plains, the relationship with scientists has been particularly strained, but things are beginning to change.
The Omaha tribe have lived in Nebraska for 300 years. Like other Indian tribes, their ancestral remains have been kept in institutions. But instead of this leading to conflict, a collaboration has developed between the tribe and the University of Nebraska
.
DR KARL REINHARD (University of Nebraska)
They contacted the Omaha tribe, suggested repatriation of the remains. But then what happened out of that letter was quite surprising. Instead of an immediate repatriation, the Omaha suggested that the bones be studied for cultural and medical purposes.
DENNIS HASTINGS (Tribal historian, Omaha)
We are in a situation that we had to do something. The skeletal remains were at the university, they were there, and so somebody had to make that decision. I had to make that decision, because I didn’t know anybody else who would, and so I made the best d
ecision I possibly can to balance out our needs versus the science’s needs. I had to do that because the skeletal remains can speak to us, but only through science.
KARL REINHARD
The research is really directed by the Omaha tribe and primarily by the tribal council. They came to us with their concerns, and we tailored the analysis to address the problems that they wanted to have addressed.
NARRATOR
The Omaha have more than their share of problems. Unemployment is rife, health is poor and the average life-expectancy is shockingly low – just 48 years. But one disease above all others has had a devastating effect: diabetes.
KARL REINHARD
The Omaha problem with diabetes today affects at least a third of the adults, and perhaps as many as 50 per cent who have not gone in for clinical evaluation. What we could tell them is that the diabetes which emerged in the 1950s is an epidemic that resu
lts from change in diet and change in activity.
NARRATOR
The rigorous lifestyle of the Omaha’s ancestors meant they were all in very good physical shape. Activity patterns have changed dramatically, but that alone couldn’t explain the explosion in diabetes. The rest of the answer lay in diet.
KARL REINHARD
By looking specifically at the bone chemistry we were able to identify that the Omaha had a very diverse diet, but a large component of it was derived from bison – bison and buffalo hunting was a major occupation of the Omaha and provided a large componen
t of the diet, perhaps 40–60 per cent. Bison meat is very low-fat in comparison with the meats that they have available to them today. Today things have changed quite a bit. There’s a lot of processed food in the Omaha diet, a lot of sugars and a lot of f
at, especially from commodities that are supplied by the government, and also in fast foods.
NARRATOR
So a less active lifestyle combined with a fatty diet triggered diabetes in the Omaha. Reinhard’s work has helped the tribe understand the origins of this epidemic.
While he was looking at the ancestors, Reinhard began to see another pattern, a pattern that could explain the gradual decline of the Omaha nation.
In the early 1800s trade between the Omaha and Europeans took off. Initially, it brought wealth and power. Ultimately, it brought about the tribe’s downfall. The evidence came from the bones of those Omaha who had died at the time of a smallpox epidemic i n 1801.
KARL REINHARD
The change in the Omaha culture resulted not just from disease, but also a change in the economics associated with the same period, and this related primarily to women. Before the epidemic struck, they seemed to have had long lives, they were producing ma
ny children and had a health status roughly equivalent to that of men. After the epidemic, the women have much more of a role in manufacturing, and this essentially ground them down. We can see that in the bones.
Bending over consistently and scraping the hides stressed the lower back. We also see, at least in one woman, stress fractures in the upper ribs from carrying very heavy burdens. When we look at the teeth of the women, we typically see that they’re very b adly worn from chewing hides to prepare them for trade.
None of them lived past the age of 30. So they weren’t living long enough to regenerate the population, there weren’t enough children born to keep the Omaha population viable, so the population was definitely in a decline.
NARRATOR
This crisis broke up the structure of Omaha society. As the elders died, knowledge died with them. Then, at the turn of the century, the authorities began to take Native American children away from the reservation, from their families and their culture, a
nd put them into boarding schools. It was a blatant attempt to strip them of their tribal identity.
DENNIS HASTINGS
I was a product of boarding school. I went eight years to Wapperton, and Flangew four years. Being there you’re not supposed to speak your language, you’re not supposed to talk Indian and anything to do with Indian. You were severely punished for it. And
that is where I felt they took our culture away from us.
Knowing about our past is really important to us, because we need to know who we are – and when you look forward into the future, one can’t see much. What we’re trying to do is to go forward, because when I die and my daughter will be here, they won’t hav
e that sense of pride. So what I’m trying to do is establish the pride itself, to give it to them – what remnants that we have left – so they can go forward with it.
NARRATOR
Hastings hopes that the work done by Reinhard has recovered some of the knowledge lost to the tribe. Now this can be used to rebuild a sense of pride in the younger generation.
KARL REINHARD
(Giving lecture with slides) This is a breastbone or what we call the sternum. This red pigment was originally applied to skin, but as the skin decomposed the pigment then settled on the bone. This individual I call The Warrior, because he’s painted on bo
th sides of his head, so he was wearing a Mohawk-style hairdo probably, with the scalp lock, because he had two of those bone tubes with him for feathers. He was painted all the way down his chest, all the way to his arms, the tips of his fingers. So this
guy was radically painted. Next picture please.
This is an individual that was shot. When we looked at the X-rays of this bone we saw these little spicules of lead, little bits of lead, in what looks like a path of a bullet, and this is a classic gunshot wound . . .
NARRATOR
As the ancestors came to life, it became clear to Reinhard that many commonly held views of Indians were flagrant stereotypes.
KARL REINHARD
The important thing is that in the war of 1812, which is contemporaneous with when this fellow died, this kind of bullet wound invariably resulted in amputation among Euro-Americans. This is one of the bits of evidence, since the Omaha bone-setters and he
alers were able to fix this bone so that it could be used for the rest of the guy’s life. It shows that Native Americans in Omaha were more advanced in their medical practices in the 1800s than Europeans and North Americans.
NARRATOR
The remains have been reburied now. The scientists have done their research; the Omaha have had a missing part of their history restored. The project has been a success.
DENNIS HASTINGS
I felt a pressure relieved off my shoulders, because it was sort of: ‘Well, it’s over now.’ We got everything accomplished. We not only got our remains reburied, but also we got the knowledge, whereas too many other tribes today are sitting there saying ‘
We want burial.’ But in the long run they’re going to miss out, because they’re going to miss the study of their skeletal remains to show how they lived – and maybe they have something to say to them. They have to find out.
NARRATOR
Dennis Hastings hopes one day to set up a museum on the banks overlooking the Missouri dedicated to telling the story of his tribe – a museum created and managed by Indians.
In New York such a museum has just opened. The National Museum of the American Indian has reinvented itself. For nearly 100 years it has held one of the largest collections of Indian artefacts. When it moved into new premises last year, Native Americans w
ere given the task of creating the displays.
SUZAN HARJO
It is really the beginning of native peoples writing history right for the first time, and taking control of what is said about us, and how we are portrayed, and what we say. From now on what we’ve really earned is the right to screw up as badly as the wh
ite people have. (Laughs) And we will do that, I have no doubt.
NARRATOR
But the museum is more than just a display of objects. It’s a showcase for a living culture – dances, storytelling and music. Most importantly, it’s made a commitment to return key parts of its collection, because repatriation is one issue that won’t go a
way.
LARRY ZIMMERMAN
Archaeology in America is facing a crossroads. We have got to become more accountable to all the different constituencies of archaeology. We can no longer believe that we are the stewards of the past and the only stewards of the past, that we are the only
people that can speak for the past.
TRIBAL REPRESENTATIVE
(Ceremony collecting ancestors’ remains) We have come for you, we are taking you back home.
BRONCO LEBEAU
Our people have been mourning ever since we’ve had contact with the waishichupi – ever since the white people have encountered the Lakota we have been in mourning, because we have been getting killed, and after we die we have been getting dug up, and haul
ed off to institutions and hauled off to museums and stuck on shelves for analysis and stuff, and we’re in mourning.
SUZAN HARJO
We’re doing two things: we’re allowing ourselves to grieve and complete that cycle, and we’re allowing ourselves to once again be the strong and powerful people we were intended to be.
ETHNE BARNES
Science is just trying to ferret out the facts that will help us realise the whole truth and not just parts of the truth. I think we can work together; we should work together; and together we can learn a great deal from each other.
BRONCO LEBEAU
We have a responsibility to bring them home. We have accepted that responsibility to bring them home, and by God, we’re going to bring them home. Whether waishichu says, ‘We can benefit your people’, whether waishichu says, ‘We can benefit humanity’, we don’t care. What we care about are our ancestors and their belongings, and by God, we’re going to bring them home.
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