Column: Despite law, Native bones sit on shelves

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Bones? What bones?

I recently asked a spokesman for the nation's largest public power company about thousands of American Indian bones and funeral objects in the federal corporation's possession. The Tennessee Valley Authority spokesman seemed to think I was pulling his leg when I told him the TVA had bones belonging to more than 8,000 individual Indians and nearly 21,000 funeral objects. The bones and items were removed from Native archaelogical and burial sites as part of the TVA's economic development project spanning seven states.

“Where do we keep them?” said John Moulton, TVA's senior news bureau manager. “Do we have them buried somewhere?” He said he's worked with the TVA for 22 years and never heard such a story.

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The TVA's bone collection is part of a recently released report that outlines enforcement and oversight problems among federal agencies charged to abide by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a law passed 18 years ago in November.

The “Federal Agency Implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act” report concludes government agencies have “no apparent enforcement mechanisms or incentives” to comply with NAGPRA.

Today, agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and TVA have more than 118,000 human remains in their possession. The bones are stockpiled on shelves at universities and museums across the country. After making an inquiry, the TVA spokesman learned that the power company stores most Indian remains at the University of Tennessee and the University of Alabama.

The bones end up in museums after being unearthed in federal works projects in areas where Native people had inhabited the land and buried their dead for hundreds of generations. The TVA project spans a Southeast territory once home to the former Muscogee Confederacy, a union of tribes like the present-day Choctaw, Chickasaw and Alabama Coushatta.

“The raiding of people's graves in the Southeast is rampant,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee who helped write NAGPRA. “Even though there are laws to stop it, people in official positions ignore them.

“It's reflective of a hide-the-ball, hide-the-body game that's going on all over the country with major universities, like the entire UC system in California,” Harjo said. “They are stockpiling these bodies to do tests when tests are allowable. I believe they are doing testing now and that's what they want all these bodies for. They are looking for remains that will prove this crazy theory that Europeans are the first people in the Western Hemisphere. It's white supremacists looking for their roots.”

Scientific testing and the looting of Indian graves forced Congress to pass NAGPRA to assure Native people “the proper respect in death that they enjoyed in life,” wrote Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, in the NAGPRA report. While the act sets the stage for repatriation, more work needs to be done “to ensure Native Americans are accorded the same respect and dignity that other Americans have rightly come to take for granted once their loved ones are laid to rest,” said Inouye.

Meanwhile, federal agencies aren't rushing forward to return or identify bones in their collection.

“So far, none of the 18 tribes who have a cultural interest in this region have made any kind of formal request for repatriation,” said Moulton of the TVA. Less than 5 percent of the TVA's bone collection has been labeled as “culturally affiliated,” a NAGPRA requirement. “You can't repatriate the remains until you know what culture they are from,” said Moulton.

The NAGPRA compliance report was researched by the Makah Indian Tribe and the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers. It is available at www.nathpo.org/nagpra.html. The group offered eight pages of recommendations to improve the process, ranging from statutory changes to compliance audits.

Tribes around the country have always felt federal agencies weren't dealing with them in good faith, said Bambi Krauss, executive director of NATHPO. “The report substantiated those feelings,” she said.

“Our people didn't stand in line to deliver our ancestors in boxes to the Smithsonian,” said Krauss. “Most people in the United States don't hand over their relatives. Most people in the world believe there is something sacred about the dead.”

Reporter Jodi Rave can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at jodi.rave@lee.net.