Update on the Alabama Sam's Club controversy: Law offers less protection for American Indian sites

[Adsos Letter]

Source: The Anniston Star
Dan Whisenhunt
Staff Writer

OXFORD — In Alabama, American Indian burial sites don't have as much protection as other graves and memorials.

If someone knowingly invades a grave created in the last few hundred years it's a felony. But it isn't if you destroy a far older American Indian burial site on your property, officials with the Alabama Historical Commission say.

There have been at least two attempts to change the law to include mound structures and remove the distinction but both have failed, according to archaeologists familiar with the situation. They say the recent controversy over a stone mound in Oxford shows why the law needs revision.

Under the current law the City of Oxford didn't have to hire the University of Alabama for a study of a stone mound behind the Oxford Exchange. And the archaeologists who performed the study didn't have to send the study to the Historical Commission for review, a move that highlighted the commission's disagreement with the report's findings.

The mound is estimated to be 1,000 years old and of American Indian construction. It was scheduled for demolition. The dirt underneath would have become fill for a Sam's Club. A private landowner now says the dirt is coming from his property. By all appearances a contractor hired by the city's Commercial Development Authority has stopped work there.

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This article deserves a read, and some support for the legislation to broaden the protection of Native American sites. Please weigh in in the comments section; those hoping to protect this site could use some support.

[csziggy]

1. I thought there was a federal law that protected Native American sites

Especially if there were human remains found. Here:

Native American Graves Protection Act
Renee Kosslak

Excerpted from: Renee Kosslak, The Native American Graves Protection And Repatriation Act: The Death Knell For Scientific Study? , 24 American Indian Law Review 129-151, 129-133, 151 (2000)

On November 23, 1990, President George {H. W.} Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This legislation is the result of decades of effort by American Indians to protect the burial sites of their ancestors against grave desecration and to recover the remains of ancestors and sacred cultural objects in the possession or under the control of federal agencies and museums.

The enactment of NAGPRA is historically significant because it represents a fundamental change in social attitudes toward Native people by museum curators, the scientific community, and Congress. NAGPRA's enactment followed more than a century of mistreatment of native peoples' ancestral dead by non- native people. In enacting NAGPRA, Congress attempted to "strike a balance between the interest in scientific examination of skeletal remains and the recognition that Native Americans, like people from every culture around the world, have a religious and spiritual reverence for the remains of their ancestors." The recent discovery of a nine-thousand-year-old human skeleton on the Columbia River, the Kennewick Man, indicates just how difficult it will be to strike a balance among the diametrically opposed interests of American Indians, on the one hand, and museums, scientists, and the public on the other, who believe that analysis of the past provides a key to the future.

The Kennewick Man has fueled a heated controversy between scientists and American Indians. Scientists who study American prehistory view the discovery of the Kennewick Man as an event of great historical and anthropological significance, and believe that much can be learned from a detailed study of his remains. Plans to study the Kennewick Man by archaeologists, however, were blocked by the Umatilla Indians who formally claimed the Kennewick Man's remains under NAGPRA. The Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) granted the Umatillas' request. The Umatillas announced they were going to rebury the remains of Kennewick Man in a secret place, where they would never again be available for study. The Umatillas released a written statement in response to the public outcry over the reburial plans:

Our elders have taught us that once a body goes in the ground, it is meant to stay there until the end of time.... We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.... Some scientists say that if this individual is not studied further, we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our history. We already know our history. It is passed on to us through our elders and through our religious practices.

The Kennewick Man is now at the center of a legal controversy, the resolution of which will determine the course of American archaeology.

The legal controversy over the remains of the Kennewick Man exposes a fundamental weakness in NAGPRA regarding the disposition of ancient human remains where the ancestral link with present-day American Indians may be questionable. NAGPRA provides little guidance for ascertaining which American Indian tribe, if any, should have control or ownership over culturally unidentified remains. Many American Indians believe that the tribe claiming the remains should have the right to prohibit or to allow research according to their customs. However, the language of the Act and the legislative history surrounding it suggest that the intent was not to ban scientific research, but to achieve the following objectives:

(1) to repatriate American Indian remains and cultural items that were stored in museum and agency warehouses, or were on display as exhibits;

(2) to prohibit, with limited exceptions, the intentional excavation of American Indian graves and * cultural items; and

(3) to suppress illegal trafficking in American Indian remains and artifacts.

Yet, many feel that, as a result of NAGPRA, less will be learned about prehistoric peoples in the years to come.

More: http://academic.udayton.edu/Race/03justice/NALR007.htm

Why was this federal law not enforced?

[Adsos Letter]

4. This is the best i can come up with from the article:

Apparently, it was determined that no burials were at this site, which I assume is required in connection with the cultural artifacts provision of the law you cited, and from the article:

"Rhinehart said federal protection laws would apply if there was a federal connection to a project on private land, such as a permit or federal funding."

I don't know the laws regarding these matters, but it frustrates me no end that cultural sites are not better protected; out of respect for descendants, and the loss of anthropological information.

[csziggy]

5. The article I cited lists "cultural items" as being protected

I think somebody fell down on this one big time.

[Adsos Letter]

2. I suppose it would help if I included the link...

http://www.annistonstar.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Law+offers+less+protection+for+American+Indian+sites%20&id=3513345-Law+offers+less+protection+for+American+Indian+sites&instance=home_lead_story

[Doremus]

3. K&R and also wondering why. nt