From the Detroit News:
ANN ARBOR — On the wooden shelves of a University of Michigan laboratory, thousands of relics — ceramic bowls, copper beads and stone and bone tools — await the careful eyes of researchers.
The ancient burial artifacts provide rich details about vibrant cultures that hunted, fished, raised crops and traded goods throughout the Great Lakes and beyond, archaeologists say.
But a group of Native Americans led by the Saginaw Chippewa of Mount Pleasant say hundreds of human remains, and the funerary objects buried with them, are being wrongly held and they are asking U-M to return them so they can be reburied.
So far, the university has declined, in part because of the federal government’s pending adoption of new rules governing Native American remains and funerary objects.
Looming is a drawn-out fight between one of the nation’s foremost anthropology programs and one of the country’s wealthiest Native American tribes. And if successful, the Chippewa, who own the state’s largest tribal casino, intend to ask other institutions to turn over similar items.
“This is a first step. The University of Michigan was a logical move,” said Shannon Martin, director of the tribe’s Ziibiwing Center, a $9 million museum on the Chippewa’s reservation just outside Mount Pleasant. “We thought we would go with the most difficult (institution) and stake our claim and position.”
The Chippewa say the remains must be returned to the ground — head to the east, feet to the west — to allow the ancestors to complete a spiritual quest interrupted by shovels and trowels of archaeology.
“This is a spirit that has been stopped on their journey,” said David Sowmick, sergeant at arms of the Chippewa. “And we as Native peoples need to make sure that that journey is continued.”
If the debate appears to pit science against traditional religion, David Hurst Thomas said that’s wrong. Thomas, curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said it’s more simple.
“It’s about power and control of the past and who gets to tell the story of the past,” he said.
Some relics returned
For nearly two decades, federal law has governed the repatriation of ancient Native remains. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 was a compromise among scientists and Native Americans that allowed for human remains and “funerary objects” to be cataloged, identified and, in some cases, returned to Native tribes.
Under that law, U-M and Michigan State University have turned over small portions of their collections of remains and artifacts.
At issue in this dispute is that the law also allows universities to retain possession if the remains and objects are considered “culturally unidentifiable” — items that cannot be linked to an existing, federally recognized tribe. U-M’s anthropologists believe that applies to most of its Michigan-found collections.
“It goes back to a period when, really, the federally recognized tribes as we know them in the Great Lakes didn’t really exist as such prehistorically,” said John O’Shea, curator at U-M’s Museum of Anthropology. “And that makes the problem even more complicated.”
The Chippewa, for instance, didn’t move south and west into Michigan until the 1600s, O’Shea said. That would put them in the state hundreds of years after the remains and objects were buried by Native populations at the contested sites in Macomb, Lapeer and Saginaw counties.
Other Michigan tribes may have a claim on the remains, O’Shea acknowledged. But the Chippewa do not and he said their request on behalf of the tribal coalition is not allowed under the law; the specific tribe with the claim would have to make the request, he said.
“If they want to make the argument that some larger group like (a coalition) has a relationship, I would be willing to at least accept that there’s some relationship there, but the Saginaw Chippewa have no relationship to these remains directly. So I think even the term of repatriating or giving back is a misnomer. These were never theirs.”
Martin disagrees. She supports a broader — though not legally accepted — view of the ties between ancient remains and present-day Native Americans. “It’s Michigan. We’re all related.”
‘We haven’t gone away’
William Johnson sometimes is startled awake by nightmares. The curator of the Ziibiwing Center said the thought that his ancestors’ remains sit in a climate-controlled building near the U-M basketball arena — more than a mile from the objects they were buried with — makes him ill.
“It makes me sick to my stomach,” he said.
The argument that the remains at U-M are unrelated to the Chippewa doesn’t sit well with Johnson.
“What we have to understand and what we have to get the public to understand is that these tribes are still thriving and they are still here and we are not relegated to museums of natural history. These are living, breathing cultures and we haven’t gone away.”
It is a culture that has changed dramatically over the last half-century. Simon Jackson, 47, is the treasurer of the tribe. He remembers living in a tar-paper shack with an outhouse and no running water. “It was real economic strife,” he said.
Today, Jackson and his tribal peers drive late-model cars and live in spacious new homes.
“We have been blessed here with economic stability at this time,” said Joe Sowmick, 39, the tribal spokesman.
The Saginaw Chippewa are among the most successful tribes in the country and perhaps the wealthiest in Michigan. Its Soaring Eagle casino complex has fueled the development of modern health care, education and housing within the tribe. Every year, casino revenues are divided among the tribe, with every adult getting an annual check estimated at between $50,000 and $80,000.
The slots and gaming tables at Soaring Eagle generated $386 million in 2005 — roughly $32 million each month — before expenses.
Those resources have made it easier for the Chippewa to take up their fight with U-M. “We’re able to take up other issues within Indian country that other tribes cannot. They do not have the economic means to do it,” Sowmick said.
And the Chippewa have made it clear to the university that they intend to use those resources. In a letter to the regents, Sowmick said the Chippewa had hired attorneys. “And, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan has the resources to see this through to our satisfactory end,” he wrote.
But O’Shea, who has been on the national Graves Protection and Repatriation Act review committee, said the process must be followed.
Should the remains and the objects be returned before proper “cultural affiliation” is determined, they may be returned to the wrong tribe.
Instead, he said emerging technologies will likely allow scientists to glean even more information from objects the university has had for decades. Trapped within the pottery is yet more evidence. There are spores and bacteria and animal and human DNA — all untapped evidence.
“What we lose if we give away this pot,” O’Shea said, his hand running along the edges of the quart-sized bowl dated to 700 A.D., “. . . is all the layers of evidence that are in the porous matrix of the ceramic, which is why it is in a museum.”
“They have to realize that they are extremely valuable as evidence of the past and they should be maintained,” he said.
The Chippewa believe scientists have had enough time to study them. “They’ve had them so long. They’ve been poked and prodded and looked at,” Johnson said. “Physically, let them go.”
Turtle Talk 