Bones of contention

The ongoing debate over where the first Americans came from has anthropologists battling with Native Americans, white supremacists and the Army Corps of Engineers.

By Juno Gregory

Apr 22, 2002 | While researching her book "Bones: Discovering the First Americans" in 1999, Canadian journalist Elaine Dewar came across a mystery. She couldn't figure out why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was so anxious to stop scientists from examining a human skeleton that had recently been discovered on Corps property near Kennewick, Wash. None of the Native American tribes in the area had yet laid formal claim to the remains under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires the return of all Native American remains found on federal lands to their local descendants (if any).

But almost as soon as the Corps heard that a preliminary carbon date on the bones had come in at about 8,400 years before present (or B.P., the standard notation scientists use for dates derived from carbon isotopes), they sent local law enforcement to seize the skeleton (which came to be called "Kennewick Man") from the forensics laboratory where it was being investigated. They even went so far as to methodically bury the site of the find -- at considerable taxpayer expense -- under tons of boulders and riprap, effectively preventing any further excavation. Why?

It wasn't as if the U.S. Army had suddenly gotten religion. They certainly didn't believe the local tribes' stories about the restless spirits of unburied Native Americans causing harm to the living. They were even less likely to be sympathetic to Native American fury with the incautious anthropologist studying the skeleton, who had dared to say in an interview with the New York Times that it appeared to him to be "Caucasoid" and not related to modern Native Americans at all. No, the Corps of Engineers wasn't stampeded by cultural huffs or woo-woo superstitions. So, Dewar surmised, there had to be another reason for the haste, the cops, the anti-scientific overkill.

At first she thought it might have something to do with a couple of federal facilities in the area: the Hanford nuclear plant and the Umatilla chemical weapons depot. "I wondered whether the Army was afraid that the soil was contaminated and that's why they covered it up," she writes in one of the early chapters of "Bones." But so much attention had already been drawn to the site, and there had been enough examination of the skeleton (and the detritus that still clung to the bones) that any contamination couldn't have been kept secret for long, no matter who had possession of the remains.

So Dewar turned to the question of stakes. What did the skeleton represent to the Corps, the scientists, the sovereign tribes of the region? Why were the bones so important? She finally discovered why the Army needed leverage with the local Native Americans, and why they effectively took the skeleton hostage. The Corps knew that when they seized Kennewick Man they seized control of the politically valuable tale the bones could tell about the nature of the earliest inhabitants of North America.

The primal story in any culture's arsenal, especially these days, is the one that might be titled "Who's on First?" These are stories that support a particular people's claim to power on the basis of their eternal ownership of a particular territory or, failing that, by proving that they possess some ascendant virtue that entitles them to displace the first squatters from a given patch of land. Much of the Old Testament, for example, tells of the battles undertaken by God's Chosen People to evict various indigenous tribes from the Promised Land, battles that, in another form, are still tearing the region apart today. It's not surprising, then, that the geography of human origins and migrations has become one of the most contentious areas in paleoanthropology, which attempts to explain the anatomical and cultural history of mankind.

"Bones" tells its own confusing, problematic story of the competing scientific theories regarding the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. And, according to Dewar, "competing" is the right word for it. She maintains that scientists cling to their own preferred stories with all the tenacity of clashing Biblical tribes. They defend their intellectual territories with weapons that should be limited to logic and hard evidence, but sometimes extend to less legitimate cudgels, like personal animosity, privileged access to research money or even outright fraud.

It doesn't help that some of the earliest physical anthropologists in North America were, as Dewar puts it, "virulent racists," intent on justifying European conquest of the continent. The huge collection of Native American remains held by the Smithsonian Institution was founded upon thousands of skulls that piled up when the surgeon general of the U.S. Army instructed troops fighting Indians on the Great Plains to cut off the heads of the dead and ship them to Washington for study. The intent was to prove by measurement and comparison that Native Americans were inferior to Caucasians.

Given that history, it's easier to understand the general Native American aversion to the anthropological study of their ancestors' remains, even leaving aside each tribe's specific religious beliefs about the proper treatment of their dead. And easy, too, to understand the concern and even outrage many Native Americans felt when Kennewick Man was purported by James Chatters, the first to study the remains, to be "Caucasoid" in character, possibly more related to prehistoric Europeans than to modern Native Americans. As anthropologist Alan Goodman wrote in the October 1997 edition of the American Anthropological Association Newsletter, Chatters' "inappropriate" racial classification of the remains led to "white supremacists ... finding support for their 'Caucasian genes-equals-civilization' scenarios."

Next Page: Claiming European rights to the New World

• View blog reactions