Kennewick Man and the Culture of Race

Lee DrummondCenter for Peripheral Studies

www.peripheralstudies.org

June 2016 – August 2017

Facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, from Kennewick Man:

The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton

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Kennewick Man and the Culture of Race

“Determination” of Kennewick Man: Science and Society

On April 26, 2016 US Army Brigadier General, Scott A. Spellmon of the Army Corps of Engineers signed what was to be the fourth “Native American Determination for Kennewick Man,” following three previous determinations by the Army Corps of Engineers or the Department of Interior over a twenty-year period. General Spellmon’s action is the latest episode in a complicated story that pits government functionaries (the Army Corps and DOI), assorted political figures (including a governor and several members of Congress), representatives of several Indian tribes (including the Colville, Umatilla, and Nez Perce), and the inevitable army of lawyers against state and federal courts sympathetic to the claims of a stalwart group of archeologists intent of preserving a unique find for ongoing scientific investigation. And all over a pile of bones. A complicated story, but with a simple if dramatic beginning. In July 1996 two young men, Will Thomas and David Deacy, were attending the annual hydroplane races held on the Columbia River near the town of Kennewick, Washington. Walking along the shore of a small inlet, they spotted a human skull lying in the shallow water. Thomas and Deacy called the police, who retrieved the skull and also noted the presence of other bones scattered around the immediate area. The police delivered the skull to the county coroner, who called a forensic anthropologist, James Chatters, known to him from earlier collaborations. Together the coroner and Chatters returned to the site that same day and recovered a number of bones from the inlet. Over the next several days Chatters mounted a systematic excavation of the site and retrieved some 350 bones and bone fragments, comprising a nearly complete skeleton of an adult male. Hence the discovery of Kennewick Man. Chatters’ first responsibility was to assist the coroner and police in determining whether the remains were of a crime victim. Artifacts scattered in the immediate area and the obvious weathering of the bones led him to reject that possibility in favor of one attributing the remains to those of an early settler of European origin. Proceeding with his analysis, however, Chatters abandoned that hypothesis: lodged in the subject’s pelvic bone and partially healed over with bone tissue was a two-inch projectile point belonging to a very early lithic technology, the Cascade, that disappeared from the archeological record some 7,500 years ago. Kennewick Man was very, very old.

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A small bone fragment sent to a lab at the University of California Riverside for radiocarbon testing indicated just how old: some 9,300 to 9,600 years (subsequent research has established a somewhat younger date of 8,400 to 8,700 years).

Here it is important to recognize how truly extraordinary the discovery is. Apart from the Kennewick site, there are only some forty-three U. S. locations containing human skeletal remains from the period 14,000 – 8,000 years before the present (BP). Of those, a mere dozen feature fairly complete skeletons. Gravely complicating the matter, half those have already been rendered inaccessible to archeological science by increasingly aggressive tribal “repatriation” demands. The handful that remain constrain researchers, already hard-pressed for subject matter, in a way that endangers the very future of American archeology. [See “Paleoamerican Human Remains Dated at Least 8,000 RC yr. BP,” Bradley T. Lepper. In Kennewick Man . . .] Local news outlets soon spread the word of the remarkable find. First to react were representatives of several neighboring Indian tribes, including the Umatilla and Colville, who came forward to claim the remains for reburial under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). That statute applies to Native American remains and artifacts found on tribal or federal land, and since the Army Corps of Engineers administers the banks of the Columbia River the tribal representatives made their demand to the Corps. The Corps responded in a regrettably typical heavy-handed and arbitrary fashion, taking physical possession of the remains from the local coroner and shortly thereafter accepting the tribes’ argument that Kennewick Man was indeed “Native American” and should be “repatriated.” At the time NAGPRA was just a few years old and its complexities were only beginning to make themselves felt in heated community meetings and law courts across the land. And, truth to tell, the Corps demonstrated for the first time in a series of questionable “determinations” that its engineers and government functionaries are no rocket scientists. Its prior accomplishments – draining and effectively destroying the Everglades to make room for tract homes and sugar plantations; designing a drainage system around New Orleans that contributed to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; botching a Colorado River diversion project that created the toxic sinkhole of the Salton Sea – has not instilled confidence in those who become the unwilling objects of its attentions. As one wag limned about the third boondoggle, “By the shores of Coachella, By the stinking Big Sea Waters . . .” Alarmed by the Corps’ preemptory action and the incalculable loss to science it represented, a group of archeologists led by Robson Bonnichsen petitioned its regional director to delay its decision until a careful study of Kennewick Man could be done. There was no response. With the loss imminent the archeologists filed suit with the District Court of Oregon, which found the Corps had acted without sufficient evidence and remanded the case to the Corps for further investigation. At this point, a series of

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legal battles commenced involving the Corps, the Department of the Interior, state and federal courts, the archeologists, and the tribes (whose representatives in a bit of Hollywood hyperbole had taken to calling the skeleton “The Ancient One” and insisting on ceremonial visits with the remains). Twenty years later that saga continues to unfold, with Brigadier General Spellmon’s action in April the latest installment. [Note: This was written well prior to developments a year later.] The April “Determination” document lays out the chronology of events for those who may want to chart its tortured course (see “Native American Determination for Kennewick Man”):

http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16021coll11/id/949 The legal maneuvering rests on, and in fact obscures, critical issues that extend into current debates in American society over the nature of race or ethnic identity and the status of minorities in our multiethnic society. What is it to be such-and-such? What is it to possess an elemental identity? These are the fundamental questions that surround the dispute over Kennewick Man, questions that no piece of legislation drafted by government lawyers intent on establishing hard and fast guidelines can come near resolving. At the heart of the problem is that NAGPRA treats Native American identity in the most cursory fashion while detailing in page after page the procedures to be followed in the transfer of remains and artifacts and, of course, the penalties for violating those procedures. Surveiller et punir. The Act sets out two defining criteria: Remains must be identifiably “Native American,” and must indicate “cultural affiliation.”

“Native American” means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States.

. . . “cultural affiliation” means that there is a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group.

https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/FHPL_NAGPRA.pdf 1990

The Corps’ “Determination” addresses only the first criterion and leaves unresolved the difficult matter of Kennewick Man’s “cultural affiliation.” With so little of substance in the Act’s definition of “Native American” it isn’t surprising that the Corps’ immediate response following the discovery was to take the path of least resistance. A political hot button issue had been dropped in its lap, local tribes were clamoring through the media for an end to the perceived desecration of their heritage, the skeleton was undoubtedly ancient, and then there was that projectile point buried in its hip bone. What else could Kennewick Man be but “Native American”? Let the tribes have their way and be done with it. And then along came those pesky archeologists.

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For those archeologists opposing repatriation in 1996 and for archeologists and cultural anthropologists right through today, “Native American” is a largely meaningless category that conceals more than it reveals. Perhaps contemporary analogies would be the categories, “Asian” or “European.” Those are not so much labels for meaningful ethnic or social identities as glosses that hold little meaning until they are scrutinized. For archeologists of Paleo-America that scrutiny involves filling in the mostly blank canvas of how and when the Americas were populated. Who were the migrants? Where did they come from? When did they arrive? How did they interact? Here grade school textbooks and tribal doctrine embrace a disarmingly simple scenario: At some point around 14,000 years ago an ice-free corridor opened from the Yukon into southern Canada, making it possible for those few groups who had migrated across the once-submerged land of Beringia to continue their journey southward into what is now the United States. But then the Beringia land bridge re-submerged, so no further migration was possible. Hence all North American, Central American, and South American peoples originated from a single, fairly homogeneous founder group. Research over the past couple of decades indicates that things were not nearly that simple. It is far more likely that there were waves of migration involving distinct populations and extending over hundreds of years. And there were probably different migratory routes: in addition to the inland ice-free corridor, some groups followed a coastal route, going from point to point in primitive boats (hence Arlington Springs Man, whose remains were discovered on California’s Channel Islands). Once arrived in North America, these groups proceeded to move around, interacting and interbreeding in complex ways that created diverse populations. Again, something like the inhabitants of Asia or Europe. The notion of a homogeneous founder group is ideology, not archeology. Until just a few years ago it was impossible even to begin to untangle this spider web of populations. Then something occurred that is as close as science comes to a miracle: a few geneticists learned to extract ancient DNA from remains thousands of years old and sequence its genomes. Yes, it’s more than a little reminiscent of Jurassic Park. And like those fictional fabricators of dinosaurs, the geneticists soon found their work embroiled in controversy. It is a tale shot through with irony. In 2004, eight years after the skeleton’s discovery, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Corps to allow scientific investigation of Kennewick Man. A bone fragment was tested for its DNA, but results were useless until, in 2013, a Danish team using the latest techniques in genomic analysis were able to extract and sequence Kennewick Man’s DNA (“The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature, June 18, 2015).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14625.html The highly technical results indicate that Kennewick Man’s genome is more closely related to Native American groups than to other proposed candidates, such as Polynesian,

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Ainu, and even Caucasian. This finding was cause for celebration among U. S. tribes, who took it to mean that, indeed, “Native American” was a meaningful identity of a people. Leaders of the neighboring Colville tribe in particular felt vindicated and renewed their demand for repatriation to the Corps. Following its review of the Nature findings, the Corps acceded to that demand. Hence its formal “Determination” of April of this year:

Based upon review and analysis of new information related to the skeleton known as Kennewick Man, and in particular, evidence provided by recently published DNA and skeletal analyses, I find that there is substantial evidence to determine that Kennewick Man is related to modern Native Americans from the United States. Therefore, the human remains are Native American under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), as described below.

http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16021coll11/id/949

Here we encounter the first of several ironies in this complicated and emotion-charged affair: The Colville, Umatilla and related tribes rely on the very sort of scientific investigation to bolster their claim that they have rejected from the beginning as sacrilege. Had Kennewick Man’s remains been reburied immediately as the tribes demanded, his “Native American” status would have remained a matter of belief rather than scientific fact. But just how is that newly discovered “scientific fact” interpreted in the case at hand? Again, it’s complicated. The Danish team determined that particular genetic markers corresponded fairly closely with DNA samples Colville members had volunteered. And here is a second irony: Having embraced the genomic analysis of Kennewick Man – a desecration they previously rejected – Colville individuals now allowed themselves to become experimental subjects of that same procedure. However, other genetic markers showed an affinity with far flung groups in Central and South America. One small tribe on the western Amazon, the Karitiana, showed an especially close genetic relationship. In his April “Determination” Brigadier General Spellmon attempts to thread a logical needle in interpreting the findings of the Nature article. A part is privileged over the whole. If Kennewick Man is “Native American” and if “Native American” status includes inhabitants of the United States, such as the Colville, then “Kennewick Man is related to modern North Americans from the United States. Therefore, the human remains are Native American under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act . . .” Note the crucial phrase: “from the United States.” Left unmentioned is the equally important fact that Kennewick Man is equally “related to” modern Native Americans from Central and South America.

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Here the Corps, again yielding to political pressure from the tribes and from state and national politicians, plays fast and loose with both logic and genomics. Without explicitly calling Spellmon out on this, the editors of Nature apparently felt his misuse of science was sufficiently egregious to require a response from the journal. Thus in May, hard on the April “Determination,” Nature responded:

The genome established that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans than to other global populations sampled. This was no surprise and it torpedoed fringe theories that Kennewick Man was related to Europeans or an indigenous Japanese group. But the researchers also found that some South American groups such as the Karitiana, who live deep in the Amazon, are more related to Kennewick Man than are many North American tribes, such as the Ojibwa from the Great Lakes region. Of the five tribes seeking reburial, only members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation offered their DNA for comparison. Members of this tribe were found to share a relatively close connection to Kennewick Man, but no more than some other groups from North and South America. Kennewick Man’s genetic relationship to contemporary Native Americans, including the Colville tribes, will factor into the next decision that the US government faces: whether any tribe can make a legitimate claim to his bones. To make a case, tribes will need to establish a cultural affiliation with Kennewick Man on the basis of several lines of evidence including archaeological, geographical and biological links. This is where things get tricky. Members of the Colville and the other four Washington-state tribes seeking reburial may be descendants of Kennewick Man, but so too may be lots of other groups, including some in South America. Could the Karitiana also claim the remains?

“Lessons from the Ancient One,” Nature, May 4, 2016 We now come to a third irony, which may be flagged with the question: Just how “Native American” are Native Americans? In analyzing Kennewick Man’s DNA for its affinity with contemporary Indian populations, the Danish team compared it with existing samples from a number of tribal groups and with the newly obtained samples from several Colville individuals. But there was a problem. Over the five centuries of European colonization, Indians have intermixed extensively with Europeans, Africans, and even Asians. The result of that intermixture is that any particular group or tribe contains individuals who fit the stereotype of Native American physical appearance, other individuals whom one would not characterize as Native American at all from their appearance, and many others who fall between these extremes. Genomes of that group reveal the same wide range of genetic markers from non-Native Americans. How did the

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geneticists deal with this problem? Their solution was technically ingenious, but at the same time shines a glaring new light on their results. That solution was to conceal or “mask” intrusive, non-Indian markers from their samples, so that they could compare the partial indigenous genomes of Colville and other tribes with the complete, unmasked genome of Kennewick Man.

Due to high levels of recent admixture in many Native American populations, we masked European ancestry from the Native Americans (Supplementary Information 6). No masking was done on the Kennewick Man. When we compare Kennewick Man with the worldwide panel of populations, a clear genetic similarity to Native Americans is observed both in principal components analysis (PCA) and using f3-outgroup statistics (Fig. 1a, b) . . . Given some individuals in the panel have varying degrees of European and African admixture, we masked regions in their genomes where they are not homozygous for Native American ancestry. This allowed us to focus our analysis only on the Native American component of the data and to avoid any confounding signal that non-Native American admixture may produce.

“The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature, June 18, 2015

In short, the “new information” and “substantial evidence” Spellmon cites in his “Determination” are in fact an abstract model produced in a genomics lab, a model free of “any confounding signal that non-Native American admixture may produce.” That “Native American” genome does not correspond to any living person. Ethnic intermixture has become a pressing issue for the tribes. In the past who was or was not “Indian” figured in an individual’s qualification to receive benefits from various government programs. But those were not enough to prevent a steady decline of reservation populations and, with that decline, a further increase of ethnic intermixture. Reservations typically were impoverished, depressing places, so that young adults in particular left for towns and cities where work and new lives could be found. And those new lives often included marriages or domestic partnerships with non-Indians in the wider society. Of a national population of just over five million Indian and mixed-Indian individuals, only some twenty-two per cent now live on a reservation. And of the larger population, 2.9 million are classified as American Indian or Alaska native alone. In the late ’seventies and early ’eighties the economic circumstances, but not the flight from the reservation, began to change dramatically. The Seminole tribe of Florida secured a judicial interpretation of its sovereign nation status that permitted it to operate the first of what have become nearly five hundred Indian casinos and card rooms across the country. Today annual net revenues from Indian gambling operations in the U. S. amount to something over thirty billion dollars.

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In Washington state some 100,000 members of twenty-two tribes benefit from over two billion dollars in net revenues. The Colville tribe, which actually consists of twelve “confederated” tribes with a total membership of about 9,400, has enthusiastically embraced Indian gambling (which, incidentally, is always referred to as “gaming”). The Colville Business Council, which is also the tribal government, oversees the operations of Colville Gaming LLC. That enterprise in turn administers three casinos on the reservation, including one casino hotel resort. For September 2014, the latest period for which figures are available, monthly tribal distribution to members was approximately $2,150,000. With a 2016 major expansion of one casino, that figure will increase substantially. See “Colville Gaming LLC, General Membership Meeting, October 10, 2015” (slide player):

http://slideplayer.com/slide/9160932/ In addition to casino revenue, in 2012 the Colville tribe settled a long-running legal case with the U. S. government over mismanagement of tribal lands held in federal trust. The courts awarded the Colville $193,000,000. At present the Colville Business Council is embroiled in a dispute with a number of tribal members over how much and in what manner settlement monies will be distributed. In any event, the greatly expanded tribal coffers have led to two situations. First, Colville leaders now have ample funds to pursue their effort to “repatriate the Ancient One” and thereby enhance their status as a distinct people. That pursuit, of course, consists in fielding a team of lawyers and experts to continue the court battle that may well come when the tribe is required to demonstrate, not only the “Native American” status of Kennewick Man, but his “cultural affiliation” as well. The second situation is that being Colville, that is, holding tribal membership, is now extremely important from a financial perspective. As with numerous other tribes, the Colville are now involved in the difficult, sometimes rancorous task of determining who is and who is not a tribal member. Individuals of mixed ancestry who long since moved off the reservation now press their claim to membership and the substantial monthly checks from casino revenues that come with membership. At the same time tribal councils, anxious to safeguard payments to those they consider bona fide community members, act to reject those claims. Even long-standing members of the community whose descent is uncertain may find themselves “disenrolled” by an aggressive council. To include or to exclude is an action that matters greatly to many tribal members who fear for the status and hence financial well-being of their children and grandchildren. Consider the following not atypical scenario. Full tribal membership for the Colville is determined by an individual’s presence or absence on old tribal rolls or some other documented evidence of descent from full tribal members. It is 1960. A young woman of 20 whose parents are both full tribal members decides to leave the reservation for work in town. She is a full tribal member. In town she meets and marries a local white man. They have three children, all born during the 1980s. All three are one-half Colville, and

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hence tribal members (regardless of residence), for the tribe assigns membership to individuals who are at least one-quarter Colville. In the 2000s all three grown children marry non-Colville individuals and maintain residences off the reservation. These couples produce children, all of whom meet the minimum requirement of one-quarter Colville descent to be enrolled in the tribe. They are the grandchildren of the woman who left the reservation in 1960. It is 2010 and she is a frail seventy year-old, a tribal elder with an important voice in the community. She, along with her children, are gravely concerned for the next generation of their family. If the woman’s grandchildren have children with partners who are not at least one-half Colville, those children will be ineligible for tribal membership and the modicum of financial security that provides. As a tribal elder she is not alone in fearing that outcome, and allies with others to demand action from the Colville Business Council to forestall it.

At the other end of the spectrum are tribes whose enrollments are stagnating, including for example the Colville Confederated Tribes in northeast Washington. Tribal council member Ricky Gabriel has proposed a referendum to relax the blood requirement in the tribal constitution so more children of mixed marriages can enroll. "I've had a lot of very positive [responses]” he says. "The elders are extremely happy about this. They're pushing hard. They're seeing their grandchildren not be able to be enrolled." Enrollment in the tribe currently requires a minimum of one-quarter Colville blood. But when you have intermarriage, that bloodline is diluted. It takes just a couple of generations of intermarriage to put the children at risk of being disqualified from membership. Then the tribal population withers. The proposed referendum would change the rules to count any Indian blood toward the minimum.http://www.voanews.com/content/us-tribes-struggle-with-growing-enrollment-

140291613/163325.html

Kennewick Man and Identity Politics: The Culture of Race . . . to count any Indian blood toward the minimum. Here it is necessary to shift from the technical procedures of that Danish genomics lab and the political and legal maneuvering of tribal leaders to the laboratory of everyday life in present-day America. For that purpose, Kennewick Man becomes less an object for study than an anthropological lens through which to view and interpret the uproar raised by his discovery.

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First, it is important to recognize the irresolvable contradiction at the heart of Colville ideology and political action. If Ricky Gabriel and his allies among the tribal elders succeed in passing that referendum, then having “any Indian blood” will be a sufficient basis for establishing an identity as a Native American. It is a logic of inclusion: possessing the smallest part entails membership in the whole. On that basis, a great many Americans – far greater than the Colville tribal roll – would qualify as Colville and hence “Native American.” But then there is the tribal elders’ ideology focused on Kennewick Man, which is based on a contrary logic of exclusion: Only those descended from The Ancient One are “Native American” and thus entitled to all the rights guaranteed by NAGPRA. The ideology embraces the thesis of an unbroken line of descent from a genetically homogenous founder group including Kennewick Man to present-day Colville. Both arguments, by inclusion and exclusion, are patently absurd. Ricky Gabriel’s referendum if passed would produce an endless line of qualified applicants for tribal membership and the rapidly dwindling payouts from casino revenues. By contrast, the ideology of “The Ancient One” envisions a prehistoric world in which group membership was passed in an unbroken line for some 8,500 years. It is pure fantasy. Over four hundred generations have come and gone, far more even than the “begats” of Genesis, but the all-important seed of “Native American” or, even more absurd, “Colville” identity persists? Consider an analogy. You’ve been told that several of your ancestors emigrated from Scotland to the U. S. in the early to mid-1800s. When you pass on to your just rewards, do you expect that the government of Scotland or some Scottish municipality will petition the U. S. State Department for the repatriation of your remains? Improbable as that seems, extend the analogy to encompass the time frame of Kennewick Man. 8500 years ago the “Scots” who had moved back into the area after successive ice ages were running around in skins, trying to keep body and soul together. If they entertained, as doubtlessly they did, notions of local group identity, those most certainly had nothing to do with anyone resembling you. Nor would you as a contemporary American find much you have in common with “Scots” of 8500 years ago. [And, no, being a big fan of Braveheart doesn’t count.] The tribes’ demand for repatriation and the complicity of the U. S. government in that demand are part of a larger tableau in American life: identity politics and the culture of race. Americans and American culture continually wrestle with utterly contradictory attitudes and beliefs regarding “race.” We are told by teachers and employers that what we do is far more important than who, in terms of our heritage, we are. In the language of a mercifully defunct sociology, American society is organized on the basis of performance, not ascription. Yet we find ourselves confronted on all sides by evidence that is not the case. Identity politics has become the order of the day. Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the American Indian Movement, Women’s Liberation, Make America Great Again, and other ethnic or gender-based movements are ready to provide firm, not to say strident answers to that fundamental question posed earlier: What is it to be such-

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and-such? And often those stereotypical answers are accepted; they become the basis for social action, sometimes on a grand scale. It turns out the lyrics of that old song are true: wishing will make it so. Identity politics can and does have positive, progressive effects. Through valorizing a formerly stigmatized identity, individuals are given courage, a sense of self-worth that motivates them to achieve. But it is essential to look long and hard at the basis for much of identity politics: the concept of race is accepted as a fact of human nature. No matter how advocates spin it, the name of this perspective is racism. For who is a racist? A racist is someone who assigns social identity and social worth to an individual based on that person’s perceived biological descent. As Lévi-Strauss famously wrote, a barbarian is someone who believes in barbarians. In seeking to rebury Kennewick Man, Colville, Umatilla and other tribes embrace the concept / metaphor of “blood,” as in “a drop of Indian blood.” That metaphor, of course, has a notorious history, having provided the rationale for the extermination and enslavement of masses of American Indians and blacks. Identity politics is a curious and disturbing phenomenon which operates in the U. S. today as a double-edged sword. The watchword of that political discourse is diversity. Individuals with particular racial, ethnic, or gender self-ascriptions join with others they perceive as like themselves to form movements and advance their political agendas. Celebrating diversity thus seems to bolster the image of American society as committed to “multiculturalism” as that is embraced by an important segment of the population.  Critics, however (who form a large and vocal group), argue that “diversity” is just another name for divisiveness, and that emphasizing difference and exclusiveness can only hurt the body politic.  Their general argument is hard to refute on logical grounds: How is social integration promoted by the self-segregation of groups dedicated to emphasizing their own distinctive identities?  It’s a thorny and important issue, since it figures prominently in the 2016 presidential election campaigns now in full swing.  As I write (August 2016) the conundrum of diversity vis-à-vis divisiveness is on display in the grade school rhetoric of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump:  “He’s a racist and a bigot!”; “Am not. She is!”, and on and on.  Never in recent memory has identity politics figured so prominently on the national stage.      In the eye of this storm, however, an important truth about identity politics has gone mostly unnoticed: Identity politics as practiced today is nothing like its practice when it burst on the American scene some fifty years ago.  Although the historical trend is not perfectly clear-cut – nothing social ever is – identity politics in general has gone from being a violent, rebellious confrontation with the Establishment to being a defensive and sometimes bureaucratic effort to contain and placate it.     That trend is most in evidence in the changing relationship of African-Americans to the wider society. In terms of national attention, from presidents and aspiring presidents and from major cable news outlets, the Black Lives Matter movement today eclipses

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other activist groups engaging in identity politics.  Conservative and a great many moderate whites regard BLM as a dangerous “radical” group bent on anarchy and race war. And indeed some of their marches and demonstrations feature shouted slogans – obsessively reported by Fox News – that espouse violence. “What do we want?” “Dead cops!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”; and “Pigs in a blanket!” “Fry ’em like bacon!”. [Note: For readers unfamiliar with American popular culture, “pigs in a blanket” refers to hot dogs wrapped in bacon strips. Here the metaphor goes astray, since “pigs” – bacon – are the blanket.] The rhetoric is as misleading as the metaphor. While BLM demonstrations have involved violence of the pushing-and-shoving, rock-throwing, fire-starting sort, nowhere have they approached anything like armed revolutionary struggle. The truth is that BLM began as resistance to the racial crisis in Ferguson, Missouri following the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white Ferguson police officer. In the immediate aftermath, Brown’s companion and a couple of other witnesses to the shooting told police and, more importantly, the news media that Brown was first shot in the back running away from the officer, then turned around and shouted, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” The crowds, incensed by the heavy-handed police response to demonstrators’ actions (some of those actions were criminal), conceived the protest cry, “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” That phrase spread like wildfire, becoming the rallying cry in BLM marches and demonstrations in numerous cities. It has not helped BLM’s call for racial justice that the original narrative of the shooting of Michael Brown is very likely a lie. Seven months after the event the Department of Justice released a detailed report documenting gross inconsistencies in that narrative. Forensic evidence revealed that Brown and police officer Darren Wilson had struggled through the window of the patrol car for possession of Wilson’s gun. The gun discharged and Brown was struck in the hand at close range. At first running from the car, Brown turned and charged Wilson with his hands “out” in a tackling position rather than “up.” Wilson then fired the fatal shot. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf

While “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” was portrayed by the media as an index of black rage, looked at dispassionately the cry is passive in the extreme. It says, in effect, “I give up; don’t hurt me!”. Hardly the slogan of a revolutionary movement. Yet BLM is still perceived as a radical group. Why? The answer brings us up against that transformation in identity politics signaled above. It requires some unpacking, but the paradoxical nature of that politics already becomes clear: the protests of identity politics, supposedly an impassioned demand for action, are couched in the language of victimization. I give up; don’t hurt me! How has this come about?

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For the answer to that question it is necessary to look back a half-century, to the Black Panthers. The Panthers provide a stark contrast with Black Lives Matter; together they represent the fundamental transformation (and embody the inherent paradox) in what has become known as “identity politics.” The Black Panthers were organized in 1966 and effectively disbanded, as a result of government repression and internal discord, in 1971. During that brief time they functioned as an armed revolutionary movement, engaging in pitched battles with police and rival organizations while also establishing community-based programs to feed, educate, and provide medical care for impoverished blacks. In June 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared, “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country,” and pledged that 1969 would be the last year of the group’s existence. His threat came close to fulfillment when, in December of that year, police raided the Chicago apartment of a Panther leader, Fred Hampton. The raid was planned by the police and agents of the FBI’s COINTELPRO group – essentially a counter-insurgency force operating within the nation’s borders. In the raid Hampton was killed (cause of death: two bullets in the brain fired at point-blank range) as well as another Panther member. Billed as a ferocious “shootout” in the media at the time, investigators found that of approximately one hundred rounds fired only one came from the Panthers. A police ruse to hammer nail holes into the apartment door, claiming these were return fire from the Panthers, was exposed. Hampton was targeted because he was perceived by law enforcement to be a charismatic leader capable of unifying warring Panther factions into a genuine threat to the nation. Fast forward to July 2016. President Obama met with government officials, law enforcement personnel, and two leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement in a “Forum on Policing” following the assassination of five Dallas policemen. At the meeting he declared that “We are one American family,” and continued:

We're not even close to being there yet, where we want to be. We're not at a point yet where communities of color feel confident that their police departments are serving them with dignity and respect and equality. And we're not at the point yet where police departments feel adequately supported at all levels.

Of the two leaders of Black Lives Matter, DeRay Mckesson and Brittany Packnett, McKesson, who alone is quoted, had constructive things to say:

The meeting -- which lasted over four hours -- included Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and Black Lives Matter activists DeRay Mckesson and Brittany Packnett.McKesson called the meeting with Obama and leaders "productive” and [said] that the President was "incredibly solution orientated in this conversation and

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pushed to challenge people to think about the concrete things that both the administration could do and law enforcement and activists could do to make sure that we address the issue of police violence head on and also that our communities are safe.”

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/13/politics/obama-black-lives-matter-meeting/

They even held hands.

McKesson’s rhetoric, which sounds like that of a candidate for public office, contains not the faintest echo of that of black activists of the late ’sixties. Apart from the Panthers, who sometimes punctuated their speech with gunfire, compare McKesson’s plea to promote mutual understanding with the words of another figure from the period, Malcolm X.

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Or, on being interviewed and rejected for the draft, he told draft board members that he wanted to be sent to the South to . . .

organize them nigger soldiers … steal us some guns, and kill us [some] crackers.

A few years later another major figure in ’sixties black activism also refused military service.

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Muhammad Ali:

I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger.

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, a year before Ali’s defiance. Ali was not killed, but arrested, convicted of draft evasion, and stripped of his heavyweight title. Only his prominence as a national hero kept him from prison. It would be difficult to overstate how much things have changed. Today’s “radicals” – McKesson and the Black Lives Matter activists – are milk-toast compared with their predecessors of a half-century ago. And in the meantime those figures have been almost magically rehabilitated. Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, feared and despised revolutionaries, are now iconic martyrs of the bad old days. Malcolm X appears on a U. S. postage stamp, and upon his death in 2016) Ali was given what amounted to a state funeral. These sea changes in identity politics raise a fundamental social issue in American life today: How is the individual to act who perceives himself to be at odds with the State? The answer appears to be in two parts. First, the incipient revolutionary is recast as victim. And second, as a victim the individual demands of the State and the wider society what a victim typically expects: solace, protection, shelter from the storm. In short, in the parlance of today, a safe space and an insulating bubble that protects one from perceived threats in the form of microaggressions, threats that need to be identified in advance through issuing trigger warnings that a particular social event, text, or speech may cause distress. An imperative of contemporary social thought is to identify the deep-seated dynamics in American society that have produced this remarkable transformation of revolutionary to victim. In this topical essay it is impossible adequately to explore those dynamics. Regarding identity politics specifically, however, a tentative thought may be aired: The enormous size and power of the modern nation state means that real protest, a genuine revolutionary threat, is crushed early on, leaving the revolutionary with only two stark choices: to die or assume the role of victim. A third possibility of redress, legislative or judicial action at the federal and state level, is foreclosed by the widespread perception, if not reality, that those bodies are bought and paid for by a power elite that runs the country. Rather than living under the rule of law, Americans live under the rule of lawyers. Lawyers who further enrich themselves by becoming politicians. Having identified the phenomenon of victimization as it has evolved among black activists over the past half-century, it is necessary to inquire whether a similar process has occurred among a group closer to our present subject matter: Native Americans. The answer appears to be that it has, though, as might be expected considering the disparate histories and numbers of the two populations, with significant differences. Paralleling the formation of the Black Panther Party, Indian activists, notably Dennis Banks and Russell Means, launched the American Indian Movement in 1968. Its

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mission, organized around the slogan “Red Power,” was similarly comprehensive: to monitor and resist police violence against Indian communities; and to provide much-needed social services to those communities. AIM’s most dramatic action, in concert with the affiliated group Indians of All Tribes, was the forcible occupation of Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay. Red Power activists, of whom a principal leader was the Mohawk, Richard Oakes, held the island for nineteen months, from November 1969 to June 1971, when a dwindling group of occupiers was forcibly evicted by the Coast Guard. Following the Alcatraz occupation, in late 1972 AIM leaders were instrumental in organizing the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan, a miles-long assemblage of vehicles which left from Seattle Washington bound for Washington D.C. The Caravan reached the nation’s Capitol days before the scheduled presidential election – in which the war criminal Richard Nixon was returned to office in a landslide. Nixon officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Department of the Interior reneged on their previous agreement with Caravan organizers to provide parade permits and housing. Left in the lurch, activists occupied and vandalized offices of the Department of the Interior until they were removed by riot police. The late ’sixties and early ’seventies saw the integration and subsequent violent dissolution or suppression of revolutionary groups with various agendas and constituencies, one of which was AIM. Here Fred Hampton, the assassinated Panther leader was instrumental. He was the moving force behind the formation of the Rainbow Coalition, an umbrella group that brought together Black Panthers, AIM leaders, the Young Lords, (a Puerto Rican activist group), the Brown Berets (a pro-Chicano group), I Wor Kuen (a Marxist Asian-American group), Patriot Party and White Panther Party members (white activists), and others. Hampton’s vision was to unify these groups, which sometimes engaged in internecine gang warfare, into a radical socialist movement fundamentally opposed to the government. As noted, the early successes of this charismatic figure so alarmed authorities, J. Edgar Hoover in particular, that the FBI’s clandestine counter-insurgency group COINTELPRO arranged his assassination. To round out this dark period of our history, in May 1970 Nixon’s henchman Jim Rhodes, governor of Ohio, ordered his National Guard onto the campus of Kent State, promising that “we are going to eradicate the problem.” The administration thus demonstrated what it was prepared to do to quell resistance of all kinds: black, white, red, antiwar, simple social protest, all were targets of lethal suppression. That legacy is with us today, and is a major factor in defining the culture of race as a culture of victimization. As revolutionaries turned victims, Indians have fared far better than blacks in recent decades. Ironically, as the demands of AIM were frustrated and the organization forced into the background of public life, the sovereign nation status of individual tribes was enhanced through a number of court rulings. Principal among these was a tribe’s right to build and operate casinos on its land. Many reservations have become Bantustans with slot machines. In addition to newfound casino revenues, the Obama administration has

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settled long-standing legal disputes over property rights and government management of tribal lands. Several billion dollars have been paid to a number of tribes, including, as noted, some 193 million dollars to the Colville. Today the most important aspect of the American culture of race as it pertains to the tribes is that greatly improved legal and financial status paradoxically go hand-in-hand with an entrenched vision of the Indian as victim. That vision applies not only to current relations between Indians and the wider society, but extends, as we see with Kennewick Man, into the distant past. The remains of Kennewick Man are not the illicit loot of repugnant grave robbers who desecrated an Indian burial ground; the 8500 year-old bones eroded naturally from a river bank and were retrieved with care and respect by a professional archeologist. Despite this, tribal leaders persist in seeing their Ancient One as a victim of white interference, a violation that can only be made right by reburying those bones in a secret location. That view is underscored at the highest level of government. Larry Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs under President Obama, has said of the excavation of Native American remains, “Regardless of the motive for expropriating Indian graves, the impact of this activity upon the affected Indians is always the same: emotional trauma and spiritual distress.” The language could not be more judgmental or far-reaching; Echo-Hawk makes no distinction between grave-robbing and archeological research. They are all instances of “expropriation,” and always inflict “emotional trauma and spiritual distress” on affected Indians, including those who insist on recognizing a bond dating back through millennia.

Kennewick Man Redux The tribes are so fixated on the matter of victimization that they ignore the most important lesson Kennewick Man has to teach us. That lesson is not a spurious Yoda-like ineffable wisdom, the eternal silence of The Ancient One secreted forever in a hidden grave. Rather, it is the glimpse Kennewick Man provides into one of the most important chapters in human history: the peopling of the New World. That phenomenon did not consist of homogeneous descent groups frozen in time for millennia, but a complex and dynamic process of the earliest Americans moving, mixing, loving, fighting, living, and dying as they spread – at remarkable speed – across two continents. And it is a process that, if they were honest with themselves, tribal members would recognize as an elemental feature of their own lives as they struggle to exist as a people in a world of bewildering, kaleidoscopic change. Archeologists and forensic anthropologists, usually not given to eloquence, occasionally write about “the voice of the bones.” The voice of Kennewick Man, stifled

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for millennia in an unknown Washington grave, was very nearly silenced forever by the strident demands of the Umatilla, Colville and other tribes and the feckless collusion of officials of the Army Corps of Engineers. Following the discovery the Corps studiously ignored the entreaties of a small group of archeologists until, at the last minute, a state court granted an injunction on the proposed “repatriation.” For nearly ten years the bones were silent, languishing in poorly curated storage containers at the Burke Museum in Seattle. Following yet another court order, a team of scientists was allowed brief access. The Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley assembled a team drawn from diverse fields who conducted an extensive investigation over ten days into all aspects of the remains, situating that investigation in the context of what was known of Paleoamerican habitation of the Columbia basin. Their findings are presented in a handsome and exhaustive volume, Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton, edited by Owsley and Richard L. Jantz (Texas A&M University Press, 2014). It is the most extensive work on any single Paleoamerican skeleton. That is the true voice of Kennewick Man. What does that voice tell us? It is a very different and far more complex story than the fable of Native American homogeneity spun by the tribes for politically sensitive ears in government. Kennewick Man lived at a time and in a place, the Columbia River Basin, of major social change.

Kennewick Man dates to a time of transition between two distinct cultural traditions. The Western Stemmed Tradition was nearing the end of its reign in the Columbia Plateau as the Old Cordilleran Tradition began its rise. . . . Although the practitioners of both the Old Cordilleran Tradition and Western Stemmed Tradition were highly mobile foragers, these occupants of the Columbia Basin led markedly different lives. Western Stemmed Tradition people followed an annual pattern of migration throughout the landscape that exploited different plant and animal resources in distinct habitats by using specially designed implements for each prey type. They were primarily hunters who took their prey with both atlatls and bolas. Fishing was secondary and plants were not exploited significantly, probably due to a lack of appropriate technology for converting complex carbohydrates into food. In contrast, Old Cordilleran people spent most of their time along major rivers, subsisting primarily on fish, freshwater mussels, and small mammals. . . . Simultaneous changes in basic lithic reduction strategy, tool and processing technologies, settlement patterns, implement and basketry styles, and the physical characteristics of the people themselves show the transition from the Western Stemmed to the Old Cordilleran Tradition to have been an ethnic replacement event that was fundamentally genetic. . . The Old Cordilleran

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appears earlier west of the Cascade Range than it does in the interior, which is evidence that the newcomers first adapted to coastal environments and then followed familiar habitat up the rivers. . . The near simultaneous appearance of the Old Cordilleran Tradition throughout the region within a century of 8,000 RC yr. BP, however, indicates that the Western Stemmed Tradition probably persevered, perhaps as a lowered population, during the interim. “Geography, Paleoecology, and Archaeology,” James C. Chatters. In Kennewick Man . . . (my emphasis)

Here it is important to recall that current thinking on the peopling of the Americas identifies two separate migratory routes from eastern Siberia. One route was that taken by big game hunters following their prey along the ice free corridor that opened in the late Pleistocene between the two glacial fields of western Canada. The other was coastal, used by groups which had acquired a maritime technology that enabled them to hopscotch down the Pacific coast and islands. Over time the big game hunters spread east, south, and west, a pattern which would have taken some groups into the Columbia Basin. At roughly the same time, coastal peoples would have recognized the Columbia River for what it was, both then and now: a major artery connecting land and sea. It is not a speculative reach to identify Western Stemmed groups with the big game hunters and Old Cordilleran groups with coastal people who kept close to river and sea. One wonders what Jean Auel might do with the story of Kennewick Man among the mountain people and the sea people. Kennewick Man’s final resting place was in a locale whose populations were highly diverse and doubtlessly involved in complex, and quite possibly violent interaction. Social life was nothing like the Indian fable of a uniform people living a timeless existence. And there is more, much more wrong with that stereotype: Rather than being “indigenous,” a son of the soil, all evidence points to Kennewick Man being an outsider, a stranger.

. . . Kennewick Man’s isotope values reflect a diet comprised primarily of high-trophic-level marine pinnipeds [seals and sea lions]. As only one species swam inland along the Columbia River, up to, but not beyond, the Dalles, Oregon . . . Kennewick Man could not have been a long-time resident of the area where he was found, but instead lived most of his adult life somewhere along the Northwest and North Pacific coast where marine mammals were readily available. Reinforcing this, Kennewick Man’s collagen isotope values are more similar to Pacific coastal human populations with diets based primarily on marine mammals. . . Kennewick Man’s depleted [oxygen isotope] level indicates that he drank cold river water originating in high elevation snow or glacial melt. . . (Joan

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Coltrain, August 27, 2013 personal communication): “Given Kennewick Man’s [oxygen isotope] value, he does not appear to be local to the Kennewick area, inland or coastal. If all we knew about him was his oxygen isotope chemistry, we might argue that he originated in inland, northern Alaska.” . . . In conclusion, available isotope data for Kennewick Man suggest that he lived most of his life in coastal locations north of the state of Washington. “Who Was Kennewick Man?”, Douglas W. Owsley and Richard L. Jantz. In Kennewick Man . . .

Kennewick Man is an enigma, his fascinating life story ignored by tribal casino executives and Army Corps mediocrities. A stranger to the inland region, he evidently was not killed in battle and his body cast aside for scavengers to ravage. Rather, the meticulous work of the forensic anthropologists document that, based on the deposition of carbonates in his bones, he was laid to rest on his back, the body unflexed, with palms outstretched. In short, he was accorded a formal burial, consistent with that of a prominent member of the community. Were others buried nearby, and if so, what sort of burial did they receive? We will never know. Following the discovery of the skeleton and days before permission was to be granted researchers to conduct exploratory excavations in the vicinity, the Corps dispatched helicopters to drop tons of concrete rubble on the site. Thus the Corps was not only an incompetent administrator of the find, but a co-conspirator with the tribes in preventing possibly invaluable knowledge from coming to light. Your tax dollars at work. If Kennewick Man found peace in death, in life he experienced considerable physical trauma and violence. What first alerted James Chatters to the skeleton’s antiquity was a projectile point over two inches long embedded in its pelvis. A spear had been hurled at him with great force, evidently from an atlatl, so that the point could not be extracted. The fact that bone had ossified around it indicates the injury occurred years before Kennewick Man’s death (at around age 38), when he was a young man presumably active in intergroup hostilities. In addition to the spear injury, he sustained two skull fractures, quite possibly from violent encounters. A shoulder had been injured, again probably from a spear thrust, so severely that a portion of bone became detached from the skeletal matrix. Remarkably, Kennewick Man sustained numerous fractured ribs, on the order of six or eight, perhaps from a serious fall or, again, violence. His was a rugged, rough-and-tumble existence in a physical environment and a social world filled with potential harm. There were no “safe spaces.” The fact that he survived and, judging by the respect given him in death, triumphed demonstrates that Kennewick Man was a tough customer who gave as good as he got. Considering the gripping drama of his life, the tribes’ stereotyping him as the wise and pacific Ancient One seems all the more ludicrous – a cheap public relations ploy to elicit support from politically correct officials.

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It Takes an Act of Congress

As noted at the beginning of the essay, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) passed by Congress and signed into law by President H. W. Bush in 1990 contains two definitive clauses. The first,

“Native American” means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States . . .

is nothing but a tautology. “Native American” is defined as being “indigenous to the United States,” in other words, native to the United States. On this ground alone the crucial status of being “Native American” is effectively worthless, mere lawyers’ words. This problem is compounded by the language specifying the entity which possesses that status: a tribe, people, or culture . . . Nothing in this definition can possibly apply to isolated skeletal remains, whether complete as with Kennewick Man or, as is usually the case, incidental bone fragments. Bones alone indicate nothing about a specific “tribe, people, or culture.” Therefore the second and far more substantive clause of the Act requiring that “cultural affiliation” be demonstrated in every case:

. . . “cultural affiliation” means that there is a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group.https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/FHPL_NAGPRA.pdf 1990

cannot be fulfilled. It is crucial to recognize that Kennewick Man and the circumstances of his discovery and excavation make it utterly impossible to find a scintilla of evidence of “cultural affiliation.” Before proceeding to examine the fate of Kennewick Man, it is important to note that, until the tribes and bureaucrats subverted it, NAGPRA filled a real need. The history of the American West is far more nuanced than most Americans realize, who tend to view it as a set of cardboard cutouts. Brutal cavalry, greedy robber barons, and invasive settlers were pitted against native peoples who were either ferocious warriors in the mold of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse or peaceful villagers subject to massacre by the whites. Yet the “Indian Wars” were a prominent element of American history from the early 17 th

century until several years after World War I. West of the Mississippi, that period was mostly condensed to the 19th century. Fur traders and the heavily romanticized mountain men made inroads in Indian country which were mostly accommodated until the 1820s, when increased contact led to open hostilities. From then until the Battle of the Little Big

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Horn in 1876, the entire Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West were a theater of guerilla warfare in which hapless settlers and Indian villagers alike fell victim to brutal attacks. And for most of that time it was by no means a one-sided conflict. With the U. S. Army fully committed (and nearly overwhelmed) during the years of the Civil War, the prairies and mountains of the West were a no-man’s land where no one, white or Indian, was secure. Complicating the ongoing hostilities between Indian and white was the well-established tradition of intergroup raiding among Plains groups. It is a threadbare stereotype to portray “the Indian people” as a unified group valiantly defending their land against marauding whites. One tribe or village raided another for women, horses, scalps. Some groups were more aggressive than others, leaving the latter to opt for a settlement pattern that came to apply to all Indians as the most bellicose groups gave up the fight. In increasing numbers Indians sought the protection and sustenance of forts, missions, and trading posts. When these displaced persons died, their remains were not buried alongside whites, but consigned to separate unhallowed “Indian burial grounds” some distance from fort or mission. As the years passed these locations became the object of odious grave-robbing forays by local whites who had arrived in the interim. Funerary objects, skulls, sometimes entire skeletons became collectibles, occasionally exhibited in roadside “museums” as tourist attractions. It was this repugnant practice that NAGPRA was designed to stop. Remains and artifacts interred in the 1850s and looted in the 1950s could be shown to have a clear connection to living Indians in the area. The requirement of “cultural affinity” was thus easily met. But beyond a century or two or three, that affinity became increasingly difficult to establish. Groups decimated by disease and warfare merged with other, formerly culturally distinct groups to form communities in which it was impossible to identify anything resembling a coherent “tribal” tradition. Contemporary example of this process are the two principal claimants in the Kennewick Man case, the “Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation” and “The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.” In pre-contact times, these “confederations” consisted of groups distinct in custom and language, groups often in a state of intermittent warfare with one another. Despite all this, NAGPRA could be a reliable resource for local and Federal officials charged with returning the contents of looted graves to Indian groups in the immediate vicinity. But the second provision of the law, the requirement to establish “cultural affinity” between a set of remains and an existing indigenous people, becomes completely untenable when the time frame is changed from a few hundred to thousands of years (about 9,000 years in the case of Kennewick Man). Thus when the editors of Nature (in the piece cited above) note that the next crucial step in determining the ancestry of Kennewick Man would be to establish cultural affinity, they also signal that is an impossible task. The genomic analysis, seriously compromised and pointing to related

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groups spread from the Northwest Coast to the Amazon, was – or should have been – useless in effecting a determination of origin, and the requirement of cultural affinity was a complete non-starter. To their credit the Corps of Engineers, barely competent and, in the case of Kennewick Man, obstructionist (recall the tons of concrete rubble the Corps deposited on the excavation site) was careful to spell out the requirement in its June 2016 “Determination”:

Determining remains to be Native American is, therefore, distinct from determining cultural affiliation. Cultural affiliation, the second step of the NAGPRA process, is required before transfer may occur. See Bonnichsen II, 367 F.3d at 875 (the first inquiry asks "whether the human remains are Native American" and the second inquiry asks "which American Indians or Indian tribe bears the closest relationship to Native American remains"). This determination does not address cultural affiliation nor does it propose a transfer of custody of the remains. To establish cultural affiliation, there must be a preponderance of evidence that there is a "relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced” between a present day Indian tribe and an identifiable earlier group. 25 U.S.C. § 3001(2); see also 25 U.S.C. § 3005(a)(4). First, substantial evidence is a lower threshold of proof than preponderance of the evidence. Substantial evidence is essentially a reasonableness standard ("such evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion"), whereas preponderance of the evidence requires the conclusion being drawn as being more likely than not true. Second, to be Native American under NAGPRA, there needs to be merely a connection to a presently existing tribe, people, or culture. For cultural affiliation, there needs to be shared group identity with a tribe. A tribe, people, or culture is significantly broader than only a tribe; likewise a "connection" is more ephemeral than a "shared group identity." (“Determination . . .” my emphasis)

How, then, were the tribes to proceed with their demands? Answer: Enter the U. S. Congress, in the personages of Senator Patty Murray (Washington state) and Representative Denny Heck (10th Congressional district, Washington state), whose reelection campaigns receive substantial contributions from Colville and Umatilla groups and individuals. Murray and Heck separately sponsored identical bills, “Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015,” which were debated and passed on to a Senate-House conference committee. Note the evocative language in the bills’ title: “bring” rather than “send,” “take,” or even “return” conjures an image of an impassioned people who have waited decades for a champion (in this case federal and

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state bureaucracies) to unite their kinsman, purloined by atheistic scientists, with them. And where would that reunion take place? Why, “home” of course, the Columbia plateau inhabited by Colville and Umatilla groups. Before composing their impassioned legislation, our learned Senator and Congressman, supposedly representatives of all residents of Washington and its districts and not just a few thousand Indians, evidently did not take the time to consult Owsley’s and Jantz’s definitive opus. Had they done so, they or their minion aides would have learned that “home” for Kennewick Man was hundreds of miles distant from the upper Columbia, somewhere on the long stretch of the Northwest Coast. Unburdened by that inconvenient knowledge of provenance, Murray was free to wax eloquent and combative – the preferred style of politicians:

“After more than twenty years of debate, it’s time to return the Ancient One to his rightful resting place,” Senator Murray said. “I’m proud to see this legislation so close to the finish line. I’ll be fighting to ensure we get this done to honor his descendants and write the final chapter on the history of the Ancient One.” https://www.murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/newsroom?ID=B4386687-1A80-4006-9BC3-52776F28BC10

For their part, tribal elders cum casino executives added to the repertoire of ritual they performed to “bring the Ancient One home”: pay to play. No one can now dispute the efficacy of ritual. We cannot know the ins and outs of negotiations in the conference committee, but in the course of things the free-standing “Bring the Ancient One Home” bill was transformed into a one-page section, “Kennewick Man,” and buried (!) in a 644-page authorization bill covering Army Corps projects for the next fiscal year: the “Water Resources Development Act of 2016.”

https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/s2848/BILLS-114s2848es.pdfIt is Congressional logic at its finest, the logic of pork as practiced by venal and ignorant politicians. The Act describes itself as:

AN ACT To provide for the conservation and development of water and related resources, to authorize the Secretary of the Army to construct various projects for improvements to rivers and harbors of the United States, and for other purposes.

Kennewick Man a water-related resource? Well, after all, the skeleton was discovered in the shallow water of a river, therefore it must be just such a resource. And while “repatriating” Kennewick Man may not be one of those “improvements to rivers and

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harbors” specified in the Act, the skeleton definitely falls (along with anything else a member of Congress can profit from) under “other purposes.” The section begins with gross inaccuracy and obfuscation:

Sec. 1030. KENNEWICK MAN. Requires the Corps to repatriate the Kennewick Man (a 9000 year old skeleton found by the Corps of Engineers) to the tribes that scientific studies have demonstrated are descendants.

Even the simple fact of the discovery is spun. The skeleton was not “found by the Corps of Engineers” – which insinuates that the Corps had the right of possession from the start. Rather, as we have seen, the discovery was made by two young men who notified the relevant local (not federal) authorities. After the county coroner and an archeologist consultant carefully retrieved the bones and after the tribes got wind of the find and raised the alarm, the heavy-handed Feds moved in to confiscate the remains. Quite a different story. And then there are those “scientific studies” that demonstrate that the local tribes are “descendants.” Again as we have seen, some Colville and Umatilla are descendants, but are no more closely related than Indian groups as far away as the Amazon. The most serious flaw of Section 1030, however, is that it blatantly subverts canonical law covering Indian remains: NAGPRA. As the definitive statement of the federal government’s position on the subject, one must ask how an incidental rider to an authorization bill on water resources can circumvent the Act’s all-important requirement to establish “cultural affinity” before any remains can be “repatriated.” Since that requirement is manifestly impossible to meet, how might Section 1030 be implemented? In the halls of Congress, the answer is simple: ignore it.

TRANSFER.—Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal law, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq.), or law of the State of Washington, not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary, acting through the Chief of Engineers, shall transfer the human remains to the Department [Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation], on the condition that the Department, acting through the State Historic Preservation Officer, disposes of the remains and repatriates the remains to claimant tribes. (my emphasis)

“Notwithstanding,” in lawyer-speak, means “disregarding.” As in so many avenues of American life, our proud claim to be governed by “the rule of law” effectively translates as “the rule of lawyers.” They make the rules; they can change or break them as they see fit. Senator Patty Murray and Representative Denny Heck are to be congratulated: far

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from the banks of the Columbia, they have proven themselves exemplary members of their own tribe. On December 16, 2016, eight months after General Spellmon issued the Corps’ “Determination,” President Obama signed the Act into law. Two months later, on February 16, 2017, representatives of the Burke Museum in Seattle which had curated the remains, in the company of several Corps officials and state bureaucrats, formally transferred them to assorted tribal members. The next morning a large group of tribal elders assembled in an undisclosed location and reburied the bones. Kennewick Man was lost to science and to any intellectual inquiry guided by the need to know. Numerous tribal publications celebrated the victory; some went on at length to expound Indian self-vindication. Below is a particularly detailed report. Winston Smith would have recognized the Newspeak genre, but probably been deeply puzzled by the fact that it emanates from a group that celebrates its victimhood rather than power (Orwell did not foresee the time when paraded victimization would equate with political power). It is quoted at length here. From “After 20 Years, Kennewick Man or the Ancient One, Returns Home: Ancient Man Laid to Rest in Private Ceremony on Columbia Plateau,” by Richard Walker, Indian Country Today Media Network. March 7, 2017.

COLUMBIA PLATEAU —Uutpama Natitayt — Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, an ancestor of the First People of the Columbia Plateau — is finally home.More than 200 of his relatives came together at an undisclosed location on the Columbia Plateau early Feb. 18 to lay him to rest. They came from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, from the Nez Perce Tribe, from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and the Wanapum Tribe and the Yakama Nation.Religious leaders from each of the Native Nations jointly conducted a ceremony. And then Kennewick Man’s remains were returned to the earth, just as loved ones first laid him to rest some 9,000 years ago.The ceremony was private.Uytpama Natitayt (sounds like “Oit pa ma na tit tite”) knew this place. The Ancient One fished for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon in the Columbia River, which he likely knew as Nch’i-Wana, or “Great River.” He hunted and harvested in the eco-diverse grasslands, savannas and shrublands of the plateau. His relatives still fish and hunt and harvest here. And they still honor, remember and respect the ancestors who gave life to the next generation and passed on the teachings before walking on.

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“The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation is proud to have worked with all parties to repatriate the Ancient One to the Tribes,” Umatilla Chairman Gary Burke said in an announcement issued by the Umatilla Tribes. “We jointly believe in respecting our ancestors of our past and have fulfilled our responsibility to finally lay the Ancient One to rest.”Umatilla Tribes Council member Armand Minthorn added, “This is a big day and our people have come to witness and honor our ancestor. We continue to practice our beliefs and laws as our Creator has given us since time immemorial.”In a separate statement issued by his office, Yakama Nation Chairman JoDe Goudy said: “The return of our ancestor to Mother Earth is a blessing for all Yakama people. The Ancient One (also known as the ‘Kennewick Man’) may now finally find peace, and we, his relatives, will equally feel content knowing that this work has been completed on his behalf. For more than two decades we have fought on behalf of our ancestors. The unity of the Native people during our collective efforts to bring the Ancient One home is a glimpse of how life once was, when we were all one people.”Uytpama Natitayt’s journey to this day was a long one. Two men inadvertently found Kennewick Man’s remains, which had been exposed by erosion, on the shores of the Columbia River in 1996. The Plateau Tribes believed that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, would ensure the Ancient One would be quickly returned for reburial. Court challenges delayed that return.In the ensuing years, Uytpama Natitayt was subjected to anthropological study, and his remains were handled and measured and sampled. Kennewick Man was determined to be 8,400 to 8,690 years old, according to the Burke Museum. Some questioned his origin and his identity. But his relatives knew who he was and never ceased in their efforts to have him returned home.Modern genetic science proved Kennewick Man’s relatives right—that he was indeed from the Plateau and an ancestor of today’s indigenous Plateau peoples. “We always knew the Ancient One to be Indian,” Umatilla Tribes Council member Aaron Ashley said in the announcement. “We have oral stories that tell of our history on this land and we knew, at the moment of his discovery, that he was our relation.”On December 10, Congress approved a bill requiring the Washington State Department of Archaeology & Historic Preservation to return Uytpama Natitayt’s remains to his relatives at the Colville, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Wanapum nations. On February 17, representatives of the Plateau Tribes met at the Burke Museum in Seattle, where the remains had been held. Representatives of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department

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of Archaeology & Historic Preservation, and curators of the Burke Museum, formally returned Uytpama Natitayt’s remains to his people.While the Ancient One’s return was being argued in the courts and in Congress, the state’s historic preservation office was responsible for his remains. At the ceremony formally returning Kennewick Man to his relatives, state historic preservation officer Allyson Brooks apologized for the trauma caused by the separation.“On behalf of Gov. Jay Inslee and the State of Washington, it is my honor today to pass your relative, the Ancient One, back to you so you can have your family member again like you should have all along,” Brooks said. “I have been your state historic preservation officer for 18 years and this is one of my proudest moments, and I apologize to all of you for the trauma that this has caused for the last 20 years, and I apologize to the Ancient One for the trauma he has gone through for the past 20 years.”She said her hope for the Ancient One “is that he go home by the Columbia River … so he can be at peace.”To the Ancient One, she said, “You did wake me up at nights, so I’ll be really happy if I can sleep again.” To his relatives, she said, “I want to congratulate you for never, ever, ever giving up on your family member.”Who was Uytpama Natitayt?Uytpama Natitayt received his name from the Plateau Tribes; “Uytpama Natitayt” means “Ancient One,” according to Chuck Sams, the Umatilla Tribes’ communications director.If alive today, Uytpama Natitayt might be a poster boy for the health benefits of an Omega 3-rich diet.According to an anthropological report on the National Park Service website, Kennewick Man stood about 5 feet 9 inches, and his diet consisted mostly of fish. He was “in excellent shape for a man of his age.” He was well-muscled and had arms similar to those of “modern weight lifters or construction laborers.” Another anthropologist who studied his remains told National Public Radio that the Ancient One’s right arm resembled that of a professional baseball pitcher. The NPR writer was compelled to refer to Uytpama Natitayt as “beefcake.”Uytpama Natitayt was definitely buff. At one point in his life, when he was a teenager, he was injured in an accident or conflict; he suffered two broken ribs and a broken right arm, and a projectile point was embedded in his pelvis. Kennewick Man completely recovered from his injuries.Uytpama Natitayt passed away when he was 45 to 50 years old, possibly from a frontal bone injury. Nearly nine millennia after his passing, he returned to show the world that The People are indeed indigenous to this land, that their oral histories are not myths but factual record.

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His work done, Uytpama Natitayt rests again.

Enough. Throughout this essay I have tried to maintain a fairly objective style, thinking that Owsley et al and their magisterial study of Kennewick Man deserved that much. But the outrageous end of the saga, made possible by a pair of D. C. swamp creatures whose political trickery made a mockery of settled law, is really too much to countenance. Added to that is the insufferable, preening self-congratulation, of which the above is merely one example, by tribal representatives. Not content to take their ill-gotten booty of bones and bury them in some forlorn patch of dirt, they elect to crow about it, to parade a host of ludicrous stereotypes as though they actually held meaning, to exult in their own virulent racism and call it vindication. Richard Walker, apparently a credentialed journalist, has chosen to publish the above piece. I think it deserves a close textual scrutiny. After all, he committed his ridiculous beliefs to prose; he should therefore expect at least the possibility of push-back. Here, well away from the claustrophobic Indian press, is that response (reader, please note, I allow myself a certain authorial license). My critique is in brackets and bold print, interspersed with the text.

COLUMBIA PLATEAU —Uutpama Natitayt — Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, an ancestor of the First People of the Columbia Plateau — is finally home. [Again, Kennewick Man’s “home” was not the Columbia Plateau, but hundreds of miles away.] More than 200 of his relatives [“relatives”?] came together at an undisclosed location on the Columbia Plateau early Feb. 18 to lay him to rest. They came from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, from the Nez Perce Tribe, from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and the Wanapum Tribe and the Yakama Nation. [a dozen or more distinct and often bellicose groups in pre-contact times, of which there would have been no trace 8,500 years ago]Religious leaders from each of the Native Nations [Native Nations? “Nations”?? Is it possible to stretch a semantic category completely beyond the bounds of any conceivable rationality? Well, apparently it is. Of the some 330 “federally recognized tribes” in the contiguous U. S., several dozen have a population of zero living on their reservation land. Might we term this a “null nation”? Many “nations” consist of a few dozen or a few hundred Indians. In one particularly bizarre case, the Augustine Band of Cahuilla Indians, surrounded by the luxurious country clubs of California’s Coachella Valley, is represented by a single adult and some eight minors. That “sovereign nation” now boasts its own large casino.] jointly conducted a ceremony. And then Kennewick Man’s remains were returned to the earth, just as loved ones first laid him to rest some 9,000 years ago.

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The ceremony was private.Uytpama Natitayt (sounds like “Oit pa ma na tit tite”) knew this place. The Ancient One fished for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon in the Columbia River, which he likely knew as Nch’i-Wana, or “Great River.” [Astonishly, it appears Kennewick Man spoke the contemporary Umatilla dialect of the Sahaptin language family. Consider this absurdity for a moment: A time-warped Kennewick Man miraculously appears at a gathering of Umatilla. Could they carry on a conversation? Assuming, of course, that any of the assembled Umatilla had a conversational grasp of the language. We are informed of KM’s spoken language by one Chuck Sams, described as “a spokesman for the Umatilla tribe.” Before imparting his wisdom to others, Sams might have acquainted himself with the rudiments of historical linguistics. All languages change, all the time, so that Chaucer’s English, for example, is barely intelligible to modern ears and Beowulf’s Old English is a foreign tongue. Chuck Sams is a huckster. He doesn’t have a clue about the nature of language, but is simply intent on spewing the party line. He hunted and harvested in the eco-diverse grasslands, savannas and shrublands of the plateau. [If Kennewick Man fished in the Columbia, that was done hundreds of miles to the west of the Plateau. His diet did not include mammals from the grasslands of the Plateau, but principally marine mammals such as seal. He was a canoe-bound harpooner, not a big game hunter.] His relatives [again, “relatives”?] still fish and hunt and harvest here. And they still honor, remember and respect the ancestors who gave life to the next generation and passed on the teachings before walking on. [Where do they “honor, remember and respect” the ancestors more: at the slot machines or the blackjack tables of the three Colville casinos and the numerous other Indian casinos in the area?] “The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation is proud to have worked with all parties to repatriate the Ancient One to the Tribes,” Umatilla Chairman Gary Burke said in an announcement issued by the Umatilla Tribes. [“Gary Burke” – a common name in the Umatilla language? Or, how might it translate into Umatilla?] “We jointly believe in respecting our ancestors of our past and have fulfilled our responsibility to finally lay the Ancient One to rest.”Umatilla Tribes Council member Armand Minthorn added, “This is a big day and our people have come to witness and honor our ancestor. We continue to practice our beliefs and laws as our Creator has given us since time immemorial.” [Where do those slot machines and blackjack tables fit in Minthorn’s self-righteous spiel about the Creator and time immemorial?] In a separate statement issued by his office, Yakama Nation Chairman JoDe

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Goudy said: “The return of our ancestor to Mother Earth is a blessing for all Yakama people. The Ancient One (also known as the ‘Kennewick Man’) may now finally find peace, and we, his relatives, will equally feel content knowing that this work has been completed on his behalf. For more than two decades we have fought on behalf of our ancestors. The unity of the Native people during our collective efforts to bring the Ancient One home is a glimpse of how life once was, when we were all one people.” [. . . “when we were all one people.” The “Yakama” are another bureaucratic construct, a made-up “confederated tribes and bands” consisting of a couple of dozen formerly distinct and often hostile groups, groups assembled in a “confederation” only through historical forces of expanding white settlement and declining native populations. Chairman JoDe might be asked how, if KM lived in a world of “one people,” he acquired that two-inch projectile point buried in his pelvic bone, two skull fractures, a major trauma to a shoulder bone, and numerous broken ribs. Not exactly a kumbaya kind of world.] Uytpama Natitayt’s journey to this day was a long one. Two men inadvertently found Kennewick Man’s remains, which had been exposed by erosion, on the shores of the Columbia River in 1996. The Plateau Tribes believed that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, would ensure the Ancient One would be quickly returned for reburial. Court challenges delayed that return.In the ensuing years, Uytpama Natitayt was subjected to anthropological study, and his remains were handled and measured and sampled. Kennewick Man was determined to be 8,400 to 8,690 years old, according to the Burke Museum. Some questioned his origin and his identity. But his relatives knew who he was and never ceased in their efforts to have him returned home. [His “relatives” knew, and they were forced to sit by while the white man’s court allowed godless scientists to commit their sacrilege on KM’s remains, handling, measuring, and sampling them. And now, thanks to Owsley et al, that constitutes all the knowledge we will ever have of KM and his story. The “relatives” “knowledge” is a willful stance of we-know-nothing and will not permit you to know anything, either.]Modern genetic science proved Kennewick Man’s relatives right—that he was indeed from the Plateau and an ancestor of today’s indigenous Plateau peoples. “We always knew the Ancient One to be Indian,” Umatilla Tribes Council member Aaron Ashley said in the announcement. “We have oral stories that tell of our history on this land and we knew, at the moment of his discovery, that he was our relation.” [“Modern genetic science” proved nothing of the sort. It “proved” that KM’s descendants were scattered around the hemisphere. There is nothing in the genomic analysis to support Ashley’s hucksterism

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that KM “was indeed from the Plateau.” In fact, Owsley et al, working with modern biochemical science have demonstrated that KM was definitely not from the Plateau, but lived his life on a distant ocean shore.] On December 10, Congress approved a bill requiring the Washington State Department of Archaeology & Historic Preservation to return Uytpama Natitayt’s remains to his relatives at the Colville, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Wanapum nations. On February 17, representatives of the Plateau Tribes met at the Burke Museum in Seattle, where the remains had been held. Representatives of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Archaeology & Historic Preservation, and curators of the Burke Museum, formally returned Uytpama Natitayt’s remains to his people. [An extremely misleading account of the legislative process, making it sound as though the U. S. Congress as a whole championed the tribes’ effort to “return” KM to his “relatives.” As we have noted, what Congress approved was a huge document, a Water Resources authorization bill, into which two clever politicians managed to insert a one-page clause covering the disposition of KM’s remains.While the Ancient One’s return was being argued in the courts and in Congress, the state’s historic preservation office was responsible for his remains. At the ceremony formally returning Kennewick Man to his relatives, state historic preservation officer Allyson Brooks apologized for the trauma caused by the separation.“On behalf of Gov. Jay Inslee and the State of Washington, it is my honor today to pass your relative, the Ancient One, back to you so you can have your family member again like you should have all along,” Brooks said. “I have been your state historic preservation officer for 18 years and this is one of my proudest moments, and I apologize to all of you for the trauma that this has caused for the last 20 years, and I apologize to the Ancient One for the trauma he has gone through for the past 20 years.”She said her hope for the Ancient One “is that he go home by the Columbia River … so he can be at peace.”To the Ancient One, she said, “You did wake me up at nights, so I’ll be really happy if I can sleep again.” To his relatives, she said, “I want to congratulate you for never, ever, ever giving up on your family member.” [The saga of Kennewick Man is a sordid tale of bureaucratic incompetence and collusion by the Corps of Engineers, of backroom political scheming by Senator Patty and Representative Denny, and of outright delusional thinking by tribal members, but none of these is as repugnant as the statement above by Allyson Brooks. As state historic preservation officer, her vocation and training should at least have left her open, if not amenable to the

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archeologists’ project to discover everything they could about KM, to preserve his history. Instead, she apologizes to the assembled Indians and to the Ancient One himself for performing her job as curator of the remains – which, according to Owsley et al, she did not do very well. It may be a first: apologizing to a thousands-years-old skeleton. Brooks appears to wallow in guilt over her white privilege. Did it not occur to her that if she preferred Indian advocacy to her professional calling, there was a simple solution: quit her job. Instead, she held onto her well-paid state job for eighteen years, all the while Kennewick Man lay in the basement of the Burke Museum. The Corps is guilty of incompetence, the politicians are guilty of being politicians, the tribal elders are guilty of no-nothing hucksterism, but, far worse, Brooks is guilty of hypocrisy.] Who was Uytpama Natitayt?Uytpama Natitayt received his name from the Plateau Tribes; “Uytpama Natitayt” means “Ancient One,” according to Chuck Sams, the Umatilla Tribes’ communications director.If alive today, Uytpama Natitayt might be a poster boy for the health benefits of an Omega 3-rich diet.According to an anthropological report on the National Park Service website, Kennewick Man stood about 5 feet 9 inches, and his diet consisted mostly of fish. He was “in excellent shape for a man of his age.” He was well-muscled and had arms similar to those of “modern weight lifters or construction laborers.” Another anthropologist who studied his remains told National Public Radio that the Ancient One’s right arm resembled that of a professional baseball pitcher. The NPR writer was compelled to refer to Uytpama Natitayt as “beefcake.” [Neither of these sources is cited. If the NPS document is correctly cited, it is in error. KM’s diet did not consist mostly of fish, but, as Owsley et al established conclusively, of marine mammals. But perhaps KM’s lifelong practice of slaughtering seals did not project quite the eco-friendly image tribal spokesmen desired. And he was hardly in “excellent shape for a man of his age.” His age, by the way, was probably around 38, rather than 45-50 as given below. Close analysis of the skeleton showed that KM was arthritic in several joints, but not to the point that he was crippled. The projectile point fused in his hip must have given him a decided limp, and was probably a source of considerable pain throughout the rest of his life. In addition, multiple skull fractures and broken bones must have impacted his “excellent health.” Uytpama Natitayt was definitely buff. At one point in his life, when he was a teenager, he was injured in an accident or conflict; he suffered two broken ribs and a broken right arm, and a projectile point was embedded in his pelvis.

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Kennewick Man completely recovered from his injuries. [This is studiously vague. KM’s multiple serious injuries were incurred throughout his life. The skull fractures are not even mentioned. “When he was a teenager” implies that, boys being boys, they get into scraps and hurt themselves. The reality is that KM lived in a harsh, rough-and-tumble, and sometimes dangerous world. He took his licks, but the fact that he survived indicates that he returned the favor. One people, one world, indeed. Utter rot.] Uytpama Natitayt passed away when he was 45 to 50 years old, possibly from a frontal bone injury. Nearly nine millennia after his passing, he returned to show the world that The People are indeed indigenous to this land, that their oral histories are not myths but factual record. [“The People”: could this be construed as anything but blatant racism? The purist form of racism is to invoke racial purity as a basis for social action.] His work done, Uytpama Natitayt rests again. [No, he has been silenced forever by the bigotry of tribal elders (unless KM becomes a promo poster for their casinos) and by the white guilt that is an increasingly pervasive feature of American life. He will be called by a name in his language—not Kennewick Man, but Uytpama Natitayt, a name that means “Ancient One,”  [again, “his language.” Willful delusion – a term describing this entire oration.]

In conclusion, and to put this bigoted rubbish behind us, it is important to emphasize what we had, and how much we may have lost.

Regardless of the explanation, the fact of the absolute rarity of documented ancient human remains in America means that each new discovery represents a vitally important addition to knowledge of the lives and deaths of the first Americans. The accidental discovery in 1996 of Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One as he is known to many American Indians, represented an opportunity to learn from the physical remains of a man who, while not in the vanguard of exploration, still is among the most ancient human remains discovered in America. The extraordinary completeness of the skeleton and the high degree of preservation make this discovery exceptional and one of the most potentially informative sets of human remains ever recovered in North America – “The People Who Peopled America,” Bradley T. Lepper. In Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton.

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As we marvel at how rapidly our ability to learn from the human skeleton is advancing, and how rarely discoveries of Kennewick Man’s magnitude occur, it is our responsibility to look to the future and emphasize that some skeletal collections and individual skeletons are particularly important in terms of what they can reveal about past populations. We, today, do not know the questions that will be significant in the future, but the remains of the earliest Americans, if respectfully cared for and curated, can be available to answer new questions. These human remains are America’s ambassadors to our ancient past. – “Who Was Kennewick Man?”, Douglas W. Owsley and Richard L. Jantz. In Kennewick Man . . .

It is our peculiarly American tragedy that, just as the methods of modern science are increasingly able to propose answers to those new questions, the future of our past is foreclosed by a coterie of tribal hucksters, venal politicians, and spineless bureaucrats eager to bend to the winds of political correctness. Kennewick Man has now joined Buhl Woman, the Chancellor California pair, Spirit Cave Man, Grimes Rock Shelter Boy, Minnesota Woman, Browns Valley Man and a growing list of potential “ambassadors to our ancient past” as victims of a know-nothing conspiracy of silence.

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