Thank You, Nathan Phillips [View all]

[H2O Man]

“ 'The men told me there weren't any human bones; it was a prehistoric campsite, not a burial ground; they had a right to dig, and I had no business there since it was private land. But looking at all those craters, well ….I know amateurs don't destroy whole sites like that. These people were literally mining the place. It had every sign of a commercial operation.' “
Sgt. Mike Hart; Who Owns the Past?; National Geographic; March, 1989; page 378.


This weekend's incident involving a gang of Catholic students, a small group of black people, and a Native American Elder reminded me of an event in Kentucky in the 1980s. As reported in National Geographic, ghouls excavated more than 650 Indian graves. The Slack Farm had been a major village site between approximately 1450 and 1650.

That some of the students from the Kentucky school shouted, “You stole the land from the indigenous people” struck me as central to understanding the conflict. And while that conflict began in the ignorance of the students, the weekend incident highlights the potential for violence that has seeped to the surface of American society since Trump began campaigning for the presidency.

Before I focus on the weekend, I'll take a minute to discuss the Slack Farm. This was on Shawnee territory. Native leaders called upon, among others, representatives of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, to conduct the repatriation ceremonies. When Tadodaho Leon Shenandoah and Chiefs Vince Johnson and Paul Waterman arrived in Kentucky, the governor said he had no idea who they were, or what right they had to be there. Vince had a copy of the September 1987 Nation Geographic with him; the article “The Iroquois: Keepers of the Fire” convinced the governor that the three men had jurisdiction.

The grave-robbers were intent upon were focused on finding “artifacts” to market. The National Geographic article showed, for example, a small pipe that sold for $4,500. They were not interested in the human remains. Thus, there were huge piles of skulls, of jaw-bones, etc. I'll never forget Paul's telling me about the largest pile of jaws. The only good that came from this outrageous situation is that it helped us get the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed into federal law in 1990.

But for every action, there is a reaction. The reaction mimicked the corporate strategy, still in use, to justify taking mineral wealth from, and/or putting pipelines through, Indian territory. The outdated theory that paleo-era people entering North America killed large game at a rate that caused mass extinctions – hence Indians were not “conservationists. The original theory that connected the melting of glaciers, the peopling of North America, and the extinction of many large mammals was started by scientists in the mid-1900s. However, as Vine Deloria Jr. wrote in “Red Earth, White Lies,” the myth of the Pleistocene Hit Man ignored the many small animals and tiny creatures that also became extinct in that era of great environmental change.

Likewise, theories about where the original inhabitants to the Americas came from, along with when and how, has been expanded in recent decades by serious scientists. Without question, groups of people did walk across the Bering Strait, and this accounts for much of the population that resulted. But there are theories about other means, including small boats with people who traveled along the coastline. More, just as the once popular myth that Columbus was the first European to reach the Americas have been proven incorrect, scientists have theorized on other people coming to the North American coasts, both east and west, primarily to trade.

There is one more myth that comes into play with this weekend's events. After the end of the US v Indian wars in the west, a curious factor effected many white families in America. This was best described by Deloria in another of his outstanding books: these families claimed they had an Indian in their family tree. Usually, it was a Mohawk, a Cherokee, or a Sioux, perhaps because were the most famous for having produced “noble savages.” Curiously, there was no common claim of an Agrican or Asian ancstor.

The combination of the loss of access to burial grounds to plunder, combined with a shallow understanding of the reality of science, took the old”family tree” myth a giant step further. The pseudo-science that too often plays on the History Channel, and claims, for example, that the Cherokee are Hebrews, has convinced these people that Europeans were the “first Americans,” and that Indians stold their land from them. Thus, the sad call that the Native Americans stole the land from the indigenous people. (The Cherokee, by the way, were from Iroquois peoples who moved south, just the same as their relatives, the Susquehannock, around 2,000 bc.)

The viciousness that we witnessed over the weekend should remind us that it is but a thin veil between civilization and barbarism. Nathan Phillips stood as the conscience against the mindless hate that threatens to destroy that veil.

Peace,
H2O Man