Kennewick Man

'Kennewick man' free to reveal secrets

'Kennewick man' free to reveal secrets Nicholas Kohler, National Post, July 22, 2004

[. . . . ] Despite that tantalizing clue about who first arrived here thousands of years ago, archeologists have been barred from studying Kennewick Man by legal manoeuvres from northwestern U.S. native groups, who claim him as an ancestor.

But last week, the native tribes who sought most actively to recover Kennewick Man from the clutches of scientists surrendered to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal's February decision that Kennewick Man is not Native American under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

[. . . . ] ''They defined 'Native American,' which is a key term under the statute, as anything that predated 1492,'' Ms. Barran said. ''Which leads to the really easy argument, 'Well heck, if we find a viking sword here -- it's Indian.'' [. . . . ]

If you dig it up, it must be Indian -- No European shrieks when the corpses of Napoleonic soldiers are exhumed

If you dig it up, it must be Indian Colby Cosh, National Post, July 23, 2004

[. . . . ] Maybe it is time to speak of anthropological research as free speech for the dead. The 9,200-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man has, since its discovery in Washington State eight years ago, been sitting in a storage bin waiting to tell its story. It's a story that could rearrange the pre-Columbian annals of North America. But some don't want them rearranged, and the whole affair has become a case study in bureaucracy's gift for murdering inconvenient history and generally behaving loathsomely.

Northwestern Indian tribes immediately claimed Kennewick Man as kin in 1996 and claimed proprietorship of his remains under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. NAGPRA provides for tribes to be able to take possession of and reinter an ancestor, forever preventing any invasive scientific fidgeting with his bones. The problem was that Kennewick Man doesn't look like any living racial group's ancestor at all, being morphologically most like the Ainu of Japan (whose own origins are rather clouded and debatable). [. . . . ]

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