“They weren’t actually looking at my ancestors as people.”

January 27, 2023 8:11 AM

“My ancestors put me here,” Pappenfort said. “They came from Illinois, and it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to get them where they’re supposed to be again.” The Museum Built on Native American Burial Mounds (Logan Jaffe, ProPublica, 2023-01-27)
posted by Not A Thing (13 comments total)

When I was in high school, my mother and I moved to Salina, Kansas. Where there was a tourist attraction just outside of town called the Indian Burial Pit. I went there with my older brother when he visited us on break from college. We were both horrified.

Here's their brochure. And here is how it was closed.
posted by y2karl at 9:59 AM on January 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Doesn’t every inch of land probably contain remnants of dead people? Why are some inches more “ sacred” than others?
posted by Ideefixe at 10:51 AM on January 27, 2023

Ideefixe, there is a definite difference between "remnants" of bodies in soil and actual grave sites. There are professionals whose jobs are all about identifying these grave sites. In the US, Native tribes have an actual legal and ethical right to those graves/remains. And white American citizens have an obligation to make sure they are returned.

Try to imagine your actual ancestors being exposed for a tourist attraction. Can you?
posted by RedEmma at 11:10 AM on January 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

Literally around the corner from my house is a neighborhood which is partially built around a pre-existing burial mound. One street is called Red Feather. Another Tomahawk (it runs alongside the burial mound). The developer put a little memorial up next to it stating what it was. Last summer a resident of the neighborhood was chilling on top of the mound in a lawn chair.

And this was after steps were taken to be "respectful."

Doesn’t every inch of land probably contain remnants of dead people? Why are some inches more “ sacred” than others?

Why do we have cemeteries...? These mounds and the people entombed within are no different than the six foot burials and their inhabitants in the local churchyard. Though, arguably, they are more important, because they represent the people and their history that western colonization attempted to thoroughly eradicate for territorial acquisition.
posted by Atreides at 11:55 AM on January 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have my undergrad in Archeology. I got my degree a mere 7 years after NAGPRA and was taught by a lot of professors who saw the act as the end of the "good times" for archeologists. A lot of them said the whole "human bodies are everywhere" nonsense and tried to sell that line to the undergrads. They would joke that all archeologist want to be cremated because they don't want random weirdos handling their bones but then go on to argue that they should be allowed to keep Native American remains because of reasons. However, my main advisor was someone who testified to Congress to encourage repatriation and he firmly believed that a key element in an archeologist's job was to honor those that came before us and make sure they were treated with dignity and respect and treat them as our ancestors.

I worked on a few digs with human remains in college and afterwards and sometimes struggled with the idea of who these people were. It seemed so abstract but when you think about it, they were no further removed from their people that individuals we excavated from a Revolutionary Era fort. Because let me tell you, when you excavate a grave and see the care with which a person was buried and the object they were buried with, you can't think of those remains as anything other than a person and wonder who missed them.

I remember working on a Stone Box Mississippian grave and one of the volunteers asked me what tribe the individual was from. I did my best to explain the Mississippian era and how modern tribes were descendants but it was difficult to directly correlate a specific tribe to this specific site. My professor overheard me and stepped in. He picked up some fallen leaves off the ground and asked if we knew what tree they had come from. Smart ass that I am, I pointed to the tree above us. He then said, what if I put them in my car and drove them to Oklahoma? Would you know then? How about if I crushed them, and mixed in with other leaves, and drove them someplace else?

His point made, he then said "We've scattered this person's descendants to the winds, and they're gonna build a parking lot on their grave, the least we can do is to try to find their people so they can have a permanent home."

There is no excuse, in this era of DNA testing and scientific advancement, for any museum to have human remains without the consent of the family. None.
posted by teleri025 at 12:00 PM on January 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

> Ideefixe: "Doesn’t every inch of land probably contain remnants of dead people? Why are some inches more “ sacred” than others?"

I surmise that it might have to do with the fact that this is not just a random spot where someone's remains happened to have landed upon death but rather a formalized burial ground marked by large earthwork structures that are the physical documentation of this culture's funerary practices. But I'm not an anthropologist or archaeologist or whatever, so who knows? Perhaps some things must remain a mystery.
posted by mhum at 12:02 PM on January 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pretty sure if someone dug up my great great grandpa's grave, stole what he was buried with, left the coffin open, built a building over him, and charged money to see him, I'd feel pretty weird about it. Especially if they did the same to my great great grandma and sent various bones off God knows where for "science." Especially if only people of my race/lineage had this happen and everyone else's ancestors were left in peace.
posted by emjaybee at 12:19 PM on January 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Mrs. Johnson & her brother have clear memories of seeing the exposed remains at Dickson Mounds from their elementary school trips to the museum back in the day. They remember it seeming odd -- even as young children -- that an exposed burial ground would be touted as an 'educational' exhibit.

But the fact that this most conspicuous overreach of grave desecration was subsequently closed up (early 1990's, per the article -- and only after Congress first passed legislation regarding human remains) made it easy to feel like progress was being made. The article does a great job of looking into the actual wrangling done on the museum side to keep "their" collections.

It's encouraging to hear the current philosophy shift occurring at Dickson Mounds. (Which I've still never visited, despite threats from Mrs. J & the brother-in-law to take me there...) I'd love a similar post-script on the current state of the Illinois State Museum, which we've visited together a number of times with our families.

Lastly, the article does give some nice background on Native American history in Illinois. The most excavated remains of any state? Not a record to be proud of, but also highlights how central the region was to Native Americans. Another thing that caught my eye was the animated map showing the regions claimed by settlers. You can see that on the 1816 map there's a corridor around Chicago -- if you want a curious Friday afternoon map-archeology activity, find two small sections of road in Chicago that trace that boundary. (A couple landmarks near the roads have names that indicate the original purpose...)
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 12:21 PM on January 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

I grew up in illinois. My gradeschool took us to Dickson mounds, and the docent was very adamant that we needed to be respectful to the people whose tomb we were standing in. even my little brain flagged that with “How respectful can you be with a museum and gift shop literally built on top of them?”

This seems like good progress.
posted by gorestainedrunes at 12:56 PM on January 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

There is a “gift shop” at the Ground Zero memorial site in NYC. Humans are pretty fucking far from noble when it comes to respecting the memories of the dead, much less the living or anything else, for that matter.
posted by dbiedny at 1:16 PM on January 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I plan to dive into this over the weekend. Thank you for posting it.

Here's another story along these lines: 2,000 Sacred Bones Went Missing 21 Years Ago.

It's about the gross mismanagement of Effigy Mounds National Monument in Northeast Iowa, a site I visited several times as a kid, then years later, when my (then) wife became professionally acquainted the the site's superintendent, one of the principle agents of these transgressions. It was so strange, after the story came to light, to reflect on the pleasant visits we'd enjoyed with that nice lady, under whose direction such destructive, unethical, and hurtful activities took place.
posted by Caxton1476 at 1:40 PM on January 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

There should some kind of study of the European-American cultural practice of displaying the remains of conquered and colonized Native American people. Seems similar to the practice some European cultures (not all!) have of collecting and/or displaying the remains of colonized African peoples.

Maybe there's some spiritual dimension to it. European cultures have a practice called Science that they use to understand their place in the world. That's important, but going against the responsibility Native Americans feel towards the remains of their ancestors is rather extreme. The White community needs to police itself a bit better with regard to practicing anthropology of this sort. Hopefully without much hand holding from Native Americans.
posted by Mister Cheese at 1:58 PM on January 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

There is a “gift shop” at the Ground Zero memorial site in NYC. Humans are pretty fucking far from noble when it comes to respecting the memories of the dead, much less the living or anything else, for that matter.

I've never been to the 9/11 memorial, but the way that the depository of the unidentified remains is described, it sounds like a very different thing from the Dickson Mounds museum. No one is putting the remains on display or sending a box of them across country to someone who wants them for a research project.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:00 AM on January 28, 2023