"The early history of museum collecting of Native American remains is replete with horror stories. "The tribes had good reason to be sensitive," writes Smithsonian Magazine's Douglas Preston. That federal law, passed in 1990, requires certain Native American artifacts and remains to be handed over to culturally affiliated tribes or provable descendants. Working together, five tribes demanded that The Ancient One's remains not be poked or prodded in the name of science, and instead be promptly reburied in accordance with tribal custom - and under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do." "From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time," a leader of the Umatilla tribe wrote in a statement at the time. So which was it? Did humans walk here, or somehow - incredible to imagine - paddle? Was there one wave of migration, or more? A study of Kennewick Man's bones could reveal what he ate, what he drank, how he hunted, and, of course, his DNA - all clues that could ultimately tell the story of where he, and his forebears, came from and how they got here.īut a group of Native American tribes considered The Ancient One, as they call him, a direct tribal ancestor - and they didn't need science to explain how people ended up here. But other evidence suggests humans were already living on this continent well before that particular pathway was possible. The dominant theory was that humans trekked here on foot around 13,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, when seas were lower and a land bridge temporarily connected Siberia and Alaska. A forensic mystery, or a moot point?Īrchaeologists dubbed the skeleton Kennewick Man, after the place he was found, and hoped his bones could help settle one of the greatest mysteries in the story of human migration: how did Homo sapiens, originating in Africa, end up in the Americas? Who gets to decide? The twists and turns in the story of Kennewick Man - which has been told before, and well - suggest there's no easy answer, of course, but certainly provide an incredible case study for the future of this debate. Others say the unfettered pursuit of knowledge ought to trump belief if the faithful always got their way, we'd still think the Earth was flat. Some say scientists need to rethink their whole approach to culturally sensitive research. And so an object of scientific interest, be it a bone or a mountain, can come to stand for an entire civilization. None of these clashes exists in a vacuum they often come on the heels of decades, if not centuries, of genocide and erasure aimed at indigenous peoples and their ways of life. Take the recent fight between native Hawaiian protesters and scientists who wanted to erect a telescope on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano considered sacred by some and "the best location in the world to observe the stars and study the origins of our universe" by others. There's a history to bitter tensions of this sort.
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