The Kennewick Man Skeleton
The corps made it clear that, after a monthlong public comment period, the tribal coalition would receive the bones. The tribes had good reason to be sensitive. The early history of museum collecting of Native American remains is replete with horror stories. In the 19th century, anthropologists and collectors looted fresh Native American graves and burial platforms, dug up corpses and even decapitated dead Indians lying on the field of battle and shipped the heads to Washington for study.
But in the case of Kennewick, Owsley argued, there was no evidence of a relationship with any existing tribes. The skeleton lacked physical features characteristic of Native Americans. In the weeks after the Army engineers announced they would return Kennewick Man to the tribes, Owsley went to work.
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They would never return a phone call. I kept expressing an interest in the skeleton to study it—at our expense. All we needed was an afternoon. But the corps indicated it had made up its mind. Owsley began telephoning his colleagues. So Owsley and several of his colleagues found an attorney, Alan Schneider. Schneider contacted the corps and was also rebuffed. Owsley suggested they file a lawsuit and get an injunction. Owsley assembled a group of eight plaintiffs, prominent physical anthropologists and archaeologists connected to leading universities and museums.
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But no institution wanted anything to do with the lawsuit, which promised to attract negative attention and be hugely expensive. They would have to litigate as private citizens. And efforts were made. When Owsley told his wife, Susan, that he was going to sue the government of the United States, her first response was: Working like mad, Schneider and litigating partner Paula Barran filed a lawsuit.
With literally hours to go, a judge ordered the corps to hold the bones until the case was resolved. When word got out that the eight scientists had sued the government, criticism poured in, even from colleagues. The head of the Society for American Archaeology tried to get them to drop the lawsuit. Some felt it would interfere with the relationships they had built with Native American tribes. But the biggest threat came from the Justice Department itself.
Stanford, a husky man with a full beard and suspenders, had roped in rodeos in New Mexico and put himself through graduate school by farming alfalfa. They were no pushovers. But both anthropologists refused to withdraw, and the director of the National Museum of Natural History at the time, Robert W. The Justice Department backed off. Owsley and his group were eventually forced to litigate not just against the corps, but also the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and a number of individual government officials.
As scientists on modest salaries, they could not begin to afford the astronomical legal bills.
Schneider and Barran agreed to work for free, with the faint hope that they might, someday, recover their fees. The lawsuit dragged on for years. In the storage area where the bones were and are being kept at the Burke Museum, records show there have been wide swings in temperature and humidity that, the scientists say, have damaged the specimen. Somewhere in the move to Battelle, large portions of both femurs disappeared. It even went so far as to give Johnson a lie detector test; after several hours of accusatory questioning, Johnson, disgusted, pulled off the wires and walked out.
The mystery of how they got there has never been solved. The scientists asked the corps for permission to examine the stratigraphy of the site where the skeleton had been found and to look for grave goods. Even as Congress was readying a bill to require the corps to preserve the site, the corps dumped a million pounds of rock and fill over the area for erosion control, ending any chance of research. I asked Schneider why the corps so adamantly resisted the scientists. Asked about its actions in the Kennewick Man case, the corps told Smithsonian: Ultimately, the scientists won the lawsuit.
The court ruled in that the bones were not related to any living tribe: The judge ordered the corps to make the specimen available to the plaintiffs for study. The government appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which in again ruled resoundingly in favor of the scientists, writing:.
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Subscribe or Give a Gift. Brazil Dissolves Its Culture Ministry. The Plot to Kill George Washington. Science Age of Humans. Photos from the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival. At the Smithsonian Visit. The team fighting for custody of the remains to perform a study would draw conclusions that would influence the outcome of that battle.
According to NAGPRA, if human remains are found on federal lands and their cultural affiliation to a Native American tribe can be established, the affiliated tribe may claim them. The Umatilla tribe requested custody of the remains and wanted to bury them according to tribal tradition. Their claim was contested by researchers hoping to study the remains. The Umatilla argued that their oral history goes back 10, years and say that their people have been present on their historical territory since the dawn of time.
Robson Bonnichsen and seven other anthropologists sued the United States for the right to conduct tests on the skeleton. By the bill's definition, Kennewick Man would have been classified as Native American regardless of whether any link to a contemporary tribe could be found. Proponents argue that it agrees with current scientific understanding, which is that it is not in all cases possible for prehistoric remains to be traced to current tribal entities, partly because of social upheaval, forced resettlement, and extinction of entire ethnicities caused by disease and warfare.
Passage of this bill would not resolve the controversy related to Kennewick Man, as there would have to be a determination of which Native American group should take possession of the remains if he could not be definitively linked with a current tribe. As of , the remains were at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington , where they were deposited in October The Burke Museum was the court-appointed neutral repository for the remains and did not exhibit them. They were then still legally the property of the US Army Corps of Engineers, as they were found on land under its custody.
The Corps of Engineers continued to deny scientists' requests to conduct additional studies of the skeleton. A first attempt at DNA analysis in the early s found that meaningful results were impossible to attain from the ancient DNA aDNA with the techniques available at that time. With changes in technology, additional DNA testing of remains has been conducted by an analytical laboratory in Denmark. A e-mail from the laboratory to the US Corps of Engineers stated their belief, based on preliminary results of analysis, that the specimen contained Native American DNA. The laboratory was not ready to release final results or discuss the conclusions.
Reporter Jack Hitt wrote in that "racial preferences color" the controversy about the genetic origin and ancestry of Kennewick Man. The use of the word "Caucasoid" in Chatter's report and his facial reconstruction were taken by many to mean that Kennewick Man was "Caucasian", European, and "white" rather than an ancestor of present-day Native Americans.
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The Corps of Engineers and federal government supported the Native American claim in what became a long-running lawsuit. The results of genetic investigations published in strongly pointed toward a Native American ancestry of Kennewick Man.
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The genetic evidence adds to evidence that ancestors of the New World's aboriginal peoples originated in Siberia and migrated across a land mass that spanned the Bering Strait during the last ice age, and undermines alternative theories that some early migrants arrived from Southeast Asia or even Europe. In September , the US House and Senate passed legislation to return the ancient bones to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes for reburial according to their traditions.
The following day, more than members of five Columbia Plateau tribes were present at a burial of the remains. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved November 8, A Battle Over Bones". Archived from the original on January 26, Retrieved January 7, David; Zollikofer, Christoph P. Retrieved February 20, Kennewick man is discovered". Retrieved 27 July Archived from the original on October 23, Retrieved February 28, Smithsonian Institution , USA.
Archived from the original on June 16, Retrieved February 5, Originally published in the "Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association". Kennewick Man and the First Americans.
Retrieved October 12, Archived from the original on December 10, Retrieved April 25, Retrieved September 10, Jantz, editors pp. James, Heaton, Timothy H. Heather, Worl, Rosita K. Loring, Seguchi, Noriko, Nelson, A. James Dixon; Terence E. Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Archived from the original on August 12, Retrieved July 28, Library of Congress , USA. Retrieved February 26, Archived from the original on April 3, Murray introduces bill to return Kennewick Man to tribes". Retrieved June 18, The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, Air date February 15, The New York Times , April 2, Inside the world of a top forensic scientist and his work on America's most notorious crimes and disasters".