on the cover / By Tony Platt

Grave Matters

A brief history of the desecration of Native American cemeteries in Humboldt County

(June 18, 2009) 

You can find ancient Native American artifacts from Humboldt on show or in storage at several places in the region: the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka, the museum of the Trees of Mystery in Klamath, University of California’s Hearst Museum in Berkeley, and the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls. And if you’re in the market, say, for “Big Lagoon Yurok Indian artifacts,” you could go on-line and purchase for less than $100 a “large and colorful pendant with fine serrations between 800-1,000 years old,”ⁱ or visit a trade show specializing in antiquities to buy rare Wiyot items for thousands of dollars.ⁱⁱ

GALLERY >

What you will not typically be told, or maybe you prefer not to know, is that most local “Indian relics” preserved in university labs, museum display cases, private collections, and tourist attractions were taken from inside graves. Today, it is a crime in California to engage in the “willful injury, disfiguration, defacement, or destruction of any object or thing of archaeological or historical interest or value,”ⁱⁱⁱ but until the 1970s digging up Indian sites for pleasure or profit was authorized and popular.

Moreover, for a long time - for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - nobody except Native Americans objected if collectors and adventurers also unearthed the skeletons of the dead to keep as curiosities or ship off to museum curators and university scientists. Sleuthing the location of gravesites and exhumation was a thriving cottage industry that generated at least 600,000 Indian body parts - maybe as many as a million - to which Humboldt contributed its fair share.^iv

Between 1788 - when Thomas Jefferson “conjectured that there might have been a thousand skeletons” in the Indian burial mound he exhumed near his home - and the 1970s when the Red Power movement began to put amateur and professional archaeologists on the defensive, the discovery and removal of Native American human remains was considered good sport and sound science.^v

The practice was rooted in the furious competition that took place among the country’s leading museums during the nineteenth century as they vied to become showplaces of American progress. Scientists had a particular interest in native peoples who, it was believed, had been frozen in time, unchanging since the Stone Age, and whose remains were therefore thought to hold the key to the “secrets of human origins,” and to provide physical evidence for claims about European civilization and native degeneracy.^vi The publication of Crania Americana (1839) by Samuel Morton (1799-1851), a Philadelphia physician considered the “father of American physical anthropology,” became a rationale and apology for scientific racism, and the widespread view that Native Americans were biologically predestined to extinction.^vii

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