on the cover / By Tony Platt

Grave Matters

Similarly, Ales Hrdlicka (1869-1943), a Smithsonian curator who made a career out of amassing a “racial brain collection,” published a how-to manual for collectors of “specimens for physical anthropology” in 1904, encouraging them “to call attention to the discovery of an ancient burial place.” He provided detailed instructions about how to preserve and transport skulls. “Whenever possible all work connected with removing the brain may be obviated by sending the entire head… The fresher the product, the better.”^viii

Excavation of Indian graves without permission was not the monopoly of racist scientists and museums eager to display freaks and oddities. Throughout the late 19^th and early part of the 20^th century, anthropologists of every political tendency got in on the hunt, “like bargain hunters at a fire sale,” as historian Steven Conn observes.^ix Some were motivated by a desire to salvage what they regarded as a dieing but valuable culture. Even anti-racist anthropologists insisted on digging up Indian remains in order to prove the commonalities of a single human race. “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave,” Franz Boas noted in his diary in 1888, “but what is the use, someone has to do it.”^x

Exhumation of Indian remains also became a fad and hobby, driven partly by a romantic nostalgia for the past, and partly by a mania for accumulating objects for prestige or profit. Digging became an end in itself, a pastime and preoccupation for everybody from boy scouts to country doctors, men’s clubs, philanthropic ladies, wealthy collectors, and amateur archaeologists.^xi “The collecting bug seized me,” admitted one collector in the late 1890s, “and I was lost.”^xii Members of Yale’s hush-hush Order of Skull and Bones - including Prescott Bush, grandfather of a political dynasty - bragged that they stole the skull of Geronimo from his grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1918.^xiii

Many Archaeologies

It was common practice for the Wiyot and Yurok, who lived along the northwest coast “since time immemorial,” to bury their dead close to where they lived. In addition, says Walt Lara, Sr., an elder of the Yurok Tribe, they also buried ceremonial items with the deceased to demonstrate that “he or she was someone of distinction here on earth.” Typically the artifacts were broken or destroyed “so that they could not be used again.”^xiv

Some of the first white travelers heading north from Trinidad in the search for gold knew it was dangerous to violate an Indian cemetery. “Anyone who dares defile the graves,” observed Ernest de Massey as he passed by Big Lagoon in the spring of 1850, “would be swiftly punished by a deadly arrow shot quietly from behind some tree. Knowing this, we approached the sacred burial-place with the deepest reverence.”^xv

But a few weeks after De Massey’s respectful visit to Big Lagoon, a group of vigilantes swept through its main settlement - O-pyúweg (Where They Dance) - killing some Yurok residents, taking others as prisoners to be executed the next day. Before burning down eleven houses, they took “all the curiosities out of them,” reported the Daily Alta California, thus initiating the area’s long history of appropriation.^xvi

The excavation of sites around Humboldt was carried out over many decades by a wide range of people - professional and amateur, organized and casual, small-time and institutional. Beginning in 1854, California enacted legislation to “protect the bodies of deceased persons” making it a crime to “disinter, mutilate or remove the body of any deceased person,” but Native American bodies were exempt from the protection of law.^xvii

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 NEXT PAGE >SHARE