on the cover / By Tony Platt

Grave Matters

Following the contested excavation at Tsurai, Berkeley’s archaeologists were on the defense against increasingly organized protests. In September 1949, the state director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed Heizer that his office had “received several protests from Indians and interested individuals concerning alleged excavation of old Indian burial grounds in the vicinity of Eureka.”^lxxxix

Heizer lobbied state officials to back him up against local Indian protests. The politically connected chairman of the state’s Park Commission offered to help Heizer circumvent local opposition to a proposed dig at Dry Lagoon State Park, just north of Big Lagoon. “There are people who haven’t much else to do but cause trouble,” Joseph Knowland wrote Heizer, “and it does not cause much energy to succeed in that.” He promised to “see if some plan can not be worked out to accomplish what you request.”^xc

But such a plan was not worked out. The Berkeley team also faced a challenge from Eureka clubwomen who lobbied state parks’ officials to make sure that any artifacts excavated in Humboldt remained in the county.^xci In deference to “considerable local sentiment” and in response to “unwelcome attention,” Heizer was forced to return to Patrick’s Point all the artifacts collected at the Sumeg site.^xcii “I have now a somewhat jaundiced view of archaeology in Northwestern California,” Heizer concluded in 1950 after experiencing organized opposition on two fronts.^xciii

Many years later, Heizer issued a public apology for the failure of archaeologist to “listen to the survivors of the people they profess to be so interested in” and for treating “Indians not as people, but as objects for study.”^xciv But he never took responsibility for his own role in digging up ancestral village sites and cemeteries without permission. In 1975, after reviewing his “big accumulation” of California-related, archaeological correspondence and notes going back to the early 1930s, Heizer decided to destroy the whole file “so that it will not become ‘archival’ and subject to the possibility of being pawed through and its contents ‘interpreted’.”^xcv

Past As Prologue

OrganizedNative American opposition to archaeological excavations on California’s northwest coast goes back at least to the late 1920s. But it became much more effective in the context of the Red Power movement that ignited a decade of protests from coast to coast, beginning with the occupation of Alcatraz (1969-1971) and culminating with The Longest Walk in 1978.^xcvi In response to this movement, Congress passed legislation that provided increased protections for cultural patrimony. The 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act recognized the importance of access to “sacred sites,” including cemeteries, and the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act provided criminal penalties for unauthorized excavations of graves and “human skeletal remains.”^xcvii

California was one of the first states in which a grassroots organization was created to specifically halt the desecration and looting of cemeteries. The Northwest Indian Cemetery Protection Association (NICPA), an inter-tribal non-profit organization with strong Yurok participation, was formed in 1969. Its first chairman, Milton Marks, and its second chairman, Walt Lara Sr., were well known Yurok activists. In 1988, NICPA gained national prominence for its role as the respondent in the “G-O Road” Supreme Court case involving Native American religious access to public lands.^xcviii But long before that case was settled, NICPA’s militancy in California generated widespread recognition and a flurry of results.

In March 1970, the Times Standard finally reported on the long-time fact that “Indians opposed people digging into the graves of their immediate ancestors.”^xcix A few weeks later, the Humboldt County Sheriff, Gene Cox, issued a public warning that “every person who mutilates, disinters or removes from the place of internment any human remains without authority of law is guilty of a felony. We sincerely hope that the guilty persons who are committing these acts not only realize the magnitude of the crime they are committing, but also that many bodies they are disturbing have close living relatives in the area.”^c

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