Monthly Archives: November 2015

The Ancient One was in prison a long time. When he went in, it was because they thought he was a white man. Now they’re denying him parole because he’s an Indian.

Like lots of inmates, it took DNA testing to prove his innocence. His relations swore up and down he was from Coleville and they wanted him back, but the scientists said they knew better and kept working him over so that he would finally confess to being European. But he didn’t. He kept quiet the whole time. Finally, the doctors in Sweden got enough of his marrow to make a positive ID. He was Colville*, just like the tribe had said all along.

While driving across southern Colorado this summer, I heard the news that DNA tests on Kenewick Man came back positive for Native American ancestry. “Kenewick Man” was the name scientists had given skeletal remains exposed by flood waters on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996. His case should have been a shining moment for NAGPRA. All the elements were there—discovered on government land (Army Corps of Engineers authority), local tribal community interested in repatriation, an overwhelming amount of evidence that the remains were not only “associated” with the pictographs that adorn the valley around his resting place, but that DNA proved he was “Indian.” Still, he has not been repatriated and sits somewhere in the bowels of Washington State Museum, biding his time. All because the law is fuzzy about human remains that pre-date the “recognized” tribal communities of any given area.

Kennewick Man was “discovered” in 1996 by two college students watching hydroplane races, a yearly event on the Columbia.  The Tri-City Herald ran a piece the next day describing how 21 year old Dave Deacy and his friend Will Thomas stumbled over the skull in the river’s shallows and then “stashed [it] in the bushes along the Columbia River’s Benton County shore” so that they could go watch the boats compete. “‘We knew it was still going to be there when we got back,” Thomas said. When Dave and Will  returned from the races, “[they] got some friends and a bucket and picked up the skull. They found a Kennewick police officer and turned it over to him.” The cops first assumed the remains were those of a murder victim, exposed by the high water that eroded the river’s banks that spring.

So it was that Kennewick Man started out his 20th-century life as a John Doe

The cops called in the corner and local forensic anthropologist James Chatters, who thought the shape of the skull looked strangely Caucasian. Chatters remembered how he worked the site:

That evening I was contacted by Coroner Floyd Johnson, for whom I  conduct skeletal forensics.  I joined him at the site and helped police recover much of the skeleton.  During the next month, under an ARPA permit issued by the Walla Walla District Corps of Engineers, I recovered more wave-scattered bones from the reservoir mud. Throughout the process, I maintained contact with the Corps, which interacted with two local Indian Tribes.

The next day, the Herald ran the headline: “SKULL LIKELY EARLY WHITE SETTLER.” That’s where the trouble began.

Chatters had a lab carbon date the bones. When the results came back, he was shocked—the remains were 9,000 years old. Instead of thinking that looks could be deceiving, Chatters clung to his theory of the Ancient One’s European origins. He was now sure Europeans had been on this continent a lot longer than we imagined, and Kennewick Man proved it. Still, a few things troubled him:

The finished face of KAennewick Man, as reconstructed by Jim Chatters and Thomas McClellan Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation

Even worse, the artist’s mock-up bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Patrick Stewart, who was then a television icon, having played Captain Luc Picard in the new Star Trek series. The European ancestry enthusiasts were elated.

There were plenty of anecdotal details surrounding the remains that pointed to another conclusion. First, the bones showed signs of multiple injuries, and a spear point was wedged in the pelvis. Even Chatters’ cursory analysis suggested that the projectile matched up with known Native weaponry in the area. But few, if any, reporters mentioned any of this. Instead, a media frenzy ensued and speculation outran the data—all because of race. The British press was the worst: Skeleton may prove Indians were not the first Americans (London Times, June 11, 1997); Ancient Bones make white mischief in US;  The First Scalp for truth in the Race debate.

A California-based neo-pagan group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, offered to rebury the remains as those of an ancient European ancestor, using their own rites—”an ancestral religion, one passed down to us from our forebears from ancient times” designed for “the preservation of the Peoples of the North (typified by the Scandinavian/Germanic and Celtic peoples), and the furtherance of their continued evolution.”

Glynn Custred, an anthropologist and principal architect of  the California Civil Rights Initiative, anti-affirmative action legislation that was passed in 1995, wrote an essay on the discovery and it aftermath as an example of the growing conflict between “the principles of open debate, freedom of scientific inquiry” and those of “‘postmodern revisionism.” In other words, either you accepted the remains as European, or you were an irredeemable postmodernist.

Outside the court of public opinion, a legal battle was joined over how and whether NAGPRA applied to the case. Archeologists filed a federal lawsuit to gain access to the remains. The Army Corps of Engineers, who had jurisdiction over the discovery site, confiscated the bones and locked them in a vault. A tribal coalition, led by the Umatillas of northeast Oregon, argued that the discovery site and the broken spearhead were sufficient evidence of Indian ancestry. Armand Minthorn, an Umatilla elder, posted a statement on an Internet site: “If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. . . . From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time.” Native people renamed the man found by the river The Ancient One.

For eight long years, the Ancient One languished in labs and vaults, his existence one ongoing autopsy. He was shipped off to the Smithsonian and poked and prodded, photographed and measured. On April 19, 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision by a U.S. District Court Judge  that the remains could not be defined as “Native American” under the NAGPRA law.

It wasn’t until June of 2015, Swedish scientists released the results of DNA testing they had done on the remains. In a statement issued with the findings, the Swedes commented on the “irony” of their findings:  “The reason we can come to these conclusions is because the skeleton was kept for science,” and not reburied as the tribes had wanted, he told reporters during a news conference yesterday. “But the conclusions show that he was Native American in the first place.”

The real irony, however, lies in how little the science of humanity has changed since the nineteenth century. Basing their claims on little more than surface level morphological similarities between the remains found in Columbia and the skeletons of caucasians, a steady stream of supposedly rational investigators guessed wrong.

James Chatters, looking back on the events that built up a firestorm around him, can’t help but sound a bit wistful about the limits of scientific method:

Much, however, is beyond our reach regardless of political outcomes.  No matter how long we might study the Kennewick man we would never know the form or color of his eyes, skin and hair, whether his hair was curly or straight, his lips thin or full — in short many of the characteristics by which we judge living peoples’ racial affiliation.   We will never be certain if his wound was by accident or intent, what language he spoke, or his religious beliefs.  We cannot know if he is truly anyone’s ancestor.  Given the millennia since he lived, he may be sire to none or all of us.

Still, these musings retain a willful stubbornness. How could this man not be someone’s ancestor? How could he be “sire” to all of us? (And isn’t it stallions—or nationalistic patriarchs—who sire offspring, anyway?) Who cares if his lips were thick or thin? It’s all too clear that the man who died with a spear point in his hip some 9,000 years ago is carrying some serious racial baggage. In that sense, I suppose he is sire to us all.

Yet for all the evidence, the Ancient One remains unburied. At one point, Senator John McCain authored a bill that would amend NAGPRA to remedy its myopia regarding remains that pre-date eighteenth and nineteenth century Native settlement. It failed to pass. At the present time, his best hope for justice is a bill Washington Senator Patty Murray has placed before her colleagues, asking for his immediate repatriation.

• An ancestor of the communities now known as the The Conferderated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

Works Consulted

Welcome Home!

 Balter, Michael. “Mystery solved: 8500-year-old Kennewick Man is a Native American after all.” Science [June 18, 2015].

Chatters, James C. (2004). “Kennewick Man”. Arctic Studies Center at the National Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian Institution, USA. “Originally published in the “Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association””.

Custred, Glynn (2000). “The Forbidden Discovery of Kennewick Man” (PDF). Academic Questions 13 (3): 12–30

Minthorn, Armand (September 1996). “Ancient One / Kennewick Man • Human Remains Should Be Reburied”. Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

“Our history has many strands of fear and hope that snarl and converge at several points in time and space.” ——Carlos Bulosan

Every American has seen this picture, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” published in the November 1943 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

To some, it’s a joke. The perfect white family (perfectly white) are all smiles as they prepare to carve the bird. Dad is wearing his tie for the occasion, but mom has on her sturdy print dress and practical apron. Rockwell frames the iconic moment of American thanksgiving as a family snapshot, with uncles and aunts, kids and cousins, just leaning into frame, all sharing a laugh–probably about last thanksgiving. The dog ate one of the pies; mom forgot to turn the oven on, so dinner was really late.

Yet, the 1943 context for “Freedom from Want” is war. Look at the meal. It is paltry by comparison to many American Thanksgiving meals today. A few sticks of celery, pickles, and jellied cranberries are all that accompany the rich roasted turkey at the illustration’s center. There might be something more exotic beneath the lid of the silver server in the foreground, but I bet it’s potatoes.

Where are the candied yams, the marshmellows, the heaping plate of green beans, corn, store-bought dinner rolls, the Readi Whip? That would come after the war. In 1943—with everything from butter to tires being rationed—this was indeed a great meal. This is what the young men and women who would normally be at the table in peacetime were off fighting for.

Another important context for the illustration is an essay of the same title by the Filipino farmworker-turned-activist, Carlos Bulosan. The editors of the Post asked Bulosan for a piece to accompany Rockwell’s painting. For Bulosan, the Thanksgiving feast brings to mind laborers like himself, who harvest the crops that adorn the holiday table. “So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us,” he explains, “so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.” Tough words. Hard to wash down with gravy and stuffing. For the everyday worker in the fields, “It is only when we have plenty to eat—plenty of everything— that we begin to understand what freedom means.”

But what does this have to do with repatriation? Actually, more than you’d think. With the exception of marshmellows and whipped cream in a can, the iconic dishes of the middle class American Thanksgiving are indigenous to the western hemisphere. Thus we pause this week to remember and to repatriate the foods native to this hemisphere—unadulterated and sustainably grown and harvested—to the late-autumn feast.

Varieties of Andean potatoes, new to the old world in 1492.

“Indians” are there too, they’re just (as Philip Deloria would say) “in unexpected places.”

When Bulosan makes his pitch for better treatment of the working poor, he does so as a immigrant whose faith in America is based in a kind of second-hand manifest destiny: “Our history has many strands of fear and hope that snarl and converge at several points in time and space. We clear the forest and the mountains of the land. We cross the river and the wind. We harness wild beast and living steel. We celebrate labor, wisdom, peace of the soul.”

The cleared forests and leveled mountains are Indian land and they no longer produce the corn, beans, and squash—the wild turkeys, venison, and waterfowl—that furnished the first Anglo-American Thanksgiving table.

Even as he pleads for justice for the worker of the fields, Bulosan elides the primal scene of want—Native peoples standing in ration lines.

Ration Day at the Commissary, Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D. (1891) Nebraska State Historical Society.

Corn fields set ablaze by the troops of “freedom.” Mountains ground down for precious metals, uranium, and coal.

But this post is not intended as a “gotcha” moment for Carlos Bulosan and Norman Rockwell, nor an indictment of giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. It is a plea for the repatriation of our indigenous foodstuffs and their former land base to a state of sustainability.

Making maple syrup at the Meskwaki Settlement . Photo courtesy of the Meskwaki Tribal Museum.

Contemporary Native American communities are  showing us the way. In Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation is engaged in developing its own Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI), a constellation of “local and traditional foods initiatives on the Settlement. MFSI has two main focuses: Education and outreach around food system control; Development of sustainable local farms and farmers.” Among the Meskwaki Nation’s traditional foods: maple syrup.

At the White Earth Land Recovery Project facility, brothers Wayne (sitting) and Gordon Stevens harvest some wild rice on lower Rice Lake.

The MFSI is joined by hundreds of similar organizations across the hemisphere. Northwest Indian College (NWIC)  at Lummi Nation near Bellingham, Washington hosts a Traditional Plants and Foods Program. This program “is a long-term general wellness and diabetes prevention program that recognizes the therapeutic value of traditional foods and medicines.” It features  gatherings “hosted by many tribal communities,” as well as “educational resources, tribal community workshops, and more.” [http://nwicplantsandfoods.com/our-programs]. At the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota, Anishinaabe peoples have established the White Earth Land Recovery Project in order to “facilitate the recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage.” [http://welrp.org/]

Wild rice from the Ojibwe lakes of Minnesota; maple syrup from Ojibwe and Meskwaki “sugar bush;”

mesquite beans on the Tohono O’Odham lands of Arizona and Sonora; acorns the Pomo harvested on California’s great Oak savannas;

wild caught salmon from the northern watersheds the Tlingit have fished for a thousand years.    These are the harvests for which we should give thanks and work to ensure their lasting place in our world.

Finally, this repatriation of indigenous plants and animals is one way to address the cruelties of the “freedom” and “want” nexus that Bulosan pointed out so many years ago—not only for the working poor, but also the middle class Euro-American descendents of the family Rockwell depicts in his painting.

Salmon drying in Tlingit country.

We can return this hemisphere, this Indian country, to some semblance of its fecundity and health, but we must do so together—the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers, suburban generations with alphabetic acronyms, Native Americans in the lower 48, Kānaka Maoli of the Hawaiian Islands, Native Alaskans near the Arctic Circle. The earth has grown much smaller (and hotter) since Rockwell painted “Freedom from Want” and we know perhaps better than he and Carlos Bulosan the consequences of inaction. Instead of “clearing” the indigenous lands and peoples, we should embrace both it and them.

Santee Sioux intellectual and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. foresaw the choices we now face, and the role of indigenous communities in solving them:

When the Indian considers the modern world, . . . he sees it being inevitably drawn into social structures in which tribalism appears to be the only valid form of supra-individual participation. The humor becomes apparent when the Indian realizes that if he simply steps to the sidelines and watches the rat race go past him, soon people will be coming to him to advise him to advise him to return to tribalism. I appears to many Indians that someday soon the modern world will be ready to understand itself and, perhaps, Indian people (“Custer Died for your Sins,” 226).

Deloria wrote this in 1969, and while the word tribalism may seem outdated or dangerous to some who associate it with extremism and fundamentalism, for Deloria it was quite the opposite. It was the way humans gathered together for companionship and preservation long before there was anything like nationhood and its oxymoronic pursuit of freedom at the expense of community.

In the first part of our conversation, State Archaeologist John Doershuk and I discussed what a State Archaeologist does. Next, we turn to NAGPRA and its role (along with Native activism) in re-defining the job of the state’s lead custodian of the material past. How does the State Archaeologist partner with indigenous communities on culturally sensitive issues?

PR: That takes us into the question, “What do you talk about?’ Have you experienced these kinds of challenges from Native people or communities?

JD: Yes, some of my first experiences were well before I got my PhD. My very first field activity I did in archaeology was right out of high school. We’re talking mid-seventies, and at that time the model was that if an archaeologist wanted to dig a site, they did so. They didn’t think they had to ask for permission. The nineteen seventies was when the American Indian movement was reinvigorated, and I didn’t know at the time, growing up in Ohio, that out here in Iowa is when this first in the nation law was being formulated—because of events that were going on here that were controversial. But I got onto a project with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History working on a Hopewell burial mound. We found skeletal remains and objects of cultural patrimony, as they would be called now, under NAGPRA.

But there was this general awareness of the fact that there were “Indians” out there protesting this kind of work. I remember one day, we had this special meeting of the crew (and this was a big crew, there were thirty of us on this dig) where the field director was very concerned that we had procedures in place, if the Native people showed up. How would we make sure things were taken care of and not taken away from us? It never came to pass—happily—but that was my first inkling that there was something bigger going on here, some politics here. I realized it’s a now issue, we’re not just exploring the past.

It was American Indian empowerment that led to NAGPRA.

PR: Thus, the State Archaeologist in now in partnership with the tribes?

JD: Yes, absolutely, the primary responsibility of the State Archaeologist is direct consultation with Native Americans. Over the years, before I took over this position, I had met people like Maria Pearson, and archaeologist Larry Zimmerman and I designed some special field schools that involved Native Americans. That was through the University of Iowa’s American Indian and Native Studies program. We had Native American speakers every week of a dig and these speakers provided input as we moved forward in our explorations. Joe Watkins was involved; Maria Pearson was involved. That really helped me out when the time came for me to become the State Archaeologist because a major component of the job is Native American consultation.

PR: Ok, that leads me to another question about consultation. Here in Iowa, the Ioway Nation was “removed” in the 1830s to Kansas and Oklahoma. So what do you do if you run into something that looks Ioway?

JD: Well, once the Iowa law was passed, it became a question of “who do you talk to then?” That became the problem for the state archaeologist, so he—as part of this law— said, “we should have a committee (Indian Advisory Committee, now called Indian Advisory Council). Maria Pearson was involved in that from the beginning, and Don Wanatee (of the Meskwai Nation of Iowa). The idea was that for most of the prehistoric record there is no definable descendent community that you can be precise about. So rather than worrying about that, we would assemble a group of Native people who lived in Iowa who could represent the others (from out of state).

That worked great for an extended period of time, but as Native American empowerment kept expanding after NAGPRA, the next step was the creation of tribal historic preservation offices (THPO, pronounced “Tippo”) which parallel the state historic preservation offices, and those THPOs more and more became the voice of tribes in the compliance activities that are governed by the NHPA What we’ve seen in the last ten yours is that, as more and more THPOs are out there, there are more and more people to go to and talk to directly about a particular discovery of ancient human remains. So the Council is still critical for my office as a general advisory body, and we meet three or four times a year, and they advise us where they can. But they also tell us who to talk to within this growing body of tribes that—because of the emergence of THPOs—we can now connect with.

PR: My final question has to do with the not-so-sensational aspect of NAGPRA—what the law calls “objects of cultural patrimony.” That’s the real focus of the Repatriation Files. So, what is an “object of cultural patrimony?” As I understand it, the same kind of object might be important to cultural patrimony in one context and not subject to repatriation in another.

JD: Well, pipes like the one you have in an earlier blog are really fascinating examples because they do come out of what we would call as archaeologists an everyday habitation context—everyday life. But they also can be sacred objects, used in different types of ceremony. So when you get a pipe that is clearly associated with human skeletal remains, then it’s an “associated funerary object” as defined by NAGPRA. That is easier to deal with because you can say, “we have these human remains; there’s the object that was with that person,” and you know what to do. But when you get pipes that are not found with human remains—maybe they are part of a mound fill, maybe part of a habitation site—they may have been used in ceremonies to bury people, but they aren’t connected to any one individual or even a cemetery. These objects that fall into the category of “cultural patrimony.” Things that are important to a group of people—recognizable to their descendants today as objects that were used in some ceremonial or sacred way. Those are fuzzier lines. It depends a lot on the knowledge of the current descendants, how much they care about that object, how comfortable they are in dealing with it.

PR: What do you mean when you say that some communities are not “comfortable” with dealing with these objects?

JD: Well, sometimes a pipe is considered to have a lot of power and the community does not want to deal with it. But they also don’t want to see it up on the shelf of a museum.

PR: Yes, that’s a concept that we want to explore in the Repatriation Files, the idea that while you want something taken care of, you don’t want it misused, you don’t want it on display. Perhaps it is no longer proper for you or this time.

JD: Yes, so sometimes museums and tribes arrive at an understanding whereby the archive keeps the object in a respectful way out of the view of its general audiences, but the elders of the tribe can view it whenever they feel that is proper.

John Doershuk has been with the Office of the State Archaeologist since 1995. In 2007, he became the State Archaeologist.

An Interview with John Doershuk, State Archaeologist of Iowa (Part 1)

As Maria Pearson’s story makes clear, the State Archaeologist was in the position, in the 1970s, to decide that the human remains of indigenous Iowans could be boxed up and shipped to a laboratory, while those of Euro-Americans would be treated with respect and re-interred according to their religious traditions. With the passage of Iowa’s Burials Protection Act of 1976, things changed. I recently sat down with John Doershuk to discuss these changes.

PR: What does a State Archaeologist do?

JD: It varies state to state. In Iowa, we have the relatively unique situation in which the Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) is a state of Iowa department separate from what is typically called in most states the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO, pronounced “Shippo”). In many states, they are combined. In Iowa, the OSA was established prior to the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), so it was an existing entity specifically positioned at the University of Iowa as a research center. Once the NHPA was enacted in 1966, then the review and compliance part of it was assigned to the SHPO, which is housed in Des Moines as part of the State Historical Society of Iowa. So in Iowa we have separation of these offices where in many other states there is not, and that allows the OSA to act as a research center and do a lot of things that those in other states are prevented from because in those states they [archaeologists] are the regulators of the law. We, on the other hand, are free to pursue grants and contracts that allow us to do research, and the majority of the 24 people on the staff here is involved in grant and contract funded research. We provide expert consulting, science research.

The Archives of the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa.

We also have an education program through which we try to connect with the people of the state, and we maintain the official site file for the state of Iowa, which contains the location of all known archaeological sites that are recorded with the Office. Finally, we are the state archaeological repository. We have four million items from 14, 000 archaeological sites here in the state.

PR: I’ve always imagined that a state archaeologist is like a county corner. He or she is on call, waiting for the phone to ring and someone on the other end of the line says, “We’re building a highway and one of our bulldozers just dug up a skeleton.”

JD: That was very much what it was like in 1965, prior to NHPA . . . But now, the Department of Transportation has us on retainer to go out ahead of construction and [become] part of the planning process—before right of way is purchased, before any dirt is moved. They are way out ahead, looking at the landscape, trying to determine whether or not there is something of cultural importance in their path.

PR: This is why you keep files, so that you have a sense already that a particular area might be a sensitive one to excavate or build on.

JD: Yes, the idea is to try to evaluate when there is still time to make a decision about avoidance, or preserving in place, or mitigation.

PR: How you choose between leaving objects in “place” or excavating them to preserve them and perhaps make them available here at the OSA for education and research?

JD: Well, a lot of that is actually driven by forces outside of our control. If an applicant for a construction permit is trying to lay some pipe, for example, and they have a preferred route, they might for engineering reasons say, “its too expensive for us to redesign and move the pipeline, we would prefer to go ahead and impact the site.” They will then go ahead with paying for a full archaeological excavation and tribal consultation. Or, it might be a great site we’d like to excavate, but they say, “No, we’ll change our route.” In that case, we preserve it in place. We note where it is and keep it in our records here so that if we need to avoid impact at a later time, we can.

PR: You said you came to the OSA in 1995, so this means your career has been especially impacted by NAGPRA. You are probably part of the first generation of anthropologists who came of age in the era of repatriation.

JD: Yes, I was in grad school at the time [of NAGPRA’s passage] and it was very much on our minds as new PhDs going out into either the academic workforce or the consulting workforce, asking ourselves, “what was this going to mean?” I remember vividly one professor a year or two before NAGPRA was passed, who was just an absolute doomsayer, you know, “this is the absolute end of archaeology.” But then there were also others who very much saw it as an opportunity. The majority of the young professors coming into our grad program were embracing NAGPRA, saying “it’s going to happen, we need to make the best of this.”

PR: How did it make you a different kind of anthropologist, coming up with NAGPRA as your ethical and legal touchstone?

JD: Well, some programs embraced it earlier than others, some have resisted, and there are still pockets out there that pretend it doesn’t exist. But I very much benefitted from having some mentors who were more forward looking, and so throughout my career, I have sort of gravitated to situations like this one at the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa. You know Iowa passed the first in the nation law protecting ancient human remains. I’m very proud of that, and I’ve continued to move in that direction.

Generally speaking, growing up in this era meant that we had to be more anthropological, and not hide in the world of archaeology, which is a field where you might hear someone say, “We deal with dead people, we deal with the past, we don’t have to talk to anybody if we don’t want to.”

Native American tribal leaders, non-native farmers and ranchers from across the United States march down Independence Avenue while demonstrating against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in 2014. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

There was also the idea that we were curators of the past, and that was a slippery slope toward “we own the past.” Too many archaeologists and some physical anthropologists have slid down that slope to thinking, “these are our people, we own these things and they are important to us—more than anyone else.

NAGPRA was definitely part of a reaction of Native Americans saying, “wait a minute, these are our people, let’s at least sit down and talk about it.”

To be continued . . .

John Doershuk has been with the Office of the State Archaeologist since 1995. In 2007, he became the State Archaeologist