Monthly Archives: January 2016

Recently, Jacki Rand, my colleauge in the History Department at the University of Iowa, endured sub-zero temperatures at the Wisconsin capitol to protest legislation that would have opened the state’s many indigenous effigy mounds to destruction by gravel mining operations. As  isthmus.com reports,

Left to Right: Jacki Rand from the UI History Department, along with Elizabeth Reetz and Brianna Hoffman from the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist.

“The bill from Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) and Rep. Robert Brooks (R-Saukville) would require the Wisconsin Historical Society to establish the presence of human remains before cataloging a burial site on private land. Under the bill, property owners would be allowed to use ‘ground-penetrating radar, other imaging technology, or archaeological excavation and examination.'”

Experts at the Wisconsin Historical Society have published data that shows about 90% of professionally excavated mounds contain human remains. They also point out that 80% of the state’s original mounds have already been damaged in some way. In Madison, a famous roundabout in the Greenbush neighborhood skirts a large mound shaped like a bear. The UW Madison campus contains 38 effigy and burial mounds; another 20 have been lost to construction. Mounds are simply everywhere in Wisconsin.

Protesters are rightly focusing on human remains, because—for many—these are the burial places of their ancestors. They are members of the Ho-Chunk Nation and have been in Wisconsin for a very long time. The earthworks, sometimes formed into the shapes of animals and legendary beings, are among the oldest human-made structures in the region.

Yet fighting over “mounds” is not new. In North America, mounds became sites of political contention soon after the establishment of the United States, when Euro-Americans promulgated a “mound builder” myth in which the Native peoples of colonial America bore no part. As the anthropologist Meghan Howey observes,

because it was a lot easier to take land from ‘savages’ who could never use it ‘properly’ than from people who were capable of the level of culture implied by the great mounds and earthworks . . . a myth that began developing in the waning years of the eighteenth century suggested in fact that these mounds were actually constructed by a white race destroyed by the modern Indians, the Mound Builder race, a myth that would greatly amplify such land grab justifications. The myth of the Mound Builders blossomed in the nineteenth century, promoting the idea that the earthen mounds had been built by a civilized white race that was then destroyed by red savages (“The Question Which has Puzzled,” 441).

So, what is going on in Wisconsin has a long and reprehensible history in the United States.

For me, disturbing burial sites is out of the question. Except for the fact that some rest on private land, the law is clear about the sanctity of human remains. But that is only part of the story. I believe that even the 10% that are presumed not to contain burials ought to be preserved. Why? Simply because the mounds are also significant features of the indigenous peoples’ built environment, and as such, demand preservation in their own right.

The proposed Wisconsin law brings up essential questions regarding the relationship between state historic preservation issues and NAGPRA compliance. In some ways, they seem at odds in this case, but in my view, the two need not be pitted against each other. Repatriation of human remains and the preservation of “objects of cultural patrimony” (which the mounds assuredly are) should be considered a part of an ethical continuum by which we serve as stewards of all things—human and non-human—in this present world of ours.

When viewed from the perspective of stewardship, mounds and earthworks easily fit into the original mandate of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966, which argued “the preservation of . . . irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest so that its vital legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, economic, and energy benefits will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans . . .” Especially relevant are two of the law’s original published goals:

• “[to] contribute to the preservation of nonfederally owned historic property and give maximum encouragement to organizations and individuals undertaking preservation by private means . . .”
• “[to] assist State and local governments, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations, and the National Trust to expand and accelerate their historic preservation programs and activities . . .”

The mandate is there, all we need to do is follow through.

A group of people from the Osage Nation tour a Native American mound in St. Louis on Tuesday, March 19, 2013. The tribe purchased Sugarloaf Mound and the house built on top of it, located at 4420 Ohio Street in St. Louis, in 2009. Photo By David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com

Of course, this problem is not unique to Wisconsin. In 2009, the blog post “Facing South,” a publication of the Institute for Southern Studies, reported that the city of Oxford Alabama was using earth removed from an ancient mound as fill dirt for the construction of a Sam’s Club. While state archaeologists concluded that the mound was indeed “cultural,” not “natural and “used only for smoke signals” (as the town’s mayor claimed), they were unable to list it as an official “National Historic Place” because of legal technicalities.

Either non-Native citizens of the U.S. believe in the value of the past or they don’t. There is no distinction between Indians and non-Indians when it comes to “the vital legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational” benefits we all derive from preserving our shared histories. Our history hasn’t always been pretty, but it will always be instructive.

In 1912, a group of Native intellectuals formed the Society of the American Indian (SAI). They were sometimes labeled “progressives,” and certainly not all indigenous peoples agreed with their views on citizenship and the Native American Church.

Yet the image they chose for their logo suggests how important they felt it was that  Americans understand that Native peoples were heirs to intellectual traditions that had existed for a thousand years before Europeans ever settled here. On the left-hand side of their publication’s mastheads, they reproduced an image of a copper repousse plate of Mississippean origin. Originally part of a mound burial, the image served the SAI as the historical ground for their own efforts. By re-appropriating the wrongly exposed remains to the service of 20th-century Indian activism, the SAI made its own small contribution to  preserving the legacies of their ancestors.

More recently, Ojibwe poet and scholar Meg Noodin has offered a song to help guide us in our own efforts to honor the past:

One thing seems clear. Repatriation should be treated as a broad term that encompasses the various sovereignties—political, social, and cultural, topographical— that make communities whole.

SOURCES

Howey, Meghan C. L. “‘The Question which has puzzled and still puzzles: How American Indian Authors Challenged Dominant Discourse about Native American Origins in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 4, Fall 2010, pp. 435-474

http://isthmus.com/news/news/save-the-mounds-rally-draws-hundreds-to-capitol/#sthash.6IZFzVT4.dpuf”

Visit SavetheMounds.com for further details and to access the tribe’s petition.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/01/06/desecration-graves-sanctioned-wisconsin-assembly-bill-162970

(http://www.southernstudies.org)

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal made by a group of University of California scientists who wished to test human remains unearthed near La Jolla in the 1970s. Having been rebuffed by the lower courts, this was the last resort for the plaintiffs, who were seeking to block UC San Diego from transferring the remains to the Kumeyaay Nation, something the university agreed to do before the researchers went to court.

The locations of tribal communities near the La Jolla remains.

This victory for repatriation law also represents a chance to challenge the claims of anti-repatriationists that such a transfer is always (to quote UC Davis professor Robert L. Bettinger) “a tremendous loss for science.” To the contrary, Kumeyaay spokesman Steven Banagas sounded somewhat more conciliatory. According to the New York Times, he “did not rule out that scientists could study the remains for DNA. ‘These things we need to discuss,’ he said. ‘We want to be the ones who tell our own story.’”

The Kumeyaay had, in fact, already allowed Arion Mayes, a San Diego State anthropologist who had worked on Kumeyaay skeletons, to conduct an examination

Even though there was not enough “associated” material culture to definitively determine a relationship between the dead and the La Posta band of the Kumeyaay,

the university argued in court that the tribe should rightfully be joined to the lawsuit, and that tribal immunity therefore nullified the scientists’ right to sue in the first place.

This demonstrates the complexity of Indian Law and NAGPRA, but it also exemplifies good faith on the part of the UC administration. The remains were uncovered in 1976 on university property, but in 2006, the school was prepared to do the right thing and return the 9, 000 year old skeletons to their descendants.

The moral of this story may be that “telling one’s own story” is as much in keeping with the spirit of NAGPRA as are the complicated procedures of establishing historical and cultural connections between present-day communities and the bodies of their ancestors.

Source:

Carl Zimmer, “Tribes’ Win in Fight for La Jolla Bones Clouds Hopes for DNA Studies,” New York Times, JAN. 29, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/science/tribes-win-in-fight-for-la-jolla-bones-clouds-hopes-for-dna studies.html?hpw&rref=science&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

For too long, pictorial narratives like the one Little Fingernail ( see “Bullet in a Bible”) took into battle have been labeled “ledger art”—with an emphasis on art—thereby obscuring their fundamental role as books in the evolving life of Native men during the Plains Wars of the 1870s.

The Curator of North American Ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Castle McLaughlin, has restored and published one of these books, mislabeled and languishing in the archive under the title “Autobiography of Half Moon.” Through painstaking collaborative research with the late Byron Wilson, tribal archaeologist of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, she has determined the identities of many of the text’s collaborative authors, including Thunder Hawk and Buffalo Tongue (whose name glyphs appear with their drawings), and several others for whom McLaughlin has plausibly described tribal and band affiliation through careful reading of stylistic and material culture details provided by the artists in their images.

Castle McLaughlin, A Lakota War Book from the Little Big Horn: The Pictographic ‘Autobiography of Half Moon.’ Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 2013. 368p. ISBN-10: 0981885861; ISBN-13: 9780981885865. $41.28. [Paper]

Like most examples of its genre, this Lakota war book is inscribed within a memorandum ledger of linen and cotton rag pages allegedly taken from the body of one J.S. Moore, who was killed by a Lakota warrior in 1868. It is filled with ink and colored pencil sketches of important events in the lives of several warriors who fought at the Little Big Horn in 1876.

As was the case with the Spotted Tail banner and Little Fingernail’s book, it lingered overlooked in the Peabody’s collections partly because its Euro-American owner had it rebound and prefaced it with a handwritten fictional autobiography of an imaginary author, a warrior named Half Moon. McLaughlin explores how Phocian Howard,

Phocian Howard’s title page.

the Chicago Tribune reporter who found it in a funerary tipi at Little Big Horn, shaped the war book into a nostalgic throwback to popular culture representations of America Indian peoples that circulated before the Plains Wars. She shows how Howard reorganized the original images into a sequence he thought made more narrative sense, and he hired an artist to pen a prefatory framing section in a calligraphic style reminiscent of the pre-Civil War antiquarian documents, peppered with fanciful sketches of Indian life drawn from sources like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and not the work of the war book artists themselves.

Using evidence drawn from the book’s circuit of ownership, its paratextual materials, and its Plains culture significance, McLaughlin traces the ledger’s physical movements and its shifts in meaning as it passed through different hands and different historical times.

Facsimile image from “A Lakota War Book from Little Big Horn.”

McLaughlin explains the significance of the book’s “discovery” in a burial tipi, pointing out that this suggests the work was both associated with the traditional burial rites of a Lakota warrior society and (having been discovered with a bag of intercepted U.S. mail) with the Native community’s growing awareness of the importance of literacy in their battles with the colonizers. Finally, she discusses the way that narrative worked against the conventions of the rectilinear ledger format,

with Native artists often telling stories from right to left, employing the book’s gutter as a “groundline” (a traditional artistic practice in Plains pictorial art), and freely mingling different people’s stories of significant personal and “national” events into a material object that had been captured in battle and overwritten with their exploits in order to dramatize their power over their American enemies.

Archives across America no doubt contain more  such War Books, and their provenance is probably similar to the one drawn by Little Fingernail, and this Cheyenne ledger described in an entry in the Colorado Historical Society’s online catalog:

Collection consists of a sketchbook captured by an American soldier during the 1869 Battle of Summit Springs. On July 11, 1869, troops of the 5th United States Regiment of Cavalry and approximately 50 members of a Pawnee scout battalion attacked the camp of the Cheyenne chief Tall Bull near present-day Sterling, Colorado. During the battle a group of Cheyenne warriors broke away from the main camp and sheltered in a nearby ravine; armed only with bows and arrows, they managed to hold off the Pawnee scouts for hours before eventually dying in battle. It is believed that the sketchbook was found among the bodies of the Cheyenne warriors in the ravine.

Even Sitting Bull made one. Currently housed in the National Anthropological archives, the war book was drawn on the leaves of an Army ledger book by Sitting Bull “while he was held prisoner at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory in 1882. They were acquired at that time by Lt. Wallace Tear together with explanations from Sitting Bull of each image. Tear sent them to Gen. John C. Smith, and they were donated to the BAE by the general’s son Robert A. Smith in 1923.” Lt. Tear wrote an explanatory letter to Gen. Smith, describing the book’s original production: “I furnished the book which contains the paintings and from time to time saw him at work on them. These notes were taken down by me after the paintings were completed in Sitting Bull’s tipi in the same outlines as given by himself (by an interpreter of course) Bull having the picture before him while giving a description.”

Like the Lakota war book, this ledger has been edited by others, and opens with a series of newspaper clippings describing Sitting Bull’s death. These are pasted into the flyleaves of the army ledger. In the latter pages of the book, Gen. Smith pasted Lt. Tear’s letter and the curators of the Bureau of Ethnology have appended to it a letter granting them its use.

Because its author was so “notorious” in the popular press, Sitting Bull’s war book soon made it into the pages of the New York Herald in a special triple-sheet edition.

Calling him “the Napoleon of the Sioux,” the Herald reported “that nothing can be more interesting than the account this savage warrior has given of himself . . . when everybody is anxious to know anything about him.” The reporter then makes a bold claim for his paper’s scoop: “[This is] the only extant autobiography of an American Indian ever prepared.” The date was July 16, 1876, just a few days after word of the Little Bighorn battle had reached eastern readers. Castle McLaughlin argues that this reporting, and other articles like it, represent the way “print capitalism gave Sitting Bull’s enemies a power far greater than than of the Plains warriors assembled at Little Bighorn” (12). I agree it did—at least for a time.

All these years later, their stories repatriated to a more nuanced history of the Plains Wars and re-edited to give voice to those warriors who carried such books into battle, the war books of the 1870s may now give some power back to the communities for whom those men fought and died in the cause of sovereignty.

To most people (people who’ve bothered to think of it at all), working in an archive seems like a pretty bloodless affair. And they’re right, for the most part. In general, archivists have what professional recording musicians call a “studio tan.” Too much florescence and climate control. They rarely look like rock-climbers—or tennis players. Scholars like me, who haunt the archives, hunting for those crumbs of detail that will anchor our footnotes, come across much the same. We arrive in the morning with a thermos of coffee and leave with a mole-eyed squint into the late-afternoon sunlight. Once in a while, though, you come across something in an archive that looks like it came from a crime lab

Case in point—a digital offering from the collections of the Colorado Historical Society. It is blandly labeled in achiviese:

“Object Name: Flag. Maker: U.S. Army. Description: This flag is manufactured from a square piece of white muslin. It has been stenciled across one side in black.”

Yet the old fashioned paper finding aid, produced in 1967 by a Denver history grad student for course credit, reveals startling details missing from the on-line description. The rust-colored blotches that lend the flag a map-like appearance— Rorschach islands in a “friendly” prairie nation—are in fact bloodstains. The innocuous white space in the right middle ground, a bullet hole.

Colorado Historical Society

Aside from being awful, this archival object begs a backstory.

Initially, all that appears in the finding aid are interpretations without context: blood and bullets. There is no dating of the flag, nor is there any provenance offered. A little digging in the historical record reveals that banners like this were given to Spotted Tail, a leader of the Brule Sioux, in 1867 when he demanded the right to hunt outside of the boundaries established by the US government. The Commissioners of Indian Affairs at the time instructed the Superintendent of the area to distribute these banners as signs of safe passage.

An August 1867 article in the New York Times describes the calvary arriving to deliver the flags in scene worthy of a John Ford western: “as they galloped away over the prairie, with their bright rifle-barrels, gay trappings and white flags glistening in the sun, they reminded one of  a troop of cavaliers of olden time, starting out on some good mission.” At this point, the Superintendent “gave Spotted Tail and all the principal chiefs a pass similar to those given to the messengers, and had printed on their white flags, in large letters, ‘Spotted Tail’s Friendly Band.”

Somewhere between it presence at this chivalric meeting and its arrival to the archive, this flag witnessed something horrendous. We just don’t quite know what.

The story of the Spotted Tail Band’s banner is not an anomaly. The Colorado Historical Society Archive contains a microfilm reproduction of another object that bears the scars of a Native American’s deadly encounter with the U. S. Army.

On January 22, 1879, a group of Cheyenne warriors who had escaped from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, NE were cornered  in a dry creek bed along the present-day Nebraska/South Dakota border. The leader of the group, Little Fingernail, arranged the some 18 men and 14 women and children with him into protective positions against the banks of the creek. Capt. Henry Wessells, who had been pursuing Little Fingernail’s band, ordered his four companies of 150 soldiers to attack. Infantrymen charged up to the creek bank edge and poured hundreds of rounds into the encampment. An officer later described the scene in a letter to a friend:

Four troops of thr 3rd cavalry, “A”, “B”, “F”, and “H” comanded by Captain Wessells . . . surrounded the hostiles and charged upon them killing all the bucks and unfortunately in the melee, some women and children.

Amidst the carnage, something caught this officer’s eye: “I saw an Indian with [a] book pressed down between his naked skin and a a strap around his waist; another strap went between the middle of the back and around his shoulder. I turned to Private Leslie of H troop, who was near me and said, ‘I want that book if we come out all right.”

He got his book.

Little Fingernail manuscript (1879) mss 1006. Colorado HIstorical Society.

When the smoke cleared, the people in the ravine were dead. The aftermath was pro forma looting: “the dead Indians being pulled out of the rifle pit, they drew out finally my Indian with the book, apparently dead; the book was injured to the extent of a carbine ball through it and was more or less covered with fresh blood.”

The officer who claimed this book as war booty believed it was the same one he had seen a few years before, at Ft. Robinson, Nebraska during the winter of ’75, ’79. He tried to get the book then, but its author “refused to part with it for any price.” In a brutal twist of fate, he got it after all.

The microfilm images show a business ledger that has been turned horizontal and illustrated with narrative colored pencil drawings depicting Little Fingernail in battle. The rifle ball has done considerable damage to the book, passing all the way through. Many pages were nearly washed out by the warrior’s bleeding.

The backstory provided by the Army officer’s letter still leaves many unanswered questions. Why was Little Fingernail carrying the book into battle? Was it a common practice? Where did he get the ledger in the first place? What stories does it tell? Are any of his relative still living, Cheyenne people who might not know their relation’s life story lies in a vault in a library, still blotted with his blood?

Like the letter from Kills Enemy Alone, taken from a body at the Wounded Knee massacre, Little Fingernail’s book seems somehow incomplete. Its final pages unadorned by the last heroic efforts of its author to protect his band, the book is suspended in history like an undelivered letter.

It’s playoff time in the NFL—coaches are being sent packing left and right, really poor teams make the cut (9 and 7 gets you in the playoffs?), and movies about football related concussions are feeling the Oscar™ buzz.

What does this have to do with repatriation?

Well, two things. First, with all the brouhaha about the Chargers needing a new stadium, I’m reminded of all the municipalities who are feverishly clearing public lands for sports venues that may or may not be the best use of money, space, and time (I’m looking at you, Twin Cities).

In St. Louis, the new Rams stadium has raised repatriation issues. According to current plans, the Rams’ new venue would be situated over an ancient indigenous urban center.

Artist rendering of proposed Rams stadium (http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2015/01/09/rams-task-force-announce-stadium-proposal-bernhard/21514423/)

As bioarchaeologist Kristina Kilgrove writes in the May 15, 2015 issue of Forbes, “Just a few blocks northwest of the current Edward Jones Dome, the remains of two dozen earthen mounds dot the Mississippi River bank. While the mounds were flattened in the 1800s to accommodate the rise of St. Louis as an urban center, underneath the buildings and parking lots is a 900-year-old Native American town.”

Over on the Illinois side of the river, the state has preserved the city of Cahokia, a regional trade and religious center dating back to AD 1000. But Missouri long ago decided to level Cahokia’s sister city to make room for progress. Now, as it seems likely that “objects of cultural patrimony” will be unearthed in this new construction, the land is private and Missouri law does not require an archaeological impact survey. Indian Country Today reported that Everett Waller, chairman of the Osage Nation’s Mineral Council, responded to the plans like this: “It has been a major pre-historic landmark for the Osage. It wasn’t just us, but we were encamped there for at least 400 years. So much of the history of my family campsites, both oral and educational, come from that area.” Waller, whose ancestors include the Osage leader Watiankah rightly feels there are plenty of places to put a new stadium. (Ever been to St. Louis?) Waller put things in perspective by using a particularly topical  analogy: “If this was in the Middle East, you’d have a Holy War over it.”

The second thing the NFL playoffs have to do with repatriation rests with the team from Washington, DC who will play the Green Bay Packers this weekend (the team that shall not be named). Their presence in the playoffs brings up the larger issues of mascots, alternative team names, boycotts and the like. I kind of want to watch the Packers, but I don’t want to support all this other stuff. What course to take?The only single response I could come up with was to ask, “What would Jim Thorpe do?”

Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics

Thorpe was not only the greatest athlete of his generation, he was also a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma. He’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 1916, he earned $250 per game for the Canton Bulldogs. The hall of fame website tells his football story this way:

“In 1920, when the National Football League was organized, the charter members named Thorpe league president. While Thorpe’s exploits tend to be exaggerated with the passing years, there is no question he was superb in every way. He could run with speed as well as bruising power. He could pass and catch passes with the best, punt long distances and kick field goals either by dropkick or placekick.

Often he would demonstrate his kicking prowess during halftimes by placekicking field goals from the 50-yard line, then turning and dropkicking through the opposite goal post. He blocked with authority and, on defense, was a bone-jarring tackler.

Of mixed French, Irish, and Sac and Fox Indian heritage, Thorpe was born in a one-room cabin in Oklahoma, but when he was sixteen his father sent him to the Carlisle Institute, a school for Indian youth. His Native-American name was Wa-Tho-Huk, meaning “Bright Path,” something he was destined to follow in the sports world.”

The Hall of Fame site hits the high points of Thorpe’s relationship to American Indian history, but his attendance at Carlisle, his being stripped of his Olympic medals for having been a “professional athelete,” and his curious afterlife are also relevant to my question: “What would Jim Thorpe do?”

His biography, as much as I know of it, doesn’t reflect the life of an activist so much as an “ambassador”—for football, for Indian people. Maybe he would just watch the Packer game and shrug off the Washington team’s demeaning name. Nothing against Jim Thorpe, but it might be a generational thing. Still, I can’t be sure, and part of me would like to think that he would stand against team mascots that insult Native people.

Yet it’s Thorpe’s “afterlife,” the circumstances surrounding his burial and commemoration, that give me a clue as to what I should do.

After his death from heart failure in 1953, Jim Thorpe’s body was interred in a Pennsylvania mausoleum, as a roadside attraction of sorts. The website explorepahistory.com displays this pitch: “Visit the grave site of a famous Native American athlete, an Olympian and baseball player. It’s located just outside Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania – a beautiful Victorian town in the Poconos.”

Jim Thorpe never lived in the town formerly known as “Mauch Chunk” before it changed its name to Jim Thorpe, PA as part of the deal that brought his body to the Pocanos. The original town moniker is—like so many place names in America—indigenous and, according to one source, means something like “Bear Mountain.” So, in order to consecrate the ground for Thorpe’s burial, the Pennsylvanians had to erase the original Native presence. In a maudlin gesture of homage, they then placed Thorpe’s casket on “a mound of dirt comprised of soil from his native Oklahoma and from the stadium in Stockholm where he participated in the 1912 Olympics” before encasing it in pink granite. Like a professional sports player, Jim Thorpe’s body was “traded” to a “club” he had no connection to at all—not for his skills as a player, but for his marquee value as an Indian and “the greatest athlete in the world.”

In 2013, Thorpe’s son’s sued to have their father’s remains repatriated to Oklahoma. Carrie Johnson’s report for NPR News in June, 2015, explains:

“Two years ago, Thorpe’s sons convinced a district judge of the merits of their case. But a federal appeals court threw out the lawsuit using something called the absurdity doctrine. William Schwab is a lawyer for the Pennsylvania town now named after Thorpe. He says in an emailed statement that the absurdity doctrine is simply a matter of common sense. The appeals court found that family and spousal rights trump tribal rights. Schwab says he expects the Supreme Court will rule the same way if the justices agree to hear the dispute.”

Johnson concluded her report with this comment: “Advocates for the Native American community say the case could have ramifications beyond Jim Thorpe. That’s because the 1990 law has been deployed hundreds of times to repatriate remains and artifacts.”

I guess I’ll never know what Jim Thorpe would do about that Washington football team, its racist name, and whether to boycott watching it on television this weekend. I do, however, know what his sons would do. One, Jack, fought for his father’s repatriation until his death in 2011. Jack went to boarding school, served in the Army, and became  the principal chief for the Sac and Fox tribe. At Jack’s death, his brother Bill said, “It’s important to the family . . . Jack was the representative, really, for our family. But nieces, nephews and grandchildren are in favor of bringing his body back. And the tribe, too.”*

With tomorrow’s forecast for Iowa City a whopping 5 degrees, maybe I’ll just throw a couple of buckets of water on the driveway, put on my ‘Leafs jersey, and knock the puck around with my son.

 Sources

To read more on the Rams, check out Veronique LaCapra’s piece at St. Public Radio, “New football stadium threatens what remains of St. Louis’ Native American past —and present ,” or Rodney Harwood’s article at Indian Country Today Media Network, “Sacred Native site to be buried by new St. Louis NFL stadium .” Also: Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/04/29/sacred-native-site-be-buried-new-st-louis-nfl-stadium-160186

Kristina Killgrove is a bioarchaeologist at the University of West Florida. For more osteology news, follow her on Twitter (@DrKillgrove ) or like her Facebook page

On the Thorpe grave: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/3583#sthash.jLA1SuWI.dpuf

*John Branch “Thorpe Family Split Over Sons’ Lawsuit,” Bew York Times MAY 18, 2011