The Long Journeys Home. Nick Bellantoni

I may fail at times.

      When I began my study of, and subsequent career in, archaeology over forty years ago, contemporary Native Hawaiian/Native American communities and anthropological archaeologists rarely communicated. Archaeologists piously believed that they were the scientists, the PhDs, the experts in antiquity. What could contemporary Indigenous Peoples tell us about their unwritten past that has been so changed, so distant, and so unlike their lives today? They surely had lost too much to ever recall their unrecorded cultural history.

      This view of Indigenous Peoples’ ability to tell their own stories contained unintended and, at times, intended Western racist undertones. Archaeologists felt no compelling need for consultation with tribes. We analyzed pottery shards and stone points, wrote manuscripts about the cultural behavior of “prehistoric peoples” and made careers without regard to, or input from, the descendants that manufactured the objects of our study. We simply did not appreciate how our research into the distant past affected the lives of living people. Accordingly Native Peoples viewed archaeologists as part of the exploitative system of Western society that killed millions of their ancestors, took their land, and left them impoverished on reservations of the U. S. government’s making. We took, rarely gave back, and never associated with them.

      I distinctly remember attending a powwow in the mid-1980s and hearing Dakota actor and activist Floyd (Red Crow) Westerman express his indignation through an audio speaker heard throughout the entire fair grounds, that Indian people had two enemies in this world: the FBI and archaeologists! I was stunned when he said that.³ I didn’t get it. How could he compare archaeologists, me, to the sometimes strong-handed tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Indian reservations? After all, weren’t we working to preserve Native American heritage, to help them restore their cultural past?

      “Archaeologists,” Red Crow explained, “dig up the bones of our ancestors, study them in laboratories, and exhibit them for people to gawk at. Archaeologists hold our ancestors prisoners in museums! And the FBI unjustifiably arrest and hold our young Indian men in federal prisons! Prisons for our ancestors! Prisons for our youth today! They are both our enemies!”⁴

      Over the years I had nurtured developing friendships within the Connecticut Native American community, and nervously I scanned the fair grounds wondering whether they looked on me as an enemy. I was confused, angry, and ashamed—all at the same time. They were infuriated; we were arrogant. Neither side understood one another or seemed to care to.

      As an undergraduate student in anthropology I had read treatises by the Lakota scholar Vine DeLoria, Jr., who harshly criticized anthropologists citing our motivations as benefiting ourselves and doing nothing to respect the concerns of Native Americans who were against our actions perpetrated in the name of “science.”⁵ With the rise of Red Power in the 1970s, Indian activists expressed their distress by disrupting archaeological excavations, conducting “sit-ins” at museums, and organizing “The Longest Walk” from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to bring attention to Native American anxieties about the desecration archaeologists were wreaking at burial sites across the country and the museums that housed the bones of their ancestors on hidden storage shelves. I understood these concerns intellectually, but not emotionally; after all, I was training to be a scientist and convinced myself that our work, in the long run, would benefit the Native American community. Nonetheless, Indian activism was bringing about a change within our science and a lot of soul-searching.

      In the early 1980s, I was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut entrusted with the forensic analyses of seven Indian skeletons earmarked for the first-ever Native American reburials in the state by the Connecticut Indian Affairs Council. Invited afterwards to the re-interment ceremony, I met a young Native man who seemed to have nothing but contempt for me. We launched into a long discussion, really a debate/argument, on the treatment of human skeletal remains. By handling the remains I was playing with fire, he warned me, a nuclear energy that would subsume me because of my “disrespectful work.” I responded with hopes that my “forensic work” made the reburials more personal since I was able to give description to each individual—sex, age, diseases, life stress pathologies, and traumas—by letting their “bones” speak to their personal histories from hundreds of years ago. I hoped that our work made the ceremony more meaningful. The young Native man counter-argued that he didn’t need science for him to hear his ancestors’ stories; he heard their voices whenever he sang to them in the forest. It was all he needed to know. I countered that I heard them, too, but through the physical study of their “bones.” We parted not truly comprehending each other’s perspective: mine steeped in western material science, his embedded in Native spiritualism.

      Five years later when I became the state archaeologist with the role and responsibility to work with Indigenous Nations over their concerns about archaeology, vandalism, and the adverse effect of construction activities on sacred sites, I began to meet regularly with tribal representatives, participating in powwows and other gatherings. Gradually, I was developing an understanding and sensitivity through dialogue and personal relationships. While I was going through this incipient transformation in the late 1980s, I met Maria Pearson (Hai-Meacha Eunka, Running Moccasins), a Yankton Sioux woman who became the “voice” for the pan-Native American reburial movement. Maria and a nationwide delegation of tribal leaders had been invited to the annual meeting of the National Association of State Archaeologists to address their concerns over the differential treatment of Indian burials by state governments.

      Maria related an account that simply put the issue into perspective for me. Her husband, John, she told our gathering, worked for the Iowa Department of Transportation, and one day he came home telling a troublesome story. An unmarked pioneer cemetery had been encountered during road construction activities. All the remains were removed and reburied into another cemetery except those identified as a young Indian woman and her baby, whose skeletons were sent to the state archaeologist for study and repository. Maria was astonished. Why were the two Native burials treated differently than the white burials? Why were Indian remains considered objects of study while Euro-American remains were respectfully reburied? Under the United States’ own laws this differential treatment was plain and simple discrimination. Maria spoke eloquently and persuasively, presenting a straightforward, sincere story that put a complex controversy into perfect context.

      Attitudes have changed remarkably since the 1980s. Archaeologists and Native Americans and Hawaiians have since opened up dialogue to mend misunderstandings and to develop trust relationships based on communication and personal empathy. While many Indigenous Peoples remain angry and many archaeologists continue to be suspicious, both communities are working to find common ground. Many tribes see the benefit of archaeological investigations and have gone so far as to engage archaeologists to jointly work with them on their reservations.⁶ Many archaeologists today are employed by Native communities and have developed equitable partnerships forging research designs benefiting both parties. Sonya Atalay’s book on “Community-based Archaeology” represents, in part, a methodological paradigm shift that incorporates descendant communities into the scientific process from conception to interpretation.⁷ Archaeologist Chip Colwell has examined the history of repatriation and offers model examples for what improved relationships between archaeologists/museums and Native communities should look like.⁸ In the last decade, collaboration has increased and the number of college-trained Native American archaeologists has skyrocketed.

      Connecticut is a marvelous example. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation has developed a world-class museum to tell their story to the public, much of it stemming from their own sponsored archaeological investigations. The Eastern Pequot Tribe has coordinated with the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in conducting archaeological surveys on its North Stonington reservation for over fifteen years. The Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut has trained tribal archaeologists overseeing cultural resource management projects and below ground historical research in their homeland. Times have changed and for the better.

      Repatriation of Indian skeletal remains and tribal artifacts of cultural patrimony is now the law of the land. At the federal level, the U. S. Congress, influenced in part by the activism of Maria Pearson and others, approved the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 acknowledging