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Kennewick Man was born of the muck alongside the Columbia River
one summer day in 1996. Here, on the Washington shoreline, two college
students stumbled across one of the oldest and best-preserved skeletons
ever discovered in North America.
Scientists say he was a fisherman who died 9,300 years ago, a victim
of repeated infections brought on by a spearpoint embedded in his
hip. Further study might reveal much more about his history and
this corner of the world. But this study might never take place,
because Kennewick Man's bones are now locked away in a vault.
Kennewick Man's modern life has been tumultuous. For nearly two
years, he has been at the center of a conflict that dates back through
the ages.
His story is one of religious conviction bumping up against science,
of racial clashes and political correctness, of guilt, power and
justice. It involves a civil lawsuit and backroom politics, blind
ambition and ulterior motives, a bumbling bureaucracy and an obscure
religious group whose ceremonies involve grown men dressing up in
Viking suits.
Here in Portland, Kennewick Man has taken a prominent position
on the docket of U.S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks. From his bench
on the 12th floor of the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, Jelderks is
presiding over a contentious lawsuit involving several branches
of the U.S. government, five Native American tribes, eight respected
scientists, one small-town anthropologist and a religious sect that
has been accused of harboring racist beliefs. As the man charged
with mediating this vigorous tug-of-war, Jelderks could play a role
in changing the way Americans think of their history.
He may also help answer a nagging question that sits at the center
of this controversy: Why is the federal government denying scientists
the right to study this ancient skeleton?
Clearly, there is more at stake here than a bunch of old bones.
Until the 9,300-year-old skeleton came into his life, James Chatters
was a nobody. A slight, balding 49-year-old, he is the only free-lance
anthropologist in Richland, a city of 32,000 in eastern Washington.
For years, Chatters has worked quietly out of an ill-equipped basement
lab in his split-level suburban house. He pays his bills by doing
geologic studies on contract, examining the odd deer bones and such
that neighbors dig up from their gardens, and identifying remains
for the county coroner.
"If bones show up, I have something to do with them,"
Chatters says proudly.
That's exactly how Kennewick Man came into his life on July 28,1996.
After college students pulled the skull from the riverbank, county
coroner Floyd Johnson toted it in a bucket to Chatters' house. The
pair later went back to the site and, miraculously, found almost
all of Kennewick Man's bones, which had been scattered downstream
by the current.
Chatters began studying and measuring, eventually sending some
bone fragments to the University of California for radiocarbon dating.
When the results came back, Chatters was dumbstruck. The skeleton
lying on his makeshift examination table was among the oldest ever
found in North America. As such, Kennewick Man belongs to an exclusive
club of a dozen or so paleoskeletons that provide the earliest evidence
of the human population of North America. Kennewick Man is arguably
the best-preserved of the bunch.
"He has a lot to let us know about his time in history,"
Chatters says. Most significantly, studies of Kennewick Man could
help trace the path of some of America's first human inhabitants.
This was all very exciting to Chatters. As a PhD in anthropology,
he knew the ancient skeleton was important for science. It was equally
important for his career. The discovery has catapulted him to a
sort of pop-culture fame that most academic anthropologists can't
even imagine. In the 21 months since he first examined Kennewick
Man, he has been deluged by the media, a fact evidenced by a 6-inch
stack of clippings he displays on his laboratory desk. It includes
everything from The New York Times to Archaeology
to Der Spiegel. When WW called him two weeks ago,
he dropped everything on a moment's notice to spend 31?2 hours with
a reporter he didn't know from a paper he had never heard of. Chatters
has been asked to give so many lectures that he has written a publicity
piece touting his entertaining speaking style. "I view myself
to a large extent as Kennewick Man's advocate," he told
WW.
He seems ill-equipped for the job. Apparently, he didn't
perform the routine examination that scientists across the country
have established as protocol. Instead of taking precise measurements
of the teeth, for example, he focused much of his energy on making
a plaster cast of the skull--a sculpture that has since been extensively
pictured in press reports.
"The science that Chatters did was just so superficial
and so outmoded and so poorly thought through," says Alan Goodman,
an anthropologist with Hampshire College who has written several
articles on Kennewick Man for the American Anthropological Association's
monthly journal.
A number of other scientists would love to get the chance to fill
in the gaps in Chatters' research.
They have been unable to do so.
On Aug. 30, just days after Chatters received the results of the
radiocarbon dating, the Benton County sheriff seized the remains.
He did so under orders from the Army Corps of Engineers, on whose
land Kennewick Man was found.
The corps was acting on behalf of five Native American tribes who
have claimed that Kennewick man was their ancestor: the Confederated
Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, the Confederated Tribes and
Bands of the Yakima Nation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated
Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Wanapum Band.
Since they first heard about the skeleton, the tribes have repeated
a single message: Kennewick Man must be put back in the ground.
Immediately.
Ask the tribes why they want to rebury Kennewick Man and they'll
cite two reasons: religion and justice.
As recently as the 1970s, when the federal government was
still building dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, local Native
Americans saw their ancestors' graves desecrated.
"There are Indian people alive today that witnessed their
relatives being unearthed," explains Paul Minthorn of the Umatilla.
"People were dug up and carted off as their relatives were
crying. I know that there's a lot of pain yet to this day about
it."
The desecration of Indian graves was nothing new, of course. Writing
for the Native American Rights Fund in 1990, Robert E. Bieder noted,
"In 1788, Thomas Jefferson opened a burial mound near his home
in Virginia and began an American preoccupation with collecting
Native American human remains."
For years, the federal government authorized and even participated
in these digs, and the tribes were powerless to stop them. As of
1990, the remains of 18,000 Indians were in the Smithsonian, most
of them in storage. Tens of thousands more sat in other museums
and universities around the country.
To Native Americans, these collections are not only a reminder
of past injustices, they're also offensive.
In most Indian religions, the spirit of the deceased is violated
when a skeleton is disinterred. "Our elders have taught us
that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there
until the end of time," wrote Umatilla religious leader Armand
Minthorn (no relation to Paul Minthorn).
In 1990, Native Americans made that case to Congress.
What resulted was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act (NAGPRA), which gave Indians the right to reclaim their ancestors'
remains and cultural artifacts. It applied not only to skeletons
and objects in museums, but to new archaeological finds as well.
The impact this has had on both tribes and scientists cannot be
underestimated.
Citing NAGPRA, the five tribes demanded that Kennewick Man be returned
to them for reburial. That's why the corps put a stop to DNA testing
already in progress and locked the skeleton in the Battelle Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.
There's just one problem: The ancient skeleton might not be an
Indian at all.
From the moment he set eyes on Kennewick Man's skull, Chatters
said it didn't resemble today's Native Americans. Later, he hit
upon someone who helped him picture the skeleton in the flesh:
Star Trek's Captain Picard.
"[O]ne evening, I turned on the TV and there was Patrick Stewart,
and I said, 'My God, there he is! Kennewick Man!," Chatters
told the New Yorker.
With that widely publicized statement, Kennewick Man came to life,
in full color, in countless American households.
"When he says Patrick Stewart, what does that say? It says
white guy. Chatters knows this," says Jonathan Mozzochi, research
director for the Coalition for Human Dignity, a Seattle-based nonprofit
that tracks hate groups.
If Kennewick Man does appear "Caucasoid"--a term, referring
to skulls that have both Asian and European features, that Chatters
has used in more cautious moments--it could change the way Americans
see the past. (It should be noted, however, that the Caucasoid label
has been disputed by other scientists.)
Most public school students are taught that the New World was first
populated with a single migration some 12,000 years ago. According
to history books, these first inhabitants were ancestors of modern
Native Americans who came from the Far East, through Alaska, and
spread out through North America before being wiped out by the white
man.
If Kennewick Man does indeed have "Caucasoid" features,
he may have something in common with the other North American paleoskeletons,
all of which have been described as having features that are to
some degree Caucasoid.
Because these paleoskeletons don't resemble modern Native Americans,
many scientists now suspect that North America was populated by
several migrations of several different groups. What that
could mean is that ancestors of modern Native Americans might
not have been the first people in the New World.
That raises a sticky question, one that scientists are only beginning
to ask: If Native Americans weren't the first people in the United
States, then who were?
It is a question the tribes don't want to consider. "If
this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates
our belief that he is Native American," wrote Armand Minthorn.
"From our oral histories, we know that our people have been
part of this land since the beginning of time.... Some scientists
say that if this individual is not studied further, we, as Indians,
will be destroying evidence of our history. We already know our
history."
The passion with which the tribes have gone after Kennewick Man
is curious, considering they have shown much less interest in five
other skeletons that were found a few weeks later in the same vicinity.
These five skeletons, which the Umatilla call the Richland Five,
are less than 200 years old and are clearly Native American. "[The
tribes] certainly haven't displayed the same intensity of interest
as they have with respect to Kennewick Man," lawyer Alan Schneider
says.
Chatters, among others, suspects that the tribes are more concerned
about Kennewick Man than about their five other ancestors because
Kennewick Man doesn't look like them.
"This isn't being done based on reason," Chatters says.
"It's being done based on emotion and politics. Why? Because
it's an indication of something greater."
Michael Clinton is a robust-looking thirtysomething who practices
law in a downtown Portland office. At night, he goes home to his
wife and child in Vancouver.
William Fox is an account executive with the West Portland office
of Dean Witter Reynolds, a former Marine Corps officer and a Harvard
MBA.
Fox and Clinton are also pagans. Both are members of the Asatru
Folk Assembly, a group that practices a pre-Christian Norse religion.
"It's a nature-based religion, honoring fertility gods and
goddesses of the earth, and the spirits of the earth and the gods
of the sky," Clinton told WW. Practice of the religion
takes different forms. Some worshipers wear cloaks or other Viking-type
garb and perform ceremonies that involve "casting runes"
and drinking "libations," according to Clinton.
Shortly after Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996, the Asatru
claimed him, saying he was their ancestor. Clinton, acting as Fox's
attorney, filed suit in federal court asking that Kennewick Man's
bones be turned over to them. Instead of reburial, however, they
want Kennewick Man to be studied. (There have been no final decisions
in the case, although the Asatru are almost certain to lose.)
In making their legal arguments, they have latched onto statements
about Kennewick Man being Caucasoid.
"We're seeing that the Americas were not first populated
by the people we know as the American Indians," Clinton told
WW, adding that he wondered if Indians wiped out these early
settlers in the same way that later European settlers wiped out
the Indians. If so, he continues, "We're not dealing with victims
and aggressors. We're dealing with biology. When one group weakens,
another group moves into its turf." In Clinton's world view,
this could remove the Indians' moral authority.
If you're seeing a hint of racism in these words, you aren't far
off. According to Mozzochi, who has researched Asatru extensively,
Clinton and Fox are "racialists" trying to use Kennewick
Man to further their own agendas.
In 1992, Clinton arranged to bring to Portland Holocaust denier
David Irving, a British historian who argues, among other things,
that Jews weren't gassed by the Nazis. In 1993, Clinton organized
the Viking Games, a purportedly family-style event held at Whipple
Creek County Park in Clark County, which was advertised in The
Spotlight, the largest-circulation antisemitic weekly newspaper
in the country, published in Washington, D.C.
Clinton denies being connected with neo-Nazi or white-supremacy
movements. He says he brought Irving to town for a lecture out of
curiosity and told the Vancouver Columbian he advertised
in The Spotlight because the rates were inexpensive.
Mozzochi also accuses Fox of antisemitism.
"His writings are steeped in the language and the idiom of
a very particular wing of the white-supremacist movement,"
he told WW. For example, in a question-and-answer piece about
Asatru presented to the Leif Erikson Society of New York in 1991,
Fox (writing under the name Thor Sannhet) praises the work of discredited
psychologists Arthur Jensen and William Shockley, who tried to "prove"
that white people's genes make them an intellectually superior race.
He rages on about discrimination against whites, who must "perpetually
atone for their (alleged) oppression of all other races." In
another document, from 1993, he defended David Irving.
Fox told WW he is not a racist. "I think that whole
issue deserves to be examined from many different viewpoints,"
he said, referring to the Holocaust.
While the popular press certainly hasn't gone so far as to agree
with Clinton's statements about Indians slaughtering European types,
they have given Asatru plenty of uncritical coverage. Mozzochi sees
this as dangerous. "The comments that have been made point
to the possibility of racist ideas gaining currency," he says.
"It's racial myth-making for white people. The potential is
this stuff can grab hold of the popular imagination and have a life
of its own beyond what these scientists have given it."
In September 1996, the Army Corps of Engineers placed a legal notice
in the Washington Tri-City Herald advertising that the ancient
remains would be repatriated to the five tribes within just a few
weeks.
The corps' decision was puzzling for several reasons. The speed
with which the corps acted was entirely out of character. NAGPRA
is very ambiguous, especially with respect to paleoskeletons, which
are in a category by themselves, according to scientists. The law
also doesn't specifically address the question of whether scientific
study is allowed prior to repatriation, yet the corps notice appeared
to bar any testing.
Most curious, of course, was the fact that the corps decided to
repatriate the skeleton based solely on the tribes' unsubstantiated
claims that Kennewick Man was their ancestor. The only evidence
the corps had at the time--Chatters' assessment, which was backed
up by two scientists he had consulted--indicated something to the
contrary.
When scientists realized the corps was going to turn the skeleton
over to the tribes for immediate reburial, they were astounded and
horrified.
On Oct. 16, 1996, a group of eight scientists filed suit, asking
Jelderks to stop the repatriation process with an injunction.
"The Army Corps refused to talk to us," explains plaintiff
Rob Bonnichsen, an anthropologist and director of the Center for
the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University. "They
would not communicate with us. The government would not listen to
some of the most respected scientists in the nation. So we had no
choice."
The scientists' legal claims are compelling.
"The lawsuit is about two things," explains Schneider,
who's representing the eight scientists, each of whom holds a post
at a respected university or museum across the country. "First,
can the government prohibit legitimate scientists from studying
a skeleton this old? Second is that the government was arbitrary
and capricious in making its decisions. It never made a reasonable
attempt to investigate the facts."
"There's a whole book of information [in Kennewick Man's bones],"
says Bonnichsen. "To put him back into the ground is like burning
a rare book so we'll learn nothing.... It seems to be the case there
is a major effort to block scientific inquiry into the study of
American origins."
So far, Jelderks has agreed that the corps acted hastily.
He ordered it to stop the repatriation process and has scolded it
repeatedly for its ill-advised and hurried decision.
"The corps took a position very early in this controversy
before it had the relevant facts or understood the legal issues
and continues to adhere to that position even today," the judge
wrote in a 52-page opinion last June.
According to the scientists' attorneys, that's because the
corps is really acting as a shill for the Native Americans. Paula
Barran, an attorney for the scientists, did not mince words: "The
tribes are not just along for the ride," she wrote in legal
arguments. "They are charting the government's course."
Why is the corps so intent on siding with the tribes?
"I think there is political motivation," says Schneider.
There are plenty of theories about the corps' ulterior motives,
but few specifics. Schneider suggested that the corps may need the
tribes' support regarding dams and salmon runs on the Columbia and
Snake rivers. Another close observer suggested that the corps may
be concerned about plans for chemical weapons storage at the Umatilla
weapons depot. In any case, it's clear that the corps frequently
works with the tribes on a variety of issues, particularly natural
resources.
The corps has consistently maintained that it is a neutral party
in the Kennewick dispute.
The tribes also deny playing politics. "They're only following
the law," says Debra Croswell, a Umatilla spokeswoman, referring
to NAGPRA. "Why can't people get that through their minds?"
If the story of Kennewick Man is a fable, it is a postmodern tale
of the tension between religion and science that has no clear-cut
heroes.
"It's not very different conceptually from fundamentalist
religions opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools,"
plaintiff scientist Richard L. Jantz told the Tri-City Herald.
Add in white Americans' guilt over our treatment of Native Americans,
however, and that fundamentalism in some ways seems justified.
"There's an ethical argument to be made," Mozzochi believes.
"A couple hundred years of this systematic pillaging, some
of which was done by scientists, raises the question of reparations,
of acting in an ethical manner today. For that reason, in my mind,
the burden of the argument has to fall on the scientists to show
why the skeleton shouldn't be repatriated."
For science, however, the stakes are high.
Kennewick Man will be an important test case for NAGPRA, which
has not gone through the courts before. If Jelderks decides that
the 1990 law applies to paleoskeletons, there is a legitimate fear
that all of those ancient bones will be reburied.
So far, two other paleoskeletons have been reburied, leaving fewer
than a dozen that are available to science.
--Ruth Rowland contributed to this report.
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