In May this year London's Natural History Museum returned the skeletons of
17 Aboriginal islanders to representatives of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
The skeletons were part of the enormous collection of bones, skulls and other
human remains that are housed in the vaults below the museum. Most people
know of the Museum only through its dinosaur skeletons or the blue whale hanging
in the mammal room. But the Museum is also a world-renowned research centre,
and much of that research - into human evolution, human history and human
disease - centres on its collection of human remains. In recent years, however,
there has been a growing demand, particularly by indigenous groups, for the
return of such remains, a demand that was given legal force by new legislation
in 2005.
One such demand came from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. Last November,
the Museum reluctantly acceded to the claim, even though, as the evolutionary
anthropologist Robert Foley put it, 'There is no doubt that if these remains
are destroyed, our knowledge of humanity will be diminished.' Scientists had
nevertheless hoped to conduct DNA and other non-destructive tests on the bones
before they were returned to be cremated, and hence lost forever. The Aboriginal
Centre objected, however, to any form of testing on the bones and in January
this year took out a court injunction preventing all scientific investigations.
The Museum was eventually forced to return the bones without performing any
tests upon them.
The battle over these 17 Aboriginal skeletons illustrates a growing tension
that has developed in recent years between the demands of scientific rationality
and the desires of cultural identity. At the heart of the debate is the issue
of who owns knowledge. Museums and research institutions across the world
house hundreds of thousands of bones, skulls and skeletons, largely collected
over the past two hundred years, and often in unsavoury circumstances. In
Britain there are around 61,000 remains in some 132 different collections,
the largest of which is that of the Natural History Museum. For scientists,
ongoing investigation of collections such as the Natural History Museum's
is critical for understanding humanity's place in the world. For many within
the source communities, however, such collections are tainted by the legacy
of racism and colonialism, and scientific investigations of them are regarded
as morally reprehensible.
The debate about the repatriation of human remains has been especially fierce
in America, Australia and New Zealand, where guilt about the treatment of
indigenous peoples - Native Americans, Aborigines and Maoris - runs deep.
Museums in these countries have thrown open their storage rooms, and returned
thousands of bones to indigenous communities for burial. In America, for instance,
the Native American Grave Protection Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990, requires
federally funded institutions to return human remains and objects found in
Indian graves to their original owners. Any new remains or objects discovered
on tribal lands cannot be examined without the consent of culturally affiliated
tribes, who could demand their return. In the first decade after the law entered
the statute book, over half a million sets of remains and artefacts were either
returned or were in the process of being returned.
At first sight, the case for the repatriation of human remains seems unanswerable.
After all, many of the remains were taken from native countries in acts often
little short of graverobbing. The collection and measurement of such bones
played an important part in the development of racial science and in the dehumanisation
of 'inferior' peoples. Legislation such as NAGPRA is intended to be an act
of restitution for the wrongs done to American Indians by scientists over
the years. Throughout the 19th century, and for much of the 20th, anthropologists
viewed American Indians, as they did most non-Western peoples, as objects
to collect and rank, rather than people with beliefs, cultures and histories
to understand. NAGPRA, the American anthropologist David Hurst Thomas suggests,
redresses past wrongs by shifting the balance between science and Native American
beliefs to ensure that 'no longer is the scientific position privileged'.
But digging more deeply, we can see that the issues are not as simple as that.
For the battle over the bones is also a battle between those who believe in
the possibility of universal knowledge and those who view truth as culturally
constrained. Despite their dubious provenance, collections of human remains
are key to scientific investigations, for they provide a fundamental source
of information about human history and the human body. The destruction of
such material through repatriation damages our ability to understand our past.
As Robert Foley has put it, 'Destroy that record and we destroy large chunks
of history, just as we would if we were to destroy libraries and books written
in the past.'
Human remains do more than simply tell us about the past. They can also aid
medical research and help refine the forensic sciences. In 1999 Harvard University's
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology repatriated the remains of more
than 2,000 individuals to the Pecos and Jemez Pueblo tribes in New Mexico.
The collection was of rare value because it was well preserved, large enough
to be statistically significant, and demographically representative of a single
population. Over the years, the bones had been examined by dozens of researchers
studying everything from head injuries to the development of tooth cavities.
Anthropologist Christopher Ruff used the collection to publish a landmark
paper on osteoporosis. According to Ruff, the collection was 'an incredibly
valuable resource', the data from which he will still be using 'for the next
30 years'. The bones, Ruff explains, provided 'a kind of pre-industrial baseline
to compare to modern populations, which may suffer ailments that weren't so
prevalent before the industrial era'. It is a resource that will now be denied
to future researchers.
Irrespective of its impact on science, however, the argument for the repatriation
is troubling because far from challenging colonialism and racism, it often
resurrects racial ways of thinking about human groups, particularly in defining
cultural affiliation or ownership. Where a skeleton is no more than a few
generations old, and it is possible to trace a direct descendant, then there
may be a rational basis to the demand from such descendants for the return
of the bones. But when remains are hundreds, even thousands of years old,
or when - as with the Tasmanian bones at the Natural History Museum - it is
impossible to identity the original individual, what does it mean to establish
ownership?
According to NAGPRA, the true owners of any ancient remains found on American
soil are the federally recognised tribes that are 'culturally affiliated'
to the group from which the ancestor came. NAGPRA defines 'cultural affiliation'
as 'a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced
historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native
Hawaiian and an identifiable earlier group'. But this notion of cultural continuity
over hundreds or even thousands of years, and the belief that a contemporary
group has a direct connection to bones or artifacts that are several thousand
years old, is both disingenuous and dangerous. As the biological anthropologist
Marta Lahr, director of Cambridge University's Duckworth Laboratory, puts
it, 'Claims for repatriation are based on ideas of biological and cultural
descent, but human populations are not bounded entities through time, and
biological and cultural ancestral affiliation are fluid concepts - who are
the descendents of our Saxon skeletons, or Iron Age or Norman ones?'
The case of 'Kennewick Man', a skeleton discovered in 1996 on the banks of
the Columbia River, in Washington State in north-west America, illustrates
very well the dangers of such Romantic notions of cultural ownership. The
skeleton appeared to have more of a European than a Native American form,
and anthropologists first thought that it must have the remains of a 19th
century European settler. But embedded in the hip bone was a spear point 9000
years old - well before Europeans arrived in the New World. The question of
who were the original peoples of the New World and where they had originally
come from has been a controversial anthropological issue for decades. The
discovery of Kennewick Man made it more controversial still. It was clear,
though, that study of the skeleton would help thrown new light on the issue
and perhaps settle some of the controversies.
Native Americans groups, however, refused to countenance any such study. They
insisted however that Kennewick Man was one of their ancestors and hence definitely
an Indian. 'Our oral history goes back 10,000 years', said Armand Minthorn,
a leader of the Umatilla, a Washington-based tribe. 'We know how time began
and how Indian people were created. They can say whatever they want, the scientists.
They are being disrespectful.'
Minthorn's argument was backed by the law. NAGPRA describes as 'Native American'
any remains more than 500 years old - in other words anyone in the New World
before Columbus arrived. Under the law, any such remains must be handed over
to the local Indian tribe for reburial. Five tribes from the Washington region
- Yakama, Umatilla, Nez Perce, Colville and Wanapum - demanded, therefore,
that the bones of Kennewick Man be returned to them. They insisted, too, that
there should be no scientific study of the bones.
The Army Corps of Engineers, on whose land the skeleton was discovered, agreed
with the Indians and decided that the bones should be returned to the Umatilla
for reburial at an unknown location. Almost immediately, eight anthropologists,
who included the most distinguished scientists in their fields, filed a lawsuit
to halt the Corps' actions, pleading that scientists should have a chance
to study the bones. Kennewick Man, they pointed out, could provide invaluable
scientific data that could transform our understanding of early American history.
NAGPRA, they insisted, was not meant to protect 9000-year-old skeletons. They
accused the Army Corps of arbitrary decision-making and undermining the First
Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, and safeguards the right to
gather and receive information. If the skeleton was reburied, not just scientists,
but the American public, would be deprived of potentially irreplaceable information
about its own past.
Native American leaders in turn dismissed the anthropologists' demand to examine
Kennewick Man scientifically. 'It's like looking at us like a bunch of rats
and mice', retorted Jerry Meninick, vice-chairman of the tribal council of
the Yakama Indian Nation. 'We feel offended to be classed in such a situation.'
Another Indian spokesman, Marla Big Boy, Oglaka Lakota Attorney General for
the Colville Confederated Tribes of eastern Washington suggested that the
Kennewick Man case was simply the latest expression of scientific racism.
At the heart of the debate about Kennewick Man was the question of who owned
the right to use the bones to tell the story of the first inhabitants of the
Americas. In other words, who owned history? For many scientists, the idea
that the bones belong to any one group was abhorrent. 'I explicitly assume
that no living culture, religion, interest groups or biological population
has any moral or legal right to the exclusive use or regulation of ancient
human skeletons since all humans are members of a single species', argued
Douglas Ubelaker, a bioarchaeologist from the Smithsonian Institute. 'Ancient
skeletons are the remnants of unduplicable evolutionary events which all living
and future peoples have the right to know about and understand. In other words,
ancient human skeletons belong to everyone.' The facts, many scientists believe,
should tell the story. 'Native American beliefs about the past and the dead
certainly deserve respect, but they should not be allowed to dictate government
policy on the investigation and interpretation of early American prehistory',
wrote Robson Bonnichsen, one of the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man court
case, and Alan L. Schneider, the lawyer who defended the scientists. 'If a
choice must be made among competing theories of human origins, primacy should
be given to theories based on the scientific method. Only scientific theories
are built on empirical evidence; only scientific theories can be adjusted
or overturned.'
Scientists rejected, too, the idea that Kennewick Man could be 'culturally
affiliated' to modern Native Americans. 'As a specialist in the prehistory
of western North America', archaeologist Michael Moratto observes, 'I can
assure you that no living society, native American or other, can credibly
claim biologic or cultural affiliation with archaeological remains 93 centuries
old. This time span represents nearly 500 generations. During this time, peoples
entered the New World, moved extensively within it, evolved culturally, intermarried
and sometimes died out.' There is therefore no 'substantive or legal merit'
in culturally linking Kennewick Man with any group of modern Indians.
For many Native Americans and their academic supporters, on the other hand,
the myths by which Indians live revealed why Kennewick Man belongs to them.
'If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates
our belief that he is Native American', claimed Armand Minthorn of the Umatilla
tribe. 'From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of
this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe that our people migrated
here from another continent, as the scientists do'. History is something given,
not something to be studied. 'Some scientists say that if this individual
is not studied further, we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our
own history', Minthorn wrote. 'We already know our history. It is passed on
to us through our elders and through our religious practices.'
These sentiments were not limited to Native American activists. One of America's
foremost anthropologist, Jonathan Marks, suggested that the Kennewick Man
debate highlighted 'scientists' belief they have a right - perhaps even a
duty! - to delegitimise other peoples' ideas about who they are and where
they came from'. This he called 'the problem of colonial genetics in a postcolonial
age'. Marks condemned the way that 'self-righteous, self-interested, self-proclaimed
and slightly paranoid advocates of science' often 'rewrite origin narratives
and identities of other peoples on the basis of partial, ambiguous and dubiously
interpreted evidence'.
This is a view of knowledge as culturally bound and of science as the product
of specific peoples. When Marks complains about scientific accounts helping
to 'delegitimise other peoples' ideas' and to 'rewrite origin narratives and
identities of other peoples' he seems to be suggesting that science belongs
to one culture (presumably modern western) and those 'ideas' and 'narratives'
to other cultures. The importance of origins stories, Marks argues, is that
they help define questions of 'morality, ultimate justice, good and evil,
happiness and what lies beyond death' and in so doing they shape the identity
of a culture and its relationship to the rest of the world. Origin stories,
he argues, 'are culturally integrated to a far greater degree than science'.
He worries that 'science's standard operating procedure is to take some aspect
of new knowledge and to substitute it for whatever alternative existed before
it - generally without looking for or dealing with the broader implications
or cultural and symbolic connections'. Scientific truth, in other words, may
not matter as much as social cohesion and cultural survival. This, of course,
is the classic Romantic view of culture and knowledge: knowledge as culturally
bound; culture as a bounded entity; an organic view of social cohesion ; the
significance of identity to the survival of a culture and a people.
In the past, reactionaries argued that reason was confined to certain human
groups while progressives believed that all humans had the capacity to reason.
Today many argue that to believe that reason is universal is itself reactionary
and demand the right, in the name of antiracism, for every culture to think
differently. Sociologists Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, writing
in the prestigious Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, argue
that no longer should 'Western "rationality" and "scientificity"
be used as the benchmark by which other sciences be evaluated'. Rather, 'the
ways of understanding the natural world that have been produced by different
cultures and at different times should be compared as knowledge systems on
an equal footing'. So, for leading Native American writer and activist Vine
Deloria, 'The non-Western tribal equivalent of science is the oral tradition,
the teachings that have been passed down from one generation to the next over
uncounted centuries'.
Drawing on that oral tradition, Deloria rejects the theory of evolution, believes
that Indians lived at the same time as dinosaurs, that mammoths and mastodons
lived in America at the time the Pilgrims landed, that the Earth is not several
billion years old as geologists believe but that Noah's Flood is a reality.
He is no cranky, marginal figure. He was, until 2002, professor of history,
law and political science at the University of Colorado. He remains someone
with whom many serious scholars regularly collaborate. Deloria penned, for
instance, the forward to Skull Wars, anthropologist David Hurst Thomas'
acclaimed study of the Kennewick Man affair. Time magazine named
him as one of the 11 most significant religious thinkers of the 20th century.
The academic status of Deloria shows the consequences of a 'multicultural'
view of science. Once the notion of objective knowledge is jettisoned, once
science is seen as a local rather than a universal form of knowledge, once
it is accepted that culturally diverse ways of understanding the natural world
should all be regarded as valid forms of knowledge, once rationality itself
is regarded as a form of racist violence, then mysticism and Creationism come
to be taken seriously.
A very different understanding of the relationship between science and myth
comes from Joallyn Archambault, Director of the American Indian Program at
the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and a member of the Standing
Rock Sioux Tribe. 'I am' she writes, 'personally familiar with Sioux religious
and cultural traditions and I have great pride in my Indian heritage'. She
has 'personally participated in all of the major traditional ceremonies appropriate
for a Sioux woman of my age and position in life, including a vision quest
and a Sun Dance'. In an affidavit to the judge considering the Kennewick Man
case, she wrote that while 'I respect the traditional religious and cultural
beliefs of my tribe and those of other tribes', such respect 'does not mean
that we must accept all of those beliefs as invariably accurate statements
of historic or scientific fact':
To do so would be contrary to commonsense and what we know about the world from other sources of knowledge. For example origin stories... vary widely from tribe to tribe. Depending upon the tribe, creation may be the work of Coyote, a bird, a first man, a turtle and so on. Even within the same tribe, traditional beliefs can include multiple creation stories. For example, three different creation stories were accepted in my father's tribe when I was a child... ordinary logic tells us that not all of these different stories or versions can be true, at least in a factual sense. And we should not expect them to be. The purpose of origin stories is to provide metaphysical, rather than historic or scientific, explanations... Like other forms of great literature they should be interpreted symbolically rather than literally.
For Archambault, 'the Kennewick skeleton should be made available for study
so we can learn as much from it as possible. The past is important because
it can help us to teach us who we are and how we fit into the world.' She
adds that 'the anti-science and anti-intellectual arguments espoused by some
Native American religious and political factions do not represent the views
of all, or even the majority of, American Indians. Most American Indians are
as interested about the past as other people. They want to know the truth
about the past, and they should be entitled to do so.'
Knowledge, Archambault, suggests, is a public affair and the property of all.
Identity on the other hand is a private matter. Traditional stories of a people's
history may be important for cultural and symbolic reasons but there is no
reason that science should defer them. American Indians, she argues, 'have
as much right as anyone else to be exposed to different ideas and to make
up their own minds about what they believe or do not believe'.
In 2005, after almost a decade of court battles, scientists finally won the
right to investigate Kennewick Man. But while in this case the claims of science
eventually won out, all too often scientific truth is forced to defer to cultural
claims. Indeed, even with Kennewick Man, potential knowledge was destroyed
in the name of cultural preservation. In April 1998 the Army Corps of Engineers
covered the riverbank site where Kennewick Man had been discovered in 600
tons of rocks. It was an act of vandalism that destroyed any possibility of
further research on the site. To this day the Corps has never satisfactorily
explained its action. When the Army engineers first proposed covering up the
site, scientists vigorously objected and the US Congress even passed a law
demanding that the site be left intact. Nevertheless, days before the law
came into effect, the Corps went ahead, some believe on the direct orders
of the White House. But if scientists were devastated, many activists were
elated. 'This is preservation of our culture', claimed Umatilla Indian leader
Armand Minthorn as he watched Army helicopters drop their load on the river
bank.
Minthorn may well have been talking metaphorically, but his response provides
a good expression of the view of culture as something as rigid as a rock-filled
tomb. From the viewpoint of a repatriationist, culture is like a sealed box
that holds a people both in the present and across time. The assumption is
that every local indigenous group is the carrier of an ancient culture, and
one that is associated with spiritual values as much as material culture.
Repatriation, the anthropologists Jane Hubert and Cressida Fforde write, is
'a process towards the recreation of the wholeness of the people receiving
the remains of their ancestors'. The wholeness of the people. It
is a phrase that calls to mind 19th century concepts of the volksgeist
and the imperatives of racial science.
Troublingly, such volkish notions of culture are increasingly coming into
vogue, usually in the name of anti-racism. 'We are discovering the "new
human rights", which include, first and foremost, cultural rights', former
UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the UN General Assembly at
the launch of the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples in
1992. 'We might even say that there can be no human rights unless cultural
authenticity is preserved.'
A United Nations report on the protection of cultural and intellectual property
argues that 'each indigenous community must retain permanent control over
all elements of its own heritage', heritage being defined as 'all of those
things which international law regards as the creative production of human
thought and craftsmanship, such as songs, stories, scientific knowledge and
artworks'. UNESCO has envisioned the creation of state folklore protection
boards that would 'register works and authorise their use'. Such protection
boards might intervene if other peoples produce imitations or if native art
was used in 'culturally inappropriate contexts'. In 2003, UNESCO adopted the
International Convention of the Intangible Cultural Heritage that requires
governments to prepare an inventory of intangible culture and thence to protect
it. What particularly worries UNESCO 'is the inability of states in a globalised
world to control the cross-border flow of ideas, images and resources that
affect cultural development'. By 'highlighting the culture of economically
powerful nations', UNESCO argues, globalisation 'has created new forms of
inequality' and helped foster 'cultural conflict rather than cultural pluralism'.
UNESCO's long-term aim, anthropologist Michael Brown suggests, is to help
nations 'restrict the exportation of local knowledge and the importation of
cultural items (such as music and film) perceived to pose a threat to national
values and tradition'.
Arguments such as these have already had an impact on the availability of
knowledge. Harvard University's Peabody Museum deliberately allowed a historic
set of photographs to disintegrate because the Navajo tribe objected to non-tribal
members viewing the rituals they depicted. Many museums now restrict certain
exhibits to particular groups of people. The National Museum of Australia
in Canberra keeps 'secret sacred' Aboriginal objects so restricted that only
designated tribal members have access. Neither the museum's director nor its
curator is aware of the contents of the secret sacred storage. The newly built
National Museum of the American Indian in Washington segregates and restricts
access to sensitive collections and has an area reserved for tribal use. New
Zealand's National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, operates in a similar way.
In America, both the Hopi and the Apache have demanded control over cultural
property of, and information about, their respective tribes, including 'all
images, text, ceremonies, music, songs, stories, symbols, beliefs, customs,
ideas and other physical and spiritual objects and concepts'. In Australia,
Aborigines have taken legal action to prevent the national airline Qantas
using a kangaroo as its logo on the grounds that the animal is Aboriginal
intellectual property. In another case, Aborigines have sought copyright over
all photographs and paintings of the Australian landscape that they believe
is central to their spiritual life.
The resurgence of a Romantic view of culture poses a real menace to the free
flow of knowledge and threatens to corral it into intellectual Bantustans.
The ideas of free speech and open debate become meaningless if we fail to
defend a universalist concept of knowledge or if we accept the notion of science
as but a local view whose factual claims must defer to cultural and political
needs. If scientific debate is constrained to express only sentiments with
which people feel comfortable, culturally and politically, then science dies
as the line between knowledge and myth becomes eroded. And from nineteenth
century racial science to Lysekoism in the twentieth century to contemporary
Creationism in the classroom, history is full of warning signs about what
happens when science gives way to myth.