Kennewick Man and the Culture of Race
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
June 2016 – August 2017
Facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, from
Kennewick Man:
The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton
Kennewick Man and the Culture of Race
“Determination” of Kennewick Man: Science and Society
On April 26, 2016 US Army Brigadier General, Scott A. Spellmon of the Army Corps of Engineers signed what was to be the fourth “Native American Determination for Kennewick Man,” following three previous determinations by the Army Corps of Engineers or the Department of Interior over a twenty-year period. General Spellmon’s action is the latest episode in a complicated story that pits government functionaries (the Army Corps and DOI), assorted political figures (including a governor and several members of Congress), representatives of several Indian tribes (including the Colville, Umatilla, and Nez Perce), and the inevitable army of lawyers against state and federal courts sympathetic to the claims of a stalwart group of archeologists intent of preserving a unique find for ongoing scientific investigation. And all over a pile of bones.
A complicated story, but with a simple if dramatic beginning. In July 1996 two young men, Will Thomas and David Deacy, were attending the annual hydroplane races held on the Columbia River near the town of Kennewick, Washington. Walking along the shore of a small inlet, they spotted a human skull lying in the shallow water. Thomas and Deacy called the police, who retrieved the skull and also noted the presence of other bones scattered around the immediate area. The police delivered the skull to the county coroner, who called a forensic anthropologist, James Chatters, known to him from earlier collaborations. Together the coroner and Chatters returned to the site that same day and recovered a number of bones from the inlet. Over the next several days Chatters mounted a systematic excavation of the site and retrieved some 350 bones and bone fragments, comprising a nearly complete skeleton of an adult male. Hence the discovery of Kennewick Man.
Chatters’ first responsibility was to assist the coroner and police in determining whether the remains were of a crime victim. Artifacts scattered in the immediate area and the obvious weathering of the bones led him to reject that possibility in favor of one attributing the remains to those of an early settler of European origin. Proceeding with his analysis, however, Chatters abandoned that hypothesis: lodged in the subject’s pelvic bone and partially healed over with bone tissue was a two-inch projectile point belonging to a very early lithic technology, the Cascade, that disappeared from the archeological record some 7,500 years ago. Kennewick Man was very, very old.
A small bone fragment sent to a lab at the University of California Riverside for radiocarbon testing indicated just how old: some 9,300 to 9,600 years (subsequent research has established a somewhat younger date of 8,400 to 8,700 years).
Here it is important to recognize how truly extraordinary the discovery is. Apart from the Kennewick site, there are only some forty-three U. S. locations containing human skeletal remains from the period 14,000 – 8,000 years before the present (BP). Of those, a mere dozen feature fairly complete skeletons. Gravely complicating the matter, half those have already been rendered inaccessible to archeological science by increasingly aggressive tribal “repatriation” demands. The handful that remain constrain researchers, already hard-pressed for subject matter, in a way that endangers the very future of American archeology. [See “Paleoamerican Human Remains Dated at Least 8,000 RC yr. BP,” Bradley T. Lepper. In Kennewick Man . . .]
Local news outlets soon spread the word of the remarkable find. First to react were representatives of several neighboring Indian tribes, including the Umatilla and Colville, who came forward to claim the remains for reburial under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). That statute applies to Native American remains and artifacts found on tribal or federal land, and since the Army Corps of Engineers administers the banks of the Columbia River the tribal representatives made their demand to the Corps.
The Corps responded in a regrettably typical heavy-handed and arbitrary fashion, taking physical possession of the remains from the local coroner and shortly thereafter accepting the tribes’ argument that Kennewick Man was indeed “Native American” and should be “repatriated.” At the time NAGPRA was just a few years old and its complexities were only beginning to make themselves felt in heated community meetings and law courts across the land. And, truth to tell, the Corps demonstrated for the first time in a series of questionable “determinations” that its engineers and government functionaries are no rocket scientists. Its prior accomplishments – draining and effectively destroying the Everglades to make room for tract homes and sugar plantations; designing a drainage system around New Orleans that contributed to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; botching a Colorado River diversion project that created the toxic sinkhole of the Salton Sea – has not instilled confidence in those who become the unwilling objects of its attentions. As one wag limned about the third boondoggle, “By the shores of Coachella, By the stinking Big Sea Waters . . .”
Alarmed by the Corps’ preemptory action and the incalculable loss to science it represented, a group of archeologists led by Robson Bonnichsen petitioned its regional director to delay its decision until a careful study of Kennewick Man could be done. There was no response. With the loss imminent the archeologists filed suit with the District Court of Oregon, which found the Corps had acted without sufficient evidence and remanded the case to the Corps for further investigation. At this point, a series of legal battles commenced involving the Corps, the Department of the Interior, state and federal courts, the archeologists, and the tribes (whose representatives in a bit of Hollywood hyperbole had taken to calling the skeleton “The Ancient One” and insisting on ceremonial visits with the remains). Twenty years later that saga continues to unfold, with Brigadier General Spellmon’s action in April the latest installment. [Note: This was written well prior to developments a year later.] The April “Determination” document lays out the chronology of events for those who may want to chart its tortured course (see “Native American Determination for Kennewick Man”):
http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16021coll11/id/949
The legal maneuvering rests on, and in fact obscures, critical issues that extend into current debates in American society over the nature of race or ethnic identity and the status of minorities in our multiethnic society. What is it to be such-and-such? What is it to possess an elemental identity? These are the fundamental questions that surround the dispute over Kennewick Man, questions that no piece of legislation drafted by government lawyers intent on establishing hard and fast guidelines can come near resolving.
At the heart of the problem is that NAGPRA treats Native American identity in the most cursory fashion while detailing in page after page the procedures to be followed in the transfer of remains and artifacts and, of course, the penalties for violating those procedures. Surveiller et punir. The Act sets out two defining criteria: Remains must be identifiably “Native American,” and must indicate “cultural affiliation.”
“Native American” means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States.
. . . “cultural affiliation” means that there is a relationship of shared group identity which can be reasonably traced historically or prehistorically between a present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group.
https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/FHPL_NAGPRA.pdf 1990
The Corps’ “Determination” addresses only the first criterion and leaves unresolved the difficult matter of Kennewick Man’s “cultural affiliation.” With so little of substance in the Act’s definition of “Native American” it isn’t surprising that the Corps’ immediate response following the discovery was to take the path of least resistance. A political hot button issue had been dropped in its lap, local tribes were clamoring through the media for an end to the perceived desecration of their heritage, the skeleton was undoubtedly ancient, and then there was that projectile point buried in its hip bone. What else could Kennewick Man be but “Native American”? Let the tribes have their way and be done with it. And then along came those pesky archeologists.
For those archeologists opposing repatriation in 1996 and for archeologists and cultural anthropologists right through today, “Native American” is a largely meaningless category that conceals more than it reveals. Perhaps contemporary analogies would be the categories, “Asian” or “European.” Those are not so much labels for meaningful ethnic or social identities as glosses that hold little meaning until they are scrutinized. For archeologists of Paleo-America that scrutiny involves filling in the mostly blank canvas of how and when the Americas were populated. Who were the migrants? Where did they come from? When did they arrive? How did they interact? Here grade school textbooks and tribal doctrine embrace a disarmingly simple scenario: At some point around 14,000 years ago an ice-free corridor opened from the Yukon into southern Canada, making it possible for those few groups who had migrated across the once-submerged land of Beringia to continue their journey southward into what is now the United States. But then the Beringia land bridge re-submerged, so no further migration was possible. Hence all North American, Central American, and South American peoples originated from a single, fairly homogeneous founder group.
Research over the past couple of decades indicates that things were not nearly that simple. It is far more likely that there were waves of migration involving distinct populations and extending over hundreds of years. And there were probably different migratory routes: in addition to the inland ice-free corridor, some groups followed a coastal route, going from point to point in primitive boats (hence Arlington Springs Man, whose remains were discovered on California’s Channel Islands). Once arrived in North America, these groups proceeded to move around, interacting and interbreeding in complex ways that created diverse populations. Again, something like the inhabitants of Asia or Europe. The notion of a homogeneous founder group is ideology, not archeology.
Until just a few years ago it was impossible even to begin to untangle this spider web of populations. Then something occurred that is as close as science comes to a miracle: a few geneticists learned to extract ancient DNA from remains thousands of years old and sequence its genomes. Yes, it’s more than a little reminiscent of Jurassic Park. And like those fictional fabricators of dinosaurs, the geneticists soon found their work embroiled in controversy.
It is a tale shot through with irony. In 2004, eight years after the skeleton’s discovery, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Corps to allow scientific investigation of Kennewick Man. A bone fragment was tested for its DNA, but results were useless until, in 2013, a Danish team using the latest techniques in genomic analysis were able to extract and sequence Kennewick Man’s DNA (“The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature, June 18, 2015).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14625.html
The highly technical results indicate that Kennewick Man’s genome is more closely related to Native American groups than to other proposed candidates, such as Polynesian, Ainu, and even Caucasian. This finding was cause for celebration among U. S. tribes, who took it to mean that, indeed, “Native American” was a meaningful identity of a people. Leaders of the neighboring Colville tribe in particular felt vindicated and renewed their demand for repatriation to the Corps. Following its review of the Nature findings, the Corps acceded to that demand. Hence its formal “Determination” of April of this year:
Based upon review and analysis of new information related to the skeleton known as Kennewick Man, and in particular, evidence provided by recently published DNA and skeletal analyses, I find that there is substantial evidence to determine that Kennewick Man is related to modern Native Americans from the United States. Therefore, the human remains are Native American under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), as described below.
http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16021coll11/id/949
Here we encounter the first of several ironies in this complicated and emotion-charged affair: The Colville, Umatilla and related tribes rely on the very sort of scientific investigation to bolster their claim that they have rejected from the beginning as sacrilege. Had Kennewick Man’s remains been reburied immediately as the tribes demanded, his “Native American” status would have remained a matter of belief rather than scientific fact.
But just how is that newly discovered “scientific fact” interpreted in the case at hand? Again, it’s complicated. The Danish team determined that particular genetic markers corresponded fairly closely with DNA samples Colville members had volunteered. And here is a second irony: Having embraced the genomic analysis of Kennewick Man – a desecration they previously rejected – Colville individuals now allowed themselves to become experimental subjects of that same procedure. However, other genetic markers showed an affinity with far flung groups in Central and South America. One small tribe on the western Amazon, the Karitiana, showed an especially close genetic relationship.
In his April “Determination” Brigadier General Spellmon attempts to thread a logical needle in interpreting the findings of the Nature article. A part is privileged over the whole. If Kennewick Man is “Native American” and if “Native American” status includes inhabitants of the United States, such as the Colville, then “Kennewick Man is related to modern North Americans from the United States. Therefore, the human remains are Native American under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act . . .” Note the crucial phrase: “from the United States.” Left unmentioned is the equally important fact that Kennewick Man is equally “related to” modern Native Americans from Central and South America.
Here the Corps, again yielding to political pressure from the tribes and from state and national politicians, plays fast and loose with both logic and genomics. Without explicitly calling Spellmon out on this, the editors of Nature apparently felt his misuse of science was sufficiently egregious to require a response from the journal. Thus in May, hard on the April “Determination,” Nature responded: