Subject: bones of contention
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 00:11:02 -0400
The Body in Question
The discovery of the remains of a 9,000-year-old man on the Columbia River
has set off a conflict over race, history and identity that isn't just about
the American past, but about the future as well
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 3, 2001; Page W08
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/postmagazine/A99386-2001May30.html
A middle-aged man with a long face died near the north bank of the Columbia
River about 9,000 years ago. He had known violence: crushed ribs, a chipped
elbow, a fractured skull. A stone-tipped spear or projectile once plunged
into his right hip, leaving a fragment in his bones. He survived and wandered
western America for months and perhaps years afterward.
The man lived among hunter-gatherers who covered vast distances in small
bands. They rarely stopped for more than a few days. They made little effort
to store food. Some may have trekked on long, solo walkabouts. A restless
search for elk, bison, deer and pronghorn dominated their lives. Continually
at risk, they had little time for decorative arts or social ritual. But they
had tools, spears, language and something like ambition.
In the coulee-riven plateau between the Rockies and the Cascades where the
man with the long face died, there were very few people -- perhaps as few as
500 or 1,000 in all of what is now eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, Idaho
and Nevada, scholars say. Bitter winters and erratic vegetation threatened
famine, but a man who could take a spear in his hip and keep walking had a
fair chance on this terrain.
Today the man's skull and skeleton lie in storage in Seattle's Burke Museum,
sequestered by a federal court order. If he could somehow be revived, he
might be dismayed to learn that he has become known as Kennewick Man, after
the shabby electricity-generating town in eastern Washington ("Welcome to
Kennewick: A Public Power Community") where his bones were discovered in 1996
by beer-sodden college students sneaking into a speedboat race. Five years
on, because of a scientific, cultural and legal battle that would be
difficult to explain to him or any of his fellow hunter-gatherers, the man's
final resting place seems unlikely to be decided until the U.S. Supreme Court
expresses an opinion. Meanwhile, disputants in Bonnichsen et al. v. United
States of America and its related, sprawling Interior Department proceeding
are set to reconvene before a federal magistrate in Portland, Ore., on June
19. Presiding will be Judge John Jelderks, who has noted that "some of the
issues presented in this case are questions of first impression that have not
previously been addressed by any court."
In the lawsuit, eight prominent American archaeologists and physical
anthropologists seek to block the U.S. government from delivering Kennewick
Man's remains to a coalition of five Northwest Indian tribes, who claim him
as an ancestor and intend to honor him by reburying him. In siding with the
Indians, the government cites a 1990 federal law that gives tribes extensive
rights over remains judged as "culturally affiliated" with modern Indians.
The law seeks in part to redress grave-robbing and racist theorizing by
19th-century white scientists who studied Native American bones.
The anthropologists who sued argue that these particular remains are a rare
scientific treasure. The bones are like precious books in a government
library, the scientists say, and they have a First Amendment right to study
them. At stake, argues the Smithsonian Institution's Douglas Owsley, one of
the plaintiffs, is "the right to ask questions of the past." But
then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt concluded last September that Kennewick
Man is likely an ancestor of modern Indians and that the scientists have no
legal basis to stop reburial. The tribes accuse the scientists of
perpetuating exploitive study of Native American bones. "We are very much
involved as well as intrigued and interested in our own history, as well as
all history," says Jeff Van Pelt of the Federated Tribes of the Umatilla
Reservation. "But science needs to have some kind of ethical foundation on
controlling how far is too far."
The case has become so inflamed that scholars involved speak of shouting
matches and threatened fisticuffs at academic conferences, as well as
vindictive silent treatments meted out in divided university anthropology
departments. Debate about race has deepened the resentments. When Kennewick
Man was first discovered, some scientists examined his skull's shape and
declared that he might have physically resembled modern Europeans, not modern
Native Americans. Newspapers and magazines carried sensational stories
describing speculation by scholars that modern Indian tribes might be
descended from Asian people who arrived later than a previously unknown
European group. (Very few scholars credit this theory today.) For a while, a
small religious sect of Norse revivalists based in California, called the
Asatru Folk Assembly, joined the Kennewick Man lawsuit, arguing that the
bones may have belonged to one of their ancestors.
The conversion of a 9,000-year-old skeleton into a racialized proxy for
conflicts about American culture and identity provoked angry interventions by
yet more scholars. They saw no convincing evidence of European origin. All
the talk about Kennewick Man's identity, they argued, dangerously
misconstrued the meaning of race.
Initially, much of the controversy seemed to concern mysteries of the
American past. When and how did people first arrive here? Who would control
evidence about that history -- scientists, the U.S. government or Indian
tribes?
The longer the case has dragged on, however, the less it has served to
illuminate the American past, and the more it has seemed to reveal the
American present.
Jim Chatters was watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" on television when
it came to him. For months he had been walking streets and staring at
strangers, looking for a face and head shape that matched what he saw in
Kennewick Man's skull. To him, the skull had contours that "you typically
find in Europeans," as he recalls. "I was looking hard . . . Some people from
India that I saw looked similar but they lacked -- the cranial form was
different." Then onto the TV screen strode Capt. Jean Luc-Picard, the British
actor Patrick Stewart. Eureka! "I said, 'Whoa, that's the closest I've seen."
In his office basement on a March afternoon four years later, Chatters's
hands brush across a replica of Kennewick Man's head. "You can already see
the Patrick Stewart sighting," he is saying. Unshaven, Chatters wears jeans
and a polo shirt and sports a gold earring. He keeps the Kennewick head
replica as an icon in his musty split-level home in eastern Washington. "Look
how the nose projects," he says, caressing the head rapidly, "the slight
backward sweep of the cheekbones, this very delicate jaw . . ."
Chatters's life changed when the coroner of Benton County, Wash., telephoned
almost five years ago. The coroner had been asked to examine a mysterious
skeleton discovered during the Tri-City Water Follies hydroplane boat race on
the dam-slackened Columbia. A former federal research scientist who now ran
his own archaeology firm, Chatters was the coroner's occasional consultant.
Initially, Chatters declared that the bones probably belonged to a
19th-century European settler. He then sent a fragment off for radiocarbon
dating. When the lab reported that it was about 9,000 years old, Chatters
helped organize a news conference, although no peer-reviewed scientific work
had been completed. Before the assembled media, Chatters declared that the
skeleton "looks like no one I've ever seen before." But if he had to choose a
category, he would say the bones looked "Caucasoid," most resembling those of
a "pre-modern European."
Enraged by these racial speculations, five local Indian tribes organized a
formal coalition to demand the bones for reburial. They said the skeleton
much more likely belonged to an ancestor of theirs than to some sort of
ancient Caucasoid. ("Caucasoid" is a term used by physical anthropologists to
describe skull and skeletal shapes common today in Europe, the Middle East
and South Asia, and does not typically refer to skin color. However, the word
"Caucasian," which is often used by Americans to refer to whites, is defined
in Webster's as a synonym of "Caucasoid." Thus even when scientists believe
they are using a technical, race-neutral term, they can be understood as
referring directly to race.) The five Northwest tribes argued that federal
law required Chatters to consult with them when digging for bones with
probable Indian origin -- he seemed to be doing an end run around the law,
they said. Indian cultural traditions held that ancestors should be buried
with privacy and dignity, they said; Chatters was now making a public
spectacle of the remains.
The decision about the skeleton's fate fell to the Army Corps of Engineers,
which managed the land where it was found. Without explaining itself, the
Corps quickly sided with the Indians and moved to hand over the bones. That's
when the eight scientists found a lawyer and went to court. The injunction
they won in the fall of 1996 put Kennewick Man's bones on hold and is still
in force.
The Indians involved speak bitterly of Chatters's catalyzing conduct. They
see him as a self-aggrandizer trying to acquire a national reputation from
human remains he should never have been able to control. (Chatters has a book
out this month from Simon & Schuster about what Kennewick Man reveals about
early America.) Chatters and some of his scientific colleagues "chose to be
possessive and aggressive" when the remains were first discovered, says
Adelin Fredin, an anthropologist with the nearby Colville Indian tribe.
Chatters used legal ambiguities to challenge tribes' control over
archaeological resources in the Northwest, Fredin says. "My opinion is that
politics and ambition mixed real well."
From the start, the tribes saw the struggle over Kennewick Man's skeleton as
connected to wider challenges to Indian legal rights pressed by conservative
politicians. Congress, state legislatures and federal courts -- seeking to
honor broken treaties and redress past abuses -- have provided Northwestern
Indian tribes with expanding legal authority over natural resources and
cultural sites. Chatters seemed to be deliberately -- provocatively -- trying
to help those who want to roll back these tribal rights.
Chatters denies such motives and is harshly critical of the Indians. "This
modern-day hyper-politicized ethnicity business is irrelevant" to his pursuit
of science, he says. "God, I will tell you, this has been an education in the
racial politics of America to me." He says some of the evidence presented by
local tribes to support their claim of ancestral connection to the bones has
been invented. "Having grown up around them, I know 90 percent of this is
bunk."
Some academic anthropologists rebuke Chatters for his comparisons of
Kennewick Man to Patrick Stewart. Such talk of European-ness in poorly
studied bones was "bold speculation," wrote Alan Swedlund of the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst and Duane Anderson of the School of American
Research recently. "We cannot understand why it was necessary to make such
controversial and incendiary claims." But other anthropologists laud
Chatters's effort to protect very old remains for scientific study.
Some of the scientists suing over Kennewick Man believe his remains and about
a dozen other skeletons from the same period "look surprisingly non-American
Indian and leaning a little bit toward Caucasoid attributes," in the words of
George Gill, a University of Wyoming anthropologist who joined the case. Gill
and others theorize about a previously unknown population that might have
lived in the American Northwest 9,000 or more years ago, a group that might
have died off from disease or war. (After some initial excitement about the
possibility, Gill and all but a handful of scholars today are deeply
skeptical about the idea that this supposed mystery group came from Europe.
But they think the group may have had an Asian lineage distinct from the
ancestors of many modern Indian tribes.) In their skull shapes and skeletons,
"what you find with these ancient ones is that almost uniformly [they] fall
outside the range of modern populations," says the Smithsonian's Owsley. "I
firmly believe there are groups in the past that did not survive to the
present day, and Kennewick certainly could be one of those."
Other anthropologists reject such speculation as premature, saying there is
not nearly enough physical evidence. Yet others emphasize that skull and
skeletal features may never provide a reliable way to identify population
groups that lived so long ago, because not enough is known about how skulls
and skeletons change shape over thousands of years due to shifting diets and
environments. Although the divide is not neat or absolute, these debates
reflect a split between physical anthropologists, who study bones and defend
their value as windows on the past, and cultural anthropologists, who usually
study living peoples and who think that bone science, at best, offers limited
insights.
The debates also reflect fevered disarray in the academic study of early
North America. Until very recently, nearly all scientists taught a confident,
consensus narrative about how the continent was first populated. As the Ice
Age ended about 12,000 years ago, they said, Asian mammoth hunters migrated
from Siberia across a land bridge that stretched to modern Alaska. The
migrants then headed south through an ice-free corridor that led to today's
Montana. From there the hunters spread out and propagated. This was always a
questionable theory, more securely grounded in facts about prehistoric
geology than in hard evidence about human movements. Yet the story was often
taught in American schools as if it were certain.
No more. Kennewick Man surfaced just as new discoveries were encouraging
radical revisions of old theory. Evidence of late Ice Age human settlements
on California's channel islands, in Chile and elsewhere suggests that humans
may have first moved around the Americas by boat, and may have arrived much
earlier than previously believed. If a current consensus can be said to
exist, it describes multiple migrations from multiple Asian origins by
multiple means over thousands of years -- certainly not a single march across
the land bridge.
Archaeologists investigating prehistory have no records, no texts, and very
little undisputed evidence. Their work necessarily depends upon inference and
imagination. The Indians involved in the Kennewick case understand this. Some
of their own history is retold similarly -- a blend of facts, myths, stories
Marvels the Umatilla's Jeff Van Pelt about the scientists he is battling in
court, "They can take a very little bit of information and tell one of the
greatest stories you've ever heard."
The scientists who theorize about early America do so amid the multicultural
tensions of the modern United States. Sometimes the language they select to
describe possible ancient migrations and group rivalries seems to echo
current talk-radio debates about immigration, race, Indian rights and the
American melting pot.
"The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts;
the source of imagination is also strongly cultural," writes the evolutionary
biologist Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Some targets of
scientific investigation "are invested with enormous social importance but
blessed with very little reliable information." When this is true, "a history
of scientific attitudes may be little more than an oblique record of social
change."
So it is, certainly, with the question of race, the emotive issue joined on
the first day Jim Chatters caressed Kennewick Man's skull, searching for
evidence of his identity.
Human migration to the Americas helped create the modern idea of race. The
notion that people could be divided into distinct races was "a social
mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations
brought together in colonial America," as the American Anthropological
Association puts it. Race became the idea by which English and other European
settlers justified the subjugation of Indians and African slaves. Initially,
white settlers explained their concept in biblical terms. Later, Darwin
provided a biological framework for racists: White superiority had resulted
from natural selection.
Race and racism still thrive as social constructs, as lived experience. In
this sense, as long as racial discrimination produces hate crimes, racial
profiling by police, bias in the workplace and other offenses, then race not
only exists, it is urgent. Yet race as lived experience has always depended
to some extent on underlying assumptions about biology, on beliefs that
racial groupings offer some meaningful way to describe physical human
variation.
In recent years, however, scholarship about the biology of race has been
undergoing a quiet upheaval caused by insights from genetic science. And in
the same way that Kennewick Man has stoked fresh debate about American
prehistory, he has also provoked new argument about the meaning of race.
Mapping the global distribution of DNA in humans, evolutionary biologists
such as R.C. Lewontin and Alan R. Templeton have shown that modern social
races are barely perceptible in genetic terms. There is far greater variation
within any given racial group than there is between two racial groups. That
is, any two typical African American neighbors have many more genetic
differences between them than they do, as a pair, in comparison with two
whites down the street. Considering a variety of genetic evidence such as DNA
and blood types, the American Anthropological Association's executive board
concluded three years ago that about 94 percent of human physical variation
occurs within social races, just 6 percent between them.
As humans fanned out and conquered the planet, they slept with one another so
copiously as to blur the kinds of genetic groupings that define subspecies in
other mammals. Rampant copulation and global dominance over thousands of
years produced a human species that is exceptional among animals in its
genetic homogeneity. Two clans of chimpanzees that live on opposite sides of
a mountain will in some cases breed separately until they evolve into
genetically distinct subspecies. Two similar clans of humans will in every
case climb over the mountain and interbreed energetically until it is
impossible to tell the original clans apart -- so says humanity's global
genetic map.
Still, there are some genetic differences between human population groups.
When agriculture led some groups of people to sit still for generations,
their tendency to mate with partners close at hand produced some genetic
clustering -- thus the approximately 6 percent variation between racial
groups. The problem for defenders of the race concept, however, is that even
these mild group differences correlate best with geographical distance, not
traits like skin color or hair type that are commonly used to define social
race. (See charts, pages 21 and 22.) In other words, the most accurate way to
describe the small genetic variation that exists between groups is not to
focus on visual traits such as skin color, but to ask how far one group lives
from another. The farther away one group is from another, the greater the
genetic variation.
All in all, "when you quantify it at the molecular genetic level -- and take
all of the biases about skin color and hair out of it -- humans come out
remarkably homogenous," Templeton says.
Human skin color variation probably reflects differing adaptations to
ultraviolet light over thousands of years among dispersed, sedentary
populations, evolutionary biologists believe. Yet variations in skin color
correlate with very few other physical traits -- not with hair texture, not
with skull shape, not with skeletal shape and certainly not with important
DNA clusters, according to evolutionary biologists. As biology, color is an
isolated and unenlightening issue, truly just skin deep.
"We're not saying that human variation doesn't exist. Obviously it does. It's
just that 'race' doesn't explain it," says Alan Goodman, an anthropologist at
Hampshire College. Because people depend so heavily on eyesight to interpret
the world, they are susceptible to over-interpretation of visual cues such as
color, Goodman says.
Physical anthropologists who try to group people past and present by the
shapes of their skulls and skeletons have created additional confusion and
debate. Certain very stable skull features such as teeth can be useful guides
to human variation, nearly all anthropologists agree. But while physical
anthropologists strongly defend the use of skull shapes to generalize about
population groups, others question whether their methods are reliable. Ninety
years ago, the founder of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas,
demonstrated that human skull shapes can change markedly within a single
generation due to environmental factors. Today there is little scientific
consensus about how rapidly such skull-shape changes occur and why. Using
data on thousands of skulls from around the world, and measuring those skulls
57 different ways, anthropologist John Relethford of the State University of
New York College at Oneonta has shown recently that about 85 to 90 percent of
skull variation occurs within racial groups, and only 10 to 15 percent
between them -- closely matching the variation of molecular DNA.
Kennewick Man has become a symbol of this wider race debate because the
scientists suing over his remains are nearly all physical anthropologists
involved with skull research. Some of these scientists, such as Chatters, say
skull shape can be a good way to gain insights about population groups, but
that the larger concept of biological race should be rejected. Others, like
the Smithsonian's Owsley, say the question of whether biological race exists
is irrelevant. But another plaintiff, George Gill, argues vocally that
biological races do exist and ought to be acknowledged.
Gill, a physical anthropologist, says that when he examines modern skeletons
while working with law enforcement, he can predict race accurately from the
shape of skulls and bones about four times out of five. Given this, Gill
asks, why shouldn't he continue to use racial language to describe human
variation? "I think using the racial lens is often the easiest and best way
to look at it," he says.
Other anthropologists "think they're helping to reduce racial conflict and
racism by ignoring race or denying race," Gill continues. "I think that's a
mistake." Since all biologists admit there is at least some human variation
between groups, the question is what language to use to describe those
groups. Why not race? "Some of us are afraid to use these words, and some of
us are not," Gill says.
Gill enrages many cultural anthropologists. They see his insistence on race
as advancing a destructive system of thought -- a set of ideas that has
spilled the blood of millions. They ask, Why retain the language and
categories of race when the underlying biology is not at all convincing?
These anthropologists see Gill's ability to deduce race from skeletons as a
kind of conjurer's trick that depends on circular definitions and faulty
data. In any event, what genetic research makes clear, they say, is that the
very modest group variation described by physical anthropologists "is not
race, it's geography," says Goodman.
Even if the idea of biological race were vanquished, racism would remain. And
because racism persists as lived experience, laws have been enacted to fight
discrimination. To enforce civil rights laws, for instance, the federal
government monitors bias in housing and employment. To do that, it needs to
measure racial groups accurately. And so it must define racial categories.
The government's official policy on race definition is contained in the
Office of Management and Budget's "Directive 15: Race and Ethnic Standards
for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting," which was updated and
reissued in 1997. The directive rejects a biological basis for race even
while reinforcing the importance of race categories.
The government's race categories "are not anthropologically or scientifically
based" and "should not be primarily biological or genetic in reference," the
directive says. "Race and ethnicity may be thought of in terms of social and
cultural characteristics as well as ancestry."
Some civil rights activists fear that a rejection of biological race will
lead to premature declarations that America is a
colorblind society, undermining legal protections for minorities. But most
anthropologists want to move faster toward a world where race language and
concepts are in retreat. In a reply to Directive 15, the American
Anthropological Association argued that it would be better to phase out the
language of race because of its false and misleading biological connotations,
and perhaps use phrases such as "ethnic origins" that may more clearly denote
cultural identity.
And what does all this debate say about the identity of 9,000-year-old
Kennewick Man? Is he Caucasoid? Indian? Indian but not the same as modern
Indian? A nonspecific, generalized early American? "We want to order the
world. And gray is harder to order," argues Goodman. Ultimately, "Kennewick
Man could be the textbook case of why race science doesn't work."
To reach the office of Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian anthropologist suing
for the right to study Kennewick Man, you step through the lobby of the
National Museum of Natural History off Constitution Avenue, climb the stairs
to the third floor, and enter a hall lined with rows and rows of storage
bins.
The bins appear at first to be innocuous trays that might hold nuts and bolts
at a hardware store. But then you notice, in a few that have been opened, the
odd bony finger sticking out. Inside, as it happens, are many human bones.
Skulls. Rib cages. Thigh bones. Feet.
Hundreds and hundreds of dead Indians lie stored in these Smithsonian halls.
They are among the 18,000 Indian remains collected by the museum as
biological specimens from graveyards and military battlefields in the
American West during the 19th century, as the Army waged what amounted in
many cases to campaigns of extermination against indigenous tribes. In a few
instances, skeletons were collected as battle trophies. Thousands of these
remains are still curated today for scientific study in one of the country's
most prestigious cultural institutions.
Like the debates about early American migration and biological race, the
story of these bones marks a path to the meanings of Kennewick Man.
In 1865, Surgeon General William Hammond issued an order to all Army medical
officers "to collect, and to forward to the office of the Surgeon General,
all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded
as valuable." At forts around the West, Indian-hunting Army surgeons fanned
out to comply. The surgeons eventually collected about 800 skeletons,
including those of some Indian battle victims who were boiled down to their
bones, packed up and shipped by train to Washington. There they joined the
remains of about 2,000 other Indians at the Army Medical Museum, a macabre
laboratory of saws and brain measurement devices located for many years in
Washington's old Ford's Theatre, after it was closed because of Abraham
Lincoln's assassination.
The Army's collection was the most militaristic expression of a wider
19th-century enthusiasm for pilfered Indian skeletons. Bone fever gripped
museums across the country, from the Smithsonian to Harvard to New York to
St. Louis. Curators competed for skeletons from commercial brokers. Rewarded
with cash and inspired by early American naturalists such as Thomas
Jefferson, western travelers routinely robbed Indian grave sites or bartered
for skulls, hoping to contribute to science. Back East, scientists aiming to
prove the innate superiority of whites studied crackpot textbooks such as
Samuel Morton's influential Crania Americana. Scribbling by candlelight, the
scientists poured birdshot into hollowed Indian skulls to measure just how
little brain they could hold. Their work created a foundation for the race
science that later offered intellectual underpinnings for the Holocaust.
By the time 20th-century anthropologists and curators concluded it was
unethical to collect Indian bones, America's museums possessed a vast
inventory -- the 18,000 remains at the Smithsonian, plus tens of thousands
more at other major municipal museums and universities. (The Smithsonian also
has a large anthropological collection of human brains from the same period
that is stored today in Suitland.)
A campaign for redress by Indian leaders led finally to the 1990 Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, sign