March-April 2000

« AAUP Homepage

N.C. Academics Relinquish Native American Remains

By Hans Johnson

Initiating a new chapter of cooperation in the relations between academic scientists and Native Americans, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor recently oversaw his institution's return of ancestral bones and burial objects to a branch of the Cherokee tribe. The surrender, capped by a re-interment and memorial ceremony, showcased efforts by faculty members to move beyond tugs-of-war over ancient relics and to forge respectful ties with Native Americans.

The North Carolina case centers on skeletons and bone fragments from fifty-eight members of the Pisgah people, direct forebears of the Cherokee. The remains were recovered during two decades of UNC excavations ending in 1985 in the state's westernmost reaches near the Swannanoa River.

Vin Steponaitis, professor of anthropology and director of UNC's research laboratories for archaeology, says the remains are between six hundred and one thousand years old. Relinquishing them, he explains, was not an act of largess; it was called for under the conditions of a 1990 federal law, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), whose implementation he has long supported. Some institutions have, however, contested their obligations in often-lengthy litigation. "Lawyers never had to get involved at UNC," says Steponaitis. "We felt both a legal and a moral obligation to return the remains," he says.

NAGPRA, says Steponaitis, "gives tribes what many people, as six-year-olds, would have called 'dibs' on remains and relics believed to be those of their ancestors." The law, he explains, tries to resolve "two conflicting sets of values" by balancing "free inquiry and the quest for knowledge with respect for the dead." And it directs museums and universities to base their decisions about whether to keep or return holdings to indigenous tribes on the closeness of the connection between the community and the remains themselves.

In the judgment of Steponaitis and his colleagues, the Pisgah remains passed this test, triggering the give-back. President Andrew Jackson's forced evacuation of most Cherokees to Oklahoma during the "Trail of Tears" in the 1830s left few adherents of the tribe in the Great Smoky Mountains west of Asheville. Yet all three current branches, or bands, of the tribe trace their lineage through the Pisgahs.

The painstaking notes traditionally associated with archaeological excavations allowed for the bones' reburial in their original resting places. Officials at North Carolina's Warren Wilson College say the repatriation is "the largest of its kind ever completed" in the state. The college participated in the original digs, and its students now work alongside members of the local Cherokee to conduct field research.

Meanwhile, out west, in a four-year-old case still drawing national headlines, a group of scientists continues a lawsuit against the federal government, which is poised to return to the Umatilla tribe of Oregon a set of remains estimated at around nine thousand years old. In 1996 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accidentally uncovered remains of the so-called Kennewick man on the Washington shore of the Columbia River. The Umatilla were prepared to take possession of the remains, but protests from some academics have delayed the handover. The professors allege that ties between the remains and the tribe are tenuous at best. As the custody battle continues, the remains have been stored at the University of Washington's Burke Museum in Seattle.

Despite the volatility of discussions over relics, Steponaitis finds standards for academic citizenship emerging from the exchange in North Carolina. "We can't just work in an ivory tower," he says of archaeology faculty. "We teach and do research in a real world, where people sometimes care deeply enough about topics to change the way we might act as scientists if we were left to our own devices."