Kennewick Man exposes Americans' deepest flaws

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The United States would be just about perfect if it were not for three flaws: it is obsessed by race, it is full of lawyers, and it is overrun by religious nuts. When all three elements come together, as in the case of Kennewick Man, it gets very weird.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finally given up on Kennewick Man. Earlier this month, it asked the Department of the Interior to take over the decision on whether this 8,400-year-old skeleton should go to the anthropologists for study, or to the local Indians for burial. The folks at Interior did not seem overjoyed.

It was along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, near the town of Kennewick, that two students stumbled on the bones in question in 1996. Police suspected a murder and gave them to the coroner -- who called in a forensic anthropologist, James Chatters.

"Right away I noticed the Caucasoid features," says Chatters, who at first thought the skeleton, of a middle-aged man, had been an early European trapper or pioneer in the area. (Caucasoids, in anthropology, are a category that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners, and most people in the Indian sub-continent).

Then Chatters noticed that the skeleton's pelvic bone had fused around a stone spear-head of a very old type. So he sent a bone sample off for carbon dating -- which revealed that it was 8,410 years old, plus or minus 60. Fascinating news for archaeologists -- but the coroner promptly confiscated Kennewick Man on orders from the Army Corps of Engineers, who had yielded to a demand from the local Indians that the skeleton be handed over for immediate burial in a secret place.

The Indians were acting under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which says that Indian remains on government property must be 'repatriated' to the relevant tribe. The Army Corps of Engineers has to work with many Indian tribes along a lot of rivers, and needs to keep them sweet.

But anthropologists were outraged, and immediately launched a lawsuit against the Army. The skeleton was locked in a vault in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with the DNA studies on it only half-completed -- and then things started to get really silly.

The Umatilla Indian band claimed the right to perform religious rituals over 'their' remains (as though there had been Umatilla Indians 8,400 years ago). A Nordic separatist group called the Asatru Folk Assembly demanded equal time to conduct a neo-Norse religious ceremony over 'their' Caucasian forebear, complete with a bust of Odin (though the Army insisted that they drink apple juice instead of mead).

At this point, anthropologists began talking about constituting themselves as a new religion whose rites would involve procedures like DNA tests. But behind all this foolishness, alas, lurks the usual tangle of racial and religious obsessions.

Native Americans have always venerated their dead, and the 1990 act was an overdue measure to stop the desecration of native grave sites. But the concerted native attempt to claim and bury skeletons eight, ten and in one case eleven thousand years old is aimed at suppressing any interpretations of early American history that compete with their own, highly politicized version.

As the Umatillas' religious leader, Armand Minthorn, put it on the tribe's website: "If this individual is truly 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent."

Native Americans have always emphasized that they were there first, since guilt is their main lever over a more powerful non- native society. But in recent years many Indians have also been swept up by a homogenized, rather 'fundamentalist' version of traditional Indian religions, aimed at restoring native self- respect, which insists that they have always been in the Americas.

This new dogma denies that the Americas were settled by tribes who reached Alaska from Siberia when the last Ice Age created a land bridge across the Bering Strait 12-15,000 years ago. All the more does it seek to suppress any notion that other, 'Caucasoid' migrants might have reached the Americas from Europe, crossing the sea ice linking Britain to Iceland to Newfoundland, at the same time or even earlier. Whereas white supremacists love the idea.

Kennewick Man is not the only very old Caucasoid skeleton found in North America: there are half a dozen others, ranging from the Pacific coast as far east as Minnesota. There probably was a 'white' strand of immigration to the Americas, although it's more likely to have come from the ancient Caucasoid population of north-east Asia -- related to the European-looking Ainu aboriginal people of Japan -- than from Europe. So how are Americans to deal with this politically incorrect datum?

Native Americans habitually cheer themselves up (and guilt- trip the rest of the population) by insisting that they are wise stewards of the land, in closer harmony with nature than those greedy, destructive European newcomers. Aforesaid newcomers, desperately hoping that there's somebody wiser than themselves, lap this stuff up, so everybody benefits from the myth. But there is this big, awkward fact that just as the first human beings arrived in the Americas, most of the large animal species became extinct.

Cynical anthropologists take it for granted that this is what happens when experienced hunters without a shred of ecological consciousness encounter wild animals with no learned fear of human beings, and refer to it among themselves as the 'New World blitzkrieg'. But it does rather undermine the Indians' hold on the moral high ground, so here's an ideal compromise.

Why don't we just admit that the 'Caucasoids' did come to the Americas -- and blame them for the blitzkrieg. We could even build new myths in which environmentally correct 'Mongoloids', the ancestors of the present Amerindian population, wiped them out to save the land. The Caucasoids are all dead, so they won't mind.