Kennewick Man controversy

Date c. 7200 BCE

Locale Near Kennewick, Washington

Kennewick Man is a nearly complete skeleton dating to about 8,500–9,000 years before the present that was found in 1996 in eastern Washington State. Because the skeleton resembled no known ethnic group, it provoked major debate regarding origins of humankind in the Western Hemisphere. It also led to conflict between those who saw the remains as key to scientific research and those who felt they should be returned to American Indian custody for burial. It was not until 2015 that DNA analysis showed the skeleton was in fact related to modern American Indians.

Summary of Event

Kennewick Man is an approximately 8,500-year-old, nearly complete skeleton of roughly 350 pieces found in eastern Washington State during 1996. Because the skeletal features of the remains resembled no present-day ethnicity, a major archaeological debate ensued between American Indian tribes and archaeologists regarding ownership of the remains. This debate provoked the first major legal test of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, signed into federal law during 1990). The discovery of Kennewick Man’s remains also sparked debate over human origins in the Americas, which may be much more complex (and much more multicultural) than has been commonly supposed.

Kennewick Man’s remains were first stumbled on by two college students, twenty-one-year-old Will Thomas and twenty-year-old Dave Deacy, on July 28, 1996. The two residents of nearby West Richland, home from college for the summer, were looking for a spot on the banks of the Columbia River from which to watch the annual hydroplane races. Recent flushing from Columbia River Dams, an attempt to preserve salmon runs for commercial and American Indian fishing, had disturbed the sediments and exposed the human remains that became known as Kennewick Man. James Chatters, whose company, Applied Paleoscience, routinely conducted skeletal forensics for Benton County coroner Floyd Johnson, helped police gather what eventually became a skeleton that was complete except for its sternum and a few small bones in the hands and feet.

The skeleton seemed to Chatters to have belonged to a man who was old by the standards of his time (between forty and fifty-five years of age) and about five foot nine or ten inches, tall for a human being that ancient. He evidently had led a rough life: he had compound fractures in at least six ribs and damage to his left shoulder, which probably caused his arm to wither. He also had a healed-over skull injury. Kennewick Man, whose dietary staple was fish, probably died of injuries sustained after a stone projectile point pierced his thigh and lodged in his pelvis. The projectile probably caused a fatal infection that may have festered for as many as six months. Kennewick Man had a long, narrow skull, a projecting nose, receding cheekbones, a high chin, and a square mandible.

As publicity about Kennewick Man spread, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) received more than a dozen claims for the skeleton, including from local tribes but also from non-Indian groups such as the Asatru Folk Assembly, a Germanic neopagan group, and Old Norse, a California-based religious organization. To claim descent from such an ancient individual could potentially give credibility to a group's other heritage claims. Amid the adamant statements of some non–American Indians that they had found a long-lost “white” brother, Vine Deloria, Jr., writing in the Denver Post, reminded his readers that, “In September, 1997, the American Anthropological Association sent a report to the Bureau of the Census, saying one could not determine race scientifically. So much for narrow skulls and high cheekbones.” University of Washington anthropologist Charles Keyes agreed fundamentally with Deloria: “Race does not exist. Racism does exist.”

Significance

A lawsuit filed against the USACE regarding Kennewick Man by eight anthropologists represented the first major legal challenge by scientists to NAGPRA, a 1990 law that provides for the repatriation to tribes of Indian skeletons and ceremonial and mortuary artifacts. Writing to the Corps of Engineers, physical anthropologists Douglas W. Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution and Richard L. Jantz of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, warned, “If a pattern of returning [such] remains without study develops, the loss to science will be incalculable and we will never have the data required to understand the earliest populations in America.”

NAGPRA is, by and large, a reflection of American Indian views on repatriation. The eight anthropologists, however, wanted to use archaeological remains for scientific study. Such explorations are opposed by a number of American Indian groups including the Native Nations, who also claimed the remains of Kennewick Man. “Native remains are not objects for scientific curiosity. They are relatives. They are grandmothers and grandfathers,” said Debra Harry, coordinator of the Indigenous Peoples Coalition Against Biopiracy, in Nixon, Nevada. “When these relatives are put away . . . they’re not to be disturbed by anyone . . . and the place that they rest is sacred ground.”

In the case of human remains inadvertently discovered on federal land, NAGPRA regulations require the government to notify American Indian nations “likely to be culturally affiliated with” the remains, tribes “which aboriginally occupied the area,” and “any other Indian tribe . . . reasonably known to have a cultural relationship to” the remains in question. Kennewick Man was found within the traditional territory of the Umatilla tribes (as determined by the Indian Claims Commission). The Umatillas’ claim to the land on which Kennewick Man was found is supported by a treaty signed with the US government in 1855. The Corps of Engineers initially determined that the remains might be affiliated with the Yakima and Nez Perce as well. On August 27, the Corps notified these three tribes; Chatters informed the Colvilles himself.

During August 2002, after more than a year of deliberation (much of it spent reading several thousand pages of documentation), US District Court judge John Jelderks found for the scientists, denying the four tribes possession of Kennewick Man’s remains under NAGPRA. “Allowing study is fully consistent with applicable statutes and regulations, which are clearly intended to make archaeological information available to the public through scientific research,” Jelderks wrote.

Chatters, who had first handled the remains, joined the scientists in maintaining that he could support the provisions of NAGPRA and oppose returning Kennewick Man to the tribes for reburial. “I have conducted repatriations for some of the same tribes who claimed this skeleton,” Chatters wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “I support the purpose of the law.” Chatters maintained that Kennewick Man’s remains were outside the scope of NAGPRA. “The act,” he wrote, “was not intended to turn over all ancient skeletons to some Indian tribe, regardless of relationship. . . . The past is not a possession.”

To the tribes that had sought to rebury the remains, Chatters’s statement came as something of a simplification, because the point of NAGPRA is that, when human remains are concerned, the past is indeed a possession. The basic question was—and remains—how far back in time the legality of possession reaches.

In February 2004, the Ninth United States Appeals court upheld Jelderks’s decision. Owsley then led a team in deeper research on the skeleton, clarifying such details as Kennewick Man's primary diet, the exact manner of his injuries, and other information. However, it was in 2015 that results of DNA analysis—attempts at which had previously failed—were finally published. These findings confirmed that Kennewick Man was indeed genetically related to the modern American Indian population, supporting traditional theories of human migration from Siberia into North America. The results also led the governor of Washington and others to call for the remains to finally be returned to the tribes most closely associated with the territory in which the skeleton was discovered.

Despite the DNA evidence, the USACE expressed a need to proceed with caution, emphasizing that NAGPRA also still required proof of "cultural affiliation" from a tribe in order to turn over the remains. Though members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation almost immediately had their DNA sequenced, hoping to prove a genetic link specifically to their tribe, scientists urged that the results were only preliminary and that more research needed to be done. In April 2016, at the request of the USACE, a team at the University of Chicago announced that they had verified the findings from the 2015 DNA study in three lines of evidence. Therefore, the USACE declared the case settled and that the next step would be determining, through collaborative efforts, which tribe has the cultural relationship to claim the skeleton for reburial, preferably as close to the original burial site as possible. Experts predicted that the process could still take up to another year, but American Indian tribes were pleased with the conclusion.

Bibliography

Chatters, James C. “Politics Aside, These Bones Belong to Everybody.” Wall Street Journal 5 Sept. 2002: D10. Print.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Balancing Science, Culture: Do Scientists Have Rights to All Finds?” Denver Post 29 Nov. 1998: G1. Print.

"First DNA Tests Say Kennewick Man was Native American." Oregon Live. Oregon Live, 18 Jan. 2015. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.

Guarino, Ben. "9,000-Year-Old Kennewick Man Set to Receive Native American Burial after Decades in Limbo." Washington Post. Washington Post, 28 Apr. 2016 Web. 1 June 2016.

Lasswell, Mark. “The 9,400 Year Old Man: The White House Keeps Trying to Bury Him; Scientists Are Furious.” Wall Street Journal 8 Jan. 1999: W11. Print.

Lemonick, Michael P. “Bones of Contention: Scientists and Native Americans Clash over a 9,300-year-old Man with Caucasoid Features.” Time 14 Oct. 1996. Print.

Miller, John J. “Bones of Contention: A Federal Law Stands Between Scientists and America’s Prehistoric Past.” Reason Oct. 1997. Print.

Petit, Charles W. “Rediscovering America: The New World May Be 20,000 Years Older than Experts Thought.” U.S. News and World Report 12 Oct. 1998. Print.

Preston, Douglas. “The Lost Man.” New Yorker 16 June 1997: 70–77. Print.

Rasmussen, Morton. "The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man." Nature. Nature, 18 June 2015. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.

Slayman, Andrew L. “A Battle Over Bones.” Archaeology 50.1 (1997): 16–23. Print.

Wilson, Conrad. "Inslee Asks Army Corps to Return Kennewick Man to Tribes." OPB. Oregon Public Broadcasting, 23 June 2015. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.