Wow. Things turn up sometimes.
Moira passes on the good news that the NAGPRA hearing has been cancelled and possiblely rescheduled. Finally, an organizer for the opposition has a request.
Note from Thras: For those puzzled by the acronym, NAGPRA is the law that allows Native American tribes to lay claim to tribal remains. The law has several times been abused to attempt to prevent scientific study of remains so ancient as to be unrelated to modern tribes. The courts handed a victory to science in the case of Kennewick Man not too long ago, when it ruled against the tribes attempting to recover the bones.
Addendum from Razib: I haven’t really talked too much about this topic because I assumed its salience is pretty well universal to many GNXP readers. Considerations of politics generally trump those of scholarship, and I am frankly taken aback that perhaps public pressure from the narrow slice of the concerned might actually be affecting change. The issues relating to NAGPRA are specifically narrow, but they cut to the heart I think of certain political-philosophical principles, what is the relationship of the state to ethno-religious groups that “exist” as emergent properties of collections of individuals? The United States, because of its history, has a special relationship with the Native American tribes. Much of that history is nothing to be proud of, much of it is shameful. I won’t regale anyone with the specifics, because we all know the specifics, it is part and parcel of the modern mythology of this nation, along with the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln. The injustice of the past is now simply a background player, a pawn on the political chessboard for certain Native American tribes who seem to be asserting ownership over the entire prehistory of the New World as religious relics. I do not honestly think that religious considerations are particularly important in the final estimation, the fact is the vast majority of Native Americans are orthodox Christians who have as much truck with “Brother Wolf” and “Sister Sky” as Norwegian Americans do with Loki’s Luck or the Hammer of Thor (see One Nation Under God by Barry Kosmin). It is a matter of maintaining uncontested supremacy of a particular idea of the relationship between the First Nations and these lands, from which Europeans displaced them from, and that the polity of the United States now rests upon. That these lands are always spiritually theirs by right by of their Being, by the essense of who they are as a people. The possibility, not even the reality or probability, of Other people, with Other traditions, on the same lands punctures that potent myth and its political leverage is gone. While the spokespersons for the indigenous peoples might witness to the idea that they have a special relationship with the past by virtue of their blood and tradition, custom and culture, the scholars bear witness to the possibility that the past is not always a shackle, that the injustices of the past are events from which we might learn that do not necessarily leave upon one the mark of sin as if it was the Fall of Man, that the disrespect and dehumanization that characterized the paleoanthropology of the past does not necessarily speak to the character of the paleoanthropology of the present.
Posted by razib at 03:06 PM