The Ancient One was in prison a long time. When he went in, it was because they thought he was a white man. Now they’re denying him parole because he’s an Indian.
Like lots of inmates, it took DNA testing to prove his innocence. His relations swore up and down he was from Coleville and they wanted him back, but the scientists said they knew better and kept working him over so that he would finally confess to being European. But he didn’t. He kept quiet the whole time. Finally, the doctors in Sweden got enough of his marrow to make a positive ID. He was Colville*, just like the tribe had said all along.
While driving across southern Colorado this summer, I heard the news that DNA tests on Kenewick Man came back positive for Native American ancestry. “Kenewick Man” was the name scientists had given skeletal remains exposed by flood waters on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996. His case should have been a shining moment for NAGPRA. All the elements were there—discovered on government land (Army Corps of Engineers authority), local tribal community interested in repatriation, an overwhelming amount of evidence that the remains were not only “associated” with the pictographs that adorn the valley around his resting place, but that DNA proved he was “Indian.” Still, he has not been repatriated and sits somewhere in the bowels of Washington State Museum, biding his time. All because the law is fuzzy about human remains that pre-date the “recognized” tribal communities of any given area.
Kennewick Man was “discovered” in 1996 by two college students watching hydroplane races, a yearly event on the Columbia. The Tri-City Herald ran a piece the next day describing how 21 year old Dave Deacy and his friend Will Thomas stumbled over the skull in the river’s shallows and then “stashed [it] in the bushes along the Columbia River’s Benton County shore” so that they could go watch the boats compete. “‘We knew it was still going to be there when we got back,” Thomas said. When Dave and Will returned from the races, “[they] got some friends and a bucket and picked up the skull. They found a Kennewick police officer and turned it over to him.” The cops first assumed the remains were those of a murder victim, exposed by the high water that eroded the river’s banks that spring.
So it was that Kennewick Man started out his 20th-century life as a John Doe
The cops called in the corner and local forensic anthropologist James Chatters, who thought the shape of the skull looked strangely Caucasian. Chatters remembered how he worked the site:
That evening I was contacted by Coroner Floyd Johnson, for whom I conduct skeletal forensics. I joined him at the site and helped police recover much of the skeleton. During the next month, under an ARPA permit issued by the Walla Walla District Corps of Engineers, I recovered more wave-scattered bones from the reservoir mud. Throughout the process, I maintained contact with the Corps, which interacted with two local Indian Tribes.
The next day, the Herald ran the headline: “SKULL LIKELY EARLY WHITE SETTLER.” That’s where the trouble began.
Chatters had a lab carbon date the bones. When the results came back, he was shocked—the remains were 9,000 years old. Instead of thinking that looks could be deceiving, Chatters clung to his theory of the Ancient One’s European origins. He was now sure Europeans had been on this continent a lot longer than we imagined, and Kennewick Man proved it. Still, a few things troubled him:
I first began to question this when I detected a gray object partially healed within the right ilium. CT scans revealed the 20 by 54 mm base of a leafshaped, serrated Cascade projectile point typical of Southern Plateau assemblages from 8500 B.P. to 4500 B.P. However, similar styles were in use elsewhere in western North America and Australia into the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the point raised the possibility of great antiquity, while the skeleton’s traits argued for the early nineteenth century. We either had an ancient individual with physical characteristics unlike later native peoples’ or a trapper/explorer who’d had difficulties with “stoneage” peoples during his travels.
It didn’t help that the forensic reconstruction of the skull’s facial features seemed to confirm his hopes for the remains’ European ancestry.
The finished face of KAennewick Man, as reconstructed by Jim Chatters and Thomas McClellan Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
Even worse, the artist’s mock-up bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Patrick Stewart, who was then a television icon, having played Captain Luc Picard in the new Star Trek series. The European ancestry enthusiasts were elated.
There were plenty of anecdotal details surrounding the remains that pointed to another conclusion. First, the bones showed signs of multiple injuries, and a spear point was wedged in the pelvis. Even Chatters’ cursory analysis suggested that the projectile matched up with known Native weaponry in the area. But few, if any, reporters mentioned any of this. Instead, a media frenzy ensued and speculation outran the data—all because of race. The British press was the worst: Skeleton may prove Indians were not the first Americans (London Times, June 11, 1997); Ancient Bones make white mischief in US; The First Scalp for truth in the Race debate.
A California-based neo-pagan group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, offered to rebury the remains as those of an ancient European ancestor, using their own rites—”an ancestral religion, one passed down to us from our forebears from ancient times” designed for “the preservation of the Peoples of the North (typified by the Scandinavian/Germanic and Celtic peoples), and the furtherance of their continued evolution.”
Glynn Custred, an anthropologist and principal architect of the California Civil Rights Initiative, anti-affirmative action legislation that was passed in 1995, wrote an essay on the discovery and it aftermath as an example of the growing conflict between “the principles of open debate, freedom of scientific inquiry” and those of “‘postmodern revisionism.” In other words, either you accepted the remains as European, or you were an irredeemable postmodernist.
Outside the court of public opinion, a legal battle was joined over how and whether NAGPRA applied to the case. Archeologists filed a federal lawsuit to gain access to the remains. The Army Corps of Engineers, who had jurisdiction over the discovery site, confiscated the bones and locked them in a vault. A tribal coalition, led by the Umatillas of northeast Oregon, argued that the discovery site and the broken spearhead were sufficient evidence of Indian ancestry. Armand Minthorn, an Umatilla elder, posted a statement on an Internet site: “If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. . . . From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time.” Native people renamed the man found by the river The Ancient One.
For eight long years, the Ancient One languished in labs and vaults, his existence one ongoing autopsy. He was shipped off to the Smithsonian and poked and prodded, photographed and measured. On April 19, 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision by a U.S. District Court Judge that the remains could not be defined as “Native American” under the NAGPRA law.
It wasn’t until June of 2015, Swedish scientists released the results of DNA testing they had done on the remains. In a statement issued with the findings, the Swedes commented on the “irony” of their findings: “The reason we can come to these conclusions is because the skeleton was kept for science,” and not reburied as the tribes had wanted, he told reporters during a news conference yesterday. “But the conclusions show that he was Native American in the first place.”
The real irony, however, lies in how little the science of humanity has changed since the nineteenth century. Basing their claims on little more than surface level morphological similarities between the remains found in Columbia and the skeletons of caucasians, a steady stream of supposedly rational investigators guessed wrong.
James Chatters, looking back on the events that built up a firestorm around him, can’t help but sound a bit wistful about the limits of scientific method:
Much, however, is beyond our reach regardless of political outcomes. No matter how long we might study the Kennewick man we would never know the form or color of his eyes, skin and hair, whether his hair was curly or straight, his lips thin or full — in short many of the characteristics by which we judge living peoples’ racial affiliation. We will never be certain if his wound was by accident or intent, what language he spoke, or his religious beliefs. We cannot know if he is truly anyone’s ancestor. Given the millennia since he lived, he may be sire to none or all of us.
Still, these musings retain a willful stubbornness. How could this man not be someone’s ancestor? How could he be “sire” to all of us? (And isn’t it stallions—or nationalistic patriarchs—who sire offspring, anyway?) Who cares if his lips were thick or thin? It’s all too clear that the man who died with a spear point in his hip some 9,000 years ago is carrying some serious racial baggage. In that sense, I suppose he is sire to us all.
Yet for all the evidence, the Ancient One remains unburied. At one point, Senator John McCain authored a bill that would amend NAGPRA to remedy its myopia regarding remains that pre-date eighteenth and nineteenth century Native settlement. It failed to pass. At the present time, his best hope for justice is a bill Washington Senator Patty Murray has placed before her colleagues, asking for his immediate repatriation.
- An ancestor of the communities now known as the The Conferderated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
Works Consulted
Balter, Michael. “Mystery solved: 8500-year-old Kennewick Man is a Native American after all.” Science [June 18, 2015].
Chatters, James C. (2004). “Kennewick Man”. Arctic Studies Center at the National Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian Institution, USA. “Originally published in the “Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association””.
Custred, Glynn (2000). “The Forbidden Discovery of Kennewick Man” (PDF). Academic Questions 13 (3): 12–30
Minthorn, Armand (September 1996). “Ancient One / Kennewick Man • Human Remains Should Be Reburied”. Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
