Shortly before he retired a decade ago, Colorado Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell sought to give Indian tribes the right to claim ancient remains simply by virtue of their being indigenous — even without evidence of a link to a current tribe.
Campbell had done much fine work on behalf of Indians during his career, such as pushing legislation mandating the return of Native American cultural objects and remains that had been seized or looted from burial grounds, but this particular proposal was out of line.
And now we have the final evidence. It arrives this month in the publication of “Kennewick Man, The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton” The book tells the story of as “the most important human skeleton ever found in North America,” by scientists who conducted the “most complete analysis of a Paleo-American skeleton ever done.”
Under Campbell’s proposal, which was a response to controversy over the ownership of Kennewick Man, this priceless scientific knowledge might never have come to light.
From almost the moment it was discovered in 1996 in Kennewick, Wash., along the Columbia River, the 9,000-year-old skeleton became the focus of a nasty tug of war between those seeking to plumb its secrets and those determined to block inquiry into the origins of humans in the Western Hemisphere.
On one side was a small band of heroic anthropologists and archeologists, led by Douglas Owsley of the National Museum of Natural History (who co-edits the new book), as well as lawyers who agreed to work for free.
On the other side were several Northwest Indian tribes who claimed ownership of the bones and who were supported by the full force of the federal government, from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Justice Department. They wished to rebury the remains without study under the preposterous contention that Kennewick Man was culturally and historically associated with modern Indian tribes — based solely on oral tradition.
It would be as if authorities in 1991 had turned over the 5,000-year-old Iceman from the Alps to local communities for modern burial rather than let scientists study the remains. The U.S. would have become the only place in the world in which research on Paleo-human findings was off-limits.
Fortunately, a judge perceived this threat to the march of knowledge and ruled for the scientists — despite consistently outrageous behavior by the Corps, which actually dumped tons of rubble on top of the discovery site.
So was all the trouble worth it? Absolutely. Smithsonian Magazine reports that if the scientists are right, Kennewick Man “does not belong to any living human population” — let alone to an Indian tribe. “Judging from the shape of his skull and bones, his closest living relatives appear to be the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, a remote archipelago 420 miles southeast of New Zealand, as well as the mysterious Ainu people of Japan.”
And if true, this conclusion “upends the traditional view” of who the original settlers of the New World were.
The new understanding no doubt will evolve with future discoveries, but the fact that it exists at all is a small miracle — and a tribute to the dedicated individuals willing to take on the federal government in the face of long and costly odds.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP
