Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip Colwell

Author:Chip Colwell [Colwell, Chip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-29904-4
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

IV. RESPECT

Calusa Skulls

19. THE HARDEST CASES

Even the unidentified dead are entitled to be buried in this country.

Walter R. Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), lawyer, Native American Rights Fund1

Congress time and again rejected the idea of a kind of forced universal repatriation.

Vincas Steponaitis, former Society for American Archaeology president2

To meet Fred Dayhoff, I am driving southward on the Florida Turnpike, watching the endless rows of strip malls zip by. Then, like a switch, the buildings recede and I am surrounded by the lush everglades. The narrow highway, known as “Alligator Alley,” is as straight as a ruler. I pass a billboard advertising a local show. A man wears traditional Miccosukee dress—billowy cotton clothes patterned in geometric lines of vibrant colors—with his arm inserted, up to the elbow, into the mouth of an alligator.

I pass a Baptist church, then a crowded row of large houses sitting on raised mounds. The evidence of the Miccosukee’s good financial fortunes is on exhibit. They are rich, thanks to a booming casino near Miami (and other investments) and just 600 tribal members to reap the profits.3 The victory of capitalism over colonialism. Having only worked in impoverished tribal communities before, I am stunned by the conspicuous consumption the Miccosukee display in their driveways. Mercedes, Humvees, Porsches. Even souped-up golf carts.

Farther on is a neighborhood of dispersed houses. Fred has left the gate to his driveway open for me. I pull in and open the car door. The air is heavy with humidity, smelling of earth and plants, like a greenhouse. “Hello!” I hear, instantly recognizing Fred’s unhurried, southern-hued drawl from our phone conversations. We shake hands. “You better run inside if you don’t want to get eaten alive by the mosquitoes.”

We enter Fred’s house, reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe’s, a tidy fort of wood slung amidst a lush five-acre plot of wild green. Fred is wearing a Western-style red plaid shirt, boots, and a wide-brimmed black hat. He has the swagger and syntax of a cowboy. We sit down in his living room. Fred removes his hat, revealing a nearly bald head and a face eroded, over his seventy-one years, by the merciless Florida sun. He sways comfortably in a rocking chair.

I’m surprised Fred is willing to talk with me after all our disagreements. For ten years, Fred struggled against the Denver Museum over one of the most problematic sections of repatriation law: what to do about human remains that cannot be linked to any living tribe. Twenty years after NAGPRA became law, only about 27 percent of the Native American human remains in 650 museums and federal repositories had been affiliated.4 This left more than 115,000 sets of remains in a kind of legal purgatory. With no regulations in NAGPRA to determine what should happen to them, the remains sat on museum shelves, suspended between the tribes who wanted them buried and the scholars who wanted them kept as artifacts.

This stalemate was created by Congress. In 1990 the question of “culturally unidentifiable” human remains (also referred to as “culturally

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