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Editor’s
note: On Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate John
Jelderks began hearing the latest round of arguments about what
should happen to the 9,300-year-old skeleton found on the shore
of the Columbia River five years ago. In March of 1999, John J.
Miller reported on the controversy surrounding the so-called Kennewick
Man.
 hen the Army Corps
of Engineers couldn't make one of North America's most exciting
archeological finds go away, it decided to perform a massive cover-up
operation. Literally. First it dumped 500 tons of rock and gravel
from helicopters onto the Columbia River discovery site. Then the
Corps layered the shoreline near Kennewick, Wash., with more than
300 tons of dirt and logs. Finally, it planted thousands of trees
on top of the remade terrain, once a muddy beach. "The Corps destroyed
as much as possible as fast as possible," says geologist Tom Stafford.
"It's like they hit it with a nuclear bomb."
A group of scientists tried to stop the Corps. Two lawsuits were
filed. Even Congress got involved. But the Corpsperhaps acting on
orders from the White House-plowed away. As it buried the site last
April, a group of American Indian activists looked on with approval,
listening to the ceremonial taps of a tribal drum-beater. The fight
over Kennewick Man, as the ancient human remains found beside the
Columbia River are popularly known, by then had become a cause celebre
for both sides. Although Kennewick Man represents an invaluable
opportunity to learn about ancient migration into the New World,
his bones are currently locked away in a museum unexamined, a victim
of conscious neglect, bureaucratic ineptitude, and political meddling.
In July 1996, two college students were walking along the river
when they spotted a human skull sticking out of the earth. They
contacted the police, and that evening local forensics expert James
Chatters was asked to retrieve the remains. The bones looked fresh,
says Chatters, but soil stuck to them-suggesting that they had been
in the riverbank for a while. Back at his lab, he noted the skull's
Caucasoid features. "I thought we had found an early European settler,"
he says. The county coroner requested radiocarbon dating. The shocking
results: The skeleton, almost 90 percent complete, was nearly 10,000
years old.
That wasn't supposed to happen. Kennewick Man doesn't look like
a modern American Indian. His skull is long rather than short, and
his face is narrow and prognathic instead of broad and flat. He
lacks other features, such as shovel-shaped incisors, that are generally
associated with the Mongoloid peoples of Asia who are conventionally
believed to have populated North and South America. Several fringe
groups have mistakenly suggested that Kennewick Man was white. But
nobody knows the color of Kennewick Man's skin, or much else for
that matter. The only sure thing is that his remains show that the
original settlement of the western hemisphere was more complicated
than once imagined. And that bothers an outspoken clique of Indian
activists.
Before researchers could conduct a full investigation on Kennewick
Man, the Corps seized the remains. They acted on behalf of five
local tribes, which claimed a right to the bones under the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed by Congress
in 1990. The Indians wanted to rebury Kennewick Man, and the Corps
was going to let them. "From our oral histories, we know that our
people have been part of this land from the beginning of time,"
explained Armand Minthorn of the Umatillas. "We do not believe that
our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists
do."
The scientists, of course, have long believed that American Indians
are descended from people who crossed a Bering Strait landbridge.
Kennewick Man doesn't necessarily challenge the Asian source, but
he does speak to the fascinating complexity of ancient demography.
The remains potentially point to a tumultuous and violent past that
contradicts the Dances with Wolves image of ecologically sensitive,
peaceloving victims of white conquest.
The Corps quickly complied with the Indians' demands-perhaps because
it was eager to use the remains as a bargaining chip in its constant
treaty negotiations with tribes over salmon fishing, waste disposal,
and other matters. Indeed, an internal memo circulated at the time
mentions the Corps' overpowering political incentive to heed the
tribes' demand: "All risk to us seems to be associated with not
repatriating the remains."
Not quite. The Corps came under withering criticism in the local
community and, increasingly, in the national media. Eight prominent
scientists sued the Corps for the right to study the remains, and
a judge halted plans to give Kennewick Man to the tribes. Several
months later, he ordered the Corps to reevaluate its actions, and
it looked like the scientists were going to have their day in the
lab. Then the remains fell victim to terrible mismanagement, and
perhaps even sabotage.
The first bad sign was a Corps plan to "preserve" the riverbank
where Kennewick Man was discovered by burying it beneath hundreds
of tons of riprap. Corps spokesmen claimed that they needed to protect
it from erosion. That attracted the attention of Rep. Doc Hastings,
Republican of Washington, who had been following the case in the
press and once lived within view of the Kennewick Man site. "That
part of the river isn't even free-flowing-it's part of a lake behind
a dam," he says. "There's no significant erosion." In an added wrinkle,
the Corps' own research team advised against this "stabilization"
effort.
Hastings amended an appropriations bill to prevent the Corps from
moving forward. Similar language passed the Senate, and on March
31, 1998, the Corps said that it would not touch the site. The next
day, however, Congress went out of session without reconciling the
two bills. At the close of business, Hastings received word from
Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard that the Corps would indeed go ahead with its
dumping operation. Within two weeks, the Kennewick Man site and
whatever secrets it still held lay beneath piles of rubble. Corps
documents, including a Nov. 28, 1997, letter to the National Marine
Fisheries Service, say that "concern on the part of the White House"
led to the Corps' dubious erosion-control plan. Nobody in the Clinton
administration, however, can explain the nature of this "concern."
Then, Kennewick Man himself started to disappear. Before he was
transferred to Seattle's Burke Museum last fall, the Corps had been
holding him in a poor state of storage. Kennewick Man was a real-life
skeleton in a closet, and the Corps' own curation report noted that
some fragments were even kept in a brown paper bag. Meanwhile, the
Corps had secretly permitted Indians to perform religious ceremonies
with the remains. Worse yet, in court documents filed last May the
Corps admitted that a portion of the remains were "unintentionally
turned over to the tribes." They were buried and no attempt has
been made to recover them.
Finally, during an October inventory, the Smithsonian Institution's
Douglas Owsley discovered more pieces missing. The two femur bones-valuable
to researchers because they reveal height, age, and other important
characteristies-were both originally found in six fragments, but
only one of each is left. A furious Owsley calls the situation "a
deliberate act of desecration." The Interior Department, which assumed
responsibility for the case last year from the Corps, says it will
conduct tests on Kennewick Man within the next few weeks, but the
scientists now wonder how much information has been lost forever.
They are hoping Kennewick Man doesn't ultimately go the way of the
so called Buhl Woman, nearly 11,000 years old, whose remains were
reburied by the Shoshone-Bannock tribe in Idaho without extensive
study. According to scientists who had limited access to her bones,
she may have displayed features similar to Kennewick Man. Then there's
the case of Nevada's 9,400-year-old Spirit Cave Mummy, another ancient
skeleton with Caucasoid-like features whose thorough examination
has been blocked repeatedly by the Bureau of Land Management.
Remains that old are extremely rare, making each one a priceless
discovery for the scientists who probe them. Because of fiascos
like Kennewick Man, however, there may not be anybody to do the
research in the future. Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University
worries that graduate students won't want to study prehistoric America
because of the legal hassles. "We're going to lose talented young
people," he says. "Our ability to know what happened here long ago
will vanish."
Maybe that's the point.
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