And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: From: Robert Dorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> This is from: http://www.sltrib.com/1999/nov/11221999/utah/50693.htm Following that is a paper on DNA evidence, which is NOT part of the news article, and was sent in by an overseas supporter/researcher. Navajos and Hopis at Odds Over Remains of Anasazi Monday, November 22, 1999 BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE Directed by a federal law that gives religion and science equal weight, a federal panel meeting in Salt Lake City over the weekend struggled to resolve a question that dates back a millennium. Are Navajo Indians directly related to the Anasazi, the mysterious people who lived in the Four Corners area from the time of Christ before seemingly vanishing by 1300? In the case of Chaco Canyon, the National Park Service believes the answer is yes. Federal managers of the famed canyon in New Mexico -- which holds 13 major and thousands of smaller structures built by the Anasazi civilization -- have determined that Navajos own a "cultural affiliation" to human skeletal remains collected at Chaco Canyon Cultural National Historic Park. That decision comes under a federal law known as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA requires federal agencies and museums receiving federal funds to inventory their collections of human bones and funeral artifacts, consult with Indian tribes about the items, determine which tribes have ancestral ties to the remains, then turn the remains over to affiliated tribes for reburial. The Park Service's surprising inclusion of the Navajo people in the list of tribes with ancestral ties to Anasazi remains at Chaco has inflamed long-standing animosities the Hopi Indians, and some other "pueblo" tribes of the Southwest, harbor toward Navajos. Besides complex land and reservation boundary disputes, the fight stems from a feeling that the nomadic Navajo tribe has ap-propriated indigenous Hopi and Puebloan culture as its own, from weaving and pottery to social customs and views of creation. Most experts believe Navajos migrated into the Four Corners area after the Anasazi disappeared. And now, Hopi tribal officials charge the Park Service has bowed to political pressure and is allowing the Navajo to wrongly call dead ancestors of the Hopi people their own. "We were very surprised by the park's determination that a non-puebloan tribe is culturally affiliated with Hopi puebloan ancestral remains," Hopi Tribe Cultural Preservation Office Director Leigh Kuwanwisima told the NAGPRA Review Committee, the national board formed to resolve disputes over native peoples' remains. "These were clearly Hopi ancestral sites. When you begin to mix in political elements, you do not do justice to the law." Chaco Culture Superintendent Butch Wilson said his staff spent nine years consulting with all regional Indian tribes to determine which had legitimate "cultural affiliation" to the remains in possession of the Park Service. In determining cultural affiliation, the park considered not only geographical, biological, archaeological, linguistic and anthropological evidence, but also folklore, kinship and oral traditions, such as creation beliefs. Hopi origin beliefs have been cited as justification for NAGPRA claims on skeletal remains in an estimated 20 percent of the continental United States. Colliding with those sacred beliefs is the Navajo tradition of the "Great Gambler," who won all the Four Corners people as slaves in Chaco Canyon until a Navajo hero beat the Gambler and freed the people -- part of a Navajo doctrine holding that their people arrived in Four Corners after "the holy ones" banished the Anasazi for being too proud. The difficult task of determining if such beliefs justify ancestral connection to the Anasazi skeletons falls to the Park Service. "In our best judgment, the preponderance of evidence justifies Navajo cultural affiliation with Chaco Canyon under the provisions of NAGPRA," said Wilson. "There are definite Navajo clans with connections to Chaco sites." NAGPRA Review Committee member Tessie Naranjo, a Santa Clara tribal member from New Mexico, challenged whether there was true empirical evidence to support the Navajo claim to Anasazi remains. "It's important we remember that cultural borrowing is not cultural affiliation," she said. By the close of the committee's meeting Saturday, the body had formulated a recommendation that the Park Service revisit its decision on Navajo cultural affiliation by determining on a site-by-site basis -- rather than from a canyonwide perspective -- the cultural affiliation of each bone or funerary object. "We'd like to see the Park Service do some more weighting of evidence on a site-by-site basis instead of looking at everything in a region together," said board member John O'Shea, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. "What the Hopi are saying is, 'We're not all the same.' We've seen a lot of cases where the Park Service has tried to finesse this issue and not address precise cultural affiliation." The often complex determination of cultural affiliation, as required under the landmark law President Bush signed nine years ago this month, has some scientists calling for NAGPRA's repeal. The law, which has radically changed the field of archaeological inquiry, has an inherent tension: The long-denied need to return control of native peoples' skeletal remains and grave objects to lineal and cultural descendants for reburial, and the legitimate public interest in the educational, historical and scientific information conveyed by the remains and burial objects. NAGPRA also relies on a shaky assumption that experts can positively identify ancestral traits from civilizations that disappeared eons ago and trace them in a continuous line to a modern ethnic group, in spite of centuries of intermarriage, relocation and evolution. And many critics believe NAGPRA tries to marry two irreconcilables -- science and religion. "Laws like NAGPRA strike at the heart of a scientific archaeology because they elevate Indian cultural traditions and religious beliefs to the level of science as a paradigm for describing or explaining reality," wrote paleoanthropologist Geoffrey Clark last spring in The Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine dedicated to scientific analysis of the paranormal. "Political considerations thus take precedence over disinterested evaluation of knowledge claims, with tragic and irreversible results." But there are few disinterested parties when it comes to determining whose bones belong to whom. "We have an ancient way of life that is being pitted against science," said NAGPRA Review Committee member Armand Minthorn of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, embroiled in its own court fight over reburying Kennewick Man, a 9,300-year-old skeleton that may shed new light on human colonization. "That is not right. The law says you must hold scientific fact in equal weight with what the tribes present." Many tribes feel at a financial and legal disadvantage when federal agencies rely mainly on scientific evidence to determine cultural affiliation of skeletal human remains. Alvin Moyle is a member of the Paiute Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation in northern Nevada, which is trying to convince the Bureau of Land Management that the so-called "Spirit Cave remains" are the tribe's ancestors. He complained to the board that the BLM refuses to recognize tribal spiritual leaders, medicine men or traditional people as professional consultants in NAGPRA consultations. "We are having to prove we are who we are," Moyle said. "We do not have a 'pre-history,' only a history. There is a lack of respect. We have a responsibility to these people who came before us, because they cannot be here to talk." Adding to the confusion is the tendency of all cultures to assimilate pre-existing structures or land forms as part of their own heritage. Park Service experts said all tribes in the region of Chaco Canyon associate the Anasazi dwellings as part of their own heritage, regardless of whether they can prove direct ancestral ties to the original inhabitants. Under the new recom- mendation of the review committee in the Chaco Canyon case, the Park Service is now confronted with conducting a cultural-affiliation test on sites ranging from massive adobe cliff dwellings to the location of a single human molar. "They need to conduct a weighting of all evidence for each site, and obviously, in the case of a site that consists of a single human molar, they will likely have to determine that site is culturally unidentifiable," said O'Shea. But already, battle lines are being drawn over such "culturally unidentifiable" determinations, where even the term itself offends many indigenous people. While all the issues revolve around a simple question -- Who was here first? -- the complicated answers may be lost in time. "Everyone agrees we want to see reburial of these remains," said Martin Sullivan, chairman of the review board and representative of the American Association of Museums. "But right now, we're at a standoff." ===================== SCIENCE PROVIDES NEW EVIDENCE IN AN OLD LAND DISPUTE Recent scientific discoveries have provided fresh information concerning the largest land dispute in the US. In the Black Mesa region of Northeastern Arizona, over 12,000 Navajo have been forcibly relocated as a result of US legislation that ended their right to remain on land within a reservation created in 1882. The relocation has cost US taxpayers over $400 million and has had a devastating impact on the Navajo. A former director of the relocation program resigned, saying that the program was "a tragedy of genocide and injustice that will be a blot on the conscience of this country for many generations". Archaeologists using the latest technology for studying human DNA have unearthed evidence that calls into question the historical assumptions on which the US policy was based. The events in question began a thousand years ago when the Hopi, a pueblo tribe, took up residence upon the buttes which they have continued to occupy until the present time, making their villages the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the United States. Archaeologists have long been aware of other pueblo tribes, collectively called the Anasazi, whose occupancy in the region preceded the Hopi. Thousands of Anasazi sites have been identified on Black Mesa. Also at the same time, a migration of Athabascan people from Canada was in progress that would ultimately reach the region. When the Europeans arrived five hundred years later, the Hopi remained in their villages on the buttes, but the Anasazi had disappeared and the surrounding region was occupied by the Navajo, whose language was clearly derived from the Athabascan migrants. In 1882, the US created a large reservation that was centered around the Hopi villages, but also included surrounding land occupied by the Navajo. When the US later transferred much of the control of the reservations to tribal governments, the control of this reservation was given to a government consisting exclusively of the Hopi, which left the status of the Navajo upon the rest of the reservation in bureaucratic limbo. In 1941, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs proposed making a region adjacent to the Hopi villages called District 6 into an exclusively Hopi reservation and transferring jurisdiction over the surrounding areas to the neighboring Navajo tribal government, but this solution was never implemented. The discovery of mineral wealth on Black Mesa increased the stakes in the situation. The Navajo-occupied areas of the 1882 Reservation contained deposits of low-sulfur coal with a value estimated in the billions of dollars. High profile attorneys entered the situation to fight for control of this wealth, and in 1956, the courts were asked to resolve the land title in a lawsuit known as Healing v. Jones. In the trial, the attorneys for the Hopi convinced the court that the Navajo were recent emigrants into the area as shown in the court's decision: "No Indians in this country have a longer authenticated history than the Hopi..." "From all historic evidence, it appears that the Navajos entered what is now Arizona in the last half of the eighteenth century" [from Healing v Jones, US District Court Arizona, Sept 28, 1962] The court accepted the premise that the Navajo were encroachers upon traditional Hopi territory, and this played a significant role in its decision to award the Hopi government 100% control of District 6 and a 50% interest in the rest of the 1882 reservation. In 1974, Congress would accept the same arguments in passing legislation partitioning the area outside District 6 into separate Hopi and Navajo territories, and requiring the relocation of all Navajo living in the Hopi Partitioned Lands. The relocation tragedy is ongoing, as many families have resisted relocation efforts for 25 years and are still fighting to remain on their land. Most archaeologists would strongly dispute the court's assertion that "all historic evidence" pointed to an 18th century arrival for the Navajo. Archaeological studies have demonstrated an Athabascan presence in the region as early as 1500, and many suspect that future discoveries may push back this date several centuries earlier. But some archaeologists have a different interpretation of the ancient history of the region: they question whether it is accurate to describe the Navajo as a purely Athabascan tribe. While no one disputes the Athabascan-roots of the Navajo language, it has long been recognized that Navajo religion and culture contain a pueblo influence that was much too deep to be explained by casual contact with neighboring tribes. Archaeologist David Brugge suggested that these cultural infusions might have resulted from a different cause: that the current Navajo tribe formed as a synthesis of Anasazi and Athabascan ancestors. In a 1998 paper "Navajo Religion and the Anasazi Connection", he outlined how the Athabascan emigrants may have absorbed the Anasazi into their tribe. This theory has received support from recent studies of DNA. Later in 1998, Francine Romero published a paper "A Population Genetic Study of Athabascan-speaking Populations in the American Southwest", which studied founding lineages or haplogroups in mitochondrial DNA samples. The Navajo were found to have a genetic make-up that was a mixture of Athabascan and pueblo haplogroups. In April of 1999, a more startling discovery was announced in the release of a paper "Biological Evidence Pertaining to the Navajo Claim of Affiliation with the Anasazi" by archaeologist David Smith of the University of California at Davis. Recent advances in technology have allowed the extraction of mitochondrial DNA from prehistoric skeletal material. Dr. Smith was able to examine the haplogroups of ancient Anasazi skeletons and to compare these to samples from current populations. The study showed a makeup that was consistent with previous studies showing the Anasazi to be part of the pueblo family that includes the Hopi and other tribes in the Southwest. But the study also revealed the presence of another haplogroup which appears similar to an "X" haplogroup found in the Navajo but which has not been found in the Hopi. He states that if the Anasazi samples are found to match the "X" haplogroup, "the Navajo- and Tanoan- speaking pueblo groups are likely to include the most genetically defensible candidates for descendants of Anasazi culture in the Southwest". As Dr. Smith points out, the ethnic characterization of populations formed as admixtures of multiple lineages is not an issue that can be handled just by genetic studies. But the DNA evidence supports evidence from oral histories as well as from religious and cultural studies that suggests a strong connection between the Anasazi and the modern day Navajo. This has always been the understanding of the Navajo - Anasazi is just the Navajo word meaning "the ancient ones". To the extent that the Navajo are at least in part descendants of the Anasazi, their presence in the region may predate that of the Hopi, and in any event they have been joint tenants of the region for over a thousand years. This evidence calls into question the handling of the situation by the United States government, which based its tragic policies in the region upon a false understanding of history. The 18th century date used in Healing v Jones for the Navajo arrival into the region has long been contradicted by archaeological evidence pushing the date back into the 1500's, and the link to the Anasazi validates a claim to residency that goes back a thousand years. The United States has always justified its extreme and devastating policy of relocation as being necessary to correct a trespass upon Hopi territory by the Navajo. The latest advances in science are adding further proof that the Navajo are residing upon land that their ancestors have occupied since ancient time. >>>>>>>>><><<<<<<<<<< For more information on this on-going human rights crisis in the United States, visit my web page at http://www.theofficenet.com/~redorman/pagea~1.htm >>>>>>>>><><<<<<<<<<< Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. <><<<<<>>>>><><<<<> Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ <><<<<<>>>>><><<<<>
