The Washington Post June 23, 2000 Oregon Tribe Snags a Piece of the Rock; With Spiritual Claim Recognized, Revered Meteorite to Stay in N.Y. Museum Byline
NEW YORK, June 22 -- The legal battle over ownership of the nation's largest and most important meteorite ended today when the American Museum of Natural History and Oregon's Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde agreed to combine science and spiritualism by keeping the meteorite here in New York but also respecting the tribe's ancestral claim to the stone. The agreement on the Willamette meteorite is part of a raft of settlements being negotiated between Native Americans and museums all over the country under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. What makes this case different, though, is that experts cannot recall a case in which a Native American group has laid claim to a celestial artifact--certainly not one so famous and so prominent as the 15 1/2-ton Willamette meteorite that scientists believe provides a chemical road map of stellar history. The meteorite had a different kind of significance to the Grand Ronde, a collection of 22 tribes and bands. For them, it is called "Tomanowos," a revered spirit that has looked after them since the beginning of time. The science says the meteorite crashed in western Oregon's Willamette Valley thousands of years ago. The Clackamas, a Grand Ronde tribe, say their people have lived in that valley for 8,000 years. Clackamas songs and dances of today still tell of hunters dipping their arrowheads in the meteorite's water-filled basins for extra power and of maladies healed from those same waters. The Grand Ronde is a relatively obscure tribal grouping that once was "terminated" under U.S. law. Its collaboration with the museum gives new legitimacy to its long trail back from near-obliteration, said Kathryn Harrison, chair of the Grand Ronde Tribal Council. "This is another milestone for us, for our people," she said. It is "the greatest undertaking our tribe has done next to the restoration and regathering of our people." Though the tribes did not succeed in gaining ownership of the meteorite, as they originally had sought, the 4,500-member Grand Ronde did succeed in gaining a platform for their beliefs. Along with a plaque bearing astronomical descriptions of the meteorite's origins, the museum has also installed one describing the importance of the meteorite in the cosmology of the Grand Ronde. Under today's agreement, the Grand Ronde also are allowed exclusive annual access to the meteorite for the purpose of tribal rituals and worship. And the museum said it will establish an internship program for Native American youth, in which Grand Rondes will be the first participants. "The museum is pleased to recognize the Grand Ronde's important and deeply meaningful relationship with the Willamette meteorite," said Ellen V. Futter, president of the museum. "We see our agreement as the beginning of a collaboration that will lead to a better understanding of cultural and scientific perspectives on the world." The museum has owned the meteorite since 1906, when it was purchased from the Oregon Iron and Steel Co. It is about the size of a car and is the largest meteorite ever found in this country. Scientists believe it is the iron-nickel core of a planet that was shattered in a space collision billions of years ago. After orbiting the sun for eons and crashing over and over into other planetary fragments, the meteorite was plunged into a collision course with earth, traveling about 40,000 mph by the time it hit what is known today as Oregon. Because iron meteorites are relatively rare and telegraph a tremendously complex process of nuclear fusion of the kind that shatters stars far more gigantic than the sun, the study of the Willamette meteorite has provided a treasure trove of knowledge about the universe. The claim that the Grand Ronde group made on the meteorite was the latest in a long series of actions that have put the small tribe back on the map after literally being wiped off it. The tribal group was a trustee of the government until 1954, when Congress terminated that tribal status and severed the Grand Ronde's relationship with the federal government. Congress restored the tribal trust in 1983. 6-23200 ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
