Posted by [EMAIL PROTECTED] : [note: some addresses are blind copied] Tribe to rebury plundered Indian remains Monday, November 29, 1999 By Sarah Kellogg WASHINGTON BUREAU http://bc.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/19991129burysi$02.frm A group of strangers will meet in Bay City this week to celebrate the homecoming of a woman they never met, from a time they never knew. The woman, an American Indian, has been missing from her grave for more than 30 years, after a bulldozer accidentally tore open an unmarked Indian cemetery on the banks of the Saginaw River. A treasure hunter among more than 500 people who plundered the Bay City site took her skull. Archaeologists, who excavated the old Fletcher Oil Co. property, took her bones. Two years ago, the archaeologists returned her bones to her descendants, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. They reburied them in a Mount Pleasant plot beside the remains of other American Indians from the site. This Thursday, the Bay County Historical Society returns her skull to the tribe. Then she will leave Bay City for the last time, traveling to Mount Pleasant for a private ceremony and reinterment in a special Indian cemetery. The woman is known simply as Burial No. 98. "This is very difficult for us," said Jefferson Ballew IV, who oversees reburials for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. "Native American people never had a practice of unburying our dead and moving them. We all deserve the right not to have our graves desecrated. Most other races don't have to worry about that - we do." American Indians were Michigan's first residents, inhabiting the land for hundreds of years before the first Europeans settlers arrived in the 1600s. Many of today's cities, such as Detroit, Traverse City and Mackinaw City, rest on the sites of ancient Indian villages. Today, as in the past, Indian remains and goods are coveted by collectors who buy and sell at auctions, and by the curious. A 1990 federal law requires government agencies and U.S. museums that receive public money to inventory their collections and then return identifiable remains and items to their respective tribes. Private collectors aren't covered by the law. "Everyone used to think that an Indian burial mound was fair game, including the government," said U.S. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Flint, who has worked to protect burial grounds. "Remains were dug up out of curiosity and put away and forgotten about. There's more of a sensitivity to this from non-Indians now. People need to respect these remains as they would their own family's." Maybe it's sensitivity that prompted an anonymous family to return the woman's skull to Bay County museum officials this year in hopes that it would find its way home. "A private citizen contacted us regarding remains that his father had excavated a number of years ago. His father is deceased now, and he wanted to give these back," recalls Gay McInerney, the society's executive director. "Through our research we were able to verify that the remains came from the Fletcher site." McInerney declined to say who returned the skull along with a tool, known as a strike-a-lot, which was used to light fires. She says the society agreed to keep the name private, hoping that other Bay County families might come forward. Grave materials from the Fletcher site cemetery are missing still. Nationwide, the federal law has been used successfully to encourage and force the return of thousands of American Indian remains to U.S. tribes from public and private museums. In Michigan, reburials tend to be private and rare. But one of the largest reburials was the transfer of the 93 sets of Fletcher-site remains from Michigan State University Museum to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. While the tribes are pleased to have the remains and goods returned, there is a growing uneasiness in the scientific community about the reburial, or repatriation, effort by the tribes. Scientists mourn the loss of knowledge that comes with reburying rather than studying what is found. "Many of the objects that have undergone repatriation are unique items," said William Lovis, curator of the Michigan State University Museum, which excavated the Fletcher site. "They just don't occur anywhere else." But the tribes mourn the loss of privacy and honor. For the last nine years, since the 1990 law was enacted, both sides have tried to find a middle ground. It's been an uneasy truce. "They're tired of being study specimens, we understand that," said John Halsey, Michigan's state archaeologist. "But we're losing a lot of important information." As for Burial No. 98, what little is known about her comes from tribal histories and, ironically, from archaeologists. She was apparently buried between 1740 and 1780. She was probably of Ojibwa or Odawa descent. Tribal officials say they don't need much more than that. She'll be home. "What is the purpose of studying the dead?" asks Ballew. "You may be able to identify that someone had rickets or rheumatoid arthritis, but why? It's American culture to look for Native American villages and graves. If you want to know us, ask us a question. Talk to us. Don't dig up our graves." American Indians fight AIDS State coalition aims for more awareness, prevention and help November 30, 1999 BY WENDY WENDLAND FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER http://www.freep.com/news/health/indian30_19991130.htm Health officials concerned that AIDS is spreading rapidly among American Indians in Michigan have formed a coalition that plans to pass out condoms at powwows, teach AIDS prevention in schools and hold a statewide conference. The Michigan American Indian AIDS Coalition says its community is ripe for a major AIDS problem, even though state and federal statistics do not appear overwhelming. The 1999 Epidemiological Profiles of HIV/AIDS in Michigan shows 28 American-Indian men and women with HIV or AIDS. "All of us in the community are saying those numbers are not right," said Jane Vass, health educator at American Indian Health & Family Services. "We're saying we have a lot of infected people." The problem, said Rick Haverkate, director of health services at the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan, is that many of the officials who collect information about race and ethnicity look at some American Indians and presume they are white, hispanic or black. Also, some American Indians misrepresent their ethnicity to data collectors because they don't want the information traced back to them, he said. But even if the state numbers are right, about 190 of every 100,000 American Indians have the virus. That rate is three times the rate of whites but a third the rate for blacks. One reason the group believes American Indians are particularly at risk is the population's mobility and its high rate of sexually transmitted diseases. American Indians had 485 cases of chlamydia per 100,000 people in 1997, according to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is compared to 86.5 per 100,000 for whites and 332.7 for hispanics. Blacks were the only group with a higher rate, 817.2. American Indians were second only to blacks in other sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis and gonorrhea. The coalition was formed last month at a CDC-sponsored HIVAIDS conference in Arizona that brought together health officials from the 13 states with the largest American-Indian populations. Larry Klein, HIV prevention coordinator with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, said Sault Ste. Marie's World Aids Day Commemoration will be at the Tribal Health and Human Services Center for the first time. It will begin with a prayer in Ojibwa, and will include an American-Indian speaker. Joan Webkamigad, an American-Indian grandmother who lives in Lansing, does traditional dancing at powwows throughout the Midwest and Canada. She now brings condoms and pamphlets. "We need to increase awareness," Webkamigad said. "If the minority groups are still seeing their numbers rise, that means our battle is not done." For information on the coalition, call Haverkate at 906-635-4208, 8-4:30 weekdays. The National Native American AIDS Prevention Center Web site is www.nnaapc.org. WENDY WENDLAND can be reached at 313-223-4792 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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/ <><<<<<>>>>><><<<<>
