Spotlight: Native American Cultural Ferment

▪ 1996

      In the United States and Canada, tribal cultures exist in a delicate, somewhat precarious balance relative to the power and interests of the dominant European cultures. Now, however, national policy in both countries seems to be moving in a direction that favours—or at least accommodates—the promotion of Native American heritage. During 1995, for example, several museums agreed to repatriate culturally sensitive objects to tribes. The Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Ariz., stipulated that a wooden False Face mask in its possession was in fact the rightful property of the Oneida Nation in New York. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago responded similarly to the Oneidas' claim to a shell bead wampum belt and recognized the right of the Pawnee tribe in Oklahoma to possess two other significant pieces in its collection, the Little Elk Standing Village Bundle and the Big Black Meteorite Bundle. Such transfers of culturally significant materials represent a dramatic change in public policy.

      For many years the American Indian peoples of both the United States and Canada were perceived as a vanishing race—unfortunate, but inevitable, victims of Western civilization's march toward perfection. Today these tribes are not usually depicted as teetering on the brink of cultural or physical extinction. In fact, many members of U.S. Indian tribes and Canada's First Nations actively engage in cultural nurturing and revitalization, including new emphasis on tribal government, identification of stable sources for group economic well-being, and encouragement of the use of indigenous languages. There is also increased concern about the preservation of sacred sites and the repatriation of sacred objects.

      The Indian policies of the U.S. and Canada have long developed in tandem. In 1883, for example, the U.S. government's Indian Religious Crimes Code virtually outlawed tribal religions and established Courts of Indian Offenses, staffed by cooperative "progressive" tribe members, to aid Indians in "adopting and following civilized habits and pursuits." The following year the Canadian Indian Act banned communal potlatch giveaway ceremonies among Northwest Pacific Coast tribes because the practice was deemed deleterious to instilling respect for private, as opposed to common, property.

      Ultimately, both U.S. and Canadian efforts to eradicate or control tribal religions proved unsuccessful. Although those religions often bent to the winds of change, the old belief systems did not break. Today organized religions such as the Native American Church enjoy broad, intertribal support. Other forms of worship, linked to the land and a belief in myriad spiritual forces, also thrive. The legal battles surrounding the preservation of sacred sites and repatriation of sacred objects have so far largely taken place in the U.S., though developments are keenly watched by the tribal peoples of Canada as well.

 Religions throughout the world hold certain geographic locations sacred to their systems of belief. Many among the Hopi, a Puebloan people who have lived in northeastern Arizona since prehistoric times, think of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff as the home of the kachinas, supernatural beings who help bring rain to their arid fields. Likewise, Hopi make pilgrimages to the sipapu, a site near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers in the Grand Canyon, believing their ancestors emerged at that spot after escaping from a flood that inundated their previous home below the earth's crust. Some American Indian sacred sites are located on tribal land, some on government land, and still others on private property. (See Map—>.) No matter where a site is located, however, its care and condition remain of paramount concern to believers. Understandably, many Hopi resent the presence of ski operations on the San Francisco Peaks.

      Likewise, the vitality of a tribal religion depends on its control of the objects it holds sacred. Basically, repatriation involves the return to tribal control of such culturally sensitive items as human remains that may have been recovered during archaeological investigations and physical paraphernalia intimately entwined in the tapestry of indigenous religion. Examples include the Lakota's White Buffalo Calf Woman pipe, the Arapaho's flat pipe, and the Cheyenne's sacred arrows—all currently under tribal control.

      Although museums and governmental institutions in North America have sometimes dealt with Indians' concern about sacred sites and objects in a casual and ad hoc fashion, the U.S. legal code is undergoing fundamental changes in response to mounting pressures from tribal peoples. In 1978, reversing the long-standing policy of persecuting, or at best ignoring, tribal religions, the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. AIRFA commits the federal government to protecting and preserving "for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions . . . including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites." The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 restricts the removal of "archaeological resources on public lands and Indian lands," categorizing such materials as "an accessible and irreplaceable part of the Nation's heritage." In some jurisdictions the legal protection now has been extended to cover artifacts on private land as well. This may be leading in the direction of Roman law, which held that recovered objects of antiquity were the property of the entire nation. Although this is not yet the position of the U.S. or Canadian government, the concept appears to be gaining some currency in both nations.

      Through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, U.S. law addresses not only human remains (also covered in the National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1989, which focuses on the return of remains housed at the Smithsonian Institution) but "sacred objects" as well, defined as "ceremonial objects which are needed by traditional Native American religious leaders for the practice of traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents." NAGPRA also defines "cultural patrimony" as "an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself, rather than property owned by an individual Native American, and which, therefore, cannot be alienated, appropriated, or conveyed by any individual regardless of whether or not the individual is a member of the Indian tribe." Because ownership is communal, an object of cultural patrimony is "considered inalienable by such Native American group at the time the object was separated from such group."

      NAGPRA allows tribes to press claims for the repatriation of certain categories of objects from any institution receiving federal funds. There is no statute of limitations. Some of the objects returned to tribal control under NAGPRA include: a Hopi Koyemsi (Mudhead) mask, a bandolier used in the Navajo Enemyway ceremony, several Zuni war god carvings, the Elk Tongue Beaver Bundle of the Blackfeet, and 31,651 funerary objects sacred to the Pawnee.

      The repatriation of objects under NAGPRA remains controversial, but sacred sites issues are perhaps even more difficult to resolve, especially when the sites in question are no longer under tribal control. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government's 1877 acquisition of the Black Hills region of South Dakota from the seven Lakota tribes was extralegal. Although the Lakota were offered substantial monetary compensation, all seven tribal governments refused to accept payment, insisting upon the return of the land they regard as a holy place. As far as the Lakota are concerned, the issue remains unresolved.

      Conflicts over sites of religious significance can occur between tribes as well—or even divide a single tribe. Some Navajo in northern Arizona, for example, revere sites in the Chuska Mountains, while others work for the tribe's logging company that harvests timber in the Chuskas. Strip-mining of coal on Black Mesa, another site of spiritual significance, is offensive to some Navajo despite support for the mining corporation by the Navajo tribal government.

      One might expect the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to provide some protection to sacred places, but this has not been the case to date. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1987), the Supreme Court announced that the government's use of federal land thought of as sacred by an Indian tribe does not impose an onerous burden on the free exercise of religion, even if that use results in the physical destruction of the site. Still, the freedom of religion issue lies at the core of tribal perceptions about sacred sites. As the Lyng case implies, this is something of an ambiguous area in U.S. law, a condition almost certainly attributable to the fact that Indian religions were long grouped with superstitions. This view seems to be losing favour, although Euro-American conceptions of property rights will require considerable adjustment to accommodate the spiritual needs and claims of the continent's oldest inhabitants.

      Ron McCoy is director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia (Kansas) State University and is the author of Kiowa Memories: Images from Indian Territory, 1880.

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