Kennewick Man

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Kennewick Man

The relevance of the Kennewick Man discovery to the issue of race is a consequence of semantic confusion over the meaning of the term Caucasoid between the scientist who initially inspected the find and the public media that reported it.

THE DISCOVERY

In July 1996, two young men discovered a human skull on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The county coroner enlisted the assistance of a local forensic anthropologist, who worked for the next month to recover the rest of the skeleton from the mud of the reservoir. Ultimately, he recovered a nearly complete skeleton in excellent condition.

Upon initial inspection, the skull and limbs appeared to more closely resemble those of a European than a local Native American; they were Caucasoid-like. The skull was long, high, and narrow, the mid-face projecting, and the chin prominent. The limbs were long, with proportionately longer lower arm and leg bones than are usually reported for Native American skeletal remains. These features, along with excellent preservation and association with late-nineteenth-century artifacts, led the anthropologist initially to suggest the remains might be from an early Euro-American settler. This inference came into question a few days later when, while cleaning the skeleton, he found a stone spearpoint embedded in the pelvis.

To resolve the apparent contradiction between the embedded artifact and the skeletal morphology, the coroner submitted a small bone for radiocarbon dating. The carbon-14 dating found the skeleton to be between 9,300 and 9,500 years old. This made the skeleton one of the oldest and best-preserved examples of human remains ever found in North America. Some in the media, as well as some public figures, quickly jumped to the conclusion that “Caucasoid-like” features meant that the first Americans had been Caucasians. To anthropologists who study the earliest Americans, however, it simply joined other discoveries, such as the Spirit Cave Mummy from Nevada, in suggesting that the first people in the Western Hemisphere had differed phenotypically from the historic indigenous inhabitants and that the peopling of the Americas may have been a more complex process than the immigration of a single, small group of ancestral eastern Siberians. Multiple episodes of migration from Asia may well have occurred toward the end of the last Ice Age, when that region was populated by disparate, morphologically distinct populations, most of whom would not fit the modern image of “Asians.’

POLITICAL FIRESTORM

The discovery set off a political firestorm and led to an important legal decision. Five Native American tribes—the Umatilla, Yakama, Wanapum, Nez Percé, and Colville— quickly claimed the remains, citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). That act, intended to protect the remains of Native American skeletons from wanton desecration, and to facilitate the return of museum specimens to their probable descendants, requires a federal agency to turn over any inadvertently discovered Native American remains to an affiliated tribe or, without affiliation, to the tribe that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims had determined owned the land in historic times. The various tribes asserted that because their religion dictated they had originated in the territory they occupied in the nineteenth century, which included the place where Kennewick Man had been found, he was certainly their ancestor and should be returned immediately for reburial. The Corps of Engineers concurred and published its intent to turn the remains over to the Umatilla tribe. The corps had concluded that the Umatilla tribe had occupied the region around the discovery site at the time of European contact, meeting one of the criteria established for repatriation under NAGPRA.

Scientific interest among scholars was high. Numerous biological anthropologists and archaeologists sought the opportunity to study these unique remains. Initially, they sent study requests to the Corps of Engineers and to the concerned native governments, but, after being ignored, eight of them (Robson Bonnichsen, C. Loring Brace, George W. Gill, C. Vance Haynes Jr., Richard L. Jantz, Douglas W. Owsley, Dennis J. Stanford, and D. Gentry Steele) ultimately filed suit in the Federal District Court in Portland, Oregon, to halt the scheduled repatriation. The case, known as Bonnichsen et al. v. United States, lasted eight years. Two other claimants, a Norse revivalist religion known as the Asatru Folk Assembly, and Joseph Siofele, a Polynesian who hailed Kennewick Man as an ancestor of his people, also filed suits, but the first dropped out and the second case was dismissed.

Both the Asatru and Siofele appeared to take the opportunity provided by Kennewick Man’s distinctive physical characteristics—the Asatru his supposed “Caucasoid-like” appearance and Siofele the statistical similarity of the Kennewick skull to that of some Polynesian peoples—to legitimize their rights to live in the Western Hemisphere. By having a legally acknowledged predecessor of their race in the New World, they seemed to believe, their later “re-immigration” might give them claims at least equal to those of Native Americans.

THE LEGAL CASE

Federal Magistrate John Jelderks heard arguments for and against dismissal of the case in 1997, and ordered the government to vacate its initial decision and properly follow the procedures of NAGPRA—that is, methodically attempt to determine affiliation. Working with non-plaintiff anthropologists, many of them approved by the native governments, the federal government conducted its own studies of the skeleton, local archaeology, folklore, and language. Ultimately, the decision, for affiliation to the claimant tribes, came down to folklore. The case then went back to court.

Legal arguments hinged on the interpretation of the NAGPRA legislation. Plaintiffs asserted, among other things, that Kennewick Man was not Native American under the statute; and if he were Native American, he could not be considered affiliated with any of the claimant tribes. Identity as Native American was the threshold issue. According to the statute, they noted, the term refers to “a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States” (emphasis added). The law refers to the present, not all time. Living more than four hundred generations ago, Kennewick Man could not be a member of a present-day group, nor connected to them in any clear ancestor–descendant relationship. For its part, the government asserted the law meant that any person who predated Christopher Columbus’s arrival is Native American. Tribes and Native American rights groups, who entered the case as amicus curiae, asserted verb tense did not matter; one never loses one’s indigenousness.

Ultimately, the court found in favor of the plaintiffs, ordering the government to enter into negotiations with them over the timing and content of studies. The government and tribes appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which unanimously upheld the initial ruling.

Studies by the plaintiffs’ study team took place in June 2005 and again in February 2006, with more investigations planned. Kennewick Man is said to have been a well-muscled middle-aged man around 5 feet 9 inches tall who had survived head, chest, shoulder, and pelvic injuries before his death and possible burial. As with most of his North American contemporaries, his physical characteristics make him distinct from all modern “races.”

Kennewick Man was a case of confused identity. The legal interpretation of Kennewick Man’s identity hinged strictly on the reading of legal language. Kennewick Man was not “Native American” under the law because no cultural or biological link between him and any modern tribe could reasonably be made. The decision had nothing to do with an assignment of his “race.” To the anthropologists who studied him, his distinctive phenotypic characteristics raised the intriguing question about greater diversity among America’s earliest inhabitants, who arrived long before present-day “races” had evolved. Nonetheless, in the popular culture, the mistaken idea of Kennewick Man as evidence that Caucasians were the first Americans has taken a firm hold. Like the Asatru, many white Americans seemingly seek a moral right to live in America at a time when they feel embattled as illegitimate usurpers.

SEE ALSO Folk Classification.