'Wrong righted' at Mesa Verde, says N.M. tribal leader
By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
May 5, 2006 Source: Rocky Mountain News
TOWAOC - "A wrong has been righted," a New Mexico tribal leader said
Thursday of the recent reburial in Mesa Verde National Park of the
remains of more than 1,500 Ancestral Puebloans.
The prehistoric corn, squash and bean farmers had been unearthed in archaeological excavations spanning more than a century.
"Finally they have been reburied so they can continue to make their
journey," said Peter Pino, tribal administrator for the Zia Pueblo in
north-central New Mexico.
New Mexico's Zia, Acoma and Zuni pueblos and Arizona's Hopi tribe
worked with park officials to finalize a repatriation agreement signed
in December.
Last month, Hopi officials reburied 1,560 sets of human remains,
including 455 nearly complete skeletons, said Linda Towle, the park's
chief of research and resource management. Also buried were 4,937
related funerary objects.
More than 90 percent of the human remains were unearthed during
archaeological excavations between the 1880s and the 1960s at Mesa
Verde. The bones are 700 to 1,550 years old, Towle said.
The bones and artifacts were reburied at a remote, undisclosed
backcountry site, she said during the second day of the park's three-
day centennial archaeology symposium. About 100 people are attending
the meeting at the Ute Mountain casino in Towaoc, 11 miles south of
Cortez.
Last month's reburial was the culmination of a 13-year negotiation that
initially involved 24 tribes. It was one of the largest reburials since
the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
known as NAGPRA, was passed in 1990.
That law requires museums and federal agencies to return American
Indian remains, funerary items, sacred objects and other goods to the
descendents of the dead or to culturally affiliated tribes.
"It's long overdue, and it's what every human being deserves, whether
you're Native American or Anglo," said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of
the Hopi cultural preservation office.
"The disturbance of burial grounds is a violation of spiritual law,"
Kuwanwisiwma said. "This particular reburial did ease our minds that
the final journey would finally go toward closure."
Towle said the grave goods included pottery, beads and other jewelry, stone tools and turkey-feather blankets.
Everything was buried several feet deep, under a "huge mound of very rocky soil."
Only a handful of park employees know the exact burial location, which
is inaccessible in the winter and is patrolled by park law enforcement
officers in the summer.
Kuwanwisiwma said security was a big concern for all the tribes involved in the repatriation negotiations.
He said the Hopis are satisfied with the park's security measures and
feel confident that the remains and grave goods are safe from thieves.
Kuwanwisiwma was present at the reburial, which he said did not involve
a ceremony, prayers or songs. "It was simply a reburial," he said.
Twenty-four tribes initially told park officials that they believed
their people are descendents of the prehistoric Mesa Verde dwellers.
Later, those 24 tribes selected the Hopi, Zuni, Zia and Acoma to
represent them in the negotiations.
The prehistoric farmers of the Four Corners area have long been known
to archaeologists as the Anasazi. Federal officials and some others now
refer to them as the Ancestral Puebloans.
Under NAGPRA, Mesa Verde National Park was required to inventory all
the American Indian human remains, grave goods and sacred objects in
its collection, which includes about 73 million items. A team of
researchers searched every box and cabinet in the collection, a process
that took months to complete, Towle said.
"We promised the tribes early on that we would rebury their ancestors in the park," she said.
"We're very pleased that we have been able to accomplish that. We never thought it would take this long."
The Zia Pueblo's Pino said his people believe that the spirit endures
after the body dies, and that people get "recycled" into new bodies.
But first the spirit must travel to the underworld to get its "next
assignment," he said.
Exhuming a body and hauling it off to a museum interrupts that journey,
leaving the spirit in a sort of limbo state between incarnations.
"What you're doing is cutting off the journey to the underworld for the next assignment," he said.
"It puts a lot of things off balance."
But the reburial allows the interrupted journey to resume, he said.
"A wrong has been righted, and that's good for all of us," Pino said.Under the law
32,052 sets of human remains and 660,222 related funerary objects, have been repatriated by the NAGPRA
or 303-892-5129
Last Updated ( May 10, 2006 at 05:26 PM )
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