Customer Reviews

Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Fourth World Rising)

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"Fine-Dare presents a sensitive review of the American Indian repatriation movement and its legal basis in the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). . . . Strange as it may seem, some archaeologists still maintain that NAGPRA is a political move that threatens science. Therefore, Fine-Dare's book is required reading for students of anthropology at all levels."-Choice.

Grave Injustice is the powerful story of the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to repatriate the objects and remains of their ancestors that were appropriated, collected, manipulated, sold, and displayed by Europeans and Americans. Anthropologist Kathleen S. Fine-Dare focuses on the history and culture of both the impetus to collect and the movement to repatriate Native American remains.

Using a straightforward historical framework and illuminating case studies, Fine-Dare first examines the changing cultural reasons for the appropriation of Native American remains. She then traces the succession of incidents, laws, and changing public and Native attitudes that have shaped the repatriation movement since the late nineteenth century. Her discussion and examples make clear that the issue is a complex one, that few clear-cut heroes or villains make up the history of the repatriation movement, and that little consensus about policy or solutions exists within or beyond academic and Native communities.

The concluding chapters of this history take up the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which Fine-Dare considers as a legal and cultural document. This highly controversial federal law was the result of lobbying by American Indian and Native Hawaiian peoples to obtain federal support for the right to bring back to their communities the human remains and associated objects that are housed in federally funded institutions all over the United States.

Grave Injustice is a balanced introduction to a longstanding and complicated problem that continues to mobilize and threatens to divide Native Americans and the scholars who work with and write about them.

Kathleen S. Fine-Dare is a professor of anthropology and women's studies at Fort Lewis College. She is the author of Cotocollao: Ideologia, historia, y acci-n en un barrio de Quito.

Fine-Dare explains about museums & private collectors need for collecting, and how that is related to empire building. For anyone that still believes museums and anthropologists did not aggressively collect human remains she gave this information.



The second practice mandated by the U.S. Government that filled museums was the collection of Indian bodies and body parts for various reasons, all of them somehow linked to "scientific research.'" Institutions such as the Army Medical Museum, founded in 1862 by Surgeon General William A. Hammond, initially wanted Indian bodies to advance the study of infections diseases. By 1867-68, field medical doctors and officers were enjoined to "send Indian specimens" to "augment the collection of Indian crania."



Anthropologists were sent out to purchase huge lots of art objects for museums What is not so well know is collections were amassed in both the US and Europe based in the Smithsonian-Army Museum agreement. Which set in motion the decade's long practice of decapitating Native people, The crania were "harvested" from massacre sites, battlefields, prisons, schools, burial grounds, and even from hours old graves.



Collectors were after Indian skulls, bones, scalps and sometimes-whole heads and bodies. Many of the remains of the Cheyenne men, women, and children slaughtered in the Sand Creek Massacre if 1864 were sent to the Army Medical Museum. Other remains from this massacre such as scalps and women's pubic hair were strung across the stage at the Denver Opera House.



(Remember folks these were good Christian people doing this. The instigator of the Sand Creek Massacre when hundreds of Cheyenne were slaughtered was led by a Methodist minister.)



Fine-Dare's book is not for those that blindly believed "science" and museums are above reproach. For those a bit less dogmatic I think you will enjoy her book and come away with your eyes opened a bit wider and your heart a bit heavier.