Anna Lee Walters's Ghost Singer Links Native Diasporas in Time and Space

An Anthropology of Late Capitalism

If an alien observer wrote an anthropological account of the problem addressed by the Native American repatriation movement, it might go something like this:

The earth was populated for millennia with people whose lifeways worked, who used the earth's resources as if they were part of nature, and who distributed these resources as if all had an equal right to them. But then a group began to develop an economic system of wealth accumulation by the few at the expense of the many. Eventually their hierarchical culture of unequal distribution exhausted the resources of their own land and people, so they began to spread out and range the globe, seeking more land, more resources, and more of their brethren to exploit. The peoples indigenous to each area they arrived at were often decimated by diseases brought by the invaders, representing numerous nation-states but known collectively as Europeans. The indigenous peoples were also murdered, moved off their land onto reservations, and the survivors were forced to assimilate to the Europeans' culture, including language and modes of dress, and forced to provide wealth for the accumulators' benefit through their labor and the theft of their land and resources.

According to ships' logs and the diaries of the earliest invaders, the Europeans also dug up graves and took the bodies of the indigenous dead--those who had died recently and those long dead and buried--along with anything buried with them. These made their way into the collections of private individuals in Europe and the colonies; eventually the international trade in these remains and objects, along with any other objects of daily or ceremonial use, involved multimillion-dollar profits and became the foundation of institutionalized study and display. Accompanying this macabre practice at all levels was a self-justifying and virulently racist discourse that cast the people collected from as less than human and at the same time reinforced the idea that their culture was dead, having been fully conquered by the Europeans. By encouraging even their own exploited classes to engage in this practice and its discourse, the Europeans gained their consent in the attempt to exploit and dominate the indigenous people.

This multifaceted strategy of destroying cultural identity and lifeways and disrupting the connections between the living and the dead, along with devastating material destruction, was intended to destroy the ability of the indigenous people to resist. But as those people began to recover from the onslaught, they did their own strategizing, often using the invaders' written language to communicate to each other around the globe and even to convince members of the invaders' people that justice must be served. Because the invading European culture purported to be a culture founded on a romantic ideology of social equality, even some of its own members began to see the disjunct between that ideology and the practice of stealing the dead and tormenting the living indigenous peoples. The indigenous resistance exploited the space created as this invaders' discourse replicated itself around the globe, and thus they challenged its mutually supportive practices.

Response to the Practice of Indian Artifact Collecting: The Repatriation Movement

According to the Pawnee scholar and activist James Riding In, theft of the dead by individual collectors and anthropologists, sanctioned and supported by the science/museum industries, has led to the rise of a resistance movement "that stands on a paramount footing with the valiant struggles of African Americans for civil rights and women for equality." ¹ Since the late 1960s, many parts of the United States have been scenes of bitterly contested repatriation struggles against what Riding In calls a "spiritual holocaust": "We have a duty not only to ourselves, but also to our relatives, our unborn generations, and our ancestors to act. Concerning repatriation, we had no choice...