The Politics of Scientific Objections to Repatriation

Any adequate definition of the sovereignty of minority cultures must include the right to assert uniqueness and difference through narrations of reality that differ from those of dominant societies. The ongoing struggle between native peoples and many in the scientific community over the right to determine the significance of native dead is an example of why the power to narrate truth is critical to the pursuit of native sovereignty. In this article I argue that attempts to delay and even curtail repatriations now being slowly accomplished under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 rely on a colonialist refusal to reflexively interrogate the political qualities of scientific claims on Indian dead. ¹ These political attacks on NAGPRA can only be successful if they succeed in convincing lawmakers and their publics that scientific claims are made in the pursuit of what is "truthful," "objective," and thus extrapolitical, while native arguments are conversely rooted in the "irrationality" of "myth," "superstition," and "religion." If native peoples are to hold onto our embattled legal right to decide who our dead are and what they are not, it is imperative that we learn to publicly insist on the wholly political qualities of scientific claims on our ancestors' remains. The scientific community ² cannot be allowed to gain the upper hand in the public relations war over the right to narrate what is real and truthful.

My strategy is not to prove the superiority of Indian narrations. Indeed, in the context of a much larger analysis I would argue that this tactic would simply replay much of the scientific and colonialist outlook that I am moving to marginalize. My goal is rather to destabilize the truth claims of the scientists by forcing the political qualities of their narrations into the fore of the public debate. I assume that their claim to a status that allows them the sole right to speak truthfully, despite the competing narrations of many peoples from around the globe, amounts to a rather brazen invocation of political power. Scientific claims can only appear as nonpolitical descriptions of a simply and empirically available reality when bitter and sometimes bloody contests over these scientific narrations can be erased from public memory. In other words, scientific accounts of the significance of native dead can only be heard as normal and natural (or can, as we sociologists say, remain reified) when the contested history of these accounts is forced from view or simply left untold.

We can highlight the political qualities of scientific objections to the repatriation of native dead by contesting those parts of scientists' arguments that they take to be most mundane and beyond question. Ideology is often most visible in those parts of an argument that proponents take to be merely practical statements of fact. For opponents of reburial, scientific ways of understanding are assumed to be a universally valid and morally neutral form of knowing. Scientific epistemology is often taken to be the only legitimate method of understanding.

Who Has the Right to Tell the Truth?

Scientific claims to speak as nonpolitical guardians of extracultural truth have begun to appear with increasing frequency in forums designed to sway public opinion against Indians and NAGPRA. Many scientists insist that they alone have the capacity to speak truthfully. For example, appearing in a NOVA television program designed to weaken native claims to being the first peoples of the Americas ("The Mystery of the First Americans"), and thus to mitigate against the repatriation of very old remains to tribes, Steven Owsly argues that "a clear and accurate understanding of the ancient past is something that the American public has a right to know about." ³ Similarly, the New York Times ran a front-page article, "Indian Tribes' Creationists Thwart Archaeologists," which announced that "adhering to their own creationist accounts as adamantly as biblical creationists adhere to the book of Genesis, Indian tribes have stopped important archaeological research on hundreds of...