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Who Owns the Past ?
(2001) The
final decades of the twentieth century brought unprecedented changes
for American Indians, especially in the areas of human rights and
tribal sovereignty. In 1990, after a long struggle between Indian
rights groups and the scientific establishment, the Native American
Graves Repatriation and Protection Act was passed.
 For
American Indians, this was perhaps the most important piece of civil
and human rights legislation of this century. Skeletons and grave goods
that had been gathering dust in museums around the country could come
home again, and Indian graves would be protected from further
desecration.
But a case tested these
claims, and Who Owns the Past? focuses on the controversy that
emerged. The discovery of a 9,000-year-old skeleton on the banks of the
Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, reignited the conflict
between anthropologists and Indian people over the control of human
remains found on ancestral Indian lands. Anthropologists insist that
these remains hold the key to America's past and must be studied for
the benefit of mankind, while many Indian people believe that exhuming
and studying them is a desecration of their ancestors.
Kennewick Man has become a test case for NAGPRA and all
that it symbolizes for American Indians. To a large extent, its outcome
will determine Indian sovereignty over their past and their future in
the 21st century.
Who Owns the Past? examines how two ways of
seeing the world - scientific versus traditional - are clashing in the
case of Kennewick Man.
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