"In the End, Our Message Weighs": Blood Run , NAGPRA, and American Indian Identity

Abstract

"In the End, Our Message Weighs":Blood Run, NAGPRA, and American Indian Identity Penelope Kelsey (bio) and Cari M. Carpenter (bio) I do my best to shelter, keep them. Sometimes, perhaps remembering,from my tilled base, barely protecting gatheringsa finger reaches out to test the temperature. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Blood Run Who speaks for the dead? The dead speak for the dead. Ellesa Clay High During a panel discussion of repatriation in 2004, Suzan Shown Harjo told a story about a group of Modoc peoples who once visited the Smithsonian in hopes of finding the skull of beloved leader Captain Jack, whose body had been beheaded in 1873. They found the skull on a desk, in use as an ashtray. In Harjo's words, "Well, since NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act], that can no longer happen—not because of NAGPRA, just because they don't allow smoking in those institutions anymore."1 Harjo tells this story as a cautionary tale about the limits of NAGPRA and the ever-present need for vigilance over the safekeeping of Native ancestors. In keeping with this caution, we juxtapose Allison Hedge Coke's poetry collection Blood Run (2006) with the larger context in which NAGPRA operates in order to investigate how Blood Run exposes the limitations of repatriation legislation, most significantly, how NAGPRA's current definition of American Indian identity falls short of sovereign tribal conceptions of identity and tribal responsibility for caretaking ancestral remains. In [End Page 56] particular, Hedge Coke's portrayal of repatriation struggles at the Blood Run State Historic Site highlights the extent to which NAGPRA's rhetoric of identity fails to encompass remains associated with non-federally recognized tribes, despite the intentions of the law's original authors, and the actual practices of NAGPRA, which sometimes exceed the law's reductive definition of Indigeneity in favor of "creative" applications of NAGPRA. In fact, Hedge Coke's Blood Run implicitly affirms and poetically embodies the complex intertribal formulation of identity that NAGPRA practitioners originally envisioned and that they sometimes enact in recuperative efforts to protect remains associated with non-federally recognized tribal groups. We claim that there are insights into Indigenous identity formation to be gained in the study of Hedge Coke's ceremony of urban, transnational, and intertribal sovereignty alongside the transgressive practices of NAGPRA officials.2 Mound poems and NAGPRA practices, both living texts, illustrate the limitations of NAGPRA's legislated rhetoric and enact a more empowering model of American Indian identity and community. Blood Run as Site of Multitribal, Intertribal, and Transnational Ceremony and Sovereignty Allison Hedge Coke's portrayal of Indigenous sovereignty in the Blood Run collection directly challenges any logic that limits American Indian caretaking of ancestors linked to a single federally recognized tribe. In doing so, she articulates and embodies (through the verse play's architectural structures) alternative rubrics of Indigenous identity, ones that relate significantly to creative interventions in NAGPRA legal code. The personae of the verse play speak in the ceremonial space of Blood Run, displaying the efficacy of language in the creation of sovereign territory. As an author and activist of multitribal descent (Huron, Tsalagi, Muscogee) and multiethnic heritage (American Indian and European), Hedge Coke constructs Blood Run as a historical trading site, which immediately complicates any contemporary notion of a rigidly defined tribe. This structure does not mean, of course, that the tribal peoples she describes do not have distinct cultural senses of themselves but simply that identity as it is presented here is more dynamic than it is represented in current repatriation legislation. A site more than 8,500 years old, Blood Run once consisted of nearly [End Page 57] three hundred mounds and over a thousand acres. In the author note, Hedge Coke writes that because of extreme non-Native looting and destruction—including the use of burial mounds to form the gravel of South Dakota highways in the twentieth century—only about eighty mounds are still visible. In 1930 a mile-long snake mound was destroyed for railroad fill in another bitterly ironic testament to the costs of European American expansion. The note resists any simplistic account of the area's tribal...