Law and Bones: Religion, Science, and the Discourse of Empire

Abstract

The fight for the control of human remains in the New World is portrayed by many scientists and even a few American Indians as a clash between religion (primitive religion at that) and science. From the Indian point of view, this fight is an antiimperial enterprise, the latest defensive battle in a European war on the ideas that constitute Indian identities in North America. Early on, the attack came under the banner of religion,1 whether from the Requiremiento of 1513 or the more peaceful blandishments of missionaries that Indian epistemology was ill suited to resist.2 In the twenty-first century, science has taken the lead, but it is the same war, 3 and a major front in that war is archaeology.4 The Pawnee historian James Riding In calls it “imperial archaeology,”5 the European proposition that the European “discovery” of the Americas conferred the right not only to the soil but also to the bodies of the people buried in that soil. This attitude toward Indian graves manifested itself early on, famously in the graverobbing excursion from the Mayflower and the supposedly scientific excavation of an Indian burial mound by Thomas Jefferson.6 The origin of this disrespect for the Native American dead can only be understood by Indians as incidental to empire because the disrespect did not extend to the European dead. Like the land and the people, the dead had apparently become an imperial asset.