“Like So Many Antigones”: Survivance and the Afterlife of Indigenous Funerary Remains

Abstract

Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, American Indian funerary remains have been returned from museums, research laboratories, academic institutions, and federal agencies to the tribal communities from whom the deceased originally derived. According to law, however, such repatriation requires first that those tribal communities furnish blood evidence of kinship with the remains. One objective of this article is to stage an intervention in the “ethics of burial” and “politics of dead bodies” debates orbiting around the indigenous repatriation issue. More specifically, however, I mean to cast the indigenous repatriation movement in terms of the broader concerns captured by political theories of transitional justice and reconciliation. The argument I defend suggests that in mapping Sophocles’ fifth century Athenian tragedy, The Antigone, onto these movements some important and hitherto unexplored questions about the meaning of repatriation as a tactic of political repair for historical injustices associated with the violent colonial expropriation of territories can be invoked and grappled with. In particular, I argue that the Antigone reveals a theory of repatriation based on reconciliation as survivance rather than recognition.