The decision comes after four
years of arguing over whether the 9,000-year-old bones should be turned over to
the tribes in the Pacific Northwest or to scientists for research.
Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of the interior, said that
two years of study by his department have persuaded him that the bones should be
returned to the five American Indian tribes.
Fight Is Not
Over
“After evaluating this complex situation, I believe that it is reasonable to
determine that the Kennewick Man remains should be transferred to the Tribes
that have jointly claimed him,” Babbitt said in a written statement issued by
his office in Washington, D.C.
However, the saga of the Kennewick Man is still not
over.
Four years ago, eight prominent anthropologists,
including one from the Smithsonian Institution, filed a lawsuit in federal court
in Portland for the right to study the bones.
Their lawsuit was temporarily put on hold while the
Interior Department looked into the five tribes’ claims on the bones.
Now that Babbitt has issued his determination, the
scientists say they will ask the judge to let their lawsuit go forward. Research
on the bones could help rewrite previously held theories about where the
original Americans came from.
Bones Are
Important, Say Scientists
The skeleton’s skull has features that are dissimilar to those of American
Indians. Professors who studied the bones for the Interior Department have said
Kennewick Man appears to be most strongly connected to the people of Polynesia
and southern Asia.
The find has helped force researchers to consider the
possibility that the continents’ earliest arrivals came not by a land bridge
between Russia and Alaska — a long-held theory — but by boat or some other
route. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently is responsible for the
skeletal remains, which are located at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural
History in Seattle.
Under an agreement with the Corps, the Interior
Department agreed to determine what should happen to the bones under the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
Babbitt today gave two reasons for handing over the
Kennewick Man to five American tribes living in the region where the bones were
found.
He said his department has concluded that the remains
were “culturally affiliated” with the five tribes.
“Although ambiguities in the data made this a close
call, I was persuaded by the geographic data and oral histories of the five
tribes that collectively assert they are the descendants of people who have been
in the region of the Upper Columbia Plateau for a very long time,” Babbitt
said.
DNA Tests Did
Not Work
Babbitt said he also concluded that the land adjacent to the river shallows
where the bones were had been determined by the Indian Claims Commission to be
the aboriginal land of a number of the five tribes.
The land is federal land managed by county government
as Columbia Park in Kennewick, Wash.
Pieces of the skeleton were sent to three laboratories,
but none was able to extract DNA for analysis due to the age and mineralization.
“Clearly, when dealing with human remains of this
antiquity, concrete evidence is often scanty, and the analysis of the data can
yield ambiguous, inconclusive or even contradictory results,” Babbitt said.
He said if the remains had been 3,000 years old,
“there would be little debate over whether Kennewick Man was the ancestor of
the Upper Plateau Tribes.”
But “the line back to 9,000 years … made the
cultural affiliation determination difficult,” he said.
