Sacred sites on private land still unprotected

STANDING ROCK—Recently Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill to help facilitate the return of ancestral human remains to the tribes in his state. The Human Remains Protection Act updates a 1989 state statute to complement the 1990 federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). While any legislation helping tribes protect their history and their spirituality is welcome, these laws only apply to state and federal lands. The majority of sacred sites are on private lands, all across the nation.

No records exist to estimate the number of sites destroyed and desecrated on private land, or the number of as yet undiscovered or unmolested sites remaining to be destroyed or desecrated. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, reason tells us that every square inch of the continent is potentially sacred, but all tribes wanted back in 1990, according to the leading expert extant on Lakota spiritual sites, Standing Rock’s Tim Mentz, was the ability to at least attempt to protect these sites.

Mentz told the NSNT in 2021: “NAGPRA was really a Fifth Amendment rights issue on the disposition of human remains but only on federal land and that’s where we lost. We lobbied for it to be put unilaterally on all lands, but certain congressional people whittled it down to where it applied only to federal land and or tribal land.”

Almost fifty years ago, Mentz, under the mentorship of his uncles, Sam Little Owl and George Iron Shield, with assistance from the late Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., began his lifelong struggle to protect the tribe’s spiritual sites. This struggle was exacerbated by the hostile attitude the federal government took toward tribal spirituality, stemming back to the 1890 Ghost Dance, which resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre. Colonizers identify spirituality as one of the biggest roadblocks to assimilating aboriginal peoples into the fold. Coupled with the fear such beliefs could motivate aggression and violence, for most of the last century the federal government forced tribal beliefs underground. The elders at Standing Rock preserved those beliefs and passed them onto Little Owl and Iron Shield and they eventually passed them on to Mentz.

The first positive step in the long struggle was achieved in 1978, with the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, so that legally there was now no need to protect tribal beliefs and knowledge, just the sacred sites. But Mentz points out that there was still a deeper responsibility for knowledgeable elders, and one that the dominant culture would not recognize, and even should they respect it, not accept, or understand.

“We were sitting back waiting for when the spirits said now is the time to start talking,” Mentz told NSNT “Now they are ready, now people are ready to hear this. We formed our company, and the reason we called it Makoce Wowakpe (Earth Writings), was you’re going to do something, you’re going to protect makoce wowakpe. One day you’re gonna stand there and protect these places.”

Given the greenlight by spirit voices, Mentz and others have begun to share their vast knowledge, but after the passing of NAGPRA, a huge problem still persisted: how do tribes organize to apply NAGPRA?

Perhaps the finest hour for Mentz was the hard work he did in 1992, to amend the National Historic Preservation Act, passed by Congress in 1966, which created State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), to protect historic sites. It did not take long for the problem of state v tribal jurisdiction to arrive. Defined as “domestic dependent nations,” the sovereignty of tribal nations protects them only from the state, and the Supreme Court, in 1886, defined the state as the worst enemy a tribe can have. States exhaust every scheme possible to extend their jurisdiction inside reservation boundaries. The SHPOs were merely the latest expression of that threat.

“SHPOs were extending their authority into tribal areas where states actually had no authority,” Mentz told NSNT.

The SHPOs were ignorant of the critical aspects of tribal sacred site preservation, including how to even identify or understand what constituted a site. Mentz talked about how one white archaeologist walked right over a sacred site and declared it safe for development. The National Park Service is not aware of this and so does not see the irony in this statement from their website: “Many people think the past is behind us. Archeologists know it’s just below the surface. If you enjoy putting clues together to solve mysteries and are curious about people and their cultures in other times and places, then archeology just might be for you!”

These archaeologists do not train and consult with tribal elders, to learn the very knowledge they would need to determine if a site is sacred. They go to a university, and learn about archaeology from people ignorant of tribal knowledge, and then they are paid by the government to inspect sites for spiritual significance.

This still occurs, but back in 1992 it was much worse because there were no tribal historic preservation officers, but Congress passed a law creating THPOs in 1992. Mentz would become the first THPO in the nation five years later, and Standing Rock the first tribe to create a THPO. Tribes now had the infrastructure, the boots on the ground, if those boots wanted to do any walking, and if they were armed with critical knowledge, if they wanted to do any learning, but as the decades have rolled by, they drifted away from the core mission as understood 31 years ago.

THPOs found that they could make money working with developers and the archaeology firms they hired, earning money in addition to their salaries. The purity of purpose, alive and active when Mentz was a THPO, deteriorated. It was no longer in their myopic self interest to stop developers from destroying or desecrating sacred sites. The alarm raised by Mentz over this, was ignored.

But the recent Illinois legislation indicates that the process is still moving forward, despite the disheartening depth and diversion of the unforeseen consequences. Looming beyond the effectiveness and awareness of NAGPRA or THPOs, are the vast tracts of private land containing most of the sacred sites, and off limits, not only to visitation and ceremony by the tribe, without special permission of the land owner, but nothing prevents that land owner from doing whatever he wants to those sites on the land he controls.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

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