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Chief Vern Jacks, second from left, and his wife, Cora, at the American Museum of Natural History to
accept the remains of tribe members.
Posted on 06/10/2008 4:18:50 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Sssr Productions
Chief Vern Jacks, second from left, and his wife, Cora, at the American Museum of Natural History to
accept the remains of tribe members.
James Estrin/The New York Times
“Our Journey Home” took Chief Vern Jacks and his wife, Cora, to the American Museum of Natural
History on Monday.
A hushed group of people, nearly four dozen strong, slipped into the American Museum of Natural History early Monday, ahead of the crowds. Their cheeks were smeared with rust-colored dye, red and white woven bands encircled their heads, snip...
...these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to take their ancestors home.
“Our people are humans; we aren’t tokens,” said Chief Vern Jacks, who heads the Tseycum First Nation, a tiny native tribe from northern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
With the museum’s full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum’s crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors’ spirits...
The tribe’s quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks’s wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith. Ms. Jacks said she learned that Mr. Smith had robbed the graves of Tseycum ancestors, who were buried on Vancouver Island under giant boulders, and sold them to major American museums, and most likely others worldwide.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Random ping...
I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about seeing dead bodies of people in museums. I just don’t think that’s a respectful way to treat the dead. It’s good to give the bodies back where they came from for burial. I think where humans are concerned, kids can learn plenty from looking at artifacts and models, not corpses.
Ancestors?......................
So, it is possible that these dead were indeed their ancestors; but then again, mebbe not.
Yes I feel differently about Kennewick Man in Washington State, in that there was a rush to close off valid investigation, the age of the remains (9,300 years) made direct ancestorship distant to unlikely and these remains were being treated respectfully. I appreciate the strides made in Anthropology in the 19th & 20th Centurys, but the 'grave robbing' matches the mores of those times, not ours. As a culture and as a conservative I value the individual and expect others to do the same for me.
Stephen Oppenheimer in his book, Origins Of The British, speaks to this subject a number of times. Original DNA is very hard to 'remove' from an area...he shows continuity over 6-10,000 years in some instances.
Cheddar Man is a perfect example...a relative of a 9,000 year old skeleton was recently found living less than a mile away from where the skeleton was found.
Descendant Of Stone Age Skeleton Found (Cheddar Man - 9,000 Years Old)
BTW, my dad's mother, Mrs Smith, has the same U5a1a DNA as Cheddar Man.
Thank you for adding great information and links to this post.
I think you stated the likely position of many Freepers on this subject quite well.
The tribe's quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks's wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith.Nice how oral histories get passed down from generation to generation...
Agreed.
Never too late to right a wrong. There’s no legitimate scientific reason not to repatriate those remains from whence they came.
Wonder if there were any cheese shops back then...?
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