(Sorry. I couldn't resist.)
Posted on 10/01/2004 7:12:56 PM PDT by Bernard Marx
WASHINGTON -- Scientists hoping to study the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man are protesting a bill by Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell that they say could block their efforts.
A two-word amendment would change an Indian graves-protection law to allow federally recognized tribes to claim ancient remains even if they cannot prove a link to a current tribe.
Scientists say the bill, if enacted, could have the effect of overturning a federal appeals court ruling that allowed them to study the 9,300-year- old bones.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com ...
HIDEOUS.
CRAZY.
Where can we make a fuss to?
email links preferably.
Let me know where your ancestors are buried, would ya? I'd like to do a study about the early norton ancestors in America, and need access to their remains. You don't mind if I go dig them up do ya? You seem to be ok with that, so I figure you won't make a fuss, right?
(Sorry. I couldn't resist.)
Really? You honestly think a set of 9300 year old bones will make any difference whatsoever to legally-binding treaties this nation has made with the various tribes? Oooookay.
Consider this... their entitlements are entirely based on race.
Ummm. No. They are based on specific agreements between governments - The U.S. Government, and the Tribal government - what are called "Treaties".
If they are found to have derived from Caucasian as well as Mongol or other sources, the proper court case could "Jeopardize their Satanding"...
Ummm... Maybe you havn't paid much attention, but it has long been theorized that some American Indian peoples were decended from prehistoric people who came from what is now Europe - at least one wave of migration, in addition to the man others from Asia... And that changed things how, exactly? hmmm?
after all, nobody has yet managed to deicide whether someone who is half Jewish is really Jewish or German OOPS EXCUSE ME... Wrong National-Socialist country here - I meant to say, whether someone who is half Black is really Black or American... Or rather, actually what I'm trying to say is -
Ok... ya lost me with the weird nazi-referencing stuff...
I think I better shut up now
Well, at least until you have a single clue what you are speaking about, I'd have to agree.
well, if kennewick man was japanese, and if the other first americans were australian aborigines (as other threads have said), i guess we should split the country in 2 and give half to the japanese and half to the australians.
the whites and native americans will all have to go back to wherever.
Ummm... That makes zero sense. If you took a sample of my DNA, since I am Iroquois, you'd find that my ancestry comes from the Jomon, the prehistoric people of Japan... However, if you sampled Seminoles and other Floridian indians, you'd probably find they shared similar ancestry as Eskimos - they both are a later stock of the Jomon.
Then, you study some of the Athabascan groups, yo'd find they are decended from a prehistoric peoples from what is now China, and maybe if you checked Algonkian peoples you'd find they may actually have some Prehistoric European ancestry...
However, since the ancestry is thousands of years old, what you say makes absolutely no sense... :0)
How are the laws against Science? They scientists got to study Kennewick Man, and they get to study them again...
So, how is anything being denied them or covered up?
Well that's not true. The agreements that were broken between Native Americans and the US Gov't were not agreements that were made thousands of years ago. More like 200 years ago or less.
Neither do I. I'm a blend of American Indian and European but I don't try to hang on to either past -- I'm an American.
Who's to say (without full scientific study and evidence) which cultures developed here? Obstructing the study of Kennewick Man doesn't contribute to the evidence base. Nobody knows for sure at this point whether Kennewick was an Indian "ancestor," as you call him, or whether he was as distinct from Indians racially as a Cro Magnon was from a Neanderthal. If you frame the question broadly enough, all humans are linked through ancestry.
When Kennewick man was discovered half-buried on a bank of the Columbia River they thought at first he was the remains of a recent homicide. No one deliberately dug him up in violation of tradition. But it soon became clear the remains were worthy of careful anthropological study. Your claims in an earlier post that the scientists have studied him sufficiently simply isn't true. There's an enormous amount yet to be learned from the remains. The politicians moved in almost as soon as they learned of the discovery and did enormous damage both to the Kennewick bones and the discovery site. They grabbed the bones before any serious study had begun. The matter's been litigated ever since and some of the bones have gone missing already.
Sure, there is plenty to be learned about Kennewick Man, and I support the study. However, I reject the myth that Kennewick Man is a European who was brutally murdered as part of a systemic genocide by American Indians. I reject the myth that Kennewick Man was a "European White Guy", when he is, in fact, a prehistoric man of undetermined culture. I reject pretty much anything those Asatru White Supremacist folks have to say (but which many FReepers quote as gospel, without realizing it) about the remains.
I'd love to know more about the prehistoric cultures of America, and Kennewick Man provides that opportunity. However, I will fight the studies if Kennewick Man is going to be used strictly for the purpose of "proving that European Whites were here first"... I will fight the study if ANY political agenda is at play.
Had you read my post more carefully, you might have noted the use of the word 'suggest.'
"Suggest". The only things the remains could suggest is that one prehistoric individual shot a spear at another prehistoric individual. It Certainly doesn't suggest anything beyond that.
Let's study Kennewick man -- and Buhl woman and Spirit Cave man while we're at it if we can dig them out from where they've been reburied -- and add more pieces to this fascinating puzzle picture. It's my personal belief (based on a whole lot of study) that there were people from many places in the western hemisphere long before the paleoindians moved down from Siberia.
Most came by boat, skirting glacier ice, and settled in middle and south america. I believe this happened as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago (there are sites in Brazil of that claimed age). I don't know where they came from or all of the ways they got here, but I'd like to find out. Sen. Campbell is a Luddite and so are others who would suppress scientific evidence in favor of a political agenda.
I pretty much agree with what you've said here... I just wish other FReepers could be as loaded with common sense about it. But, I guess I'll just s**t in one hand, and wish in the other...
Kennewick Man changes nothing about my family's 10,000+ history in this land, no matter what the results of a study show. The one thing I AM positive of, though, is that Kennewick Man is not a "Caucasian". :0)
What exactly constitutes a "Tribe", if not a group of people related by genetic inheritance?
What binds the Government's agreements - however old - with the "Tribal Government" to which you refer, and thereby to an individual as a member of a "Tribe", other than that person's genetic makeup or blood relationship to other members of the "Tribe"?
A lawyer can pick these things apart... and if today's European "invaders" are in fact linked by blood relationship to today's American Indians, as a result of ancient migrations from Europe, it drives a wedge - to the extent that legal claims to entitlement are based on blood relationships - into the the argument that only today's "Tribes" are entitled to the portion of your paycheck that the US Government is handing over to them.
(For what it's worth, I didn't invent these arguments; I read them somewhere, and have *no* recollection of where...).
If you would take the time to study the origins of Hitler's "Rassenpolitik", and of the mission of Himmler's "Office or Race and Resettlement", you would find that discrimination by birth and by by race, and the equating of race with culture and predestination, is one of the foundations of Nazi philosophy, and is advocated and practiced in nearly identical form by today's Lieberals - all in the name of "equality" and "justice", of course.
Ummm... When they talk about Kennewick Man possibly being "European" (which is most likely not even accurate in any way - most believe him to be of asian heritage in some manner) they mean PREHISTORIC - meaning he would have absolutely ZERO linkage with those who came here post-Columbus... But, you get an A for effort in muddying the waters ;0)
Now, also keep in mind that the government does NOT take money from our paychecks and turn it over to the indians, but you can keep believing that if it helps you to sleep at night... Probably 90% of the money tribes get "from the government" comes actually from businesses who lease indian land, and pay royalties to the tribes for natural resources etc... However, the businesses pay the money to the government, who then doles it out (and skim billions off the top first) because we indians are too stupid to manage our own money and our own business affairs, apparently... Some money is spent on federally-run schools and federally-run health care, but both are mismanaged and basically a joke - bit then, the government does the same thing in other economically-depressed areas, regardless of race...
I suggest (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) that you actually research the facts about Indians BEFOE talking about them. It helps alot. :0)
Hey if you don't like a court ruling, pass legislation. I don't think it will pass.
I doubt it will pass either, and I hope it doesn't.
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