[Type here] [Type here] Dominic Coombs
Dominic Coombs
Professor Yvonne Fish-Kalland
English 104-032 W, Freshman Composition 2
December 12, 2015
Road to Repatriation
Ever since European’s “discovered” and started exploring the New World (the
America’s), the people who originally lived here, Native Americans, have been killed,
forced to move from their lands, and in more recent times had their artifacts and
ancestors remains stolen. While this last offense could be explained away as “needed
for science,” it is still the bones and sacred artifacts that mean so much to each tribe
that is being taken. In the early 1990’s, the United States government made steps to
make up for what has been done, with the NAGPRA act, or the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act. Native American’s have suffered much at the hands of
European settlers and their descendants, but today we try as hard as we can to make
up for some of the atrocities of our ancestors.
In the 18th century, grave robbing was something done by doctors, students, and
surgeons to fill their need for bodies to learn from in their laboratories and dissection
labs. Because so few would willingly give their bodies to science, they were forced to
steal from graves to meet their needs. “By examining the history of body snatching in
the United States for medical education, insight can be gained into the later practice of
early anthropologists robbing Native American graves for osteological collections”
(Highet, p.2). Because doctors and other intellectuals were grave robbing, archeologists
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[Type here] [Type here] Dominic Coombs
thought it was acceptable and moral to steal the remains of Native Americans in the
name of science, and didn’t think twice about stealing both bodies and artifacts.
Grave robbing and the theft of artifacts belonging to Native Americans was
mostly done in the name if science, but there was also an element of greed to it. Many
of the Native artifacts found could be sold all over the world for a large amount of
money, making grave robbing a lucrative venture. Because archaeologists thought they
were worth a large amount to science, they would buy remains from looters to try to
learn more about Native’s. “Archaeologists and educators…see the scholarly value in
these ancient bones and fear that returning them is imprudent and will be a devastating
loss to science” (Utne).
“The first move to create any type of legislation criminalizing the abuse and
