LawCulture

Evidence in Conflict: Repatriating Native American Human Remains

I spent Saturday morning on the reservation of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. I parked near the massive casino, the engine powering the housing boom in evidence all around the reservation. Many of the spacious homes, mostly typical mcmansions like those dotting any suburban gated community, were still works-in-progress .  Our meeting was held in the community center, itself a well-appointed facility with a cheerful outdoor children’s playground and an impressively large scale.

I was there for a conference, and I was almost certainly the person in the room who knew least about matters Native American.  My task was to moderate and comment on a panel on evidence issues that arise under NAGPRA – a statute I had never heard of until recently, which stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act – and, as the name suggests, regulates the repatriation of those remains and funerary objects presently in the hands of museums, universities and other institutions that receive federal funds, if they are found to be ‘culturally affiliated’ with particular native American groups.

NAGPRA says that in determining whether cultural affiliation has been established by a preponderance of the evidence,  many kinds of evidence should be considered, including:  “geographical, kinship, biological, archeological, linguistic, folklore, oral tradition, historial evidence, or other information or expert opinion.”   But NAGPRA provides no further insight about how these various kinds of evidence should be aggregated or compared.

You can probably already see where this is going.  What happens when the evidence conflicts?  What happens when the biological evidence points in one direction and the oral histories of the native people point in another? Whose truths count, and why?

Not cannibals after all!

Well, maybe not. The LA Times reports today that archeologists tested the remains of campfires left by the famous Donner Party, and found no trace of human bones (though it does like the Donners ate their pet dog). Of course, maybe they built separate campfires for cannibalistic purposes, or maybe the fragments of human boned had just gotten lost. But this is a disappointment to those of us eager to claim cannibals among the pioneers.

No human cloning after all

Whew! Scientific misconduct is not a pretty sight, but I confess to some relief that we won't be seeing human clones any time real soon. One of each of us is plenty, thanks. And I was not looking forward to realizing Ishigura's vision of people raised solely to be organ donors....

The Troubles with Fingerprints

This is old news, by the standards of the blogosphere, but since we're brand new here, I"ll post anyway.  Last week, the Inspector General released a mostly classified report on the Brandon Mayfield case.  (The 20-page pdf summary is available here.)  Brandon Mayfield, as you may recall, was the Oregon lawyer whose fingerprint was identified by the FBI with '100 percent certainty' on a bag of detonators connected with the Madrid bombing -- and then it later turned out that the FBI goofed and the fingerprint in question belonged not to Mayfield at all but instead to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian national.  Oops!

But this scandal may yet have a silver lining, and this IG report is part of it.