All stood as the four flags were carried through the room, history was made as the colors of the United States, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians were posted together for the first time. The NAGPRA Consultation Conference in Moundville, Ala., May 19-21, opened lines of communication between tribes, archaeologists, anthropologists and caretakers of historical landscapes with an interest in the Choctaw people and their history.
NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) was passed in 1990, and established procedures for Tribes to reclaim from museums and other federal institutions Native American human remains and grave goods that have been removed from the earth and stored. These procedures include protocols for Tribal representatives to consult with archaeologists and other officials in order to repatriate the remains, so that they can be brought back home and reburied. This conference, held at Moundville, a major ancestral southeastern village site, brought together the historic preservation staffs from the three federally recognized Choctaw Tribes, with anthropologists and museum staff memebers to discuss Choctaw origins, early history, and the repatriation of Choctaw remains under NAGPRA.
Dr. Ian Thompson, CNO tribal archaeologist and writer of the grant awarded for the conference, welcomed everyone to “Chahta Tikba Aiisht Anumpoli,” the Speaking of the Choctaw Ancestors conference.
“As every Tribal origins account, every contemporary Native American community, and the landscape of the continent itself irrefutably attest, the human past in North America is profoundly deep and storied,” he said. “Although, in many circles, American history is often said to have begun with Columbus in 1492, in reality, at the time that he and his few shiploads of desperately lost Spaniards washed up on a Taino shore, perhaps as many as 100 million people (more than lived in Europe at the time) were occupying every part of the ‘New World.’ These pre-colonial indigenous communities comprised a highly diverse array of vibrant societies that through the millennia had produced numerous world-first advances and discoveries in agriculture, nutrition, medicine, ecology, political science, philosophy, architecture, technology and the arts. They created sacred places like Moundville and left markers of their presence on nearly every piece of land across the face of this continent, forging a chapter that is unique, but fully as human as any other within the human story.
“Through history, Moundville has undoubtedly been the site of many important meetings,” Thompson said. “We are at the beginning of another important meeting created by the very history that many of us study.
“In 150 years of the discipline’s history, no group of anthropological scholars has ever assembled who possessed a greater commitment to preserving and educating about the Choctaw history as the past of a sentient, human, and still living society of people.
“In a real sense,” Thompson continued, “the determination of Choctaw societies to survive and thrive, praised so long ago by the de Soto Chroniclers, is this very evening met by the realization of the positive inter-ethnic relationships foreseen by former Choctaw Chief George Harkins. The time is appropriate for Choctaw traditionalists and officials to sit down with western scholars and stewards as intellectual equals to discuss Choctaw history, its interpretation, and the appropriate disposition of ancestral objects and burials.
“Over the course of the next few days, we will each have the opportunity to benefit from this contact and to come away with a fuller understanding of Choctaw history and historical identity,” Thompson noted. “This information-sharing and the relationships formed through this conference will not only tend to improve the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) process for all parties involved, but also filter out to site management plans, tribal cultural curriculum, and even those history textbooks that help shape the world’s views of Choctaw people, and in some ways our own self-perception.”
Members of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, most of them elders, rode by bus for more than 2 1/2 hours to bring the conference participants a demonstration of Choctaw dancing.
Eyes would travel from the expressive faces of the dancers, to the ribbons and designs of their colorful traditional clothing, to the movement of their feet, some clad in moccasins, others in sneakers or shoes, stomping to the steps of the Choctaw War Dance. Laughter filled the plateau overlooking the setting sun beyond the Black Warrior River when the dancers picked people from the audience to join in the Stealing Partners dance.
“The group is descendant of the Choctaw people who chose to face all obstacles in order to stay in the Choctaw homeland through the Trail of Tears,” said Thompson. “Roughly 60 years ago, this tribe represented perhaps the most economically marginalized group of people in the country. Today, the Mississippi Band has built itself into the second largest employer in the State of Mississippi.”
Choctaw storyteller and author Greg Rodgers played several Choctaw tunes on the flute and gave a passionate narrative of a family during the Choctaw removal to Oklahoma.
Tours of the newly remodeled museum and the repository also awakened the group’s links with ancestral history.
Sonja Monk, the Mississippi Band’s assistant to the archivist, said that coming to Moundville has brought her closer to her roots.
Dr. Vin Steponaitis, professor and director of Research Labs of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, explained about the archaeologist’s ways of knowing, the theory and methods behind how they think.
“Archaeology is not physics,” he smiled. “It is about people; it’s another way to study history.”
Archaeology is based on evidence; the collections are archives of ancient history. Moundville is the largest archaeology site in the southern United States.
“There are a lot of people who are working on Moundville research, on the pieces of the puzzle,” Steponaitis told conference participants. “Moundville was occupied by a group of cultures. It was the center of the Mississippian world with its occupational peak in 1200 to 1300 AD. At one time, a fortification wall of logs surrounded it on three sides and it is speculated there were 10,000 logs. The wall was rebuilt at least four times during Moundville history.
“If you dig in the way archaeologists dig,” Steponaitis said, “you can see where every log stood. You can trace it by reading stains in the soil and know how big the logs were.”
Moundville covers 180 acres and there are least 20 mounds still on the site. The big mound (B) is 250 feet at its base and 70 feet high.
“The mounds were built by people hauling baskets of soil,” Steponaitis explained. A mental picture arose of hundreds, possibly thousands of people hauling dirt with the baskets on their backs or in their arms. It took a tremendous amount of effort, moving and filling the earth to create the many mounds of a once thriving hierarchical community. Some of the buildings on the mounds were elite residences and some were common buildings. The largest mounds and fanciest regalia were at the north end with the houses getting smaller on each side circling to the south. It is believed that the ponds in the area are a result of removing the dirt for the mounds.
There were a lot of people living in Moundville before 1300 AD, but afterward it ceased to be a place to live and became a place to bury the dead. From images of patterns, it is believed by some that the people thought of Moundville as the “path of souls.” People who had moved out into the valley would return to bury family members.
Olin Williams, CNO Senior Heritage Resource Technician, talked about time.
“Time has an elusive personal character,” he said. “If we make a slave out of it, it becomes our master.
“Time is sovereign of itself, a part of creation first mentioned in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The elders value time. They measure from one event to another. The younger Choctaws are entering into the business world and have to understand the clock.”
Williams read a book by Mary Frye, “Push and Indian Time,” and quoted early 20th Century Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier on the Indian sense of time. Collier regretted that the mechanized world had taken their unique sense of time away from them.
Dr. Patricia Galloway, an associate professor, at the University of Texas, spoke on ethnohistorical evidence pertaining to the Choctaw’s emergence onto the colonial landscape. Her presentation explained history as the voices, genres and theories of the past.
“We start with a peoples’ theory of the past when there isn’t any written account and look at patterns in testimony,” Galloway said. Two theories are the indigenous history, which includes the emergence of Nanih Waiya, and migration history, which includes accounts of following the pole.
“We still have a huge amount of work to do to follow the Choctaw archaeologically,” said Ken Carlton, the tribal archaeologist for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw.
“There is a big void in 17th Century sites,” he said. “It was a chaotic time, people moving back and forth. We need to link the 16th and 18th centuries.”
Choctaw pottery is the most common artifact, and even though pots aren’t people, Carlton said, they are hard to ethnicize but they are what’s available to work with. The classic classification of pottery is based on how it is tempered. In the southeast, it is made of sand, grog (crushed pottery) and shell.
“The French used Choctaw pottery,” he said. “It was as good as European ware.”
Many examples of what is believed to be ancestral Choctaw pottery have been found in the Moundville area, thought so in part because of their motifs which resemble motifs of Choctaw sashes.
Ancestral Choctaw pottery has definitely been discovered at another large Mississippian archaeological site, Bottle Creek, Carlton said. The structure of the sherd inside the pot, the way it is tempered and the way the clay is blocked are the identifying markers.
Dr. Kennith York, Mississippi Band’s director of Tribal Planning and Development, discussed more on the Choctaw genesis, pre-colonial history and European arrival. York believes a Choctaw medicine man knew about the North Star and would use it to point his pole toward the east each night as they traveled. The next morning, the group would follow the direction of the pole. “Milky Way, the ‘road of the white dog,’ led us to where we are today,” he said.
York also spoke of the ancestors crossing the Bering Strait by boats or ships and of Nana Awaya (a place of growth) and Tali Cholok (place of birth or “rock cave”).
“The Creek led the migration from the west to Mississippi, then the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Chakchiuma. They were followed by the Cherokee, Caddo, Shawnee, Delaware and Wichita.”
“In history we are always finding more, still more than we know about,” said Dr. Greg O’Brien, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Historical accounts are missing from the middle 18th Century too, he said, even though a number of significant events were going on.
O’Brien believes that historians missed events important to Native peoples because they didn’t consider the events important. He gave an account of how Chakchiuma diplomats were responsible for ending the discordance between the Choctaw and Chickasaw in 1758-59.
“The Choctaw, Chickasaw and Chakchiuma migrated to Mississippi at the same time,” he said. “There are records of Choctaws wiping out Chakchiumas, of Chickasaws wiping them out, but also records of them living with both tribes.
“A Chakchiuma man living among Choctaws had relatives living with the Chickasaws, making him a perfect diplomat,” O’Brien said. “They led efforts to end the long-standing war between the Choctaw and Chickasaw.
“Relations forever altered and the two became forever linked.”
The historical information and hypotheses provided by all of the above speakers created a foundation on which to discuss repatriation.
“Repatriation means ‘return to own country’,” said Dorothy Lippert (Oklahoma Choctaw), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s case officer for the Southeast and Alaska regions of the Repatriation Office.
“NAGPRA acknowledges that human remains do not belong in museums. They need to be returned to their own country.”
Lippert looked out over the attentive faces and made a comment that raised the understanding of what repatriation means.
“Human remains are people … people who have relatives. They have friends.
“A formal signing [of custody of human remains to a descendant Tribe under NAGPRA] changes the moment,” she said. “The person is no longer scientific property of the museum. The need is strong to go immediately to get their relative.
“I have seen tribal members, as soon as the papers are signed, they need to jump up right then and there and go get their relative,” Lippert said. “I’ve seen another group race out of the museum; it was starting to rain, but it was as if they needed to get those people out into the environment again as quickly as possible. They needed to get them back into the world.”
She once saw a woman scoop up an item, cradling it as if it were a child, and carry it out of the museum.
“It is such a sense of relief to know it was going back to its rightful home.
Of an estimated 18,000 catalog numbers [of Native American human remains at the Smithsonian], at least 3,000 have been repatriated, she said. Approximately 1,500 more have been offered for repatriation.
“It is possible to integrate science and honor,” she said and wishes more would make it their life’s work. “I would love to talk with kids who are interested in this serious and challenging line of work.” Internships and community scholar grants are available, she said, and offered her e-mail to those who would like more information,
The Jena Band of Choctaw, long overlooked in Louisiana, was federally recognized in 1995 and is today rapidly developing programs for tribal members, including cultural and NAGPRA initiatives. Its Tribal Historic Preservation officer, Mike Tarpley, says that closure is important. “We talk a lot about respect,” Tarpley said, “but I think what we all want in the end is closure.”
Les Williston, a traditionalist and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said that we still have a long way to go to create a complete sense of unity between people, tribes and government.
“It is an enormous task but it needs to be done,” he said.
When Choctaw remains are repatriated, Williston says, we put them back with honor.
“Honor is a big part of tribal culture. Our children, who are lost in today’s culture, may understand the repatriation as a way to bring honor. They will understand you have respect for your elders,” he said. “When they see that, maybe they will learn there are things that mean more than petty needs.”
A teleconference with Steven Simpson, Division of Indian Affairs, Office of the Solicitor, continued the discussion of NAGPRA. Simpson spoke of new regulations that went into effect May 14, integrating 43 CFR 10.11, the Disposition Process for Culturally Unidentifiable Native American remains.
“There are three new notices of inventory completion for after the remains have been determined to be Native American,” he said. “Not changed are the obligation to consult with tribes on inventory and determine cultural affiliation; government-to-government relationships; and the ability of museums to retain human remains for which they have right of possession.”
Web sites for more information include www.inps.gov/NAGPRA.
Alabama State Archaeologist Stacye Hathorn recognized the benefits of partnerships that have developed over the years, a sentiment echoed by CNO Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and Director of Historic Preservation Terry Cole.
“NAGPRA began with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma not too long after the 1990 law was enacted,” Cole said. “The tribe has repatriated 16 sets of remains.”
Cole remembers his first experience, a Choctaw Nation reburial of eight sets of remains from the Smithsonian Institute.
“There has also been a reburial of a warrior in his 50s from a museum in Red Oak,” he said. “The remains and belongings dated back to the Pushmataha era.
Cole couldn’t stress enough the importance of NAGPRA and how the law is used to bring home tribal ancestors.
“I believe it is one of the most important laws passed for Indian people. I would like to someday see a streamlined process that takes less time.”
“Each collection group is like a chapter in a book,” says Eugene Futato, NAGPRA coordinator for the University of Alabama’s University Museums. “Some objects could be associated with one set of remains, some with another, and some with all.”
“It is my hope that this conference was beneficial to all of those who have made the effort to be a part of it,” said Thompson. “On the behalf of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma I wish to thank National NAGPRA for supplying us with a NAGPRA Consultation Grant to make this conference possible. We wish to thank the University of Alabama Museums and Moundville Archaeological Park for allowing us to host this conference on this important site, and for their gracious help. We thank all of the participants for coming to contribute to this conference,” Thompson said, “and I personally thank Chief Gregory E. Pyle, the Tribal Council, Sue Folsom, Terry Cole and the Choctaw Historic Preservation and Cultural Events staffs for their support that has made this event possible.
“All of the Choctaw people are likely in part descended from the original inhabitants of Moundville, as are many of the representatives from other tribes here at the conference,” he said. “We have come back.”
Friday, April 26, 2024
Choctaws return to Moundville for NAGPRA conference
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- Written by: LISA REED, Choctaw Nation
- Parent Category: Life
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