Just imagine.
Donald C. Miller lived comfortably in rural Indiana, well off the beaten path, in a big, welcoming home out in the country. This is his basement--or was, before the FBI raided it five years ago. Today, the abundance of artifacts he collected is greatly diminished because the FBI has been trying, not always successfully, to return these artifacts to their rightful owners. Some of what he collected is home.
But the collection is endless. And what he has is from around the world. Already delegations of people from Columbia have come by to retrieve those objects whose origins are Columbian. Included in the massive collection are all kinds of antiquity from Haiti, China, Australia, Peru, and Russia. Approximately half of his incredible collection, the FBI says, is Native American, and much of it from the Arikara tribe whose homeland is the upper Missouri.
Just exactly what all of this is worth is beyond imagination, if it would be salable. Much of it is not. The FBI became interested in what Mr. Miller had collected because they learned that among the ancient treasures were human remains, thousands of human bones from what experts claim to be as many as 500 people.
For almost five years now, the FBI has been very, very carefully cataloging what Donald Miller had in this expansive collection of things, carefully storing what they discovered, and attempting to pack the artifacts they can trace to return to rightful owners.
Much ado, some might say. Lots of taxpayer money being spent on that basement--and for what? Think of it this way: if what Mr. Miller had stored in his basement came from your own family's grave sites, if my great-grandfather's skull was on display in one of his glass cases, I'd do much more than flinch.
You could argue that no one cared as much about the antiquities Mr. Miller collected than he did. Look at all those cases. No one else spent vacations excavating sites very, very few people in the world even knew of. No one treasured these treasures like he must have.
Besides, the man's collection was no secret in rural Indiana. He personally led all kinds of people through it--Boy Scout troops, church groups, whoever wanted the tour. By all reports, Donald C. Miller was a fine man, a good man, a church man who spent lots of his free time and money on building projects in Haiti. He was a wonderful Christian.
Racism is a very difficult word, so thorny that it shouldn't be tossed around glibly. It can be a charge that's impossible to refute. In the Michael Cohen hearing on Tuesday it was leveled against a Republican legislator who had ushered in an African-American woman into the room to show that the Donald Trump he was defending wasn't a racist. That ploy led to angry accusations from both sides of the aisle.
By all accounts, Donald C. Miller was a warm-hearted man given to selfless acts of charity and benevolence. By all accounts, Christians might say, he knew his Lord and Savior.
Was he a racist? Good question. Tough question.
In his basement he kept bones and funerary items taken from grave sites that experts say belong to as many as 500 human beings, many of them Arikara. It's fair to say--and even he admitted it--that the collector in him became a hoarder; somehow, in a very human way, he got in over his head.
But what we can say for sure is that when he traveled the Missouri River looking for sites, he never once dug up the bones of white people. He wouldn't have done that. That far he wouldn't have gone.
Does that fact allow me to use that difficult word?
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| Mass grave at the Ponka Cemetery, Niobrara, Nebraska |
5 comments:
I have no problem calling Miller a racist. Never mind that NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, has been in effect since 1990, and that no one who called Miller a good Christian seems to have cared a whit that he was an obviously unashamed and open lawbreaker.
Here’s my reason:
I learned just today that one of my students is Arikara. I knew she was from one of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) but I didn’t know which one. But today she asked me how much I knew about the Arikara, because they are her people. I had to tell her that I know more about the Mandan and Hidatsa than Arikara, and she understood that but it also meant that I couldn’t answer her real question.
I think she’s in my course because she’s hungry to learn anything about her background that she can, and this is one of three or four courses that come anywhere near acknowledging that her people are worth studying. She was adopted by white parents, and while that often leads to a de facto erasure of culture, her adoptive parents have been quite open to having her learn about her background and in fact she has kept in touch with her birth mother. She is in touch with Native cultures in general: she participates in powwows as a jingle-dress dancer and she has been involved in some other activities as well. But she would like to know more.
Although we’re focusing directly on Anishinaabe/Ojibwe and Dakota/Lakota/“Sioux” cultures in our course, those groups were affected by many of the same forces that affected her own people. She’s had to read some pretty difficult stuff as we have talked about their backgrounds and the contexts for Native cultures in general.
And now she’ll have to hear—and she will hear—that some white guy in Indiana thought it was cool to pull the bones of her relatives out of a river bank and display them to people in Indiana who have no knowledge, respect, or care for the people to whom she belongs. That will hurt. It hurts me to think about how she will feel as she learns this—but for her it is her own relatives’ bones that have been taken from their resting places and put on exhibit.
The result of Miller’s actions is that she and others like her will be hurt. No question—he’s racist.
Thank you. Couldn't agree more. Thought you might enjoy this: https://www.kwit.org/post/warrior-hero
Jim Postema, Any and all treatment of indigenous people on a world wide basis have been affected by a document that came out in 1493 thru the Church. It is referred to as "The Doctrine of Discovery of 1493. It laid the ground work for discovering countries and their treatment towards Indigenous peoples of that country. Here in the US, it can be found applied to the drawing up of the Constitution, Manifest Destiny, Indian Removal Act of 1830, The Allotment etc. Information on all of this can be found on the following link. www.wirelesshogan.com As you will find out, it led to the Trail of Tears involving the Cherokee Nation and is the reason why there are two bands of Cherokees in Oklahoma and NC, For the Navajo, it led to the Long Walk in 1860 and approved by Abraham Lincoln. I hope this peaks your interest to investigate other tribes of these US.
Thank you for the link to your story about Maria Pearson, Jim -- I didn't know the specific history behind NAGPRA. She would have been a member of the Ihanktonwan Dakota Oyate, as were the Deloria family originally, including Ella Cara Deloria and Vine Deloria Jr. (and Sr., of course!) before they moved to Standing Rock. Zitkála-Šá, or Gertrude Bonnin, was also Yankton.
I'm not angry, but I can't help but wonder sometimes how I could have lived for so long so close to the Yankton reservation without ever hearing of any of them, save Vine Deloria. My word, they were all neighbors at one time. I remember discovering that Zitkála-Šá, grew up two hours away--never knew a thing about her. I wish I were closer to your place. I'd love to sit in on your course.
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