The Miller Collection

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? 

Mass grave at the Ponka Cemetery, Niobrara, Nebraska