The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xii

Maria Pearson accepting an award from the Ames (IA) Historical Society

A bit of a road trip, fast forward 80 years. During the summer of 1971, on Highway 34, southwest Iowa, heavy-duty road work was going on, some lumbering monster doing dirt work with healthy jaws was opening the earth and eating it, a monster that had to stop munching when, one day, the ancient graves of 28 people were discovered and in the way.

That night, one of the men, John Pearson, a district engineer with the Iowa Highway Commission, came home to Maria, his wife, with the news.

I don’t know how Mr. and Mrs. Pearson started talking, but let’s pretend Maria asked him a standard, spousal question: “Well, dear, now tell me, how was your day?”

Okay, that’s unlikely, given what we know of Maria. Most who knew her would steadfastly declare Maria was no June Cleaver, a fact which husband John must have known only too well because the story goes that he preceded his news of the day with a warning: “Sweetheart,” he said, “you’re not going to like this.”

And he was right on the money with that one. She didn’t.

Because she didn’t, her world—and his and ours—changed at that very moment.

John Pearson told Maria that when his road crew turned up the graves of 28 people that morning, 26 were set for reburial at a previously appointed place just up the road. Two of them, however, were not--a mother and child, whose remains were sent to the office of the State Archaeologist in Iowa City.

Because they were Indians.

As was Maria Pearson, born and reared on the Yankton Reservation, where as a member of the Turtle Clan, she was named Running Moccasins, and where her grandmother made sure her granddaughter learned everything she should know about her own Yankton Sioux people and their ways.

What the Pearsons had for supper isn’t written up anywhere, but John wasn’t wrong—his wife was hot, angry. The two of them barely finished drying the dishes before Maria left for Des Moines, where she stormed the office of then Governor Robert Ray—and then to Iowa City, where she ambushed Marshall McKusick, the State Archaeologist.

She wasn’t demanding special treatment, only equal treatment. What she told them both is that she expected the remains of that Native mother and child to be buried just like the others, not stored in some museum or lab like a dead bull snake. She got so mad she sat—that’s right—she sat on the governor’s office desk, even though she’d never been there before. She could barely contain her righteous indignation.

And that was only the beginning. Maria Pearson spent the rest of her born days making sure honor was granted where it was due, creating the nation’s first legislation to protect Native American graves and provide for repatriation of remains. Those state laws led to what some call “the most significant legislation pertaining to Native American cultural identity since the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”

Wasn’t easy either. Mary Pearson took on politicians, museum officials, and the scientific community, to create the landmark Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which protected the rights of Native Americans “to certain human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony with which they are affiliated.”

At the core of the arguments was Maria Pearson’s own Native religion, a religion which holds that the past and present are one and that a person’s spirit abides with their remains. When those remains are disturbed, their spirits grow unsettled and unhappy. Standing Bear’s argument for taking his band of Poncas back, once again, on the long walk from Oklahoma was that he had promised his son he would be buried with his ancestors overlooking the Niobrara, together.

Maria Pearson, through all those years of activism, liked to tell people that throughout her life she heard her grandmother’s voice in the leaves of a cottonwood gently shaking in prairie winds. And what her grandma told her in the voice of those trees—make no mistake about it because Mary Pearson didn’t—was that her granddaughter, a little girl named Running Moccasins, should always stand up for her people.

When, that first day in the governor’s office, Robert Ray asked her what it was she wanted, she told him. "You can give me back my people's bones,” she said, “and stop digging them up."

Twice, Maria Pearson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in preserving once abundant communities all around us. She was and is a hero.

“You’re not going to like this,” her husband said that night, just home from work. Blessedly, he was right.

In April of 1995, Marcella Le Beau, along with Mario Gonzales, another resident of the Cheyenne River Reservation, traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, on a mission determined by and undertaken for their people, her neighbors, specifically the descendants of the survivors of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. An American lawyer named John R. Earl, on vacation in Glasgow, had attended an exhibition titled “Home of the Brave: The Story of the Native Americans Since Columbus,” at the McLellan Galleries, where he found a number of Native American artifacts from 19th century Plains Indians, including a remarkable Ghost Shirt, reportedly worn at the Wounded Knee Massacre and described as having been taken from the body of a victim.

When John Earl returned to the States, he told friends of his, Native people—including the Wounded Knee Massacre Survivors Association—about the shirt, feeling aggrieved at what he considered the exploitation of a garment of great meaning to men and women and children who could trace their ancestry to the victims of the horror at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1890. The Survivors Association agreed and sent Marcella and Mr. Gonzales to request repatriation.