Ancient
Chugach burial caves, hidden in outcroppings all along the rugged
coastline of Prince William Sound in Alaska, are accessible only
by small boats such as kayaks. For more than a century, these
sites have been looted for their artifacts, masks and skeletal
remains. The increase of kayakers, who can nose into areas difficult
to access any other way, is a worry to tribes working to preserve
what little evidence of their material culture remains.
In
October last year, the Anchorage Daily News reported the return
of seven large masks from the Smithsonian Institution's Virginia
warehouse to the Chugach natives. They are the only masks to be
returned to the Chugach, who have pitifully little of their material
culture left after more than two centuries of colonial rule, first
by the Russians and English, then by Americans. These resource-extraction-driven
settlements changed the trajectory of native culture forever.
John
Johnson, cultural resource manager for the Chugach Alaska Corporation,
works, through the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, to secure the return of artifacts and human
remains taken from burial caves. He is one of dozens of cultural
resource managers working for tribes along western U.S. and Canadian
coastlines-from Barrow, Alaska, and along the Bering Sea, in the
Aleutian and Kodiak archipelago, through the Inside Passage, and
down the Pacific coast to Southern California.
The
seven recently returned masks and an undisclosed number of "mummies"
were sold to the Alaska Commercial Company in 1875 for $12. No
one knows what happened to the human remains after they were sold.
Pothunters still search for artifacts in shell middens (large
refuse piles of shell and bone) and old village sites along the
coastline, even though federal law prohibits the possession of
cultural remains; but the problem for tribes lies deeper than
that.
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