LA Ken-Man Spin I just noticed that the LA Times (registration required) version of the Kennewick Man decision puts a bizarre, er, spin on the story. The headline reads (all emphasis in quoted material mine):

Ruling Allows Scientists to See Kennewick Man Before Burial Courts: A U.S. judge grants access to a 9,300-year-old skeleton found in Washington before it is released to its tribal descendants.

Now, I haven't had the chance yet to sit down and read closely the decision's 73-page pdf file, but from a quick look-over of the decision and what I've read elsewhere, nowhere does Judge Jelderks acknowledge the claim of "tribal descendants" to rebury the bones after the scientists get a look-see. The gist of the decision is that, contrary to Interior's earlier dictate, no affiliation with modern groups has been demonstrated, and therefore none have claim. (On p. 70 of the decision it is stated explicitly that "NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] does not apply to the remains of the Kennewick Man.") Either I'm missing something major, or the writer, Dana Calvo, is engaging in wishful thinking or manufacturing his version out of whole cloth:

A federal judge ordered Friday that before five Northwest Indian tribes can hold sacred burial services for a 9,300-year-old skeleton discovered near Kennewick, Wash., the bones should be handed over to a group of scientists who want to get a closer look at him.

Huh?

Perhaps Calvo is just a careless writer who doesn't bother to get the facts straight, as this line demonstrates:

Eight scientists filed suit to conduct further studies, saying Kennewick Man may reveal that humans arrived in North America by way of a land bridge from Asia.

That's just sloppy, though I'll grant that it could just be second-hand sloppiness, slurped off the wires from another careless journalist. However, the bias in this wording -

As for the scientists, they were eager to assert that the desire to look at Kennewick Man is purely scientific.

- and the fact the writer carefully skirts around the substance of both Jelderks's decision and criteria for applying NAGPRA (the question of affiliation), makes me even more dubious.

More later after I get a chance to comb through the decision and check other sources.

(OF RELATED INTEREST: A story on the Brazoria girl.)

UPDATE: Good summaries in this news story and this editorial concerning the involved government agencies' bias and shenanigans in the K-Man case. From the linked editorial:

Kennewick Man's remains were found on Corps' property near the Columbia River in 1996. The Corps announced several weeks later that it would turn the bones over to Native American tribes for reburial, prompting scientists who wanted to study the bones to sue. Kennewick Man later was handed over to the Interior Department, where former Secretary Bruce Babbitt sided with the Corps' decision.

As Jelderks found, the evidence was not on the government's side. The agencies reached a conclusion - that Kennewick Man is culturally affiliated with several modern-day tribes - not supported by even the government's experts.

When scientists challenged that position, the federal agencies sought to stifle a forthright inquiry by conspiring to keep information from the scientists and by taking advantage of a congressional recess to bury - under 2 million pounds of rubble and dirt - the site where the bones had been found.
[...]
The federal government argues that it was only trying to protect tribes' rights. What it did was make a mockery of those rights - and the rights of scientists - by attempting to stretch a good law to fit a prejudged, political outcome.

UPDATE II: Richard Bennett fires off a letter to the LA Times.

NRO weighs in.

(Links to Kennewick Man posts.)

Posted by Moira Breen at September 03, 2002 08:50 AM