New York
ABOUT 18,000 VISITORS filed through the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side a couple of weeks ago. They came to marvel at the museum’s new $ 210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space, and also to get a peek at something very old — a piece of metal and rock about the size of a small car that fell to earth in the Pacific Northwest some 10,000 years ago. The Willamette Meteorite, the largest ever found in the United States, is the centerpiece of the museum’s new wing, as it was for decades of the Hayden Planetarium. But the giant rock may not be there much longer.
Under a far-reaching 1990 federal law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde have claimed the meteorite was sacred to their ancestors and should be returned to Oregon. A few days after the February 19 opening, the museum went to a federal judge in Manhattan to ask that the claim be denied. The museum’s counterclaim is straightforward: It owns the rock fair and square, and the meteorite’s significance to the museum is hard to overestimate.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, estimates that 50 million people have seen the Willamette meteorite at the museum since it went on display in 1935, among them the late celebrity scientist Carl Sagan who later wrote about how moved he was seeing it as a kid. “It was part of the core of a shattered planet that once orbited the sun” billions of years ago, says Tyson. “It is two things: a record of the early solar system and a record of things that have happened from the time it became a shattered world until the time it landed on earth. . . . If it were not [at the planetarium] there would be a gaping hole in the message we are trying to share with visitors.” There would also be a gaping hole in the museum, since the meteorite is too big to move without tearing down walls. But such arguments will not necessarily trump the tribes’ claim under NAGPRA.
Representatives from the Grand Ronde tribes visited the museum last September, looking for objects of religious and cultural significance to reclaim. According to Ryan Heavy Head, cultural consultant for the tribes, “the meteorite is very significant to their religion.” He explains: “Every time a new crop was to be brought in, whether it be salmon or acorns, the participants would have to bathe in the waters [which had collected in the crevices] of the meteorite.”
The meteorite is only one of many objects that the Grand Ronde tribes are trying to reclaim this year. The delegation has also visited the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley on its “documentation” tour, with each yielding a number of objects. Indeed, Heavy Head says that with the exception of the Museum of Natural History, he found all of the institutions “very cooperative.” And he has a basis for comparison: He has been a full-time repatriation consultant since 1995.
Impoverished tribes needn’t sacrifice to retain Heavy Head’s services. He and the other repatriation consultants work under grants from the National Park Service. Rich artifact-fanciers once underwrote expeditions to stock their collections and museums; today, the federal government underwrites expeditions by Native American consultants to remove items from museums. Every year the federal government gives out almost $ 2.5 million to representatives of Native American tribes as well as to museum officials to identify items that should be removed from museums and returned to the tribes.
Authorized by Congress when it passed the law in 1990, the grants till now have mainly been used to reclaim man-made relics, like arrowheads and pots, as well as human remains (accusations of grave robbery were central to the debate that led to the legislation in the first place). Laura Mahoney, a grants management specialist at the National Park Service, confirms that “nothing like the meteorite has been reclaimed before.” The law nonetheless does not specify that the objects repatriated must be crafted by Native Americans. Heavy Head notes that other natural objects are being investigated for possible repatriation — a copper boulder from Colorado currently housed at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., may soon be involved in a similar dispute. Under NAGPRA guidelines, a lot will turn on whether objects are or are not sacred. Judges could have their hands full.
As important as the Willamette meteorite is for the museum, which constructed an entire wing around it, Heavy Head claims it is even more vital to Grand Ronde Native American culture: “The meteorite was from space. It was considered such a holy place because it embodied all three realms of creation: earth, water, and sky.” But how, one may wonder, did Native Americans of thousands of years ago know that the meteorite came from space? In fact, though it did originally fall from space, it actually came to Oregon from Canada, moved by a glacier about 10,000 years ago. Thus, there wouldn’t even have been a crater to tip anyone off to the rock’s origins. It seems more likely that Heavy Head and his colleagues are drawing on the findings of modern science to retroactively attach cosmic significance to the Willamette meteorite.
It wouldn’t be the first time that representatives of Native American tribes have relied on the findings of modern scientists to attribute cultural significance to an object to which they then laid claim. A similar conflict has arisen between tribes and scientists over the remains of “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric skeleton found in a riverbed in Washington state. Because of the skeleton’s caucasoid features, the local coroner initially assumed it must have belonged to a colonial settler. But carbon dating showed that the skeleton was actually 10,000 years old. As soon as this was revealed, the skeleton was assumed to be Native American and the government confiscated it from the scientists. For the last couple of years the area’s Native American tribes have waged a legal battle over the ownership of the almost perfectly preserved specimen.
Ironically, Kennewick Man is of particular interest to archaeologists because its caucasoid features make it unlikely the skeleton belonged to an ancestor of the tribes who now claim it. When confronted with this scientific evidence, however, Suzan Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, told a reporter, “What the archaeologists call evidence is usually based on what one person thinks might have happened. It’s such a Eurocentric point of view.”
One editorialist in the Pacific Northwest, no doubt from a Eurocentric point of view, has speculated that the Willamette meteorite, if repatriated, might become the centerpiece of the Grand Ronde’s Spirit Mountain casino. That, too, would be in keeping with its long, strange trajectory, since before a museum benefactor bought it from the Oregon Iron and Steel Company in 1906, it was displayed by a local farmer who charged tourists a quarter to view it. (The farmer lost it to the steel company, from whose property he had dragged it, in a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1905).
But Heavy Head denies the casino insinuation. “There hasn’t been any talk of that at all,” he says. “Grand Ronde does have a casino, and they do make a lot of money, . . . but this is a religious claim. And it’s not going anywhere near a casino. It will be put in a place that is fairly isolated and will be used by religious people.”
In any event, the museum directors are likely to have a long battle ahead of them. Heavy Head says that the tribes won’t be satisfied with a merely monetary settlement if they win. And he promises a civil suit if the museum prevails, adding, “I have been 100 percent successful in all my repatriation efforts.” Having a federal law on your side does lead to those kinds of percentages and may, unless the courts step in, prove able to effect the transfer of what New Yorkers had assumed to be an immovable object.
Naomi Schaefer is assistant editor of Commentary.
