Grave Matters

The Controversy over Excavating California's Buried Indigenous Past

Tony Platt

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781597145596
• eBook ISBN: 9781597145626
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we reconcile the sanctity of Indigenous burial grounds with the desire to study them? Whether by curious Boy Scouts and "backyard archaeologists" or competitive collectors and knowledge-hungry anthropologists, the excavation of Native remains is a practice fraught with injustice and simmering resentments. Grave Matters is the history of the treatment of Native remains in California and the story of the complicated relationship between researcher and researched. Tony Platt begins his journey with his son's funeral at Big Lagoon, a seaside village in pastoral Humboldt County in Northern California, once O-pyúweg, a bustling center for the Yurok and the site of a plundered native cemetery. Platt travels the globe in search of the answer to the question: How do we reconcile a place of extraordinary beauty with its horrific past? Grave Matters centers the Yurok people and the eventual movement to repatriate remains and reclaim ancient rights, but it is also a universal story of coming to terms with the painful legacy of a sorrowful past. This book, originally published in 2011, is updated here with a preface by the author.

NOTES

One: Between the Lines

1. Shaunna Oteka McCovey, The Smokehouse Boys, 8.

2. The phrase comes from Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, 129.

3. Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, 119.

4. Unless noted, information about the Yurok Tribe comes from the Yurok Tribe’s website, www.yuroktribe.org; Yurok Tribal Council, Yurok Tribe (2007); and Constitution of the Yurok Tribe (22 October 1993).

5. The Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge was named in 1948 to commemorate the author of Passing of the Great Race (1921).

6. Yurok Tribal Council, Resolution no. 07–84, 29 November 2007. See, also, letter from Marian Tripp, chair of Yurok Tribe, to Don Tuttle, president of Big Lagoon Park Company (29 November 2007).

Two: Present and Alive

1. Bob Lorentzen, The Hiker’s Hip Pocket Guide to the Humboldt Coast, 109.

2. Ibid., 108–112. On the ecological significance of Big Lagoon, see Office of the Governor, “Governor Schwarzenegger Announces Indian Gaming Agreements,” 9 September 2005, www.cgcc.ca.gov/Press/BigLagoon.htm.

3. J. Michael Fay, “The Redwoods Point the Way,” National Geographic 216, no. 4 (October 2009), 60.

4. “California: 36 Best Campgrounds,” Sunset Magazine (May 2009).

5. Allison White, “Families in Need Pick up Food and Toys during Salvation Army Event,” Times-Standard 23 December 2009, 1.

6. By January 2010, employment in Humboldt reached a record low, while unemployment increased to 12.2 percent. Information about Humboldt’s economy comes from “Humboldt Economic Index,” ed. Erick Eschker, Humboldt State University website, http://www.humboldt.edu/econindex.

7. Jonathan B. Tourtellot, “Destination Scorecard: 115 Places Rated,” National Geographic, March 2004, 60–67.

8. John S. Hittell, A History of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California, 9.

9. Golden State Museum, Sacramento, California, press release, 19 August 1998.

10. M. Kat Anderson, Michael G. Barbour, and Valerie Whitworth, “A World of Balance and Plenty: Land, Plants, Animals, and Humans in a Pre-European California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi, 14.

11. McArthur-Burney Interpretive Association, “McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park 2008 Visitors Guide,” Burney, California; Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen, 5.

12. Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, 275.

13. On the evidence and debates about how and when the Yurok settled in northwestern California, see Thomas Buckley, Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990; and Ray Raphael and Freeman House, Two Peoples, One Place.

14. On the legal and political history of the Yurok and Hoopa tribes, see James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image, 205–217.

15. Buckley, Standing Ground, 6.

16. The Indians of the Big Lagoon Rancheria formally organized themselves in 1985 when they adopted a constitution. See “Constitution of the Big Lagoon Rancheria,” http://www.narf.org/nill/Constitutions/lagoonconst/biglagoonconst.htm, accessed 28 August 2009.

17. See www.bluelakerancheria-nsn.gov and www.trinidad-rancheria.org.

18. Shaunna Oteka McCovey, “Measurements,” The Smokehouse Boys, 25.

19. Donna Tam, “Enrollment Requirements Change for Hoopa Valley Indian Tribe,” Times-Standard, 13 April 2008, 1, 7.

20. Shaunna Oteka McCovey, “Resilience and Responsibility: Surviving the New Genocide,” in Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust, ed. Marijo Moore, 287.

21. “Yurok Tribe Sponsors Gathering to Fight Methamphetamine,” Times-Standard, 22 March 2009.

22. Axel R. Lindgren, Introduction to The Four Ages of Tsurai: A Documentary History of the Indian Village on Trinidad Bay, ed. Robert F. Heizer and John E. Mills.

23. From the journal of Don Bruno de Hezeta, translated and reprinted in Heizer and Mills, The Four Ages of Tsurai, 33.

24. During his fieldwork in Yurok territory in 1909, anthropologist Thomas Waterman identified Oket’o as a “center of population” w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Definitions
• One: Between the Lines
• Two: Present and Alive
• Three: It Is Not Gone Into Here
• Four: Unpleasant Work
• Five: Joint Ventures
• Six: Unwelcome Attention
• Seven: Vigorous Complaint
• Eight: An Argument about the Past
• Nine: Never Too Late
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author