When I sat down to write this article, my country was smack in the middle of its greatest political embarrassment since 1876 - maybe even 1860.
| My feelings were clear and highly partisan. So far as voting goes, I'm a Democrat down to my toenails. My guy got the most votes and was clearly the moral victor; and the fact that George W Bush and his three-watt brain nipped into office over the bleeding carcass of democratic procedure while the band played 'Hail to the Thief' literally sickens me.
| Yet there is one perverse corner of my soul that looks upon the repudiation of the Democratic administration with a kind of grim approval. This peculiarly monomaniac kink in my intellect looks at everything through the lens of single-issue fanaticism. For some time now, its baleful glare has been directed at one particular palladin of the Clinton administration - secretary of the interior Bruce Babbit - wishing him every possible ill-fortune.
| Why pick on poor old Babbit? He's been a pretty good steward of his cabinet department for eight years now, staying largely free of serious scandal. He's done a decent job of fending off the rapacious interests that, under more accomodating regimes, have often looted the Interior Department and the American people of their enormous natural resources, creating a terrible mess in the process. He's kept the timber and oil companies from doing too much irreparable damage, and preserved the National Park System, preventing the cynical hand of commerce from defiling it excessively. He's been a generally reliable ally of most serious environmentalists, though nobody can make those guys 100-percent happy. In short, he's performed about as well in his position as is possible for anybody forced to play the game under the Beltway's ground-rules.
| So why do I wish to see the poor man fed to the dogs? It's not as though my suppurating curmudgeonhood extends to environmental issues. While I'd never make a minimally acceptable Green, I'm pretty sympathetic to mainstream environmentalism so far as genuine issues of public safety and scenic values are concerned. The fact that big oil and big timber don't like Babbitt would, other things being equal, predispose me to like him very much. But there's one big obstacle: the skeleton of a man who died roughly 9000 years ago in what is now the state of Washington near the modern town of Kennewick.
| 'Kennewick Man', as the descedant is now universally known, was discovered about four years ago along the banks of the Columbia River (1). Suspecting that the remains might be those of a murder victim, the authorities sent them off to Jim Chatters, a local forensic anthropologist. Chatters discovered that Kennewick Man might indeed have met a violent end - but that the suspect weapon was an ancient spear. Carbon-dating of the bones produced an age of 9000 years (since confirmed by further tests). But the obvious conclusion - that the skeleton was that of an ancient Indian - immediately ran into puzzling anatomical inconsistencies. Morphology seemed to rule out an 'Indian' identity. Indeed, the remains seemed more 'Caucasian' than Indian. This obviously implies that much is yet to be understood about the historical movements of people from the Old World to the New.
| However, just when Chatters and other scientists were beginning to anticipate an extensive and rewarding study of the skeleton, politcs, chauvinism and convoluted legalisms conspired to frustrate them cruelly. The main culprit was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (2), a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has grown into a monster of anti-scientific bias. This measure was initially devised to make amends for generations of arrogance and cultural insensitivity on the part of anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, pot-hunters, and collectors of pre-Columbian art. It mandated the 'repatriation' of human remains, as well as artefacts, to Native American tribes with which they were demonstrably affiliated.
| Unfortunately, this measure came along just as the tribal groups themselves fell under the sway of an extremely chauvinistic and pugnacious ideology, growing, in part, out of the bitter conditions of Indian life, but also reflecting a larger political mood evident in black and Hispanic separatism, in the militance of feminist and gay activism, and in the widespread enthusiasm for 'multiculturalism' as policy and ideology.
| Inspired by such sentiments, Indian separatists took to using NAGPRA not merely to reclaim relics and remains clearly tied to existing tribal groups, but, far more boldly, to frustrate all scientific investigation
into the deep history of ancient America. In one notorious instance, the activists prevented archaeologists from carbon dating a few isolated human hairs found among the detritus of a 1000-year-old hunting camp. All this stretched the scope and sense of NAGPRA far beyond what its congressional drafters had in mind. But the government officials responsible for enforcing the act apparently found it easier to go along with such extraordinary interpretations rather than risk offending the activists by tempering the process with a little common sense.
| The Kennewick Man episode that is still being played out in the federal courts represents the phenomenon at its most grotesque. Before Chatters and his colleagues could get fairly started on a systematic study of their material, the feds intervened to seize the skeleton with the avowed intention of 'repatriating' it to the clamouring political activists of a few Northwest tribes. The frantic and indignant scientists rushed into court to prevent this and largely succeeded in halting the return, but not before some of the bones were damaged and a few, apparently, smuggled back to the militants for 'reburial'.
| A fully fledged trial of the issues ensued; it has been dragging on for several years now. The most fascinating and sobering aspect has been the attitude of the Department of the Interior which, as the custodian of the skeleton, is the defendant in the case. For a long while, the department equivocated, backing the tribal chauvinists on the substantive points without directly endorsing their claim that the skeleton is the Ancient One, the true and venerable ancestor of their peoples. But pressure from the judge forced the department to get off the fence and to declare explicitly whether the Kennewick Man skeleton bears a cultural relation to existing tribes that brings it within the compass of NAGPRA.
| That decision was made a couple of months ago. It came directly from secretary Babbitt himself. And it affirmed the notion that the tribal coalition has a right to take back and rebury the skeleton, holding that the evidence, as interpreted by Babbitt, sustains the claims of cultural connection.
| The decision was crazy, flying in the face of scientific evidence already accumulated and simple common sense. The skeleton's age alone refutes the idea of meaningful cultural connection. Cultural continuity over nine millenia is an absurd supposition. The history of humanity, especially of small social groups, is one of continual migration, disintegration, fission and amalgamation. Neither language nor culture, and certainly not geographic location, remains stable for more than a small fraction of that time.
| On top of this, the physiological evidence obtained so far makes it clear that the people from whom Kennewick Man sprung were a different stock from that which settled the area within the past thousand years or so. (Contrary to the initial media reports, they were probably not 'European' but, more likely, related to certain sparse Asian subpopulations like the Ainu of Japan.) Indeed, this disparity is precisely what makes the remains so fascinating from an archaeological point of view. The demographic picture of the Americas following the last Ice Age is much more complicated and surprising than has traditionally been thought.
| Babbitt completely disdained these compelling points. Instead, he opted to accept the assertions of the Indian chauvinists that their supposed 'traditions' counted as strong evidence for the state of the world 9000
years ago and that their myths of continuous occupation of tribal lands since the proverbial dawn of time had to be received as evidence that Kennewick Man was their near kin. The horrifying thing about this decision was not merely that it was wrongheaded - that's hardly surprising in any governmental judgement. What truly appalled was the implicit philosophical relativism, the blithe assumption that scientific rationality is merely one path to knowledge, a modality that may work well for Western rationalists but is not binding on cultural Others, who are encouraged to substitute their alternate epistemologies whenever it proves politically convenient.
| What prompted this bizarre philosophical excursion? Could it be that Babbitt, beyond the bureaucratic facade, is a resolute postmodernist on the model of Foucault or Feyerabend, and, like them, a rumbustious epistemological anarchist? This, I think, is hardly the best explanation. More traditional organisational dynamics were probably at work. Babbitt was, I suppose, very reluctant to overrule the subordinates who had worked long and hard on the case, misconceived as their efforts may have been. Even more important, he most likely wanted to do what he could to mollify Indian activists throughout the country, as well as those few in the Pacific Northwest who were directly concerned with the case.
| These days, many treaty stipulations and legal concessions once granted to Indian peoples, provisos that have long been treated as virtual dead letters, have come alive with a vengeance. They give tribal groups the power to cause considerable social and economic disruption, should they decide to take that course. Mere prudence would go far towards persuading Babbitt that it's better to butter up the tribal leaders, scientists and scientific truth be damned, than to provoke them and provide further incentive for legal mischief. Scientists don't form a very large voting bloc, after all; nor do they have treaty rights that a sympathetic judge might read as giving them the power to repossess Syracuse, NY or Cleveland, OH.
| Yet, beyond these practical, if cynical, calculations, I can't help thinking that Babbitt's decision really does manifest just a trace of the postmodernist relativism previously mentioned. How the miasmal stuff might
have made its way from a university seminar room to the echoing hallways of Interior is something I can only guess at. But the boundaries of public service are pretty permeable, and it's a sure bet that over the years quite a few intellectuals, semi-intellectuals, quasi-intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals and outright fakers have diffused through them, trailing a whiff of the academic trendy in their wake. We certainly can't rule out the possibility that in the process, Babbitt, or at least a few of his close advisers, got a bit of the stuff up their nose.
| What's important and frightening about this story is not merely that scientists, and, in consequence, all of us eventually, were denied a chance to find some new truths about the demographic history of pre-Columbian America. More deeply disturbing is the implicit denigration of science and reason as such, the suggestion that makers of public policy are no longer obliged to defer to traditional canons of scientific judgement in reaching their decisions. This development is very annoying when the questions on the table merely concern archaeology. But when matters involving climate, genetic engineering, 'alternative' medicine, the supposed dangers of power lines, and vaccination come up, as of course they will, the possibility that anti-scientific dogma has systematically clouded official judgement becomes extremely frightening. Bruce Babbitt's unfortunate lapses have given us much to deplore and even more to worry about in the long run.
| Am I cheered at least a little, then, by the prospect that a new conservative administration will repudiate Babbitt in many matters, including, just possibly, the Kennewick Man case? Frankly, no. Babbitt's good works (and these are many) would probably head the list of things to be nullified. The Kennewick Man business would probably be assigned a pretty low priority. Since Republicans generally take a dimmer view of Indian rights than Democrats, a Republican interior secretary might eventually get around to reversing course in the case. But then, he might equally well decide to embrace the reasoning of Babbitt and Co, not because of outrage at the historic injustices done to native peoples, but because of the logic of the argument - the implicit theory that cultural 'traditions' should have veto power over scientific findings.
| One can hardly think of a doctrine more suited to the aspirations of the fundamentalists and creationists who want to put scriptural accounts of the origins of the world and its creatures back into America's public schools. Their Republican allies would doubtless relish the opportunity to conscript the ideas of Mr Babbitt and his liberal, multiculturalist friends in order to deliver on their promises to the creationist lobby.
| It would be an irony to appreciate, perhaps, but not to cherish.
| Norman Levitt is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He is author of Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture and co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.
Read on:
Burying the evidence, by Tiffany Jenkins
Battle of the bones, by Josie Appleton
Who owns human remains?, by Tiffany Jenkins, on openDemocracy
spiked-issue: Museums and galleries
(1) For official documents on Kennewick Man see here. For general news summary go here. The positions of the eight scientists involved can be found here
(2) For a survey of NAGPRA sites and sources see here. The NAGPRA overseer, National Parks, is here
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