Here in the US, a woman named Hai-Mecha Eunka, Maria Pearson in English, noticed that when a cemetery was disturbed for a highway, the white bodies went to a funeral director hired to rebury them and the Indian bodies went to the Iowa State Archeologist. When she was done raising a stink, Iowa had passed the first state level repatriation law in 1976.

Ten years later, the US Congress began a similar effort that would come to fruition when the first President Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990.

I agree with what is now a minority of the scientists that NAGPRA is preposterous, but what is preposterous about it is that Indians had to have a law to forbid disturbing our dead. I’ve been unable to find the part of the old law that said “except Indians.”

The fallback position of the community that calls itself scientific is to introduce age as a proxy for race, and there has even been a court decision denying NAGPRA protection to graves that antedate the European Invasion. I suppose the intellectual justification for this, if it has one, is that we savages had no laws and therefore did not prohibit grave robbing before white people taught us what is sacred.