Alex Jacobs: 'Experts' develop more theories about Indian people

Alex Jacobs takes a look at some of the latest theories about the origins of Indian people:
Kennewick Man fades back into history. For a time this dead Indian had a team of lawyers to sort out the claims that scientists and tribes had on the K-Man. The last science had to say about him was maybe he was Ainu, the indigenous folk of Japan and what we know of them is that they are Bear People. Bear People are all over the world and it doesn’t matter the political nation state they now reside in, they are Bear People with Bear songs, Bear dances and Bear medicines. Many of the old-timers thought they came from Bears, of all concepts, choices and legends, Bear’s a good one.

K-Man had more lawyers than most Indians and proved the issue that dead Indians can have more power and even more rights than living Indians. They can stop developments better than all our protests, they don’t have corrupt politicians selling them out. They bring out the heavy hitters in respective fields, science, religion, politics, and philosophy to argue over their actual bones and the meaning of their very existence, and by extension, all of “us” as “Native” Americans.

Now some experts are saying a root branch of Native Americans came from Europe along the North Atlantic ice some 20,000 years ago, with one site dated at 22,700. A hardy race called Solutreans left an increasingly small area due to ice and cold to head west and in true American spirit, re-invent themselves in the New World. These experts then conjecture that the Solutreans became the Clovis hunters, and this would solve many of their issues, as the Anthro/Archeo Old Guard has insisted on holding the line at 13,500 because this neatly fits their theories of the Bering Strait Ice Age corridor. The much admired Clovis big game hunters with their perfect bifacial fluted stone spear points are thought to be the main Paleo-Indian bad-asses who hunted to extinction the mega-fauna of the New World.

Get the Story:
Alex Jacobs: Kennewick Man Steps Into the Time Machine (Indian Country Today 3/29)

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