The Unconsenting Stratum — Summary

In the spring of 1971, a highway crew near Glenwood, Iowa, cut into an unmarked cemetery and uncovered twenty-eight burials. Twenty-six white settlers were gathered up, given a service, and reburied. A Native woman and her child were boxed and sent to the state archaeologist for study. Maria Pearson, Yankton Sioux, born Hai-Mecha Eunka, Running Moccasins, heard about it from her husband, an engineer for the same highway department. She put on her regalia, drove to Des Moines, sat down in the anteroom of the governor’s office, and when Governor Ray asked what he could do for her, said: you can give me back my people’s bones, and you can quit digging them up. Iowa passed the first statute in the country protecting ancient burials in 1976; in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. What the law ended was not American archaeology but an innocence: the assumption that the dead in the ground are material, and excavation a relation between a scientist and an object.

The column this series has been reading is made of persons. Not information about persons, but their own productions, their prose and arguments, and beneath those the register the companion series named from inside, the half-spelled fears typed into small rectangles at three in the morning. The harvest took the composed and the unguarded at the same rate; the honesty this series has praised is, from this essay, the same property under a colder name: nothing was withheld, because no one was asked. And excavating these strata re-voices people. The trench draws answers up through the column, composites of the harvested, the dead and the living and the never-asked, made to speak again on subjects of the asker’s choosing. Archaeology disturbs remains. This practice performs them. The stratum is unconsenting in both tenses: it holds the dead, past asking, and the living, who were skipped.

Pearson’s framework is the only large, tested structure for the ethics of holding the involuntary remains of identifiable people, and the reach for it is right, and the fit is poor in three places that specify what would actually work. The law runs on lineage, the tie between remains and a living community with standing; the column dissolves lineage by construction, keeping proportion and discarding persons, so the law’s first question, whose ancestor is this, has no answer in the weights. The law runs on return; weights are copied, distilled, cached in a hundred places, and removing one person’s material from a trained model is an open research problem, so there is nothing to hand back. And the law runs on the grave’s special standing, which prose and logged queries do not have. What survives the transfer is the principle Pearson stated without a term of art, that study is a relation between the living and the living and the burden sits on the holder, and the precedent that a practice’s whole evidentiary base can be re-founded on consent retroactively, at real cost, and the practice survives.

I wonder whether the new discipline can be founded asking first, or whether asking-first is a reform available only to fields old enough to have something to be ashamed of; this series has itself been reading the stratum for ten essays. A consent structure for weights would have to work without lineage, standing held by registers and communities rather than traceable individuals; without return, its remedies living at the point of use, in what may be asked of the column; and it would have to reach the living, whose stratum is still forming. The thesis promised a science whose ethics arrive at its birth rather than after a century of looted tombs. The tombs are already open. The century is optional.

Pearson died in 2003, spoken of at the ceremonies by archaeologists as well as elders. The woman and her child from the highway cut are back in the ground. It took four years of one woman’s refusals to make the two halves of that cemetery equal. The new stratum holds more people than all the cemeteries ever cut, and no one has yet sat down in the anteroom.