Who's On First?: Kennewick Man Meets The Beauty Of Xiaohe

OTR has never had much use for superlatives including the terms "first people" and "Native American." He was trained by the first generation of students of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School of cultural geography where the study of origins, diffusion, and landscape reigned. There was nothing static about places studied under such a lens. Waves of settlement, often over thousands of years, modified landscapes. The people, objects, structures and sites in each wave left rich resources for study by anthropologists and archaeologists. The Sauer School took information from these and other fields to define places throughout the world. Also, by studying the diffusion of cultural items, geographers traced peoples and cultures to their supposed points of origin.

In this day and age of political correctness, being declared the "first culture" has its advantages, often dispensed in the form of privilege, property and money. When the declaration is by law, the limitations of such thinking becomes very evident. The best example in the United States is the term, "Native American." It is purely a legal term. If your tribe is recognized by the federal government, you are a "Native American." If your tribe does not meet the criteria for recognition, you will be forced to settle for the term, American Indian. All Native Americans are Indians, but not all Indians are Native Americans. The "natives" get the privilege, property, and money. The Indians may have the genes, but they don't get the recognition. So confusing. And what happens when those waves of settlement produce something that doesn't fit the legal model? OTR thinks the same question emerges when cultural geographers run out of evidence. Is this really the original? Could there be earlier waves lost to catastrophe?

These questions arose in 1996 with the discovery of Kennewick Man, a prehistoric skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River. There was no controversy at first, but one soon emerged when scientists revealed this 9500 year old skeleton was not genetically related to any Native American tribes. In fact, he is more genetically associated with the ancestors of the Ainu people of northern Japan. The tribes saw this as a serious threat to their nativity claim and began a protracted legal battle for the skeleton and a quick ceremonial burial. It didn't happen, as Kennewick Man remains the property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The value of being first isn't confined to the shore of the Columbia River, the United States or even the Western Hemisphere. It seems the same thinking surrounding Kennewick Man has now forced the Beauty of Xiaohe out of an exhibit making its rounds in the United States. Beauty was buried in Xinjiang province in western China about 4000 years ago. Today, that province is filled with oil and a strong separatist sentiment. The fact that Beauty has distinctive Caucasian features emphasizing the Western origins of Xinjiang isn't helping the situation. The Chinese government wants no part of that Western linkage to show. This is a case where millions of barrels of oil trump diversity and the truth.

OTR wonders how many more model breaking surprises await us as we play this and similar games of who's on first. While identity politics has been lucrative for Native American tribes, good fortune has come at a cost, often to the traditional culture it was designed to preserve. He thinks we could build more beneficial political constructs out of our academic models. The pursuit of honesty would be a good start. As for the argument about "firsts," OTR recalls walking the streets of Old Oraibi, a village on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona. People in Old Oraibi have been doing that for almost a thousand years. The folks on Charlotte Street in St. Augustine - "our nation's oldest city" - don't like it one bit. And Old Oraibi is a relatively new town when you examine settlement history in the Western Hemisphere.