Kennewick Man Revisited: He's The Most Important Human Skeleton Ever Found In North America

Five years ago, I began a blog post on this subject with these remarks:

For fifty years, I have walked a rather wide vocational path incorporating history, geography and anthropology and their expressions on the physical landscape. I find the study of human origins, dispersals, and the waves of settlement over time and across the planet simply fascinating. When there's a new bump in what has become the expected order brought on by political correctness, I have always enjoyed watching the jostling for position and reassurance. One of the latest and best examples was the discovery of the 9300 year old Kennewick Man on a bank of the Columbia River in the state of Washington in 1996. Official Native Americans claimed him under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but there was a problem. Kennewick Man looked very Caucasian. It took nearly eight years to get a federal court ruling keeping the remains out of the hands of the official local tribe and the obscurity that would have followed. When the law says you're "first," there's no place for an interloper with DNA that could ruin your status. After more months of negotiation, a DNA test determined that the remains were most closely identified with the Ainu people of Japan. The results have reopened the debate on the origins of early Americans.

There were more remarks in a followup post in 2011:

[I have] never had much use for superlatives including the terms "first people" and "Native American." [I] 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? [I think] the same question emerges when cultural geographers run out of evidence. Is this really the original? Could there be earlier waves lost to catastrophe?

Now the truth has come to light and Kennewick Man's story may very well rewrite the story of human settlement in North America.  It's an exciting time for anthropology and cultural geography, but there is opposition both from the federal government and Native American tribes. In the name of science and the search for truth, I hope the research continues.

Source: Instapundit, 8-27-2014

Offending History

Some well-meaning state senators from the People's Republic of Maryland raised the political correctness flag again earlier this month. It seems they have issues with the names of two mountains in Western Maryland, about 150 west of their homes in and around Baltimore. Their proposal, outlined in Senate Joint Resolution 3, calls for the creation of a commission to rename Negro Mountain and Polish Mountain.

This calls to mind an early cartography lesson that OTR knows has made the rounds for generations. It seems the junior mapmaker was out in the field one day with a local expert preparing a map. As a series of ridges filled the vista, the mapmaker asked the expert for the name of the third ridge. "That's Peaked Mountain," he said. A few months later, the mapmaker returned with the finished product and asked the expert to check out their good work. When the expert looked a bit confounded, the mapmakers asked if there was a problem.

"Sure is." said the expert, "What's this here Pickett Mountain?"

"But you told me Pickett Mountain, and here it is in my notes."

On seeing the notebook, the expert replied, "That ain't it." "I said Peaked, as in P-E-A-K-E-D." "Sounds just like it's spelled, 'Pick-et' "

Even the best research deserves the proper context. That said, we can explore the topic at hand.

Both mountain names date from the 18th century. Negro Mountain was named during the French and Indian War (1754-1763) to honor a free black man. According to most documents, his name was Nemesis. He was the body servant to Thomas Cresap, Maryland's famous western frontiersman and Indian fighter. Nemesis was a giant of a man--referred to as Goliath in some documents--who fought valiantly beside Cresap in many skirmishes. The night before he died, Nemesis shared a premonition of his death with Cresap who then gave him the option of avoiding the fight. Nemesis declined the offer and was killed in an ambush on a ridge and buried there in what is now Garrett County. Cresap' was so moved by his loyal man's ultimate sacrifice that he wrote letters to colonial newspapers informing them that he had named the ridge Negro Mountain to honor his friend and fellow-frontiersman.

Changing a geographic place name in the United States is not as simple as it may sound. The final word on such names and changes rests with the Department of the Interior's Board on Geographic Names. The board itself is a rather fascinating little niche in our vast federal government and well worth exploring on its own. In the specific case of Negro Mountain, OTR expects the board will find insufficient evidence to overturn a name that has withstood the test for over two centuries. Though some may find the word "Negro" to be offensive, it is far from becoming the next "n" word in our vocabulary. After all, the U.S. Bureau of the Census maintains the term "Negro" to identify a racial class. Furthermore, the term is retained in a number of names, including the United Negro College Fund, and there are others, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People being one, that would seem far more offensive. On the other hand, OTR would not object to Nemesis Mountain as an alternative name as long as its memorial nature could be explained at every opportunity both on the ground and in the history books.

Renaming Polish Mountain is another issue entirely. Documentation to date tells us that this mountain's name first appeared on a map around 1790. No Polish family ever explored the mountain or settled there or tilled the rocky soil. No Polish hero died there fighting Indians. In fact, the name has nothing whatsoever to do with ethnicity or country of origin. As is characteristic of many of the mountain tops--Big Glassy Mountain in North Carolina, White Top in Virginia, to name two-- in the Appalachian's formations, Polish Mountain has extensive rock outcrops at its summit. From a distance, with the morning sun at a frontiersman's back, those rocks could seem to shine...as if they were polished. Indeed, that 1790s map labels the ridge, "Polished Mountain." Over time and history, the "ed" fell away to leave future generations with the current name. It is a common occurrence in the world of geography.

So we are left with Polish (with a short "o") Mountain and a group of six Maryland state senators who should be embarrassed for not doing better research before raising a "much ado about nothing" issue. This is a perfect expression of OTR's belief that meanings reside in people and not in words. One man's offense is another man's pride and joy. If there is a problem and we wish to know who owns it, we often have no further to look than in the bathroom mirror. And before we bring our problems to others, we had better understand the backstory before we ass-u-me the worst.

Photo: A real Polish mountain, in fact, the highest.

Environmental Mythology And The Evil White Christian Capitalist

In 1983, the environmental historian, William Cronon, published a seminal book on American Indians and colonist in New England and their relationship to the land. Most prior scholarship accepted and reinforced the idea that Indians were dependent on the "wilderness" in which they lived. Cronon's work introduced a far different picture of the Indian as an active shaper of the American landscape. Although the mythology of the "noble savage" living harmoniously with the Earth Mother is still very much alive, a generation of new studies confirms it wasn't so. Unfortunately, much of the environmental movement will never accept this premise as its membership is largely composed of leftist ideologues hellbent on crushing the free world. Believe me, I know because I worked with some of them.

This morning, a post on Moonbattery links to highlights from an article on the pre-Columbian Americas written by Charles G. Mann and published in The Atlantic in 2002. It shows readers how far the new scholarship has come in a generation by exposing a full range of myths about Indians and Europeans alike. There is a link to the full article in the first paragraph. Be sure to read all of it.