Anne-Marie Cantwell

“Who Knows the Power of His Bones”: Reburial Redux

Abstract: This paper discusses the repatriation of human remains to indigenous peoples in Australia and the United States and the role anthropologists play in the construction of past, present, and future identities for contemporary indigenous peoples. Using examples from both countries, I suggest that many of the participants at the reburials, and in the events leading up to them, were not only reburying their dead ancestors and addressing religious concerns, but were also redeeming past social injustices, renegotiating the status quo, and affirming their modern social and religious identity‐all important issues for Fourth World peoples living in First World nation‐states today. Reburials are powerful social dramas, testimony to the complex historical relationships between and among all concerned, living and dead, indigenous and non‐indigenous. I also argue that as Fourth World peoples attempt to renegotiate the status quo by turning to the past and reburying their ancestors, the important role of anthropologists in this effort should be considered in terms of both practice and theory. Because of the combination of heritage/cultural resource management legislation, government regulations, a changing professional ethic in regards to issues of repatriation, anthropologists in all subdisciplines are increasingly involved in the witting and unwitting reproduction of indigenous social orders. The implications of this and its ethical dilemmas for anthropologists working in all the subdisciplines and in varied workplaces are explored. The necessity of working with indigenous communities is underscored and suggestions for working toward a common universal heritage are presented.

The choir invisible: Reflections on the living and the dead

Abstract This article is a comparative study of the ways in which, at different times and in different places, the material remains of dead human beings, be they bones or mummies, have been transformed by the living into relics. As such, these relics then were used to create cohesion, legitimacy, and identity for the living. Conversely, these very relics also may be destroyed or humiliated to shatter the very legitimacy they once created. Further, I argue that it is more likely that dead human bodies will be chosen to represent living bodies politic in times of political instability. Examples have been taken from the medieval and early Renaissance royal families of Europe, revolutionary governments of the 19th and 20th centuries, and from the archaic states of Egypt and the Andes. The dead are men who have ceased to function. They no longer produce or consume

Penhawitz and Wampage and the Seventeenth-Century World They Dominated

Archaeological finds made nearly a century ago in New York City provide a unique opportunity to reshape the traditional, self-congratulatory stories of settler colonial society. This essay focuses on the major roles two Native leaders, Penhawitz and Wampage, and their descendants played in the development of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. By including their forgotten stories and analyzing archaeological sites found in their territories, a more complex view of the crucial inter-cultural economic and political alliances that marked the Dutch colony emerges. Finally, the significance of Native human remains found on Ellis Island to this reshaping of New York’s history is discussed.