Bio: Cynthia-Lou Coleman is a professor at Portland State University, where her areas of inquiry focus on the social construction of science in mainstream discourse and the effects of framing on biopolitical policies that impact American Indian communities, which is distilled in new book, “Environmental Clashes on Native American Lands” (2020). She has held fellowships with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She was awarded the Fulbright-Canada Jarislowsky Foundation Visiting Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies in 2019, when she worked with faculty and Indigenous communities in British Columbia. Dr. Coleman is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation.

Our Story Starts at the Columbia River

On a warm, summer day in 1996, two Washington State University students stumbled across what one news reporter would call “the find of a lifetime.”^[1] The students were wading in the shallows of the Columbia River, heading for the annual boat-races, when one lad lost his footing. While digging into the mud with his fingers, he pulled out a human skull.

The discovery of the cranium—later reunited with its skeletal remains—captivated news reporters across the globe, who, for more than two decades, would follow the ebb and flow of stories about the 9,000-year-old denizen plucked from the Columbia River. ^[2]

The skeletal remains would become legal tinder for Native Americans and scientists involved in what one reporter called a “firestorm” over who had the right to determine the fate of the ancient remains.^[3] Court battles would continue for eight years until a ruling in 2004 allowed scientists access to the skeleton—called Kennewick Man in news reports—for their research, rather than repatriating the ancient bones to local tribes, which is a required, according to a federal law designed to protect Indigenous remains and relics. The law, however, applies to Indigenous artifacts, and one of the scientists announced at a press conference not long after the discovery that Kennewick Man looked—not like a Native American—but “Caucasoid.”^[4]

Studying the remains provided experts with an abundance of data they published in the form of a coffee table-sized book that sells for $100 at Powell’s Books, in 2014.^[5] The editors of the volume noted that the antediluvian skeleton closely resembles Polynesians, whose relatives “are like those of the Moriori of Chatham Islands,” an archipelago about 840 kilometers east of Christchurch, New Zealand.^[6]

But their judgment was questioned by another team of experts one year after publication of the six-pound volume on Kennewick Man.

A group of geneticists from Denmark announced in the journal Nature that the skeleton was indeed Native to North America and that Kennewick Man’s DNA matched the genetic makeup of members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Nation. Experts said the match is “closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide” and they “reject the hypothesis that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Ainu or Polynesians than he is to Native Americans.”^[7] Although the ancient skull may look different when compared with modern-day North American Indians, the genetic results are more robust than the conclusions drawn from measurements of one, single skull.^[8]

The findings enabled local American Indians to resume pursuing repatriation of the ancient remains and in February, 2017, Indigenous stakeholders returned The Ancient One to the earth in an undisclosed location.

How Social Discourse Framed Kennewick Man

Overall, news coverage of Kennewick Man, or, The Ancient One (the name given by Indigenous residents) tended to legitimize the position of the scientists, politicians and others invested in studying the bones. In contrast, Native American researchers and policy-makers, and activists who support Native rights, urged officials to proffer Kennewick Man to local tribes, as required by the Native Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990.

After reviewing more than two decades’ worth of news, blogs, websites, and books on the Kennewick Man case, I found two broad issues in the social discourse. The first entails how messages of the skeletal discovery were framed as a conflict between Cartesian belief systems and Native American belief systems, and between scientists and Indians. The second dimension of coverage is more subtle: entailments of racism coursed throughout the narrative.

The findings are important for several reasons to the Confluence community and to publics interested in communication and social diversity. First, the case study of Kennewick Man directly impacts tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest and more specifically, Indigenous citizens from the Columbia River valley. Second, the unearthing of the skeleton illuminates the relationships of tribes to elected and appointed U.S. government representatives, and regional county and city officials, in addition to judges, attorneys, law-enforcement agencies, and so on. And third, the analysis of discourse demonstrates a common refrain in mainstream narratives about conflicts that arise in Indian Country.

One additional note: social discourse is the way most individuals will have learned about Kennewick Man. With that in mind, the impressions forged by individuals arrive second-hand—through news reports, for example—rather than from first-hand experience. As a result, the messages wrought through mass media channels have more salience because readers and viewers have no benchmark to gauge the accuracy of the narrative.

News Stories Engage in Conflict

The narrative surrounding the Kennewick Man story not only disparaged Native American knowledge systems; the discourse reflected language used in the 1800s and 1900s that painted Indigenous people as cruel and rash. When you drill down into the modern discourse about Kennewick Man, you will find outdated pseudoscientific theories about human personality, intellect, savagery and—for Indigenous denizens—“civilizability.”

Throughout history, scientific beliefs were offered to readers as legitimate, in contrast to Indigenous knowledge systems that were diminished as “irrational and superstitious.”^[9] The struggle on the part of local tribes to wrest control of the bones from researchers and the courts was framed narrowly—typically in binary language that summoned up war-like tales with such headlines as, “Scientists and Indians battle for the bones of Kennewick Man” and “Bones put Indians on warpath.”^[10]

After the skeleton was unearthed, officials in the Kennewick (Washington state) community invited a freelance anthropologist—James Chatters—to examine the remains. Chatters sliced off a hunk of bone for radiocarbon dating. While waiting for the test results, Chatters created a mold of the skeleton and skull—which would be used later to construct a replica of Kennewick Man.^[11]

When the radiocarbon tests were completed—about a month after the discovery—the bone fragment was estimated to be more than 9,000 years old.^[12] Three days later, Chatters and local officials shared news of the discovery with reporters at a press conference at Kennewick City Hall, where Chatters described the ancient being as “Caucasoid,” who lacked “traditional Native American features.”^[13] Chatters told reporters later that the skull looked nothing like modern Indigenous peoples in North America, with his “long, thin skull with its jutting jaw.” He added that Kennewick Man “was very different from an Indian skeleton. I could have picked him out in a crowd in an instant.”^[14]

Chatters defended his jargon as scientific classification—terms such as Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid have a technical and a historic basis. He said, “American Indians tend to have what are known as Mongoloid characteristics.”^[15] The ancient skull was described as both White and Caucasian in news reports. Examples include a headline from the New York Times: “Old skull gets white looks, stirring dispute” and from Agence-France Presse: “Human bones suggest Caucasian-like early Americans.”^[16]

Speculation that the 9,000 year-old discovery was Caucasian enraged many, and for several reasons. The assessment was based on a subjective observation of what the skull looked like. Chatters’ analysis of skull type was delivered to a room of news reporters without evidence, confirmation or peer-review, which scientists argue are requirements of robust research.

Chatters added insult to injury when he told reporters the ancient being has a contemporary doppelgänger. Pointing to a clay replica of the skull, Chatters said Kennewick Man looked like Patrick Stewart, a British actor famous for his role as a captain in the television and film franchise Star Trek.^[17] Reporters seized on the comparison and newspapers, television programs and websites published pictures of Kennewick Man’s clay likeness side-by-side with Patrick Stewart’s character, Jean-Luc Picard. Following is an example of a particularly gleeful report:

“We can only presume that, in a plot worthy of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard somehow managed to travel back in time to North America, where he fathered the entire local Indian population.”^[18]

Meantime, tribal members in the Pacific Northwest found their arguments diminished after images of the British actor became synonymous with the 9,000-year-old denizen. The Umatilla, Yakama, Colville, Nez Perce and Wanapum communities took action and formed a coalition to argue in court that a federal statute requires return of the remains to local tribes. The NAGPRA law had been written in an effort to respect Indigenous provenance over ancient remains and relics, which have attracted grave-robbers and thieves keen on collecting and selling Indian skulls, bones, clothing, and jewelry for centuries. Armand Minthorn, a Umatilla elder, said:

“This is a very sensitive issue for me and my tribe. Our religious beliefs, culture, and our adopted policies and procedures tell us that this individual must be re-buried as soon as possible. Our elders have taught us that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there until the end of time.”^[19]

Minthorn argued that bones so old could be nothing except native to North America:

“If this individual is truly over 9,000 years old, that only substantiates our belief that he is Native American. From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time.”^[20]

Chatters and some of his colleagues condemned the idea of repatriating the skeleton to local tribes and argued that “science would be harmed” because Kennewick Man was a “rare scientific treasure.”^[21]  Chatters told reporters: “From a scientific point of view alone, he’s just an absolute treasure.”[22]

Adding to the conflict, social discourse noted that giving the skeleton to tribes would amount to destroying scientific evidence. According to one Canadian newspaper, “The most insensitive and hypocritical act of all would be to deny our shared past—and bury the truth.”^[23] Another scientist told a reporter that “reburying Kennewick Man would deprive the world of the essential knowledge locked up in his bones.”^[24]

The Kennewick Man narrative soon assumed a fresh layer of contention: scientists claimed they alone would ferret the truth from the skeleton and that tribes blocked their path. Indeed: Native Americans involved in the dispute were presented as luddites. For example, a 60 Minutes reporter noted that, for Indians, “science doesn’t matter to them.”^[25] An opinion printed in The Rocky Mountain News decried returning Kennewick Man to tribes, noting that if such a decision were made, then:

“The United States could become virtually the only place in the world where ancient human remains are off-limits to anthropological study. The greatest scientific nation in history would be adopting the head-in-the-sand attitude of a pre-literate society.”^[26]

Other critics suggested that Native Americans should “just get over it” or adapt to the settler culture. For example, one of the anthropologists suing to study the bones said:

“The fact is that, hey, there was a big war. The world has had a lot of these issues of conquered peoples, and you know, one doesn’t like that sort of thing, but that’s the reality. It happened … Can we resurrect and make history right? I don’t think so. I mean, hey, life goes on.”

The view was echoed by an attorney for the scientist-plaintiffs who said that he “simply cannot understand why Indians don’t just assimilate into America the way the Irish did. This country does have a wonderful ability of pulling elements of other cultures in and absorbing and making them American,”[Alan] Schneider says. “We are bifurcating this country on Native Americans—that something that is Native American in orientation, it belongs to them, it doesn’t belong to us. That is not good.”^[27] Unlike Irish emigrants—who had some agency in their decisions to adopt North America as their new homeland—Indigenous denizens had little choice but to adjust to the hegemony of colonizers who literally occupied their territory before claiming it for themselves. By the time the Dawes Act was signed in 1887 (an act that enabled the US government to reapportion Native territory to tribal members and then sell the rest) some 1.5 billion acres were claimed by settlers.[28]

As a result, news coverage assumed what one scholar calls “a versus frame”—us against them.^[29] Headlines reflected the dualism: “Faith, reason clash over remains” and “Scientists and Indians battle for the bones of Kennewick Man.”^[30] In one news article, science was described as a “hostage to irrationality.”^[31]

Coverage pitted rationality against religion: an observation Erin Dysart and I made in our study of the first era of the narrative.^[32] We found the battle was reduced to empiricism versus beliefs, with the scientific perspective heralded as the most enlightened and the Native view as superstitious.

The empirical view was bolstered in four important ways: through the use of scientific methods (“sciencing”), by quoting technical experts, by situating claims as progressive and for the public good, and by reducing the Indians’ claims as driven by “politics.” Some examples include framing knowledge as sanctified by scientific techniques: radiocarbon dating, skull measurements, genetic tests, CAT-scans, and so on. Scientific progress was heralded as existentially critical, with an anthropologist noting that “the entire human race would suffer” if the skeleton was repatriated. “We’re talking about our understanding of the human heritage … if you bury the evidence it will never be in. It would be a loss to all people, all mankind,” said one London newspaper. ^[33]

By reducing Indigenous perspectives to an act of “politics,” opponents mocked Native American sovereignty—the right of citizens to determine their destiny through their own governance and not by permission from some higher authority or hegemon. And this point is critical: sovereignty translates to pluralism, where Native communities have a seat at the bargaining table with their political peers.

But the pursuit of pluralism—an ideal prospect where all voices have a chance to be heard—was roundly reduced to “politics.” For example, Chatters said the Kennewick Man case demonstrated “political correctness gone wild … You can’t say anything about the Indians’ heritage that might differ from Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage.”^[34] Chatters considered the Indian claims “bunk,” and added: “This modern-day hyper-politicized ethnicity business is irrelevant…God, I will tell you, this has been an education in the racial politics of America.”^[35]

Chatters’ simplistic and reductionist claims of “politics” fit well within the news-writing framework, where sources are required to legitimize a narrative. In the Kennewick Man story, scientists were accorded more authority and legitimacy than Native Americans. Critics point out that scientists were serving their own interests while disparaging Native American beliefs, rights, and sovereignty. A common refrain in social discourse was the scientists’ “right” to conduct studies on Kennewick Man. “To the scientists,” one reporter wrote, “the chance to examine the remains was self-evidently a triumph for reason. ‘It comes down,’ says anthropologist Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian, ‘to the right to ask questions of the past’.”^[36]

One stream within the discourse narrowed the focus to one question: Who was here first? As a 60 Minutes reporter noted: “I am asking about the central question of concern: Who was here first?” The reporter opined that the question made Native Americans fearful. “If someone else was here before they were, their status as sovereign nations and all that comes with it—treaty rights and lucrative casinos, like this one on the Umatilla Reservation—could be at risk.”^[37]

But when Native Americans like Armand Minthorn were asked what issue was central, he said, “We know our history.” Oral histories go back thousands of years, and “just because it’s not written down in a book” doesn’t mean the stories are mythical. “It’s fact to me, because I live it every day.”^[38]

Minthorn noted: “We are not trying to be troublemakers, we are doing what our elders have taught us—to respect people, while they’re with us and after they’ve become part of the earth.”^[39] Treating the skeleton deferentially is part of the Umatillas’ moral fabric.^[40] “Sacred human remains are not artifacts. They are what they are—sacred—and they are our ancestral remains, and they need to be treated as such.”^[41]

Sovereignty is an important part of this, Minthorn explained. “We are trying to ensure that the federal government lives up to its own laws, as well as honoring our policies, procedures, and religious beliefs. We understand that non-Indian cultures have different values and beliefs than us, but I ask the American people to please understand our stance on this issue.”^[42]

But sovereignty issues were overshadowed by the characterization of Native beliefs as mythical, quaint, and nonsensical. An anthropologist observed, for example, that “the advancement of their [Indians’] interests … lies not in knowing what really happened in the past, but rather an image of the past which best serves their purposes.”^[43]

Racism Suffuses Discourse

Native Americans argued that Indigenous remains—particularly skulls—have been plundered, and then sold as charms and trinkets. Indigenous body parts have long been fetishized as exotic, notes Simon Harrison, who writes that collecting skulls was a hallmark of refinement among colonizers: “The skull of an anatomized murderer kept by a physician, the skull of an African chief brought home by a colonial officer or a celebrated composer’s skull treasured by a love of music expressed the social identities, tastes and aspirations of their owners.”^[44]

The narrative surrounding the repatriation of the 9,000 year-old remains recalls centuries of grave-robbing, including skull collecting by scientists. For example, Samuel George Morton—a nineteenth century researcher at the University of Pennsylvania—amassed some 1,300 specimens for his examinations of crania, which he plied to his thesis of racial types.^[45] Morton based his notion of human intelligence and personality on skull shape, which he argued revealed the characteristics of the mind. Morton and phrenologists of the era created a hierarchy of human categories based on skull shape and size, with Caucasians at the top-most rung, followed by Mongolians, Malayans, Americans [Indigenous peoples] and Ethiopians. Morton believed in polygenesis—that humans arose from several genetic racial types—a theory since replaced by monogenesis, meaning, all homo sapiens share the same ancestors. That is, there is one, single human race, not many.^[46]

No wonder calling the Kennewick Man skull Caucasoid drew ire from critics offended by Chatters’ announcement. Terms like Caucasoid and Caucasian were used to separate humans into racial types based on appearance and skull size. Practitioners of phrenology, like Morton, considered themselves bonafide scientists whose work would “show the true bearings of this science on education (physical, intellectual, and moral), on theology, and on mental and moral philosophy,” according to the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany in 1839.^[47]

Phrenologists engaged in empirical methods to add gravitas to their beliefs about personality and intelligence. By using instruments to gather data on the contours of the skull—weights and scales and rulers and calipers—they impressed layfolk and specialists alike with the use of scientific methods with less regard for the underlying theories that drive notions about race.^[48]

Morton experimented with several ways to calibrate intellect.

He would scoop the goop from a fresh skull, boil it, and pour millet or mustard seeds into the cavity. He would then weigh the seeds to determine the head’s mass. Morton experimented with other materials before settling on buckshot as the best method for measuring intelligence. He poured pellets into a hollowed skull, weighed the lead, and claimed the heavier the buckshot, the more the brain. The more the brain, the greater the intelligence.^[49]

Caucasians were endowed with the largest skulls and hence, the greatest intellect, while American Indian brains suffered from a surfeit of barbarism and destructiveness, as evidenced in Morton’s writings.^[50] Such inferior qualities prevented Native Americans from advancing socially, Morton claimed, and, as the Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated stated in 1883, Native Americans failed to adapt:

Surrounded by civilizing influences the Indian nature is slowly modified but the race will have disappeared before the missionary and the teacher will have completed their work in transforming the child of the forest to a member of civilized society.^[51]

Similar racial taxonomies were commonly used in the Kennewick Man discourse. For example, terms like Mongoloid, Negroid and Caucasoid described skulls, whose owners had such characteristics as big noses, flaring cheekbones, narrow faces, delicate jaws, and symmetry, depending on the individual under study.^[52] Chatters described Kennewick Man’s face as “narrow” with a “very delicate jaw.”^[53] He told another reporter The Ancient One had “a high degree of facial symmetry. ^[54] Chatters’ analysis reads like it was cribbed from Morton, who said the Caucasian race is distinguished by “symmetry” and “narrow faces” with a “delicately pointed chin.”^[55]

Crude characterizations of Indians were not limited to scientific publications like Morton’s. News stories, poetry, lectures, paintings, and books of the 1800s and 1900s regarded Native Americans as animal-like brutes who would eventually disappear and were thus labeled “the vanishing race.”^[56]

For example, Francis Parkman Jr.’s descriptions of the Sioux were ossified like discursive amber in his memoir of life on the Oregon Trail in 1846. He noted: “The Ogillallah, the Brulé, and the other western bands of the Dahcotah, are thorough savages, unchanged by any contact with civilization.”^[57] Theodore Roosevelt’s four-volume series, The Winning of the West, is dedicated to Parkman, and echoes much of The Oregon Trail writer’s beliefs. Roosevelt wrote:

“The truth is the Indian never had any real title to the soil; they had not half so good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler and the pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”^[58]

Roosevelt’s assessment of justice favoring the settler and pioneer has a material element in terms of appropriate use of land. And in the Kennewick Man case, materiality takes human form in the skirmish over who can claim the ancient remains, and on whose side we find justice.

The linkages between acts of justice and sovereignty over relics and remains bring to mind how settler relationships with Native Americans had a fetishistic quality. The allure of the ancient skeleton’s identity in modern narratives recalls race science of the 1800s as well as the gentlemanly custom of acquiring exotic skulls.^[59]

Vestiges of race science can still be found in discourse and in practice. For $389—not counting taxes and shipping—you can buy your own replica of the Kennewick Man skull. The anthropologist who made a cast of the cranium and skeleton after it was dredged from the Columbia River sells copies of the skull through an online shop called Bone Clones, Inc. You can buy replicas of African, Asian, European and—of course—Native American skulls.