Haida Bones from NY Back to BC
The history of history in New York is always extremely interesting, especially if you like to think about how people think. It’s especially rich for mining the shifting points of view, as well as cultural attitudes, over time. There are a million places in the city that can keep you entranced for hours, and it’s considered by some to be a particularly intellectual city. This is where some of the best minds in the world come to visit, and often to live. It wasn’t very many decades ago when the best minds of the generation, at least in this city, did not give much thought to bones. In the interest of scientific discovery, bones were relics to examine, and that was all.
One of the more interesting museums in the world, of course, is the Museum of Natural History. It was always a fantastic weekend to book accommodation in Manhattan, and take my kids over the see the museum. They loved looking at bones, too, and it’s been interesting to see how their attitudes have changed over time. There was a time when holding 141 ancestral bones of the Haida was simply a matter of protocol. It’s what scientists did in the name of researching the human race, and it didn’t matter that there were Haida scholars and activists objecting.
Today, their objections seem much more logical and quite reasonable, and it’s a matter of honoring the spirits of the dead to keep them close to their original home. This case, in 2002, helped to bring some of the issues of Native rights to light. This was also the year that my eldest turned 10, right about the time when they start to ask deeper questions. She began to lose her blanket fascination with bones for their own sake, and started to question the origins. Whose bones are these? she wondered, and, What does the rest of the skeleton look like without this part? She, too, seemed happy to hear that they would be going home.