Grave Matters: Burial Practices Affecting Indigenous and African American Populations
By Joseph Golden
As the final and most unsettling of the ‘rites of passage’ (van Gennep, 1960), death is immensely significant to any society, and we continue to learn much from studying a culture’s reaction to mortality. While creating cemetery sites serves the dead, burial grounds can also provide significant cultural spaces essential to the traditions of the living. The cemetery links the past to the present in tangible and intangible ways. For instance, it lets us see multigenerational relationships and extended family histories and reflect on them. The burial sites of previous societies have great potential for academic study (Pardoe, 1988). Archaeologists often examine burial grounds through the lens of a “deathscape,” which focuses on the diverse cultural practices associated with death: from disease and death to funerary behavior, burial, and memorialization (Meade, 2020). The archaeological examination of death can discover many themes involving identity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, religious association, and socioeconomic position) (Meade, 2020). Therefore, the analysis of cemetery sites is critical to the insight of many aspects of a given culture.
For Western societies, understanding the past is essential to the future. Equally, Native Americans believe that any method of archaeological investigation at any burial site constitutes desecration (Kosslak, 1999). For those burial grounds regarded as sacred, the site where a body was placed is considered permanent regardless of the innate lack of the whole body itself and worthy of protection for eternity. The long history of abuse towards Native Americans and scientific appropriation of Native American cultural material indicates the need for more excellent protection for Native American burial sites and more careful control over the removal of Native American human remains and sacred objects. For almost 100 years, Native Americans struggled to regain possession of sacred objects, the remains of their ancestors, and the protection of the burial sites of their dead (Dresser, 2017). The failure of the American legal system to protect Indian burial sites has been attributed in part to the lack of access to courts by American Indians when the courts and state legislators were enacting specific statutes for cemeteries and burials (Kosslak, 1999).
We can uncover the abuse of Native American human remains and cultural objects for over 400 years. When arriving in the New World in 1620, the pilgrims began searching an abandoned village, as well as graves. Winslow (1622) states, “We opened the less bundle likewise, and found . . .the bones and head of a little child, about the legs, and other parts of it was bound strings, and bracelets of fine white beads . . .we brought sundry of the prettiest things away with us and covered the corpse up again.” (Heath,1986). The earliest archaeological studies in the United States frequently included the excavation of human remains, often clearly intended to locate and examine Native American burials, with the exhumed relics intended for exhibition in museums or personal collections (Hertzberg 1979; Trigger 2008). Indigenous people were deemed artifacts of ancient history. Early museum exhibits depicted Native Americans alongside dinosaur bones (Dresser, 2017).
Public interest in gathering Native American remains began by Dr. Samuel Morton in the 1840s, who collected significant amounts of Indian crania to demonstrate that, through skull measurements, the American Indian was racially inferior and destined to extinction. His craniometric analysis, then, brought about racialized categories. (Geller, 2020). Morton grouped Native Americans as scientifically inferior to the “Caucasian Race.” Those who possessed a “brown complexion (54)” were “slow in acquiring knowledge (54).” The government used Morton’s theory to legitimize their forced relocation and eradication. The Surgeon General’s Order of 1868 became official federal policy, which directed army personnel to acquire Indian crania and other body fragments for the Army Medical Museum.’ Consequently, “over 4000 heads were taken from battlefields, POW camps, hospitals, fresh graves, and burial scaffolds across the country (55).”
In the early 1880s, Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a Norwegian explorer, was recruited by a German museum to explore Alaska and find and take back as many authentic Native cultural items as possible. He returned with over 7,000 artifacts, often disturbing burial sites without permission (Gannon, 2018). His travelogue is cluttered with scientific accounts of grave-robbing: “… [W]e went to an old cemetery near Koskimo,” he records, “where we got three exquisite, deformed skulls to rescue them for scientific purposes” (Fisher, 1979). Jacobsen also describes finding the grave of a mother and child. The bodies were crumbling in his hands, so he took the mother’s skull and threw out the cradle contents. Jacobsen rationalized his worldview in his journal, he describes coming across a memorial to an indigenous person: “Since this monument would be admired by many more people in the newly completed Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin than here on the banks of the Yukon, and since it was made to be seen, I took it with me” (Fisher, 1979).
Regarded as a disappearing culture, amassing Native American artifacts and human remains reached notoriety during the late 18th century when grave looting and robbing by soldiers, pot hunters, private citizens became standard (Dresser, 2017). Scientists were given free legal rein over Native sites by the Antiquities Act of 1906, which led to museums, federal agencies, and private collectors to amass extensive collections of Native American cultural objects, and human remains. By the end of the 20th century, they were estimated to be in the millions (figure 4). Until late into the 20th century, many of the protections designated to cemeteries and unmarked graves effectively did not apply to Native American or African American remains. All 50 states had passed statutes to regulate the disruption of human remains, the administration of cemeteries, and outlaw damage and desecration. However, the wording applied explicitly to recognized cemeteries, which means a Western cemetery concept that failed to consider indigenous and African American burial practices and mortuary traditions. Instead, only marked graves and actively used cemeteries were protected (Trope & Echo-Hawk, 1992), and Western beliefs about burials, the afterlife, and the scientific imperative were uncritically applied to archaeological fieldwork (Riggs, 2017). Further, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1974 deemed human remains and sacred objects as archaeological resources, and the law did nothing to expel existing collections (Kosslak, 1999).
In 1990, there was a significant change in how archaeology was operated in the United States with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which is a critical section of the legislation that protects and repatriates Native American and Native Hawaiian cultural items — human remains funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony (United States Congress 1990:169). The guiding influence behind this act is the fundamental human right to cultural heritage and respect of that heritage. NAGPRA defines consulting methods with tribes to protect existing graves and cultural materials, outlines methods to follow if and when human remains are discovered or excavated and imposes criminal penalties for the trafficking of human remains and NAGPRA related items. (Suagee, 1996).
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires federal agencies to repatriate or transfer human remains and other cultural items to the appropriate community. Separately from broad historic preservation policies, no comparable federal law or act authorizes broad protections of African American graveyards. America’s historic burial grounds, including sites of enslaved people and historically Black cemeteries are cultural treasures; however, they encounter various threats, including uninformed property owners, petty vandalism, and grave robbing (Burg, 2008). These burial sites have been systemically abandoned, destroyed, or endangered for decades; with the graves of enslaved people and their relatives frequently unmarked, development projects have razed unofficial cemeteries (Blakey, 2006). Across the United States, from the late 1800s and ongoing today, African American burial grounds were landfilled, leveled, or destroyed by developments, roads, infrastructure, and housing (Jones, 2021).
In the Antebellum South, enslaved African Americans died by the thousands. One study found that on the Georgia and South Carolina coastal rice plantations, nearly 90% of all enslaved children died before they reached adulthood (Chicora Foundation, 1996). Enslaved people were forced to find creative ways to honor their dead due to widespread white fear that every black group coming together could be a chance to formulate an escape from the plantation, so these funeral traditions were usually scrutinized and crushed by overseers (Brown, 2018). As a direct reflection of the lack of humane treatment they granted the enslaved while alive, slaveholders didn’t take the trouble to honor those who died (Brown, 2018). The enslaved used non-traditional grave markers in group-run cemeteries throughout the slaveholding states, often shrouded in secrecy as a form of protection. Burials usually took place at night on land that the master wasn’t likely to use for other purposes (McMickle, 2002). Some graves were marked using plants, reflecting an African belief in the living spirit (Chicora Foundation, 1996). As well as personal objects, some Black graves were adorned with white seashells and pebbles, indicating the watering atmosphere at the bottom of the ocean or a lake or river (McMickle, 2002). Black Americans found a way to take ownership of the final resting places of their people. “The cemetery may well have taken on special significance,” Blakey (2006) writes, “for affirming that [the Africans] were human beings, for preserving cultures, and for maintaining a sense of hopefulness.”
Today, more than 2,000 African American bodies are in museums, medical anthologies, and academies across the United States. Until the early twentieth century, Black cemeteries were pillaged in the name of research. In 1989, thousands of remains were discovered by construction crews at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. The bodies had been robbed from a cemetery for Augusta’s Black residents between 1835 and 1913 (Berry, 2017). In another case, the body of the freedom fighter, Nat Turner, hanged and skinned in 1831 for leading a rebellion, was entered into the ‘cadaver trade,’ for anatomy classrooms in the U.S. (Berry, 2017).
To protect cemeteries, the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 requires evidence that they achieved historical meaning, are linked with historical events, can yield historical data, or contain the graves of people of “transcendent importance.” That essential data can be challenging to provide for many African Americans. For marginalized, poorly documented graveyards, this is difficult or impossible. The graves of historically enslaved people are scattered across the country, with many unmarked and left out of state and federal records (Burg, 2008). Black burial grounds, a few holding several thousand, are currently in danger of being lost, several before they have been found, as the climate crisis and urban growth deepen (Brown, 2018). Scholars, administrators, and community leaders are organizing initiatives to document these spaces to prevent that from happening. Part of this effort is reframing the public awareness of cemeteries as rich cultural assets worth both protecting and investigating.
Escalating urbanization and gentrification has led to the swift expansion of some of America’s largest cities. As urban space becomes short supply, African American heritage sites confront escalating threats from developers and city planners (Brown, 2018). Contemporary American sentiments typically recognize cemeteries as sacred spaces preserved in eternity, with careful attention, dignity, and respect. African American cemeteries have suffered from years of official neglect and government policies that ignored or devalued their significance to U.S. history. Concurrently, researchers must strike a balance between the interest in the scientific examination of skeletal remains and the appreciation that all Americans, from all cultures, have a religious and spiritual reverence for the remains of their ancestors (Suagee, 1996). The solution will be to discover a means to respond to their many questions while simultaneously acknowledging the appropriate treatment of their ancestors. We can make a difference by changing our thinking about archaeological resources. We need to view them not as curiosities but as tangible reminders of living communities both past and present.
References
1906 American Antiquities Act of 1906: 16 USC 431–433, June 8, 1906. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office
1974 Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, Amended Reservoir Salvage Act, May 24, 1974. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office.
1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: 25 USC 3001, November 16, 1990. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Blakey, M. (2006). Chapter 1. Introduction. New York African Burial Ground Skeletal Biology Final Report, 1.
Burg, S. B. (2008). “From Troubled Ground to Common Ground”: The Locust Grove African American Cemetery Restoration Project: A Case Study of Service-Learning and Community History. The Public Historian, 30(2), 51–82.
Dresser, J. (2017). “Native American Artifacts Tell a Story of Loss, Betrayal and Survival.” PBS Independent Lens, January 11; https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/native-american-artifacts/
Fisher, R. (1979). Alaskan Voyage, 1881–1883: An Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America by Johan Adrian Jacobsen, and: These Mountains are our Sacred Placee Story of the Stoney Indians by Chief John Snow. The Canadian Historical Review, 60(1), 82–84.
Gannon, M. (2018) “After 130 Years, the Spoils of a Grave-Plundering Explorer Are Returning to Alaska.” Atlas Obscura, May 18th. Retrieved from: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/alaska-stolen-artifacts-mummy-returned
Heath, D. B. (Ed.). (1986). Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Applewood Books.
Hertzberg, H. W. (1979). “Nationality, anthropology, and Pan-Indianism in the life of Arthur C. Parker (Seneca).” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 123(1), 47–72.
King, T. (1998) Cultural Resource Laws and Practice: An Introductory Guide. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, California.
Kosslak, R. M. (1999). The Native American graves protection and repatriation act: the death knell for scientific study?. American Indian Law Review, 24(1), 129–151. Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1255&context=ailr
Meade, E. (2020) “Prepare for Death and F e for Death and Follow Me:” An Follow Me:” An Archaeological Survey of the Historic Period Cemeteries of New York City. Dissertation, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Retrieved from: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4778&context=gc_etds
Pardoe, C. (1988). “The cemetery as symbol. The distribution of prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds in southeastern Australia.” Archaeology in Oceania, 23(1), 1–16.
Trope, J. F., & Echo-Hawk, W. R. (1992). Native American graves protection and repatriation act: background and legislative history, The. Ariz. St. LJ, 24, 35.
Van Gennep, A. (1960) The rites of passage, translated from the 1917 Masson, Paris edition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Trigger, Bruce. “A history of archaeology thought.” (2008): 128–134.
Geller, P. L. (2020). Building Nation, Becoming Object: The Bio-Politics of the Samuel G. Morton Crania Collection. Historical Archaeology, 54(1), 52–70.
Suagee, D. B. (1996). Tribal Voices in Historic Preservation: Sacred Landscapes, Cross-Cultural Bridges, and Common Ground. Vt. L. Rev., 21, 145.
Riggs, C. (2017) “Confronting Cultural Imperialism in Native American Archaeology.” Anthropology Magazine, August 10. Retrieved from: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/native-american-archaeology/
Berry, D. R. (2017). The price for their pound of flesh: The value of the enslaved, from womb to grave, in the building of a nation. Beacon Press.
Jones, A. (2021) Stop Destroying African American Cemeteries. Anthropology Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/african-american-cemeteries-destruction/
McMickle. M. A. (2002) African Burial Customs in America, a story. An Encyclopedia of African American Christian Heritage. Judson Press. Retrieved from: https://aaregistry.org/story/slaves-brought-burial-customs-from-africa-to-the-united-states/
The Chicora Foundation (1996) Grave Matters: The Preservation of African American Cemeteries. University of South Carolina, Columbia.
