death. The Lakota didn’t have a written language then, so only Euro-American records are available for us to reconstruct his life. After death, Albert, for the most part, had become anonymous, lost even to his family who never learned why he hadn’t returned home from his time with Buffalo Bill, and, except for photographs that Indian art collectors cherish in the Library of Congress, memory of him became obscured through time. As a result, we have taken more liberties with the telling of Albert’s story, reading between the lines and even going so far as to suggest motives for his leaving Pine Ridge. ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia had a profound effect on the Euro-American culture; Afraid of Hawk barely had the opportunity to penetrate it.
The physical remains of both men were archaeologically “resurrected” from their graves and welcomed home to great acclaim from long, arduous journeys. The parallels to their stories are striking. This book is an account of their lives, the histories of their people, and our experience repatriating their physical remains, an experience that has left me with a profound respect for the importance of family, heritage, and spirituality among Native communities in response to changes in the modern world and giving rise to my own personal journey as an archaeologist. In the spirit of Indigenous oral tradition, our approach in chronicling both long journeys home is through storytelling rather than scientific treatise. The danger of this approach is unintended romanticizing. The journeys they embarked upon were rites of passage, exhibiting universal elements of “separation, initiation, and return,”2 and, as a result, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Afraid of Hawk have inadvertently become champions who reappeared to bestow promise, cultural continuity, and pride to their people. They are links to a cultural past that has been modified greatly by the modern world system. Their stories are inspiring and have contemporary connotations. Our challenge has been to introduce Henry and Albert to the reader in pragmatic, unsentimental ways without losing the moving experiences of their personal tragedies and the inspiration they provide to their descendants. My intent is to memorialize and celebrate Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Albert Afraid of Hawk, not idealize them, though perhaps because of our personal involvement, I may fail at times.
When I began my study of, and subsequent career in, archaeology over forty years ago, contemporary Native Hawaiian/Native American communities and anthropological archaeologists rarely communicated. Archaeologists piously believed that they were the scientists, the PhDs, the experts in antiquity. What could contemporary Indigenous Peoples tell us about their unwritten past that has been so changed, so distant, and so unlike their lives today? They surely had lost too much to ever recall their unrecorded cultural history.
This view of Indigenous Peoples’ ability to tell their own stories contained unintended and, at times, intended Western racist undertones. Archaeologists felt no compelling need for consultation with tribes. We analyzed pottery shards and stone points, wrote manuscripts about the cultural behavior of “prehistoric peoples” and made careers without regard to, or input from, the descendants that manufactured the objects of our study. We simply did not appreciate how our research into the distant past affected the lives of living people. Accordingly Native Peoples viewed archaeologists as part of the exploitative system of Western society that killed millions of their ancestors, took their land, and left them impoverished on reservations of the U. S. government’s making. We took, rarely gave back, and never associated with them.
I distinctly remember attending a powwow in the mid-1980s and hearing Dakota actor and activist Floyd (Red Crow) Westerman express his indignation through an audio speaker heard throughout the entire fair grounds, that Indian people had two enemies in this world: the FBI and archaeologists! I was stunned when he said that.3 I didn’t get it. How could he compare archaeologists, me, to the sometimes strong-handed tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Indian reservations? After all, weren’t we working to preserve Native American heritage, to help them restore their cultural past?
“Archaeologists,” Red Crow explained, “dig up the bones of our ancestors, study them in laboratories, and exhibit them for people to gawk at. Archaeologists hold our ancestors prisoners in museums! And the FBI unjustifiably arrest and hold our young Indian men in federal prisons! Prisons for our ancestors! Prisons for our youth today! They are both our enemies!”4
Over the years I had nurtured developing friendships within the Connecticut Native American community, and nervously I scanned the fair grounds wondering whether they looked on me as an enemy. I was confused, angry, and ashamed—all at the same time. They were infuriated; we were arrogant. Neither side understood one another or seemed to care to.
As an undergraduate student in anthropology I had read treatises by the Lakota scholar Vine DeLoria, Jr., who harshly criticized anthropologists citing our motivations as benefiting ourselves and doing nothing to respect the concerns of Native Americans who were against our actions perpetrated in the name of “science.”5 With the rise of Red Power in the 1970s, Indian activists expressed their distress by disrupting archaeological excavations, conducting “sit-ins” at museums, and organizing “The Longest Walk” from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to bring attention to Native American anxieties about the desecration archaeologists were wreaking at burial sites across the country and the museums that housed the bones of their ancestors on hidden storage shelves. I understood these concerns intellectually, but not emotionally; after all, I was training to be a scientist and convinced myself that our work, in the long run, would benefit the Native American community. Nonetheless, Indian activism was bringing about a change within our science and a lot of soul-searching.
In the early 1980s, I was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut entrusted with the forensic analyses of seven Indian skeletons earmarked for the first-ever Native American reburials in the state by the Connecticut Indian Affairs Council. Invited afterwards to the re-interment ceremony, I met a young Native man who seemed to have nothing but contempt for me. We launched into a long discussion, really a debate/argument, on the treatment of human skeletal remains. By handling the remains I was playing with fire, he warned me, a nuclear energy that would subsume me because of my “disrespectful work.” I responded with hopes that my “forensic work” made the reburials more personal since I was able to give description to each individual—sex, age, diseases, life stress pathologies, and traumas—by letting their “bones” speak to their personal histories from hundreds of years ago. I hoped that our work made the ceremony more meaningful. The young Native man counter-argued that he didn’t need science for him to hear his ancestors’ stories; he heard their voices whenever he sang to them in the forest. It was all he needed to know. I countered that I heard them, too, but through the physical study of their “bones.” We parted not truly comprehending each other’s perspective: mine steeped in western material science, his embedded in Native spiritualism.
Five years later when I became the state archaeologist with the role and responsibility to work with Indigenous Nations over their concerns about archaeology, vandalism, and the adverse effect of construction activities on sacred sites, I began to meet regularly with tribal representatives, participating in powwows and other gatherings. Gradually, I was developing an understanding and sensitivity through dialogue and personal relationships. While I was going through this incipient transformation in the late 1980s, I met Maria Pearson (Hai-Meacha Eunka, Running Moccasins), a Yankton Sioux woman who became the “voice” for the pan-Native American reburial movement. Maria and a nationwide delegation of tribal leaders had been invited to the annual meeting of the National Association of State Archaeologists to address their concerns over the differential treatment of Indian burials by state governments.
Maria related an account that simply put the issue into perspective for me. Her husband, John, she told our gathering, worked for the Iowa Department of Transportation, and one day he came home telling a troublesome story. An unmarked pioneer cemetery had been encountered during road construction activities. All the remains were removed and reburied into another cemetery except those identified as a young Indian woman and her baby, whose skeletons were sent to the state archaeologist for study and repository. Maria was astonished. Why were the two Native burials treated differently than the white burials?
