Thread by @KaitlinCurtice

washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02…

So, a missionary steals the remains of over 500 Native bodies, and here's a report on it.

First, @CBS has a video of it, and I'll say a few things about that.

Let's just get this out of the way: Native bodies ARE NOT artifacts, and we need to be clear about that.

They interviewed a few different people here, including Pete Coffey, a tribal official with North Dakota’s Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. He says:

“All too often here we have been treated as curiosities rather than a people,”

@washingtonpost says in the article, "The ghoulish crime of digging up long-dormant graves has been an ongoing source of frustration for Native American communities."

It's more than that.
It's an atrocity.

If you are non-Native, think about a relative that is dear to your heart, who is buried in a cemetery somewhere in America. Imagine their grave is dug up and their bones are displayed in someone's basement for years, or in a museum, or in a university for "anthropology" studies.

Imagine.
It's a little more than a frustration.

At the end of the CBS video, one of the news anchors says, "Huh. Very unusual."
This is another instance in America in which we don't even have words to process the truth.
Nevertheless, we have to.

For generations, the Indigenous experience has been seen as something to be studied, but from a distance. Who will take personal and collective responsibility for what has happened?

The church?
The government?
The people on the Mayflower?
The ancestors of those people?

We need to get deeper, once again, into this conversation abt missions. A missionary hides remains of sacredly created and loved people in his basement, and we applaud our missionaries for doing the work of the gospel?

Once again, we must ask what Christianity is actually doing.

We must ask what our anthropology departments are actually doing.
We must ask what our government is actually doing.
We must ask what our healthcare system is actually doing.

Every American system is tied to the history of genocide & oppression of Indigenous peoples.

And I'm not going to give you an answer here.
This is a "let's sit in this and grieve and face the truth" kind of moment.
You can't do anything for Native peoples if you don't acknowledge what we've seen and been through.

Start there today.
Make room.
Get to work later.

"As 1971 opened it became apparent that the issue of grave robbing had not yet been satisfactorily resolved...Their (white people's) education had taught them that almost all the Indians were dead, so they promptly began to search for dead Indians." - Vine Deloria Jr. God is Red