And now:Sonja Keohane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
An interesting challenge to the repatriation process. A
quote from the article and an excerpt below:
"I'm not aware of anything quite like this," said Stephen Dow Beckham,
history professor at Lewis & Clark College and expert on Oregon
tribes. He said the case could chart new legal ground.
"Nagpra, I believe, normally is used for the recovery of special
objects like a carved fetish or a sacred bundle, a shaman's rattle, a
doctoring drum," Beckham said. "Whether a natural object qualifies,
not crafted and so on, for recovery under Nagpra may be a new field."
<http://www.oregonlive.com:80/news/99/11/st112103.html>
Tribe's rock of ages will test
federal repatriation laws
The Grand Ronde's claim to an ancient meteorite is a new front in the
fight about sacred objects
Sunday, November 21, 1999
By Courtenay Thompson of The Oregonian staff
WEST LINN -- Dick Pugh points out of his Ford pickup toward a slight
depression in the ground just off the road, a 9-foot-long hollow
where the largest meteorite found in the United States rested for
thousands of years.
Here, on a rare undeveloped hill above the historic town of
Willamette, covered with fallen oak leaves and sprouting blackberry,
the site doesn't look like a place of historic significance. But it
is.
"That's it," says Pugh, a meteorite aficionado and geology teacher
who has spent 40 years studying the history of the 16.1-ton
Willamette Meteorite. "There is five tons of rust right there."
The rest of the mostly intact 4.5-billion-year-old chunk of cosmic
iron was sold to a New York woman in 1905, who donated it to the
American Museum of Natural History in New York. It has been there
ever since.
Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde want to bring the
meteorite back to Oregon, using federal repatriation laws to have it
returned to them as a sacred object.
----end of excerpt----
