Tribes given custody of Yellowstone park remains

By MIKE STARK
Of The Gazette Staff
January 21, 2006

In the summer of 1941, a work crew digging a sewer line in Yellowstone National Park came across the skeletal remains of a man and a scattering of burial objects, including two dog skulls, a chert knife and sharpened points.

Fifteen years later, remains of two other people were found nearby. This time it was a buried woman and an infant along with a dog.

For decades, the carefully preserved remains were kept in a storage room at Yellowstone. They were simply pieces of history never directly tied to any of the American Indian tribes that roamed the area for thousands of years.

But thanks to a federal law passed in 1990 and years of research, the remains - dated to the late prehistoric period - have been connected to tribes in Wyoming and Idaho.

Legal possession

This month, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe of the Wind River Reservation and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation are taking legal possession of their buried ancestors' bones.

The process of returning burial remains to the Indian tribes is the first of its kind in Yellowstone, said Rosemary Sucec, the park's cultural anthropologist.

It's also an important reminder that people were in Yellowstone long before explorers of European descent stumbled onto it.

"It graphically portrays human beings were on this landscape," Sucec said. "There's been 10,000 years of continuous indigenous occupation."

The return of the Yellowstone remains was nudged along by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The act requires federal agencies to look through their collections and identify sacred or cultural objects, burial items and remains and attempt to return them to American Indian tribes.

In Yellowstone, that meant delving into the stories of the native people who once used the park area.

Oral histories among several tribes indicate that Fishing Bridge was a common rendezvous site.

That's where the remains were found in 1941 and 1956.

1st burial site

The first burial site included a male, probably 35 to 45 years old, who was buried with more than 100 objects. Among them were a granite pounding stone, projectile points, a piece of an antler, stones, scrapers, flakes and the skulls of two dogs.

"It was clearly a man … who I suspect was buried with his tool kit and his dog," Sucec said.

Investigators identified two people at the burial site discovered in 1956: a 40- to 50-year-old woman and an infant. No other burial objects were found except the skeleton of a dog.

Park officials contacted a long list of Indian tribes with ties to the area and found three that said dogs were sometimes buried with people.

While it's still unclear when ancestors of the Shoshone tribes arrived on the Yellowstone Plateau, some historians say there's evidence that their presence stretches back 3,000 to 8,000 years, according to a report on the Yellowstone findings.

A Crow tribal historian said they, too, traveled through and sometimes lived on the Yellowstone Plateau.

Investigators narrowed the list to the two Shoshone tribes in Idaho and Wyoming because of the short stature of the remains found near Fishing Bridge.

The remains were not subjected to radiocarbon dating, but based on layering of the soil and other evidence, archaeologists believe they are from the late prehistoric period, a range generally figured between 400 A.D. and 1803.

In conducting their research, park officials invited tribal officials to Yellowstone to examine the location and the objects and to hear their stories.

The sessions made it easier to imagine that the area around Fishing Bridge was a popular stopping point for tribes, a place for marriages and ceremonies, games, hunting and socializing, Sucec said.

"It was exhilarating, like the convergence of past and present," Sucec said.

Everyone seemed to come away with something, she said.

"It's not just what we learn about the park, but it's renewing that connection with them and them renewing their relationship with the park," Sucec said.

Park officials notified the tribes last week that they can take over physical custody and legal ownership of the remains and the funeral objects.

A representative of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes said tribal leaders were discussing what they would do next and were not prepared to make a public statement. The Eastern Shoshone leader who has headed up the tribe's interest in the objects could not be reached for comment this week.

Sucec said it will be up to the tribes to decide whether the objects stay at Yellowstone or are taken back to the reservations.