Elaine Dewar

Dewar has attempted to combine an investigation into the peopling of the Americas with a consideration of whether the researchers or the Native Americans should control the relics of the past. Unfortunately, the book is very uneven in quality, even disjointed, and if one might say that life is disjointed, it would still have behooved Dewar to examine the disconnects. I found it worth reading since I'm interested in the topic and she presents information that I haven't encountered before, but I did have to keep reminding myself not to grind my teeth. Both because of her attempt to catch the process of science as well as the results (which I applaud) and her many, many digressions (which I hated) I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wants to know what the present thought on the topic is.

I almost put the book down around page 10. In the first place, I wish authors would not attempt to sneak autobiographies into their books; even after Dewar's research gets going she tells us more than I care to know about her airplane flights and the places she eats. More significantly, it makes no difference to me if Native Americans came to this continent 99,999 years BP, or in 1450 AD or evolved here from Homo erectus migrants. They were here when the ancestors of anyone else living here came and were barbarously pushed aside. Even if they were just as violent as their supplanters, the point is that we are trying to create a new ethic against shoving aside people just because we can, similar to the attempt to abolish that other ancient and nearly universal human custom, slavery.

The book was fascinating for the next 300 pages or so as Dewar talks with various researchers about their own and other people's work often, admirably, allowing for rebuttals. (She was rather unhappy when James Chatters turned the tables and grilled her.) If that makes some of them look bad, well maybe they'll learn to stop shooting their mouths off. There is a world of difference between inquiring whether one's learned and esteemed colleague checked to make sure that there is no evidence of a forest fire that might have produced surprising ancient charcoal and making vicious accusations of incompetence and fraud when one has never actually examined the evidence. It is very significant to consider, in weighing the claims of researchers versus Native Americans, the care that scientific institutions have taken of the remains that they have in their hands already. I'm not learned enough in the subject myself to really judge her competence, but she sounded knowledgeable most of the time and the bibliography was impressive. There were one or two questions that made me wonder if she was bluffing, and she wasn't always entirely even-handed, but on the whole, she was pretty impressive.

The book flags seriously during her account of her trip to Brazil, largely because she spends more time recounting her trip and less recounting the research that I picked up this book to read about. At one point, she becomes fascinated by some ancient paintings and spends a great deal of time arguing about the intended subjects with her hosts. The argument strikes me as a waste of time, and potentially exasperating to her hosts, and it was utterly boring to read her repetitious account about it since with the exception of the cover (nearly indecipherable) and the dingbat, we can't see the pictures in question. This is especially frustrating: since I only read English this research is much less available to me than US or Canadian studies.

Her attempts to consider Native American sensibilities, on the other hand, while well-meaning, are a combination of arms-length sentimentality and New Age fuzzy thinking. Dewar does very little to seek out Native American informants, with the exception of a couple of story-tellers, and the information that she picks up from incidentally encountered informants makes it clear that their attitudes are not uniform. As a white journalist, she might find probing these issues difficult, and they are very complex (beginning with who is Native American and do traditionals have more right to control these decisions than the assimilated and/or christianized) but she would have done better to have dropped the pretense of representing their views and simply noted the controversy. This quarter-hearted effort merely becomes another pointless digression. A much better book is Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity by David Hurst Thomas.

One pipe-carrier that she meets tells her that the dead are dangerous. Dewar actually questions him a little, and elicits the information that for this reason, he thinks that all Native American remains must be buried even if they belong to a culture that does not share his beliefs. This gives her an idea of a "Curse of the Bones" which she spends the rest of the book looking for. She never asks how he applies his beliefs to non-Natives: the worst nightmare of the claimants in the Kennewick Man case must be that the anthropologists associated with the case will donate their remains to science, stipulating that they be used as anatomical displays in Washington state. She never examines the difference between fearing and respecting the dead; the latter opens the possibility of compromise, the former doesn't.

She pretty well shoots down her own arguments for considering legends as historical evidence when she argues that the story of Noah's flood fits well with the scientific descriptions of the retreat of the glaciers in North America., including massive extinctions of species. That last bit is exactly backwards: the point of Noah's ark is that while millions of animals presumably drowned, no species went extinct since Noah had at least one breeding pair on board. (The story about the unicorns missing the boat is not in Genesis.) Worse, Noah's tale is set in the area where Africa meets Eurasia. When in human history or prehistory was that area glaciated?… (meer)