In August, the National Park Service turned over to the Navajo Tribe three ancient Indian shields found in Capitol Reef National Park. The action, says a legal scholar, reflects a fundamental weakness of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Debora L. Threedy, law professor and the associate dean of the University of Utah College of Law, is writing a study of the incident.
The federal act, known among archaeologists by its initials NAGPRA, requires the repatriation to Indian tribes of human remains and sacred items that have an association with particular tribes.
The buffalo-hide shields were made between 1420 and 1640, according to carbon dating. They were discovered in 1926 in what later became Capitol Reef by Ephraim P. Pectol, whose work to establish the park earned him the sobriquet, Father of Capitol Reef National Park.
The Park Service later confiscated the shields and put them on display in the Capitol Reef visitor center. A few years after NAGPRA became law in 1990, a Pueblo tribal expert visiting the park noticed the shields and said they might be ceremonial items. Whether shields, ordinarily designed for warfare, are sacred objects may be debatable to some. But the comment triggered a NAGPRA consultation process in which the Park Service sent word to tribes asking if they had a claim.
The Pueblo people did not seek to obtain the shields. Claims were filed by Utes from Fort Duchesne, Uintah County; the Kaibab Paiutes from Fredonia, Ariz.; Utes from Colorado; and the Navajos.
According to the National Park Service's Administrative History of Capitol Reef, the inhabitants of the region after about AD 700 were first, Fremont and Anasazi, and later, Southern Paiutes and Utes. The Administrative History mentions hunting trips by Navajos, whose present reservation is far to the south.
But the Navajos claim was accompanied by oral tradition that the shields had been hidden at this site during wartime by the grandfather of an elderly Navajo medicine man. And NAGPRA states that cultural affiliation with an object may be demonstrated by "geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical or other relevant information or expert opinion."
Relatives of Pectol would like to be able to see the shields and pay their respects to Ephraim and Dorothy Pectol "as well as to those people who created them," said Neal P. Busk, Richfield, grandson of the Pectols. "Some of the Pectol family members feel a very close spiritual connection to the shields."
Busk respects oral tradition but, "My Western view is that it should not be used as the determining factor in a legal case," he commented.
"We would like to see the shields displayed as they have been for so many years, at Capitol Reef National Park, where they were found," Busk added in an e-mail. "If that is not possible, then the Pectol family would like the shields held in common for all of the tribes in a safe place if and until a tribe makes a definitive claim."
Marklyn A. Chee, cultural specialist with the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department, said the shields are kept in the Navajo museum. They don't belong to the medicine man involved and don't belong to the museum but "to the people," he said.
"They are kept in the museum, and they are not on display. I repeat, not on display. . . . They are for ceremonial purposes and they have been reintroduced into ceremonial use."
The shields were handed down through a particular line for eight or nine generations before Kit Carson rounded up Navajos, he said. (That shameful round-up and forced exodus, known as the "the Long Walk," was in the 1860s.)
At that time, they were put away because "they did not want those shields to fall into military control," Chee said.
Could non-Navajo scientists view them? the Deseret Morning News asked in a telephone interview. "They are not to be looked at," Chee said. "And that was part of the repatriation agreement we had."
The shields were meant for the protection of all Navajo people, he added. Oral tradition is only part of the reason the Park Service awarded the shields to the Navajos, he said. A chanter in the tribe "described the shields in great detail, having never seen them," he said.
Also, he said, markings on the shields have meaning to the Navajos. They are "esoteric meaning that I cannot share with you."
What about the fact that they were found in Capitol Reef? "That was our aboriginal use area," Chee said.
Asked how he knows that, he replied, "The oral history also."
Navajos are "happy to see those back," he said.
Threedy believes the Park Service followed the law and did what was required under NAGPRA.
However, she said, "The act requires archaeologists to make a legal determination" of a type not appropriate to archaeologists.
"From a scientific point of view, the best you can say about those shields is that their provenance is not known," Threedy said.
The upshot of the law's action is that these priceless shields, discovered in Utah and once the property of all Americans, are now locked away from view in the Navajo museum in Window Rock, Ariz.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com