Description

This conference presentation, given at the Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Conference in Silver Springs, MD in 2001, identifies the prime institutional driving motive behind contests over the possession of Native remains by white-dominated museums. I claim that for such museums and private collectors, the native body serves as an ideological fetish, in which possession of the body serves as a magical and legitimate appropriate of the land. I examine this proposition through recent (at the time, 2001) controversies over the disposition of pre-colonial bodies, especially that of the so-called "Kennewick Man," then housed in the basement of the Burke Museum of Anthropology at the University of Washington, where I was a Master's student.