August 27: Whose Past Is It?

Before we left  Blanding, I wanted to speak with the curator at the Edge of Cedars Museum regarding their rock art database.

Unfortunately, she was on vacation, but I did get to speak extensively with one of her assistants.  On each of our visits to the museum, which has a fine collection of prehistoric local artifacts, we noticed a conspicuous absence of Native Americans and of local residents.  That had puzzled me since there was a major Native American Cultural Center only a few blocks away and an extension college of the Utah State University system even closer, serving the SE Utah Navajo and Ute population in particular.

It turns out that Navajo children are discouraged from exploring the museum.  The Navajo, especially, still have taboos about ancestral Puebloan ruins and the spiritual forces of the dead that may still haunt the remains.  The assistant explained that she was meeting with representatives of the college to explore greater collaborative efforts in the future.  I had read about these sorts of animosities but I was surprised to discover that they are still so vivid.

We also discussed the collections that some local residents had turned over to the museum, either out of guilt or fear of prosecution.  The assistant's reaction revealed that the issue of "pot-hunting" in SE Utah was still a sore subject distancing the museum and local residents.

I knew Blanding had a reputation for exploiting the many local ruins, but I had no idea of just how serious the issue was until I read the chapter on illegal pot-hunting in Blanding, Utah, in Craig Childs' book, Finders, Keepers.  It is a fascinating look at the conflict between popular American attitudes and the concerns of the federal government and the scholarly community.

As recently as 2009, 150 federal agents, guns drawn, raided homes in the Blanding area in an operation called "Cerberus Action."  Unable to identify the professional pot-hunters who now use heliocopters and radar to loot sites in SE Utah, the agents went after local citizens whose "collecting" habits were well known.  Removing prehistoric artifacts from protected sites is a felony, with severe financial and prison penalties.  These were respectable citizens, including lawyers, doctors, and honored citizens--caught on surveillance tape recordings.  One was a member of Utah's Tourism Hall of Fame.  Another was the 60-year town doctor and his wife.  He was a respected member of the Mormon community.  He committed suicide the day after posting bail.  Eventually, the case collapsed in 2010 when the chief prosecution informant and witness himself committed suicide.

The area is so rich in artifacts that Mormon families used to take shovels and buckets on Sunday picnics, according to Childs.  In his words, the SE corner of Utah "is an archaeological mecca, one of the richest zones in North America if you want to walk around picking up pots and baskets  Over the past century, with a shovel you could have found anything your heart desired--sandals, skeletons, turquoise ornaments, carved shells."  Collecting artifacts often happened out of a desire to respect and preserve the past from less scrupulous or indifferent explorers.  (We will find the same issue haunting Mesa Verde history.)

As one family member protested, "This is our passion.  Why should we be assaulted for it?"

My guess is that museum staffs and professional archeologists are now seen as collaborators in an "unfair" federal policy to attack private citizens.  There is a lot of resentment at federal take-over of important archaeological and geological sites in the West, going back to the creation of the National Park System and its continued expansion.

It is an important moral issue to ponder.  As Childs notes with empathetic sympathy for the local collectors and for the need to protect the past, "Only the easiest targets were caught, mostly old-school diggers.  Who they did not catch were aerial investors and those actively traveling from site to site with industrious efficiency, people far too savvy to let their names slip to locals."

I realized that issues of archaeology, history, and scholarship are politically charged even today.  Old animosities die hard.  To whom does the past "belong"?

Perhaps that is why the Edge of Cedars has had to fight to stay open, in the face of threats of defunding from the Utah state legislature.