Beyond the Burial Tree

The Argument

The histories record the conquest of Native America as the theft of land and the killing of people, both documented past argument. This book sets a third theft beside them. A people's authority over its own dead was seized, the right to decide where the ancestors rest and whether they stay present to the living, and that bond fits in no ledger of acres or casualties, which is why it has gone under-counted for a century. A people's hold on its dead is the thread by which it holds itself, the cord that makes one generation continuous with the last, and to sever it is to strike at a people's continuance.

The seizure ran through specific machinery. The dead were dug from graves and battlefields and lifted from the freshly buried, then measured, numbered, and shelved in universities, historical societies, and the medical collections of the Army, where an order of 1868 called for Native skulls to be gathered for study. Two conditions made the scale of it possible. Disease and removal killed faster than a people could bury its dead in the old way, and the theft of the land carried the theft of the graves inside it, since the deed that transferred a quarter section transferred the burial ground on it without a word.

The argument measures the country against its own standard. It treats the recovery of its war dead as a sacred duty, counts the desecration of a cemetery as an attack on a whole people, and helped give the erasure of a group's graves a name in the vocabulary of atrocity. That same country spent more than a century doing to the Native dead exactly what it condemned when others did it. All of it happened in full view of a respect for the dead the conquerors claimed as the first mark of civilization, and withheld at home.

The book is exact where the easy version of this story is loose. What was taken was never a matter of tree-burial against ground-burial, since Native nations kept no single rite, and the Pawnee themselves most often buried in the earth on the bluffs above their rivers. It turns instead on authority and continuity, on who held the right to dig. The closing chapters follow the return the Pawnee forced into law and carried out with their own hands, the reburials in the valley of the wolf, and the boxes that sit unopened still, because the account this book gives is real and nowhere near finished.

Table of Contents

A Note on Terminology

Introduction. The Conquest You Cannot Survey

Chapter One. The Wolf River

Chapter Two. The Visible Dead

Chapter Three. The Crime of Grief

Chapter Four. The Dance for the Dead

Chapter Five. The Lost Grave

Chapter Six. The Specimen

Chapter Seven. The Right of Return

Chapter Eight. Still on the Shelves

Chapter Nine. Home to the Wolf River

Chapter Ten. The Children Return

Chapter Eleven. Hidden Again

Chapter Twelve. The Speed of Death

Chapter Thirteen. The Slow Death

Chapter Fourteen. Stolen Ground, Stolen Graves

Chapter Fifteen. The House That Death Built

Chapter Sixteen. Beyond the Burial Tree

Conclusion. The Valley of the Wolf

Notes · Bibliography · Glossary · About the Author · Also by David Boles

The Epigraphs

"To aid in the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of the aboriginal races of North America."

Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, circular on the collection of Native crania for the Army Medical Museum, 1868

"Set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named."

Treaty of Fort Laramie, 1868, Article II

"The ownership or control of Native American cultural items ... shall be ... in the case of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects, in the lineal descendants of the Native American."

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990

What the Book Traces

From a boy climbing the walls of Fort Hartsuff who could not have told you the river's name meant wolf, through the Skidi who held themselves the children of the Morning Star and the Evening Star and built their houses to the pattern of the sky, through the graves on the bluffs above the Loup and the wagons that carried the dead off to be measured and numbered, through the schoolrooms at Genoa where Pawnee children were sent to be remade, through the courtroom and the legislature where the Pawnee forced the country to give their ancestors back, to the reburials in the valley of the wolf and the boxes that sit unopened on shelves to this day. The cases run across more than a century and the length of a river. The theft stays the same. Naming it, setting it beside the theft of the land and the killing of the people, and standing with the nation that forced the return is the work of the book.

A Note on the Free PDF

A book about a people whose dead were carried out of reach has no business sitting behind a paywall. The free PDF is a complete reading edition, set at five and a half by eight and a half inches with the cover as its first page, the body in Crimson Text, every font embedded so the file reads the same on any machine, a clickable table of contents, and a bookmark panel that runs from the note on terminology through every chapter to the bibliography. Download it, read it, and pass it to anyone who should know what was taken and what it will take to return it.

Dedication

For Janna, and for the valley that raised me, and the people it was taken from.