When the young man died, his family was understandably
upset.

But even in their state of grief, it was necessary to make the
proper funeral arrangements.

A spot would have to be secured for his final resting place. He
was a good son and brother, and the family believed he deserved the
best.

Finally, it was time to say goodbye forever. Very carefully and
lovingly, the family placed a few sentimental possessions with the
body. And then they left him in peace for what they believed would
be forever.

But it wasn’t.

About a thousand years later, a group of entrepreneurs leased
the land in eastern Oklahoma where the Spiro Mounds are located.
They dug through the site – earthen mounds filled with human
remains and artifacts – looking for objects to sell. Sometime
during the Great Depression, the young man’s final pieces of
property were sold on a little wooden table out in the open
air.

But the group had legally leased the land and all the rights
that went with it. In the eyes of the law, they were the rightful
owners of all the pieces of the past, everything from small pieces
of cloth to the physical remains of the original builders.

It was at this point in the 1930s that Oklahomans first started
asking themselves, “Who owns the past?” Oklahomans
continue to struggle for the answer to that question today.

Recent federal legislation has changed the way archaeologists,
museums and tribes treat artifacts. And the arguments have both
added to and subtracted from the strain on the relationship between
social scientists and the people they study.

Now no one is sure who owns the past.

The public’s outrage at the treatment of the Spiro Mounds
led to the creation of the state’s first preservation law for
the sites of ancient American- Indian cultures in 1936.

But they kept digging at Spiro. Instead of businessmen, the
diggers werearchaeologists taking down notes about everything they
found. They used the information to tell when people lived there,
who they were and who their descendants were. Objects and bodies
were still removed.

They were government property sent to museums and collections
around the state and country. The past was now the property of the
people of the United States.

Then the Civil Rights movement found the American-Indian
community.

People began to question the treatment of these sacred and human
remains, and another series of laws passed in the late 1980s and
early 1990s.

For the last 10 years, archaeologists, anthropologists, museum
specialists, tribal leaders and people of American-Indian
ancestryhave been trying to decide who legally owns the past and
the rights to the objects ancient people left behind.

The new laws state that all “sacred” items belong to
whoever is deemed the descendants of the original owners. But this
change has raised many questions about this continent’s past,
the way it’s seen and the way it’s taught.
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