Completing the circle
Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006
FAYETTEVILLE — Carrie Wilson has a heart very near to her father acclaimed artist Charles Banks Wilson. Her dad saved the past by capturing American Indians’ faces with strokes of a pencil. She’s working to preserve the past by making sure human remains and other artifacts are properly and respectfully cared for. During about six decades, her father traveled around Oklahoma, Arkansas and other states drawing and painting American Indians of single-tribe heritage. Tribes in Arkansas included Quapaw, Caddo, Osage, Cherokee and Peoria, and his subjects were often tribal elders. She works as program director for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation for the Osage and Quapaw tribes. She grew up in the Miami, Okla., area, where the Quapaw tribe was relocated after coming from land that became Arkansas. Her mother, who died last year, was a member of the Quapaw tribe. Her 88-year-old father lives in Fayetteville.
Wilson says her dad discouraged her from going into commercial art, so she got a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She later did research at the Smithsonian Institution and attended George Washington University.
As a woman of American Indian heritage, she often feels she’s trying to prove herself. Many would call her “formidable,” she says.
Her uncle, Jesse McKibben, is a former chairman of the Quapaw tribe, which has about 3, 000 members. He says she is knowledgeable about the tribes and the law, and she faces challenges with grit and grace.
“Carrie can handle her own and just about anybody,” he says. “I think the tribe ought to be real proud.” That trait blossomed years ago.
After becoming Miss Indian Oklahoma in 1974, Wilson tried to get a college scholarship, but there were none for American Indians. She spoke before the Arkansas Legislature and was awarded a heritage scholarship that came from funds originally intended for a football scholarship. But hers was a one-time scholarship. She later helped establish in-state tuition for individual tribes in Arkansas.
When she was Miss Indian Oklahoma, she wore clothing that represented the more than 30 tribes that had been relocated to Oklahoma, and she felt a connection to all tribes. She used to frequent powwows, and she’d recommend interesting faces to her dad to draw.
“I never think of myself as representing one tribe because my focus is Indian people,” she says.
Wilson, 51, works under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a federal law passed in November 1990. This provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return cultural items to descendants or culturally affiliated tribes.
When the Quapaw tribe got its first grant, part of it covered training. Wilson attended classes in Washington and occasionally attends refresher courses.
She is actively repatriating human remains and other artifacts that originated in Arkansas. These include funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural heritage.
“A lot of times, people would just go in and take the pottery and leave the remains,” she says.
She’s helped recover the remains of 500 people and repatriated 27, 000 cultural items and associated funerary items. Her two adult sons, Benjamin and Solomon, tell her she’s on “bone patrol.” “Doing what I’m doing, there is never a dull moment,” she says. “There’s always something going on someplace.” A respect for the past drew her to this.
“I think it got involved with me. I don’t think I got involved with it,” she says.
The Quapaw tribe made her the Arkansas contact for the repatriation act, and she also works on behalf of the Osage. Her document-filled office is at the Arkansas Archeological Survey, where she had worked as a work-study student while attending the UA.
“I think it just more evolved than anything,” she says. “All of a sudden it was just something I was a part of.” Randy Ramer, curator of anthropology at Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, says the work Wilson does is important, and it goes along with how he views museum collections in general.
“We are basically controlling the things that belong to other people,” he says. “A lot of these things still have cultural meaning today.” During the repatriation process, which can be “long and drawn out,” he says Wilson remains calm and collected.
“One of her greatest qualities is her patience,” he says.
Wilson’s father says he’s proud of the things she’s accomplished.
“I’m just impressed almost every day by her knowledge and her ability to understand some of the real complications of the government program with the Indians,” he says. “She not only knows her stuff, she also has a good sense of humor about it.” Remains and artifacts are often found in burial mounds. Sometimes the soil has been used for construction of a nearby highway or for building levies. Other times, items are discovered when a collector’s children go through the treasures boxed up in the attic or basement.
People like to hunt for treasure, and one man told her it was the best hobby he’d ever had. But it’s actually looting, stealing from the tribes, Wilson says. She wishes people would change from the treasure hunting mentality.
Major damage to sites in the Delta has come from land leveling, where big machines scrape the surface with blades.
Some people say that Indians don’t live on those lands anymore, so they shouldn’t have claim to that land. But tribal members feel a connection to the land of their ancestors, she says.
When remains are found, the police first determine it’s not a crime scene. Then, she’s notified, on behalf of the tribes.
“I know how to classify them, and I know how to go through the repatriation process,” she says.
Wilson recalls a northeast Arkansas site that was visited by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS ), a program of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The NRCS determined there were no burial sites on the farmer’s property, and gave the OK for land leveling.
Locals had been calling, though, to report a non-Indian cemetery in the area. The leveling machine revealed that cemetery, as well as a former American Indian village and burials. The machine destroyed the site and scattered human remains, she says.
Federal money was available to preserve the non-Indian site, but not the Indian site.
“I’ve never felt quite so second-class as I did then,” she says. “I think I hit numb.” In the state’s Delta region, farmers are growing rice in ancestral remains.
There are no “mechanisms to be incentives for people to save those sites,” she says. “There are more incentives to save a wildlife site for ducks than to save America’s past.” For a while, archaeologists and Quapaw tribal members didn’t agree on what should be done with artifacts, Wilson says. But now, they have an understanding.
“They’re not against archaeology. They want it done responsibly,” she says. “It has to be done in consent and in coordination with the tribes.” Ancient burial sites are usually “pretty near the surface” — unlike the American custom of burying the body several feet underground, she says. The human remains can often be identified as a particular tribe by the way they’re buried or the soil where they’re found.
When remains or artifacts are found, tribal members will be called in. They’ll usually rebury the remains near the site, but further down, in a spot where they’re not likely to be disturbed. Most Indian tribes want the remains of their ancestors to stay close to where they were originally interred.
“That’s the ideal,” Wilson says.
Sometimes those items can’t be returned to the ground from which they came. For these remains, Wilson has helped establish two “keep-safe” cemeteries in the state — one at the Toltec Mounds in Scott and the other at Parkin Archeological State Park near Wynne. Quapaw tribal elders picked the 1-acre sites and consecrated the soil.
The Caddos want a keepsafe cemetery, and it would likely be located in their former homelands of southwest Arkansas. The Osage want one in the northwest corner.
With museum collections, putting the pieces back in their recorded sites isn’t feasible. In that case, they can be repatriated, or the ownership returned to the tribe. Many pieces repatriated to the Quapaw are in the UA’s collection because the Quapaw don’t have a museum and taking care of such pieces properly is expensive, Wilson says.
In a large room of the survey building, the UA’s museum collection is in storage, away from regular public visitors. Seven rows of white shelving, seven shelves high, hold hundreds of pieces of American Indian funerary items and other artifacts.
Pieces with engraved designs are typically from the Caddo. Red and white pottery, affiliated with the Quapaw, is found in the northeast part of the state. They are valuable, and people try to sell them on the Internet, she says.
Wilson says people were typically buried with about three pots in a grave.
“It contained food for the journey to the other world,” she says.
Many pieces bear animal shapes — like wood duck, owl, bat, fish and bear. One shows how the Mississippian people wore their hair.
Wilson sees a sense of humor in many shapes and faces.
“They do tell the character of the people,” she says. “There’s this really charming, fantasy, humor about them.” Some Osage human remains will come to the UA facility until they can be repatriated to that tribe. The human remains are on a storage shelf veiled on all sides with white fabric.
For Wilson, returning the physical remains to the earth is only part of the drive. In the American Indian tradition, she recognizes the spiritual aspect, “completing that circle of life.” “ I think it’s just basically doing the right thing. It’s kind of righting the wrongs of the past, ” Wilson says.
“I think it’s our responsibility as children of these ancestors to take care of them and put them back as close as possible to their point of origin.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
