Bone Courts: The Rights and Narrative Representations of Tribal Bones
Author(s)
Vizenor, Gerald
Abstract
Two generations of debate over the disinterment of aboriginal bones and the reburial of tribal remains has left little accomplished. That, according to one tribal advocate, close to three hundred thousand tribal bodies have been taken from their graves to museums and laboratories speaks to a problem that needs immediate addressing. This article, a contentious discourse on the prima facie rights of human remains, sovereign tribal bones, to be their own narrators calls for the establishment of a bone court. The rights of bones are neither absolute nor abolished at death; bone rights are abstract, secular and understood here in narrative and constitutional legal theories. Most human remains were buried with ceremonial heed, an implied communal continuation of human rights; death, cremation, subariel exposure, earth burial and other interments are proper courses, not the termination of human rights. Thus, the rights we hold over our bodies and organs at death are the same rights we hold over our bones and ashes. To deny these rights so systematically to a peoples so continually disadvantaged and disenfranchised is tantamount to the denial of all rights.
