http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/20000305_xex_eaglemaniac_.shtml
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>ARMED AND DANGEROUS
Eagle-maniac feds
raid for headdress
Owner drops fight after heirloom
is taken by FBI with M-16s, Uzis
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Paul Ciotti
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
Georgia attorney Leighton Deming didn't know what to think when 10 to 12 armed men suddenly burst into an Embassy Suites hotel room in Philadelphia one day last October.
"I'm thinking, 'What the hell are they doing?'" says Deming. "They were pointing M-16s, Uzis and 9 mm pistols in my face. It was the only time in my life anyone ever pointed a gun at me."
Deming at first believed they were thieves, come to rob him of a valuable family heirloom, a 48-feather Indian headdress that once belonged to Geronimo, the famed Apache war chief. Then he realized the gunmen were FBI agents.
"I thought, 's--t,'" says Deming, "'they're going to get me for trying to sell the headdress.'"
Actually, he was right both times. He was being robbed, but legally, under cover of the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act, which makes it illegal to sell eagle feathers in this country. And Geronimo's headdress, which went back to 1907, contained 48 golden eagle feathers.
Deming was astounded, he says, not only by the fact that the FBI would spend six weeks on a sting to catch someone selling his own property, but also at the number of guns and people they felt they needed to arrest him.
"Al Capone was a baby compared to [me]," he said. "The (head) agent asked me, 'Do you have a gun?' 'No,' I said, 'Why would I have a gun?' 'Are you carrying a knife?' he said. 'No,' I said. 'I'm not carrying a knife either.'"
The FBI handcuffed Deming, marched him out of the hotel, and took him away to be booked and fingerprinted. Deming was humiliated. He was a 56-year-old personal injury attorney who represented people injured in car crashes and train wrecks. In Georgia, he was respected by the judges before whom he practiced. He was president of the Gwennett County Optimists Club. Now the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia was charging him with a federal criminal offense punishable by five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
"It was the worst experience of my life," Deming told a reporter for the Gwenett Post.
His distress notwithstanding, Deming wasn't a total innocent. He knew that under the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act it was illegal to sell eagle feathers. But in his opinion, these were "ex-post facto" laws. The Bald Eagle Protection Act wasn't passed until 1940 and golden eagles weren't added to the ban till 1962. Geronimo's headdress not only predated both laws, it went back to when Oklahoma was an Indian territory.
"It was pre-bald eagle, pre-golden eagle, pre-whatever-eagle it was," says Deming.
Furthermore, the headdress wasn't some shady artifact he'd picked up on the black market and was now trying quickly to turn over for a fast buck. The headdress had been in his family for three-quarters of a century. At the turn of the century, Geronimo had given it to a friend who in turn gave it to Deming's grandfather.
"Even the FBI had to admit I had legal possession and legal ownership," says Deming.
According to the Gwenett County (Georgia) Post, which recently published a detailed history of the headdress, in 1907, Geronimo, who was 78 at the time, acquired the headdress when he was invited to be guest of honor at a celebration/carnival/wild west show called "the Last Pow-Wow." As a way to honor Geronimo, Cheyenne Indians presented Geronimo with a golden-eagle headdress, moccasins, chaps and a blanket. Geronimo, in turn, gave these gifts to a half-Cherokee Army scout named Jack Moore. Years later, Moore, also known as "John Gray Eagle," gave the headdress along with posters, photographs of Geromino wearing the headdress, and some of his sketches to his longtime friend, C.W. Deming, an Oklahoma oil man and grandfather of Leighton Deming.
For the next 50 years the headdress remained in the Deming family, sometimes staying in a trunk in the basement and at other times on display in a glass case in the living room. In 1975, Deming decided to give the headdress to a museum.
Knowing that it was covered by the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act, Deming contacted the Library of Congress and his congressman for advice. After conducting an investigation, says Deming, his congressman wrote back, telling him there was no problem, he was free to do what he wanted -- "Let the eagle feathers fly!"
Deming says he wrote nearly 50 letters to museums asking if they wanted to have it.
"All of them were really interested (at first), and then suddenly they were not interested. The Smithsonian said they wanted it really bad, but were afraid the Fish & Wildlife Service would [seize it as contraband in order to destroy it] and they didn't want that to happen."
Frustrated with trying to give the headdress to a museum, last year Deming mentioned his problems to Marietta car dealer Tom Marciano, who, Deming says, thought it might be valuable. Subsequently, says Deming, Marciano found half a dozen people who were willing to pay up to a million dollars for the headdress. Among those interested were agents of the FBI, who, posing as buyers for a wealthy European collector, arranged to meet Deming and Marciano at the Embassy Suites in Philadelphia.
In an attempt to avoid legal problems, Deming offered to sell only Moore's artwork, along with accompanying photographs, posters and newspaper stories. If the European collector was willing to pay $1 million for those, Deming would then throw in the headdress for free. Although Deming thought he was protecting himself, in legal terms it was a distinction without a difference. As soon as he signed the sales contract, FBI agents burst into the room to arrest him for illegally trying to sell the headdress.
Deming was angry and chagrined. To be arrested for trying to sell something that he'd been trying to give away for free for 25 years seemed ridiculous.
"I said to the FBI," says Deming, "'Why didn't you call me and tell me you wanted the headdress?' He said, 'We are not in the business of calling anyone about to break the law.' I said, 'Well, why didn't you just say, 'We will help you get a permit to donate it to a museum?'"
After being released on bail, Deming went back home, where, he says, seven local judges and a bailiff offered to put up money for a defense fund. Two Native American organizations also contacted also Deming, he says, to tell him they were behind him all way. And an Atlanta radio commentator rallied to his defense, calling the arrest a "government outrage. This guy owned a headdress from an eagle that took a dirt bath 100 years ago. It was his personal property. The government had no right to take it."
It "doesn't matter" how old the feathers are, says Assistant U.S. Attorney for Philadelphia Bob Goldman. When Congress passed the Eagle Protection Act, it made it illegal to sell any eagle feathers, no matter what their age. When asked how banning the sale of feathers from an eagle that died a hundred years ago serves any public purpose, Goldman said that some headdresses are in poor shape "with feathers damaged or missing." To repair them, dealers need new feathers, which could create incentives for someone to try and get them from living birds.
Given what seemed like widespread public support for what he regarded as a constitutional right to sell his own property, Deming says he initially was tempted to plead innocent and take the case to trial.
"If I had fought it I had a 95 percent chance of winning," he says. "But that 5 percent bothered me. If I lose, there goes my license to practice law."
In the end, Deming decided it was too risky. So in February, in exchange for agreeing to forfeit his headdress to the Justice Department, Deming was allowed to plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor -- "unknowing bartering," for which he received a six-month suspended sentence.
Although Deming was relieved to get this eagle-feather albatross off his back with little or no damage to his reputation or law practice, to others Deming's arrest was a missed opportunity to stop an offensive, confiscatory and unconstitutional Fifth Amendment government "taking" dead in its tracks.
"I think he had a very winnable case," says University of Torledo emeritus law professor, Richard Edwards. " ... What he did was perfectly lawful. My view is he [had every right to sell the headdress and accompanying eagle feathers.] All he had to do was prove that they were old, which was no problem in his case. He inherited them. He had a trail of evidence linking them directly to Geronimo."
Deming had no way of knowing it, says Edwards, but the government probably had no stomach for a fight on the headdress issue.
"It wouldn't dare prosecute him all the way and risk losing on appeal," Edwards says. If the case ever went to the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia would jump at the chance to overturn Andrus v. Allard -- the 1979 case that established the right of the government to ban the sale of eagle feathers even if they were "taken" prior to the law which made their sale illegal.
According to Edwards, Andrus v. Allard was a bad case decided on bad facts. Unlike Deming's, the Andrus case involved dealers who were trying to sell the eagle feathers for which they had no documentation -- they claimed at trial they could tell old feathers by their "patina". Not surprisingly, the court didn't put much stock in the age-dating by patina argument and it ruled against the dealers. In the process, it sidestepped the Fifth Amendment "taking" issue, saying that a ban on selling feathers wasn't really an unconstitutional taking of private property since the owners could still make money off the feathers by putting them on display, for instance, and charging admission.
But in the 21 years since Andrus v. Allard was decided (Judge Brennan wrote the opinion), changing membership on the court, accompanied by a growing respect for the Fifth Amendment, had resulted in a new attitude toward government assertions that it has the right to seize private property without compensation.
"No one relies on Andrus anymore," says Edwards. "It's been overruled on everything but the facts. Scalia would love to reverse it."
The last time such a case came up, says Edwards, the government let it be dismissed on a technicality rather than risk endangering Andrus. In 1986, the government tried to prosecute a man named Paul Raczka for trying to sell an old Indian headdress (containing in this instance pre-protection act feathers from bald eagles, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks and owls). As in the Deming case, the government wasn't so much interested in punishing Raczka as it was in getting the headdress. And the government offered him what Edwards calls a "sweetheart deal" if Raczka forfeited the headdress voluntarily.
But Raczka boldly refused the deal, which left the government in a quandary. In response, says Edwards, the government held on to the headdress for so long, saying it needed it for testing, that it ended up violating the provisions of the speedy trial act, whereupon the judge dismissed the case, without ruling on the merits one way or the other.
By fighting the case, Raczka got his headdress back. Because Deming didn't fight, he had to forfeit his.
"If you don't challenge the law," says Edwards, "you have to live within what the government says is permissible."
Even so, Deming says he doesn't mind forfeiting the headdress. He says it's given him nothing but trouble -- "I think Geronimo cursed it." What he can't understand is why no museum wanted to take it during all the time he'd been trying to give it away. If he'd been able to donate it to a museum, he says, it would have been out his hands years ago and the issue of selling it never would have come up.
The reason why some museums don't want Indian artifacts these days, says University of Emporia history professor Ron McCoy, is that the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act makes it both embarrassing and legally dubious.
When NAGRPA was enacted in the early 1990s, it addressed a real need. In the past, says McCoy, "anthropologists tended to treat tribal concerns with disdain." NAGRPA allowed Indian tribes to protect newly discovered gravesites, reclaim bones and recover associated funerary objects from collectors and anthropologists. Unfortunately, it also had some less attractive and unintended side effects.
When two college students found a 9,200-year-old skeleton on the Columbia River in Washington State in July 1996, initial examination seemed to suggest the bones were more Caucasian than Native American. To scientists, this skeleton, which came to be known as Kennewick Man, was a major new find that raised important issues regarding the genetic ancestry of the earliest North Americans. To resolve the matter, they wanted to test the bones for DNA. But to some Indian groups, such testing was not only a religious outrage, it was a blatant political effort to weaken Indian claims to be the original native Americans and they demanded that the bones be re-buried at once. After several years of controversy, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt decided last week to let the DNA testing proceed.
Although NAGPRA was originally envisioned a way to protect the contents of Indian graves, a lot of things besides bones fall under its purview. Little-noticed provisions of the act also allow Indian tribes to assert ownership of masks, pottery, headdresses, pipes, totem poles and "cultural patrimony," including, some Indians assert, ideas, myths and traditions.
"A lot of material is going back from museums to tribes," says McCoy. When Native American groups file a claim under NAGRPA, most museums tend to fold on the spot. "It's the kind of publicity museums don't want to deal with." Even if they think have a valid claim, they generally give any Native Americans the benefit of a doubt -- "just get this out of here."
Some claims under NAGRPA are so expansive that even the act's most fervent advocates are surprised. Recently, Oregon's Clackamas Tribe demanded that the Museum of Natural History in New York return a 16-ton meteorite that was found on the property of an Oregon iron ore company in 1902.
According to an Associated Press report, Indians regarded the meteorite, which currently is the featured attraction at the museum's new Rose planetarium, as an Indian "holy object" symbolizing the three heavenly realms -- earth, sky and water. The meteorite hit Earth 10,000 years ago in what is today West Linn, Oregon. Local Indians said the water that collected in its hollows was holy. Returning the meteorite won't be easy, given that the new planetarium was substantially built around the meteorite exhibit with special support pilings sunk deep in the subsoil. A crane would be required to move it and the planetarium might have to be partially disassembled. Under federal law, the museum was supposed to respond to the NAGPRA claim by Feb. 29.
Similar confusion over ownership has also left Geronimo's last headdress up for grabs. It's a problem complicated by the fact that it was a Cheyenne headdress given to an Apache. After Deming surrendered his claim, 10 to 15 museums inquired about getting the headdress. The judge who set Deming's bail asked (perhaps in jest) if he could hang it on his courtroom wall. U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla, subsequently told reporters that he wanted it to go to a museum in his district, a statement the Stillwater (Oklahoma) News Press called "ridiculous and insulting."
"The (Cheyenne) headdress worn by Geronimo for the last powwow in Oklahoma Territory should not be placed on display like war treasure by the government that defeated him," declared the News Press in a recent editorial. It should be returned to its rightful owners -- "the Apache people."
[/quote]
------------------
John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>ARMED AND DANGEROUS
Eagle-maniac feds
raid for headdress
Owner drops fight after heirloom
is taken by FBI with M-16s, Uzis
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Paul Ciotti
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
Georgia attorney Leighton Deming didn't know what to think when 10 to 12 armed men suddenly burst into an Embassy Suites hotel room in Philadelphia one day last October.
"I'm thinking, 'What the hell are they doing?'" says Deming. "They were pointing M-16s, Uzis and 9 mm pistols in my face. It was the only time in my life anyone ever pointed a gun at me."
Deming at first believed they were thieves, come to rob him of a valuable family heirloom, a 48-feather Indian headdress that once belonged to Geronimo, the famed Apache war chief. Then he realized the gunmen were FBI agents.
"I thought, 's--t,'" says Deming, "'they're going to get me for trying to sell the headdress.'"
Actually, he was right both times. He was being robbed, but legally, under cover of the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act, which makes it illegal to sell eagle feathers in this country. And Geronimo's headdress, which went back to 1907, contained 48 golden eagle feathers.
Deming was astounded, he says, not only by the fact that the FBI would spend six weeks on a sting to catch someone selling his own property, but also at the number of guns and people they felt they needed to arrest him.
"Al Capone was a baby compared to [me]," he said. "The (head) agent asked me, 'Do you have a gun?' 'No,' I said, 'Why would I have a gun?' 'Are you carrying a knife?' he said. 'No,' I said. 'I'm not carrying a knife either.'"
The FBI handcuffed Deming, marched him out of the hotel, and took him away to be booked and fingerprinted. Deming was humiliated. He was a 56-year-old personal injury attorney who represented people injured in car crashes and train wrecks. In Georgia, he was respected by the judges before whom he practiced. He was president of the Gwennett County Optimists Club. Now the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia was charging him with a federal criminal offense punishable by five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
"It was the worst experience of my life," Deming told a reporter for the Gwenett Post.
His distress notwithstanding, Deming wasn't a total innocent. He knew that under the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act it was illegal to sell eagle feathers. But in his opinion, these were "ex-post facto" laws. The Bald Eagle Protection Act wasn't passed until 1940 and golden eagles weren't added to the ban till 1962. Geronimo's headdress not only predated both laws, it went back to when Oklahoma was an Indian territory.
"It was pre-bald eagle, pre-golden eagle, pre-whatever-eagle it was," says Deming.
Furthermore, the headdress wasn't some shady artifact he'd picked up on the black market and was now trying quickly to turn over for a fast buck. The headdress had been in his family for three-quarters of a century. At the turn of the century, Geronimo had given it to a friend who in turn gave it to Deming's grandfather.
"Even the FBI had to admit I had legal possession and legal ownership," says Deming.
According to the Gwenett County (Georgia) Post, which recently published a detailed history of the headdress, in 1907, Geronimo, who was 78 at the time, acquired the headdress when he was invited to be guest of honor at a celebration/carnival/wild west show called "the Last Pow-Wow." As a way to honor Geronimo, Cheyenne Indians presented Geronimo with a golden-eagle headdress, moccasins, chaps and a blanket. Geronimo, in turn, gave these gifts to a half-Cherokee Army scout named Jack Moore. Years later, Moore, also known as "John Gray Eagle," gave the headdress along with posters, photographs of Geromino wearing the headdress, and some of his sketches to his longtime friend, C.W. Deming, an Oklahoma oil man and grandfather of Leighton Deming.
For the next 50 years the headdress remained in the Deming family, sometimes staying in a trunk in the basement and at other times on display in a glass case in the living room. In 1975, Deming decided to give the headdress to a museum.
Knowing that it was covered by the Migratory Bird and Eagle Protection Act, Deming contacted the Library of Congress and his congressman for advice. After conducting an investigation, says Deming, his congressman wrote back, telling him there was no problem, he was free to do what he wanted -- "Let the eagle feathers fly!"
Deming says he wrote nearly 50 letters to museums asking if they wanted to have it.
"All of them were really interested (at first), and then suddenly they were not interested. The Smithsonian said they wanted it really bad, but were afraid the Fish & Wildlife Service would [seize it as contraband in order to destroy it] and they didn't want that to happen."
Frustrated with trying to give the headdress to a museum, last year Deming mentioned his problems to Marietta car dealer Tom Marciano, who, Deming says, thought it might be valuable. Subsequently, says Deming, Marciano found half a dozen people who were willing to pay up to a million dollars for the headdress. Among those interested were agents of the FBI, who, posing as buyers for a wealthy European collector, arranged to meet Deming and Marciano at the Embassy Suites in Philadelphia.
In an attempt to avoid legal problems, Deming offered to sell only Moore's artwork, along with accompanying photographs, posters and newspaper stories. If the European collector was willing to pay $1 million for those, Deming would then throw in the headdress for free. Although Deming thought he was protecting himself, in legal terms it was a distinction without a difference. As soon as he signed the sales contract, FBI agents burst into the room to arrest him for illegally trying to sell the headdress.
Deming was angry and chagrined. To be arrested for trying to sell something that he'd been trying to give away for free for 25 years seemed ridiculous.
"I said to the FBI," says Deming, "'Why didn't you call me and tell me you wanted the headdress?' He said, 'We are not in the business of calling anyone about to break the law.' I said, 'Well, why didn't you just say, 'We will help you get a permit to donate it to a museum?'"
After being released on bail, Deming went back home, where, he says, seven local judges and a bailiff offered to put up money for a defense fund. Two Native American organizations also contacted also Deming, he says, to tell him they were behind him all way. And an Atlanta radio commentator rallied to his defense, calling the arrest a "government outrage. This guy owned a headdress from an eagle that took a dirt bath 100 years ago. It was his personal property. The government had no right to take it."
It "doesn't matter" how old the feathers are, says Assistant U.S. Attorney for Philadelphia Bob Goldman. When Congress passed the Eagle Protection Act, it made it illegal to sell any eagle feathers, no matter what their age. When asked how banning the sale of feathers from an eagle that died a hundred years ago serves any public purpose, Goldman said that some headdresses are in poor shape "with feathers damaged or missing." To repair them, dealers need new feathers, which could create incentives for someone to try and get them from living birds.
Given what seemed like widespread public support for what he regarded as a constitutional right to sell his own property, Deming says he initially was tempted to plead innocent and take the case to trial.
"If I had fought it I had a 95 percent chance of winning," he says. "But that 5 percent bothered me. If I lose, there goes my license to practice law."
In the end, Deming decided it was too risky. So in February, in exchange for agreeing to forfeit his headdress to the Justice Department, Deming was allowed to plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor -- "unknowing bartering," for which he received a six-month suspended sentence.
Although Deming was relieved to get this eagle-feather albatross off his back with little or no damage to his reputation or law practice, to others Deming's arrest was a missed opportunity to stop an offensive, confiscatory and unconstitutional Fifth Amendment government "taking" dead in its tracks.
"I think he had a very winnable case," says University of Torledo emeritus law professor, Richard Edwards. " ... What he did was perfectly lawful. My view is he [had every right to sell the headdress and accompanying eagle feathers.] All he had to do was prove that they were old, which was no problem in his case. He inherited them. He had a trail of evidence linking them directly to Geronimo."
Deming had no way of knowing it, says Edwards, but the government probably had no stomach for a fight on the headdress issue.
"It wouldn't dare prosecute him all the way and risk losing on appeal," Edwards says. If the case ever went to the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia would jump at the chance to overturn Andrus v. Allard -- the 1979 case that established the right of the government to ban the sale of eagle feathers even if they were "taken" prior to the law which made their sale illegal.
According to Edwards, Andrus v. Allard was a bad case decided on bad facts. Unlike Deming's, the Andrus case involved dealers who were trying to sell the eagle feathers for which they had no documentation -- they claimed at trial they could tell old feathers by their "patina". Not surprisingly, the court didn't put much stock in the age-dating by patina argument and it ruled against the dealers. In the process, it sidestepped the Fifth Amendment "taking" issue, saying that a ban on selling feathers wasn't really an unconstitutional taking of private property since the owners could still make money off the feathers by putting them on display, for instance, and charging admission.
But in the 21 years since Andrus v. Allard was decided (Judge Brennan wrote the opinion), changing membership on the court, accompanied by a growing respect for the Fifth Amendment, had resulted in a new attitude toward government assertions that it has the right to seize private property without compensation.
"No one relies on Andrus anymore," says Edwards. "It's been overruled on everything but the facts. Scalia would love to reverse it."
The last time such a case came up, says Edwards, the government let it be dismissed on a technicality rather than risk endangering Andrus. In 1986, the government tried to prosecute a man named Paul Raczka for trying to sell an old Indian headdress (containing in this instance pre-protection act feathers from bald eagles, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks and owls). As in the Deming case, the government wasn't so much interested in punishing Raczka as it was in getting the headdress. And the government offered him what Edwards calls a "sweetheart deal" if Raczka forfeited the headdress voluntarily.
But Raczka boldly refused the deal, which left the government in a quandary. In response, says Edwards, the government held on to the headdress for so long, saying it needed it for testing, that it ended up violating the provisions of the speedy trial act, whereupon the judge dismissed the case, without ruling on the merits one way or the other.
By fighting the case, Raczka got his headdress back. Because Deming didn't fight, he had to forfeit his.
"If you don't challenge the law," says Edwards, "you have to live within what the government says is permissible."
Even so, Deming says he doesn't mind forfeiting the headdress. He says it's given him nothing but trouble -- "I think Geronimo cursed it." What he can't understand is why no museum wanted to take it during all the time he'd been trying to give it away. If he'd been able to donate it to a museum, he says, it would have been out his hands years ago and the issue of selling it never would have come up.
The reason why some museums don't want Indian artifacts these days, says University of Emporia history professor Ron McCoy, is that the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act makes it both embarrassing and legally dubious.
When NAGRPA was enacted in the early 1990s, it addressed a real need. In the past, says McCoy, "anthropologists tended to treat tribal concerns with disdain." NAGRPA allowed Indian tribes to protect newly discovered gravesites, reclaim bones and recover associated funerary objects from collectors and anthropologists. Unfortunately, it also had some less attractive and unintended side effects.
When two college students found a 9,200-year-old skeleton on the Columbia River in Washington State in July 1996, initial examination seemed to suggest the bones were more Caucasian than Native American. To scientists, this skeleton, which came to be known as Kennewick Man, was a major new find that raised important issues regarding the genetic ancestry of the earliest North Americans. To resolve the matter, they wanted to test the bones for DNA. But to some Indian groups, such testing was not only a religious outrage, it was a blatant political effort to weaken Indian claims to be the original native Americans and they demanded that the bones be re-buried at once. After several years of controversy, Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt decided last week to let the DNA testing proceed.
Although NAGPRA was originally envisioned a way to protect the contents of Indian graves, a lot of things besides bones fall under its purview. Little-noticed provisions of the act also allow Indian tribes to assert ownership of masks, pottery, headdresses, pipes, totem poles and "cultural patrimony," including, some Indians assert, ideas, myths and traditions.
"A lot of material is going back from museums to tribes," says McCoy. When Native American groups file a claim under NAGRPA, most museums tend to fold on the spot. "It's the kind of publicity museums don't want to deal with." Even if they think have a valid claim, they generally give any Native Americans the benefit of a doubt -- "just get this out of here."
Some claims under NAGRPA are so expansive that even the act's most fervent advocates are surprised. Recently, Oregon's Clackamas Tribe demanded that the Museum of Natural History in New York return a 16-ton meteorite that was found on the property of an Oregon iron ore company in 1902.
According to an Associated Press report, Indians regarded the meteorite, which currently is the featured attraction at the museum's new Rose planetarium, as an Indian "holy object" symbolizing the three heavenly realms -- earth, sky and water. The meteorite hit Earth 10,000 years ago in what is today West Linn, Oregon. Local Indians said the water that collected in its hollows was holy. Returning the meteorite won't be easy, given that the new planetarium was substantially built around the meteorite exhibit with special support pilings sunk deep in the subsoil. A crane would be required to move it and the planetarium might have to be partially disassembled. Under federal law, the museum was supposed to respond to the NAGPRA claim by Feb. 29.
Similar confusion over ownership has also left Geronimo's last headdress up for grabs. It's a problem complicated by the fact that it was a Cheyenne headdress given to an Apache. After Deming surrendered his claim, 10 to 15 museums inquired about getting the headdress. The judge who set Deming's bail asked (perhaps in jest) if he could hang it on his courtroom wall. U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla, subsequently told reporters that he wanted it to go to a museum in his district, a statement the Stillwater (Oklahoma) News Press called "ridiculous and insulting."
"The (Cheyenne) headdress worn by Geronimo for the last powwow in Oklahoma Territory should not be placed on display like war treasure by the government that defeated him," declared the News Press in a recent editorial. It should be returned to its rightful owners -- "the Apache people."
[/quote]
------------------
John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
