About 45 minutes in, they are talking about how, in North America, skeletons are treated as "an embarrassment" rather than as a "national treasure" (as skeletons are viewed in Mexico).
Killing Kennewick Man: Dr. James Chatters
As it stands, the NAGRPA laws are used to suppress most studies of the past. Skeletal remains cannot be shown in journals whose supposed goals are to study the past.
You can make of that what you will, but I am thinking we dodged a bullet here in the East because the "openness" policy was embedded in the earliest history of rock piles. There have been efforts to privatize the subject, keeping sites secret and demanding certain spiritual buy-ins from visitors. [see Rock Piles: Sacred Stones, Vision Quest, and the Nashobah Praying Indians] However, thankfully, more curiosity-based thinking prevailed. The tribes had discussions of whether or not to keep things secret and let old sites molder away back into the soil; or whether to support open research and publicity for newly discovered sites.
I am not sure what swayed the Indians involved in those early discussions. It might have been that, at the time, the Indians felt a small debt towards the discoverers of site and adopted some of our attitudes. It might also be the argument we made to the effect that so much development and land use tension occurs in the East, keeping things secret nearly guarantees developers will bulldoze sites.
Anyway, the point I am making is that research has not been stifled towards rock piles in the same way that research about sites is discouraged elsewhere. We are lucky our sites are not privatized or co-opted by the tribes and, as it goes, the USET resolutions codify a research partnership that is lacking, out West.
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