Neither green
nor pleasantOliver Balch
The Village News: The Truth Behind
England’s Rural Idyll
by Tom Fort
Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 400The old coaching inn on the green. The
Sunday morning toll of church bells. The
ducklings paddling on the pond. The soft
sound of leather against willow. Nothing,
absolutely nothing, defines England’s idea
of itself more than the sleepy rural village.
World events can shake our island nation.
Population growth can swell our cities.
Who knows, climate change could even
sink East Anglia beneath the waves. But
as long as the country’s villages stand true,
then England is safe and we can all put the
kettle on for tea.
Utter rot, says Tom Fort, in this time-
ly, myth-busting march through English
rural history. Racing through the ages on
his bicycle, the travel writer and historian
— himself ‘by inclination a village type of
person’ — is at pains to decry our senti-
mental attachment to the rural idyll. The
idea of the old, simple, pre-Fall rustic Eng-
land may cling on in our hearts, but it’s a
‘deathly silent sham’.
Villages were never meant to be perma-
nent. Nor, for most of their history, were
they very pleasant. Their primary purpose
was to enable the land to be worked. Life
was tough, amusements were few and pov-
erty was pervasive. The idea of rootedness
is similar poppycock, Fort maintains. Vil-
lagers were regularly on the move, whether
running from marauding Vikings or drivenBones of contention
Tiffany Jenkins
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits:
Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native
America’s Culture
by Chip Colwell
University of Chicago Press, £22.50, pp. 336
A few years ago, a group of Native Ameri-
can leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma
to Denver Museum of Nature and Science,
a natural history museum in the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado, to collect 26 sets
of human remains. When Chip Colwell, the
museum’s senior curator of anthropology,
explained to them that, though the remains
were fragments from people that populat-
ed the Great Plains, he didn’t know from
which tribes, they were shocked: ‘The room
plunges into silence,’ he recounts, followed
by ‘heated deliberation’. The visitors were
affronted. ‘They had come to rebury their
kin — not strangers.’
This is only one of a number of fraught
cases in Colwell’s lightly written, insider’s
account of the battle over human remains
and objects in museums. Skirmishes began
in the 1970s in North America, rapidly
breaking out into a vicious war of words.
On one side were scientists who study
human remains; on the other, campaigners
who want to repatriate them to indigenous
communities. While repatriation derives
from the Latin repatriatus, meaning hav-
ing been sent home again, the bones rarely
go ‘home’. They are hundreds, if not thou-
sands of years old; no one knows where
home is. Instead, they are often reburied
by a tribe deemed affiliated on the basis of
factors that include group identity, geogra-
phy and oral history.
The problem is that human remains
are unique evidence, vital for research
on evolution, population movement and
the lifestyle of past peoples. But, as they
were once human beings, they are also thefocus of remembrance, associated with the
sacred, and easily used in political fights,
in this case the making of amends for his-
torical wrongs. Nagpra, the Native Amer-
ican Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act, made law in 1990, mandates repatria-
tion as an act of restitution for the heinous
treatment of American Indians by scien-
tists, anthropologists and settlers over cen-
turies.
Colwell’s role at Denver Museum was
‘to be a paradox’: he was both responsible
for caring for over 20,000 sets of remains
and objects in the collection and the offi-
cial in charge of returning them. One part
of that paradox, he embraced:
I feel a fleeting moment of satisfaction. All
the shelves are empty except one... After
nearly 25 years since Nagpra’s passage, near-
ly all the museum’s human remains are gone.Where his story jars is in his naive asser-
tions as to the benefits of collaboration
between museums and indigenous groups.
‘Every repatriation is not an end but a
chance for a new beginning’; ‘Repatria-
tion has given American museums a sec-
ond life.’ This appears disingenuous, for his
‘paradox’ is no such thing: if you empty the
shelves and destroy the research material,
it is not possible to investigate the past or
collaborate.
Colwell is probably right that the war
is coming to an end. But who has won?
Although repatriation is presented as a
triumph for indigenous groups, it is trou-
bling because it resurrects racial ways of
thinking about people. The idea of cultural
continuity between the remains, some of
which are thousands of years old — one of
the most well-known, Kennewick Man, is,
at 8,500 years old, older than the pyramids
— and a contemporary group, is highly
questionable; human populations are not
bounded entities through time in this way.
That a selected group can decide the future
of remains — and the future of research —
on the basis of their biology, is disturbing.
Identity should not dictate the pursuit or
closing down of knowledge.
Colwell refers self-deprecatingly to his
own youthful eagerness to buy into themyth of the ‘Noble Indian’ but reproduces
something similar. One Native American is
described as having ‘the bearing of a high
priest, full of quiet dignity’; another has a
‘soft voice and a kind air’. No doubt they
do, but compare that to his pathologising
of collectors, who have an ‘unruly passion’
that they exercise to fill a loss from child-
hood.
As Colwell has himself pointed out,
burials of human remains sometimes take
place without any member of any tribe.
When there was no one to return remains
to, curators from Denver Museum reburied
the bones themselves. Perhaps the softly
spoken Native people with quiet dignity
are also a useful stage army. For, as this
book shows, the fight to reclaim Native
America’s culture has been waged, in sig-
nificant parts, by professionals such as
Colwell. His is indeed an insider’s account
— just not from the sidelines. He too has
been on the battlefield.If you empty the museum shelves and
destroy the research material, it is not
possible to investigate the pastTHE SALISBURY MUSEUM