LETTERS

The Benefi ts Of NAGPRA

Like all writings dealing with repatriation, your article “The Fates Of Very Ancient Remains” (Summer 2017) assumed the loss of valuable historical knowledge is due to the actions of Native Americans.

I am a Navajo, trained in anthropology, and I have worked in the museum world in the Southwest for thirty-fi ve years. In the summer of 1973, as a young intern in training at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Museum, I encountered abuse of burial remains fi rst hand. One morning I opened one of the many rows of drawers that reached from fl oor to ceiling, and to my surprise discovered they held human burial remains. In another room were rows of tables with recently excavated remains. I was shocked and appalled.

Although trained in science, I am a Native American fi rst. As a Native American, it is my duty to preserve and perpetuate the traditional ways of my people. NAGPRA is the best thing that has happened to us. We don’t see its intent as a loss of our historical knowledge. We have other ways of recalling history that has served us well from time immemorial. We are not the culprits in this game, but victims who have been abused by “science” for many years. Justice has fi nally come.

Harry Walters Red Valley, Arizona

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Write to us at 1717 Girard Blvd. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106, or send us e-mail at tacmag@nm.net. We reserve the right to edit and publish letters in the magazine’s Letters department as space permits. Please include your name, address, and telephone number with all correspondence, including e-mail messages.

Editor’s Corner

“These instruments are so prevalent, but we know so little about them,” observed José Cuellar, professor emeritus of Latino studies at San Francisco State University. Cuellar was referring to clay ocarinas, which are said to be the most common musical instruments used by pre-Columbian societies in Mesoamerica. (See “An Instrument For The Ages,” page 24.)

Unlike most instruments, ocarinas have no standard type. In fact, their myriad shapes and sizes all but defy categorization. There are various animals—birds, monkeys, alligators, armadillos, frogs, fi sh, lizards, chickens, a dog atop a cow, a half-anteater, half-pig—and those are the ones known to zoologists. There is also an equally wide array of human-like fi gures.

These simple wind instruments, some of which are thousands of years old, are capable of producing a range of sounds. It’s thought that their music served as an accompaniment to activities profound and prosaic, from warfare, funerals, and communions with the spirits to children’s amusement.

Cuellar, who also goes by the name Dr. Loco, is an accomplished musician who heads the Rockin’ Jalapeño Band. A few years ago he put down his saxophone to become a Hrdy Fellow at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, where he researched their extensive collection of ocarinas. In this case, researching them also meant playing them, much to the chagrin of some of the museum’s conservators who cared for these ancient, fragile instruments. While playing them, Cuellar did his own communing with the spirits. Had he damaged one, he would have taken it as a sign they disapproved of his endeavor. But the spirits, it appears, were pleased.

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