It is never too late to come to terms with history. The Mississippi state has returned to the legitimate owners, i Chickasaw, human remains and grave goods belonging to this Native American tribe to bury them permanently in their lands and try to reconcile with the past. These are the remains of 403 ancestors, who lived between 1,800 and 750 years ago, along with 83 artifacts – the largest such event in Mississippi history.
The Chickasaw graves, explains the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Mdah), had been destroyed in the last century, much of it during the 1960s, to use the land for other (mainly agricultural) purposes. The burials were located in different areas of the Mississippi Delta, the lands once inhabited by that tribe.
For decades these “artifacts” had remained on the shelves of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, along with funerary objects of great importance to these ancient cultures, such as animal bones (including wolf and turtle teeth), shells, vases, and arrowheads. Artifacts they must have had for the Chickasaws, explained Meg Cook, director of the archeology department of the Mdah, a similar value to what we could give today to the act of wearing a wedding ring at the moment of burial.
The repatriation process for us “is an act of love”, he explained to theAssociated Press Amber Hood, the director of The Chickasaw Nation’s Historic Preservation and Repatriation. Since they are our ancestors, “our grandmothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who lived a long time ago”.
The Chickasaw Nation wanted the remains and objects of their ancestors to be transported in muslin sacks, so that when buried back in their lands, they would naturally decompose. Crucial to the success of this event is the existence of a 1990 law (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act”) on the protection and repatriation of Native Americans, which gave people the right to claim artifacts and remains of their ancestors. when kept in federal museums and collections.
The Chickasaws, ancient inhabitants of the territories now belonging to the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, were transferred in forced marches to the “Indian Territory”, the future Oklahoma, together with the Cherokee, the Choctaw , the Creek and the Seminole, considered the “Five Civilized Tribes”. That mass deportation went down in history as the Trail of Tears.
There are still thousands of human remains preserved in state collections waiting to be identified, returned and buried again, this time forever. “It is our responsibility to tell the story of Mississippi,” he explained to theAp Meg Cook. “And this also means talking about the negative aspects”. A complex past, that of relations between the United States and the ancient inhabitants of North America, made up of deportations, attempts at assimilation and wounds still far from being completely healed.
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