Attimoni (ah-jee-MOOUHN) – The Stories We Have to Tell: relationships among the Meskwaki Nation, tribes with historic ties to Iowa, and the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist

Summary

A long-standing relationship has existed between the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) and tribal entities including the Meskwaki Nation. The precedent-setting burial law established in Iowa in 1976, 14 years prior to the passage of NAGPRA, has long required equal treatment and reburial of Native American remains. The law gave the OSA statutory authority for upholding the law and established the OSA Indian Advisory Council (IAC). Maria Pearson (Yankton Sioux) and Donald Wanatee (Meskwaki) were instrumental in passage, implementation, and success of the law and served on the OSA IAC from the start. The OSA and its Burials Program (recently renamed the Bioarchaeology Program) has an exemplary record of collaboration in the protection and proper treatment of human remains, its success leading to a variety of other tribal collaborations. The OSA, the IAC, and tribes took a proactive approach to allow reburial of culturally unidentifiable remains prior to development of NAGPRA regulations, ultimately developing a NAGPRA-approved process for the reburial of culturally unidentifiable remains in Iowa’s established cemeteries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• NAGPRA and Beyond: successes and shared benefits of collaboration

Keywords

Spatial Coverage