By Dennis Romboy, Deseret News:

SALT LAKE CITY — Four people charged in the biggest bust ever of Native American artifacts looting are scheduled for trial next month in a case that could turn on the purported value of beads and bracelets.

Federal prosecutors recently turned up the heat on Joseph M. Smith and his wife, Meredith Smith, Tad Kreth and Reece Laws with a third superseding indictment alleging 38 felony counts of trafficking in archaeological resources, theft of tribal and government property and conspiracy. They originally faced a total of 27 counts.

The new indictment basically charges them with four felonies for each allegedly stolen and sold artifact. Those items include a sandal, turquoise pendant, copper bracelet, polishing stones and ivory bead necklaces.

“It appears to be a real attempt to justify what has gone on, to justify the cost (of the investigation), as opposed to meting out justice,” said attorney Benjamin Hamilton, who represents Joseph M. Smith, the only defendant charged in all 38 counts. Kreth faces 17, Laws nine and Meredith Smith six.

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The University of Texas at Arlington Native American Students Association is hoping to give an education to anyone who attends its “This Is Not a Costume” program.

The Star-Telegram reports that the event will showcase the personal, historical and important significance of regalia. Both male and female dancers will show off American Indian dress and the group hopes attendees realize every piece has a history.

“When someone puts on regalia, it’s something,” said Les Riding In, a UTA Honors College adviser whose parents are members of the Osage and Pawnee tribes. “What I like is hearing the family histories. It’s a chance to learn more.”

Riding In said that although the campus group only has 15 to 20 members, North Texas has a good-size American Indian community.

“This is going to be an open forum” with a time for questions, said Riding In, whose last name is Pawnee. “All ages are welcome. It’s definitely a chance to see something that they may have heard of.”

Jenna Cederberg

Western Michigan University has issued the following news release:

KALAMAZOO – A reward of $300 has been offered for information leading to the identification and arrest of a suspect in the theft of Native American gloves from the 1930s stolen from Western Michigan University’s Waldo Library sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday, April 27-28.

Based on security camera images, the suspect is described as a white male, in his late teens or early 20s, dark hair, medium height and build.

The gloves were displayed in a plexiglas case on the library’s main floor. The suspect removed the case from the wall and was able to open the case and remove the gloves. The gloves, valued at about $1,000, are part of the University’s Indian Heritage Collection.

If you have any information about the artifact or suspect, please contact WMU Public Safety at (269) 387-5555 or Silent Observer at (269) 343-2100.

This story by the British paper, The Guardian, focuses on three friends from Blanding, Utah, who grew up scavenging for Native American artifacts, Jim Redd, Austin Lyman and Winston Hurst.

Its headline” “Native American artefacts bring curse of suicides and FBI raids.”

As the paper tells it, here:

But decades later, the three friends’ old pastime has wrought bitterness and tragedy. They fell out badly after Hurst became an archaeologist and came to see the town’s obsession with collecting ancient artefacts as a desecration. Then last year, 150 FBI agents swooped on Blanding, arresting some of the town’s most prominent citizens, including Redd, Lyman’s three older brothers and the brother of the county sheriff, on charges of dealing in antiquities plundered from state land.

Redd, by then a popular local doctor, killed himself the next day. Two other people caught up in the case, including the FBI’s principal informer, also took their lives in the following months.

Meanwhile Lyman’s brothers, along with 23 other people, are expected to go on trial within weeks.

People in Blanding feel the FBI has handled the case badly. And Lyman says he resents the characterization of artifact hunters as “lifelong criminals.”

But Hurst, the archaeologist, gave up collecting.

“Anybody can walk out there, find the stuff, plunder it, take it home and almost no one understands the implications of what they’re doing,” he says. “They don’t understand how the stripping of what’s out there, how you might as well walk in to the library and start cutting the words out of the pages of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s the primary record of the human experience and they’re beating the crap out of it.”

And he goes on to say that “”I’ve been physically sick, truly nauseated by things I’ve seen walking in to these sites. One day you’ve got a relatively intact site that’s been sitting there for 12,000 years and the next day it’s a bombed-out crater, a landscape of craters and human bones strewn all over the place. It can never be put back together again and you never know what was taken away.”

Gwen Florio

Millennia before the first tourist pitched a tent at Yellowstone, Native Americans spent summers beside the region’s hot springs and bubbling pools, a University of Montana archaeological team has discovered.

“It’s always been a destination resort,” Hale, park archaeologist, tells Brett French of the Billings Gazette, here. “For at least 10,000 years people have been using the lake area.”

Adds Douglas MacDonald, a University of Montana archaeology professor, “The lake may have served as a crossroads of sorts for Native Americans from multiple regions.”

MacDonald and 13 graduate and undergrad students at UM are excavating parts of Yellowstone as part of the university’s Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project.

“The lake area was clearly an important warm-weather hunting and gathering grounds for Native Americans from all over the northwestern Great Plains, northern Great Basin and northern Rocky Mountains,” MacDonald tells French.

They’ve discovered, among other things, 5,800-year-old Early Archaic hearth and an area where people quarried obsidian for spear points traded as far east as present-day Ohio.

Gwen Floro

A report of people poking around with flashlights near a Native American burial ground has led to the arrests of three men suspected of stealing artifacts.

The men had some artifacts with them when they were arrested near a Chumash site in the Santa Monica Mountains in Ventura County, according to KEYT-TV. Authorities identified them as Noah Erickson, 22, John Watson, 37, and Frederick Villela, 40.

A search of one man’s home later turned up more, police say. Authorities recovered jewelry, arrowheads and cooking implments. Capt. Ross Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department tells KEYT that it’s a felony to remove items from a burial site.

Gwen Florio

The case against 21 people accused of trafficking stolen Native American artifacts will continue, despite the suicide of the chief witness against them, the Associated Press reports here.

Ted Gardiner’s death lastweek marked the third suicide among people connected with the case.

“He had a lot of demons,” his 23-year-old son Dustin tells New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson, here.

As the AP reports:

Monday, a magistrate scheduled six separate trials as defense lawyers reacted to the chief witness’s suicide. Defense attorney Richard Mauro said, “We don’t know what impact [Gardiner's death] will be at this point. We’re certainly researching whether or not we have an effective right to cross-examine that witness. That’s something I think all of us in this case will look at,” said Mauro.

Prosecutors say the suicide may change trial strategy, but they told the magistrate they plan to press forward. “Our intention is to marshal our evidence, to respond to any motions that are filed, and to proceed with the trials,” said Carlie Christensen, acting U.S. Attorney for Utah.

Still, much remains unresolved now.

“The confidential informant was involved in every one of the cases, was basically the source in setting everybody up,” says defense attorney David Finlayson.”There’s a lot of issues that has come out of that.”

Gwen Florio

A plan to expand a commuter rail line in Utah has run into opposition from six tribes, who say construction along its route trespasses on sacred burial grounds that house a huge collection of Native artifacts.

It’s not the FrontRunner tracks themselves, according to this ABC4 News report, but construction debris; specifically, topsoil that was dumped on land near Draper, south of Salt Lake City.

As the station notes:

The Soo’nkahni Indian Village is the largest discovery of Native American artifacts ever found in the Salt Lake Valley. It has been estimated there are as many as one million artifacts on the lands around the area. In August 2009, Governor Hebert signed a conservation easement to protect the land from development.

The Utah Transit Authority says it believed the land in question fell under a 50-foot easement granted by the Army Corps of Engineers, but that it will cease work in the area until the issue can be resolved.

As Madelyn Gray Mountain of the Confederated Band of Goshutes says: “Our ancestors knew no boundaries and to provide that protection for that small piece of land is the least we can do as tribal leaders.”

Gwen Florio

A man who was an informant in a federal case involving stolen Indian artifacts has committed suicide.

Ted Dan Gardiner, 52, shot and killed himself during a confrontation with police Monday, according to the Deseret (Utah) News, here.

“He had a passion for Southwestern archaeology and Native American culture,” Dustin Gardiner says. “It was something he didn’t want to see destroyed or disrespected.” According to the News:

Last summer, federal officials wrapped up a 21/2-year investigation in the Four Corners area, with the indictment of 26 people, including several prominent community members from the southern Utah town of Blanding. The indictments accused them of violating the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. The government believes the defendants were selling or attempting to sell artifacts taken from federal land.

Gardiner is the third person involved in the sting to take his own life since the case has unfolded. Two defendants, Blanding physician James Redd and Steven Shrader, of New Mexico, killed themselves following their arrests in June 2009.

His son said Ted Gardiner had a history of mental difficulties and substance abuse. A KSL-TV report (video above) says his death could jeopardize the case.

Gwen Florio