Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’

5
Mar

Not on their burial ground – Utah tribes say rail line project intrudes on huge and protected artifacts site

   Posted by: admin    in artifacts, Goshutes, Indian History



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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

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24
Jan

Military veterans work to restore Native American archaeological treasures

   Posted by: admin    in Indian History, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act


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Back in the 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was building dams all over the places, it disrupted a number of ancient sites in the process.

The remains and artifacts within those sites were excavated and put into storage. Then, nothing.

As Cheryl Wittenauer of the Associated Press writes here:

U.S. Army veteran Sean Box organizes artifacts as part of the Veterans Curation Project in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

U.S. Army veteran Sean Box organizes artifacts as part of the Veterans Curation Project in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

    Prehistoric and historic pottery, stone tools, arrowheads, Indian beads, necklaces, earrings and ear spools, and ceremonial artifacts, even human remains, were collected. The items then sat in boxes and paper bags in university museums as well as private basements, garages and tool sheds.

    In recent weeks, U.S. veterans – many with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder – have begun processing, cataloguing, digitizing and archiving the collection as part of a one-year $3.5 million project, funded with federal stimulus money.

    It’s part of the corps’ effort to find American Indian cultural items and return them to tribes or their descendants – something all federal agencies must do under a 1990 law. Michael Trimble, chief of curation and archives for the corps’ St. Louis district, said the goal is to get the collection catalogued, digitally photographed and put on the Web for public viewing.

The idea is to help veterans and also meet the requirement to deal with the remains and artifacts – which, he says, would fill 30 semitrailers.

For their part, the veterans involved are enthused about the project.

“This is the best thing that has happened to me since I got out of the military,” Cody Gregory tells Wittenauer. The Burleson, Texas, man works at the Veterans Curation Project’s St. Louis center with a dozen other veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Vietnam. The project’s other centers are in Augusta, Ga., and Washington, D.C.

Gwen Florio

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