ABSTRACT
What follows is only tangentially about the legal issue concerning Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, although he does come into it. It is really about two other, related, issues. First, it is about U.S. legal culture, the history of the origins of that culture as it relates to Native Americans, and the way that legal culture figured in the lawsuit concerning the Ancient One. Second, this chapter focuses on the emergence of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and what it has meant and might mean for the ownership, control, and/or disposition of Native American human remains in America. These two issues come together in the consideration of ancient Native American human remains in a way that highlights distinct cultural differences between Native American and Euro-American cultures, including attitudes about legal culture in the United States. In the end, there appears to be an irreconcilable gulf between these cultural perspectives, one for which a compromise is difficult to imagine without further significant social and legal changes.
