How foolish can one get? Four or five governors later, they’ll open it again.
I quickly soured on a career as a ditchdigger for Science, but I went back to Dickson Mounds many times as a tourist. The burial wing of the new museum has been carefully built around the partly excavated mound that gives the place its name: the mound looks just as it did when it was exposed nearly 70 years ago. Instead of an earthen cover, the place is now sheltered by a tall-ceilinged, bare-walled room that’s more storeroom than sanctum in design, if not ambience.
“Who were they?” is a question always asked by visitors to the Dickson Mounds. Now the bones demand, “Who are we?”
The bluff was destined for an archaeological treasure house, composed as it is of well-drained and nonacidic glacial soils. White settlers recognized the mounds as human in origin, but the burial complex was not explored (or “vandalized, ” depending on your point of view) until after the Civil War, when a Kentucky farmer named Dickson found bones while clearing the site for a new orchard.
But two or three years ago, Franke says, “Things began heating up.” Native Americans had begun formally protesting the appropriation and display of Indian remains and artifacts by museums from Wisconsin to Oklahoma. (In 1987 an attempt to expand a Quebec municipal golf course onto a Mohawk burial ground led to armed violence between that tribe and the Canadian army.) By 1990 most states had passed laws requiring the repatriation of remains to known modern descendants, and 18 states encouraged or required their reburial; under the prodding of such new laws, standard museum practice regarding the display of human remains began to change.
Closing the burial wing was also a preemptive legal maneuver. Federal statutes like the Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 do not explicitly ban displays of Indian remains but might provide the hook for annoying lawsuits challenging them. Some museum administrators and scientific staff concede privately that the potential for costly litigation and bad PR intimidated some of their colleagues. Museum officials, remembering what the General Assembly did to the School of the Art Institute after the flag flap of 1990, may have decided that discretion is the better part of public administration.
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Until the ruckus about the Dickson Mounds bone room two years ago, the only time Jim Thompson worried about dead spirits was when the champagne at the mansion went flat. Two years ago he was informed as the museum’s titular boss of the decision to close the wing, and was as unprepared as anyone for the whoops of protest when news of the closing leaked. Local legislators were angry as much at having been left out of the planning as at the closing itself. At that point a scientific and ethical issue became a political one; thereafter, Thompson spoke–and thought–for the museum.
