Bunch of Amateurs (26 page)

Once again, there’s Blumenbach’s word. Only this time it’s got that “-oid” ending. What is the difference between Caucasoid and Caucasian?

“Caucasoid sounds more scientific,” said University of North Carolina anthropologist Jonathan Marks, laughing. Otherwise it has no more meaning or significance than Blumenbach’s original. Caucasoid is a magnificent piece of pure
Star Trekery
, a word meant to sound all clinical and precise, even nerdy. But the word is a rhetorical Trojan Horse. Its surface meaning suggests something scientific, respectable and learned, when in fact what we really hear is the connotations lurking inside, long-suppressed intimations of superiority, exceptionalism, and beauty.

The court fight over Kennewick Man was resolved in favor of the scientists—in part because this is America and who can be against “open inquiry”? In the popular market of ideas, though, the courts also legitimized the story of the Caucasian man who came to this continent as the Authentic First American and whose bones survived the millennia to report the truth. It is the story that has gotten told this last decade about this hundred-century-old man that is arresting in its perversity. It begins with his name. Does anything sound more European, positively British, than Kennewick? Native Americans had dubbed him the “Ancient One.” But it didn’t take. The mass media, which follows the meandering will of the popular mob, could sense where this story was trending, and so they ran with “Kennewick.” Isn’t that a suburb of Essex or the other airport in London? Perhaps not so ironically, the origin goes back to a local Indian chief named Konewack, whose Native American name was anglicized to Kennewick after the railroad workers moved in. As if it were a trend, the very year after Kennewick, more ancient bones were found on Prince of Wales Island. This skeleton was quickly declared to be “Prince of Wales Man,” making it seem like the Stone Age forebears of the Saxon kings fancied the Pacific Northwest as a dandy vacation spot.

In the few years after Sir Kennewick’s discovery, his life was described and depicted in all the leading magazines. One writer on the subject, Sasha Nemecek, confessed that when she looked at the evidence
“the misty images of primitive explorers evaporate” and now “I suddenly picture a single artisan spending hours, perhaps days, crafting these stone tools” whose “workmanship is exquisite, even to my untrained eye.” For the article, an artist rendered images of what Kennewick and his ilk looked like. He’s an average-height white man with round eyes and some sexily tousled long brown hair. He is wearing a pair of long slacks sewn with a fetching seam straight down the leg to his ankles and a big animal coat (with long sleeves)—an outfit that looks like it comes from Ralph Lauren’s Flintstone collection. If it weren’t for the spear in his hand, you might mistake him for an English professor at Bennington, but in fact he’s the “First American.”

And his bride has the complex toolkit of her time, not to mention a nice Ann Tayloroid dress and a haircut that presages Jennifer Aniston by nearly ten millennia. She has thoughtfully shaved her legs for the artist, the better to see her lovely Caucasian skin.

Where did these pictures appear?
Scientific American
.

Kennewick was instantaneously described with words that launched him millennia ahead of his primitive enemies, the Paleo-Indians. He was, as Chatters had said from the beginning, probably an individual “trapper/explorer”—two words that, together, suggest that Kennewick was practically an advance scout for Lewis and Clark. And these words imply degrees of complex rational thinking, especially when set beside a horde of “Stone Age peoples.” Other articles painted beautiful scenes of Kennewick as the “strongest hunter in his band.” Paleo-Indians were still mucking around in “tribes,” while Kennewick traveled with a “band,” which “usually consisted of immediate and extended family members with several bands ranging over the same general territory.”

Family? Absolutely, that’s why Kennewick lived “a good life. He had a mate, and two of their four children still were alive. He still could hunt, though he relied on his dog to bring the game down.
And young men in his band still asked his advice, though lately, his sister’s mate was showing signs of impatience, always wanting to do things at his time, in his way.” Food was important. “To keep up his strength, he and his band dined on rich, lean roasts and steaks.” Kennewick is naturally on the Atkins diet. No type II diabetes from obesity for Sir Kennewick.

“It’s natural that people of that time would trade with distant bands,” the article goes on to say, although, as a caution, it adds, “there’s not a lot of physical evidence to prove it.” But proof isn’t really necessary when you have adverbs such as “likely” to work over: “To protect his feet, Kennewick Man likely trudged the hills and valleys of Eastern Washington and Oregon in sandals made of sagebrush bark.”

Within the first few years of his reappearance, Kennewick Man received major, lengthy profiles in nearly every major magazine in North America, from
Newsweek
, the
Economist
, and
Natural History
to the
New Yorker
,
Maclean’s
, and
Discover
. In all of these articles, sourcing is a good place to invisibly move the story in one direction or another. For the confirmation of Kennewick’s skull shape, the articles most often cited two people. One was Catherine J. MacMillan, an acquaintance of Chatters and a fellow private-sector archaeologist. Most articles avoid naming the salvage archaeology company she runs, perhaps because it lacks a certain gravitas: the Bone-Apart Agency. The other source is Grover Grantz, who was a professor at Washington State University. He, too, has an unmentioned gravitas problem, as a pioneer of “Sasquatchery” and a man often described as the “only true scientist to throw his hat in the ring”—the ring being the hunt for Bigfoot. Grantz was the physical anthropologist who suggested that believers kill a Sasquatch and bring in the corpse in order to prove his existence. Grantz died in 2002 and donated his skeleton to the Smithsonian to show he had no fear of having the flesh boiled off his bones so that they could be mounted for display.

Kennewick Man “seems to have been a tall, good-looking man, slender and well-proportioned.” Blumenbach’s notion of superiority as beauty is never really behind us. Also: “Some nearby sites contain large numbers of fine bone needles, indicating that a lot of delicate sewing was going on.” Here’s a classic case of journalistic nudging. Fine bone needles found in
nearby
sites. Could they have belonged to the marauding hordes of Paleo-Indians? Instead here’s the shove: “Kennewick Man may have worn tailored clothing.” Dig the “may.” But also swish that other word around on your connotative palate. “Tailored.” Feel the force, tugging us in a certain direction. Then: “For a person at that time to live so long in relatively good health indicates that he was clever or lucky, or both, or had family and close friends around him.” Good health, clever, family, close friends—a veritable claret of connotative complexity.

And these are the elegant accounts which struggle to keep the story contained inside the scientists’ own cautious terms. From there, the implications of Kennewick quickly became insinuated in current fashions of political opinion. Here’s the
National Review
writing about “the growing suspicion among physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and even geneticists that some of the first people who settled in the New World were Europeans.” Note how a tentative resemblance of skull shape, “Caucasoid-like”—always hedged by the scientists—has quickly settled into declarative certainty: “were Europeans.” The politically obvious conclusion is also clear, as the writer continues: “An important part of American Indian identity relies on the belief that, in some fundamental way, they were here first. They are indigenous, they are Native, and they make an important moral claim on the national conscience for this very reason. Yet if some population came before them—perhaps a group their own ancestors wiped out through war and disease, in an eerily reversed foreshadowing of the contact Columbus introduced—then a vital piece of their mythologizing suffers a serious blow. This revised history drastically undercuts the posturing occasioned by the 500th anniversary of
Columbus’s 1492 voyage.” Once you step away from the magazines and books, the story leaches into the poisonous domain of online discussions, where one can easily find comments like this one from shmogie1 on the alt.soc.history board: “Kennewick man is older than any known N/A [Native American] remains, and appears to be much more European than N/A, so your people stole the land from my European ancestors who were here first.” And then you finally drift on down to the neo-Nazis, always good for a pithy quote. The extermination of the American Indian, said former Klan Dragon and part-time Nazi Louis Beam, was just “white people” getting revenge.

Most of these accounts conclude with a hushed imagining of how that spear point got into the hip. Because Kennewick Man’s skeleton body was found in a riverbed, the writers surmise that he died there, as in this sentence: “He may have perished alone on a fishing trip, far from his family.” Cue Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

In these stories, the Indians are typically ignored or they simply move about as a supernumerary horde summoned onstage to throw the Cascade point. They have no friends or family. Might they have also been clever and scored well on their SATs? It’s never mentioned, or maybe there just weren’t enough bone needles to draw such a conclusion. But the hedge in Kennewick’s favor is constant, each detail slightly pushed toward revealing a man who was smart and carried complex tools and had damn sophisticated taste in clothing. He hunted and ate well and had good bone structure. He was surrounded by friends and family, i.e., that intimacy of culture that would lead to the abandonment of nomadism, the invention of agriculture and society, the stable foundation that would lead us inexorably toward Western civilization. Which, in turn, would bring Kennewick’s Caucasoid-like descendents back to America to find him and tell his story.

The story of a European presence here in America prior to the Indians would be a truly novel tale if it hadn’t already been told so many times. The number of theories holding that Native Americans were either latecomers or actually Europeans who’d set aside their history for loincloths is impressive. We—and by we, I mean white people—have been getting Indians wrong from the git-go. Remember where the word “Indian” comes from, for starters. But even the earliest depictions of Indians simply used European bodies and faces with a few feathers added.

Western Europeans were stunned that the New World had so many people already in it. How could these primitives have gotten here first? They must be … us! Theories abounded. Some British savants thought Indians were covert Welsh families who’d slipped over on their rafts, the cunning little demons. Others theorized that the Indians were the lost people of Atlantis. There were a whole host of arguments that Indians were Jews. During the colonial era, the chief rabbi of Holland, Menashe ben Israel, theorized that all Native Americans were descendent from the Lost Tribes of Israel, and the theory was confirmed by a 1650 book entitled
Jews in America or the Probabilities That the Americans Be of That Race
. Mormons continue to believe this account of Native American origin, holding that the sons of Lehi sailed to the Americas around the time of Christ and forgot their knowledge of the Torah. They reverted to a state of savagery and their descendents scattered among the plains and throughout the two continents. Thus, all Indians are essentially: Jews Gone Wild.

Most Americans rarely saw images out of books such as the rabbi’s. Rather, the most common mass media image was found on the coins in your pocket—and for most of American history, those Indians looked astonishingly European, if not Roman imperial.

In 1914, on a ten-dollar gold coin, it was still possible to see in the face of the Indian the wavy blond Nordic princess of that dream. Then, at last, the famous buffalo nickel appeared on the eve of World War I, the first Indian image that looked like a Native American. It’s unlikely Chatters knew the full depth of this history when he asked a local artist to take the Kennewick skull and reconstruct the face.