Giving the bones back

Every single part of our body is a gift from those who lived before. You, me, each of us is a weaving of some seven billion billion billion atoms or something in the area of 52 trillion cells. Around 60 percent of you is water; even the part that seems the most dense - our bones - are a third fluid. The food we eat is broken down into elements which we absorb into our bloodstream, move throughout our body and then use to build every cell, enzyme and tissue that makes up you. The food we eat - a mix of plants and animals that also sometimes includes plastic - absorbs elements from rocks, soil and water. Those elements are transformed in the bodies of the wheat and apple, chicken and goat before then becoming the elements that are moved through our bodies. And those rocks, soil and water? They are the remains of lives before, the same kin that includes our bloodline ancestors and the ancestors of the wheat and apple, chicken and goat. Oh, and stardust. Don’t forget the stardust. As Nikita Gill writes: “We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names”.

We do not and can not own a single thing…. and that includes the elements that make up the secrets that go with us to our graves, decomposing back into soil to start the cycle all over again.

In 2020, I wrote a piece about the origins of craniosacral therapy called Aligning the Relational Field. I had known slivers of stories about the Shawnee and Cherokee origins of our practice for years. It was in researching those stories, that I learned that our field’s earliest originator, Andrew Taylor Still, dug up the remains of Shawnee ancestors and used their bones for his research.

Pause. That should never just be information. Pause. He dug up the ancestor's remains and used their bones for research. These were ancestors who had largely died from one of the many epidemics that settlers brought to Turtle Island; cholera, in this case. Pause. Feel. Rage. Know.

Pause.

A few months ago, a group of people reached out to me. They are from a cousin-field to craniosacral therapy, Ortho-bionomy, which is also in the lineage of Andrew Taylor Still’s work. This small group has been working to determine if those ancestor’s remains that Andrew Taylor Still once stole are still held by the descendants of his field - in this case, at the Museum of Osteopathy. It is early days but evidence is pointing towards yes.

It is early days but evidence is pointing towards yes.

Pause. Feel. Rage. Grieve. Know.

The writing on this blogpost is not (yet) a piece designed to get you to call up the Museum. The group who began this work are doing it in the slow and steady way needed to be in good relationship, meaning in relationship to the descendants of those ancestor’s remains. Instead, this is written to say, hello, practitioners, hello. How are you, like me, part of this same lineage of violence?

In January of this year, new regulations were passed as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). These new regulations build on the Act’s passing in the 1990s by, in the words of one of NAGPRA’s investigators, putting the power and authority for the act more firmly into the hands of tribes. Part of what this means is that in 1990, when the Act first passed, scores of universities, museums and private “collectors” found a range of loopholes and did everything they could to keep their literal hands on the ancestor’s remains they claimed to own. The new regulations, only a few months old, close those loopholes and put the responsibility for respectful right of return on the institutions that hold on to these remains. And to be clear, ancestral remains include bones but also include ceremonial and other sacred objects.

Dear beloveds, there is and always has been an epidemic in trafficking the remains of ancestors and the objects they held sacred. Fields like anthropology and archaeology and paleontology were created by colonial forces to justify the study of what had been stolen and extracted, even as some of the people in those fields are shifting and changing their intent. Beloved ancestors’ remains have been used for “study” to justify scientific racism; including studying the shapes of skulls to determine “criminality.”. The outcome of this research was - and sometimes still is - used to build a case for the normalcy of racism and racial violence, of colonialism and attempted genocide. Beloved ancestors’ remains, taken out of the circle of life and death, used against their descendants and then frozen in a vault so that the memories can not return home.

The internet is filled with horror stories, moments when a highway development project unearthed a burial ground and disappeared the remains, or through the founding of museums to create a space for cataloging and studying what a farmer had found when digging up his field. If you go to the NAGPRA site, you can see lists of places where remains are still housed, and those are only the known large scale sites. Lawsuits and millions of dollars have gone to support these institutions and private collectors to “keep” what they assert that they “own.” This includes the remains of children buried at boarding schools, these ancestors as well. Hence, the new NAGPRA regulations that were passed in January.

What is not included on these lists are the many private homes and practice spaces of individuals, including practitioners and teachers, who have a mandible or a set of vertebrae that they use to both study and marvel at.

Pause. Feel. Rage. Grieve. Know.

Dear practitioner of whatever flavor - doctor, nurse, craniosacral therapist, physical therapist, osteopath, chiropractor - whose remains did you study when you were learning about tensegrity, fascia trains, articulation, the craniosacral rhythm, the relationship between joints and ligaments? I once took an online anatomy class to go with my craniosacral study and the professor stood at the front of the room and looped their arm around the skeleton, calling him “Bob” and then manipulating the bones so that the students would laugh. I know that he did it to bring down the anxiety that students were likely feeling about the course but I just watched and thought, but whose remains are those, really? Whose remains and why have my people learned that this kind of disrespect is cute?

The only way it is possible to treat any remains or living being - from bones to an oak tree - as an object to manipulate and control is because you and your people have already experienced such a thing over a long enough period of time that it has become “normal.” And in the case of this professor, even funny.

One of the main sources of teaching skeletons - the phrase used for those remains that are frozen in the front of classrooms - is India. In particular, bodies stolen under British colonialism that were then taken from crematoriums and used for research. This became illegal in 1958, but part of the illegality did not include returning those ancestors’ remains to the land.

Every single body that is determined as disposable by racial capitalism and colonial extraction is treated in the same way. In 1985, after the MOVE bombing, when the city of Philadelphia literally exterminated the home and members of a Black revolutionary organization, the remains of two of the children killed in that bombing - Tree who was 14 and Delisha who was 12 - were stolen and used by Princeton University for study.

Tree and Delisha. Children whose remains were stolen from their family and kin, turned into objects for study and beloved ones, as someone who absolutely loves to study and learn, I am very clear that when we study, we are being entertained. For those of us who love learning, study provides an endorphin rush which means that those children, those beloved children, were stolen for someone’s entertainment. Period.

Stealing ancestors' remains is part of the act of colonization; whether desecrating burial sites here on Turtle Island or currently in Gaza. This desecration has been a military strategy for so long that there is international law, the International Religious Freedom Act, that prohibits the destruction of sacred sites including burial grounds. Laws like this, without any real accountability metric, are sometimes passed to remind us of our deepest sense of connection. Of morality. We do not steal the remains of ancestors, they remind us, our own or anyone else’s.

As practitioners we know that our bodies, our lives are created from histories. We work with those who come to see us, listening for the rhythms between the past and the present and noticing what is restricted; noticing where a past tightly held in the body impacts the fluidity of the liver, the beating of the heart, the electric pulses sent through neurons.

Those who have worked on NAGPRA, thank you to the real people who are building and holding this work, they are not confused. They know that the bones stored in plastic bins that are pulled out when the curriculum gets to that part of the course are not another kind of empty land, ready to be interpreted and claimed. Instead, the language that NAGPRA uses, and as a practitioner I love this, is that we all have a duty of care in relation to the remains of ancestors and the sacred and ceremonial objects that they used. A duty of care. The oldest believed root of the English word “duty” is a word that means “to give or receive.” When I read that I thought, but of course. Of course. While the meaning of the word has grown disconnected, the word’s oldest memory is about a cycle of interdependence, of giving and receiving. I would imagine that the ancestors grieve alongside us when noticing that this word - duty - got frozen into something that can feel like a burden rather than life.

We have a duty of care for the respectful return of the remains of those who lived and breathed, who loved and were sometimes irritating as shit to the people around them. Real living beings, a weaving of memories and practices that emerged from the earth and have the right to return. The sacred and ceremonial objects they created and prayed over, that remember those prayers in the field of their own bodies, whether made of wood or skin or stone.

The NAGPRA site is clear and the resources are constantly updated. There is so much support there for looking at something whose lineage is uncertain and then taking the next step. There is nothing that gets in the way of respectful return other than a sense of ownership and possession, a recoil away from duty. This is true whether we are talking about land/back or our duty of care to these ancestors and their descendants.

And beloveds, I would say that our duty of care extends to those who hold these remains and who are potentially ignorant and defensive around what this means. You have a choice to turn this into another power struggle, a moment of drawing a line in the sand and putting your body on the side of the righteous and theirs on the side of the sinner. This is part of the wound, this binary of good/bad, and it is part of the larger wound that allows for the objectification of life. After all, you have to have this binary in place to begin the movement that ends up with eugenics and the stealing of land and culture. Our duty of care, as I understand it, is about relationships and that includes in the ways that we turn towards those closest to us and ask, can we talk about the bones that you have used to teach me? Can I share with you what I have learned and can we talk about what we are going to do?

When the remains are from Turtle Island, then the path is clear. Thank you, NAGPRA. When the remains are from other lands or are unknown, then the path can be muddier. The questions, however, are clear: what will most honor this ancestor or the ancestors who created these sacred items? What do their living descendants, if we can name them, say, recognizing that there won’t be a single story or answer? How would I want my grandparents’ remains to be treated? My parents, my own and my children’s? What does NAGPRA teach me about respectful return and can I learn from this practice even when the remains are connected with other lands? And if these remains can not return home, can they at least return to the land, held by prayer and care so that the memories contained can then be released before moving back into life again?

What would happen if the bones we learned from had been lovingly donated by one of us before we passed, gently treated after death, washed and cleaned by those who loved us, wrapped in familiar cloth and then handed as a gift to those who would help others to learn and heal? What would happen if we demanded intimacy? Consent? If we invited letters from those whose remains we held against our hearts; a letter telling us who they were and what about life had mattered to them?

We live in a cycle of death and rebirth. When I have moments where the present and future feel terrifying, I sometimes sense in to the calcium crystals starlit through my tibia and whisper: what do you remember? I am shown images of times that were harder and easier than this one. I hear stories of moments when the beloveds of the past lived through unspeakable things and still stumbled forward so that on this day I could look outside and notice how beautiful the lines of the elm tree are against the early morning sky. I am awash with gratitude, the fact of the soil that created my daughter’s skin, the rush of rain that ensures that those I love will live another day and the pull of the tides in all of our bodies that connects us more securely than any internet ever can.

Our bones are our fluid infrastructure; they enable us to move from one place to another, whether running playfully or fleeing danger. And when we are done, it is time for them to sink back into the earth, becoming calcium and magnesium and iron and love again so that someday, some other being, whether using wings or hands or the support of others, can also find a way to move to where they need to move.

Pause. Feel. Rage. Grieve. Know.

Return.

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With gratitude to Renee Schneider and Moriah Williams