KU, Haskell faculty featured in Kansas premiere of 'Who Owns the Past?'

LAWRENCE -- Faculty from the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University are among the experts interviewed in a one-hour documentary film, "Who Owns the Past?" that premieres Wednesday, Dec. 3, in Topeka and Thursday, Dec. 4, in Lawrence. Both screenings are free and open to the public.

Produced by independent filmmaker Jed Riffe of Berkeley, Calif., with funding from the Kansas Humanities Council, "Who Owns the Past?" tells the story of American Indians' struggle for control of their ancestral remains.

The first screening will be at 7 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Kansas History Center and Museum, 6424 S.W. Sixth Ave., Topeka.

The second will be at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4 in Navarre Hall at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence.

A panel discussion will follow each screening.

The Topeka panel will feature Tom Witty, former Kansas state archaeologist; Rita Napier, historian at KU; Randy Thies, Kansas State Historical Society archaeologist; and Dan Wildcat, educator at Haskell.

Napier, Wildcat and Thies also will participate in the panel discussion at Haskell Indian Nations University.

Wildcat and Napier both served as consultants for the script and provided on-camera commentary.

Napier has served on the Kansas Governor's Board on Preservation of Unmarked Burial Sites and participated in repatriation ceremonies for ancient and recent tribal remains.

In the 1980s, Wildcat worked with resident tribes in Kansas -- Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, Iowa and Potawatomi -- and the Native American Rights Fund of Boulder, Colo., to get legislation passed in 1988 in Kansas to protect unmarked graves and skeletal remains. A federal law, the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act, later was enacted to provide this protection nationwide.

"Who Owns the Past?" for the first time presents the real story behind the clash of worldviews that led to the closing of the Indian Burial Pit in Salina. This powerful film from the maker of "Ishi, the Last Yahi" uncovers the truth about one of the most contentious issues facing American Indians, archaeologists and museum curators -- the control of their ancestral remains.

Filmed on location in Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon and Massachusetts over a five-year period, "Who Owns the Past?" was funded by the Kansas Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.

The film opens with the contemporary conflict over the Kennewick man, a 9,200-year-old set of human remains found in the Pacific Northwest. The film takes audiences back to 1620, when the Pilgrims unearthed a series of American Indian burial mounds on Cape Cod, and brings viewers to the present by examining specific events in American history.

Napier is shown at a repatriation ceremony for Pawnee scouts in Genoa, Neb., where the skulls of men who died in service as scouts for the U.S. Army were buried. The scouts, who often served as guards for the railroad, were killed in January 1869 in an encounter with the U.S. Army in Kansas that turned hostile. Soldiers removed the scouts' skulls to be shipped to Washington, D.C., for ethnological study. Until the repatriation ceremony a few years ago the skulls had been stored at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Wildcat appears frequently throughout the film, commenting on the Native American movement that led to the protection of ancestral graves and remains and about sites in Kansas.

The film is the first in-depth history of the national controversy over the collection, representation and disposition of human remains found in North America.