"Last Rites for Indian Dead" by Susan Shown Harjo
What if museums, universities, and government agencies could put your dead relatives on display or keep them in boxes to be cut up and otherwise studied? What if you believed that the spirits of the dead could not rest until their human remains were placed in a sacred area?
The ordinary American would say that there ought to be a law--and there is, for ordinary
Americans. The problem for American Indians is that there are too many laws of the kind that make us the archaeological property of the United States and too few of the kind that protect us from insults.
Some of my own Cheyenne relatives' skulls are in the Smithsonian Institution today, along with those of at least 4,500 other Indian people who were violated in the 1800s by the U.S. Army for an
"Indian Crania Study." It wasn't enough that these unarmed Cheyenne people were mowed down by the cavalry at the infamous Sand Creek massacre; many were decapitated and their heads shipped to Washington as freight. (The Army Medical Museum's collection is now in the Smithsonian.) Some had been exhumed only hours after being buried. Imagine their grieving families' reaction on finding their loved ones disinterred and headless.
Some targets of the Army's study were killed in noncombat situations and beheaded immediately. The officer's account of the decapitation of the Apache Chief Mangas Coloradas in
1863 shows the pseudoscientific nature of the exercise. "I weighed the brain and measured the skull," the good doctor wrote, "and found that while the skull was smaller, the brain was larger than that of Daniel Webster."
These journal accounts exist in excruciating detail, yet missing are any records of overall comparisons, conclusions, or final reports of the Army study. Since it is unlike the Army not to leave a paper trail, one must wonder about the motive for its collection.
The total Indian body count in the Smithsonian collection is more than 19,000, and it is not the largest in the country. It is not inconceivable that the 1.5 million of us living today are outnumbered by our dead stored in museums, educational institutions, federal agencies, state historical societies, and private collections. The Indian people are further dehumanized by being exhibited alongside the mastodons and dinosaurs and other extinct creatures.
Where we have buried our dead in peace, more often than not the sites have been desecrated. For more than two hundred years, relic-hunting has been a popular pursuit. Lately, the market in Indian artifacts has brought this abhorrent activity to a fever pitch in some areas. And when scavengers come upon Indian burial sites, everything found becomes fair game, including sacred burial offerings, teeth, and skeletal remains.
One unusually well-publicized example of Indian grave desecration occurred two years ago in a western Kentucky field known as Slack Farm, the site of an Indian village five centuries ago. Ten men--one with a business card stating, "Have Shovel, Will Travel"--paid the landowner $10,000 to lease digging rights between planting seasons. They dug extensively on the forty acre farm, rummaging through an estimated 650 graves, collecting burial goods, tools, and ceremonial items.
Skeletons were strewn about like litter.

R HETORICAL A NALYSIS OF
S USAN S HOWN H ARJO ’ S "L AST R ITES FOR I NDIAN D EAD " (2002)
I recently read a three-page article by Susan Shown Harjo, a Native American rights advocate entitled, "Last Rites for Indian Dead." The article was reprinted in The Bedford Guide for College
Writers (2002) and was an article dedicated to the issue of Native American burial rights and repatriations. Harjo contends throughout her essay that her peoples ought not to be treated as the
"property" of the United States of America; for Harjo, all too often, Native American bones and relics end up on display at a museum, or even worse, on sale at an auction for private collectors. Harjo does an exceptional job of eliciting an ethical and emotional response in the reader, yet she fails to refute and develop a counterargument against scientists who claim studying relics is valuable.
Harjo makes her reader “feel” her people’s pain and in that way, the argument could be understood as effective. Yet, ultimately, I believe, her failure to present a counterargument compromises her argument.
From the very beginning of her essay, Harjo employs the ethos-based rhetorical appeal by claiming a Native American identity. In her couple of sentences, Harjo attempts to place readers into her shoes by asking questions: "What if museums, universities, and government agencies could put your dead relatives on display or keep them in boxes to be cut up and otherwise studied? What if you believed that the spirits of the dead could not rest until their human remains were placed in a sacred area?" (119). She uses questions here as a rhetorical strategy to create imagery. The images that these questions evoke are exceptionally brutal--how could a regular reader not help but feel a sense of Harjo's outrage? After all, the mere thought of one's "dead relatives on display" or even worse, them being "cut up and otherwise studied" likely makes the reader horrified and disgusted.
As a result, her credibility, or more specifically, her extrinsic ethos, as a Native American helps to emphasize her strong feelings against desecration and the study of Native American bones and relics. Harjo wants a regular audience, one largely unfamiliar with her topic, to feel sorry about the historical injustices suffered by her peoples. If the audience were well-informed about this topic, then Harjo would not need to include a passage that carefully describes the study like the following:
Some of my own Cheyenne relatives' skulls are in the Smithsonian Institution today, along with those of at least 4,500 other Indian people who were violated in the 1800s by the U.S. Army for an
"Indian Crania Study." It wasn't enough that these unarmed Cheyenne people were mowed down by the calvary at the infamous Sand Creek massacre; many were decapitated and their heads shipped to Washington as freight. (The Army Medical Museum's collection is now in the Smithsonian.) Some had been exhumed only hours after being buried. Imagine their grieving families' reaction on finding their loved ones disinterred and headless. (120)
This passage, in its entirety, combines the ethos-based appeal with the pathos-based one. She uses the rhetorical strategy of personal narrative and description in an effort to establish her ethos as well as elicit emotion. Harjo initially demonstrates how she is personally linked to her topic by citing her Cheyenne ancestry, then goes on to show how the U.S. army systematically led a campaign to decimate, then later study her people. Her verb choices, another rhetorical strategy, are particularly important here: "Indian people . . . were violated"; "Cheyenne people were mowed down"; "many were "decapitated and their heads shopped to Washington as freight" (120). Notice that the verbs move from a more violent sense, from "violate," "mowed down," then finally, the verb becomes very passive and dehumanizing--people's heads are "shipped" merely as freight, much as other packaged items might be sent. Such emotion-laden rhetoric helps the reader to completely empathize with the author.

Harjo calls research on her peoples' relics into question by citing a well-known, seemingly credible doctor, Emery A Johnson, attempting to both contribute to the argument through this logical rhetorical strategy as well as establish her ethos as a writer. Johnson's quote, however, raises more questions than it answers. According to Dr. Johnson, studies into Indian relics and bones are baseless:
I am not aware of any current medical diagnostic or treatment procedure that has been derived from research on such skeletal remains. Nor am I aware of any during the thirty-four years that I have been involved in American Indian . . . health care. (qtd. in Harjo 121)
Without a doubt, Dr. Johnson's quote seems completely damning to people who would argue against Harjo, that is to say, people who would claim that study of the relics of the bones are important. The real problem that I find with Dr. Johnson's quote is that in recent years, scientists in fields such as forensic anthropology have begun to discover the importance of tracing migratory patterns of Native American groups using D.N.A. samples. Dr. Johnson, while certainly being qualified to speak on this subject as the former assistant Surgeon General, would unlikely be qualified to speak on behalf of other scientists who would find the data from such studies beneficial.
I feel that Harjo would have been more persuasive if she were she able to successfully repudiate scientists in the fields of cultural anthropology or archaeology; these scientists would probably be outraged to discover said bones buried in the ground, forever.
Thus, Harjo's main problem lies not so much in her ability to win us over as a reader emotionally and ethically; Harjo, from my perspective, is primarily unsuccessful in raising counterpoints to her position, then explaining why these are flawed. Had she clearly explained what sorts of medical procedures there were concerning these relics, then demonstrated why such studies were completely baseless, her argument would be exceptionally compelling because of her logical stance.
As it stands, however, Harjo's argument, I feel, more forcefully establishes a sense of outrage and empathy more than a sense of measured logic. Because of this, I don’t think the argument is as effective as it could be.
This student analysis was found at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~davink/ARGUMENTATIVE/Harjo.html
and adapted by Professor Rodrigue