Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil (Ojibway), in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The case pitted the Umatilla people and other tribes, who wanted to provide a burial to the \u201cAncient One,\u201d against two scientists\u2014one of which from the publicly-funded Smithsonian Institute\u2014who wanted to study the \u201cKennewick Man\u201d. In order for the claim to fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) it became necessary to establish the lineage of these remains.<\/p>\n
This fight unleashed a controversy with groups attempting to establish white ancestry, and with this seeking to altogether undermine the indigenous sovereignty over land and ancestors and annul centuries of colonial violence. The evolving science of DNA and cranial morphology was grotesquely called in to testify to the purity of the bones’ ethnicity, where native claims to embodied knowledge of its origin had little means of addressing the court. Despite all of this, the Umatilla people and other tribes ultimately repatriated the \u201cAncient One\u201d and he was reburied earlier this year in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":9587,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"languages":[],"countries":[1443],"film_categories":[],"master_copies":[],"pricing_grid":[],"press_types":[],"class_list":["post-9575","film","type-film","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","countries-united-states-fr"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n