PUB00021

• Year: 1996
• Title: The Colorado River Workshop Issues, Ideas, and Directions
• CWCB Section: Water Conservation & Drought Planning
• Author: Grand Canyon Trust
• Description: An open forum for discussion of management issues between managers, water users, and stakeholders of the Colorado River Basin
• Publications - Doc Type: Brochure

32

OTHER NATIVE AMERICAN ISSUES FOR
CONSIDERATION IN THE MANAGEMENT
OF THE BASIN

The lands over which Native American tribes, located
within the Colorado River Basin, have jurisdictions
have been essentially established by the United States
Government without regard to the original extent of
these tribes' traditional use and therefore, likely do not
reflect the limits of their contemporary concerns. As a
result, many places of traditional cultural importance
that playa central role in the continuance of tribal cul-
tural identity and religious practices within the
Colorado River Basin are located on lands that are
under the jurisdiction of federal agencies, state agen-
cies, and/or private landholders.

Generally speaking, because Native American tradition-
al cultures and religions are integrally linked to the nat-
ural environment, the exercise of these Native American
religions and the contentment experienced by the prac-
titioner is most often integrally tied to a geographic
location. Thus, the preservation, protection, and unre-
stricted and non-harassed access to these places are fun-
damental concerns to Native American tribes.

Additional issues of concern to Native American
tribes identified in this discussion paper include the
protection and appropriate treatment of human
remains and the preservation of historic places and
traditional cultural places of significance to tribal
groups. V\Thile these issues are discussed in more
depth below, the one common key element to all
these issues is a meaningful, government to govern-
ment, consultation with Native American tribes by
federal and state land managing agencies and the
integration of Native American concerns and tradi-
tional values in an equitable manner into the man-
agement decision-making process.

Another leading management issue for the basin is
how to facilitate the tribal involvement in a way that
is affordable and meaningful to the traditional values
of all 54 Native American tribes, and concurrently
diminishes the perception and tendency of pitting
states, irrigation districts, power marketing entities,
the power purchasing public, private industry and
grass roots environmental organizations against
Native Americans.

HUMAN REMAINS

Human remains and associated funerary objects, which
are usually associated with archaeological sites, have
been customarily viewed by archaeologists as sources
of scientific data and by federal land managing agen-
cies as another class of manageable resource. Generally,
when human remains are identified) either in an isolat-
ed situation or during the course of archaeological data
recovery, they are, similar to any other class of artifact,
scientifically excavated, analyzed, and curated in a
museum or within the federal agency. For approxi-
mately a century this was the standard federal land
managing agency method of dealing with Native
American human remains.

This method of human remains management has been
disputed by Native American tribes for many reasons,
but one of the fundamental reasons is directly associat-
ed with concepts of death and dying. For many Native
Americans the moment of death initiates two separate
but related journeys; the return of the physical body to
a oneness with the earth and the journey of the spirit
to its final resting place. A disruption, through excava-
tion and curation in a museum, in the physical remains
return to the earth dramatically disrupts the journey of
the spirit. The cumulative effect of halting or disrupt-
ing these processes, creates disharmony within the spir-
itual world. The disharmony created in the spiritual