On the Warpath: Images of Indian Cemeteries

Agency Mission Cemetery

JFK was our first minority president. It’s hard to picture that wavy-haired youth, stylish First Lady, Camelot and all, being our first minority President, but he was: Catholic. It’s hard to picture Catholics as a minority. Isn’t the Pope Catholic? Don’t they have all of South America? How can they be a minority?

Chief Schonchin Cemetery

Nonetheless, during his campaign it was a mighty issue and one that threatened to derail him, much as Obama’s milk chocolate skin. The 2012 elections showed how much the demographics of the country have changed in the ensuing half-century since Kennedy. Now, all those little minorities have morphed into one majority. Suddenly, a putative black man represents the face of America today. The WASP days are definitely on the wane. Adios and good riddance.

Agency Cemetery

Catholic? Black? We almost had a Mormon, funny underwear and all. So when will there be a Jewish President, already? Heck, the way the country is going, we’ll soon have a gay Latina running the place. Let’s see her bomb Afghanistan. Asian? Why not?

Anybody but an Indian. You can’t be President if you’re from another nation. Sorry, guys, it’s the way they wrote the laws; you wanna be President, you have to be a Native-American, not a Chippewa, or a Paiute, or a Mohican. You have to be a plain old anybody from Anywhere, USA.

Indian Cemetery - Husum

Not that one couldn’t be born on a reservation and become President of the United States, that’s perfectly legal (I think). What one can’t do is spend one’s life fighting for status as a sovereign nation and then want to be President of ours. I don’t think the rest of us minorities (hey, I’m a minority now) are going to want to vote for someone who’s perennially pissed off at us.

Agency Cemetery

Jesus, how did that happen? How come one minority is shut out of the game? Oh sure, it’s PC to idolize the Indians, these days; but when it comes to having them do anything for us besides building casinos and being a tourist attraction, they are—I’m going to say this—low on the totem pole. And for sure, it’s not their fault. In fact, it’s no one’s fault; it’s just the way history rolled out: sometimes you’re the victor, sometimes you’re the loser. Happens to us all.

Paiute II Cemetery

What doesn’t always happen is that the losers don’t always get shunted away onto reservations which are mythical sovereign nations. They are, of course, nothing like nations (built on unemployment, casinos, and alcohol)  much less sovereign, but it’s a comfortable fiction for both sides. Unfortunately, rather than giving the Indians independence, respectability, and a place among the nations of the world, we gave them a ghetto thousands of acres broad. It couldn’t be helped. It was a product of the times. A couple hundred years earlier and the Indians would have simply melted into the rest of the population. Setting them aside on barren tracks of land and giving them the illusion of independence has kept them from successfully joining the mainstream. Of course, the Indians don’t want to join the mainstream, but that’s pride talking, not wisdom.

Chief Schonchin Cemetery

The result is they’re stuck on reservations set aside from the rest of the country, and because of those reservations, will never be able to fully join the body Americana. The curse of an inappropriate gift. They are welded to the memory of a dream-time long since vanished under the wagon wheels of settlers. It is, alas, one more legacy of farming. Farmers grow many people and big armies and they always need more land. No tribal society can withstand the march of the plow. It’s a story 10,000 years in the making.

Paul Washington Cemetery

It makes for an uncomfortable truce. Reservations have quasi autonomy, and the lack of true autonomy creates a never ending undercurrent of tension between people from the rez and those from beyond. Us. There is, as far as I can tell, no solution. The pattern is set; the lines are clearly drawn; there’s no going back. No one’s about to give up their reservation and government support. It’s all they have left. Except, of course, for their pride. (If I were them, I’d concentrate on building community colleges instead of casinos, but what do I know?) Likewise, you can be sure the farmers aren’t going to give up their land. Or their government support.

Paul Washington Cemetery

Indian graveyards don’t have to be on reservation land to have an unworldly feel to them. Given, each graveyard is different from any other graveyard just as any human is different from any other human, but upon entering an Indian graveyard one immediately knows they’re in a place apart from the common. In those carefully crafted windows onto a community’s soul, an alien gestalt wraps around the mounds covering the dead. This is not your farmer’s graveyard.

St. Andrews Cemetery

The emotions surrounding an Indian cemetery are complex and strong. How they feel about them and how they feel about outsiders visiting them is writ in the “no trespassing” signs one sees at many of them. There are other gated and locked cemeteries out there, but they’re rare. By far, most cemeteries are open to whomever happens by; nice for visitors and vandals alike. Part of the problem with visitors to Indian cemeteries is that the cemeteries have suffered an inordinate amount of vandalism through the years, much of it sanctioned for and paid for by prestigious American universities and museums. Americans went through Indian graveyards like the British through Greece, stealing everything they could get their hands on. The Americans, though, weren’t content with just grave goods; they went so far as to steal whole bodies; skulls, if nothing else.

Agency Mission Cemetery

Casting one blanket over all the Indian tribes, of course, doesn’t do justice to the diversity of cultures found in a land as varied as the Oregon Territory. Coastal tribes lived a significantly different lifestyle than did those from the interior. Nez Perce were distinct from the Paiute. Each had its own culture and nuances, and each treated their dead in a different manner; distinctions which had to be submerged in the move to reservations that combined tribes, not only quite different from each other, but sometime mortal enemies. Life in pre-American Oregon Territory was no Rousseauian idyll. There may not have been many Indians left after diseases ravaged their peoples, but for those who were left, peace settled over the land like snow. One could finally walk the breadth of the Territory without fear of being killed. Nonetheless, it’s only fair to warn you, being an outsider in an Indian cemetery can cause trouble. Inadvertent as it may be, your very presence can be an irritant; and many Indians are disturbed that outsiders would want to visit their cemeteries, much less take pictures of them. I once stirred up a hornet’s nest by innocently asking a tribal historian if there was someone who could talk to me about the changes in burial practices that they’ve gone through since the arrival of the Americans. They were outraged to find I’d been taking pictures of their cemetery, not to mention writing about them. This very article will, undoubtedly, put some of them on edge. The general gist was that no one should talk about or write about Indians without being an expert and preferably Indian. Sort of like one shouldn’t write about highways without being a traffic engineer.

Okay, so shoot me.

Agency Cemetery

Beyond that, though, Indian cemeteries are interesting for the large amount of personal items that tend to be left at graves. Grave site decoration is becoming more and more prevalent in the U.S., despite the sextons’ eternal battles to maintain the place; but rarely is it encouraged to bloom the way it does at Indian cemeteries. They can be bewildering. The first one I experienced—one that my wife and I happened to stumbled upon at the side of a highway—we had to spend some time looking at to even decide that it was a cemetery; our first impression was confusion because it seemed like no place for a junk yard, yet there was a staggering variety of things strewn about. Finally, clues here and there led us to understand the nature of the place.

Paiute II Cemetery

I believe I was wrong about my first impressions, which included the idea that this small cemetery alongside the road represented the disintegration of Indian culture in the face of the onslaught. I no longer think that. If the historian had taken the time to talk to me, I’d probably have understood it sooner. What it represents, I’ve gathered from further reading and observation, is the continuation of age-old traditions with an overlay of American-Christian practices. Indian cemeteries before the appearance of the white man were equally strewn with grave objects, personal items of the deceased. One of the reasons for the enmity between the Indians and the invaders is that the invaders saw the cemeteries as ripe for the picking. For a long time, it had been custom among many tribes to put the deceased in canoes; but after the arrival of the Americans they had to start smashing holes in the bottoms of the canoes so they wouldn’t be stolen. It’s easy to see why they’re reluctant to have Americans in their cemeteries.

Old Agency Cemetery

The Indians who railed against me never seemed to understand that I shoot cemeteries. All and every cemetery. The proportion of Indian cemeteries in my portfolio is minuscule. I wasn’t emphasizing them or zoning in on them. I wasn’t elevating them or demeaning them; I was just showing their cemeteries along with everybody else’s. Still am. I’m sorry they got pissed, but I figure it’s their problem. I gotta keep doing what I gotta do; they gotta keep doing what they gotta do.

Paul Washington Cemetery

It’s a cautionary tale for those of you who might be inspired to search out Indian cemeteries in your area. Like all cemeteries, they’re endlessly fascinating and some of the more colorful graveyards around. It would be nice if someone would shoot the different styles from around the country, but it would be a touchy subject. It’s not a job for an outsider.

Indian Cemetery - Husum

Sacred Ground and Digital Archaeology

North Palestine Cemetery

I work with sacred ground: cemeteries. There are other types of sacred ground — churches and the like, battlefields, virgin springs — but cemeteries are pretty much universally accepted as sacred ground. At least if they’re your cemetery. If they’re somebody else’s cemetery, they’re fair game for looting. The world’s museums are stuffed with artifacts stolen from cemeteries, up to and including the bodies themselves. But if it’s your grandma and grandpa, hands off. If the looting is done publicly and at a decent time remove, it’s called archaeology.

But the bottom line is a cemetery is a cemetery is a cemetery. Make that your mantra.

A cemetery is composed of dead bodies and their associated artifacts. Among other things, the artifacts tell you the cemetery is there. Without them the bodies belong to the nameless stream of dead people long since disappeared. The most important artifact in a cemetery is the one that tells you that it is there. If it’s lasted for any length of time, it’s probably stone. It’s called a tombstone. The rich can build their whole tomb out of stone; then it’s called a mausoleum. A mausoleum is a glorified tombstone. Among the more notable mausolea in the world are the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids.


River View Cemetery (Portland)

All cemeteries are liable to be robbed. For some reason human skulls have a value all of their own, not to mention burial offerings. Public theft — that done by archaeologists — has the virtue of A) keeping the artifacts in the public eye, and B) if we’re lucky, advancing our knowledge. Archaeology is first and foremost the study of three things: fire pits, garbage heaps, and cemeteries. Post holes are good, too.

When an archaeologist studies a grave, he or she, aside from looking at the body itself, inventories the associated artifacts, which we commonly call the “grave offerings,” although they all don’t serve the same purpose as the word “offerings” implies; some artifacts are more decoration rather than offerings to the dead or to the spirits of the dead; perhaps “ephemera” might be a better term to cover both. Traditionally, of course, the artifacts are simply taken back home with the archaeologist to their university or other supervising institution, the better to preserve and study them, being the rationale.


Agency Mission Cemetery

Just exactly what the purpose and understanding of ephemera are, though, is a matter of interpretation, and undoubtedly many different forces come into play; but when food offerings are found at a grave site, for instance, it’s not clear that the people who left them actually intended them to be used by the deceased rather than leaving them as a symbolic gesture. One has to presume that the concept of symbolism dates to very early human existence. For the observer, it’s not important that the ephemera are not meant for the deceased’s actual use; they’re significant because they indicate what the survivors — and presumably other people of their time and place — thought important. Grave ephemera, then reflect the people and times in which they are offered. That’s what the stuff found with King Tut does: it helps explain Egyptian life in those times. That’s what archaeologists do: they try to make sense of peoples and times through what they throw away and what they leave for their dead. It’s a very time-consuming task.


Apostolic Cemetery

The first “offering,” as it were, is the marker itself, the object that tells you a grave is there. The marker is important because without it people wouldn’t know where to come to remember the deceased; and ultimately cemeteries are not about stashing the dead somewhere, but about not letting people die. Cemeteries are where the connections between the quick and the dead are maintained. No one in a cemetery, if they have a marker, is truly dead. The marker can be considered “the permanent offering.” It’s the offering that’s not ephemeral. Its importance is that it locates the place of remembrance and the place to which temporary offerings are brought. Without the permanent marker everything quickly fades. Cemeteries, if they don’t obviate the process, at least slow it down.

American grave ephemera include anything left at a grave site excepting the monument, from a simple flower or a pebble to complex assemblages of hundreds of items. Through a combination of decay, cleanup, and theft, grave site ephemera disappears relatively quickly and from times past we have no record of what was left at our graves. We can find grave ephemera from other eras and places where ephemera were buried with the deceased, but for the most part that has never been an American custom; and consequently, most everything ever left at graves here has long since vanished.

Interestingly enough, though, while grave ephemera from other cultures — Peru or Egypt, say — excite great interest and study, to my knowledge local ephemera has always been ignored. Which only means, of course, that vast amounts of information have been lost and that the opportunities are endless. (The worry being, inevitably, that the opportunities will continue being ignored.) With the advent of digital photography it’s become economically feasible to amass large collections of ephemera pictures dripping with anticipation that someone will come and sort them. My only regret is that we don’t know what people left behind at graves in the 1940s, much less the eighteenth century. We only know what the Egyptians left behind.


Brown Cemetery (Beatty, OR)

Grave offerings open tremendous windows into the deceased, their culture, and their times. They tell us more about those who left them than about those for whom they were left. The amount of cultural information packed into one picture of grave site ephemera is quantum leaps above the information conveyed by tombstones alone. Unfortunately though, it’s apparently a case of always being unable to see the forest for the trees. Current ephemera is too much under our nose to pay attention to it, and once it’s gone we never knew it was there in the first place.


Alpine Cemetery

In tombstones the corollary to ephemera is “personalization,” which is the monument industry’s jargon for anything carved into a stone other than names and dates. There has always been some degree of personalization of tombstones, a practice which has waxed and waned in popularity depending on custom, technology, and materials. And there have always been “handmade” markers as well as professional ones. There has been some limited academic attention paid to professional representations in recent tombstone personalization, which has been largely anecdotal rather than analytical and dealt with small databases.

Which is all a round about way of explaining what I do, what the DeadManTalking collection is about. It took me several years to figure it out myself, so don’t worry if it’s not clear to you, it’s still foggy to me. I also know that, whatever I think my mission is today, I will think differently in a year.

I collect grave site offerings, permanent and ephemeral. I am a digital archaeologist. I record objects brought to sacred ground to bask in and add to the spiritual powers present there. I don’t loot any graves. I don’t take anything away to display or to sell. What I do is record a world that will be gone tomorrow. Like the river that is never the same whenever you step into it twice, the cemetery you visit will not be the same one I saw. I’m showing you the soft inside of the culture of the Oregon Territory as it stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It will never be seen again. Enjoy it while you can.


Canyon City Cemetery