Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

of Natural History, and their crew of workmen had been excavating a
mound looking for artifacts. Located on the banks of the Delaware River in
Sussex County, New Jersey, near the town of Montague, the “old Minisink
Graveyard” was well known to archaeologists and local people as the
resting place of the Munsee Lenape, the ancestors of Delaware and
Mohican Indians.
Heye’s activities were not unusual for this time. “Men of science” from
this era typically had free rein to remove objects and skeletons from Native
American cemeteries. They used their funding to build large collections for
teaching, research, and display within museums, universities, and world
fairs. These collections would enable crucially important scholarship,
teaching, and public education in anthropology and archaeology, which
continues to this present day. Heye’s own efforts (and those of the
archaeologists he funded through his foundation) would form the
collections of the Museum of the American Indian in 1916. viii These
museum collections are of tremendous value to science. But their formation
caused incalculable harm to Indigenous peoples. ix
Heye and his contemporaries did not consider that descendant
communities’ objections to the looting, plunder, and desecration of their
ancestors’ bodies were valid. This was largely because they prioritized the
aims of scientific research, but also because they believed that it was their
duty to “salvage” the bodies and objects of the “vanishing Indians” as sites
and cemeteries were being destroyed by settlers’ agriculture and population
expansion (16).
Heye’s arrest was one of the rare cases in which there were any real
consequences at all for disturbing a Native American cemetery. Heye and
Pepper included a discussion of the history at the beginning of their
excavation report, noting that the judicial history of this case “will be of
interest to future investigators of American archaeology” (17). They were
charged with violating the 148th section of the New Jersey Crimes Act,
which prohibited the removal of “a body of any deceased person from his
grave or tomb for the purpose of dissection or for the purpose of selling the
same, or from mere wantonness.” Heye was convicted and fined $100 x by
the Sussex County Court of Special Sessions. His conviction was later
overturned in 1914 by the New Jersey Supreme Court. The court noted that
because the remains were not removed for the purposes of dissection, sale,