After I graduated from law school back in the sixties, I bounced around for a number of years during those easy-to-acquire-a-job times. When I finally settled down, one of the first issues I happened across was the innovative practice of selling cigarettes off what are historically called Indian Reservations, a legal designation of certain areas inside the borders of which United States Law does not apply.
Because U.S. law stopped at the reservation's borders, so did any attempts to tax the sales, and Indian Reservation cigarette stores were soon doing a booming mail order business in competition with the many smugglers who bought cigarettes in tax free tobacco growing states and transported them in the trunks of cars throughout the country to the big cities like New York which charged five or six times the cost of the cigarettes in tax (and that was before cigarette taxes raised the price of a pack to twice the price of a taxed carton when I was young).
Thus, when gambling casinos began to spring up across the nation on reservations -- my first notice was a friend who's wife kicked him out for gambling in Temecula, CA, "Temecula?" I said, "How can you gamble in Temecula?" -- I followed the growth of reservation gaming with some curiosity, not as much perhaps as Donald Trump, but enough.
I also, with less detachment and much more interest, began, upon its discovery in 1996, following the affair of Kennewick Man, probably one of the most disgusting and more revealing episodes in the pursuit of politically correct, and, as it turns out, politically corrupt, science. I had just finished Light: Replacing Three Centuries of Misconceptions, probably the most difficult book in The Copernican Series to write, and was working on Where Science Went Wrong: Tracking Five Centuries of Misconceptions, probably the book in the series that was the most fun to write, so I had been asleep at the wheel of reality when Kennewick Man was found and I was honestly startled by the controversy that ensued.
I had long wondered the extent to which the authoritarian scientific process created by Newton, where laws were created by men who knew only what existed at the time of the law's creation, laws that then controlled the universe of information that was accepted as scientific fact, creating centuries of mistake on top of mistake until we reached the fantasy land that is scientific thought today, I had wondered about what the millions of practicing scientists thought. Were they so focused on their own little territories, or did they question the bigger world around them, the concepts, accepted as fact, that controlled their basic thoughts?
During the development of the Kennewick Man controversy, a group of eight reputable scientists filed a law suit against the United States to preserve the remains of Kennewick Man, which the United States, for some reason, wanted to turn over to the local Indian Tribes in Washington State where the remains were discovered after being uncovered by flooding on the banks of the Columbia River. Turning the remains over to the local Indian Tribes under the Native American Protection and Graves Repatriation Act, which was passed in 1990 to return to Native Americans the remains of their ancestors pillaged over the years, seemed a little far fetched because Kennewick Man was clearly of European dissent, was dated to be seven to eleven thousand years old, not only by traditional dating methods, both radiocarbon and DNA analysis, but also by the stunning fact that a CT scan revealed a spear head embedded in one of the bones that was typical of the type of spear head used in the area during that same period.
While the United States Government had used the Repatriation Act to return any and all bones found up to that point, even where the bones appeared of European descent, upon which the bones disappeared from the historical record into some unknown location, the existence of the spear point in European remains drove the scientists to join together to sue the Government to release the remains for scientific study, immediately incurring threats to those whose income was dependent on the government of the loss of that income.
Here, I thought at the time, was evidence that rank and file scientists didn't really accept the establishment pap about our reality. I was well aware of the source of the particular establishment pap that led to the Repatriation Act, or at least I thought I was, although the Government's actions to repress the discovery has provided a far more revealing reason. And as to the rank and file scientists, standing up against government authority, well, perhaps their actions did not signify a disagreement with established fantasy.
The original fantasy that I thought led to the reparations act was the fantasy created by the massively influential 19th Century scientist and administrator, William Powell. When settlers moved past the Alleghenies in the early years of the European settlement of the North American continent, they started coming across thousands upon thousands of mounds which the inhabitants found in control of the continent claimed were not theirs, and which revealed skeletons which were unrelated to the inhabitants, and in fact, seemed unrelated to Europeans, although plenty of evidence of European occupation going back thousands of years was apparent.
In addition, the mounds were clearly created by agrarian societies, which the natives occupying North America at the time were not, and which they further laid claim to never having been, being nomadic and following the abundant food with the seasons. This led to a whole bunch of religious stereotyping of a preflood biblical civilization that didn't sit well with the scientific community.
Powell, seizing on his scientific status, persuaded Congress to set up a Bureau of Ethnology in the Smithsonian which, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, decreed that because no European had ever set foot on American soil prior to Columbus, any of the mounds that contained evidence of non-Native American, the term applied to the existing populations to get away from the pejorative Indian, was not of historical importance and could be destroyed. Powell's minions then set out to destroy the mounds, the history of the North American Continent, with impunity.
With Smithsonian influence behind him, Colleges and Universities, and local historical societies followed suit, allowing developers to bulldoze unopened mounds to make way for farms and expanding towns. Questioning preColumbian contact became the trapdoor out of the profession, a warning for all and sundry to toe the line. Ordinary citizens, who came upon finds that were clearly of foreign origin, honestly and in good faith turned to local historical societies and professors from educational institutions, only to find themselves the objects of ridicule and even prosecution for fraud, their evidence discredited, confiscated and destroyed, or where it couldn't be destroyed, destroyed by demonization.
Thus, the eight scientists that sued to claim the remains of Kennewick Man for science at the expense of their careers, appeared to be very brave men indeed. Science, from the very beginning, has been the process of classification and unification of similar classes. Our minds work by comparison. We see something and we don't have any information as to what it might be. We see something else like it, and we recall what we have seen before, and all of a sudden we have two of something, a comparison, and we create a classification for that comparison. If we come across gold for the first time, we note its color and softness. Then we come across iron, and notice its weight and hardness. We know that we can compare the two because they are both something in reality, but that comparison becomes sharper when we find more gold and more iron and discover that we can classify one as gold and the other as iron and create a classification for both as elements.
As we go on to discover the elements, we eventually reach a unification that explains what we see in even broader terms, in the case of elements, the chemically successful periodic table. Once we create broad unifying classifications, we can make predictions of how the elements interact with one another, a new system of classification where we use effects, the effect of heat, of light, of chemical baths, of mixing and matching.
The problem is, we think we are using the classifications we have created to predict facts which we go looking for when in fact, most, if not all of chemistry is a process of trial and error. When we come right down to it, a trained scientists learns the classifications that deal with a particular field, and then goes out into the field to see if any new light can be shed on those classifications. Scientists learn how to manipulate the facts in the field, but when it comes right down to the basics, classifications are arbitrary, and techniques limiting. The goal seems to be to come up with something that can create a new classification, or to come up with a new technique, but never to challenge the existing classifications, the existing techniques, whose results are defined by the detectors we use to make conclusions about the results, and never, ever to question the overall unifications that are used to classify all of the classifications.
Sometimes, feedback, as in the chemical manipulation of the periodic table, keeps our feet somewhat on the ground, and other times, such as the classification of the stars and galaxies which provide us with no feedback, lets us wallow deeper and deeper in fantasy. And sometimes, we can just never know, the situation that presented itself with the mounds and forts found located between the Alleghenies and the Rockies on the Great Plains of the North American Continent. While finding European artifacts might be open to question, the vast majority of the mounds contained skeletons that were apparently of no known source, and these bones were destroyed on the spot or shipped back to Washington for "storage" which meant destruction by neglect.
We know there was something there, and we are finding other things that we can't classify, for instance, Kennewick Man, but the scientific establishment has made a decree dealing with all matters preColumbian, and that decree is that they are Native American.
Powell's distaste for biblical explanations for America's prehistory is understandable. Reading books from the 1840s, for instance, can be embarrassing as the authors dictatorially date this and that from the date of the flood or the creation of the Earth so many specific years ago and trace the populations from the lost tribes of biblical fame. But his response to religiosity was drastic, destruction of the actual history of the continent, and thus unforgivable. The fact that his distorted views have lasted pretty much intact over a hundred years later is a sign that the ignorance empirical science creates with its classification process sinks deep into the rank and file, leading to the brain dead investigations into the actual nature of reality with which we are so familiar.
Powell's sins were doubly bad because they were based on no classification system. They were based on his dictate, that because preColumbian contact had never happened, any evidence for preColumbian contact was false. There were only two classifications, if not classified as Native American, it was classified as fraud.
This is not science by any stretch of the imagination, not even empirical science, and when I began to view the actions of the eight brave scientists in standing up to the Government, I found I had to view them in the light of dissenting, not from the empirical science that had taught them the classifications that ruled their minds and their methodologies, but rather in support of that empirical science. The existence of a European skeleton with a stone age spear point embedded in one of its bones was a new classification. It was not a Native American, and in fact, appeared to have been in conflict with Native Americans.
Which classification had come first? It was beyond the stretch of imagination to believe that one lonely European had showed up on the Western shore of America to trap or whatever, had been in a fight with Native Americans, had lived on after the fight with the embedded spear point, to die in one piece on the river side, to be unearthed by a flooding of the plains thousands of years later. Given the fact that defensive forts were being found all over the West, and given the fact that Native Americans were nomadic rather than agrarian societies needing defense against marauders, who did actually come first?
But the government was spending millions of dollars to get Kennewick Man into the hands of Native Americans so that the evidence he represented could be destroyed, and apparently not all Native Americans were in agreement with the Government's actions.
What actually was going on here?
Things came pretty clear on April 6, 1998 when the Army Corps of Engineers spent several hundred thousand dollars to have helicopters drop millions of pounds of rubble on the site of the discovery and then plant it over. The government, having suffered serious legal setbacks in its many attempts to destroy Kennewick Man, was worried that there were more Kennewicks lurking beneath the muck of the river bank and decided that the chance of any being discovered was just too great.
Well, this is carrying science to an extreme. It's one thing to refuse to create appropriate classifications, and label everything that didn't conform to the one classification, Native American, as fraud, it's quite another for high ranking officials of the White House, as documented in the court case, to order the site of discovery destroyed. Why would White House authorities in the Clinton administration be interested in Kennewick Man?
Flash back to reservation gambling. While the laws of the United States don't pass the boundaries of the reservations, allowing the reservations to escape tax laws, the reservations can be legislated to extend "beyond" the reservations. Creating "off-Reservation" Reservations requires legislative action and legislative action requires massive campaign donations from financial interests expecting to profit from operating newly located "Indian Reservation" Casinos.
The result, of course, is the spread of Indian Reservation Casinos and the campaign contributions that support their creation and continued existence, contributions that go to city officials, state legislatures, and state candidates for office (Bustamante, in his challenge with Schwarzenegger, received over three million dollars in illegal Casino campaign contributions, which he was ordered to, wink, nod, pay back after the fact).
So, we have a new dictator in science, a dictator that is challenging the existing dictator, empirical science. The new dictator, first embodied in the form of political correctness, has broken out in the form of political corruption.
If Kennewick Man is in fact a class of Europeans that had settled in America before the Native Americans arrived, then the argument that Casinos run by Native Americans are privileged because Europeans stole everything else from them goes up in smoke and with it the privileged Casinos that generate political contributions that are designed to put people in office that will continue to support the casinos and the notion that Powell was right.
It's not only politically correct to claim Columbus was the first European to set foot on the new world, it's politically profitable!
UPDATE: 11/17/04 The "Native American Technical Correction Act of 2004" is a technical amendment to the 1990 Act that changes the definition of Native Americans as "of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States" to read "is, or was indigenous to the United States." By changing "of" to "is, or was," the drafters claim that it would make proof that Kennewick Man is covered by the Act more difficult when in fact the amendment is designed to neutralize the U.S. Magistrate's 2002 ruling that Kennewick Man is not covered by the Act. Simple Washington logic, bolstered by the fact that it is a technical amendment, a class of legislation that doesn't get much attention, and completed by the attempt to push it through the current Lame Duck Congress. Looks like, in the battle of politics v. science, politics trumps every time, which means that politically correct science is no science at all.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com