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had gone north to see my grandfather. I d been studying to be a librarian
until then. It was learning the story of these ancestors, and the journey of
Qisuk s bones, that changed my path. That s when I decided what I wanted to do
was be an anthropologist.
Did you go to the ceremony?
Oh, yes. A very traditional one. Quite moving, actually. They were buried on
a hilltop near the water, with a pile of stones on top of the grave. And a
marker with a simple inscription:THEY HAVE COME HOME .
She paused with her eyes closed, as if remembering the scene.
And this story you ve told us, Mike asked, you think this has something to
do with the murder of Katrina Grooten?
Most definitely.
Why?
It all seemed so obvious to Clementine. When Katrina started coming to the
Natural History Museum to work on the joint show, she was amazed at all the
skeletons that were there. She d never given any thought to where they came
from.
Neither had I. I had always assumed that they were thousands of years old,
specimens found in remote desert areas, abandoned caves, archaeological digs.
Guess she never sawThe Flintstones, Mike said.
Clem was not put off by Mike s humor. She had a story to tell and was
determined to do it. It was Native Americans who really rattled the cages.
While Robert Peary and his cohorts were studying my people, anthropologists
were doing the very same thing with American Indians out West. Not just
collecting their artifacts and tools, but digging up skulls from graves and
hauling them back East to study, too.
What became of them all?
Until a decade ago, the remains were in the collections of more than seven
hundred museums, large and small, throughout your country. The bones of more
than two hundred thousand American Indians arestill sitting in wooden boxes
and drawers at these institutions. But your native people had an advantage
that mine didn t have, in terms of their numbers and their ability to
organize.
What d they do?
Demonstrated, agitated, got new laws passed.
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Legislation?
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990. Guess if your
ancestors brains had been diced up and studied, Mike, you d have known about
it, too.
Slim pickings, ma am. Well preserved in alcohol, but very dense matter
inside thick skulls.
You re not telling me every skeleton can be linked to a tribe? Mercer
asked.
No, no. That s one of the biggest problems. Some of these museum collections
are hundreds of years old. They re not matched to any tribe or cultural
affiliation. Never will be.
Mike was still stuck on the Eskimos. So if this law was passed here in 1990,
how come your people Qisuk and the others still didn t get home for a few more
years?
The legislation only applied to Native Americans. Museums were required to
repatriate all the Indian bones that tribes asked for, but that didn t help my
Eskimos a damn bit.
Why did Katrina care?
Take this girl whose scholarship field was funerary art, Mike. For the first
time in her life she came face-to-face with the reality experienced by most
cultures of color, all over the world. No churchyards, no headstones, no
marked graves. Our ancestors are sitting in cardboard boxes, collecting dust
on museum shelves.
In the name of science.
I got under her skin at first. How could she have been so blind to this?
Think of what the situation was in South Africa, where she grew up. I told her
Mene s story, which mesmerized her. I told her about my own great-grandmother
being shipped to the United States in a barrel. That got her riled up. Then
she focused on the American Indians. I practically had to club her over the
head before I could get her to understand her own country.
The skeletons found there?
Foundthere? Hey, Mike, I m not talking aboutPithecanthropus erectus and the
missing link. Those guys walked the earth thousands of years ago. Their
remains werefound . The ones I m referring to, like my own relatives,
werestolen.
Mercer was standing behind Mike, with his enormous hands wrapped around
Mike s forehead. His skull doesn t slope quite as obviously as you d think,
Clem. It s just impenetrable.
The detective in Mike was skeptical when he heard Clem refer to human remains
as stolen. Explain that. The story of your Eskimos is a very unusual one.
That s not how all these bones got into collections.
Maybe you don t want to hear me, but my colleagues and I have all the
documentation to prove this. Clem didn t need a notebook to call up the facts
she had mastered. I told Katrina what had been happening all over Africa. In
1909, a black man named Kouw was dismembered and boiled just four months after
he died. His widow and children watched and wailed, but the scientists won.
Off to a museum with him. The diary of a famous anthropologist described how
she kept vigil over a sickly woman till her death, in the 1940s, waited for
her tribesmen to bury her, then dug her up and took her back to Cape Town.
No government protection?
First half of the twentieth century in Africa? The natives didn t have a
prayer. Only the missionaries tried to intercede for them. They kept some of
the best records of plundered graves. These aren t the relics of cavemen.
They re the remains of Khoisans bushmen and Hottentots many of whom have
living descendants who have heard these stories all their lives.
You think this had anything to do with Katrina s decision to go back to
South Africa?
Everything. She had taken a job at the McGregor Museum.
I remembered that from our conversation with Hiram Bellinger. He thought it
was a waste of her education. The McGregor specialized in natural history but
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had no European art department.
So, Mike said slowly, so you think you know why she wanted that job at the
McGregor?
The bone vault, Detective. She wanted to get into their bone vault.
30
What s a bone vault?
Nothing you re going to find in any museum directory, Mike. It s how Katrina
and I referred to the stash of skeletons that every museum has in one hideaway
or another. The South African Museum in Cape Town, they ve got a locked
storeroom with more than a thousand cartons full of somebody s grandmothers
and grandfathers.
And the McGregor?
Up in Kimberley. One hundred and fifty dusty boxes of bones, sitting under
white fluorescent lights.
None on display?
No. The curators got wise to the controversy a few years later than the
Americans. Took down the hanging skeletons in the late nineties.
So, where s the McGregor vault?
That s the trick. She was going to try to find it and help to get the
remains identified. To return them to the families that have been asking for
them.
Mercer was fascinated. Can they actually be identified at this point?
Some can. I think there s a new DNA process.
Mitochondrial DNA, I told her. Tracing genetic material through the
maternal line, through bone and hair.
Katrina was to replace a woman who used to work at the McGregor, a friend of
mine who had actually started to catalog the remains when they were taken off
display three years ago. She had been doing this as a personal measure, hoping
the day would come when the indigenous communities would be able to win their
return.
This friend of yours started to inventory them?
You didn t know how dangerous museum work could be, did you? Shortly after
she undertook her project, she began to get death threats. First mailed to her
office at the museum, then on her answering machine at home. Vague, of course,
and anonymous, but good enough to scare her. She left South Africa and moved
back to Kenya. It was after she left that the skeletons were all moved into
storage and locked up.
Why? What had she found?
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