In western Iowa, archaeologists and Iowa Department of Transportation crew members helped salvage some of a former Iowa Tribe village that was occupied more than 600 years ago and being eroded by a river.
using federal dollars have to send com- pliance reviews to all tribes that claim ancestral connections to the land on which the site is found. Some tribes, including mine, have connections to ancestral lands in a dozen states or more. Unlike with projects on reservation lands, THPOs are not legally required to review any off-reservation projects, and certainly we don’t get paid to review them, yet we receive hundreds of them every month. Although we may have only one or two THPO staff, we keenly feel the responsibility to our ancestors, our homelands and our communities to review them. So stacks of requests grow, agencies become frustrated with low response rates and THPOs often go
through high staff turnover and burnout. But American Indians are used to achieving the impossible. We work together with other THPOs. We estab- lish collegial relationships with those agencies who want to work with us. We focus on the projects that have the greatest potential for impacts such as multistate pipelines. We are like the doctors and nurses in the television show "M.A.S.H.," with an ongoing flood of casualties who we must triage. We learn how to do more with less in crit- ical situations. And that’s just the pres- sures from outside. We also experience pressures from
inside. For example, our own communi- ties are often suspicious of us because we work with archaeologists who often must excavate objects from ancestral and his- toric sites in order to save them from destruction from bulldozers, the burying of utility pipes or the construction of highways. At the same time, Native com- munity members also have high expecta- tions that THPOs can stop projects and save ancestral sites forever on our own based on a complex law few understand. One successful collaboration was
with the Iowa Department of Transpor- tation (IDOT) and Iowa’s Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) in 2017. On a site called Dixon in western Iowa, river erosion was exposing parts of a former ancestral village, including once-buried human remains. A plan was undertaken to mitigate the erosion through engineer- ing, which also required the relocation of the ancestral remains to unaffected portions of the site where they could be reburied. Several tribes, including my own, united and assisted the IDOT and OSA in this sensitive operation over sev- eral months. In the end, the reburials were accomplished by the tribes, during which an eagle soared over us, blessing the ceremony. Tribal historic preservation officers
often seem to reflect the guardianship role of those old warrior societies. Fol- lowing rules, we unite to defend our lands and ancestors. Sometimes we have to plant a staff and say, “This far and no farther.”
lance foster is vice chairman and the tribal historic preservation officer of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WINTER 2022 9
LANCE FOSTER
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