Not a Single Bone

NOME is pleased to present Nora Al-Badri’s and Nikolai Nelles’ first solo show, Not a Single Bone. The artists will show their most recent project Fossil Futures which results from research (funded by Haus der Kulturen der Welt), at the Tendaguru Beds in Tanzania, a former German colony that was the site of systematic excavations of dinosaur bones during the colonial era.

Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell writes that the dinosaur is “the totem animal of modern culture”—whether analyzed by empirical scientific methods in the West, popularized by Hollywood, or the object of native ritual practices. For Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, the dinosaur activates a public dialogue on mass extinction and extraction, also in terms of a “cultural fracking” related to a hierarchy of knowledge and the role of Western science.

By manipulating and reproducing these fossils with the help of artificial intelligence and leaked data as well as with the classic tools of natural history museums, the artists question the fictions of authenticity told by Western institutions, and seek to uncover alternative emancipatory narratives.

The duo also present an iteration of their acclaimed project The Other Nefertiti (2015), based on an “open-sourcing” of the Ancient Egyptian Nefertiti Bust through a data leak, in order to make it publicly available and display it in Cairo—an intervention into the production and commodification of global heritage and cultural goods. The replica and its various representations, along with The Other Nefertiti’s remixes, which have emerged across the world, address the exploitation of colonialism and unequal global power relations, and critique the continued display of such “treasures” in Europe.

FOSSIL LEGENDS OF THE FIRST AMERICANS

Around the campfire that night…the talk drifted to the people who had known these fossil-rich badlands better than anyone ever would: the Crow, Blackfeet, and Sioux. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native people had been the first to experience the thrill of discovery that we had felt today. They were the first to encounter dinosaur bones and other fossils buried in the earth for eons and then exposed, like our finds, by wind and rain.

Suddenly we all were wondering out loud: What did Native Americans think of these bizarre skeletons mysteriously turned to stone? How did they explain the bones and teeth and claws of gigantic creatures that no one had ever seen alive? Did they speculate about what could have destroyed such monsters? Did they collect fossils?

As a scholar of natural history legends, I had written a book about how the ancient Greeks and Romans interpreted the remains of enormous, extinct creatures buried around the Mediterranean. And I’d read about the pioneer paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh battling over dinosaur bones in the American West. But Native American discoveries and conceptions of fossils—this was unexplored territory, full of exciting possibilities for understanding pre-Darwinian ideas about paleontology.

What did fossils mean to Native Americans? It was something I’d wondered about every time I had gazed at arrowheads and fossils exhibited side by side in museums. I knew that Plains Indians had gathered certain iridescent marine fossils for their magical power to summon buffalo herds. Growing up in South Dakota, I remembered reading Sioux myths about Thunder Birds fighting Water Monsters. Now I was curious to know whether those stories had been woven around dinosaur and giant reptile skeletons that people had observed weathering out of the Badlands.1

I recalled an object I’d seen earlier that summer in the Phillips County Museum in Malta, Montana, a small town northwest of Hell Creek. Indian artifacts were displayed along with impressive dinosaur remains, just as they are in countless other American museums, whether large and famous or modest and obscure. This juxtaposition, which seems to equate the human artifacts with the animal fossils as relics of extinction, would become a common sight as I visited natural history collections across the country. I had always wondered why museum curators never made what seemed to me the obvious connection between the local Native cultures and the conspicuous evidence of remarkable creatures from another age that they had encountered in their lands.2

Most historians of science assume that traditional Indian knowledge of fossils is irretrievably lost. As the paleontologists David Weishampel and Luther Young recently put it: “Native Americans, so in tune with Earth and sky and water, surely noticed the giant bones weathering from the ground and the birdlike footprints preserved on slabs of stone. But their discoveries are lost to modern science; only their legends survive.”3

But, in fact, the collection of New World oral paleontological traditions began nearly 500 years ago, in 1519, when Hernando Cortés brought Aztec fossil legends and a huge mastodon bone from Mexico back to the King of Spain. And it turns out that many of the great figures in early modern scientific history— from Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt in Europe to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in America—were avid investigators of indigenous American fossil lore.

The deep involvement in Native folklore of these scientifically oriented individuals—especially Cuvier, the father of paleontology—was one of the most surprising discoveries of my research. Their interest points to an important theme of this book: even though Native American understandings of the fossil record were not scientifically methodical in the modern sense, they offered an alternative, coherent way of interpreting earth’s history at a time when Europeans were questioning their own mythic explanations for fossils and just beginning to develop the formal disciplines of geology and paleontology. Many of the Native approaches to the fossil record—based on their careful and repeated observation of evidence and on rational speculation— are compatible with scientific inquiry. Observations of remarkable natural evidence stimulated explanations that became part of traditional Native knowledge, and those traditions were often verified and revised over time—activities that spring from the same impulses to “get it right” that led to the creation of scientific methods.

The interest in Native American fossil knowledge continued among scientific thinkers for 400 years after Columbus, but had already begun to wane by the time Marsh, Cope, and the other pioneer paleontologists began to hunt fossils in the American West in the late 19th and 20th centuries. These men depended on the help of Indian scouts to locate the bone beds, but they rarely preserved any traditional notions about the extinct remains offered by the guides—or even their names. I have made a special effort to recover the names of Indians who helped the early paleontologists find and collect fossils. They deserve no less than what the famous bone-hunter Charles H. Sternberg claimed as his “inalienable right.” “I demand that my name appear as collector on all the material which I have gathered from the rocks of the earth,” he wrote in 1909.4

In 1935, the Canadian paleontologist Edward M. Kindle (1869- 1940) was the first scientist to suggest that Native Americans should be credited with several significant fossil discoveries, in a brief paper in the Journal of Paleontology. But in 1942-43, the eminent U.S. paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1902-84) strenuously rejected Kindle’s suggestion, classifying all Indian fossil discoveries as “casual finds without scientific sequel.” Simpson, Curator and Chair of the newly formed Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), effectively ended the earlier conversations between Native Americans and Euro-American scientists about the fossil record. And his pronouncements are one reason why the history of Native encounters with fossils is so little known today.5

Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer timespan than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbara Mann suggests that one should look for the “consistent elements” in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are “real history.” Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that “oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever.” But Lowie’s grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as “respectable siblings of written documents,” as valuable sources for reconstructing “ancient American history.” Indeed, the most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics and cognition studies and matching details in traditions with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.6

Other, mute, evidence for ancient curiosity about fossils is literally buried in the ground, since modern archaeological excavations have shown that many kinds of fossils were collected and used in various ways by paleo-Indians. Further evidence for interest in fossils is also stored in museum collections, in the form of medicine bundles and amulets containing petrified wood and fossil shells and bones.

Trying to reconstruct the outlines of an incomplete and ancient body of oral fossil knowledge is like trying to reconstruct a skeleton from disarticulated and incomplete remains. As in paleontology, luck plays a role and so does conjecture. The paleontologist assembles a framework from the fragmentary traces of a creature that were accidentally preserved in stone by a capricious geological process—a process as unpredictable as the preservation of spoken folklore over countless generations and cultural upheavals. Gaps are filled in with hypothetical bones. The reconstructed dinosaur skeleton is truly impressive, but it is still only a lifeless armature and one longs for so much more than dry bones. I remember Jack Horner exclaiming, as he pointed outcthe remains of T. rex and Triceratops at Hell Creek: “But these are just skeletons! I wish I could see the real dinosaur, the living, breathing creature!”

Like paleontological resources on Indian lands, however, traditional fossil knowledge can be fraught with issues of ownership. Some oral knowledge is considered sacred or kept secret from outsiders. Deloria approaches the problem of sacred knowledge by trying to avoid being the first to publish oral material unless a comparable version has already appeared in print. This approach is generally accepted among Native Americans as they balance the tensions between revealing and sharing cultural wisdom. Juanita Pahdopony, a Comanche storyteller who related some personal memories about fossil- bone medicine in Oklahoma, remarked: “I would not like to be the first to reveal a tribal knowledge that is kept by our people. After all, what is left that hasn’t already been taken from us?”

Some traditional stories are the private possessions of individuals. The early ethnologists learned that offering something of value was often the price of a hearing a story. A rare few today feel that their stories remain personal possessions even after publication. For example, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a Lakota writer in South Dakota, told me that I needed her permission to quote from books she has published with a university press. John Allen, Jr., an Assiniboine spiritual leader in Montana, on the other hand, says that it honors his culture whenever oral traditions are retold in writing.

Some elders believe that oral stories should never be put in print, for they “must have human breath or they will die,” in the words of the Shawnee storyteller Neeake. And sometimes stories are not recalled until the right question is asked, continued Neeake. “People sometimes suddenly give a story if they have found someone who knows how to listen with the heart, but at other times they decide not to share. A cardinal rule of Indian teaching must be followed: If you don’t know the proper question, or how to pose it properly, then you don’t need to know the answer.” 7

Fossils of all sorts were collected in the Americas for a wide range of uses: as “deeds” to land, as historical evidence, as weapons, as healing medicine, and as personal amulets for protection or other special powers. Their mysterious presence in the earth inspired explanatory narratives both simple and suprisingly sophisticated.

Notes:
1. I use the terms Native Americans, Native people, Indians, First Americans, American Indians and Amerindians, and First Nations interchangeably, giving the names of specific cultural groups (often called nations in the east and tribes in the west), whenever possible. I use the term paleo- Indians for prehistoric, early cultures for which there is archaeological evidence, specifying Clovis, Folsom, Fremont, and so on whenever known.
2. David Hurst Thomas 2000, chapter 3, argues that the definition of Indians as natural history specimens like mastodon and dinosaur fossils began in 18th century America.
3. Weishampel and Young 1996, 51.
4. Sternberg 1990, 30-31. Each of Marsh’s Yale students hunting fossils in the Bridger Basin in 1870 received “full credit for all his discoveries, and the thought of having one’s name attached to some rare specimen in the Yale Museum led to sharp competition.” Lanham 1973, 108.
5. Kindle 1935 credited Indians with several important fossil discoveries, but was roundly criticized by Simpson, 1942 and 1943. Simpson referred to Native American involvement in some historic paleontological discoveries, but denied that their finds constituted “true” scientific discoveries. Simpson 1942, 132; 1943, 26-27. Occasional, brief references to Native American fossil traditons may be found in paleontological literature since Simpson. For example, Paul Semonin, in American Monster (2000), recounted some Indian interpretations of mastodon remains in the Colonial era, in order to show how such myths were appropriated by early Americans to create a national identity based on the mastodon as a patriotic totem. Claudine Cohen’s The Fate of the Mammoth (translated into English in 2002), focuses on European myths and theories about prehistoric elephants, with passing reference to American Indian legends. Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., pits Native American worldviews against Euro-American science, with some paleontological examples, in Red Earth, White Lies (1997). Deloria also presents examples of Native knowledge excluded from orthodox science and history as superstition and fantasy. A few archaeologists have collected evidence for Native American interest in fossils. For example, rock art scholar Peter Faris presented a survey titled “Native American Paleontology: Fossils, Myths, and Imagery” to the Utah Rock Art Research Association in 2001, and continues his investigations. See also Jerry McDonald’s 1989 paper “A Collection of Fossils from an Adena Mound [Ohio] and Notes on the Collecting and Uses of Fossils by Native Americans.” An important article by Allison Dussias, “Science, Sovereignty, and the Sacred Text: Paleontological Resources and Native American Rights,” Maryland Law Review 55 (1996), surveys the history of legal issues surrounding fossils in the western United States since the era of Cope and Marsh, from the Native American point of view (thanks to Daniel Usner for this reference).
6. Barbara Mann, Interview, June 2002. Lowie cited by Thomas, 2000, 99-101. Folklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about 1,000 years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about 6,000 years. On studies testing the antiquity and accuracy of oral history and traditions, see Roger Echo-Hawk 2000, quote 267. The processes of creating reliable oral myths about datable geological, historial, or astronomical events thousands of years ago are now analyzed in terms of linguistics and cognition by Barber and Barber 2004. These issues were broached by Deloria in 1997, 126-36, 39 (observation and accuracy), and 186 (Deloria believed the extent of human memory is about 3,000 years). See also Thomas 2000, chapter 10, on the history of the ethnological debate over whether oral traditions preserve “real history.”
7. Deloria 1997, xiv-xv. Juanita Pahdopony, Interview, April-May 2002. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, per. cor., May 6, 2002. John Allen, Jr., Interview, September 6, 2000. Neeake, elected Principal Storyteller of the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, Interview, March-April 2002. I am grateful to Deloria, Pahdopony, Neeake, and Roger Echo-Hawk for valuable discussions of these issues.

Adrienne Mayor