The enormous interest in Kennewick Man certainly has much to do with its appeal as a historical and scientific phenomenon. This doesn't account for the controversy, however. Kennewick Man ultimately is a symbol of who controls history and, more important, who controls the way history is composed by those with a stake in its composition.
Steven Salaita
YellowTimes.org

{"...has much to do with 'its'... "? his. his appeal. he's a real guy. all dead and gone. but still busting up the dialectic for all time. something else is happening here. the old time one-two kneejerk 'them guys are all racist assholes therefore us guys are all cool indigenes' vs. 'them guys are all dumbass savages therefore us guys are all cool modern man'. it's obvious where I stand personally on the native/colonist issue, but the truth is bigger than a black and white contest. what Kennewick Man is truly a symbol of is the Roswell aspect of the past. the past as galaxy. the truth of the past as an as yet unknown. the insistence on both sides of the nativist controversies to see the other as monolithic. but there were nomadic tribes in europe who never made it into the limited books of written history, whose descendants entered the American continent alongside the oppressing thieves of european imperialism. and there were and are selfish ignorant natives of the 'New world'. not all one not all the other.
Kennewick Man is a wake-up call for wannabes everywhere, ultimately.}

{before I lived where I live now, I lived in a cabin which, through no fault of its own, resembled to a 'T' the cabin in which Mr. Ted Kaczynski, the infamous 'Unabomber', lived, and which (his, not mine) made the astonishing, memorable, and so perfectly representative of American justice as we have known it, where was I?, yes, made that memorable journey from Montana to Sacramento CA, to testify against Mr. Kaczynski, or something. I had a picture on the south wall, in the kitchen area, that's probably still there unless my ex-girlfriend or one of her minions has broken into it and taken it down, of the skull of Kennewick Man. a photograph from some magazine. maybe Nat'l Geo. uncaptioned. so it's just a photograph of a skull. to someone who didn't know.
now if you can read all the above without losing your grip on the language you should be able to tell that Kennewick Man is more than just a bone of contention to me, he represents what those dingbat drawings of cat-eyed ET's represent to other people, only in my case it's definitely real. The Other. for sure for real. someone completely outside the known universe. accent on known. I love that. so it has that resonance for me, but you wouldn't know that if you just broke into the cabin especially if you were there looking for weirdness.
also, and this is the real difficult part for most of you, there was a long tradition of philosophers and other solitary thinkers, saints of the early church among them, of keeping skulls close at hand in order to meditate on the transitory nature of earthly existence. these were called 'momento mori'. this was not an eccentric, once in a while thing, it was very common, as a quick google of the phrase will quickly show you. and thirdly, I've been aware of the presence of uninvited 'guests' in my life for decades, more or less. and have intentionally courted their condemnation. far better, in my mind, to be condemned by villains, and suffer for that, than welcomed by them, and suffer for that.
so it was a flag of rebellion in that sense.
of the three the Kennewick Man as himself, the skull as representing the presence in our reality of the unknown but real, was the most often invoked whenever I saw it, which was many times during the day.}

put here 9:05 PM

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