Asatru Folk Assembly - Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1)

00:00:00.000 The End

00:00:30.000 our speaker hails from the Lone Star State of Texas originally he has a career that started

00:00:43.320 off in university he graduated to the United States military did did saw some service he had

00:00:49.320 originally intended to go to Vietnam but ended up in in Germany after that he found himself in a

00:00:56.520 number of occupations, including that of a journalist. He ended up in South Africa. He's

00:01:05.400 been in Bosnia. He's been up on the Angolan border. So he's a man of very eclectic experience.

00:01:11.740 But the area, two areas that perhaps call himself to our attention and cause us to invite him here

00:01:19.140 tonight is a religious area, the area that he will explain a little bit called Asatru,

00:01:25.060 which is the pre-Christian religion of Northern Europe and what values that might have to offer us.

00:01:34.340 And secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, a discovery made a few years ago in the state of Washington called Kennewick Man.

00:01:42.340 And this discovery turned out to be extremely important.

00:01:46.820 And although it's not the only one, it is one of a series that will eventually have

00:01:54.500 to reshape the way we look at who it was that was first on this North American continent.

00:02:01.780 And I know the cynics would say, well, you know, it's only money that matters.

00:02:05.000 Who cares who was here first?

00:02:07.020 But as you all know, one of the big games being played up here in Canada today is the

00:02:11.840 game of native land claims.

00:02:14.300 And who was here first seems to be very important as to who is going to get what.

00:02:21.760 Anyway, I don't want to intrude on the political message, and without any further ado, and

00:02:26.420 thanking you all for braving it through the rabble, our friend now from the slowly being

00:02:34.760 occupied state of California, Stephen McNallan.

00:02:44.300 Having just passed the 50 mark and sort of, you know, being determined not to be on the downhill slope, you know, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, life and, quote, what it means, unquote, and it's dawned on me that none of us really know just what impact our lives will have had.

00:03:06.880 you know we know that we get up every morning and we go to bed every night

00:03:11.560 and in between presumably we do something that we hope matters

00:03:14.720 but the days go by and the weeks go by and the months and the years and the decades

00:03:20.000 and before you know it you're as old as Paul and I

00:03:21.780 and you're still wondering you know have I done anything that's going to matter

00:03:26.740 so in a way that the message that I've got or a part of the message that I've got tonight

00:03:33.360 is one of hope because I want to tell you about a man

00:03:37.840 whose life did matter. It mattered

00:03:41.700 a lot and continues to matter.

00:03:48.680 A long time ago

00:03:50.280 in what someday was to be the state of Washington

00:03:55.020 in the somewhat disunited states of

00:03:58.160 balkanizing America, a man lay

00:04:02.060 dying. And he was about my age. Yours too, Paul. And he had had a rough life. He had

00:04:13.060 broken a number of ribs, for example. We know that the breakage on those ribs was severe

00:04:19.060 enough that it partially disabled one arm and caused him quite a lot of atrophy and

00:04:25.060 difficulties in the later years of his life. We know that he had all of the usual sorts

00:04:30.060 of aches and pains and arthritis and one thing or another that sets in to people as they

00:04:36.920 go through this life that we lead. But the real reason that he was dying had nothing

00:04:45.600 to do with broken ribs, nothing to do with arthritis. It dealt rather with a spear point

00:04:51.500 lodged in his pelvis. Now he had beaten the wound. We know that he had survived the initial

00:04:58.620 damage. But what was killing him, of course, was the infection.

00:05:03.700 And he lay there on the banks of what was eventually to become

00:05:07.080 or to be known as the Columbia River, and he

00:05:11.140 died. He left this realm

00:05:14.560 for wherever one goes when one leaves it.

00:05:24.120 9,300 years later, I got a phone

00:05:27.180 call. And the phone call was from a friend down in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the people

00:05:32.160 who kind of stays in touch with him. And he says, Steve, Steve, the most astounding thing has just

00:05:36.500 happened. They found a skeleton up in Washington. It's ancient, and it's a white guy. And I say,

00:05:43.960 come on, you got to be kidding. You know, don't tell me about Atlantis or Lemuria or, you know,

00:05:48.960 what, you know, are we talking fringe archaeology? What is this? I was a little skeptical.

00:05:52.180 But as the days went by, the story started coming together and it wasn't just from people

00:05:58.620 who follow fringe archaeology, it was from people who are really serious about science,

00:06:03.200 people that understand that science is essentially a conservative, a cautious endeavor, a discipline.

00:06:11.060 And the facts began to come in and the story was something like this.

00:06:18.040 Some while back, about two and a half years before the time that we're in right now, a

00:06:24.280 couple of college students were trying to sneak into the hydroplane races on the Columbia

00:06:29.260 River.

00:06:30.260 They were going in the back way, which meant kind of coming along the banks of the river

00:06:34.860 and kind of wading through the shallows.

00:06:37.940 One does these sort of things when there's something important at stake, like the hydroplane

00:06:41.020 races.

00:06:42.300 And one of them decided to play a trick on the other one, because over here in the water

00:06:45.660 was this sort of rounded thing you know it looked just like a skull

00:06:49.900 he says hey hey tom look look there's a skull in the water well it was it was a skull in the water

00:06:59.180 so yeah obviously they were a little excited so they they call the police who in turn call

00:07:03.580 the coroner and the coroner comes out and out comes all the guys in their scuba gear and you

00:07:08.380 know they get to strut their technology you know they they come out and the water's only this deep

00:07:12.140 but they come out and they dive down and they look for fragments i mean hey you know i've played

00:07:16.860 that game you got to have the toys you know and they pulled out all of these fragments of a human

00:07:22.140 being coroner looks at it looks at the skull in particular he says hmm white male okay

00:07:33.180 coroner whose name was floyd johnson takes these these remains in a plastic bucket over to a friend

00:07:39.020 of his who sometimes works with the coroner's office. This is a fellow named Chatters, Dr. James

00:07:44.300 Chatters, who's been very involved in the case since. He says, hey, Jim, what do you think of

00:07:48.940 these? Dr. Chatters picks them up. Hmm, white male. Well, okay, that's kind of interesting,

00:07:56.860 but Chatters also points out that there's little encrustations on the bones, and these are not

00:08:02.220 bones that were there last week or, you know, three weeks ago or, you know, last Christmas or

00:08:07.420 something. These bones have been there for a while. So he says, well, it's probably a

00:08:12.060 pioneer from the 1800s. But just to check, he takes him up to another anthropologist,

00:08:19.240 a third individual, a third professional now, who takes the remains, looks at him. And this

00:08:24.600 was a female anthropologist named Macmillan who runs her own business on forensics. She 1.00

00:08:30.080 looks at it and she says, hmm, white male. So, so far starting to look kind of consistent. 0.79

00:08:36.460 That was exciting enough because Jim remarked that, well, okay, this doesn't happen every day.

00:08:43.160 Usually all I get are just ordinary murders and stuff.

00:08:45.580 But this time we've got somebody who's got a little bit of history.

00:08:51.520 Little did he know.

00:08:54.780 So he's kind of cleaning up the pelvis.

00:08:59.040 And as he's cleaning up the pelvis, he notices, there's a little something in here.

00:09:04.400 There's something dark.

00:09:05.400 and it's about so big

00:09:07.320 and it's kind of got serrated edges

00:09:08.840 and it's a projectile point

00:09:10.820 and it's a projectile point

00:09:14.260 of a style

00:09:15.180 of a kind

00:09:16.400 that hasn't been in use

00:09:18.920 for several thousand years.

00:09:23.560 Well, 1.00

00:09:24.760 either there's some really retro Indians out there 1.00

00:09:27.700 or this is not,

00:09:29.520 I say again,

00:09:30.680 not a pioneer from the 1800s.

00:09:34.180 Well, at this time,

00:09:35.060 we got to crank up the high tech so they took a bit of a finger bone

00:09:39.740 did the carbon 14 dating thing with it and they came back with a date of

00:09:44.380 approximately 9,300 years before present

00:09:47.820 now Chatters knows right away he's got a problem

00:09:51.680 because if word of this leaks out and of course it does 0.75

00:09:55.860 the local Indians are going to really press him for

00:09:59.660 the return of these remains 0.93

00:10:01.900 and in fact

00:10:05.200 very soon that materializes

00:10:07.840 and the sheriff's department

00:10:09.780 shows up in front of Dr. Chatters'

00:10:11.760 house where he has his office

00:10:13.040 and they have him bag up

00:10:15.540 all of the bones and they take them away

00:10:17.620 as it turns

00:10:19.760 out the waterway where these

00:10:21.760 were found is under the jurisdiction of

00:10:23.680 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

00:10:25.600 and they have a very sweet

00:10:29.360 relationship with the local tribes

00:10:31.720 because they have to interface with them on an almost daily basis on a wide array of issues.

00:10:36.620 So there is a political thing right away.

00:10:40.560 And the Indians really want this set of remains.

00:10:45.980 Now, this is not necessarily characteristic behavior on their part

00:10:49.440 because, as Chatters pointed out, he's got a locker full of remains,

00:10:54.800 some of which stay there for as long as four or five years with no one coming to claim them.

00:11:00.560 They don't really care about some of these remains, much more mundane remains, but this set they really want back in the ground right away, right now, no further study, give us the bones, please.

00:11:16.860 and the government

00:11:20.620 the government

00:11:22.700 announces that they are in fact

00:11:24.960 going to return the bones to the Indians 0.99

00:11:27.020 despite the anomalous

00:11:29.220 characteristics of these remains

00:11:30.740 at this

00:11:33.280 point academia begins to wake up

00:11:35.360 a little bit you know we've got some pretty bright

00:11:37.140 people scattered around the country over at the

00:11:39.140 Smithsonian we got people like Doug Owsley

00:11:41.260 who was very concerned about

00:11:43.240 this we've got Chatters himself

00:11:45.120 who was very concerned, a lot of other really top people in their field were saying, wait

00:11:50.120 a minute. Stop what you're doing. There's something else that's going on here. We need

00:11:55.260 to take a much closer look at these remains. And so a group of about seven or eight scientists

00:12:02.840 got together and filed suit in federal court to stop the so-called repatriation of Kennewick

00:12:10.640 man's bones to the local tribes.

00:12:14.640 Well, now the scientists, of course, had their end of it.

00:12:18.580 And their end of it is simply that this individual is really, really old, almost certainly is

00:12:22.680 not related to any existing tribe, certainly not any existing tribe in this area.

00:12:27.480 And he's sort of, you know, common property of humankind, you know, and should be studied

00:12:32.640 from that end.

00:12:33.640 And I hear that argument and I sympathize with that argument.

00:12:37.800 At the same time, our emphasis, and by our, I mean our organization, which is the Alsatru Folk Assembly,

00:12:45.140 we had sort of a different take on it, a different approach on it.

00:12:49.800 And that was simply that this person was a kinsman.

00:12:54.880 And at this point, I must digress for just a moment and kind of give you a sort of the theological perspective

00:13:00.020 or the spiritual perspective of where we were coming from.

00:13:02.680 and I hasten to add to this

00:13:05.800 that as I'm talking to you

00:13:07.200 I'm not trying to speak for the AFA

00:13:10.200 I'm not trying to speak for anyone but myself

00:13:12.480 and my own experience and my own guts

00:13:14.940 but I think that my sentiments would be shared

00:13:18.140 by many other people

00:13:19.220 who also have my spiritual perspective

00:13:22.020 the way we see it

00:13:25.600 we are connected with our ancestors

00:13:29.900 in a way that completely transcends time,

00:13:35.920 transcends space, transcends borders.

00:13:42.460 In a way, we see our ancestors,

00:13:45.460 even back to the most ancient of times,

00:13:47.360 as living again through us.

00:13:49.620 We have a connection with those people.

00:13:52.220 We have a responsibility to those people.

00:13:55.300 We have a link with those people

00:13:57.560 that is not diminished by distance, by years, and by the petty politics of the 20th or even

00:14:04.700 the 21st century.

00:14:07.120 It is a bond of blood, a bond of heredity, a bond of spirit, a bond of rebirth down through

00:14:15.560 the millennia within our family lines and across the continents and around the world.

00:14:22.580 So for us, it was very important that this individual,

00:14:27.020 who certainly seemed to be more nearly related to us than to the Indian tribes,

00:14:33.180 that he be associated with us rather than with them, 0.89

00:14:37.420 that he be buried in the ground by the rights of his own people

00:14:42.100 and not by the ceremonies of an alien folk.

00:14:45.300 well needless to say this was not a very politically popular or acceptable sort of

00:14:53.620 standpoint but nonetheless it's where we were coming from and so we also filed suit in federal

00:14:59.600 court and a suit parallel with but separate from that of the scientists to keep the government

00:15:05.140 from giving these remains back to the indians well right away politics came into action i'd

00:15:11.320 mentioned that you know the corps of engineers has got kind of a sweetheart relationship with

00:15:14.780 the Indians. And it rapidly went from a sweetheart relationship to something that was virtually

00:15:20.440 incestuous. The bias was scandalous. We found out that on approximately five separate occasions,

00:15:35.800 had been allowed access to the bones completely sub rosa completely in secret word came out to us

00:15:46.600 only because there was a security leak within the system there that called up one of our people and

00:15:51.200 said look you need to know what's happening you know they're letting the representatives of the

00:15:55.620 Indian tribes in to have the remains we found out that they had actually handled the remains which

00:16:02.240 of course contaminates them from the standpoint of DNA to the point that one specialist down

00:16:07.740 in California feels that this particular set of remains is hopelessly compromised scientifically

00:16:12.620 as a result.

00:16:14.760 They let them place objects in the box where the remains were being stored, but more details

00:16:20.220 on that in a few minutes.

00:16:22.220 And all of this done despite the fact that these remains were supposed to be strictly

00:16:28.180 off limits to all parties. Being basically naive and basically trusting and basically

00:16:34.620 assuming that the system is really fair and will really work all right for us, we had

00:16:39.260 no problem with that. And then we find out that the Corps of Engineers is going behind

00:16:43.820 our back, behind the judge's back, behind the backs of all concerned basically to play

00:16:50.300 their particular political favorites.

00:16:54.260 This policy of, there's no other word for it, discrimination, bigotry, we might even

00:17:04.000 say, continued and intensified as the months went by.

00:17:11.900 On one occasion, a fragment of Kennewick man was accidentally given to the Indians.

00:17:21.300 You know, nobody really knows quite how it happened.

00:17:24.020 Somehow it got into the wrong box and well, and this box got given to the Indians and

00:17:29.760 yes, it got buried and no, we can't get it back and gee, we're sorry about that.

00:17:37.900 The location, the portion of the riverbank where Kennewick man was found, suddenly had

00:17:46.040 to be protected from erosion.

00:17:49.480 And so the government brought in helicopters and dropped feet of dirt, layers of stone,

00:18:00.740 planted trees on top of the entire mess and just for added good measure placed artificial

00:18:10.740 logs made of coconut fiber in and amongst all of this. Now coconut fiber of course is

00:18:17.740 organic. It will degrade over time and sift its way in very small particles down through

00:18:23.740 layers of soil, thoroughly contaminating anything else that might possibly be found there.

00:18:32.740 And from the standpoint of the scientists concerned, would greatly complicate any attempt to make

00:18:40.740 further carbon-14 dating evaluations of these strata.

00:18:45.740 An inventory was done on the bones last October, and again, more on that in a bit.

00:18:50.740 And they found that some pieces were missing, in addition to the piece that was accidentally given to the Indians.

00:18:58.220 What was missing were portions of both femurs.

00:19:05.460 This is significant because next to the skull, the femurs are the most important part for determining what they would politely call affiliation,

00:19:14.900 i.e., to whom this individual is most closely related, because, of course, it determines things like height.

00:19:20.740 which is now something that will have to be based on Dr. Chatter's original notes.

00:19:26.720 So there was one abuse after another after another.

00:19:32.120 Who took the bone fragments? We don't know.

00:19:35.100 I strongly suspect it was not Dr. Chatter's. 0.90

00:19:37.620 I know it certainly wasn't us.

00:19:41.020 The most that we could get from the system

00:19:43.180 at the time that the Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of the remains

00:19:48.660 was permission to go in and do our own ritual over the remains.

00:19:57.120 And a small concession as that was,

00:20:00.300 it was still a day that I shall never forget.

00:20:07.300 We showed up in the morning in question,

00:20:09.980 and of course there were all the usual news people

00:20:12.000 and there was all of the usual Indian representatives

00:20:15.020 and this, that, and another.

00:20:16.520 we were ushered into a small room

00:20:19.360 probably a third or a fourth of the size of this one

00:20:22.220 actually just a small conference room

00:20:23.900 with a long wooden table

00:20:25.420 and along the table were the chairs

00:20:27.480 and down at the end

00:20:29.100 down at the end of the table

00:20:30.440 there was a box

00:20:32.360 plain wooden box

00:20:34.700 about yay by yay

00:20:36.400 so high

00:20:37.480 they took the top off of it

00:20:40.740 and inside are little baggies

00:20:42.680 and some of the baggies are sealed

00:20:44.440 and some of the baggies are not sealed

00:20:46.100 and they said to us

00:20:48.860 alright

00:20:49.920 you can do your ritual now

00:20:52.240 but don't put anything into the box

00:20:54.380 and don't take anything out of the box

00:20:56.280 well that wasn't a problem to us

00:20:57.480 because we really didn't need to do that

00:20:59.340 but I noticed as I looked into the box

00:21:02.300 someone had rather beaten us to that

00:21:05.120 because interlaced amongst all the baggies of bones

00:21:08.500 were portions of cedar branches

00:21:12.440 little fronds of cedar about so long

00:21:15.020 We found out that not only had the tribes been allowed access to the remains, but in

00:21:21.640 fact they had been allowed to put things inside the box.

00:21:26.320 When this came out and was revealed to the scientists, they were most agitated because

00:21:30.900 the things that were placed in there affect things like moisture content, chemical content,

00:21:36.940 various rosins, things that are in the various cedar fronds and so forth.

00:21:42.140 We complained about this most strenuously.

00:21:44.100 The scientists complained about this most strenuously and I think that this ultimately

00:21:47.880 led to something that was to happen some months later where the bones, thank goodness, were

00:21:53.500 finally taken out of the custody of the Corps of Engineers and turned over to academia,

00:22:01.000 where in fact they are supposedly being studied this week.

00:22:05.620 We shall hope that some sort of results are published.

00:22:09.660 Those are mummies that are more or less contemporary with Kennewick man, that is to say anything

00:22:15.660 before about 8,000 years old or anything about that old or older, they seem to be associated

00:22:25.000 with a number of remains that are curiously Caucasoid.

00:22:31.840 Of the perhaps five, six, seven, depending on where you want to draw the horizon set

00:22:35.980 of remains that we have from that time period. Almost all of them to one degree or another

00:22:43.200 exhibit these Caucasoid traits. So Kennewick man was not a lone wanderer. He was not somebody 0.95

00:22:52.220 who decided that Norway or the British Isles or God's nowhere was too dull so he was going

00:22:57.900 to take a long hike. He was a part of a set of people. He was a part of a culture. He

00:23:04.040 He has a context, he was not just a sole anomaly,

00:23:08.040 some Fortean event dropped out of the ether.

00:23:16.040 In fact, scientists have noted that as this very old group,

00:23:21.040 as this very old population was displaced,

00:23:25.040 so did the material artifacts associated with these people change.

00:23:30.040 So apparently what we have is an actual change of population

00:23:33.040 and not merely people deciding to start using a new kind of flint work or something of that sort.

00:23:38.040 There was an actual displacement of population that took place back, you know, many thousands of years ago.

00:23:45.040 This led some scientists, in particular Dennis Stamford over at the Smithsonian,

00:23:50.040 to note that what would they call the Solutrean culture or the Solutrean style of making projectile points

00:23:59.040 over in ancient Spain and France, is actually very, i.e. strikingly similar to what we call Clovis culture here in North America.

00:24:14.020 Now, one could say that, hey, you know, how many ways are there to make an arrowhead or a spear point?

00:24:20.060 But in actuality, there are many ways.

00:24:21.880 flint knapping stonework be it clovis be it salutary and be it whatever is actually a rather

00:24:29.760 deep technology there are many different points of decision there's many different

00:24:36.000 points in making say for example a spear point at which you have to say well i'm going to make it

00:24:41.500 like this i'm going to make it like that and that decision will affect all the other decisions that

00:24:46.740 are made thereafter.

00:24:48.980 So if you add up all of those left, right, yes, no

00:24:53.140 kinds of decisions that have to be made to produce

00:24:55.620 one of these artifacts, you really

00:24:57.620 get a very large number of possible combinations.

00:25:00.600 And so the chance that Solutrean and Clovis just

00:25:05.020 sort of accidentally happen to resemble each other

00:25:07.920 becomes mathematically rather small rather quickly.

00:25:12.920 It's possible, but it becomes very unlikely.

00:25:16.900 So what we have is a set of artifacts in North America,

00:25:19.840 the Clovis artifacts, that seem very similar

00:25:22.560 to those of Europe, the Solutrean.

00:25:28.280 We note that Clovis points seem to have spread

00:25:33.660 from east to west across North America,

00:25:38.380 which might be an argument in favor of a European origin.

00:25:42.920 We note that there is very little, if anything, coming across from East Asia down across the Bering Strait and down,

00:25:51.920 which seems to resemble Clovis.

00:25:53.700 So we don't really have a track.

00:25:56.160 There's really no artifact chain to indicate anything coming across from that direction,

00:26:01.200 but we do have it coming from the other direction across Europe.

00:26:03.880 One might be tempted to draw at least tentative conclusions from that.

00:26:07.860 So what we've got is a most remarkable material culture that may in fact be a common culture

00:26:16.460 between Europe and ancient America.

00:26:19.440 We have the shape of the bones themselves.

00:26:23.280 And this is most significant because Dr. Chatters, like most people who do forensic

00:26:27.680 anthropology in your coroner departments and university departments across the country,

00:26:34.500 has essentially a checklist.

00:26:36.440 And on this checklist, there's a descriptor of, you know, various characteristics that,

00:26:42.700 for example, a skull might have.

00:26:45.320 There are measurements involved.

00:26:47.080 Everything from the length of the skull, the height of the jaw at this point compared

00:26:50.820 to the height of the jaw at that point, the breadth through here, factor after factor

00:26:56.720 after factor that a specialist will look at.

00:27:00.380 And essentially, you know, is this an Indian trait or is this not an Indian trait?

00:27:06.120 And going down Kennewick man's skull, this list of traits was rather unanimously non-Indian.

00:27:16.520 There were no traits or virtually no traits that indicated kinship with the people that

00:27:22.300 we perhaps mistakenly call Native Americans in the United States and who I have now resolutely

00:27:28.360 call the Indians.

00:27:31.180 So we've got possible artifacts.

00:27:33.840 We've got the morphology of the remains themselves.

00:27:39.140 But science, of course, can only be carried a certain distance because the apologists

00:27:44.840 are very quick to point out to us, well, you have to consider American Indian oral tradition.

00:27:51.440 And at this point, science breaks down because there are some American Indians, by no means

00:27:56.620 all of them, but a sizable number who seem to have a sort of creationism going on in 1.00

00:28:02.340 regards with the origin of their people our people were always here we didn't

00:28:07.860 come from Asia we've been here forever and ever and at that point we're all

00:28:12.780 supposed to say oh yes thank you for your wisdom your insight

Asatru Folk Assembly - March 02, 2021

Stephen McNallen the Importance of the Kennewick Man (1)

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