Kennewick Man Controversy

Re “Skeleton Embodies Debate on Americas’ First People,” Aug. 13: The find of Kennewick Man in Washington seems to threaten the very identity of many Indian nations. If the discovery of an early man in the Middle East upset some Christians, because it conflicted with their myth of creation, would scientists have to give them the bones for burial? Why are we allowing the Indian nations to dictate where a scientific discovery should go because it conflicts with their myth of creation?

An Indian leader, Armand Minthorn, states that his people “always believe that Native Americans were created here, and they did not cross no land bridge.” What? His belief in a religious myth trumps scientific knowledge because of political correctness; we want to respect Indian beliefs after a long history of not paying them any heed whatsoever. But the pendulum has swung too far if we allow religious belief to short-circuit scientific inquiry.

PETER LIPSCOMB

Hawthorne

* Your article is Eurocentrism at its core. Would it hurt our sense of identity to have the shoe on the other foot--for us to be the actual immigrants to North America or at least the more newly arrived? Would it somehow justify our cruelty and insensitivity to the population that was “discovered” by Columbus, et al., if we were to prove that Europeans were the first ones on this continent?

Like all the other broken promises to Native Americans throughout our history, this becomes just the most recent.

The United Nations defines genocide as not only the physical destruction of a people, but also an inexorable and insidious chipping away of its language, culture and beliefs. Haven’t we done enough damage to a people whose environmental philosophy we are only now, in the eleventh hour, beginning to realize is profoundly correct?

LARRY HARPEL

South Pasadena