Protecting the Spirits of the Ancestors

Each weekend, Robert DeBord pulls his hair into a ponytail, straps on a gun and walks along the Tennessee River to protect his heritage.

A Cherokee, he is among a group of men and women of Indian ancestry deputized by the Hamilton County sheriff to stop looting of Indian graves.

Members of the all-volunteer Native American Reserve Force patrol about 600 acres of Chattanooga’s Moccasin Bend, the site of some of the worst destruction of Indian graves in the state.

“There’s still so much left in the ground,” said DeBord, a 42-year-old mechanic. “We’re going to make sure it stays here.”

The unique patrols seem to have worked. The sheriff’s office says looting and vandalism at the site have been nearly eliminated.

Before the patrols, Moccasin Bend had become a symbol of neglect. Professional collectors and amateur enthusiasts had taken shovels to the hundreds of mainly Cherokee and Creek graves, searching for pottery, pipes, knives and other items that can be sold for thousands of dollars.

“It looked like someone had taken grenades and blown holes into the ground,” said Harley Grant, an Eastern Band Cherokee and former member of the state Commission on Indian Affairs. “It’s mind-numbing that someone would go in as a Sunday outing to loot Native American graves.”

Artifacts 10,000 years old have been found on the property, along with campgrounds where Spanish explorers and Indians had contact in the 16th century. Civil War buffs also comb the park for rifle shells and other battle relics.

Tennessee passed a law in 1986 making disturbing an Indian grave a felony punishable by up to six years in prison and a $3,000 fine. Still, the looting continued.

Angered by the continuing desecration, members of the Chattanooga InterTribal Assn. decided to protect the area themselves. In 1993, the group of local Indians held a religious ceremony on the land, filled in holes left by looters and announced the patrol.

Unarmed volunteers walked the park at all hours, sometimes finding amateur collectors or freshly dug holes. The looting gradually stopped as word spread that the Indians were on watch, said Tom Kunesh, a Lakota who volunteered with the first patrol members.

“We didn’t see it so much as a law enforcement thing,” Kunesh said. “We saw it as security. It was just to go out there to make sure people weren’t there.”

The next year, one of the volunteers with police experience suggested the group needed more authority. The sheriff’s office agreed to train the patrol as a reserve force, giving them badges and the authority to make arrests.

The patrol members underwent the same training and review as other reserve deputies: FBI background checks, psychological testing and classes on using guns, searching buildings and making arrests. They were given a confiscated truck, an old patrol car and a donated boat.

Signs were posted around the property warning trespassers that the Native American Reserve Force was on patrol. Volunteers bought guns and began staffing shifts around the clock.

“If I didn’t have the legal right, I’d just be a common vigilante and we wouldn’t be much better than the others coming in,” said reservist Gary Williams, 44, a Cherokee and Chattanooga contractor.

Williams said he’s proud to volunteer, even though the shifts can be tiring and lonely. The watches begin with an Indian ritual in which sage is burned to purify the deputies as they walk among the graves.

“This is not one of my favorite things to do, but these people can’t protect themselves,” he said of his ancestors buried at Moccasin Bend. “We’ve been given a chance to protect them, and we’re going to do just that.”