Grave Matters: The Controversy Over Excavating California's Buried Indigenous Past

How do we reconcile the sanctity of Indigenous burial grounds with the desire to study them?

Whether by curious Boy Scouts and "backyard archaeologists" or competitive collectors and knowledge-hungry anthropologists, the excavation of Native remains is a practice fraught with injustice and simmering resentments.

Grave Matters is the history of the treatment of Native remains in California and the story of the complicated relationship between researcher and researched. Tony Platt begins his journey with his son's funeral at Big Lagoon, a seaside village in pastoral Humboldt County in Northern California, once O-py weg, a bustling center for the Yurok and the site of a plundered native cemetery. Platt travels the globe in search of the answer to the question: How do we reconcile a place of extraordinary beauty with its horrific past?

Grave Matters centers the Yurok people and the eventual movement to repatriate remains and reclaim ancient rights, but it is also a universal story of coming to terms with the painful legacy of a sorrowful past. This book, originally published in 2011, is updated here with a preface by the author.


About the Author
Platt, Tony: - Tony Platt is the author of more than ten books and 150 essays and articles on race, inequality, and social justice in American history, among them Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States, Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial, and The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Platt, now a professor emeritus, taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, Sacramento, where he received awards for teaching and scholarship. Platt has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian, and his commentaries have aired on NPR. His publications have been translated into four languages. Platt lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California.