Twenty-four were charged with violating the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, among other laws. None of them were Native American, although one trader tried vainly to pass himself off as one. Ultimately, 32 people were pulled in, in Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. (A wrongful-death lawsuit filed by his widow is pending.) The prosecution’s case was not helped when its confidential informant also committed suicide before anyone stood trial. But some white residents felt that the raid was an example of federal overreach, and those feelings were inflamed when two of the suspects, including the doctor arrested in Blanding, committed suicide shortly after they were arrested.
#FINDY INDIAN POTTERY CRACK#
Among the 28 modern Native American communities in the Four Corners, the raids seemed like a long-overdue attempt to crack down on a travesty against their lands and cultures-“How would you feel if a Native American dug up your grandmother and took her jewelry and clothes and sold them to the highest bidder?” Mark Mitchell, a former governor of the Pueblo of Tesuque, asked me.
Legal limitations on removing artifacts from public and tribal (but not private) lands date back to the Antiquities Act of 1906, but a tradition of unfettered digging in some parts of the region began with the arrival of white settlers in the 19th century. In some spots in the Four Corners, Operation Cerberus became one of the most polarizing events in memory. In all, they seized some 40,000 objects-a collection so big it now fills a 2,300-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City and spills into parts of the nearby Natural History Museum of Utah. They also discovered a display room behind a concealed door controlled by a trick lever. At another house, investigators found some 4,000 pieces. In one suspect’s home, a team of 50 agents and archaeologists spent two days cataloging more than 5,000 artifacts, packing them into museum-quality storage boxes and loading those boxes into five U-Haul trucks. The informant also accompanied diggers out to sites in remote canyons, including at least one that agents had rigged with motion-detecting cameras. Wearing a miniature camera embedded in a button of his shirt, he recorded 100 hours of videotape on which sellers and collectors casually discussed the prices and sources of their objects. Agents enlisted a confidential informant and gave him money-more than $330,000-to buy illicit artifacts. The search-and-seizures were the culmination of a multi-agency effort that spanned two and a half years. Ogden, announced the arrests as part of “the nation’s largest investigation of archaeological and cultural artifact thefts.” The agents called it Operation Cerberus, after the three-headed hellhound of Greek mythology. attorney general, Ken Salazar and David W. Later that day, the incumbent interior secretary and deputy U.S. Similar scenes played out across the Four Corners that morning as officers took an additional 21 men and women into custody. At one hilltop residence, a team of a dozen agents banged on the door and arrested the owners-a well-respected doctor and his wife.
An enormous cloud hung over the region, one of them recalled, blocking out the rising sun and casting an ominous glow over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. At dawn on June 10, 2009, almost 100 federal agents pulled up to eight homes in Blanding, Utah, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying side arms.
0 kommentar(er)
