Navajo custody of shields fueling discontent

In August, the National Park Service turned over to the Navajo Tribe three ancient Indian shields found in Capitol Reef National Park. The action, says a legal scholar, reflects a fundamental weakness of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Debora L. Threedy, law professor and the associate dean of the University of Utah College of Law, is writing a study of the incident.

The federal act, known among archaeologists by its initials NAGPRA, requires the repatriation to Indian tribes of human remains and sacred items that have an association with particular tribes.

The buffalo-hide shields were made between 1420 and 1640, according to carbon dating. They were discovered in 1926 in what later became Capitol Reef by Ephraim P. Pectol, whose work to establish the park earned him the sobriquet, Father of Capitol Reef National Park.

The Park Service later confiscated the shields and put them on display in the Capitol Reef visitor center. A few years after NAGPRA became law in 1990, a Pueblo tribal expert visiting the park noticed the shields and said they might be ceremonial items. Whether shields, ordinarily designed for warfare, are sacred objects may be debatable to some. But the comment triggered a NAGPRA consultation process in which the Park Service sent word to tribes asking if they had a claim.

The Pueblo people did not seek to obtain the shields. Claims were filed by Utes from Fort Duchesne, Uintah County; the Kaibab Paiutes from Fredonia, Ariz.; Utes from Colorado; and the Navajos.

According to the National Park Service's Administrative History of Capitol Reef, the inhabitants of the region after about AD 700 were first, Fremont and Anasazi, and later, Southern Paiutes and Utes. The Administrative History mentions hunting trips by Navajos, whose present reservation is far to the south.

But the Navajos claim was accompanied by oral tradition that the shields had been hidden at this site during wartime by the grandfather of an elderly Navajo medicine man. And NAGPRA states that cultural affiliation with an object may be demonstrated by "geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical or other relevant information or expert opinion."

Relatives of Pectol would like to be able to see the shields and pay their respects to Ephraim and Dorothy Pectol "as well as to those people who created them," said Neal P. Busk, Richfield, grandson of the Pectols. "Some of the Pectol family members feel a very close spiritual connection to the shields."