What settler colonialism therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers: Janna Lynell Martin Rogers, Human Categorization: A History of Race Science and Trafficking Indigenous Remains’, MA dissertation, Oklahoma State University, 2027 | settler colonial studies blog

What settler colonialism therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers: Janna Lynell Martin Rogers, Human Categorization: A History of Race Science and Trafficking Indigenous Remains’, MA dissertation, Oklahoma State University, 2027

30Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the history of graverobbing in the United States and influence of Race Science on the demand for Indigenous specimens. The original contribution of this research to the historiography modernizes language to redefine graverobbing as posthumous violence in an international necro – economy of trafficking Native cadavers. Through necro – capitalism white elite men commodified decedents and built institutional legacies that continue. Academics, scientists, physicians, Christian ministers, museum professionals, private and federally funded repositories stole, mutilated, sold, and hoarded the dead in exchange for wealth, fame, and power. In the terms of international law, the posthumous violence experienced by Indigenous decedents are genocidal crimes against humanity. Through contrapuntal examination and interdisciplinary methodologies of sociology, psychology, and forensic medicine graverobbing is understood as a patriarchal structure of discursive authority by white educated men and absolute power over bodies of the dead. This dissertation resolves race science and graverobbing as science gone mad. The minds, ethics, and unchallenged claims of scientists are plagued with a fetishistic disorder akin to necrophilism. Unabashed capitalist greed targeted subjugated demographics, terrorized living communities, debased graves, and defiled freshly buried bodies. Key findings demonstrate that broader society became complicit in despoiling the dead. The phenomenon of graverobbing was normalized in a complacent society where the dead had no rights. Racialized science, racialized language of eugenics, and blood quantum pseudoscience influenced federal policy that continues to assault Indigenous identity and Indian Country in the twenty – first century. This dissertation argues that academe, historical institutions, repositories, and medical sciences still prey on nonwhite and subjugated communities. As growing numbers of Indigenous and Black scholars enter fields of museology, medicine, and the human sciences a collaborative approach is reshaping conferences, methodologies, and bioethics. The Indigenous Archaeology Collective and Society of Black Archaeologists are impacting repatriation, exalting cultural and ethnic perspectives while exercising sovereignty and human rights of living communities and the deceased. Decedents have human rights, cultural rights, sovereignty rights, repatriation rights, and the right to remain interred. All decedents should have the right to remain safe from the institutional abuse historically enforced through ideologies of ethno – supremacism.

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