Our house sits near an official historic site on the Chippewa River in northwestern Wisconsin, where the Ojibwa once fought a bloody battle against a party of Lakota warriors traveling by canoe, in a victory that persuaded the Lakota never to return to Wisconsin again.
The Ojibwa buried their dead warriors on a bluff overlooking the river, and for the last 200 years, despite incursions of white settlers and numerous land transfers, both native and non-native people have venerated this sacred ground.
The non-natives who now own the land, cooperate with the Ojibwa of the nearby Lac Court Oreilles reservation to protect and preserve the site for living descendants who visit and pray.
In Ojibwa burial customs, great care is taken to ensure a safe journey to the spirit world for the deceased. Cemeteries are consecrated ground, and tampering with graves would jeopardize the departed soul’s journey to the spirit world, and bring back sadness, anxiety, unrequited longing for the departed, and very real guilt, to surviving relatives.
Which is why folks here acutely sympathize with victims of the Burr Oak Cemetery crimes.
Many people whose relatives’ remains have gone missing from the cemetery near Alsip after their graves were dug up and coffins removed report suffering all over again, the same grief which they experienced years earlier when their loved ones died.
Their hopes and values aren’t all that far removed from those of Indian people. The overwhelming majority of non-Native Americans, including those whose family graves were robbed in Burr Oak, likewise believe in life after death. To many, the human remains are inextricably linked with the eternally surviving soul, either symbolically, sacredly, or literally, depending on the individual family’s religion and beliefs.
In reacting to the egregious violations at Burr Oak, where employees allegedly resold grave sites for profit, and the recent news of irregularities at Mt. Glenwood Memorial Gardens South Cemetery, near Glenwood, legislators have called for reforms and tighter regulation of the funeral industry.
But victims have seen scant promise of resolution or catharsis, especially since similar outcry led to no substantive change following grotesque grave robbing in
Florida in 2002, and in five other states since then.
Failure to fix the problem is due to a number of factors, including weaknesses in state laws, uncertainty regarding who has jurisdiction over cemeteries and the funeral industry, lack of federal oversight, and inadequate funding for enforcement of current laws — a glaring inadequacy in the Burr Oak incident, where the Cook County Sheriff’s Department is finding itself overwhelmed in just the early stages of the investigation.
What can be done?
Some have suggested that Americans resort to cremation rather than entombment, to avoid the problem of cemeteries altogether.
Cremation, after all, is not anathema to Judeo-Christian beliefs and traditions, in which an individual soul prevails spiritually, while human remains perpetuate through dignified restoration to earthly element (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”).
Ancient Rome used funeral pyres, and modern-day Hindus continue the practice, to facilitate the departed spirit’s abandoning of earthly form, for transcendence to a higher, divine plane.
But customs, religious rites and attitudes can hardly be legislated.
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If it were that easy, an engineer from Microsoft could probably figure out a way to digitalize human remains and store and categorize each one in cyberspace for eternity.
So because universal acceptance of cremation will not happen for decades, if not centuries, it is incumbent upon the federal government to do what individual states have tried but failed to accomplish, and that’s getting control of the situation.
In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted by the federal government in order to finally protect the sacred burial grounds and holy and historic sites of Indian people.
The federal law provided funding and “teeth” for enforcement of regulation of Indian cemeteries, which for the previous 500 years had been treated like archeological flea markets of Indian antiquities.
A similar all-encompassing federal bill ought to be forged to tighten and standardize funeral industry regulations and record-keeping nationwide for all citizens, implicit with serious federal penalties for violations thereof.
Down the county road from our house, a 7-foot-tall granite boulder stands prominently atop a bluff overlooking the Chippewa River. It marks the Ojibwa warrior burial ground and serves as an imposing reminder of the site’s permanent and untouchable status.
The graveyards of all of our loved ones demand the same kind of granite protection, that only the weight of a federal decree can endow.