A Spiritual Genocide: Grave Theft and Desecrations of the Sacred as United States Settler Colonial Occupation

Claire Urbanski
Feminist Studies
UC Santa Cruz

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, museums and research institutions across the United States embarked on an expansive mission to excavate and collect the bodies of Native American dead. Today, despite the passage of the 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, many U.S. institutions still hold large collections of these dead, while ongoing desecrations of sacred Native American burial grounds are routine to construction and resource extraction projects. This dissertation argues that the theft and desecration of Native American burial places are imperative to the consolidation and reproduction of United States settler-colonial power. It uses archival research to track these projects across U.S. institutions of militarism, scientific knowledge production, and industrial development as they are used to extend U.S. settler claims. By showing how U.S. power is authorized through state violence against Indigenous dead, the work argues that the U.S. settler state accumulates materially and immaterially via the spiritual dispossession of Indigenous life and death. In turn, it examines the decolonial activism of Indigenous women who work with land and dead as agential beings throughout their efforts to protect sacred spaces.