Ashes to ashes, death to death
This is interesting:
Except that there is a difference between fact, truth, and Truth; and between vernacular, scientific, and legal versions thereof. Consider: in 1922, a resident Japanese alien sought to be naturalized; the Supreme Court denied his petition because he was Mongoloid rather than Caucasoid. A mere three months later, a resident South Asian alien who had served in the U.S. armed forces and had sought naturalization since South Asians are scientifically categorized as Caucasoid, had his own petition denied because, according to the Supreme Court, he wasn't "white" (here).
NAGPRA is a adjudicated within a legal framework, not a scientific one. There may be some correspondence, but they are not identical and they do not serve the same purposes. With respect to NAGPRA, "Native American" has a legal definition, and it is basically this: any registered member of a federally recognized Indian tribe, or the generalized pre-Columbian American ancestors of the same. Earlier descent from Asian populations (as per, for example, the Bering Land Bridge hypothesis) is not mentioned and it has not [yet] been made legally necessary for Native Americanness. That scientific models for the peopling of the New World have, in the minds of scientists and (to a sadly lesser extent) the general public, made such a requirement, is irrelevant to the legal question. The remains of people who lived in the United States before Columbus' arrival are, by legal definition, those of Native Americans. [And note that the final, pro-science decision in the Kennewick Man case rested upon scientific interests outweighing Native ones, in part because of this very controversy and the public interest in its resolution].
Likewise the question of when human life begins. Whatever biological definition one uses, it's not terribly germane. In the above quotation, the definition of death is not so much biological as it is medical: related, certainly, but not identical. If the brain is dead, the body can be killed without legal consequence, because it no longer contains a person. And if that is true of a onetime person, how much more so is it of a hollow ball of cells such as a blastula, that has never had a brain to have any activity in the first place?
"Among human beings, brain activity is a necessary condition to legal personhood in the United States. 'It appears that once brain death has been determined … no criminal or civil liability will result from disconnecting the life-support devices.' (Dority v. Superior Court of San Bernardino County, 193 Cal.Rptr. 288, 291 (1983))" [from Wikipedia, as of 19 June 2006].In arguments over the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, one of the 'essentially contested terms' is "Native American." This particularly came out in the Kennewick Man controversy, since he kinda sorta distantly resembles modern Caucasoid populations a tad more than he does modern Native American populations. Ergo, the inherent invalidity of NAGPRA-driven claims to his remains by certain Native American tribes.
Except that there is a difference between fact, truth, and Truth; and between vernacular, scientific, and legal versions thereof. Consider: in 1922, a resident Japanese alien sought to be naturalized; the Supreme Court denied his petition because he was Mongoloid rather than Caucasoid. A mere three months later, a resident South Asian alien who had served in the U.S. armed forces and had sought naturalization since South Asians are scientifically categorized as Caucasoid, had his own petition denied because, according to the Supreme Court, he wasn't "white" (here).
NAGPRA is a adjudicated within a legal framework, not a scientific one. There may be some correspondence, but they are not identical and they do not serve the same purposes. With respect to NAGPRA, "Native American" has a legal definition, and it is basically this: any registered member of a federally recognized Indian tribe, or the generalized pre-Columbian American ancestors of the same. Earlier descent from Asian populations (as per, for example, the Bering Land Bridge hypothesis) is not mentioned and it has not [yet] been made legally necessary for Native Americanness. That scientific models for the peopling of the New World have, in the minds of scientists and (to a sadly lesser extent) the general public, made such a requirement, is irrelevant to the legal question. The remains of people who lived in the United States before Columbus' arrival are, by legal definition, those of Native Americans. [And note that the final, pro-science decision in the Kennewick Man case rested upon scientific interests outweighing Native ones, in part because of this very controversy and the public interest in its resolution].
Likewise the question of when human life begins. Whatever biological definition one uses, it's not terribly germane. In the above quotation, the definition of death is not so much biological as it is medical: related, certainly, but not identical. If the brain is dead, the body can be killed without legal consequence, because it no longer contains a person. And if that is true of a onetime person, how much more so is it of a hollow ball of cells such as a blastula, that has never had a brain to have any activity in the first place?
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 13:21
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