An Alaska Native group will continue its traditional winter burials this year despite a conflict with a local cemetery that made headlines in October.
Bodies are normally kept above ground in a crypt until the ground thaws, according to the Fairbanks Native Association [1], but the group has struck an agreement with the cemetery that allows its members to come through and bury the deceased immediately.
The Fairbanks Native Association said last month it feared Natives wouldn't be able to perform customary winter burials because of blocked access to Birch Hill Cemetery during the winter months. But cemetery and city officials denied any intent to interfere with Native customs and attributed the misunderstanding to a sale of the cemetery last year, according to media reports. "We'll gladly open [the front gate] for them," the cemetery owner, Tim Wisniewski, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner [2].
It's not surprising the Fairbanks Native Association would concern itself with burial customs, according to Joe Watkins, Choctaw, director of the Native American studies department [3] at the University of Oklahoma. He said many tribes believe what happens after death still affects the deceased.
"I'm Choctaw, and in our ideas, we never said the name of the deceased person ... if we said the name we called them back from where they were and made their spirits restless," he said in a telephone interview from Norman, Oka.
Jan-Mikael Patterson, Navajo, said he was taught death was a taboo subject.
"For me, I can't go to a cemetery and walk around like they do in movies — I just can't do that," he said from Window Rock, Ariz., where he works as a reporter at the Navajo Times. "That's walking over people who can still watch from a place."
Tribal practices can seem to be almost opposites
But that's not always the case. Watkins said that other tribes, like the Inuit, would name a child after a deceased relative if they recognized a part of that person in the infant.
Robert Johnson, Navajo, a cultural specialist with the Navajo Nation Museum [4] in Window Rock, Ariz., said the last truly traditional burial he went to was that of his grandmother in the early 1980s.
He said that in Navajo tradition, three or four members of the deceased's in-laws — no blood relations — will wrap the body in a new blanket, load it onto a brand-new horse and lead it north of the homestead. When they feel they've gone far enough they'll bury the body and kill the horse.
"After they're buried, they say there is a journey into the afterworld — that young, brand-new horse will carry her into that afterworld," he said. "The closest translation for that place was from my grandpa, who called it ‘Indian happy hunting grounds.' "
Some traditions date way back in time
Johnson recalled that growing up, he knew of another traditional burial practice dating back even further.
"In the old time, Navajos weren't buried in the ground — they were buried in a tree," he said. "Back then they'd let spirits go by having nature take its course ... I had a relative buried in a tree, but that tree was always off limits."
For the Florida Seminoles [5], the nature of their swamplands made above-ground burials a practical choice, according to Neal Bowers, a cultural adviser with the tribe's Historic Preservation Office in Clewiston, Fla.
"There weren't too many places to dig — the swamp and the land determined the pathways we took as far as some of our practices," he said. "It was more practical to lay a person down above the ground ... because in the old times without cars, sometimes families were not able to reach a medicine man until weeks later who could perform the finishing ritual."
Seminole traditions differ from family to family
Bowers stressed that traditions varied from family to family, and there's no one thing all Seminoles did when someone passed.
But he did say that one old tradition from before assimilation was for the family to lay the deceased out in his chickee — an open-sided, thatched-roof housed made out of cypress poles and palm fronds — and then abandon that camp.
Another tradition still sometimes practiced today is for the survivors of a loved one to collect the deceased's belongings and throw them out into the swamp.
"In some families they'll pass things down — they'll say this was grandma's dress, this was grandpa's gun. We don't do that," Bowers said.
"I was taught when my loved one passes, I help them in their journey to the other side ... if I'm holding on to their objects, I'm holding them back," he said.
Travel and terrain can require different actions
Watkins, the University of Oklahoma professor, said migratory Kiowa and Comanche tribes in southwest Oklahoma would sometimes bind the deceased really tightly into the smallest space possible and put them into the rock and crevices in the Wichita Mountains. This was to protect them from animals.
He added that another Choctaw tradition was to put the body on a platform and allow it to decompose naturally. They would then save the skull and other long bones. Those bones would be present at a feast two or three years later in honor of the deceased.
Watkins said while it's understandable that some traditions have died out because of public health issues, they're not all gone completely.
"I think many tribal people still in some way or another practice smaller aspects of those traditions — I'm still hesitant to say the name of my deceased ancestors," he said. "Do I feel it necessary to converse with their skulls and long bones? No. I have a photo so I can remember them now."
Greenberg reported from Columbia, Mo.