S moke S ignals
AUGUST 1, 2015
9
Meeting explains new charnel house
By Brent Merrill
Smoke Signals staff writer
Tribal Historic Preservation
Office Program Manager David
Harrelson hosted a meeting about
plans for a new charnel house on
Wednesday, July 15, in the Tribal
Community Center.
Harrelson used the 90-minute
meeting to explain the difference
between the planned charnel house
at the Tribal Cemetery and a mau-
soleum.
Harrelson was joined by Engi-
neering and Public Works Manager
Jesse White and Facilities Main-
tenance Supervisor Tyson Mercier
for his presentation to a small, but
interested audience.
Harrelson said that he handles
repatriations of objects and re-
mains returned to the Confederat-
ed Tribes of Grand Ronde. His office
is the contact point for inadvertent
discoveries of ancestral remains in
Tribal homelands.
He said it is these types of ongo-
ing discoveries that prompted the
need for a charnel house and not a
mausoleum.
“A number of years ago our office
came forward with a need to have
a place to keep ancestral remains
that we get back before they go back
into the ground,” said Harrelson.
“We need a place to keep them that
isn’t someone’s office, some place
that isn’t a storage facility and not a
museum. It needs to be a place that
isn’t regularly occupied by people.”
Harrelson said the need comes
from traditional beliefs of not being
around the dead or spending time
around their objects.
“A lot of traditional beliefs are that
if that happens you can catch sick-
ness from these things,” said Harrel-
son. “That has been a challenge that
Elders have expressed to us. We don’t
want bones in our museum and I can
say right now that we do not have
bones in our museum.”
Harrelson said remains currently
in possession of the Tribal Historic
Preservation Office are stored in an
undisclosed location away from the
museum complex.
“It’s not really a place of respect
or honor like we would like it to be,”
said Harrelson. “That is why we are
proposing the charnel house. Previ-
ously, people had been referring to it
Housing installs stop signs, changes speed limit
The Grand Ronde Housing Department has installed two new stop signs
near the welcome center, as well as changed the speed limit in Tribal
housing from 35 mph to 25 mph.
For more information, contact Homeownership Coordinator Vicki Jones
at 503-879-1465. n
as a mausoleum when it was first in-
troduced as an idea, but the purpose
was to be a small structure where
repatriated remains can be held until
they can be reburied. A mausoleum
for people leads to them thinking of
where you place urns and you go to
the cemetery and you see that. That
is not what this structure will be.”
Harrelson said that the origins of
the term comes from when early ex-
plorers like Capt. Meriwether Lewis
and 2nd Lt. William Clark traveled
through the area and discovered the
burial islands of the Multnomah
people and the Cascade Indians on
the Columbia River. Remains were
placed in house-like structures that
were described as charnel houses.
“A lot of the objects that we end
up repatriating from museums are
originally from those islands,” said
Harrelson. “That’s why we wanted
to call it a charnel house because
it’s a place for those types of things.
We have a custom and a tradition
of our ancestral people, before they
came to Grand Ronde, of having
structures like that.”
Harrelson said remains and buri-
al objects come in piecemeal. He
said that if an entire set of remains
were to come to the Tribe all at once
it would simply be reburied as per
custom, but that those occurrences
are extremely rare and never hap-
pened in his career.
“The need for the charnel house is
that sometimes our ancestors come
home a bone at a time. I do want
to emphasize that the Tribe’s pref-
erence is always to keep the bones
where they are if that can happen,”
said Harrelson. “We will make ev-
ery effort to re-bury at the location
where those objects or remains are
discovered. They belong there.”
Sometimes reburial at the site of
an inadvertent discovery is impossi-
ble, Harrelson said. If an object has
already been disturbed and turned
into a Sheriff’s Office, then those
objects once recovered will be repa-
triated to Grand Ronde after being
identified as belonging to the Tribe.
White said groundbreaking on
the charnel house is scheduled
for late summer and construction
should take about four weeks to
complete.
Tribal Council member Tonya
Gleason-Shepek asked if Harrelson
thought there might be an increase
in recovered remains and objects in
years to come.
“I’m expecting a lot more inad-
vertent discoveries with the dry
weather and the lowering of water
levels,” Harrelson said. “Lower
reservoirs will and have resulted in
things being exposed that weren’t
previously exposed.
“With population growth in west-
ern Oregon over the next 25 years,
there is going to be a lot of devel-
opment and as a result of develop-
ment we have a greater likelihood
to see things happen in our area.” n
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