Native Americans hope to train law enforcement when human bones
are discovered
When San Juan Bautista maintenance workers dislodged a bone
fragment three inches by one-quarter inch Oct. 5 while digging on
Third Street to repair a broken water main, they ignited a desire
by Amah Mutsun tribe members to explain laws and traditions around
Native American burials to locals and law enforcement.
Native Americans hope to train law enforcement when human bones are discovered
When San Juan Bautista maintenance workers dislodged a bone fragment three inches by one-quarter inch Oct. 5 while digging on Third Street to repair a broken water main, they ignited a desire by Amah Mutsun tribe members to explain laws and traditions around Native American burials to locals and law enforcement.
“Death is very taboo. It’s something we don’t even mention,” said Quirina Costillas, the owner of the Mission Cafe in San Juan and a member of the Amah Mutsun tribe. “It’s bad luck. It’s all these bad things that come with it. It’s important that we let things be as undisturbed as possible.”
Costillas said discovering bones is common in this region and she has worked in other counties on construction sites to ensure that bones are handled properly. There are state and county ordinances that outline the procedure to be handled when bones are found, though they leave the ultimate fate of the bones in the hands of homeowners.
When bones are discovered and determined to be Native American, the Native American Heritage Commission, centered in Sacramento, assigns a likely descendant to review the bones, but before that can happen a local coroner needs to determine that the bones are in fact Native American. The descendants have 24 hours to complete an inspection and make their recommendation to the NAHC. Most of the time, the descendants will re-inter the bones close to the place they were found and perform a burial ceremony.
“The sites I’ve been called on are very organized,” Costillas said, who has worked with agencies such as Caltrans. “Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.”
Costillas said the first deputy on the scene, a woman whose name she didn’t know, assumed the bones were animal bones.
“It just really surprised me that they didn’t seem to take very well to not knowing [about the laws],” Costillas said.
Any time bones are found, law enforcement has to respond to determine if the site is a crime scene, according to Johnny Peña, a San Benito County Sheriff’s Detective. When they first respond to a scene, they tape it off and try to preserve the integrity of the area.
“As a detective, we handle coroner’s duties,” Peña said. “We can’t determine how old the bones are exactly, but our job is to make sure it is not a crime scene.”
Peña said though they can’t age the bones, the deputies can usually determine if the bones are recent bones or ancient bones. When they can’t make a determination, they call out an anthropologist as they did at the scene of the dig in San Juan.
“I called an anthropologist and they advised me if I couldn’t myself make the determination, to put the bone back,” Peña said. “That’s what we did.”
If the bones had been identifiable as Native American, the NAHC would have been called in to help with investigating the bones.
“We pretty much ruled it out as a burial site because it was above a water main,” Peña said. “It was probably collected as filler in another location and used to pave the road.”
The lack of additional bones and the shallow location of the bones – just three feet deep, led detectives to the determination that they were not part of a burial site. At past sites where bones have been determined to be Native American, such as a site on Fairview Road that Peña responded to last year, the NAHC responded.
Costillas and other tribe members are in the early stages of planning workshops for locals and law enforcement that would explain some of the religious rites around native burials as well as work through the laws – local, state and federal – that protect such bones. She has talked with the California Rural Legal Assistance office about helping with the workshops.
“We want to train them, teach them the proper procedure and use this event [last week] as a learning tool,” Costillas said.
