Utah Town Unsettled by Doctor’s Suicide and an Inquiry on Indian Artifact Looting

[groovedaddy]

BLANDING, Utah — For 30 years Dr. James Redd was always on call to care for the Mormon and American Indian families who share the remote canyon lands here in southeastern Utah. Upon his death on June 11, people found themselves mourning a man who provided not just medicine but a measure of common ground.

“I’ve been in his office when it was clear full of Native Americans,” Robert Carroll, who is 77 and a member of the Mormon Church, said after attending an emotional funeral service for Dr. Redd at a Mormon center here last week. “He took everybody.”

Yet even as residents of Blanding have joined in grief, the circumstances of Dr. Redd’s death have shocked this tidy little town and threatened the delicate cross-cultural balance here that he helped preserve. Dr. Redd, 60, was found dead of a suicide a day after federal prosecutors charged him, his wife and 22 others with stealing, selling and trading Indian artifacts from the ancestral lands that stretch out from here in every direction.

On Friday, a second defendant, Steven L. Shrader of Santa Fe, N.M., was found dead of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds behind an elementary school in DeKalb County, Ill., according to the authorities there. Mr. Shrader, 56, had turned himself in to law enforcement officials in Albuquerque after being served a warrant in the case.

The events have resonated deeply here in Blanding, the home of 16 of those charged and the site of a federal raid in the case. Many defendants have surnames — Lyman, Shumway, Redd — that have been prominent here since Mormon pioneers explored the area in the 1880s with plans to bring their education system to Indians.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/us/21blanding.html?th&emc=th

[Tikki]

1. Yeah, an optometrist and I had this out....

I never went back...
He asked me about my classes (University Physical Anthro)...
I explained how we were working hard to get skeletal remains back to the local Tribe.

He informed me that was a stupid idea...that the tax payers
owned those remains.

I asked him how he would feel if his grandmother's skull
was setting on a shelf in someone's garage.

And you know the answer..."Well, that would never happen to my family." Sometimes
it is hard for me to like people.


Tikki

[groovedaddy]

2. Sheer arrogance...all too common. n.t

[Historic NY]

3. I agree its not right...

In upstate NY at a fort, from at least the 1950's until 1993 they displayed the dug up remains of F&I soldiers. I complained every time I went there, they were finally re-interred. I know many in the historic community pressured them as it is a privately own location.