'In the End, Our Message Weighs': Blood Run, NAGPRA, and American Indian Identity

In this article, the authors juxtapose Allison Hedge Coke's poetry collection "Blood Run" (2006) with the larger context in which Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) operates in order to investigate how "Blood Run" exposes the limitations of repatriation legislation, most significantly, how NAGPRA's current definition of American Indian identity falls short of sovereign tribal conceptions of identity and tribal responsibility for caretaking ancestral remains. In particular, Hedge Coke's portrayal of repatriation struggles at the Blood Run State Historic Site highlights the extent to which NAGPRA's rhetoric of identity fails to encompass remains associated with non-federally recognized tribes, despite the intentions of the law's original authors, and the actual practices of NAGPRA, which sometimes exceed the law's reductive definition of Indigeneity in favor of "creative" applications of NAGPRA. In fact, Hedge Coke's "Blood Run" implicitly affirms and poetically embodies the complex intertribal formulation of identity that NAGPRA practitioners originally envisioned and that they sometimes enact in recuperative efforts to protect remains associated with non-federally recognized tribal groups. The authors claim that there are insights into Indigenous identity formation to be gained in the study of Hedge Coke's ceremony of urban, transnational, and intertribal sovereignty alongside the transgressive practices of NAGPRA officials. Mound poems and NAGPRA practices, both living texts, illustrate the limitations of NAGPRA's legislated rhetoric and enact a more empowering model of American Indian identity and community. (Contains 27 notes.)