Ancient native remains return to Vancouver Island
Victoria Chief Vern Jacks, Tseycum band hugs one of his relatives at the Victoria airport after returning home with the sacred ancestral bones from New York Thursday.
Lindsay Kines , Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, June 12, 2008
VICTORIA - It took more than a century, but the ancient remains finally made it home.
As First Nations elders, singers and band members, their faces streaked with red paint, watched quietly Thursday morning, the plane carrying the remains of 55 Tseycum ancestors touched down.
Chief Vern Jacks and other Tseycum chaperones raised their arms to the sky as the journey that took them across the continent to liberate their ancestors ended.
"We're very, very happy to bring them home," Jacks said.
The quest began more than a decade ago when his wife, Cora, began investigating the looting of traditional burial cairns on Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsula.
She discovered that American archaeologist Harlan Ingersoll Smith had removed and sold remains from dozens of graves in the 1890s and early 1900s. He received $5 for a skull and up to $10 for a full skeleton, some estimated to be several thousand years old.
Eventually, Cora Jacks traced the remains to the Field Museum in Chicago and the New York Museum of Natural History, and the Tseycum began negotiating their return.
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