I very much agree to what Clement W Meighan has offered in his section against the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA): where he clearly supports the archaeological studies of the ancient Indian burial sites. The Native American history has been quite primordial one since it doesn’t even have a formal history or roots to take in and begin with. They have become quite ‘forgotten’ with the bygone sands of time and hardly anyone, who doesn’t live in America, can picture how Native Americans would be like. The Federal Government of the USA had passed the NAGPRA legislation which regulates the unearthing of Indian burial sites, and protects loots of funerary and consecrated artefacts and objects of cultural legacies. Many activists have gone against the law. They have edified their agreement which poses the reburial of the exhumed artefacts to the same places where they were unearthed from. Many cultures, especially the critically conventional ones, have opposed the archaeological studies of sacred and historic places. According to Meighan, they are especially the Australian aborigines, ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel and by no doubt the American Indians. They continue to protest the archaeological interventions. In America, it is often viewed by the conservatives that the study of Native Americans are insults to the existing Indians. In my view-point, people should carry on the process of hauling out the truth out of ancient artefacts. Tales from the past help us to comprehend a culture even better than we do now, learn about it. It should be done because the Indian history of America has become almost extinct and if we don’t try to protect it, then we lose a very important chapter in the history of mankind. While Meighan supports the study of the history by archaeology, Larry J Zimmerman advocates against the study that Meighan favours. Zimmerman says that the history of the past is installed in the present people of the same root. He believed that the present Indians were themselves the identity of their glorious past, and also that he believes that archaeologists do not reconstruct the path to history that was already there, but they construct their own way of defining the Native American history: however true or false the reconstructions are. It is not that the present generation of the Indians prove or illustrate their history.
I strongly contradict to what Zimmerman has mentioned in his abstract. Meighan said, ‘Indian knowledge of the traditions of their ancestors is derived in large part from the collections and scholarship that activists among them are now seeking to destroy,’ which clearly means that Indians gain access to their sea of history only through their inheritances. They will never know anything about their precedents if they try to oppose the act that can help them in knowing and understanding their culture better. Zimmerman said, ‘The idea that anyone can "save" the past is a false notion …,’ where he means that the belief that we have that archaeology will help ‘"save"’ the past is actually quite untrue. He also said, ‘Preservation itself reveals that permanence is an illusion,’ which means that preservation of the history itself displays that solidity in preserving these artefacts for study is just an illusion that makes us think that we are preserving a very ancient story of the past to the very end. However, we have been able to conserve the history of many wiped-out civilisations, e.g. Egyptian, which has apparently proven that archaeological study not only helps us in knowing things, but it also gives aid to those who share the Indian blood. Therefore, it is very much likely to say that Meighan has stronger points that prove that everyone should be against the NAGPRA which clearly tries to subdue the ancient American Indian history. As what Meighan says that it would have been interesting to know whether a majority of living persons of Indian descent actually favoured reburial or the continued preservation, display, exposure, and study of Indian remains and artefacts, it is quite clear that the many an Indian themselves do not know what to support and follow: reburial or preservation of their heritage.