Re: digging

The reporter for Indian Country Today asked Chief Bearskin if putting pylons in the cemetery for a casino structure wouldn't require digging. His answer was that was why they were surveying for the location of graves, so they could dig in the cemetery.

I don't know that it is important whether or not this is a temporary or permanent structure being planned. A structure is being planned *over* the graves of Wyandots. Previously Chief Bearskin said that this was untrue and Bearskin said that he was misquoted. Now we have his own words to prove otherwise. Did he not promise the Canadian Wyandots that this plan was untrue and that he was being misrepresented by the Kansas Wyandot? Now his plan to build over the Huron Cemetery is proven to be true by his own admission.

It seems that encroachment, whether temporary or permenant is encroachment. Exhumption is not the issue at the moment, although Chief Bearskin told me and seven other Wyandots that if the Huron Cemetery was the only place they could build a casino, then he would go up there with a shovel himself and start digging up bodies. This statement shook me to the core and decided for me the position I must take with respect to the cemetery.

The respect we natives show for our dead reflects the respect we feel for life. It is unseemly to have white people playing BINGO, Blackjack and roulette over the graves of our families. It is more abhorent that the plan is proposed by natives and even more so that it is planned by members of our own nation.

The issue of whether the "elevated" casino over the Huron cemetery is temporary or not, requires digging or not, is irrelevant in my mind. Once the cemetery has been desecrated, it is a desecrated site and there is no amount of monetary damages, prayers, or apologies that can be proffered to change that. Once it has become a commercial site, it is no longer a burial site, no longer a place of worship, reverence, and burial. How would you have us pray, ducking our heads under the casino structure or in the casino itself, among the clanging of the one armed bandits? If a casino is placed on, over, or around the cemetery, anyone connected with the building of that casino will be guilty of cultural genocide. Cursed be the villain that Molests their graves!

As long as money is the almighty God to a segment of society, we will live in a twisted world.

Holly R. Zane

Attorney General

Wyandot Nation of Kansas