Anonymous post

If  it were a native American cemetary, the mining would be stopped. We can’t touch the “native” lands but we are permitted to destroy our own ancesters resting places. There is something not right in that way of thinking.

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1 Response to Anonymous post

  1. Elisa Young says:

    Actually, this is not true.

    There were multiple sacred sites (their burial place is as sacred to them as my family cemetery is sacred to me) in the last mining permit here. I called a Delaware chief to come down and see what we could do to protect these sites, requested meetings with the ODNR, the archeologists. I was appalled by the whole process.

    The “protections” for these sites in the state of Ohio, the heart and soul of native mound-building culture, could not be worse. Sacred sites get “protection” to keep a coal company damaging it only if the archeologists will learn more about the people who used to live here by digging up their graves and carting off their remains and belongings for scrutiny, than from the coal company destroying it.

    That’s the size of it.

    Either way it gets destroyed.

    I sat in meetings I requested with them and watched their eyes light up with greed. When I told them there were other sites they had not documented, they called me every day for months. I thought about how I would feel to have my ancestors seven generations back excavated and put on display, or worse, land in someone’s private collection, and was so sick I could not bring myself to pick up the phone.

    Elisa

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