Muscogee Nation Revives Complaint that Casino Desecrated Graves
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation (MCN) has rekindled a lawsuit against the Poarch Creek Band of Indians that alleges the latter federation of tribes desecrated a sacred MCN situation when it reinforced its Wind Creek Casino and Resort inwards Wetumpka.
MCN is based inwards Oklahoma, but its hereditary homelands are inwards what at present comprises often of Alabama, as easily as parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.
Most of the federation of tribes was forcibly removed to OK inwards the 1830s, as voice of a federal policy of forced repatriation. Thousands of Muscogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole federation of tribes members died nut route from disease, hunger, and exposure in an case that came to follow known as the Trail of Tears.
Human Remains Removed
During a longstanding legal fight with the Alabama-based Poarch Creeks, MCN claims the Wind Creek gambling casino was reinforced at Hickory Ground, MCN’s endure great inward Sooner State and a sacred entombment site.
The causa alleges 57 sets of human remains and the artifacts inhumed with them were removed inwards 2001. This was during the twist of the bingo parlour that later grew into the casino.
It farther claims that the human remains were stored in containers without right ventilating system or temperature control.
The suit of clothes also names Auburn University, whose archeologists helped take away and lay in some of the remains so they could be studied.
‘Do Right by Them’
“You made a hope to protect these lands and the MCN ancestors who remain there,” wrote Jacques Louis David Hill, the Muscogee Nation’s principal chief, in a letter of the alphabet to the Poarch Creeks last-place month. “A hope that was low when you removed our ancestors, stored them in boxes, and sent them turned to a university to be studied by non-Indian archeologists. Some, still today, sit inward a storage facility on site. You feature yet to do rightfulness past them.”
Sovereign Immunity
The case was dismissed past a US dominion adjudicate in 2021 on the grounds that the Poarch Creeks could non be sued because, as a crowned head nation, they are shielded from liability by monarch immunity.
Now MCN is asking a federal appeals lawcourt to reconsider. The charm seeks to arrest further development on the Hickory Ground and feature the Wind Creek Casino torn down.
It accuses Auburn University of violating the Native American Robert Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This mandates that federally funded museums and universities must proceeds ancestors and their artefacts to their descendants.
Both the Poarch Creeks and Auburn experience declined to notice on the appeal.
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