What do you think about what we're doing here? It was an immensely complicated question put to me by Maria Mulford, an American Indian who played a key role in organizing this past weekend's Ancestors Days in Uniontown, Ky.

The gathering marked the almost 20-year anniversary of the disturbance of hundreds of American Indian graves on the old Slack Farm along the Ohio River, a few miles west of the Union County community.

The graves were looted in late 1987 by a group of people digging for artifacts. They were looking in graves because things such as cooking pots, weapons, jewelry and other possessions were often buried with the people to assist them on their journey to the afterlife.

The site was part of what archaeologists call an important village of the late Mississippian period that flourished near the convergence of the Ohio and Wabash rivers. They term it the Caborn-Welborn period and date it from 1400 to 1700 or so.

The people who lived there, they say, were descendants of what we call the Mound Builders, the American Indians who lived atop large mounds they constructed along the rivers. Examples of those sites are Angel Mounds in Evansville and Wickliffe, Ky., Cahokia and others throughout the southeast.

The culture was gone by the time settlers from the American colonies began pushing west to claim the land. But the people at the Slack Farm had contact with Europeans — perhaps the French or Spanish, who were in the region as early as the 1600s.

That's known from some of the items — brass and copper objects and glass beads — that had been buried with the people. They were found among the debris of bones, pottery shards and mussel shells left behind by the diggers. The bones, discarded and scattered about as the graves were probed, collected and reburied by American Indians — including Mulford — who came to Uniontown in 1988 to place them back beneath the dirt of the gentle knoll overlooking the river bottomland fields where they had likely hunted game and tilled crops.

Over four days, prayers were said, incense of sage, tobacco and cedar was burned and offerings of tobacco were made. They were repeated over the next three years because of the completeness that four suggests — four compass points, four seasons.

Mulford said the prayers and ceremonies are to appease angry spirits of the ancestors buried there and to seek their forgiveness for not protecting their bones as they make their journey in the afterlife.

As we walked away from the burial site, down a long driveway with ample time for pondering, she asked her question: What do you think about what we're doing here?

It led to others I paraphrase here from memory: Do you think we're foolish? What do you believe about life, death and the afterlife? Why do people think they can dig up Indian bones? When did we become artifacts and not people? What was the date?

It was a long driveway, and the pace that morning was slow, but the questions were difficult, and I've pondered them for a good ways now — long after the Slack Farm faded away in my rearview mirror.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on Evansville Courier