The Blanding Artifact Raids – Getting to the Heart of the Matter

By Christian Probasco, 7-17-09

Browsing the news stack on the Blanding, Utah artifacts raids, I finally found an editorial in the Deseret News which seemed to address what for me are the central issues. It’s by George Hawkings of Bountiful who references a previous artifacts raid 23 years ago.

“For those too young or who have forgotten, back in June of 1986, the state and the feds decided they would put a stop to ‘artifact thefts.’ Using Gestapo tactics, they raided and confiscated the best collections in Blanding. Now, most of the confiscated pots reside behind a locked bank-vault door at Edge of the Cedars Museum. The bureaucrats claimed they could prove the artifacts came from public land. They couldn’t, but most of the collectors didn’t have the money to sue for the return of their property.

The sad truth is that the bureaucrats have the law on their side, but their record of protecting, studying and displaying ancient artifacts is far from exemplary. Most of what they have is stored in bags and boxes in some warehouse.”

Hawkings goes on to advocate issuing permits for ordinary schlubs without academic degrees to collect relics off federal lands. “Since neither the bureaucrats nor universities nor Mother Nature will protect these ancient artifacts, why not let ordinary people collect and enjoy them?”

Let me back up a little. Here’s the story so far: Following standard entrapment procedure, the feds created a market for illegal goods and then kicked in some doors and dragged away the people who wouldn’t have been involved in the operation if an informant hadn’t waved money in their faces. This time the market they created was for Indian artifacts. The federal goon squad rounded up and shackled about two-dozen people and charged some of them with trafficking in archaeological artifacts.

Then a local physician who had been rounded up in the raid, James Redd, apparently killed himself by asphyxiation to avoid having to face the charges. Blandites were not amused. “I feel the way most townspeople do,” said resident Buddy Black, according to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune,“I’m angry. Just real angry.”

Angry at the federal govmint? Sounds like a terrorist to me. Perhaps he should have his guns taken away. Search his house and see what you find.

Quinn Howe, who leased property from Redd, told it like it was: “The reason the whole town isn’t in jail is because the rest of us didn’t meet up with this guy.”

Deputy BLM director Mike Nedd, speaking with forked tongue at the Outdoor Writers Association of America National Conference in Michigan, said the BLM had no option but to enforce federal laws pertaining to relics.

“Sometimes people think we have an option. But we don’t. These are protected resources on federal land.”

Why was he speaking with a forked tongue? Because with respect to Blanding, the BLM helped create the market in stolen antiquities. And the BLM makes the sort of decisions he says it is prohibited from making all the time.

According to Sec. 6 (a) of the Archaeological Protection Act of 1979 (ARPA), “No person may excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any archaeological resource located on public lands or Indian lands.”

In this context, “archaeological resource” means “pottery, basketry, bottles, weapons, weapon projectiles, tools, structures or portions of structures, pit houses, rock paintings, rock carvings, intaglios, graves, human skeletal materials, or any portion or piece of any of the foregoing items.”

I’ve walked through fields on federal property in northern Arizona where you couldn’t avoid stepping on pottery shards. There were no signs warning against trespassing. Every other step I took “altered” the archaeological record by scattering a few pottery shards and degrading their contextual value. Every other step, according to the ARPA, was a felony. If Nedd means what he says, the BLM could—and should--set up surveillance on such fields and nab “violators” for life sentences and millions of dollars in fines.

But there was more. Nedd added that the agency “looks to protect individual rights and privacy…We took the appropriate action and we were thoughtful to do things as caring as possible.”

Which leads one to wonder what kind of action the BLM takes when it is not trying to “protect individual rights” or act in a “caring” manner.
Utah Senator Hatch also thought the raid was a little heavy-handed and grilled U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a hearing over the feds’ tactics. Holder said he was sad about Redd but not about sending in the stormtroopers:

“The arrests that were done were felony arrests. And as best I can tell, they were done in accordance with FBI and Bureau of Land Management standard operating procedures.”

Standard operating procedures even for nonviolent offenders, according to Holder.  Which is funny, because I can’t remember the feds sending in hundreds of heavily armed and armored raiders to snatch up other nonviolent “felons” like white collar criminals.

Hatch finished up his interrogation of Holder by speculating on whether the raid had political motives. Is that possible?

The FBI and BLM recently backed up a couple moving vans to Redd’s house and loaded up his artifacts to store…probably in a big warehouse somewhere. The government is now intimidating the Blanding “criminals” into admitting their culpability, making plea deals and shutting up about the details. Their admissions will then be used to justify the raid.

Many commentators on articles in the Tribune and the Deseret News mistakenly assumed those arrested were exclusively involved in grave robbing. But there was no breakdown in any publication of how many artifacts were stolen from burial sites, how many were recovered from archaeological sites or how many were taken off private lands. Some of the arrestees just had a few pottery shards or arrowheads in their houses. Many, if not most, people in rural southern Utah do. 

BLM district manager Shelley Smith speaks for a lot of government experts when she argues that, “the net effect (of any artifact collection or disturbance) is, it all destroys evidence…It’s a chronic problem.” But again, if you know anything about the four corners region, you also know that there are archaeological sites and artifacts practically everywhere you would care to travel. Many towns in southern Utah are built on archeological sites. The only way you could avoid disturbing artifacts or archeological sites would be to force everybody out of the four-corners region—from the Mogollon Rim in Arizona north to Spanish Fork Canyon in Utah—and close it off to the public.

I have to agree with Hawkings on many essential points. Universities and the state do not have nearly enough resources to excavate and evaluate even a fraction of the archaeological sites in the four-corners area, much less display all of their finds for the public. And much of what they don’t get to eventually gets buried or washed away, and so never comes to the attention of people who enjoy such art.  I imagine most craftsmen, even in ancient times, wanted their work to be seen and appreciated.

Reading through reams of comments on my source material—newspaper articles-- I can spot the fault lines of misunderstandings and I want to address them before I get called for something I didn’t write. Nobody is shedding tears for the commercial-scale traffickers who were caught up in this dragnet. But small time operators who were entrapped shouldn’t be treated in the same manner. There were a lot of comments in both papers to the effect, “Expect to do the time if you do the crime,” “If you break the law, you pay the price,” and so on, implying that the law itself is sacrosanct. Really? Tell it to former President Dick “Dick” Cheney and his apparent lackey Bush. Why aren’t they in jail? And then you can move on down the line until you get to local government. Who gets busted depends on whom it is politically expedient to bust, who has access to lawyers and knows how to use them and the budget of the relevant law enforcement agency.

I’m against individuals who own a couple of arrowheads being dragged out of their homes by armed thugs for the same reason I’m against anyone being dragged out of his home by an armed thug for, among other things: having sex with a teenager when you are a teenager, file-sharing, smoking a bowl, gambling, cultivating the poppies growing in your back yard (as long as you don’t live on a plantation), failing to discard expired prescription medications, disparaging a cucumber in Arizona, bowling in public in California, or hunting whales in Utah. Any law on the books is eventually going to be misinterpreted and misapplied, and there are too many laws on the books. Whether we are aware of the myriad, small, insipid laws we are breaking every day or not, most of us are just as criminal as some of the people who have been dragged into the black hole of legal bullshit in Blanding.