Geronimo v. Obama
With his poll numbers cratering and troubles mounting, at least President Obama needn’t be concerned with the whereabouts of Geronimo’s bones.
Yes, a federal judge delivered that small favor to the White House when he ruled against the famed Apache warrior’s descendants in a lawsuit that also happened to involve that favorite target of conspiracy theorists: the Yale Order of Skull and Bones.
This stuff I can’t make up.
The story goes that sometime around the end of World War One a group of Yale students came up with the whacky idea of stealing the remains of Geronimo.
From the old Saturday afternoon Westerns, we all learned that the Apache leader ran circles around the U.S. Cavalry in the Southwest for nearly three decades.
Geronimo was finally forced to surrender in Arizona in 1886. He died in 1909, after becoming something of a worldwide celebrity, and was buried in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Geronimo’s descendants now claim that members of Yale’s Skull and Bones snuck into Fort Sill in 1918 and grabbed Geronimo’s, ahem, skull and bones.
But what was their recourse?
The Geronimo clan thought they had the perfect tool for redress in the form of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Enacted by Congress in 1990, NAGPRA essentially provides the statutory framework for the recovery of stolen Native American artifacts.
In 2009, twenty descendants of Geronimo sued the federal government, from President Obama on down, invoking the Act to have Geronimo’s remains returned and collect money damages.
They sued Skull and Bones, too, but apparently the possibility of tapping into the U.S. Treasury was apparently too hard to resist.
Late last month, U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts delivered some bad news to the Geronimo clan.
Protecting the U.S. Taxpayer, Judge Roberts concluded that the Geronimo descendants’ claims against the federal government were foreclosed because they could not show an express waiver of sovereign immunity.
Moreover, the judge concluded that the Geronimo clan could not state a claim under NAGPRA in any event because their complaint only alleged wrongful conduct that predated the Act.
“The only alleged discovery or wrongful removal described by the complaint occurred in or around 1918. Because the complaint does not set forth facts supporting an actionable claim, it will be dismissed as to the non-federal defendants as well,” the judge said. (Geronimo v. Obama)
So that let Skull and Bones off the hook, at least as far as NAGPRA liability is concerned.
This result might seem to be a low blow to the descendants of Geronimo, but it still sticks in my craw that the federal government was a target of this lawsuit in the first place.
The plaintiffs’ beef is with Skull and Bones. It seems rather unseemly to make a cash grab of federal tax dollars if the real aim is to place Geronimo’s remains in an appropriate resting place.
- Pat Murphy
