'Anasazi sickness': Relic raiders do more than mess with history

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Aneth » A shell necklace scoured from ancient ruins makes for a rare collector's item in the white man's world and fetches thousands of dollars for a grave robber.

A clay pot with pre-Columbian black-and-white zigzags is a coveted mantel ornament in Santa Fe or Salt Lake City.

Here in Four Corners Indian Country, though, the cultural riches that federal authorities allege 24 traffickers plundered and peddled from public lands are anything but souvenirs.

"We aren't supposed to be digging up anything like that," Navajo medicine man David Filfred says. "It's the people who lived before us, and how they lived. They had their traditions, which deserve respect."

And disrespect for either human remains or the ancients' belongings brings deadly bad medicine. According to tribal lore, it can lead to bad luck, ill health, even death.

Filfred points to what many here on the Navajo Nation call the "Anasazi sickness" as a factor in the suicides of two men indicted last month on federal charges of illegally trafficking in ancient Puebloan, or Anasazi, artifacts.

"You'll get blacked out. Just faint," he predicts for those who disturb the dead. "It will cause something like, you don't care. Seems like there's no hope."

Other Four Corners cultures report similar spiritual repercussions or "bad energy" for artifact looters. Elders believe bones, pots, amulets and other items buried with the dead -- whether today's Navajos or yesterday's faded Puebloan cultures -- harbor spirits. These spirits command a wide berth and sicken those who disturb them, Filfred says. The torment may be either physical or mental.

Outsiders may scoff, but believers ask the same deference that other religions command.

Bless the living » Researchers who document the culture say the fear is deadly serious.

"The elders feel really strongly about it," explains Robert McPherson, a historian and longtime humanities instructor who teaches at the College of Eastern Utah's San Juan campus in Blanding. "The younger people are also offended, but perhaps for a different reason."

Younger Navajos, many of whom have been his students, are exposed to outside influences: schools, Christian churches, the modern Native American Church. Still, he says, they revere their heritage and want outsiders to leave their land, elders and graves unmolested.

Navajos still send their dead to the spirit world shrouded in the dignity of favored woven blankets and sacred turquoise regalia. It's a generous burial for the dead that also reflects graciously on the living, and it's not just for show.

Ten years ago it was Filfred's turn to bless a loved one and send him along to the spirit world. One of the medicine man's sons had died in the line of duty as a Navajo Nation policeman. He now is in a family cemetery here, near the Four Corners, wearing his ceremonial silver and turquoise, his favorite blankets and shells.

"It's stuff that leaves with the body," Filfred says. "When you do that, when you're taking a body back to the earth and you're sending the spirit back to the spirit world, you get a good strong blessing.

"If you dress them like that, then, in turn, you will get blessings."

Dead zone » Filfred's Aneth home, shared with extended family, is the same kind of plain rectangular box that lines both sides of his dusty lane, although it lacks the satellite TV receiver that most here have sprouted. Inside he slouches in an easy chair, wearing jeans, a white tank top, a maroon "New Country Auto Center" cap and leather high-top slippers worn through in the heel. He has sculpted his facial hair into a flowing goatee and wears turquoise on both wrists.

Later, consenting to a photograph, he dons a dress shirt and black cowboy hat with police pins commemorating his son. He adds a beaded necklace and a silver arm band with a turquoise slab the size of a mango pit.

On the paneled wall behind his chair hang two fly swatters, side by side, and a completed coloring page depicting Belle from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."

Clearly a senior citizen, he won't divulge his age. "Too many moons," he laughs.

He fixes his eyes on his outstretched feet and explains the traditions he learned as a young man. One was a clear warning: Don't mess with the dead or their belongings -- even those who were not Navajo.

Archaeologists say many of the artifacts seized in the federal sting appear to have come from burials. In some cases, defendants allegedly found bones with relics. In others, scientists say, items such as intact pots were so well preserved that they likely came from well-protected graves.

"In our tradition," Filfred says, "it's just like this law. You're just not supposed to be disturbed. That's it."

Filfred's sister and two young women listen quietly around the living room as he explains the taboo to an outsider. His preschool-age grandnephew reclines opposite him wearing shorts and a "Navajo Nation Head Start" T-shirt and munches a bag of Frito-Lay's Funyuns.

For their own protection, Filfred says, traditional Navajos assume that where there are artifacts on the desert there will be bodies.

"If you did [disturb the dead]," he says, "then it will affect you somewhere, or you will get sick in certain ways: Your health, mind, mentally and physically.

"When a lady is pregnant, and if they go to ruins and see something -- especially the body or parts of bones -- it will affect the baby and get sick."

Respect if not reverence » Such mysticism is a mystery to T. Rockwell, a middle-age Navajo who grew up here but attended a church school in Farmington, N.M. Her parents never mentioned the old beliefs about the dead, she says, and medicine men who conduct regular traditional dances shield women from some of the practices.

Still, she knows about the "Anasazi sickness" -- she manages the Aneth Senior Center, where she is surrounded by dozens of elders daily -- and she knows it is said to afflict disrespectful "belaganas" (whites) and Navajos alike. She just doesn't know the details.

For her, it's enough just to show respect, and to expect the same from would-be looters.

"If they have something sacred -- what they consider sacred," she says, "I'm sure they wouldn't want us to go snooping around."

Robert McPherson interviewed Navajo elders, sometimes with an interpreter, for his 1992 Brigham Young University-published book, Sacred Land, Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region . The volume is intended to pass on traditional beliefs to future Navajo generations.

The elders believe that even some relics unassociated with graves must not be disturbed, McPherson says. Pictographs and petroglyphs, for instance, carry a link to the person who drew them.

"You don't know what they were thinking," he says. "By me putting my hand on it, it invites that spirit to come have an effect on [me], usually negative."

Beliefs differ among clans and regions of the Navajo Nation, McPherson says.

Other modern cultures also grew from the Four Corners and have distinct views of antiquities. While only some Navajo clans claim a link to the Anasazi or ancient Puebloans, the Hopis of Arizona draw a direct line.

"They regard these remains as being their direct ancestors," says Greg Johnson, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado. "They have more of a stewardship mission. They regard themselves as caretakers of the dead."

How to heal » Federal agents in Salt Lake City are storing an undercover operative's purchased artifacts from the sting and, in one case, the entire family collection of artifacts. Blanding doctor James Redd, 60, killed himself last month the day after he was indicted in the raid. His wife, Jeanne, 59, later pleaded guilty to seven trafficking charges and agreed to forfeit even those relics obtained legally on private lands. The couple's daughter, Jericca, 37, admitted to three felonies.

On July 7, agents and archaeologists confiscated two moving vans full of boxed artifacts from the Redd home.

A second defendant, 56-year-old Steven Shrader of Santa Fe, N.M., killed himself after last month's indictment while visiting his mother in Shabbona, Ill.

Federal law requires that those items considered culturally significant or associated with burials be repatriated to a tribe of possible relation: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni or Ute.

Johnson studies repatriation cases and says modern Pueblo Indians -- the Zunis of New Mexico and the Hopis -- are sticklers for the law because they view items buried with human remains as sacred.

"They might be utilized [by the dead] in some future capacity," he says, "or at the minimum they symbolize their stature."

Pueblo Indians believe properly respected spirits of the dead will manifest themselves in life-giving forms such as desert rain clouds.

"If the dead are disturbed," Johnson says, "it monkey-wrenches with the cosmology in a profound way."

Like the Navajos, Utes teach that bones retain a spirit or "energy," says Forrest Cuch, a Ute who serves as Utah's director of Indian Affairs. His tribal elders suggested a "negative energy" may follow those who disturb the dead, but not necessarily the acute illnesses that the Navajos dread.

To the Navajo medicine man, there's just one way for looters to get well. They must recognize their errors and seek a ceremonial blessing. It requires sacred and secret herbs, Filfred says, previewing a scheduled visit from a New Mexico woman whose hair is falling out. She believes a childhood class tour of the Mesa Verde National Park ruins afflicted her.

Filfred will brew some of the herbs into a tea for her. He will burn others in her presence and then mix the powder with sheep fat to make a healing salve.

"We sing and pray," he says.

The seizures and headaches stop. Hopelessness vanishes. Blessings return.

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