In the summer of 1968 a guard at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola took a metal detector into a field in West Feliciana Parish and found a cemetery. He dug for months, with no archaeological training, at more than a hundred graves, and in doing so destroyed much of what the ground could have told anyone. The cemetery was Tunica. The Tunica lived at Trudeau Landing from 1731 to 1764 and buried their dead with goods. They were traders. From first contact the French relied on them for salt and horses and fought beside them against the Natchez, and the Tunica received metal tools in return. When the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana went to court, the question was who owned what that trade had left in the ground.
A collection nobody could sell
The guard tried to sell the finds to Harvard's Peabody Museum, but the deal stalled because he could not show he owned them. He sued the landowners instead, and the state stepped in to keep the collection in Louisiana, moving it to New Orleans. Jeffrey Brain, the Harvard archaeologist who worked at the site, coined the name "Tunica Treasure" and later regretted it. Accounts differ on when each party joined the suit.
Recognition and the courtroom
The Tunica and Biloxi had been told they did not exist. A claim to their land was rejected in the 1890s, and in 1920 a state court found nothing that set them apart from the rest of the population. Earl J. Barbry Sr. was elected tribal chairman in 1978 and led the appeal to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. To win recognition the tribe had to show a distinct community going back to first contact with Europeans. The excavated site helped supply that proof, and the federal government recognized the tribe in 1981.
Once recognized, the tribe joined the case. The trial judge held that the objects belonged to the tribe and that abandonment, the guard's argument, did not extend to burial grounds. On appeal in 1986 the court agreed, writing that "the intent in interring objects with the deceased is that they will remain there perpetually." The Louisiana Supreme Court declined to review it that December. The ruling treated grave goods as belonging to descendants. Four years later Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the case is often cited as groundwork for it.
Coming home
The collection reached Marksville in the summer of 1989, after years at the Peabody and in New Orleans. The tribe built its first museum as an earth-covered mound so the objects could be symbolically reburied, but water seeped in and the building came down in 1999. The present Cultural and Educational Resources Center was dedicated on November 30, 2011. Trained tribal members have done much of the conservation work on the collection over the years since it came home. Earl Barbry Jr. has said of it, "The 'treasure' is cultural, not monetary."
You can see it at the Tunica-Biloxi Museum, run by the tribe in that center just south of Marksville. Call ahead for hours and admission.