People Called It Archaeology. Tribes Called It Grave Robbing. | Grand Gulch Ancestral Puebloan

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]In the late 1800s, collectors and archaeologists flooded into Grand Gulch, deep canyon country in the Four Corners region, home to ancestral Puebloan sacred sites that had been carefully tended for over a thousand years.

[00:00:14]Richard Wetherill led some of the first major expeditions in 1893.

[00:00:19]He and his crew pulled pottery, burial goods, woven textiles, and human remains straight out of cliff dwellings and caves. They called it discovery. Those objects weren't artifacts. They were relatives. They were placed with the dead on purpose by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Thousands of items ended up in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, far from the nations they belonged to. It wasn't until 1990 that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gave nations the legal right to reclaim what was taken. Some items came back.

[00:00:57]Most never did. Arizona's canyons were never empty. They were never abandoned.

[00:01:02]They were looted. Whose land holds the answers they took from us? Drop your nation below.