| Native people have lived in the Big Bend region for thousands of years. Who should claim their remains?  Illustration by Marco Quadri “In the U.S. there is a long tradition of individuals and institutions owning the bodies of Indigenous people, which have been used to justify eugenic claims, analyzed to understand the prehistory of North America, and displayed as curiosities,” Rachel Monroe writes, in a rigorously reported piece in this week’s issue about a series of archeological discoveries at a cave in West Texas known as Spirit Eye. For decades, the cave has been the site of expeditions among local enthusiasts, some of whom have sold or hoarded objects belonging to Native American tribes, sometimes claiming a “spiritual connection” to the Indigenous inhabitants. When the researcher Bryon Schroeder visited, flashbulbs littered the floor; a former landowner had operated a pay-to-dig scheme. And when Schroeder managed to track down people who had previously dug at Spirit Eye, “he found them cagey, evasive. He figured out that it was because some of them hadn’t just removed artifacts from the cave—they had removed bodies, too.” Monroe examines the unsettling history of Spirit Eye, and delves into crucial questions about who should be permitted to excavate Native land, and about whom the land and its contents belong to. —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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