CHARLESTON — Members of the Chickamauga Nation are now asking for help from the public in their fight against the state’s planned prison in Franklin County.
Representatives from the native American tribe are asking the public in the county and region to help them document local burial sites near the prison and for them to file Freedom of Information Act requests with the state. The request for help comes as the nation has asserted that there area multiple Chickamauga grave sites located on the property purchased by the state.
Chief Jimmie Kersh said Monday he and the nation have talked to many people in the area who have already started finding stone box graves and other Native American artifacts in the area around the prison site.
“There is no way that, when you look on your properties and find these graves, arrowheads and pottery, that there will be just a blank space where nothing exists between those properties,” Kersh said. “They are going to be nearly identical as far as pottery, as far as burial sites and as far as arrowheads.”
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced in October that the state was purchasing 815 acres of land north of Charleston, near Vesta, for $2.95 million for a new state prison. The proposed correctional facility would have 3,000 beds.
Despite vocal community opposition the Arkansas Board of Corrections approved the purchase in a November 7 meeting.
Supporters say the project is needed to ease overcrowding in jails and prisons across the state. Sanders has said she is working to solve an issue that Arkansas has put off for decades.
Opponents criticize the chosen site as remote and lacking needed infrastructure and an adequate pool of labor in the region, among other issues.
Dr. David Jurney, an anthropologist who spoke at Monday’s event, said he is part of an ongoing project that has been looking for native American grave sites from New York to Mexico.
One of the techniques that Jurney said he uses, and particularly has used locally to date grave sites, was refined at the University of Arkansas. It looks at the age of lichen, which grows incrementally like a tree and can be dated to within a few years.
“Indian territory resides where the people lived,” Jurney said.
While the Chickamauga Nation has claimed that there are grave sites on the land the state purchased, state officials have said the Arkansas Department of Corrections has “been mindful” of possible grave sites at the location but none have been discovered.
The Department of Corrections has found no grave sites on the Franklin County land thus far, Communications Director Rand Champion said recently.
“Concerns of a possible Native American grave site were expressed early in the process,” Champion said via email. “The Department has been mindful of that as preliminary assessments of the site have been completed. No evidence of a burial site has been found to date.”
Sam Dubke, spokesman for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s office, said the assertions by the Chickamauga are aimed at undermining the state’s new prison plans.
“This is an absurd claim based on a group that is not recognized by the state or federal government, and this claim’s only purpose is to try and derail the Franklin County prison,” Dubke said.
Kersh noted that the nation has not just had a new interest in the site after the prison was announced there but rather had been looking for evidence of burials there months before the project was unveiled.
The current situation, Kersh said, would be like if he went to where the Governor’s grandmother was buried, dug up her grave and built a race track on the site.
Though acts of Congress and Supreme Court rulings, Kersh said he is able to prove that his tribe is one recognized by the federal government.
The Chickamauga Nation, Kersh said, has been under the jurisdiction of the United States since 1785 when his ancestors made an agreement with the federal government. This, he said, qualifies them as a Native American tribe under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.
Kersh said the governor has tried to deny that the nation has a claim to this area and doesn’t qualify as a native American tribe.
“They are saying that those people who we know are buried, or were buried, on the land where they are wanting to put their prison, are not our family members,” he said. “We know this, we have been on this land and in this county since the 1820s and 1830s. We know where everything is at up there and there is nothing that can tell us we are wrong because we have family traditions that go back that far and we have treaty rights and obligations that go back that far.”
Kersh said that the Chickamauga were in this part of Arkansas when the other tribes, that are now located nearby in Oklahoma, were still in the Great Lakes region.
“We are not them and they are not us, and they have no right to speak on our behalf in this state because they were never here,” Kersh said.
Kersh said he wants a local residents to submit Freedom of Information Act requests with the state to get a copy of those assessments.
Many of those who were at the press conference in Charleston Monday said they owned property around the prison site and have found evidence of stone box graves and other Native American traces.
Franklin County Justice of the Peace Cody Sosebee said his property borders the proposed prison property and when he learned what the Chickamauga Nation was looking for it was easy to find stone box graves on his property.
Sosebee also mentioned that he, and neighbors of his, got together and all found similar graves on their properties as well as other artifacts.
During the event Sosebee asked Kersh what residents could do to make sure the state is doing their due diligence on making sure there is no graves on the property. To this, Kersh said residents could ask for records from any study because he thinks that they do not exist.
“The only things that they have ever released are site studies to determine water capability, visibility from the road and other land uses,” Kersh said. “They have not done an archeological study. So the department of prisons, as much as I hate saying it this way, is bold face lying to the public.”
Justin Flanagan, gorget chief of the Chickamauga, said a big issue that the tribe has with the state is the lack of transparency about a study supposedly done on the site and the fact that the state has not shared the results.
To get this information, Flanagan also asked that those in the area opposed to the jail, as well as other residents and local representatives submit Freedom of Information Act requests to get that study.
“We have a right to know and these are people who have been here for hundreds of years,” Flanagan said. “I think that is probably the biggest issue we are having with the state — their laundry list of excuses not to work with us.”
Flanagan said when it comes to genocide, extermination is only one step in that 10 step process, a step which his tribe has previously survived.
“What we are encountering today is dehumanization, polarization and denial,” Flanagan said. “Those are three other steps in the 10 steps of genocide. So not acknowledging who we are through treaty, not acknowledging who we are through our burial remains and using the media to defame and invalidate us, these are all a continuation of genocide in our eyes.”
Kersh said the tribe would try and get information through the Freedom of Information Act and other ways for the next 30 to 60 days and, if they were unable to do so, they would resort to other, unspecified measures.
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