Golden Eagles for the Gods

What the Bush administration will do with the special rule for Wupatki is anyone's guess, but even cancellation wouldn't slow current eagle killing. The 1,500 dead eagles distributed to Native Americans by the Eagle Repository are snapped up so fast, there's a three-and-a-half-year waiting period for whole birds. The waiting period for a pair of wings is a year; for 10 loose feathers, six months. By law, the stuff must be used only for "the religious purposes of Indian tribes." But the Indians sell some of it illegally. Much of it is used in costumes worn on the "powwow circuit." Indians frequently argue that commercial powwows are part of their religion, but they're no more religious than rodeos. Some dancers make their livings going from powwow to powwow, competing for cash prizes. The Mohegan Wigwam Powwow at Uncasville, Connecticut, is typical, offering "over $50,000 in prizes for Dance Competition." Powwow contestants are judged, in part, by the feathers they wear. During the "grand entry" dance at the annual Albuquerque powwow, you can see the remains of at least 20,000 eagles bouncing around the floor at one time.

It is the powwow circuit that keeps eagles and eagle parts moving so briskly on the black market. An immature golden eagle tail, with the 12 coveted white-trimmed feathers, can sell for $400. A single "deck" feather from the center of the tail can fetch $300. A whole carcass, if it's immature and in good condition, is worth $1,000. While there is no evidence that the Hopi use immature golden eagles for anything other than their religious rituals, no one can reasonably expect them simply to place feathers worth this kind of money on Kachina dolls that never get sold or to piously scatter them under robbed aeries. Members of the Hopi tribe have succumbed to similar temptations. In 1998, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs busted nine Hopis for selling ceremonial items (some with eagle feathers attached) in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. They served six-month jail sentences.

In 1995 and 1996, Kachina dolls, bustles, fans, and all manner of other powwow-circuit items containing feathers from golden eagles and 24 other species of protected birds were purchased from Indians of various tribes in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah by special agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, working undercover. One type of ceremonial fan requires the carcasses of 25 scissor-tailed flycatchers.

So many birds were being killed that the agency decided to issue arrest warrants after only two years, thereby ending its sting operation early. Had the investigation continued for another year or two, as planned, agents believe they would have taken down several hundred traffickers. As it was, they successfully prosecuted about 45 individuals and businesses, many on multiple counts.

The agents found that a lot of the illegal selling was being done by traveling Native American Church leaders called roadmen. One roadman sold more than 90 eagles. Much of the contraband was finding its way to the Native American Church for ceremonies in which the hallucinogenic, mescaline-based drug peyote (illegal for non-Indians) plays a role as important as eagle parts. The church is much despised by elders who revere live eagles, and its ritual requiring peyote and eagle sacraments is a modern tradition among Native Americans, which may not even date to the 19th century.

According to search warrant affidavits, most of the eagles purchased in the undercover operation had been caught in leghold traps. Special agents learned that eagles had escaped from sprung traps minus their feet, and they obtained eagles with crushed, dangling, or severed legs and feet. In New Mexico one member of the Jemez Pueblo claimed that he and his fellow tribal members had killed 60 to 90 eagles during the winter of 1995-96 and that he had caught six at once by setting traps around a dead cow. He explained that the best way to dispatch a trapped eagle is to sit on it, get it to bite a stick, then ram your thumb down its throat so it can't breathe. They jump around for 10 or 15 minutes, he said.

A raptor biologist who used to work for the Park Service and who also requested anonymity told me this: "No one wants to confront the fact that so many eagles are getting killed. We have no data, but my sense is that more birds are being taken than are being hatched. I had one Indian tell me: ‘I'm like most Navajos. If I see an eagle, and I've got a gun, I'm taking a shot at it.' I've been with them when they've said: ‘I wish we had a gun.' Another time I was out with Hopis and an eagle jumped off a carcass out in the sand hills, and they were all bemoaning the fact that they didn't have a rifle. If Indians want to have eagles in their world, they need to consider changing their physical relationship with the bird; it's that simple."

When I asked Suzan Shown Harjo if all Native Americans should be able to take wildlife from all park units, she responded with an emphatic "Yes." Then she said: "If you're exercising your religion, it doesn't matter what other people think about it." But it does matter. In America freedom of religious belief is absolute. Not so freedom of religious practice. Religious practice has always been questioned when it conflicts with the public good. There is, for example, an obscure sect (not Native American) whose members believe that evil spirits are best banished by the screaming of dogs. Practitioners of this religion therefore hang dogs from trees and beat them to death with sticks--but not in the United States because we don't tolerate that kind of thing. Our courts acknowledge the rights of dogs. What about the rights of eagles? And what about the rights of Americans--white, black, and red; young, old, and yet unborn--who cherish or will cherish the sight of living eagles? As the Hopi of the Eagle Clan might put it: What kind of gods really want eagles dead instead of soaring in our spacious skies?

A chapter from Ted Williams's 1986 book, Don't Blame the Indians, appeared in the September 1986 issue of Audubon under the title "A Harvest of Eagles."

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