Indiana's Dead Keep Coming Back

 MirrorIndy points out how Indiana law underserves its dead and its history,   The search for who’s buried at Greenlawn Cemetery, before it’s too late.

The situation shines a light on the limitations of state and federal regulations to preserve historic cemeteries. Federal laws are only triggered when a federal agency or funding is involved, which is not the case with Keystone’s project. And while state law requires archaeological plans to be filed with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, it does not mandate a full excavation. 

According to the plans, when human remains are found, work will stop and the remains will be documented and excavated by hand before construction continues.

That falls short of the demands of community members, who are advocating for a proactive archaeological dig on at least a portion of the site to find and carefully exhume remains.

Or is this neglect due to other reasons, the sort that ought ot make us blush?

Bates, a historian who has been researching the site’s history and working with the city in a community advisory group, is convinced there are several more bodies buried beneath the planned development. 

“We know African Americans were here from the very beginning,” Bates said. “So the question becomes: Before Crown Hill (Cemetery) opens in 1863, where were the African Americans buried?

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Historical maps show the shifting boundaries of the cemeteries, in particular as commercial interests took precedence over the cemeteries’ contents. Indianapolis’ meatpacking industry, and the railyards that supported it, cropped up around the cemeteries in the latter half of the 19th century and beyond. 

History never goes away.

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