Indiana’s Indiana Jones | Nina Siegal
In April 2014 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the family farm of Don Miller, a ninety-year-old electrical engineer and amateur archaeologist, and seized thousands of artifacts, skulls, and other bones that he had stolen from indigenous burial grounds and cultural heritage sites across the globe. Miller had hoarded his plunder in his house, his barns, and a disused fallout shelter in Rush County, Indiana. Investigators found that he had also created eccentric and morbid displays: “arrowheads hammered into a skull for dramatic effect, a baby’s skull repurposed as an apple bowl.” Bones were mixed with animal remains, “strewn across shelves and stuffed into tote bags…. They were filthy with grime and black mold, infested with silverfish.” Mice were nesting in skulls. In a locked room, there was a nearly complete skeleton laid out on red felt cloth in a glass case labeled “Sioux Warrior, 19th Cent.,” which Miller claimed was the remains of Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota leader of a rebellion against the US military. Miller was so attached to it …
