US Open course built on sacred Shinnecock burial grounds, tribe seeks repatriation

The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, host of the upcoming US Open, stands on land that was once sacred burial ground for the Shinnecock Indian Nation. The construction of the famed golf course in the 1890s involved extensive manual labor by Shinnecock people, and according to designer Willie Dunn jnr, burial mounds were incorporated into the course as bunkers and sand traps.

Remains were accidentally unearthed during play, with some eventually transplanted to the Museum of Natural History. More than a century later, the Shinnecock Nation wishes to repatriate these ancestral bones to their original resting places, a desire complicated by the fact that many graves now lie beneath world-famous fairways and greens like Ben Nevis and Thom's Elbow.

In a striking act of protest, the Shinnecock Nation erected two 18-meter tall digital advertising pillars near the golf club entrance seven years ago. These "Welcome to Shinnecock Indian Nation" billboards, flashing messages of "Aboriginal Territory" and "Indian Country," serve as a stark reminder of stolen land and desecrated graves. Despite court orders for their removal, the pillars remain, built on the tribe's sovereign land, a testament to their ongoing struggle for recognition and the repatriation of their ancestors.

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I started work with one hundred and fifty Indians from the reservation, the only available labour. Except for several horse-drawn road scrapers, all the work was done by hand. The place was dotted with Indian burial mounds, and we left some of these as bunkers in front of the holes. Others we scooped out and made into yawning bunkers, and sand-traps. It was in these traps that the Indian workmen would bury their empty whiskey bottles. We did not find out this until later when playing the course. One never knew what an explosion shot out of the sand trap would bring out, a couple of fire-water flasks, or perhaps a bone or two.