We are taught Aztecs are a vanished people. A trip to Mexico disproves that

She knows from experience that every time the museum gets into the news, it reminds a thousand old ladies of things in the attic that should be saved for posterity. Opening the box reluctantly, she finds on top a copy of that interview, part of it circled in black: MUSEUM OFFERS COMPROMISE IN OLD BONE CONTROVERSY. There had been no compromise: she had simply stated the museum's policy: ''If an Indian tribe wanted ancestral bones returned, it had only to ask for them and provide some acceptable proof that the bones in question had indeed been taken from a burial ground of the tribe.'' The article went on to explain ''how the reburial of 18,000 skeletons was simply not possible, and that research needs and the public's right to expect authenticity, had to be respected . . .'' Underneath the newspaper clipping there was a letter which read:

''Dear Mrs Perry,

You won't bury the bones of our ancestors because you say the public has the right to expect authenticity in the museum when it comes to look at skeletons. Therefore I am sending you a couple of authentic skeletons of ancestors. I went to the cemetery in the woods behind the Episcopal Church of Saint Luke. I used authentic anthropological methods to locate the burials of authentic white Anglo types - and to make sure they would be perfectly authentic, I chose two whose identities you can personally confirm yourself. I ask that you accept these two skeletons for authentic display to your clients and release the bones of two of my ancestors so that they may be returned to their rightful place in Mother Earth. The names of these two authentic . . .''

By the end of the letter, Mrs Perry knows the skeletons are those of her own grandparents . . . sent by a native American activist.

This is how Talking God by American writer Tony Hillerman starts, setting the scene for a great read and a very new world problem. Hillerman published this book in 1989. The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires that every federal agency and museum in possession of native remains, sacred and funerary objects, compiles an inventory and grants access to tribal owners. Doubtless Hillerman's book drew a lot of attention to the problem.

Last year, the Australian High Commission intervened for the return of the head of Yagan, the Aboriginal nineteenth-century leader, exhumed from a grave in Liverpool. If it had been in a museum, the story would have been very different. Today the British Museum uses arguments like those in Talking God. The Unesco convention dealing with the return of ''items of exceptional significance to the people who are seeking its return'' is studiously ignored. The British Museum Act, prevents it from returning anything . . . but who wrote the Act? Museum policies protect their very essence of being. It is worth mentioning that there are exceptions to the rule: both the University of Edinburgh and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, have a policy of returning remains. The body of the amassed bounty of bones and human remains (including penises and brains) have largely stood unused for 150 years. It is still

true that the size of any collection reflects the standing of the collector and many are reluctant to let go.

All kind of liberties are taken while dealing with ''primitive'' societies (invariably all those with oral traditions) with a tendency to ''freeze'' them in time. If these societies are deemed extinct, nobody is able to dispute the authenticity of curators' arguments, fight for the rights of the extinguished peoples, or demand artifacts to be returned. But are all these vanished societies really extinct?

Museums will have it so. While they cannot dispute the fact that Aboriginal peoples of Australia are still very much among us, nor deny the existence of more vociferous groups of native Americans - there has been, for a long time, a conspiracy of silence. Native peoples were either ''not there any more'' or if they were, our museum culture has helped foster the belief in a ''timeless'', fixed past to which they should belong. As a result, the ''authenticity'' of contemporary indigenous peoples is being questioned if they veer-off from that white construction.

In schools we are taught the Mayas and the Aztecs are a vanished people. A trip to Mexico disproves that. Their descendants are there . . . disempowered . . . but still there . . . Recently, in the South-west of the US I came face to face with the descendants of other so-called ''vanished'' peoples, the Anasazi, the inspired eleventh-century architects who left amazing multistoreyed villages tucked away in natural caves over dizzying cliffs all over Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. These people, like many others, did not abandon their dwellings in space-ships and disappear in the blue. They merged, moved on - perhaps unwillingly. Today, their descendants, the Hopi and other Pueblo Indians, re-adapt their existence to a new reality.

Recently, at a Crossing Cultures conference - organised by the Australian National University's English Department - Australian author Anita Heiss was proven wrong. In the introduction to her book Sacred Cows (1996) she predicts that - unlike some authors who may have never set foot in this country but write text books on Aboriginal culture - she will never be taken seriously: ''. . . the difference between myself and these authors, is that no-one will take me seriously. I won't be asked to speak at conferences, give lectures, or write policy. I'll just be the Koori woman having a joke . . .'' At this conference she addressed the problem of white expectations in her poem Not a Real Aborigine and the realisation of not being perceived as a real Aborigine because of the wrong reasons. At the same conference the equivalent problem of the ''White-Indians'', as a white-American construction, was

raised.

But even these white constructions of the Other are not fixed for good, as it is evident in the current exhibition at the Australian National Gallery's New Worlds from Old, 19th-Century Australian & American Landscapes, a brilliant curatorial idea grouping landscapes from both countries borrowed from 44 different institutions. It is interesting to observe the pictorial treatment American Indians received. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many paintings - steeped in the tradition of the sublime - include the tiny figure of a native American guiding the eye to nature, with perhaps a storm brewing in the skies, symbolic of the power of nature over man. Until mid-century this was the case, many painters included the figure of the native American as mediator between the European viewer and nature. Soon after, this tradition was replaced by depictions of the allegorical figure of the

beau sauvage to that of the brute savage. The push to the west, the Mexican war, and the appropriation of Indian lands, finished that myth and the Indian became the true enemy. Massacres carried out by Kit Carson coincided with paintings which turned facts on their heads: two muscular Iroquois ambushing a white, defenceless woman in flowing blue robes, who, on her

knees, in a lonely wood, is about to be scalped. While thousands of Navajos were force-marched in Canyon del Muerto, heroic paintings of Daniel Boone, a gun-toting, Moses-like figure leading ''the chosen people'' into the new lands, were all the rage.

In Australia, J H Carse (c 1820-1900) son of Alexander Carse, founding member of the Royal Scottish Academy, painted two versions of Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains. The 1873 version, features two European tourists and their guide, precariously perched in front of the waterfalls. In 1876, Carse replaced the Europeans by a group of Aborigines standing confidently on the rocky outcrops. A gesture of acknowledgment, or was he cashing in on a trend? Gestures of this kind could be profitable. John Glover (1767-1849) painted Ben Lomond Setting Sun in 1840. The Scottish namesake was close to Glover's heart since the mountain was part of Glover's own new world's backyard in Tasmania. He also depicts Aborigines, some around a fire, some bathing. The painting, together with four others, were sent to King Louis-Philippe of France for possible purchase, appealing to the interest in far-fetched,

exotic locations and Aboriginals engaged in an idyllic life as if ''in the last moment of order and tranquillity before invasion, violence and mayhem break out''.

It must be said that other works of this kind were purely initiated by people with a genuine interest in Aboriginal culture and survival. James Dawson, a Scots landowner, commissioned Eugene von Guerard to paint Tower Hill, 1855, which, against a background of volcanic cones and marshes include - at his request - a group of Aborigines engaged in daily chores. Dawson completed The Australian Aborigine in 1881, based on his talks with the people on his land.

The idea that the Red Indians and the Aboriginals were on their way to inevitable extinction was a recurrent one. Even early American photographs depict lines of mounted Indians retreating into the woods, looking back over their shoulders . . . Painters and photographers alike were ''fixing'' these moments, for posterity. So were museums, frantically engaged in the collection of human remains better to build their reputation and that ''order'' of humankind where, inevitably, the white race came up on top.

But there is more than bones in these collections . . . Countless sacred/secret artefacts, collected by dubious means, preserve ''the dying culture'' involved. Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell says of such objects: ''The items are a guidance of who you are, where you come from, where are your values - and are critical to your make-up. My parents and grandparents couldn't pass on the material to me because it was all in museums . . . It's essential this material comes back to the Aboriginal communities.''

Fixing oral cultures in a ''timeless'' past is dangerous. The narrative of change, of appropriation, is hidden from the anthropologist by definition. At the risk of stating the obvious, oral cultures have no written records and allow for more curatorial liberties. The fact that our construction of the essential Red Indian always includes a horse, is testimony to the layers of appropriation cultures - without exception - go through. Yes, the native Americans took to horses like ducks to water, but they encountered them only in the mid-sixteenth century, courtesy of the Spanish conquistadors. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine the novelty of the first horse rustled into an Indian camp. . . disbelief, rejection, fear of modernity, opposition from elders? Sheep and peach-trees from the Spanish became a way of life for the Southwest tribes of the US. So essential were peach-groves to the Hopi

that a few centuries afterwards they were demonically torched by a new wave of white invaders as a way of starving them out.

All manner of things appropriated become part of human life. Once, an English academic guest successfully smuggled past the US Customs officials a wheel of Stilton cheese and a bottle of Port to accompany an ''English'' evening at an American home. The Stilton was English, but the Port? - I pressed pedantically - ''But my dear,'' he said, ''have you not heard of appropriation?''

Pre-history - like history - is made by continuous waves of changes: the Navajo and the Apache were raiders from the north. They invaded the Pueblo Indian lands who had been so named by the Spaniards to differentiate them from those very raiders. Pueblo means village, ''the ones who build villages.'' The others were more dangerous and knew how to put to good - and fearful - use, things they acquired from the Spaniards, horses and cut-throat razors, navajas, from which their name derives. With a magnifying glass trained on this micro-cosmos, the entire scene is one of appropriation, a true palimpsest of history and its resented waves and consequences: the Hopi dislike their ancestors called Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning ''ancient enemy''. The Navajo in turn call themselves Dineh, the People, rejecting the conquistadors' label. If we were to push far enough, the very name ''indians'' is a

historical mistake - Columbus temporarily thinking himself in the Far East - but the name stuck, despite further developments. The naming of the continent itself has an accidental ring to it too: cartographer Amerigo Vespuccio scrawled his name across an early version of the new continent's map, and it also stuck. The British are certainly not alone when it comes to acquiring empires in fits of absent-mindedness.

Claiming the remains of one's dead is not the sole patrimony of oral or ''primitive'' societies. Following a tradition initiated after the American Civil War, all western powers have a special place - in their consciousness as well as a real monument - for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, one of the most moving testimonials to those not officially identified, but believed to be nationals. Britain chose a single unidentified body - whose nationality could be verified by items found with the body - for the memorial at Westminster Abbey. A number of coffins, retrieved from cemeteries near battlefields in the continents, were placed in a tent. A blind-folded officer was guided in to place his hands on one of the coffins, singled out to represent ''all the Empire's Million Dead''.

Australia disinterred the remains of an unidentified Australian soldier from the Adelaide Cemetery in France as late as November 1993, to re-bury him ceremonially in the Australian War Memorial's Hall of Memory. The emphasis on anonymity is deemed crucial.

Aboriginal remains (victims of anthropological attrition), even if unidentifiable, should be important not only to their descendants, but to all Australians.

n Maria Visconti is a linguist and writer specialising in Australia.