218 68 18MB
English Pages 288 [323] Year 2008
(OLLABORATI NG AT THE TROWEL'S EDGE
AMERIND STUDIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY SERIES EDITOR JOHN WARE
Volume 1
Trincheras Sites in Time, Space, and Society Edited by Suzanne. K. Fish,. Paul R. Fish, and M. Elisa Villalpando Volume 2
Collaborating at the Trowel's· Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology Edited by Stephen W. Silliman
COLLABORATING AT THE TROWEL'S EDGE TEACHING AND LEARNING IN INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGY
EDITED BY STEPHEN
W. SILLIMAN
WITH A FOREWORD BY LARRY
J. ZIMMERMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS TUCSON
The University of Arizona Press © 2008 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collaborating at the trowel's edge : teaching and learning in indigenous archaeology / edited by Stephen W. Silliman ; with a foreword by Larry J. Zimmerman. p. cm. - (Amerind studies in archaeology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-2722-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8165-2800-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America-Antiquities. 2. Indians of North America-Study and teaching. 3. EthnoarchaeologyFieldwork. 4. Ethnoarchaeology-Research. 5. Ethnoarchaeology-Study and teaching. I. Silliman, Stephen W., 1971E77.9.c65 2008 970.01-dc22 Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the Native American Scholarship Fund of the Society for American Archaeology.
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CONTENTS
Foreword, by Larry J. Zimmerman Acknowledgments 1
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Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Troweling at the Edges, Eyeing the Center r
Stephen W Silliman PART 1
Methods and Practices in Archaeological Field Schools 2
Field Schools without Trowels: Teaching Archaeological Ethics and Heritage Preservation in a Collaborative Context 25
Barbara J Mills, Mark Altaha, john R. Welch, and T. J Ferguson 3
The Tribe and the Trowel: An Indigenous Archaeology and the Mohegan Archaeological Field School 50 Jeffrey C Bendremer and Elaine L. Thomas
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Working on Pasts for Futures: Eastern Pequot Field School Archaeology in Connecticut 67
Stephen W Silliman and Katherine H Sebastian Dring 5
Summer Workshops in Indigenous Archaeology: Voluntary Collaboration between Colgate University and the Oneida Indian Nation of New York 88
Jordan E. Kerber 6
Field School Archaeology, Activism, and Politics in the Cayuga Homeland of Central New York 103
Jack Rossen
Contents
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PART 2
Indigenous Archaeology and Education 7
Pedagogy of Decolonization: Advancing Archaeological Practice through Education 123
Sonya Atalay 8
Building Pathways between Zuni and Mashantucket Pequot Country 145
Russell G. Handsman and Kevin A. McBride 9
A Critical Change in Pedagogy: Indigenous Cultural Resource Management 165
Andrea A. Hunter 10
ihoosh'aah, Learning by Doing: The Navajo Nation Archeology Department Student Training Program 188 Davina R. Two Bears PART 3
Reflections on Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology 11 Collaborative Research Programs: Implications for the
Practice of North American Archaeology
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Kent G. Lightfoot 12 Melding Science and Community Values: Indigenous Archaeology Programs and the Negotiation of Cultural Differences 228 George P. Nicholas References Cited
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About the Editor
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About the Contributors Index
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FOREWORD
During the days before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the reactions I got from anthropology students to what I'd been writing about repatriation gave me hope that American Indian voices eventually would be heard. Students seemed to understand the rightness of the respectful treatment and repatriation of human remains. Letters, e-mails, and calls told me that most of them "got it." Although they knew that there was benefit to be derived from studying human skeletal material and grave goods, they also understood that academic freedom and the rights of scientists didn't supersede the rights-or at least the expectations-that most people have when they die and are buried: that they will stay that way. Students also were very aware of the expectations of descendants of the dead that their ancestors' remains would be treated with respect and, if disturbed, would be reburied. In the late 1980s, an especially memorable, very upset student called from a small, well-known eastern college. She and fellow students had planned a dialogue about repatriation between several Indian people and archaeologists they hoped to bring to campus. When she had raised the idea with her professors, they told her in no uncertain terms that the issue was too controversial and that they couldn't do it, going so far as to threaten sanctions if they tried. I advised her that if the students wanted to do it, they should, and that faculty members couldn't really do all that much if the students remained united. I emphasized that taking a stand or action always brings risk and that ethically responsible people take that risk and bear the consequences, good or bad. To my great satisfaction, the students did indeed host the session, which went very well, with even their reluctant faculty members complimenting them on a successful meeting. I was more heartened by that student's courage than I can ever hope to express. As with her, many who contacted me had come to their views in spite of what their professors had been telling them. Apparently, indoctrination into archaeological science hadn't yet overwhelmed their
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humanity. The students still considered people and how people thought about themselves to be more important than what could be learned about them or their pasts. To paraphrase Loren Eisley (1971:81) in The Night Country, the students were not yet made "peculiar," having looked with the "archaeological eye" so they could never quite see normally again. Students still saw the treatment of the dead in the way "normal" people do. As debates about repatriation wore on, matters got more complex, but students still could see through the fog. Disagreements about who got to tell the stories about distant Native American pasts-Indians or archaeologists-became glaringly apparent. When Vine Deloria Jr. published Red Earth, White Lies in 1995, there could be no misunderstanding what most North American archaeologists had been hearing for decades: many Indians believed that much of what archaeologists said was suspect at best. To their immense credit, a few archaeologists-several of them in this volume- had gotten the message and realized that archaeologists must deal with the disconnect between Indigenous and archaeological views. Many built partnerships with Indian people and structured projects that considered Indian voices to be more important than those of archaeologists. Many of them recognized that over the long term students were central to changing the discipline's relationships to Indians and that the means to make it happen was direct interaction of students with Indian people as partners in research. Most probably would agree that for them frequent interaction with Indians was what had made the difference in their own understanding, and that to really appreciate the intensity of the issues, students needed firsthand contact with Indian people. They also needed to understand that issues were not bipolarus/them, science/myth, archaeologists/Indians-and that some archaeologists and some Indians were doing just fine in their relationships. My own experiences in codirecting (with Bill Green and John Doershuk) three University of Iowa field schools (1998-2000) were enlightening. We specifically arranged for students to face a range of Indian viewpoints about archaeology. An American Indian Movement activist told the students in no uncertain terms what she thought of archaeology and them for wanting to be part of a profession that exploited Indians. They got to work with an lnhanktonwan oral historian who took them
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on an intense tour of the Yankton Sioux Reservation, where they found themselves on the back of a pickup truck in the middle of the tribal bison herd and later looking at the graves of generations of his people outside Greenwood, the old agency town. They spent a morning in the mobile home of an Omaha tribal historian who has been working for years on building a tribal museum, and later with him and a University of Nebraska osteologist at an Omaha village site the two had worked on together. Our Omaha colleague was so enthused that he came to the site to dig with the students the next day! They toured an important northwestern Iowa site with members of the state archaeologist's Indian Advisory Council and heard what council members thought about preservation and interpretation at the site. The next two years were similar, but students worked in northeastern Iowa with descendent Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, Dakota, and non-Indian community members whose ancestors had been part of Iowa's Neutral Ground in the 1830s. They also got to work with junior high Native students on excavations and to excavate with a Ho-Chunk archaeologist. And yes, they learned traditional field methods. Student exit interviews showed us that engagement with people had reinforced the innate respect they had for Indian people and helped them to understand that pasts are not distant but immanent and very personal. They were reminded that like everyone else, Indians created their own pasts and did not need archaeologists to tell them what they were. They also learned that many Indian people recognized that archaeological tools could be powerful and useful, but that Indians wanted to have a say in how those tools got used. Learning was not one-way. To a person-even the AIM memberthe Indian people involved found out that archaeologists could be (with pun intended) "down-to-earth" people, who could be respectful and who could listen to their concerns. As with our Omaha colleague, many were enthused about the students and about the possibilities for archaeology. The Omaha and Meskwaki actually invited us to run a field school on their lands because they had some questions they thought we could help them answer. The experiences we had are echoed in the chapters here. I had the honor of being a discussant for the Society for American Archaeology session for which most of these chapters were prepared. I was enthused
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then about what our colleagues had been doing, and I remain so as I write this. What they are doing is not about "identity politics," as some have suggested, but about better ways to understand peoples' pasts, ways that work to incorporate how Indian people process their pasts and feel about how their people became who they are. Many lessons are to be learned from these chapters about how to create a better archaeology. From everything we say, archaeologists apparently think that the past is a public heritage, but that's only true if those publics-not archaeology-are the reason we do what we do. To modify an old saw, "archaeology is about community, or it is nothing." Changing archaeology by working with students is proper, and as my old friend Leonard Bruguier would say, "it's a 'seventh generation' thing." Larry J Zimmerman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea that led ultimately to this book hatched in a conversation that I had with Randy McGuire in Berkeley in spring 2004 when he and I both were visiting the UC-Berkeley campus. In our various discussions about indigenous archaeology and my pilot efforts to run just such an archaeological field school in New England, he remarked that no one had ever done a session at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting on indigenous/tribal archaeological field schools and encouraged me to do one. I agreed that this would be an interesting path to pursue. Unfortunately, Randy was not able to participate as I began piecing together that symposium, but I still credit that conversation as a catalyst for what became quite an extraordinary process. The symposium that resulted, "Indigenous Archaeology at the Trowel's Edge: Field Schools, Pedagogy, and Collaboration," took place at the 70th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Salt Lake City, Utah. The participants included many whose names appear in this book now: Barbara Mills, John Welch, and T. J. Ferguson; Jeffrey Bendremer and Elaine Thomas; Stephen Silliman and Kathy Sebastian Dring; Jordan Kerber; Jack Rossen; Russell Handsman and Kevin McBride; Davina Two Bears; Stephen Loring; Kent Lightfoot; Larry Zimmerman; and George Nicholas. We had the good fortune at that annual meeting to win the outstanding symposium award offered by the Amerind Foundation in conjunction with the Society for American Archaeology, which brought with it the wonderful honor of convening together again later that fall in beautiful Dragoon, Arizona, to revisit these issues in a much more intensive, focused advanced seminar format. The Amerind Foundation director, John Ware, and I then began the process of arranging the seminar. The preparations and logistics for the October rendezvous in Dragoon resulted in some slight shifts in the topic and people involved. The goal of the Amerind seminar was to bring the symposium participants back together, with some exciting new additions, to discuss the current standing and future trajectory of collaborative indigenous archaeology.
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Although the field school experience remained a solid anchor for the seminar, we expanded the discussion to include broader methodologies, pedagogies, and ethics involved in indigenous archaeology and to focus strongly on the collaborative aspects of indigenous archaeology. This seemed to offer a richer set of issues for the seminar itself and for the edited book that was to result. A critical aspect of this enrichment involved inviting several other participants-Sonya Atalay, Mark Altaha (on the chapter lead-authored by Barbara Mills), Andrea Hunter, Don Ivy, and Michael Wilcox - all of whom graciously agreed to join us. Despite the extraordinary generosity of the Amerind Foundation in supporting the participants and hosting the event, only so many people could actually be physically present at the seminar because of the high costs of transportation, the limited number of residential rooms, and, most important, the tendency of intensive seminars to break down a bit with more than twelve to fifteen people. John Ware understood these factors very well. Even with some careful planning around that reality, we experienced the inevitable attrition as people encountered travel problems, health issues, or personal commitments elsewhere as the seminar drew near. By the time the dust settled (an appropriate southern Arizona desert metaphor, perhaps) and all participants arrived at the Amerind campus, the following people were seated at the seminar table: JeffBendremer, Russ Handsman, Jordan Kerber, Kent Lightfoot, Barbara Mills, George Nicholas, Jack Rossen, Kathy Sebastian Dring, Elaine Thomas, Davina Two Bears, Mike Wilcox, and me. Sonya Atalay's chapter was present for our discussion, although she could not be there in person, and Andrea Hunter's chapter was on its way. Larry Zimmerman was unable to attend owing to seminar size constraints, but he readily agreed to do the foreword to the volume once we brought everything together. This group, plus their absentee co-authors, then set the course for the book now in your hands. We presented and discussed, ate and drank, and socialized together to debate our ideas, push our limits, and consider the future. Thankfully, we collaborated quite well in this adventure (which, had we not, I guess would have been a sad commentary on our collaborative methodologies!). John Ware's guidance and participation in the Amerind seminar were invaluable, and he helped pull this volume into the final product that it is.
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I must end by extending a hearty "thank you" to many people who helped make this book possible. First and foremost, I thank John Ware for his generosity, assistance, and comments before, during, and after the Amerind seminar. He is a warm and gracious host for the Amerind seminar series, and his staff in Dragoon deserve significant praise for their friendliness, their support, and their amazing cooking skills involved in preparing our hearty meals. I appreciate the efforts of the Society for American Archaeology, the Amerind Foundation, and the University of Arizona Press to support this worthwhile seminar award at the annual meeting and the subsequent opportunity to publish in the Amerind Studies in Archaeology series. I am also grateful that the Society for American Archaeology has the Native American Scholarship Fund in place so that the proceeds from a book such as this can be turned over to a worthwhile cause. I thank the University of Arizona Press, especially the foresight and helpfulness of Allyson Carter and Christine Szuter, for being willing to carry this book and to see it through to completion. John Mulvihill deserves high praise for his careful and professional copyediting for the press, and I thank Kate Johnson at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for her help early on with compiling parts of the manuscript. In addition, I and the contributors have great appreciation for the anonymous reviewers of this book, both of whom went to extraordinary lengths to refine and improve the chapters contained therein. Last but not least, as editor, I want to thank all chapter authors for their tireless efforts to help achieve this final product. The time I spent with them in Dragoon stands as one of the highlights of my professional career, and I thank them for their inspiration, patience, collegiality, and commitment.
COLLABORATING AT THE TROWEL'S EDGE
1 Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology Troweling at the Edges, Eyeing the Center
Stephen W. Silliman
Working with descendent communities has begun to assume a noticeable role in contemporary archaeology. Whether collaborating with a community oflndigenous people,1 individuals sharing class or labor histories, or stakeholders of various lineages and cultural heritages, archaeologists have developed ways of meshing archaeological histories with the interests and concerns of the descendants of those pasts (ColwellChanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007a; Damm 2005; Kerber 2006b; McDavid 1997, 2002; Singleton and Orser 2003). Some have referred to this as "community archaeology" (Marshall 2002) or even "applied archaeology," and it has worked to broaden the "public outreach" mode of archaeologists into one of "public engagement" among stakeholders. The latter welcomes the input of various publics rather than just presumes them to be an audience interested in hearing final reports on archaeological information. Sometimes this collaboration changes the kinds of questions asked by archaeologists; other times, it alters the answers assumed by communities. Yet it almost always brings about more responsible historical narratives and research practices that ramify into representations of the past, issues of the present, and concerns about the future. Collaborations that have taken place between archaeologists and Indigenous people have been the most challenging, not only in the sense of being difficult for the discipline to accept over the last few decades, but also in the sense of their transformative impact on both the participants' beliefs and practices and the nature of archaeology itself. The challenge undermined the core assumption in traditional archaeology that archaeologists-typically non-Native in ancestry-had the primary authority to tell, evaluate, and control Indigenous histories and heritage objects.
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The new space created by this challenge has been labeled "indigenous archaeology'' (Atalay 2006a; Smith and Wobst 2005b; Watkins 2000), a term that serves as a broad umbrella for other similar approaches such as "ethnocritical" archaeology (Zimmerman 1997b, 2001), "covenantal" archaeology (Zimmerman 1996b, 1997b), "internalist" archaeology (Yellowhorn 2002), or "new vision" archaeology (Rossen 2006). Its germination in North America lies in early, but relatively few, attempts by archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s to incorporate Native American 2 perspectives and participation (e.g., Spector [1993] at Little Rapids in South Dakota; Samuels and Daugherty [1991] at Ozette in Washington; Zimmerman's work [1989, this vol.] in the Midwest), but the full sprouting took place in the wake of the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 and the passage in 1992 of amendments to the federal legislation known as the National Historic Preservation Act. A similar growth can be seen in Australian archaeology with the impact of recent Native Title legislation (Lilley 2000; McNiven and Russell 2005). A better term is perhaps indigenous archaeologies, since the practices of such approaches remain fluid and situational and thankfully dodge any attempts at systematization or universal codification (Smith and Wobst 2005b). Doing indigenous archaeology does not exclude those archaeologists without Native ancestry or tribal affiliation (Atalay 2006a:293-294), although the growing number oflndigenous people in the profession has helped the transformation in significant and desirable ways, nor does it arguably have to involve collaboration, the latter of which explains my use of "collaboration" as the qualifier of "indigenous archaeology" in the book's title. Rather, doing indigenous archaeology means embracing an archaeology for, with, and by Indigenous people (Nicholas 1997; Smith and Wobst 2005a:7), a prepositional diversity that produces and engages a plethora of methods, theories, and practices that share the goal of making archaeology responsive to Indigenous needs, histories, perspectives, and worldviews. Key themes include incorporating oral histories and cultural knowledge into archaeological narratives, involving Native communities in archaeological research, working on repatriation efforts, decolonizing methodologies and interpretations, developing and using Indigenous epistemologies, protecting sacred sites, remedying historical and contemporary erasures, de-
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veloping historic preservation and stewardship efforts, rethinking the sharing and production of knowledge, and confronting discipline- and society-wide equity issues. For some, it even questions the validity of notions of "stakeholder" and "community archaeology" when referring to Indigenous involvements in their own heritage (McNiven and Russell 2005:234-242). At their core, indigenous archaeologies respect openness, multivocality, personal engagement, ethics, sharing of authority and interpretation, local and cultural knowledge, and the fact that history matters to people. Contrary to some views of its detractors, indigenous archaeologies also seek rigorous, high-qua/tty research. These goals are shared by many collaborative archaeologies (e.g., ColwellChanthaphonh and Ferguson 20076), but the intersections of colonialism, sovereignty, dispossession, and anthropology's tainted history with Indigenous people make collaborative indigenous archaeology a unique enterprise. Integrating collaborative or community archaeology and indigenous archaeology constitutes a central theme of the book, but the volume takes a unique direction by considering these integrations "at the trowel's edge." Coined by Asa Berggren and Ian Hodder (2003), the phrase captures a dilemma in archaeological practice: the disconnect between what happens in the field (or laboratory, by extension) and what happens in the interpretation and writing. They argue that, rather than maintaining the common division of intellectual, physical, and skilled labor in archaeology between those who do and those who think and write, the archaeological process should reintegrate the thinking and interpreting back at the trowel's edge. This frequently requires a number of reflexive elements beyond the scope of this short summary, such as on-site specialists, videography, daily presentations, free data access, and often a hefty budget (Hodder 2005), but a key conceptual and practical feature involves permitting and, in fact, encouraging different voices to be heard during archaeological research. Within collaborative indigenous archaeology, this perspective requires that archaeologists consider Indigenous perspectives at many times other than during the final interpretation or at the moment of doing "public outreach" to a descendent community. These perspectives should be acknowledged and often embedded at all stages of the archaeological process, from project formulation to field methods, from
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excavation recovery to laboratory analysis, from interpreting to writing. In particular, these incorporations should also be fundamental elements of archaeological field schools that focus on Indigenous pasts, for in these complex intersections of teaching and research lies real potential to change the discipline. Those who become archaeologists learn some of their first real archaeological habits in field school; those who choose other career paths can take with them a new way of looking at the past and the present. Such indigenous archaeology perspectives tend to find their voice when participants or collaborators bring them directly to a project, a process that integrates indigenous and collaborative archaeology at the trowel's edge. Stated differently, perhaps instead of worrying so much about the physical sharpness of the trowel's edge-a favorite obsession in North American field archaeology-archaeologists should worry more about who grips the trowel's handle and whether their voices are heard (e.g., Shepherd 2003). Having outlined the general framework for the collection of chapters herein as "collaborative indigenous archaeology at the trowel's edge," I now offer an irony: I hesitate to call what the contributors to this volume have done "collaborative indigenous archaeology" at all. I pause not because of the unfortunate acronym that might result, nor because the term "collaboration" has potentially negative connotations of "collaborating with the enemy'' that might undermine it (Brown and Robinson 2006:62; Dean and Perrelli 2006:145-146; Kerber, this vol.), but because of my fundamental conviction about archaeology as a discipline. Many, if not all, contributors to this volume, including myself, would like the visions and ideas .that we promote here to simply be "archaeology'' (Atalay, Lightfoot, this vol.). Labeling it does draw attention to kinds of theory, method, and practice that differ from the standard "ways of doing" past and even contemporary archaeology, but it also runs the risk of minimizing its impact and drawing it to the periphery rather than integrating it into the mainstream. In this conundrum, I still choose to label the broad project represented herein as collaborative indigenous archaeology to convey what we are trying to accomplish to as broad of an audience as possible, but readers may rest assured that we are all committed to developing, blending, and using this framework to redirect contemporary archaeology in ways that are more methodologically rich,
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theoretically interesting, culturally sensitive, community responsive, ethically aware, and socially just. At the intersection of collaboration, indigenous archaeology, and working at the trowel's edge, this book tries to take the pulse of collaborative indigenous archaeologies in North America. Finding this pulse in the body of North American archaeology can be difficult at times given the sheer scale of projects taking place in academic, cultural resource management, historic preservation, avocational, and tribal realms and the subtle and not-so-subtle legacies and contemporary realities of archaeological practice in colonial and postcolonial settler nations. Yet, when detected, the palpitations are decisive and, in some cases, long lived. They have already impacted mainstream archaeology and should continue to do so. The book's focus on Native North America does not imply a lack of collaborative indigenous archaeology elsewhere, because such practices are readily discernible in Australia (Clarke 2002; Lilley 2000; Smith and Jackson 2006, 2007), Africa (Meskell 2005; Meskell and Masuku Van Damme 2007; Ouzman 2005), and Latin America (Ardren 2002; Heckenberger 2007), among other regions. In fact, other edited volumes already have begun to capture some of this global diversity (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007b; Smith and Wobst 2005b). Instead, the North American focus here offers a sharply defined continental perspective well after the impacts ofNAGPRA and the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act first began to be felt in archaeological and Indigenous communities in North America but still firmly in the wake of the Ancient One/Kennewick Man controversy of the last decade. The book takes stock of how far we have come on this indigenous archaeology path and how far we still have left to travel. This collection of works has five emphases that serve as a prism, simultaneously drawing together the chapters into the agenda of collaborative indigenous archaeology while allowing them to differentiate into unique illuminations of this broader project as they play out in local contexts. These themes are (1) positive and future directions; (2) process, not just product; (3) diversity and flexibility; (4) longevity and sustainability; and (5) pedagogy. Because these issues weave in and out of the chapters that follow, I do not summarize each book chapter in
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sequence but rather summon them in the appropriate themes under discussion.
Positive and Future Directions Indigenous archaeology arose largely in the 1990s as a response to a troubling history and a problematic perpetuation of certain archaeological practices in colonial/settler nations (Thomas 2000; Watkins 2000, 2005). It has found its strongest footing in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Certainly, the issues surrounding repatriation and the control of cultural patrimony and ancestral remains set most of the context for the rise of indigenous archaeology, particularly with the passage in 1990 of the federal law known as NAGPRA in the United States and the subsequent and contested implementation of that law (Mihesuah 2000; Swidler et al. 1997). At times, repatriation has catalyzed discussion between Native people and archaeologists or museum personnel by offering the proverbial "kick in the pants" to archaeologists and curators to initiate consultation; at others, it has provided a legal base and a public forum from which Indigenous people could further reassert their rights to sovereignty, particularly as it impacted ancestral remains. In most cases, Indigenous people were reacting to archaeology as a damaging enterprise, as a Western cultural practice that continued to colonize, appropriate, and take away. Although indigenous archaeological perspectives helped to reveal the negative sides of North American and other continental archaeologies and to summon practitioners to acknowledge and admit the history of animosity, exclusion, and appropriation (Thomas 2000), it also set a course to take the discipline in new, enriching, and positive directions, partly through a decolonizing process. This book focuses on these new developments rather than on reworking the history of troubled relationships between archaeologists and Native people (e.g., Atalay, this vol.). The contributors to the book believe in "the necessity of looking back before we can look forward" (Isaacson and Ford 2005:354) because we cannot afford disciplinary amnesia, particularly about the ways that archaeology still can do harm to Native communities (Nicholas 2005) and still draws its structure and content from colonial origins (Atalay 2006a; Zimmerman 2001). However, much like the slogan used by the SHARE
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organization in upstate New York discussed by Rossen (2006:254, this vol.), in this book we hope to "build a bridge and get over it." Out of this desire to establish a new mode for archaeology, collaborative indigenous archaeology has begun to explore how to make archaeology more than a scientific practice that takes away, to transform it into a cultural practice that gives back in responsible and needed ways. This perspective on the archaeological process attempts to balance the mantra that we are taught to abide by, teach to students, and share with the pubHc-that archaeology is inherently destructive. Collaborative indigenous archaeology reveals how the act of physical "destruction" required in many archaeological techniques may actually be integral to the "production" of history, cultural significance, and heritage for Native communities. This is not a call to ignore preservation needs, nor should it deflect attention from the terrible destruction wrought by archaeologists over the years on Indigenous sites, materials, and ancestral bodies. Rather, it is a reminder that "stakeholders" vary significantly in whether they find archaeology to be the worst thing that you could do to a landscape or find it a way to draw out more cultural history from the land. For those of the former persuasion, collaborative indigenous archaeology can involve very little physical destruction while otherwise producing useful results (Lightfoot, Mills et al., this vol.); for the latter, full-scale excavation may well be the preferred method as long as it is undertaken in appropriate and sensitive ways (Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). To others, archaeology may be a cultural way to care for ancestral sites (Two Bears, this vol.), and excavation itself may be approached as a ceremonial act for archaeologists who are themselves Indigenous (Million 2005). Collaborative indigenous archaeology must be about something decidedly different than consultation if it is to succeed in these positive directions. Consultation involves legal mandates, procedural steps, and compliance, whereas collaboration emphasizes social relationships, joint decision-making, equitable communication, mutual respect, and ethics (Smith and Jackson 2007; Watkins and Ferguson 2005). Although consultation may explicitly recognize sovereignty (that is, government-togovernment interactions) whereas collaboration only implies it (Gonzalez et al. 2006:392), the difference is not lost on Native American communities who may see consultation by archaeologists, particularly
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federal archaeologists adhering to NAGPRA, as bureaucratic and formulaic rather than as something that archaeologists desire, enjoy, and encourage. The contributors to this volume partake of collaborative indigenous archaeology out of that desire and enjoyment. In fact, many of them see collaboration as a form of advocacy (Rossen, this vol.), which would be difficult to implement in mere "consultation." They recognize that the collaborative relationship entails more than academics and professionalism; it also involves personal and cultural interactions with often poignant political consequences. A final word of clarification about positive directions is in order. We must be careful in this age of developing and flourishing indigenous archaeology projects to not become too self-congratulatory or to believe that collaboration must bring about harmony and unity in perspectives. We should certainly feel proud to see the discipline of archaeology coming to terms with its tortured past and attempting to develop a more sustainable practice (Nicholas, this vol.). Similarly, archaeologists should breathe some sighs of relief that the efforts to change the field have not gone unnoticed by Native communities whose members might have refused to even talk to us a few years ago. These all suggest an improving disciplinary health. Still, we will need to develop a variety of self-assessment mechanisms to diagnose and prognose that growing body of work. The chapters in this book hopefully have begun that process. At the same time, we must be careful not to expect collaborative indigenous projects to reach a point where all collaborators agree on everything and develop a kind of cultural or intellectual unity. Quite the contrary. These projects offer places where archaeologists and Indigenous people (and Indigenous people who are archaeologists!) can come together to engage with and discuss many issues, but we should not seek a necessarily unified voice at the other end of the process. Instead, we should keep our ears open to hear many voices (Ferguson and ColwellChanthaphonh 2006). Conflict and differences may arise, but as long as the differences and their bearers are treated respectfully (Kuwanwisiwma 2007), the tensions and contradictions are acknowledged (McGuire 2003), and the relationships are rendered honestly even in their disagreements (Brown and Robinson 2006), we all stand to benefit.
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Process, Not Just Product Archaeology, like most academic disciplines, tends to judge its success through products: recovered artifacts, excavated sites, reports, publications, curated collections. These products serve as valuable currency in academia where administrators and colleagues track scholarly productivity and in the cultural resource management realm where agencies and companies need rapid results and clear recommendations. Such a focus on products may well explain the protectiveness that archaeologists have displayed when some of the more tangible products-viewed as their products, won through physical and intellectual labor-were repatriated to a descendent community. This commitment to final product has resulted in unwarranted predictions concerning the "end" of archaeology in the repatriation era (e.g., Meighan 1992). Recent reflection on this repatriation era has revealed quite the opposite-an archaeology that has improved in health and vigor in its process rather than one that has withered and died with a loss of "products" (Lippert 2007). This book takes a different approach to archaeology and seeks to emphasize the process of archaeological practice, generally, and of collaborative indigenous archaeological practice, specifically. Such an orientation does not in any way devalue the products or the need for them to be rigorously produced, but it does pay significant attention to the paths that collaborators travel toward such products. For example, a promising format is joint writing by indigenous archaeologists who reveal their own personal narratives in the broader process of doing collaborative archaeology (Nicholas et al. 2007; Spector 1993). Focusing on process underscores the journey, so to speak, of collaborative indigenous archaeology as an anthropological, cultural, and social undertaking. This has implications for academic and Indigenous communities alike. On the academic side, postprocessual, feminist, social constructivist, and other critical perspectives have surely taught us by now that what we consider to be the "output" of a scientific, archaeological, or research project cannot be understood outside of the process that produces it. Recent ethnographies of archaeological practice attempt just that (Edgeworth 2006). This means more than paying attention to disciplinary methodology; it means also coming to terms with the social, political,
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historical, cultural, and personal milieus that help to make possible the final product. In fact, it is often the process of research more so than its product that must be evaluated in terms of ethics, for an ethical product requires ethical production. As a result, the hope of many involved in collaborative indigenous archaeology is that these "final products" will differ from those possible in status quo archaeology. They may differ in the results and interpretations as a result of multiple perspectives during the research process, in their impacts on and relevance to descendent communities as a result of the collaborative input and Indigenous perspectives, and in their influence on students through a revamped pedagogical approach in university classrooms and field schools. Yet, narrating that process and evaluating its ethics takes precedence for many chapters in this book, well in advance of those anticipated products (Rossen, Lightfoot, this vol.). Collaborative indigenous archaeology is, in some ways, more of an anthropological undertaking than some of its archaeological counterparts because of the noticeably ethnographic and, some might say, hybrid qualities (Damm 2005; Meskell 2005; Silliman 2008). Perhaps herein we can think about reclaiming what it means to do "anthropological archaeology," following the lead of such archaeologists as Gillespie et al. (2003) and Pyburn and Wilk (1995). Participants involved in this kind of archaeology have to be attuned to their interlocutors, must be aware of the ways that interactions and collaborations influence the scope and outcome of research, and have to document the subtleties of this process. Gone are the days when students could claim: "I want to be an archaeologist so that I don't have to work with living people." However, I warn against taking this parallel with ethnography too far without considering the purpose of collaborative indigenous archaeology. Unlike traditional ethnographers who once tried to capture aspects of people's lives without too much of their own interference, archaeologists and Native people working on collaborative indigenous projects actually embark on a joint project. In many cases, archaeologists seek Indigenous participants as coproducers of their own history rather than as informants on a closed repository of such knowledge. One group does not study the other in a traditional anthropological sense; rather, the parties join together in the present to pursue the past with respect to research
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projects, heritage concerns, and cultural activities for both separate and mutual benefit. It behooves us as anthropologists to document and reflect more upon that process. The Indigenous side of the collaborative process may well seek finished "products" for purposes of historic and cultural preservation, land management, tribal history, or public dissemination of knowledge, but the spate of recent projects reminds us that the process itself may well have great significance on its own for Native communities. In one instance, projects may offer building blocks for future impact. Even projects that do not produce the most exciting archaeological results still have significant value for building relationships between archaeologists and Native communities and for positioning archaeology to be a positive force (Jerome and Putnam 2006; Nicholas, this vol.). Similarly, tribal members may learn the basics of "professional archaeology" during a particular project that will serve them well in future dealings with or even in careers as archaeologists, regardless of that project's particular published or presented product (Silliman and Sebastian Dring, Two Bears, this vol.). In another instance, the relationships established between archaeologists and Indigenous communities deserve cultivation and attention in their own right. Because these collaborations often become, if they do not start out immediately as, much more than a professional, business, legal, or academic set of relationships, new communities and interactions sometimes arise that have cultural or social implications, if not resulting in full transformations (Clarke 2002).
Diversity and Flexibility Reflecting on process involves discussing the specifics of collaborative indigenous archaeological projects. Improvement in our collaborative methods will come both from explicit and enumerated advice by longterm participants (Watkins and Ferguson 2005; see Harrison 20m for cultural anthropology) and from the consideration of unique cases that highlight the complex terrain of ongoing projects. Newer generations of archaeologists seem to have a vibrant commitment to doing collaborative and indigenous archaeology, but the literature does not yet offer enough examples of these in practice to guide collaborators, whether
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Indigenous or non-Indigenous, in such archaeological efforts (ColwellChanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007b; Dowdall and Parrish 2002; Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006; Peck et al. 2003; Smith and Wobst 20056). The goal does not entail providing additional local recipes for a global archaeological cookbook on collaborative methods, but rather elucidating the key contexts that frame when, where, how, and why collaborative indigenous archaeologies work. Those projects that succeed and those that fail, those that last for weeks and those that endure for many years, those that do all the right things and those that make fatal wrong turns-all provide guideposts for future researchers. The best adjective to describe the contexts in which collaborative indigenous archaeologies operate is diverse. The cultural, historical, linguistic, economic, political, geographic, and demographic diversity might be rich enough to weigh against any overarching recommendations for archaeological best practice, other than the useful tips provided by Watkins and Ferguson (2005) and Smith and Jackson (2007). This diversity certainly requires considerable flexibility on the part of archaeologists and Native people to find ways to work together on projects. Whether about time, space, money, personnel, research questions, project scope, methods, curation, or interpretation, this flexibility encourages participation and critical dialogue. However, this does not undermine the need for what Lightfoot (this vol.) describes as a collaborative research design negotiated at the outset of a project. Such flexibility holds significant promise for shaking archaeologists out of their disciplinary comfort zones and for making them confront their own black-boxed methodologies and perspectives. I imagine that this flexibility does the same for Indigenous people working with or as archaeologists, but we must be aware that personal life experiences may render the process more disruptive for Native collaborators and scholars. Care must be exercised when pushing the "shake and confront" agenda to ensure that archaeologists remember that the primary objective is to sensitize archaeological practice and its resulting histories. But as Two Bears (2006, this vol.) reminds us about Navajo beliefs-sometimes one must change certain practices in order to stay the same, to remain Navajo. Within this diversity, several broad variables impact the structure and content of collaborative indigenous archaeological approaches in
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Native North America. At the risk of excluding other important variables, I have opted to restrict my discussion here to the following critical features: federal recognition, sovereignty, land and site "ownership," and community structure. Practices that work in one permutation of these variables may not work in others. It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of federal recognition in Indian Country and the implications that the process and outcome have for archaeological research. The Office of Federal Acknowledgment in the U.S. government's Department of the Interior determines which Native American groups receive federal acknowledgment based on seven criteria concerning genealogy, political leadership, government, continuity, community, and prior relationship with the government that a group must address in a petition that often totals many thousands of pages in length, including supporting documentation. Frequently, years pass between the declaration of intent to file a petition and the assistant secretary's decision about the final petition and any subsequent appeals. The process is arduous and expensive, as Native American communities seek the federal government's agreement, so to speak, that the tribe is "officially'' who it claims to be. Federal acknowledgment does not bring about identity security for Native communities since they do not need the U.S. government's bureaucratic blessing to know who they are, but acknowledgment does offer the guarantee that the Native nation can exercise significant sovereignty in its community's governmental, economic, and social activities and can have access to significant government benefits (Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). Archaeology can intersect this issue in complex ways. Those tribal nations with federal acknowledgment often have their own historic and cultural preservation offices and hire archaeologists from inside and outside their community to handle cultural resource management issues, particularly during construction. The Navajo Nation in Arizona (Two Bears 2006, this vol.) and the Mohegan Tribe in Connecticut (Bendremer and Thomas, this vol.) offer examples, as does the well-established Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, also in Connecticut (Jones and McBride 2006), and many contributions to Dongoske et al.'s (2000) Working Together edited volume. In these cases, archaeologists who work on tribal lands may be of Native American ancestry and frequently do their work as employees of the nation itself. These
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archaeologists frequently have access to federal funding and to the tribe's own economic revenue to finance archaeological projects. In some cases, these open up interesting venues for collaboration; in others, they offer tribal communities the option to do indigenous archaeology without collaboration. A critical feature of archaeology by federally recognized tribes is that they do not have to mobilize archaeology in service of being treated as sovereign nations by the government, but they do have to balance internal economic development plans with their frequently assumed roles as tribal historic preservation offices under federal cultural heritage legislation (Two Bears, this vol.). For those Indigenous communities who seek federal acknowledgment or do not have it, having been denied or having not yet completed the process, collaborative archaeology takes place in a different setting. Rarely do these tribal nations have standing historic preservation offices or even archaeological staff because tribal government funds are limited and often directed toward the production of the federal acknowledgment petition itself. In these contexts, collaboration with archaeologists may be done to initiate historic preservation and archaeological programs that involve low start-up costs and donated services (Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). As a result, university-based archaeologists can often establish these ties since cultural resource management archaeologists have no financial flexibility to do so. In addition, the tribal government may direct the archaeological work toward the needs of the community vis-a-vis the federal acknowledgment petition to establish particular histories in a landscape rather than in advance of any major economic development, which may not be possible anyway without federally granted sovereignty. In other words, archaeological information may be called upon to help meet the necessary criteria for federal acknowledgment. Sovereignty is the second variable at play, as alluded to in the discussion about federal acknowledgment. Perhaps it is less of a variable, which suggests that it varies by the community's relationship with the federal government, and more of a given, which acknowledges that Native American communities want to be considered and treated as sovereign regardless of what the U.S. government has to say about them. Archaeologists must pay careful attention to this relationship during collaborative work since notions of sovereignty likely will influence perspectives
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on ownership of the past, responsibilities to heritage, land management, permissions for projects, and primacy in setting research agendas. Sovereignty certainly sets an agenda for fundamental sharing of authority, results, and intellectual property from collaborative research. In sum, sovereignty involves self-determination, and archaeologists usually find their way into this process whenever Native communities find them useful in that regard. Therefore, archaeologists must remain useful and must respect the larger Indigenous trajectory in which the archaeology is embedded if they hope to collaborate successfully. In other words, archaeology may mean the world to archaeologists, but it may be only one cultural preservation or heritage activity among many in an Indigenous community. Land provides a third element in collaborative indigenous archaeology. Collaboration takes place differently when a Native American community is landed, particularly in the sense of having a reservation, as opposed to landless. Some groups struggling with land claims or loss of the aboriginal land base may seek collaboration as a way to reassert historical connections to a landscape or to rejuvenate contemporary access to private, municipal, state, or federal land through archaeological research. In fact, the collaborative process may well create a situation for the recovery of land (Rossen 2006, this vol.), or it may open a dialogue about cultural affiliation for sites on privately held land (Adler and Bruning 2007). Those communities with reservation land often approach collaborative archaeology differently since the connection between land and sovereignty already exists. Communities may desire archaeological documentation of their historical and cultural sites to assist their larger goals of preservation, research, and perhaps development, but the decision to tamper with the land in an archaeological way rests with their authority. Community structure for both Indigenous community member and archaeologist reveals a fourth feature of collaborative indigenous archaeology, as it begs the important question: With whom do archaeologists collaborate, and in what capacity? The inverse is equally pertinent: With whom exactly do Indigenous communities believe themselves to be collaborating? Archaeologists tend to talk about collaboration as though the parties involved are self-evident, but they rarely are (Blume 2006; Zimmerman 2005). Do archaeologists collaborate as individuals; as rep-
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resentatives of their universities, museum, or contract archaeology firm; as members of the professional discipline; or as all of the above? The personal relationships formed in indigenous archaeology projects tend to revolve around individual and personal collaborations, but Native communities may well see the archaeologists who collaborate with them as agents of federal or state governments or their employers. That is, they may try to establish government-to-government relationships. Archaeologists' employers may view it in the same manner. In that case, can archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts, for instance, collaborate on behalf of their department, their university, or even the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Similarly, archaeologists need to be aware of their collaborations in light of Native community structures. Do archaeologists collaborate with individuals in a tribal community, with the Indigenous government (such as a tribal council), with particular political or family constituents, or with the entire tribal nation? Perhaps the answer is frequently: all of the above, but at different times and in different ways. Addressing this question means understanding the Indigenous community's politics, government, and cultural practices to ensure proper dialogue and authority in decision making. It also means situating collaborative projects in a community model rather than an "informant" model (Blume 2006:201-203).
Longevity and Sustainability Collaborators in indigenous archaeology projects need to consider issues of time and continuity. That is, how long do they plan to work together, and will this depend on individual relationships or on community or institutional ties? Will the project establish infrastructure or build capacities that might foster continuity even if personnel change? Since many collaborative indigenous projects grow organically as various participants sort out their relationships to one another and as goals change and mature, it would be unwise to have a precise answer to these questions at the outset. However, it would be equally unwise to enter these collaborative projects thinking of them as either onetime events or lifelong marriages. A balance must be struck. Archaeologists and Native people should envision these collaborations as long-term relationships that involve both professional and personal connections, because only
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after extended conversations, deep investment in shared projects, and the development of trust can such collaborative indigenous projects mature (e.g., Lightfoot, Nicholas, this vol.). But participants must remain cognizant that the project may have a definite end. The latter does not involve ending personal relationships that may well last for many years (e.g., Smith and Jackson 2007), but it does recognize that many factors can bring about the end of a particular archaeological project. I refer not to negative situations like an ethical violation, a breach of contract, cultural insensitivity, or personality conflicts, but, instead, to the possibility that projects may simply run their course or need a hiatus. Native communities may decide that they have had enough archaeology for a while or that they need to prioritize other activities in light of financial or personnel constraints, as Kerber (this vol.) has outlined in New York. Turnover in tribal governments may change the dynamics of a collaborative project and bring about its dissolution. Academic archaeologists who receive funding from external or university grants may find themselves out of money if tribal communities cannot take up the financial slack. On the other hand, Native communities that have conducted collaborative indigenous archaeology for years may find themselves able to support their own tribal archaeology program as part of self-determination and sovereignty and may (or may not) choose to diminish their collaborative relationships outside of the tribe. The case of the Mashantucket Pequot shows continued collaboration (Jones and McBride 2006), but the case of the Navajo Nation reveals its strong movement toward being a Navajo operation (Two Bears 2006, this vol.). The Mohegan Tribe may well be headed in a similar direction (Bendremer and Thomas, this vol.). When a project does end, the collaboration that preceded it should not be considered a failure, but rather a time-sensitive success. The goal should be sustainability of collaborative products, infrastructure, or personal relationships rather than simply duration of specific projects.
Pedagogy The literature on collaborative indigenous archaeology has blossomed since 2000, following the seminal texts of Watkins (2000), Dongoske et al. (2000), and Thomas (2000), but a gap still exists in the realm of
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pedagogy. People have talked about collaborative indigenous archaeology in practice and in theory, but few have ventured into discussing collaborative indigenous archaeology in education. How do we take the insights and methods that develop in on-the-ground research projects and among living communities into university and college classrooms, archaeological field schools, or even to younger generations still in primary or secondary school? Collaborative indigenous archaeology produces a different kind of research, but does it produce a different kind of pedagogy as well? Several contributors in this book think that it does and that it should (Atalay, Mills et al., Nicholas, Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this. vol.). Therefore, we must attend to figuring out how to expose students to the ethics, methodologies, theories, and practices of collaborative indigenous archaeology. The impacts can be felt in the classroom and in the overall curriculum that have indigenous and collaborative archaeologists on the faculty. One way involves the integration of Indigenous perspectives into traditional cultural resource management curriculum, as Hunter (this vol.) has detailed for the graduate program at Northern Arizona University, or into any level of university education in anthropology or archaeology majors. Atalay's (this vol.) provocative chapter charts another way through the blending of critical pedagogy by scholars like Freire (1970, 1998)-a kind of education for liberation-with the Indigenous perspectives on decolonizing education and methodology from such scholars as Smith (1999). Her insights cover a range of public, critical, participatory, and Indigenous educational formats. A third way involves taking collaborative methodologies into a younger generation, much like Handsman and McBride (this vol.) have done in their approach to Zuni and Mashantucket Pequot "informal science learners" through the vehicle of archaeology. This involves not just simple outreach, but a fundamental rethinking of how to teach archaeology and "science" to young people, particularly Native American youth, with an eye toward indigenous and very collaborative approaches to knowledge. Others in the book opt to reconsider the fundamental building block of Americanist archaeology-the archaeological field school-from a perspective borne of collaborative indigenous archaeology. In fact, this constitutes one thematic section of the volume. The archaeological field
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school traditionally has been a venue for students to "cut their teeth" in archaeology and to decide if it offers a viable educational and career path for them. As a result, the format has focused frequently on teaching empirical methods rather than on teaching critical perspectives and making a difference in social and cultural communities (but see Gonzalez et al. 2006; Huculak 2003; Mills 2005; Pyburn 2003; Walker and Saitta 2002). Several chapters in this book revisit the archaeological standard and explore ways of making the field school a transformative, communitycentered, responsive, ethical, and critical pedagogical space (Bendremer and Thomas, Lightfoot, Mills et al., Nicholas, Silliman and Sebastian Dring). These concerns truly sit at the trowel's edge or, as suggested above, with the trowel's handle.
Conclusion The dimensions of collaborative indigenous archaeology are many, but this introduction and the chapters that follow try to outline the ways that these have taken form and have begun to have considerable impacts in archaeological and descendent communities. Its impacts are even being felt in feminist archaeology (Conkey 2005). Although the successes are noteworthy thus far, we all still have much to learn and much to experiment with to propel archaeology into the kind of discipline that works not only pragmatically and critically but also ethically and responsibly. In some ways, it seems appropriate to end this chapter with the assistance of fellow archaeologists who have already made important comments about the process outlined here. Many of us are convinced that to achieve a decolonized archaeology, collaboration will be a necessity (e.g., Atalay, Lightfoot, Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.) and the process will be challenging. The decolonization of Indigenous archaeology is a considerable task, and it is a task that must be shared by both Indigenous and nonIndigenous people. This is not a task that Indigenous people should be asked to undertake alone. Since archaeology underwrote many of the stereotypes of colonialism, Indigenous peoples have a right to expect archaeologists to assist with the decolonization of archaeology. (Smith and Jackson 2006:312)
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This statement strikes a positive, rather than a negative, chord for the burden that archaeologists bear. Instead of heaping insurmountable guilt upon archaeologists, the perspective that this book promotes is one of taking responsibility for the past, present, and future. Once archaeologists take responsibility for their discipline's composition, history, and practices, then archaeologists and Indigenous communities can jointly, collaboratively, and cooperatively take responsibility for narrating vibrant, respectful, and honest histories (e.g., McGuire 2003). Another article in the American Indian Quarterly issue from which the Smith and Jackson statement above was drawn highlights this eloquently: I argue that if archaeologists and Indigenous people are to be successful stewards of the archaeological record, we must begin to explore ways of moving beyond posturings that pit science against religion or polarize interests oflndigenous people against archaeologists, and I advocate for a collaborative approach that blends the strengths of Western archaeological science with the knowledge and epistemologies of Indigenous peoples to create a set of theories and practices for an ethically informed study of the past, history, and heritage. (Atalay 2006a:301)
Similarly, in both contractual and partnership projects, the final results need to represent the fruits of negotiations between the Indigenous community and archaeologists. In this way the final results can be true to the belief and aspirations of both parties. While some archaeologists may feel such negotiated results compromise the scientific integrity of research, it is our experience that Indigenous communities have no desire to jeopardize the quality of scientific research on their heritage. The issue is about ensuring that interpretations do not jeopardize the cultural integrity and significance of cultural (archaeological) materials. (McNiven and Russell 2005:240)
These perspectives balance a position on advocacy with a position on rigorous anthropology. We will need this balance to confront any accusations of pandering to ethnic nationalists or to special interest groups or embedding ourselves in identity politics. All who do this kind of archaeology know this is not what the broader movement entails.
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Collaborative indigenous archaeology is fundamentally about making better histories, better sciences, and better communities. Collaborative indigenous archaeology may someday itself be a thing of the past, but those of us who do this kind of archaeology will only let that happen once we are certain that the methodologies, practices, and pedagogies outlined in this chapter and throughout this book have become mainstream and no longer require such a label. Yet until the "mainstream" offers a more critical perspective on academics and politics, this movement of collaborative indigenous archaeological troweling to the center will be a long time in coming. Notes I. As editor, I have chosen to standardize the various uses of the word "indigenous" throughout the volume. "Indigenous" is capitalized when it refers to the broad identity of groups who continue to negotiate their sovereignty and selfdetermination in colonial, settler, postcolonial, and neocolonial worlds. Therefore, uses such as "Indigenous perspectives," "Indigenous people," or "Indigenous groups" denote this meaning (see Smith and Wobst 2005a:16). On the other hand, we do not capitalize the word when it is contained within the phrases "collaborative indigenous archaeology" or "indigenous archaeology" because this usage has a more general and less fixed meaning and would make the phraseology a little casecumbersome with the capitalization. Admittedly, this might be an arbitrary choice, but it seems to work decently well in the current volume. 2. I have opted to avoid standardizing the label that authors use to refer to Indigenous people of the Americas. Because Indigenous people on the continent have different preferences for what they want to be called-such as Native American, American Indian, Indian, California Indian, First Nations, and so on - it seemed problematic to impose a standard in this volume. Instead, authors use the terminology and referents that they feel are best suited to their case.
PART 1
Methods and Practices in Archaeological Field Schools
l Field Schools without Trowels Teaching Archaeological Ethics and Heritage Preservation in a Collaborative Context
Barbara J. Mills, Mark Altaha, John R. Welch, and T. J. Ferguson
Over the past two decades, North American archaeology has been redefined. Employment and research opportunities in cultural resources management companies, historic preservation programs, tribal museums, and government agencies have increased dramatically (Anyon et al. 2000). Research with, for, and by Native American communities is now in the forefront of American archaeology, whether conducted in academic or nonacademic settings (Ferguson 1996b; Nicholas and Andrews 1997; Swidler et al. 1997; Watkins 2000, 2003). Dramatic growth in the quantity and functional scope of cultural heritage management programs in Indigenous communities is fueling demand for professionals with diverse skill sets that include the capacity to develop consensus agendas for stewardship and research. To prepare students for new positions that involve mutually beneficial collaborations, innovative archaeological training programs are needed. Consequently, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School and the White Mountain Apache Tribe set out a goal to train students in this new archaeological milieu. Complementing this goal was that of expanding and enhancing tribal capacities for archaeological preservation. Archaeological field training is a crucial complement to classroom instruction at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and as such its restructuring is necessary to prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of archaeological research in the twenty-first century. Fieldwork is becoming increasingly community oriented, collaborative, and participatory. Exactly how we teach students to design and effectively participate in collaborative projects, however, needs more explicit dis-
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cussion (see Lightfoot, Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). In this chapter we describe how ethics and heritage management were taught in the southwestern United States during a three-year-long collaboration between the University of Arizona and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. Although traditional field methods such as excavation, survey, and laboratory analyses were also included as components of the field school, the primary focus of training was to provide students with the skills necessary for working in and with Indigenous communities. The curriculum was explicitly designed to address an integrated management and research agenda agreed upon by the tribe and the university. This approach allowed specific benefits to flow to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, while students were taught to value contemporary American Indian culture, ethics, and heritage management, as well as learn traditional field and laboratory techniques. Although White Mountain Apache perspectives and interests received special emphasis, the field school also incorporated collaborations with representatives of the Hopi Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni. This chapter discusses how our collaborations evolved over three seasons. It emphasizes how tribal and university-based field school goals can converge to provide specific benefits for all participants. We close by considering the challenges we were unable to completely overcome and commenting on the growing potential for archaeological field schools in North America to train a new generation of archaeologists to transform and "decolonize" archaeological practice. In our approach, collaboration was planned and carried out cooperatively, and most important, benefits accrued to all project participants through balanced reciprocity and commitment to common goals. This chapter describes how we proposed the collaboration, organized our instruction, and designed the work so that all parties benefited. We then assess some of the results and issues that came up during the three-year project. Ultimately, our collaboration was about teaching students with different backgrounds about how to work with tribes, engaging tribal members in discussions with archaeologists to increase understanding of how tribal and archaeological goals may converge, and applying archaeological skill sets to historic preservation problems and needs identified by the White Mountain Apache Tribe.
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The Collaborative Context: The White Mountain Apache Tribe Apache history and culture are literally "grounded" - nothing is more important to Apaches than the land. White Mountain Apache trust lands are home to about 15,000 people, 14,000 of whom are tribal members. The rapidly growing size of the population necessitates major development of infrastructure and housing. Understanding the tribe's interest and participation in the field school requires an appreciation of some of the challenges the White Mountain Apache face as they simultaneously address increasing development and deepening concerns about how Apache history, language, and culture can be carried into the future. Challenges and opportunities are embedded in the land and in Apache history. First, because of geography and history, intertribal collaborations are essential, and the White Mountain Apache have long histories of working with the Hopi and Zuni pueblos as well as other Apache tribes. Second, for complex reasons involving colonialism as well as Apache culture, there are very few academically trained Apache archaeologists-two in Arizona. Both were trained by the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Pinedale. The first is Vernelda Grant, who is now the tribal archaeologist and historic preservation officer for the San Carlos Apache Tribe, and the other is Nicholas Laluk, who attended the first year of the field school's collaboration with the White Mountain Apache Tribe described in this chapter and is currently a graduate student at the University of Arizona and an employee of the Coronado National Forest. This fact, along with justified suspicions about non-Apache uses ofApache cultural heritage, have made planning, inventory, education, and preservation programs linked to Apache cultural heritage difficult to develop. Nonetheless, with more than twentyfive hundred documented heritage sites and countless sacred sites to protect and oversee, the tribe recognizes that it needs help. The reasons why the White Mountain Apache Tribe wanted to collaborate in the field school include (1) the difficulty and cost of intertribal collaboration; (2) maximizing the tribe's resources, which have been spread thin in providing basic services to tribal members; (3) recognizing that the tangible elements of Apache cultural heritage are elusive
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and that there has been little successful archaeological research involving the Apache; and (4) the prior focus of Apache leaders and communities on language perpetuation and sacred sites protection rather than preservation of material remains. These factors led the tribe to embrace the idea of a joint field school with the University of Arizona. The concept of placing standard archaeological survey, excavation, and lab work on the same level as preservation and stewardship-of making archaeology only one of the tools in the cultural heritage stewardship toolkit-appealed to the tribe.
The Changing Contexts of Southwestern Field Schools The southwestern United States, more than any other geographic area, has been used as a training ground for the education of archaeological students. Over the last century, the interaction between archaeologists and Native Americans at field schools in the Southwest has significantly changed (see Mills 2005 for a longer discussion of this history). Early field schools employed tribal members as laborers rather than as participants, a practice consistent with the colonial model for archaeology still practiced in many areas of the world. Native American students were rarely recruited for or incorporated into field schools until the end of the twentieth century. As other contributions to this volume demonstrate, field schools today are working hard to train a diversity of students, including Native Americans, in contemporary ethical, legal, and professional responsibilities, while at the same time continuing to teach a wide range of up-to-date field techniques. There is an effort to engage students in understanding the social and political implications of modern archaeological research. Nonetheless, the number of Native American students who have attended archaeological field schools in the Southwest is remarkably low. Several factors have precluded more widespread participation, including the cost of attending, a poor tribal image of archaeologists as being primarily interested in burials, and the fact that those students who are interested in archaeology and heritage issues often find employment and learn archaeological techniques on the job (Mills 2000; see Hunter, this vol.). In addition, some tribal communities (including the White
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Mountain Apaches, see Welch 2000) have cultural proscriptions against working with archaeological materials and people who engage in archaeology. Those tribal members who do participate in archaeology often go through extensive and sometimes expensive ceremonies to ensure their · well-being. Despite these hurdles, many Native American communities in the Southwest have active heritage preservation programs. Tribal offices and businesses conduct archaeological field and laboratory work on and off their reservations, provide jobs for tribal members, promote heritage issues within their communities, and often house the contact person for consultation on implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and cultural property issues (Two Bears, this vol.). Tribal historic preservation officers (THPO) have taken over state historic preservation office (SHPO) responsibilities in a growing number of southwestern communities. These initiatives significantly further goals of tribal sovereignty and self-governance by engaging heritage preservation issues and interests. We saw a clear need for training Native American students in archaeological field schools, especially if tribal members are to become principal investigators, project directors, and program directors in their reservation-based organizations. Moreover, non-Native students need to understand how the social and political landscape of contemporary archaeology has changed, and they, too, need to learn the social and technical skills of archaeological fieldwork incorporating Native communities. These factors were our impetus for establishing a collaborative field school between the University of Arizona and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. We saw an opportunity to offer a different kind of a field school-one almost entirely "without trowels." Our vision was to design a field school that could be used to teach the new kinds of profe~sional skills needed to work in the ever-changing context of archaeology in North America and around the world. Instead of emphasizing excavation, we supported heritage management and ethics by balancing the archaeological research agenda with projects that directly benefited the Native American community with which we worked. We accomplished this by tailoring the research agenda to intersect with the needs and interests articulated by tribal members and tribal employees.
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How the Collaboration Evolved In 1993, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School began a decade-long research project based out of a field camp in Pinedale, Arizona, on Sitgreaves National Forest land (fig. 2.1). The primary focus of fieldwork was in the Silver Creek drainage at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. The Mogollon Rim defines the boundary between the Sitgreaves National Forest on the north and the Fort Apache Indian Reservation (i.e., White Mountain Apache lands) on the south, one of the Southwest's largest and most geographically diverse reservations. For the first seven field seasons of the Silver Creek Archaeological Research Project (SCARP) we worked exclusively on Sitgreaves National Forest land. During this time, fieldwork concentrated on archaeological test excavations at Ancestral Pueblo sites occupied from AD 1000 to 1400, with a small survey component to round out the curriculum. Our goals were to understand settlement dynamics and the changes in social, economic, and political organization that accompanied late-thirteenthcentury migrations from the Four Corners, ushering in what is known as the Pueblo III to IV period transition (see Mills 1998; Mills et al. 1999; and the SCARP Web page at http://web.arizona.edu/ ~scarp/index.htm for summaries). Interactions with local Indigenous communities were a part of the Pinedale field school's research from the start. As required by the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), our permit for research was reviewed by several tribes, and a memorandum of understanding was signed by representatives of the Hopi, Zuni, White Mountain Apache, and Navajo tribes. Between 1993 and 1998, members of the Zuni Cultural Resources Advisory Team and the White Mountain Apache Cultural Advisory Board were given tours of the archaeological sites and hosted in camp. As described in the "Working Together" column for the Society for American Archaeology Bulletin, however, these visits were short and not entirely satisfactory for any of the parties (Mills 2000). The students, including members of several southwestern tribes over the years, did not have enough time to interact with the visiting community members, and there was not enough meaningful input into our research by the tribes. During this period, tribal advisory groups were facing growing demands
Archaeological Ethics and Heritage Preservation
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..,
0
1,rip..,. ;~
.. (
•. ,
Location of the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Pinedale and places cited in the text on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.
2.1.
for their time to consult on many CRM (cultural resource management) and NAGPRA-related projects. The visits were always cordial and useful to the research program, but we felt that more fundamental changes were required to create a field school that offered true benefits to the affected tribal communities. In 1999 and 2000, we worked with the Hopi Tribe on mapping the Bryant Ranch Pueblo, but even this did not fulfill our goal for more intensive collaboration. After a break in fieldwork in 2001, the senior author found herself in a position to rethink how the field school should be organized. By that time the field school had conducted seven seasons of fieldwork on the Sitgreaves National Forest, excavated seven Ancestral Pueblo sites dating between AD 1000 and 1325, and completed a two-volume monograph (Mills et al. 1999). Although one could spend a lifetime conduct-
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ing archaeology in the area, and there were still ongoing student theses and dissertations, a turning point had been reached. We had made a significant research contribution to the archaeology of the area, but we had done so within a traditional model of a late-twentieth-century field school with an emphasis on our research goals and an excavation focus. We had not fully explored alternative ways of teaching archaeological practice in the field, and we had not used our location just north of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation to intensively collaborate with our closest Native American neighbors. The White Mountain Apache Tribe had hosted forty seasons of University of Arizona archaeological field schools, first at K.inishba, under the direction of Byron Cummings (Cummings 1940; Welch 2007), then at Forestdale Valley under Emil Haury (Haury 1989), and more recently at Grasshopper, under the direction of Raymond Thompson, William Longacre, and J. Jefferson Reid (Longacre and Reid 1974; Longacre et al. 1982; Reid and Whittlesey 1999). John Welch, a graduate of the University of Arizona PhD program and a former assistant director at the Grasshopper field school, became the Bureau oflndian Affairs (BIA) archaeologist for the Fort Apache Agency and, simultaneously, the White Mountain Apache Tribe's historic preservation officer. With input from Welch's staff, the tribal council, and the cultural resources director, Ramon Riley, Mills and Welch applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. This grant provided the resources for a three-year field school in Native American archaeology and heritage preservation. Our determination to broaden the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School experience to include close collaboration with the tribe coincided with the tribe's interest in engaging more tribal members in cultural heritage stewardship. The tribe established its Heritage Program in 1996 to integrate diverse interests in cultural perpetuation and heritage stewardship. The overall goals of the Heritage Program include repatriation and cultural documentation, museum and collections management, and historic preservation and oversight of the Fort Apache Historic Park (Welch 2000:74; see also Anyon et al. 2000). A new collaboration with the University of Arizona was seen as a means to further these goals, as well as an opportunity to rebuild a relationship that had become strained over the university's role in the construction of an as-
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tronomical observatory atop Mount Graham, one of the Apache's most sacred mountains (Welch 1997). Benefits desired by the tribe were written into the agreement between the field school and the tribe. As articulated in a June 2001 tribal council resolution authorizing Heritage Program participation in the preparation and submission of the NSF proposal, the field school was to provide the following: Tribal member training in cultural heritage stewardship 2. Assistance in documenting and restoring vandalized sites 3. Cultural heritage resource inventory of areas likely to be developed 4. Support for enhancement and implementation of interpretive and visitor use plans for the Fort Apache Historic Park and the Kinishba Ruins National Historic Landmark 5. Tribal member preference in participation in the field school 6. No excavations on tribal lands 7. Exclusive ownership and control by the White Mountain Apache Tribe of all information and materials collected from the reservation 8. Ongoing consultations regarding field school policies and procedures having the potential to affect Apache heritage resources located both on and off tribal lands 9. Sharing of administrative funds 1.
The tribal council resolutior.i set the agenda for our three-year collaboration. Instead of the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School requesting access to reservation resources based primarily on research interests, which had been the pattern in the past, the tribe identified specific areas where we could help. In addition, the tribe maintained its rights over the physical materials and information we collected during the project. All of the conditions set by the tribe were met in the design and implementation of the field school. In the remainder of this chapter we discuss how we incorporated tribal interests into the field school organization and pedagogy.
Field School Structure and Pedagogy A major focus of the field school was to demonstrate, through participatory activities, the scientific and stewardship benefits of cooperative research in archaeology. This was coupled with a research objective
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to investigate Native American archaeology of the Mogollon Rim region in a manner that contributed to both heritage preservation and science. An overarching goal was expanding the archaeologist's basic skill set by providing students with practical knowledge to work in tribal heritage management and collaboration, while simultaneously meeting the needs of the tribe. The students were told at the outset that the tribe had selected the areas that we would work in, the kinds of activities that were allowable, and the extent of future research with the materials. All participants in the field school, staff and students, signed a nondisclosure agreement acknowledging tribal ownership of the information and material collected on the reservation and agreeing to obtain the tribe's permission prior to using data or images in research and publications. Student activities varied as they rotated through modules focused on ruins preservation, inventory survey, damage assessment, and excavation. All activities except for the limited excavations were conducted on tribal lands, and digging was a relatively minor part of our curriculum hence, our tide, "field schools without trowels." Trowels were one of the least used tools that students became familiar with. Instead, mapping equipment, GPS receivers, cameras, computers, data recorders, and the concepts of community collaboration were emphasized. We applied the idea of working "at the trowel's edge," coined by Berggren and Hodder (2003), by encouraging students to explore and express different perspectives about archaeology during the course of each summer. Discussions about archaeology revolved around the role of our discipline in the twenty-first century and how archaeology is relevant to contemporary social and political issues. Students were consistently exposed to different cultural attitudes about archaeology, many of which contrasted with the ideas they brought to the field school based on their previous education. Even those students who came from Native American communities other than the White Mountain Apache Tribe were exposed to new ways of thinking about the past. Presentations were given by White Mountain Apache tribal members and Heritage Program staff, visiting tribal members from other southwestern communities, and, in one of the three years, a Native American teaching assistant. The non-Native American students enrolled included several members of other minority groups, international students, and domestic students from all over the country-all of whom had different back-
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grounds and training to bring to the discussions. The diversity in field school participants created multiple opportunities for students to gain exposure to a variety of new perspectives articulated by students, staff, visiting speakers, and community members encountered in the field and camp. With the exception of the White Mountain Apache tribal members invited to speak at the field school, and the members of the Heritage Program staff, there was only limited interaction with community members. In part this limited interaction was designed to protect the cultural privacy highly valued by tribal members. It was also because, aside from the first week of fieldwork in the vicinity of Fort Apache and Whiteriver, we spent most of our field time in the relatively isolated Forestdale Valley. This valley contains no year-round residences and is distant from the political and social hubs of the reservation. The relatively few community members the students met in this area either were affiliated with the tribe's cattle association, had farming plots in the valley, or visited one of the active springs. Student projects provided an opportunity for a few students to work more directly with community members. Oral history projects were carried out each summer with Apache and off-reservation Mormon cultural experts. In addition to investigating Apache use of the Forestdale Valley, one of the directives from the tribe was to identify all components of historic occupation in the valley, one of which was the brief Mormon settlement in the late nineteenth century. Other projects involving community members included the preparation of an interpretive history of the valley that could be used in different levels of the K-12 curriculum (accomplished by two students) and creation of a poster explaining the activities of the tribe's Heritage Program. Another project, conducted by White Mountain Apache student Nicholas Laluk, entailed interviewing Apache elders to document their perspectives on artifacts collected at an Apache Scout camp near Fort Apache. Laluk began the mapping and collection of the site while he was an intern with the Heritage Program. He subsequently entered the University of Arizona graduate program and completed his MA thesis on the project (Laluk 2005). The first field module that all students participated in was on masonry ruins preservation and interpretation, facilitated by personnel from the National Park Service's (NPS) Vanishing Treasures initiative, under
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the direction of Todd Metzger, and members of the tribe's Heritage Program. This module encouraged students to consider the long-range preservation and public presentation of sites employed in research. The module was conducted at Kinishba Ruins National Historic Landmark, where the tribe in partnership with state and federal agencies as well as the Hopi Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni has been addressing preservation and visitor-use issues for a decade (fig. 2.2). Kinishba is an Ancestral Pueblo site that was primarily occupied in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although Apaches seldom claim to have built or occupied pueblos, they respect them as features of ancestral landscapes and reflections of the power and industry of Zuni and Hopi ancestors. Kinishba was excavated in the 1930s by Byron Cummings, with the assistance of a large number of White Mountain Apache tribal members (Welch 2007). Cummings and his crews rebuilt more than half of the two hundred rooms that they dug and constructed a small museum to house collections. Unfortunately, owing to design flaws and a lack of funds and maintenance, many sections of the rebuilt pueblo have now collapsed into a ruin for a second time. Our work focused on aiding the Heritage Program in the preservation of Kinishba, including stabilization of collapsing walls. The NPS instructors taught students stateof-the-art techniques for documentation and preservation of architecture. Students participated in planning the tribe's interpretive program by discussing the cultural, economic, and preservation issues associated with archaeological research, trails, guidebooks, and community relations. The Kinishba Ruins preservation module provided several important opportunities for teaching new concepts. First, because Kinishba had been the location of an earlier University of Arizona archaeological field school, we were able to engage students in discussions of the history of archaeological field schools, the changing goals and strategies of field research, and the expense and ethics of preserving and interpreting the archaeological record exposed by excavation. Our field school students were literally assessing and stabilizing the walls of rooms that had been excavated by an earlier generation of University of Arizona field school students. Second, because most of the initial reconstruction of Kinishba had been done by Apache tribal members under Cummings's direction, it also provided us with a chance to illustrate how the signifi-
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Kinishba Ruins restoration, Arizona,
2002.
37
(Photo by Barbara Mills)
cance of a place can be based on mulciple criteria and use of mulciple groups. Although the original settlement had been occupied by Ancestral Puebloans, through the participation of Apache tribal members in the reconstruction many Apache families still have direct ties to the site. Third, the students were introduced to the staff, facilities, and goals of the tribe's Heritage Program and the Culcural Center, located only a few miles away from Kinishba at Fort Apache. Kinishba is also close to the tribal and BIA offices at Whiteriver, where the students were first given an orientation and where they got to see the economic and political center of the reservation. Conducted during the opening week of the field school, the Kinishba preservation module laid a foundation for understanding the issues of multiple claims on a site, as well as the different cultural programs of the tribe. The module provided hands-on training in the ruins preservation process itself-much of it taught by tribal members. The field school's research program on tribal lands focused on archaeological survey of the Forestdale Valley, where Emil Haury worked out the Mogollon sequence in the late 1930s. Apache use of this valley
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will likely increase in the future, so relocating sites recorded by Haury and conducting an inventory survey provided the tribe with muchneeded information to guide future development. Once more, our students were following in the footsteps of an earlier generation of University of Arizona Field School students, and again within a different kind of field school model. Although the valley was an important complement to our field school surveys conducted in the Sitgreaves Forest, the survey module in the Forestdale Valley emphasized collection of data to support the tribe's management objectives and the Heritage Program's ongoing project of documenting Apache oral traditions, cultural landscapes, and tribal histories. To these ends, the survey included an unprecedented focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century use of the valley. This included a series of student projects involving Apache elders and cultural specialists as interpreters of the valley and its archaeological record. Each year we contacted several Apache tribal members who use the Forestdale Valley, and these tribal members were involved in student projects, including an MA thesis by one of our teaching assistants (Jelinek 2005). Even though only a few students conducted the interviews, all of the students were exposed to current method and theory in oral history, presented by one of our faculty mentors, Andrea Smith, an assistant professor at Lafayette College (Smith 2005). In addition, information about the sites provided by community members was used in the archaeological recording of the sites and shared among the crews. The survey data that we collected were integrated into the inventory of sites maintained by the tribe, a database managed separately from the statewide AZSITE computerized inventory. One of the student projects entailed compiling a valuable concordance of sites recorded during Haury's work in the 1930s, the tribe's cultural resources management program (FAIRsite), and our field school survey. Over the three summers, 124 sites were recorded in a 2.9-square-mile area. Of these, 82 sites have precontact components, while 54 have historic components. The concordance now allows the Heritage Office to add previously unrecorded sites to their site files and update existing site records with more accurate locational information. One of the reasons that the Forestdale Valley had been identified as in need of survey is because it lies only
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eight miles south of Show Low, a commercial center for the Mogollon Rim area. The tribe anticipates that there will be increased development of the valley by tribal members, and the site inventory, which includes some of the most significant Ancestral Puebloan sites on the reservation, will be an important planning tool in the future. Although we used AZSITE standards for site documentation, the tribe does not enter sites on its reservation into the AZSITE system, and the rationale for maintaining a proprietary system was used to discuss how the tribe asserts its sovereignty and cultural property rights while recognizing those of other nations. By maintaining its own site file, researchers who want access to site data for the reservation first need to get the permission for the research from the White Mountain Apache Tribe. These issues further reinforced the terms of the nondisclosure agreement the tribe required all students and staff to sign. Instruction about the social and political context of these agreements was included as part of student training. Several students have taken the next step by contacting the tribe for permission to work further with the data (see similar case in Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). In addition to the MA thesis mentioned above, two honor's theses, one at the University of Kansas and one at the University of Michigan, were completed by field school students under these agreements. In addition, a symposium on field school research was held at the 2005 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SM), and one of the teaching assistants has received permission to conduct geoarchaeological sampling for his PhD dissertation. The module dealing with the mapping and damage assessment of vandalized sites was explicitly tailored to provide the tribe with tools for combating looting in the Forestdale Valley and across their lands. One of the most important goals of the field school was to aid the tribe in its effort to repair the damage caused by illegal pothunting on the reservation. Sites in the Forestdale Valley have been especially hard hit because the valley is near a major highway. Its distance from Whiteriver, where tribal law enforcement personnel are based, makes it difficult to patrol. Hundreds oflooter's pits have been dug into sites in the Forestdale Valley, especially at the two largest pueblos of Forestdale Ruin and Tundastusa. Charles Riggs, assistant professor at Fort Lewis College,
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provided student instruction in total station mapping of the sites-information essential in documenting and keeping track of new looting disturbances. At Tundastusa and the Forestdale Ruin, where vandals had seriously damaged habitation areas and desecrated burials, we developed a training and resource management protocol that integrated the collection of data about the extent of disturbance and the contents of backdirt piles with the restoration of the site by backfilling potholes. The data collected were used in preparation of damage assessment reports following Society for American Archaeology (SM) guidelines for determining the archaeological value caused by violations of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (1979). We were allowed to collect artifacts from the damaged areas for analysis and use in student research projects concerning chronology, typology, and other topics. At the end of the summer, these artifacts were returned to the looted areas and placed in their respective potholes, which were then filled to restore the original ground surface. By restoring the surface, the tribe will be able to document all new damage at the site and determine if it postdated the work of the field school. Student participation in the reburial of artifacts at the site was an important learning tool for understanding the principles behind repatriation and reburial. Our willingness to put things back and to restore the site was an important point to the occasional community members who came by to see what we were doing. When we told them we were archaeologists and that we were filling up the holes, rather than digging them, they would laugh good-naturedly and wish us good luck. Students also rotated through one week of excavations at a site in the Sitgreaves National Forest. In keeping with the preservation ethic that underpinned the field school, only sites previously damaged by forest fires and vandalism were chosen for excavation. The need for data recovery and stabilization of sites grew immensely in 2002, the first year of our three-year program, because of the devastating effects of the Rodeo-Chediski fire, which engulfed nearly half a million acres of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, Sitgreaves National Forest, and nearby private lands. Students enrolled that summer saw the fire firsthand as we were evacuated from our camp at Pinedale for nearly two weeks. During
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the subsequent two seasons, we excavated sites in the burn area that the U.S. Forest Service identified as needing work. Excavation was optional for the Native American participants, but all chose to participate. Other shared experiences included afternoon laboratory processing and analysis also more typical of traditional field schools. These laboratory analyses transformed into independent research projects conducted by each student, which ranged from artifact analyses, to GIS analyses of the survey sites in the Forestdale Valley, to oral histories with tribal cultural advisors and preparation of materials for local teachers.
Teaching Ethics The ethics component, coordinated by T. J. Ferguson, was an important part of the field school because it provided an opportunity for students to explore how contemporary archaeologists balance their professional responsibilities to Indigenous peoples with their scholarly commitment to science. This is rarely an easy or straightforward task because different values are involved that can be difficult to reconcile. Six lecture and discussion sessions were held each summer to engage students with the major ethical issues facing archaeologists working with descendent communities, and to highlight the practical and successful solutions that have been achieved. The first ethics session was devoted to a discussion of various standards of ethics used in archaeology, including the ethical principles or codes of conduct promulgated by the Society for American Archaeology, Register of Professional Archaeologists, and World Archaeological Congress. In the second and third summers, this discussion was supplemented with a consideration of virtue ethics, an alternative theory of ethics predicated on cultivating good conduct based on positive personal attributes of behavior and attitude (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2004). The basic steps of ethical analysis were reviewed, including defining the issue, considering options, selecting the best alternative, and taking action. This was followed by sessions on legislated ethics and consultation as mandated in the National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and on the ethics of
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research and publication, including the design, implementation, and review of archaeological projects. Each summer several ethics sessions were conducted with Cornelia Hoffman, Ramon Riley, Paul Ethelbah, Doreen Gatewood, Mark Altaha, and other members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. These Apache tribal members discussed their perspectives on consultation, protection of sacred sites, culture and language preservation, and protection of intellectual property rights. The Apache presentations were a highlight of the summer for many students, as they provided exposure to and insights about Indigenous concerns frankly presented in a collegial atmosphere. Learning about Apache beliefs and values concerning the preservation of heritage sites and the spiritual and physical dangers posed by archaeological activities helped everyone think about their work in relation to other cultural systems. The Apaches were gracious in answering the many questions raised by students during these presentations, and this greatly enhanced the educational objectives. Many of these presentations were culturally challenging to the students and pushed them outside their "comfort zone." Nonetheless, all the students had positive things to say about their interactions with Apache tribal members, recognizing that they were learning new ways of interacting and understanding. Given the vagaries of scheduling, the sequence and content of ethics sessions with tribal members varied from summer to summer. One summer, for instance, most of our tribal colleagues were engaged in fighting the Rodeo-Chediski fire, and when Doreen Gatewood, coordinator of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's Sacred Sites Program, was finally available one evening, she combined a discussion of sacred sites with a consideration of how the forest fire was adversely affecting the wellbeing and harmony of the Apache people. This helped students understand that what may seem like academic issues when considered in a distant classroom are actually vital issues affecting living communities. During the last two summers, we were able to include panel discussions about the ethics of studying cultural affiliation pursuant to NAG PRA with teams of Hopi, Zuni, and Apache tribal members working with the White Mountain Apache Tribe on an intertribal study of land and history (Welch and Ferguson 2005) (fig. 2.3). Listening to the cultural advisors of several tribes discuss their respective histories, how
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Hopi cultural advisors and field school students at Pinedale, Arizona, 2004. (Photo by T. J. Ferguson)
2.3.
these can be documented, and how archaeologists should work with native peoples in this activity provided an important opportunity for students to consider both the common themes and diversity of opinions about these topics. The positive and negative impacts on living tribal members of archaeological studies conducted for NAGPRA were identified. During the first two years, panel discussions were held at the end of four ethics sessions where selected students were asked how they would respond to an ethical dilemma. Their answers were used to clarify the concepts presented earlier in the session. In the third year, these panels were replaced with a single ethics bowl held as the final ethics session. Prior to this event, teams of students were given a series of ethical case studies and asked to prepare statements for a debate on how they would respond to the situation. The teaching assistants at the field school served as the judges, deciding which team won by providing the most complete and appropriate analysis. The ethics bowl proved to be an effective
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means to actively engage students because they spent several weeks discussing the case studies with each other and the staff prior to the competition, and there was a lively discourse as each team saw how other students responded to an issue in a manner similar to or different from their own approach. We were especially pleased when three of the field school teaching assistants were members of the four-person University of Arizona team that won the 2005 SM Ethics Bowl. An important role of field schools is as a place where graduate student staff members learn new skills and take leadership responsibilities. Participation in the SM Ethics Bowl (see http:/ /www.saa.org/aboutSM/committees/ethics/ebowl.html) is one important example of this growth among our own graduate students. Teaching ethics was fully integrated into the curriculum and research program of the field school. This approach demonstrated how archaeologists are accountable for consulting with the groups affected by their research, and how this consultation can establish mutually beneficial working relationships. The ethics component of the field school provided students with practical skills and knowledge needed to meet ethical obligations to Native peoples and, at the same time, advance the scientific study of archaeology. In so doing, the ethics component helped prepare archaeologists for the challenges they will face in their careers.
An Assessment of the Benefits of Collaboration for the White Mountain Apache Tribe The White Mountain Apache Tribe standard for all proposals and projects is that a majority of the benefits-economic, managerial, and educational-must accrue to the tribe and its members (see also Bendremer and Thomas, this vol.). Originally developed by Raymond Kane, this has become known locally as the ' 51 percent rule," or the "Kane rule." This simple standard is misunderstood and off-putting to many researchers, who view it as conflicting with their disciplinary and institutional obligations or as too onerous. In contrast, we found that it provided a measurable goal by which we could develop an educational and research program that benefited the tribe. This standard was developed as a result of many generations of research programs and projects conducted on the tribe's lands, few of which have had significant local bene-
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Table 2.1. Applying Ray Kane's 51 Percent Rule: Assessing the Project from the White Mountain Apache Perspective. Costs, Deficiencies, Liabilities
Benefits, Opportunities, Advantages
r. Access to and disturbance of cultural heritage resources 2. Only one White Mountain Apache tribal member enrolled and graduated 3. Opens up invitation to others to do projects or propose studies 4. Not much public involvement or education 5. No clear plan to extend or take advantage of the benefits 6. Significant impacts to Heritage Program schedule and budget 7. Are cultural historic resources really safer, better preserved now than in 2002? Do we know more about Apache history and culture?
r. Good interpersonal/cultural contacts and communications 2. One White Mountain Apache tribal member graduated 3. Two follow-up UA student projects approved 4. Badly looted sites assessed, mapped, and restored with no new looting 5. Kinishba Project advanced 6. First time in twenty years relations with UA (Mt. Graham) improved 7. Apache perspectives, lands, capacities shared with non-Apaches and non-Indians 8. All data remain under White Mountain Apache tribal control, and researchers are careful in making use requests
fits. Tribal leaders have learned from the recent field school experience and other recent initiatives that the standard can be met and exceeded through creative thinking and a willingness to construct each step in the research process to find ways and means for involving the tribe and its members. As seen in table 2.1, there were both drawbacks and benefits to working with the University of Arizona. The greatest benefit by far for the tribe involved the demystification of the archaeological process and the creation of friendships and collegial relations with university personnel. Members of the tribe's Cultural Advisory Board and Heritage Program staff participated in close collaborations with field school participants over the course of several years. For example, the Kinishba module provided a chance for field school students and staff to join in the tribe's work, rather than vice versa. Training in preservation documentation and treatment is not normally available to students, and this module demonstrated at the begin-
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ning of the season the leadership of the Heritage Program in the field school curriculum. On tribal lands, tribal members must show the way by identifying the goals and methods and parameters for research and stewardship projects. Additional benefits for the White Mountain Apache Tribe focused primarily on management and stewardship. The most important of these included (1) expansion of technical capabilities in mapping and survey, including some equipment acquisitions; (2) identification and evaluation of all or most of the cultural heritage conflicts with future development in Forestdale Valley; (3) restoration of the looter-desecrated sites and the production of detailed maps that will allow the tribe to identify and hopefully prosecute future vandalism episodes; and (4) modest funding for the long-term conservation of records related to the field school and the small number of surface artifact collections. Consultation was treated as a useful and valid way to allocate people and time-an end in itself rather than a means to achieve research goals. Field school staff and students were genuinely interested in hearing Apache perspectives and in putting these views into action. This represents a big change from the typical Section 106 process mandated by the NHPA, where most consultations do not involve real listening or significant project modifications. Although progress was made toward all of the goals the tribe had for the University of Arizona partnership, the list of what the tribe wanted to see resulting from the field school still reads like a list of things the Heritage Program needs on an annual basis, where funding for program activities is particularly scarce. Other pressures were the result of scheduling. Early summer is a busy time for many Apache families and elders. With vacations, increased job duties associated with seasonal employment and the normal fire season, and ceremonial obligations, it was often difficult to involve tribal members and representatives. Nonetheless, Paul Ethelbah and Cornelia Hoffman provided information and oral traditions for student and staff projects focused on Apache sites. In addition, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni elders all helped to guide the damage assessment and repair of looted sites. The field school also provided a hospitable and useful context for visits from Hopi and Zuni cultural representatives. The tribe would have been especially pleased to see more Native stu-
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dents, and Apaches in particular, graduate from the field school. Several Native students attended the field school, though not in the numbers that the community had originally hoped. Apache student participation was low because of long-standing beliefs about the power of archaeological sites and, therefore, the necessity ofleaving them alone. We think the relatively low participation in the field school by members of other Indigenous communities was due to the fact that many students need paid employment during the summer in order to finance their education. The relatively low number of applications parallels the low number of applications to the SAN.s Native American Scholarship Committee, which has an even longer history of funding summer fieldwork. Although the three-year REU grant offered a generous stipend, it took several years for word of this opportunity to disseminate to the professors that advise students of opportunities. Ironically, after the REU program was concluded, a number of Native American students wrote to apply for the program. It is still too early to fully judge whether the "Kane rule" has been met and the majority of the benefits have come to the tribe. Will students and junior staff go on to careers that support and enhance tribal selfgovernance, self-determination, and self-representation? Will the survey data prove useful when they are needed to plan the almost inevitable residential and commercial development of the Forestdale Valley? Will looters return? If so, where will they have learned where and how to dig? Will the maps we made prove useful in investigations and prosecutions? Will the field school inspire young Apaches to pursue careers in cultural heritage stewardship, or discourage them? Will it encourage or dissuade Apache leaders' support for future collaborative projects? And finally, will the tribe secure the resources to set the agenda, plan and prioritize stewardship projects, and establish the partnerships necessary to make additional progress? In the few short years since the project ended, we have seen new collaborations take place between University of Arizona faculty and graduate students and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, less looting in areas that were stabilized, and continued discussion of how archaeologists at the University of Arizona can help serve the interests of the tribe. But, as can be seen, the field school has raised at least as many questions as it has answered.
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Conclusions: What Did the Native and Non-Native Students Learn? The three-year University of Arizona Archaeological Field School in collaboration with the White Mountain Apache Tribe helped to correct some of the damaging preconceptions that archaeologists have about tribal collaborations and that tribal members have about archaeologists. Furthermore, the field school gave recognition to the full spectrum of activities embedded in archaeological fieldwork, from collaboration in research design to implementation. We see our field school structurewhich has expanded the typical survey-excavation-laboratory model to include planning, community collaborations, ruins preservation, site protection and restoration, and site interpretation-as constituting a new (and we think improved) means for exposing students to the dynamic and challenging realities of conducting archaeological fieldwork. By broadening the range of experiences without limiting students' discretion in selecting projects that allow them to develop expertise in one or more areas of special interest, the field school directly engaged the students. Instead of asking only for their heads and hands, we asked them to use their moral sensibilities, their concepts of U.S. history and minority relations, their approaches to planning and problem solving, and their hearts. The archaeology we taught for the last three seasons and plan to continue to teach is an emphatically human enterprise, a fundamental tool in the necessarily collaborative endeavors of cultural heritage stewardship and explorations of the past.
Acknowledgments We wish to thank the Apache elders, especially the White Mountain Apache Tribe's Cultural Advisory Board and Ramon Riley. We thank the White Mountain Apache Tribal Council, especially Chairman Dallas Massey Sr. and Ronnie Lupe, for their support over the years. We also thank former BIA superintendent Ben Nuvamsa; Doreen Gatewood, director of planning and resource conservation for the White Mountain Apache Tribe; and Karl Hoerig, director of the Apache Cultural Museum. In addition, Paul Ethelbah, Cornelia Hoffman, Willard Hoffman, Sunshine Hoffman, Nicholas Laluk, Beverly Malone, and Wesley Malone joined us in the field and in camp to help teach students about ethics and Apache history. We also thank all of the SCARP participants, students and staff, and especially those of the 2002 through 2004 years. Steve Silliman provided excellent leadership in
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organizing the SM session and Amerind seminar. We thank him for his comments on this chapter, as well as those of Kent Lightfoot and Russell Handsman. Funding for the project was through the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites program. Other important benefactors to the White Mountain Apache Heritage Preservation Program include the National Park Service (Save America's Treasures, National NAGPRA, Historic Preservation Fund, American Battlefield Protection Program), Arizona State Parks, and Preserve America. Ahiyi'eh! (Many thanks!)
3
The Tribe and the Trowel An Indigenous Archaeology and the
Mohegan Archaeological Field School
Jeffrey C. Bendremer and Elaine L.
Thomas
The familiar axiomatic passage from the late Vine Deloria Jr. (1969:83) describing anthropologists as a curse exemplifies the fact that many Native Americans have a strong distrust of archaeologists despite some improvement in our conduct and sensitivity in recent years (Deloria 1992, 1995, 1999; Thornton 1998; Watkins 2000; White Deer 1997). This distrust is rooted in a historical pattern of disturbing and exploitative interactions by archaeologists (Downer 1997; Fawcett 1994; Ferguson 1996b; Lurie 1988; McGuire 1997; Thomas 2000; Trigger 1980, 2006; Trope and Echo-Hawk 2001). Consistent with Western scientific tradition, anthropologists systematically extracted cultural information and examples of material culture possessed by Indigenous peoples or held within the land. Much of this fieldwork was premised upon the mistaken assumption that cultural data from "disappearing" societies needed to be "salvaged" and preserved (Dippie 1982; Garza and Powell 2001; McGuire 1997). This assumption was used to justify anthropological methodologies that often contradicted local norms and ideologies of Native Americans and their communities and rejected or marginalized Indigenous histories and oral traditions (Bordewich 1996; Echo-Hawk 1997, 2000a; White Deer 1997; Whitely 1997; Zimmerman 2001). These methods were especially contentious when archaeologists studied human remains, sacred sites, sacred objects, and/or religious beliefs (Deloria 1989; Garza and Powell 2001; Grimes 2001; Thornton 2001; Trope and Echo-Hawk 2001; Watkins 2001; Zimmerman 1997a). Anthropologists' activities tended to reify, objectify, and decontextualize Native Americans and their societies. As Lippert (1997:121) commented, "many Indians were made to feel like interesting specimens rather than people" (see also Bentz 1997). Anthr9pologists, as academicians and so-
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cial scientists, gave the impression that "only scholars had the credentials to define and explain American Indians and that their word should be regarded as definitive and conclusive" (Deloria 1992:595; see also Wax 1997). Ultimately, there was no provision for any binding power or control by Native people, who rightly felt they had an overriding interest in the disposition of their own traditional knowledge and cultural properties. Archaeologists, because they primarily investigate the past, the ancestors and material culture, have been especially problematic to many contemporary Native Americans; they often take possession of the things of the past, excavate and store the remains of ancestors, disturb sacred sites, and make themselves into authorities of tribal history. As Zimmerman (1996a:214) stated: ''Archaeologists often claim to speak for past peoples, however remote. Implicit in this claim is the notion that they, as practitioners of a science, are the only ones capable of doing so. Native Americans do not accept this and challenge the very authority of archaeological knowledge." Some progress has been made in recent years for archaeology, especially in the areas of human remains, grave goods, and sacred objects (McGuire 1997). This is largely owing to legislation such as the Archeological Resources Protection Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act passed because of the increased influence of various tribes and, in the case of NAGPRA, against the opposition of many anthropologists. The result has been, as Trope and EchoHawk (2001:31) note, that "human remains and cultural items can no longer be thought of as merely 'scientific specimens' or 'collectibles.'" As a practical matter, however, there has been little change in archaeological research methods and applications in many parts of North America (Swidler et al. 1997). As Bendremer and Fawcett (1995=3) remarked, "few practical suggestions have been offered to make archaeological methods and research objectives more responsive to the special concerns of Native People." After data collection, Native people are still rarely permitted to participate in the interpretation of cultural data, to critique the resulting literature, to easily access collections of material culture, or to say how cultural information is disseminated. Even considering this long and contentious history, it is our experi-
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ence and the experience of others (see Lightfoot, Mills et al., Rossen, Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.) that collaborative archaeological projects have the potential to provide some redress of the past and a basis for a mutually advantageous and productive partnership for the future. For example, the centerpiece of the Mohegan Archaeology Program is the Mohegan Archaeological Field School (MAFS), directed by the authors and operated under the auspices of the Mohegan Tribe Historic Preservation Department. MAFS was founded in 1995 and has provided thirteen years of archaeological services and research to the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut. It was created explicitly to benefit the Mohegan people and to contribute directly to the interests of the Mohegan Tribe (Bendremer 1996, 1998; Bendremer and Fawcett 1995). From a practical standpoint, the Mohegan Archaeology Program requires the anthropologist to reverse traditional power relationships by recognizing the binding authority of tribal officials and governing bodies. Prior to our first field season, thoughtful consideration of these issues took place: It is understood that some areas of inquiry traditionally pursued by archaeologists, as well as some methods traditionally performed by archaeologists, will be deemed unacceptable by the Mohegan People. The constraints placed on our research will no doubt make some archaeologists wary of the validity of our approach and results .... We disagree and believe that much of the discomfort that will be felt by archaeologists may be related more to issues of power over the direction of archaeological inquiry, archaeological resources, and the artifactual remains. Furthermore, we believe that the active partnership and dialogue between archaeologists and the Mohegan People will provide heretofore unattained insights that will more than compensate for marginally curtailed archaeological activities. And, importantly, by assuming a greater share of the control over its archaeology, the Mohegan Tribe is also accepting responsibility for high quality, productive, scientific archaeological research which also serves the tribe's best interests. (Bendremer and Fawcett 1995=7)
In our case, it is expected that there will be tribal authorization and input in the designation of fieldwork projects, as well as the design,
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methodology, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of information, and the representation of the tribe and its histories. As a result, the Mohegan tribal historian and tribal council and/or council of elders reviews, approves, and authorizes all fieldwork projects. This chapter illustrates how MAPS has accomplished these goals and specifically how tribally based archaeological programs can make a substantive, positive contribution to tribal communities when they incorporate a number of important, overlapping, and complementary attributes (see Mills et al., this vol.): r. The program must foster and promote an "indigenous archaeology" ethos. 2. The program must welcome, solicit, and accept input and involvement by tribal elders, government officials, and tribal members. 3. The program must allow considerable tribal control over projects, objectives, methodologies, interpretation, and written reports. 4. The program must acknowledge tribal control over the use of information generated from archaeological research. 5. The program must include tribal participation as staff. 6. The program must emphasize the spiritual, political, and social dimensions and implications of archaeological work. 7. The program must give as much weight to oral tradition, tribal custom, and community sensibilities as archaeological data. 8. The program must contribute toward a positive image of the tribal community for both tribal members and nontribal participants. 9. The program must provide an educational opportunity to both tribal members and nontribal participants, with an emphasis on the historical and contemporary issues of archaeology and Native Americans. 10. The program must include substantial participation by and training of tribal students of all ages.
Indigenous Archaeology Our ancestors and our spirits would prefer for the archaeology to be left alone. But the world is changing and you have to live today. If you found anything in the cemetery, I'd be very upset. But when you look at where our people lived, that's helping me learn a better under-
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standing of the past. I'm learning more about where we were. Instead of reading it, hearing it, I'm seeing it and living it. -Mohegan elder and spiritualist (2005) We are helping ourselves rather than putting our trust in someone else. It gives us more control. It is tribal members taking care of tribal lands, recording parts of our heritage ... respectfully. The way we do it is sensitive to the tribe's feelings. -Mohegan field school student (2005)
Anthropologists have found it increasingly difficult to maintain and promulgate their exploitative dynamics. For both ethical and practical reasons, it is very important that archaeologists establish a working relationship with Native Americans that fundamentally changes the power dynamics and no longer exploits culture as a commodity. A number of well-known approaches have been suggested. Watkins, Pyburn, and Cressey (2000:73-81) suggest seven steps for applied archaeologists: r. Identify the community with which they will be involved. Form partnerships beyond archaeology. 3. Understand the legal boundaries involved in the process. 4. Communicate effectively. 5. Recognize the diverse decision-making structures. 6. Place the goals of the project ahead of personal and private goals. 7. Be aware of social and gender issues. 2.
Zimmerman (2001:178) espoused "ethnocritical archaeology," where "archaeologists and indigenous people share construction of the past." "Community archaeology," as practiced by Loring (2001:190), "addressed the interests and needs of the lnnu community and their notions of the past while exploring the ancient tenure of the land." Gaining wide acceptance is "indigenous archaeology" as proposed by Watkins (2000:177), where Native communities control the "quality and quantity of archaeology." As Watkins (2000:178) stated: "I do not see a truly indigenous archaeology developing until there is a major change in the way that archaeology views ownership and protection. Only when indigenous groups are able to control not only the physi-
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cal manifestations of their culture but also what should be protected and how 'protection' is defined will indigenous archaeology flourish" (Watkins 2000:178). Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson (2004:527) advocate an approach based on "virtue ethics" implicit in Watkins's work (Salmon 1999:308). Similarly, Garza and Powell (2001:50) advocate "covenantal archaeology," where "programs train tribal members as archaeologists and ethnographers-so they may take over direction and management of their cultural heritage." There are some notable signs of progress in this area. Many of the ideals described above, which seek to acknowledge the interests and rights oflndigenous people in their own heritage, are beginning to be reflected in formal codes of ethics. For example, the World Archaeological Congress Code of Ethics (1991) requires the following of its members: r. To acknowledge the importance of indigenous cultural heritage, including sites, places, objects, artifacts, human remains, to the survival of indigenous cultures 2. To acknowledge the importance of protecting indigenous cultural heritage to the well-being of indigenous peoples 3. To acknowledge the special importance of indigenous ancestral human remains, and sites containing and/or associated with such remains, to indigenous peoples 4. To acknowledge that the important relationship between indigenous peoples and their cultural heritage exists irrespective of legal ownership 5. To acknowledge that the indigenous cultural heritage rightfully belongs to the indigenous descendants of that heritage 6. To acknowledge and recognize indigenous methodologies for interpreting, curating, managing, and protecting indigenous cultural heritage 7. To establish equitable partnerships and relationships between members and indigenous peoples whose cultural heritage is being investigated 8. To seek, whenever possible, representation ofindigenous peoples in agencies funding or authorizing research to be certain their view is considered as critically important in setting research standards, questions, priorities, and goals
Archaeological field schools and other educational programs must begin to promote an ethical indigenous archaeology. It is essential, though not sufficient by itself, to involve tribal governments and indi-
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vidual tribal members. Binding control of the archaeology program must be in the hands of tribal authorities. In the case of the Mohegan Archaeological Field School, credit is conferred through Eastern Connecticut State University. However, as the field school is based with the tribe and on tribal lands, no university personnel, resources, equipment, or facilities are utilized by the field school. Therefore, the Mohegan tribal government has the ultimate authority and responsibility regarding the archaeological objectives and methods as well as the disposition of archaeological resources and any information generated. Tribal members and authorities are involved in every aspect of the archaeology program. Field schools, because they are of relatively short duration and limited scope, are a good place to enact these kinds of protocols and to finally change the entrenched traditional dynamics of the archaeological enterprise (Lightfoot, Mills et al., Rossen, Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). In addition, they can act as the vanguard of wider changes that need to be implemented in archaeology.
Tribal Control and Participation [T]he field school taught me more about my ancestors, a perspective on tradition, a perspective on where our tribe is today ... geographically, spiritually, culturally. The program respects the wishes of the tribal members, to tread lightly. -~ohegan field school student (2005)
It is important that more Native Americans become archaeologists (Gould and Thomas 2004; Kluth and Munnell 1997; Pyburn and Wilk 1995; Watkins 2000). But Native Americans can be willing and enthusiastic participants only in an ethical archaeology. To arrive at an ethical archaeology, it is crucial to examine closely a number of related issues, including the nature and purpose of anthropology, the effects of archaeological inquiry on Indigenous individuals and communities, the perception of our field by Indigenous peoples, tribal sovereignty, belief systems, colonialism, and self-determination (see Anderson 1995; Deloria 1992, 1995; Grimes 2001; O'Brien 1989; Smith 1999; Swidler et al. 1997; Tsosie 1997; White Deer 1997). Without this deliberate introspection, archaeologists will never understand how their activities are per-
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ceived by the Native community and how the anthropological endeavor should be changed to enable full partnerships and meaningful collaborations with tribal governments and individuals. The American Anthropological Association's (1998) Code of Ethics requires anthropologists to put the interests of their host community above anthropology's interest in data collection. The code clearly states that "these obligations can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge, and can lead to decisions not to undertake or to discontinue a research project." Furthermore, "anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work, conduct research, or perform other professional activities" (American Anthropological Association 1998). Westin (1967:7) defined privacy as "the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others." Presently, the primary mechanisms to implement these ideals are Human Subjects Institutional Review Boards (HSIRB) at academic institutions. Without institutional review based upon the Belmont principles (respect for persons, beneficence, and justice) and their requirements for informed consent, Native American interests are not fully protected by current laws and standards of conduct for archaeologists (see Watkins 2000). However, as it stands now, archaeologists in the academy are not ordinarily required to participate in this review process, although one of this chapter's authors has provided an in-depth discussion of the reasons why archaeological research should be bound by the same HSIRB procedures as cultural anthropologists (Bendremer and Richman 2006). Instead, archaeologists are merely called upon to "consult" with federally recognized tribes (Section ro6, National Historic Preservation Act of 1966), interested or affected groups (Society for American Archaeology 1996; Watkins et al. 1995), or local communities (Archaeological Institute of America 1990). One often-used definition of consultation is as follows: "Consultation means the process of seeking, discussing and considering the views of the other participants, and, where feasible, seeking agreement with them in regarding matters arising in the Section ro6 process" (36 CFR 800.16[f]). Although consultation is meant to recognize the interests of Native
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Americans and others (the latter term of which significantly dilutes its benefits for Native Americans), decision-making authority clearly still resides with the archaeologists and not with the Native community. "In the field, anthropologists are largely free of local community oversight . . . . Afterwards, anthropologists answer to their department heads, peers, administrations, granting institutions, but generally not to their former host communities. Accountability is only to colleagues through peer reviews and advancement (tenure) requirements. Usually, the resulting publications are produced for use by the academic community, educational institutions, museums, and the public. Obviously, these publications, produced for professional advancement, do not necessarily benefit the indigenous community'' (Bendremer et al. 2002:9). These power dynamics must change if we are to build an indigenous archaeology that Native Americans can value. In the context of a collaborative archaeological project, consultation is not remotely adequate (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2004). In the case of the MAFS administered by the Mohegan Cultural and Community Programs Department, the tribe controls the archaeological projects, the objectives of these projects, and the methodologies employed. Tribal members always participate in the fieldwork, laboratory work, and the interpretation of archaeological data, as both students and staff, and contribute to written reports for various tribal entities, departments, and agencies. Written reports and any other information generated by archaeological research are considered proprietary and confidential and are also controlled by tribal authorities.
Recognition of Tribal Perspectives The field school gives us a better understanding of our ancestors, gives us more information regarding our oral history and the stories ... insight into the past I didn't have. It gives legitimacy to the stories we've been told and a chance for tribal members to be closer to our roots. -Mohegan elder and field school student (2005) I suppose it's good to learn from the past. I know you don't disturb, desecrate our burial grounds, but I still have concerns about when it's justified to disturb mother earth. I understand that it's important
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to learn from the past especially considering how much of our culture has been lost. I don't necessarily like it, but I can see the need
for it. -Mohegan elder and storyteller (2005)
If we accept the notion that tribal control and participation lead the way to an ethical archaeology, then it is of paramount importance that we recognize tribal perspectives relating to archaeology, oral history, the ancestors, sacred sites, and the communities' traditions and sensibilities. In order for Native Americans to gain truly significant benefit from archaeology, we must dramatically alter our approach to pursue the selfdefined vital interests of Native communities (Bendremer et al. 2002). Therefore, the program must emphasize the social, political, and spiritual dimensions and implications of archaeological work. In addition, the program must give as much consideration and respect to oral tradition, tribal custom, and community sensibilities as archaeological data. At Mohegan, we have pursued this goal through regular discussions with the Council of Elders, Mohegan spiritual leaders, and political leaders. Tribal members, including tribal elders, are present daily during archaeological work. We regularly confer with the tribal historian and tribal archivist regarding oral tradition to ensure that we consider the importance of this vital source of information. The MAFS program also projects a positive image of the tribal community for both tribal members and nontribal participants. We do this through tribal involvement in archaeology projects, through articles in tribal and nontribal publications (with permission), and presentations to tribal members, government officials, outside groups, and conferences (again, with permission). By doing so, the archaeology field school projects a positive image of the tribe to the public and becomes a positive component of tribal life, contributing to community vitality and generating interest in culture, history, and tradition. The Academy and Native Americans This has not only been an outstanding learning experience, but a reconnection to my true roots. - Mohegan field school student (1998)
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To me, this idea of a field school, digging into our past in our Mohegan homeland, was very exciting. This is the class that enticed me to go back to school after thirty-three years. -Mohegan elder and field school student (2005)
It helped me learn about the tribe and its history. For me, on a personal level, it was a good educational experience. -Mohegan field school student (2005}
The nature of academic life requires archaeologists to research and publish. However, Fagan, decrying the lack of consistency in the publication record of archaeologists, wrote: "Clearly, an overwhelming case can be made for less excavation and more analysis of previous work. However, our scholarly culture rewards people for new and original research, sometimes defined in the narrowest terms as participation in an active fieldwork program" (Fagan 1996:249). Academics generally develop their research topics based on their personal and/ or professional interests and consistent with the traditions of academic inquiry that privilege the right of anthropologists to study and investigate over the Indigenous group's right to control their own historical, cultural, and intellectual property. The institutional relationships promulgated by the academy tend to empower the anthropologist at the expense of the local community. These economic and power relations make it very difficult for Native People to trust anthropologists or to derive any real, lasting benefits from our activities. For the most part, they promote the anthropologist's career, the academic institution, publishing houses, professional organizations, and the discipline in ge~eral. (Bendremer et al. 2002:w)
The scant literature on this topic rightly describes this as an imperial or colonial relationship (Biolsi 1997; Smith 1999). TheAmericanAnthropological Association (1998) Code of Ethics tacitly acknowledges this: "While anthropologists may gain personally from their work, they must not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological materials. They should recognize the debt to the societies in which they work and their obligation to reciprocate with people studied in appropriate
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ways." However, most existing codes of ethics do not afford sufficient protection to Indigenous communities regarding the anthropological/ archaeological industry previously described. In fact, the Commission to Review the American Anthropological Association Statements on Ethics reported: "There ought to be no expectation that an anthropological researcher must be an advocate for or be expected to 'promote the welfare' of a group or culture studied" (American Anthropological Association 1995:IV-D-2). The commission did find that "the anthropological researcher, however, does have duties to the people studied, including doing no harm or wrong, full disclosure and informed consent, warnings of possible outcomes (good and bad) of the research for the people involved, and a careful weighing of the risks and benefits of the study for the people being studied" (American Anthropological Association 1995:IV-D-2). A particular problem regarding archaeology lies in the fact that the interests of contemporary Native American populations in regard to their ancestors are not put on a par with those of other modern populations whose welfare cultural anthropologists are required to set above data collection as a matter of course as described above (American Anthropological Association 1998; Bendremer and Richman 2006; Johnson 1973=129). Ultimately, the anthropologist's personal goals and academia's institutional interests coincide in such a way as to make it difficult for individual social scientists to consider Indigenous communities first, and the university helps to concretize these interactions and power dynamics by sheltering, validating, and supporting the academic. In this way, academicians remain insulated from Native communities and their representatives. In the United States, this isolation helps fuel an attitude that North American archaeologists and Native people are competitors for cultural and material resources that can be viewed in this context as a commodity. "In anthropology, ethnographies and monographs are products of our industry, which help to support and propagate powerful, wealthy institutions .... However, this increased emphasis on publication and the burgeoning ranks of anthropologists is exacerbating a long-standing problem for indigenous people" (Bendremer et al. 2002:6-7). Compounding this is an important tenet in anthropology that views archaeological resources as the property of the wider society, not oflocal
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inhabitants or even the descendants of ancient peoples. Archaeologists, thereby, declare themselves "stewards" of the past (Archaeological Institute of America 1990; Chippindale and Pendergast 1995; Hamilton 1995; Lynott and Wylie 1995; McGuire 1997; Pyburn 2003; Society for American Archaeology 1996; Zimmerman 1995, 1996a). As Groarke and Warrick (2006:163-164) note, "stewardship is an unsatisfactory basis for an archaeological ethic because (1) it is vague and difficult to apply in practice; (2) it confuses ethical and political concerns; (3) it has inconsistent implications in circumstances in which different groups vie for the control of archaeological resources; and (4) it does not properly recognize those aspects of archaeological ethics which transcend (and sometimes limit) stewardship." The claim that archaeologists can act as impartial caretakers of a common heritage denies the Indigenous community's prevailing interests in the disposition of their archaeological resources as well as the politics inherent in archaeology (Kohl and Fawcett 1995). Furthermore, to say that archaeologists conserve historical and cultural properties better than Native people is arrogant at best and also disregards the many cases where the professionals have done so badly in this regard even by our own standards. Finally, it should be acknowledged that preservation can have a very different meaning to Native Americans, including preservation of tradition and Indigenous knowledge; even reburial can be viewed as a form of preservation. Given these historical dynamics it is extremely important that field schools begin to appeal to Native American students who can take an active role in an ethical, empowering, and supportive archaeological experience. This is especially important because this is where the "indigenous archaeologists" will be inspired and trained.
The Mohegan Field School and the Tribal Government Having the opportunity to learn about our history and about the ways in which our ancestors survived was priceless. -Mohegan field school student (2005)
The underlying philosophy for the Mohegan field school, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, was to "contribute to Mohegan cultural
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and physical survival" and to further our knowledge of the past (Bendremer and Fawcett 1995:6), which made it consistent with Pyburn and Wilk's (1995=72) call for archaeology to "be used in the service of native peoples." In this, the field school has been a resounding success. To date, we have excavated over twenty archaeological sites and conducted research for numerous tribal authorities, including the Mohegan Archives, Tribal Planning and Development, Council of Elders, Cultural Resources Department, Tribal Burial Committee, Mohegan Public Works Department, Tribal Publications, Mohegan Aquaculture, Tribal Utility Authority, and Tribal Housing Authority. The projects undertaken exclusively serve the research and development interests of the Mohegan Tribe, produce significant savings in archaeological services done in-house, provide an educational service, and always involve significant tribal participation. We simultaneously pursue additional research when it is determined, as it often is, to be in the best interest of the tribe. Pressure to engage in research and publishing, and many of the rewards for doing so, prevalent in academia, are not found in our situation. Publishing occurs at the sole discretion of the Mohegan Tribe. However, the dissemination of archaeological data and interpretation through publishing and museum exhibits is slowly becoming an increasingly important aspect of our program, presumably because it confers some benefit to the tribe. At Mohegan, we have had some success in actively soliciting the participation of Native students. Of 159 seats in thirteen years, 35 have been filled by members of federally recognized tribes and many more by self-identified Native Americans. In some recent years, over half of our field school students were Mohegan tribal members. An important component of our field school program explicitly explores archaeological ethics and the history of archaeologists and Native Americans. The MAFS accomplishes this though our Native American Speaker Series. Two or three times a week, Native American dignitaries and/or scholars come to speak to field school students about issues in Native history, archaeology, and culture, with an emphasis on the historical relationships between anthropologists and Native Americans. These speakers have included chiefs, spiritualists, tribal elders, council members, educators, historians, performers, archivists, crafts persons, and state government officials. These speakers have included members of
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the Mohegan, Eastern Pequot, Narragansett, Schaghticoke, Wampanoag, Cherokee, Tlingit, and Maliseet tribes. These Native American voices have been critical to MAFS's goals and the educational process. Field trips to local Mohegan historic sites-including the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum (founded in 1931, the oldest continuously run Indian museum in North America), Mohegan Church, Cochegan Rock, Moshup's Rock, and Shantok-and other Indian reservations and other tribal field schools (Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot) round out this important component of the educational experience for Native and non-Native participants alike. We have also hosted visiting archaeological programs from the Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, and Narragansett tribes (see Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). Most archaeological field school programs are based at the university, where important resources, such as laboratory facilities, grant support, and graduate student labor, are readily available. However, there are a number of advantages to a tribally based field school program. For one, conflicts of interest never exist between the tribe's goals and the academy's or academician's interests. Besides our dedication to the use of a rigorous, professional approach, our only responsibility is to the Mohegan Tribe. And there are no personal incentives to publish or conduct additional fieldwork for the purposes of promotion and tenure. This substantially changes the dynamics between the archaeologist and the tribe and makes it easier for the archaeologist to develop and maintain an indigenous archaeology program that can make a significant, positive contribution to tribal life. This has been the overriding goal of the Mohegan field school since its founding. In this way, the field school has become a component of a great revival of Mohegan culture, pride, political power, and confidence as well as contributing to numerous tribal development projects, including elder housing, museum projects, burial ground expansion/restoration, recreational facilities, and a traditional longhouse.
Conclusion I've learned the basics of archaeological techniques-things necessary for the field. But what I've learned about the culture and thoughts of
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the entire Mohegan Tribe and individuals associated with us has been a far more touching experience. -Mohegan field school student (2003)
In order to establish an ethical, indigenous archaeology, we must imaginatively transform the fundamental power relations between anthropologists and Native Americans. As King (1997:118) stated, "Creative approaches must be discussed and debated by aboriginal communities, academic institutions, and individual researchers to reach a working relationship that neither constricts the advancement of knowledge nor denigrates the aboriginal communities' legitimate authority over the integrity of their own intellectual traditions." Field school programs are among the best venues from which to establish these conventions and begin to prepare and train the next generation, Native and non-Native. To do so, field schools must foster and promote an indigenous archaeology ethos and involve tribal elders, government officials, and tribal students. It is essential that archaeologists stop privileging academic inquiry and assign equal standing to Indigenous belief systems, decision-making bodies, and sensibilities. For ancestral sites, ultimate control of the research questions pursued, methods employed, and the disposition of resulting information should reside with tribal authorities, since the cultural data and examples of material culture belong to the community, not to the anthropologist. Members of the Native community should participate in all aspects of the archaeological process as both staff and student. The field school should reflect positively on the tribe and advance a positive image to the public. Educating tribes and the public on the history of archaeology as well as archaeological method should be an important goal. Once all of the parties are aware of these historic dynamics, we can collectively take steps to avoid conflicts in future. The archaeological field school, especially when conducted under the auspices of the tribal government, can be a valuable tool for Native Americans. We believe, under these circumstances, that the scientific pursuit of cultural data on behalf of tribal authorities will be recognized as an important tool that will be utilized by many tribes and motivate a generation of indigenous archaeologists. Important contributions can
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be made to the community when pursuing the research and educational goals of the tribe, involving tribal members, and abiding by the decisions of elders, councils, and government officials. In this way, the anthropologist acts to assist tribal people in their own efforts to explore their past, learn more about their ancestors, inspire their membership, and represent themselves to the public. Under these conditions, anthropologists have an opportunity to mitigate some of the damage done to Native American communities by our predecessors and fulfill some of the promise of our discipline.
4 Working on Pasts for Futures Eastern Pequot Field School Archaeology in Connecticut
Stephen W. Silliman and Katherine H. Sebastian Dring
Even though collaborations between Native American communities and practicing archaeologists are not yet widespread in North America, the quantity and quality of collaborative projects have increased significantly in the last ten years in the United States and Canada (Dowdall and Parrish 2002; Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006; Kerber 2006b; Moss and Wasson 1998; Peck et al. 2003). The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 and the ensuing debates about repatriation played a significant role in prompting more collaborative ventures in archaeology (Swidler et al. 1997), as have explicit efforts to create an indigenous archaeology (Watkins 2000). However, we must be careful not to assume that all collaborations result from federal law generally or NAGPRA specifically, especially when many of these latter "collaborations" are instead mandated "consultations." We need to explore and recognize the possibilities of collaborative efforts built on other foundations, such as cultural and historic preservation or a recognition that multiple histories can be constructed in a political present. We argue that these latter two elements, rather than concerns about human remains or NAGPRA, have created a context for truly collaborative educational projects between tribal and archaeological communities, and we join others in this volume in highlighting that aspect. Educational and collaborative ventures take a variety of forms, as several chapters in this volume demonstrate, but we choose to focus on the standard and, as some might call it, traditional North American archaeological field school typically administered through colleges and universities. The goal is to suggest ways that this venue can be realigned for collaborative and indigenous archaeological purposes. That is, we seek to make the field school quite nontraditional. To structure our view of collaborative education in an Indigenous
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context, we turn to the idea of archaeology as craft as outlined by Shanks and McGuire (1996). The idea draws metaphorically on the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early twentieth century. Shanks and McGuire suggested that considering archaeology as a craft would collapse the false dichotomies between thinking and doing, between sciences and humanities, and between scholar and community by recognizing that archaeologists craft a product-history-through a combination of skills in using archaeological information about the past and a responsiveness to communities (or crudely, "clients") who have vested interests in the product. Those communities might be Native American nations, other archaeologists, or an interested public group. Shanks and McGuire (1996) claimed that history detached from communities is esoteric and ivory tower, while history produced only for public consumption and mass markets is uncreative capitalism. The alternative recognizes that archaeological and historical knowledges are made rather than discovered. This position does not imply that just because history is made, the past is therefore made up. The remains of the past, whether artifacts, houses, or documents, constrain what we can say in these histories, yet the production of history resides in a political present (e.g., Lowenthal 1996; Meskell 1998; Trouillot 1995). The craft perspective recognizes that we produce knowledge about the past in a present social context and that we need to acknowledge the limitations and possibilities of that context. We also craft more than histories or even the data to support them; we also craft relationships. Importantly, these relationships make possible the production of certain histories, and we must recognize the role of those social and cultural contexts in the present as we attempt to study the past. A collaborative field school is one way to enhance the potential of crafting archaeological histories and to do so in a specifically indigenous archaeology context. To complement the creation of responsible and useful histories, collaborative archaeological field schools can serve as a mutually beneficial endeavor between Native American tribal communities and academic archaeologists. University-based field schools can benefit Indigenous communities with limited resources through lower-cost historic preservation efforts, practical archaeological training for tribal members, and Native oversight of research. Simultaneously, field schools provide undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to work
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closely with descendent communities, to examine the empirical and political aspects of field methodology, and to think about more responsible archaeologies. The latter aspect opens a space to critically examine archaeological field pedagogy and methodology.
Background to an Indigenous Archaeology Field School In this chapter, we bring together strands of collaboration, methodology, and field school education in a case drawn from Native American New England. The context is the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation and their 225acre plot of reservation land, located in North Stonington, Connecticut. Community members in varying numbers have occupied and used this reservation land since 1683, when they were granted (and relocated to) it by the colonial Connecticut government following the decades of dislocation, hardship, and persecution after the Pequot War of 1636-37 (Bragdon and Simmons 1998; McBride 1990). This conflict marked the beginning of full-scale European colonial aggression against northeastern Native communities. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, along with Narragansett and Mohegan allies, organized a punitive expedition for earlier colonist deaths and launched an attack on the fortified Pequot village at Mystic in 1637, resulting in a brutal massacre of Pequot men, women, and children. Pequot War survivors were either executed, sold into slavery in the Caribbean, or turned over to Narragansett and Mohegan overseers. This marked a turning point in the intertwined colonial and Native histories of New England. Only in the postwar years did the surviving Pequots become colonially divided into Eastern Pequot and Western (or Mashantucket) Pequot, community boundaries that continue to this day. The historical trajectories diverged radically in the twentieth century, with only the Mashantucket obtaining federal recognition. Eastern Pequot families have now lived on their reservation for more than 320 years and have maintained community and kinship ties that fan outward from that reservation into the surrounding towns and cities in southeastern Connecticut. The reservation land remains mostly undeveloped today, although some tribal members have houses along the reservation's perimeters. This characteristic offers an unparalleled archaeological op-
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portunity to study Eastern Pequot community and household changes, continuities, and creativities over the last few centuries. A critical feature of this particular brand of collaborative archaeology is the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation's navigation of the federal acknowledgment process. In 1978, the Eastern Pequot Tribe filed its letter of intent to petition the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) for acknowledgment as an Indian tribe, which would establish a governmentto-government relationship with the United States within the meaning of federal law 25 CFR part 83. The Eastern Pequot received a preliminary positive finding for federal acknowledgment in 2000 from the Bureau oflndian Affairs for having demonstrated to the U.S. government their longstanding community, political, and cultural practices. After two years of pressure from the Connecticut attorney general and three local towns to extend the comment period, plus a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs issued final federal acknowledgment in September 2002. As with other Native American groups that have pursued this goal, the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation compiled many thousands of pages of documentation in support of their claim (Bragdon and Simmons 1998; Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation 2001). The DOI acknowledged the tribe as the Historic Eastern Pequot Tribe of Lantern Hill Reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut, and noted that they had an "unbroken history" of state recognition as an Indian tribe, with a reservation established by the colonial government in 1683, making it one of the oldest reservations in the United States. The assistant secretary for Indian affairs has a trust responsibility to federally acknowledged tribes to promote selfdetermination on behalf of tribes. Federally acknowledged tribes receive benefits, per federal laws, to support better health, education, housing, environmental and historic preservation programs. However, within three months, the positive Final Determination was appealed to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals by some public officials, local towns, and others on politically charged evidentiary grounds. Although entering an unprecedented and unfairly long appeals process, the Eastern Pequot Tribal Council had interests in beginning a formal cultural and historic preservation effort on their reservation. Per U.S. Department of the Interior government historic preservation guidelines and Eastern Pequot desires to document material aspects of
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their history to accompany what was already known through oral and written histories, the tribal council wanted an archaeological survey of their reservation to determine the kinds of archaeological and historical sites present and their preservation needs. This context opened the door for the collaborative project described in this chapter, and archaeological research took place in the summers of 2003 and 2004. After keeping the Eastern Pequot in appeal for more than two years, the Internal Board of Indian Appeals vacated and remanded the Final Determination back to the assistant secretary for Indian affairs in May 2005 based on questions raised in the appeal. Despite the tenuous political position, a third season of archaeological work took place in the summer of 2005 because of the continued interest by tribal members and archaeologists in documenting Eastern Pequot history and practices in the past as vital links to cultural life in the present. On October 12, 2005, four months after having the final acknowledgment subjected to reconsideration and an ironic two days after Columbus Day and one day before the beginning of the Amerind seminar that laid the groundwork for this book, the assistant secretary issued a reconsidered final negative decision that rescinded the original positive federal determination. In November 2005, the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation sent a notice of appeal of the final reconsidered determination and a request for reconsideration of the decision to decline acknowledgment to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals. In January 2006 they received a response from the deputy assistant secretary stating that the administrative process of the acknowledgment petitions was complete and the reconsidered final determination was effective. That same month, the tribe also received a response from the Interior Board oflndian Appeals dismissing the Historic Eastern Pequot Tribe's request for reconsideration for lack of jurisdiction. Despite the enormous blows to the financial and governmental resources that the tribal council had mustered over the last few years in preparation for sovereignty, the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation continues its fight for federal acknowledgment and to redress what they consider to be a serious injustice. The archaeological field school plays an important role in internal and external negotiations of that process as it constantly reveals the cultural survival and historical uniqueness of the Indigenous community. Even though we have such information, we do
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not use this chapter to discuss archaeological interpretations of Eastern Pequot history. These are better left for other venues. Instead, this chapter shares some of our thoughts to date on the process rather than the final product of collaborative indigenous archaeology. We want to focus on how we can reframe archaeological questions, conduct responsible research, and implement methods to meet multiple community needs, especially in light of colonial legacies general to the discipline and specific to this Native American community. This turns archaeology into responsive historical inquiry-that is, a kind of craft. We begin by outlining the ways that collaborative archaeological field schools can benefit Indigenous communities, as illustrated by the Eastern Pequot case, and follow with a consideration of the transformation of field school pedagogy that is possible in a collaborative environment.
Benefits to Tribal Communities All collaborative indigenous archaeologies must place Native American needs and wishes in the foreground, from the initial conceptualization of the research, through all phases of field and laboratory work, to final interpretation and dissemination (Bendremer and Thomas, Mills et al., this vol.; see Harrison 2001). This is particularly essential, although historically overlooked, when university and museum archaeologists work on aboriginal lands and with Indigenous people. By granting singular importance to Indigenous needs and wishes, archaeologists can ensure that their projects serve the Native American community whose heritage they propose to study. As we will demonstrate, this commitment does not undermine academic research questions or methodology, but rather enriches them. Here we outline three direct benefits possible from a collaborative tribal-university field school program. First, tribal governments can begin to meet their historical and cultural preservation needs by using university- or college-based archaeological field schools with only minimal financial outlay. This is by no means imperative, since many Indian communities conduct their own archaeological research (see Bendremer and Thomas, Two Bears, this vol.), but it remains an important option for those Indigenous nations that may not have the financial or technical means to accomplish such a
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task despite their interests in doing so. This lower-cost historic preservation strategy is particularly important for tribes without DOI federal acknowledgment who still want to begin a proactive historic preservation program on their reservation or aboriginal lands. Since academic field schools are funded in large part through student tuition and since the instructors are paid by universities to teach such courses, these multiweek field courses do not require that the primary benefiting groupthe tribal community-expend major funds to acquire archaeological information. However, care must be exercised to prevent the money from wielding too much power, as it is prone to do, in the collaborative relationship. In practice, much of the archaeological work becomes a "donated" service in such an arrangement. Although student field crews can never be as quick in "data retrieval" as trained cultural resource teams from private companies, they require nowhere near the finances that the latter do when contracted to provide archaeological services. This does not mean that we should misuse student labor; rather, it means that we can derive from an otherwise necessary curricular field course benefits beyond the practical training of students. Besides, laying this archaeological and historic preservation groundwork may later open doors for historic preservation funds should these Native communities receive full federal recognition. Second, by using an educational setting to engage in archaeological research, opportunities exist for training not only enrolled students but also tribal community members who participate in the field project or who become involved with the research planning and execution. At least two Eastern Pequot tribal members have participated as paid interns each summer field season in our project, and others, including youth and elders, have visited and worked on several occasions (fig. 4.1). Taking time to teach and to learn while engaged in archaeological research rarely happens in "contracted" situations because of budgetary and monetary constraints, but teaching and learning are integral parts of the field school experience. We simply emphasize extending that education beyond the enrolled students. The benefits to tribal communities are notable, particularly when tribal interns enjoy many, if not all, of the educational activities that field school students have had to pay for to receive academic credit. The participation of tribal interns provides di-
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4.1. Eastern Pequot elder Norma Parrish and Eastern Pequot youth Brianna Sebastian working with field school student Edith Thomas (Akimel O 'Odham/San Carlos Apache) in 2006. (Photo by Stephen Silliman)
rect training in archaeological techniques, terms, and issues. This training does not presume that tribal members will alter their life courses to become professional archaeologists, although it sets the context for community members to take over their own heritage management and research in the future. Similarly, it does not attempt to overwrite Indigenous ways of understanding with the imposition of professional or academic language. Rather, the training introduces Native communities to the jargon and methods of "standard" archaeological research so that they can converse with archaeologists on common ground and, similarly, can critique them. This ensures that academic discourse does not alienate descendent communities because oflack of communication with Native people while archaeologists continue crafting their history, and it helps to close the gap between professionals/academics and the nonspecialists or public communities who interact with them. Third, running archaeological field schools in a collaborative setting
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guarantees that the research design, practice, and results fall under tribal community oversight (Bendremer and Thomas, Mills et al., this vol.). Doing such research in a field school setting requires a discussion about tribal sovereignty, both political and legal. Tribes have certain governmental powers because of their inherent tribal sovereignty that may not be unilaterally taken away by the U.S. federal government, but many now struggle to regain or assert those rights. Specifically, non-Native professionals and students should become familiar with the inherent sovereign rights of tribes, especially as they relate to their land, natural and cultural resources, and relationships with other sovereign nations. These have tangible impacts on archaeological research and interpretations of reservation land because these elements form the crux of political and economic life for contemporary Indian people. Community oversight at the logistical and interpretive level prevents archaeologists from conducting their research in a political, social, or cultural vacuum and from presuming that the student educational components of the field school are the only important elements. In other words, archaeologists and students are now accountable to the tribal community. For example, the mixture of archaeologists and Eastern Pequot tribal members in our field school sets the context for mutual trust and observation. Students work closely with individuals who have personal or community connections to the reservation landscape, while at the same time, tribal members monitor the activities of archaeologists in the reservation forest. The thought of sending university anthropologists by themselves into the woods to dig on ancestral ground was not the most comfortable feeling initially for many Eastern Pequot tribal members. In the end, tribal members have displayed respect for professional training in archaeology as a useful tool for their community, while archaeologists and students have shown respect for Eastern Pequot values, views of the land, and local knowledges. In addition, tribal members participate directly in generating their community history alongside archaeologists rather than waiting, by choice or by necessity, for archaeologists to "find" Native American history and "report back" as the authority. We find the latter to be a problematic way to craft archaeological and cultural histories. In our case, tribal members help to acquire the information, feel that they are con-
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tributing to the preservation of cultural objects and histories for future generations, and now have a direct connection to the archaeological process. In fact, they helped to constitute the process and to change it. The collaborative process continues into the documentation and interpretation of the findings, since participants have diverse frames of reference for describing the site, materials, historical facts, or conclusions. To avoid too partial of a view, it is important to describe the project with Native voices as well as non-Native voices in order to dearly represent the history of the people who lived on the land. Sometimes a story is told by an elder who remembers a similar area, dwelling, or artifacts that may assist in drawing conclusions about the historical materials found. Other times it is necessary to acknowledge a Native preference not to speak about spiritual and personal matters. Ways to ensure the collaborative balance include having jointly authored works, using words of the people whose histories are being represented, or requiring that academic and student writings on Native archaeological materials undergo critical review by the tribal council before documentation is finalized. All master's theses completed on reservation sites thus far have gone through this process, whether about faunal remains (Cipolla 2005), ceramics (McNeil 2005), or pollen and charcoal (Jacobucci 2006). Striking a balance between tribal preferences for confidentiality and academic needs for publication, we both share in the commitment that all benefit by making Eastern Pequot history more widely but carefully known in tribal, archaeological, historical, and public arenas. This cooperative spirit is upheld by the independence of the field school research as a university project since it ensures that the interested parties - tribal members and academic professionals- can engage in a dialogue about the meaning(s) of the archaeological results from multiple standpoints. This process acknowledges that people and data cannot be forced into any or all desired scenarios and helps counter any charge that all indigenous archaeological histories are only political. We feel that "indigenous archaeology" is in part defined by having this space for multiple views and dialogue. This does not deny the desirability of projects run completely by tribal governments as a function of their sovereignty, self-determination, and autonomy, but instead emphasizes that the university-tribal government relationship can be a mutually beneficial one at economic, cultural, and intellectual levels.
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Benefits to Academic and Educational Communities While benefiting tribal communities, collaborative tribal field schools provide undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to work closely within and alongside descendent communities, to examine the empirical and political aspects of field methodology, and to think about more responsive and ethical archaeologies. These are above and beyond the traditionally assumed benefits of field schools, such as practical training in methods, regional cultural history, and interpretation, as well as the formation of"authentic research communities" (Perry 2004). Yet, we want to argue that the field school has not had its pedagogy examined carefully enough (but see Pyburn 2003; Walker and Saitta 2002), and that such reexamination is required in, and a result of, collaborative indigenous archaeology (Bendremer and Thomas, Mills et al., this vol.). We want to discuss two main models for the pedagogy of archaeological field schools. Perry (2004) recently offered one such model, that of the "authentic learning" environment, which she outlines in the context of the multiyear San Clemente Island field school in southern California. This model emphasizes the development of a productive "research community," one that forms in the context of people-trained and undergoing training-who coalesce to answer specific research questions about the archaeological past. The focus is the "culture of archaeological research" and the "methods and tools used to acquire and interpret data." Although this model may be sufficient for certain field schools and does capture the archaeological research process fairly well, we argue that it is overly narrow with respect to collaborative indigenous field schools (but see expansion of this perspective in Perry 2006). Field schools need to be about more than methods and tools, need to emphasize methods as social as well as research practices, and need to reconsider the "culture of archaeological research" since that "culture" has generated at least as many problems in contemporary Indigenous communities as it has information about past ones. For instance, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999:5) has argued for decolonizing scientific research in general: "research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions." These conditions are particularly striking for Indigenous people as the subject of researchers
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of all stripes, whether archaeological, anthropological, sociological, or historical. A second model for archaeology arises from critical pedagogy, as suggested by Hamilakis (2004). Hamilakis does not focus on field schools, but his words are pertinent to field learning environments: Pedagogy in archaeology, or in any other field, is not simply the passive transfer and delivery of produced knowledge nor the training of students in certain skills and abilities, as the current dominant discourse would have us believe. It is rather a socially crucial and politically contested field of cultural production, the effects and implications of which permeate everything we do in archaeology, from the production of archaeological knowledges and the reproduction of the field of archaeology as a whole, to the economic, social, and political articulations of our activity and its products. (Hamilakis 2004:288) We find this emphasis on pedagogy as "cultural production" and on the "economic, social, and political articulations of our activity and its products" to be absolutely central to a reformulation of field schools in a collaborative setting. The creation of Eastern Pequot history through archaeology takes place in a political present-it articulates with individual biographies, community concerns, federal acknowledgment, state politics, colonialism, nation-to-university relationships, historic preservation, land management, racial discourses, debates on authenticity, public opinion, and many other aspects. Students need to know that history is produced in this complex mix with particular methods and by certain people rather than simply "discovered" in the sifted dirt of a shaker screen. These dimensions all intersect at the edge of the trowel, which is frequently held by students, and not just in the final write-up of project results or interpretations (see Berggren and Hodder 2003; Silliman, this vol.). As a result, archaeological field classes are prime candidates for a critical pedagogical reexamination in the context of collaborative indigenous archaeology. Field courses regularly neglect theory as they opt instead to focus on methods and the "practical" side of archaeology. Students often do not gain access to the theoretical choices that lie behind field strategies, the bigger issues that drive the research, or the implica-
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tions of particular methods or findings for larger theoretical discourses. However, the fact that field courses focus heavily on methods offers untapped potential for a new pedagogy. Teaching skills in real-world, hands-on archaeology remains a worthwhile goal for field schools, but we run the risk of letting the teaching of methods replace the teaching of methodology. The former involves instruction in the techniques of "doing" field archaeology-how to trowel, how to use a line level, how to make a plan map, how to collect artifacts, and so on-and most standard archaeological field textbooks offer useful manuals in this respect (Hester et al. 1997). The latter-teaching methodology-involves examining the decisions behind certain methods and, more important, the implications of using those methods. The most overlooked tend to be the social implications, which are just as important to the academy as they are to the cultural resource management world (Chilton 2006:293). We argue here that archaeological field methods are not just research practices, but also social practices with social consequences. Yet, archaeological field classes tend to implicitly teach students that methodology means only knowing which methods work best to achieve practical and empirical needs to "gather data." For instance, archaeologists have spent countless pages debating the pros and cons of regularly spaced small shovel test pits in the forests of New England and have batted around the question of whether a plastic or metal line level should be used on that taut string tied to the corner of a unit. Archaeologists are rightfully concerned about using standardized yet flexible methods for obtaining the best possible information from a field project. However, for collaborative indigenous archaeology, we must avoid relying on an instrumentalist version of pedagogy where students learn methods as products rather than as processes (Atalay, this vol.). These methods constrain what can later be done with "data'' in the laboratory in ways that few of us appreciate, much less teach (Galloway 2006:42-52), but more significantly, they may impact the perceptions and involvement of collaborators and descendent communities. In other words, the methods' process (the acts themselves) deserves just as much of our attention as the methods' products (the data). Even status quo, seemingly innocuous field methods regularly employed in archaeological field schools may "do work'' outside of"the field" in significant ways.
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Despite archaeologists' rigorous attention to how we do our research, considerable room remains for flexibility, particularly with regard to so.cial and cultural needs. This is an aspect of research that we often do not impart to our students. Part of that flexibility involves remaining open to surprises, as collaborators may perceive "standard" practices as inappropriate and confusing or may have their own methodological requests (see Chilton 2006). Archaeologists often cannot know how methodologies, much debated in the academic literature and frequently "black boxed" as standard practice, might affect local communities with different interests if we do not engage with or participate in them. An example from northern California will illustrate. Dowdall and Parrish (2002) argue elegantly for the collaborative nature of archaeological research between the Kashaya Pomo and the California Department of Parks and Recreation. They reveal that even the standard archaeological practice of simply showing up to work-the most mundane and unquestioned aspect of doing archaeology-may be culturally significant. They discuss how the agency archaeologists agreed to abide by Kashaya .k11ela rules that prohibited menstruating women and husbands of menstruating women from actually" excavating, particularly on sacred sites (see also Lightfoot, this vol.).
Collaborative Methodologies and Pedagogies We can illustrate these various points about pedagogy and methodology with examples from the Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School. The student-intensive archaeological research has hinged on efforts to emphasize the social, as well as the practical, aspects of field methodology. The methodology is designed to "do work'' in the field, the community, the collaborative environment, and the educational setting. The features include modifications to standard archaeological practice that meet community needs without radically altering data collection and welcome interjections of Eastern Pequot cultural traditions into the archaeological work. The modifications have gone a long way toward forming a relationship of trust, mutual respect, and cooperative learning. The latter is critical because just as the Eastern Pequot community had little familiarity with the actual practice of archaeology at the outset of the project, the archaeological team also had minimal knowledge
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of Eastern Pequot preferences and perspectives. The realization of this learning process meant that we needed to maintain open dialogue about even the most mundane of archaeological tasks. The st~ndard procedure for a New England archaeological field project focused on preliminary reconnaissance is to excavate shovel test pits at regular intervals, fill them in with backdirt when done, and move on to the next one in the series. Although care must be exercised in choosing the sampling interval, depth of excavation, and screen mesh size for recovery, archaeologists take the practical side of dig-fill-andmove-on for granted, particularly when they complete a large number. However, the Eastern Pequot perceived the methods differently-they saw each instance as disturbance to their ancestral lands. They wanted to place an offering of loose tobacco at each location that we excavated, an act performed by the tribal historic preservation officer, to honor the disturbed earth (fig. 4.2). This compliance required a new sense of vigilance of otherwise mundane shovel test pits. The students played a key role in regularizing this process, for it had to become routine while retaining its cultural significance. The collaborative field school may also be an introduction for archaeologists and students to unrecorded Native American history, cultural knowledge, and traditions concerning their Indigenous land. Very often, "at the trowel's edge," archaeologists focus their attention on what may lie beneath the earth and often disregard that which is a natural part of the earth. Eastern Pequots and many other Native Americans believe that Mother Earth consists of living things and natural objects, all of which are sacred. They hold that Mother Earth has sustained their people, history, and culture since the beginning of time. Mother Earth holds the spirit of ancestors and is available to nurture and inspire those who honor her. All people and Mother Earth are a part of the Circle of Life, where all contribute and all receive in the process. People have the responsibility to be aware of this process. Therefore, archaeologists and students who work on the reservation land must respect and try to understand Eastern Pequot ancient history and cultural ways so as not to disturb this balance. In this manner they may truly develop a more responsive archaeology and gain a broader educational perspective. The collaborative field setting reveals the ways that past and present merge in the exploration of the land, of Earth itself. What lies
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4.2. Royal 'Two Hawks" Cook, the tribal historic preservation officer
in 2004 and 2006, applying a tobacco offering in an excavation unit. (Photo by Stephen Silliman)
in the Indigenous land besides dirt, stones, and artifacts? Some Eastern Pequots have noted that it is "peace" that they find when walking or working the land of their ancestors. As a result, Eastern Pequot tribal leaders were thankful when students made efforts not to unnecessarily harm animals and plants impacted by the excavations and when the archaeological team would cover excavation units overnight to keep animals from injuring themselves by falling into them. To further orient the students to the social and cultural context of the field school, all participants go through an orientation with several tribal members on the first day before actual fieldwork begins. This orientation involves tribal members sharing thoughts on archaeology, history, and the reservation; personal introductions between all students, archaeological staff, tribal interns, and community members present; and, in recent years, a potluck meal. At the close of this orientation, an
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Eastern Pequot designee (Mark Sebastian in 2003; Royal "Two Hawks" Cook in 2004 and 2006; Bobby "Little Bear" Sebastian in 2005) conducted a smudging ritual, which involves lighting wrapped sage and other herbs and wafting the smoke over students and staff members for spiritual cleansing. To complement the initial orientation in 2005, we also arranged a meeting of the field school students with the Eastern Pequot Elders' Council to ensure that students understood how elders felt about history, archaeology, and the land. As we began to sort and clean the artifacts both during the field season and back at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, during the semester, the status quo oflab work shifted to accommodate a special request from the tribal council. Standard practice in archaeological laboratories involves going through bags of items collected in the field to sort, clean, and catalog artifacts and then to discard any objects-usually unmodified rocks!- collected in haste or uncertainty that proved, under more controlled observations, to be noncultural items. Again, archaeologists tend to consider this a process unworthy of reflection, but we encountered a new twist after discussing this with the tribal council: Any items that we would have normally discarded into the trash needed to be returned to the reservation. These natural objects constituted part of that historical and cultural landscape, and many tribal members held the perspective that they rightfully belonged there. Ultimately, all artifacts and other items collected will return to the tribe, but we now include these noncultural items for basic repatriation. We have also designed the flotation protocol on campus to capture as much sediment as possible from processed soil samples to then return it to the reservation. It is no exaggeration to say this poses significant logistical difficulties. The tribal council also instituted an oversight procedure with respect to removal of artifacts from the reservation. North American archaeologists take for granted that what they remove from the ground goes to the laboratory for later cleaning, identification, and analysis, but a standard contract that Silliman was to sign with the Eastern Pequot had a clause about not removing any natural or cultural objects from the reservation. Silliman had anticipated that Sebastian Dring would say to just cross out that clause once the process was explained more clearly, but instead she reported back that the tribal council agreed to our temporary removal of cultural materials only if we provided a daily count of artifacts being
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removed. We reached a compromise that met the spirit of that request but was attuned to field logistics. Archaeologists collect many artifacts in the field, but often do so in bulk with little time to count and identify every piece collected. Once Silliman explained this protocol and noted that in-the-field tabulation would probably cut productivity in half, we agreed on a daily bag count instead. This daily accounting was regularly monitored by the tribal historic preservation officer and witnessed, if not also participated in, by field school students, allowing them to see the ways that archaeological research practices were also constituted as social and cultural practices. North American archaeologists may abide by codes of ethics, such as those published by the Society for American Archaeology, that would prohibit absconding with artifacts and never accounting for them, but real-world communities want their own assurances of ethical and respectful conduct. Like most field schools, our project requires students to keep daily journals. The journals served one purpose of maintaining quality checks on data recovery (as a complement to field forms) and of encouraging students to keep detailed notes on their activities during the day (cf. Perry 2004:241), but they began to serve another purpose in that students were encouraged to write down not just findings and interpretation but also critical reflections on collaboratio~ and tribal involvement. These latter reflections proved to be some of the most illuminating of all entries, as students recounted interactions with tribal members, wondered about politics, thought about cultural representation and identities, and reflected personally on how transformative the collaborative aspects of the field school had been for them. These journals are, therefore, like those used in classroom settings for pedagogical reasons. "Perhaps the most important contribution of the journals is that they encourage students to see education as a life-transforming experience, a journey of self discovery, rather than simply a race to acquire usable, saleable skills and competences" (Hamilakis 2004:300). Many of these elements tap directly into a central but often neglected feature of collaborative archaeological research: relationships. Everyone knows that archaeological fieldwork is an inherently social endeavor, but the collaborative and indigenous environment offers unique challenges and possibilities. Understanding relationships means recognizing that archaeology is a "cultural science" -or more pointedly for North
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America, is still a kind of anthropology-in the social and political present and that it takes place between people with varying interests in the process, content, and outcome. Consequently, the collaborative process must be monitored to ensure that all participants work toward a willingness to consider, respect, acknowledge, and include diverse perspectives, philosophies, and interpretations during the project. Each participant comes to "own the project" in his or her individual ways, which is a better metaphor than simply trying to "own the past." When the voices of archaeologists, students, Native leaders, and tribal participants are heard and valued by all involved, the educational, professional, and personal benefits expand in unique directions. We are reminded of a student who responded to a question from Eastern Pequot tribal members about what she gained from the project. She did not say historical knowledge or archaeological skills; she answered "self-development." If personal or community transformations occur during a collaborative archaeological project, then the project has an impact well beyond-or before-its final output of "interpretation." This is fundamentally important, since many participants in the archaeological process, whether students or tribal members, do not or cannot follow through to that end point (see also Berggren and Hodder 2003). They draw out their own experiences during the collaboration. We can understand these social, political, and even personal dimensions only by paying critical attention to the process of collaborating.
Conclusion We have outlined what the "craft" of archaeology might look like in New England in the context of a collaborative tribal archaeological field school on the historic reservation of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation. Our central concern has been to document and reflect on the process itself as it has developed in our specific setting. Since archaeology has been a product-driven academic discipline, it has rarely taken stock of how these products take form and how the process itself may have had effects or implications in other arenas. The complex and highly variable nature of collaborative and indigenous archaeological projects necessitates that we pay more attention to these issues. In this context, we made two broad arguments.
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First, in such collaboration, academic archaeologists can conduct research that is rigorous, empirically sound, theoretically engaging, and methodologically tight to meet scholarly community standards. At the same time, archaeologists can make the final product-history-responsive to the communities in which the archaeology takes place and to whom the cultural heritage is clearly linked. These are not mutually exclusive, and in fact, these archaeological and cultural histories can be coproduced by archaeologists, students, and tribal members. Doing so requires open dialogue with communities about methods and data. Archaeologists have a tendency to think of methods as only academic or professional considerations, but even the most innocuous methods can have import as social and cultural practices. Second, we argued that collaborative tribal field schools offer more than the opportunity for "authentic learning" in a research community or the necessary personal test to see if one wants to pursue archaeology as a career. Instead, they offer transformative pedagogical spaces in which students can participate and examine the social practices involved in the production of knowledge and histories and the political contexts of history-making in the present. These can have significant impacts on the ways that students live beyond the field school experience. These collaborative field schools are also venues for tribal communities, particularly those who have not received federal acknowledgment, to receive reduced-cost historic preservation programs for land management and preservation and hands-on field training to tribal members. To meet these pedagogical and community needs, the practice of traditional archaeological field schools must be reexamined carefully and then recrafted actively in local settings, both to work on the past and for the future.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank the many people who have made this field school possible as of 2006. First and foremost, we would like to thank one another for the trust, respect, and open dialogue that we have developed over the last few years of collaborating. We also thank the Eastern Pequot Tribal Council for their support of the archaeological and historic preservation work; the tribal members who participated in the multiyear field project as historic preservation officers (Royal "Two Hawks" Cook, Robert "Little Bear" Sebastian) and as interns (Darlene "Tubby" Fonville, Linda McCall, Gerrilynn "Nuffy'' Cagle); the various graduate student
Working on Pasts for Futures teaching assistants (Craig Cipolla, Starla Lane, Julie McNeil, Jon Patton, Melissa Smith, Tom Witt); the many undergraduate and graduate students who have now participated in the four field schools; the lodging assistance provided by Marilyn Burnett at Connecticut College; and the logistical and administrative support of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, particularly the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Corporate, Continuing, and Distance Education. Finally, we extend our deepest appreciation to John Ware and the Amerind Foundation for their support of the seminar that led to this book project and to all of the participants in Dragoon in October 2005 for their collegiality, encouragement, and critical insights. In particular, we thank Jeff Bendremer and Jack Rossen for their "internal" review of this chapter. At the time of this writing, funding for the project has come from the National Science Foundation (BCS no. 0623532), the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
s Summer Workshops in Indigenous Archaeology Voluntary Collaboration between Colgate University and the Oneida Indian Nation of New York
Jordan E. Kerber
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 and the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 have ushered in a new era in American archaeology, one that has witnessed an ongoing shift in power and control and a greater inclusion of Indigenous voices in the practice of the discipline. An important effect of such changes over the past seventeen years has been a significant increase in the frequency of collaboration between archaeologists and Native peoples in the United States (see Dongoske et al. 2000; Ferguson 19966; Kerber 20066; Klesert and Downer 1990; Swidler et al. 1997; Watkins 2000). While most of these cooperative undertakings are mandated by the two pieces of federal legislation, requiring consultation with federally recognized Native American groups and tribal historic preservation officers in specific contexts, other collaborative occurrences are voluntary and not legislated, as indicated by several chapters in this volume. I present a case study in collaborative archaeology involving the Oneida Indian Nation of New York' and Colgate University. The case study examines a summer workshop in archaeology for Oneida adolescents that was conducted by the university. In discussing this project, I explore methods of collaboration and education in indigenous archaeology, which provides a comparative perspective on other examples discussed in this volume and elsewhere. It is worth mentioning at the outset that the term "collaboration" has different, contrasting connotations. As used in this chapter and volume, "collaboration" refers to a process of working together (i.e., "colaboring") in which all involved parties cooperate on equal footing by
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sharing power and control- necessary ingredients of a true partnership. On the other hand, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary provides a secondary definition of the word: "to cooperate with or willingly assist an enemy of one's country and especially an occupying force." Ironically, many Native Americans, particularly those who remember the Vietnam War, may interpret the term in this negative way when applied to relationships with archaeologists (see Brown and Robinson 2006; Dean and Perrelli 2006). In these postcolonial times, archaeologists are still perceived by numerous Indigenous peoples as adversarial and threatening- in short, an enemy. As such, under the second connotation, anyone working with archaeologists (i.e., "consorting with the enemy") would be deemed a collaborationist and traitor, resulting in pariah status. It is understandable, therefore, that those who view the term with this pejorative meaning not only would be reluctant to collaborate but would recoil at the use of the term (see Dean and Perrelli 2006). At the very least, archaeologists must convince Native communities with whom collaboration is sought that the desired cooperation pertains to the first definition only. Some resistance may still be unavoidable.
Summer Workshops in Indigenous Archaeology: 1995-2003 Colgate University, situated in central New York State, offered annually between 1995 and 2003 an archaeological workshop to teenagers of the Oneida Indian Nation, a small but growing Native community of just over a thousand members. The program was directed each summer for two weeks by me with assistance from a number of Colgate students and recent alumni, among other personnel. More than one hundred Oneida youth participated in the nine workshops and obtained direct fieldwork and laboratory experience in learning about their ancestors and other previous American Indian residents of the region. Only a few students took part in more than one workshop session. The workshop's main goals were (1) to strengthen the relationship between the university and the nation by bringing together people from both communities in meaningful educational experiences; (2) to provide a firsthand learning experience in archaeology for Oneida ado-
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lescents that involves limited excavation and laboratory processing of nonhuman remains from Indigenous sites in central New York; and (3) to identify, manage, and protect important archaeological resources in the region. Thus, the workshop was not created to train participants to become archaeologists. The workshop was conceived in 1992 when I was director of the university's Native American Studies Program. The idea was articulated as part of a larger grant proposal, prepared by the program's faculty, for a three-year project to improve community relations between Colgate and neighboring Iroquois communities. I envisioned that the summer workshop would focus on Native teenagers from surrounding areas. Lacking any previous experience collaborating with Indigenous peoples, I was, and continue to be, a firm supporter of public education in archaeology. This commitment contributed to my vision of a kind of tribal public archaeology. The proposal was approved in 1994 by the John Ben Snow Foundation, which granted matching funds to support only the workshop in archaeology during the 1995-1997 summers. Colgate contributed the match, which was considered "seed money" to initiate this innovative project. It is important to emphasize that during the mid199os when the workshop project began, most projects involving archaeologists and Native peoples in the northeastern United States were completed in compliance with legislation, such as NAGPRA and the National Historic Preservation Act, requiring consultation with federally recognized tribes. Very few voluntary collaborative programs existed at this time. For similar examples of early (and still continuing) programs in the region, see Bendremer and Thomas (this vol.) and Jones and McBride (2006), who work with the Mohegan Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, respectively, both in Connecticut. The Oneida Indian Nation, located some fifteen miles north of Colgate University, seemed a fitting target for the workshop since no other Indigenous group resides closer to the campus (fig. 5-1). While preparing the grant proposal, I contacted a few members and employees of the Oneida Indian Nation with whom I had previously developed an informal relationship to discuss the project. I was encouraged to offer the workshop to participants in the Oneida Indian Nation's Youth Work/ Learn Program once the grant proposal was approved. The Youth Work/
OneidaLake
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5-1. The location of Colgate University and the Sterling, Dungey, and Wilson sites. (Reprinted from Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples
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Learn Program provides summer employment to Oneida adolescents working on landscaping and in nation facilities and offices. The program's focus on the youth was appropriate, especially given the frequent complaint among Native communities about their young members "losing touch" with their roots. I hoped (perhaps naively or somewhat romantically, in hindsight) that through active learning and finding objects used by their ancestors, particularly on Oneida territory, the students would experience a link to their heritage. I suspect that for several participants this did not happen, at least during the project. They were, after all, teenagers, seemingly more interested in listening to the latest music at the site than in excavating test units in the often oppressive summer heat and humidity. For some, however, the workshop undoubtedly had an immediate powerful effect, as will be discussed. Perhaps for others the positive impact will be felt when they are much older. Each summer workshop consisted of two five-day sessions held during July and August, involving between three and fifteen students; more participants enrolled in the first three summers than more recently, as the Youth Work/Learn Program became smaller. For the first few workshops, each session had a separate group, while in the more recent workshops the same group participated in the two sessions. All the workshops involved limited archaeological excavation of at least one Indigenous site, as well as laboratory processing of the retrieved material remains. At the start of each session, an overview of the subject of archaeology was given to help correct some popular stereotypes. As is common among a general audience, very few individuals had any experience in archaeology. Nearly all were familiar with the field essentially by watching movies and television programs and mistakenly thought that archaeologists study dinosaur fossils. Actual remains, such as stone and bone tools, chipping debris, ceramics, wampum, glass beads, and metal implements, were shown during the orientation so that the teens could familiarize themselves with the diverse range of materials that they likely would be finding in the coming days. In addition, I explained that human graves would not be intentionally disturbed. If we accidentally uncovered any, the digging would cease immediately so that I could seek instruction from nation officials as to how to proceed. This critical point needs to be elaborated, as I am convinced that
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it is the chief reason that the nation first allowed me to conduct this program. In each workshop proposal submitted to the Oneida Indian Nation Men's Council and Clan Mothers, the nation's current governing body, I stated clearly that human burials would not be deliberately excavated. As a result, mutual trust and respect were created early in my collaboration with the Oneidas. The importance of establishing such positive relationships at the very beginning of collaborative programs is vital, as emphasized by several chapters in this volume (Bendremer and Thomas, Mills et al., Rossen, Silliman and Sebastian Dring). It is common knowledge that interactions between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples are frequently still tense, principally as a result of past and ongoing excavation and analysis of Native skeletal remains (see Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997; Bray 2001; Mihesuah 2000). During the course of this nine-year program, negligibly few human skeletal remains were unintentionally disturbed by workshop students. These consisted of isolated human teeth and a few disarticulated bones unearthed from nonburial contexts at two sites. After I contacted Oneida officials about these remains in both situations, digging of the test units containing the human skeletal material ceased, as requested by the nation, though excavation was permitted elsewhere at the sites. Following the orientation, each five-day workshop session involved archaeological testing for three days (weather permitting) and a day of laboratory work at the university to clean the recovered objects. At least one staff member of the Oneida Youth Work/Learn Program was present throughout every session. Two or three assistants with previous experience, mostly Colgate undergraduates or recent alumni, provided invaluable aid in the field and the lab in each workshop. Two alumni are oflroquois descent, and a few pursued graduate school in anthropology and employment in contract archaeology following their involvement in the workshop. My assistants soon realized that it was (and continues to be) highly unusual, particularly in the Northeast, to supervise Native youth in archaeological excavations on their own territory. During the summers of 1995-97, the workshop was held at three precontact sites situated on private property (not Oneida land) 2 in the vicinity of the university. Prior to the workshop program, I had been performing archaeological investigations at these locations with Colgate
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students in field methods classes. They consist mainly of stone tools, chipping debris, and pottery, ranging in age from approximately four thousand to one thousand years old. All archaeological remains recovered and cleaned by the 1995-97 workshop participants were kept in the Colgate Archaeology Laboratory for cataloging, analysis, interpreting, and reporting by students in my field methods classes during the subsequent fall semesters. By the end of the 1997 workshop, marking the termination of the three-year grant, I was convinced of the program's success and its unrealized potential. As a result, I soon submitted a proposal to the Oneida Indian Nation Men's Council and Clan Mothers requesting funding and permission to conduct the 1998 workshop on Oneida land. While the three precontact sites near Colgate were not insignificant or unproductive, other sites on nation territory were younger. Several are village sites, dating to about three hundred to five hundred years ago, that were settled by more recent ancestors of the workshop students, in contrast to ancient Native peoples who inhabited camp sites in the vicinity of the university. It was (and still is) my hope that the recovery of Oneida objects at these more recent villages by the participants would spark an interest and curiosity in their past. In the 1998 proposal I also requested that all recovered cultural materials from Oneida property be curated by the nation after cataloging, analysis, and reporting were completed at the university.3 Entire funding of the 1998 workshop budget was granted by the nation. 4 They also allowed me to hold the workshop at the Sterling site, situated on nation land in Verona, New York, and occupied from approximately six thousand to two hundred years ago (fig. p). Looking back, I realize this was a critical turning point in the history of the program, as it paved the way for future workshops on Oneida territory funded largely by the Oneidas. I submitted subsequent proposals to the Men's Council and Clan Mothers for the 1999-2003 summer workshops, and each year they not only approved them but provided the majority of funding. The university contributed a smaller amount to each of the past five workshops. The 1999-2001 workshops were conducted at the Dungey site in Stockbridge, New York, located south of the Sterling site (fig. p). This Oneida village dates to approximately the 1660s-1670s and contains the
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remains of hunting, fishing, gathering, and horticulture, and at least one longhouse, all the hallmarks of traditional Iroquois subsistence and settlement. Although the site has experienced many years of intensive collecting and excavating by avocational archaeologists and others, over four thousand seventeenth-century objects were retrieved from more than one hundred test units completed by Oneida workshop and Colgate students between 1999 and 2001. Most of the cultural remains are Euroamerican in origin and represent trade goods (e.g., glass beads, white clay [kaolin] smoking pipe fragments, cassock buttons, and metal objects). In contrast, few of the objects are lithic tools and chipping debris, pottery, wampum, charcoal, animal bone, and a charred maize kernel. The last two workshop sessions, in 2002 and 2003, were held about one mile north of Dungey at the Wilson site, also in Stockbridge (fig. 5.1). Dating to about the 1590s to the 1620s, the site contains several of the types of materials uncovered at the Dungey site, except for fewer artifacts of Euroamerican origin and more remains of Native manufacture (e.g., lithic and ceramic objects) and cultigens (e.g., maize, beans, and squash). I agree with Rossen (this vol.) that the process of doing collaborative archaeology is just as important and fulfilling, both to the descendent communities and to the archaeologists, as the product. The Oneida workshop was designed to be heavily process-oriented, as elaborated previously by its goals. Nevertheless, a number of products emerged. Analysis and interpretation of the assemblage from the Sterling, Dungey, and Wilson sites are discussed in my five coedited unpublished reports, prepared by Colgate students in my field methods classes, based on research that they and the workshop participants performed at these Oneida sites (Kerber et al. 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003). I have given many presentations of this work, both with my Colgate students and separately, to nation members and employees and at meetings of the New York State Archaeological Association, the Society for American Archaeology, the American Anthropological Association, and other organizations. Also, two Colgate alumni who served as assistants relied heavily on their workshop experience in writing a PhD dissertation (Henry 2001) and an undergraduate honors research chapter (Danielson 2001). In short, the fruits of this collaborative archaeological project have been far-reaching and continue to grow.
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Signs of Success The Oneida workshop's success is demonstrated clearly by the involvement of more than one hundred nation teenagers during nine consecutive summers between 1995 and 2003 and the contribution of funding from both the Oneida Indian Nation and Colgate University (fig. p). Further, numerous statements from the students and others attest to the significance of the program. In the words of one Oneida youth, "It was interesting to learn about what archaeologists do, but the best thing was holding the materials used by my ancestors. I learned more about my culture and our past" (Malone and Hanks 2000:23). The director of the Youth Work/Learn Program, who is a schoolteacher, commented: "You can't get a better history class than this. The kids are learning more than they'd ever learn in public school" (McCarroll 2001:14). He added, "These kids had hands-on discovery. They had a connection to history'' (Walters 2003:14). An Oneida clan mother remarked similarly: "Walking over the land where our ancestors walked ... thinking 'Our people were here' ... helps us to bring our ancestors back into our souls, into our hearts, and the artifacts are real. They add so much to the knowledge and understanding that we have of our very own people" (personal communication to Dixie Henry 1999, cited in Henry 2001:rn). One of the most revealing comments comes from a member of the Men's Council and Clan Mothers: "Everyone has studied our people, but not with cultural sensitivity. We revere those who have gone before us. We have our oral tradition, but to be able to provide our children with an actual hands-on experience with our past, that is invaluable" (Cronin 2001:1). Although he conceded that "archaeology used to be a bad word among the Oneidas" (Corbett 2000:1C), the workshop altered this perception, while also helping to shape the identity of the participants. Referring to the workshop, he stated: "It gives our people a connection with their past and a greater understanding of who they are. It is one thing to say 'I am Native American' and another to say 'I am Oneida and I know who I am.' That's one thing the nation and Colgate can provide" (Hubbard 1997:6). Other voluntary collaborative archaeological programs with a focus on Indigenous youth education have been successful in the United
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5.2. An Oneida Youth Work/Learn Program participant rejoices after
recovering a seventeenth-century glass trade bead at the Wilson site during the summer 2003 workshop. (From Kerber 20066; photo courtesy ofTim Sofranko)
States and Canada. In addition to those presented in this volume (see Handsman and McBride, this vol.) is the Red Earth Summer Archaeology Program for high school students, created in conjunction with the Gila River Indian Community's Employment and Training Office in south-central Arizona (Ravesloot 1997=177). The project's impact on its participants was similar to that of the Oneida workshop. The main goal of the eight-week program was to introduce high school students to archaeology. The similarities in expectations and outcomes between the two are striking: While it is our hope that one or more of the high school students who have participated in the Red Earth Archaeology Program will elect to
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pursue a career in archaeology, that result is not absolutely necessary for the program to be a success. More important is the fact that the program has provided Native American students with an opportunity to participate in the study of their past and that it has introduced some to higher education who most likely would not have had the experience. In the process of introducing Native American students to archaeology, I also believe we have managed to change some perceptions about archaeology and archaeologists. (Ravesloot 1997:177)
Additional proof of the Oneida workshop's success occurred in 2000, before the nation demolished two small buildings abutting the Dungey site. The Oneidas asked that this location be investigated as part of the 2000 workshop in order to recover any significant cultural materials prior to the removal of both structures. While important archaeological remains were not found, the assistance of workshop students in Oneida cultural resource management was a positive outgrowth of the collaboration that had developed. Especially during the latter workshops, there was much favorable local, regional, and national media coverage by newspapers (including the Christian Science Monitor) and television and radio stations (including programs on the local PBS affiliate and interviews on a local National Public Radio affiliate). Beneficial for both the university and the nation, the publicity contributed to increased public awareness about archaeology, the Iroquois people, and collaborating with an Indigenous descendent community. As put by a member of the Men's Council and Clan Mothers, "The more people know about Oneidas, the more they will respect us" (Walters 2003:14). During our time in both the field and lab in each session, I tried to encourage students to contemplate the significance of the findings by asking what the artifacts, as well as the workshop experience, meant to them. Although several individuals were reticent, perhaps feeling uneasy talking to a group or to me as someone who is not Oneida, a few shared their thoughts. One participant revealed to a journalist rather profound insights: I see this as an opening to many other things, not just archaeology. This is an opportunity that kids shouldn't overlook. It opens the door to
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religion and other issues around us. People need to get involved in our culture. We have lost a lot of people.... This makes me think about history and what's happened right here in Stockbridge, Munnsville, and Oneida. I think about how our people were separated when .these lands were settled, and I dream about us (Oµeidas) uniting again one day. When I'm out here, I can dream and think. When I find a bead, that is special to me ... I still bead ... when I find a bead, I feel good, and I feel a connection with my ancestors ... and I feel hope for our future. I dream of my people coming together again. (Cronin 2001:14)
In addition to the workshop, other examples of collaboration in archaeology exist between Colgate University and the Oneida Indian Nation. In the mid-199os, people from both communities began working together in compliance with the NAGPRA statute. Colgate's Longyear Museum of Anthropology contains several hundred Oneida artifacts that were excavated in the 1950s and 1960s by avocational archaeologists, who later sold or donated their collections to the university. Included in these acquired collections were Oneida skeletal remains and burial objects. Consultation was initiated with NAGPRA representatives of the Oneida Indian Nation, culminating in 1995 with the repatriation of the Oneida skeletal remains (at least six individuals) and all the associated funerary objects: "The Oneida feasted their ancestors, burned tobacco to carry their thoughts and prayers, spoke words to the Creator, then laid their people back to rest" (Hubbard 1997:6). As one of the NAGPRA representatives reflected, It helps to think these are my people, my ancestors housed in these institutions. To do the right thing, repatriations, can be strenuous and painstaking. It was quite straining, and quite rejuvenating at the same time. The nation is thankful for the approach the university has taken to correct a great wrong. Colgate has been very cooperative in working to resolve this sensitive issue. (Hubbard 1997=6)
While repatriation of these remains was mandated by federal law, other agreements concerning the exhibition and curation of sacred Oneida archaeological materials in the Longyear Museum were reached voluntarily as a sign of good faith and out of respect for the sensitivity
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of the objects. Specifically, for the past several years, the museum has discontinued exhibiting items that were removed from Oneida burials by collectors more than forty years ago. These unassociated funerary objects, numbering more than a thousand, remain in storage and are viewed only with permission of the museum curator. Under NAGPRA, the Oneidas possess a copy of the museum's inventory of these objects. They have not yet requested repatriation, which I see stemming largely from our relationship of mutual trust and respect forged over the past decade. Collaborative relationships, however, tend to be precarious, fraught with politics, and should not be taken for granted as they are apt to change. Creating and sustaining them require nurturing, firm commitment, and good faith from all the parties, but there are still no guarantees.
Conclusion Despite the excellent publicity and the large number of Oneida youth who have participated in the archaeological workshop, the program is no longer offered. The Oneida Indian Nation Men's Council and Clan Mothers declined to approve the workshop for the summers of 2004 and 2005. Although I am not entirely certain why it has ended for now, the official reason, as explained by Brian Patterson, a member of the Men's Council, in his letter to me (Patterson, personal communication 2004), was that "a funding time-out" was necessary to reconsider the extent to which the workshop was consistent with the nation's emerging heritage management plan. In particular, concerns were raised over the destructive nature of the excavation process. This is indeed a valid point that pertains to the conservation ethic prevalent in archaeology today. A time-out is a good idea for all collaborative projects so that the broader impacts of fieldwork and other issues can be evaluated. Although in this particular situation, subsurface testing by Oneida and Colgate students amounted to sampling less than one percent of the Sterling, Dungey, and Wilson sites. I am patient and remain optimistic that the Oneida workshop in archaeology program will once again be offered to the nation's young population. I hope to direct future sessions for the Oneidas, or any other
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Native groups in the region, as long as the tribal community and the university value the educational importance of the project, as long as sharing of power and control in the project are maintained, as long as mutual trust and respect continue to develop, and as long as the workshop goals are met. Although the project has ceased for the time being, it should not be seen as a failure. On the contrary, for the reasons cited previously it was successful, even if, as expressed by Ravesloot (1997:177) concerning the Red Earth Archaeology Program, no participants become archaeologists. In retrospect, conducting nine consecutive summer sessions of collaborative archaeology is indeed a remarkable feat for any project, especially in the Northeast at the end of the twentieth century when few such voluntary programs existed among Native groups. It is also a testament to the commitment and vision of those at the Oneida Indian Nation and Colgate University who were involved in and supported the project for so long. The archaeological experience for many of the workshop participants may be even more meaningful as they become older, thus perpetuating the long-term impact of this project on the nation and its view of archaeology. Notes r. The Oneidas call themselves "Onyota'a:ka'' in their language, which means "the People of the Standing Stone." They are traditionally members of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Haudenosaunee, a Native term meaning "the People of the Longhouse"). For purposes of this chapter, "Oneida Indian Nation," "nation," and "Oneidas" refer only to the Oneida Indian Nation of New York (i.e., people of Oneida descent living in central New York State), and not the Oneidas residing in Wisconsin or Ontario. 2. "Oneida land" and "Oneida territory" refer to the more than 17,000 acres of property in central New York State owned by the Oneida Indian Nation, as opposed to a much larger area of some 250,000 acres, encompassing the current land claim case. 3. Until recently, all the recovered objects from Oneida land were kept at the nation's Shako:wi Cultural Center, as stipulated in this proposal. Some of the objects also have been displayed there. The materials are now curated in an archive storage facility in the Oneida Children and Elders Center. 4. It should be mentioned that the Oneida Indian Nation· runs a lucrative casino (Turning Stone Casino), as well as other profitable business enterprises.
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Acknowledgments This chapter is a substantially revised version of Kerber (2006a). I thank members of the Oneida Indian Nation Men's Council and Clan Mothers, especially Richard Lynch, Brian Patterson, and Dale Rood, for allowing me to conduct the archaeological workshop between 1995 and 2003 and for contributing the majority of financial support since 1998. I am also thankful for the support of Randy Phillips, director of the Youth Work/Learn Program, and Anthony Wonderley, formerly Oneida Indian Nation hisrorian. I am indebted to ·Colgate University and the John Ben Snow Foundation for their funding of the workshop. My sincere thanks are offered to the more than one hundred participants in nine years, as well as to Dixie Henry, Seth Bidder, Jason Flay, and all the other archaeological assistants who provided such indispensable help. I wish to express my gratitude to Stephen Silliman for the opportunity to contribute to this volume and to his constructive comments on this chapter, along with those of Kent Lightfoot and an anonymous reviewer. Lastly, thanks are due to John Ware, director of the Amerind Foundation, and the Amerind seminar participants for their lively discussion of my presentation version of this chapter.
6 Field School Archaeology, Activism, and Politics in the Cayuga Homeland of Central New York Jack Rossen
In this chapter I attempt to make a very long story short. I have conducted four archaeological field schools, joint programs of Ithaca College and Wells College, at Cayuga sites in the socially and politically complex situation of central New York. This is not a formal collaborative program as are many others described in this volume, but I feel it is instructive to show how collaboration cJeveloped in an area with little history of archaeological research or collaboration between Native people and academics. The story includes a federally recognized but essentially landless Native nation, a long-running Indian land claim, an anti-Indian land claim organization, and the formation of a grassroots community organization that repatriated land and advocates for Native people. It involves expanding the identity of the archaeologist to become involved in the community and contemporary Native issues, using archaeology to form a solid historical backdrop to today's struggles, developing corollary educational projects, and taking personal and financial risks to help the Native community. The Cayuga are still members of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. After an award of $247 million made by the courts in 2002 (Rapp et al. 2002; Shaw 2002a), the Cayuga land claim was dismissed by a federal district appeals court in August 2005 after twenty-five years in court (Associated Press 2005; Broach and Elliott-Engel 2005; Rapp 2005a). The dismissal was a devastating blow to the Cayuga, whose nation is the only one of the six of the confederacy that has remained essentially landless since the Sullivan Campaign of 1779, when the U.S. Continental Army under the orders of George Washington burned their settlements, crop fields, and fruit tree orchards (Cook 2000 [1887]). This scorched earth destruction occurred despite the fact that the Cayuga
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were neutral during the Revolutionary War (Mann 2005:rn2). There has been a resurgence of interest in the Sullivan Campaign (Mann 2005; Spiegelman 2004; Williams 2005), but little of this new research has been conducted from either Cayuga or archaeological perspectives. The New York State economy has been depressed in the years following 9-n (the World Trade Center event on September II, 2001), and former governor George Pataki pressured Native nations in the state to take casinos as a dual solution to the problems of economy and multiple Indian land claims. With the dismissal of the Cayuga claim and a recent court refusal to rehear the case, it is unclear whether the current governor will move forward with plans to negotiate pacts to allow several Native-run casinos. The New York Cayuga have split into factions, divided over whether or not to build a casino and stay in the confederacy, as opening a casino risks expulsion from the traditional confederacy, which maintains an anti-gaming position. Cayugas from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma also retain interest in the original New York homeland. The neighboring Onondaga Nation, the center of the traditional confederacy, has recently unveiled its own land claim, centered not on demands for land or money, but on a demand for environmental cleanup of a vast area of New York, including the cities of Watertown, Syracuse, and Binghamton (McAndrew 2005). As of early 2008, the negotiations with Native groups for casinos continued, but without any implications for resolving land claims or disputes (Elliman and Berry 2007; Rapp 2007). A vociferous local anti-land claim group, Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE) also operates in the region (Anonymous 2003; Shaw 2000a, 2001c; Tobin 2002b; Wheeler 2000). The word "equality" is used as a euphemism for assimilation (Peterman 1999). The organization includes small farmers and businesspeople trying to make ends meet in a difficult economy and venting their frustrations toward Native Americans (fig. 6.1; Stith 2003a, 2003b). State politicians aid and abet their anger at Indians as a convenient scapegoat. These people otherwise might start wondering about state and federal farm policies, why corporations in the area pay few or no local taxes, and about the consequences of New York's Empire Zone program, which levies no property or sales taxes for ten years on new businesses or even old businesses that change their names.
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6.1. Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE) signs on a barn. The rhetoric refers to the lack of recognition of the Cayuga Nation, as well as an ideology of
assimilation. (Photo by Jack Rossen)
The situation is complex and roughly comparable to regions m Canada and Australia where Indigenous land rights efforts have met with a local backlash (Mackey 2002, 2005; McIntosh 2000). I have briefly described it to set the backdrop for the archaeological field schools that I direct and the collaborative efforts chat I have initiated with the local Native community. The situation heightens the already complex relationships between archaeologists and Native people, accentuating both the positive and negative potential effects of archaeology. I endeavor to discuss my field schools and interrelated projects and how they have transformed the way that I think of and perform archaeology.
Historical Revision of the Cayuga and Their Homeland A primary motivation for practicing collaborative field school archaeology in the Cayuga heartland is to counteract politically motivated historical revision. A section of the UCE Web site titled "A Cayuga Chronicle" by Warren Hickman (n.d.) describes the Cayuga as "cannibalistic," "Stone Age People" with a "warlike character." Hickman includes the statement, "In describing the Iroquois the Encyclopaedia
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Britannica notes: 'No other tribes showed such a preoccupation with supernatural aggression and cruelty, sorcery, torture, and cannibalism."' UCE further states on its Web site that "the Cayuga Indians came to the area of New York in the 1500s, a wandering nomadic tribe that traveled around the northeast, never having a permanent settlement" (UCE n.d.), an assertion that few if any archaeologists or Native scholars would agree with. Another depiction of the Cayuga homeland emphasizes low population numbers. Hickman, using an interesting sports analogy, states that the "estimated total population oflndians [in 1600] in what is now New York State would not fill half the seats in the Carrier Dome of Syracuse University or a third of the football stadium which is home to the Buffalo Bills." UCE is certainly not the only source of historical revision in the area. Despite ample evidence that the Cayuga had significant villages and cornfields in the area, a local historian wrote that when the first white settlers arrived in the heart of Cayuga territory (near current Aurora Village), they "found an empty wilderness" (Edmunds 2000:1). These interpretations attempt to denigrate Native culture and erase or downplay the Cayuga presence in the region. They represent strategies that are used to undermine the validity of Indian land claims (that is, the Cayuga weren't here at all; they were here, but they weren't strongly attached to the land; or there weren't that many of them here anyway). Other forms of revision can be found in the historical markers that dot the roadways around Cayuga Lake. Many of these glorify the Sullivan Campaign of August and September 1779, when George Washington sent the Continental Army north to burn forty-three Seneca and Cayuga towns and villages at the height of the Revolutionary War (Cook 2000 [1887]). The campaign was ostensibly conducted to punish the Haudenosaunee nations that backed the British (Williams 2005: ix) and to protect frontier settlements (Halsey 1901:257), but there is mounting evidence that many Cayuga were neutral during the war and indeed were not British supporters (Mann 2005:ro2-ro4). Some historians argue that the campaign was instead conducted against the Cayuga to open a northern route for westward expansions of the nation (Flick 1929:ro; Spiegelman 2004), as a training project to shore up the supply lines and chain-of-command issues of the army (Fischer 1997), and to provide land as payment for soldiers. Markers placed in 1929 discuss the
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campaign "against the hostile aggressions" of the Cayuga (Ford 2002). Also commemorated are the many Native towns, villages, crop fields, and fruit tree orchards that were destroyed. The glorification of this destruction has taken many forms, including a musical play about the campaign written for the 150th anniversary (Lord 1929). It should come as no surprise that these commemorations and glorifications are hurtful to the Haudenosaunee people. The Sullivan Campaign was a complex event that has not only been the focus of much historical revision, but also has been rendered invisible by local school curricula. Researching and raising awareness about the Sullivan Campaign helps local people understand that the Cayuga did not simply leave their territory two hundred years ago, as is suggested by anti-Indian land claim adherents, but that they were literally burned and chased out under the orders of General George Washington, known to the Haudenosaunee as "Town Destroyer" (Mintz 1999:4; Williams 2005:ix; fig. 6.2). The local political climate, coupled with the extensive amount of historical revision, fueled my commitment to research and educate about more accurate depictions of the history, archaeology, and culture of the Cayuga people. This led to my involvement in the formation of a grassroots organization called SHARE and what I now refer to as my "expanded identity."
Archaeology and Expanded Identity All archaeologists must overcome the historical insensitivity of their profession toward Native people and strive to change the negative stereotype that Native people have of archaeologists (Anonymous 1986; Jemison 1997). In the Cayuga heartland, archaeologists have committed what Native people consider atrocities, such as the complete excavation of large cemeteries (Ritchie 1945). I have learned that an archaeologist working in or near a land claim area, or in any politically complex situation, especially where archaeologists have a dubious history, might take on an expanded identity. In other words, archaeologists can be advocates for contemporary Native issues, constructing a relationship with Native people that transcends the archaeology (Rossen 2006). By expanded identity, I mean that whether or not people approve of my research
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6.2. This plaque in Aurora Village, one of many in the area, contains a matter-of-fact statement about the destruction of the Cayuga Nation by the American Army in 1779. (Photo by Jack Rossen)
activities, my advocacy and community involvement have somewhat submerged my identity as an archaeologist. I do not mean to hide the activities of excavation and analysis of Native American materials, but instead place them within the broader framework and identity of the community activist. Families and communities in my research area have long been divided by the issues surrounding the long-standing land claim. In 1999, Julie and Jim Uticone, lifelong residents in the land claim area, began SHARE (Strengthening Haudenosaunee American Relations through Education) to promote friendship and mutual respect locally between non-Native and Native people. She is a self-employed businesswoman, and he is retired after long-term employment at a local business. A major catalyst for the Uticones to begin SHARE was a public threat made close to Thanksgiving of 1999 to bomb the Turning Stone Casino of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York and to murder a Native person every three days. Though the Uticones are not supporters of Indian casinos, the threat brought the deep-seated racism present in the region into sharp focus. SHARE was born modestly, with friends and neigh-
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bors gathering at a park for a Peace Circle. The Uticones recruited a small founding circle of people including academics like myself, Brooke Hansen, a cultural anthropologist at Ithaca College, and Ernie Olson, a cultural anthropologist at Wells College. A local Seneca family was also central to the original SHARE group. We joined as founding members with two convictions: first, that there was a silent majority of local people who supported Native people but were intimidated by the noisy UCE proclamations and signs, and second, that an alternative voice advocating for Native people was sorely needed. As an archaeologist, I felt personally responsible that this organization have a solid historical grounding and awareness. SHARE members put out a quarterly newsletter, held gatherings, and visited local schools to discuss Native people and contemporary issues. Early in 2001, we heard that a friend's organic farm was going up for sale near Union Springs in the land claim area. The seventy-acre organic farm is located adjacent to both Cayuga Castle, the largest historic Cayuga settlement site, and Great Gully, the place where, according to oral history, the Cayuga hid during the Sullivan Campaign (Tobin 2002a). A few of us thought about who should really own that land. We pooled money, bought the place, and the SHARE Farm was born (Burdick 2001a, 20016; Saldi 2001; Shaw 2001a, 20016, 2001d; Thornley 2001). For five years, we operated the farm as an educational center, an advocating voice for Native people, and as a friendly place for people of all kinds to plant crops and reconnect with each other and the land (Olson et al. 2001). In December 2005, our ultimate goal was realized when the farm was transferred to the traditional Cayuga Nation (Carter 2005; McNamara 2006; Rapp 20056). These are the Cayuga people who are still within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and continue to be led by the ancient system of clan mothers who select the chiefs. Our Native friends have expressed interest in building a ceremonial longhouse and having community gardens and other environmental projects at the farm. Immediately after its purchase in April 2001, the SHARE Farm was constantly visited by large and small groups of Native and non-Native people. There are many stories to tell about Native returns to the heartland, impromptu socials, heirloom crop projects, medicinal herb gardens (Keemer and Williams 2003), and bridges built between people
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(after all, the SHARE slogan is "Build a bridge and get over it"). Student internships were conducted at the farm on a range of topics including wind power, soil microbes, farming and marketing of organic crops, and archaeology (Cuppernell 2004; Moragne 2001). Support came from places as diverse as the Onondaga Nation (the closest existing Native nation), the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force (HETF), and organizations such as Cultural Survival in Boston (Cultural Survival 2003). SHARE also co-organized with Wells College the Peachtown Native American Festival, which provided a day of Native dance, music, food, and crafts for local people (Plotnick 2001). SHARE became a social experiment and cultural success that astounded us. Our huge mailing list and turnouts at our workdays, events, and festivals vindicated our belief that there was strong but previously silent local support for Native people. My involvement on the board of directors of SHARE strengthened my relations with local Native people. This helped me better understand their concerns about cultural presentation, resource management, and archaeology. One of my favorite SHARE stories comes from the visit of Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a headman of the Brazilian Yanomami, who was visiting Cornell University to speak on his desire to reclaim blood samples taken by anthropologists. Davi spoke emotionally about his fellow countrymen who had passed on but could not travel to the land of the ancestors until their blood was returned to the rivers of Brazil. After the session, he asked about meeting some local Native leaders, and we were able to quickly arrange it. The next day, Davi met with a range of Haudenosaunee clan mothers, chiefs, and faithkeepers at the farm. At one point of an emotional day, everyone stood at the edge of Great Gully, where Davi was told the story that during the 1779 burning of the Cayuga villages by the American army, the Cayuga people had hidden in the gorge (Tobin 2002b). Through a translator, Davi described similar events that had happened to his people. He told the Haudenosaunee leaders not to forget history or let anyone change it.
Archaeology as a Tool of Reconciliation In many ways, the SHARE Farm Project transformed my ideas about archaeology. It is the place where Cayuga people planted corn in their
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homeland soil for the first time in over two hundred years, where wild strawberries are grown for their spring festival, and where meetings of organizations such as the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force have been held. Now that the Cayugas have taken ownership of the farm, we will continue working as requested and on joint projects. In this setting, archaeological field schools occurring in the region around the farm can be a tool of reconciliation and cultural survival. The explicit educational purpose heals old archaeologist-Indian rifts. Local non-Native people have forgotten, suppressed, or revised the Native history of the area, feeding their anti-Indian sentiments. Archaeological projects can bring Native people back to visit and reconnect with their ancient villages, which raises awareness of the depth and meaning of that history for local non-Native people. In other regions, Native leaders have taken an active role in choosing particular sites to investigate, and in developing research designs and questions (cf. Hunter, Two Bears, this vol.). This has not occurred in my work with the Cayuga. Because of the continuing dispersal of the Cayuga people, the Cayuga themselves are unaware of the locations of most of their ancestral villages. Native people have, however, expressed a general interest in knowing about the Cayuga landscape and the layout and nature of villages before the destruction. There is also a concern about revision and lack of recognition of the depth and complexity of their history, along with an understanding that archaeology is one way to counteract this. However, Cayuga interest in archaeology is tempered by and balanced with a strong concern about disturbing sites. For this reason, clan mothers have approached my archaeological research on a site-by-site basis, visiting places they have never before seen to determine whether the story of the site should be told. This approach brings to light how the Cayuga view archaeologists and academics in general. To the Cayuga, archaeologists are conduits for information. They themselves discover nothing; rather, the sites reveal themselves when the time is socially and politically correct. I once told a clan mother that I believed I had found the location of a portion of the Cayuga village of Chonodote, known to the British and Americans as Peachtown. She replied that I had not found anything, but the site had chosen to reveal itself now. Similarly, Native people are unconcerned that Coreorgonel, the T utelo village once located near present Ithaca, has
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not been located by archaeologists (Baugher and Quinn 1995), because they believe the time is not yet right for its revelation. Clan mothers can change their minds, too, such as when we encountered burned human remains in a house at a site. We together decided to immediately backfill and leave the site. One question raised by this project is whether archaeologists have an ethical obligation to work with all stakeholders, even those they may disagree with. Certainly all local people-even anti-Indian organization members-are legitimate stakeholders in this case. Productively engaging them may mean conducting historical archaeology to demonstrate to them what Cayuga people feel, such as the emotional power of unearthed objects. For some local landowners, it is the power of connecting themselves as present-day farmers to Cayugas who farmed their land centuries earlier. For others, it may be a question of discussing regional economic and tax base issues, including the use of Native people as scapegoats by local politicians for the region's problems. The inclusion of all stakeholders is a gradual, long-term effort and learning process for an archaeologist in this type of situation.
A New Vision for Archaeological Field Schools How do we construct a new vision for archaeological field schools that is collaborative and indigenous in orientation? I have no blueprint, and I feel that archaeologists must construct their field schools based on the particular local people and sociopolitical conditions. To begin, a field site may be transformed into a context for dialogue. For instance, in a land claim area, as visitors stare into open excavation units, conversation invariably turns to regional history and contemporary issues. My students are already educated on why there are land claims in the Cayuga case: the illegal land sales of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century following the Sullivan Campaign and the desires of New York State to undermine the central authority of the United States by building its own empire (thus, the state's nickname "Empire State"). Students also read about the real and imagined consequences of the Cayuga land claim, including eviction hysteria, taxation concerns, and the depressed economy of central New York. The particular details of these issues are beyond the scope of this article, so it must suffice for now to state that
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field school students are conversant enough to engage site visitors in a calm and reasoned dialogue. Perhaps foremost, the students know why the Cayuga feel so strongly about returning to their estranged homeland, and why this return must be mutually respectful. The field school teaches students the importance of process versus that of product in archaeology (see Kerber, Mills et al., Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). I was trained as a processual archaeologist and taught that what really matters in archaeology is the final report, articles, or book. In this case, the process of doing archaeology may be more important than the product. There is a basic importance to the presence of professional archaeologists in the Cayuga region. Although professional archaeologists work in other areas around Cayuga Lake (Allen 1999; Baugher and Clark 1998; Levine 2003), I am the first professional to work in the central Cayuga heartland region since Marian White in 1970. The absence of a professional archaeologist for so long imparts a local impression that the area has no history, or that the history is insignificant. An ongoing professional presence forces residents to ponder and reflect on that history (Shaw 2002b). The Cayuga land claim and impending return to the area, which has begun with their occupation of the farm, now known as the Cayuga-SHARE Farm, can begin to seem more reasonable and less invasive. Another role of my field school is that it introduces students into local social and political activism. While some students who are favorable to Native people and cultural diversity self-select for the field school, student comments show that the field school also offers a transformative experience that challenges and changes unsuspecting students. Many students were housed at the SHARE Farm itself. After hours and on weekends, students could be found planting crops with Native people, helping to plan a Native American festival, or cleaning up trash from spiritually important land like Great Gully (fig. 6.3). When an Indian mascot issue was raised by Native students at the local high school, field school students attended the school committee meetings to support changing the stereotypical Plains Indian mascot. Other field school students assembled or revamped local museum exhibits to discuss the progress and problems of modern Native peoples, along with key issues such as site protection, repatriation, and cultural revitalization (Barreiro 1990; George-Kanentiio 1998; Jacobs 2001). When one student entered
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6.3. Field school students planting heirloom Haudenosaunee corn at the SHARE Farm. The crop was harvested by the Cayugas. (Photo by Jack Rossen)
the local museum to begin her internship, she found among the exhibits Lewis Henry Morgan's classification of the Cayuga within "barbarism" and a nineteenth-century photo labeled "the last Cayugas." These field schools are not studying the history of a distant, dead, or disappeared people, but are actively integrating the past and present. This is a particularly key point for archaeological field schools held in the eastern United States, where Native people are not as numerous or visible as in western states. What are the realities of conducting this type of applied and activist investigation within the academy? I began this work as an untenured faculty member and received tenure during the project, probably because my curriculum vitae also contained much "traditional" scholarship. Ocher faculty members involved in the project struggled to have their applied and activist work recognized as scholarship. My college included a specific written mandate from the provost directing faculty to become involved in the local communities and to conduct experiential education, but this has not been recognized at the tenure committee level, where more traditional views of scholarship are maintained. The debate about the scholarly value of applied and activist research is
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thus playing out. Now, as a department chair, I can encourage faculty and lobby in favor of the significance of this style of research project; however, I must also urge junior faculty to conduct traditional research while we persuade the academy to recognize activist scholarship. Finally, I wish to return to the concept of the expanded identity of the archaeologist, which I have pondered for a long time. Activities such as involvement in nonprofit organizations that expand the archaeologist's identity certainly divert time and energy from purely archaeological pursuits, but they are central to reconciliation and the construction of a new vision for archaeology. The field schools are committed to maintaining dialogue with and the participation of Native people and local residents and an involvement in contemporary issues that reach beyond but are informed by the archaeology. I can tell you this is not an easy bridge to stay on. In this atmosphere, even spanning both good and bad days, the old product-driven, contemporarily uninvolved archaeology seems to me barren and sterile by comparison.
The Future My expanded identity continues to take me far beyond my archaeological base to other outreach projects. I encourage archaeologists to use their knowledge and connections in creative and unusual ways. Often these projects entail acting as a liaison, working with my Native American studies faculty colleagues, and facilitating meetings to bring people with different skills and interests together. One such project is a film camp for Native middle school and high school students. This project brings together our School of Communications dean and faculty with Native secondary schools and an experienced Native filmmaker to provide an opportunity for students to learn the creative and technical aspects of filmmaking, and perhaps to spur an interest in recording family histories. A second project involves working with Native historians and educational experts from a media literacy program to develop a Haudenosaunee high school curriculum based on specific issues like the influence of the Haudenosaunee on the U.S. Constitution and the Revolutionary War experience of Native people. These are tangible projects with clear benefits to Native people that do not carry the spiritual and intellectual ambiguity of archaeology.
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Meanwhile, the "new vision" or indigenous archaeological field school must stay in tune with the dynamics of the local Native situation. After four field schools, we are faced with new challenges. The traditional Cayuga installed two new chiefs in the spring of 2005, and thus the leadership structure of the nation is in flux. The twenty-five-year-old Cayuga land claim was dismissed by an appeals court in August 2005, an event that shook the Nation to its core and may damage Indian land claims throughout the country. In the face of these events, the SHARE Farm, transferred to the Cayuga Nation in December 2005, may become more important to the Cayuga as a base for traditional activities. Consequently, the new leadership is beginning to turn its attention to issues of cultural resources and archaeology. In the summer of 2005, we had our most successful archaeological field school from some perspectives. We had a dozen quality students and a variety of Native visitors and on-site speakers (fig. 6.4). Students spent considerable time at the SHARE Farm working in the traditional fields. The archaeological site where we worked revealed a tremendous amount of material and information. We uncovered a complete "shorthouse," or building of paired-post longhouse construction that was only twenty-five feet long. A row of five fire hearths contained reconstructable pots and delicate faunal remains that are rare in central New York. Native leaders watched and worked screens as these features were carefully excavated. Yet there was a shift away from the solid Native support I had received in the past. One Native leader visiting the site asked the crew if they had had dreams or felt spiritual disturbance at the site. Others raised questions about the final disposition of artifact collections. It became clear to me that the changing leadership and political landscape had begun to erode support for the archaeology (cf. Kerber, this vol.). I realized that performing Cayuga archaeology is not worthwhile if the Cayuga people do not support the effort. The development of Native support for archaeology in central New York will be a long, slow process, because of the negative experiences of Native people with archaeologists. Improved relations require changes in how archaeologists work, construct their identity, and relate to Native people, but it also requires active facilitation of Native participation and interest in archaeology. Native people in New York have not participated in archaeology to the same extent as in the west (Swidler et al. 1997;
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6-4- Ada Jacques, an Onondaga potter, discusses pottery making and other topics with field school students at the site. (Photo by Jack Rossen)
Watkins 2000; Hunter, Lightfoot, Two Bears, this vol.), but they are becoming increasingly involved in the federal government Section 106 system of archaeological site management and data recovery. There is thus a growing need for Native people to understand the methods, technologies, and jargon of archaeology in order to effectively participate in the management and protection of their ancestral sites. There are official Native committees on cultural resources that have discussed this need with me, and as a result I am forming a working group of professional archaeologists to develop a registry of scholars who excavate in Haudenosaunee territories and a systematic framework for them to communicate with appropriate Native leaders. Many contract and academic archaeologists working here are not in contact with Native leaders and are unaware of the proper means to contact them. Our working group will develop a survey, brochure, and Web site to facilitate communication and provide consultation on archaeological issues. Another aspect of this communication is my implementation of a separate series of free noncredit-bearing field schools exclusively for Native people, geared to people of college age and older but also in-
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duding family days. These schools will last only one week to ten days, instead of the five to six weeks of the regular field schools. There have been Native students on three of the four field seasons, but the logistics of the college-based field school have often made Native participation impossible. Largely because of the demographics of Ithaca College, which has only a few Native students, the crews have been mostly composed of white students who have had little or no contact with Native people. This situation provides both educational challenges and opportunities, but it has become dear that another program is needed to provide field experiences for Native people. The Native field schools will thus be geared to a set of cultural resource and management issues that are somewhat different from the history and contemporary issues taught in the credit-bearing college field schools. The Native field schools will provide opportunities for people to intimately consider the benefits and risks of archaeology so that sustained dialogue about collaboration or its discontinuation will be possible. A dual system of separate credit and noncredit-bearing field schools would probably not work everywhere. In any area where field schools are normally too expensive and timeconsuming for the participation of Native people, the development of separate brief Native field schools might work. In this region, there is a great need for a new apparatus for recording sites and housing artifact collections. The Cayuga have been denied access to the New York State site files, and Native leaders have instructed me to not submit my sites to those files (see Mills et al., this vol.). A dialogue is under way about whether there should be a Haudenosauneecontrolled site file and artifact collection facility to be open to Native scholars. A key decision to make involves the disposition of the collections made during the four field schools-specifically whether all field school collections should be reburied, whether representative materials should be archived while the remaining materials are reburied, or whether all collections should be curated. This question arose as-Cayuga leaders expressed disapproval of the usual curation practice of housing collections in state-controlled facilities. This is an ongoing dialogue, and I intend to carry out the final decision. It will soon be time to present to the Cayuga Council the results to date of the archaeology and corollary projects. I believe we have made
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some strides in raising awareness of the history of the Cayuga Nation, improved the public presentation of that history, worked toward protection of key sites, combated politically motivated historical revision, developed educational opportunities for Native people, and provided support on local contemporary issues. With their changes in leadership, the Cayuga Nation must decide anew if these benefits are worth the spiritual risks of excavating. Should they decide against further archaeological research, I am prepared to discontinue my academic work on the Cayuga. Ultimately, I believe that archaeologists must be prepared to walk away when Native people view the archaeology as more dangerous and harmful than interesting and useful.
Update As the summer of 2008 approaches, we continue to work at the Cayuga-SHARE Farm with groups of college and high school students, hut now under the schedule and task requests of the traditional Cayugas who own, operate, and live at the farm. Meanwhile, the archaeological field school is moving into new research areas. We will be excavating at the Levanna site, an Owasco-period site dating to the HOOS. This research will address at least two areas that specifically interest Native people. First, Levanna and other sites of this period are often referred to as Algonquian in origin, meaning they are affiliated with non-Iroquoian speakers who lived in the region prior to a Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) in-migration (Snow 1995). There is still a lively debate over whether the Haudenosaunee developed in situ in central New York or in-migrated (Crawford and Smith 1996; Snow 1996), yet Owasco archaeology has been largely neglected for the last fifty years (Schulenberg 2002). Second, there continues to be great debate surrounding the origin date of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which ranges in the literature from the HOOS (Mann and Fields 1997) to the 1400s (Fenton 1998:69) and the 1600s (Kuhn and Sempowski 2001). The Haudenosaunee have long asserted that their confederacy began many centuries before European contact. The excavations scheduled at Levanna for June 2008 may thus provide evidence for two issues of direct interest to the Haudenosaunee in terms of their history and their navigation ofNAGPRA (regarding the key issue of affiliation).
Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge the guidance of numerous friends, especially Bernadette Hill, Dan Hill, and Tim Twoguns of the Cayuga Nation, Norman Hill of the Tonowanda Band of Seneca, Freida Jacques, Ada Jacques, and Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, and Rick Hill of the Tuscarora Nation. Brooke Olson, a cul-
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tural anthropologist and my co-coordinator of Native American studies at Ithaca College, made important comments on the chapter and contributed material to the section on historical revision. Kim Milling administered the Ithaca College archaeological field schools, and Ellen Hall and Terry Martinez coordinated the Wells College participation. I also thank Julie and Jim Uticone, the founders of SHARE, who brought me into the organization. I particularly thank the forty Ithaca College and Wells College students who enthusiastically participated in politically and socially conscious field schools.
PART 2
Indigenous Archaeology and Education
7 Pedagogy of Decolonization Advancing Archaeological Practice through Education
.Sonya Atalay
Prior to European colonization in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and a multitude of other locations, the Indigenous populations living on those lands held stewardship over the cultural resources produced by their ancestors. Native groups also held sovereign control over the forms of education and the methods used to reproduce and maintain cultural and historical knowledge. Each of the hundreds of diverse Native nations present at the time of European contact had its own unique, culturally appropriate method of managing its heritage and sharing that knowledge with the next generation. Through the process of contact and the devastating effects of colonization that followed, these groups' ability to manage their cultural resources and heritage, to tell their own histories, and to educate their descendants in culturally appropriate ways was severely compromised. The stories ofloss, struggle, and ultimate survival of these cultures are both heart-wrenching and powerful, and they are ongoing. Today many Native nations are working to recover traditional knowledge, to regain the ability to manage their own cultural heritage and history, and to recoup and strengthen their precolonial forms of knowledge production and reproduction. Such efforts are taking place locally as well as collaboratively at national and international levels. Within the interdisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous studies, increasing research relates to the recovery of education, pedagogy, and traditional knowledge. Scholars involved in such research, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, recognize the role of past and contemporary sociopolitical contexts in research methods and practices, and as a result understand the importance of including activism in their scholarship (e.g., Alfred 2004; Atalay 2003a, 2003b, 2006b; Carpio
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2006; Deloria 1997, 2004; Deloria and Wildcat 2001; Mihesuah 1998, 2000, 2003; Mihesuah and Wilson 2004; Warrior 1995; Wilson 1998a, 1998b, 2004). Many are involved directly with Native American communities to develop, fund, and carry out research that aids those communities in reaching their goals of decolonization and sovereignty. In this chapter I outline the work oflndigenous scholars on topics of decolonizing and indigenizing research and education, and suggest ways such critiques might be incorporated into current archaeology courses and curricula. As I discuss briefly below, many of these scholars' critiques are not new to the field of archaeology. Archaeologists have been aware of and have responded to Indigenous concerns in myriad ways over the past twenty years or more. Yet mainstream archaeological practice in the United States remains a discipline that places primary, nearly exclusive, value on Western scientific knowledge as the lens through which to study and interpret the past. Legislative mandates that require consultation with Native American tribes have increased archaeologists' interactions with Native peoples, yet more inclusive and beneficial collaborative research projects between tribes and archaeologists remain strikingly limited in number. And while the numbers of Native Americans with experience, training, and interest in archaeology are increasing, the field still attracts a very small number of Native people to professional or academic practice. The field of archaeology has certainly seen profound changes over the past twenty years, but that change has been slow, and much work remains to bring about a truly decolonized archaeology. The aim of this chapter is to connect decolonizing theories and critiques with realistic models of practice that will have an impact on the way mainstream archaeology is practiced. More specifically, my goal here is to consider practical ways that Indigenous experiences, research, and critiques can be put into action to further effect change and improvement in archaeological research methods, theories, and daily practice, and to further diversify the ways in which archaeological knowledges are created and reproduced. I do this by outlining the need for an increased focus on education - both public education and archaeological training. I offer course topics and a research methodology that will contribute to improved archaeological public education and professional training.
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Decolonizing and Indigenizing Scholarship The scholarship and activism of Vine Deloria Jr. played a major role in bringing to the foreground the critiques and concerns of Native Americans, with respect to archaeology and anthropology. His passing in 2005 was a great loss felt by many in Indian Country and the scholarly community. Deloria was not alone in his activism but was one of many Native American activists and community members, most of whom worked in contexts outside the academy, who played a primary role in giving voice to Native people in their desires to regain control over the remains of their ancestors and the treatment of sacred spaces, spiritual items, and their connection of the past with the present (Deloria 1973; Echo-Hawk and Echo-Hawk 1994). As I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere (Atalay 2006a), their critiques, activism, and research all played an important role in bringing changes to the field of archaeology, including the creation of legislation such as NAGPRA and the formation of what is now termed "indigenous archaeology." At its core, the aim of such scholarship and activism has been to bring an end to the exploitative practices of Western scientific research involving Native people and others. This has been done through critical examination of the costs and benefits of scientific research, with an emphasis on the imbalance of costs (these include cultural, physical, spiritual, emotional, and economic costs) paid by Indigenous people versus the ratio of benefits gained by them (see Bendremer and Thomas, Mills et al., this vol.). Indigenous critiques ofWestern scholarship are not new. Vine Deloria J r.'s well-known work Custer Diedfor Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) presented some of the issues that Native people had been voicing regarding being subjects of research that did little to benefit their communities or address concerns that were of interest to them. While Deloria's focus was on anthropology, his critiques could be applied more broadly to many areas of research and academic practices of the time. Following Custer Died for Your Sins, Deloria continued to research and publish on topics relating to similar issues of Western scholarship, uses of Indigenous knowledge in research, and the ways Western knowledge production is biased against other ways of knowing and understanding the world (Deloria 1970, 1973,_ 1995, 1997).
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More recently, Deloria addressed the issue of research and Native people with particular attention to the role of higher education in the book Power and Place: Indian Education in America, co-authored with Daniel Wildcat (Deloria and Wildcat 2001). In this book Deloria and Wildcat address not only research methodologies and the production and use of knowledge, but also the reproduction of knowledge through education. In a series of essays Deloria and Wildcat critically examine a range of issues related to the education system in America. The authors call for what Wildcat terms an "indigenizing of education," discussing the problems within the wider educational system in the United States (not only those faced by Native students) while demonstrating how bringing Indigenous knowledge into the academy will benefit the entire system. Deloria and Wildcat present examples of ways that Indigenous knowledge related to pedagogy and education will be beneficial, and they also discuss how the incorporation of Indigenous concerns and experiences will improve research methods for both Natives and nonNatives in higher education, which in turn will have a positive impact in local communities. Vine Deloria Jr. was one of the earliest to voice critiques of anthropological and archaeological practices in print and to have them heard widely by an academic audience. He and Wildcat also published one of the earliest discussions of decolonizing education and indigenizing teaching and research methods. However, Deloria and Wildcat are not alone in calling for changes in the way knowledge is (re)produced and in the goals, benefits, and rationale behind these processes of knowledge (re)production. In both a special edition of the American Indian Quarterly (1996) and the updated and expanded edited book that followed, entitled Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (1998), Devon A. Mihesuah brought together research and commentaries by Indigenous scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who discuss current issues and concerns of researching and publishing about Native Americans in all aspects of their history, heritage, and past and present experiences. In both publications, the authors discuss topics such as alternative forms of scholarship (Cook-Lynn 1998; Mihesuah 1998), the framing of what are considered "data'' (Miller 1998; Wilson 1998a, 1998b), and improved methods of practice and data collection (Allen 1998; Deloria 1998; Fixico 1998).
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More recently, the Natives and Academics volume was followed up by lndigenizing the Academy: Tramforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, edited by Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson (2004). This volume includes articles by scholars from myriad disciplinary backgrounds, many of whom work in direct collaboration with Native communities, each offering ways in which scholarship might be changed and improved through an introduction oflndigenous knowledge, methods, and experiences. In his contribution to the volume, Vine Deloria Jr. (2004) calls for this generation of scholars to become involved in research that matters to Native communities. He points out that much of the recent scholarship by Indian academics has lost its connection and concern, its rootedness, in the problems facing Indian Country. Taiaiake Alfred (2004), in his article entitled "Warrior Scholarship: Seeing the University as a Ground of Contention," discusses the meaning of colonization and how scholarship utilizing Indigenous values and concepts can be beneficial in efforts to overcome colonization of the mind in practice. Angela Cavender Wilson's (2004) contribution to the volume, an inspiring and moving essay entitled "Reclaiming Our Humanity: Decolonization and the Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge," beautifully demonstrates the strong need for research in Native communities and outlines some of the important areas of traditional knowledge recovery that researchers can work collaboratively with tribes to address. Some of the topics she mentions are particularly relevant and well suited for archaeological research, including understanding and protecting sacred sites and traditional foodways and diet. In the books and journal articles mentioned above, these Indigenous scholars have brought to the foreground important critiques of the academy, asking critical questions about the role of research in the lives of people outside the academy. They challenge scholars with the concept that research related to Native Americans should be of interest to, and contribute something beneficial for, the communities under study. This is a point also called for by the United Nations subcommittee seminar on the protection of the heritage oflndigenous people (Daes 2000). Similar concerns about the role of research in society and people's daily lives have been addressed by scholars outside of Native American and Indigenous studies, in disciplines such as women's studies (hooks 1994, 1999, 2003), postcolonial studies (Spivak 1987, 1993; Said 1993,
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1994), and philosophy of science (Kitcher 2001). Archaeologists have also pointed out the critical social and political implications of archaeological research, particularly for Indigenous and local communities (see Silliman and Sebastian Dring, this vol.). This is one of the primary points of many postprocessual approaches to archaeology, and it is a significant concern of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC). Because of its engagements with critiques by Indigenous people, and with a strong concei;n about the social and political ramifications of practicing archaeology in the contemporary world, the WAC has grown over the last two decades and continues to thrive. For Indigenous people, WAC membership and attendance at conferences is specifically encouraged, and their travel is supported by high registration fees from those with better financial resources. In her overview ofWAC's history, Joan Gero (2000:58) describes one of the primary aims of WAC as debating and refuting institutionalized views that serve the interests of a privileged few to the detriment of disenfranchised others, stating that WAC "explicitly values diversity against institutionalized mechanisms that marginalize the cultural heritage oflndigenous peoples, minorities, and the poor." WAC has a long list of accomplishments in the decolonization of archaeology, too many to list fully and describe in detail here. Some of the most noteworthy include development of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains in 1989, followed by a statement of archaeological ethics, both of which include primary consideration for the rights of Indigenous people and descendent communities with respect to archaeological resources and human remains. WAC also publishes a number of excellent edited and single-authored books in several book series, and in 2005 released the first volume of its peer-reviewed journal,
Archaeologies.1
Developing a Sustainable Archaeological Practice Archaeologists are aware of the critiques made by Indigenous people and have worked actively to improve certain aspects of archaeological practice. Without question, positive change in the discipline of archaeology has had a measurable impact on Indian Country. However, the need for further change is still apparent in many areas, as some of the
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more substantial changes in mindset and practice called for by Indigenous people have not yet become part of standard archaeological practice and training among all archaeologists working in the United States. The reasons for this are complex and varied, but a primary reason for the slow and limited change in American archaeology compared with other postcolonial nations in response to calls for a decolonized practice is that scholarship and activism have focused on critiques of archaeology and often remain at the level of theory without developing models of improved practice. If my experience over the past several years of publishing, grant writing, and attending conferences is indicative of the current situation, then I believe that a growing number of archaeologists recognize the need to find more satisfying approaches of working with Native Americans that move beyond the mandated model of consultation. I've found that many are striving to find practical and more productive models for working together. This makes the work of participants in this volume so critical, as the chapters here offer practical models of how to create and maintain a more sustainable archaeological practice. In my view, one area in particular that requires further modeling on the part of archaeologists in the United States and globally is that of education. Areas that would seem to benefit the most include (1) greater research toward developing effective, culturally sensitive, and appropriate methods of public (popular) education models to be used by archaeologists in our interactions with diverse publics, and (2) further incorporation of such popular education and collaboration models into the formal training of archaeologists in university settings through the development of university courses.
Popular Education and Participatory Research Methods Paulo Freire's (1970, 1974, 1994, 1998) work on participatory research and popular education provides a research methodology that satisfies the critiques by Indigenous people and the calls outlined briefly above by Deloria Jr., Mihesuah, Wilson, Alfred, and others to decolonize scholarship and indigenize the academy. In brief, Freire's model of participatory research involves collaboration with community members to
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(1) define a research issue, (2) develop research strategies, (3) design research instruments, and (4) collect and interpret data. This method also involves feedback between collaborators to evaluate the project's effectiveness from multiple perspectives and develop culturally relevant methods of popular education within the community. Incorporating collaborative research methods into undergraduate and graduate archaeology courses and curricula may be aided by a collaborative effort with university education departments, some of which offer courses or have faculty with experience, even expertise, in participatory research methods and popular education theory and approaches. In my early experiences with collaborative research methodology and popular education practices, my home campus at UC Berkeley had extensive resources available that greatly increased my knowledge in this area. While I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, the Center for Popular Education and Participatory Research (CPEPR) was founded through the university's Department of Education. CPEPR was founded in January 2000 by a group of graduate students in the Department of Education under the direction of Professor John Hurst and is explicitly concerned with diversity, community-university collaborations, participatory action research, popular education, and a range of other topics related to issues of social justice. Its self-stated mission is "to promote and support popular education and participatory research in order to strengthen the participation of everyday peopleespecially the poor, youth, immigrants, and people of color-in efforts for social justice" (CPEPR 2002). CPEPR holds courses and seminars and maintains a library with extensive reading materials related to participatory research and popular education. Attending a semester-long reading course on participatory research methods gave me the opportunity to work collaboratively with scholars who have extensive experience in these methods, offered me a familiarity with the relevant literature in this area, and allowed me t,o explore the ways these methodologies might best be applied to archaeology. Through this cross-disciplinary training and interaction, I developed several field research projects that utilize a Freirian methodology. If a center such as CPEPR is not available, a range of literature related to popular education and participatory research (sometimes called partici-
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patory action research, or PAR) exists that will familiarize both students and senior scholars with these approaches. One of the best places for anyone interested in these approaches to begin is with the work of Paolo Freire (1970, 1974, 1994, 1998). The aim of the participatory research projects I developed is to put theoretical models of collaboration into practice, and to measure their effectiveness in producing knowledge useful to descendent communities and stakeholders as well as to the archaeological community. My current field project is funded by the National Science Foundation and involves implementation and critical evaluation of a Freirian model of participatory research using quantitative and qualitative data gathered from two case studies-one with local communities near