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Indigenous New England Tattooing Practices with Rebekah Lamb - Ep 90
534 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, Carlton does a solo interview with Rebekah Lamb. Rebekah is pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Cultural Anthropology and Developmental Sociology and minoring in Archaeology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Zuidoost. Rebekah belongs to the Abenaki Tribe of the Wabanaki Confederacy as well as being a descendant of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Carlton and Rebekah talk about her research on Abenaki tattoo practices through apprenticeship ethnography, studying both the historical and contemporary significance and the revival of traditional tattooing culture within New England Indigenous tribes. We also discuss the challenges facing New England Indigenous Nation's cultural practices and history, issues of blood-quantum, decolonizing academia.
Links
Rebekah Lamb on TEDxVUAmsterdam: Empowering Disabled Students in the University System
Literature Recommendations
- Drawing with Great Needles by Aaron Deter-Wolf and Carol Diaz-Granados
- Aaron Deter-Wolf's Instagram: @archaeologyink
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Transcript
Introduction to Life in Ruins Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to episode 90 of the Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins.
Meet the Host and Guest: Rose and Rebecca
00:00:20
Speaker
I am Rose Carlton-Gover, and I am not joined by any of my co-hosts today. They're on strike.
00:00:25
Speaker
But today I am joined by Rebecca Lim, the Cultural Anthropology and Developmental Sociology undergrad at Vrij University-Tite, Amsterdam. Rebecca, it is a pleasure to have you on. How are you doing this morning? Well, for you, it's the afternoon. Yeah, I'm doing great. I'm really excited that you have invited me to go on. I think this is really cool. Excellent. And so you are currently in the Netherlands now, correct?
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm in the Netherlands. I'll be flying back to spend Christmas with my family in Vermont in a couple of days, but right now I'm still in Amsterdam.
Rebecca's Educational Journey and Influences
00:00:57
Speaker
Excellent. We'll get onto your education here a little bit in the episode, but so you are an undergraduate, correct?
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm an undergrad student, but I'm a little bit of an untraditional student. So I've done a little bit of ethnography here and there, and I've gotten to do some research in some really cool situations. And it's turned into really cool stuff that my professors are just as excited about as I am. So it's a really fun.
00:01:23
Speaker
thing, but definitely not the traditional standard undergrad, I think. Gotcha. Well, growing up, what were your first experiences in anthropology? Did you know what anthropology was, or archeology, linguistics, anything like that? Or did you gravitate towards a science subject? Were you a dinosaur kid, a history buff, or one of those nature nerds?
00:01:43
Speaker
So my dad growing up, he's a veterinarian, but he actually got his bachelor's degree in history and then went on to vet school. And so it's always been like history has always been a huge thing for me, especially ancient history and archeology. And it just kind of spiraled out of control from there where like I wanted to know everything about everything. So especially with cultural anthropology, I was like, why are so many people, you know,
00:02:07
Speaker
Different from me and I wanted to know all of the things and so it just spiraled out of control with like bouncing from hyper focus to hyper focus. I had that Egyptology kid as a book, the gold one that everyone like. Oh, yes, with the scarab in the center. I had that.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yes, they had all those books. They had like Egyptology and like Feriology. I got super. Yeah. Those books are so great, but the Egyptology one was probably my favorite or the Pirates one. Pirates was another hyper focus of mine. When I was a kid, I was obsessed. And so it just filed into wanting to know everything and like, not just, you know, know the facts like history, but like to have that deep, like ingrained understanding that I think anthropology gives you.
00:02:50
Speaker
Absolutely. I think it was kind of weird that they would put like an Egyptology book alongside the dragonology, the pharaology, kind of like doesn't seem like to mysticize Egyptology a little bit by putting it like those are its colleagues.
00:03:04
Speaker
See, it does. But they also have like pirateology and whatever. I don't I don't know who made those books. I you I went looking for them in my dad's house in my attic. I was convinced that we had kept them because we had a lot of my books from my childhood. I can't find them anywhere. I'm a little heartbroken about those books are so cool. I do think like there is this kind of level of like mystifying, like,
00:03:28
Speaker
that when you think like something so far back, it's a little bit mind blowing that you're like, whoa, that was so long ago. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So was there a favorite like time period of yours when growing up with your kind of passion for history?
Exploring Identity: Heritage and Culture
00:03:49
Speaker
Like it was there a certain time period or a certain subject that you were very, that you really gravitated towards?
00:03:53
Speaker
I actually was obsessed with mythology. I loved learning mythology and religion. I won't say mythology entirely because it started with Greek mythology, which I think a lot of people go into a Greek mythology phase. But it started with that, and then it started bridging out into Celtic mythology and Celtic lore. My dad's Irish, so that was really interesting to me to learn all this stuff.
00:04:16
Speaker
these little stories that I grew up with and transferring that into, Oh, that's actually, you know, like a route from like way back, you know, when, and then it turned into this whole like practice that we have now in our family that we've just created and turned into a thing. And so for me, that was like, I, you know, Norse mythology. And then I went further and I started learning about Hinduism. And that's so complicated. I can't even begin to, you know, I started on it and I was like, Oh my God, I have to take a break. And then I, you know,
00:04:47
Speaker
Hinduism, I felt like I was learning so much in so little time. It was so fun. But yeah, religion and mythology. And then I started really focusing on like folk religion because I kind of really enjoy that. So how would you how would you describe folk religion for our audience? Oh, folk religion, I would say tends to be a blend of both cultural and like
00:05:11
Speaker
beliefs that the, you know, religious body at the time, so like the primary religious source, like so it could be Catholicism or Christianity or Islam or whatever. And that blends with local cultural practices that are necessarily within that secular practice. And so, but yeah, so they blend together and then they create this kind of new interesting thing. And I think that's really cool. Excellent. Awesome.
00:05:37
Speaker
Well, on top of that, continuing on this thread of your childhood, you belong to the Wabanaki Confederacy. What is the Wabanaki Confederacy and did that background influence your curiosity in history and anthropology even further? Yeah. The Wabanaki Confederacy is a confederacy of tribes in northeastern Woodlands. I specifically belong to the Abenaki tribe, but there are four other tribes outside of that.
00:06:02
Speaker
So, and I also have Houdenosaunee descent, so it's kind of vague and misty and a lot of the issues with that is that that's tracked through a matrilineal line. And unfortunately, I only have a male ancestor that I know of for sure. It's a very fascinating story where he was born in Canada and was arrested in Canada and then fled to the US and changed his name.
00:06:28
Speaker
It's been a bit difficult trying to track down relatives to that specific ancestor to try and figure out what tribe specifically within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. So the Wabanaki Confederacy is another tribe around that region, native to Canada, Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, that general kind of area is where Massachusetts as well. There are some Abenaki, so that's kind of the main area that we're settled in. And yeah, I think that had a huge influence.
00:06:58
Speaker
My mother is a lot darker skin than I am and so are my siblings. And so culturally I had this kind of understanding of like, oh, like we're the same and also we're different. And my mom always, I grew up very disconnected from my culture. My mom always made sure that we knew that we were Abenaki and that we were proud of that, but we never really knew
00:07:19
Speaker
beyond that and so I've just recently started reconnecting with that and I've loved doing it and it's been incredibly powerful to kind of reconnect with your tribal ancestors and you know to see these powerful people from you know centuries ago that and be able to relate to them and so yeah absolutely I think a lot of people can relate to that that's best I've never
00:07:43
Speaker
in my, I know like most of the Plains tribes, cause that's where, you know, my tribe's from. So I'm very familiar with that, but like, I don't know anything really about the Northeast. Like I know like the Delaware, I know the Haudenosaunee and Tuscarora, like very little. So when kind of going over your outline, I was like, Oh, I've never heard of this one. I did like a lot. I went on down on a Google rabbit hole, uh, learning more about the Wabanaki, which was just fascinating. So excellent. And you know, why did you end up
00:08:11
Speaker
deciding to pursue an undergraduate degree in anthropology. Did you have any anthropology courses offered in history? What exposed you to anthropology? This is actually kind of a funny story. I took a gap year after I graduated high school because I wasn't totally sure what I wanted to do. I was going to major in gender studies or journalism. The idea was to go into an advocacy role through either of those
00:08:36
Speaker
degrees, but there had been an error. I did dual enrollment in high school, and so I took college courses while I was in high school, and I got both high school and college credit for that. But there was an error with the system when my transcripts were submitted, and so my dual enrollment transcripts were never submitted. So to every single college that I applied to, it looked like I didn't have enough credits. So I didn't get into a single school because they were like, why are you applying? You haven't graduated.
00:09:05
Speaker
I was like, oh my gosh. And they were like, well, it's a huge process to appeal that kind of stuff after the date. And they have like all these rules that I was just like so fed up. I just kind of threw my hands in the air and said, I'm not doing it. So I took a gap year.
00:09:20
Speaker
And I worked with a gap year program and I got to move to Shanghai and I lived there for a couple months and I went to a language school there. And while I was there, I got the opportunity to do like a little baby ethnography. So I did ethnographic research on mental health in China and kind of the cultural, you know,
00:09:40
Speaker
ideas surrounding mental illness and, you know, mental health and all that. And so that was really cool that, you know, it wasn't a big research thing. It was a kind of a tiny little baby. I got a taste of it though. So I was, oh, I love doing ethnography. I love getting to sit there and talk to people and do research. And this is so much fun. I want to do this for the rest of my life. And so.
00:10:01
Speaker
I said, okay, how do I do that forever? And they said, be an anthropologist. I said, hell yeah. So I applied to schools and then here I am. Excellent. That's really fascinating. So you went to Shanghai for a gap year and you learned Mandarin.
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, so on the spot. Well, no, I had taken it in high school, I had taken Mandarin one into in high school. And then, but I for some reason, my teacher never taught us characters, we only learned how to write opinion, which is writing it with English letters, and the tones written on it. And so that was a huge struggle when I moved to Shanghai, was learning to read the characters. That was really difficult for me.
00:10:40
Speaker
But other than that i got fairly close to fluent in a fairly short amount of time because i had that language background and then i live the language and i spoke it every day and you know i live in the host family and they didn't speak english and so i use mandarin every day with you know even the smallest conversations that you know.
00:10:59
Speaker
I never got to use English. I remember somebody, a family friend of mine whose daughter had lived in Shanghai or something, she had told me, like, oh, it's such an international city. Everyone speaks English there. She had never been to Shanghai, and that is not the truth, at least where I was. I think there's some areas that are more populated by immigrants and expats that are more comfortable with English, but where I was, nobody spoke English. And so you had to get good fast speaking Mandarin.
00:11:26
Speaker
Fair nothing. What's one of your most memorable experiences in Shanghai? I remember I went, so there's this, there's this water town. It's like 13 kilometers outside of Shanghai. You can reach it through the metro. And it's an ancient water town called Qi Bao. Not to be confused with Qi Pao, which is an article of clothing.
00:11:48
Speaker
But it's this ancient water town. There's tea houses and there's markets where you can get all these traditional foods. And I went there several times. I went there once with my roommate and just had the best experiences I got because I had this thing where I would panic and my teacher who
00:12:06
Speaker
She's very funny. She would call it my Chinese panic where she was like, you understand it. Just when people start to talk to you, you get really nervous and you just space out and you forget everything. I was like, I can't even speak English if they tried to talk to me. I just get so shy and scared.
00:12:22
Speaker
And that was the first time that I felt comfortable enough. I had like a 15, 20 minute conversation with the shop owner who owned a calligraphy shop. And that was like, Oh, right. I do know Mandarin. I do know what I'm doing. I do know how to speak this language. And I'm comfortable enough to speak it. And the guy was super sweet. And his wife was super sweet as well helping, you know, me out just, you know, because I would like, I'd miss a few words here and there. And they immediately be like, Oh, you know, this is here. Here you go. And they were super sweet and super kind. And like,
00:12:52
Speaker
That was one of my favorite memories. If I could like teleport anywhere in the world, like right now, I'd go to Cheebau because it's just beautiful. It's genuinely one of the loveliest cities you can go and experience really just like so much. And it's so cool. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
Academic and Cultural Experiences Abroad
00:13:09
Speaker
So why, why pursue an undergrad in Europe? Why didn't you want to go to college in the United States? Why did you have to go across the pond?
00:13:16
Speaker
Can I be honest with you? It was entirely financially motivated. Fair enough. I pay, I think I paid like 7,800 euros for my yearly tuition this year. So I saved a lot of money by pursuing an undergrad in Europe. My college fund lasted longer than a year. Gotcha. Yeah, that's like half.
00:13:42
Speaker
like seven grand was like some master's worth of tuition for me and undergraduate. And that was a cheap school. So yeah. Wow. My top choice school, which was Smith College, which is a wonderful school. It's my sister's alma mater, 10 out of 10. Like you have the opportunity to apply. It was like 75,000 a year.
00:14:02
Speaker
Nope. Nope. Nope. I was like, I can't, you know what? That's a great idea. I love that. You know, it's a great school. Obviously it's been, you know, my sister's a lot older than me. She's almost 17 years older than me, I think. So obviously there's a huge gap between.
00:14:20
Speaker
economically, I think tuition has increased drastically. But yeah, that was, I was like, yeah, no. Gotcha. And what universities were you looking at in Europe and were you looking specifically for anthropology programs?
00:14:35
Speaker
Um, so I was actually focused mainly on the city, which is not the best way to choose a school, but I had gone before I had gone to Shanghai. It's been a month traveling around Europe and I'd gone to Amsterdam and I just absolutely fell in love with the city.
00:14:54
Speaker
I felt like it was kind of the perfect, I grew up in a town with less than 400 people. So it felt like a city that wasn't really a city. It was a little bit of both. And I found that really exciting that there was that division. And so when I was in Shanghai, my roommate kept talking to me and telling me like, oh, you love Amsterdam. She would ask me questions and I'd be like, oh, in Amsterdam, because I just loved it there.
00:15:20
Speaker
And so when I got back and I was applying to schools again, she was like, why don't you apply to some universities in the Netherlands? And I was like, oh, and she was like, you should apply to universities in Amsterdam. And so.
00:15:32
Speaker
I was like, okay. And so I applied and got into the VU and the VU has the highest ranked anthropology program or had, I don't know if it still does in the Netherlands because at the time I was unaware that most of the ranking, your ranking drastically increases when you internationalize and
00:15:52
Speaker
switch your program to english the ranking automatically goes up and the vu was the first university to switch to english for that program and so that was like oh but it was still you know i got in and i still really like going here i still really enjoyed the university so
00:16:09
Speaker
Excellent. Well, on that note, we'll go ahead and wrap up the first segment of episode 90. We'll be right back with Rebecca Lam. And welcome back to episode 90 of A Life From Its Podcast. We're here with Rebecca Lam. So Rebecca, what are you studying in undergraduate? Like what's your research on? So currently my research is on Abenaki tattoo practices and the kind of revival of that within the tribe and seeing how
00:16:36
Speaker
traditional Native American tattooing has grown and blossomed into this new kind of thing. And it's really cool. I'm really excited about it.
00:16:44
Speaker
Excellent. How did you get interested in this topic?
Reviving Abenaki Tattoo Practices
00:16:47
Speaker
Did your parents have tattoos? Did members of the tribe have tattoos? What got you into this? No one in my family besides my sister has tattoos. I am actually covered in tattoos and I have been for several years. I've got two sleeves going on.
00:17:06
Speaker
working on my legs right now and I'm, you know, fairly covered. And so people are a little taken aback. Sometimes when they see me, I've got, you know, five facial piercings and, you know, lots of tattoos. And so I started getting into Native American tattoo revival because I was like, this is so cool. Why don't we talk about this enough? And then it spiraled into
00:17:25
Speaker
I don't know a single, you know, like I could name most tribes in the Northeastern region, but I don't know if any of them practice tattooing. And then I stumbled upon GEO Neptune. GEO was Maine's first trans elected official. They use they them pronouns and identify as two-spirit and they are also Wabanaki. And GEO has traditional facial tattoos.
00:17:47
Speaker
And so that spiraled a whole thing of, you know, if one Wabanaki person has it, like it's all kind of the same cultural route. So they've all got it, you know, there's got to be someone that knows about this. And so I went on this whole like deep dive and I finally found a woman whose, her name is Melody Brooke and she is my mentor. So she is a traditional tribal tattooer and she also works with a bunch of.
00:18:12
Speaker
museums in Vermont and she's mainly just a Native arts, you know, person and she's really involved in the Elneu Band of the Abenaki. She's pretty high up there and so that's, you know, my connection to it was I, you know, got in contact with her because I was like, hey, is this a thing? And she was like, yes, it's a thing. It's been a thing for years. Nobody talks about it though. And I was like, oh, I'm about to talk about it so much.
00:18:36
Speaker
Excellent. And what did like contact era Abenaki tattoos look like? Where were they placed? What kind of designs are you talking about? If you can share that, of course.
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, so there's an account of people having multiple animals on the cheeks. There's accounts of tattoos on the chin. Tattoos were used not only as medicine and they would be put into, you know, on specific areas to deaden a nerve. And so then it would solve, you know, pain, but it would also be used to show your bravery and your beauty. And it would also just be used for entirely cosmetic. It would be like, oh, like,
00:19:14
Speaker
You know, it is something nowadays that you have to earn. So you have to earn your markings and you have to say, okay, like ancestors tell me, you know, you have to wait for a sign that will tell you. And so it's a whole process. Hopefully I'll be getting my markings when I return home, but it's a little bit of a process. So I only have three weeks when I'm home for Christmas. So, and then I'll fly back, but I'm home for much longer in the summer. So I'll either get them in the winter or this winter or in the summer.
00:19:44
Speaker
Excellent. And what about surrounding nations to the Abenaki? Do they also have tattoo markings? Yeah, so culturally we are Algonquin. So like that's the cultural root of Wabanaki and most Northeastern Woodlands tribes rely culturally on kind of the Algonquin.
00:20:05
Speaker
you know, root. And so they have tattoos everywhere. If you look at Mohawk tribes, there's Iroquois tattoos, you know, people have their whole faces and there's Haudenosaunee warrior. Haudenosaunee and Iroquois, I feel like I need to clarify, are the same thing. The Iroquois was the French word and the Haudenosaunee is the word that they use to refer to themselves as. So, but you see these portraits of Haudenosaunee warriors covered in these massive tattoos, you know, from face to, you know,
00:20:33
Speaker
waist and even below. So people used to get their entire chests tattooed. And it would be a huge, I mean, that's a huge process to go through nowadays, even with the, you know, tattoo machines that we have now. But before then, it was used, you would either prick the skin individually, like, you know, the one at a time traditionally, we would use guard teeth, alligator guard.
00:20:54
Speaker
the fish. Obviously we use needles now because it's a lot more sterile and just you know, safety first. But they would use alligator guard teeth and a mixture of charcoal and water. And then they'd, you know, individually prick it into the skin or they would cut it cut the skin and then rub the charcoal and water mixture into the wound.
00:21:18
Speaker
to create the tattoo. And so, you know, there's accounts that like, you know, they would do it and you know, people would do it and then they'd be, they'd feel really sick for a couple of days because your body, you know, has gone through a lot of trauma in those situations. Nowadays we use needles and we hand poke them, but we do it a lot safer because we're, you know, cultural continuity.
00:21:40
Speaker
Absolutely. Of course, of course. And so before we get into this research, you're working on like a paper for undergraduate, or is this all- This is my bachelor's thesis. Okay. Excellent. Right. Prior to really diving into this research, what were your previously held assumptions or perspectives regarding Northeastern Indigenous tattooing practices?
00:22:02
Speaker
I genuinely didn't really know it existed. It was something that I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to. I knew Inuit tattooing was very common and was practiced.
00:22:13
Speaker
for centuries and then was almost phased out and then was brought back again. What I didn't expect to see was that a lot of Inuit tattooing is very similar to our tattooing, which I thought was really interesting. It's not entirely, you know, you can't say they're the same, but they do have some similarities, which I find really interesting. Overall, I had no idea that, you know, the Northeastern tribes practiced this. I didn't, you know, I think almost every indigenous nation
00:22:41
Speaker
around the world has some form of body modification. And I think it's really cool to see that, you know, kind of explored further with my own tribe and within my own cultural roots. That's awesome. I know I've been bugging and we'll get on to Aaron later. I've always asked Aaron every now and then I'm like, did you find any evidence for potting and tattooing? He's like, dude, I tell you there's accounts of it, but we haven't seen any illustrations. And I'm like, come on, man, give me something. Cause there's not that much, I know in the Plains, there's not,
00:23:10
Speaker
not many nations practiced it. It was kind of like American bottom, Southwest, everyone around us. So it kind of feels strange that everyone around us is doing tattooing, but we're not. So the Wichita's did it though. They looked like little, I think like little raccoons or bears. So they made these like black circles under their eyes.
00:23:29
Speaker
Oh, that I can't that I imagine that must be so painful. I'm a little bit of a baby. And so that hand poking tattooing now that I've like got more, you know, I'm doing apprenticeship ethnography. And so I've learning I'm learning as you know, learning by doing and so that's been really cool to be you know, I only know
00:23:50
Speaker
to people, to other people who do the traditional tattooing currently, but the whole process is about, you know, it's supposed to hurt. It's about withstanding pain and being strong and sitting through it. And so one of the key things is that if you don't sit through it in, you know, one session, if you tap out,
00:24:06
Speaker
that you never get to finish that tattoo. That's like a shame that you live with forever. And I was like, oh geez, I don't know if I can do that. Obviously I'm not about to get a huge piece, but there's so much that goes into it that it's, you have this tiny little tattoo that is hand poked one dot at a time and it's, there's two, that takes two hours, but then there's two to three hours of ceremony before the tattoo even starts. That's a huge commitment.
00:24:36
Speaker
Absolutely, it kind of reminds me of that scene from Moana at the beginning when that huge buff guy's about to get tattooed and there's just one little fish and he's just screaming about it. He's almost over, they're like, nah man, you're just beginning. Yeah, those tapping tattoos, I consider myself lucky that I've never had one because I am an absolute baby and I think I would cry if I ever had, you know, if presented with the opportunity, I'd be like, yeah, I'll totally do it.
00:25:05
Speaker
but I would not enjoy it. And so I'm a little glad that I haven't been presented with the opportunity for like that impulsive like, oh yeah, it'll be fine. I am covered in tattoos. But it's like, no, you're not. That's a whole different ballgame. Well, what are some of the big takeaways that you learned from this? Like what stands out to you as like this huge moments of realization through the course of your thesis?
00:25:32
Speaker
I think one thing that I feel like was really kind of brushed aside is that Abenaki is not federally recognized. There's four bands recognized by the state of Vermont, but federally it's not recognized, which makes no sense because according to way before Abenaki had been petitioning for a long time for recognition. There was this argument that Abenaki were entirely non
00:25:59
Speaker
you know, sedimentary people. So they constantly migrated. So they didn't act, you know, someone had said in 17 something or whatever, when Vermont was declared a state, the Abenaki never lived here. They just passed through here to hunt. So therefore we don't need to give them, you know, any land. And so therefore, you know, this unseated land that did belong to the Abenaki and the Wabanaki was able to be taken.
00:26:22
Speaker
until we've been fighting for centuries. But it makes no sense because people are like, oh, well, I thought they all died in the 1800s. And I was like, up until the 1950s, Abenaki women were being sterilized with the Vermont eugenics program. So you can't say that they weren't there when the government was actively acknowledging them and then actively committing an active genocide against them.
00:26:45
Speaker
But everyone's just pretending, you know, sweeping it under the rug. And I found it fascinating that like, there is this tenacity within I, you know, I always say like, indigenous people are like, so resilient. And there is this tenacity to preserve their culture that, you know, I'm so proud of that, like, so much has been lost, but there's so much has been saved as well through, like, intense efforts of we are not losing this. You know, people are very determined to
00:27:16
Speaker
maintain their culture and to keep it. And I think that's so important because that's how you lose terrible things. You know, I've been able to connect with a language keeper within my tribe and that's been an absolutely amazing situation that I can text him and say, what's the word for this? And I just learned little bits and pieces of grammar and vocab. And he's like, oh, we have classes you can take. And, you know, 13 people are fluent in Western Abenaki and Eastern Abenaki is extinct.
00:27:41
Speaker
And so this preservation is so important and not just preservation, but also, you know, the cultural continuity and keeping it alive and letting it grow and become, you know, what it's going to become in the 21st century, because obviously we're not going to be the same as we were in the 17th and 18th century. But we're allowed to grow and we're allowed to be different, but we also need to maintain, you know, our traditional practices and teachings because they're so important to us intrinsically.
00:28:07
Speaker
Absolutely. That's a really good continuation.
Decolonizing Academia and Anthropology
00:28:10
Speaker
Before this episode 89, we interviewed the two Pawnee language directors and we had a whole segment with linguistic anthropology and language awakening. That's fantastic. Did you say that at the same 90s? Excellent. Loving that.
00:28:28
Speaker
I don't know. I think it's just fascinating. Like one, you know, kind of talking about the whole. Recognization thing that a lot of like East coast drives or state recognized because, and they're like the first people that got in contact and also some of the first nations that helped English, French, and English and Spanish settlers. And they're not even being recognized in the 21st century as independent sovereigns.
00:28:51
Speaker
nations, which I think is just, it's like, come on. It's the argument of blood quantum, which is once again, this huge colonizer notion. But even if you go back far enough to with, you know, I still meet blood quantum standards by, you know, set by the US government, but I belong to two different tribes. And so therefore, I don't technically meet blood quantum because
00:29:14
Speaker
They're not the same tribe. It's like, this is so stupid. Quantum is blood quantum. It's one eighth to become enrolled in most federal tribes. It's like one. I know my tribe went from the Pawnee went from one quarter to one eighth in like 2005.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah. And so I'm lucky because my tribe isn't federally recognized. So they're like, you meet blood quantum by our rules. They're like, we kind of get our own rules. Like, obviously you have to, it's a whole process to be, gain membership to the Elnu band. You have to prove ancestry, but you also have to be really involved in the community and, you know, do something to further, you know,
00:29:57
Speaker
you know, help the community and be involved. And so you're voted in by a tribal council. So the tribal council sits and votes on whether or not they're going to allow you in. It doesn't matter if you meet one quantum, they're gonna make that decision, you know, either way. And I think that's like the most stressful. Cause it's like, what if someone doesn't like me? You know. I think that's a great way to do it though. You know, getting rid of, like you said, that very much colonial and genocidal policy of blood quantum, but allowing tribes to do it themselves. I know the Shoshone,
00:30:26
Speaker
If you enroll Shoshone but you have, you know, Indian blood from a different nation, they allow you just to add it all up and that's your Shoshone blood quantum. Oh, see that's, yeah, that's, it's that same idea. But we don't rely heavily on blood quantum because there was so much heavily missionary station of the Abenaki. They aligned with Jesuit missionaries that came from France and there's lots of stories. I have so many stories that I could tell about
00:30:54
Speaker
that where people were like oh they all converted and it's like they didn't actually convert they just wanted the metal crosses because metal to us you wear it on certain points in your body that are considered you know ports where bad spirits can come in and the metal reflects them and so there's an account that says like the Abenaki don't like the British because they give them wooden crosses
00:31:14
Speaker
But the French give them metal crosses, and I like those. And so you see these Abenaki art, they're called dragonfly crosses. And so they look like, you know, crosses that someone would wear, but in reality, it's just dragonflies that are made to look like that. And so that's another example of this like, yeah, this tenacious like, we're going to preserve our culture, but we're also not going to let you, you know,
00:31:34
Speaker
kill us for not converting. So we're going to pretend to convert, but we're going to keep this cultural practices going. But there was so much intermarriage. It's so confusing. I mean, genetically, it's just such a mishmash. The Northeast in general is people from all over Europe and then some random, you know, if you run into people and they're like, oh, yeah, like my great, great grandma was blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I don't know how, you know,
00:32:01
Speaker
My great, great grandma was a Cherokee princess. That's what everyone always says. And it's like, that's not, there was this huge, I recently did some research on it. That was a huge like government propaganda thing to like deny Cherokee land to do that. And so I think there's this concept of like, you know, there's this tenacity that like, we're going to stay here and we're going to preserve this and we're going to do what we can to survive. And I don't think, you know, the ancestors of people who did so much to survive should be punished for, you know, that.
00:32:31
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think on that note, we're going to go ahead and end segment two. We'll be right back with Rebecca Lam on episode 90. And we're back with episode 90 with Rebecca Lam. So continuing our conversation about blood quantum specifically and kind of a larger picture of one of these colonial and genocidal practices, how
00:32:52
Speaker
in your undergraduate studies, have you investigated or dealt with this recent movement? Well, not necessarily recent, but this movement gaining traction and decolonizing academia.
00:33:07
Speaker
Fascinating, honestly, like some of my beginning courses as a first year were all about, you know, decolonizing anthropology and can it be done? And this is a whole ethical debate because anthropology has such terrible colonial roots. Obviously anthropology, the entire, you know, genesis of modern anthropology was, you know, this idea that we can, if we can justify that, you know, these people in these places are stupider than white people,
00:33:36
Speaker
then we can justify going in and taking their resources. And so there's, I think there's a bit of academic guilt that a lot of people feel and they're like, how can we fix this? And I think there's not quite, you know, people went into it super gung ho and were like, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna fix our problems. And then it was really, I really felt like, you know, like, I feel like we're really lacking, like understanding the root. And it's like, we know that, you know, historically, anthropology sucked.
00:34:05
Speaker
Um, but how do we, you know, not suck in the future? And I feel like that was completely, you know, we've gotten a step one, which was acknowledged bad practices, but there's, you know, 17 other steps that have to come with that of, you know,
00:34:22
Speaker
putting into practice better tools. And I think that's a huge thing that can be seen in museums. It's whether or not, you know, an exhibit is the Henrietta Litchy. Oh, I am probably pronouncing that wrong. I can't remember her last name totally. She's a Dutch anthropologist and she's
00:34:41
Speaker
in charge of a lot of museums. And she writes about colonial spectacle and this idea, you know, in the 19th century, all these exhibits were created for people to be like, ooh, and ah, at these, you know, savages from different cultures. But how much of that has actually changed when you look at what is exhibited now in museums? How much of it is, oh my god, this is so weird and so crazy. And so I got this really some opportunity last year, I got to do a focused research project, I got to do an analysis on
00:35:10
Speaker
The exhibition of Papuan Corroars, I'm probably pronouncing that terribly and I apologize ahead of time to any Papuan viewers and listeners. This is just, you know. And so Papuan Corroars, they're ancestral figures that are made out of the skulls of the dead and they're heavily decorated and they're used to channel that spirit. They would be channeled, and they're currently don't, they're not practiced in Papuan. They're not, it's not a thing that people do anymore, mostly because of missionary work.
00:35:39
Speaker
within the region, but it's something that I think people, you know, when you go to a museum and you look at the skull of, you know, the heavily decorated skull of an indigenous person.
00:35:51
Speaker
What are your thoughts and how can the museum itself work to challenge the thoughts that people, you know, the thoughts and prejudices that people already come into the museum with? And so that was really, you know, fun to, you know, it's a huge ethical issue and it's a very complicated issue. How do you go into this situation and say, okay,
00:36:11
Speaker
Like we have this object that we want to exhibit. How do we keep people from going, Oh my God, that's so weird. And there's going to still be people that do it, but how do we make sure that like we're challenging that thought process that people have. And that's heavily complicated issue, but so fun to talk about and so interesting to discuss.
00:36:31
Speaker
Are there, I guess, like if you're learning about this in undergrad, because I never learned about any of this kind of stuff at an American anthro program, you know, I guess kind of starting off like one, I mean, what's the ratio of like European students versus non-European students present within your program? And then two,
00:36:53
Speaker
Who's teaching these classes? Are these European-born folks? Are these non-European indigenous people from Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia? Who's teaching these courses and who's taking them? I'm in the international track. There is a Dutch language track of my program, but I'm in the international track, which is taught all in English. For the most part, is European students.
00:37:17
Speaker
I there are a couple Americans that I know of, but mostly European and there are. I'm trying to think if there's any one. I think almost everyone is European or American in my program.
00:37:29
Speaker
And most of my professors are white Europeans. I'm not going to say that they're, you know, completely, you know, for that specific class that I took that was taught by a Malachan professor of Malachan descent. And he was, you know, he loved that kind of stuff. Museum ethics used to be a curator in Utrecht. And so he worked on all that stuff. And so he was able to kind of, you know, put that perspective of being a person of color living in the Netherlands.
00:37:54
Speaker
I won't say that like my professors are totally, you know, have totally got this down. I think this is totally, you know, something new for them. And sometimes my professors will bring up the concept of decolonizing and you'll you see them kind of like grown internally, like, oh, this again, and it's like, yes, this again, we're going to talk about it until we have beaten it like a dead horse and we fully, you know,
00:38:15
Speaker
I have a complex understanding and I'm kind of the person that goes in there and is super annoying and I was like well actually that's not true and well actually you know I remember we were talking about Malinowski who's this you know.
00:38:27
Speaker
the pioneer of participant observation ethnography and modern day anthropology. And my professor was like, yeah, and then his diary was published after he died and he wasn't that, and he was, we found out some not cool stuff about him. And I was like, let's talk about the fact that he was racist and a sexual predator and all this terrible stuff about Malinowski that was revealed through his diaries. We can't just tack that on at the end.
00:38:53
Speaker
fully analyze why he thought he had that power in the first place. And because if you don't fully understand that you might go into whatever situation that you are conducting your research on, and obviously different people come from different backgrounds, but if you're a white person going into
00:39:14
Speaker
an indigenous community and saying like, oh, like, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm better because I'm white. And you might not even recognize that you think that, but, you know, that might just be a conception that you have because, you know, you have a cell phone and you have Facebook and, you know, all this. And these people, you know, live off the land and it's just different culturally. And so I think sometimes people like, I'm one of those people that's like, we really need to understand this. And I'm going to, you know, rant about this until the day is over, you know,
00:39:44
Speaker
I always joke around with my professors. I talk to them. I talked to one of them at the beginning of the year, this year, and I was like, I'm back to terrorizing the anthropology department. Because I'm constantly like, hey, what about this? And hey, what about that? And my professors, for the most part, are very willing to discuss this kind of stuff and willing to talk about it. But sometimes, especially with like, I hate to say, but sometimes with the white male professors, they're like, oh, well,
00:40:09
Speaker
You know, they give that kind of smile that's like a little kid, you know, and it's like, oh, you don't know that I'm about to go to war because I have so many opinions. Gotcha. Yeah. I know it's like coming to terms with some of what.
00:40:22
Speaker
the older anthropologists and the ones that we read, Boaz, Malinowski and others, it's like people in our discipline are just like, oh, well that's just kind of like what it was for the time. That's like, isn't it a whole discipline about like breaking social norms and not justifying like how the concepts of the time, like how do you use this as a justification for some of these older books? And it's just like that disconnect. I don't know. Are you part of the American Anthropological Association?
00:40:49
Speaker
I'm not because I'm not based in the US. So they were like, do you want to join? And I was like, yeah. And then they were like, you can't do that because you're from a European university. And I was like, darn.
00:41:02
Speaker
Well, there was recently a couple of older silverback archaeologists, you know what I'm talking about. They wrote a letter against the decolonization work and kind of like, what we did back in the 70s and 80s, like, you know, we did all this social justice work. This is so grossly unfair. It's like, no, you're helping out like your friends, like you're making sure like liberals and white women out of space and you didn't
00:41:24
Speaker
necessarily care about anyone else. Were you guys marching with AIM? No. Are you marching with Martin Luther King? Maybe, but you guys were primarily within white organizations advocating for Euro-American descent rights within the country. You can't sit there and tell us you did everything when clearly we have 40 years showing you haven't done enough.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think that one of my favorite like statements is my dad is a huge, you know, a very large leftist and has always been and he spent, you know, most of his college years in UC Santa Monica protesting the Vietnam War. And you ought to always joke like I never got arrested, but that's because I could run. I could run like a mother, you know, he can outrun the next guy.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, he's like, I can run. So I, you know, got away from the cops every time, but he got hit with water cannons and all this stuff. And he was like, he's a boomer. And he was always like, you know, people are always like, oh, like,
00:42:21
Speaker
you know, people always say like, well, they don't know better. And he was like, well, I'm from that generation and I know better. So obviously like, that's not true. Like that was my dad's, you know, there were not racist people, you know, back then, not everyone was trash. We just assume everyone was trash. And that was a conversation that my dad had. He was like, yeah, did I know people older than me who sucked? Yes. Did I also protest alongside people older than me who really understood this?
00:42:50
Speaker
You know, my dad lived in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis and you know, where a lot of people kind of shied away. My dad, you know, his roommate, he directed HIV. A lot of his friends passed away and my dad was there, you know, walking hand in hand and holding these people's hands. And, you know, I joke that my dad was the token straight friend because he was, you know,
00:43:13
Speaker
But, you know, these were people he loved and cared about. And he was like, they were also people. Like, even if they weren't my friends, you know, he was like, that was the important thing. They were people. And, you know, I think that's an important thing is that we kind of lose sight of that in the name, in the pursuit of knowledge or whatever. I think sometimes we forget that we're studying other people and.
00:43:36
Speaker
I think when you can recognize the humanity of someone is when you can do the best work and do them the most justice in your work. It's really frustrating sometimes. I do get really, really frustrated sometimes when I'm reading Malinowski. I have a copy of his diary and I have it highlighted and dog-eared.
00:43:59
Speaker
almost a full year to get through it just because reading it made me nauseous because the way he referred to women, the way he referred to children, just the terrible, terrible things he said. It was like, we really need to do better. He didn't see these people as human. He referred to them regularly as monkeys.
00:44:20
Speaker
How do we do better? And that's the whole point of decolonizing is how do we do better? Because we haven't done well in the past. So we obviously need to do a whole lot better. And I think the number one rule is involving more people from all over the world, involve more people of color, involve more people from different backgrounds and different ethnicities and different origins. And that's how you're gonna get the most complete, solid,
00:44:46
Speaker
framework for what you build. No, I mean, that's an excellent point. Excellent point. I know, uh, me and some of the tip I was on the plans, your joke about writing a book about medieval peasant life, just kind of flipping the script. We have a bunch of indigenous people talk about European peasantry for a little bit, just be as nasty as we can. Like, look at these idiots. They don't even bathe. Like how unclean they are. And I, yeah, I completely, uh, absolutely vibe with everything that you're talking about when it comes to all this deep colonial
00:45:17
Speaker
And just acknowledging, you know, that's kind of been a theme in this past segment is just like, acknowledge it. Acknowledge how bad the discipline was and how bad some of these people were.
00:45:29
Speaker
You know, just because Boaz was Jewish doesn't mean he was necessarily like the best when it came to understanding all these cultures. Like he developed the American four fields approach. Great. Um, but there's a legacy with that when you make American archeology about studying human behavior, not history. And we see that legacy and how the American archaeological record
Ethical Considerations in Archaeology
00:45:52
Speaker
has dug up. It's like, it's not, it's not for history. It's not for the benefit of the indigenous folks.
00:45:56
Speaker
is purely for understanding human behavior and using it as a case study for a worldwide population. It's like, that's not, there's problems with that. Yeah. And it's also like, what, why is the rationale? I remember having a conversation with someone that you were talking about, there were these caves out West that were being auctioned off that were in indigenous burial site. I don't know if you heard about that. And so it was like, well, they could be used for research. And I was like, why do we need to research?
00:46:23
Speaker
Like that's the traditional burial site. Why do we need to dig those people up? What's the point? And I was like, okay, I'll go dig up, you know, I'll go to the graveyard and start digging people up, you know, I'll go dig up grandma. And they're like, well, you can't do that. And I was like, well, I want to research her. It's like, well, you can't. And it was like, why are you not understanding this? Like, they're like, that's my grandma. And I was like, no, exactly. That's, those are those people's ancestors. Like you can't do that.
00:46:52
Speaker
Exactly. And there's laws protecting Euro-American cemeteries and burials, but you don't see people in American archaeology upset about those laws. They're all upset about NACRA. That's the one that gets in the way of research. Not everything else. Oh, totally. And it's like those people are still right there. You could just go talk to them. You don't have to dig them up to ask. Exactly. Well, I really enjoyed having you on. So before we end the show, Rebecca, what are a couple sources, these books, articles, videos, or whatever?
00:47:21
Speaker
for anyone interested in the topics that we discussed today.
00:47:24
Speaker
So I would definitely recommend kind of a beginner would be Archeology Inc. on Instagram. I think they're a great kind of resource. If you're interested in tattooing, in the history of tattooing, you want to know more, but you don't kind of know where to start and you want kind of a light version of it. I think they're an awesome account to follow. A book I would recommend is Drawing by Great Needles by Aaron Dieter-Wolf and Carol Diaz Granados. So I would definitely recommend those two sources.
00:47:53
Speaker
for anyone interested in learning more about tattooing. Excellent. Yeah. And you know, well, early, early, uh, interviewee of the life ruins podcast. So we're always excited to have guests refer back to that. That's awesome. And, uh, where can our listeners find you on social media? So my Instagram is appearing academic. That's really the only social media I have currently, but yeah, you can totally check me out there. I do a lot of blog work. So a lot of it's blog stuff. Some of it's talking about
00:48:20
Speaker
tattooing, some of it's talking about language, some of it's talking about disability advocacy. It's a little bit of everything. So if you're interested in that, check it out. Excellent. Thank you, Rebecca. And for listeners, you can find the book recommendations and her contact information in the episode description below, wherever you were listening to this podcast. And of course, we have to ask the famous question, Rebecca, if given the chance, would you still choose to live a life in ruins?
00:48:43
Speaker
Absolutely. Excellent. Well, when we just interviewed Rebecca Lamb, you can find her on Instagram at appearing academic. Once again, you can find that in the episode description below. And everyone, please, please, please be sure to rate and review the podcast with whatever platform you're listening on. It helps us know what we're doing and how our listener engagement is. If you're listening on the all show speed, please go ahead and subscribe to our actual show just so you can get those numbers a lot easier. And with that, we are out.
00:49:20
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. What kind of ink do politicians get? I don't know. Aristotats. Yeah, pretty bad. All right.
00:49:57
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.