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Exploring the Ethics in Experimental Archaeology - Ep 73
940 Plays1 year ago
On today’s episode, we have a panel talking about the ethics of experimental archaeology and specifically on their work together around the digitization of the Crabtree Lithic Technology Collection. We talk about why the Indigenous Advisory board members wanted to be part of these efforts, overarching ethics in experimental archaeology, and what this project is trying to do to address those ethical issues. Finally, we talk about the future of this project and how this project helps bridge the gap to where they’d like to see the fields of anthropology and collections get to in the future.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 73. I'm Jessica Uquinto and I'm your host. And today we are exploring the ethics in experimental archaeology.
00:00:21
Speaker
Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch or Ute People's Treaty Lands, the Diné Ta, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
Panel Introductions
00:00:31
Speaker
So today we have a panel episode, so I'm going to ask the panel members to introduce themselves.
00:00:39
Speaker
So Angela, would you like to get us started? Aloha mai kakou. My name is Angela Neller, and I'm the curator at the Wanapum Heritage Center. I'm calling in from Ellensburg, Washington, which is the lands of the Kitatas Band of the Yakama Nation. I'm a museum curator. I have over 33 years of experience working in archaeology and museums, and I'm excited to be here.
00:01:03
Speaker
Hello, everybody. My name is Jason Yonker. I am a citizen and chief of the Coquille Indian Tribe, also associate professor here in anthropology at the University of Oregon and the assistant vice president and advisor to the president for sovereignty and government-to-government relations.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hi everyone, I'm Julissa Kenyon and I am the Social Sciences Librarian at the University of Idaho and I am one of three co-principal investigators on a Council on Library and Information Resources Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archive grant project that's looking at digitizing the Donald E. Crabtree Lithic Comparative Collection in 2D and 3D.
00:01:51
Speaker
Hello, everyone. I'm Keisha Supernant. I am Métis and I'm Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta here in Edmonton, Alberta on Treaty 6 territory and the Métis homeland. And I also serve as Director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology here at the University of Alberta.
00:02:15
Speaker
Hello, everyone. My name is Larissa McLeod. I am a member of the James Smith Cree Nation and I live and work in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, same as Keisha.
Project Introduction and Significance
00:02:28
Speaker
And I'm also the Learning Services Librarian at the Alberta Library.
00:02:33
Speaker
Hi, everyone. My name is Marco Seifeli Valencia, and I'm the open education librarian at the University of Idaho library. I'm also a co-creator of the Chicana Pormirasa Digital Memory Collective, and I'm joining you from Moscow, Idaho, which is the homelands of the Nez Perce, the Palouse, and the Coeur d'Alene tribes.
00:02:50
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. Very excited to have you all. Yeah, so, okay. Let's start with the basics. Always a good place to start. And would you mind telling us a little bit more about this project that we're going to be talking about today?
00:03:07
Speaker
Sure. So this is Marco again. I'll dive in with a little bit of background. So this project centers around criticizing, critiquing, contextualizing, reimagining the
Ethical Considerations in Archaeology
00:03:18
Speaker
Donald E. Crabtree collection. So for those who don't know, Donald E. Crabtree is an important experimental archaeologist. He was born in 1912 in Haber in Idaho, which is actually not too far from where I'm at in Moscow. And he grew up in Salmon, Idaho. Crabtree is an interesting character in that he
00:03:35
Speaker
is an exemplary flint knapper who is self-taught and went to go on to establish the kind of field of experimental lithic archaeology in academia.
00:03:45
Speaker
He has a kind of a romantic narrative around him as an outsider, a self-taught expert, and one that immediately stuck out to me as one that a race sort of indigenous and native context for his work, the collection, his influences, and even some of the holdings. So this project got started at the library. So Julissa and I are here on behalf of the U.I. to whole library for this project. I was approached by Dr. Leah Evans-Yonka, who's our third PR on the grant.
00:04:13
Speaker
and she's the collections manager for the Crabtree collection. The collection itself includes his archive, as well as about 8,000 Flint Knapp points. Many of those were created by him, we estimate about 90%, but about 10% of the collection is native or indigenous provenance. So either collected by Crabtree as a surface collection at some point in his life or given to him by colleagues. So when Jalisa and I heard about this project,
00:04:39
Speaker
I think we were both immediately keen to think about how do we bring the cultural relevancy and context and sensitivity of this effort up to what we consider a sort of modern contemporary library standard. And we immediately approached Dr. Yolanda Bisbee, who's the Executive Director of Tribal Relations here at the University of Idaho. And she gave us the idea of an advisory board.
00:05:01
Speaker
And we kind of took the idea that she had, which was more coming from a traditional archeological context with a lot of provenance, belongings, belonging to native people. And we thought, how can we adapt this idea for this setting? And so I'm going to turn it over to Julissa and she's going to go into a little bit more about our process and thinking putting that together and how we got so lucky having this incredible team to help us on this project.
00:05:24
Speaker
Thanks, Marco. Yes, following upon that conversation with Yolanda, as Marco said, we were attempting to create an advisory board that kind of followed a model that the Alfred W. Bowers Laboratory of Anthropology had used and some of the researchers and faculty across the university had used when
00:05:43
Speaker
maybe working with collections or dealing with topics kind of around these areas. At first, we identified and contacted local cultural heritage experts in our regional area of Idaho. And at the time we submitted our grant proposal, we had two or three individuals who had tentatively agreed to participate and be on this advisory board. However, after receiving the grant, the original contacts that we had identified were ultimately unable to participate.
00:06:10
Speaker
And as a result, Marco and I spent most of 2021 talking and meeting and trying to reimagine what our advisory board could actually be. And we eventually made some pretty significant changes to our original ask, what we had talked about in our grant proposal. We decided to shift away from asking our board members
00:06:30
Speaker
to create content for our project website and instead we decided to ask board members to participate in an interview with us for posting on the project website and then share their perspectives and expertise on topics and issues associated with this project.
00:06:47
Speaker
We also changed our approach to finding these board members by looking towards native and indigenous scholars, professionals, and graduate students in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and archaeology and GLAM institutions, which are galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
00:07:04
Speaker
The way that we went about identifying these individuals was also pretty unique to what we had heard some of our colleagues had done when trying to form their own advisory boards. We started looking at kind of large professional associations like the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists and the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. We also identified researchers who had taken a critical perspective
00:07:29
Speaker
to examining these types of topics in archaeology and anthropology and in libraries and digital humanities. And then finally, we really utilized some of the ongoing conversations on social media and Twitter in particular, looking for these individuals and folks who were talking about topics around cultural appropriation and critical anthropology, archaeology and librarianship to identify others who were interested in this type of work.
Digitization and Representation Challenges
00:07:55
Speaker
So we pulled together lots of names from all of those different areas and sent some emails to potential members who we thought might be interested in being part of this or at least learning more. We introduced the project, talked about our ideas for the type of work they would do and their time commitment during the eight months of service on this board, and then shared some more details about our $2,500 honorarium for each member.
00:08:18
Speaker
We really wanted to make sure that our board members had a chance to ask questions before agreeing to participate. So Marco and I held individual Zoom meetings with everyone who was interested, giving them the chance to ask any questions and learn a bit more about the project. So as of fall 2022, we now have seven amazing members of our advisory board and we're really excited to be working with them. We have maintained an open spot on our board.
00:08:44
Speaker
for a regional cultural heritage expert if an opportunity does arise in the future to work with someone who is more local to our geographic area. Great. So for those of you that are here on the advisory board, let's start with what made you interested in being part of this project.
00:09:03
Speaker
So I think one of the things that really drew me to this project was the engagement around a collection which was created by an experimental archaeologist, someone who was a renowned flint knapper, and the opportunity to really question the ethics of where that knowledge came from, how it's engaged,
00:09:27
Speaker
And what do you do with a collection like that? So much of the conversation we've been seeing is around belongings and ancestors that come from indigenous landscapes. But here's something that represents indigenous knowledge that's being produced by a non-indigenous
00:09:44
Speaker
flint knapper. And I hadn't really seen other opportunities to really engage with the ethics of that. And what does that actually mean? So as an Indigenous archaeologist myself, I was very curious to see what kind of conversations would come out of this engagement and to work with other folks who bring different perspectives to a collection like this.
00:10:06
Speaker
You know, I'll definitely echo Keisha on that. A big part of what drew me was actually the concept of being able to have some conversations with other folks that were on this board and to really dig into the ethics around a collection like this. You know, that was really fantastic.
00:10:27
Speaker
Also for me, while I'm a librarian now, you know, my bachelor's degree, I focused on archaeology classes as part of my major. So to me it really felt like an opportunity to give back to the field and to really try and apply some of what I had learned in librarianship where we talk about
00:10:49
Speaker
access to knowledge and how do we effectively cite knowledge, how do we ensure people are critically accessing information, and that they understand the context that the information exists within. All of those felt like pieces that connected very well to this project. And so I was really excited at the idea of trying to kind of bridge some of my newer librarianship knowledge
00:11:16
Speaker
into some of this experimental archaeology, digitization, ethics questions. It just sounded like a really cool conversation to be a part of.
00:11:27
Speaker
And I think along those lines too is this idea of how do we bring Indigenous voice out more in the science and the process of archaeology. There seems to be such a focus on individual knowledge, individual work, and not really understanding the bigger context that people work in and understanding the contributions that folks that came before
00:11:54
Speaker
who are indigenous, who built the sites that people are working in or develop the knowledge that's trying to be replicated through experimental archaeology to give them that voice in the process as well. Hello, everybody. My two cents on all of this is that whenever there are indigenous displays,
00:12:22
Speaker
there are lots of ethical considerations. And when there are replicated displays, there's even more ethical considerations that need to take place. There has to be community involvement, mostly tribal involvement. The narrative needs to be reasonable and not supplant a Native American narrative.
00:12:50
Speaker
All right. Okay. So we are at our first break point already always flies by so fast. So we will be right back here in a moment.
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Speaker
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00:14:41
Speaker
All right, okay, so we are back from our break and I just want to dive right in and let's talk about some of these ethical issues that you all mentioned. Let's say you're an archaeologist and maybe you never thought that there would be ethical issues involved in experimental archaeology or you're a museum's person or collections. What would you tell that person that
00:15:08
Speaker
never read the connection that there might be ethical considerations to think about with this type of work.
00:15:14
Speaker
I might get us started, if that's right, with everyone. I know when I first started having these conversations around this particular collection, it really did raise a number of things I hadn't explicitly considered before about experimental archaeology. I actually took an experimental archaeology course in my master's and a lot of us made items from particular Indigenous contexts, but we never considered them to be Indigenous knowledge. And yet, of course, they were.
00:15:44
Speaker
Like I was making stone beads and my friend was making bentwood boxes. These are from particular places, indigenous contexts that need to be recognized and understood. And when we specifically come to flint knapping, for me, that's very clear when you have predominantly white men making items that are reflective of, you know, 10,000 or more years of indigenous history in the lands we call
00:16:13
Speaker
Canada, North America, without any consideration of the fact that that actually is Indigenous knowledge. It raises all kinds of ethical considerations. And I often liken it to the conversations in art right now about appropriation. So there's particular Indigenous artists and creators who have their work stolen and taken up by other people, non-Indigenous people.
00:16:40
Speaker
And in many ways, you can draw similar connections with the way that experimental archaeology takes Indigenous knowledge without recognition of the fact that it is Indigenous knowledge and belongs to particular places and nations. Does anybody else have anything that they want to add there to what Keisha was saying, or any other ethical issues?
00:17:06
Speaker
Sure. You know, I definitely think Keisha's covered a lot of it. And, you know, the only other thing that I would also add is also thinking about the relationships that surround some of that knowledge gathering and knowledge interaction that we have in the past. Western academia has been really great at taking knowledge from indigenous peoples. And we see that in
00:17:34
Speaker
fields well beyond even archaeology. We see it in pharmaceuticals, we see it in technologies that we use. And I think that this is really trying to look at better ways of engaging with
00:17:50
Speaker
the people and the knowledges and having it be a much more holistic relationship. So yeah, looking at the ethics of how do we engage with people and particularly when we're talking about knowledges that
00:18:08
Speaker
colonial forces have tried to remove from their culture and their way of life. And the importance of re-engaging communities in those knowledges and their caretaking is, I think, really important. But it also needs to not come from a place where
00:18:33
Speaker
scholars are acting as though they're benevolent saviors. This really is just attempting to improve some of the past harm that has been caused.
Cultural Context and Historical Harms
00:18:45
Speaker
It's not actually a cause for celebration yet. It's really just making good on some of the injuries that have been caused in the past, I would say. So it's trying to balance those as well, ethically trying to make sure that we're not
00:19:01
Speaker
becoming blind to the fact that this is not benevolent saviorship on the part of scholars either. It's just doing the right thing that probably should have been done from the start if we had known better. I'll just add that to that to say that I absolutely agree and I think from the library's perspective, Julissa and I wanted to make sure that we didn't unthinkingly re-perpetuate the narratives and the harm in those narratives and the sort of process of just kind of trying to
00:19:31
Speaker
digitize this collection without providing any further context. And it's been really interesting for me coming into this with no formal archaeology or anthropology background, and to have kind of what we might call in like Buddhism, like a beginner's mind. And so having a sort of a very, just sort of not necessarily fresh, but a uneducated, I guess, kind of look at this.
00:19:53
Speaker
I was most familiar with experimental archaeology through entertainment, like TV shows, you know, those survivalist types of TV shows where people are emulating quote unquote primitive techniques. And I feel like that helped me to understand how a lay person might appreciate this collection, but also how they might unknowingly just sort of accept all those false narratives and damaging narratives that were sort of submerged
00:20:19
Speaker
the ones that were clearly stated. I think there's quite a bit in this collection that has value in terms of the lithics and the technology and the collection of indigenous belongings, but there is also a lot of harm in the way it's been presented and discussed so far, in particular in the ways it erases indigenous knowledge and lineages.
00:20:39
Speaker
I think I would add to what Marco was saying is I really appreciate the direction that the project is taking to really contextualize the collection within a broader perspective. And I think it, you know, what he was just talking about really speaks to also the history of archaeology and academia and the movement were, you know, moving towards that director of more engaged
00:21:05
Speaker
archaeology, more recognition of indigenous values and histories and contexts in the work that we do, more collaboration. And so hopefully we're making that change in the field and the profession to be more inclusive of the, you know, what I think Jason was speaking to, the narratives and the knowledge and respecting that. That's where
00:21:35
Speaker
our understanding comes from. Yeah. So how within this project, how exactly are you guys approaching that? So let's say, how does this look different than a project that is, is not grappling with those, those ethics issues? I'll jump in with a little bit about that and Jalisa, if you have any thoughts and then we can turn over to the board and they can comment how well we're doing on these aims.
00:22:03
Speaker
If you look at what's out there on Crabtree right now, it's a narrative that I personally find pretty frustrating. It's a sort of narrative that contains a lot of stereotypes about Native people.
00:22:15
Speaker
If you look at any of the scholarship or writing on Crabtree, it's kind of a story of a singular white genius who happens upon a lost quasi-primitive technology, and he, through his own genius, excellence, creativity, and vision, produces something spectacular, produces a whole discipline, and produces a whole way of understanding lithics.
00:22:39
Speaker
And I think that there's a kind of veneration of Crabtree as a singular genius that doesn't, as we've discussed, include that sort of complete context that he was operating in both in his time
00:22:51
Speaker
as well as the context that a contemporary institution has a responsibility to present a more complete and thorough and accurate cultural context. The University of Idaho is a land grant university that is on unceded territory. And so for me as a native person working in this context, if I was going to be affiliated with this project, it was very important that we didn't just reproduce it as it had been. And so I think that's the critical perspective that Jaleesa and I
00:23:18
Speaker
knew that we wanted to bring to this project, but also understood that in our personal and professional capacities, we weren't prepared to do that on our own. And I don't really think anybody, even someone with expertise in this background, is prepared to take on the work that a seven-person advisory board could do, the vision that they could give. But I think Julissa and I felt particularly aware of the ways that we were sort of out of our depth
00:23:41
Speaker
in content expertise, but understanding from our own work as librarians and some of the motion in that discipline towards counter story, towards contextualizing and towards sort of actively resisting the white supremacy of the institution and the
00:23:57
Speaker
reproduction of damaging collections as a sort of norm and just default way of doing it. So the sort of compact answer is, you know, a reproduction of the status quo of the way we've talked about Crabtree is me to one that would continue to have some harm and some erasure, and also as one that's sort of outdated. It's not the way that I think that we should talk about a collection like this in 2020, which is when we were writing our grant.
00:24:22
Speaker
And kind of thinking a little bit more about some of the things, some of the discussions that we're trying to have that really hadn't been considered when looking at this collection in the past, which it had never been digitized, but it had been talked about and shared on the website or people had talked about or shared on the university's website or talked about kind of in research and kind of general interest circles is
00:24:46
Speaker
is thinking about, how do we talk about the items that Crabtree created, that he created himself with his own hands, building upon, appropriating, emulating, kind of experimenting with Native and Indigenous knowledge, versus the actual Native and Indigenous artifacts in the collection that are currently unprovenanced.
00:25:06
Speaker
I'm either because he surface collected them or they were they were looted or they were given to him is how do we talk about. Can it both sets of things that are in this collection and one of the things that we've been kind of talking about with our advisory board members and some of our early meetings in the fall
Advisory Board's Role and Future Directions
00:25:25
Speaker
of.
00:25:25
Speaker
2022, as well as in our individual interviews with them, is how do we and even should we share the Native and Indigenous items in this collection on the project website. We are digitizing all of the items in this collection, all of the stone flint knapped points in 2D by taking photos. But for those 10% that are Native and Indigenous items that are unprovenance,
00:25:48
Speaker
Should we post those photos on the project website? Should we be making 3D models of a subset of these items, which we are doing for the grant? Should we be doing that for these unprovenance native and indigenous items and posting them on the project website?
00:26:03
Speaker
what might be the benefits of that what harm might come from that and so fostering those discussions around discussions around those topics with our advisory board members mark when i are seeing as as a way to do this type of digitization work differently and even if we don't come to,
00:26:21
Speaker
a clear answer to at least have those discussions and then come away with a decision that for right now makes the most sense to try to minimize as much harm as possible when working with this collection, knowing full well that in the future, maybe partnerships with some of our local and regional
00:26:42
Speaker
Native and Indigenous tribes might come to a different conclusion. Maybe they would want things like that posted on the website. Maybe they'll have a different idea. So right now, just having those discussions and figuring out what can we do to change how the collection's been talked about and minimize any future harm through kind of what were the decisions that we're making.
00:27:03
Speaker
All right. And we are lucky enough that we had another advisory board member who's joined us in this conversation. So Richie, would you mind introducing yourself and then talking about what got you interested in joining this board?
00:27:19
Speaker
Sure. My name is Richie Myers. I am an Oglala Lakota tribal member on top of being a cultural anthropologist and currently work for the U.S. Forest here in the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota. I am the Tribal Relations Specialist.
00:27:41
Speaker
fairly new position for me as of September. As far as my interest and kind of segue into the project, I'm honestly drawing a blank as to the real nitty-gritty particulars, but I was happy to join the idea of, I guess, cultural representation and the complexity of trying to do justice to obviously
00:28:09
Speaker
historical injustice and to amend all of that with more appropriate collaborative responses is optimum in most settings dealing with Native people. And so the project and all of the parts to it are really fascinating to me. So I'm just happy to provide any kind of
00:28:30
Speaker
intellectual thoughts to it. Thank you. We are at our second break point, so we will be right back here in a second. All right, and we are back from our break. So we've heard from Jalissa and Marco about the project and ethics, but let's hear from the advisory board members about how they see the ethics being addressed in this project.
00:28:56
Speaker
I think the broadening of the narrative and increasing the scope of how Crabtree is talked about in particular is really interesting to me because I think we're having a much broader conversation about how we remember history and who gets celebrated. And it's not a matter of erasing that history, of course, but it is a matter of actually engaging with not just the
00:29:24
Speaker
you know, brilliant genius that was done with Crabtree, but also the appropriation of an erasure of Indigenous knowledge, both by him, but also by the discipline of anthropology more broadly, which is based at least in North America on the premise that as Indigenous people, we wouldn't be here anymore. So they had to like collect as much as they could about our culture and ways of knowing because we were going to be
00:29:50
Speaker
eradicated or assimilated. And so for me, this idea of really broadening the conversation around experimental archaeology collections, also around digitization, because we're seeing a big push toward that in many places. And this assumption that it's sort of a neutral thing to do, we're just going to make it more accessible, and we're going to create these. But what are the ethics of creating a representation of something that it has
00:30:16
Speaker
appropriated indigenous knowledge, I think that's a really important conversation that stretches sort of far beyond experimental archaeology into all kinds of different collections and materials so that indigenous voices and ways of knowing can be, you know, brought back in and in many ways centered around a lot of this. So for me, that's what sets this apart in many ways.
00:30:39
Speaker
I know for me, I was really excited to see the advisory group had kind of a good mix of, you know, it wasn't all people from one area or even from only, you know, archaeology focused scholars.
00:30:55
Speaker
I think that's really great and neat, especially when we're trying to tackle these kind of like bigger ethical questions and we want to start that conversation. So I was really excited that they were willing to be a bit more open to who was going to be on their advisory board than I've seen other projects necessarily do. So, you know, I think to me, that was a really good sign that they were actually open to
00:31:22
Speaker
having these ethical conversations and were willing to, as they were talking, willing to not necessarily find the right answer forever, just working to find the right answer for now. And when we talk about ethics, I think that's a lot of times where it has to
00:31:40
Speaker
it has to fall. We can figure out what the best thing to do now with what we understand and the technology that we have and the relationships that are built. We can do what is best to do now, but being open to things possibly will change in the future. And I think the fact that they're coming at this project with
00:32:01
Speaker
kind of an eye out for how this is going to develop in the future and other questions or changes that might happen in the future. To me, that's a really important position to take when you're dealing with these kind of grayer ethical questions and trying to change the status quo of how Indigenous knowledge has been treated.
00:32:23
Speaker
So we're thinking about that. Where would you, does anyone have like a vision for where they would like to see this project go or, you know, kind of like next steps or, or really taking it to the next level or anything like that? I can share a little bit about from the project's perspective, just briefly. Some of the things that we're thinking about is how we can continue conversation with
00:32:50
Speaker
native and indigenous communities moving forward even after the grant project comes to an end. So those in the academy might be familiar with the kind of model of getting a grant for a project. It runs for two or three years. Sometimes those projects are continued to be funded by recurring grants. This one, we don't foresee doing that. So we've established the digitization process. We will create a website that shares the materials that we've scanned
00:33:18
Speaker
and also host these interviews and other contexts as we are able to create it, including some of the K through 12 resources we're going to make. But one of our goals and actually ask for the advisory board to help us brainstorm on is what would meaningful community engagement look like for this site going forward?
00:33:35
Speaker
So I think one of the most exciting and maybe impossible in some situations kind of vision is that this in some way facilitates repatriation, or if not repatriation, then re-identification of provenance, of belonging, of connection of the native items in the collection back to the places and the people that they belong.
00:33:58
Speaker
So that is, I think, like I said, a very lofty goal, a challenging goal. And so I don't want to at all be saying that that's what we're promising that we're going to
Ethics in Indigenous Representation
00:34:07
Speaker
do. But I think that's what our eye is towards. How can we facilitate that? And how can we facilitate a continuing conversation that centers
00:34:15
Speaker
native perspectives and a contemporary understanding of natives as contemporary people and also people who have been here since time immemorial with a sophisticated technology and so I think keeping an eye on how we can keep building relationships with native communities how we can facilitate repatriation.
00:34:34
Speaker
and how we can also keep respecting the relationships with our advisory board members. One of our members, Bonnie Newsom, she's not here today, but she had the idea of putting a time limit on the interviews because she said what she thinks about things right now, she's willing and happy to share.
00:34:52
Speaker
you know, three or five years down the line, her perspectives have hopefully evolved. And so I really appreciated sort of her thoughts of this as a kind of time capsule and the ways in which we would want to be sensitive to that and both preserve it going forward, but also try to have it be as sort of flexible and evolving as possible while also understanding that we're working within a grant context with specific deliverables that then are sort of fixed once they're launched.
00:35:19
Speaker
I would really like to see this open up a conversation that goes far beyond this collection. And I think the approach that the team has taken to interviewing a diverse set of indigenous folks from different backgrounds and from different fields will really bring a lot that other
00:35:41
Speaker
collections can look to for questions they might need to be asking about the collections that they have. And I also hope that it encourages experimental archaeologists who practice that method today, especially in contexts in indigenous lands, really reflect on what that means and have a more critical engagement with this issue more broadly. And I think the way that this has been approached will really allow that hopefully to happen.
00:36:09
Speaker
And hopefully this podcast will help too. That's always my help. And I'd like to add, I think, you know, critical engagement with community too, to really understand, you know, my understanding of experimental archaeology is this idea of learning techniques and processes and how you create.
00:36:30
Speaker
And but but the context is missing, you know, what are those objects used for? You know, why is it better to flake something on this side versus this other side? How does that help in the the actual contextual work of culture and living and, and the things that are done in communities? And so I would like to see, you know, that hopefully the project then expands also to more collaborative
00:36:55
Speaker
relationships, more understanding from a cultural perspective of the techniques that are being seen and not just from a Western, oh, I think this would be good for an axe. So I think it's an axe, but really truly getting true contextual information from the communities that develop that knowledge and use it.
00:37:19
Speaker
I think in addition to that community piece that Angela just said, I think about a librarian community too and how a sort of goal I would say for Julissa and I would be is if what we've done here can inspire
00:37:33
Speaker
Librarians and archivists working on similar collections that have similar issues of erasure or appropriation, and to sort of show a model for how you don't have to have content expertise to put together a team and a process that can help you to provide some meaningful cultural context and to address some of these harms that happen in the institution.
00:37:57
Speaker
I think that that would be one of our goals too in terms of our discipline of librarianship is just kind of inspiring people to think deeper about appropriation, erasure, hidden histories and knowledges, and what we have an ethical responsibility in our profession to make sure that we're not continuing those harms going forward.
00:38:19
Speaker
I might want to jump in if I can. One of the things that I do deal with here in my current position is looking at the government and the data that we have on place names on a lot of different things involving culture and what tribal communities in the plural sense around the area with the 16 tribes that work with the Black Hills
00:38:42
Speaker
Each is different in their own way as a political entity, but those that are of the same cultural kind of baseline, there's Lakuta language, there's Lakuta culture, there's this idea that
00:38:55
Speaker
you know, erasure is happening. All of these things are going on as culture is transforming and changing at every instance. And this notion of preserving it, keeping it, holding on to it, it's a really fascinating topic because there are things that not everybody from said culture that is being kind of decimated by modernity are meant to be known by people of that culture as well. And so within this idea of communities,
00:39:23
Speaker
you know, I live in my tribal community where Matyoshpa resides, and that idea of, I don't speak for all of them, what does it mean for those of us who, again, in the advisory capacity are, I guess, the bridges or the fancy word being interlocutors to what are the challenges between mainstream concepts of
00:39:45
Speaker
Kantian notions of knowledge in museum artifacts and collections versus sacred, sacred in the body of literature on the secrecy of knowledge and what shouldn't be revealed to others within that culture, proprietary knowledge for different families within tribal communities. That stuff, you know, it still exists in many communities and there are other communities where things have been lost to the point that they rely upon external
00:40:13
Speaker
subject matter experts to figure out what are the artifacts and items and places that are considered sacred because that disconnect happened with either boarding schools or language loss or things of that sort. So all of those are really fascinating. And that's, I guess, again, going back to some of the reasons of why I'm really excited to be a part of this team.
00:40:39
Speaker
I also neglected to mention, I guess I'm the president elect of the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists in this next year. I think I just barely got used to 2022, but I guess that's 2023.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, there are definitely things to mediate within tribal communities as well. Again, not everybody from said community that's being subjugated by, you know, the amorphous blob of English-speaking modernity has access or should have access to knowledge about things that have different value in different spaces.
00:41:16
Speaker
Well, one thing that I was thinking about while you guys have all been talking today, there was a lot of talk about re-centering on Indigenous perspectives. And that made me curious, you know, why do a project that focuses on Crabtree at all? Like what is the benefit there as opposed to just having a project that's solely focused on Indigenous voices and Indigenous perspectives?
00:41:44
Speaker
If I could chime in, first of all, I know Marco will probably have a really great answer for this project in particular, but hopefully to kind of set the stage, I just wanted to give my two cents on that where, you know, especially because we are looking to diversify fields and have people with differing voices, but that's still an ongoing process.
00:42:08
Speaker
Quite honestly, a lot of archaeology still looks more like Crabtree than it looks like, say, someone like me. So I think there's actually a lot of importance and power in engaging with collections like this because
00:42:26
Speaker
you know, hopefully experimental archaeologists or other folks in the, you know, especially social science fields, they can kind of see themselves and see the position of traditional academia power that they might hold.
00:42:42
Speaker
And they can start to question how they can use that position in academia or the doors that are open to them to try and bring in other voices that have been left out or to make some different ethical decisions than have traditionally been made.
00:43:04
Speaker
I think it's great that this project really does center on Indigenous voices, but engages a collection that is much more like the majority of archaeology still. I would really agree with what Larissa was saying, and I think
00:43:22
Speaker
we have to reckon with the past and ongoing colonial nature of archaeology and related disciplines. And we can only really reckon with that in relation to the non-Indigenous people who, you know, took our knowledge, incarcerated our ancestors and belongings and institutions. And while there is a
00:43:46
Speaker
essential space for Indigenous-centered and Indigenous-focused voices. We can't also just move to that without engaging this, you know, history, but also something that continues, as Larissa rightly noted in the present. And we're not at a place yet where it can only be Indigenous voices. And I hope someday we get to a point where it will be different, but we need to do this work of undoing before we can create that different vision of the future.
00:44:15
Speaker
I think those are really great answers. And I think this is a really great, great, great question. I mean, at a core level, my most honest answer is
00:44:24
Speaker
It pains me to think about if our grant proposal was competing directly with a really positive indigenous-based collection led by indigenous researchers, and our grant was selected over that grant. To me, that is one of the harms, I guess you might say, that's kind of
Conclusion and Future Directions
00:44:41
Speaker
baked into the institutional model of competition for grants, of scarcity of resources, of
00:44:47
Speaker
the way that basically Native and Indigenous people in belongings are still being minoritized and marginalized, including on budget lines, right? Having to even compete for grants instead of universities saying like, oh my goodness, our obligation is to pour money into repatriation. So I think at that core level, it's a valid, valid question. I think there's some interesting things about the Crabtree Collection in particular that adds some even further nuance to this.
00:45:15
Speaker
So thinking about that, Crabtree is incredibly important in the field of experimental and lithic archaeology. And I'm speaking outside of my experience here, but what I have learned through the process of this project is his importance in establishing the field. I have a more formal background in photography, and I think of someone like Edward Curtis, who took a lot of photographs of Native people and established
00:45:40
Speaker
I mean, frankly, some of the visual stereotypes that still persist to this day. There's an argument that we could say against, well, we shouldn't pour resources into digitizing and reunifying Edward Curtis photograph collections. And I would agree with that, especially if it's at the expense of preserving or digitizing Native belongings in collaboration with Native nations and people.
00:46:03
Speaker
However, at the same time, these collections exist and contain valuable information that Native people have then gone on to use in their own context, as well as what others have alluded to already in terms of expanding and broadening the conversation in the discipline in the first place.
00:46:20
Speaker
There's also something really ethically interesting to me about the fact that 90% of this collection, we're using a rough estimate there, is created by Crabtree, that presents a unique opportunity for archaeologists and anthropologists, in my opinion, to have a collection to work with that is not stolen belongings, that does have a provenance of being created by someone, even if outside of native culture.
00:46:46
Speaker
And the last thing I want to mention, and I'm hoping perhaps Angie can round us out on this, is Crabtree established a lot of field schools and went on to train many native people in Flintnapping. And so Crabtree is himself an important part of many people's story of how they do Flintnapping, including in culture.
00:47:07
Speaker
And so I think we need to have that kind of nuance when we think about Crabtree is someone that has so much influence both in the academy and also in Flintnapping community and also in native community. And so to me, this project, since it gives us the opportunity to talk about all of this, that's the kind of value that it adds and my sort of longer form response to that question of like, why even do this at all since there's harm kind of baked in. I guess a final thought that
00:47:37
Speaker
was going on in my head is often when I'm dealing with the politics of in between, so to speak, and the liminality of dealing with tribal communities and perspectives or the government as a kind of looming ominous representation of the other, who's otherized and what that means.
00:48:01
Speaker
becomes a very rigid binary of, this is Indian, this is not, this is pro-Indian, this is not. Seemingly, that seems like the DC world of attorneys and policies, but at the same time, I guess what I appreciate about both anthropology and
00:48:19
Speaker
and social science in general, is the notion that we're doing interpretations and rendering reality not between clear-cut binaries of us versus them. You know, I don't want to learn your Western ways. And that concept of saying, so is math Western? Is calculus Western? What does it mean
00:48:40
Speaker
to make such grandiose claims, those are often things that hinder the collaborative work that could be done with people exploring cultural boundaries. I think it's fascinating that Crabtree represents the really incredibly complicated nature of what is cultural collision.
00:49:02
Speaker
creating and co-constructing, in many cases, knowledge. But that idea of what knowledge is and who has access to it and more say in it, obviously that does fall within the kind of realm of identifying colonialism and imperialism and the voices that have neglected to include the marginalized. And so that is one of the beauties of this project, I think.
00:49:29
Speaker
Going back to anthropological perspectives within the history of the discipline, as of 2008, when I completed my dissertation research, there were under 100 PhD holding anthropologists who are federally recognized tribal members. Perhaps the number has risen a slight bit.
00:49:49
Speaker
But going back to the days of Ella Deloria working for Franz Boas, she achieved a master's, but wasn't given the access to inserting the doctoral type narrative of those who are in the scholar category. So it is a really interesting time, again, to bring all of the different disciplines forward in conversation and the type of research projects that exist these days where
00:50:17
Speaker
you have multidisciplinary approaches, multiple mixed methods of research and things of that nature that often, you know, the silos of academe can silence that. And again, just if I was trying to be a car salesman, one of the beauties of this advisory, as far as I can see, are that it is bringing a diverse background of people's kind of perspectives together to further these thoughts and to
00:50:45
Speaker
ideally keep going with complicating clean binaries.
00:50:51
Speaker
All right. Well, I mean, such amazing people on this panel. I could definitely talk to each of you and as a whole, a lot longer, but sadly we are at our time. Um, hopefully we get to have some of you back again in the future. Keisha, hopefully we get a fourth time sometime in there, but, but yeah, thank you so much everybody. And I really appreciate your time and your efforts.
00:51:19
Speaker
Thank you, thanks for having us and thanks to this amazing advisory board for collaborating with us on this project. Yes, thank you, it was great.
00:51:31
Speaker
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00:51:54
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org.
00:52:12
Speaker
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00:52:37
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.