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Lumbee Perspectives on Environment, Culture, and Community - Ep 80
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On today’s episode, Jessica talks with Dr. Ryan Emanuel (Associate Professor of Hydrology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University; Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) and Dr. Seth Grooms (Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University; Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina). Using highlights from their careers as examples, we talk about how to do community based work and educate the next generation of scholars in both the Environmental Sciences and Anthropology fields. We also talk about their hopes for these disciplines and what they have learned over the years.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to: https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/80
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- Dr. Ryan Emanuel’s Nicolas School of the Environment Page:Ryan Emanuel
- Dr. Ryan Emanuel’s Website:Ryan E. Emanuel, Ph.D.
- Preorder Ryan Emanuel’s Book: On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental JusticeOn the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice a book by Ryan Emanuel
- Dr. Ryan Emanuel on the Tribal Research Specialist Podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/tribal-research/30-this-one-time-at-the-vine-n72XlLsA1Wd/
- Dr. Seth Grooms’ Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University Page:Dr. Seth B. Grooms
- Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations by Vine Deloria Jr. and David E. Wilkins:Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional ...
- The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance:The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
- Native Nations Institute Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance:Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance | Native Nations Institute
- A Life in Ruins Podcast Episode 139 An Oral History of Indigenous Archaeologies with Dr. Joe Watkins:An Oral History of Indigenous Archaeologies with Dr. Joe Watkins - Ruins 139 — HQ Downloads
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction to Episode 80
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 80. I'm Jessica Uquinto, and I'm your host. And today we are talking about Lumbee perspectives on environment, culture, and community. 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 Daneta, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
Meet Dr. Ryan Emanuel
00:00:31
Speaker
Today, we have Dr. Ryan Emanuel and Dr. Seth Grooms on the show. Dr. Ryan Emanuel is an associate professor of hydrology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. He studies the movement and status of water in the environment, and he's also interested in historical and cultural aspects of water and watery places. Emanuel's work pays special attention to indigenous peoples' enduring relationships with rivers, wetlands, and other waterscapes in southeastern North America.
00:00:59
Speaker
He partners with tribal nations and indigenous communities to identify and address threats to culturally important waters that stem from pollution, climate change and unsustainable development. Emmanuel holds a Ph.D. in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia and is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. Welcome, Ryan. Happy to be here, Jessica. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Introducing Dr. Seth Grooms
00:01:23
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And Dr. Seth Grooms is an anthropological archaeologist who works primarily in the eastern woodlands of North America.
00:01:29
Speaker
In the broadest sense, his research is focused on crafting archaeological narratives of native histories that are, as much as possible, informed by Native American perspectives. He uses methods from geoarchaeology, landscape archaeology, and chronological modeling, and interprets the resulting data within a theoretical framework comprised of traditional anthropological theory, as well as Native American philosophies and epistemologies developed by contemporary native intellectuals.
00:01:56
Speaker
Dr. Groom's latest work is in the Southeast, specifically Mississippi and Louisiana, where he examines the role of landscape modification, such as mound building, in the poverty point phenomenon. Seth is an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina. So welcome, Seth.
00:02:13
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Thanks for having us, Jessica.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
00:02:16
Speaker
It's my pleasure to be here today. Yeah. I'm so excited to have both of you on at the same time. This might actually, nothing else is coming to me, be the first episode where we've had both somebody with an environmental sciences background and somebody with a cultural anthropological background on the same episode. So I'm pretty excited about this.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm very excited to talk to both of you today and let's get started. Just keep it simple with, um, how did you get into this
Ryan's Journey to Environmental Justice
00:02:48
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field?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, I'm happy to start off. So Jessica, I had a very conventional earth science and environmental science background. I studied geology as an undergraduate. I was attracted early on to hydrology, water science, and that's what I really wanted to pursue in graduate school.
00:03:10
Speaker
And so there are very few programs that actually offer hydrology degrees, or at least there were 20 years ago. So I enrolled in an interdisciplinary environmental sciences program at Virginia, where I could focus on hydrology. And I did that for my master's, my PhD. And the first several years of my career, I focus primarily on natural sciences, specifically around the movement of water in natural environments.
00:03:39
Speaker
maybe eight or 10 years ago, I began to move into issues around environmental justice and cultural resources, primarily in the context of NEPA reviews. And so that sent me down this path of thinking more about the cultural implications of water and the policies and actions that surround those cultural resources.
00:04:05
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So that's what spurred the bifurcation in my work. And it's where I've landed today. Yeah. And I mean, for me as a cultural anthropologist, it's like, well, obviously, you know, water turns into culture. But, you know, a lot of people out there obviously don't think about it that way.
00:04:23
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Right, you'd be surprised. Hydrology is still taught in many contexts as a purely physical science in the absence of human impacts or cultural impacts or things like this.
00:04:36
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Yeah, and I definitely want to get more into that later in this episode. Seth, what about you? How did you get into this work?
Seth's Archaeological Mission
00:04:45
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So I would say I've always been like a history buff. I was the kind of kid that probably liked documentaries a lot more than other kids my age, that kind of stuff I was always interested in.
00:04:57
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I also always enjoyed being outdoors and so archaeology was a natural fit in that kind of way as far as your work setting and your subject of your work. But I didn't think too much of it as a career option seriously probably until my early 20s. So I enlisted in the Marine Corps right out of high school and
00:05:19
Speaker
deployed overseas in 2008. And so I just, I found myself outside of the country in Iraq as this just one big kid who had never really left North Carolina. And despite kind of all that, you know, chaos around that sort of chapter of my life, I just was really fascinated by the history, you know, that I saw overseas. And so, you know, when I got out of the Marine Corps, I used my GI Bill
00:05:49
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I put myself through undergrad and it didn't take long, you know, after I got going at the University of North Carolina Charlotte from undergrad degree, for me to realize that I wanted to become an archaeologist and then not long after that for me to realize, you know, more specifically that I wanted to get those credentials so I could hopefully come back home one day and help the tribe with their various, you know, heritage, cultural heritage initiatives.
00:06:14
Speaker
So I'd say that by the time I was finishing up my undergrad, I knew that I wanted to get my PhD and that I wanted to work with my tribe and other indigenous communities. Okay. So I have all these questions coming to my brain. But first, so Seth, why did you feel like you needed to get a PhD in order to do that? What about that called to you?
00:06:39
Speaker
Well, I knew that obviously there are a lot of folks out there with master's degrees or bachelor's degrees doing a lot of great community engaged work in various capacities. So it's not like a PhD is a necessity for that, but I felt that it would give me the best shot to be competitive on the job market for being a college professor and things like that in anthropology. And I knew pretty early on that that was the
00:07:08
Speaker
That's what I needed to kind of punch my ticket and have a chance at the kind of jobs where I felt like I could make an impact teaching and also having university resources to conduct research with communities. Yeah, I was just thinking about all the students out there listening, but maybe are navigating those decisions right now. So I thought I'd ask more details about why you went that way.
00:07:33
Speaker
You had more of a, like, it seems like you, you went in and you were like, okay, I see how this can have a direct impact on my community. I'm working in, in archeology and on heritage projects. Ryan, it seems like from what you were saying, that was a little bit more of a process to figure out what that could look like. So can you talk about what that looked like for you going from, like you said, you know, the straight hydrology that they were teaching.
00:08:01
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to some of these more community-engaged aspects. Yeah, absolutely.
Community Feedback in Water Research
00:08:07
Speaker
And Seth knows this already, but in the Lumbee community, as in many Indigenous communities and even some non-Indigenous communities, there's a strong message that young people hear during their upbringing that's, go and get all the education you can so that you can come back and help your people.
00:08:26
Speaker
And so that was a message that I received as a young person. I didn't have any water science role models in the Lumbee community. We had lots of physicians, lots of attorneys, and we had lots of educators, but I didn't know any indigenous natural scientists at all.
00:08:47
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And it was only later in graduate school, maybe even during my early faculty career when I began to find other native environmental scientists. And so I spent the first few years of my career trying to figure out how hydrology
00:09:05
Speaker
enables me to give back in the way that my elders told me that I needed to. And it took many different forms as an early career scientist for several years. I was an ambassador for STEM education. I would come out and represent my university at college fairs. I would welcome high school groups from all over the Southeast who came to my institution and wanted to do college tours from various tribes.
00:09:33
Speaker
give them some perspective on what it was like being a native person on a predominantly white campus. And so that was how I contributed to my community for many years. Over the course of those activities, which eventually evolved into things like environmental field days with high school students back home in the Lumbee community,
00:09:54
Speaker
I began to hear from students, from their teachers, and even from parents who came out to these activities about some of the pressing environmental issues that they faced on a day-to-day basis, and the ways that those issues began to pull at the threads that tied them to this place that we've called home since time immemorial.
00:10:19
Speaker
And that's when I realized that if I was going to make an impact on things that had immediate concerns on people's lives, that I needed to broaden my lens a little bit and think more about the human and cultural dimensions of water.
00:10:36
Speaker
And around that same time, the North Carolina Commission of the Indian Affairs invited me to join their newly formed Environmental Justice Committee, as an ex officio member, a technical expert. And through my work on that committee, I began to see these issues appear over and over again in tribal communities throughout North Carolina.
00:11:02
Speaker
through that, that study and through that practice and through many conversations, I began to settle into a rhythm of partnering with the commission and partnering with individual tribal communities to think through some of these problems and some of the potential solutions. Okay. So can you give us an example of maybe one of them that, that you felt like really, I don't know, it was really successful or really stands out to you?
Pipeline Advocacy Success
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, so around late 2016, early 2017, the federal government released a draft environmental impact statement for a very large interstate gas transmission pipeline to carry gas from fracking formations in the central Appalachians down to urban areas on the eastern seaboard.
00:11:57
Speaker
And when the draft environmental review was released, the maps that were presented were jaw-dropping because the route of this pipeline cut with almost surgical precision through a number of tribal communities in Virginia, but especially in North Carolina.
00:12:16
Speaker
When we looked at the demographics around the populations that were going to be impacted, the disparities of impacts to American Indian populations were just astronomical. We make up
00:12:31
Speaker
about 1% of North Carolina's population, yet American Indians were set to be 13% of the people who would be directly impacted by this project. And so that information, those disparities were not disclosed in the federal government's environmental impact statement.
00:12:53
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but they could be readily computed from tables that had been provided in the vast appendices for this environmental review. And frankly, my skills as a hydrologist, as a quantitative scientist, allowed me to quickly eyeball those tables, grab the important information that we needed, and compute those disparities based on the population fractions that I just described to you.
00:13:20
Speaker
And once we had those disparities, we were able to make strong cases for enhanced tribal engagement in the decision-making process and for enhanced scrutiny of environmental justice implications because environmental justice is concerned with disparities in the distribution of harmful environmental impacts.
00:13:44
Speaker
And so that conversation and that data analysis led to a number of engagements in which tribal leaders were able to submit comments, tribal councils were able to draft resolutions, and
00:14:00
Speaker
these were statements that were submitted into the record. In the end, they were part of a large body of voices that spoke out against this project on a number of grounds, everything from climate change implications to land conservation, to endangered species, and to environmental justice. And so it was one of the first times that tribes across
00:14:27
Speaker
the region had all stepped forward on the exact same issue with a similar message. That was part of the body of evidence that eventually persuaded the energy companies behind this project to pull the plug. It was a success from that perspective, but
00:14:49
Speaker
For me, I see it as a larger success because tribal governments were able to actually articulate what they expected from state and federal governments when it came to engaging them in the environmental decision-making process. And we now have this paper trail of clearly articulated
00:15:08
Speaker
expectations that we can point to and hopefully develop lasting policies around, at least at the state level, before the next big project comes our way. Yeah, I mean, and the coming together and showing that you're a force to be reckoned with, I'm sure, very powerful as well.
00:15:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Awesome. Okay. Well, we're right at our first break point, but when we come back, Seth, I want to talk about, you know, some of your work and, and what that looks like for you, your community engaged work. So let's, let's touch on that right when we come back.
00:15:44
Speaker
Okay, so we're back. So we heard from Ryan about some really impactful work that he was working on in the Southeast on this EIS. And Seth, I want to check in with you. You mentioned before that it was a pretty easy
00:16:02
Speaker
thing for you to see the connection of how to apply this work. Can you talk a little bit about that journey for you and how you have tied in your work to your community as well?
Engaging with the Lumbee Tribe
00:16:18
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. Um, so what kind of led me to that work in the first place was that I, you know, the further along I got in my, you know, like undergraduate studies, I, you know, you realize it's unavoidable. You realize that, uh,
00:16:34
Speaker
In many cases, archaeologists have kind of a rough reputation with many native folks. And to be clear, there are plenty of good reasons for that tension. What I thought and I hope that I do now is I thought that I could join existing efforts to move the discipline forward in that regard.
00:16:54
Speaker
To be clear, again, these efforts between archaeologists and just trying to be better partners with native communities is not new, right? So I just thought that I might be able to be part of that. And being native myself, I figured that I could help kind of mediate those conversations with my work. Another thing to add is I haven't been at this very long. I just finished my PhD last December and just got to Appalachian State. But that's what I hope to do with my career.
00:17:23
Speaker
you know more specifically with some of my current community engaged work is mostly with our tribe the Lumbee tribe and that work is just getting off the ground like I mentioned you know I'm only in my second semester at App State but I'm encouraged by how quickly that work and those projects have picked up and the enthusiasm from the community and the
00:17:46
Speaker
the tribal government, and so all of that is really encouraging. Yeah, right now, actually, as we speak, we're getting ready at App State. So my colleague, Dr. Alice Wright, and I are preparing to take some App State students down to our land, you know, Lumbee lands, down in and around Robeson County this weekend to do some of the first on the ground work with our Tippo office.
00:18:12
Speaker
And so that's really exciting. And yeah, that stuff seems to be kind of going forward full steam ahead.
00:18:19
Speaker
I hope that, you know, I have a long career in, you know, doing that kind of stuff, especially with my community. What kind of work are you going to be doing specifically with the Tippo? We're just doing some non-invasive or, well, minimally invasive survey work, archaeological survey work on one of the tribal properties where we, as a cultural center, where a lot of our events happen, powwows are held, that kind of thing.
00:18:44
Speaker
So anyways, the TIPO, we're just going to be helping the TIPO give them some labor and research specialties to help that process, surveying that property, just walking it, looking at artifacts that might be on the surface. We're going to do some geophysical survey, specifically magnetic susceptibility survey, which is essentially a non-invasive way to kind of get an idea of potential things that are under the ground, archaeological features.
00:19:12
Speaker
And then the only sort of invasive part of the survey is we might be doing a little bit of shovel testing. That'll be very small scale and just sort of help what we call ground truth, those geophysical survey results, just to sort of check and see it with our own eyes. Again, just limited disturbance. So yeah, that's kind of the stuff that we'll be doing this weekend. That's awesome.
00:19:34
Speaker
So, okay. I want to also give you the opportunity. I went a little out of order with all of that because I got excited, but I want to give you the chance to talk about your PhD work. And, you know, I know that obviously for most people, that's a big project and really influences how they do all of their work and everything. So I wanted to give you a chance if you're, if you wanted to, to speak to what you did your PhD on and what you learned from that.
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, so my PhD work, so I did my PhD at the university, or excuse me, Washington University in St. Louis, in St. Louis, Missouri. Most of my work, or all my dissertation work was focused down in the lower Mississippi Valley, like in modern day Louisiana and Mississippi.
00:20:21
Speaker
And so my dissertation research was based on using a lot of different methods and forms of analysis to understand the history of mound building down there, some of the oldest instances of mound building in North America between those two states where many of the oldest urban monuments are found. And so, yeah, researching that and
00:20:46
Speaker
What I tried to do was bring in more native perspectives to that sort of narrative that I hope was a little different than typical traditional archeological interpretations and narratives, just in the sense of trying to, how would I describe it? I guess write more excessively, less jargon, and just include more native perspectives on these important cultural achievements of native people.
00:21:15
Speaker
through the millennia. So yeah, that was my dissertation research in a nutshell. Yeah. And Ryan, I want to give you a chance to do the same thing, to talk about what kind of work do you do specifically within hydrology as well. I know that obviously we're talking a lot about the community and environmental justice aspects, but I want you to give you a chance to highlight the other work you do as well.
00:21:40
Speaker
Sure.
Research at Duke University
00:21:41
Speaker
I lead a lab group at Duke that has six or eight folks in it at any given time, postdocs, grad students, undergraduates. And we have diverse interests that range from computer modeling of the movement of water through watersheds. One of the PhD students in my group is studying how projected climate change will impact
00:22:08
Speaker
streamflow in the Lumbee River Basin and how those changes in streamflow might impact the health of culturally important wetlands. That's an example of the type of work we do. I work with folks who use satellite imagery to detect the die-off of coastal forests along the
00:22:31
Speaker
East Coast of North America, there's a phenomenon that a lot of people have come to know as ghost forests, where sea level rise and saltwater intrusion are killing large swaths of forest land in low-lying areas along the coast. So we study the occurrence of those forests and what factors allow salt to move into those ecosystems.
00:22:55
Speaker
We do a lot of ground-based studies that involve measuring soil and atmospheric variables and trying to understand how that might impact the flow of water through the landscape. And then in recent years, unfortunately, because Eastern North Carolina has experienced two catastrophic floods in the past six or eight years, my lab has pivoted into water quality mode where we
00:23:24
Speaker
collect flood water, groundwater, and other types of water samples, and we analyze them for potential contaminants. These could be contaminants from livestock operations or other kinds of industrial contaminants, even things like septic tanks.
00:23:40
Speaker
We try to make sense of the patterns that we see in the data. What are the likely culprits? Where are the bright spots? Where do we have good water quality? And what are the factors that help us maintain good water quality here in eastern North Carolina?
00:23:57
Speaker
So in some respects, my group is all over the place, but you could say that we orbit around these questions that all of us have come to realize are extremely important to Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in the region where we live and work.
00:24:14
Speaker
I mean, again, as a cultural anthropologist, it's hard to understand somebody not understanding that water is important to people. But yeah, it sounds like you guys are touching on a wide range of really important topics that have direct impact on
00:24:30
Speaker
You know, like you said, both indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Yeah, I don't want to paint my hydrology colleagues as ignorant of human dimensions. You know, of course, we're all motivated by the fact that water is critical to humans and to other life on Earth.
00:24:47
Speaker
I guess where my perspective has come to differ is thinking about the cultural importance of that water. So it's more than just a critical commodity. It also has this enduring importance to people around the world. And is that something that you've seen be talked about more in hydrology in recent years? Is that something that there's a growing awareness of or does it still need some work?
00:25:14
Speaker
There's a growing awareness that always needs work, but I am encouraged by scholarship that has been coming out of not just hydrology communities, but also ecology communities. And we are too closely allied fields where people are beginning to recognize these other dimensions of human relationships to water.
00:25:36
Speaker
And so that's fun and encouraging, and it gives me hope that the students of today are gonna become water and ecosystem professionals who have these kinds of connections at the top of mind when they think about the questions that are important. Okay, so for both of you, what have been some major learning moments, aha moments, that have happened throughout your career so far?
Building Trust with Communities
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I think there have been plenty. I feel like hopefully most people who stay in college as long as we've been in it, that you learn. The more you learn, I guess the more you realize you don't know things, you don't know anything. So I feel like that's the longest list that I could give you is aha moments.
00:26:23
Speaker
You know, I think one of the big ones as it relates to my community work, right, is that I think I realized not long into my graduate education that I may have been a little naive as an undergrad when I was thinking about what it would be like pursuing this kind of work, like working with the Senate communities in the sense that, you know, like regardless of the fact that I'm a native person, you know, there are plenty of folks that just don't simply don't believe we should be digging or disturbing sites.
00:26:54
Speaker
And I understand those concerns and those opinions. And you know, obviously all this is wrapped up with, like what we're dealing with this tangled mess of colonial, you know, kind of ripple effects, right? In the sense that in archeology, right, doing, you know, tribes don't always own the land, maybe, you know, that the site might be on today, whether that's because
00:27:20
Speaker
you know, they were removed from their ancestral lands or, you know, the land was bought up around them over the centuries. But regardless, just like any other archaeologist, I learned that, you know, working with descendant communities and, you know, meaning community, it takes a lot of time and effort, right, to build that trust and build relationships. It takes a lot of goodwill and patience, right, a lot of humility,
00:27:47
Speaker
I learned that, like I said, early on in grad school and I'm still learning those sorts of things to be honest. All I can do is I try my best to embody those things and just keep chopping at that tree and do the work and just learn from mistakes I may make and just keep at it and always just stay genuine and kind and patient and just let it take you where it's going to take you with the sort of work. Yeah. Ryan, what about you?
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for that, Seth. I really appreciate that and I feel like I'm a continual learner as well throughout my career.
The Art of Listening in Research
00:28:27
Speaker
I would say
00:28:29
Speaker
One noteworthy moment in my work happened maybe 10 years ago. I got a small grant to study climate change impacts in the Lumbee community. And I was really excited about this project because your listeners may know that every few years, the federal government issues a report called the National Climate Assessment.
00:28:53
Speaker
and it's supposed to be an update on the status of climate change, climate impacts, and climate adaptation throughout the United States. And for the first three reports, I had noticed that there was a gaping hole in the Southeast when it came to discourse around tribal nations and indigenous people.
00:29:14
Speaker
So, I set off to try to plug that hole by thinking about climate change in the Lumbee community. I went down to Robeson with my virtual clipboard and ready to suss this out.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah, I got a few months into it and realized, oh my goodness, I'm doing the exact same thing that we're criticizing non-native or extractive scholars for doing in our communities. I came into the community with my preconceived set of questions that I wanted to ask and answer instead of
00:29:50
Speaker
instead of listening. And so at that moment, I realized that, yes, climate change is a pressing issue, and it is something that we absolutely have to talk about, study, and come up with action plans to deal with. But at the same time, it's absolutely important to
00:30:09
Speaker
shut up and listen and continue to build relationships. Even though I am a Lumbee person, I can't hang on that one statement in order to maintain relationships in the community. And so a week or so ago, one of my colleagues at Duke's said something wonderful. She said that relationships are research. In other words, relationship building is a research product and we should value it as such.
00:30:38
Speaker
And so I would say that I have come to adopt that as well. And so that's sort of been both an aha moment and a highlight of my work is the ability to think about research in terms of how am I building and maintaining good relationships with my lumpy kin and with our neighbors.
00:31:00
Speaker
Well, on that note, we are already at our second break point, but we'll come back and we'll, we'll keep talking about some highlights and, and where Ryan and Seth want to go with this and see in the future. We'll be right back. Okay. And so diving right back in, Seth.
00:31:19
Speaker
Let's talk about, we already talked about one of Ryan's highlights of his efforts.
Work with the Crow and Lumbee Tribes
00:31:25
Speaker
Let's talk about a highlight of yours and maybe what are some of the most creative or effective outcomes that you've seen in your work. Sure. Yeah. So definitely one of the highlights of my career so far was
00:31:41
Speaker
a project that I was involved in out in Montana with the Crow Tribe. That was a few years back. That was actually in 2016. And I wasn't a PI. I was actually still an undergrad at that time. I was actually preparing for grad school. But the archaeological team was led by Dr. Ed Herman. He's at Indiana University in Bloomington. And Rebecca Nathan, she was the archaeologist at the time for the Crow Tipo.
00:32:08
Speaker
and Matthew Rowe, Dr. Matthew Rowe, he was at the University of Arizona. And of course, I got to meet a lot of great La Croix colleagues out there. I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Sun Sun, Two Leggins, and John Bergen-Ground, Logan White Clay, Anthony Wegner. There's a lot more that I'll have time to name here, but
00:32:28
Speaker
I haven't spoken to those folks in a few years, but I hope you're doing well. But that project was really special and it left a really big impression on me. And that was really because, you know, that effort was led by the interest of the, you know, the Tippo there.
00:32:44
Speaker
and their interest around their ancestral bison hunting practices. I believe that interest from, you know, for the Crow goes back to Joseph Madison Crow. I think he kind of started those conversations, at least from like a historical and archaeological perspective about that history of bison hunting out there. And so I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Madison Crow before he passed away, but just being involved in that project, even at a small capacity, was an incredible experience.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah, the people we worked with and got to know is what made that special. And then, you know, my current work, like I've already mentioned with my tribe, that work is, you know, really special and personal to me, obvious reasons. And so, yeah, I just feel really...
00:33:28
Speaker
content and happy and really fortunate to be able to do that work and especially that my community isn't trusting me with that sort of partnership. Yeah, that's amazing. Sounds like a really incredible experience. So thinking about all of your experiences throughout your career for both of you,
00:33:50
Speaker
What would you offer as three pieces of advice for people who are looking to work with tribes or descendant communities, trying to do more community-based work?
Advice on Working with Indigenous Communities
00:34:02
Speaker
What would you tell them? Some advice that I would give people for this.
00:34:07
Speaker
doing this sort of workout. I mentioned this a little bit before already, but I think it really is important, worth repeating, that you really have to enter these partnerships with goodwill and patience. Like I said before, humility is really important and letting those kind of values and that mindset guide your efforts. That's true of any community, right?
00:34:29
Speaker
No, indigenous communities are necessarily unique in that way, but with American Indian communities and nations, that can be compounded sometimes because of the fraught relationship or the fraught history. I should say this involved there sometimes.
00:34:45
Speaker
And so I mentioned earlier too, you know, you may run into some opposition in the sense that people, some people, you know, in indigenous communities may not want sites disturbed, right? And then others may, you know, support the work as a means to an end. And you know that that end being the documentation and preservation of cultural heritage. So you need to be, I think you need to be open
00:35:11
Speaker
criticism sometimes in that sense, but more importantly, I mean, you need to be able to talk through those things and find common ground. And yeah, again, native communities aren't unique in that regard, but that's true probably of any community, but that is one piece of advice I would offer. And I would also, lastly, I would just advise scholars who want to do this work, who haven't done it before, to be really careful or mindful about
00:35:38
Speaker
Getting too far ahead of yourself with your research design, your grant writing, et cetera, because, you know, for that to be a true partnership, you need to be working with community members, you know, from the beginning of all that. So their perspectives and interests and their knowledge are included in, you know, the entirety of the sort of the research process and not just the actual field work or, you know, anything that happens after that. And so that's my two cents.
00:36:08
Speaker
Thanks for that, Seth. I want to add on and first just echo what you said about humility and listening more than you talk, I think falls into that same category. I've had a number of people tell me through the years that research moves at the speed of relationship in communities and relationship building is not something that can be rushed.
00:36:33
Speaker
And so what that means is we have to cultivate ongoing relationships with indigenous peoples and other communities because moments of environmental and cultural crisis are not the time to initiate relationship building. While that can happen, it's not an ideal time. And effective work can happen in those difficult moments if
00:37:00
Speaker
relationships are already established and there's already been a degree of trust building. I guess my other piece of advice, and I have to put this out there because Seth and I both belong to a tribe whose recognition status is impacted by a termination era federal law that is still in effect today. I just want to say that in the US, tribal recognition status is not a measure of indigeneity.
00:37:29
Speaker
neither does it predict the degree to which native people hold cultural connections to place. And so the advice that I would give to consultants, regulators, students, even to SHPOs and THPOs are experts in this area.
00:37:44
Speaker
is to look at resources like the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's published guidance on working with non federally recognized tribes and indigenous peoples because they affirm this message that recognition status doesn't prescribe the degree to which an indigenous community stands to experience cultural or environmental harm due to
00:38:11
Speaker
development or climate change and other practices. And sometimes we use that list of federally recognized tribes as shorthand for screening a region to figure out who we need to talk
Engaging Non-Federally Recognized Tribes
00:38:26
Speaker
to. And we have a number of folks, especially in the Southeast, who are not on that list for a variety of reasons.
00:38:34
Speaker
And so frustration for me is to see my tribe and other tribes that I work with constantly left out of conversation because decision makers are only interested in doing the minimum legal standard of Section 106 consultation is extremely important, but we do have guidance to take a broader approach when it comes to tribal engagement. And so that's the advice I'd like to offer.
00:39:02
Speaker
This is the bad thing about a podcast. You guys can't see me like nodding my head the entire time. Yes, we're talking like yes. Yeah, totally agree with everything that both of you just said. So I'm curious for both of you, you know, we've talked a lot about, you know, hydrology or environmental sciences and anthropology and, you know, both fields are all of those fields having grown a lot in recent years in terms of working with
00:39:31
Speaker
Living people, especially understanding the cultural components, like you both were saying.
Integrating Community Work in Archaeology
00:39:38
Speaker
What direction would you like to see the fields that each of you work in go in the future? What would you like to see more of, less of changed, et cetera?
00:39:50
Speaker
Obviously, I would hope that that current trends that I see in archaeology regarding many archaeologists working with the great work they're doing with different Indian nations. I hope to see that continue. And of course, there's plenty of room for growth and improvement in that work, but I think it's encouraging. I hope that that trend continues.
00:40:12
Speaker
I think the more we work together as far as archaeology and indigenous communities, the more that work just becomes typical practice rather than some special subset of archaeology. And when that happens, that kind of best practice, it trickles down to our students and then so on and so forth to the point where
00:40:31
Speaker
Our students today become that next generation of researchers and I hope that in the future, you know, it just becomes common practice. This is how you do archaeology rather than a special subset of community-based, you know, archaeology. You know, real quickly about things that I would like to see changed, I guess. Personally, I think the way grad school and archaeology, the way grad school and publication deadlines and grant writing are all
00:40:57
Speaker
structured right now. It can make genuine partnerships more difficult because of the time pressures involved at every level. When you're working on your PhD, those timelines, they aren't really conducive to meaningful relationship building and engagement with communities.
00:41:16
Speaker
And of course, you know, there are exceptions to that. Some programs are doing that really deliberately, but the typical grad school experience, I just think makes it tough sometimes to do community-based work. And so I think it's just a big part of that is you don't usually have the runway, right? Like the time to develop those relationships and that trust.
00:41:35
Speaker
Same thing for grant writing deadlines and publication process either way that that is generally, you know, goes through review and stuff in those timelines. Just too often, I just think that those things aren't very conducive to co-producing, you know, knowledge with your community partners. So.
00:41:51
Speaker
Those are just some of the big structural aspects of anthropology that I think and I think and hope can be improved in the future to sort of continue to facilitate a more meaningful collaboration. And again, I want to stress that plenty of folks are doing great work within that structure already, but just generally speaking, I think that those kinds of things, the way they're currently constructed, can interfere.
00:42:17
Speaker
Seth, I absolutely agree with you on these issues around timelines, especially with the timelines associated with external grants, right? We see a lot of researchers just churning through communities still today, and a lot of that is driven by these externally imposed schedules, funding agencies.
00:42:42
Speaker
These are such good questions. I see an opportunity that could be shared by the environmental sciences and the anthropology communities.
Data Sovereignty and Governance
00:42:54
Speaker
I think this is a direction that both of our areas of scholarship and practice could be moving. This is the growing awareness of indigenous data sovereignty and data governance. In other words, who owns
00:43:09
Speaker
the data that are being collected about indigenous peoples. What types of data are subject to this idea of indigenous peoples exerting governance over these data sets? Is it just limited to things like health data or cultural data or what about environmental data?
00:43:28
Speaker
that are collected on tribal lands. And so this emerging area of indigenous data governance, I see it raises some really important questions. And we've got some great work by people at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona who have developed
00:43:46
Speaker
a set of principles that should guide our decisions when it comes to data collection and management. But I think this is extremely important because both of our fields collect data.
00:44:02
Speaker
that can weigh in on indigenous people's relationships to place, their historical ties, and their experiences with the environment in the present. And I firmly believe that indigenous people should have a right to own those types of data. And sometimes that can come into conflict with
00:44:23
Speaker
institutional missions or things like this. In the same way that we're having this national reckoning around repatriation of ancestral remains within universities and museums and other institutions, I think it's time for us to have a similar reckoning over the types of data that we're collecting in our fields and in other fields.
00:44:45
Speaker
With all of that in mind and on, you know, how you want to do this kind of work and how you'd like to see the field, like what direction you'd like to see the field go, what would you both like to, like, what work do you want to be doing in the future? Where do you want to go with, with all of this?
Future Goals with the Lumbee Tribe
00:45:04
Speaker
So, I mean, I hope to continue the work that I'm doing with my community and just continue to develop a permanent partnership between the tribe and App State that hopefully facilitates opportunities for the tribe to pursue their interests and train App State students, community-based learning, train mumbies and skills that maybe they can use to work for the Tippo going forward. Just try to contribute to my community's
00:45:32
Speaker
cultural heritage management initiatives and communicating that work to our community and the broader public.
00:45:40
Speaker
Also, on top of that, I hope to continue working with other Native communities as well whenever I can be of help to them. One thing that is kind of a uniting thread through my research is I just want to tell stories of Native histories in maybe a different way compared to typical archaeological narratives of the past.
00:46:04
Speaker
So in my teaching, in my research, you know, I try to emphasize the incredibly rich histories and achievements of Native people here and educate our students in the public about the intellectual and cultural diversity of Native America, both, you know, in the past and the present, so that they go out, you know, into the world and remember these things, right, even if they don't necessarily go on to be anthropologists or researchers.
00:46:29
Speaker
I would just add, well, to be blunt, we need more scholars like Seth. We need native scholars who are at the forefront of their academic fields and they've gotten there while still centering their own
00:46:46
Speaker
cultural values and perspectives and not forgetting the communities that they come from and actively seeking out opportunities to engage, build relationship, and contribute to the well-being of those communities.
00:47:02
Speaker
Every time I go to Robeson County now, I get an update on what Seth and his students are doing or when they're coming down. And I was just in Pembroke last night. And then our Thippo, I overheard a conversation between him and another tribal administrator. And I heard that Seth and his students are coming down this weekend. And there's a lot of excitement about that. I'm really excited about that too. So I'm really encouraged by the work that Seth is doing. And I think that we need
00:47:32
Speaker
more native people coming through, you know, what are admittedly colonial disciplines, but we're taking the tools and the skills that we need from those disciplines and we're bending and reshaping them back towards the wellbeing of the communities that we come from. And that is an important philosophy and mindset. And I'm really encouraged by what I've seen from Seth and other early career native scholars so far.
00:47:59
Speaker
That's awesome. Thank you for the kind words, Ron. And I hope that, I mean, your work, your scholarship has served as a role, you know, a model, right, for my work and my scholarship. And I try to remember those things, you know, as I go in and teach and conduct research in the classroom and the community every day that, you know, hopefully I can look back at some point and end up being a model in that sense for, you know, this generation of students as well. So thank you again, Ron.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And Ryan, what about you? What would you like to do moving forward?
Upcoming Book: "On the Swamp"
00:48:33
Speaker
I think what I have on my short-term radar is just getting my book out in the world. Yeah, so exciting. Yeah, I've got a book coming out with the University of North Carolina Press in April of 2024. It's called On the Swamp.
00:48:53
Speaker
fighting for indigenous environmental justice. And so On the Swamp is a Lumbee colloquialism that just means in the neighborhood or around the community. And so the book is an exposition of some of the environmental threats to Lumbees and to our indigenous neighbors.
00:49:13
Speaker
and responses to those threats by our own communities, by outside actors, and what it means for promoting justice and promoting indigenous rights for us and for Native peoples all over the region. And so I'm really excited that that's going to be out in the world soon.
00:49:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's so exciting. Sounds like a super interesting book. I definitely want to check it out once it comes out. And you said it's going to be called On the Swamp Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice. Did I get that right?
00:49:44
Speaker
That's correct. Yep. And it's already available on bookshop.org for preorder bookshop.org. Okay. So Ryan, we have Ryan's book, which we're very excited for. And Seth, do you have any resources that you'd want to recommend for someone wanting to learn more?
Learning Resources for Indigenous Archaeology
00:50:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So you can't really go wrong, starting the work of Joe Watkins, who's a Choctaw citizen from Oklahoma, and one of the founding figures, I would say, of indigenous archaeology. And so actually, he's appeared on A Life in Ruins, right, which is part of the Archaeological or the Archaeology podcast network. And yeah, his conversation with Carlton Grover was incredible. And Carlton, who's at Indiana University in Bloomington now, he's a citizen of the Pawnee Nation, and he does
00:50:32
Speaker
You know, incredible work himself. Yeah, so he and those guys Carlton and those guys over at life and ruins are hilarious. And that's a great show. Generally pretty much anything by written by Sonya Attaway is good. You know, especially her writing on a community-based work. She's got a book from 2012, 2011, 2012, something like that, a community-based archaeology.
00:50:52
Speaker
And Larry Zimmerman, Chip Caldwell have done some great work as far as books and publications. And yeah, generally podcasts can be a great resource. So you can find some good ones that deal with this stuff. I already mentioned the Life in Ruins, but there's also the Tribal Research Specialist podcast, which Ron has appeared on.
00:51:09
Speaker
And then last but not least, Dr. David Wilkins' work. David, he's a 1B citizen and specializes in political science and native politics and governance. And he did his master's with Vonda Lauria Jr. at the University of Arizona. And those two went on to co-author some great works together on native political science and governance. So those are some plugs and kind of additional resources that I want to present.
00:51:39
Speaker
Well, I just want to say thank you so much to both of you for taking the time and coming on, but also for the really important work that you're doing across so many things, not just educating students, but also the work fighting for your communities and advocating for what they'd like to see. And it's just really inspiring. So thank you so much for both of you for coming on and sharing and showing that this work can be done across a lot of different disciplines.
00:52:08
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for the invitation, Jessica. And Seth has been great to sit with you virtually this morning. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. I'll echo that. Thank you, Jessica, for the opportunity. And Ron, it's always great to chat with you. Hopefully I can see you in person again soon.
00:52:28
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
00:52:50
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.
00:53:08
Speaker
You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at Living Heritage Anthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council, or on Twitter at LivingHeritageA. As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
00:53:33
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech 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.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.