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Walking the Ancestors Home - Ep 74
964 Plays1 year ago
On today’s episode, Jessica hosts Dr. Michael Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, American Studies and Founding Director of the Institute for Historical Biology at the College of William and Mary and the Co-Chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. Dr. Blakey carries us on his lifetime journey in the field of Anthropology, including his childhood looking for archaeological artifacts, serving as the Scientific Director of New York City’s colonial African Burial Ground archaeological site, and the development of NAGPRA. He focuses on the ethics and best practices of working with human remains, especially the importance of empowered descendant communities and serving them as the ethical client of any project.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/74
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- AAA Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains:
- Walking the ancestors home: On the Road to an Ethical Human Biology Article
- African Burial Ground Archaeology Reports
- African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act passed via the Omnibus Bill in December 2022
- UPenn Report on the handling of human remains from the 1985 MOVE tragedy:
- Florida blocks high school African American studies class (Article):
- Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites: A Rubric of Best Practices
- Social policy, economics, and demographic change in Nanticoke-Moor ethnohistory (1988 Article in American Journal of Physical Anthropology 75(4))
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Transcript
Acknowledging Indigenous Lands
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 74. I'm Jessica Uquinto, and I'm your host. And today, we are talking about walking the ancestors home. 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 Dinata, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
00:00:26
Speaker
You're listening to
Introducing Dr. Michael Blakey
00:00:29
Speaker
Today, we have Dr. Michael Blakey on the show. Dr. Blakey is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, American Studies,
00:00:30
Speaker
the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:38
Speaker
and founding director of the Institute for Historical Biology at the College of William & Mary. He is on the scholarly advisory committee for the U.S. National Museum of African American History and Culture.
00:00:50
Speaker
of the Smithsonian Institution. He was scientific director of New York City's colonial African burial ground archeological site, which is now a national monument. He is co-chair with Deborah Thomas of UPenn of the American Anthropological Association's Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. Welcome to the show, Dr. Blakey. Hi, Jessica. Pleasure to be here.
00:01:12
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm so excited to have you here today. You came highly recommended by some very loved past guests of ours.
Early Influences and Interest in Archaeology
00:01:19
Speaker
And I wanted to get us started by talking about what initially got you interested in this type of work and the field of anthropology.
00:01:28
Speaker
Well, you're asking a question about an entire life, actually. But I should say I was a science geek as a child in the 50s when science was all the rage. Both of my parents were scientists in their own ways, and that was certainly an influence.
00:01:52
Speaker
My father was a dentist who did dental research for endo-osseous implants, which is the plastic teeth that now people can screw into their gums, which then had not been invented. He was working towards that. And my mother, who was really an artist, had a degree in biology. So there was interest in science around our house in Washington, D.C. But my archaeological interest
00:02:22
Speaker
It stems from a more personal experience, materially with my great uncle, my mother's uncle, Kermit Mosley in Delaware, just two hours away from where I was raised in D.C.
00:02:42
Speaker
My mother's people were radical more. They mixed Native American, African, and European ethnic group of their own. I wrote something about their history in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1988. As a child interested in science,
00:03:05
Speaker
I imagined I was interested in my own heritage, that side of it. My father was wholly African-American. That I was doing on weekends. We often visited Delaware. I would walk the cornfields or the soybean fields with my uncle, who was a real collector. He was one of the biggest collectors in Delaware.
00:03:34
Speaker
and find pot shirts and projectile points and all kinds of interesting artifacts. And it's an opportunity to be contemplative about the past. Even my grandparents would occasionally go out in the field and do this kind of collecting.
00:03:57
Speaker
I lived for the science fairs as this kind of geek. So all year in junior high school, I'd prepare a science fair project. One of my two major interests was archaeology, and so I would parade not only the artifacts that I had found,
00:04:21
Speaker
sometimes some of Uncle Kermit's would get on into my project, but would go home and study them and read all the archaeology that was available to me about that region. And I was also interested in marine paleontology
00:04:43
Speaker
Halfway, about halfway between Washington and Delaware are Calvert Cliffs on the Chesapeake Bay, where there's excellent biocene. What's then good fossil hunting, I think, much of its park service now, and you can't touch it. But I, with a friend I was competitive with at the time, with the science fairs, Bob Socorra, also had projects on those fossil beds we would go out and collect together. He helped me get to these fossil beds.
00:05:12
Speaker
And my last year in junior high or middle school, I won the grand prize, I think it was for earth sciences in archaeology.
Pivotal Shifts from Archaeology to Music
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, I should mention that I was doing well enough that I had a teacher
00:05:28
Speaker
science teacher in junior high school who recommended me to Dorothy Martin, who was a member of the Archaeological Society of Maryland. So at 13, she used to take me to the monthly meetings in Bethesda. And then as I getting to this year, you know, after graduating from junior high school, I told you this is a lifelong thing. Yeah, you're not kidding. My father,
00:05:57
Speaker
contacted, well, the real story is a little more interesting because I also love music and I needed to buy a guitar amplifier. This was like 1968. Imagine that. And so I needed a job for the summer. My father arranged with Don Ordiner, who, Edgar Smithsonian, who is one of the leading paleopathologists,
00:06:22
Speaker
for me to conduct a study in paleopathology. I looked at the musculature muscle attachments and dental pathology and total of 50 skulls and for the summer and wrote a report that's consistent with what paleopathologists did. So I was 15. And I also was a student of
00:06:51
Speaker
Jay Lawrence Angel and Lucille Saint-Hoyne, they had a summer seminar there in paleopathology. And so I was the youngest and only black member of those student in that while I did my research. And when I finished, I got the guitar amp and realized
00:07:17
Speaker
physical anthropology is very tedious. And I felt more creative than that. So I got into music, thought I'd become a musician in high school. And then at the same time, you know, that's so common, play the guitar. But also this was 1968 to 1971. Those were my years of high school in Washington. Long story short, I learned about politics.
00:07:47
Speaker
I learned about, I was compelled by the liberation politics of the time, the black consciousness movement, black power. I was in study groups with the Black Panther Party where I read Du Bois, Mao, Fanon, and others, also in cultural nationalist study groups or organizations. I was all over the place.
00:08:16
Speaker
to be tied down to any one tendency, except the tendency towards finding the truth, maybe, and finding the most progressive positions I could take.
00:08:35
Speaker
And so I was president of the Black Student Union at my high school, Pooj High School in Northwest D.C. And we had Black
Academic Journey and Return to Anthropology
00:08:44
Speaker
Studies there for at least a year. I took two semesters of Keeswahili in high school. I was a Howard University student who taught it. As soon as my class, three years after my class left, apparently they closed all of that. And now we're still fighting just today.
00:09:05
Speaker
Right? And the Florida Standard, DeSantis, and the sort of mad resentful expressions of white fragility come to impede our ability to know ourselves. I don't think it will win, but it's a mess. So here we are. What is that?
00:09:33
Speaker
I can't even count it, 50 years later, trying to get a reasonable history into the high school classroom. Well, we had it for a little while, and I benefited from that, which we demanded in the late 60s. Ultimately,
00:09:57
Speaker
I wasn't as good a musician as I had hoped. I did go to music school at Howard for a while. Things changed. I would just say, maybe I have to mention that my family expatriated to Jamaica in 1971. The civil rights movement had achieved a lot, but not enough. They decided they would go work in a country that under the manly regime, a socialist black nation,
00:10:27
Speaker
But I was also tied to these other interests. I was 18. I couldn't stay permanently as my brothers did. So I came back, I went to music school at Howard, where my father had previously taught. Then decided, no, this is not really for me. And returned to, fortunately, I had another love to which to return, and that was anthropology.
00:10:54
Speaker
Took courses there in the early to late 70s, actually, on and off, really 75 to 78. When, for the first and only time, there was a sizable black faculty that was ultimately pushed out by sociology and what I call the, I'd say there's the best of Howard and the worst of Howard. And the worst of Howard is it's
00:11:23
Speaker
mediocracy, which removed that brilliant possibility of the first and only African-American anthropology program that could
00:11:39
Speaker
as the title of the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists reads, transforming anthropology, right? That could transform anthropology. But anthropology is much weighed down, I think, in black institutions by its service to the enemy throughout much of its history, and so it's a complicated thing. But what wasn't was that I had happened to be there
00:12:06
Speaker
with these really interesting, often African-American anthropologists seeking to transform it at a particularly transformative time in this moment after the winds of the Civil Rights Movement and before the 80s when the backlash came to impede those developments.
00:12:31
Speaker
I finished at UMass Amherst, a graduate program. I spent time at Oxford and University of London while at UMass and ended up teaching at Howard and other places. But what I have done throughout, I believe, is to create syntheses
00:13:03
Speaker
anthropological specializations that equip me for what it is that I'm interested in doing. Maybe it's special about anthropology. I don't know other fields as well, but it's broad enough that, you know, I've studied archaeology at first, and I didn't mention this while in the
00:13:30
Speaker
my junior year at Howard, I took
00:13:35
Speaker
Mesoamerican archaeology from Laura Henley at Howard, a Black student who graduated from Michigan in the heyday of the new archaeology. I studied at Dumbarton Oaks with an interest in doing my archaeology. I had an opportunity working with the help of
00:14:02
Speaker
David Friedel at Sarah O'Maya in Belize to do a survey for a month of a site on the periphery that I backed by myself with lots of quasi Indiana Jones, uh, excitement with, with snakes and bugs and Jaguars, um, and came back to, uh, to continue to develop my interest. I realized.
Critiquing Physical Anthropology
00:14:31
Speaker
because I was using Norman Hammond's spatial models at that time when I was a junior in my report, that I could take interpretations that were contradictory and use on a similarly substantial basis, which interested me that the truth, that archeology as I initially saw it, was not sufficiently objective.
00:15:01
Speaker
I also studied, by the way, Great Zimbabwe and the political influences on its archaeology. At any rate, in my naive day, I decided when I went to graduate school, I would shift to physical anthropology, biological anthropology, for a more objective basis, you know, real science.
00:15:26
Speaker
choice, that if I was going to get into this thing, that I would study its history. And so I went back to the Smithsonian as a graduate student one summer and studied the Herd Liska papers at the National Anthropological Archives. Herd Liska was the eugenicist founder of American physical anthropology. I know his work now better than any other American, I'm sure. Frank Spencer, who was the only
00:15:55
Speaker
other person who knew as much, he wrote a long dissertation on Radliska and missed some important beats, but, you know, captured some things. I didn't know he and I were equivalent. He's no longer alive, so here I am. The expert on this man and the field he started in what I learned was, well, you know, I think part of the title of my article called Skull Doctors is intrinsic subjectivity, craniometry,
00:16:23
Speaker
all of that nonsense suited white supremacy and the people who read it and used it and conducted it were white and have increasingly looked at how people in Frederick Douglass initially debates with it in 1854.
00:16:46
Speaker
with Samuel Morton before her delishka, and devastates it, these, these biodeterministic arguments. So those debates between African scholars and the so-called mainstream in physical anthropology, you know, were increasingly interesting to me. And then in terms of synthesis, UMass, with the work of George Armélagos, Alan Sweatlin, Harbrooke Thomas,
00:17:16
Speaker
were exploring biocultural anthropology, which I also learned on my own in that environment. So I was influenced by them and yet by other things. And I found out that these other influences were old African diasporic intellectuals' insights that
00:17:42
Speaker
The causal arrow, which the eugenicists and other mainstream anthropologists, the causal arrow, they pointed from biology, whether it's race or now DNA to behavior is misguided. And what we needed to do was turn the causal arrow on its head
00:18:10
Speaker
and have it point from society, from political economy, the structures of power and economic distribution to human biology, that it is these things that these aspects of our history, the one that we create ourselves as human beings that determine differences in health and physiological effects, that important differences in human biology are created by human beings.
00:18:39
Speaker
And so UMass was working towards biocultural anthropology, those with whom I had studied continue to develop it. There are a couple of nice volumes on this now. And I proceeded to develop my version of it. Ran into Leslie Rankin Hill, another UMass graduate in Washington.
00:19:05
Speaker
Leslie invited me in again to work with Larry Angel on the first African Baptist Church, the largest at that time African American skeletal population. I had done a lot of work with skeletal populations and living populations before and so I found myself increasingly focused on and she was
00:19:32
Speaker
And so we worked
Ethics in Biocultural Anthropology
00:19:35
Speaker
towards those goals, about theoretical goals, as well as of biocultural studies, as well as to elevate our knowledge of African American history.
00:19:48
Speaker
where it was not adequately written about, as a student of mine once said, a poet student once said, so we read the body as text. And so I continued to work with those, including the African burial ground, who were interested in reading the body as text
00:20:12
Speaker
but with the particular edition of which in our work is to ask permission and to do it in an ethical way. Just one thing that I didn't say, I meant to say in that part of the anthropological trip at UMass, I mentioned Armela Gose and Sweatland and Thomas, but as a serious, someone serious about biocultural studies,
00:20:38
Speaker
I felt it would be important to have as co-chair of my committee a cultural anthropologist. And here the African leftist, feminist, African-American cultural anthropologist with expertise on the African diaspora, Johnetta B. Cole became my co-chair of my doctoral committee. And she continues to have important influences on my thinking.
00:21:07
Speaker
Well, that is a pretty amazing journey so far. And if you want to keep listening to Dr. Blakey's journey in anthropology, stay tuned right after the break. Okay. So we're back from the break and we're just going to dive right back in to Dr. Blakey's journey. So I guess that brings us up to the African burial ground. And I'll just say that since then,
00:21:36
Speaker
developing in that project what is being called, what we're calling the clientage model that has us as anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, work for descendant communities whose permission we have asked for to study their ancestral remains.
Empowering Descendant Communities
00:22:00
Speaker
That option of working on remains
00:22:04
Speaker
If the ethical conditions of informed consent have been met, then we've had conversations about what research might reveal and what their concerns are as descendant communities. That's by the way a term that I coined in the 90s. Did you really? Yes. I didn't know that. That's amazing.
00:22:29
Speaker
I could talk about that moment, too. And I'll just say I was looking for a handle, as it were, for the protesting African Americans and African descent leadership in New York who were concerned about the mistreatment of the skeletal remains at the
00:22:53
Speaker
African burial ground who were, I think, equally concerned about the anthropologists who were there were ill-prepared to study and not trained for studying African-American remains, much less African remains. So we stepped into my Howard team, stepped in to take it over with people who were adequately trained.
00:23:18
Speaker
and had a history of, as I mentioned, the first African Baptist Church, the history of the study of African Americans, but also entered with new ethical sensibilities. I like to say that we entered with empathy for those protesting people, which either the GSA, which was our business client, nor my colleagues there had or demonstrated was
00:23:47
Speaker
We didn't say it much then, the people in the community did. It was about racism.
00:23:55
Speaker
When I was sitting in the lab working on our proposal, we had a research design of about 160 pages to replace my colleague's 13-page research design that was mostly about the trash that had been put on the burial ground, not the remains of the people who were buried there. So we created a, once I got control of it, with John Miller Associates, a contract firm.
00:24:19
Speaker
We, under my direction, wrote a longer research design and one that the descendant community through numerous hearings in downtown New York and Harlem to which they contributed questions and so we worked with their questions. So I was sitting there on the last version of this and I was looking for a handle
00:24:45
Speaker
For them, what is their relationship? And certainly I'm interested in an empowered relationship to the site. They certainly asserted one as they protested and had prayer vigils around the site, hundreds of people. You really needed to see that in 1991, 92. So I looked to the National Historic Preservation Act
00:25:14
Speaker
where because there was no NAGPRA, that was as close to the legitimating document for the empowerment of anyone on that site as there was. And I don't remember, frankly,
00:25:32
Speaker
Whether it was the term descendant community or something that sounded like that, I'd looked in some places, I saw a descendant group. I had used descendant community before in publication in 89, as I had worked with the World Archaeological Congress and Native American Rights Fund to support what would later become NAGPRA, which was unusual for physical anthropologists, very unusual.
00:26:01
Speaker
But at any rate, I know I found some language in Section 106 of the Historic Preservation Act, and that became descendant community in my mind. Maybe it was literally in the document that I used as a way of tying
00:26:25
Speaker
the community to those legal rights, they had a right to comment, as I remember. Well, GSA knew they had a right to comment. Only the community in its own efforts, its own protest, would assert that that comment, you know, had teeth, had substance, had consequence.
00:26:47
Speaker
And, but having the name helped and immediately community groups started talking about them, referring to themselves as the ascended community or the descendants and all of that. So, and we had very clear ideas about, you know, that they were our client. I wrote something in an article with Cheryl LaRoche in, uh, historical archeology in 1997, where we began to.
00:27:16
Speaker
that talks about what had been developed on the project under my leadership and it included this reference to that community as our ethical client. So that's the other part that I
00:27:32
Speaker
Crafted as a way of understanding and reinforcing the empowerment of the descendant community That they are also our ethical client. They are our client and that is to say we work for them because Given that they care about These remains which is one of the qualities of descendant communities one of their two things that defines them the fact that they care about these remains means that we can hurt them and
00:28:01
Speaker
by how we treat those remains. And therefore, we have an ethical obligation essentially to informed consent, which means they can say no.
00:28:12
Speaker
to any research, and if we want to do the research, so we're promoting the idea of that, of a kind of plural democratization of knowledge, that we take community questions, we use those that can be answered substantially with empirical evidence, because we are researchers, if they don't want that, then they want religious practitioners to, as most people do, bury their dead,
00:28:41
Speaker
We answer those questions and others they accept, as we did on the African burial ground. In the end, our 2,500 page reports that are available online at the National Park Service monument site, I believe, constitutes the most sophisticated bioarchaeological reports that have yet been written. You can hold them up against any others. And they involve questions like,
00:29:10
Speaker
the origins of African Americans seen through the lens of those 419 individuals who were analyzed at the African burial ground, the physical quality of life created during their enslavement, the transformation of different African societies to an African American society. And then there's the question that is, I think, particularly
00:29:39
Speaker
Important for African Americans, although all of them are important. Resistance. What were the modes of resistance? So these four questions were at the center of our 2,500 pages. And I think better questions than I have seen elsewhere answered between the covers of the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.
00:30:07
Speaker
So I have continued in 2018 with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, for example, to encourage the development of an empowered public engagement of a public engagement with the senate communities who are empowered.
Public Engagement and Ethical Research
00:30:27
Speaker
to shape the questions, not the answers, but to shape the questions of research is quite a lot. And to improve the kind of research we do and to foster ethical research. As with recent work at James Madison's Montpelier, to put descendants in the position of telling their own story.
00:30:54
Speaker
All that just evolved. It's just about, I think, trying to be thoughtful about the encounters of my life. And to use, once I wrote something about how one should choose a research topic, and I said something to the effect of,
00:31:21
Speaker
It should be something you're interested in and that you're good at. And thirdly, that appears to be of some value to people beyond, you know, other than yourself. So those are often principles that I think about and that allow me
00:31:45
Speaker
the kind of work I do. Okay. So much more to talk about after the break, but we do need to take a break right now and then we will be right back. All right. So we are back from our break and okay. So we talked about
00:32:03
Speaker
your work from being a very small child getting into this field and how you were influenced by your uncle and really interesting your parents, you ended up doing a combination of everybody there with your work. I'm curious to hear more looking back at this career, what are you currently excited about and what are you currently working on?
Setting New Ethical Standards
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, I'm happy that I was made co-chair.
00:32:32
Speaker
of the American Anthropological Association's Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains by the executive board with Deborah Thomas. We have brought together a stellar group of anthropologists. I think they're mostly physical anthropologists, but significant representation of archaeology and cultural anthropology and anatomy.
00:33:01
Speaker
One of the things they have in common is an ethical sensibility and a history of working towards better ethics for, and here's our charge, for the study of cemeteries, collections of skeletal remains, tissue samples, and DNA samples. So that's just about everything
00:33:32
Speaker
that might be studied or that has been studied by anthropologists, anatomists, archaeologists. Our charge, as I see it, is to propose new best practices and ethical standards, which I believe will be
00:34:00
Speaker
what we'll ask for are elevated ethical standards for all those fields, archaeology, biological anthropology, uziology, and other genetics that handle human remains. I believe the inspiration for the AAA's creation of this commission was the fiasco
00:34:30
Speaker
involving our colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Princeton, where the remains of one or two children killed in the move bombing, the mob bombing of that group's home, an African American social and political organization's home in Philadelphia in 1985. It's a long
00:35:01
Speaker
difficult story, but the remains of those who were burned included two children, skeletons, and did is, has been really quite well confirmed that at least one of them was kept. It should not have been kept by anthropologists at Penn.
00:35:26
Speaker
should have been returned to the parents or at least the medical examiner, but was instead kept in the private hands of our colleagues and then later brought out as a part of a online forensics course and displayed. It took this incident
00:35:56
Speaker
to jar our colleagues sufficiently to realize that they had been objectifying human beings in ways that were unethical. In fact, Janet Monge, who was the teacher in this case, was not found by a legal team to have been unethical. You know, that could be debated because it did hurt people for those, the child's remains.
00:36:27
Speaker
to have been displayed, even where her relatives might have seen it, and who thought that she had been reburied, by the way. But I think part of the reason why it was not seen as unethical, if very poor judgment, which is what they did come to, is not that far from what my colleagues generally do.
00:36:56
Speaker
And in fact, I'll just say when we began our use essentially of informed consent in New York on the African burial ground to follow the descendant questions, to accept and assume that they would be in charge of the final disposition of their remains, where they allowed us to do research and then reburied and created a monument. White anthropologists were saying it was reverse racism.
00:37:27
Speaker
throughout the 90s. And this kind of nonsense has continued. So there are some who read our work and use it. Others who quite patently continue to insist that that was just reverse racism. Black people were saying only black people could study black people. I never said that in the press. This was white fragility. So what I'm saying is that
00:37:58
Speaker
Anthropology is largely white, and physical anthropology is very white. And they historically, from Hurd-Bliska or Wharton onward, there has been the objectification of the other. And that also embodies a certain kind of power relationship in which my colleagues have used the other. And so accumulated collections
00:38:29
Speaker
the Smithsonian and elsewhere where Native Americans were able by 1990 to gain control and African Americans are still struggling and now are in a position I think by virtue of this last most recent embarrassment hopefully we'll be able to see ethical treatment of everyone's human remains and so that's what
00:38:57
Speaker
the commission of the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains is charged to do, to lay out new ethics for everyone's remains.
Global Perspectives on Ethical Treatment
00:39:07
Speaker
And in that effort, we've obtained the support of the Wintergren Foundation to have global listening sessions. So we will be talking with, as a commission of nine people, talking with
00:39:25
Speaker
or some representatives of us, we'll be talking with our Japanese colleagues and Ainu and other indigenous Japanese representatives who are concerned about the treatment of human remains by our colleagues there in Japan. We'll visit Australia at Queensland.
00:39:54
Speaker
meet with Australian Aboriginal representatives and our colleagues there with a listening session with each and then with both about the treatment of human remains to understand what the concerns are and limitations and openness is. And then we have already finished Rachel Watkins with
00:40:23
Speaker
Deborah Thomas just finished a listening session in Cape Town at the University of Western Cape. And we had one at the American Anthropological Association meetings just talking with our colleagues. And then in the end, in 2024, having listened, accumulating also all of the documents that we could find about ethics involving that might relate to human remains, we will
00:40:54
Speaker
come to our conclusions. I found that good ethics, the sharing of power leads to better questions, leads to better science. That the ivory tower notion of how to conduct research is OK at times.
00:41:25
Speaker
and not the best thing. Collective influences on research questions produces anthropology of broader interest. So in New York, though African Americans had often been involved in sort of trips to Egypt from New York or Chicago or DC, you know, where they saw their archaeological heritage,
00:41:56
Speaker
domestic African-American bioarchaeology had been of no interest to African-Americans, though there were some, you know, white people like the, you know, sort of the, often the quite objectified way of understanding them through their bones, sometimes better than that. But African-Americans did not embrace it.
00:42:28
Speaker
working for them with questions they were interested in. And I think they're much more interesting questions generally than what was produced without that. So I'm hoping that the democratization of knowledge will be a product of these new ethics, whatever they are, whatever we come to in a year from now.
00:42:54
Speaker
Wow, that sounds like an amazing experience and project. It'll be really interesting to see the similarities between the four countries and maybe areas where they're different as well. And obviously even just within the US, I mean, the difference, the diversity of experiences just within the indigenous communities, for example, are vast. So that'll be really interesting to see what conclusions you all reach.
00:43:23
Speaker
So one question that, that keeps coming to my mind that I'd like to ask you, you know, as someone that supported the development of NAGPRA and then all the way through to the African-American burial grounds preservation act in December of 2022, which I should mention in my episode with, uh, Dr. Jackson and, um, Delaun Justinville.
00:43:47
Speaker
that it hadn't passed when we recorded it yet, and now it has, so that's exciting. But just from your experience in those years, those decades that passed in between, do you have any thoughts on why there was such a disparity and why it took decades longer on the African American burial ground side than on the NAGPRA side?
Cultural Implications of Handling Human Remains
00:44:18
Speaker
Well, I think the issue of human remains stored in museums excavated from ancient cemeteries without permission was more a Native American
00:44:49
Speaker
It was also a problem of settler states. When in 1990, I taught as a visiting professor at La Sapienza, my Roman colleague, and I talked about this. He couldn't understand, well, what's the problem? You know, he says, we excavate in the Vatican, which they do, or excavate in Abruzzi, where we were. And, you know, community people come out and
00:45:18
Speaker
remember we had a great, you know, celebration one night with food around a cemetery site. These were the descendants, you know, we sang Volari. It was not contentious. But these were their ancestors. And the people involved in the excavation, you know, were also Italian.
00:45:45
Speaker
And so my colleague Alfredo Coba and I sort of agreed, this is a problem of settler states, where the ancient history is the history of the occupied and the archaeologists
00:45:59
Speaker
are the occupiers or their descendants or their cousins. I don't know which maybe it's the occupied and the occupiers still. So in that one can read the problem for native Americans, native Alaskans, native Hawaiians. I watched them organize as a
00:46:28
Speaker
member of the World Archaeological Congress worked with Larry Zimmerman at the first inter-Congress in Vermillion and developed the Vermillion Accord with many Native Americans and some Native Australians and others. Clyde Snow, the great forensic anthropologist, human rights forensic anthropologist was there as well. Leslie Reichenhill was there, but there were very few.
00:46:56
Speaker
physical anthropologists who would show up at this meeting, which was meant to, I organized a session to build bridges between Native Americans and my profession. And the word came to us, partly from people at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, Chicago, that to talk with the Indians would be a professional kiss of death.
00:47:23
Speaker
while we are running this session, or I'm sorry, organizing it, inviting people to come, anthropologists to participate. So I ignored them, as I usually do, or took note and moved on forward. You know, there was a point at which there was a debriefing by extra at the physical anthropology meetings. They were meeting about in 89,
00:47:52
Speaker
efforts towards what would become NAGPRA.
Challenges in Ethics and Representation
00:47:55
Speaker
And they decided, you know, they were reporting in this luncheon debriefing that, well, there are the political Indians and then there are the reasonable Indians. And we listened to the reasonable Indians who happened to be the ones who agreed with them. This reminded me absolutely of the late sixties. This was white people's nonsense. This was an attempt to justify
00:48:18
Speaker
their control by delegitimating the voice of the other that's political. Yeah, you bet. That's where their voice is. And then I was on in 89 again, the commission
00:48:42
Speaker
or something like the disposition of human remains, was the AAA's attempt to respond. And I thought that we had agreed, it was under June Helm, I'm trying to remember the archeologists there, I thought we had agreed in the conversation that the policy recommendations would be for all people
00:49:08
Speaker
But they had, in the last minute, watched the last details of the language in the report, contained it to Native Americans. And even that was not as responsive to the empowerment of descendants as either the Vermillion Accord was, or my thinking, where we had actually talked ourselves into. Apparently, they were not.
00:49:39
Speaker
willing to go that far. So basically they contained it. And one of the reasons, therefore, that we are back to this issue of African-Americans or why the African burial ground needed to take those steps to establish it there in New York as the empowerment of descendants is because the AAA, the white commissions, there were a couple of native people on the commission, but I think it was, well,
00:50:08
Speaker
We were out written in the final document such that the recommendations were still limited to those that Native people had already demanded. So, of course, they were ahead. They got NAGPRA.
00:50:37
Speaker
There's still more work that needs to be done to shore NAGPRA up. Tribes need funding to help them implement NAGPRA. And African Americans who have a few thousand remains at the Smithsonian and other universities,
00:51:02
Speaker
including Howard University, that's a longer story, created the Cobb Collection to counter the racism in the other collections, using the other collections like the Smithsonian, required, you know, Audre Lorde calls them, the master's tools, the legitimation of having its own collection in order to argue against
00:51:29
Speaker
for Montague Cobb to argue against racism. And at any rate, we are in the 21st century. Yes, African-Americans have to catch up. We have another one at the center of the Smithsonian that will happen in the spring in which African-Americans begin to assemble themselves as descendant communities towards the capacity of decision-making over their skeletal remains.
00:52:00
Speaker
You know, NAGPRA is enhanced by the fact that tribal councils can decide through, you know, informed consent. It requires someone reasonably authorized to decide. African Americans don't have such an organization or organizations for those purposes. Descented communities are reasonably assembled at different times, as in New York, to take action.
00:52:25
Speaker
So they need to think about how they want to do that and only they can decide that for themselves. So they're being brought together for many purposes and hopefully one of which will be to develop this some sort of polity.
00:52:43
Speaker
ethics, repatriation, which Smithsonian is moving forward with. I saw something from Lonnie Bunch, just Secretary Bunch, just a few days ago. It wasn't specific, but I think the writing is on the wall. That repatriation of African-American, anyone's human remains will be possible at the Smithsonian in short order.
00:53:13
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Well, I, I'm again, I could, I could talk to you for hours and hours. I'm sure I have a million questions, but we are at the end of our time sadly. Um, but I hope that maybe, you know, in 2024, when, when you and the commission reach your conclusions, maybe, maybe you guys will consider coming back and sharing all of those findings. Cause I think that would be really fascinating. That sounds great, Jessica. Just plan to do it.
00:53:42
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. And yeah, I appreciate it.
00:53:52
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.
00:54:14
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. You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at livingheritageanthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council, or on Twitter at livingheritagea.
00:54:41
Speaker
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00:54:57
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo 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.