Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists (Archaeology and Indigenous Peoples)

BEING AND BECOMING INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGISTS

ARCHAEOLOGY AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES SERIES S PONSORED BY THE W ORLD A RCHAEOLOGICAL CONGRESS Series Editorial Board: Sonya Atalay, Indiana University, Bloomington T. J. Ferguson, University of Arizona Dorothy Lippert, Smithsonian Institution Claire Smith, Flinders University Joe Watkins, University of Oklahoma Martin Wobst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Larry Zimmerman, Indiana University, Indianapolis Books in this series: Kennewick Man: Perspectives on the Ancient One, Heather Burke, Claire Smith, Dorothy Lippert, Joe Watkins, Larry Zimmerman, editors Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader, Margaret Bruchac, Martin Wobst, and Siobhan Hart, editors Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists, George P. Nicholas, editor

BEING AND BECOMING INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGISTS G EORGE P. N ICHOLAS , E DITOR

WALNUT C REEK , C ALIFORNIA

LEFT COAST PRESS, INC. 1630 North Main Street, #400 Walnut Creek, CA 94596 http://www.LCoastPress.com Copyright 2010 by Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: Being and becoming indigenous archaeologists / George P. Nicholas, editor. p. cm.—(Archaeology and indigenous peoples series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-59874-497-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethnoarchaeology. 2. Archaeologists—Biography. I. Nicholas, George P. CC79.E85B456 2010 930.1—dc22 2010002575 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

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C ONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

George P. Nicholas, Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Miguel Aguilar Diaz (Pallca Andean Community) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Being and Becoming a South American Archaeologist Clement Abas Apaak (Bulsa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The Challenges of a Ghanaian Archaeologist Tautala Silauleleioamoa Asaua (Samoan). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Understanding Archaeology from a Samoan Perspective Sonya L. Atalay (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Raise Your Head and Be Proud Ojibwekwe Kevin Brownlee (Cree [Ithinew]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Searching for Identity through Archaeology Margaret M. Bruchac (Wabanaki [Abenaki]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Indigenous Journeys—Splinterville, Drenthe, Amherst Alan Burns (Wiradjuri, Yorta Yorta, Ulupna) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Being a Yorta Yorta Heritage Man: An Interview by Claire Smith Iyaxel Ixkan Anastasia Cojtí Ren (Maya K’iche’). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 The Experience of a Mayan Student Antonio Cuxil (Kaqchikel Mayan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 My Life as a Kaqchikel Mayan Tour Leader and Maya Researcher in Guatemala Brandy E. George (Ojibway-Potawatomi [Anishinabe]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Who Am I and How Did I Get Here? D. Rae Gould (Nipmuc). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Indigenous Archaeology and Being Indian in New England Sven Haakanson, Jr. (Old Harbor Alutiiq) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Written Voices Become History Robert L. Hall (Stockbridge Mohican Descent) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Archaeology in My Soul Augustin F. C. Holl (Bassa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 The Flying Alien—An Outsider Archaeologist Ken Isaacson (Waanyi) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Archaeological Reflections of a 68-Year-Old Bushman Kathy Kawelu (Hawaiian) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Take Only What You Need, and Leave the Rest Vincent Kewibu (Siriputa Clan [Makanina] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Archaeology and Perceptions of the Past in Papua New Guinea Chapurukha Kusimba (Bukusu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Being an African Archaeologist in the United States

19. Roger Lewis (Sikepnékatik Mi’kmaq) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 The Journey of a L’nu Archaeologist in a Mi’kmaw Place 20. Dorothy Lippert (Choctaw) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Echoes from the Bones: Maintaining a Voice to Speak for the Ancestors 21. Irene Adziambei Mafune (VhaVenda) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 “An Encounter”: A Personal Account of Being-Becoming an Indigenous Archaeologist in South Africa 22. Nola M. Markey (O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 The “Other” Accidental Archaeologist 23. Desireé Reneé Martinez (Gabrieliño/Tongva) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 (Re)Searching for Ancestors through Archaeology 24. Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu (Zulu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Archaeological Battles and Triumphs: A Personal Reflection 25. Gerard O’Regan (Ngai Tahu Maori) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Working for My Own 26. Akemi and Rika Oshino (Ainu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Living Archaeology for the Ainu in Hokkaido: An Interview by Hirofumi Kato 27. Myrna Pokiak (Inuvialuit) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Being an Inuvialuk Archaeologist and Educator from Tuktoyaktuk 28. Rudy Reimer/Yumkks (Squamish First Nation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 Nach’en or Transforming into a Squamish Nation Indigenous Archaeologist 29. Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke (Maori) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Haere Tika Tonu Atu—Keep Going Forward 30. Nelly M. Robles García (Ayoquezco) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Indigenous Archaeology in Mexico: Recognizing Distinctive Histories 31. Eirik Thorsgard (Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Munk-[ xwáp íli?i khapa nayka anqati shawash tillixam ikta— Digging for My Ancestors’Things 32. Davina Two Bears (Navajo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 What Better Way to Give Back to Your People 33. Aribidesi Usman (Yoruba) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Being an Indigenous African Archaeologist 34. Joe Watkins (Choctaw) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Becoming One of “Them” . . . 35. Christopher J. Wilson (Ngarrindjeri) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Becoming a Ngarrindjeri Archaeologist: The Journey to and from Suburbia 36. Eldon Yellowhorn (Piikani First Nation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 My Eclectic Career in Archaeology About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

D EDICATION This volume is dedicated to the students in the first class of First Nations students I taught in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1991: Gladys Baptiste, Dean Billy, Percy Casper, Donna Dillman, Debbie Jules, John Jules, Laurie Kennedy, Petrina Schooner, and Mel Seymour. They provided me with an education of more value than I can fully acknowledge, and opened the door to a new kind of archaeology.

The 1991 Kamloops Field School. Left to right: Mel Seymour, Steve Lawhead (Assistant Director), Petrina Schooner, George P. Nicholas, Diane Biin, Dean Billy, Gladys Baptiste, Debbie Jules, Laurie Kennedy, John Jules, Percy Casper, and Donna Dillman.

Acknowledgments The idea for this volume rode in on endorphins produced during a run through the sagebrush and grasses of the traditional homelands of the Secwepemc First Nation in Kamloops, British Columbia, where I lived at the time. I was then on the advisory board of Left Coast Press’s Indigenous Archaeologies series. Excited by the notion of a book in which Indigenous archaeologists present their own life stories—and still in running gear—I emailed the series editors with the suggestion that they should find someone to compile such a collection. The response: “Great idea. When can you get us the manuscript?” My first thanks are therefore to the series editors—Claire Smith, Larry Zimmerman, Joe Watkins, and Martin Wobst—for prompting me to follow through on this idea. Mitch Allen and Jennifer Collier at Left Coast Press were, as always, fun to work with. It was also a pleasure working with production editor Carol Leyba. The volume was reviewed by Claire Smith, Michael Diplock, and Martin Wobst. I am especially grateful to Martin for his many suggestions, which have significantly improved this collection. Martin and Catherine Carlson provided substantive comments on the introductory chapter. I thank Ryan Dickie for his considerable assistance, as well as Sarah Kavanaugh for her help earlier in this project. A small grant-in-aid of publication was provided by Simon Fraser University. I am grateful to Michael Nassaeny, editor of Le Journal, for allowing a portion of an article by Robert Hall in that journal to be reprinted in his chapter. My thanks also go to the Archaeology Department at Simon Fraser University; to Marianne Ignace, Donna Dillman, Nadine Feather, Larissa Blank, Lana Harker, and Margaret Gardiner at the Kamloops Campus; to the Kamloops Indian Band; to Larry Zimmerman, T. J. Ferguson, Roger Green, and Claire Smith for paving the way; to the many friends and colleagues who have lent support to this project, including the Closet Chickens; and, of course, to my family—Catherine, Gordon, and Graham. All royalties from this volume go to the World Archaeological Congress for supporting conference travel by Indigenous persons.

I NTRODUCTION

George P. Nicholas hat does being an archaeologist mean to those Indigenous persons who have chosen this profession? How did they become archaeologists? What led them down a career path to what some in their communities have labeled a “colonialist” venture, or, alternatively, what others see as a way to challenge colonialism’s legacy? What were the circumstances that brought them to this career, and what were the challenges they faced along the way? What were (and are) the motivations that have enabled their success? How have they managed to balance Indigenous traditional values and worldviews (that is, if they embrace these) with Western modes of inquiry? Finally, how are their contributions broadening the scope of archaeology? Such questions frame this collection of autobiographical chapters on what it means to become and be Indigenous archaeologists. The contributors to this volume come from Papua New Guinea to the Canadian Arctic, and from parts in between. They address these questions by offering insights into and anecdotes about their engagement with archaeology, whether as community practitioners or as tenured faculty. These are stories—often very personal reminiscences of

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challenges and triumphs, of family histories—that deserve careful reading, both for what is said and what is not. The stories are often sometimes difficult to tell, recalling painful encounters—individuals being called “apples” or “coconut”1 by community members, or treated as the token “Indian”in the classroom by a university professor—yet that sharing of experiences, perceptions, and understandings is something that both teller and listener (or, in this case, reader) can benefit from. Some readers may find the degree of honesty and self-reflection here disconcerting at first, and then ultimately rewarding because there is much recounted that goes against expectations. In the end, we learn much about the social dimensions of archaeological practices within Indigenous communities, as well as in cross-cultural contexts. In this introductory chapter, I deliberately refrain from discussing, or even describing, the chapters that follow in order to provide readers with a sense of discovery. I do, however, provide some general background to the context and nature of this volume. I begin with a very brief overview of “Indigenous archaeology”—more information on this topic can be found in a list of Recommended Readings below—and the notion of “Indigenousness.” I then highlight some of the values implicit in the diverse stories told here. Finally, I comment on the diverse writing styles used, the organization of the chapters, and some factors that have shaped the volume.

I NDIGENOUS P EOPLES , I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGY ( IES ) The question of who is “Indigenous” is challenging, for there is no one definition that suffices in all circumstances. Indeed, some will argue (sometimes disingenuously) that the term is meaningless, since all peoples are indigenous to some place. However, as used here and in other similar contexts, “Indigenous peoples”2 is a relational term that emphasizes both cultural distinctiveness and a relationship with colonial powers (see Daes 2008: 18; also Haber 2007). This is exemplified in David Maybury-Lewis’ use of the term for those who are “marginal or dominated by the states that claim jurisdiction over them” (2002: 7), although not all such societies are disenfranchised or disempowered, as is the case with some African states. Identifying as an Indigenous person may be a very fundamental element of one’s cultural identity, as well as a powerful political statement. At the same time, indigeneity brings with it many challenges, ranging from cultural stereotypes to outright racism and marginalization. What’s more, social and economic marginalization can be multilayered— such as being a Native American and a woman and disenfranchised and having limited educational opportunities and seeking to pursue a career in archaeology. All of the contributors to this volume self-identify as Indigenous; as readers will discover, how that identity is defined, and how it has affected their lives, varies considerably among the authors.3 A significant development has occurred worldwide in recent decades as members of descendant communities—Zulu, Cree, Ainu, Ojibway, Samoan, Ngarrindjeri, Hopi, Maya, Saami, and many others—have engaged in the process of archaeology more fully and more frequently than ever before. This has been, in part, a response to a variety of factors that range from charges by Indigenous peoples that archaeology has long been a colonial-

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ist initiative of little or no value to them, to calls by archaeologists themselves to make the discipline more inclusive. This has been framed by a host of larger events that have unfolded worldwide as Indigenous peoples have sought tribal recognition, national sovereignty, cultural revitalization, economic independence, and control over heritage matters. This broadening of the discipline, both practically and theoretically, has increasingly been referred to as “Indigenous archaeology,” which is one of several new “flavors” of archaeology to emerge in the last quarter century.4 Most simply put, Indigenous archaeology refers to “archaeology with, for, and by indigenous peoples,” as Tom Andrews and I originally defined it in 1997.5 However, a closer examination of it today reveals a more complex entity (see box below), so much so that some prefer to pluralize the term to emphasize its multifaceted character.

T HE B ROAD S COPE OF I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGY ndigenous archaeology is an expression of archaeological theory and practice in which the discipline intersects with Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, ethics, and sensibilities, and through collaborative and community-originated or -directed projects and related critical perspectives. Indigenous archaeology seeks to (1) make archaeology more representative of, responsible to, and relevant for Indigenous communities; (2) redress real and perceived inequalities in the practice of archaeology; and (3) inform and broaden the understanding and interpretation of the archaeological record through the incorporation of Aboriginal worldviews, histories, and science. In its broadest sense, Indigenous archaeology may be defined as any one (or more) of the following: (1) the active participation or consultation of Indigenous peoples in archaeology; (2) a political statement concerned with issues of Aboriginal self-government, sovereignty, land rights, identity, and heritage; (3) a postcolonial enterprise designed to decolonize the discipline; (4) a manifestation of Indigenous epistemologies; (5) the basis for alternative models of cultural heritage management or stewardship; (6) the product of choices and actions made by individual archaeologists; (7) a means of empowerment and cultural revitalization or political resistance; and (8) an extension, evaluation, critique, or application of current archaeological theory (Nicholas 2008: 1660).

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The benefits of Indigenous archaeology are proving to be substantial in many different ways. For some individuals and communities, what is most rewarding is a renewed connection with their own history, and repair of connections to the past that had been severed by colonialism. There are not only new educational opportunities for Indigenous students at all levels, but an increasing number of Indigenous scholars and educators now available to train them. And there are also economic benefits through capacity building and other ventures that enable community members to be employed in cultural resource

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management (CRM), including supervisory positions. Such initiatives are helping to counter the legacy of scientific colonialism by ensuring that the products of archaeological research benefit the community (e.g., Hollowell and Nicholas 2009). Of course, many challenges still remain. For example, some Indigenous peoples remain unconvinced of archaeology’s value, even when done by their community members, or are wary of what happens to information about their culture. And for some archaeologists, Indigenous archaeology is viewed as an exercise in political correctness or a challenge to science and rational thought. While still residing at the margins, substantial strides forward are being made to enable greater participation of Indigenous peoples in archaeology. For example, the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) is deeply committed to Indigenous peoples and provides considerable support to them for conference travel and other assistance.6 Likewise, the Society for American Archaeology offers a series of scholarships for Native American students,7 including one named after Arthur C. Parker, the first president of the society.

VALUING L IFE STORIES Certainly, most Indigenous peoples have much in common—disenfranchisement, political marginalization, effects of violence and warfare, threats to culture, livelihood, and language through government or church-sponsored schools, forced relocation, limited access to education and adequate health care, discrimination, and much else—although the circumstances of, and responses to, these threats have varied. Such shared experiences have served to unite local communities and also provide the foundation for national and international organizations and initiatives (e.g., World Council of Indigenous Peoples; United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues). However, we risk essentialism by not acknowledging that substantial differences exist among Indigenous societies. This holds true for the life histories and experiences of the 37 authors represented here. While the contributors have much in common at one level, a careful reading of this collection reveals considerable differences among them, whether cultural, experiential, or circumstantial. This is one of the defining features of this volume. There are indeed many possible trajectories to becoming an archaeologist; many different reasons for a doing so; many different opportunities and challenges encountered; and many different perceptions about the values of archaeology. What these stories make abundantly clear is that archaeology is a viable career option for Indigenous persons. Indeed, some of the authors have risen to the top of their profession and are acknowledged not just for being an “Indigenous archaeologist,” but for being a “good archaeologist,” in general. A number are still working their way up through the academic ranks, or completing university degrees, encountering both opportunities and frustrations along the way.8 And for some, a non-academic career in archaeology, whether for a CRM company or their own community, is their choice, although in many instances it may be their only opportunity (which isn’t unique to Indigenous peoples).

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Becoming an archaeologist may be a difficult path for anyone to take. It can be all the more challenging for Indigenous persons, especially where educational resources are limited, or where community priorities favor other career paths (such as in health care) of more tangible benefit. And within the field of archaeology, inequities and misunderstandings may persist, and job opportunities may be limited, leading some to leave. Not everyone will succeed, but it can be done. And knowing that others are struggling to accomplish this, and knowing that many have succeeded, may be both comforting and encouraging to those just setting out. There is also much of value for non-Indigenous archaeologists, especially in seeing what archaeology looks like when viewed from the Indigenous side. Many non-Indigenous readers might be unaware of the obstacles that the discipline has erected, or the misguided notions about Indigenous cultures that persist within the educational system. As anthropologists, we too often give only lip service to celebrating cultural diversity and may be discomforted when that diversity requires accommodation within our discipline. I hope that the vibrant personal accounts and academic accomplishments represented in this collection aid both in dispelling that discomfort and in celebrating the cultural diversity represented here.

A BOUT THIS VOLUME This book developed organically, starting with an initial group of individuals that I specifically targeted (primarily those I knew personally, or knew of) and then expanding from there. I sought broad cultural, geographic, and experiential representation, which I believe I found. Represented is a remarkable array of individuals, and I am very proud to have had a role in bringing their stories to the wide audience they deserve. I wish it were possible to include many more individuals in this collection. I fully anticipate that many readers will ask “Why isn’t [So-and-so] included in this collection?” As with any edited volume, there were several practical considerations at play, including meeting some fairly rigid publication deadlines. A number of individuals invited to contribute regretfully declined due to other commitments, or were simply not interested; others agreed to participate but in the end were unable to complete their chapters due to personal or family matters, by which time it was too late to solicit other submissions. I also attempted to include as broad a geographic coverage as possible, and to avoid having those areas with the most Indigenous archaeologists dominate the collection. Three other factors contributed to the shape of this collection. The first was a reliance on Web-based communication, which literally reached around the world to provide a remarkably good means of connecting with everyone. The second was, regrettably, a bias toward English-speaking contributors, although there are a respectable number of authors whose mother tongue is not English and who prepared their chapter in English or had it translated. The third was that many community-based practitioners (full- or part-time) were simply not comfortable with sharing their life histories at this time; their stories are very important nonetheless, particularly where traditional worldviews and scientific practice intersect, and I hope to address this is in a future volume.

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With all of this in mind, it is best to consider this collection an introduction to the realm of Indigenous archaeologists. And the fact that these 37 contributors represent only a fraction of those out there is cause for celebration. What has become apparent is that the number of Indigenous persons involved in archaeology, whether as professional archaeologists or as lay practitioners, has grown far larger and faster than anyone could have anticipated, even five years ago when this project was initiated. We have thus reached a point where we would need many volumes like this to include just those individuals located in North America. I am nonetheless sorry that I could not include a far greater number in this volume, but I look forward to other future initiatives that bring their voices forward. A word about the range and diversity of voices and writing styles is also warranted here. When I sent out invitations to contribute to this volume, I included a set of guidelines as to length, format, and such. What I had in mind was a non-academic writing style, with a minimum of citations, which I thought best suited the collection. A number of contributors took a different approach, however, one much more formal, more academic than I had anticipated. Some, for example, situated their personal/family/cultural histories within the larger context of the history of colonialism in their region, while others went to lengths to acknowledge those individuals who had contributed to their education. The result is a much wider array of writing styles and approaches than originally expected; rather than request revisions, I chose to honor the decisions each author made in how they presented themselves. This diversity of styles is reflective of the different experiences and histories of these writers and is thus instructive in its own right. At the same time, this also introduces a tension between the highly personal accounts and more formal ones, and between anecdotal and analytical accounts, which reflects the intersection of alternative, sometimes competing approaches or values. Finally, I do not prescribe any particular way to read this book, except to recommend it not be read at a single sitting or necessarily in order. The chapters are presented in alphabetical order only for convenience; they could have easily been presented randomly or in reverse order.

C LOSING T HOUGHTS For me, assembling this collection has been a richly rewarding and very humbling experience. As a non-Indigenous person, and one who has had a privileged life, I have come to appreciate and understand some of the realities of life for Indigenous persons in Canada and elsewhere. This came largely as the result of spending sixteen years as an archaeologist and educator working in a unique university program located on the Kamloops Indian Reserve in British Columbia, Canada. I found myself in a situation, very uncomfortable at first, where I quickly came to realize that I had as much to learn from my students as they would from me.9 A growing awareness, at best only an incomplete understanding, of lives so different from my own resonated strongly with my affinity toward the concept of “representativeness,” which has permeated my archaeological

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research and writing. In this case, I came to view the nature and promise of archaeology as incomplete because of what I—and many others—saw as interpretive and analytical gaps. This collection is an attempt to reduce some of these gaps. Finally, this book—and indeed others of similar aspiration—should be seen foremost as a sampler, however arbitrary in construction, of a wide range of voices, life histories, experiences, and such, of Indigenous individuals around the world, many of whom have not been heard before. The individuals represented here, and their many colleagues who are not, have been path-breakers, leaders, role models, instigators, and tricksters as they have pursued their interest in archaeology. My admiration for what they have done, and what they will do, for their communities, and to the discipline of archaeology, is profound.

N OTES 1 Derogatory terms that refer to being red or black on the outside, white on the inside. 2 I follow the convention of using the capitalized plural form: As Smith and Wobst (2005: 16)

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note, “The capital ‘I’ emphasizes the nationhood of individual groups, while the plural ‘peoples’ internationalizes Indigenous experiences, issues and struggles . . . and acts against the notion of an Indigenous homogeneity.” This includes many instances where a parent or grandparent may be of European descent. As is often the case, this doesn’t make one any less Indigenous culturally, but adds additional layers of negotiation: for Arthur Parker, an influential early 20th-century archaeologist and scholar of Seneca descent, he “undoubtedly lived his life in the interstice of two parallel societies, but his family history begins to explain why and how he was able to negotiate a seemingly divided identity” (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2009: 32). This follows the emergence and disciplinary recognition, first, of Marxist and, more recently, of feminist archaeology. See Nicholas and Andrews 1997: 1. This commitment to Indigenous peoples is the dominant theme in WAC’s First Code of Ethics (http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/wac5/ethics.html). http://www.saa.org/AbouttheSociety/Awards/SAANativeAmericanScholarships/tabid/163/ Default.aspx. One of the great dangers that these junior faculty members face is that they are in high demand for committees where Indigenous representation is required or desired. For a description of this program, see Nicholas et al. 2007: 275–279.

R EFERENCES C ITED Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C. 2009 Inheriting the Past: The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Daes, E.-I. 2008 Indigenous Peoples: Keepers of Our Past—Custodians of Our Future. International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), Copenhagen.

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Haber, A. F. 2007 This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?” Archaeologies 3 (3): 213–229. Hollowell, J., and G. P. Nicholas 2009 Using Ethnographic Methods to Articulate Community-Based Conceptions of Cultural Heritage Management. Public Archaeology 8 (2–3): 141–160. Maybury-Lewis, D. 2002 Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Groups, and the State. 2nd edition. Allyn and Bacon, Boston. Nicholas, G. P. 2008 Native Peoples and Archaeology. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3, edited by Deborah Pearsall, pp. 1660–1669. Academic Press, New York. Nicholas, G. P., and T. D. Andrews 1997 Indigenous Archaeology in the Postmodern World. In At a Crossroads: Archaeology and First Peoples in Canada, edited by G. P. Nicholas and T. D. Andrews, pp. 1–18. Archaeology Press, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. Nicholas, G. P., J. Welch, and E. C. Yellowhorn 2007 Collaborative Encounters. In The Collaborative Continuum: Archaeological Engagements with Descendant Communities, edited by C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T. J. Ferguson, pp. 273–299. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Smith, C., and H. M. Wobst 2005 Decolonizing Archaeological Method and Theory. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by C. Smith and H. M. Wobst, pp. 5–16. Routledge, London.

R ECOMMENDED R EADINGS There is a rich and varied literature relating to the presence (or not) of Indigenous peoples in archaeology. The following titles provide an entry into the realm of what has become known as Indigenous archaeology, as well as related themes. This list is illustrative, not exhaustive. The entries marked with an asterisk (*) are by, or include chapters by, Indigenous contributors. * Allen, H., and C. Phillips (editors) 2010 Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities and Archaeology into the 21st Century. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. * Atalay, S. (editor) 2006 Decolonizing Archaeology. American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4). * Biolsi, T., and L. J. Zimmerman (editors) 1997 Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. * Bray, T. (editor) 2001 The Future of the Past: Native Americans, Archaeologists, and Repatriation. Garland Press, New York.

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Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C. 2009 Inheriting the Past: The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. * Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C., and T. J. Ferguson (editors) 2007 The Collaborative Continuum: Archaeological Engagements with Descendant Communities. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Conkey, M. 2005 Dwelling at the Margins, Action at the Intersection? Feminist and Indigenous Archaeologies, 2005. Archaeologies 1 (1): 9–59. Colley, S. 2002 Uncovering Australia: Archaeology, Indigenous People, and the Public. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. * Davidson, I., C. Lovell-Jones, and R. Bancroft (editors) 1995 Archaeologists and Aborigines Working Together. University of New England Press, Armidale. * Deloria, V., Jr. 1969 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. MacMillan, London. * Dongoske, K. E., M. Aldenderfer, and K. Doehner (editors) 2000 Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, D.C. Gnecco, C., and C. Hernández 2008 History and Its Discontents: Stone Statues, Native Histories, and Archaeologists. Current Anthropology 49 (3): 439-466. * Kerber, J. E. (editor) 2006 Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. * Langford, R. 1983 Our Heritage—Your Playground. Australian Archaeology 16: 1–6. * Layton, R. (editor) 1989 Who Needs the Past? Indigenous Values and Archaeology. Unwin Hyman, London. McGuire, R. H. 1992 Archaeology and the First Americans. American Anthropologist 94 (4): 816–836. McNiven, I., and L. Russell 2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Nicholas, G. P. 2008 Native Peoples and Archaeology. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3, edited by Deborah Pearsall, pp. 1660–1669. Academic Press, New York. * Nicholas, G. P., and T. D. Andrews (editors) 1997 At a Crossroads: Archaeology and First Peoples in Canada. Archaeology Press, Burnaby. * Norder, J. W. 2007 Iktomi in the Land of the Maymaygwayshi: Understanding Lived Experience in the Practice of Archaeology among American Indians/First Nations. Archaeologies 3 (3): 230–248.

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* Peck, T., E. Siegfried, and G. Oetelaar (editors) 2003 Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology. University of Calgary Press. *Ren, A. C. 2006 Maya Archaeology and the Political and Cultural Identity of Contemporary Maya in Guatemala. Archaeologies 2 (1): 8–19. * Schmidt, P. R., and T. C. Patterson (editors) 1995 Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Shepherd, N. 2002 The Politics of Archaeology in Africa. Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (1): 189–220. * Silliman, S.W. (editor) 2008 Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology.University of Arizona Press, Tucson. * Smith, C., and H. M. Wobst (editors) 2005 Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Routledge, London. * Swidler, N., K. E. Dongoske, R. Anyon, and A. S. Downer (editors) 1997 Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Trigger B. 1980 Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian. American Antiquity 45 (4): 662–676. Verdesio, G. 2008 From the Erasure to the Rewriting of Indigenous Pasts: The Troubled Life of Archaeology in Uruguay. In Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by H. Silverman and W. Isbell, pp. 1115–1126. Springer, New York. * Watkins, J. 2000 Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. 2003 Beyond the Margin: American Indians, First Nations, and Archaeology in North America. American Antiquity 68 (2): 273–285.

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Photo by Manuel Perales

BEING AND BECOMING A SOUTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST

Miguel Aguilar Diaz t has been ten years since my first archaeological class. In the beginning, I had many questions: What were the real goals of archaeology? Was it just the study of ancient artifacts, or was there something more? Why did I pick archaeology in the first place? Today, as a practicing archaeologist, I still consider these questions important but also have a much deeper understanding of the contributions that archaeology makes, and the challenges that we face, especially as Indigenous archaeologists. As a child I had enjoyed reading history books. When I was fifteen, the novels of Jules Verne captured my imagination and led my mind to wander as I thought about new and different cultures. But I couldn’t fantasize too much; the reality was that I lived in one of the poorest countries in the world, with its large populations of marginalized and oppressed Indigenous peoples.

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My grandmother belonged to a peasant community. She was taken from Tarma, near Junin in the Central Highlands of Peru, when she was just eight and raised in Lima. That is where she established my family. However, no one acknowledged their Indigenous past. Family members grew up in the city and decided to assume a more Western way of life. They became doctors and engineers; my mom became a social worker. It was not until after her death that family members decided to learn more about the family history and visit their roots. I was raised by my grandmother, who taught me many traditional Andean ways. It wasn’t until some years later, when I first took that archaeological class, that I realized that all of the people who had migrated to Lima, just like my grandmother’s family, were part of the ancient cultures that my teacher told us about. And what a discovery that was—that the past wasn’t the past of a different people, it was my past. I also learned that the various and unique cultures of ancient times continued into the present, occupying the Andean landscapes of a past that I hadn’t known about before then. Until that point I had been educated as most middle-class Peruvians from Lima had been, learning that the Andean people were great in the past. But we never heard anything about them in the present. It was ironic that we had been taught to bestow such prestige and honor on these ancient people, and yet their descendants had been living in some of the poorest conditions for the last 500 years. There was something very wrong with this. I therefore started to adopt the identity of my past. I soon came to believe that the discipline of archaeology provided the means to challenge this imbalance and to make contributions to Andean people beyond simply reconstructing the past.

R ECONNECTING TO THE PAST What does it mean to be an Andean archaeologist who is disconnected from his origins, from his past? This question was in my mind for ten more years, until I developed an answer for myself. Generally, the study and practice of archaeology in Peru and other Latin America countries is a major undertaking. Often doing archaeology here feels like a kind of fight, because archaeologists have to constantly confront the government and its policies, in addition to fighting against local and regional authorities who think that the past is nothing more than ruins to be exploited—a product to be sold. In addition, Indigenous and peasant communities sometimes see archaeologists as enemies who want to steal their lands and disrupt their livelihood. This is due to the idea (sometimes accurate, even today) that archaeologists view the past primarily in terms of objects that can be taken straight to the lab, or as exotic works of art that can be exhibited without benefit to the communities who are the real owners of that heritage. Indeed, the international archaeological community has often been guilty of overlooking Indigenous peoples and their rights. Intentionally or not, the connections that living peoples have to the past may go unrecognized, yet it is their heritage and history that is at stake. Ignoring both human and historical property rights, Western archaeologists have sometimes been responsible for taking artifacts or for interpreting the past in

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ways that challenge local knowledge. In doing so, they have “kidnapped” a part of Indigenous social life, beliefs, and belongings. One example of this is a case I have been involved in—the artifacts and other materials taken from Machu Picchu by the North American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911 and 1916. The Peruvian government had authorized him to take the remains out of the country for scientific study at Yale University in the United States, but only for a limited number of years. However, after more then 90 years, the university has returned just a small sample of artifacts and some human bones. As a result, part of the history of the people from Cusco, the former Inca capital, and the descendants of the Quechua’s Inca communities, has been lost to them. Thousands of people have been denied their heritage rights. To me, the lack of access to my material past is very much like my grandmother being denied the right to know her roots. Machu Picchu is perhaps the best-known site not only in Peru but possibly in all of South America. There is a lot at stake here. As archaeologists Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (1991) note, the past is a big business, for both tourism and the auction houses. In important museums around the world, the past is a kind of rentable space. This big-business approach to cultural heritage not only affects the integrity of material culture, but destroys the identities of entire nations and limits access to their origins. I strongly believe that a people without a past and an identity are an easy target for oppression and conquest. My hope is to see, within my lifetime, the material aspects of my identity, represented by the Machu Picchu artifacts, placed inside an Andean museum as a celebration of our history. There is another “other” history to consider: the Indigenous one that is included in what the government calls the “national identity of Peru.” This is what academics and museum curators call “prehistory,” which to me means the forgetting of history, of traditional and local beliefs, as a result of the Spanish conquerors’ imposition of 300 years of colonialism, exploitation, and racism. Now we know that we have a history, one not separated from us in time—our history is not “pre” anything! When the Spanish arrived in America, they did not start civilization or history. This process began in South America when the first complex societies were developing, which in the Andes was 5,000 years ago.1 The use of the term “prehistoric” is, in my view, just a colonial reminiscence and a term I encourage archaeologists and the public to avoid using. In fact, Peruvian archaeologists generally don’t like to use it, but it is common to read the term in the North American and European archaeological literature.

T HE P ROBLEM , T HE S UFFERING , T HE R EALITY In addition to exploring the past, I believe that archaeologists need to develop an activist position, possibly in the sense of the early 20th-century Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whom I consider an engaged intellectual. To illustrate this, I will tell some true stories of what Indigenous or peasant communities in Peru have had to live with. In the year 2000, a mining company wanted to exploit a gold quarry that was directly under the town of Tambogrande in the Piura region of northern Peru. The people

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Author mapping a shell scatter at Playa Chica, Huaura Valley, Peru. Photo by Manuel Perales.

of Tambogrande were opposed to this project and rejected it in a popular referendum by 98%. They knew they would be ill affected by mining activities on their land: the drinking water supply would be polluted, as would be a number of cultivable fields; it would even be necessary to move the town. In situations like this, the first casualties are cultural heritage and archaeological remains, followed by health threats affecting the lives of children and then of the whole community. While the peasants were battling this proposed project, in 2001 the mining company presented to the Peruvian government their environmental impact statement on the potential effects of the project in the Tambogrande region. The document was thousands of pages long and was almost impossible for community members to acquire. Robert Moran, a Canadian environmental engineer, provided the Tambogrande community with his evaluation of the environmental impact report, and concluded that there would be water contamination if the operations of the mine continued. The company’s report could have been written to be much clearer, but obviously there was no intention of communicating the results to the people. This fact created an uprising, supported by many human rights organizations, university scholars, and social organizations. Community members called strikes throughout the area. The risks of the mining operation to agriculture—an ancient traditional activity—were the principal reasons the people succeeded in removing the threat of the mining operation from their land. However, the residents of Choropampa, near Cajamarca, Peru, were not so lucky. On June 2, 2000, large quantities of mercury were spilled by the Minera Yanacocha. Yanacocha is a gold-mining company, and a very powerful one in Peru. Many believe that Yanacocha is a corrupt transnational that paid local authorities, members of the Peruvian Congress, regional clubs, reporters, and religious congregations to help cover the crime—a crime that to this day is costing the lives of children, in addition to causing

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chronic illness, abortions, kidney failure, and other health problems for the rest of the inhabitants.2 Ironically, the people who protested against the mining company were ordered to pay a fine to the government for disturbing the peace. Peruvian archaeologists are generally not only disconnected from Indigenous issues, but sometimes work for these corrupt companies, making big money doing rescue archaeology and permitting the destruction of sites and the identity of small communities. Being unaware or ignorant of the reality of traditional lifeways results in poor scholarship by archaeologists, making it impossible to understand the past and even the archaeological record.

D OING S OCIAL A RCHAEOLOGY: A P ROPOSAL With the Tambogrande and Choropampa cases in mind, I propose a different way of doing archaeology in South America, especially in the Andes. This is a proposal that involves practicing archaeology within the traditional communities—living with them, sharing the culture, and viewing the world from their perspective. This can be considered as a new perception of archaeology, a social archaeology based on ethnoarchaeology, and with a theoretical independence from more conservative general theories (Aguilar Diaz 2004). This is the way that I’ve conducted my archaeological practice for the last few years. Social archaeology is also a political practice and a way of doing the discipline outside of academia. It shares the same formal objectives with the rest of the social sciences, but it does have a distinct methodology and praxis. I’ve found many inspired ideas from Luis G. Lumbreras, one of the creators of Latin American Social Archaeology, particularly for promoting the idea of an archaeology that is relevant to descendant communities.3 I have found another methodology that is similar in some respects to Lumbreras’s, and that is Jerimy Cunningham’s ethnoarchaeological study (2005) of pottery production in Mali. I find that his desire to understand the past by means of working with community members is very similar to mine. He writes: The central topic in this dissertation is that ethnoarchaeology has much to gain from engaging with the economic, social and political realities that created material systems in the present. Ties between individuals and their things— whether things they have bought or things they have made—are complex, sensual, emotive, economic and utilitarian. Things are banal and they are esoteric. Ethnoarchaeology can only meet its goals within the broader discipline of archaeology by seeking to identify as accurately as possible exactly these sorts of ties. (Cunningham 2005: 9) This approach can be contrasted with processual archaeology’s emphasis on groups, not individuals, and also with the position that material correlates of human behavior (via Binford’s middle range theory, for example) are relatively unambiguous. My idea is to go beyond the typical field of study and range of traditional archaeology

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because I believe that the practice of archaeology should not be disconnected from the problems of society. After all, how can we understand ancient societies if we ignore the interests and values of their descendants?

The author and members of the Huachis community, partaking in a ritual offering of food and drink to the Mountain God Apu to ensure they can work without problems at the site, Ancash region, Peru. Photo courtesy of Miguel Aguilar Diaz.

The time of doing armchair archaeology is over. Today, Indigenous people are also archaeologists, and they can develop their own ways of studying their own past. This is the way I personally think archaeology should be. I met my grandmother’s family—my family—for the first time in 2006 in the small town of Pallca. And I know I will not be fulfilled as an archaeologist and a person until I can go back there and try to write that ancient history in the language every child and every peasant will understand as their own past, which is both the language of my grandma’s past and my daughter’s present.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank George Nicholas and Julie Hollowell for sending me information, and Anna E. Schuray for her help reading and correcting this manuscript—being with her in the past makes me believe that a better world is possible.

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N OTES 1 The first complex society in the central Andes, or what Fried (1967) named a “pristine” society

and one of the six crucibles of civilization in the world, appeared in what is known in Peruvian archaeology as the Late Archaic or Preceramic Period (ca. 5000–3800 BP) (Haas and Creamer 2004; Silverman and Isbell 2008). 2 The case of Choropampa is an example of the true cost of gold; many cases of infantile cancer occurred because the community’s water sources were polluted with mercury from the mining company. 3 Editor’s Note: See Benavides 2001 for a review and discussion of social archaeology in Latin America.

R EFERENCES C ITED Aguilar Diaz, M. 2004 Entre la antropología y la arqueología: Conceptuando la etnoarqueología en el Perú. Paper presented at the XI National Congress of Anthropology Students. Lima. Benavides, O. H. 2001 Returning to the Source: Social Archaeology as Latin American Philosophy. Latin American Antiquity 12: 355–370. Cunningham, J. 2005 Household Vessel Exchange and Consumption in the Inland Niger Delta of Mali: An Ethnoarchaeological Study. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McGill University. Fried, M. 1967 The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. Random House, New York. Haas, J., and W. Creamer 2004 Cultural Transformations in the Central Andean Late Archaic. In Andean Archaeology, edited by H. Silverman, pp. 35–50. Blackwell, Malden. Renfrew, C., and P. Bahn. 1991 Archaeology, Theory, Methods and Practice. Thames and Hudson, New York. Silverman, H., and W. Isbell (editors) 2008 Andean Archaeology III. Springer, New York.

C HAPTER T WO

Photo by Charlie Smith, the Georgia Straight

T HE C HALLENGES OF A G HANAIAN A RCHAEOLOGIST

Clement Abas Apaak am the eldest son of Mr. John Azundem and his wife, Mrs. Agnes Azundem. My father is a member of the Bulsa, one of the smallest ethnic groups in Ghana, and my mother is a Kasina, the neighbouring, much larger ethnic group. Born in 1970, I have three brothers and one sister. My family lives in our ancestral homeland of Dogninga, where my grandfather was born and is buried, as was his father and grandfather, a reason why I consider myself Indigenous. As a boy growing up, I lived in several places within Ghana because of the frequent relocation of my father, a civil servant. This, in addition to the fact that my native Buli language was hardly known by other Ghanaians, enhanced my ability to learn and communicate in the major languages of Ghana, including Twi. I attended Sandema Secondary School from 1984 to 1989, where I completed my General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level Examination, and then enrolled in Nandom Secondary School for my General

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Certificate of Education Advanced Level. I was the only student there in my year group to qualify for the university in 1991, and I enrolled at the University of Ghana in 1992, after serving my nation in the National Service Program, during which I was appointed as a Deputy District Electoral Officer. I entered the field of archaeology by accident, which perhaps now seems a surprising thing to say, now that I’ve just completed my Ph.D. in archaeology at Simon Fraser University in Canada, with my dissertation an ethnoarchaeological investigation of the 2,000year-old salt trade in northern Ethiopia. However, the story of how I got into archaeology and the subsequent path I followed to get a Ph.D. was anything but smooth. While I did not set out to become an archaeologist, I am glad things played out the way they did. Hopefully, sharing my experience with other Indigenous students will help them anticipate some of the problems I confronted. And for those non-Indigenous educators, I hope that my experience will provide insights into the problems Indigenous students face and how people in academe can help.

F ROM N AME -C ALLING TO E ARNING AN M. P HIL . The first time I heard of archaeology was when I started in the bachelor’s degree program at the University of Ghana in 1992. As fate will have it, the University of Ghana was my third choice among the three universities in Ghana at the time. Due to the corrupt practices in the public sector, as well as the use of bribes by the rich and powerful people in Ghana to secure admission for their family members, I was not accepted into my firstand second-choice schools, which were the University of Science and Technology and the University of Cape Coast. With no options left, I agreed to commence my university education at the University of Ghana, following intense persuasion by my father, John Azundem, himself a graduate of that university. As was then the practice at the University of Ghana, students were admitted and subjects assigned to them by the admissions board: I was assigned archaeology, history, and religion. Although I accepted these courses, my intention was to switch from archaeology to geography upon registration. However, after completing most of the steps needed to do so, I ran into the biggest obstacle: the dean of social sciences, who was the only person with the power to effect such a change. The dean, Professor James Anquandah, was the head of the Archaeology Department and, as I later came to know, was (and remains) the pre-eminent native Ghanaian archaeologist. Professor Anquandah declined to sign my Change of Course form on the grounds that both my General Certificate of Education advanced (GCE “A” level) and ordinary level (GCE “O”) scores were below the aggregate accepted for geography that year. In hindsight, and having taken classes with him, his refusal may also have been motivated by my attempts to drop archaeology, his discipline. I considered withdrawing from university when I was not permitted to change to geography, but my father talked me into giving archaeology a chance, which I did. One of the first problems I faced as a first-year archaeology student was peer pressure and social pressures to pursue academic programs with immediate economic

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rewards. These two factors combined to create an unfriendly atmosphere for students taking archaeology. My classmates and I were also subjected to name-calling—Adianu (“the thing”) in the Twi language of Ghana—by peers in other departments. The origin or source of this name-calling is not clear, but during my days at the University of Ghana, it connoted something degrading and worthless. In fact, such name-calling and ridicule dissuaded some students from pursuing archaeology past their first year. The extent to which the negativity associated with archaeology may have encouraged Ghanaian students in general and female students in particular not to pursue graduate studies in archaeology cannot be dismissed. What was the basis of such name-calling? Let me sketch the socioeconomic context within which this sort of negative attitude thrived. Like most African nations, Ghana is poor and the average Ghanaian earns less than one U.S. dollar a day. As a result of more pressing national needs, Ghana has no resources to invest in archaeology, and parents see no benefit to their children pursuing disciplines that lack immediate prospects for jobs. I lost count of how many times I had to answer the following questions: What do archaeologists do? How does your study contribute to resolving our problems? What job will you get with a degree in archaeology? Who will employ you? Perceptions of archaeology in Ghana were negative, I will argue, due to poverty, ignorance, and the limited opportunities for archaeology-related jobs. Yet my zeal for archaeology enabled me to survive the scorn and degrading comments associated with studying archaeology. I thus went on to obtain my B.A. degree. In Ghana, the lack of textbooks and journals was a general problem faced by students; the problem was more acute for those of us in archaeology. For example, from 1991 to 1996, when I was a student at the University of Ghana, most of the books in our library were from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The only text from the 1990s was Nelson and Jurmain’s Introduction to Physical Anthropology (1992), a general text on physical anthropology. We relied on notes from our lecturers (Professors Anquandah, Gavau, Mensah, Crossland, and Osei); they took great pains to make that possible, as they too had to deal with the lack of up-to-date texts and journals. Simply put, we could not afford the luxury of getting current textbooks or journals. In fact, the first time I saw a book or journal article in its original context was when I commenced graduate studies in Norway in 1997 at the University of Bergen: I remember the excitement I felt when I saw books written by Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder for the first time. I was even more thrilled to have full access to a computer at age 27, for the first time in my life. Funding remains a problem for every student, but Indigenous students often have fewer opportunities for funds than others. In my case, frustrations relating to funding began with my decision to write an honours essay as part of my B.A. degree. With an interest to investigate traditional architectural practices, I proposed to document the architectural practices of the Bulsa people of northeastern Ghana, which is my ethnic group. In particular, I wanted to explore the relevance of Bulsa architecture in archaeology. To fund this project, I used my student loan and so could afford only a short field season. There were other problems I encountered. Although I was collecting data among my own people and knew the language, it was not a bed of roses. Older people were partic-

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ularly difficult to deal with, as they expected me to know my own culture. They were also reluctant to discuss the ritual aspects of Bulsa architecture with me. Other informants thought my questions were not worth their time, as they were not being rewarded. Thinking about it now, the fact that my mother was from a neighbouring ethnic group, the Kasina, coupled with my growing up outside my father’s home area (Bulsa district), may have contributed to the suspicion informants had about by intentions. Notwithstanding the discomforts, as my advisor, Dr. Gavua, will tell you, my project (Apaak 1996) shed some light on the origins of Bulsa building technology, the relationships between compound organization and social structure, and the influences that the environment and the Bulsa’s sociocultural system had on their architecture.

G RADUATE Y EARS While serving as a teaching and research assistant in the Archaeology Department of the University of Ghana after completing my B.A. degree, I applied to the University of Ghana, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and the University of Bergen for graduate studies. Cornell University indicated an interest, but declined to offer me a place, claiming there was no funding for my area of interest, which was ethnoarchaeology. Both the University of Ghana and the University of Bergen offered me admission, but only Bergen offered a full scholarship. In the fall of 1997, I started my M.Phil. at the University of Bergen under the tutelage of Professor Randi Halland. I wanted my thesis to build on my B.A. honours essay on Bulsa architecture. However, I was advised to do something more archaeological, and although I now had funding, it was not enough for an archaeological study in Bulsa territory. As a result, I settled for analyzing material from Okai Koi-Ayawaso, an Iron Age site in coastal Ghana excavated at different times by Paul Ozanne, J. R. Anquandah, and Y. BredwaMensah (see Apaak 1999). The material I analyzed was from Dr. Mensah’s 1988–1989 excavations. To help me interpret the archaeological pottery from this site, I conducted an ethnoarchaeological study of Ga pottery at the two Ga communities of Afuaman and Manhean, situated about 2 kilometers apart in the Lower Densu Valley in the vicinity of the Ayawaso site. Tradition has it that these settlements had an ancient tradition of pottery production and supplied quality products to other settlements of the Western Accra Plains, including ancient Ayawaso. My work subsequently supported the claims indicated in oral tradition. Today, Ayawaso is just a small village, but from AD 1520 to 1700, it was the center of the Ga Kingdom, and its inhabitants engaged in trade with Europeans on the coast and other inland groups (Anquandah 1982; Apaak 1999; Bredwa-Mensah 1990). The archaeological and ethnographic components of my work lasted a total of four months. The archaeological component involved sorting, washing, classifying, and cataloging the archaeological material, while the ethnographic aspect involved interviews and observations of pottery making in Afuaman and Manhean. As is the case with most ethnographic projects, I had to deal with a cloud of suspicion from the communities. Most of the people, including the chiefs, welcomed me and work progressed smoothly for the first two weeks, but things changed soon after. Apparently, a fellow who failed to

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get a job with me as an assistant told the local potters that I had a lot of money, and encouraged them to ask for payment anytime I conducted interviews with them. Fortunately, the person I did hire as my assistant, who was appointed by the chief of Manhean, came to my rescue by explaining the context of my work and the fact that the chief had sanctioned it.

Forced to Canada by Lack of Funding to Face More Challenges Before I defended my thesis at the University of Bergen in November 1999, I had already secured a place in the doctoral program of the University of Cambridge. My original desire was to study the ethnoarchaeology of Bulsa ironworking under the supervision of Ian Hodder. As part of the process, I traveled to Cambridge for an interview, only to learn that Dr. Hodder had moved to teach at a school in the United States. I was disappointed but still determined to study in Cambridge. After my interview, Dr. David Phillipson, who was on my interview panel, agreed to be my advisor. However, my dream of studying in Cambridge did not come to fruition because I did not have the necessary funding. Dr. Phillipson had indicated at the outset that this would be a problem, but offered to do what he could to help. This included writing letters of recommendation if I found sources interested in funding my intended project. I was very hopeful and set my eyes on the Commonwealth Scholarship program, for which, as a citizen of Ghana, I was eligible. In the end, my application for funding was not successful, as I was unable to get Ghanaian support, despite my best efforts; my inquiries regarding the scholarship were never answered. Sadly, I had become a victim of indifference and corruption at the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat (as it was called). It is no secret that the awarding of government scholarships in Ghana is influenced by political ties, power, and wealth. Being from a small ethnic group and having no family in high places worked against me. So, in spite of successfully defending my M.Phil. thesis in November 1999, I was unable start in Cambridge because I could not produce a bank statement indicating I had the 16,000 pounds Cambridge demanded. Consequently, I postponed my admission for one year, with the help of Dr. Phillipson, and moved to San Diego to join my wife and daughter, who had been deported from Norway four months earlier for visa violations. In San Diego, I tried but failed to get a teaching job and so obtained a basic clerical position with Kelly Staff Leasing (KSL). However, my interest to get a Ph.D. in archaeology remained intact, and my search for funding for Cambridge continued. By this time, I hoped to get partial funding, but again failed. As it was becoming clear that I would not get the funds needed for Cambridge, I decided to apply to other schools, especially since I was advised that the postponement of my admission there could not be extended beyond two years. I applied to other universities in Australia, the United States, and Canada. The Australian schools indicated interest, but, as usual, the issue was funding. The American schools asked me to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL); although I felt insulted by this requirement, I did both. My GRE score was respectable, but did not meet the level required by some of the universities.

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Luckily, I was offered admission to Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada. I was assured of a teaching assistantship and was accepted on the basis of the assistantship, plus the money I saved from working in San Diego. I also had access to the U.S. student loan as a green-card holder. Dr. Cathy D’Andrea, who would become my advisor, played a very key role in helping me enter SFU. I found out about her work in Africa, and about the archaeology program of Simon Fraser University, on the Internet. All this time, I continued to receive support from Dr. Yaw Bredwa-Mensah (who had excavated earlier at my B.A. thesis site) and Professor Randi Haaland, both of whom wrote many recommendation letters in support of my numerous applications. They still keep a keen interest in my progress. I began my Ph.D. in the fall of 2001 at Simon Fraser University, and my proposal was the one I had proposed for Cambridge—to study the traditional ironworking technology of the Bulsa people. However, soon after beginning my study, it became evident that I was not going to secure funding for this study. My application to the Wenner-Gren Foundation failed, and I learned that they were no longer funding ethnoarchaeological research. By the end of my first year in the doctoral program, it became clear again that funding was going to be an issue. My advisor rescued me by offering me a place on her project, “Ethiopian Farmers Then and Now: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Investigations at Gulo-Makeda, Eastern Tigrai.” The goals of her project were (1) to examine the nature and role of rural economies in the developments of ancient Ethiopian complex societies; and (2) to develop a regional picture of modern-day Tigrayan material culture, providing a basis from which to explore new interpretations of past cultures. My Ph.D. research was to collect information on the present socioeconomic role of the salt trade in northern Ethiopia. My specific objectives were to (1) document technological and socioeconomic aspects of salt production, trade, and consumption; (2) identify material correlates of the salt industry; and (3) explore how trade in salt may have contributed to the development of complex societies. My fieldwork was fully funded under my advisor’s grant. After conducting fieldwork in northern Ethiopia on the traditional salt industry, analyzing field data and combing those results with library research, I successfully defended my doctorate on August 29, 2008.

Vexations and Health Problems In addition to the problems listed already, I had to deal with family demands and health problems. As soon as I arrived abroad in 1997, my family in Ghana started asking for financial help, a situation most African students studying oversees are familiar with. This meant that I had to find another source of income. In Norway, I delivered newspapers and later worked at a fish-processing factory to earn extra income to help with family demands. As most students from Africa can attest, families at home in Africa do not care whether or not you are a student; they still expect you to help them financially. One particular source of distress for me was when the Norwegian immigration authorities refused to give my wife an extension to stay in Norway. As an American citizen, my wife could stay in Norway without a visa for three months, which she did. We

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were led to believe that she could apply for a visa from inside Norway, but, as it turned out, that was not the case. As a consequence of overstaying her visa, my wife and our three-month-old daughter, Kinla, were deported by the Norwegian authorities to the United States. My health also became, and is still, a source of concern. I started having health problems in 1999, just before I left Norway to join my wife and child in the United States. While I was preparing for my comprehensive exams in 2003 at Simon Fraser University, my right hand swelled with what was subsequently diagnosed as cellulitis. In spite of the swelling and excruciating pain, I wrote my comprehensive exams at the Students with Disabilities Centre, aided by high doses of painkillers. Poor health also prevented me from traveling to Ethiopia in April 2003 to start my data collection, so I spent the time conducting a literature review on the salt trade. My plan was to go to the field the following season, but a few days before departure, my advisor, Dr. D’Andrea, fell ill and the trip was canceled. Unfortunately, all of the arrangements had been made: tickets bought, and my wife and children already dispatched to San Diego, California. I had also resigned my job as the coordinator of the Teaching Support Staff Union and had vacated my apartment. Dr. D’Andrea subsequently made arrangements with the authorities in Ethiopia to allow me to conduct my fieldwork from December 2004 to March 2005. She traveled to Ethiopia a week earlier to set the stage, including obtaining needed permits. I was able to usefully conduct my fieldwork and returned to school in March 2005.

R EWARDS AND L ESSONS While I cannot point to any tangible rewards from archaeology at this time, I know I will be able to do so in the near future. I have come to understand that I must work harder than non-Indigenous and non-African people for everything, but I feel rewarded to know how far along I have come. The thought that someday I will design and implement my own research projects is satisfying and inspiring. Knowing that I am only the second person from my ethnic group and one of very few from northern Ghana with a Ph.D. in archaeology (Dr. Apentiik is the first) is a source of motivation and pride. I expect to use my knowledge to help reconstruct the history of the Bulsa people, and of the African people, as I have always wanted to do. I have come to the conclusion that if you are willing to try, there are people who will help you along and will give you a chance to prove yourself. My success can be partly credited to the initial encouragement and motivation I received from my archaeology lecturers, including L. B. Crossland, Dr. Bredwa-Mensah, Dr. Gavua, Professor Anquandah, Professor Haaland, and Professor D’Andrea. I have learned that it takes a lot more tolerance and hard work to succeed as Indigenous archaeologists. Yes, there are frustrations at every bend, but respect, tolerance, and determination will carry you through. Of course, I wish I had received the funding I needed or had been accepted to the programs of my first choice. That did not happen, but I did not give up. So to those Indigenous students in the pipeline or those thinking of getting on the archaeological train, I can only say: keep working at it and never give up. Communication is very important in the process; nothing should be taken for

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granted, so Indigenous students must endeavor to clearly state their perspectives. Humility never hurts, and willingness to apologize when one is at fault only helps. It is also important to balance personal interests and issues with academic work. You can have a life and still be a good academic; I have been a student leader, public speaker, human rights advocate, community activist, entertainer, radio host, and disc jockey, in addition to being a student—you can Google “Clement Apaak” for proof of that! Throughout my school years in Ghana and during my graduate studies, I always found time to serve others. I served as a student senator of the Simon Fraser University Senate (the first international student to be elected to that position), and Student Society president between 2004 and 2007. I was also the first African graduate student selected as convocation speaker for my graduation class. My awards in advocacy and community service, such as the 2006 International Peace Maker Award, YMCA, Greater Vancouver, Canada, were in recognition of my contributions to the effort for a more peaceful world. For their part, people in academia must understand that not all students have the same opportunities or resources; some are richer than others and have better access to funding. Academics must also keep in mind that students have different experiences based on their sociocultural and historic contexts. As a result, it is necessary to consider the particular backgrounds and circumstances of Indigenous students when decisions regarding acceptance into university programs or funding are being made. The issue of funding is very important to up-and-coming Indigenous archaeologists; thus, institutions should endeavor to provide funding for them when possible. Historically, Indigenous students have limited presence in archaeology programs, but this can be corrected by making more funding available to them. The Bulsa people, my people, do not yet see the benefit of archaeology—not because they do not appreciate their history or their culture, but because those topics are not high on their priority lists. With no access to health care and other basic necessities of life, how can the Bulsa or, by extension, the African people be blamed for relegating history and culture to the background? What is the benefit of studying an ancient culture when the modern descendants do not have food to eat? From a national perspective, these problems partly explain why students are encouraged to enter those professions with prospects for immediate employment—namely, law, business administration, and medicine. Neither the Bulsa people nor my family have any expectations regarding what benefits my chosen area of study will bring. However, I personally hope to help change the misunderstanding and related negativity associated with archaeology in Ghana, and in Africa. More generally, adequate funding for attending graduate school is needed to increase the number of Indigenous archaeologists. The result will be more Indigenous students working with their own people in investigating and documenting their own histories from their own perspectives.

R EFERENCES C ITED Anquandah, J. R. 1982 Rediscovering Ghana’s Past. Longman, Harlow.

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Apaak, C.A. 2008 The Socio-Economic Role of the Salt Trade In Northern Ethiopia. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby. 1999 Change in the Accra Plains during the Late Iron Age (1500–1700): Archaeological Analysis of Okai-Koi Ayawaso Pottery. M.Phil. thesis, University of Bergen, Norway. 1996 Bulsa Architecture and Its Relevance to Archaeology: An Ethnoarchaeologcal Study of Bulsa Traditional Architecture. B.A. honours essay, Department of Archaeology, University of Ghana, Legon. Bredwa-Mensah, Y. 1990 An Archaeological Excavation Conducted at OkaiKoi Hill (Ayawaso) and Its Significance for Iron Age Archaeology in Ghana. M.Phil thesis, Department of Archaeology, University of Ghana, Legon.

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Photo by Juliet Boon

UNDERSTANDING ARCHAEOLOGY FROM A SAMOAN P ERSPECTIVE

Tautala Silauleleioamoa Asaua ver since I was young, I have always had a fascination for the past. This was mostly due to my religious upbringing at home, in the church, and attending Sunday school at the Pacific Islands Presbyterian Church in Newton, Auckland, New Zealand. I often studied stories from the Bible and even remember trying to visualise what it would have been like to live during the times of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, for example, and imagining how they managed to survive daily. I was always fascinated with the many ways in which various cultures in biblical history expressed and manifested their cultures, such as in the construction of beautiful architecture. All these things contributed to my interest in how people lived in the past. Although I had no idea that what I was interested in was called “archaeology,” I knew that any career path I would pursue would have to include my three main interests: history, science, and working outdoors. When I took my first archaeology course at university, I realised I wanted to be an archaeologist. However, at that time I thought I would become a biblical archaeologist,

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because of my love and interest for biblical history. It wasn’t until my first Pacific archaeology class that things changed for me.

STUDYING A RCHAEOLOGY: U NDERGRADUATE YEARS I remember the first time I learned about Pacific archaeology at university. According to archaeological evidence, the Pacific region was the last part of the world to have been settled by humans. I had no idea that those humans, according to archaeologists, were the ancestors of Polynesians—my ancestors! I am of Samoan descent, and I was born and raised in New Zealand. Samoa is an island in Polynesia, in the South Pacific region. Currently, the Samoan archipelago is divided into Samoa (formerly Western Samoa) and American Samoa, due to European colonial events in the late 1800s, although culturally and linguistically we are the same. Archaeological evidence shows Samoa was settled about 3,000 years ago by a group known as Lapita (Davidson 1987). The main evidence to support the existence of the Lapita Cultural Complex is based on a distinct type of pottery, known as Lapita pottery. This Lapita Cultural Complex has a restricted geographic distribution, from the Bismarck archipelago progressing eastward, ending in Samoa. It also has a specific time range for its appearance and distribution (ca. 3,300 to 2,600 years ago). The more I learned about my archaeological past and especially the accomplishments of my ancestors, the more I wanted to specialise in Samoan archaeology. My reactions to the knowledge I obtained from these university classes were mixed. For example, on one level it was so empowering for me to learn that this is what the ancestors of Polynesians had achieved. At the same time, I also became somewhat frustrated because I had learned this at university, and not in my earlier education. I then remember feeling a sense of responsibility and determination to make sure that more Polynesians became aware of this archaeological knowledge, and not just at the university level. This was especially important for me because, although I am a Samoan, I grew up elsewhere. As a Polynesian or a Pacific Islander, I, and others like me, are routinely viewed with negative stereotypes. For example, in the educational sector, we are often seen as low achievers. There are many other examples that I will not list here, but I distinctly remember—during my university years, especially—that such attitudes existed and often became barriers. I even began to question my identity and culture during my undergraduate years, particularly the way cultures are viewed, understood, and taught by anthropologists. I did not realise at the time that the need to be “objective” subtly led me to viewing my own culture from an institutionalised perspective, which became static and synchronic. This added to my own personal struggle in trying to validate my own cultural upbringing and beliefs in relation to what anthropologists and archaeologists thought about my people and my ancestors. It took me a while to understand and accept that even though I was learning about my past from an archaeological perspective, archaeology is but a tool that can offer insight into time periods in which our “oral traditions, myths and legends may be silent” (Davidson 1987). I also came to see that while history in my culture is generally oratory based and takes the form of many myths and legends, it is our way

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of recording the past and should not be denigrated. Archaeology and oral traditions should complement each other, and the two ways of knowing the past should be allowed to coexist, even when they appear to conflict. I didn’t learn this lesson till much later in my professional development.

A RCHAEOLOGY AND G RADUATE S CHOOL AT U NIVERSITY When I reflect on my experience as a Samoan archaeology student in graduate school, I can say that it definitely had its challenges. One factor had to do with being the only Indigenous Pacific student in my archaeology classes. This issue resonated with my Pacific peers, who also had similar experiences, especially in their anthropology courses. There are many reasons that contribute to Pacific students feeling like this—awkward and out of place—possibly related to life experiences, level of maturity, and what we would encounter with other students and some lecturers during our educational experiences. The reality is that at the graduate level at the University of Auckland (and other universities in New Zealand) there are not many Maori or Pacific students in archaeology (or anthropology); although there are a fair number of undergraduates who do have an interest in this discipline, I know that somewhere along the line they tend to feel discouraged (as I did). Unfortunately, this sometimes results in students taking courses in other disciplines or even leaving archaeology and anthropology altogether. I remember walking into my classroom on my first day as a graduate student. I expected to be the only Islander there, so I had mentally prepared myself for this. Everyone was having full-on conversations, and as I sat down everyone stopped. Maybe this was because no one knew who I was—it was obvious everyone else in that room knew one another. But I could see them all looking at each other, so I couldn’t help but think that they probably thought I was in the wrong class (a common mistake on the first day). To put everyone at ease, I asked what course this was. After someone told me, I said, “I’m in the right class,” and gradually everyone started their conversations again (I even remember seeing one student who looked surprised when I said I was in the right class). Another awkward moment was in a different archaeology class. The lecturer went around the room asking students to introduce themselves; as soon as it came to be my turn, the lecturer started explaining the curriculum for that semester. I felt so embarrassed because I saw the other students were looking at me, having noticed that I had been missed. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided I would drop out of my degree straight after the class ended. When I look back, I wish I had dropped out of that class because it ended up being the most uncomfortable course I took, with other “misunderstandings” between myself and the lecturer. But the reason I stayed in this course and in the degree program was because I remembered how I felt during the times I volunteered in archaeology projects in American Samoa and Samoa and saw the need to have more of my own people involved in this field; I remember also wanting to be the voice for my community and my culture in the world of academia. I have a passion for archaeology, and I felt it was my responsibility and duty to ensure that archaeological knowledge became more accessible to my community. There were even moments in my graduate

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years when I had to remind myself that I too had a right to study archaeology, especially as it was another way to study my Samoan past. One of the most difficult things I found at the graduate level was class discussion. The graduate classes are smaller than undergraduate ones. In some classes we were required to participate in class discussions and even to give presentations; a percentage of our grades was even based on these. I found it quite difficult to present my ideas, because I felt intimidated and believed my peers to be much smarter than me, since they could articulate their views more clearly. Plus, my cultural upbringing never really allowed room for discussions, especially with people in authority, which in this case would have been the lecturer. So, I found it difficult to adjust from my cultural experience to an academic setting. I also didn’t want to appear stupid in front of my classmates and the lecturer. As a result, I would not participate in class discussions, and often dreaded going to class. At times I would simply not show up, because it was so uncomfortable for me to talk in front of people, especially in my archaeology courses. Sometimes it was difficult to express my cultural experiences and cultural knowledge and to find how they related to archaeology. In one of my classes, each person was required to contribute at least two things to class discussions. When everyone else gave their contributions, and I didn’t, there was such an awkward atmosphere in the room while everyone waited for my contribution. I remember wishing the class would be over and even pretending to be invisible. This was a complete contrast to my Pacific Studies classes where I was able to engage with the lecturer and my classmates and to express my thoughts freely and without problems, and even participate in critical discussions about readings and course topics. Why was there a difference? I was more comfortable with my own peers, as this is what I had been used to and surrounded with my whole life. Even my lecturers were Pacific, which really helped me feel at ease in being open and unafraid to make a mistake or sound stupid. When discussing cultural ideas and cultural values within the academic context, it didn’t feel awkward because everyone understood. My Pacific lecturers were able to identify with me because they shared similar experiences in their studies and naturally played a mentor role for their students; they helped us be at ease with contextualising our cultural knowledge within a Western academic framework. This is not to say that all my archaeology lecturers made me feel uncomfortable. I got to know those who became my supervisors and advisors on a different level, which helped me to overcome some of the challenges I faced in my first year of grad school. I think most of my difficulties had to do with learning how to deal with my own cultural values and beliefs within a different context, such as viewing my past from a Western perspective. It was difficult for me to translate my knowledge of Samoan culture into archaeological language, especially since oral traditions, myths, and legends are a huge part of Samoan identity and culture. Archaeology’s focus on seeing the archaeological record from a very theoretical perspective is very different from Samoan cultural understanding—something I had difficulty articulating during graduate school. In my final year in graduate school, I did the research for my master’s degree. I chose to look at how Samoan oral traditions can be used in archaeology. Earlier archaeologists

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who worked in Samoa had actually collected a lot of traditional accounts and tried to include them in their research. I struggled with my topic, because I did not know who I was writing my research for. I wanted to make sure I was objective and sounded like an archaeology student. At the same time, I wanted to present what I knew about Samoan culture appropriately in an archaeological context. After all, I am a Samoan, so I wanted to represent my culture well. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied with the result. When I look back at my research, I feel that I didn’t do a good enough job in making my arguments clear. I feel I failed my “Samoan-ness.” Several senior people I know in archaeology told me not to let this one research project affect me, because at the master’s level, we’re not expected to know everything. They also pointed out that there is always the opportunity to revise your work and get it published. One Ph.D. graduate said that even after earning a Ph.D. you still don’t know anything, but you’re expected to keep researching and keep learning. This gave me some comfort and helped me to get over my dissatisfaction with my master’s research. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was selling out my own culture. One of the highlights of my university years was meeting an archaeologist who had worked in Samoa in the 1960s. I had read some of the work he had done in Samoa and discovered he was a professor at the university I attended. I wanted to meet him and ask him many questions about his experiences in Samoa. Because I knew this professor was well known, and had made major contributions in Pacific archaeology, I was nervous about introducing myself to him. Eventually I managed to meet him, and the enthusiasm he showed for my interest in Samoan archaeology gave an extra boost to my wanting to continue in this field. He said to me that there is no point in doing archaeology if you do not have the passion to drive you and motivate you to be in this field. Over the years, I have maintained a really good relationship with this professor, who helped me immensely throughout my studies. What really touched me about him was that he understood Samoan culture and knew very well that some of my behaviour (such as a lack of response to his questions and the tendency to always agree with him) were culturally based. It made a huge difference that he was understanding, patient, and, especially, encouraging. It was a huge relief not to have to justify myself, since he already had that understanding of Samoan culture from his own work in Samoa and elsewhere in Polynesia. I would often visit the Auckland War Memorial Museum to look at some of the artifacts recovered during the 1960s investigations in Samoa. Seeing the material culture often left a profound impression on me, knowing that it was made by my ancestors, and also that not many people had the opportunity to see what I got to see. I have lost count of how many visits I’ve made to this museum. My last visit was to search for a specific field notebook, and as I was looking through the field notes, I noticed how carefully organised the notes were, and how everything was there. I suddenly felt emotional for two reasons. First, here I was, a Samoan, interested in archaeology, looking through these field notes close to 40 years after they were written; and second, I realised that if it weren’t for these archaeologists who went to Samoa in the 1960s, if they hadn’t cared about my archaeological past, would I, as a Samoan archaeologist, have all this data to refer to? It was then that I felt a deep gratitude to and appreciation for the people who had cared about my past; I thanked them for showing such conscientiousness in preserving aspects of my

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Excavating at Fatu-ma-Futi, American Samoa. Photo by Frederique Valentin.

archaeological past. The professor whom I thanked in person had said to me, “Well, it was important for us to record all of this, because we believe it is the Samoan people who need to continue this work.” This comment really confirmed for me that this is what archaeology should be about.

L IFE AFTER U NIVERSITY I often sought out volunteer work while I was studying, specifically in Samoa, as this was my interest. Only American Samoa had archaeology projects, as it is an American territory and has laws protecting archaeological sites (specifically, Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act). When I first volunteered there for a month in 2003, my focus was only on getting field experience and learning practical methods of recording archaeological sites. During my graduate years I also participated in other projects in Samoa, with other universities from around the world. However, it wasn’t until an opportunity came up in American Samoa, after I’d finished my master’s degree, that I began to have a different view of what archaeology really meant to me. Here I was able to begin to address some of the issues I had faced as a graduate student—namely, what does archaeology mean for me as a Samoan, and how can I, as a Samoan archaeologist, make this field accessible to my community in a language that is meaningful to my community? The topic of Indigenous communities’ involvement in archaeology was not really addressed during my studies; after finishing my master’s, I came to see this as a really important topic to include as part of any archaeology degree. I am really grateful for all the opportunities I have had to work with different archaeologists, to see how they do archaeology in American Samoa and Samoa. Each experi-

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ence provided me with new insight into and understanding of what kind of archaeology I was interested in—an archaeology that really involves the community and where we archaeologists are in constant communication and consultation with the people whose history we are uncovering. Often we encountered people in the community who had no interest in our work, but it did not stop us from keeping them informed of what we were doing. These experiences taught me how to approach my community—which is especially important now that I have moved on and am now currently teaching archaeology at the National University of Samoa, in Samoa.

A RCHAEOLOGY AT THE N ATIONAL U NIVERSITY OF S AMOA I have been working for two years now at the National University of Samoa (NUS). In 2006, an archaeology program was introduced, originally developed by an archaeology professor from Gotland University in Sweden. I was hired to continue teaching and to develop the program further. Ever since I studied archaeology at university, I had always said to my close friends that one day I would go to Samoa and develop an archaeology program at NUS. This had always been my passion and desire, to return to my roots and make this discipline accessible to my community. Fulfilling this desire occurred much sooner than I anticipated, as I had imagined it would happen well after I had a Ph.D. Fortunately, there were other people in other parts of the world who shared the same vision and set the foundation that has enabled me to live and work in Samoa. My experiences so far in teaching archaeology to Samoans are very interesting and rewarding. Most of my students express an interest in archaeology and often are amazed at the things their ancestors did in the past, things that have left a lasting impression and sense of pride in these students. The biggest challenge I have faced is presenting archaeology in a way that is meaningful to them—that is, showing them how their cultural knowledge and understanding is relevant for understanding what archaeologists encounter in the archaeological record. While this seems like an easy task, in reality it is difficult because I am dealing with a somewhat younger generation being influenced by the fast effects of globalisation and Westernisation in Samoa. Even though I have been teaching archaeology for two years, I am still learning about my role and how to define it. Archaeology is still something new in Samoa, and I am currently the only archaeologist here, so trying to understand what my role is in relation to the current needs of archaeology in my country continues to be a challenge for me. However, I recognise my position is important in that it is an opportunity to involve more Samoans in this field. At the same time, I need to start addressing archaeological issues on the national level, such as creating a national database of sites of archaeological and cultural importance, and working toward stronger legislation to protect archaeological sites, something that does not currently exist in Samoa. These are major efforts relating to the public promotion of and education in archaeology. In order to ensure archaeology will have a future in Samoa, it needs to be done in conjunction with community involvement and through solidifying relationships with the relevant government ministries that deal with archaeological sites.

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I am very grateful to and appreciative of all the people who have helped me along the way, and who continue to do so. When I reflect on my time as a student and on my current position in Samoa, I see that what has really helped me through is support from my parents, siblings, and close friends throughout my university life. It is a rare thing for Samoans to be involved in archaeology, so for my parents to be my biggest supporters throughout my studies (and even now) has been a major motivating factor. Whenever I talk with my students—including Pacific students—who are considering archaeology as a career, I always advise them that it’s really important to keep communicating with their parents, to help them understand what this interest and passion for archaeology is about, because it is not a common profession for Pacific people. I even encourage students to really get out of their comfort zone and meet people, introduce themselves to their lecturers and professors, and let them know they’re really keen and serious about archaeology. Once an instructor sees that a student has a sincere interest, help may be given in ways unimaginable at the time. Doing archaeology here requires that critical conversations be had with Pacific people about recovering and dealing with things from the past, including human remains, as well as how our ancestors would feel about this. My first response is always related to my spiritual convictions: that there is no greater power than God, and that this knowledge gives me faith and courage that no harm will come to me whenever I do archaeology. Also, I explain that from my experience, it’s really important to practise Samoan protocol and make sure you always seek the permission of the living descendants before conducting any archaeology. You must make sure you explain your work, why you are doing this, and how this knowledge can help us learn more about our ancestors and our past. In a way, this is also seeking permission from our ancestors, because we are going through their living descendants. I have talked about this with my father, and asked him about what I should do when I come across human remains. My father advised me to be respectful and to treat human remains the same as I would a living being, and just begin by saying something along the lines of, “Faamalie atu, ona ua a faina oe ona o lou suesuega,” which translates to “Please forgive me for disturbing you, I am doing my research which is. . . .”1 My father also advised me to explain exactly what I am doing, and to recite a prayer afterwards. I know this practice may seem strange for other cultures, but for the students with whom I have talked and who have asked this question, this is actually an important practise, because for them, encountering human remains is a serious issue, culturally and spiritually. This advice would often put many of them at ease.

S HARING L ESSONS L EARNED My experiences thus far have allowed me to see things from the viewpoint of an archaeology student, a Samoan doing archaeological research in my community, and a teacher of archaeology in Samoa. To summarise and offer suggestions for Pacific students, and archaeology professors who have Pacific students, I would say it comes down to communication, empathy, understanding, and patience. What made a difference for me as a student was the openness and approachability of the lecturer. I needed to develop the

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Pulemelei Project, Palauli Savaii, Samoa. Photo by Epifania Suafo’a Taua’i.

courage to get out of my comfort zone and approach lecturers, so this often started off as sending e-mails to lecturers rather than seeing them in person. Eventually I was able to talk to my professors, which led me to being able to express my thoughts, but also to explain to my lecturers that sometimes I had trouble speaking. With this understanding, changes occurred in my relationship with some of my archaeology professors. I also learned to be proactive in keeping informed of who was doing research in Samoa, and I would send e-mails introducing myself to archaeologists working in Samoa, asking if I could volunteer on their projects; many times the answer was yes. This also led to other opportunities that I never would have had if I had kept to myself. I have been very blessed in meeting archaeologists who have had a sincere interest in my professional development and have helped along the way, even with my position at NUS. I think that an element of being an archaeologist, irrespective of our background, is to ask ourselves why are we in this field, and how can we make sure that the knowledge we get from the communities we work in is given back to the people it belongs to. And lastly, as a long-term vision, we must ask how we can help in the areas of capacity building. We need to ensure that the younger generations of the communities we research feel they too have the right to participate in this discipline, and be given the opportunity to contribute their knowledge, something that will make the archaeological record richer and more applicable for the present living communities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the editor of this project for the opportunity to share my archaeological experiences so far. It has been an interesting journey trying to decide what

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aspects to write about. I also thank Emeritus Professor Roger Green, who has always been a great supporter of my efforts to be an archaeologist. To the many archaeologists whom I have met and have formed friendships with, I thank you for sharing your work and life experiences and allowing me to learn many things, and for always being a source of encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge all the archaeologists who have worked in Samoa from the 1950s to the present, for their work in documenting the Samoan archaeological past. Without these early researches, I am not sure what future Samoan archaeologists would have to look at. Last but not least, I thank my parents and my brothers and sisters, who have always been so patient with me, even showing immense support for my wanting to do archaeology. Faafetai tele lava.

N OTE 1 This does not really capture the deeper meaning of the statement.

R EFERENCE C ITED Davidson, J. 1987 The Prehistory of New Zealand. Longman Paul, Auckland.

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R AISE YOUR H EAD AND B E P ROUD OJIBWEKWE

Sonya L. Atalay ome might argue that we need to cut ourselves off from our heart, emotions, or spiritual selves to succeed in the academic world, particularly so when engaged in a discipline such as archaeology, which involves the often opposing world views of Indigenous and Western ways of thinking and viewing the world. I disagree. My experience in becoming an archaeologist has been one of what Native educator Gregory Cajete (1993) refers to as “hunting”—that is, hunting to be a real person, a complete being. Emotional, spiritual, and intellectual struggles play a critical role in that journey, as they provide us with constant opportunities to develop and hone the coping skills and tools necessary to do the important work needed in our communities and in the world more broadly. This is a shared truth that applies not only to Indigenous archaeologists, but to all people, whatever their profession.

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My path to archaeology has not been an easy one. It was filled with difficult, challenging, and painful events. Reflecting upon those events now, I view them as turning points in which I learned and grew tremendously, as a scholar, an activist, and a human being. Each of the sections below begins with a quote that typifies a learning experience or important period along my path to becoming an archaeologist. In recounting these experiences, my aim is not to focus on the difficulty of becoming an archaeologist, but rather to demonstrate that difficulty and challenge are gifts that build our intellect, our spirit, and our emotional aspect of self and community. Through these experiences, we and our communities gain strength and wisdom, and become complete beings.

“Archaeology? Why don’t you choose something that’s interesting?” Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my path to archaeology started with my sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Barbara Eiseman. She gave me a book about ancient Rome and Pompeii, and suggested that I read it during class free time. That book was the first of many she gave me, but it had the greatest impact. I was fascinated by the images of that other world, and the way people lived in modern-day Rome, with the remnants of their past all around them. It is interesting that my curiosity and fascination were not predominantly about the past, but about the way the people and cultures of the past were alive, remembered, and celebrated by contemporary people in Italy. Through that book I was introduced to archaeology for the first time. Eventually, I decided to study archaeology—not because of a thrill of digging or discovering what was hidden beneath the ground, but rather out of an interest in the past, and the way it lives and breathes in the present. As I came to recognize much later during my early college years, archaeology is a tool through which I could connect with people and their cultures—in the past, present, and future. Unlike many of the people I met in undergraduate and graduate school, I was not a child who dreamed about being an archaeologist. Although I found Ms. Eiseman’s book about Roman prehistory fascinating, I never knew that archaeology was an actual “career” option. Where I grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan, people didn’t go to college—they were factory workers and laborers, or simply unemployed. In a graduating high school class of over 500 students, fewer than a handful went to college or received any type of post–high school training or education. This may explain why it wasn’t until the first-year orientation of my pre-med program in college (at the University of Michigan) that I realized I could study the people and culture I’d read about back in Ms. Eiseman’s sixth-grade class. In choosing biology, chemistry, and other required courses, I saw a listing in the course guide for “Ancient Greek Archaeology” in the Classics Department. I remember the orientation advisor that day telling me that this was only the “C” section of the course guide (alphabetized under “Classics Department”), and she urged me to keep looking for a course that was “really interesting,” as it would be my only elective that semester. I laugh now realizing that she obviously didn’t find archaeology very appealing, but the course description, which mentioned the Minoans and Myceneans and the study of their culture and lifeways, sounded perfectly fascinating to me. A month after that day in summer orientation, I attended my first college lecture: “Ancient Greek Archaeology.”

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During the first few years of college, I’d heard from many professors how the demanding life of a physician would never allow me time to have a family. As is the case with many Native people, spending time with family and contributing something useful to the wider community were important goals for me. As I met with archaeology professors who returned from fieldwork in the Greek islands and rural villages outside of Rome, it seemed that archaeology would not only allow me to have a family and explore these fascinating areas of the world, but to do so together with a family. Through the work-study program on campus, I met and worked with several women who had families and maintained active programs of fieldwork; this encouraged and inspired me. I saw those same professors return from the field to begin anew their public archaeology, educational, and museum work—each of them with a passion and concern for sharing their knowledge with a wider community. Women such as Laura Talalay and Marti Lu Allen (who both worked at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology) encouraged me to write children’s activity books and to develop curricular materials that made the past relevant for diverse public audiences, and they encouraged me to explore ways of doing the same for Native American cultures and publics. The importance of this early positive experience, the women I had as role models, and the opportunities these mentors provided for creative work and taking my ideas and contributions seriously cannot be overstated. These women created an environment in which I felt I had something to contribute—something valuable that had meaning in people’s lives. It was this hands-on learning and mentoring that fueled my passion for archaeology, much more than the lectures and memorization of site plans or specific dates for Minoan pottery jars. Through those positive experiences I felt the real possibilities of doing archaeology that interested people and was relevant for developing understanding among people from very different cultural and economic backgrounds. Creating knowledge that is relevant and interesting to people—be it descendant communities, stakeholders, or the wider public—is something that remains with me and continues to guide my archaeological research and practice.

“I’m going over there to dig up their bones” My experience working at the Kelsey Museum, creating educational materials and bringing the past to life for others, prompted me to consider the critical role that archaeology could play in Native communities. Yet as a freshman, I was embarrassed to talk about my interest in archaeology around other Native people on campus, and I deliberately tried to hide my interest in archaeology at powwows and Native ceremonies, not only when talking to elders and community activists, but also around my friends and other college-age students. This was 1987, three years before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)—which legislates the return of human remains, grave goods, and sacred objects to federally recognized Native Nations—would be put into law. At that time, many Native American activist organizations, individuals, and communities were openly voicing their outrage at the colonial practices of archaeology, and were demanding different treatment for their ancestral remains and greater control over their cultural heritage. In such a context, the responses I often received from friends, family, and others

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in the Native community when they learned about my interest in archaeology were understandable. The conversation was most often a slight variation of the same theme: “What are you studying?”“Archaeology.” “Sick! Why? You like being a grave-robber?” This was followed by the looks, comments, and one-word write-offs: “Apple!” (red on the outside, white on the inside), “Sell-out,”“Wanna-be,” or worse—an eye roll, smirk, and silence. There was no room for discussion, no space to talk about the ways I felt our communities could benefit from archaeology and the ways that we could utilize the tools of archaeology, make them our own. Eventually I learned to talk about my studies by jokingly saying, “I’ve decided to turn the tables—I’m going over there to dig up their bones.” This was always met with laughter and a relaxed acceptance. This single comment worked because it got to the heart of what is the matter with archaeology—the power imbalance. In my experience, a great deal of the objection of Native people to archaeology relates to power imbalances and the related lack of respect that has characterized much of archaeological practice. Colonization ripped away Native peoples’ most basic human rights, including those involved in maintaining the dignity to control our own destiny. Management of one’s own cultural heritage is an important part of self-determination and sovereignty, and with the development of archaeology this aspect of Indigenous selfdetermination and sovereignty was destroyed. The power to control Native American sites, ancestral remains, and other aspects of tangible and intangible cultural heritage was taken over by archaeologists who came to see themselves as stewards of the archaeological record. It is this unjust power imbalance that removed control and decision-making power outside the hands of Native communities and into those of archaeologists that is at the heart of the struggle between archaeology and Native peoples. This point about power imbalances is a critical lesson that remained with me throughout my education and continues to inform my research and practice as an archaeologist. It is also one of the essential points about archaeology that we, as Indigenous people, must continue to communicate to our non-Indigenous colleagues. Considering this situation more broadly, I believe the knowledge gained from Native experiences related to such struggles as sovereignty, self-determination, and the respect and rebalancing of power that accompanies these plays a critical role in decolonizing contemporary archaeology on a larger scale. While sovereignty and self-determination are particularly important to Native Americans and other Indigenous and colonized peoples, the broader issues of respect and the power relations inherent in archaeological practice are relevant for local communities living near sites or affected by archaeological research around the world. In this way, the lessons learned from listening to and examining the experiences of Native Americans and other Indigenous people contribute to a more ethical, socially just archaeological practice globally.

“NAGPRA is just a political tool used by Indians to get back at white people” In joking about shifting the power balance and “digging up” European graves, I’d found an effective way to keep my friends and family from writing off archaeology long enough for me to talk about the importance of working to change the discipline from the inside.

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At the same time, I was beginning to realize that pursuing my intellectual interests in European and Near Eastern archaeology had buffered me, in many ways, from the quagmire and fury of archaeological practice in North America. While I’d already come to understand that, within archaeology, the construction of knowledge and the ethics of its application are critical for colonized communities, as an undergraduate studying archaeology outside of North America I’d not yet been engaging actively in some of the most difficult debates and struggles between Native people and archaeologists. However, when I moved across the country to begin graduate school at Arizona State University, it was immediately clear that I would have no choice but to face head-on the social and political aspects of archaeological research. During my first year of graduate study, I encountered open hostility toward Native people from one of the professors teaching a core first-year graduate course. It was 1993 and NAGPRA was fairly new legislation. When questions and discussion of reburial and repatriation came up in class discussion, the professor confidently told the class, “NAGPRA is nothing more than a political tool used by Indians to get back at white people.” As all the students in the class turned toward me to look for a response, it was clear that I could not, and indeed must not, remain on the sidelines of this debate. Of course, the statement of the professor angered and outraged me, but it was also upsetting to see the responses of my peers. I felt that NAGPRA was a response to an ethical struggle that belonged to all of us, not only Native people, and up to that point I’d believed that my graduate school cohort felt the same. Perhaps they did but saw it as my role to offer a Native perspective. Whatever the reason, it was clear that throughout my graduate and professional career, I would be expected to offer a Native voice or perspective. While I recognized the importance of this role, it was also incredibly frustrating that, unlike my peers, I did not have the luxury of simply focusing attention on topics because of my intellectual interest or curiosity. I realized that I would need to devote a considerable amount of time and effort to engage with the academic debates and scholarship related to North American archaeology in order to effectively and responsibly take on this new role. This is a shared experience for many Native people and others from “minority” groups, who consistently take on double or triple duty compared to their peers and colleagues. In addition to being students and scholars, they also need to be activists and mentors, work that is very often not recognized or rewarded within the current academic tenure system. Ironically, at the same time that I felt a strong desire and responsibility to take a stand on behalf of Native communities and to provide a Native voice in the classroom on issues such as reburial and repatriation (topics I knew little about from an academic standpoint), other Native graduate students outside of the Anthropology Department treated me as a sell-out, as someone who was not contributing to Native causes because of my choice to study archaeology. What I remember most about that experience is the extreme loneliness and isolation. I was living far away from my home and support system in Michigan for the first time. As an undergraduate student, I had found a way to build understanding about archaeology among Native friends and peers, and was able to obtain the support I needed to succeed. In graduate school, that support system was absent and, worse yet, some of my

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encounters with other Native graduate students had become just as hostile and debilitating as my experiences in the classroom. I remained in that graduate program for three semesters, then dropped out and returned home to Michigan. In those three long semesters, I learned that racism and ill-informed, insensitive perspectives related to Indigenous issues, such as that professor’s views on NAGPRA, exist everywhere. To face them effectively, it is critical to have a support system in place to help process and respond to such circumstances. This may be via a group on campus, a few people in your workplace, an e-mail listserv, or several colleagues who have regular phone-meetings—I’ve found successful support in all of these formats. Each has offered a sounding board to talk about troubling situations, a place to vent outrage and frustration, and a safe space to develop and give voice to solutions or responses to a range of challenges. The importance of seeking out or building such a support system cannot be overstated, and I would urge everyone who reads this to search for, create, and nurture a supportive shared community. If there’s nothing established where you work or study, create it yourself. Start small; find a mentor and become a mentor for someone else.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the manifold insecurities of Indians in this country and I don’t have to, because I don’t work here ” During the required first-year core method and theory class at Arizona State, the one in which my graduate student cohort was told that NAGPRA was nothing more than a political tool, the same professor uttered the italicized quote above, expressing his complete lack of concern about Native Americans’ critiques of archaeology. I was again angry, hurt, and unsure of how to approach this situation. Again I was in need of a supportive community to help address such racism. However, beyond reinforcing the importance of a strong support system, this particular comment also raised another key issue that has remained a focal point of my research in Indigenous archaeology and, more broadly, in my fieldwork in Turkey and elsewhere. In hearing the professor’s proclamation in class that day, it was clear that he felt exempt from respect, ethics, and issues of human rights raised by Native American critiques of archaeology. He indicated that these issues were not his concern because he worked outside of North America. This was a critical turning point in my intellectual development, because it reinforced the important role of descendant communities and stakeholders worldwide. The critiques raised by Native Americans are not only North American issues, but central tenets of doing good archaeology anywhere in the world; and through the experience of hearing his angry, bitter words, I began to see the importance of presenting these issues as having global relevance. As a result, the role of the past in the present, the political and social context of our work as archaeologists, our ethical behavior as researchers, and the importance of making our work relevant and accessible to local audiences and a diverse public became central to my research. It remains so still. Now, in teaching archaeology, I consistently stress that regardless of where we conduct research, it is a privilege to study someone’s past, not our arrogantly assumed right or something we are able to do by exploiting political or economic power imbalances. This is a critical example of the ways in which Indigenous archaeology has applicability

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to inform all of archaeological practice globally, not only those working on an Indigenous land base or with Indigenous communities.

“She’s more useful and interesting to us if she’s studying Native American stuff” Certainly I’d faced some difficult times during those three semesters of graduate school at Arizona State, yet after dropping out and returning back to Michigan, my interest in archaeology remained. A year later I decided to give graduate school another try and applied to two other anthropology departments. I was accepted to one and rejected at the other. A friend and colleague who was a junior faculty member (and the only Native faculty person) in the department that rejected my application shared with me the reason why my application was not accepted. She explained how she’d sat in the meeting listening to the faculty discuss my application. The main point of contention was that I was proposing to conduct graduate research on the pottery and clay use of the Neolithic Near East, not Native North American archaeology. When she asked why my choice in topics was a problem, she was told that I’d be more “useful and interesting” as a candidate if I studied Native America. My friend was shocked—I wasn’t. I’d already experienced this issue in other contexts and had come to realize that many archaeologists envisioned the role of Native Americans in archaeology as translators, as contacts who can “get”the wider Native community to “trust them,” or as negotiators who can facilitate their research agenda. Why should a Native person be judged on the basis of usefulness while others are judged on the merits of their scholarship? Are we not also expected or allowed to have intellectual interests about the past and archaeology? I strongly object to the idea that all Native people are anti-archaeology, as it implies a strong anti-intellectual inclination on their part. Perpetuating the idea that Native people simply dislike or don’t understand the benefits of archaeology removes the actions of archaeologists from the equation, and relegates to the background the power imbalances and ethical issues that lie at the heart of Indigenous critiques of archaeology. In my experience, it is the way in which research has been conducted that is at issue. While there are certainly Native Americans (as well as other groups, Indigenous and not) who object to excavation of burials, there are also some Native Americans and entire Native communities who value and desire archaeological research, including excavation and even the study of human remains, for a number of reasons. Beyond the issue of the “usefulness” of Native people as archaeologists, this situation raises the issue of choice. Why should it be assumed, or required, that I should want to study Native America, while the majority of archaeologists studying Native North America are not Native people? Yet it’s not questioned that a white American or European might not want to study her own history/culture, or that she might have a very genuine and passionate interest in Native North America. I have a friend who summarizes this brilliantly by asking: “Why must those who the academy sees as ‘the other’ be forced to study ‘the self’to be relevant?”Ironically, the opposite side of this experience is true for Native people also: many are told their work is not valid or rigorous precisely because they study their own culture. In both cases, it is clear that Native persons who choose to

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study archaeology often unfairly face a different set of questions and standards relating to their career options and interests, indicating that the privilege of choice and the burden of expectation remain unequally distributed in our discipline.

“It must be horrible to know you’re only here because of affirmative action” As mentioned above, one graduate program rejected my application but the other accepted me; this was the University of California at Berkeley. In January 1996, I attended my first semester of graduate study there. Overall, my experience at Berkeley was very positive and enriching, yet there were also challenging and difficult times. One of the most upsetting occurred during my first semester, when a fellow graduate student said directly to me: “It must be horrible to know you’re only here because of affirmative action.” For those who aren’t familiar with affirmative action in the United States, it is a system designed to remedy past discrimination and eliminate current and future discrimination; it usually includes positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. The belief that we, as Native scholars, are not intellectually equal to our peers is a serious issue faced by many “underrepresented minorities” during their graduate and professional careers. The assumption is often made that I was accepted to the university as part of an attempt to make institutions of higher education more diverse, not because of the caliber of my research or the work that I’d conducted. I thought this perception would fade as affirmative action programs in the United States were dismantled in many states (in California it was legally banned in 1996), yet the perception remains, and followed me into my professional academic career as I entered the job market. While on the job market, the expectation seemed to be that I wasn’t as qualified as other candidates, nor my research as rigorous as theirs. Yet when my CV or job talk was strong and polished, comments and questions of my authenticity as a “real Indian” sometimes arose—the implication being: “Real Indians” aren’t supposed to succeed or do well. I don’t need to discuss further the enormous problems inherent in such thinking and action. What’s important to ask is: How can we address and change such stereotypes and racist thinking? In all of the talk and debate about affirmative action, the problem to highlight is not whether someone has benefited from affirmative action, but the belief that once a Native person “gets in the door” as a university student or junior faculty member, that individual is on an equal playing field. As I’ve tried to demonstrate through sharing my experiences above, this is often not the case; double- and triple-duty expectations without formal reward in the system keep the “playing field” strongly uneven. As a new faculty member at Indiana University, I find myself constantly concerned about the collaborative research I do with tribes. Much of this research is related to the very important issue of so-called “culturally unidentifiable human remains”and is a very contentious and highly politicized issue currently. I worry that my commitment to working with my community on this issue will have negative effects on my bid for tenure. Through our ceremonies and traditional teachings, I renew my energy and gather the strength to keep working, even when the

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path is a very frightening one. While I’ve learned to accept that others might view me as nothing more than an affirmative action token, I’ve also found that those same colleagues are not aware of the added pressures and responsibilities we must carry during graduate school and in the workplace. This is something that I hope will change as we share our experiences—something this book will help to attain. Lastly, in dealing more broadly with being treated as a “token” and insinuations that I’m somehow less of a scholar, I’ve found solace by reminding myself that the quality of my research will eventually be appreciated by my colleagues and peers. In speaking with other non-minority faculty members, I’ve found—much to my surprise—that although they don’t have to deal with being viewed as a token minority, they also have their own worries and insecurities to face. I’ve spoken with several colleagues who are from poor or working-class backgrounds, who are also the first in their family to attend college, and they seem to share a similar sense of self-doubt about their abilities and “right” to be in the academy. Once again, I feel that finding a community or group of friends or colleagues with whom to share our experiences and frustrations is extremely helpful.

“Raise your head and be proud Ojibwekwe” I end this essay by sharing one final reflection about my experiences as an Indigenous archaeologist. Throughout this paper I’ve described some of the challenges and painful experiences I faced on this path. I cherish these experiences and view them as powerful gifts that continue to improve the work I do on behalf of our Native ancestors, our contemporary communities, and the generations to come. These challenges have helped me to build powerful medicine that can be used to ease the struggle and strengthen the accomplishments of those who are just starting on the path toward learning and preserving cultural heritage in communities all around the globe. Perspectives about archaeology and Indigenous peoples are not monolithic, nor are they constant. The spectrum of views by archaeologists and Native peoples are diverse and continually in flux; thus, as with all things in life, some days continue to be tougher than others. I have memories of being a young undergraduate student ridiculed by Native colleagues, friends, and family about being a “grave digger”; but I also remember the happiness and pride in my work that comes when elders introduce me at ceremonies by saying, “This is Dr. Atalay—she’s an archaeologist.” Of course, things are not always positive and glowing from my perspective as an archaeologist or a Native person—challenging days remain. On the difficult days, I turn to a memory that keeps me inspired, and it is that memory I want to share with you in closing. In 1999, I received a Fulbright fellowship to spend nearly two years in Turkey researching clay and cooking practices at the 9,000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük and the surrounding rural villages. Before heading out of the country, I went to a community powwow in Michigan. Several hundred elders, spiritual leaders, and community members joined in dancing and drumming during an honor dance in my name. Several of my friends from college presented me with a Pendleton blanket in recognition of my receipt of the Fulbright fellowship. As I led the group around the stadium, wearing that beautiful

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Pendleton, one of the elders in the crowd yelled out: “Raise your head and be proud Ojibwekwe” (translated as Ojibwe woman). That, more than anything else, is the advice that keeps me moving ahead on this challenging path of being an Indigenous archaeologist. If there is a message I have for others considering this field, it would be to read this collection of essays and do your best to learn, feel, and share in the experiences offered here, keeping mindful that you will gain wisdom and strength from them, and will then take steps forward to have your own experiences. It is through this ongoing process of spiraling movement and experience that positive change is born and our communities across the globe will come to live in balance and harmony.

R EFERENCE C ITED Cajete, G. 1993 Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Kivaki Press, Durango, Colorado.

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S EARCHING FOR I DENTITY THROUGH A RCHAEOLOGY

Kevin Brownlee

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y interest in archaeology extends to my young childhood. While my perspectives have changed over the years, I see archaeology as my profession and passion.

E ARLY Y EARS My parents met in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada, in 1972. My mother was working at the Norway House hospital as a nurse soon after she finished training. Her background was Scottish, and she grew up near Rivers Manitoba, a small farming community in rural Manitoba. My father worked at the hospital and met my mother. He was born and raised in Norway House in the adjacent Métis1 settlement. His background was a mixture of Cree, Ojibway, and Scottish. My birth parents decided that it was best I be raised in a fam-

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ily with two parents and siblings, so at ten days old I was adopted into a non-Aboriginal family in Winnipeg. Ever since I can remember, I was told that I was adopted and that my father was Cree from northern Manitoba and my mother was Scottish. My adopted family included me, an older brother (my adopted parents’ biological son), and a sister who was also adopted and of Aboriginal background. I was always interested in my birth-father’s Cree heritage. As it happened, an uncle of mine, Don McMaster, was an avocational archaeologist and would collect artifacts from southern Manitoba. He was a teacher and school principal during his career, and he was always engaged in outdoor activities, including hunting, fishing, and backpacking. My parents were not involved in these activities, but they supported my interest. My uncle was also interested in Aboriginal history and how things were done in the past. He had learned how to make baskets, make cordage from plant fiber, start fires with a bow drill, and tan hides; he even had a tipi that he would set up on his property southwest of Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. At the age of seven, I was visiting my grandmother in Souris Manitoba at a family reunion. My uncle Don was there and took his kids and me out “collecting artifacts” from farmers’ fields near Souris. I found my first arrowhead and lots of stone tools, and tons of bison bones (although some may have been cow). I came back with pockets full of stuff. I was so excited to find the tools Aboriginal people had used hundreds or thousands of years ago. My interest in archaeology continued to grow, as did my interest in how things were done in the past: How did they tan hides before the use of chemicals? What were my ancestors’ lives like back a hundred years ago or two thousand years ago? I would read books on Aboriginal life and archaeology and started a small artifact collection. My interest in the past went back even earlier. In kindergarten we were asked to make a book and fill in the blanks for different questions, including “What are the names of your brothers and sisters?”and “What do you want to be when you grow up?”I recently found this book and discovered that I had written “Archaeologist” in response to the second question. I didn’t spell it correctly, but I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist. In 1985, at twelve years old, I went to my first archaeology conference in Brandon. I managed to convince my mom to take me to the conference, and there I met people who made a living doing archaeology. I became a member of the Manitoba Archaeological Society that fall and started getting the quarterly journals. I picked up free books from the provincial government on archaeology in the province and was particularly interested in northern Manitoba, since this was where my biological father came from. Of course, many of these materials were too technical to understand, but I always loved looking at the pictures and artifacts. One of the best things about the conference that year was that they had four flintkappers making stone tools and one woman making pottery. I stood and watched with amazement at the skill these individuals demonstrated. I even got a chance to try my hand at making my own stone tools. I also met David Riddle, a provincial archaeologist who had worked in northern Manitoba, particularly Southern Indian Lake, since 1969. He told me stories of the remote northern wilderness and of his work there, and I thought, “What an amazing job. You get

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to fish and look for artifacts and ancient campsites and experience the wilderness and they pay you.” I never wanted an office job but dreamed of one that would allow me to be outside. Archaeology seemed like the perfect fit. After this conference I had the good fortune of meeting Chris Vickers, one of the pioneers in Manitoba archaeology. He was quite old and living in a care home, but he examined my artifact collection and identified the items I had collected. He then started to describe his work in the 1940s and 1950s, and even brought out an album of old blackand-white photos of the excavations he had done. In 1988, Dr. Leigh Syms developed a Young Archaeologists Club at The Manitoba Museum, and I immediately became a member. One Saturday every month, a group of youth would get together at the museum and learn about archaeology and Indigenous technology. We traveled to a few sites over the years and collected artifacts and then cataloged them in subsequent months. Over the years, the club members also spent time experimenting with traditional technologies. We learned how to make (and use) an atlatl (spear thrower), pottery, willow baskets, and beading; we obtained plant fibers for making cordage; and we played traditional games. Eventually I began to teach younger club members about things I had learned, such as making fire, tanning hides, making grass baskets, and flint-knapping. After I turned eighteen, I continued to supervise and play an active role in the club.

E ARLY WORK E XPERIENCE Leigh Syms was an instrumental role model and mentor for me. He encouraged me to continue in archaeology as a profession, and in 1991 I entered the University of Winnipeg to train as an archaeologist. After my first year of studies, Leigh helped me contact all the consulting firms in Winnipeg to see if anyone was hiring. Brandon University hired me that summer to assist in a public archaeology dig in Minnedosa and excavate with them at another project south of Brandon. That summer I met Brian Scribe (Norway House Cree Nation) who was working on an Aboriginal archaeology dig. Brian was leading an excavation with an entire Aboriginal crew. I was impressed with the care and sensitivity shown to the archaeological materials and the ceremonies conducted prior to any excavation, both Brian’s excavation and our own. I transferred to the University of Manitoba that year, more convinced than ever that archaeology was my career path. The following summer, I was hired as a summer student with the archaeology unit in the government of Manitoba. My supervisor was David Riddle, whom I had met in 1985 at the Manitoba Archaeological Society meeting. In fact, most of the archaeologists at Historic Resources Branch—including Pat Badertscher, Peter Walker, and Gord Hill— remembered me from that early conference. As David Riddle’s assistant, my position took me to northern Manitoba and the community of Nelson House (Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation). This was my first immersion into the Aboriginal community, and by the end of the summer I had been informally adopted as brother. Most of my summer work involved the newly created Churchill River Diversion Archaeological Project (CRDAP, established in 1990), funded by Manitoba Hydro. We

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focused on hydro-impacted areas and conducted intensive surveys and surface collections from the archaeological sites. By the end of the summer I had collected 22 projectile points from northern Manitoba. For the winter of 1993–1994, I was hired by Leigh Syms at The Manitoba Museum to catalog the artifacts I had helped collect during the previous summer. The low water in 1993 provided an opportunity to collect over 25,000 artifacts and identify over 100 new archaeological sites. It was a great opportunity to clean and catalog the collection. Sometimes my co-workers and I argued over the identification of artifacts. For example, one unusual tool that was identified as a hide scraper did not make sense to me. I indicated that it was too dull to scrape a hide; the lab supervisor at the time did not understand, and challenged me. I asked, “Have you ever scraped a hide? If you had, you would know that this tool could not be used for that purpose.” We agreed to disagree. Studying the artifacts gave me new insights into tool use. I wanted to replicate every tool I cataloged and test how well it functioned. In such a manner, I figured, actual tool use would be identified and thus better artifact typologies could be established. I was fortunate in my upbringing to be exposed to material culture from my uncle and the Young Archaeologists Club. I thought it was more important to understand an artifact’s function than to fit it into a preconceived category. My experience working with perishable or organic materials was extremely important in my understanding of artifacts, since such items are rarely recovered from archaeological sites. To understand the durable material culture, you must be aware of the perishable materials in a tool kit.

Discovering Myself The summer of 1995 was a remarkable year. I was hired by the government of Manitoba to be a summer student, again assisting David Riddle. One of the elders I had met in 1993 while working for the province of Manitoba was Lawrence “Teddy Boy”Houle from Ebb and Flow First Nation. He contacted me that summer to ask if I would be interested in setting up an exhibit of my experimental archaeology materials at The Forks (downtown Winnipeg) for Aboriginal Solidarity Day (June 21). I took the day off from work and pulled out everything I had ever made or could demonstrate: fire making, tanned hides, baskets, beadwork, and stone tools. Dozens of people stopped by that day, including many youth asking all kinds of questions. I was surprised that so many of them were Aboriginal and yet had limited knowledge of our material culture and history. It put aside my fears that I would not be accepted because I was just a young Aboriginal who was raised in a non-Aboriginal family. One of the questions that continued to be asked was “Where are you from?,” meaning what First Nation community is home. Being adopted, I had no idea, and I would explain that I was adopted. During that day, two people stopped by and asked if I would be interested in setting up my exhibit at the First Nations Pavilion at Folklorama (the largest cultural festival in Manitoba). I was honoured and arranged to set up my small display at the pavilion. The pavilion showcased First Nation culture, from powwow dancing, contemporary Aboriginal music, traditional foods, and arts and crafts. Right in the middle of this pavilion was me, with my array of traditional tools, games, and archaeology set

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on several tables. Most of the comments were very supportive, but there were a number of people who stopped by and told me that Aboriginal people have no business doing archaeology: archaeology was a discipline that others did to us and should not be undertaken by Aboriginal people. The pavilion was a huge success, and I was invited to become a member of the organizing committee for the 1996 pavilion. During the event, I became good friends with one of the organizers, Lisa Hill. She helped me understand the confusion I felt with my identity. As I mentioned, my mother was Scottish and my father Cree and Scottish; did that make me Métis? In conversations with Lisa , she asked if I felt connected to the Métis people and their history. I responded no. I feel a stronger connection with my father’s Cree heritage. She then asked, “Does the Cree (First Nation) community accept you as one of their own?” I responded yes, and that I now had numerous adopted brothers and sisters who saw me as a Cree. She looked at me and said, “You have your answer.” She explained that it did not matter if the federal government recognized me as a First Nations person; it was more important to feel connected and accepted by the First Nation community. After this point, I began to identify myself as a Cree (although by blood was partly Scottish).

Returning to Work in the North Working for the province in 1995 took me to northern Manitoba again to continue archaeological surveys in hydro-impacted areas. Most of the summer was spent near Nelson House. We had discovered a number of burials that had eroded from the shoreline, some over 4,000 years old. These discoveries required consultation with the leadership from Nelson House, with a ceremony and feast conducted prior to the recovery. I participated in a number of these events, including one ceremony for an individual buried at the Victoria Day site that our team discovered eroding from the shore. I subsequently wrote my master’s thesis on this burial and the associated artifacts. I met Andrew Wood, the councillor for Nelson House whose portfolio was education. I told him about the experimental archaeology work I did, and he invited me to the school that winter to conduct an archaeology teaching workshop in the Native Studies class, which was taught by William Dumas. I had not met William personally but had stayed at his place in Nelson House while working there in 1993. After we completed the survey in Nelson House, I was sent to Leaf Rapids to assist in an excavation being conducted by Brian Smith. They were excavating a late 19th-century cabin. Brian had hired Keith Anderson and Bobby Moose from Leaf Rapids and South Indian Lake, two individuals who had worked with David Riddle for a number of years. I had earlier heard of the many adventures Keith and Bobby had with David Riddle, so it was a pleasure to meet them both. Keith was a full-time fisher and trapper whose life was in the bush. He had extensive knowledge about the environment, plants, animals, and fish, all of which I found fascinating. It was quickly becoming apparent that my university education was restricted and that most of what I had learned had primarily come from books. I thought to myself, “How was I ever going to be qualified to interpret the past and

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the archaeological record from northern Manitoba when I never had the opportunity to live in the bush?” Keith and I immediately established a good friendship, and he invited me to return for a moose hunt that fall. Later that summer I met Alice Moore, who was an expert in tanning hides. My visit with Alice at her camp was brief because she was sick, but she did show me her tools and various hides she had tanned or was in the process of tanning. She also talked about the youth of today and said, “They are very fortunate because they have two types of education, education in school and education in the bush. It was all about balance between these two and you should not focus too much on school education or you will lose touch with your culture.” When I left, she told me to never let the traditional activities die: “Share what you have learned with the youth and pass it on to anyone interested in learning.” She also told me, “Come back next spring, my son, and I will teach you how to tan hides the old way.” Unfortunately, Alice passed away that winter, and I never had the opportunity to learn from this master. In the winter of 1995, I was once again working in the archaeology lab at The Manitoba Museum, this time supervising the cataloging of the artifacts collected during the CRDAP from the summer before. I spent a week up with Keith Anderson moose hunting. Although the hunt was unsuccessful, I returned with a greater interest in learning about the bush life and how this would improve my interpretations in archaeology. That winter I also continued my studies at the University of Manitoba, applying what I had learned in the field. Anthropology classes became much more relevant. In reflecting on my career and my role as a First Nations archaeologist in training, I began to realize that my interest in archaeology and First Nations history (primarily northern Manitoba) was a connection to my own identity. I had spent my entire life trying to understand that part of my background and was coming closer to this goal. But I had the nagging question about where I was from. I found it difficult not knowing my father’s community; I wanted to reconnect with my birth family.

B ECOMING AN A RCHAEOLOGICAL E DUCATOR In January of 1996, I was invited to Nelson House by William Dumas to conduct a teaching workshop with the entire school, grades 1 to 12. William believes archaeology can play an important role in developing pride in young Aboriginal people. I met with each class individually and talked about life long ago and highlighted the great technology and ingenuity of First Nations people in the area. My hands-on approach was very well received by the students, and they understood that the ancient past and tools were part of their history and culture. I told them that archaeology was one piece of the puzzle but cannot be the only method of understanding the past, that one must also use oral history, historical journals, ethnology, and anthropology, and then weave these together to get a comprehensive look at the past. William has adopted me as a younger brother and we have worked together ever since. The next summer I continued to work on planning the First Nations Pavilion cultural display. I also wrote a grant to set up a survey of two lakes that are not affected by hydro-

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electric dams. I received funding from the First Nation to conduct a canoe survey and hired one individual from the community to assist with the fieldwork. This was the first Aboriginally funded and Aboriginally run archaeological project in Manitoba. We discovered sixteen new archaeological sites and established that long-term use of the area extended over 3,000 years. My work with archaeology, education, cross-cultural awareness, and various events resulted in my nomination for a Manitoba Aboriginal Youth Achievement Award from the First Nations Pavilion. I received the award for “Culture Male,” which was a huge honour, as it recognized the importance of heritage education and archaeology to the broader Aboriginal community in Manitoba. This was so important to me because the Aboriginal community of Manitoba was recognizing both archaeology and my work, despite my being adopted and raised in a non-Aboriginal family. That fall I took a break from my studies at university to enter into the Aboriginal Archaeology Internship Program at The Manitoba Museum. This was a wonderful opportunity and well worth the seven months of fundraising. Part of my internship was dedicated to public outreach. I taught in schools and spoke at conferences dedicated to the Aboriginal community, especially youth. By the end of my program, I had spoken to more than 7,000 people. I also was responsible for the development of one tabletop display of artifacts for the community of South Indian Lake and two freestanding exhibits with twelve drawers and two large panels for the community of Nelson House. I was also responsible for assisting in the development of a major monograph on the Nagami Bay Woman or Kayasochi Kikawenow (“Our Mother from Long Ago”). The funds I had raised assisted in the technical analysis on this woman, which was published through The Manitoba Museum. Publishing the manuscript was not easy. While the main target audience was the Aboriginal community and non-archaeologists, Leigh had insisted that the monograph include all the raw data from the analysis for the technical side of the publication. This would make the publication of interest to a much wider audience. However, after we submitted the draft of the publication to the review committee at the museum, they indicated that it was too public for a technical report and too technical for a public report. Leigh and I were confused, but we convinced the publications committee to accept the monograph with minor changes, and it was published in 1999. That fall I returned to university to resume my studies. In October I traveled to northern Manitoba for an event hosted by Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (NCN) to officially accept the display cases that I had developed for them. During the celebration, the chief and council presented all of the archaeologists working in Nelson House with eagle feathers and plaques recognizing their important contribution to the community. This was only the second time that elected officials at NCN had ever honoured individuals with eagle feathers—the first time had been to war veterans from the Nation. This was an extremely moving experience, and I realized what an impact archaeology was having in the northern communities of Nelson House and South Indian Lake. Youth were being reconnected to their history and past through archaeology. The teachers at the school were also commenting on how the youth were more aware of their identity and roots.

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STARTING M Y P ROFESSIONAL C AREER In 1998, I accepted a full-time position with the Archaeology Unit of Historic Resources Branch as the Aboriginal liaison officer. And I completed my undergraduate degree in the spring of 2000, nine years after I began my university career. My major was anthropology with a minor in Native studies. While this was an extremely long period of time to complete a four-year degree, I obtained valuable work experience. Indeed, one of my recommendations to anyone interested in following a career in archaeology would be to balance university with practical experience, through either paid or volunteer work. In my case, the combination of work and school gave me the unique opportunity to obtain a full-time position in archaeology with only an undergraduate degree. Many of my fellow students were unable to find summer jobs in archaeology, as they had no field experience. This can be a vicious cycle, where contractors don’t want to hire people without field experience, which raises the question of how students can break into the field. At times during my university years, I felt the disapproval of some of my fellow students who saw me as having opportunities because I was Aboriginal. I never challenged these people and tried to ignore them. This pushed me to work harder to prove to them I was more than just filling quotas. In hindsight, I have realized that no matter who you are—Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal—you can’t wait for opportunities to come to your door. A 4.0 grade average at university will not guarantee a job. My experience is that you have to be driven and must make opportunities happen, rather than wait for opportunities to land in your lap. Another important lesson that my mentor and friend Leigh Syms imparted to me was that to be a good archaeologist required you to be politically astute when dealing with First Nations communities, developers, governments, and landowners. There is a very complex web of social interactions, and you cannot bury your head in an excavation unit and ignore the social aspects of our work. Leigh approached me in 2000 about moving into his position as curator of archaeology at The Manitoba Museum when he retired in 2003. I was honoured that he would consider me for the position but also apprehensive. He indicated that I would need to enter a graduate program and complete my master’s degree. At this point I was drifting away from academics and not considering continuing my education. Was completing an M.A. relevant to me? Even with it, could I compete with others who had more extensive university training? Leigh assured me that I would be an ideal choice for the museum, with my experience in Manitoba, my work at The Manitoba Museum, and my commitment to public outreach. I followed up our conversation with meetings with Nancy Noble, director of research, collections and programs at The Manitoba Museum. She also encouraged me to enter the M.A. program and then apply for the curator position when Leigh retired. After much thought, I entered the master’s program in anthropology at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2001. I quickly set my sights on selecting a topic that engaged me and focused on my interests and experience—experimental archaeology would be a perfect fit, especially because it included engaging with the First Nations

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Author at Quartz outcrop. Photo courtesy of The Manitoba Museum.

community. I chose a set of tools recovered in association with a burial from the Victoria Day site on Threepoint Lake in northern Manitoba dating to 4,000 years ago (I assisted in the recovery of this burial in 1995 as a summer student with the government of Manitoba). All of the material had been repatriated and reburied by the local community. I wanted to demonstrate that academic research can be conducted on repatriated materials after they have been returned to a community for reburial. For my study, I used vinyl moulds taken from the original tools and produced casts in order to examine wear patterns and understand the production sequence of these tools. I interviewed numerous community members on the possible function of the tools and then tested the replicated tools on these activities. This led to improved classification of the artifacts and gave meaning and purpose to the tools. The final thesis was filled with over 81 drawings and hundreds of photographs to graphically represent all stages of the research. I completed my M.A. degree in the spring of 2005.

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While I was still in graduate school, in 2003 I was hired by The Manitoba Museum in the position of curator of archaeology. My first year was half time at The Manitoba Museum and half time at the Historic Resources Branch. This provided an opportunity to train my replacement at Historic Resources Branch and learn from Leigh Syms. My permanent position was contingent on finishing my degree, which I completed in 2005. After six years in the position of curator of archaeology, I am still enthusiastic and excited about my job. I consider it a huge honour to be in this position as a First Nations individual. Being in charge of and overseeing archaeological collections for future generations is one of the great rewards. Caring for these collections is extremely important, in order to preserve the material for future generations. The archaeology collections are an ancient archive that we must ensure is protected and cared for. After working in northern Manitoba for seven years I earned the trust of Leslie Baker, the headman of Okawamithikani First Nation. Leslie invited me to his community in 2006 to record heritage sites significant to the community, including two large quartz quarries. This small, community-driven project has developed into a large Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant, of which I am principal investigator. The objective of the project is to preserve, protect, and promote culture heritage of the Rock Cree on the Churchill River. This is accomplished by integrating oral history, archaeology, and geological studies as they pertain to land use and occupancy, landscapes, and resource use.

LOOKING INTO THE F UTURE Archaeology in Manitoba is mainly reactive to land development. As a result, a handful of contract archaeologists bid on various development projects that require an impact assessment before the green light is given to development. My passion for archaeology is in the results from research and in reconnecting Aboriginal youth to our ancient heritage. I am less interested in how many negative test pits are found or whether or not this small site or area can be destroyed based on the number of archaeological sites present in the region. The gray literature that is produced by consultants is of little interest to the general public or Aboriginal communities, not because they are not interested in the past, but because those reports are seldom understandable to community members. Instead, layoriented reports, museum exhibits, videos, and cultural centre offerings are often much more successful in reconnecting people with their past. Often when cultural management studies are conducted, contract firms try to minimize the expense to the developer. As a consequence, detailed artifact studies, technical analyses, and lay-oriented reports are often excluded from these projects. Archaeology is a very powerful tool in nation building. In Canada, more funds are spent on heritage sites and archaeology related to the post-European contact period than to earlier times. I can only assume that the rationale has been “Why focus federal or provincial funds on sites that do not relate to the founding of this country by Europeans?” Indigenous peoples have to reverse this trend. If this is our history, shouldn’t we decide or be part of the decision-making process that states what sites should be protected and

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which can be destroyed? Elders and First Nations people would likely have different opinions of which sites must be protected than archaeologists. Archaeologists must remember that we are within the discipline of anthropology. We have to ask ourselves, What is the point of doing archaeology? What warrants protection? What can be sacrificed in the name of development? Archaeology is focused on tangible heritage resources located physically on the landscape. But how is meaning assigned? How is significance assessed? When archaeologists are conducting a survey, they may easily miss a sacred boulder or ignore landscape-based community values. In some cases, certain site types may not fit into provincial site guidelines and would not be included in site registers unless artifacts were recovered. Community values need to be known to answer these questions, and these can be learned through collaborative study, as well as by anthropology and ethnography. In reflecting back on my experiences, I now see that archaeology is an integral component of First Nations heritage, culture, and identity. Here I take issue with any Indigenous people who say that archaeology is a profession that Indigenous people should not follow. I disagree with the idea that Indigenous archaeologists are traitors to their culture. Archaeology certainly has had a terrible history of insensitivity and racism, but the only way to change the system is from inside the profession. Today many archaeologists would not think of conducting fieldwork without the support of local communities and their assistance in recording and documenting sites of both archaeological and cultural significance. If the point of archaeology is to record ancient heritage, why should the recovery of artifacts be the only criterion in recording a site? A more inclusive definition of an archaeological site can vastly improve our interpretations and validate the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. My perspective of archaeology is that we need to weave together many lines of evidence, including archaeological fieldwork, analytical research, ethnohistory, historic documents, traditional knowledge, oral history, and land/resource use. We blend these pieces of evidence together in our interpretations. In the end, we have created a story of what happened in the past—essentially we are storytellers. Archaeologists don’t have time machines and can’t be absolutely certain about what happened in the past. So we make our best guesses; sometimes we are right and sometimes we’re wrong. But I am quite comfortable with being identified as a storyteller. After all, storytellers have always had important and well-respected positions in Indigenous societies.

N OTE 1 “Métis”refers to a formally recognized population of individuals of First Nations and European

descent, located primarily in Canada but also in the United States.

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Photo by Justin Kennick

SPLINTERVILLE, DRENTHE, AMHERST

Margaret M. Bruchac y work as a traditional Abenaki storyteller often dovetails with my efforts as an Indigenous archaeologist. In both roles, I explore and interpret physical and ephemeral locales where memories reside, where Indigenous knowledges are situated, and where histories of past events speak in some way to the present. I am particularly attentive to places where Indigenous stories and understandings have been distorted, threatened, or forgotten. Some of my travels to Native sites are meticulously well planned—research visits, field trips, consultancies, performing gigs, and such—but others are seemingly random—a wrong turn on a back road, a chance meeting with an elder, a casual comment by a landowner, an artifact on a dusty shelf, or an invitation to dinner in a foreign country (both figuratively and literally). The quixotic (and yet always informative) nature of these encounters has trained me to pay close attention to local landscapes and historical mem-

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ories, phenomenological experiences and collecting processes, and my own situatedness in any particular project or place, at any given time. I believe that the ethics of our profession demand such attentiveness, such reflexiveness. As archaeologists, when we choose to place our hands into the past, we become active agents in shaping that past. We are not just neutral observers; our physical being, thought patterns, and subsequent sorting behaviors interrupt the momentary stasis between what lies above and below, and as we break that barrier, our actions can disrupt and distort the very object of our study . . . unless we are very careful. Storytelling holds much the same dangers. But I have neglected to introduce myself, to explain where I come from. N’delewizi Maligeet, nia ojihila kpiwi ta Salatogi. K’wawtam? My tribal relations are known to Americans as Wabanaki, or Abenaki. Abenaki people are the Indigenous residents of the middle and upper Kwinetigok (Connecticut River), the mountains and valleys of present-day Vermont and New Hampshire, the eastern shore of Bitabakw (Lake Champlain), and parts of the lower Adirondack Mountains (where I first walked into the world). Concentrated settlements can be found at places like Saint Francis, Missisquoi, Lake George, and elsewhere in Ndakinna, our homeland. Some of my family ancestry is English, and some is Czechoslovakian (with intricate kinship stories and Indigenous connections to be discussed at another time); it is the Abenaki roots that link me to the physical landscape where I was born, that make me Indigenous to this particular place.

S PLINTERVILLE H ILL I NDIANS I came from a place called Splinterville Hill, in the town of Greenfield, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, northwest of the tourist resort of Saratoga Springs, near Fox Hill and Indian Hollow, and not far from Barktown and Indian Stream. Native people here were also called Atirontac (Adirondack), a Haudenosaunee term that roughly translates to “bark-eaters.” During the 19th century, white historians imagined these mountainous places, and all of Ndakinna, to be a virgin wilderness inhabited only by wild animals and a few wandering Native people, despite the dense archaeological record testifying to more than 9,000 years of continuous occupation (Woods 1994). One late 19th-century writer described it as “primeval forest, where the footsteps of civilized man had never fallen” (Robinson 1892: 52). Another declared that the region “was never occupied by any Indian tribe or tribes during the historical period, if ever before” (Donaldson 1921: 21). The language of dispossession was popular with those who imagined the area as an empty hunting ground, crisscrossed by clumsy Indians dropping arrowheads as they went. “Indian relics found by . . . plowmen, by gardeners, or by delighted little boys, are arrowheads lost by red men hunting deer or bear” (Fisher 1953: 21–22). This interpretation of past lifeways and habitation patterns (with the apparently accidental and random deposition of diagnostic artifacts by wandering Indians) has heavily influenced local archaeological research and political relations, but it also shaped my own questions and identity. If Indians were so inept, how could they possibly have survived over time?

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If their histories were so fragmented, how could there possibly be any connecting threads to the present? It is easy for non-Indigenous Americans, secure in what they have been taught as children, to ignore the powerful influence that fantasy images and antiquated tropes can have on contemporary Native American peoples. Images of the “real Indian” (typically a Western Plains tribal stereotype) and the “vanishing Indian” (the supposedly tragic remnants of New England’s Native peoples) carry dangerous weight and power. Adapting to modernity carries a different set of dangers, since Native peoples who have adopted the dominant culture of white Europeans, even for their own ends, risk being seen as inauthentic and therefore no longer truly “Native.” During the 1950s, there was virtually no mention of living Native people in my elementary school textbooks. As a good student, I dutifully absorbed the “vanishing Indian” trope, and at the age of eleven, I wrote a report encapsulating what I’d been taught about the colonial era, which began as follows: “Along the river grow countless forests of cedar, spruce, fir, evergreens and hardwoods. Countless furred animals inhabit these forests. There is still one more creature . . . the Indian. The Indian still lives in the Stone Age.” I ended the report by saying that all of the Indians were now “long gone.” This cognitive disconnect was fairly logical: Indians were primitive creatures of the distant past; ergo, if one was alive or modern, one could not be “Indian.” Nonetheless, I was fascinated by the places where Indians (supposedly) used to be: the samp mortar on the back road, the historical marker at the Wilton battleground, spooky legends about Bear Swamp, Indian trails across the back edge of the family property, and arrowheads scattered in all directions. Little did I know (as a child), I was surrounded by Indians. During the late 19th century, my Abenaki great-grandparents, Louis and Alice Bowman, had frequented the Saratoga Springs Indian Camp, where they peddled ash-splint baskets to tourists. They kept a farm up on Cole Hill, not far from a sacred spring where hunting parties would gather, right next to the old Indian trail, close by an ancient Indian burial mound. Around 1920, their son Jesse (a logger and teamster skilled in woodcraft but with no “book learning”) set up a little gas station and general store on the road to Corinth. Bowman’s Store became a gathering place where Indians and non-Indians sat around and jawed about local folklore and history while trading furs, baskets, spruce gum, ginseng, gasoline, cigarettes, soda pop, candy, and groceries. Some folks also sold wild berries, game birds, and venison to the restaurants down in Saratoga Springs, for cooking up special “wild game” dinners for fancy tourists. Did the Splinterville Hill crew look like “Indians”? Well, no, as a family friend later recalled: “These were not Indians in Regal Costumes, fur and feathers. No, they wore shirts, regular slouch hats, pants, overalls or blue denims” (Bowman 1993: 60). In 1940, Jesse and Marion Bowman’s daughter, Flora Marion, married Joseph Bruchac, who opened up a business called Adirondack Taxidermy Studio just down the road from Bowman’s Store. Joe hunted with Abenaki guides who worked the Adirondacks, and he learned taxidermy from Leon Pray, an Ottowa Indian trained by Carl Akeley at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. As a taxidermist’s daughter, I was

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taught, from an early age, the skills of tracking, hunting, trapping, and fishing, and the mysteries of tanning, preserving, and reconstructing the hides of dead animals to achieve some semblance of life. My father also sold leather goods made from “Indian Tanned” deerskin, advertised as “Soft as velvet, smooth as silk, strong as steel, washable, just like the Indians used to tan, but twice as good.” A drawing of an Indian maiden graced the cover of the catalog, but she didn’t look anything like my mother or me. By the 1950s, the Indian Camp in Saratoga Springs was long gone, but there was an exhibit of dusty stuff in the Canfield Casino Museum. More than 5,000 arrowheads and a large number of stone objects (pestles, steatite bowls, pipes, beads, tools, etc.) were on display, having been collected from Native sites around Saratoga Lake, Lake George, Kayadeross Creek, and Greenfield. The artisans who created this “prehistoric” stuff were nameless, as were the makers of two 19th-century ash-splint baskets in the collections, which were identified as having been “made by the last remaining Indians in Saratoga County”(Britten 1959: 279). Were they my grandparents’baskets? How is it that out of the hundreds of Indians, thousands of baskets, and countless face-to-face encounters among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that took place in Saratoga Springs and surrounds, only two anonymous baskets had survived? Were there no stories? As a child, I learned not to ask too many questions; as an adult, I learned why. Elsewhere in the bucolic Northeast, Native people had been forced out of their homelands, their children taken away, their communities disrupted. “Real Indians”made good targets for ethnic discrimination, removal, and worse. In the hill towns where I grew up, Native people stood a pretty good chance of keeping house and home intact by keeping to themselves, by learning to “hide in plain sight,” by not acting or dressing like “Indians.”

DANCING BETWEEN THE A NTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE A NTHROPOLOGIZED My desire to understand the social mechanisms that shaped the survival of regional lifeways and traditions, especially in transcultural rural locales, eventually turned me toward anthropology. Yet, the practice of anthropology, with its origins in empirical (and imperial) science, is regarded with suspicion by many Indigenous peoples, and the experience of being anthropologized is a double-edged sword. As Vine Deloria, Jr., articulated the problem: Indians have been cursed above all other peoples in history. Indians have anthropologists. . . . Anthropologists came to Indian country only after the tribes had agreed to live on reservations and had given up their warlike ways. Had the tribes been given a choice of fighting the cavalry or the anthropologists, there is little doubt as to who they would have chosen. In a crisis situation, men always attack the biggest threat to their existence. A warrior killed in battle could always go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. But where does an Indian laid low by an anthro go? To the library? (Deloria 1969: 86)

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The library, the natural history museum, the college curiosity cabinet . . . if the anthros noticed you, then parts of your peoples’ material culture and oral traditions were collected and ended up in these places. Despite the obvious issues of property and sacredness, these collections made your tribal culture visible. If the anthros missed you (busily focusing their attention on exotic Indians in faraway places while you were going about your regular business), then your tribe was less likely to be visible, less likely to be recognized, and less likely to be in the library. Thinking back on Splinterville Hill, I realize that the old folks who gathered around the stove in Bowman’s Store were the closest thing we had to any resident anthropologists (even though they would certainly reject that label). Although many of them (my grandfather included) could barely read and write, they were more learned than the records that the Abenaki call akwikhigan (“talking leaves”). These Native folks and their neighbors carried deep bodies of knowledge that walked with them as they moved around familiar landscapes. The non-Indian academics who wrote things down, who dug artifacts out of the ground, only captured disconnected pieces of the Indigenous past. Now, as I take up a position amidst these different ways of doing history, I find myself tracing paths between them, much as one might follow a very old, very overgrown, and almost forgotten streambed. When I became an Indigenous archaeologist, some of my kinfolk were aghast that I would willingly identify with the search-and-salvage operations that epitomize classical American-style archaeology. The very word “archaeology” brings to mind unsettling images of ancestral remains being unearthed for display. Let me assure you, there is no shovel in my hand, and I am not among those who excavate, disarticulate, or otherwise handle other peoples’ bones. My archaeological efforts are instead directed at excavating data about significant archaeological sites, collections, and practices. As a consultant on repatriation and cultural property, I specialize in locating, correlating, and interpreting historical information, folklore, local memories, and data about archaeologists and their intellectual kin, by analyzing their discourse, sorting methods, and collecting patterns. One might say that I anthropologize anthropologists. During the early 1990s, while working as a consultant for natural history and living history museums, I purposefully tried to avoid working with institutions that held collections of Native skeletal remains. In 1996, although skeptical of archaeology, I began serving as a consultant for the University of Massachusetts-Amherst field school at Pine Hill in Deerfield, sharing traditional stories. After being recruited to enter graduate school in 1999, I was shocked to learn that the basement of the Anthropology Department—the very building where I was expected to attend classes—housed the remains of more than 100 Native individuals, most of them excavated from sites in the middle Connecticut River Valley. There were, quite literally, more dead Indians than live Indians on campus. Suffice it to say that my dissertation research (which originally dealt with oral traditions and landscape) took an abrupt turn. As a Native student, I felt it was my personal responsibility to help these disembodied ancestors find their way home. My efforts focused on untangling delays in the repatriation of unidentifiable Native individuals, driven by ethical concerns, intellectual curiosity, and fear.

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The collection and display of Native American remains and artifacts in American colleges and museums is inextricably linked to the old “cabinets of curiosity” in elite European and American homes and museums that were once filled with diverse objects to satisfy scientific and aesthetic impulses. Collectors used these collections to construct and situate themselves vis-à-vis the people who were the subjects of their interest. In the minds of collectors, hypothetical stories about Indigenous pasts took shape, animated and populated by the isolated things stored in collections. These visions were shared and embellished over time until they comprised a sort of museological shadow world, identified as Indigenous, but separate from the real world experienced by Indigenous communities. This imaginative history-making is, to my mind, most problematic when applied to other peoples’ remains, when bones that had once walked around inside their own flesh, as parts of individuals who were themselves part of families, are dislocated, disarticulated, reassembled, and conscripted to move in manners not of their own making, regardless of where their spirits might have chosen to travel after death. As I carefully compared archaeological records, primary documents, and materials in the UMass collections, I came to realize that the “invisibilizing” of Native peoples was, in many cases, a trick of misdirection caused, in part, by the habitual portrayal of the skeletal remains of the ancestral Native dead as “real” and authentic specimens. Collectors in the Connecticut River Valley were archaeologists, not ethnographers. They made no effort to study living Native people, who, although present, were harder to manipulate than the bones on their shelves. I became determined to discern and make visible the specific practices, ideologies, and methodologies that had disconnected these Indigenous bodies from their relatives. To do this work, I needed to learn a great deal more than I ever intended about the art and practice of archaeology.

S OMEBODY E LSE ’ S R ELATIVES The practices of storytelling and archaeology, as I noted at the outset, sometimes dovetail in unexpected places. As a case in point, during the spring of 2000, I set out to conduct field research in Europe, seeking oral traditions indigenous to that place that might illuminate or otherwise intersect with archaeological understandings of past peoples. My project, “Ancient Memory in the Northern Netherlands,” explored cultural connections to ancient lived landscapes at significant sites (e.g., standing stones, churches, historical markers). I interviewed folklorists, museum directors, archaeologists, farmers, musicians, and others who served as caretakers of these sites, or who had constructed present identities based on creative understandings of the past. Through ethnographic interviews and site visits, I expected to discover reinvented traditions, and hoped to discover the survival of older stories, thereby illustrating how the physical landscape, and the marking of that landscape, figure as components of group memory and regional identity (similar to Barbara Bender’s work at Stonehenge [1998]). I took up residence in the town of Haulerwijk, Friesland, in a little cottage surrounded by fresh herbs and flowers (far away from the grim repatriation research at UMass). My kind hosts, folk musicians Marian Nesse and Marita Kruswijk, along with their

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neighbors, embraced me as their resident Indian. Within those small communities, knowing one’s neighbors and knowing the landscape were integral to village life. As temporarily adopted kin, I was expected to fit in; as an outsider, I was expected to feed this intricate web of connections with interesting stories. They found deep amusement in the fact that I was studying them, instead of the other way round. Unable to “hide in plain sight,” I quickly became a minor celebrity, as local newspapers, television reporters, and radio stations clamored to interview the exotic Indian anthropologist. This notoriety enabled me to collect colleagues and informants with relative ease; total strangers insisted on inviting me into their homes to record a dizzying array of scientific theories, historical accounts, fantastical myths, family traditions, songs, and more. Dutch stereotypes (equating my Native American identity with an almost mystical connection to nature) actually improved my access to information, since many people assumed that the Indian would appreciate the tidbits of folklore their neighbors found tedious. In every interview, I found that folklore of the ancient landscape was common knowledge, almost seamlessly interwoven with the present, yet many informants insisted that stories from the longdead past had no real significance in their lives, since their personal identities (unlike mine, they assumed) were thoroughly modern. As my understanding of the language improved, I noticed that subtle behavioral guidance, in the form of proverbs, was frequently cast in my direction. I also noted the emphasis on social harmony, expressed as gezelligheid, the feeling of calm when everybody is in their proper place. On one sunny afternoon, during lunch with Ita Prins (mother of my dear friend, Dutch anthropologist Dr. Harald Prins, well known for his studies of Wabanaki peoples), she stabbed a finger at the newspaper account of an explosion in a town that, like Haulerwijk, had a fireworks factory. “If it happened there,” she said to me, “someone would now be asking, ‘And where is the Indian?’ Hopefully some neighbor knows you are safe.” Her point was, they would tend to all of their neighbors, the Indigenous (in this case, Dutch) and non-Indigenous (me) alike. So it is that I was thinking about other peoples’ relatives on the day that archaeologist Willem Deetman brought me to the Drents Museum in the nearby town of Assen. One of the ancient bodies found in a local peat bog, the Meisje van Yde, a young redhaired girl, was on display, lying beneath a finely woven blanket in a climate-controlled glass case. As I gazed into the case (in ways that I would never have gazed upon the bodies of the Native dead at UMass), I felt like an intruder, and found myself wondering about her relatives. Which neighbors were now asking after her well-being? Who was there to claim her, to lay her in a more peaceful place, away from the staring eyes of strangers? In a corner outside the building, I left a little tobacco offering while asking her to forgive me for invading her rest. I asked the birds to make their songs carry through the glass of that silent case, so that she might hear the sounds that had surrounded her in life. Willem empathized with my distinctly unscientific reactions, and we wondered aloud whether there could be some gesture of respect made for the old ones on display—perhaps prayers, covering them at certain hours, or even returning them to the ground. Willem considered the cause hopeless, since the girl from Yde was being readied for a

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Willem Deetman illustrating cup marks at a megalithic site in Drenthe, Netherlands. Photo by Margaret M. Bruchac.

new exhibition; she was about to embark on a world tour. When I left Drenthe, I tried to forget her. Three years later, I was buried deep in repatriation research, prowling through the archives at Amherst College and Smith College, when “The Mysterious Bog People” exhibition (including the Meisje van Yde) arrived at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. Willem wrote to tell me that all did not go exactly as planned. When the moving van arrived, the Dutch curator, Dr. Vincent van Vilsteren, “was met with five grand gentlemen [all Aboriginal Canadians], who told him that the remains of what they considered to be the ancestors of contemporary [white] Canadians should be given back to the earth, instead of being put in museums. Ergo: no exhibit” (Deetman 2003). Deetman quoted van Vilsteren: The Canadians of Indian descent had much difficulty with the European ways of handling human remains. So there was nothing for it but to hold a purificationmeeting (reinigingsbijeenkomst), as composers of the exhibition we had to set right with the upperworld. With much respect I have taken part in this smudging-ceremony. It was very harmonious (van Vilsteren 2003). After much negotiation, Dr. Stephen Augustine, a hereditary Mi’kmaq elder and a curator in the Ethnology Services Division, had offered to take responsibility for caring for these Dutch ancestral remains while they were at the museum. They would be displayed

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during the day and covered every night, as a compromise between Euro-American museum practices and Aboriginal customs. Van Vilsteren, a self-described “scientist and atheist, a non-believer,” was so moved by the experience that, on his return to Assen, he wrote an article titled “Holy Smoke and Bad Vibrations.” He e-mailed a draft version to Stephen Augustine, who e-mailed it to me; I e-mailed it to Willem Deetman, who then walked around the corner to the Assen Museum to speak to Vincent in person. Van Vilsteren was stunned at having sent a text to Canada, only to have it translated within hours by one of his neighbors. Deetman said that’s just how Indians are. At the end of the world tour, van Vilsteren promised, they would arrange a special ceremony to properly welcome the Mesije home to the Drents Museum. It would be very gezellig.

I NDIGENIZING ACADEMIC R ELATIONS TO THE I NDIGENOUS PAST There was a time when I naively imagined that repatriation work was little more than the physical transfer of Indigenous remains and objects from one location to another. While delving into the relations and ideologies that allowed some people to become the “collectors” and some to be the “collected,” I have become an advocate for what I call “restorative methodologies.” Restorative methodologies attend to more than just repatriating items to their source; they intentionally make visible the social relations and epistemological dimensions of archaeological collecting and history-making, calling attention to the habits and thought patterns that shape the collecting of other peoples’ stuff. I use, quite consciously, some of the same strategies I learned as a tracker, to discern how my quarry (in this case, 19th-century archaeologists) thinks and moves, in order to predict where they, and their collections, can be found. An awareness of the ways in which various forms of knowledge are constructed and situated is crucial to help diverse communities understand themselves and one another, as we reflect on our positions, origins, and responsibilities. Our understanding of various peoples’ pasts is improving, as we strive to include, in theory and practice, those who were once among the voiceless, the vanished, the archaeologized. The “past,” as I see it, is not an unambiguous collection of data, a point in a historical timeline, or a logical narrative. It is a multilayered assemblage of material and immaterial stuff, held together mostly by physical circumstance, locational happenstance, and human memory. Situations that seem to be temporally and geographically disparate may become linked when we move through them, physically or metaphysically, generating complex cross-cultural dances across time. We need not dismiss science, folklore, or reinvention out of hand, since all of these are human expressions, forms of observable data that can encode and convey myriad meanings; all are potentially destructive, all are potentially restorative. When we touch the past or recall a memory, emotional connections may surface that can evoke a sense of kinship and relationship between present-day people and long-dead ancestors—even (at times) in skeptical scientists. During my great-grandparents’ time, northeastern colleges were dedicated to amassing comprehensive archaeological collections while systematically disconnecting Indigenous peoples from their property and their past. During my parents’ generation,

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these collections were captured in glass display cases to signify the disappearance of the Indians. During my generation, repatriation legislation has been enacted, but there is no legislation (yet) that redresses the historical erasures of the archaeologized. In 1996, when I spoke to that first archaeological field school in Deerfield, I feared that it might be necessary to become an archaeologist in order to follow their tracks, to recover what had been lost. By 2003, I was no longer surprised to discover, among the archaeological collections at UMass-Amherst, several trays filled with lithics from my own place of origin, around Saratoga Lake. Perhaps it was no accident that I landed at a college with a collection of Native remains. Perhaps, it was a sort of calling.

R EFERENCES C ITED Bender, B. 1998 Stonehenge: Making Space. Berg, Oxford and New York. Bowman, D. 1993 Go Seek the Pow Wow on the Mountain and Other Indian Stories of the Sacandaga Valley. Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield Center, New York. Britten, E. B. [alias Jean McGregor] 1959 Chronicles of Saratoga. Evelyn Barrett Britten, Saratoga Springs, New York. Deetman, W. 2003 Translation from the Ochtendblad Trouw, January 7, 2003. Deloria, V., Jr. 1969 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Scribners, New York. Donaldson, A. L. 1921 A History of the Adirondacks. The Century Company, New York. Fisher, D. C. 1953 Vermont Tradition. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Robinson, R. E. 1892 Vermont: A Study of Independence. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston. van Vilsteren, V. 2003 Holy Smoke and Bad Vibrations. Draft article for Museumkrant. Woods, L. 1994 A History in Fragments. Adirondack Life, November/December 1994: 30–79.

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Photo courtesy of Alan Burns

AN INTERVIEW BY CLAIRE SMITH

Alan Burns n November 2005, Claire Smith sat with Alan Burns at the Waipapa Marae, University of Auckland, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to record the following interview for this volume. The final editing of this paper and clarification on some details were undertaken in phone conversations between Alan and Claire on January 12, 2009, and on March 13, 2010.

I

Claire: Alan, the first thing I want to ask is, do you consider yourself an archaeologist? Alan: No, more of a cultural heritage research officer, a protection officer more than anything. My role is maintaining, looking after, and caring for country. That’s what I mainly do. But I’ve worked with a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists over the eighteen years I’ve been a cultural heritage protections officer. I seem to have a bit of a repartee with those sorts of people.

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Claire: What’s the difference between what you and archaeologists do? Because I would think that what you do is archaeology. Alan: Well, for me, I guide the archaeologists when they come into my country and identify what we believe are special places for us. The archaeologist then comes along and says “What do you propose?” [regarding community concerns]. And we say, “We want to do a line walk or go down and check out some of the areas we think might be culturally relevant or important.” My role is to coordinate the archaeologists and my community, who we employ to work with the archaeologists. At the end of the day when it’s all finished, it’s my role to sit down with the archaeologists to listen to their advice and take their expertise. But they also want my advice, where I’m coming from, and I take that back to my community, and the proposals are brought up [for certain types of development]. I do have the mandate to make a decision there and then, but where possible I will take it back to discuss with the community. All the decisions I make are in the best interests of the long-term needs of the community in which I live in. Claire: When you were a kid, when did you first develop an interest in archaeology? Alan: That’s a good question. I’ve always had an interest in archaeology, but my first interest was always palaeontology. So way back when I was kid, I collected all the dinosaurs, and knew all the names of every one. I had little models of the dinosaurs that came with Lipton tea bags when I was 6 years old—I’m 61 now, so I’m going a long, long way back. My interests today are a bit different, but I’ve always enjoyed the history of mankind; I’m interested in anthropology in that sense. I’ve got lots of things that I’ve kept over the years, like a documentary that came out many years ago, “You Can’t Get Blood Out of a Stone.” Today we can get blood out of a stone. To me that’s very interesting, because a warrior or someone cut themselves while skinning an animal 50,000 years ago left their blood and their DNA on that stone tool. That to me was interesting, because here they were able to establish that this was human blood, not animal blood. While the name of the program was “You Can’t Get Blood Out of a Stone,” this demonstrates that you can. So that sort of thing was of interest to me. So while I was originally more interested in palaeontology than archaeology, over the years of working with my people, getting involved with the archaeology of my people, I’ve done almost a complete reversal. Claire: How did you first get into the work then? Alan: Here’s my quick history! I worked around Australia, did my own thing, bummed around Australia (to use the expression). Wherever my thumb took me was where I went. I worked in all sorts of fields, mainly hard, physical labour. I picked cotton, worked in the sugarcane fields, worked on roads, and worked in mines. The last “mainstream” job I had was as an exploration driller for a mining company in Western Australia. However, I had an accident there. My back went and I ended up in traction in the hospital. But this meant that I had become a liability to a big multimilliondollar company, so their aim was to get rid of me. I ended up with an invalid pension and was sent home. So I went back to Victoria, and sat at home with this “poor bugger me”

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attitude—“Where am I going? I can’t physically work any more.” But then I realized that wasn’t any good for me. So I got involved in the Aboriginal Movement. I came back to Victoria where the Aboriginal Movement was very strong. Claire: What year was this? Alan: We’re talking almost 30 years ago, about 1980. I got involved in the Aboriginal Movement through my mother who was very much involved in it. She said, “Go out and make yourself known.” I thought to myself, “I don’t know that much about the Aboriginal Movement, I’ve worked all my life, I had another life.” But then I thought, “I’ll go down and say ‘Here I am, I’m on an Invalid Pension and can’t do any physical work but I’ve got a driver’s license (not a lot of Aboriginal people have got that) and can volunteer to drive’.” And that’s what happened. The administrator of that community said, “Here’s a bloke that can drive down to Melbourne, we can go to the conferences.” So I tagged along with him. In fact, I became a director of that organization too. But I ended up, by default, going to lots of meetings and lots of conferences. Also, because I didn’t drink, I could drive all the people home and they could all have a good time. And in doing that, it started to get into my blood. And in that community there was a cultural program, and I used to just sit there and help them out. Like I said, I was a director mainly. I could help them be there for numbers, help them get the boomerangs and all that. So I did start to get a little involved in the cultural aspect. I was living in Ballarat when a particular set of skeletal remains, those of a little girl, were found nearby and then sent to Victoria. I knew a lot about it because one of our students went down and then reported to our board of directors. And that really got me interested because I started to see these remains of this little girl, and I thought that it was sad, you know, her being in a vault in a dark room in Melbourne. How can I get her home? And that was the end of it. We moved to Horsham, and my wife, who couldn’t stand the cold of Ballarat, said that we had to keep moving towards the west. I said it’s warmer up the road than it is here, so we moved up there. I did the same thing, I went to the Aboriginal Community Organization. I knew most of the people and said, “Look, I’m here. I’m on a pension, I can’t physically work but I’m happy to be here, happy to volunteer.” And after a few months, a few jobs came up; one was a children services worker, and I actually got that position because it wasn’t physically demanding, but it is mentally, so I had to retrain my whole way of thinking. And I just started talking about this little girl, this cultural issue that really stuck inside me, about the traditional people of the area, and where she came from. They weren’t aware of it, so I enlightened them about the human remains in the museum, because they are very special, this girl, the Jarra baby, maybe you’ve heard of her because there was a big issue over it. She was buried within the two cultures, buried with Aboriginal grave goods and buried with non-Aboriginal grave goods. She has the dress, she had the shoes, she had a belt, she had pins and needles, and she had on the other side an opossum skin coat, she had the ochre, she had string games, so she had wooden pegs. So she was buried with a lot of love from whomever, we don’t know. And I started asking

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questions. Was it an Aboriginal mother? Was it an Aboriginal father? And that led to me getting the community, getting the elders of the community, to start to think that Alan knows a little about culture. And so when a cultural heritage position came up, I said, just out of the blue, “I wouldn’t mind the position.” They thought I was quite knowledgeable because I knew about this one particular thing [the Jarra baby]. So that’s how it all started. I didn’t apply for the job. The chairperson at the time said, “Are you going to apply for the cultural heritage position?” I said, “I don’t really know that much about cultural heritage,” and they said, “We’re waiting for you to apply, because you will get the job.” That was eighteen years ago, and now I’m the longest serving cultural heritage officer in the state of Victoria! Through that process I started to learn, I knew who I was. I could identify my area, my country, my traditional group, but I wasn’t at all knowledgeable about the broader issues in our communities. Over the years I would go to meetings, including the World Archaeological Congress, and I would meet all my other brothers and sisters from all over the world, not just my own people. And I’m learning, learning, learning, and that’s what it is. I keep learning, keep listening, keep talking, and everyone has given me the confidence to go to conferences and to stand up and give a statement, a paper, or an observation. So it all started from a simple thing that I knew to now being an inspector under the Burra Charter1 and having quite an important role in my community and being honoured to sit on the two World Archaeological Congresses. Claire: Can you tell me the group you are affiliated to?

Author in conversation with Joe Watkins at the World Archaeological Congress, Washington, D.C., 2003. Photo by Larry Zimmerman.

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Alan: Okay, my traditional group: I always identify as being a Yorta Yorta man, because that’s my country up near Echuca, near Barmah, which is on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. But I identify as a Wiradjuri Yorta Yorta man, when I talk about my nation, my tribe, and my clan group. Ulupna is my clan group near Moira Lakes, that’s my particular area where my family, my band, whatever, is. But they were part of the Yorta Yorta tribal group, which was part of the Wiradjuri Nation. Well, I had two ties, my greatgrandfather was a Wiradjuri, and my great-grandmother was a Yorta Yorta lady. So that’s my traditional country. I don’t live in my traditional county, never have. My grandmother was one of the “stolen generations” so she never went back home to country to live. She visited; she’s buried in country. I moved around and I eventually went to Horsham. Before Native Title—sadly, Native Title is something I never wanted—we were an Aboriginal community, we were one people. And sadly, the government has said that the traditional owners are the traditional group on the land, and the people like myself who have lived in this area, who have worked and done a lot of good work, are now classified as Historical Aboriginal. I don’t like that term “traditional owner.” I prefer “custodian” because my job is to care for and maintain the land, but I don’t own it. I live in the area now. The Wotjobaluk Native Title Group has put a claim on their country, the Werghia language region. I’m in an area that’s not my traditional country. I’m not a popular person because Native Title people believe it is their culture, their right, and their native ancestors and it’s their land, and an outsider like myself should not be doing this. I am not a traditional custodian for that country, even though I have blood ties there and have worked on my own ancestors’ graves, who are buried at Ebenezer Mission in Antwerp, Victoria. I have been a cultural heritage protection officer and an inspector under the State and Federal Acts for this region, but all of that does not make me a traditional custodian. I’m still an outsider, I’m in a real no-win situation. When you come to congresses, even today, we talk about there being traditional owners and traditional country and all the rights should be had by those. But I don’t live in my traditional country. I was the one who got Native Title into traditional areas, because the traditional people didn’t do it. And now I’ve been ostracized. And I come down here to see all my sisters and brothers, and I am a traditional owner in my own right. I could go back to my traditional county and live, but I don’t live in it and probably never will. If I die in Victoria, I’ll probably be buried at Cummeragunja Mission, on the New South Wales/Victoria border, which is where my ancestors are buried—mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, grandson, nephew. And lots of aunties and uncles, of course, and cousins. Typical extended family. Typical family. They have all been buried there since the mission was established, and before that people were buried in the lands nearby, in Barmah Forest and places like that. But if I don’t, I don’t expect my wife to take me back. I plan to retire to Western Australia, where most of my grandchildren are, where I married my wife, that’s the plan. Claire: So if you pass away in Victoria, then you will go back to country? Alan: I’ll go back to country. Claire: But if you don’t?

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Alan: I wouldn’t expect my wife to do that, no. Though she said she would, I did say I don’t expect you to do that. I’d rather be buried in country; most of us want to be cremated anyway. I said I want some ashes to go into country. So I want to be scattered. I’ve got a place that I have no affiliation with, no ties to, but I love the Nullabor Plains, on the Great Australian Bight, it’s just something that is in here. And along that ocean part of the Nullabor, just want to stand on the great ocean, the Great Australian Bight and spread me, so keep a little of me to put back in country. But if she doesn’t do that, well, I won’t know that. But she said that she wants to be cremated and is happy to be buried wherever, and I said, well, we should be buried together, so she’s happy to come be buried in my own country. Claire: What about your kids? Do they have anything to do with cultural heritage? Alan: Not a lot, no. My youngest son dances, but he’s now a single parent and he’s finding it difficult to be a single parent. He’s a good dad, but he’s bringing up two children, so his whole life revolves around that, so he doesn’t dance anymore. My oldest two don’t really get involved. My daughter got pregnant when she was young to an Aboriginal boy and had our first grandson; unfortunately he died. And that’s probably the closest tie she’s had to an Aboriginal lad, and she’s gone and been married twice to non-Indigenous people. She lives in, we think, Western Australia, because mum and dad aren’t popular at the moment. And our eldest son lives in South Australia at the moment, and the other one lives at home. So we have three children and ten grandchildren,2 eleven had the eldest survived. And most of them live in Western Australia. That’s also what could take me back there. My heart’s in the west, even when I’m in Victoria. I love my country, where I live, but my heart’s in the west. I want to go back to Western Australia and retire. Whether that takes ten years or more, I don’t know. But while I’m capable of doing this [cultural heritage office] job, I want to. Claire: What has been the most challenging part of doing archaeology or cultural heritage? Alan: The most challenging part has been just these last few years with Native Title, because we come down to the Law with me, and the Lore with respect to traditional people, and I’m finding that very difficult. I’ll give you an example. I’m over here, at this World Archaeological Congress and I’m getting a phone call from my boss—my big boss, I’m talking about, in Victoria—saying the area that I just consented to disturb, because we’re not going to destroy anything, we’re just going to cover up the actual site, it’s not a Native Title area, it’s Crown land. When I got the archaeologists into doing the survey, I included Native Title out of courtesy; I felt that even though it’s not Native Title, it was in a traditional area with traditional people, so I included them in the area where I live. As it turns out, this area has three Native Title groups, and I’ve got myself into a little bit of a mess. Because it’s not Native Title, I didn’t have to involve the traditional groups, but I got one of the other groups really making life hard for me and my big boss, Mark. He said, “I know you haven’t done anything wrong here but. . . .” And I said, “I don’t want to hear nothing of it, I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s not a Native Title issue, but out of courtesy I’ve involved Native Title.” He said, “I know, I know.”

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Claire: Native Title is a really hard thing. Alan: Native Title is a killer for me. Claire: As an Aboriginal man, you’re trying to work and do the right thing. Alan: I never had a problem in all the time, until the last five or six years when Native Title really started to get into the swing of it. Before that, I was just part of the community. The people had no problems with me, they put me up as their spokesperson, I’m here [at the WAC Inter-Congress] because of them, the community people, the traditional people. I’m here because I have the best wishes of the community that I live in. But there’s a little group of traditional people that just want me out, just want me out, period, and there’s nothing that will change their minds, and they’ve wanted me out for a long time. The two things that have become a problem for me over the eighteen years, the two areas that have been problems have been Native Title issues. Well, when I go home from here there could be some problems for me, but overall I haven’t done anything wrong in my job, and my duties are still the same. These are the crosses you have to bear sometimes when you live in a community that is divided anyway. So before Native Title there were no real dramas in our community, because in those days we were one people, it didn’t matter. I’d meet people every day who were from different countries, who actually live over borders in South Australia, but they welcomed me as one of them. I know I’m not a Ngarrindjeri man, but I know I’m respected by these people, and they show that respect to me by the way they talk to me and treat me. And I believe as an Aboriginal or Indigenous Australian, or as First Australian, that I do the job I’m paid to do, and I do a good job and I’m there for my people and my community, So I look after them, look after all the cultural heritage issues in my area, whether it is site identification, management, site restoration, whatever sort of site it is, a midden site or burial site. Really the only two problems in eighteen years have been Native Title problems. Claire: That’s really our tradition, isn’t it? Alan: Yeah, it is. Claire: The government has got everyone fighting with themselves. Alan: Yeah, that’s what they’ve done, they’ve achieved that. And it’s hard to sit in a congress like this, in a conference today and the last week, hearing all traditional people saying “it’s ours, it’s ours,” and I’m a traditional person in my own right. I hear all these talks and I feel that I’m not a part of it, the country that I work in and live in is not my traditional country, so I feel sort of out of that conversation. So that’s the only thing that sort of hurts me a little bit, to hear all my brothers and that talking about the traditional owners and the right people to talk to country and all that, yet that was my role before Native Title, so now I’ve been put on the back grass. At the congresses that I’ve been at and involved in, [in my presentations] I acknowledged everyone, acknowledged my Indigenous brothers and sisters. But I also acknowledged the non-Aboriginal people in that room because without them we’re nowhere. We need their support, we need them to talk for us. And they do talk for us and listen to

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us and help us and guide us. And there is no point in us as Indigenous people standing there and saying, “You do this and you do that.” We have to work together. And what I have found with WAC is that it is a forum for all Indigenous voices from all over the world to sit down and have a lot of people, even though it’s archaeological. The problems that we are faced with, with archaeologists stealing and taking all our grave goods and taking out our ancestral remains, today, I believe we’ve educated them, if that’s the word to use. We’ve made people think of who we are. It’s important to us, to our ancestral remains, even our secret, sacred, secular goods, whatever. The Maori experience has really come home to me by being here, because we see, we talk about our lands at home, about what’s important to us. But the Maori take it further, they pray to their tree, their god, their craft, their people, and I feel that is a really strong connection to country, something so powerful and so strong. And they have that language that goes with it; unfortunately we haven’t. The question of what is WAC? To my mind it’s the best forum. We’ve got to better our situation and our world on a global experience, and it’s working. We’ve got on well with it. Claire: Thank you for coming a long way. Alan: At this forum today, for the last week, the Indigenous strength that was in this forum, we were one people again. That’s what struck me. It didn’t matter if you were a Solomon Islander or a Maori or a Samoan, it didn’t matter, or an Aboriginal person, or an Indian or Bangladeshi. We were all there for one reason, and one reason only, and we had the support of the West, of non-Indigenous people too. That’s what WAC means to me. And it’s something for me to come to too, on a personal basis and find that I need support. I have friends like you who I can just give a ring to and say, “Ah, I’m going through a rough trot.” And you’ll say, “Alan, hang in there, you’re all right, you’ll get there.” And it’s that brotherhood, that sisterhood, that feeling of family. I feel WAC is very family. That’s how I feel about WAC. Claire: You do, too. Alan: Even my wife, who’s not involved, said to me, “I can understand how you feel about it.”

N OTES 1 The Burra Charter is a set of recommendations to aid in the conservation and management of

places of cultural significance (cultural heritage places), which was developed in 1979 by the Australian members of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). For more information, see http://www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au/ burracharter.html. 2 At the time of final proofreading, Alan and his wife Stephanie had acquired two great-grand-

children. Alan describes Stephanie as “the woman who gave me those beautiful babies, who gave me my other beautiful babies, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” Alan's mother, Molly Dyer, received the Order of Australia on the basis of her work in founding Aboriginal childcare agencies in Victoria, Australia, which she modeled on a Native American program developed on the Yakima Apache Reservation in Arizona, USA.

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Photo courtesy of Iyaxel Ixkan Anastasia Cojtí Ren

THE EXPERIENCE OF A MAYAN STUDENT

Iyaxel Ixkan Anastasia Cojtí Ren y name is Iyaxel Cojtí Ren. I am an archaeologist recently graduated from the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala. I am very happy to have completed my archaeology degree and plan to conduct research about Indigenous peoples past and present, and then pass on the knowledge gained through teaching. In this chapter I will tell you first about my life and family and of my experiences in studying archaeology, and then discuss the nature of archaeology in Guatemala today.

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M Y I NTERESTS IN A RCHAEOLOGY I am a Maya-K’iche’ from the pueblo of Chichicastenango (“place of the nettle patch”) in the Departmento (province) of El Quiché. Our town, which is at least 95% Maya, is very

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well known nationally and internationally for the preservation of Mayan spirituality, traditions, and customs. Our economy is today largely based in the tourism and craft industry for locals and foreigners. Since my elementary school days, I have always had a deep interest in the ancient cities and the people who lived there. With my family, I frequently visited ancient cities in the highlands, such as Iximche’, Q’umarkaj and Saqulew.1 My parents told me that these cities were occupied by our ancestors who were forced to abandon their homes when the Spaniards invaded the land. I did not understand why their material culture, especially their buildings, was so different from ours; in other words, I was not able to establish a specific connection between “them” and “us.” Contributing to this problem is the public media. Television, the national newspaper, and other media have long promoted “Classic Maya”tourism in parts of Guatemala´s lowlands, especially El Petén province. Lowland Classic Mayan culture has been presented as the greatest of all civilizations, but one that mysteriously disappeared. By the 1980s and 1990s, the general population of Guatemala (and elsewhere) came to believe (as many still do) that the Maya really vanished and that we, the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, especially those of the highlands, are descended from the Toltecs from Mexico or are simply of unknown origin.2 These popular ideas, promoted by both public media and the educational system, initially shaped my view of the Maya, as it did for other Guatemalans. It is important to mention that archaeological investigations in the Guatemalan highlands had refuted the notion of Mayas being of foreign origin, which demonstrates that archaeology can be a meaningful tool used by Mayas to learn about their past. However, it has been difficult to introduce this archaeological information into the Guatemalan educational system. In Guatemala, archaeology continues to be perceived by society—with some exceptions—as a field without great importance or utility, except for tourism. Those who have the means to continue their higher education generally prefer to pursue more “productive careers,” such as engineering and the sciences. Such careers will, in their view, give them better employment opportunities and will also benefit their society. However, when I hear of individuals making such career choices, I wonder about the type of benefits they are referring to, and, more specifically, what sectors of the population they identify with when they talk about “society.” These are important considerations, because we are meant to believe that we are all Guatemalans, but this is not true—we are very different peoples facing very different realities.

O BSTACLES IN B ECOMING AN I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGIST When I entered high school, I learned there was a career called “archaeology,” which specialized in studying the material culture of ancient civilizations. This was what I wanted to do, but there were many challenges that I had to face in order to become an archaeologist. First, it was necessary to move to the city and pass admission exams to enter upper high school and university. I had to contend with the fact that because the educational

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opportunities for the majority of rural communities (such as mine) were limited, the probability that I would pass the admission exams was very low. To help me, before entering my university studies, my parents put me in a top private school, the BelgiumGuatemalan Institute’s “The Holy Family”school. My sisters and I were able to register and attend this school with the help of a friend of my parents who was at that time the school’s principal. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for us to be admitted because we were not prepared academically. This reflects the poor quality of education offered in all the schools in my town and probably in the whole region. Moving to the city proved to be difficult for us because we encountered the historic ethnic differences that were so prominent there. We discovered that the majority of ladino people from the city were racists (explicitly or implicitly) who mistreated and thought very low of the Maya. This was especially so in the high school classroom, where my sisters and I were subjected to the racist vocabulary of our classmates, but also from the unequal relations that took place.3 The Belgium-Guatemalan Institute is one of the few private educational institutions in the city that allows Indigenous students to wear their traditional clothes to school. This allowed us to keep our right of identity; at the same time, it marked us as “different” because we did not wear the uniforms that the other students wore. We felt that we were always being judged. As time passed, however, we felt that wearing our traditional clothes was not an element of weakness, but one of strength and cultural pride. Nonetheless, there were always difficult moments where we had our doubts. I agree with my Kaqchikel friend who also faced discrimination while studying at a non-Indigenous institution. She said, “The only way to counteract discrimination from the ladinos in the classroom is to show them that we are better than they are in studies.” My desire was not only to compete with my classmates, but to demonstrate that Indigenous people are like anybody else—that we have the same capacity to be good professionals, but that our main challenge is lacking opportunities to reach our potential.4 I felt that I also had more to learn about some things. For example, while in this high school, I learned about the political, social, and economic situation of my country, and also its history, much of which I did not learn in my hometown due to the poor quality of the public educational system there. In 2002, I began my studies at San Carlos University in the field of archaeology. I did not have any admission problems this time because I was better prepared academically by the private college I attended and also because admission exams at this university had not yet been upgraded: they are harder now than they were five years ago. Later I decided to move to del Valle for the same program in the field of archaeology. In both universities, the most significant problem I encountered was that archaeology reproduces, in both practice and theory, a colonial system (of investigation) that arose in Mesoamerica in the 19th century. Guatemalan archaeology, whether as a means of knowing the past and/or as an instrument of ideological legitimation, has played different roles over time. Both its nature and its applications have been in response to the sociopolitical context in which it unfolded. The uses of archaeology have ranged from legitimating a nationalistic discourse that promotes the inclusion of the whole society under the same past (as was the case in

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the liberal period), to a discipline that alienates the society or certain sectors of the society from its past, as occurs presently with the Mayan descendant population. In the present sociopolitical context of Guatemala, archaeology has developed within a society whose nation-state only recently recognized its multiculturalism, and in which the Mayan population continues to struggle for recognition of its rights and identity in a society of exclusion. These issues continue to frame my experiences as both an archaeology student and a Maya.

G UATEMALAN A RCHAEOLOGY TODAY 5 Contemporary archaeology differs substantially from what it was a century ago, owing to advances in technology and the methods employed to analyze the archaeological record. It has also changed as a result of the increased participation of Guatemalans in archaeological investigation; however, relations with the majority Indigenous population have remained the same as they were in the early 19th century. In spite of the increase in the number of Guatemalan archaeologists, the majority of projects are developed and carried out under the direction of foreign archaeologists who entrench their theoretical perspectives in Guatemalan investigations. In the same way, both ladino and Indigenous students who study in foreign countries learn and adopt the manner of doing archaeology specific to the academic institutions from which they graduate and later reproduce them in their investigations in Guatemala.6 Latin America has made only one theoretical and methodological contribution to the archaeological field, “Latin American Social Archaeology.” Conceived in the 1970s, this Marxist-based stream focused on the critique of the theoretical and epistemological subordination of archaeology in the continent, and took a radical political posture toward social problems. Its impact was short-lived in Guatemala, perhaps due to the increasing dominance of the New Archaeology/processual archaeology (developing primarily in the United States) and to its limited applicability, especially in the context of the repression of Marxist revolutionary movements during this period. Processual archaeology made substantial contributions through the series of methods it introduced to discover, recover, preserve, describe, and analyze the archaeological record (Sharer and Ashmore 1993: 13). It also developed a theoretical foundation by which to interpret archaeological evidence and then describe and explain the past. However, this approach made little reference to the role of archaeology in contemporary society, much less to its relation to Indigenous populations. Although processual archaeology did not threaten the prevailing authoritarian system in Guatemala, it was, and continues to be, a threat for the descendant Maya in many ways: ‹

A “neutral” archaeology in such a political context only serves to sustain the existing social order in Guatemala (which is exclusionist and racist) instead of questioning it (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 189).

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By emphasizing scientific procedures as the basis of their investigations, processual archaeology excludes other forms of interpretation (that do not follow the standard

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of Western rationalism), and thus limits the participation of contemporary Maya in interpreting the history and culture of their ancestors. ‹

Another negative consequence of this situation is that it denies the Indigenous population the right to declare itself as descendants of the prehispanic Maya, since it is the archaeologists who define who is and is not “Maya.”

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Finally, archaeologists work principally for science and for their academic institutions. The knowledge they produce is destined for the intellectual and commercial marketplace; little effort is made to contribute directly to the present Maya.7

However, some of the knowledge of the prehispanic Maya that archaeologists generate in their investigations is reappropriated and reutilized by present Maya to reclaim and revitalize their culture. This is the case with hieroglyphic writing and iconography, which in prehispanic times were associated with politics and power—the same context in which present-day Maya are using them (Sturm 1996: 116). For example, many Indigenous leaders and organizations that fight for the Indigenous cause employ prehispanic iconography and writing in their books, pamphlets, emblems, and other items. There are also expressions of Mayan symbolism in articles of daily use and in different spaces, such as women using symbols of the days in their jewelry, in the designs of belts and huipiles (traditional women’s blouses), and in the embroidery of men’s shirts. Another aspect of the past that has been recovered by Indigenous people (though not by all), and which is considered very important, is the Mayan calendar, especially the sacred calendar called ch’olq’ij—its role in the counting of time is vital in guiding daily activities. The use of this calendar has continued uninterrupted since prehispanic times, thanks to the knowledge maintained by the Ajq’ijab’, the practitioners of Mayan spirituality.

T HE C HALLENGES OF THE A RCHAEOLOGY IN G UATEMALA In Guatemala City, only two universities offer an archaeology degree: Universidad del Valle (UVG) and Universidad de San Carlos (USAC). Neither of these programs has defined explicitly its theoretical or political direction about archaeological research. However, the approaches they promote are essentially based on cultural historical and scientific or processual roles, and generally they do not go beyond looking at material evidence and its analysis. In Guatemala, multicultural discourse in archaeology is something seen as “politically correct,” but practically speaking, there have been few substantial changes to methodology and research techniques, with little progress in the development and application of new theories, alternative ways for information management and information sharing, or equal and collaborative relations with Indigenous communities. The result is that that Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in archaeology graduate from university with the same type of academic training and knowledge. But this knowledge does not respond to the needs of the Guatemalan population and leaves unaddressed the needs and cultural rights of the Mayan people.

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It has come to a point where many Indigenous students in archaeology do not identify with the Indigenous cause, either by choice or due to the racism that they themselves have experienced. Some people lose their identity when they move to the capital city and adopt the ladino culture. There are other reasons why people lose their Indigenous identity, but I will not discuss them here. What little progressive change has occurred in the field of archaeology has come through efforts by popular, cultural, and educational segments of the Mayan population. For example, Oxlajuj Ahpop, a Mayan organization composed of Mayan spiritual guides, recently presented the National Congress with a proposal to create new legislation that would recognize, respect, conserve, and administer the sacred archaeological sites of Indigenous communities located in the territory of Guatemala (Oxlajuj Ajpop 2008: 8). According to Felipe Gómez,8 director of Oxlajuj Ahpop, one of the main challenges that we face in Guatemala is for Indigenous people from different linguistic communities to become more involved in the creation of knowledge through research of their cultural past, both material and intangible. Until now, Indigenous participation in archaeology has been limited to physical work, without any possibility to participate, give feedback, or raise concerns about the archaeological process and its outcomes. There is also the need for Mayan people to provide input on how best to promote or protect Mayan archaeological sites. The perceptions of the Maya toward sacred sites or prehispanic cities vary across the country. There are, for example, Mayan communities that maintain their spiritual practices in sacred sites as part of their daily lives. Other communities are very interested in researching and knowing more about their history through archaeology. At the same time, there are some Mayan communities that regard ancient remains as having no value to their present reality. The lack of knowledge and participation of Indigenous people in archaeology is a phenomenon that is institutionalized by the government. It is necessary to be an archaeology student, or have a university degree in archaeology and permission from the Institute of Anthropology and History, in order to investigate archaeological sites. Doing so without a permit is illegal, and the person responsible for the investigation would be penalized. There have not yet been any propositions or alternatives that allow Indigenous people without a post-secondary education to get involved in archaeological investigations. Another aspect that has limited the participation of Indigenous people in Mayan archaeology is that they do not consider it important. As Felipe Gómez observes, “Poverty and economic challenges have caused the efforts from the majority of indigenous Maya to focus mainly on survival so they have little or no interest in participating in archaeological research.” To me, culture is not an isolated entity. It is always related to the economic, educational, social, and political conditions of the population. If we are looking to build the interest and recover the Mayan culture, it is necessary to first recover our dignity and our rights as Indigenous people. It would not be meaningful to know our past, which was

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glorious and full of knowledge and wealth, if our current conditions remained precarious and deficient. One of the difficulties that contemporary Mayas face is the loss of culture. There are many factors, institutionalized and non-institutionalized, in the country that do not allow ethnic groups to grow and have their cultural freedom. Racism and the discrimination it creates contribute to the loss or the concealment of the Mayan identity. This has a huge impact on young generations. If we lose our culture, it will be difficult for us to connect to and appreciate our past. Also, since many interpretations of archaeological evidence have been informed by contemporary Indigenous analogies and practices, the loss of contemporary Mayan culture—the legacy of our ancestors—would further diminish our history. Another challenge that Mayas face is being able to establish lines of communication and cooperation between archaeologists and Indigenous leaders. Presently, each group mistrusts the procedures and results of the other. I have personally faced difficult situations where my knowledge about archaeology has been ignored or discounted by some Mayan leaders and spiritual guides who refuse to recognize any authority who speaks about the past except those who have traditionally done so for years. These differences need to be discussed between both groups in order to clarify their doubts, which on many occasions are the result of the lack of communication and goodwill.

C ONCLUSIONS Archaeology, like other social sciences, is able to establish historical and cultural links between the past and present and identify changes and cultural loss in those societies. Yet archaeology is a very specialized and limited field that requires higher education. It is thus necessary to establish new research mechanisms to involve Indigenous peoples at a different level; instead of just benefiting from their labor, archaeology needs to incorporate Indigenous ways of thinking and living and to recognize the needs and interests of descendant communities. At the moment, I believe that cultural research by Indigenous peoples themselves needs to be outside archaeology, given the fact that the local mechanisms to obtain knowledge of the past are different from the scientific perspective of the archaeology. This doesn't mean that the two research approaches (traditional and scientific) need be separated; rather, they can complement each other by comparing their outputs and not their processes. I also believe that both prehispanic cultural heritage and the contemporary cultural expressions of Indigenous peoples are at risk of abandonment or destruction in Guatemala due to the dominant culture’s influence in this country. The key role of archaeology is educating the present population to value and enhance the strengths of Indigenous cultures by challenging stereotypes that degrade Indigenous peoples and that disconnect them from their past. If we are able to strengthen our identity as Mayas, with or without help from archaeology, then we will be rescuing and preserving the heritage that our ancestors have left to us, and, consequently, our historical past.

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Finally, the recovery and appreciation of different manifestations of the Mayan past are not restricted to archaeology. A variety of efforts are underway by different segments of the indigenous population (including academics, non-archaeology academics, Mayan spiritual guides, and organizations) to protect, study, and share the knowledge of Mayan culture, sacred sites, and ancient cities. Many such means already exist in present Mayan communities that can support archaeology, and vice versa. But we must work to unify these different efforts in a participatory and egalitarian way.

N OTES 1 They are three prehispanic cities from the Postclassic period (AD 900–1524). Iximche’ (“corn

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tree”) was the last capital of the Maya-Kaqchikel people; Q’umarkaj was the last capital of the Maya-K’iche’; and Saqulew (“white sand”) was the last capital of the Maya-Mam people. All three are located in the highlands of Guatemala. This is because Indigenous texts, known through colonial documents, recorded that Mayan royalty indicated that their origins were a distant city called Tulan. This was a generic name given to many prehispanic cities in central Mexico to embrace their greatness, but which highland groups believe was a mystic city where all that is divine originates (similar to the concept of paradise or heaven in Christianity). On the other hand, there is no archaeological evidence of huge migrations, only that Mayas from the highlands had occupied the territory since the early decades of the Classic period (AD 300). However, although ladinos are generally perceived as racist in Guatemala, there are exceptions to the rule, where Indigenous people and ladinos have equal relations in daily interactions. This problem is also faced by poor urban and rural non-Indigenous people. But the main difference is that their education is delivered from the perspective of the official ladina culture, which is similar to the one they share, whereas for Indigenous people, education is based in the culture—and language—of the “other.” This section is based on part of a conference paper by Iyaxel Cojtí, Cojtí Avexnim, and Diego Vásquez (2007). As Politis and Pérez note (2007: 353), the limited contribution of Latin American archaeologists is the consequence of their intellectual subordination, which corresponds to the political and economic dependence of countries in this region. There are exceptions, such as the Cancuen Project; the epigraphy workshops given by Nikolai Grube in Antigua, Guatemala; the Q’umarkaj project in Quiché; and the workshops offered by the University of Texas at Austin, in which there is a more direct relation with the Indigenous population. Personal communication, 2008.

R EFERENCES C ITED Cojtí, I., C. Avexnim, and D. Vásquez 2007 The Contribution from Archeology to the Present Maya and the Contribution from the Present Maya to Archaeology. In Guatemalan Culture, Proceedings of the VII Congress of Maya Studies, Rafael Landívar University of Guatemala.

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Oxlajuj Ajpop 2008 Propuesta de modelo organizativo para la recuperación, conservación, dignificación y administración de los lugares sagrados mayas. Glifo Litografía y Servicios, Guatemala. Politis, G., and J. Pérez 2007 Latin American Archaeology: From Colonialism to Globalization. In A Companion to Social Archaeology, edited by L. Meskell and R. Preucel, pp. 333–373. Wiley-Blackwell, London. Shanks, M., and C. Tilley 1987 Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sharer, R., and W. Ashmore 1993 Archaeology, Discovering Our Past. 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill, New Jersey. Sturm, C. 1996 Old Writing and New Messages: The Role of Hieroglyphic Literacy. In Maya Cultural Activism, edited by E. Fischer and M. Brown, pp. 114–130. University of Texas Press, Austin.

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Photo courtesy of Antonio Cuxil

MY LIFE AS A KAQCHIKEL MAYAN TOUR LEADER AND MAYA RESEARCHER IN GUATEMALA

Antonio Cuxil arcus Garvey famously said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” I believe the contemporary Mayan people have been like a tree without roots when we talk about linking them to their ancient Mayan ancestors, because they have generally been presented as people without history—at least one written by themselves. I am not being ethnocentric when I talk about the history of Mayan studies, but we have to recognize that it has mostly been told by non-Mayas. Very few Mayas have been involved in Mayan studies, due both to limited opportunities and to a lack of interest—topics I will discuss in this paper. In order to tell my personal story, I first need to put it in the context of the larger history of the Maya.

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S ITUATING M AYAN STUDIES Without the interest of the early explorers and later the first archaeologists and researchers whose many projects awakened interest in the Maya and other ancient civilizations, we would now know very little about our ancient Mayan history. Today, a wide variety of sources that provide information on the ancient Maya—including publications, symposia, documentaries, workshops, and the Internet—have helped to increase interest in the topic by their descendants. In fact, I am really surprised at how much interest Mayan people have shown in the field of archaeology and other sciences in just the last five years. I hope this will grow even more in the future, because there is a great need for the Mayan people to participate more in archaeology and to benefit more from the knowledge and opportunities it has produced. By the 15th century, the major ancient cities of Tikal, Calakmul, Yaxha, Palenque, Copan, and many others were already abandoned and covered by jungle. The reasons for the collapse of those societies are still widely discussed among specialists, yet few questions about what happened to the Maya have been completely answered. We can’t blame the Spaniards for the decline of the ancient Mayan civilization because they arrived a halfcentury later, but they destroyed a lot of what they found. We also have to recognize that since the Spanish conquest (AD 1524 in Central America) until just a few years ago, the Mayan population has been dominated—in terms of political power, economic opportunities, social status, and even academic research projects—by non-Mayan interests. The result is that the Maya have received little benefit from the development of their homeland, or from the products of such academic pursuits as archaeology, anthropology, epigraphy, and other fields of study of value to the whole Mayan population, all of which reveal and celebrate the Mayan past. Indeed, as Mayan scholar Avexnim Cojtí Ren has noted (2002), “Sadly and unfortunately, the history of our people has also been colonized. That is, the history of the Maya has been distorted and is told by others. The colonial system guaranteed the continuation of its legitimacy by erasing the records (written, material, cultural, and oral) that could support claims of historical legitimacy and cultural distinctiveness of Indigenous People.” How can we move beyond this?

T HE VALUE OF A RCHAEOLOGY TO AND FOR M AYAN I DENTITY I am interested in the topics of Indigenous archaeology and Indigenous people as archaeologists, but especially in the question of why Indigenous Maya, in general, have not studied, or are only now studying, the ancient history of Mesoamerica. I believe it is because the popular historical accounts of our past do not go further back than the European discovery of America in 1492; in school we still learn very little about our ancient history (although that is now starting to change). I believe archaeology has an important role to play in the vindication of Mayan identity, as well as in helping to increase interest in developing links to our past history: As Mayas we want and need to reconnect and confirm our present history with our past. An alive rather than a dead past that empowers our present struggles

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for decolonization and allows us to have more agency in the making of our own future. History is power for our people; history is the basis for the Mayaland rights, historical patrimony, education, language, recognition leadership and so on. (Cojtí Ren 2002) Greater participation in university programs on archaeological and historical research, for example, could thus benefit Mayas as they seek to build a real nation, because it would build stronger links between the contemporary Mayas and their ancestors, and also between the various Mayan groups of the present. Archaeology could be used to promote a shared Mayan culture by uniting different groups from different regions and countries, having different languages, ideologies and beliefs, but having their Mayan identity and ancestry in common. At this time, however, in spite of increased awareness in and appreciation of our past, few Mayas are studying archaeology or other disciplines related to ancient history. I suspect that just being Maya will not necessarily make an immediately big difference between non-Mayan archaeologists and Mayan people as archaeologists. What is needed are people very interested in, and engaged with, their culture and cultural identity. It will be difficult to reach such goals at first, but we know that we will learn through the process of Mayas becoming archaeologists. It is going to take some time until we Mayas can make contributions to our history through archaeology because we have been disadvantaged academically for many years. We still don’t have much experience participating in excavation projects or in supervisory positions. On the other hand, the majority of the workers on archaeological projects have long been Mayas and have gained important skills. Hopefully, one day there will be more Indigenous archaeologists in Guatemala and elsewhere in the the Mayan World who are sufficiently committed, responsible, and knowledgeable to make decisions and contributions about Mayan cultural heritage. We also need more representation by Mayas in the government, specifically in the ministry that deals with archaeology and anthropological matters. An integrated team effort is needed wherever studies of the past are going on in Guatemala and elsewhere in Mesoamerica; otherwise, a few individuals will not make a big difference. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that the archaeologists currently working in the Mayan area are not sufficiently committed—of course they are. All of them are really engaged with the culture they are studying, and they respect everything they discover, which brings them closer to the Mayas and, in turn, makes them understand our past more fully. Some of these archaeologists now ask Mayan Ajq´ij (“shamans or priests”) to conduct ceremonies at the beginning of excavation to obtain permission from our ancestors. They also listen to suggestions and advice about how to respect our ancestors (rather than commercializing the ceremonies), and that is a big step. It is through the contact that researchers have with the local populations that archaeologists begin to know more about the needs of the communities, whether related to archaeology or to the village’s own priorities and development plans. I am also pleased to have a lot of them as my good friends because they have awakened my interest in archaeology, especially the late Linda Schele and Nikolai Grube.

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Without the interest and courage of such researchers, we would not know a lot about our history and past. It is amazing how so much of what we know about our past has come from the different teams working hard in the jungle. We Mayas will understand even more when we have the opportunity to be active in the field and to make contributions of our own. Archaeology and anthropology are most often viewed as the sciences that link contemporary cultures with ancient civilizations, but there are many other disciplines that contribute to a better understanding of ancient Mesoamerican cultures. These include epigraphy, astronomy, art, architecture, medicine, and weaving, among many others. Ethnographic studies are also very important, as they provide insights into the beliefs and traditions maintained and practiced by different Mayan groups in the present and how these relate to archaeological or epigraphic evidence found in situ. In the last few years I have had great experiences teaching Mayas how to read the Mayan glyphs; it is really exciting to get contemporary Mayas closer to their/our past. We also need educational reform programs. More bilingual education and Mayan history courses in school curricula will help to increase students’ interest in ancient Mayan history. This would reinforce the ties we contemporary Mayas have to our past. It is also another way of giving Mayan history back to the people it belongs to.

M Y I NTEREST IN A RCHAEOLOGY I grew up in a small village in the highlands in Guatemala, a community with 99% Indigenous population. Most of the villagers were farmers like my father. We grew maize (corn) and wheat, with vegetables in between. Our parents taught us what maize means for our culture and our life and how our life is related to it. So as a child, I learned about growing and harvesting and how to care for and respect maize. I also learned the various ceremonies that were then practiced, which were related either to agriculture or daily life. Fortunately there was a school in my village, so all my brothers and sisters and I had the chance to attend. In the school we did not learn much about our (Mayan) history or what happened in the past. It was explained to us that there was a great civilization in our country, but that was it—there was no relation between it and the contemporary Mayan groups. After completing elementary school, I decided to continue with my education. Since there was no other school in my village, I had to move to the next big town, in Tecpan, Guatemala, where there was a secondary school. In Tecpan, the number of Mayas in the student population was much smaller than in our village, so we faced discrimination at many levels and in many ways. I think that such discrimination encouraged students not to speak the Mayan language and to study modern topics instead of ancient civilizations, and to work toward any career that would provide them with what at that time was seen as a good job. The situation in Tecpan was often difficult, because there were three different groups in the school: Mayas with traditional dress; Mayas who wore modern clothing (in order not be discriminated against); and the ladinos or mestizos (considered Spanish

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descendants), who were the largest group. We had to find the group that we best fit into, which usually was the Mayas who wore modern clothing instead of traditional dress. Our school used to visit Iximché,1 the ancient capital of the Kaqchikel Group, located 5 kilometers away from Tecpan. As a child I often saw buses with foreigners going to this site, which was founded in AD 1470. I thought they must be interested in some kind of history that we did not learn about in the school—that there was something more to the place and its history than we were being told. It is still common to label the ancient cities, like Tikal, Iximché, and many others, as “ruins,” as something of the past. But now we are learning to see them as our ancient cities, and also as sacred places. This appreciation grew as I got deeper into the field of archaeology, but when I was young, we were told very little about Mayan history or how our group was related to them. Some elders explained our relation with the ancient city of Iximché, but this was still difficult for us to understand, because a lot of the Mayan people themselves considered the vestiges of these sites to be ruins and didn’t consider them as part of their heritage. In fact, the term “Maya” was then not common; instead, natural, Indio, and indígena were used in reference to the Mayan people. I don’t want to speak for others, but I also think that Christianity also played a big role in our not learning about our past, because evidence of warfare in the past is considered against the principles of religion. Despite these factors, I became interested in studying and knowing about our past and what is now called ancient Mayan history. When I was sixteen years old, after completing secondary school, I decided to move to the capital, Guatemala City, and perhaps study archaeology or anthropology. However, this would have required full-time study, and because I had to work to support myself (since the age of fifteen), it was not possible for me to study archaeology. I thus ended up first studying English, and then I completed a bachelor’s degree in tourism in 1985. The tourism curriculum included a little bit of archaeology, anthropology, history, art, and other related subjects. My tourism studies got me more interested in reading and learning about archaeology. Later, I had the chance to participate in a workshop on Mayan glyphs organized by epigraphers Linda Schele and Nikolai Grube. This further encouraged and reinforced my interest in studying more about ancient Mayan history. What also prompted me to learn more about my past were several disagreeable experiences that I had while working in tourism, when different ladino individuals discriminated against Mayan people. My response to this was to study more and work to change the way people see and think about Mayan history and the relationship between modern and ancient Mayan history and why both should be respected. In recent years, my goal has been to teach tour guides and share with them some of the knowledge that I have learned in workshops and seminars, which they, in turn, can share with visitors. I have to say that I am happy and surprised by the way they love to learn about the results of new research in Mayan archaeology. So far I have organized four workshops and several talks in the Peten lowlands about Mayan history, especially epigraphy. I think that when people come to know more about our history, they will respect and appreciate it more—something confirmed by the fact that several of my colleagues are now studying archaeology. Also, several tour guides look at me as the

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link between epigraphers and themselves, because I share with them any new information I learn from symposia that I have been fortunate to attend in the United States. I also share all of what I learn with the Mayas, because they seldom have the opportunity to attend such conferences. Beginning in 2001, I have accompanied Dr. Nikolai Grube on expeditions into the jungle south of Campeche in Mexico. It is always exciting to go back and visit those places again and again, especially since these provide an important opportunity for me to experience and understand more about archaeology and the life of archaeologists in the field. Since 2003, my good friend Lolmay from the Guatemala highlands has joined us. Lolmay, who is also Kaqchikel (like me) and also an excellent linguistic researcher, told me, “I also want to know how and where epigraphers and archaeologists do their research. We have participated in many workshops, but [these have been] in a classroom. . . . I also want to experience what it is like to be in the field of research in order to appreciate more what we know about our history through the experience and work done by researchers in situ.” The participation of Mayan people in the field of archaeology makes it possible to examine the archaeological record from different perspectives. Including the Mayan point of view can improve or extend archaeological studies, and results in less biased interpretations.

C HALLENGES TO I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGY IN G UATEMALA In Guatemala, most of the Indigenous people in villages have difficulties finishing elementary school, or continuing to the next level. Most difficult of all is to get to the university and receive sponsorship or scholarships in any field. There are only a few towns (versus cities) where university training is available, where it is more accessible to students and easier for them to live, work, and study. According to statistics, only about 10% of the students in the universities are Mayas, which helps to explain why there are so few Indigenous people studying archaeology there. There are many organizations and groups of people working with, or interested in developing projects with, Mayan communities. Almost every year, in both the highlands and the lowlands of Guatemala, vestiges of ancient cities or ceremonial centers are found. This increases local interest, especially when the archaeologists seek community assistance to learn more about such ceremonial centers. But when there is no one with knowledge of such places, or anyone who can impart something specific about these sites, then these are often simply called “ruins.” Another problem is that there are very limited funds for cultural studies, and what little there is has to be divided among many. This means that most of the big archaeological projects are sponsored by international universities or other organizations. What would be very beneficial is to have education and training in archaeology (with scholarships) that combine local research and fieldwork opportunities with opportunities to study abroad. This would provide students with direct experience in Mayan archaeology and knowledge of new archaeological methods and theory.

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Finally, up-and-coming Mayan archaeologists—or, for that matter, anyone else planning to work in the Mayan region—also need to be knowledgeable about other disciplines. This should obviously include both anthropology and epigraphy, to name only two topics that would complement archaeological investigations. Scholars would be well prepared if they were knowledgeable in these areas.

A RCHAEOLOGY AND M AYAN C OMMUNITIES Larry Zimmerman (1994: 66) proposes that “archaeologists must be anthropologists first,” meaning (in this case) that archaeologists must consult with Mayan people, seek their involvement in every level of the search, and acknowledge Mayan traditional knowledge in interpreting the Mayan past. Archaeology is a science that helps to understand how the people lived, how they managed their environment, and how their societies developed over time. We have a lot to learn from our past. Archaeology and anthropology also help to confirm the great accomplishments of the Mayas and to provide better interpretations of the archaeological record. This can best be accomplished by including Mayan persons on the scientific team. Such individuals can also represent local interests and values, and help to ensure that the project benefits the Mayan community. Mayan archaeologists can have yet another advantage: being able to speak the language of the people in the project area. This can give community workers a feeling of familiarity in what they are doing and help them to feel more comfortable in making suggestions to the team leaders. I know from experience that local Mayan people are very proud when they work in such programs. As traditional people, we know and understand the value of ancient gifts or objects that are inherited from generation to generation, because in our communities we have the same tradition, giving valuable things to new generations. Such participation helps to convey the value of and respect for the ancestors. We, the Mayas (and I think any indigenous group), are proud of our origins, our history, and our heritage, but it is necessary to constantly confirm it, especially in areas where modern (non-Mayan) influences are strong. Every archaeological project has different impacts on the community. Sometimes there are no villages near the site, but often the ancient cities are surrounded by villages. It is interesting what the inhabitants want from, or want to give to, the ancient city. Through the process of studying archaeology, people will become more respectful and knowledgeable of the living customs and traditions of the Maya in order to understand the past cultures, or to find a link between them. For example, the cosmology of Indigenous people today in the Mayan area is the same as, or similar to, that of our ancestors, despite the influence of modern media and or other religions. When the local community is integrated into archaeological projects—not just in excavating, but also in managing the projects—they will realize that this is something of value for them. Developing closer relations between communities and archaeologists may help to reduce or even prevent looting of the ancient sites. Local participation also helps to preserve and promote their culture and could also be a source of economic benefit. This

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may be difficult at the beginning, but with time and experience it will work, and the local Mayan population will begin to see archaeology in another way, perhaps fairer, more human, and more relevant to their interests. There is a need for this now, as there are already Mayan communities and organizations asking for someone who can do something or help in their ancient ceremonial centers, big or small, including those containing only small temples or single altars. When I have organized small workshops and lectures in communities, the people are very proud of being Mayas. But they are even more proud when they hear positive things about their past and present cultural heritage, and also when new research confirms what they already knew about their ancestors. I want to end this chapter by saying that archaeologists, epigraphers, anthropologists, and many other experts have contributed a lot to the history of the Mayas. I hope that in the future more Mayas are involved in archaeology in Guatemala. This will help us Mayas learn and appreciate more fully what our ancestors in the pre-Columbian time accomplished, especially during the Classic period (AD 250–900). Perhaps that knowledge will help us to better manage our society and environment today and in the future. Many people know about Ramses, Tutankhamun, and many famous people in world history, so now it is time to include such great Mayan leaders as Hasaw Chan K’awil, the 26th ruler of Tikal (AD 682–734; see Grube and Martin 2000). Hasaw Chan K’awil, along with his son and grandson, ruled during the Late Classic period at the height of Tikal’s power and influence.

N OTE 1 Ixim = maize; Ché = tree.

R EFERENCES C ITED Cojtí Ren, A. 2002 Maya Archaeology and the Political and Cultural Identity of Contemporary Maya People. Paper presented at the “Towards a More Ethical Mayan Archaeology Conference,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, November 2002. Grube, N., and S. Martin 2000 Chronicles of the Mayan Kings and Queens. Thames and Hudson, London. Zimmerman, L. 1994 Sharing Control of the Past. Archaeology 47 (6): 65–68.

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Photo courtesy of Brandy George

W HO A M I AND H OW D ID I G ET H ERE ?

B RANDY E. G EORGE ees the Past Woman”—I was called this one day when I was working in my home community. First I wondered if he was talking to me, and when he answered that he was, I asked him why he called me that. He said that at some point in an Anishinabe person’s life, they must find what their purpose is and a name will be chosen for them by an elder, a name that reflects the chosen life path. I found it interesting that he would call me “Sees the Past Woman,” for, after all, I was just “doing my job.” I will return to this issue later to show why I was wrong in my thinking that my job would have little impact. To everyone at home, I am Brandy George and I am Ojibway-Potawatomi (also known as Anishinabe) from the Kettle Point and Stoney Point communities in southwestern Ontario, Canada. For various reasons, I had a difficult time through school, but mostly in

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university. I had assumed that by the time I reached this stage of my education, information relating to Native peoples in Canada would be substantial and up to date. However, throughout my undergraduate and master’s degrees, I was taught that my people were “dying out”and should be studied while there was still time. So I came to realize that there is a need for updated information to be taught. I finally understood why people often think the way they do about Native peoples in general—the education system itself is in need of an overhaul in how people are studied and discussed. In a few classes, I even questioned whether a particular anthropologist actually talked to the people he studied or had included all ages and genders in his investigations. More importantly, I asked my instructors why they were teaching in a way that makes students believe First Nations populations are declining when there are actually more Native people showing up in the school systems, among other places. Needless to say, I did not receive many satisfactory answers.

W HY A RCHAEOLOGY ? Interestingly enough, it was out of a pure interest in archaeology that I found my way to where I am today. I developed this keen interest while in high school and decided I would study archaeology in university. Even so, I was delayed in entering university because a trusted counselor advised me that I would never make it in a post-secondary institution so I shouldn’t bother; I should accept this and hope for the best. I believed him, and applied to college instead. However, after graduating from an Early Childhood Education college program and working with children for two years, I realized I wasn’t happy, so I decided to return to school. I was accepted into a psychology program at a university but soon renewed my interest in archaeology and anthropology, eventually switching programs at the end of the first year. Surprisingly, it was not until the break between the third and fourth years of my undergraduate degree that I realized there was such a need for Native peoples in archaeology. At that time, there were no Native archaeologists in Ontario. When I learned this, I was determined to finish my degrees and get into Ontario archaeology in the hope that I could give Native people the means to participate in a field that studied them but did not include and work with them. However, in my final year, I was told by one of my instructors that he felt the master’s program would be too demanding and that it was doubtful I would succeed. Sound familiar? In response, I applied to and was accepted into the master’s program at another university, completed it with the highest marks I ever achieved, and began my official career in Ontario archaeology in the realm of cultural resource management (CRM).

B UMPS IN THE R OAD —T HROUGH THE G OOD T IMES AND THE B AD Once I finished my M.A. degree in 2004, I started working in cultural resource management as an archaeologist and First Nations liaison for a consulting archaeology company. Since then, I have had to learn about field methods and about how to be both a CRM supervisor and a liaison. In Ontario, to practice archaeology, you must have one of three

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licenses. I received my research license in 2006 and my professional license, the highest one you can achieve, in 2007. Although today there are First Nations people in Ontario who participate in archaeology in some form or another on a monitor or volunteer basis, I am still the only licensed Native archaeologist in the province. My role as First Nations liaison has been to ensure that I am in a position to help Native people and groups to understand and be more comfortable with archaeology. In this capacity, I am in direct contact with, and act as a communication line between, Native and non-Native groups. Through this part of my job, I realized there are many misconceptions and outdated ideas about what archaeology is and how Native people are involved and affected by it. Some still believe, for example, that archaeologists are grave robbers and that all we look for is the ancestors’ bones to put into museums. Many of these notions were formed by previous experiences of community members, as well as by things they’ve read. Often on a personal basis, I explain that archaeologists have changed. I am asked why I decided on archaeology when “all archaeologists do is look for bones.” My answer is that in my past six field seasons, I have only been involved twice in situations where an ancestor has been disturbed and that I am most interested in learning about past lifeways, including ancient activity areas and campsites, and not necessarily the burial practices of a group of people. They ask what I think about those who study human remains and if I ever would do so myself. My honest answer is that I believe that the only time human remains should be physically studied or handled archaeologically is if they have been disturbed by accidental means and we are helping to return them back to the earth. In saying this, I mean that if information obtained during the process of accidental discovery and reburial of a person can be used to expedite the burial process, then it is something that should be done on a limited basis. Spiritually speaking, I believe that human remains should be left as placed and not disturbed unless absolutely necessary. Many archaeologists that I have met do not understand this and ask why I decided to become an archaeologist if this is how I feel. Some things are hard to explain. Another problem I have encountered concerns how people think of me. Professionally speaking, colleagues see me as an archaeologist first and a Native person second, while I, my family, and other First Nations people see me as Native first. I will share an example to illustrate these differences in perception and also the different responsibilities I have in each role. Often I am required to attend meetings on archaeological matters in my home community where elders and non-Native people are both in attendance. When I am home and in the presence of my elders, my role is to listen, learn, and speak when asked, and here I am considered to be a community member first. To show respect, I follow what I know my role is and speak only when necessary. My non-Native colleagues sometimes do not understand this, and I have been told to speak up and take an active role in these meetings. I have attempted to explain to them my community roles and responsibilities, and how, by living up to these, I show my respect; I explain that in those meetings, I am an archaeologist second. My professional colleagues think I should be an archaeologist first and a Native community member second, and this often causes problems.

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Community members sometimes also find it difficult to understand this issue. For example, I was once invited to attend an Iroquoian longhouse meeting with two nonNative archaeologists, and the three of us were introduced to the members in a particular order and way. The two non-Native archaeologists were introduced first by name and then by profession, whereas I was introduced as being a Native community member from Kettle and Stoney Point, and then, almost as an afterthought, that I was also an archaeologist. Interestingly, not only did people in the longhouse actually sit forward to look at me when I was introduced, but then after the meeting, all the elders passed my two colleagues with only a nod while they all stopped to talk with me. One of the elders asked me a question about his own people’s pre-contact history, but, still being new to the profession, I could not answer the question. He then stated, “Well, aren’t you supposed to have all the answers? Aren’t you the expert?” My reply was, “In this case I would consider you to be the expert and would hope that you would be able to teach me the answer.” At this point, he smiled and said that he had been waiting so long for someone to tell him that, someone who was actually willing to listen to the people instead of telling them what they already knew. I have had a few other experiences like this that help me to see that I am doing something right. At the same time, I have found there are also many people who are not interested in encouraging me to do the best I can. They seem to believe that my position in Ontario archaeology would effectively threaten all they had done to keep the “science” in and Native viewpoints out of archaeology. This is one thing that keeps me going. I feel that archaeologists need to remember that the ancient groups they choose to study are linked to living people today and therefore that archaeology can have an effect on modern communities. Often I have thought that a host of problems and misconceptions come from archaeologists not engaging with living peoples in the archaeological study of the past. In the end, then, it is not just my own interests in and curiosity about the past that brought me to archaeology and kept me involved, but also a variety of circumstances and encounters, not all of which have been positive.

A DVICE FOR A S MOOTHER R IDE I have learned many lessons from my experiences so far. I would like to encourage others to continue on and keep pushing, and to realize that their efforts may make the way smoother for those who will come after. Knowing that I can make someone else’s way a bit easier by going through the hard times first is what pushes me everyday. Those of you Indigenous persons involved in or interested in archaeology should know that there are others out there who have felt the rejections based on who they are, along with those who have been discriminated against because their level of formal education may not be as high as someone else’s. There are also those who struggle in the workplace, where sometimes it feels they are there only so the company can tell clients that they employ the Indigenous and marginalized. My overall experience in archaeology has been fairly positive to date, although it has been rough at times. I cannot say that things will be easy for others, or that everyone will

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succeed in achieving their goals, but at least those “marginalized” persons who are going through the process of becoming archaeologists will have others to talk to. I have found that being the only Native archaeologist who holds a professional archaeological license in Ontario is an extremely lonely place to be. I have had to go looking for other Native people from around the world to network with because nobody else locally seems to understand many of the issues I’m concerned with, except for those who have experienced the same things that I have. My advice to up-and-coming Indigenous archaeologists is to go to conferences, seek out people who have published on topics relating to Indigenous archaeology, or who are at universities or in government jobs that have programs you are interested in. In doing so myself, I have been able to develop a fairly good network with like-minded individuals. As for non-Native archaeologists and the institutions and consulting companies you represent, my advice would be to include the people whose ancestors you study in a more effective way. Instead of telling them what you think you know about them, ask them what they would like others to know about their community and culture. This entails including Indigenous communities in policy making, which is something that is generally not done enough. Although there are some policies, guidelines, and legislation in Ontario regarding archaeological consultation with Native communities, all have been created without consulting with these communities. And to universities who are teaching new archaeologists, some of them First Nations, I say “open the doors!”When I was going through school, I tried for years to work in the archaeology lab, but was always turned down. I was given numerous excuses as to why I could not be in there. I found out later that it was because there were items and human remains that they did not want me to see because, as a Native person, I might want them returned. Instead of asking me and including me, it was assumed that I would “ruin” everything, so I was never given the chance. Universities, professors, institutions should never assume anything. Give people that chance to learn, give them the tools instead of taking those opportunities away. I had several professors who made me work hard, pushed me along the way, and encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be— they helped to make the many awkward moments, barriers, and painful experiences I encountered more tolerable. I would also ask schools to rethink how you teach Native people about themselves. Please consider that perhaps they have something to teach you and their non-Native classmates.

W HAT C AN A RCHAEOLOGY D O F OR N ATIVE COMMUNITIES ? From a personal perspective, I can see archaeology providing a means for Native people to add to their histories and have something to show when telling oral histories and legends. For the Anishinabe people, our stories, teachings, and histories were passed on orally, and not written down. It was believed that if the information was important enough, you would remember it and learn from it. Only in recent decades have the stories been written down and shared. It was thus both surprising and very rewarding that in the course of a particular archaeological project I had the experience of researching my

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own family and community history and, interestingly enough, many of the stories I had been told as a child were reflected in my research results. As a consequence of this project and the new awareness it produced, I began to see that the value of archaeology to my community is now coming to the forefront. Several other projects that I have been involved with have brought more visibility to archaeology as a result of community members learning about it. For example, I worked with an Iroquoian community on disputed land where archaeology was required. Along with my crew, I had community members work alongside, in the process learning what archaeology is and how we do fieldwork. From this experience, the community became more aware of archaeology and some of the methods we practice. Hopefully, such work can show Native peoples that archaeology can be a useful tool for them and can also encourage them to become more involved with the work being done around them. Returning to the name “Sees the Past Woman,” I had not realized that my work had any impact on people until this happened. It was explained that because I was one of the first Indigenous archaeologists in Ontario, I would be a role model and should thus keep working hard and doing things in a respectful manner that would bring honor and pride to my community and people. This tells me that my place in archaeology is so much more important than just fulfilling a personal interest. People are watching and learning, and it is my responsibility, not only to my home community but to others as well, to help them see that archaeological awareness is needed.

C ONCLUSIONS Overall, all I can say for sure is that the journey for a Native archaeologist is not easy. You should expect to have hard times, but hopefully you will find that there are people willing to help if you need it. Throughout my five years of formal education and six field seasons, I have had many experiences that illustrate the challenges and rewards of being an Indigenous archaeologist, but have mentioned only a few here. But I continue to share my thoughts, feelings, and experiences with others. I also know that I will encounter new trials as my archaeological career evolves, and I only hope that from every experience I continue to grow and learn. Let me end by saying that one of the main things that I have learned is that if it were not for the continued support of those who believe in me, I would have had more difficulties. It has been the support of my family, my partner, and the Native communities, especially my home communities of Kettle Point and Stoney Point, that have kept me going. To them, I say Chi-Meegwetch (“Thank you very much”). To those of you who are going through the same things, I hope you find your external support and internal strength to do the things that must be done and know you aren’t alone.

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INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGY AND BEING INDIAN IN NEW ENGLAND

D. Rae Gould hat does it mean to be Indian in New England, the northeastern part of the United States? I have been considering this one question for over a decade, and now, as my career has turned toward archaeology, another question arises: What does it mean to be a Native archaeologist in New England? The answer to this question has been revealing itself to me over the past few years through projects and responsibilities I have undertaken that are directly related to the interpretation of Nipmuc culture and history. Through these projects, I have found that these two questions are more than related; they are inextricably woven together. The participation of Native researchers and archaeologists in projects that interpret our culture is long overdue in New England. While tribes in other regions of the country

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developed archaeology programs decades ago (the Navajo being one example), New England tribes have only relatively recently begun to assume the responsibility of interpreting and presenting their past. This is an important point, because interpreting the past is, in essence, what archaeology is all about. But our past has rarely been interpreted from a Native perspective. More often, it has been recast by scholars who study New England Natives. And while the perspectives of outside scholars can certainly be useful, they need to be balanced by the knowledge that can only come from a tribal perspective. This is what I have been able to contribute to my tribe, the Nipmuc, by becoming trained as an archaeologist. My interest in using archaeology as a tool to better understand our past began a number of years ago, as the Nipmuc Nation interpreted our history of the post-contact centuries as part of an ongoing battle for federal acknowledgment that began in 1980. The various roles I have assumed for the tribe include being the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO), the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) coordinator, and a member of the Nipmuc Nation’s Federal Acknowledgment research team. More recently, as a member of the tribe’s Museum Committee, I am overseeing fundraising efforts and restoration of a 200-year-old homestead located on the tribe’s 1.2 hectare reservation in Grafton, Massachusetts. As the Nipmuc Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, my responsibilities have included monitoring and protecting the cultural and archaeological resources of our people. This role is closely related to the responsibilities that a NAGPRA coordinator assumes, which include communicating with institutions that hold our ancestors’ remains and ensuring their return and re-interment. Through serving my tribe in these positions, I have gained valuable knowledge and a rare perspective available to few non-Native scholars, since historic preservation and NAGPRA issues are most often handled by tribal members. This knowledge includes recognizing that in New England (and elsewhere) Indian people, and their histories, do not always fit stereotypical images that the public associates with what it means to be Indian in this country. These stereotypes are as old as the field of archaeology and were, in many ways, fostered by it. Our tribe has had to battle these misconceptions over generations and, more recently, through several decades of very trying times, as we fought to gain status as a sovereign nation within the United States. The recent rejection of the Nipmuc Nation’s federal acknowledgment petition by the Bureau of Indian Affairs has led those familiar with New England history to openly discuss the injustice of this decision and its undeniable connection to issues of status and identity in Indian Country (Calloway and Salisbury 2003: 17). My part in this process led me to ask the initial question posed at the beginning of this chapter, and to dive deeper into our tribal history to find an adequate answer through archaeological research. My belief is that the archaeological record, unlike the written record, can provide a less tainted (albeit incomplete) record that speaks more clearly about our past. But, admittedly, biases exist in every discipline, and there are certainly perspectives that a Native archaeologist will have that non-Natives would not. Furthermore, all archaeological records require interpretation, which adds yet another layer of “meaning” to our work that must be deciphered. As a Native archaeologist focused on

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The homestead on the Hassanamisco Reservation in Massachusetts as it appeared in the 1800s (top) and in the mid-1900s (bottom), altered after two centuries of use by Nipmuc families. This structure has become the focus of both an architectural restoration project and an archaeological/historical investigation that seeks to interpret what Indian life was like in New England over the past 200 years. (Drawing from The Hundredth Town by Harriet M. Forbes, 1889. Courtesy of Nipmuc Nation Tribal Archive.)

the contact and post-contact periods, I openly admit the biases inherent in my work and that my goal is to reaffirm the continued existence of New England Indian cultures in the centuries since European settlement. By combining data from excavations with documentary research, I hope to create a more complete picture of everyday Native life in New England over the past 400 years.

T HE WABBAQUASSET P RAYING V ILLAGE One of the projects I have undertaken involves locating a 17th-century Nipmuc “praying village” that was located in northeastern Connecticut and which also addresses issues of cultural survival during the contact period. Before King Philip’s War, Puritan missionary John Eliot established fourteen praying villages that spanned the central portion of

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Massachusetts Bay Colony from Natick and Punkapog (now Canton) west to Quabaug (west of present-day Auburn) and south into present-day Connecticut. These settlements were mostly among Nipmuc Indians. As the first Indian missions in New England, the praying towns were intended to convert Native people to both the Christian religion and English customs (Carlson 1986: 1). While most of these settlements were located in Massachusetts Bay Colony, three were established within the present-day boundaries of Connecticut, including the Nipmuc settlement of Wabbaquasset. John Eliot held great expectations for what came to be known as Indian “praying towns,” or villages, but by 1675 his hopes were dashed by the outbreak of King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion, 1675–1676). The war ended with Metacom’s beheading in August 1676 (Gookin 1972 [1836]: 433; Lepore 1998), but the brutal nature of this war permanently affected definitions of Indian identity in the minds of non-Natives (Lepore 1998), definitions that have persisted into the present. Although almost all of the praying villages were abandoned by 1676, their impact continues to influence Native populations in southern New England. Today, Nipmuc people practice a combination of Christian and Native customs that are inextricably woven throughout our modern culture. It is this interaction between two cultures, and the resulting transition from the original Indigenous customs to those practiced today, that still require interpretation by modern scholars. My hope is that the interpretation of this site, the Wabbaquasset Praying Village, by a member of the Nipmuc tribe will inspire other groups in our area to assume a more active role in research and archaeology projects that help define their culture and past. This project has sought to address important issues by providing an analysis of the depth and persistence associated with an important place on the Nipmuc landscape from a Native perspective. As I see it, the presence of this Native perspective is just one more change in the continuum of transitions that began over 350 years ago in the praying villages, where Nipmuc people were “encouraged” to accept Christianity over their Indigenous beliefs. The decision to take on this project was the result of a personal interest in this area of Connecticut. Generations of my family were born in the town where this praying village was located, but the continuous presence of Nipmuc people and their connection to the landscape in northeastern Connecticut have never been fully explored. For tribal members, the relationship is just an assumed, internalized knowledge. The locations of old family homesteads, popular hunting grounds, and fishing areas known for generations, and stone walls built by grandparents and great-grandparents, provide reminders of the Nipmuc presence in this area to those of us who know this past. But to outsiders looking in, these connections are not as obvious. While the continuation of a Nipmuc presence in the Wabbaquasset area (now Woodstock, Connecticut) following the Praying Village period (1650–1675) is well documented in local histories, the actual site of the settlement has not yet been located, although many have speculated about its location for centuries. Being able to directly connect my heritage to a specific site on the landscape through archaeological investigation became one of the primary goals of this project. As I delved into this project, I also realized that my goals extended beyond just connecting my family’s past to a specific place in time and space. I began to see that the perspective of a Native American researcher might greatly contribute to a more complete

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understanding of the juncture of two cultures that occurred at this settlement, and inform modern interpretations of New England’s Indian tribes. Just as importantly, the analysis of this site by a Native scholar can help to achieve what became another primary goal of this project, establishing a model for the participation of Native researchers and archaeologists in projects that interpret Indigenous culture in southern New England. While Indians have been involved in the oversight of archaeological projects for several decades in the region, few have actually directed or managed a research project. In southern New England, John Brown (Narragansett) and Melissa (Fawcett) Zobel (Mohegan) are among the few who have established a precedent for Native people being actively involved in archaeological or historical research projects that interpret their tribal pasts. Their involvement throughout the 1980s and 1990s sent the important message that Native people have an inherent right to tell their own stories and should be integral to (if not the lead researchers on) any projects discussing tribal histories.

A N EED FOR C OLLABORATION The role that Native researchers should be assuming is directly related to the need that still exists for more collaboration between Indians and non-Indian people in the Northeast. In New England, there is still an obvious need for better communication and improved relationships between Natives and non-Natives, as I learned while researching the Wabbaquasset Praying Village. After a year or so of documentary research, I began an archaeological survey that was designed to locate this important site. I started this phase of the project by personally contacting each landowner in the project area to describe my project and request permission to conduct the survey. In my conversations with residents, I identified myself as both a University of Connecticut archaeologist and a member of the Nipmuc Nation. While some residents responded positively and supported the concept that a Native American researcher was seeking to locate an important cultural and archaeological resource, the reactions of many residents to the project were mixed at best. Several feared that land claims would be instituted by my tribe and so coordinated an effort to undermine my project. This fear was fueled by the economic success of the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan casinos. Several residents even described to me how these tribes had “taken away people’s land,” despite my attempt to explain to them that there is no precedent for Indian tribes taking private land from citizens based on their status as Indian tribes. This was the most disappointing part of this project; it reconfirmed that, 350 years after the Praying Village period, there is still a desperate need for better communication between Native American and Euro-American descendants in southern New England. The relations between these two groups continue to be defined by misconception, fear, and mistrust. As a result, by the time the summer field season began, access to the Wabbaquasset Hill area where I suspect the center of the praying village settlement may have been located was very restricted. While I understand that non-Native archaeologists also encounter resistance from landowners, for my project it was the cause of the resistance that was at the heart of this issue.

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More critical than the lack of support that many Indian tribes in New England face is the pervasive belief that “real” Indians ceased to exist in this area long ago, which directly affects how Native and non-Native people approach archaeology. Rhode Island State Archaeologist Paul Robinson (2000) discovered how differently the past can be interpreted when he explored “archaeology, memory, and meaning” in a Rhode Island town, as told from a Native versus a non-Native perspective. These opposing ideologies came to the fore several decades ago through the discovery of one of the largest Indian burial grounds in New England and the determination to include the local tribe (the Narragansett) in decisions regarding how to archaeologically document the site (see McBride 1989; Simmons 1970). The Narragansett assumed a central role in this project, as would be expected by many today. But at that time, the perspective of Natives was based on the fact that many non-Indians “believed that 19th- and 20th-century Narragansett had lost their Indian identities through marriage with non-Indians and with the sheer passage of time since European contact” (Robinson 2000: 406, citing Campbell and LaFantasie 1978). Helping the public to understand that this is not the case in New England is an important part of the work of Native researchers.

Indian identity in 20th-century New England. Two generations of the Cisco family, who lived at the Indian homestead on the Nipmuc reservation in Massachusetts, pose at an Indian gathering held around 1930. James Lemuel Cisco (left) wears his Indian headdress and a suit, while his daughter Sarah Cisco Sullivan is in more traditional regalia, and her brother Horace Cisco (right) wears a modern suit. Within this one family, public expressions of their Indian identity varied. Photo courtesy of Nipmuc Nation Tribal Archive.

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In many ways, this mind-set continues into the 21st century in New England. Even when people do admit the presence of Indian people, many do not sincerely believe that we should be in control of our own history or destiny. Admitting that Native people continue to share the same land that the Puritan settlers occupied centuries ago means admitting that Native people might have an inherent right to that land in the minds of many. And the recent economic success of several tribes in southern New England, such as the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot, creates an even greater atmosphere of mistrust. This mistrust, combined with the many misconceptions about Indian people that still plague people in New England, has led to roadblocks that must be removed in order for our shared history to be told. Many non-Indian people respond to the mistrust and misconceptions by defending their individualistic rights and denying access to the land and—in the case of archaeological research—to the past that can be interpreted through it. This, I believe, was the heart of the issue for my project, an issue that has brought me right back to the initial question: What does it mean to be Indian in New England? And, more importantly, how can we overcome these obstacles to create an environment that fosters collaboration rather than division? Despite such obstacles, Native archaeologists, perhaps more than others, must continue to be candid about their goals, biases, and perspectives. Archaeology is never just about interpreting the past; it is also about understanding the present and the centuries of events and relationships that have formed contemporary opinions about Indian people, so that we can move forward in our work as individual scholars and as tribal groups that must live cooperatively with our non-Indian neighbors. Although there will certainly continue to be obstacles to overcome, it is important to understand that each project can provide an opportunity to connect the present with the past and, hopefully, break the barriers that form the foundation of misconceptions about Indians in New England. The first requirement in this process is to believe in the contribution of archaeology as a way of reading the past and as an alternative, and a complement, to the written record. If upcoming archaeologists can help both Native and non-Native people understand and appreciate this, future projects will perhaps run into less resistance than mine did and the opportunities for Native archaeologists will be greater. Within the academic and professional spheres, being a Native archaeologist often offers more opportunities than resistance. This is not to say that obstacles no longer exist in these worlds. There is still a significant need to educate non-Native anthropology and archaeology students about the concerns of Indian people with respect to reconstructing Native histories. Many archaeology students at the graduate level are just learning about important laws such as NAGPRA, for instance. Archaeologists, in particular, need to be properly prepared for real-life interactions with Native people, interactions that may well become an important component of their careers. A career in cultural resource management (CRM), for example, requires knowledge of tribal territories and often involves establishing relationships with tribes whose homelands are affected by projects managed by these firms. This type of training should not occur when students enter the professional world, but should be a component of their academic training, when they are

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preparing for life as practicing archaeologists. This is one way that academic institutions can help to foster a more symbiotic relationship between archaeology, non-Native people, and Natives.

M OVING F ORWARD FROM THE PAST For Native archaeologists in New England, such as myself, it is important to remember that one project can make a major difference in how a tribe’s past is interpreted, and this interpretation may help determine what direction other research will take in the future. The goals of my work have a clear agenda, which includes answering very specific questions about the presence and history of Nipmuc people, such as: How can I help adequately “define” who Indian people in New England are? And what rights do we have as an Indigenous population to this land and the history that it holds? Answering these questions requires first identifying the Native tribes that still exist within the broader American cultural landscape; for many of us, the federal acknowledgment process has played an important role in that determination. While Native archaeologists must deal with such personal issues as these, we must also balance our duties to our tribes with our roles as scientists and professionals. As one can imagine, this is not always an easy task. I feel it is important to set an example for other Native people by focusing on projects that are truly meaningful to our tribes. And archaeology provides an opportunity to interpret our own history, correct misconceptions, and to tell our own story. By becoming the archaeologist, Indian people gain yet another valuable asset—the ability to interpret our past according to our standards, rather than relying on others to do this for us. Furthermore, as Vine Deloria, Jr. (1997: 219) has noted, Indian people should not have to choose between being Indians or being anthropologists and archaeologists who feel they must justify their choice of profession. But many of us still feel compelled to do this. I sometimes must convince people in my own tribe that I do not run around digging up graves! Many Native people still carry fear, mistrust, and misconceptions about the field of archaeology; these must be dispelled, just as the fear, mistrust, and misconceptions of non-Native people about Indians must also be remedied. One of the most important goals of my work is to establish that alternative perspectives of Native New England history exist and need to be recognized. It is imperative that Native scholars take a more active role in these new perspectives and interpretation of the sites and histories that describe their past. Some non-Native New England scholars and archaeologists already recognize this. David Murray (2000: 171), for example, has commented on recent research of Indian people of the Northeast that has focused on “the remarkable strategies of adaptation and change on the part of the Indian communities,” and which acknowledges the continued presence of Indians in this region. Colin Calloway and Neal Salisbury (2003), two other well-known New England scholars, take this one step further and acknowledge that it is not only appropriate, but necessary for Native people to take charge of telling their own history. Now Indian people in New England must take the reins and move into the future as the proper stewards of our past.

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Uncovering our past can only mean a more accurate and fair interpretation of our present, and this, now more than ever, is critical to the survival of sovereign groups in New England. For me, this is what it means to be a Native archaeologist in New England.

R EFERENCES C ITED Calloway, C. G., and N. Salisbury (editors) 2003 Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Boston. Campbell, P. A., and G. W. LaFantasie 1978 Scattered to the Winds of Heaven: Narragansett Indians, 1676–1880. Rhode Island History 37: 66–83. Carlson, C. C. 1986 Archival and Archaeological Research Report on the Configuration of the Seven Original 17th-Century Praying Indian Towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. UMass Archaeological Services, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Deloria, V., Jr. 1997 Anthros, Indians and Planetary Reality. In Indians and Anthropology, Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology, edited by T. Biolsi and L. J. Zimmerman, pp. 209– 221. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Gookin, D. 1972 (1836) Historical Collections of the Indians of New England. Arno Press, New York. Lepore, J. 1998 The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. McBride, K. A. 1989 Phase I and II Investigations, West Ferry Site, RI 84, Jamestown Elementary School. Jamestown School Committee, Jamestown, Rhode Island. Murray, D. 2000 Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Robinson, P. A. 2000 One Island, Two Places: Archaeology, Memory, and Meaning in a Rhode Island Town. In Interpretations of Native North American Life, edited by M. S. Nassaney and E. S. Johnson, pp. 398–411. University Press of Florida, Jacksonville. Simmons, W. S. 1970 Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay. Brown University Press, Providence, Rhode Island.

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Photo by Eric Waltonbaugh

WRITTEN VOICES BECOME HISTORY

Sven Haakanson, Jr. Compared with the American Whites, who must always be our main standards, the Koniag men contrast thus: They (the Koniags), in general, are much shorter; they have markedly shorter legs, relative to stature they have larger heads; they have, both absolutely and relatively to stature, larger faces, appreciably higher but not broader foreheads, broader lower jaws, larger noses and ears; they have rounder heads than those of any known White group; their relative head height is above, and their facial indices close to, the means of White Americans. Aleš Hrdlicka (1944: 360) enerally speaking, attitudes toward Natives peoples have changed radically in the 65 years since renowned Smithsonian physical anthropologist Dr. Aleš Hrdlicka published the words above. Native peoples are much better known and

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understood today than they were in Hrdlicka’s time, and the overt racial biases of the early 20th century have eased. Yet an attitude of Western superiority continues to filter its way into studies of Native culture and the interpretation of the Native past. There remains a sense that Westerners, particularly those trained in academic disciplines, are better equipped to study and present Native history than Native peoples themselves. Non-Native people are believed to provide more objective, reasoned interpretations. Just eight years ago, I was asked to write an article for a catalog accompanying a national traveling exhibit on my people, Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People (Crowell et al. 2001; Haakanson 2001). Specifically, the authors asked that I share my personal experiences of being an Alutiiq person. The volume was to include articles by Alutiiq people and by anthropologists who had worked in the Alutiiq region. However, as I examined the volume’s layout, I realized that only one Native person, Gordon Pullar, had been able to write from a “scientific” point of view, and he was one of the editors. Anthropologists were sharing what they had learned about Alutiiq heritage from their studies, yet Native people were asked to discuss what it meant to be Native—not their knowledge of Alutiiq history. Why? This division seems to reflect the attitude that Native people aren’t scientific, that we are incapable of understanding the complexities of the archaeological record, researching historical documents, or analyzing stories. This attitude also expresses itself in the expropriation of Native knowledge. Those outside the academic process may wonder why Native people are not involved in research and interpretation. Native people have long been involved in research, but their voices too often have been silenced by an interpreter—the words of an academic authority. Elders have been asked time and again to repeat the same story, only to see it published and copyrighted by an interviewer, usually an academic who is making a

Artom Serotetta trying to lasso the author as his picture was being taken. Photo by Sven Haakanson, Jr.

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career with such knowledge. Yet the interpreter would never have known such things if it weren’t for the Native informant. The simple act of writing down our history seems to make it belong to someone else. The frustration of being excluded from the interpretive process and watching Alutiiq knowledge leave our community led me to a career in anthropology, despite the field’s presuppositions and attitudes. I realized as a young man that Native people could make a difference in the lives of their communities, and could change the course of our own history if we, ourselves, got more actively involved in documenting and sharing our heritage. My name, Sven Haakanson, Jr., doesn’t announce that I am Native, but my short stature, brown eyes, and skin do. I grew up in Old Harbor, Alaska, a remote Alutiiq village of fewer than 180 people, accessible only by boat or plane. In school, we were never taught that our history was as deep and rich as today we know it to be. As I became more aware of my ancestry and its beauty and complexity, I started asking elders about our ancestors. How had they lived? What was it like to live there in the past? Most of the time, the elders said nothing, not because they did not know, but because they were ashamed. They had been told that what they knew was either old, dumb, or not of any use today. Luckily, one elder, Larry Matfay, started to share with me his great knowledge of Alutiiq culture and language, and never stopped sharing until his death in 1998. In 1988, I was attending the University of Alaska when Rick Knecht, archaeologist and cultural programs coordinator for the Kodiak Area Native Association, called to see if I would be interested in attending the Sixth Inuit Studies Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. With great curiosity I agreed. While I was there, I attended a lecture by worldrenowned Russian-American historian Dr. Lydia Black. As I listened, I wondered why I had traveled to the other side of the world to learn about Alutiiq history and culture when I could be doing the same thing at home. The following summer, between salmon fishing trips, I volunteered to help Knecht with an archaeological excavation—and I was hooked. However, as I started to do archaeology, I was pulled aside by an elder who warned me about our taboo of dealing with the dead. If I happened to excavate human remains, he said, there would be consequences. I took this warning to heart and talked at length with the elder, explaining what I thought and felt, and what I would do if we came across remains during an excavation. I also thought hard about my own convictions, and in the end, I chose to pursue archaeology because Alutiiq history is so accessible through the archaeological record. This is just one more way for us to learn about how our deep history is: through excavations of sites that span over 7,500 years and also by putting our own voices and knowledge into the interpretations of this information, which is our history. In 1991, I applied to graduate school and was accepted into Harvard University’s graduate program in archaeology for the fall of 1992. During the summers of 1991–1993, I participated in excavations around Kodiak, Alaska. In 1992, we excavated a site called the Refuge Rock (Knecht et al. 2002). In the Alutiiq language, the site is called Awa’uq, which means “to be numb,” and it is where Russian explorers began the conquest of Kodiak Island. Here, hundreds of our ancestors died in a battle that represented the loss of our homeland. No one in my community knew of this tragic event. Many of the sur-

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Alutiiq/Sugpiat dancers from Old Harbor performing a dance in Bethel, Alaska. The reflection in the middle is the author’s daughter dancing with the group from his hometown. Photo by Sven Haakanson, Jr.

vivors of the Awa’uq massacre died within the first twenty years of Russian conquest, and those who lived chose not to pass the news of this horrible event on to the next generation. As we were excavating one area of Awa’uq, I had a very strange feeling and asked to move to another area. Five minutes after I moved, the excavator who replaced me in that spot exposed the remains of a woman who had had the back of her head crushed in. I cannot say what made me uncomfortable or want to move, but the experience made me think about what the elder stressed regarding “the importance of respecting the dead and their remains.” I spent one more summer doing excavations on Kodiak. In 1994, I was going to conduct ethnoarchaeological research in the Yakutsk Republic of Siberia, but when the project fell through I had the opportunity to work on an archaeological survey with Dr. William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center, in the Yamal Peninsula, Russia. While we were conducting our survey on the Seryakha River in the center of the Yamal, we encountered a group of Nenets people, who spoke their language, lived in chooms (Russian for “tipi”), and still practiced their traditional ways of life. I never expected to see Indigenous peoples living this way because of all the forced assimilation practices by Europeans. From this two-day experience I knew I would do my doctoral research among the Nenets. From 1994 to 1997, and with the support of my graduate committee, Dr. Fitzhugh, Dr. Golovnev, and the Nenets Reindeer Herders from Brigade 17, I learned about how sites are interpreted by archaeologists. Through reading, excavations, experience, and learned knowledge, archaeologists are able to interpret sites based on analogies with

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living peoples. I realized it is pure and simple guesswork based on what an individual has experienced and been exposed to. The more knowledgeable you are, the better your stories become. It is a simple revelation, but one that carries huge consequences. What anyone writes and thinks about Native histories will eventually impact the course of history in a region, and that knowledge is greatly influenced by who the writer is. My experience as a Native in the anthropological field has taught me to keep an open mind with everyone I work with, Native and non-Native alike, but also to make sure our voices and the interpretation of our histories are heard and not forgotten. The cliché that “the pen is mightier than the sword” rings deep and true. This brings me back to Hrdlicka’s words describing the Koniag. Why bring up something that is at the same time so funny, disturbing, and shocking? It is important to think about the importance of what you are writing and how it will be seen in the future. We all want to say the right things, get published, and become well known. This is fine, but remember what you write does become history and will impact your area for generations to come, whether you are Native or non-Native. I ask you to think about one thing: when Hrdlicka wrote about the cranial size of Koniag people, do you wonder if he thought about why our heads were larger than the “white standard” and if this meant we were more intelligent?

R EFERENCES C ITED Crowell, A. L., A. F. Steffian, and G. L. Pullar 2001 Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People. University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks Haakanson, S. D. 2001 Can There Be Such a Thing as a Native Anthropologist? In Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People, edited by A. L. Crowell, A. F. Steffian and G. L. Pullar, p. 79. University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks. Hrdlicka, A. 1944 The Anthropology of Kodiak Island. Wistar Institute, Philadelphia. Knecht, R. A., S. Haakanson, and S. Dickson 2002 Awa’uq: Discovery and Excavation of an 18th Century Alutiiq Refuge Rock in the Kodiak Archipelago. In To the Aleutians and Beyond: The Anthropology of William S. Laughlin, edited by B. Frohlich, A. S. Harper, and R. Gilberg, pp. 177–191. Publications of the National Museum Ethnographical Series, Vol. 20. Department of Ethnography, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.

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Photo courtesy of Robert L. Hall

A RCHAEOLOGY

Robert L. Hall

B ECOMING y personal story begins when I was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was here that I was given a sense of family and place. I lived in a household that included my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom were enrolled members of the Wisconsin Stockbridge band of the Mohican Nation. This was as Indian a household as you would find anywhere for anyone of Mohican descent, but there was also a strong French presence. My great-grandmother Elsie Anger let no one forget that her relative Amable Deguire, called Larose, fought alongside Charles de Langlade on the Plains of Abraham in defense of Quebec in

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Elsie J. Anger, the author's greatgrandmother. Photo courtesy of Green Bay Press-Gazette.

1759 and earlier outside of Fort Duquesne when the French and Indians defeated the British general Edward Braddock on the Monongahela. Charles de Langlade was part French and part Ottawa, as also was my great-grandmother. Elsie Anger died in 1936 when I was nine years old, but in those nine years she set the course of my life in ways that I am still following. One of my first recollections was being bathed by my great-grandmother in a bathtub along with a large toy birchbark canoe that she had bought for me at Keshena on the Menominee reservation. I am sure she must have told me at the time how, as a young child around 1859, she had traveled with her family by birchbark canoe from De Pere, Wisconsin, just south of Green Bay, up the Fox River, down the Wisconsin, and into the Mississippi, intending to homestead in Kansas. I do remember hearing the story from her as I grew older. Eventually I grew too big for the canoe and the canoe split, but the story continued. The street in front of our house was being patched by the city, and my greatgrandmother daubed some of the tar on a stick and showed me how Indians and French voyageurs repaired birchbark canoes with pine pitch mixed with charcoal. I am sure that she came by this knowledge firsthand. I have spent many years checking the stories she told me, sorting out truth from fancy in memories of events as told or remembered. I checked the Iowa census for 1860 and learned that her family was living at that time in Clayton, a small river town on the Mississippi. From the census enumeration, I also learned that with them was Alexander Larose, Elsie Anger’s fur-trading voyageur grandfather. Her Grampa Larose was of mixed blood—part French, part Menominee, first cousin of Chief Oshkosh and grandson of the Old King, Chakauchokama, whose village had been located on the Fox River in Green Bay

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just south of Fort Howard. Earlier records list Alexander Larose as Alexis Deguire; my great-grandmother believed that he was the son of Amable Deguire, also known by the sobriquet Larose. One of the most vivid images implanted in my mind by my great-grandmother during my childhood was that of Amable Deguire on the Plains of Abraham outside the walls of Quebec during the French and Indian War. In my child’s imagination, I could almost smell the gun smoke that drifted across the battlefield and hear the Scots highlanders’ bagpipes skirling as the British under General Wolfe advanced toward the French defenders commanded by the Marquis de Montcalm; and there, watching in the French lines with the Wisconsin Indians he led, I imagined to be Charles de Langlade, with Amable Deguire at his side. In grade school, I saw an educational film showing General Wolfe’s soldiers by night secretly struggling up a narrow path to the heights of Quebec, and I felt smug in knowing that, of all my class, only I knew who would be waiting up there for General Wolfe: it was Charles de Langlade and Amable Deguire. I did not know then that everything Elsie Anger knew about Amable Deguire in the French and Indian War she had learned from reading the recollections of Augustin Grignon in the Wisconsin Historical Collections, or that everything else that she thought she knew about Amable Deguire really related not to Amable Deguire at all, but to a Jean-Baptiste Deguire, a great-grandfather whose name she did not even know. Elsie Anger died believing that Amable Deguire himself was her great-grandfather. The family history as she learned it and retold it was a matter of sustaining personal pride for Elsie Anger. The idea of descent from Amable Deguire inspired and sustained my own interests in history and historical archaeology for half a century. I am not saying that Amable Deguire was not an ancestor. I know only that he was not the particular ancestor that we thought he was. Though not her great-grandfather, Amable could have been her great-great-grandfather and, if not that, then certainly some collateral relative, because the Deguires were a single lineage. All Deguires were descended from a single ancestor who arrived in Quebec in 1665 as the soldier François Deguire dit [nicknamed] Larose. Personal and cultural ancestral roots do not have to be accurate in factual detail, or even real, to satisfy the social and psychological needs they may serve. They only have to be believed. I realized this personally when I once visited Quebec City and walked the Plains of Abraham with the ghosts of 1759. As I tried to explain to the ticket-counter attendant at the interpretation center just why it meant so much to me to be there, my voice broke, I choked up, and my eyes filled with tears. Yes, personal and cultural ancestral roots do not have to be accurate in factual detail, or even real, to satisfy the social and psychological needs they may serve. I recollect as a child accompanying my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother to the gravesite of our ancestor Ashwaubomay, near Green Bay. Ashwaubomay was a French-Ottawa métis, or mixed-blood Indian, who had come to Green Bay sometime around 1795. Ashwaubomay’s name has come down in history as the place-name Ashwaubenon and in the name of Green Bay’s Ashwaubomay Memorial River Park. His name has been reported to translate as “Side Looks” because of the dirty glances certain Ojibwa women gave him when he rescued a Menominee maiden from the lodge where

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she was being held captive by the Ojibwas. In fact, though, Side Looks was actually the translation of his Menominee name. His Ottawa or Odawa name, Ashwaubomay, translates into French as “Grandblanc” and into English as “Great White.” Ashwaubomay received a large grant of land from the Menominee chief Standing Earth after Ashwaubomay married the chief’s daughter, Wapanokiew. Wapanokiew’s hand in marriage was the reward Ashwaubomay received for rescuing the maiden captured by the Ojibwas. This land is now a great part of the Township of Ashwaubenon between Green Bay and De Pere. I once accompanied my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother to certain locations on the east bank of the Fox River between the Green Bay city limits and the old Hochgreve brewery in the Town of Allouez, looking for some evidence of an old root cellar, some depression in the ground that would give evidence of such a cellar. Although I did not know it at the time, we were probably looking for a root cellar that had belonged to Jean-Baptiste Deguire, whose land turns out to have actually been south of where we were looking and on the location where Heritage Hill State Park is now found. His daughter Susan Larose is reported to have said that she helped to make canvas bags for gold that her trader father took to Canada, and she wondered what could have happened to that gold. We were searching for a root cellar because a fortune-teller had once told someone in the family that what we were looking for would be found in the “small house,” which was interpreted to mean a root cellar, the kind that was dug partway into the ground. We did not find any root cellar back then, in the 1930s, but in a sense I have never stopped looking for that cellar. We did not find any gold either, but in a way I have found something much more valuable. Almost everything I have done since those days has been in pursuit of a past that has been just barely beyond my reach but close enough to give my life a direction and purpose. And it serves me still today.

B EING I consider myself primarily an archaeologist, though I haven’t been personally active in field projects for thirty years. By the time NAGPRA came along, it had already been eleven years since I had “thrown in the trowel.” The period of my experience with professionally directed, or professionally directing, fieldwork in archaeology extended on and off from 1947 to 1979. My active interest in archaeology began in 1941 at age fourteen, when two friends and I discovered, or actually rediscovered, a burial cave near Green Bay that had many years earlier been partly cleared of human skeletal remains and accompanying pottery vessels by person or persons unknown (we found their alcohol lamp and trowel). We reported our discovery to the director of the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, who aided us in organizing the cave’s investigation and in publishing the results in The Wisconsin Archeologist (Hall et al. 1944).This led to my employment at the museum after high school and on Saturdays between 1943 and 1945. Since 1979, I have been primarily concerned with exploring the archaeological background of historically known ritual and seeking historical manifestations of ritual inferred from archaeology.

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I went into archaeology partly because my father had an amateur interest in archaeology and geology. My father and I spent many weekends walking plowed fields and sand blows looking for arrowheads, when the Packers weren’t playing a home game. Also, my family frequently took me to the Menominee reservation to visit cousins there. To this day, I associate the wood-smoke odor of Indian-tanned deerskin with my visits to Keshena. As I grew older, archaeology became a way in which I could take some personal initiative in learning about my Indian ancestry. In my teens, I was greatly influenced by the work of Alanson B. Skinner among the Menominees and Arthur C. Parker among the Iroquois in New York. Each worked with contemporary Indians but also studied those of the past. At the Neville Museum, I had access to reports by these and others whose research appealed to me. I recognize that I was very privileged in that respect. In 1997, when I wrote An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual, part of my motivation was to condense as much Indian culture history as possible into an affordable book that might have a broader distribution than the usual research bulletin. I was fortunate in having all of my undergraduate education funded by the GI Bill after World War II. My choice of school and career did not have to be influenced by my personal financial situation. I chose the University of Wisconsin in Madison partly because of the attraction of the Wisconsin State Historical Museum. I volunteered there in 1946 and became a regular part-time employee the following year, after returning from a summer in South Dakota with the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys (Hall 2006). I rejoined a Smithsonian field party in 1948 on survey and testing in South

The author in South Dakota with the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys, Missouri Valley Project, in 1947. Photo courtesy of Robert L. Hall.

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and North Dakota but spent the summers of 1949 and 1950 digging in southern Wisconsin at the Aztalan site, a well-known 12th-century Mississippian temple town. Despite many summers of archaeological fieldwork, I have never been committed exclusively to archaeology as a field discipline. In 1953, I spent six months as a graduate student assisting with a socioeconomic study of the Venezuelan Andes. Most of that time I worked alone in an isolated former Indian mission town, as a participant observer of the community life. Even so, there, in a corner of the Andes, fate brought me one day to another cave, a second cave whose exploration threw light on the archaeological background of the local district and influenced my career (Hall and Harburg 1970). The final report of the team that I worked with was initially refused distribution by the Venezuelan government, in some part because of photos of mine that showed more poverty and sickness than the government would have liked the general public to associate with their country. The report was finally released when the government became convinced that it was for internal use and planning only. Ironically, the report received an award from the National Geographic Society for its photographic content. After completing my graduate residence at the University of Wisconsin, I worked from 1955 to 1959 as director of a county historical society and curator of the LincolnTallman Museum in Janesville, Wisconsin. My responsibilities were entirely in the realm of state and local history, but thanks to daylight saving time, I was able to spend the early evenings after closing time excavating on nearby Lake Koshkonong at a site with late prehistoric and historic Winnebago components. This became my dissertation in 1960 and was published in 1962 as The Archeology of Carcajou Point.

Moccasins worn by the author as a baby, made by his great-grandmother. Photo courtesy of Wisconsin State Historical Society.

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The Venezuelan experience and my own Stockbridge and Menominee ancestry helped me when I applied for a job as director of the Institute of Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota in 1959. What archaeology I did in that job had to be on vacation time, but those weeks became An Archaeological Investigation of the Gavins Point Site, 39YK203, South Dakota (Hall and Hall 2004). Though the Institute of Indian Studies was a South Dakota institution, I worked with tribes over the tri-state area of Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. Among my duties was organizing conferences such as “Tourism and Economic Development” and “The Indian and State Government.” In my next job, at the Illinois State Museum, the exhibition work I did was partly archaeological and partly ethnological. For the first ethnological exhibit I was assigned to design, I wanted to represent a scene from a familiar Indian myth. The preparation department was quite excited because it involved creating a circle of dancing ducks and the challenge of depicting the culture hero Manabush, the Great White Rabbit of Algonquian lore. That project was found unacceptable for the reason that, in its new building, the museum’s first major new Indian exhibit ought not to be based on a “fantasy.” That was almost fifty years ago, of course. Looking for stories of a more historical nature to tell, I proposed an exhibit on the subject of Indian removal, one showing a party of Cherokees crossing the Mississippi from our state while on the Trail of Tears.1 Again, the preparation department was quite excited, because there was the challenge of representing the party being ferried across the Mississippi River with snow swirling around them. Again, the project was nixed: “Too controversial and besides, the Cherokees never lived in Illinois; they just passed through. Can’t you do something for a local tribe?”Well, I could accept that logic. On the following try, I proposed an exhibit showing a party of Potawatomis traveling in their forced removal from Indiana west across Illinois on the Trail of Death in 1838. The exhibit would have shown elders whose faces reflected the sadness of leaving their homes, and children for whom the trek was a new adventure. The word came down from above: “Sure, the Potawatomis once lived in Illinois, but those particular Potawatomis on the Trail of Death never lived in our state. They just passed through.” Well, true enough. On my final try, I proposed an exhibit showing a party of Illinois’s own Potawatomis leaving the Chicago area, traveling west after being obliged to cede their lands. This exhibit was meant to be accompanied by side panels showing the Potawatomi and other tribes returning to Chicago in the 1940s and later, along with something of their urban lives. This proposal did receive approval, but with the provision that I show the dispossessed Potawatomis traveling in the distant background and, in the foreground, a friendly domestic scene. In the end, I never had to do that exhibit because priorities arose that diverted me to the design of a series of more urgently needed archaeological displays, for Dickson Mounds, as I remember. Visitors to the Illinois State Museum today can nevertheless view some stunning dioramas of Indian life in Illinois, both historic and prehistoric, including one of a Kickapoo household inspired partly by the museum’s own excavations. I was gratified also on a recent visit to find a display on the subject of Indian removals under Andrew Jackson and later presidents, featuring a map tracing both the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the

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Potawatomi Trail of Death across Illinois. My career benefited greatly from my tenure (1961–1967) in Springfield, which gave me the opportunity to direct some of the museum’s archaeological activities in and around the world-famous Cahokia site and also to aid in exploring 2,500-year-old crystal mining operations by Indians within Salts Cave, Kentucky (Hall 1967). Soon after I joined the Anthropology Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1968, I experienced negative reactions to a planned research activity when I applied for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to analyze and process excavated materials from the Cahokia area with a plan that was mindful of what the artifacts and structures might have meant to the ancient Cahokians themselves. The proposal was rejected by NSF. I was not told explicitly that the proposal contained elements that were thought to be too subjective; rather, by telephone, I learned that reviewers objected to, let us say, “that symbolism stuff.” I eliminated the “symbolism stuff,” resubmitted the next year, and was funded. Since then it has become fairly mainstream to search in the archaeological record for what Indians might have been thinking in the distant past. Not so in the 1970s or even for many years afterward. The conflict between “scientific” and emic studies goes back at least to Frank Cushing’s work among the Zunis beginning in 1879. Cushing’s experience is heralded now as the first example of participant observation in anthropology, but in 1879 Cushing was abandoned by the rest of his party and given up as someone lost to the Dark Side. I still get some grief from colleagues who think that I am not sufficiently objective, but it is not because I am in any small part Indian. It is more because the idea of an Indian perspective is still thought by many to be incompatible with good science. And, there is still a great gap between what some people see as the “noble” sciences, like physics and chemistry, and the “soft” sciences, like anthropology and sociology. One good example is from the field of archaeoastronomy. I once had an e-mail exchange halfway around the world with an astronomer who refused to believe that the ancient Cahokians were capable of designing and laying out a monumental circle of posts such that designated posts would line up with the solstice and equinox sunrises when viewed from a certain observation post I had discovered during excavations at Cahokia in 1963. His concluding zinger was, “Who do you think those Indians were? A bunch of Euclidians?” Well, my advice is, “Hang in there!” Though I have not engaged in field archaeology since 1979, I have practiced an archaeology less intrusive but no less informative. There is so much information long neglected in the ethnographic and historical literature that might as well be buried in the ground for any benefit that it provides us in understanding the Indian past. To retrieve that information, I have used a comparative approach that emphasizes the symbolic associations of artifacts and structures and the meanings and thought associations of ritual practices and their elements. In this I was inspired partly by my association with the Dakota anthropological linguist Ella Deloria, with whom I had close contact at the University of South Dakota for most of 1961. From Ella Deloria I learned of the “sacred language” of the Dakotas, by which she meant the vernacular language used in a highly figurative way to either obscure a topic

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Display on the Illinois Indians designed by the author while on staff with the Illinois State Museum. Photo courtesy of Illinois State Museum.

of discussion for the uninitiated or to elevate a subject to a higher level of discourse. She called it speaking “in a holy way.” In its simplest form, it involves the use of ritual terms like “sacred hoop” to refer to the world or the universe, and it is hardly limited to the Dakotas. Speaking “in a holy way,” the Winnebagoes, for instance, refer to reincarnation as “shedding our skin,” grass and herbs as “the hair of our grandmother,” and the oak as the “chief of trees.” In ritual language, the Aztecs referred to the earth as “mirror that smokes” and with the calendrical term “one rabbit.” Tobacco was “green priest” and “turquoise flutterer.” I have been motivated by the belief, hard to prove in an empirical way, that there is much in Indian myth and other oral traditions that refers to practices and narratives obscured by figurative language. The vernacular word for eagle in the Western, Central, and Eastern Dakota languages is based on a root that translates as “arrow,” for instance. This suggests to me that Dakota “eagle” was once a ritual term that has become desacralized—meaning that it was once a metaphor, perhaps for a sunray, because the eagle itself is often a sun metaphor. In myth, both sunrays and arrows have the power of conception. In one story, the modern Dakota nation traces its origin to the union of an eagle and a woman who was the lone survivor of a great flood. There is nothing in Winnebago oral tradition that refers to mound building as such, but the creation of the earth told as part of the Winnebago Medicine Rite strikes me as mound construction described “in a holy way,” with the mound as an earth metaphor. I have found wide acceptance for my

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suggestion that the Earth Diver story of the creation of the earth is reflected in the use of mud, marl, liquid clay, black muck, and other water-related sediments in some Midwestern burial mound construction of the Woodland period. In 1962, my wife Barbara gave birth to our first child, our daughter Jane. When Ella Deloria received the news, she mailed to us a tiny pair of Sioux moccasins for Jane to wear. Ella explained that since Jane had no Indian great-grandmother to provide her with moccasins, as mine did me, she, Ella, would step in to fill that role. We each have the power to preserve tradition and to pass it on in our own ways, and we also have the power to return to a life tradition that has been lost. That is the unique ability of the archaeologist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Portions of this chapter were previously published as “A Deguire-Larose Perspective on the Wisconsin Story,” which originally appeared in 1999 in Le Journal, a publication of the Center for French Colonial Studies, and is used here with the permission of the author and Le Journal.

N OTE 1 This refers to the forced relocation of many Native American tribes from their homelands in

the eastern United States to present-day Oklahoma in 1831.

R EFERENCES C ITED Hall, R. L. 2006 A Plains Experience and Beyond. Plains Anthropologist 51 (200): 633–648. 1997 An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 1967 Archaeology by Lamplight: An Exploration of Salts Cave, Kentucky. The Living Museum 28 (11): 84–85. Illinois State Museum, Springfield. 1962 The Archeology of Carcajou Point. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Hall, R. L., and B. M. Hall 2004 An Archaeological Investigation of the Gavins Point Site, 39YK203, South Dakota. Midwest Archaeological Center, Lincoln, Nebraska. Hall, R. L., and E. Harburg 1970 Análisis de unos tiestos de un cueva del Estado Portuguesa, Venezuela. Boletín de la Sociedad Venezolana de Espeleogía 3 (1): 63–71. Caracas. Hall, R. L., R. C. Linck, and W. L. Wittry 1944 Discovery of an Indian Rock Shelter in Brown County. The Wisconsin Archeologist 25 (1): 16–19.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN

Photo courtesy of Augustin F. C. Holl

THE FLYING ALIEN— AN OUTSIDER ARCHAEOLOGIST

Augustin F. C. Holl he issue dealt with in this book is important and interesting. It is precisely in this uncharted interface between abstract principles and real-life events that things happen. It goes without saying that archaeological research as practiced today is the outgrowth of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. The canons of archaeological discourse are nonetheless constantly shaped and reshaped, first by a handful, then by hundreds, and now by thousands of actors. The internationalization of higher education and academic research, which is more common in the United States, has resulted in a more diverse body of archaeologists. As is the case in virtually any human enterprise in which the process is open, there are sometimes unexpected ethnocentric difficulties. Writing on how one became an archaeologist is

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clearly leaning on the side of autobiography, an exercise I am not very fond of. I have nonetheless accepted to commit myself to this task for a very precise reason. The whole process has been and still is so amusing that there are tons of stories to share. But it is also sometimes problematic, as my title implies.1

H ERE AND N OW I am writing from my office in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where I am curator of African archaeology. The job has involved creating a new research component, “the Africa Range,” to study, preserve, and curate archaeological remains from Africa. In addition, the curator position is coupled with my position as professor of anthropology and Afro-American and African studies. The University of Michigan program in anthropological archaeology has played a crucial role in the consolidation of what anthropological archaeology is today. It is a high-powered place with fabulous colleagues. The standard activities of any faculty member are well known and can be spelled out in three words: research, teaching, and participation. Simple as it seems, each of these domains is a “kingdom” in itself. Research requires the development of a sustained agenda that may include fieldwork, laboratory work, and thus a constant search for adequate funding. Unfortunately, though the grant application process—for example, to the National Science Foundation—is theoretically meritocratic, it hardly works that way, at least as far as my personal experience is concerned. Polar extreme positions on the same proposal are reconciled by a ballot-like approach that generally brings down

Partial view of a household complex (ca. AD 1200–1300) at Kérébé Sira-Tomo (KST- 4), mound 4, in the Mouhoun Bend, Burkina Faso. Photo by Augustin F. C. Holl.

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excellent projects. Teaching undergraduate and graduate students takes most of a faculty member’s time and energy. Student evaluations, based on a consumer-satisfaction model, tend to become more and more counterproductive. It is assumed that students enrolling in a new course can effectively evaluate their teacher after a few weeks. As expected, they will rely more on the performance than the content, a content they do not grasp in such a short time and cannot yet assess critically. There are significant variations among students, but a significant fraction seem to be seeking entertainment. The high frequency of faculty meetings and committee commitments add another important but burdensome level to academic life. The emergence of village life and development of complex social systems is the core of my research interests. I have conducted a variety of different projects on these related topics in three different parts of the world. In West Africa, I directed fieldwork in Mauritania (Dhar Tichitt), northern Cameroon (Houlouf Region), and Burkina Faso (Mouhoun Bend); and I am currently director of the Sine Ngayene Archaeological Project on the Senegambian Megalithic tradition in Senegal. In Israel, I have participated in field research in the northern Negev, specifically at Shiqmin, Gilat, Abu Hof, and Lahav. And in New York City, I was involved in the analysis of the 18th-century African Burial Ground, found in Manhattan in the early 1990s. In addition, I am interested in general issues of social evolution, technology, and art (Bisson et al. 2000; Holl 2004a, 2004b).

T HE I NITIAL CONDITIONS I did not have any vocation and literally did not know anything about archaeology before graduate school. After attending middle and high school in a strict private boarding school, I went to college at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon. Due to its colonial history, Cameroon has a bilingual higher education system: students are required to take classes in both French and English, and can write their essays and term papers in either language. It was tough and nerve-wracking to understand and take notes in disciplines as technical as “structural geomorphology”if one did not have a good mastery of the language it was taught in. I graduated in history and ethnology and earned a maîtrise (master’s degree) in social history. My maitrise thesis examined the installation of the French colonial system in a département in south Cameroon, following the implementation of the Versailles treaty, which resulted in the loss of all German colonies. The research examined the period from 1920 to 1940 (Holl 1979). It was so exciting to spend days in the National Archives, discovering the intimate reactions of the administrators, their opinions, and views. The French colonial obsession was to create a Francophile elite, and it was fascinating to see how this was carried out in the field. The fantastic seminar and passionate discussions we had with our professors and supervisors were the best times of my student days. World history, in the Hegelian, Toynbeean, and Spencerian traditions, was violently rejected by the positivists around Leopold von Ranke, a rejection epitomized in their motto: wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (“exactly as it was”). The Annales School, which crystallized around Andre Pirenne, Lucien Febvre, and Marc Bloch, developed new

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approaches to social history, advocating a problem-oriented strategy and initiating what was later known as “Histoire des Mentalités.” In my senior year, when it came to apply to graduate school, my education goals were still vague, despite a family background of intellectuals. History was exciting because it helped in deconstructing the myth of providential leaders that was such common currency in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. What I was dreaming of was to be a “savant” and, if possible, a “revolutionary”—Che Guevara was my role model. I wanted to change the world, to debunk neo-colonialism, to build a free, self-reliant Africa. While I worked to complete my maîtrise thesis during the tumultuous academic year 1978–1979, which was marked by student strikes and sit-ins, I applied for a scholarship for graduate school abroad for a Ph.D. degree. The awardee’s names were soon published in the national newspaper, and I was one of them. In the application process, each student had to choose among three disciplines, ranked by order of preference. Social history in the Annales tradition was my top choice. Semiotics, the global study of signs, symbols, and meaning in social arena and discourse (as popularized by brilliant intellectuals like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Umberto Ecco), was my second choice. Archaeology, then considered the “handmaiden of history,” was my third choice. With the help of different family members, I then applied directly to different graduate programs in Paris, France. Surprisingly enough, I was awarded a scholarship without any strings attached and left for France in the fall of 1979.

S ERENDIPITY Once in France, I was relatively free from the worries that plagued other foreign students, as I had many relatives in and around Paris. Foreign students had to be granted a residence permit that depended on evidence of enrollment in a school. After contacting all the schools I had applied to, there were many surprises. The famous and selective École des Chartes, the history graduate program I applied to, did not recruit applicants who lacked reading proficiency in ancient Greek and medieval Latin. I was thus ineligible. The university Paris-VII, with the semiotics school, had not yet started to process the applications, while the University Paris I-Pantheon Sorbonne archaeology program had just started the application evaluations. After a couple of weeks, I received the official notification from the Sorbonne. I was enrolled in the class 1979–1980 as graduate student in—believe it or not—“Protohistoire Européenne.” My supervisor for that first year would be Dr. Pr. Marion Lichardus. In fact, I ended up circumstantially in an archaeology graduate program. That was the luck of my graduate studies years, and I had to catch up with all the other students and literally teach myself archaeology and African prehistory. The structure of French graduate studies at that time included one year of intensive coursework and seminars, ending with a frightful evaluation at the end of the academic year. I took the African Archaeology seminar and, later during the year, clashed with the seminar instructor, a famous Africanist professor, as I will explain here.

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Inspired and excited by the ideas and works of Lewis Binford, David Clarke, Kent Flannery, and Eric Higgs, as well as the rigorous methodology of André Leroi-Gourhan, I wanted to investigate the emergence of agriculture and early-village life in Sub-Saharan Africa. Diffusion was still the dominant mode of explanation of the emergence of African agriculture and complex sociopolitical systems. In the late 1970s, I was working on a theoretical paper summarizing what was known on the prehistory of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agriculture, along with practical methods for retrieving data more systematically. That was how I came upon Patrick Munson’s (1971) work on the Tichitt tradition. Investigating prehistoric economy from a “Higgsian” perspective was very appealing to me, and Munson’s developmental approach raised a number of interesting issues. I presented my paper at the assigned session. My fellow students, most of whom were studying more recent Medieval and later periods, were a polite but unenthusiastic audience. However, the seminar instructor’s comments were devastating to me. He very bluntly said, “The research project is very interesting indeed, but it will take a minimum of ten additional years of training before doing fieldwork.” He consequently suggested that I shift to the ethnoarchaeology of the pottery project he was launching at that time. This meant I would have to collect data on pottery manufacture, trade, and consumption somewhere in southern Cameroon, following the methods worked out in the seminar to ensure cross-cultural comparability. It was a well-intentioned comment based on his long experience with African students, but I was taken aback and offended. While the alternative project he suggested was very interesting and could have been easy to carry out, I had absolutely no interest in it. I was demoralized when I went to talk to my supervisor. She encouraged me to go ahead with my project if it is what I wanted to do, but warned that the Africanist professor’s judgment would be a determining factor in having the thesis topic approved. In the meantime, I was advised to start looking for a study area. Following a suggestion of one of my professors, I visited Dr. Alain Marliac, who was directing a long-term project in the Diamare in northern Cameroon. I was hoping for help and support for my research project by linking to an ongoing project, but frankly I had no idea of what was required to conduct an archaeological excavation. For good reasons, Dr. Marliac was skeptical of my ability to be an archaeologist, and spent some time and effort explaining how difficult it was. He also told me that his limited funding did not allow him to accept graduate students. I was thus left without any prospect for fieldwork. At the end of the academic year, I turned in the final version of my research proposal (Holl 1980); the seminar instructor submitted it for evaluation to one of his colleagues, Dr. Henri-Jean Hugot of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, whom I knew only by name at that time. My proposal was accepted, and I earned my DEA (Diplôme d’Études Approffondies) in spring 1980. I worked frantically that spring and summer. I took classes and had laboratory training in palynology, animal osteology, and archaeozoology, and also learned field techniques during an intense, three-month-long field season in the Aisne Valley in northern France. That fall, Professor Hugot asked me to his office. To my surprise, he was excited and interested by my paper, although he found it too abstract. He asked if I could turn “that”

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into a workable excavation project. I told him that after my intensive summer training I felt more confident and thought it could be done. “If it is the case,” he said, “go and see my secretary in the library—I am leading an archaeological expedition to the Dhar Tichitt in Mauritania next winter, and you will be one of the crew members.” The Dhar Tichitt!—I could not believe that this was happening to me. So that was how I became a member of the “Mission Préhistorique de Tichitt” and went in The Dhar Tichitt, from February to April 1981, for my doctoral fieldwork. The fieldwork, analysis of data, laboratory analyses, and the writing of the dissertation took approximately two years. The defense took place in March 1983, and in June I was offered the position of assistant professor at the University of Paris X, which is one of the fifteen universities of Paris-Île de France.

O N THE J OB As a new professor, I found that teaching, fieldwork, conferences, writing, and administration were intertwined all the time. I was involved in several different field projects. Before completing my dissertation work, I was invited to participate in a new project in northern Cameroon in 1982. I ended up doing fieldwork in the Houlouf region for ten years. At a Prehistoric Society conference in 1984 in London, I met Dr. Thomas Levy, who invited me to visit him in the Negev where he was starting a project on the Chalcolithic societies of the northern Negev. In the fall of 1984, I was at Shiqmim, starting an exciting long-term cross-collaboration. Dr. Levy later did two field seasons with me in northern Cameroon, on an ethnoarchaeology project. Less exciting were my administration duties, starting with being the coordinator for the Prehistory program of the department, which included ethnology and ethnomusicology components. The department chairmanship followed, in parallel with an elected position in the Conseil National des Universités (CNU), which is the institution that oversees the hiring, tenure, and promotion of academics in France. Difficulties started with my increasing seniority. Relationships that had previously been friendly and supportive slowly shifted to competitive. The problem was clearly not of a personal nature, but sprang from a deeply entrenched mind-set that manifests itself under different guises, but frequently relates to trespassing a certain threshold. The most frequent question I was asked was, “Why are you doing research here?”People are not used to see a black African conducting research in the southern Levant, or northern France, or southern Belgium. There is no stipulation against it, of course, but it does not seem to be the “normal order” of things. The awareness of this mind-set generates serious uneasiness in interaction with colleagues; it cannot be spelled out explicitly except in a burst of anger. But it cannot be concealed either. Papers and books submitted for publication take years to be reviewed and are rejected without convincing explanation; jury members decide to withdraw from a crucial committee on short notice, knowing that the whole process will have to be delayed for six to twelve months; reviews of fellowship applications are usually biased; and some book reviews are unnecessarily hurtful and patronizing. In fact, there is no alternative: you smile, shrug your shoulders, and move forward.

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T HAT IS O UR WORLD There is a profound paradox in the very structure of academic life. On the one hand, academics have to strive for the constant advancement of knowledge and understanding. One way of achieving this splendid goal is through critical evaluation of ideas. But the standards, if any, are constantly shifting. On the other hand, academics belong to organizations that grant rewards, honors, or promotions usually on a basis of individual merit; in such a competitive context, some feel that downplaying anyone else’s achievements is ipso facto promoting their own. Some groups have developed adaptive mechanisms to deal with these constantly changing variables. They create loose demes, or networks, of mutually supportive fellows that ignore all outsiders and systematically downplay the contributions of others. The competitive nature of the academic systems does not justify such practices. Nonetheless, it takes a strong will and a quasi-fanatic sense of intellectual honesty to avoid these facile solutions, as we are all, following one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books, Human, All Too Human (1878).

F ULL C IRCLE I have been exploring a number of research themes articulated around the concept of social evolution, and on one select aspect of this: the emergence of complex societies. As already noted, the cases I have worked on are stretched from Senegal in West Africa to the northern Negev in the southern Levant, all characterized by an overtly regional approach to sociocultural change. The lesson I have learned throughout this process can be summarized in a few words: commitment to intensive fieldwork and attempts to foster understanding between African and American students right from their undergraduate years. They will very likely be colleagues in the future, and if they are trained together, they may develop more respect for one another. This important goal is now being implemented in collaboration with the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, the IFAN Cheikh Anta Diop, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. American and Senegalese students participate in the Sine Ngayene Archaeological Project (SNAP) which started in 2002. This program, with a research base at the Field Station of Ngayene, investigates the settlement patterns and mortuary practices developed by the megalith builders of the Senegambia. It is clearly a slow process, but if it succeeds, the students who have shared a common training experience will probably develop different kinds of relationships. At the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan, I have founded the Africa division, which hosts an important research collection that is made possible through a balanced agreement with the Senegalese government. This collection is used for research and training of undergraduate and graduate students alike and will be useful as a resource for future emerging research topics.

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N OTE 1

It is a borrowing from Richard Wagner’s opera “The Flying Dutchman,” and it really conveys what I went through. It is not only “license poétique,” as we would say in French: being African, trilingual (but considered Francophone by my North American colleagues), French-trained, and such has put me in the category of “Outsider.”

R EFERENCES C ITED Bisson, M. S., S. Terry-Childs, P. de Barros, and A. F. C. Holl 2000 Ancient African Metallurgy: The Sociocultural Context. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Holl, A. 2004a Saharan Rock Art: Archaeology of Tassilian Pastoralist Iconography. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. 2004b Holocene Saharans: An Anthropological Perspective. Continuum, New York/London. 1980 Palethnologie de l’agriculture soudano-sahélienne: Esquisse méthodologique. DEA (Diplôme d’Études Approffondies) thesis, University Paris I: Pantheon-Sorbonne. 1979 Chefs et notables dans la politique economique et sociale française dans la région du Nyong et Sanaga de 1920 à 1940. Maîtrise thesis, History, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon. Munson, P. J. 1971 Tichitt Tradition: A Late Prehistoric Occupation in Southwestern Sahara. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Photo courtesy of Ken Isaacson

A RCHAEOLOGICAL R EFLECTIONS OF A 68-Y EAR -O LD B USHMAN

Ken Isaacson am a very proud Indigenous person. I have a wonderful Indigenous mother and a tribal grandmother, both of the Waanyi peoples from the Gulf region of Australia, north of Mount Isa. I also had a white father from Lochiel of South Australia, whose ancestors came from England and Germany to Australia 185 years ago. I live today in the traditional territory of my mother and grandmother. I was sent to a great white man’s school where I received a fair education. However, I struggled through school, with exam results only in the 48% to 75% range. Whilst receiving this education, I saw some of the elite white children whose marks were in the range of 90% to 98%. Even at this early age in school, I soon realized that these few elite, good students were the ones who would go on to become doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, and, of course, archaeologists.

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Until the age of eighteen, I didn’t know who or what I was. Could I be white or brown or even black? At this time, in the Australian way of life I was shunned for having a black mother and a white father. This was difficult for me at the time. But today it is something I can now speak about openly to schoolchildren when I visit their classes, as well as to society at large. I tell them all that I am very proud to be an Indigenous person.

D ISCOVERING M Y H ERITAGE At the age of fourteen, I joined the Post Office to become a telegram messenger and then a postman. But I soon realized this did not suit me, so I quickly learned Morse code and was then selected to go to the Post Office Business School down in our state capital, Brisbane. Through much hard study, I became a postal clerk, and after ten months was transferred to the small country town of Tambo in central Queensland. Whilst in Tambo, I was taken out into the hills that made up part of the famous Carnarvon ranges and gorge systems. There I was shown my first very large Aboriginal art and burial site, known as Blacks Palace, a site of some 5,000 red ochre paintings depicting boomerangs and hand stencils. Here I also saw my first burial caves, where skeletal remains had been placed, wrapped in bark or kangaroo skin. These included both adults and babies, and most were in a bad state of repair. From that day on, I really knew who I was and what I wanted to be—an Aboriginal person from the Waanyi peoples of the Gulf Country of Northwest Queensland. I badly wanted to be an archaeologist who could record, manage, and look after our rock art sites, not only in my home district, but indeed right across my travels throughout Australia. I believed then (and still do) that these sites must be recorded and preserved so as to pass this information on to our children and grandchildren. If we fail to do so, there is a danger that soon these world-famous sites would disappear, and with them, important elements of our culture, including traditional knowledge, language, and stories, would be lost forever. However, with my limited education, I realized that becoming an archaeologist would be a struggle, while going on to university to study archaeology was out of the question. So it was evident at the age of eighteen that I would never become an academic archaeologist with university degrees and papers. But this did not deter me. I immediately started recording and photographing these sites on my own. This would take me on a long journey into the unknown, over many thousands of miles through five states of Australia and spanning the next 50 years. During my quest to learn about my own cultural heritage, and that of others, and whilst traveling this great country of mine, my first teachers were the station hands (known as “ringers”), both black and white. These bush people had a vast knowledge of the country and of the heritage sites within it because they came across them whilst mustering cattle. Indeed, these station people were our early archaeological rangers, looking after our sites. And if I was really lucky, I would be taken out and shown sites by Indigenous tribal elders. These were truly the professors of our Indigenous archaeology,

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their knowledge having been handed down from generation to generation through the initiation system for over 40,000 to 60,000 years.

R ETURNING H OME In 1975, I came home to Mount Isa and have spent the last 30 years in the northwestern part of our big state. This area is close to my birthplace. Here I have been recording and managing 1,500 rock art (both painted and engraved) sites and burial sites ever since. In 1992 and 1993, a young stockman was in touch with me about some incredible rock paintings of the Wandjina people over in the Kimberly of Western Australia. Over the course of those two years, I visited some incredible art sites. Again I was very fortunate to meet some wonderful elders of the Gija and Jaru people, who took me into their lives and showed and explained to me some of the stories of the great art sites. Later, on my way home to Mount Isa, Queensland, I left Halls Creek of Western Australia and traveled 160 kilometers down the Tanami Desert track towards Alice Springs to look after a road house in the Wolf Creek Crater region. As is their custom, these desert tribal elders took me in and told me some wonderful Dreamtime stories about their desert homelands, which included the sand hills, the rivers and desert springs, and water holes. All of these stories related to their birthplace and also to their Dreamtime and the beginnings of time where Aboriginal culture began. Growing up in the Northwest, I acquired a great skill as a bushman and got to know many of the traditional sites there. My years in the bush, both on my own and with elders, were truly an education that I could not receive in any school or university in Australia. Every new site I found or was shown was a big thrill to me, because while I was recording this site, however small or large it was, I knew I was preserving it for our culture and for future generations.

S HARING M Y K NOWLEDGE Eventually, researchers and professors at various universities got to know about me, and then each year they would bring their students into my country to study and look at these sites. This was a two-way street: as I was teaching them my bush ways and showing them these sites, they showed me great respect and taught me new ways to record and talk about sites. These were wonderful years because I met many wonderful scholars, and as much as I taught them, they readily passed on to me what they thought about these sites. I also learned from them about radiocarbon dating and other ways to determine how old various sites are. The relationships I developed with these scholars later enabled me to visit other rock art sites not only elsewhere in the region, but also much farther away, including South Africa and Arizona (in the United States). By this time I was also receiving invitations to attend archaeological seminars and events at universities throughout Australia, to speak on how I saw my work in bush archaeology. These were also important opportunities for me to talk about the respect

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that academic people should show our elders when they come into my country to study our sites. One of the great fortunes of my life that stemmed from traveling and attending seminars throughout Australia was meeting Dr. Claire Smith, from Flinders University of Adelaide, South Australia, and now president of the World Archaeological Congress. Claire has helped me to become involved (and recognized) in archaeology at the international level. In 1997, for example, Claire invited me to give a paper at a Fulbright-sponsored symposium, “Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World,” which was held in Darwin, Northern Territory. Later that same year, she invited me to participate in a World Wildlife Fund expedition into Kalimantan (Borneo), where the Iban Dyak people lived— wonderful people who shared their knowledge and food with us. This was the start of the next ten years of my life in which I truly became an international traveler, giving papers on archaeology, bushman style. I also spoke on how I perceived the relationship between white archaeology and our Indigenous peoples. I related this to how we could become more involved in our own sites, while at the same time walking arm in arm in a partnership of respect with non-Indigenous archaeologists. This key to the international door that Claire Smith gave me opened up the world to me, and it let me further my archaeological knowledge and education (e.g., Isaacson and

Author and friends in Kamloops, British Columbia, on the way to the American Anthropological Meetings, 2002. Left to right: George Nicholas, Ken Isaacson, Martin Wobst, and Connell Perry; Claire Smith kneeling. Photo by Catherine Carlson.

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Ford 2005). As a result, I learned how to live and work with non-Indigenous scholars and Indigenous peoples of many different countries and cultures and languages. And, finally, you may ask me what degrees I have. Well, that is easily answered. In my hometown of Mount Isa, northwest Queensland, Australia, the temperature for seven months of the year is around 38° C (100° F), while in Calgary, Canada, where I gave a paper at the Chacmool conference on “Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology”in 1999, it was very cold and –17° C (0° F) degrees. So you see, I have many degrees (and a sense of humor).

T HE 68-Y EAR -O LD B USHMAN Over the last five years, I have been doing cultural heritage work for a natural resource group, which entails visiting communities in the northwest of Queensland and seeing what sort of projects they might like some monetary assistance with. This includes developing bush tucker (bush food) gardens, videotaping traditional knowledge, and ranger training; in these projects I serve as mentor, assisted by a TAFE (Technical and Further Education) College archaeologist. Today I am supposed to be a pensioner, but at 68 I can’t give up the lifestyle I’ve had for 50 years. So now I do consulting for mining companies, evaluating locations where

Rock art at Mount Isa. Photo by Ken Isaacson.

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Rock art at Mount Isa. Photo by Ken Isaacson.

they may want to open a new mine, or a new road, or drill holes for mining and water. Over the past few months, I have completed a five-day walk in the country looking after a very large burial site that we found on a mine site some three months ago; I also helped to clear a new road and some water drill sites. Last week I walked 72 kilometers in six days doing the same kinds of tasks, and for five days the week before. Tonight I have just come in from walking for five days in temperatures around 36° C (97° F). Tomorrow morning, I will leave for another four days of walking in very rugged country doing the same. Some of our younger generation come with me, which gives me the opportunity to teach them about sites that may contain rock art, burials, and stone tools (some with magnificent dark green or black stone axes), as well as how to map or use a digital camera or a GPS navigation system. In addition, a Native Title group now wants me to be their cultural heritage manager for one or two years, so I will see how my health holds up. I am looking forward to going overseas again, this time to Argentina, where a fine group of friends will take me to Peru to see Machu Picchu. Some of them are planning to come to Australia and Mount Isa to visit me here, so that I can show them some of my country, including some of the best rock art and stone tools in the world. And a few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a fourth-year archaeology student from Australian

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National University-Canberra who wants to come to Mount Isa so I can show her the stone tool quarries she plans to study. I am very excited about helping her and also being a mentor for those of our younger generation who want to be rangers or even archaeologists. After fifty years of involvement in Aboriginal culture and Australian archaeology, including twelve wonderful years in the World Archaeological Congress, I sincerely thank all of my colleagues for the assistance and training they gave me. Probably the greatest person in my life was my mother, who passed away at 94 last year; it was she who gave me the inspiration to go back and trace our great heritage and record and preserve it. I also thank the great professors of my life, the Aboriginal elders, who taught me so much about the hills and rivers and animals. The people I would like to thank in Australia are too numerous to name in this chapter, but one must be mentioned: this lady met and stood by me for twenty years. She put some academic knowledge into me and never left my side; this wonderful lady is Dr. Claire Smith. So to my mother, to Claire, to all of my elders, and to the great archaeological people from around the world, my sincere thanks. I hope that the trials and tribulations and great happiness and rewards presented in this paper will help inspire Indigenous people from around the world to follow their own aspirations and to become archaeologists and pass on their knowledge to younger generations.

R EFERENCE C ITED Isaacson, K., and S. Ford 2005 Looking Forward–Looking Back: Shaping a Shared Future. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by C. Smith and H. M. Wobst, pp. 354–367. Routledge, London/San Francisco.

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Photo courtesy of Kathy Kawelu

TAKE O NLY W HAT YOU N EED, AND L EAVE THE R EST

Kathy Kawelu grew up on the island of Hawai’i, in the town of Hilo. Both sides of my family come from this island, and it is where the majority of my family still resides. I was surrounded by different cultures as a child, and while my family experiences centered on Hawaiian and Japanese culture, I’m a typical Hawai’i-plantation mixture of Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Scottish descent. I was your average Hawai’i kid, except I was going to be an Egyptologist, a word I was quite proud to use as an elementary school student. My mom is an avid reader, and she encouraged me to read as a young child. The lifeways of ancient Egyptians fascinated me, and I began reading about pharaohs, pyramids, and King Tutankhamen. This interest developed into an appreciation of history, and my high school years were spent learning about African American and Native American experiences in the development of the United States. I

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was struck by the similarity of their experiences, and their current circumstances, with those of the Hawaiian people. In my senior year of high school, my attention grew to include anthropology, which led me to Beloit College in Wisconsin, where I pursued a degree in anthropology and museum studies. Prior to college, I had visited my sister twice in California but never traveled beyond the Sierra Mountains. Clearly, I was bound for unfamiliar territory: I even had to look for Wisconsin on a map. Once at Beloit College, I learned much more than was taught in the textbooks and classrooms, a common experience for anyone who has the opportunity to attend college. I was in a foreign culture, where I needed to relearn the basic life skills I took for granted. Dressing for the seasons, navigating without the mountains and the sea as reference points, and communicating better with people were a few of the skills I developed. English is the only language I’m fluent in, not including Hawaiian Pidgin English (which is a language, and can be spoken incorrectly, unbeknownst to many newcomers who attempt to fit in by speaking it), but I came to realize the way I spoke and the words I used were sometimes incomprehensible to those around me. Imagine my amazement at finding a fellow freshman dorm-mate who lacked any knowledge that Hawai’i existed. At the time I was shocked at having to explain to this Chicago student where Hawai’i was—“an island group in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the 50th state, a set of islands west of California, the place where people dance hula.” I thought these clues would trigger some kind of recognition, but no such luck. I later decided it was my “accent” she didn’t understand, attributing her perceived lack of knowledge to the way I pronounced “Hawai’i”(with the ‘okina, or diacritical mark), and the less than “proper”English I spoke when I first arrived in Wisconsin. For example, I once had a friend from Hawai’i translate what I said to our new college classmates. At the time, I didn’t fully realize particular words in my vocabulary were Hawaiian, because people back home, non-Hawaiians included, used these words too. My days away from the islands revealed both my naiveté and the cultural distinctiveness of my developmental experiences. While there are many benefits in leaving Hawai’i for my education, I do regret some experiences I’ve had, and aspects of how I’ve changed as a person. If not for the grounding of my family, I probably would have changed more than I already have, and, regrettably, I can’t go back to the person I was before. However, the person I’ve become is more assertive and better prepared to handle difficult people and the problematic situations I occasionally find myself in. Therefore, if I can make the transition easier for another student entering this field, through the culture shock of academia, then I’ll consider this chapter more than simple self-promotion.

G ROWING PAINS : T HE P ROCESS OF B ECOMING AN A RCHAEOLOGIST The initial reasons I pursued archaeology have remained constant over time, but my motivations for continuing to participate in this field have changed. Archaeology satisfies my interests in different cultures and histories; it enables me to enjoy the outdoors while exercising my mind, and it allows for a balanced mental and physical life. I like the

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challenge of making sense of what people left in and on the earth’s surface. When I first dove into anthropology as a college student, I understood the discipline to be a means of studying other cultures. I’m embarrassed to admit (but feel it’s necessary to acknowledge) that I initially pursued archaeology because it meant “I didn’t have to deal with people.” Unwittingly I fell into the trap of believing I studied bygone cultures whose people, at least the “real” ones, no longer existed. I recognized the error in my thinking, not unique within the discipline by any means, after I began to look at Hawaiian culture in an anthropological way. I realized people would study my own culture, and indeed had studied it. I certainly wasn’t comfortable with researchers thinking my people were dead and gone, as if I were the dregs of a colonial history. I placed myself in the shoes of people I intended to study, and I didn’t like where I found myself. I sheepishly withdrew from studying other people, feeling uncomfortable with the ignorant attitude I brought to the investigation of their cultures. Instead, I turned my attention to Hawaiian culture, knowing I was better prepared to approach the culture in a respectful manner. Originally I entered archaeology to study cultures that were not my own. I grew up surrounded by Hawaiian culture; it hadn’t occurred to me to study it in an anthropological manner. Hawaiian culture wasn’t something I studied; it was something I lived. When I found myself in situations contrary to those I’d experienced growing up, and began dealing with nagging feelings that something wasn’t quite right, I began to focus on my own culture. It took leaving the islands and recognizing how “others”were treated to realize I needed to focus on my own community. I believed that as a Hawaiian I could offer another perspective. This is not to say I should only study Hawaiian culture, a pigeonhole many Native students are shoved into, but I felt I could best serve my community by turning my attention toward it. There is nothing wrong with a Native student, or non-Native for that matter, exploring other cultures, as long as they take with them the respect they would afford their own people. This is where my journey changed, as I left the safe haven of Beloit College (student population 1,200) and entered the daunting halls of the University of California at Berkeley (student population 35,000, just slightly smaller than the size of Hilo, my hometown). When I first visited Berkeley as a prospective student, I described it to family and friends as Beloit College on steroids. The day before my Anthropology Department orientation, my uncle took me on a tour around the campus to acquaint me with the town. After we’d driven for some time, I asked him where the university was; he laughed and told me we’d been driving around it for the last ten minutes. Where Beloit had been a place for me to grow in a supportive environment, Berkeley was more intimidating, so in the beginning I struggled to find guidance. I had naively thrown myself into a situation I was ill prepared for, academically and socially, and it has thus taken much longer to find my way through this process than most. I call myself a “tenured graduate student,” a statement my mother cringes at, and an announcement I shouldn’t be so willing to divulge. However, there’s no hiding from the facts (I have been in graduate school for ten years), and if I can’t laugh at myself, someone else will gladly do it for me. The process of becoming an archaeologist has been enlightening, comedic, and sometimes upsetting; it has forced me to look critically at

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myself when I wasn’t necessarily prepared to do so. Subsequently, I’ve become critical of those around me. I’m concerned many professors only give lip service to involving Native people in the discipline; in publications I rarely see calls for Native involvement beyond cultural monitors. Few students are introduced to ethical problems in their academic studies; this concerns me as well. Students are allowed to pursue their degree without addressing these issues before entering the field, thus perpetuating the disrespect Native peoples oftentimes associate with archaeological research.

S CREAMING P OTATOES AND OTHER D IFFICULTIES The first few years at Berkeley were awkward years for me, and for the students and professors around me—at least that’s what it looked like from my vantage point. It seemed like some students and professors were walking on eggshells when I was around, not speaking as freely as they normally would outside of the field and away from the Native peoples they studied. Here, you must take into account that I entered graduate school in the heyday of political correctness, and this too played a role in the cautious dealings with touchy subjects. I developed a sense of what conversations might otherwise be like if I weren’t around: talk of superstitious locals, laughing at irrational cultural beliefs, or retelling of field stories in the local dialect for added humor. One particular lecture in my first year stands out in my mind. The Archaeological Research Facility at Berkeley holds a weekly lecture series given by associated faculty, visiting scholars, and students. I don't remember much about the lecture, who gave it or what the work was about; but what I do recall is that the archaeologist, having spent the summer working in the Andes, now saw fit to belittle the cultural beliefs of the descendant community. The researcher had gone to a community event where food was being prepared. The speaker showed a slide of sweet potatoes being cooked in the fire, and explained that the people of the area believed the potatoes were alive and screamed as they were cooked. At this point, the audience burst into laughter, the speaker chuckling along with the crowd. I sat there pissed at the people around me, too angry to pay attention to the rest of the lecture, disturbed at their hypocritical attitudes that dismissed the descendants of the people they made their living off of. I didn’t understand how a group of people so fascinated with the ancestors of a culture could think so little of their descendants. How can archaeologists expect to understand the behaviors and beliefs of ancient people if they can’t understand their descendants who retain the cultural knowledge they seek to understand? My intention is not to paint a horrible picture of insensitive non-Native archaeologists scoffing at the “ignorant” Natives. But this is an example of the need for increased education on the culture and politics of the descendant communities whose ancestors archaeologists study—an academic understanding of a culture and its ancestors doesn’t automatically translate into knowledge about the living culture or their modern circumstances. Situations like this, which I thankfully haven’t experienced too often, and a steady questioning of my identity, have made becoming an archaeologist challenging. I’m unaware of other disciplines that call into question an individual’s identity by the mere

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pursuit of a degree, although others may exist. Individuals in both my own community and in the archaeological community have questioned the authenticity of my “Hawaiianness,” as if seeking an education somehow negates my legitimacy as an Indigenous person. Sometimes I’m viewed as a Westernized Native, someone who’s lost her traditional knowledge and credibility by leaving the islands for school. It would appear to be a double-edged sword: seek a Western education and lose your legitimacy, or remain in the islands and lose your ability to effect positive changes for your people within a given field. I seem to lose either way. But this is a myth that serves to limit the options of Native people. There’s no need for Native scholars to choose between their culture and an education, because it is possible—although not easy—to seek an education while retaining one’s cultural ways. As anthropologists, we know culture and people constantly change, and it’s irresponsible to hold Native people to an unrealistic, unattainable, static persona. As an example of how things change, I’d like to share a revelation I had a few years ago that might help Native and non-Native readers understand some of the issues raised here. The word “they”gave me a lot of trouble for some time (actually it still does, as you’ll see throughout this paper). A few years into my tenure at Berkeley, I noticed I constantly used “they” when speaking about Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture: “They built complex stone structures”; “they possessed a strict kapu system”; or “they perpetuated history orally.” This realization concerned me. I questioned whether I was embarrassed of my own people and history; I questioned my identity. I did some soul searching to figure out if the accusations were true, that I had somehow severed ties to my community, lost the connection to my cultural foundations, and transformed into a Westernized Native. For years I struggled with this, before I realized what the issue really was. My choice of words had nothing to do with my cultural pride or severed roots; it had everything to do with who was teaching me about Hawaiian culture. As already noted, Hawaiian culture was something I lived, but it wasn’t until college I decided to study my culture academically. It took me several years to realize I used “they” because the people who taught me about Hawaiian culture were not Hawaiians; it was my professors’use of “they”that I had unconsciously picked up. This story offers a word of caution to professors who need to realize that Native students may be dealing with issues other students don’t have to face, issues they might not be completely aware of before they reach college. This is also a cautionary tale for Native students, who may face issues unique to their people and culture and who must allow themselves room to make mistakes.

C OMMUNITY: M Y M OTIVATION TO C ONTINUE IN A RCHAEOLOGY What keeps me in archaeology is the belief I can be of some use to my community. I believe Hawaiian communities are best served by people they can hold accountable, who are accessible, and who won’t disengage themselves from the concerns of modern Hawaiians. One way to ensure this is to encourage Native Hawaiians to enter the field of archaeology. Another way is to improve the manner in which archaeology is presently carried out, and to encourage archaeologists to be more aware of the sociopolitical

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issues associated with doing archaeology. I continue to participate in this field because I expect its practitioners to do a better job of engaging local communities, feeling a sense of responsibility to those people, and conducting studies in a more respectful manner. As an example of the lack of respect I’ve seen in the way archaeologists at times conduct themselves, I recall my first excavation experience as an intern for a museum in Hawai’i. The problem wasn’t with the excavation itself, or even in the way it was being done; rather, I took issue with the attitude of the lead archaeologist overseeing the project. The group of people I worked with that day began talking about Hawaiian beliefs, and the negative consequences of whistling at night, leaving an open pit in the ground unattended, cutting your hair and nails at night, and other related topics. Although more than a decade has passed, I still recall the comment the lead archaeologist made regarding the “stupid superstitions” of Hawaiians. My reaction to her statement was just like the one I would have several years later, listening to a lecture in Berkeley about summer fieldwork in the Andes. How could she think that way about the cultural beliefs of people she studied? It made no sense to me how a researcher could dismiss the beliefs of the people they investigated, but my readings have enlightened me to the root of this disconnect. It comes back to the notion (held by too many) that the real Natives are dead, and since there are no living people to carry on those beliefs, then belittling the living culture has no bearing on the investigation of past people. Another reason I’m still in this discipline is to educate Hawaiians about archaeology, particularly the ways in which archaeology can benefit communities. I don’t see archaeology positively affecting many Hawaiians on a daily basis, at least not as it’s currently practiced, but where I do see the field contributing to the culture is in the historic preservation arena. If archaeologists and Hawaiians can reach a point where we recognize we’re essentially working toward similar goals—preservation and perpetuation of culture— we present a stronger front in fighting against superfluous land development. I’m continually drawn back to this discipline, despite the difficulties, because I believe it’s vital for archaeologists and Hawaiians to develop working relations to ensure Hawaiian culture will not only be preserved, but perpetuated and practiced on a daily basis for and by future generations.

A DVICE TO N ATIVES It’s my hope the above stories will be of some help to Native students entering, or thinking of entering, the discipline. I also offer suggestions to students and professors based on my experiences and background that I hope might save them some discomfort and misunderstandings in the academic world. These suggestions are based on my own cultural teachings and are obviously not applicable to everyone. Please take from these what you can, and leave the rest. ‹

Avoid Isolation and Find a Mentor. Pursuing an academic degree can be isolating on many levels. I have found the academic process to be a lonely one, especially when contrasted with the community-oriented mind-set of Hawaiians. You also run the

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risk of falling outside the cultural norms of both your home community and your academic community. Find a group of like-minded people, or a mentor, to help you get through school. Having people around who have gone through the process, who may have had similar experiences or backgrounds, or with whom you can share ideas is an excellent way to overcome many challenges. ‹

Speak Out/Ask Questions. In Western academia, students are encouraged to participate in the learning process in ways that directly challenge the professor at times. Students are expected to ask questions, or to request further clarification if something doesn’t make sense. Some professors enjoy the theoretical banter they share with students, and welcome debate and challenges. But be aware that the Native style of learning—keeping your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut—isn’t always appreciated in academia. You can’t rely on the professor to recognize you don’t understand the material; you must be willing to approach the professor and ask questions, whether in class or afterward. I have found my professors and other graduate students to be more than willing to explain concepts or methods I was unclear on. Pretending you understand the information will only hurt you; don’t be afraid to ask questions.

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Outwardly Vocal Doesn’t Mean Knowledgeable. Just because a student talks a lot doesn’t mean she knows what she’s talking about. Feeling insecure about your intelligence or your right to be at your institution isn’t an experience reserved for Native peoples alone. You will be surprised to find many other students who feel like frauds, who wonder if the university made a mistake in admitting them, who doubt their knowledge and skills. Don’t allow this common insecurity to be exacerbated by comparing yourself to students who appear more knowledgeable than you. Focus on your own education, and leave the game playing to other people; be honest about your abilities and inabilities, and you’ll find people are often willing to help you.

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Look Out for Yourself. I got stepped on a lot the first few years I was on the mainland because my understanding of the world was vastly different. For example, growing up I was taught that if you look out for those around you, they’ll look out for you. However, my kindness and courtesy were taken as signs of weakness, and people took advantage of my generosity. I gave up time on lab computers, offering to share when I saw other students waiting, not realizing they had no intention of sharing once they sat down. I’ve shared cultural knowledge with colleagues whom I thought would use it to better their working relations with Hawaiian people, only to realize they were just looking to make inroads with hesitant “informants” to obtain information they were seeking. To me, a gathering meant no one showed up empty-handed and always stayed to help clean up after—but others thought differently. While I’m hesitant to tell people to alter their behavior to reflect their surroundings (because I think the world is a better place for kind acts), knowing when, where, and with whom to share courtesies may save you from being used. You need to look out for yourself, because in most cases the people around you aren’t looking out for you: if you don’t, no one will.

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Choose Your Battles. The world is full of stereotypes and misinformation, some of which I’m guilty of possessing myself. If possible, help to educate those around you by dispelling false knowledge about your people. I often find myself having to explain that Native Hawaiians are an Indigenous people, and that all residents of the state of Hawai’i are not Hawaiian. I’ve also informed people that the Nation of Hawai’i was illegally overthrown by the United States of America in an 1893 coup perpetrated by American businessmen living on the islands. Sometimes this information leads to constructive communication, but it can also fall on deaf ears. There are those people in the world who have made up their minds, and nothing you or anyone says will change their opinion; in those circumstances I suggest you count your losses and move on. There’s no use in arguing with a woman of English, French, and German descent as to whether or not she’s Hawaiian when she considers herself that. If being born in the state of Hawai’i is her criterion for calling herself Hawaiian, then let her be. It won’t help you to ask when she last attended a community meeting about the disproportionate rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity in the Hawaiian community. It won’t behoove you to inquire when she last testified in front of an island burial council about the mistreatment of family members buried in unmarked graves. Nor will it benefit you to question whether the gradual destruction of ancestral sites to make way for modern development enrages her. There are far too many battles to fight, you must be steadfast, and learning to choose your battles is important.

A DVICE TO ACADEMICS I wrote this section thinking about my own experience in school and what could have helped me advance through my degree more easily. Admittedly, not all my difficulties progressing toward my degree were based on cultural issues, and I do take responsibility for my personal shortcomings in finishing my doctorate in a more timely fashion. However, I believe the process can be less problematic if a few issues are kept in mind when dealing with Native students. ‹

Mentoring is Important. Most Native students find themselves in the circumstance of being the first individuals in their family to attend college. Fortunately for me, my older sister, brother, and mother all attended college (at one point all of us, except my sister who had graduated, were in college at the same time). I thus had family who could advise me about school. Once I went beyond undergraduate work, however, I was on my own and initially sought advice from my mother’s college professors. Because many Native students are in unfamiliar territory, it is essential for them to find advisors to mentor them, to make themselves available for such advisement or at least to be pointed in the right direction.

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Don’t Fit the Mold. Academic advisors should be aware that Native students will not necessarily fit the mold of students who traditionally enter the academic field. How

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they choose to enter the discipline, why they pursue a degree, and what they plan to do after obtaining the degree may differ from the answers of other students. In my case, the individual rewards and accolades that accompany a graduate degree are not my ultimate goal; what’s more important is my ability to speak with those in authority on issues important to my community, in a manner that cannot be dismissed. The degree is thus important for the clout it gives me to work within the system to effect positive changes for my people. Rather than a goal, it is foremost a tool to be used for greater objectives. Keep in mind, then, that if the goal of the journey is not an academic teaching position, the path students take will not mirror that of others who are seeking that particular result. ‹

Allow for Community Involvement. Because Native students are often the first entrants of their community to pursue a degree in a given field, they are frequently called upon to help in related matters. They aren’t simply responsible to themselves or their professors, but, more importantly, are responsible to the community that helped them get where they are. There’s an expectation of giving back to your community. These students aren’t allowed to focus solely on their academic work, but are often asked to use their knowledge to help their community with legal, political, or social issues affecting their people. For myself, I worried about such things as representing my people in a respectful manner, finding a dissertation topic that would benefit my community, making myself available to uncles and aunties who wanted advice on sites and artifacts in their care, and encouraging other young Hawaiians to enter the field. Professors should be aware that Native students often have a responsibility to their communities, which becomes heightened once they enter graduate school.

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Not Your Personal Informants. Few people are experts in every aspect of their culture, yet Native scholars are often put on the spot in just this way. Thus, when we are unable to answer the myriad of questions posed to us by outsiders, we are somehow seen as deficient. Don’t view the Native students in your department as personal informants; other students in the program aren’t expected to bark out answers on the different aspects of their cultural lives. A student of English descent isn’t expected to know about the genealogy of British royalty, food preparation practices, origins of particular sporting activities, traditional modes of transportation, reproductive practices, religious beliefs, rites of passage, or ancient weaponry. Nor are they expected to act as tour guides, suggesting the best season to vacation, the best pubs in the area, or the cheapest airline to book. Sometimes I’ve felt like a quarry pit being mined for information.

I’m not asking for special treatment, nor do I believe coddling helps to develop realworld skills. Sometimes the perceived special treatment of Native students makes the situation more difficult, drawing criticism from non-Native academics who assume you’re only in the program because a quota needed filling. What I am advocating, however, is an awareness of the particular issues Indigenous students bring to the table, issues many

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academics have not been made aware of. I have seen professors make good faith efforts to bring Native students into the discipline of archaeology, but fall short of success because they were unprepared for the level of commitment needed. Again, advisors need not hand-feed these students, but pointing them in the right direction, giving good practical advice, and not placing unfair requests on their time and knowledge is a good place to start.

C ONCLUSION IIn this essay I tried to be true to myself, honest about my expectations, and productive in my discussion. I want academics to know my concerns are not solely about producing an intellectually rigorous doctoral dissertation, but also involve cultural responsibilities beyond the discipline. I’m not looking for sympathy or making excuses; instead, I’m taking my own advice and speaking out, to educate those around me about circumstances and experiences common among Native students. I encourage other Native people to enter the field; I believe it will benefit their communities, providing an inroad to an area of study that has traditionally been suspect. This choice is difficult, particularly when community demand for health or law professionals is more immediate, but it is a field that can only benefit from Native involvement. I also encourage archaeologists to engage descendant communities more; it requires an investment of time and may entail some uncomfortable moments, but the rewards are immeasurable. Thoughtful collaboration makes for a better archaeology, one that is respectful to the descendants of the culture you study, and more robust in its understanding of cultural complexities.

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Photo by Vincent Kewibu

ARCHAEOLOGY AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Vincent Kewibu ommunities throughout Papua New Guinea (PNG) have collective memories of their past relating to their ancestors and landscapes through oral traditions, whereas archaeology employs scientific methods to reconstruct and document the past. Some of these oral traditions convey stories about the movement of people and materials, the formation of landscapes, and the distribution of flora and fauna. However, oral traditions only trace human history to the recent past, unlike archaeology, which traces it to tens of thousands of years ago. Both Indigenous perceptions of the past and archaeology strive to bring to contemporary societies the history of the human past, but their methods differ. Here I offer a brief account of my personal experiences, some Indigenous perceptions of the past and of the discipline of archaeology, from a Papua New Guinean archaeologist’s point of view. I also discuss some of the problems and developments associated with archaeology in PNG society..

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A G ROWING I NVOLVEMENT IN A RCHAEOLOGY My intention at the end of high school (grade 12) was to choose a career different from the rest of my classmates. At the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in Port Moresby, I was directly involved with archaeology in 1993 as a second-year undergraduate B.A. student. I had been introduced to the discipline in the Study of Societies course offered by the Anthropology and Sociology Department the previous year. From there, I took up anthropology and was directed towards archaeology by Dr. John Muke, Jo Mangi, and (later) Dr. Linus digim’Rina—all Papua New Guineans who were pioneer students of archaeology. However, the program at UPNG at that time was underfunded and ill equipped to function fully and to adequately train students like myself. However, through the efforts of Dr. Muke, a few students, including me, were able to do some fieldwork at Kana site in Minj, Western Highlands Province. Kana is linked to early sites associated with the early development of agriculture in the highlands of New Guinea. Other field excursions were made to archaeological sites within the Port Moresby region. These sites were associated with the early arrival of Austronesians (Motuans). Despite these fieldwork experiences and short excursions, the broad range of archaeological theory and practice was not fully covered. I discovered this shortcoming later when enrolled as a B.A. (honours) student at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. I had to study twice as hard as the Australian students to understand the basic framework, concepts, and current debates in archaeology in order to participate fully in class discussions. This is a major problem in PNG archaeology, and the solution is to provide as much exposure at all levels of education in the country, from primary to secondary level, and

The author at the Australian-Cypriot project at the Marki Alonia Site, 1998. Photo by Rudy Frank.

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also to restructure the program at UPNG to meet current trends in world and regional archaeology in practice and theory. Part of this problem has been addressed by three Southwest Pacific Cultural Heritage Management Training Programs from 2001 to 2003 (Bedford and Leavesley 2004) and in the current archaeology courses that are taught at UPNG. The process of change is slow but ongoing. After completing my studies at La Trobe University, I spent two months of fieldwork (excavations) at the Marki Alonia site in Cyprus with the Australian-Cypriot Expedition, before returning to PNG in early 1999. I was engaged as a temporary tutor in archaeology at UPNG and was formally awarded a three-year contract as a senior tutor in 2001. In 2003 I embarked on a Ph.D. at the Australian National University and returned in 2006 to UPNG and resumed teaching archaeology. My Ph.D. program is temporarily on hold due to my current commitments. In Papua New Guinea, family members, the community, and socioeconomic situations are the strongest influences on most career choices. If these factors had had any bearing on my career choice (which they did not), I would not have chosen archaeology at all. However, the community appreciates the fact that somebody amongst them is interested in the past—one who is equipped with a different framework and set of tools (i.e., archaeology), and acknowledges that local oral histories will be complemented and somewhat legitimised with the new ways of looking at the past. Like most societies throughout the world, people are curious about their past, their origins, their neighbours, and their environment; in a way, archaeology addresses some of these issues. Whenever I spend time with my community, people ask about the past and the present concerning land, natural resources, shifting socioeconomic patterns, and technology, and also what will happen in the future with regard to global changes. This brings to light the notion that in PNG the past is a living entity; it gives sense and meaning to communities through past events, histories, and foundation myths and shapes them.

P ERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST AND T HEIR A RCHAEOLOGICAL I MPLICATIONS There are thousands of oral traditions in PNG. In terms of narrating local histories and the creation of natural and cultural landscapes, they vary in their usefulness from one region of the country to another, but their threshold of relevance is seldom more than 100 years old. Comparatively speaking, the remembered history of many communities is equal in time depth to the beginning of colonial history. Though many would consider history through oral narration and hearsay accounts as doubtful, some researchers have succeeded in legitimising these accounts by demonstrating their association with the physical or tangible remains of bygone societies. Muke (2000) uses the term “Indigenous archaeology” to refer to Indigenous people’s own use of the past material culture or sacred landscapes to interpret the present. Indeed, Indigenous attitudes towards things past have an almost archaeological character. By this I mean that many accounts exist of people discovering, storing, curating, and worshiping landscape features and artifacts, and these are understood to be the prod-

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ucts of bygone communities. Just like Western archaeologists who are attracted to artifacts in order to uncover prehistoric societies and reconstruct the meanings of ancient lifestyles, Papua New Guineans are acutely aware of the significance of past material culture. For example, Brian Egloff (1970: 154) refers to a section of a stone arrangement (riri stones) in Goodenough Bay (southeast coast of PNG) as foundation stones of a village. He writes, “While the stones stand firm, the village will be secure, the gardens will be alright and the people will be strong in every way.” Perhaps one of the most striking relationships between the past and the contemporary generation is posited in ancestral settlement sites, burial sites, anthropogenically created landscapes, and various artifacts. These support the correspondence between the verbal accounts and the archaeological evidence of human activities. They are the most sacred places and objects, in and around which all tribes or clans acknowledge their common identity and their inheritance of certain social rules, by reference to their physical source of unity. Ethnobotanical remains found at origin sites are another form of evidence of the initial migration and settlement of the founding populations of contemporary social groups. Here, the validity of oral histories is visible in the deliberate planting of trees, palms, shrubs, and other plants (both ornamental and edible). Such past ancestral activities have their counterparts in the Western world in the form of both botanical gardens and the planting of shrubs and placing of flowers on graves in Christian cemeteries (Muke 2000). So far, little research has been conducted on the social and religious significance of these ethnobotanical remains in PNG.

L IVING THE L AND The land is an integral part of PNG communities. It is no surprise, then, that oral traditions of the past are directed towards the legitimisation of the communities’ties to the land on which they reside and have user rights to cultivation and natural resources. Indigenous perspectives of archaeology may differ from one community to another and from individual to individual, but perspectives of the past in PNG overlap. Some Papua New Guineans may say that archaeologists are interested in things that Indigenous people within the communities care nothing about, while others may say that there is no need to consult archaeologists about the past, that looking to elders in the community is more appropriate (Leavesley et al. 2005). How can archaeology bridge this gap? Indigenous archaeologists need to make a concerted effort to pull together and present the vast corpus of archaeological literature in language(s) that all Papua New Guineans can understand, so they can digest the information and relate to it. Education and training are the key to untangling this dilemma. With a more complete understanding of archaeological theory, methodology, and interpretation, coupled with an acceptance of alternative views about the past within Western scientific/academic discourse, Indigenous people will be better able to contribute and speak at level terms. Archaeology cannot stand entirely on its own for relevance in PNG and so requires other methods to develop and maintain public interest in its objectives (see McManamon

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2000: 7). Education and training programs in archaeology not only increase its profile, but also strengthen ties with neighbouring Melanesian countries (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji), as well as with the wider Pacific community.

A H ISTORY OF A RCHAEOLOGICAL P RACTICE AND T RAINING IN PAPUA N EW G UINEA Since the 1700s when European explorers, colonial governments, missionaries, and traders set their sights on Papua New Guinea, the land and its people have fascinated the Western world. This curiosity later led naturalists and anthropologists to carry out systematic research in order to understand this alien land and its inhabitants. Early ethnographic accounts revealed substantial diversity of cultural practices and languages, and this led to questions about the origins and history of these societies and the processes by which they changed over time. These inquiries were fuelled by particular objectives set (and assumptions held) by the Europeans. At the same time, the accidental discoveries of material culture records of past societies revealed some depth in the human history. Systematic archaeological research in PNG began in 1959 when Susan Bulmer first excavated a site in the central highlands (Allen 1972), despite the fact that anthropological research had begun some 50 years earlier; those excavations contributed significantly to the development of archaeology itself and to the understanding of some PNG cultures. Since then, ongoing archaeological research has revealed that PNG has a long and continuous record of human occupation spanning nearly 50,000 years of prehistory. To date, only about 2% of that prehistory has been documented. Nonetheless, archaeology has shown that the north coast of PNG and the Bismarck Archipelago were the major “stepping stones” by which humans, materials, plants, and animals passed across the Pacific. It has also demonstrated the early independent development of agriculture in the highlands 10,000 years ago (see Denham et al. 2004; Golson 2007), the beginning of obsidian exploitation and trade in the late Pleistocene, and the networking of the coastal, island, and inland areas through exchange networks in the last 2,000 years. Today there are two orientations in archaeological research in PNG: academic archaeology and contract archaeology. Most research is conducted by academics or scholars from overseas universities and institutions, and they are the ones who set the research agendas. These projects usually extend over a longer period than contract archaeology. Contract archaeology is also conducted by consultants from overseas but also by handful of local PNG archaeologists. PNG’s National Museum and Art Gallery is the monitoring government agency dealing with archaeological impact studies; occasionally, the University of Papua New Guinea is involved. Contract archaeology work is usually funded by the developers of a project. The curriculum in primary and secondary schools in PNG has long been dominated by European (rather than Indigenous) history, which long asserted that PNG had only a short prehistory.1 Introductory books and pamphlets on PNG prehistory have been produced, including Bernard Minol’s (2000) Manus from the Legends to Year 2000, which combines local legends and archaeology about his people. Generally, however, little place is

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given for such publications in the curriculum, and what information there is, is often outdated. The lack of archaeology in the PNG school curriculum, and the limited nature of what there is, result from a number of complex factors in the development of formal education since PNG gained independence from Australia in 1975. Teaching and research in archaeology began in 1969 at the University of Papua New Guinea, well before the country gained independence in 1975. Despite this promising start, today there are no more than five practicing Papua New Guinean archaeologists. Part of the problem was due to the lead up to independence, during the early stages of education and training in archaeology, and the need then to train students in administration to take over from the departing colonial government. Archaeology and related fields thus took the back stage. It was not until the 1980s that archaeology gained some prominence, with the enrolment of a good number of promising students; still, only a few of them ended up in archaeology or anthropology. Another factor is that most undergraduate students choose fields that will provide immediate employment after graduating from the university. Since the job market for archaeology is very small, few pursue it. The archaeology program at the university comes under the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and is housed under the Anthropology and Sociology Strand (i.e., department). As part of the strand’s objectives for student training, archaeology provides a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives on human groupings, patterns of behaviour, and resource exploitation. Through a strong combination of scientific and cultural knowledge, archaeological methods are used to interpret evidence

The chief archaeologist from the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery explaining to high school students about the importance of archaeological excavation during the Southwest Pacific Cultural Heritage Training Program, 2003. Photo courtesy of Vincent Kewibu.

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of past existence and vindicate a people’s cultural heritage, both past and contemporary. A handful of students enroll in the introductory, methodology, PNG, and regional archaeological courses each semester. As part of the training program, selected students majoring in archaeology also participate in fieldwork, with international researchers collaborating with UPNG. In addition to university-based training, a series of workshops was conducted between 2001 and 2003 by Australian National University archaeologists, sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (Japan). The workshops were generally known as the Southwest Pacific Cultural Heritage Training program. This initiative attempted to link archaeology and local Indigenous perspectives of the past at the national, provincial, and local levels—an important approach because PNG is a culturally diverse country. The emphasis was on training Papua New Guinean archaeologists and selected government officers who deal with education, culture, and heritage management. It was also an opportunity to promote the notion that archaeology should not only be used to educate compatriots, but also must go further to inform the world about the unique cultural identity and PNG’s past by both local and international archaeologists.

C OMMUNITY-O RIENTED A RCHAEOLOGY There is a need in PNG to carry out collaborative archaeological research and preservation projects with visiting international and local Indigenous archaeologists, based on both the Indigenous knowledge of the past and archaeology. The engagement of relevant national institutions, provincial and local authorities, and local communities within the country should be a priority. The aims of the projects should be community-oriented in order to raise awareness of the importance of the archaeological heritage of the country and to demonstrate how it should be documented and managed. The communities will take ownership of this archaeological heritage only with their participation, but a lack of funding and specific training in archaeological field methods, analysis, and documentation is the major problem. Fostering cooperation and assistance of the international archaeological community—that is, international scholars working in PNG—has been a positive step in the development of the country’s archaeological proficiency. This should be seen as a necessary step en route to an Indigenous archaeological effort in the country. An integral part of a few collaborative projects, such as those headed by Professor Glenn Summerhayes of the University of Otago (New Zealand) over a number of years, has been teaching students about archaeology in PNG through fieldwork and assisting students with scholarships from the institutions the lead scholar is affiliated with, building the level of technical expertise in archaeology, and facilitating future collaborative—and specifically Indigenous—PNG projects. Training in archaeology for Indigenous Papua New Guineans should not be restricted to descriptive and extractive areas in mapping, data recording, or excavation, but should move beyond this preliminary work and engage in analysis and interpretation. However, lack of expertise, and the limited facilities, equipment, and tech-

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nical experience available in the country perpetuate a dependence on foreign scientists for analysis. International researchers and students are required to affiliate with the PNG National Research Institute in order to obtain research visas, while local researchers work with a variety of institutions. In both cases, permits to excavate and to export archaeological materials (on loan) for studies overseas are issued by the PNG National Museum and Art Galley. As part of the permitting process, provincial2 and local-level authorities are informed so that individuals within the community can participate in the discussion of archaeological projects that will be conducted in the areas where they reside. Most experienced archaeologists who work in PNG consider this an ethical obligation for researchers. The communities they work with generally consist of traditional landowners and people related through kinship or marriage. The ownership of land is communal, although individuals have custodianship over certain areas, so it is important for the entire community to know about the proposed project and to ask questions and receive answers. In PNG, decisions are negotiable, so an open dialogue between the archaeologist(s) and the respective communities is important. Meetings are usually conducted in a number of languages, depending on the particular ability of the parties and areas or regions involved. Most overseas researchers and students of Melanesian archaeology speak English as a first language and some Tok Pisin (a creole language spoken widely in PNG), while most Papua New Guineans speak their local language first, followed by Tok Pisin or English. Leavesley et al. (2005) note that many of these discussions involve some interpretation on both sides, because the underlying philosophical justification for the pursuit of scientific knowledge has limited explanatory value for Papua New Guineans unless the links are made obvious. Archaeology is also important in the village, especially to the people who live close to, or have a connection with, the land where archaeological sites are present. The initial questions that community members have for visiting archaeologists, prior to detailed discussions and explanations, revolve around the economic implications of research: Where will the researchers be accommodated during the course of their research? How much labour from local community members will be needed? What is the rate of pay? Discussions then turn towards the social and educational responsibilities of the researcher. Communities also request that archaeologists return to the village later to disseminate information about the results of the excavations through written reports and published articles, or through oral presentations for those who cannot read. Such features represent what Field et al. (2000) have described as “community participation” (see also Moser et al. 2002). Communities may also be employed as field workers who participate in site surveys and provide excavation labour; they are paid for their efforts based on negotiated rates and research funds at the archaeologists’ disposal. The role and contribution of archaeology in PNG are clearly defined by trained archaeologists based on the results of their research. The challenge is to find a common ground where they will be complementary to the sociocultural framework of PNG communities with regard to their understanding of the past. This common ground will

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enable archaeology to maintain its viability as a discipline that provides information with a broader appeal.

C ONCLUSIONS Although the problems and needs of Indigenous people and archaeology in PNG differ slightly from those in other neighbouring Pacific countries, they do share widespread links through both their prehistory and the much more recent colonial past, and through a reliance on international economic and technical aid. However, PNG is a more culturally diverse country with a relatively larger population. Addressing the educational and training needs required to bridge the knowledge gap between archaeology and Indigenous perceptions of the past is thus more complex than elsewhere in the region. In Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, many members of settler (non-Indigenous) communities are genuinely interested in understanding cultural differences and are also concerned for the welfare of disposed or dominated Indigenous populations (Torrence and Clarke 2000). However, using the methods of historic archaeology (which is non-Indigenous-oriented) and prehistoric archaeology (which is Indigenous-oriented) to distinguish or reinforce the existence of non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities reveals epistemological differences between archaeology and Indigenous ways of understanding the past (see Hemming et al. 2000; cf. Pardoe 1990). There is often tension between these communities that reflects historical relations. For example, at the 2005 Australian Archaeological Association conference, one of the sessions was titled “The Archaeology of Frontiers,” in which debates between Indigenous and nonIndigenous archaeologists revolved around the evidence of European and Aboriginal historical relations regarding land and settlement. In PNG, in contrast, the tension may be found between Indigenous PNG archaeologists and visiting archaeologists from overseas, the latter coming from places where the majority of the population is made up of Indigenous peoples and where archaeology could be used to reinforce common links rather than differences. Though archaeology traces the history of human settlement in PNG to the late Pleistocene, most Papua New Guineans only relate their history to the last 2,000 years or so. To improve cross-communication skills, it is imperative to increase training and education in archaeology for Papua New Guineans. It is also vital that while data collection and analysis adhere to science-based methodology, interpretation should incorporate Indigenous or traditional knowledge about the past and other relevant information regarding traditional lifeways and local ecology. Apart from theory and methodology, the philosophical underpinnings of why and for whom archaeology is practiced should be appropriately addressed. The experience and efforts of all archaeologists who have worked and are working in PNG have not only contributed immensely to the knowledge about the past, but also set a scenario where Papua New Guineans can be proud of their heritage. Although the problems that face PNG with its few Indigenous archaeologists and research may be different from those in other countries, there are similarities to recognize and important lessons to be learnt.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Pamela Swadling who read an earlier version of the paper and made useful comments. Any errors are mine.

N OTES 1 This changed when archaeologists discovered Late Pleistocene human occupation sites in

PNG. 2 Some provinces have research committees.

R EFERENCES C ITED Allen, J. 1972 The First Decade in New Guinea Archaeology. Antiquity 46: 180–190. Bedford, S., and M. G. Leavesley 2004 Distance Education in the South-West Pacific: Cultural Heritage Training 2001–2003. Report presented to the Sasakawa Pacific Island Nations Fund, Tokyo. Denham, T., S. Haberle, and C. Lentfer 2004 New Evidence and Revised Interpretations of Early Agriculture in Highland New Guinea. Antiquity 78 (302): 839–857. Egloff, B. J. 1970 The Rock Carvings and Stone Groups of Goodenough Bay, Papua. Archaeology and Physical Anthropology 5 (2): 147–156. Field, J., J. Barker, R. Barker, E. Coffey, L. Coffey, E. Crawford, L. Darcy, T. Fields, G. Lord, B. Steadman, and S. Colley 2000 Coming Back: Aborigines and Archaeologists at Cuddie Springs. Public Archaeology 1 (1): 35–48. Golson, J. 2007 The Origins and Development of New Guinea Agriculture (1989). Reprinted in The Emergence of Agriculture. A Global View, edited by T. Denham and P. White, pp. 175–148. Routledge, London/New York. Hemming, S., V. Wood, and R. Hunter 2000 Researching the Past: Oral History and Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Difference. Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania, edited by R. Torrence and A. Clarke, pp. 331–359. Routledge, London/New York. Leavesley, M. G., B. Minol, H. Kop, and V. H. Kewibu 2005 Cross-cultural Concepts of Archaeology: Kastom, Community, Education and Cultural Heritage Management in Papua New Guinea. Journal of Public Archaeology 4: 1–25. McManamon, F. P. 2000 Archaeological Messages and Messengers. Public Archaeology 1: 5–20. Minol, B. 2000 Manus from the Legends to Year 2000. A History of the People. University of Papua New Guinea Press, Port Moresby.

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Moser, S., D. Glazier, J. E. Phillips, L. Nasser el Nemr, M. Saleh Mousa, R. Nasr Aiesh, S. Richardson, A. Conner, and M. Seymour 2002 Transforming Archaeology through Practice: Strategies for Collaborative Archaeology and the Community Archaeology Project at Qusier, Egypt. World Archaeology 34: 220–248. Muke, J. 2000 Universiti Em I Go We? The Future of the University of Papua New Guinea: Cultural and Philosophical Perspectives. Manuscript on file, Anthropology and Sociology Strand, University of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby. Pardoe, C. 1990 Sharing the Past: Aboriginal Influence on Archaeology Practice, A Case Study from New South Wales. Aboriginal History 14: 208–223. Torrence, R., and A. Clarke 2000 Negotiating Difference: Practice Makes Theory for Contemporary Archaeology in Oceania. In The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania, edited by R. Torrence and A. Clarke, pp. 1–31. Routledge, London/New York.

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Photo by Mohamed Mchulla

BEING AN AFRICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST IN THE UNITED STATES

Chapurukha Kusimba s I reflect upon my career as an anthropological archaeologist, I am humbled by how fortunate I was to have received an outstanding education and training. Throughout my career, I have had dedicated mentors who have helped me to learn that independence, teamwork, hard work, vision, mission, discipline, and direction are the most critical ingredients in forging successful careers. On the other hand, I have also discovered that having detractors and competitors was healthy for me too, as long as the playing field, which includes access to research funding and channels for publications and publicity, is level. I have learned, however, that this is not always the case, and sadly, this will remain a predicament for the foreseeable future for many Indigenous scholars.

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My research, drawn from a traditional four-field background, has focused on the role of technology and trade in the development of urban society in East Africa: what factors contributed to the rise of urbanism and what kind of relationship did those societies have with their rural neighbors from whence they arose and on whom they were dependent. My primary research sites are in Kenya, but I also have ongoing research projects in the Czech Republic, India, Madagascar, and the United States. This research has been supported by my position as curator of African anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where I have worked since 1994. I am vice-chair in my department and serve on several editorial boards. What follows is an account of how I arrived at where I am today.

P EOPLE AND I NSTITUTIONS THAT M OLDED M Y C AREER IN A NTHROPOLOGY I am Bukusu and my people inhabit the area around Mount Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border. The Bukusu refer to themselves as the children of the “thigh of the elephant” in reference to their multi-ethnic origins traced to all the groups in and around Mount Elgon. They are the most dominant of the Luyia peoples, who constitute the second largest ethnic group in Kenya after the Kikuyu. The Bukusu are historically agro-pastoral people. They value land and cattle equally, and have fought many wars with their neighbors and the British to defend both. Their most immediate neighbors are the Iteso, Sabaot, Ogiek, and Nandi, all of whom they have interacted with for many generations. Our grandparents emphasized that we were related to all neighboring groups, and their message was always one of love and tolerance. Grandfather spoke all the languages of his neighbors and was at home among the Sabaot, Ogiek, and Iteso, to whom he preached the Quaker message of universal peace and brotherhood between 1930 and 1950. Few Kenyans can now speak more than four Indigenous languages, in addition to English and Kiswahili. The fact that pre-colonial people were multilingual is testimony to the underestimated degree of interaction that existed among them; it also stands in contrast to the later division of Indigenous peoples into nation-states and divided ethnic communities. In my own case, my ethnic group is found in both Uganda and Kenya. My early childhood was shared equally between town and country. My father had received technical training in civil engineering and worked in several places. At the time of my birth in 1962, he worked for a Canadian copper mining company in Kilembe, Uganda. We returned to his fatherland, Kenya, and joined other members of our extended family in 1967. After one year at home in Kaptola, my father took a job in Nakuru with the Kenya Railways Corporation. We saw very little of him, mostly once every three months when he would come home to visit. Our paternal grandparents, Jesse and Rachel Kusimba, filled the void left by our father’s work-enforced exile. Devout Quakers converted in 1916 by the Friends African Mission headquartered in Earlham, Indiana (USA), our grandparents were the center of family and friends. We all gathered with them to listen to Bible stories and fairy tales, and to sing traditional and Christian hymns. This was also where we could take refuge from vexed parents offended by our antics.

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Mohammed Mchulla and the author’s grandmother, Rachel Nelima Kusimba, age 103 (deceased 2009), to whom he credits his early interest in the history of East Africans, December 2008. Photo by Chapurukha Kusimba.

My grandparents were also fantastic storytellers, and sowed the seeds of my interest in the cultural and natural history of East Africa fairly early. Later, as a youth, I became aware of the famous discoveries of Louis and Mary Leakey in Olduvai Gorge, and of Richard and Meave Leakey elsewhere in the region. As a child, this information was intriguing, but of course I knew nothing then of the intense politics of paleoanthropology. I first heard about Swahili peoples, whom I now study, from our grandparents. In those days, their fame as ivory merchants was widespread. According to my grandparents, the Swahili inhabited distant lands on the edge of a great lake (which was the Indian Ocean). It was then believed to be a world of heavenly cities and unbelievable wealth. However, later at school, we learned about the Swahili’s role in the slave trade, and those images somehow colored our perceptions and interaction with coastal peoples (Kusimba 2004). We came to view the Swahili and other coastal peoples as somehow responsible for slavery, which momentarily blinded us from seeing their experiences, successes, and failures as inexorably linked to wider global events. My first visit to the coast was in 1984 when I was a college freshman at Kenyatta University, Kenya. My history professors, William Robert Ochieng’, Henry Muoria Mwaniki, and Bethwell Allan Ogot, believed that experiential learning, coupled with fieldwork, led to greater appreciation of history and anthropology, and that knowledge strongly grounded in scientific research results in better understanding, interpretation, and appreciation of past human experiences. While on the coast, we visited archaeological and historical towns and villages. The Great Palace at the Gede National Monument particularly impressed me, as did the main Congregation Mosque at the early city of Gede, built 700 years ago.

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An opportunity to return to the coast came in 1986, when Dr. Simiyu Wandibba, then head of the Archaeology Division at the National Museums of Kenya, on the strong recommendation of Professor Ochieng’, sent me to Lamu to work for several months on Dr. Linda Donley’s excavations in Lamu Town. Later that same year, I participated in the joint Harvard/National Museums of Kenya Summer Field School at the paleoanthropological sites in Koobi Fora, co-directed by Dr. Harry Merrick and Dr. Wandibba. At the completion of my field assignment, Dr. Wandibba and Dr. Richard Leakey were sufficiently impressed by my performance to offer me a one-year internship, which I elected to spend on the coast. Thus began what has become a long and productive career in coastal archaeology. While in Lamu working for Dr. Donley, I became acquainted with Mr. Mohamed Mchula Mohamed. Mohamed worked for the National Museums of Kenya and was in Lamu as the museum representative on Dr. Donley’s project. At one point during my stay, I needed money to buy a kikoyi (a Swahili loincloth). Mohamed offered to lend me what I needed, even though he knew I would be returning to Nairobi, with little chance of returning to the coast. In hindsight, I think it was Mohamed’s generosity toward me when I was in Lamu, and the camaraderie I developed with Swahili peoples, that led me to seriously consider investing my attentions into the later prehistory of East Africa and the archaeology of social complexity. In addition, while they may not have been aware of it, Lotten and Joen Gustafson, two Swedes from Vasteras who also participated on Dr. Donley’s dig, played a significant role in shaping my perspective. There, for the first time, I had the opportunity to interact with peers from different backgrounds and discuss our shared dreams, ambitions, and fears in an uninhibited fashion. As an undergraduate at Kenyatta University, I had majored in history and linguistics with a special focus on Swahili language and literature, but harbored an ambition to study human evolution. Sadly, only one course, “Prehistory of Africa” taught by Mr.

Prof. Simiyu Wandibba examines a traditional pot at the Field Museum, 2007. He is one of the pioneering Kenyan archaeologists to whom the author credits his initiation into archaeology. Photo by Chapurukha Kusimba.

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Mohamed Mchulla and the author at Mokowe Jetty, Lamu. The author credits the impetus for learning about the Swahili to his lifelong friend and colleague, Mohamed. Photo courtesy of Chapurukha Kusimba.

Nathaniel Mudoga, was offered on this subject in the History Department. For my research paper in that course, I undertook a year-long study of the way of life of Homo erectus. Unlike fellow students elsewhere researching such a topic, I visited the National Museums and interviewed Dr. Simiyu Wandibba and Dr. Richard Leakey, who had recently discovered the Nariokotome fossil, better known as the “Turkana Boy.” During the same year, a chance ride to Nairobi with Dr. Inez Sutton, whose course I was taking on Latin American history, led to a conversation on my long-term interests. When she learned that I was interested in archaeology, she arranged for me to meet her husband, Dr. John Sutton, who was then director of the British Institute in East Africa. I took my research papers with me and showed them to Dr. Sutton, who advised me that the National Museums would be an ideal place for me since the British Institute had no fellowships for African students at the time. As I had already made acquaintance with various staff members at the National Museums, I kept Dr. Wandibba abreast of my progress, thanks to the intervention of Professor Ochieng’ who, unbeknown to me, had encouraged Professor Wandibba to seriously consider taking me on as an intern at the National Museums. At my graduation, Dr. Wandibba arranged for me to participate in the Harvard Summer School at Koobi Fora. However, before I could do so, he sent me to Lamu, where Dr. Donley was excavating. At this time I still harbored the dream of studying paleoanthropology, so after Lamu I participated in the excavations at Koobi Fora—two very different experiences. The Koobi Fora Field School, which drew students from all over the United States and Britain, was an expensive program that attracted fairly wealthy students. To make sure that Kenyans benefited from the school, Dr. Wandibba had insisted that scholarships be provided to African

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students. My participation in this program, with three other Kenyan students, was under these circumstances. In general, the program was very good, and Kenyans who participated—including Drs. George Abungu, Isaiah Odhiambo, Kennedy Mutundu, Mzalendo Kibunjia, Purity Kiura, and Stephen Nangendo—have gone on to become paleontologists and archaeologists. But to my recollection, the instructors in the program spent little time and effort on African students. We were often left on our own, which made it very clear to me that black Africans seeking careers in paleontology, paleoanthropology, and archaeology would have difficulty finding committed mentors. The month I spent in Koobi Fora may have shattered my dreams of ever studying humankind’s evolution, and steered me toward the archaeology of urbanism and Indian Ocean exchange; my thanks go to Mohamed, Lotten, and Joen, and to Dr. Donley-Reid for letting me work for her, to Dr. William Harrison, who first taught me how to use the trowel, and to Dr. Justin Willis for running a fantastic dig. For the next ten months, I undertook excavations, mostly rescue projects, usually with Mohamed Mchula and Kaingu Kalume Tinga, under the supervision of the late Dr. Richard Wilding, who was then head of coastal archaeology. Dr. Wilding had spent a long and fruitful career working with Dr. Neville Chittick at the British Institute, had taught at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and had carried out extensive archaeological and ethnographic research among the Swahili and Borana peoples. Probably the best ceramic expert of his time in East Africa, Dr. Wilding was an energetic and committed Africanist, but for one reason or another, he could never find time to spend with us, either in the field or laboratory. And when he did, he said precious little about our progress as budding archaeologists. It was during this time that my friendship with Mohamed’s family blossomed. Whether Mohamed realized my frustration, I will never know. Unbeknown to me, one day during lunch at their house, Mohamed and his wife Maimuna (now deceased) invited me to move into their home in Old Town Mombasa. I was humbled by the invitation and agreed to move that same evening from the YWCA, where I had been staying for some three months. The Mohamed household consisted of Maimuna and their two sons, Abubakr and Abdillatif. Over the next seven months, Mohamed and Maimuna would introduce me to their extensive network of friends and relatives. It was Mohamed’s intervention that made it possible for me to become fully immersed in my Swahili studies. He introduced me to the most noted Swahili scholars, sages, and poets. In due course, I was able to extend my network of informants to include blacksmiths, traders, sailors, fishermen, potters, midwives, mothers, sons, daughters, and, yes, hustlers. These knowledgeable men and women are responsible for teaching me Swahili history and culture.

B RYN M AWR C OLLEGE AND B EYOND In May 1987, I was awarded a five-year fellowship to study anthropology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, for which I had applied at the urging of Richard Leakey. When I accepted the fellowship, I hadn’t the slightest idea how good a school it was. Growing up

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in Kenya, we had been duped into believing that the finest education was the one provided within Commonwealth (understood as British) universities: Oxford, Cambridge, McGill, Australian National University, University of Sydney, University of Cape Town, University of Ibadan, and Makerere University. For America, we knew little beyond Ivy League Schools, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Duke, and Berkeley. I think you get the picture. It is thus little wonder that out of the five or six fellowships that Dr. Leakey had secured in 1987, no recipient was keen on applying to Bryn Mawr. My colleagues who had expressed an earlier interest in studying human origins found themselves with mentors in the large research universities—Harvard, Duke, UCLA, Rutgers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Yale. Be that as it may, studying at Bryn Mawr was the best thing that ever happened to me. Besides its reputation and commitment to excellent teaching, research, and a liberal education, Bryn Mawr attracted exceptionally talented students, many of whom were women. My professors included Richard S. Davis, Richard Jordan (deceased), Philip Kilbride, Jane Goodale, and Jean DeBernardi. Dr. Frederica DeLaguna (deceased) had retired but was then still very active. I also took seminar courses at the University of Pennsylvania (with Vincent Pigott) and at Temple University (with Peter Rigby, deceased). Later, through the efforts of Dr. Pigott, I was introduced to David Killick and Nikolaas Van der Merwe at Harvard University—two Africans who were then engaged in research on the history of technology in Africa, a topic I was then interested in. Dr. Killick later served on my dissertation committee. Dr. Van der Merwe taught me many things, among them one very important career lesson. It happened that after completing analysis of my artifacts in his lab at the Peabody Museum, I was asked to speak at a brown bag lunchtime seminar. I had neatly prepared my paper to read. But just as I was about to present it, he walked up to the podium, turned the paper over, and ordered me to speak—rather than read—about the work I had done. After recovering my thoughts, I went on to present what turned out to be a good presentation. I have found that lesson enduring to this day. We had just begun our graduate program when we learned that the doctoral program in anthropology at Bryn Mawr was to be discontinued and we would be the last of its doctoral students. Needless to say, 1987/88 was a difficult year for both faculty and students. Dr. Jordan, who was then chair of the department and my graduate advisor, tried his best to save the program, as did his departmental colleagues. Unable to do so, he left for the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to chair the Anthropology Department there. Dr. Jordan, who had carried out excavations at early Labrador Inuit and Dorset culture sites in Labrador, Canada, and was then working at Karluk on Kodiak Island, was impressed enough by my first-year performance that he invited me to join his project to study Arctic anthropology. We both thought it would be a great idea for me to study Inuit anthropology. In the summer of 1988, the department awarded me a summer grant to participate in an excavation at the Koniag settlements at Larsen Bay, co-directed by Amy Steffian, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and Christopher Donta, then at Bryn Mawr. This would help me develop a comparative perspective for my African study, and also to check out Alaska to see if I liked it well enough to move with Dick (Jordan). Dr. Jordan left

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Bryn Mawr in the summer of 1988 on the understanding that I would join him in Alaska upon completion of my M.A. degree. However, our plan was never fulfilled because turmoil in the department at the University of Alaska forced him to step down as chair, and in 1991 he passed away, the victim of a heart attack. I probably would still have carried out my doctoral research in Africa after that, but sometimes I wonder what could have happened had events unraveled differently When Dick left for Alaska, I began working more closely with Rick Davis, Phil Kilbride, Jean DeBernardi, and Jane Goodale. Dr. Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist, was completing analysis of the assemblage excavated at Gritille in Turkey. Dr. Kilbride, a cultural and psychological anthropologist who worked in East Africa, was completing his book Family Change in East Africa: Women and Children at Risk in Kenya and was then beginning a study on street children (Kilbride and Kilbride 1990). Jean DeBernadi, a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, was writing her book on Chinese Malaysia spirit mediums (DeBernardi 2004). Jane Goodale, a cultural anthropologist, had just returned from Tiwi, northern Australia, where she had revisited in order to restudy her earlier work on Tiwi wives, the subject of her classic Tiwi Wives (1971). It was through these teachers that I received my training in anthropology as a four-field discipline. For example, by emphasizing the importance of linguistics for understanding preliterate societies, Dr. DeBernardi encouraged me to take a literature survey course on historical linguistics in Africa. During that time, I also served as a linguistic consultant for Kiswahili. My professors recognized the importance of getting training in other larger programs, and made resources available for me to study at The University Museum of Pennsylvania and Temple University. Later I spent time at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University and at the University of Arizona, where I carried out laboratory analysis of iron artifacts for my dissertation. My graduate school years (1987–1993) were the best years of my school life, but they were also the most trying. All of my professors were committed to their research, but they spared time to work with me. My friendship with all of them has endured. Jean DeBernardi, now at the University of Alberta, Canada, played an especially important role during the years after Dick left. Her encouragement and support during sometimes very difficult financial crises was critical in enabling me to hang on. It turned out that my fellowship at Bryn Mawr covered tuition and a stipend of $6,000. As a primarily teaching college, Bryn Mawr did not provide many teaching assistantships, and funded most of its students in other ways. As a foreign student, I could not work outside the college for more than 20 hours a week. In those days, the minimum wage was $2.50 an hour. Before coming to America, the National Museums had committed to financially support me to meet the shortfall in the estimated cost of living. However, the assurances from Dr. Richard Leakey that the National Museums of Kenya would meet the shortfall were never kept, despite repeated intervention by the dean of the graduate school, Dr. Catherine LaFarge. In fact, Leakey’s successor, Dr. Mohamed Isahakia, went so far as to remove my name, and that of other students, from the museum’s payroll, thus severing any binding relationship and loyalty I may have had to the institution. Finances were tight—14% of my $6,000 stipend was taxed, thanks to U.S. education policies under President Ronald Reagan, and the gross amount was never increased dur-

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ing the years I was enrolled. After paying for my room at the Graduate Center, I would be left with $273 to pay for books, photocopying, and subsistence. I moonlighted in the library and as a security dispatcher (what we call a night watchman in Kenya) to make ends meet. Despite the financial hardships, I never sought work outside the university, as many foreign students nowadays are accustomed to doing. It is, however, thanks to Phil Kilbride and Rick Davis that I learned the art and craft of scholarship, and they are ultimately responsible for inculcating in me a devotion to fieldwork as one of the best means of experiential learning and theory building and testing. As teachers, we are at our best when we engage students in field, laboratory, and collection-based research. Phil, Rick, Jane (Goodale), and Freddy (Frederica DeLaguna) taught this by example. My memories of Bryn Mawr are filled with the one-hour walks that Phil and I took for the last four years of my studies there. My scholarship was nourished in the classroom, in the field, and on those beautifully manicured lawns of Bryn Mawr. Few students can be that fortunate! I graduated in December 1993, five-and-a-half years after joining the program. My Ph.D. dissertation was The Archaeology and Ethnography of Iron Metallurgy of the Kenya Coast (Kusimba 1993). In May 1994, I was honored as the graduate student speaker at that year’s graduation ceremony. And in July, I moved to Chicago to become the assistant curator of African archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum—at the end of a road that had taken me through a number of interviews and countless letters of application.

C AREER -M AKING , R ESEARCH , R ESOURCES , AND WAYS OF OVERCOMING P ROBLEMS My job at the Field Museum involves field, laboratory, and collections-based research on Africa and the African diaspora, museum service, and public education. I joined the Field Museum of Natural History in 1994 as assistant curator of African archaeology and ethnography and was promoted to associate curator with tenure in 1999. In 2005, I became full curator of anthropology and was elected vice-chair of the Department of Anthropology by my colleagues. I oversee of a professional staff that includes collection managers, conservators, and registrars. The Field Museum has a joint Ph.D. program with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and thus all its curators are faculty at UIC. One advantage of being a curator at a renowned natural history museum is the ability to engage in full-time research, teach courses I like, and take on students who really want to work with me and so enroll at UIC specifically to work on African archaeology. Most importantly, the museum protects me from being fully immersed in the distractions of campus life and politics. It is an enviable position, but one that still has its share of trials and tribulations, for such is the adventure of life. The anthropology faculty at the Field Museum consists of ten curators—eight archaeologists, one physical and biological anthropologist, and one applied anthropologist. Collectively, we study on all five continents, and each of us has at least two research projects in different countries or continents. My colleagues are deeply committed to general anthropology as an explicitly scientific discipline. Continuous fieldwork

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and collection-based research are at the core of the department’s mission. One thing I like most about my colleagues is that they are some of the most exceptional anthropologists alive today. I relish making a living as an anthropologist and especially working at the Field Museum and in the Chicago metropolitan area. There are more than 50 archaeologists in Chicagoland, many of whom are considered leaders in their respective areas of specialization by their peers. We meet once a year at the Field Museum in a series of workshops I helped found with my colleague Jonathan Haas, to talk informally about global dimensions in the archaeology of chiefdoms, states, and empires. I find these sessions intellectually rewarding. From a personal standpoint, I really enjoy what I do. I still maintain close ties with my professors at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania, and our relationships have undergone a rather smooth transition from the formal “Kusimba” to simple “Chap,” “Jean,” “Rick,” “Phil,” “Dave,” “Vince,” and such. I continue to play a role, albeit minor, in the mentoring of Bryn Mawr students by involving some of them in my field research in Kenya. I have learned through experience to be wary of fair-weather friendships. I despise the posturing that is so evident in academia today, and instead pay close attention to people’s commitment to fieldwork. I have found out that doing so helps me understand their intentions and goals. I enjoy being around productive colleagues, even if their research is unrelated to my own. I am aware of the fact that it can be disappointing to be in a place where people are not interested in your research interests. However, to me the most important thing is being around colleagues with whom I share a theoretical, philosophical, and scientific commitment to the pursuit of anthropological truths. For example, the work of Charles “Chip” Stanish in the Lake Titicaca Basin comes to mind (Stanish and Kusimba 1996). His research, spanning almost three decades, has combined research and community involvement that has paid off for both science and community participation. Another example is the relationship that Arctic anthropologists have cultivated with the native Alaskans, going back to the time of Aleš Hrdlicka, Frank Speck, Froelich Rainey, Frederica DeLaguna, James VanStone, Richard Jordan, and Richard Knecht, among others. Forging good relations with the people among whom we work should not and cannot be only the preserve of Native or Indigenous archaeologists. The other reason why I like being an archaeologist is that working at the Field Museum is inspiring. This is a great place that attracts very fine scientists who are, for the most part, good people. For here, over the last fifteen years, I have been a member of a small club of co-workers that meets for breakfast every day at 7 AM. This team includes a zoologist who made a career of studying small mammals (mostly bats) in South America and who now also studies lion ecology in Kenya; an anthropologist who works in Oceania and who is, without an iota of doubt, one of the most original thinkers in anthropology today; a biologist who makes his living in the information technology world, and who, over the last three decades, has helped improve the museum’s use of computer technology; an anthropologist who works in Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and lately, Kenya, who boasts of having personal knowledge of everyone who matters on both sides of the Atlantic; and a paleontologist who studies the roles of different modes of growth in

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large-scale patterns of bryozoan evolution, environmental distribution, and ecology. Occasionally, when he has good news or is just seeking the word on the street, Mr. John McCarter, the museum’s president and chief executive officer, stops by. Having friends like these inspires the spirit and makes it worthwhile to rise every morning ready for yet another day of thinking and doing anthropology. But in the end, it is the assistance that one gets from one’s family that makes and/or breaks careers. I owe my success to my wife, Sibel, herself an Africanist archaeologist, who has nurtured and continues to provide dedicated support, from the time I planned my first major fieldwork to the coast in 1989 to the present. It goes without saying that since 1998 we have worked together as a husband-and-wife team. We alternate, as much as possible, the times we go to the field, and we are each other’s critics. We have two wonderful children. Our son Jesse (14) and daughter Eve (11) are already world travelers and are learning the joys and frustrations of doing archaeology, staying active and in the loop, and also enduring the often long fieldwork-enforced exile of daddy or mommy. This year, for example, Sibel and Jesse are in Kenya. Sibel is spending her sabbatical year at Egerton University. Jesse is attending freshman high school at nearby St. Andrews. Left at home in Oak Park, Eve and I have decided to work on a book project about our adventures without mom and Jesse. Finally, I think that anyone wishing to pursue anthropology should be deeply committed to the simultaneous pursuit of science and the equal rights of humankind. To succeed in academia, you must have a thick skin and a willingness to take criticism and engage in scholarly debate, which is, after all, the most critical ingredient of scientific practice. Competition is healthy for science. No single form of anthropology, least of all Indigenous anthropology, should claim that its way of seeing is ultimately the closest to the truth. After all, people are difficult to study, and may especially be so for those studying their own cultures.

R EFERENCES C ITED DeBernardi, J. 2004 Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. Goodale, J. C. 1980 Tiwi Wives: A Study of the Women of Melville Island, North Australia. 2nd edition. Waveland Press Long Grove, Illinois. Kilbride, P. L., and J. E. Kilbride 1990 Changing Family Life in East Africa; Women and Children at Risk. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park. Kusimba, C. M. 2004 Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa. African Archaeological Review 21 (2): 59–88. 1993 The Archaeology and Ethnography of Iron Metallurgy of the Kenya Coast. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr.

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THE JOURNEY OF A L’NU ARCHAEOLOGIST IN A MI’KMAW PLACE

Roger Lewis jila’si (“welcome”). I am L’nu (“of the people”)—a Mi’kmaq who grew up in Sikepnékatik, one of seven traditional Mi’kmaw sakamowits (“districts”] of Mi’kmakik. Mi’kmakik is the traditional homeland of more than 20,000 Mi’kmaq living in 31 First Nations communities found throughout present-day Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, eastern and western New Brunswick, and the Gaspé Peninsula, as well as parts of Newfoundland, and whose cultural memory and lives comes from living within this landscape. Our presence here is conceptualized by Mi’kmakik Teloltipnik L’nuk (literally, “How the People Live in Mi’kmakik”). Central to that concept are three notions of thought and memory:

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Nikmatut (pronounced Nig-a-ma-tut), which focuses on the people and our relationship to our ancestors, one another, and future generations of Mi’kmaq;

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Netukulimk (pronounced Na-du-ga-lump), which describes how we interact(ed) with one another, and with the past, present, and future, and with our natural world, and stresses our economic, social, and political existence here; and

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Wejisqalia’ti’k (pronounced We-jis-gal-e-a-tik), which describes how our culture and knowledge are rooted in a continuum of thousands of years of history and existence on the land, in this place called Mi’kmakik.

B ECOMING A M I ’ KMAW A RCHAEOLOGIST The primary reason for my decision to become an archaeologist was a personal one, rooted to a great degree in the previous statement. However, having grown up in a nonNative community disconnected from my people and culture, archaeology served as the catalyst that allowed me to do two things: to measure who I was as a Mi’kmaq person, and to learn where I fit personally within Mi’kmakik Teloltipnik L’nuk. Like most everyone else, I was captivated by archaeology and history at a very early age. However, I hadn’t seriously thought of archaeology as a profession until I met three gentlemen— David Christianson, the Nova Scotia provincial archaeologist, Stephen Powell, assistant curator of archaeology, and Rob Ferguson, both from Parks Canada (Atlantic Region). Their research interests in this region were in the pre-contact archaeological history of Mi’kmaq people. It was their dedication to that period of history that so impressed me. In any discussion of Indigenous archaeology, we tend to forget it was the dedication and commitment of people like these who paved our way. I owe a tremendous debt to these individuals. They encouraged my involvement in their work and shared unselfishly of their knowledge. As a result, that relationship instilled in me a desire to contribute to the telling of my people’ story, and it is this that compelled me to become an archaeologist. I will never forget the words they said to me—in effect, “Remember, you are not a Mi’kmaw archaeologist but an archaeologist who just happens to be Mi’kmaq, and as an archaeologist you now have the obligation to tell the story of your people.” As I advanced through my undergraduate and graduate-level studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, one of the foremost problems I encountered was the cultural disconnect between archaeological “practice and theory” and the reality of who I am as a Mi’kmaq and what that means to me. What happens is that the discipline requires Indigenous practitioners of archaeology to work within strict taxonomic frameworks that foster conflict and suspicion. For example, until very recently, little consideration was given to the values, knowledge, and practices of Indigenous people and how they view their history and existence on the land.

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WORKING FOR THE COMMUNITY Through a series of Supreme Court of Canada decisions (Regina v. Marshall, 1993, and Regina v. Bernard, 2005; see Lundell 2006 for overview), the Mi’kmaq won (that is, regained) their right to sustain a “moderate livelihood” through “Harvest, Trading Rights and Aboriginal Title.” Despite those successes, the Supreme Court of Canada, in a 2005 decision, nonetheless insisted on an “obligation” for Mi’kmaq to show regular and physical occupation of lands and use of resources. This meant that the Mi’kmaq would need to employ a new archaeological approach and develop a new way of thinking in order to meet the challenge of having to document their historical tenure on the land. Upon graduation form Memorial University, I was hired as the senior archaeological researcher by Kwilmuk maw-klusuaqn (KMK)—otherwise known as the Mi’kmaq Rights Negotiations Office—to provide support to the senior legal advisors charged with Mi’kmaw land and treaty rights negotiations. So the challenge of integrating Mi’kmaw perceptions of the past and archaeological methods was laid at my feet. I recognized that it would require an approach that considered other modes of knowledge and thought within an archaeological context. This led me to visualize the Mi’kmaw past in a new way, one that internalizes the archaeological past by embracing traditional Mi’kmaw values, knowledge, and practices (see table). This view does not replace the traditional academic and technological categories through which history (past and present) is understood, but reinforces a Mi’kmaw relationship with the people and places, and with both those who have come before and those who will come afterward. It emphasizes descent and continuity of L’nu in Mi’kmakik and is our own interpretation of our history and being. Ironically, while the archaeological record complements that interpretation, it is not necessary for the story of the people to complement the archaeology.

MI’KMAKIK TELOLTIPNIK L’NUK (“HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED IN MI’KMA’KIK) Time Periods

Radiocarbon Years

Saqiwe’k L’nuk (Ancient People—Palaeo Period)

11,500–8,500 BP

13,500–10,000 BP

Mu Awsami Saqiwe’k (Not so Recent People—Archaic Period)

8,500–3,000 BP

10,000–3,150 BP

Kejikawek L’nuk (Recent People—Woodland Period and early European contact era traditions)

3,000–300 BP

3,150–400 BP

Kiskukewe’k L’nuk (Today’s People—early European contact and colonial-era traditions)

1,000 BP–present

900 BP–present

Source: Lewis 2006.

Calendar Years

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I NDIGENIZING M I ’ KMAW A RCHAEOLOGY “Indigenous archaeology” has become a recognized element of contemporary archaeology in recent decades (Nicholas 2008; Watkins 2000). However, what Indigenous archaeology is or can be will remain problematic if it does not include the voice and direction of Indigenous populations and also if practitioners of the discipline are not ready to accept that this type of archaeology can exist outside established frameworks. An Indigenous archaeology needs to be rooted in the traditional values, knowledge, and practices of the Indigenous people it is intended to serve. That view is still too often not heard or taken seriously, or remains poorly understood. Many scholars (Cruikshank 1998; Nadasdy 1999) suggest that Western scientific knowledge have tended to discount traditional Indigenous knowledge as anecdotal, non-quantitative, and unverifiable. That has only served to put Indigenous communities and Indigenous archaeologists at a disadvantage in intercultural relations. Most Indigenous peoples have a significant interest in their history. In addition, many are willing to share their traditional values, knowledge, and practices, their oral histories, and even their language, as well as such mnemonic devices such as songs, chants, and prayers, if they are used in a constructive, respectful, and meaningful way. For their part, non-Indigenous archaeologists should be willing to reframe their investigative approaches and to collaborate with Indigenous populations to arrive at both a scholarly and Indigenous conclusion to their research investigations in keeping with this simple approach. This is one way that archaeologists can overcome the constraints of their thinking, to cite Dincauze (1993); my reconceptualizing of Mi’kmaw history (above) shows that common ground can be found where new appreciation and awareness of multiple worldviews can be cultivated. Archaeological inquiries of past Indigenous histories should not be carried out separately from whatever place, time, values, knowledge, and traditional practices mean to present-day Indigenous populations. Otherwise, the result is simply an object-oriented archaeology that alienates Indigenous people from the discipline even further than they may already be. An example of such a disconnect or alienation is provided by the following quote from an internal 2006 Parks Canada press release on the recognition of Kejimkujik National Park, in Mi’kmakik, as a National Historic Site of Canada on the basis of its cultural landscape and importance to Mi’kmaq people: “The park is located in the midst of traditional canoe routes first used by Maritime Archaic Indians 4,500 years ago. Woodland Indians then lived in the area, making seasonal campsites along the river and lakes. . . .” In a public presentation on Mi’kmawey Debert in 2007, Leah Rosenmeier provided an excellent present-day analogy of the limits of such discourse. She noted that if the disciple of archaeology followed same line of thinking that Parks Canada used, we would find ourselves in a discussion of the “Wood People” who are now the “Steel People” and soon to be “Fiber Optic People.” In contrast, my reframing of known archaeological periods (see table) emphasizes the language and worldview of the people who are the owners and

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guardians of that history. It emphasizes descent, continuity, and a long tenure of land and resource use within Mi’kmakik.

A P ERSONAL Q UEST The rewards of my becoming and being an archaeologist are immeasurable and far outweigh the tribulations I have faced. Yet the two most difficult and disappointing periods in my development as an archaeologist have involved witnessing the “Disneyification” of my culture and being reproached by members of my own community for my choice of a profession. What I mean by “Disneyification” is the unrealistic representation of who we are as a people and culture, a version that is hardly reminiscent of the practicable and reciprocal relationship we actually have with the environment in which our ancestors lived, in which we continue to live, and where our children may live. Despite those periods of disillusionment and reproach, the most gratifying and fulfilling phase of my becoming an archaeologist was the day I sat with my people and admitted to them I did not know what the language of my training meant to them. It was a day that I recognized the need for those within our discipline to refocus our approaches to contribute to a true and realistic Indigenous archaeology—one that would include the voice and direction of Indigenous populations; one that would accept that the discipline can exist outside established frameworks and promote the inclusion of the traditional values, knowledge, and practices of Indigenous people in current practice and future scholarly studies. Of course, there were times when I would feel discouraged and questioned myself and the direction I was traveling. In those times of doubt, I would take a moment to read this poem by Nora Bromley. I have always carried this with me in the field in a water-tight bag:

Ancient Brother Man As man today, I greet you ancient brother man and point with gratitude to these artifacts you made in eons past. The signature of man’s slow rise on each and every tool, each point, and axe. We can sense the human impact still. Who smoked this pipe? Who played this flute? Who used this hoe? Who threw this spear? And was it made for deer or foe? As man today, I kneel upon a mountain circled flat to feel ancient ashes yellow and see a kinship gift which you have left for me. I grasp within my hand a perfect tool, so long ago chipped carefully from stone And now but for the timing of our fates it might have been my own. I touch with care its edges keen and fine. Where once you placed your thumb there I now place mine! Thank you Ancient Brother Man… Nora Bromley

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What advice can I give to Indigenous persons considering the merits and rewards of becoming an archaeologist? To those who find themselves within academia and to those considering this as a career, I would simply say, let us put the humanity back into our profession. I think we have begun to do this.

R EFERENCES C ITED Cruikshank, J. 1998 The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in Northern Canada. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and UBC Press, Vancouver. Dincauze, D. 1993 Pioneering in the Pleistocene: Large Paleoindian Sites in the Northeast. In Archaeology of Eastern North America: Papers in Honor of Stephen Williams, edited by J. B. Stoltman, pp. 43–60. Archaeological Report No. 25, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi. Lewis, R. 2006 Mi’kmaq Rights and Title Claim: A Review of Pre-Contact Archaeological Factors. Mi’kmaq Maliseet Nations News, June 2006: 16–17. Lundell, L. 2006 Implications of the Recent Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Marshall; R. v. Barnard. URL: http://www.hg.org/articles/article_1271.html (accessed January 22, 2010). Nadasdy, P. 1999 The Politics of TEK: Power and the “Integration” of Knowledge. Arctic Anthropology 36 (1–2): 1–18. Nicholas, G. 2008 Native Peoples and Archaeology. In The Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3, edited by D. Pearsall, pp. 1660–1669. Elsevier, Oxford. Watkins, Joe 2000 Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California.

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MAINTAINING A VOICE TO SPEAK FOR THE ANCESTORS

Dorothy Lippert When we walk upon Mother Earth, we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them. Oren Lyons (Onondaga Nation) or most of my life, I’ve been interested in archaeology, but it wasn’t until I was well advanced in my studies that I realized I was becoming an Indigenous archaeologist. At first, I didn’t understand that my being Choctaw would be the directing force in my archaeological work. I’ve come to terms, somewhat, with the idea that I will never feel entirely sure that this was the best choice of a profession for me, but in reflecting on how I got here, I find that some basic ideals remain. I think that

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archaeology is fun. I think that it can enrich people’s lives. I think that there is much that archaeologists have done wrong, but there are many people who are trying to make things right. I find myself in the middle of a lot of debates, and when things get tough, I have to remind myself that I made the choice to be here. This essay is my attempt to plot out how I got to where I am today. From the beginning of my interest in archaeology, I was committed to a practice that would establish the links between present-day peoples and those ancestors whose lives gave rise to our own. I am Choctaw, a fact that was never a matter of choice for me, but there was a process to becoming an archaeologist. By identifying myself as an Indigenous archaeologist, I am making an inescapable reference to earlier times and earlier peoples. To be Indigenous is to be linked to people whose lives were profoundly altered through the colonial process. To be an archaeologist, on the other hand, is to participate in a profession that was born from a colonial process of distancing and evaluating the “other.” I sometimes say that I chose this profession because my two interests in school were science and history, but that’s an analysis after the fact. I think that my primary motivation is still true: I enjoy learning about people. My father was instrumental in developing my scientific curiosity by catching unusual moths for me and my siblings to examine, teaching us how to build pin-hole cameras, and trying to instill the joys of statistical analysis in all of us. In school, my fifthgrade teacher, Mrs. Bewley, allowed me to take home books that she owned—reading one such book about the rediscovery of the coelacanth allowed me to encounter the thrill of scientific discovery. My seventh-grade science teacher, Cathy Schragin, was a strong role model, showing me that science was definitely a female province. I don’t actually recall the source of my attraction to history except to note an attempt to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs in junior high and a strong interest in Tudor England. However it happened, I eventually recognized that these two interests could be combined into a single profession; by the time I reached high school, I had decided to become an archaeologist. At that age, what I lacked was influence from other Native people about the difficulties that might be involved when I tried to maintain my complete identity within the scientific realm. When I decided to become an archaeologist, I had no idea that the study of my own heritage would hold any difficulties, but in fact, I probably fantasized more about discovering an Egyptian treasure than about uncovering mere debitage or pottery sherds in the United States. I was imbued with an eagerness that could not imagine how the colonial nature of the United States could affect my chosen profession. My mother’s unwavering support for my scholarly interests had convinced me that I could do well at just about any profession I selected, and it took a long time before I began to encounter doubts about whether archaeology was a safe choice. I’m certain it never occurred to me that in the course of practicing archaeology, I would be brought to tears or nausea simply by reading someone else’s field notes. This is something I would encounter in my repatriation work, as I frequently read the diaries and notes left by 19th- and 20th-century collectors who are responsible for the large number

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of Native human remains in our museums. The clinical description of an Indian Health Service doctor’s decision to send in the brain of a patient from his hospital compares with a collector writing in 1868 who noted that the cranium would be much better for being sent to the U.S. National Museum than lying in the grave, “rotting in useless completeness.” In both cases, the collectors were talking about people who would have retained their human identity as protected dead, had they not also been identified as Native American and therefore subject to the “necessity” for scientific analysis. *** [Indians] have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order. Tonto, the Washington Redskins. Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1994) This long journey through archaeology has been a hazardous one for me, in both mind and spirit. I feel continually compelled to guard my devotion to this discipline, because it is often threatened by my own recognition of the sometimes monstrous history of the practice and by the daily challenges of my work. I once made a list of things I had done for the repatriation office; it read like a script for some bizarre movie: 

Check skulls for writing to figure out name of original site.

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Move human remains into cleaner boxes for viewing by tribal people.

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Remove photos of burials being excavated from seminar room for comfort of tribal visitors.

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Figure out if FedEx can ship two human crania to an airline’s cargo desk.

I find that I am able to do these things not by dissociating myself from the humanity involved, as a medical student might, but by forcing myself to acknowledge the similarities between myself and the remains. In fact, keeping my ethnic heritage and my scholarly discipline firmly entwined is what allows me to continue this work, even as the work itself provides daily challenges. What frequently happens to me is a sense of unreality, as I am constantly encountering challenges that I know that few of my colleagues experience. It is strange to me that my devotion to this profession only began to waver once I had reached what would, by most standards, be considered a significant achievement: employment at a worldrenowned institution. It may also be that the challenges of working at a major U.S. museum have strengthened my ability to engage my cultural heritage while in pursuit of scientific understanding. The truth is that both I and the bones that I work with share some sort of identity as Native people. To care for them and work on behalf of their descendants brings both honor and pain. I think that this may be the one thing that I can try to explain in this essay in response to this question: How is it that Native people continue to work in this discipline given the myriad, fantastic challenges involved? The

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answer lies in our ability to combine many things into one and to unite all aspects of our identity in this desire to know the past. *** The only good Indian is a dead Indian. General Phillip Sheridan, U.S. Army, 1869 I entered graduate school at a time when the National Museum of the American Indian Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and state laws governing repatriation had only recently been passed. The embers from these battles were still smoldering, and none of the forces involved had yet mapped out a plan for the reconstruction of the discipline. I became an archaeologist at a time when there were few other Native people doing so. While it was a lonely time for me, I also recognized that there was much that I could contribute to the discipline simply by virtue of being able to understand many sides of the same discussion. I have been interested in learning from human remains since reading stories about paleopathological examinations of ancient Egyptian mummies in sixth grade. This did not seem overly intrusive to me because I had also read of the ancient Egyptian people’s desire to have their names and identities live on after them. Examining the mummies and talking about their lives seemed to be acting in accordance with this wish. I began to study Native American bioarchaeology out of the same desire to honor their lives. I had picked a good place to do this because at the time, the University of Texas at Austin had some 3,000 sets of Native American human remains. During my graduate years, the dangers of my interest were brought home to me by many Native people who initially decried my involvement in archaeology. A Pueblo War Chief once told me, “I don’t think you should be doing that, not to your own people.” Archaeology was seen by him, and by many others, as something that could be done to Native people, but not as a profession that Native people could lay claim to. The battle lines had been drawn during the repatriation wars, and Native peoples were on one side and archaeologists on the other. On more than one occasion, Native people asked me to declare my allegiance with them, against archaeology. Even now, as the number of Native American archaeologists is growing, I still encounter people who view my work as incomprehensible, a sort of selling-out to the worst evils of white civilization. Archaeologists, on the other hand, were more pleased that I had decided to join “their side.” I fit in fairly well with other people who wanted to focus their time and energy in understanding how human beings lived many years ago, even as I suffered a few small slights. One stereotype that Native students struggle against is the concept that we are able to speak on behalf of all tribal people; I was routinely questioned for Native American examples in some of my anthropology classes. Another source of irritation was the seemingly willful ignorance of modern Native culture on the part of some of my fellow archaeologists and, conversely, the almost fetish-like interest some of them had in visiting intertribal meetings with me.

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Throughout my studies, I could not separate my interest in human osteology from my awareness of the bones as members of my human family. This set up an internal conflict that I have only recently begun to resolve. There are battle lines that are drawn within my psyche in the practice of this profession. I continue to struggle, drifting between my identity as a living scientist and my kinship with those who have for too long been labeled as specimens. The dead Indians and the living, the good and the bad—each group lays claim to me, and I acknowledge responsibility to both, even as I choose to continue my work as an archaeologist. When I produce written reports on ancient lives, I view my work as a kind of service, not to the profession, but to those ancient people. I believe that writing information about their lives is a form of translation. I don’t believe that I have the automatic right to speak about them; rather, I think that speaking about them can be a form of respect. This approach to archaeology differs from that of many of my colleagues in that I don’t feel my scholarship necessarily gives me the right to examine ancient lives; it merely allows me to listen and translate, should those ancient ones want to speak. A living Native person was an exotic, though difficult species in the Anthropology Department in Austin; the rest of the archaeologists were far more comfortable with the dead. When a fellow graduate student told me that my work “wasn’t scientific enough,” it stung me deeply, because this person’s work was considered highly scientific, utilizing as it did the exotic methodology of stable carbon isotopic analysis to theorize about ancient diet. In addition to having my capabilities questioned, my exoticism was emphasized through a series of condescending remarks about how nice it was that Native Americans were becoming interested in their past. I think sometimes that the process of becoming a scholarly person is a sort of training. It’s similar to the act of training roses to grow on a trellis, or creating a bonsai tree, or (more painfully) binding a woman’s foot as they once did in China. As soon as you make that commitment to gaining a degree, you begin to tie your voice to a rigid set of rules that sometimes won’t permit you to speak the way you really want to. Because you can’t speak about certain things, you begin to lose the ability to think about them. I have only recently begun to understand how constricting graduate school and my early years as a professional archaeologist were. While in graduate school, I became trained in the ways of academia, even though I felt that I hadn’t yet found a place for my own voice. Recently I’ve come to see that the academic rush toward obfuscation can be a silencing mechanism for alternative views. My classmates all seemed eager to embrace the academic jargon, using terminology from Foucault and others in what I thought was an unnecessary practice of trying to “sound smart.” I preferred to write in plain language that could be understood by my nonanthropological friends; in fact, my dissertation on Native health was guided by casual discussions in the Native Student Association meetings. I figured that if I could explain things to such a diverse group of Native individuals, then the work I was doing might be of value or interest. Within the framework of academic classes, however, I felt silenced myself by my own unwillingness to sound idiotic by using “tautology” when “repetitious argument” would do, “hegemony” for “dominating view,” and “reification” for “making the

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abstract, real.” The use of academic language is yet another way in which anthropologists insulate themselves against the real world. In my professional life as an archaeologist, I’ve experienced numerous other silencing techniques. Some of these seem to be linked to the bureaucratic mind-set of my employer, the federal government. Others derive from work experiences that I never could have imagined when deciding to become an archaeologist. At work, when talking to tribal visitors, I find that the horrors of the collection’s history frequently choke my voice. What can I say to someone when we have only the head of their relative, the body left to rot “in useless completeness”? It is difficult to reconcile all the different aspects of myself as a Native American archaeologist. At times, it seemed all right to be one thing to tribal people and another thing to my academic colleagues. This fracturing of identity, however, is dangerous and exhausting, and I’ve learned to embrace a more challenging sense of myself. For a while, I accepted the silencing of my voice, but then one day I remembered how I had once described my work in archaeology: that I work on behalf of those who are gone; that I tell the stories of those who died and whose remains are left behind in order for us to talk about their lives. These ancestors have a hard time talking, because it is difficult to speak with a voice made of bone. It took a long time, but I finally recognized that the same thing was happening to me: my voice was becoming ossified. It was hardening, ever so slowly becoming bone. Cold. Dry. White. I only began to change after hearing Lakota author Susan Power talk about American Indian literature. Her words sent an echo through the hollowed chambers of my voice. She had embraced the English language, calling it a tool and a weapon. She understood that speaking about a thing was a way of laying claim to it. Telling a story was a way of reconciling oneself with the essential truths involved. I finally understood that the fear that kept me from speaking was a weak bond in comparison to the power of my need to convey what I’ve learned, and so I vowed to reclaim my voice. *** If you take the words from a people, it will backfire. They forced all of us to learn English. Now, for the first time in history, Native peoples are united by language. That’s permitted us to communicate with one another in such a way that the missionaries and the colonizers may someday come to regret. Wendy Rose (Hopi and Miwok) If there is one thing that I could say to other Indigenous people working in archaeology, I would urge them to resist the innumerable mechanisms by which your voice can be silenced. Seize the myriad of experiences within yourself and express your work through all of these, rather than forcing yourself to fit a simple identity as a “scientist.” Just as variation exists within all human cultures, there is no single “Native American point of view.” Nor is there a single “scientific point of view.” In order to keep this profession living and strong, we must all combine our voices and speak on behalf of those who are related to some of us, but with whom we all share an identity as human beings.

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What I’ve learned about being an Indigenous archaeologist is that white bone was never alive but for the red blood that coursed within. Finding my voice has been a process of reclaiming the support both of my ethnic heritage and my scientific training. Human beings need both bone and blood to survive and be productive. As an Indigenous archaeologist, I draw on all parts of my identity in order to be a full member of this discipline and of this world. I continue this work not just for my own satisfaction, but out of respect for those who came before me and also out of hope for those who will come after. Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan and a member of the Onondaga Nation, was right in thinking of the future generations who will draw life from this earth. By digging beneath the ground, I make connections between past, present, and future, drawing all the generations into a strong, complete circle.

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Photo courtesy of Irene Adziambei Mafune

A PERSONAL ACCOUNT ON BEING-BECOMING AN INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGIST IN SOUTH AFRICA

Irene Adziambei Mafune

was born in 1973 in the rural homeland of Venda, South Africa. My parents, like many black adults, were forced to migrate from their rural Venda homeland to a city, in this case Johannesburg (now part of the Gauteng Province), in search of a better life. Consequently, like many children, I spent my schooldays in the rural areas and my holidays in the city visiting my parents. These events of moving from one area to the other, mixing with people from different cultural and racial backgrounds, led to childhood experiences that are complex and filled with memories of conflicting cultures. Although I was young at the time, and probably had a poor understanding of what was going on around me, the impact of apartheid racial policies on sociopolitical, economic, and academic status were to have a huge effect on me. Little did I know at the

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time that the experience of moving around the country with little sense of stability (i.e., a permanent home, friends, schools, and language) would contribute to and influence my current understandings. Recounting my personal, cultural, and academic background will therefore help readers understand the position from which I raise my arguments and also the factors that have influenced me to enter the discipline of archaeology and, further, to take the bold step of writing this chapter. What follows is an account of my journey into being an archaeologist in South Africa.

M Y ACADEMIC H ISTORY Although I studied mathematics and physical science and later agricultural science in high school, my interest or desire to study social history in an academic context can be traced back to the very early stages of my life. Approximately 5 kilometers from my family house in Venda lay a very significant historic site named Dzata, also known as “Dzata Ruins.1 It is an Iron Age archaeological site in Venda situated in Nzhelele District in the northern part of South Africa, now called Limpopo Province. This site remains the closest and the most easily accessible archaeological site to me. Memories of how the site used to look, my sense of pride toward it, and also all the taboos and symbolism surrounding it, are still imprinted deep inside me. I remember the sound of a horn being blown from the royal homestead, a call for all the elderly people to go and work on the site. I remember how my grandmother, together with other people from our village and from neighboring villages, would narrate stories about the ruins, ancestral worship, rituals, and everything that adds to the site’s significance to the VhaVenda2 nation. It was for these reasons that even before my “encounter” with archaeology in 1993, when I enrolled for a B.A. degree at the University of Venda, I had already developed a deep interest in social history and respect for cultural or traditional history and beliefs. I acquired my early education under the apartheid Bantu Education system, whose segregationalist policies were meant to privilege whites and disadvantages other races in knowledge acquisition. I cannot ignore the barrier that this education system imposed on my desire to study archaeology in an academic context—a desire connected not only to my pursuit of an academic career, but also to my childhood experiences and respect for those who have left us distinctive histories, and a sense of dignity and pride in our own heritage. The magnificent stone walls of Dzata Ruins, which happened to lie along the route I took to my high school, always fascinated me. Since I could not see any evidence of the remains of houses, I used to wonder how people had lived there, and why and when the site was abandoned. My interest in the history that lay behind the builders of the walls would leave my 80-year-old grandmother and Miss Masindi Ramunyandi, our neighbor (who lived to be 101 years old) struggling to answer some of my questions. I bombarded them with these questions, since I believed that the occupants of this site might have been their peers or people they had once known. I remember my secret visits to the site

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so that I could speak to the old man, Mr. Rangolo, who by then was placed on the site as both a guard and a site interpreter.3 Earlier I referred to my introduction into the discipline of archaeology as an “encounter.” This is because I only heard of such disciplines as archaeology when I began my post-secondary studies. Although I had an early interest in history, and found archaeological evidence around me, the chances of my ever entering this field as a career were limited, if not a dream. Furthermore, my encounter with archaeology only happened as a result of not being admitted into the School of Agriculture where I wanted to do my B.Sc. in soil sciences. This assertion could be shocking to some people. It was, however (and still is), commonplace for most black scholars who studied under the Bantu Education system to have become aware of archaeology, anthropology, museology, and other similar disciplines only when they reached university. Indeed, I remember sitting in my first archaeology class in 1993 and thinking. “What is this course all about? What am I going to do with it once I have graduated?” The concept of discovering information through excavations was somehow foreign to me. The interesting part is that, at the University of Venda where I obtained my B.A. in archaeology, all registered archaeology students were from previously disadvantaged (that is, black) communities. I further learned that we all shared the same experiences and had the same questions, regarding archaeology as a discipline, our roles, and the role of those who were teaching us (both of whom happened to be white males): What is excavation? What is the relevance of these subject to the present? What are artifacts, anyway? Although many students decided to drop the course very early that year, for some reason I continued. While studying the course materials, I began to view how past experiences have fuelled discourses and set foundations for critical research. I saw an opportunity to take up a discipline that would allow me to tackle problems that some would be content to silently endure and that others would choose to brush away. I strongly believe that my views and contributions in critical debates and emphasis on ethics of practice will somehow add value in the development and transformation of the discipline. Most importantly, this may give hope to others who currently look up to me as their role model, as one who has stood the test of time in the journey of being a recognized archaeologist of colour in South Africa. After graduating at the University of Venda in 1996, my passion for the discipline grew, leading me to desert my then newly acquired qualification as a high school teacher and go back to further my studies in archaeology at the University of Pretoria. The interesting part is that I was the only black scholar in my class, and, as they told me, the first Indigenous archaeology student to enter and gain a postgraduate archaeology qualification in their institution. To me, that was a challenge, the beginning of a lonely journey, one that I feel is still continuing even though I am not a practicing archaeologist at the moment. Going back to Venda after graduation and working with local communities, listening to their views on archaeologists and their understanding of the discipline, leads me next to highlight the significant roles by which, if permitted, Indigenous people could play in knowledge production and transformation of archaeology.

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LOCAL S IGNIFICANCE : I NDIGENOUS U NDERSTANDING AND H ERITAGE VALUES As I mentioned earlier, Dzata Ruins is situated near my family house in Venda. This site holds a strong significance to the Singo clan and the VhaVenda nation as a whole. According to Professor Ralushai (2003), a well-known Venda social anthropologist, Dzata is a sacred site; it is a “sacred grove,” or Zwifho in Venda. As I was growing up, I heard a lot about the site’s previous occupants, and the beliefs and taboos that were dominant whenever Dzata was mentioned. According to some of the elders interviewed during my research, traditional healers, leaders, and local communities used Dzata as a base for ritual performances and other traditional ceremonies. This practice continued annually for years. During the early 1970s, the late president of the then Venda Homeland, His Majesty Thovhele Patrick Ramaano Mmbulaheni Mphephu, would request elderly people to come and participate in the ritual ceremony called Thevhula.4 Only older people and those from the royal family known as Vhakololo were allowed access into the ruins in order to perform their sacred rituals. As young people growing up close to this site, we never had the opportunity to see or understand what the ceremonies were all about. However, our knowledge of and linkages to the intangible heritage associated with the site, and our feeling of fear and respect for those that once dwelt at the site, kept us away. Whilst writing my thesis for an M. Phil (Public Culture) degree at the University of Cape Town (completed in 2004), I interviewed several elderly people who had witnessed and participated in most events that took place on the site. One of them was Mr. Phaswana, an old man I interviewed in 2002. According to him, no commoner knew what was done during the ritual or how it was done, as every clan had its own way of worshiping its ancestors. However, when it came to protecting the site, it was every local person’s duty to act as a guardian, to make sure there was no vandalism. When animals and natural forces had caused some of the stones to collapse, villagers saw it as their duty to rebuild the walls. Community projects, which are referred to as Dzunde in the Tshivenda language, were another way in which people in local villages would get involved in conservation and preservation of the tangible heritage. During this process, local communities would voluntarily, or under instruction from their respective leaders, go and work on public spaces without demanding any remuneration or compensation. More often than not, it is elderly people who were called to render this kind of service, especially in the case of sites that have religious or spiritual symbolism and are regarded as sacred. To demonstrate the level of significance this site has, out of ten public holidays in the Venda homeland, there was one holiday called Dzata Day, which used to be celebrated on February 1 each year. Before it was abolished in 1992 under the Public Holiday Amendment Proclamation Act, Dzata Day was significant to many VhaVenda people as the only official day during which Indigenous people could remember and celebrate a once very united nation in South Africa, a day in which local Indigenous communities would gather, offer sacrifices, and worship their ancestors. Following the holiday’s abolishment, and archaeologists’ involvement in excavation around Dzata in response to the proposed development on the site by the then Venda Development Agency, the commu-

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nity’s social and cultural obligation to the site was severely impacted; in addition, their relationship with archaeologists was hampered altogether. As far as the VhaVenda are concerned, archaeology is a destructive discipline, with its disrespectful methods of revealing the past. Here and elsewhere, archaeologists are regarded as unfit to tell Indigenous people about there own past. At Dzata, the community members felt ignored and left out in the process and subsequently chose to distance themselves from the site.

T RANSFORMATION : W HERE A RE W E G OING ? While acknowledging the effort some archaeologists are making to mend these relationships, it is imperative that I discuss some of the current trends by which archaeology is further distancing Indigenous people from taking interest in the discipline. The limited position and roles of Indigenous peoples in the development of such disciplines as archaeology have raised concern throughout the world. While archaeologists struggle to deal with these challenges, Indigenous peoples continue to fight for their rights, claiming their position and power to manage and interpret their own past. South Africa is in no way exceptional in this. In the past few years, the discipline of archaeology, its development, and most importantly, archaeologists’ working relationship with Indigenous societies have all come under severe scrutiny. Many people consider apartheid South Africa and its governing policies as the main source of these problems. Martin Hall (1999) argues that under these policies, many researchers, archaeologists included, were forced to work in isolation, without any collaboration with Indigenous societies or communities whose past they investigated. Any knowledge that controverted the canons of apartheid ideology was regarded as subversion (Prah 1999: 2). As a result, biased research was conducted, and knowledge was produced that justified apartheid’s racist ideologies and dominant discourse of power over marginalized societies. In short, Indigenous South Africans were studied, histories constructed, and knowledge produced by the powerful scientific elite. In response to this exclusion, many Indigenous peoples resorted to dissociating themselves from the past altogether (Hall 1999). Thus in South Africa, not only did politics slow down the development of archaeology, but it also affected in other sociopolitical and economic areas of many people’s lives. Apartheid’s end, therefore, signaled the birth of a new democracy and also marked the time when previously marginalized South Africans would have rights and equal access to basic socioeconomic and other needs once deemed exclusive to certain racial groups. The birth of the new South Africa was a long-awaited change that would see a rise in interest in, and a call for transformation of, the ways in which knowledge was produced in academia and in public spaces such as museums, monuments, and other areas of knowledge production. Many disciplines that were previously the exclusive domain of the white privileged classes—in this instance, archaeology—had to face up to contestations and pressures by various interested groups, including Indigenous peoples, who began demanding that a representative discipline, accommodating everyone, be built.

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The demise of apartheid also called for the reinstatement of previously banned political organizations, and for the doors of learning to be opened to all. However, there is still much to do to make the needed changes in archaeology in South Africa. Some of the critical issues of concern to me relate to accessibility, role-playing, and the acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples by archaeologists and scholars in other fields. It is thus important to ask about the roles that trained Indigenous archaeologists are being offered today in the development of this discipline and in the interpretation of their past and knowledge production.

A RCHAEOLOGY I N R ELATION TO I NDIGENOUS C OMMUNITIES AND E DUCATIONAL I NTERESTS In post-apartheid South Africa, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and archaeologists has changed. The emerging trend now is for everyone to claim to be working and speaking on behalf of the Indigenous communities. However, the role of Indigenous people in this remains contested, especially in terms of knowledge production. In most cases, when community members have offered their views, they were shunned and accused of being mythical rather than factual. Scientific knowledge or evidence always takes the center stage. Drawing from my personal encounters, I can argue that while Indigenous people might bring new views about the past, in most cases archaeologists remain reluctant to offer them space to contest and interpret their own histories. In fact, as long as the younger generation of students, especially in rural schools (where most Indigenous people are), are still not being taught what archaeologists do and what archaeology as a discipline can offer, the pace of its transformation will remain slow. Furthermore, although the new South Africa is one in which all doors of learning are said to have been opened for everyone, in the discipline of archaeology this change is hardly noticeable. Some have argued that this period has also signaled the rise of public scholarship; unfortunately, however, this trend has also coincided with the relative decline of interest in social history within the academy. In other words, the increasing popularity of other fields of study has left archaeology under threat (Shepherd 2002). Many black students who had shown an interest in archaeology in the early 1990s have dropped out. This is of great concern to me, and raises many questions that need to be addressed. Why, for example, is the response to this discipline so low amongst Indigenous scholars? What are archaeologists doing to bridge the gap in their respective areas of study? Has archaeology lost its direction? Is archaeology no longer relevant in contemporary South Africa? Could the socioeconomic problems that many Indigenous peoples face every day be the cause of their declining interest in archaeology?

A RCHAEOLOGY IN THE A PPLIED E NVIRONMENT An informal survey of the places where archaeologists are most likely to work—museums and academic institutions—and of how many Indigenous archaeologists are

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employed there, reveals interesting but not surprising results. The answer is: a small number, very few of whom are practicing archaeologists. In many instances, people who have been working in similar institutions for over two or three decades still occupy the very same positions after all these years. Most of their work is not stimulating and does not reach interested groups outside their scientific fraternity. Generally speaking, archaeology also remains a white-male-dominated discipline. All told, many South African archaeology graduates cannot find jobs in the field of archaeology. They end up working as assistant researchers, curators, or in heritage management. Speaking from my own experience, I know many young archaeology graduates who have taken jobs in areas that are not related to their training (e.g., as chemists, or workers in retail stores or banks). Although I worked as an archaeologist amongst Indigenous people for a while, there were factors that led me and others to look for opportunities outside of archaeology. For any scholar with socioeconomic problems, as most of us had when we matriculated, pressure to repay our student loans remains one of the major factors. Passionate as we were and still are about the discipline, our continual struggle to become recognized as professional archaeologists—without the “amateur” tag hanging on us—is a daunting experience that not everyone is willing to put up with. Unless such issues are addressed, drawing the younger generation into archaeology, especially those belonging to Indigenous societies, will remain a forlorn task.

C ONCLUSION Development continues to threaten heritage sites still considered significant to communities, but archaeology and other social history disciplines will not be able to adequately protect (and learn from) those sites without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. Given South Africa’s political history, and the broader social context in which we all work today, archaeologists really have no choice but to consult with and involve those who understand, respect, and share the same values as those who left us this irreplaceable heritage. The situation at Dzata Ruins is but one example of the values Indigenous people attach to heritage sites and a further demonstration of problems that arise when there is poor communication and non-involvement of Indigenous people. In closing, I will say that archaeology, and those who work in it, should strive to make its relevance to contemporary issues known to a broader community. Archaeology should have its strategy for building community capacity clearly defined and implemented on a daily basis. By such means, archaeology will empower and enlighten Indigenous people, especially the younger generation. Its main focus should be that of both culturally enriching and restoring the dignity of those peoples who have for years been the subject of scientific inquiry. Archaeologists should also encourage programs that promote opportunities for Indigenous scholars to enter and become part of this fraternity (e.g., accessibility to funds, public awareness, and early childhood educational programs) and help to eliminate those factors that deny those opportunities (e.g., language barriers). Although I am currently not a practicing archaeologist, I am nonetheless committed to taking part in the development of the discipline through public debates and other

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review processes. I believe that my efforts, and those of others, to see this discipline transformed will be of great benefit not only to Indigenous peoples, but to all peoples and generations to come.5

N OTES 1 Archaeological evidence indicates the site was occupied for a period of 60 years, from AD

1700 to 1760 (Hanisch 1980).. 2 VhaVenda refers to a group of people who occupy the area called Venda in the Limpopo

Province, northern South Africa. 3 Mr. Rangolo died in November 2009 after a long illness. Since no one documented all the

knowledge he possessed, his death is a great loss, not only to the heritage fraternity, but to the VhaVenda nation as a whole. 4 Thevhula is a Venda word that refers to a ritual that each clan or royal family performs once a year. There is no set way of performing it; each clan has its own way of communicating with their ancestors. 5 At the time of writing this, the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA) was engaged in the process of facilitating such a transformation. A committee known as Transformation Technical Team (TTT) has been formed. As result of the team’s dedication, a charter that addresses issues of inclusivity and equality in the field of archaeology was drafted and adopted by the association. Whether this charter will be implemented by archaeologists and the institutions they work in remains to be seen.

R EFERENCES C ITED Hall, M. 1999 Archaeology and Apartheid. In Knowledge in Black and White: The Impact of Apartheid on the Production and Reproduction of Knowledge, edited by K. Prah, pp. 53–61. Centre for the Advanced Studies of African Society, Cape Town, South Africa. Hanisch, E. M. O. 1980 An Archaeological Interpretation of Certain Iron Age Sites in the Limpopo/Shashi Valley. M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria. Prah, K. 1999 Knowledge in Black and White: The Impact of Apartheid on the Production and Reproduction of Knowledge. Centre for the Advanced Studies of African Society, Cape Town, South Africa. Ralushai, N. M. V. 2003 Mapungubwe Oral History Project: Additional Information on Oral History of Mapungubwe. Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Johannesburg, South Africa. Shepherd, N. 2002 The Politics of Archaeology in Africa. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 189–201.

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T HE “O THER ” A CCIDENTAL A RCHAEOLOGIST

Nola M. Markey y earliest memories of an introduction to past cultures involve television, movies, books, and museums. I remember that one television show, In Search Of . . .The Mummy’s Curse, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, inspired my fascination for Egyptian archaeology. I later had a chance encounter with “Native” displays at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a museum visit that eventually led to the discovery of my own cultural origins. The lives of all Aboriginal peoples living in Canada have been directly impacted by a variety of federal policies. In my case, I was specifically impacted by the Child and Welfare Department policy, now known as the “60s Scoop,” which was intent on removing Aboriginal children from their home communities—a situation similar to that found in many other countries.

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My home community is O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation near Dauphin, Manitoba, but I was adopted and raised in Ontario by a wonderful non-Aboriginal family who has always encouraged me to be proud of my heritage. I grew up in a predominantly white Catholic community with good intentions, but which had little or no understanding of Aboriginal cultures or social conditions. Histories of Aboriginal peoples were absent from the school curriculum, leading to many unanswered questions posed to me by other school kids and later adults—since I’m seen as Aboriginal, I must know the answers. This came to a head for me when, at age twelve, I could not answer the question of what culture group I belonged to. I consequently approached my brother Pat with my quandary, and he resolved this matter by taking me to the Royal Ontario Museum. He placed me in front of several Aboriginal displays and then decided that I most closely resembled Ojibway people. The display text for the Ojibway exhibit offered some rudimentary information, including that my language family was Algonkian. Later I found out that I was, in fact, Saulteaux, which is a branch of the Ojibway, so my brother’s informed guess was remarkably accurate. While this discovery satisfied my immediate interests, my new knowledge only inspired more questions from others. So I made a pact with myself to continue the search for my origins. As it turned out, however, it wasn’t until many years later, in the early 1990s—after my own children, Marie Claire and Christopher, were born, and the James Bay Cree hydro -electric dam1 was still being debated and the Oka “Crisis”2 was underway—that I would continue my quest. Again, questions were posed directly to me by co-workers regarding the plans and intentions of “Indians,” and what the “big deal” was over these conflicts. I confessed that while I did not know more than what was being related in the media, in the case of Oka I knew that Aboriginal lands, specifically cemeteries, were being threatened by a proposed golf course. I thus began following subsequent stories of efforts of various Aboriginal groups to resolve old and outstanding business, and was particularly interested in what two prominent individuals, Ovide Mercredi and Matthew Coon-Come, were working to accomplish. I eventually chose to return to university and enrolled at Trent University in Ontario, in the Native Studies and Anthropology Program.

U NIVERSITY DAYS While I found my initial studies at Trent invaluable for an introduction into Aboriginal histories and identity and for particular issues relating to the contemporary political landscape, I soon became intrigued with the unique situation in British Columbia, where Aboriginal Title and Right claims still remain unsettled. Unfortunately, there was little opportunity at Trent to explore the historical and cultural differences between peoples of British Columbia and the rest of Canada. However, following my first year at Trent, an opportunity arose for me to move to British Columbia and continue my studies at Simon Fraser University’s satellite campus on the Kamloops Indian Reserve. This program was unique in that it was the only one that offered anthropological and archaeological studies directed at the Aboriginal population, and I found myself studying in the company of Indigenous peoples from all over British Columbia and other parts of Canada. The pro-

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gram also paid particular attention to preserving threatened Aboriginal languages in British Columbia, and there was an extensive archaeology program3 with an annual field school, which provided me with my first introduction to practical archaeology. In addition, the campus itself is situated in the heart of some of the most archaeologically significant sites in British Columbia’s southern interior. My participation in one of the field schools was what really drew me to archaeology. I was thrilled to find my first projectile point, one that was about 3,000 years old. That year I was awarded an Alvin Jules Archaeology Scholarship for having a strong aptitude for archaeology. I was beginning to consider a double major in anthropology and archaeology and was always encouraged by Dr. George Nicholas to pursue archaeology further. However, I ended up enrolling into the anthropology master’s program at the main SFU campus in Burnaby (near Vancouver)—not a cheap endeavor by any means; I spent a year driving back and forth between Kamloops and Vancouver, a 3.5-hour trip each way. My M.A. thesis focused on the nature and implications of “traditional use studies” (TUS), which were developed by the provincial government of British Columbia to gather and categorize cultural and land-use information in areas where First Nations and provincial interests were in conflict, specifically in timber rights. My research was directed to studying how the imposition of the TUS policy affected First Nations. The central argument of my thesis (Markey 2001) was that while TUS projects claimed to involve “consultation” with First Nations communities, they also bureaucratized the process and products of data gathering on Aboriginal land use and occupancy. My findings supported the hypothesis that the TUS research design was fundamentally flawed, as it limited projects to site-specific mapping endeavors and inventory-based research, omitted Aboriginal voices in the articulation of their histories or their concerns about the land, and resulted in a consultative process of dubious effectiveness at best. After completing my M.A. thesis, I began in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Archaeology at SFU in Burnaby. My thesis proposes that cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology functions within a context of power imbalance among government, industry, and Aboriginal interests. Accordingly, my aim is to critically explore how CRM is politically positioned, as well as to study the interplay between archaeological practice and theory and Aboriginal politics of identity. This research may ultimately be useful to those with Aboriginal interests, encouraging them to become fully involved in all levels of heritage management. In undertaking this work, I began to work for Native organizations, to assist with their CRM training and policy development. At this time, I also developed my own independent contract research company, experiencing firsthand the challenges of conducting archaeology as an Aboriginal person, working in First Nations communities, as well as under the auspices of industry and all levels of government (Aboriginal, provincial, and federal), with their sometimes conflicting objectives.

T EACHING AND D OING A RCHAEOLOGY Since 1998, I have taught as a sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby and Kamloops campuses, and also at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, teaching

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an array of topics in anthropology, archaeology, and First Nations studies. I hope I’ve encouraged some students to enter these disciplines. Over the past eight years, I have also frequently delivered the Resource Inventory Standards Committee (RISC)4 course to numerous First Nations communities in southcentral British Columbia. The purpose of this provincial certification course is to provide standard training in practical field methods for individuals who will assist archaeologists in CRM projects. Many First Nations community members have enrolled in this course, received their certificates, and have become exceptional field assistants. Six students introduced to archaeology as a result of these RISC courses have gone on to pursue a university degree in archaeology. Three of these students are Brad Arnouse and Jason Paul (Secwepemc Nation), and Mary Suchell (Nlaka’pamux Nation), who are all in their final year of university. I consider it important to encourage more Indigenous archaeologists to pursue this discipline, in an attempt to empower First Nations organizations to develop and manage their own heritage affairs, both on and off reserve, and to contribute to academia. To date, Eldon Yellowhorn is the sole Ph.D. Indigenous archaeologist in Canada, and there are fewer than 20 M.A. graduates. There is still much work to be done. My point of entry into CRM archaeology was in some ways similar to the experience of early anthropologists, who found themselves in foreign cultures with little or no practical experience in interpreting their observations. I knew virtually nothing of the government policies that shaped the design of fieldwork or the objectives that directed the reporting approaches of CRM. Nor did I have a good grasp on the enormous scope of

Canadian Pacific Railway Mitigation Project, Kamloops Lake, 2006. Pictured are Crystal Simon, Lea McNabb, J. R. William, and Bert William. Photo by Nola Markey.

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CRM work: writing proposals for funding, developing budgets, assembling and training crews, managing projects, obtaining provincial permits, and working with clients at various levels of government, all the while satisfying the needs of First Nations clients whose interests were also at stake. I was initially overwhelmed with the tasks at hand, but, beyond even my own expectations, I managed. I found myself working in a vacuum, but came to rely on and learn from the goodwill and advice of many individuals working in this realm. Some were members of the BC Archaeology Branch (Al Mackie, Doug Glaum, and Jane Warner), others were CRM field practitioners (Richard Brolly, Bonnie Campbell, Bjorn Simonsen, Jeff Bailey) or members of First Nations Resource Management teams (Mary Sandy, Lea McNabb, John Jules, Bert William) who had dealt with such projects and knew the protocols and processes required of them. A few years ago, I was honoured to conduct an archaeological mitigation project for three First Nations communities on behalf of the Ministry of Transportation (Reg Lawrence, project manager) in Spences Bridge. All of the project’s crew, administration, and technicians were Aboriginal. Most of the crew members were graduates of the RISC program and were well equipped to carry out fieldwork and data-gathering tasks, including site mapping, excavating, artifact recovery and identification, wall profiling, analysis and cataloging, and photography. This successful project was not only unique in British Columbia, but may possibly be the first in Canada, in that all project functions were completed by First Nations members under CRM archaeology. It is my hope and intention to continue directing projects of this nature and significance.

Ministry of Transportation Mitigation Project 2006. The Spences Bridge crew included Rhonda Billy, Mary Suchell, Brian Michele, Crystal Swayze, Matilda Abott, John Shackelly, Vince Wilson, Josie Billy, Bernice Garcia, Nola Markey, and Basil Wilson (Liz Gilbert missing). Photo by Mary Sandy.

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I spent the last seven years working with a number of Aboriginal organizations conducting contract work to develop CRM and heritage protection policy, launching and instructing RISC courses, and taking on anthropological research projects. In doing so, I have benefited enormously from working with innovative individuals who strive to make positive change in their communities while maintaining their cultural identity.

CRM C ONTEXTUALIZED Over the past two decades, a number of First Nations in British Columbia have responded to the pressures of government and industrial development, and to the legislated consultation process, by developing research departments to address the processes required for launching land-use studies, Aboriginal Title and Rights research, and archaeological and heritage matters. However, most CRM work has been initiated primarily in response to the BC government’s resource extraction and Crown land development referral process.5 One of the historical and contemporary factors that makes BC First Nations affairs different from the those in the rest of Canada is that here there are conflicts that still remain to be settled between concepts of Crown lands and claims to First Nations homelands. This was, and remains, the political and social reality into which I was parachuted. I was approached in 2001 by an Aboriginal organization to conduct a pilot project consisting of an extensive archaeological overview assessment6 in their traditional homelands. At this time, my knowledge of CRM was rudimentary, because academia does not focus specifically on the business element of contract archaeology, an element of CRM that today contributes fundamentally to the shaping of projects in the field. Unlike academic or pure research archaeology, which focuses on constructing theories, developing research tools, establishing cultural time lines, and reconstructing past lifeways to explain past human cultural behaviour, CRM typically designs its projects based on the time and resource constraints of commercial or industrial proponent objectives. As a result of significant industrial development beginning in the 1970s, most archaeological research in British Columbia has been conducted using a cultural resource management approach or contract archaeology. In Canada, as elsewhere, CRM evolved to protect archaeological sites that would be disturbed or destroyed by land-altering activities, and also to curtail or control the trafficking of cultural material to foreign or private interests. These “salvage” projects contributed to the development of expedient field techniques, which differentiates CRM somewhat from academic approaches. My journey into CRM studies with and for First Nations has been marked by many successes, but I’ve also encountered a variety of challenges, disappointments, and frustrations. Clarifying these helps to explain the conditions and dynamics under which First Nations currently operate within the field of CRM. There are four significant challenges that First Nations communities and CRM organizations face in the management of their heritage and resources: (1) capacity building; (2) consultation; (3) the dynamics unique to First Nations organizations; and (4) varying degrees of research professionalism in the service of First Nations communities.

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The Capacity-Building Conundrum: There are substantial differences between First Nations-based and other CRM initiatives that limit community capacity. First Nations typically secure appropriate funding and hire and train staff on a by-project basis: however, once a project is completed, the funding for infrastructure is depleted so they are unable to sustain permanent research management between projects. In contrast, an archaeological consulting firm has a project management infrastructure in place, affording them the services of multiple offices and departments in between projects; they don’t need to reconstruct a research body for each new project. In addition, because there are presently so few Aboriginal CRM consultants resident in local communities, such expertise inevitably must be secured from outside the community and outside the culture. First Nations are limited in their capacity to retain fulltime CRM consultants and must hire them per contract. Because of this, they are unable to respond to proposals as an archaeological agency. If they did have experts in place, they could compete with existing archaeology consulting companies—which in turn could be perceived as a threat to existing enterprises. A solution to this conundrum might be to develop a heritage/resource entity physically and functionally separate from all political band administrative bodies and operated using a business approach. Such a research body could be self-sustaining if it could generate income devoted specifically to managing its own agenda. I know of several First Nations heritage management entities that are successful in sustaining themselves this way, including the Sto:lo, Ktunaxa, and Esh-kn-am (Nlaka'pamux). Monies earmarked for capacity-building measures, such as training First Nations members, are rarely enough to afford consulting fees as high as those in the private sector. And taking the time to implement teaching/learning processes inevitably impacts already tight schedules. Sometimes this results in CRM archaeology that is rushed, incomplete, or delayed; budget overruns and inconclusive or ambiguous reporting are other hazards of this approach. The capacity-building conundrum is not limited to archaeology, but includes other areas of expertise such as legal advice. Since typically very few community members can act as legal advisers, many Band administrations must obtain expensive legal counsel to interpret documents and administer simple legal processes. One example is the negotiation of large project contracts, wherein a community’s interests must be protected.7 In short, to build capacity with a view toward developing autonomy in CRM, First Nations communities must rely on outside help to negotiate and administer a project contract, recruit within the limitations of the community, train, and produce quality research within strict time constraints, often over and over with each new project. The Bipolar Nature of Consultation: “Consultation” refers to the legislated process of government departments and/or industry proponents engaging in the expression of intent to conduct development on unsettled lands in British Columbia. In preliminary meetings with First Nations who are considering archaeological projects, I am frequently reminded that a dichotomy exists between how different parties expect to treated during consultations with government. First Nations communities want to be respectfully and equitably involved in a development project from its inception to its conclusion. In

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contrast, when government departments are consulting on behalf of industry, it is not unusual to merely notify the community to be impacted, often by mail, of the intent to develop, and to begin development plans post-haste, irrespective of a response. Recently, I’ve observed that should the First Nation respond with concerns about proposed plans, department officials will issue assurances that these will be considered; however, unless these concerns impact directly on the public, or are perceived by the public to be cause for alarm, generally little is done to further address them, and the development process moves forward. The exception arises when government development interests lie within Reserve lands, in which case a lot of consultative overtures and mitigating and compensating behaviour is observed. But as usual, even then history repeats itself, and government objectives are achieved.8 I find that there is still little in the way of respectful or effective consultation being conducted between governments and First Nations. The absence of a consistently respectful approach at the head table has disturbing consequences even in the field, where archaeologists and other researchers working on government projects may feel no compunction to maintain a consultative relationship with the communities in which they are working. I believe that a truly consultative approach would include factual declarations about the scope of research, sharing protocols and the disposition of data, communicating the results of the project, and considering the First Nations’ concerns or recommendations with regard to research design and the management of projects. Disorganizational Dynamics: As within any hierarchical network of relationships, there are bound to be counterproductive dynamics, political aspirations, personal agendas, and unaddressed management issues. Unique to First Nations organizational dynamics, however, is that all these elements are greatly intensified, operating as they do in tight quarters and under the pressure of long-held, unresolved conflicts involving competing factions, the effects of which span generations and become deeply embedded in the fabric of the body politic. I have observed how these very real conditions contribute to dysfunctional management approaches of CRM and impact research quality. I have experienced, for instance, situations where cultural heritage issues have been impacted by decisions made during one administration, only to be changed or left unaddressed by its successor, and projects interrupted, delayed, or left incomplete as a result. As with the capacity-building conundrum, an alternative to this dilemma is for a First Nations cultural resource department to operate autonomously from the rest of its administrative body. Superimposed on the already dysfunctional band management organization, which was imposed in the early 1900s by the Department of Indian Affairs,9 are the recent impacts of the 1996 Delgamuukw decision on consultation. Prior to this decision, which compels government to consult with First Nations, chiefs and councils generally lacked the experience to enter into such business consultation relationships. Bands thus have had to reinvent themselves as equitable business entities and to adopt skills equal to those of their perceived opponents. The process has been slow and intermittently successful. One of the casualties of this process, I believe, has been archaeological research,

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which has become a pawn or tool in the negotiation of past and unresolved First Nations grievances. I have experienced this specifically where human remains have been encountered in projects on lands where treaties have not been resolved. The disposition of human remains is then used as a bargaining chip to force proponents to address past grievances that they may not be accountable for. This results in delayed projects and disintegrated business relationships, as both bands and proponents lose monies, and a general breach of trust occurs. Rarely does this bargaining approach result in an equitable resolution to First Nations grievances. I contend that a more effective resolution is for First Nations to develop their own policies on human remains, to enable archaeology to proceed within set parameters. Perceptions of Research Professionalism: While on the whole, archaeology enjoys the right of self-scrutiny, particularly when it comes to conducting testable research, examples of bad science occur everywhere. I have had the unpleasant task of examining the poor-quality work of non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal archaeologists on a few occasions. In one case, I was required to review the work of an Aboriginal archaeologist who tendered a poorly constructed research proposal, performed substandard fieldwork, and submitted an inadequate report for work conducted on their own reserve. As Aboriginal archaeologists, we are subject to more intense scrutiny than non-Aboriginal practitioners, owing to the long history of stereotypes, perceptions, and expectations by both nonAboriginal and Aboriginal people. We must be aware of this scrutiny and be careful to avoid perpetuating such prejudices; we also need to be that much more conscientious in the design and implementation of research, and in conducting all elements of a project.. Having said that, I have also had the uncomfortable and contentious task of reviewing the work of a non-Aboriginal archaeologist on behalf of a First Nation whose project it was. My criteria for reviewing the work were fair and practical; based on its own merits, I found the report incomplete and inconclusive. Professional archaeologists generally acknowledge, and even accept, constructive criticism from their peers, particularly if they are aware of weaknesses in the research. However, this individual’s response was, and remains, defensive and deflective. Was the individual bothered because of the negative review or because of a perception that I fit a stereotype whereby professionalism is compromised by a cultural perspective (in this case Aboriginal)? Have I ruffled feathers by turning the tables and being perceived to be speaking as an Aboriginal archaeologist about the work of a non-Aboriginal archaeologist? There’s that paradox again—perception is everything. One of the great challenges we face today concerns the contradictions that exist between project standards on and off reserve, and between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal archaeologists. Notwithstanding the existence of codified ethics, guidelines, and grievance procedures10 for archaeologists who practice off reserve, there is little to protect Aboriginal communities from poor-quality work by their own people. While non-Aboriginal practitioners working on reserve are bound by these guidelines, no such guiding principles bind First Nations practitioners whose homeland is often directly impacted by the quality of the work they do. Of particular consequence

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here is the potential of all archaeology on or off reserve in British Columbia to be called into court as evidence, in light of recent Aboriginal Title and Rights litigation. Some First Nations communities have implemented a permit system, along with ethical guidelines that govern all on- and off-reserve archaeological research and project management, for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal archaeological practitioners. Measures such as this can help provide better standards for conducting and monitoring projects; they can also contribute to the evolution of training procedures and evaluation criteria for developing future field and administrative support personnel. I believe these last objectives are imperative to achieve if First Nations communities are to address and resolve some of the difficult challenges they currently face.

H INDSIGHT AND W ISDOM L EARNED In early 2007, I accepted a position with Golder Associates in Kamloops, a large ground engineering and environmental sciences company, to conduct archaeological projects and anthropological research. My experience with Golder has been an eye-opener, revealing how important it is to understand corporate management techniques and processes. I now encourage Indigenous archaeologists to gain some experience working for such archaeological consulting companies. A sound comprehension of the business end of archaeology is imperative before one can successfully embark on one’s own or establish a CRM department in a First Nations community, because such knowledge is not obtained strictly through academic studies. My own experience taught me that I needed to have greater access to more highly skilled personnel, a deficit that I am now able to address working for a large corporation. My general advice to people who are interested in building a career in CRM is to make themselves available to the knowledge and experience derived from a variety of employment settings, including corporate, First Nations, and government, and to augment this learning with current CRM courses as they become available. I see myself as being a facilitator for increasing such opportunities for First Nations peoples through education, training, and capacity building wherever possible. Similarly, I actively encourage other archaeology consulting companies to engage First Nations archaeologists, assist in First Nations capacity building, and “seek advice from” (i.e., consult with) chiefs and councils and their resource management departments when undertaking research projects within a Nation’s homeland. As I evolve as an archaeologist, I hope to address and contribute to the resolution of many of the challenges I encounter in the field of CRM, particularly those faced by future Aboriginal archaeologists. Perhaps as I progress, I’ll accidentally stumble upon the answer to my own peculiar paradox of being expected to “know better” the answers to the questions because I’m Aboriginal—apparently such knowledge is innate.

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N OTES 1 In 1971, the government of Quebec proposed a massive hydroelectric project in the James

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Bay region, without consulting or involving the James Bay Cree or the Inuit of northern Quebec, whose livelihood depended on hunting, fishing, and trapping. Furthermore, the land to be developed had not been settled by treaty, and assessments did not include the James Bay Cree or Inuit. In 1990, a land conflict occurred when the town of Oka in Quebec proposed to build a golf course on Mohawk burial grounds without consultation. The Mohawk community of Kanasatake protested against a court decision to allow construction to proceed, resulting in a 78-day standoff between the Mohawk and the Quebec Security and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The archaeology program was developed and directed by Dr. George Nicholas (see Nicholas 2000 for a description of the program). Established in 1991, the RISC program is responsible for establishing natural and cultural resource inventory standards that dictate how resource inventory information is sampled, collected, stored, and interpreted. The provincial Archaeology Branch oversees training courses related to archaeological site recording and inventory. The referral process is set up by provincial agencies to notify First Nations of government’s intent to develop lands, which may impact lands subject to Aboriginal Title and Rights claims. These assessments involve a review of known information regarding the project area to determine if previously recorded archaeological sites are present and if unrecorded sites are likely to be present. The study may involve a field visit to determine the potential for archaeological sites. Personal communication from Neskonlith Councilor Gary Wiens, 2008. Personal communication from Neskonlith Councilor Gary Wiens, 2008. The result of the 1876 Indian Act. Most, but not all, consulting archaeologists in British Columbia belong to the British Columbia Association of Professional Archaeologists, which has a code of ethics.

R EFERENCES C ITED Markey, N. M. 2001 Data “Gathering Dust”: An Analysis of Traditional Use Studies Conducted within Aboriginal Communities in British Columbia. M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Nicholas, G. P. 2000 Archaeology, Education, and the Secwepemc. In Forging Respect: Archaeologists and Native Americans Working Together, edited by K. E. Dongoske, M. Aldenderfer, and K. Doehner, pp. 153–163. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, D.C.

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Photo courtesy of Christina Salvador Photography, Archives of Rancho Los Alamitos

(RE)SEARCHING FOR ANCESTORS THROUGH ARCHAEOLOGY

Desireé Reneé Martinez W HO Who are you? Who is this woman that goes from land to land in search of the one that she loves, the one that she can no longer hold? Who is the woman with dark hair? The one with sadness in her eyes, with tears falling, carrying a vessel upon her shoulder

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The vessel contains all that she had once hoped for and dreamed of, although only for a short time. Yet she wonders helplessly. Who is the soul that she looks for? The only love that she knew, her child. But she does not look below her feet Dead Desireé Reneé Martinez, Colorado City, Arizona, August 1990 n the World Archaeology Congress (WAC) listserv in April 2005, someone posed the question, “Why archaeology?” Multiple responses were shared: to hold artifacts that hadn’t been touched for thousands of years; to dig in the dirt like they did when they were children; to feel the thrill of discovery; to help give a voice to the people of the past; and because it’s important.1 However, the majority of the respondents stated that archaeology was “just plain fun.” In contrast, when I’m asked why I study archaeology, I always say, “Because I hate it.” Many are taken aback by my forthrightness and wonder why I have devoted over half my life to a discipline that I do not like. However, when scholars from minority communities hear my response, they nod and understand what I mean without further explanation. They, like myself, have chosen to participate in disciplines that have been colonial and imperialistic in practice. These disciplines have historically used data from marginalized communities for the benefit of a select few, leading our communities to question the relevance of research to our larger and more pressing social problems: poverty, violence, disease, substandard housing, among others. The power and authority given to these studies—studies created without input from the community—silence our histories, histories that challenge “well-documented” research by academic “experts.” As a consequence, our elders, the keepers of our traditions and knowledge, are dismissed when their knowledge cannot be verified by these studies. After witnessing the effects of these often well-intentioned yet nonetheless detrimental research projects, I decided to study archaeology in order to demand, create, and help maintain a space within academia where Indigenous knowledge is recognized as pivotal to our understanding of the world and its past. My decision was, and continues to be, difficult. In this essay, I describe how my interaction with the educational system, specifically teachers and museums, led me to choose archaeology as the discipline from which I seek change. I relate how various life events have shaped my approach to the practice of archaeology and anthropology of Indigenous peoples. I conclude by describing the encouragement and guidance that I receive from a remarkable and inspirational community of Native and non-Native scholars who, like me, participate in the Indigenous archaeology movement, which strives to provide a permanent venue for Indigenous

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communities to talk back to, and then talk with, the academy. By documenting my journey through archaeology, I hope to give thanks where it is deserved and highlight some of the struggles that many Indigenous archaeologists face during the education process.

T HE I NFLUENCE OF E ARLY E DUCATION Through their words, actions, or ambivalence, teachers at all levels have the power to shape their students’future goals and dreams. Such teachers influenced my career choice, my approach to the study of Native American communities, and my pedagogy. My incentive to teach came from my third-grade teacher, Mr. Alpert. He told our class not to choose a career solely for economic gain or fame (much to my mother’s chagrin, for she wanted me to become a doctor or lawyer). Our careers, he said, should be something that we will want to do every day, something that we love. At the time, other than becoming a singing Princess Leia from the movie Star Wars, teaching was the only career that appealed to me; I loved going to school and playing teacher with the children in my neighborhood. The importance of teaching and the power teachers have over knowledge production and reproduction became more evident to me in the fourth grade. In California, this is the grade in which children learn about California history, especially the interactions among Native Californians and Spanish explorers, soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. Activities included a written report on one of the 21 California missions founded by Spain from 1769 to 1823 and a class field trip to the San Gabriel Mission, the mission closest to my hometown of Baldwin Park. For extra credit, students built mission models using various materials or kits, an activity that continues to be assigned today. At first I was excited to learn about San Gabriel Mission and California history because of my family’s connection to it. We are Tongva, sometimes called Gabrieliño (the Spanish term for the “people of San Gabriel Mission”), an Indigenous nation whose traditional lands encompass Los Angeles County, the southern Channel Islands, and parts of the surrounding counties. I wanted to learn about the everyday lives of my ancestors, including those who are buried in the mission cemetery. Instead, the history presented was romanticized and historically inaccurate. We never talked about the forced labor, involuntary resettlement, and the required religious conversion of Native Californians. Instead, we were told the Indians were “fortunate”that the missionaries came just in time to “save” them. The history of mistreatment and repeated revolts protesting foreign rule was silenced by the romantic images of padres, señoritas, and vaqueros. The remythologizing continued at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, one of the institutions schoolchildren visit to learn about the history and prehistory of California. At the museum, the true vibrancy of Indigenous history and contemporary cultures was overshadowed by the multitude of dioramas that depicted Indigenous communities in their “natural habitats,” frozen in time. In the People of California hall, the docent described the “primitive” lifeways of the Mission Indians prior to European contact. She focused on the Chumash, a Native nation north of Los Angeles, because they were the “most advanced” and “civilized.” These descriptors allude to the antiquated theory of social evolution, that cultures evolve through various stages of cultural sophistication, a

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Student’s model of the San Gabriel Mission on display in the courtyard of the San Gabriel Mission. February 2005. Photo by Desireé Reneé Martinez.

Indian figurines sold to students at San Gabriel Mission in February 2005, representing California Indians in their mission models. The figurines do not reflect the clothing that Native Californians would have worn during the Mission period, but instead represent stereotypical ideas of “Indianness.” Notice the buffalo-horn headdress on the figurine on the far right. Although buffalo currently reside on Santa Catalina Island, they are not native to California. Photo by Desireé Reneé Martinez.

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theory dismissed in the early 20th century. Throughout the tour, the docent relegated all California Indians to the past. This was made most apparent when my friend Jessica asked, “Are there any Chumash still living?” “No,” the docent replied, “The Mission Indians are extinct.” Even at the age of nine, I immediately recognized the significance of the docent’s statements. Native cultures, including my tribe’s, were being presented as dead. Here I was, a physical representation of these thriving communities, and yet the museum was teaching that I didn’t exist. As a result, my classmates questioned my Gabrieliño heritage. Since I did not look and live like the “real” Indians they saw in the dioramas, I must be lying and not really Indian. This incident demonstrates the power museums and docents have in shaping the worldview of the visitor. The museum is seen as the authority on other cultures. My classmates’ inability to acknowledge the existence of different perspectives outside the museum, because they were not informed that other viewpoints existed, reinforced my desire to teach. I had to correct the misconceptions that institutions of authority were presenting about Native communities and, specifically, about the Gabrieliño community. Using archaeology to obtain my goals came from my exposure to it in sixth grade by Mrs. Buckner. We explored the discipline by watching archaeological documentaries and “excavating” dirt-filled shoeboxes planted with “artifacts” (a technique I now use when I give archaeology talks in public schools). Although we studied worldwide archaeological sites, we focused on California and the “advanced civilization” of the Chumash. I soon realized that museums and teachers turn to anthropological studies for information they pass on to their visitors and students. Thus, if I wanted to effectively change how Native American cultures and histories were presented, I would have to do it from the top, where knowledge production begins. I would have to critique and discredit existing anthropological studies and then replace them with studies that incorporated contemporary Native American perspectives. The need for a Ph.D., as stated in my junior high school’s career files, solidified my academic objectives—to attend one of the top colleges listed for archaeology and then go to graduate school.

V ERIFYING M Y C HOICE Although I had been exposed to the end result of archaeological research, I did not know what the life of an archaeologist entailed. Fortunately, the Harvey Mudd College Upward Bound Program provided me with my first taste of archaeology by sending me to the Southern Utah State College Undergraduate Field School in Southwestern Archaeology in Colorado City, Arizona, during the summer before my senior year of high school.2 Upward Bound seeks to increase the number of disadvantaged students who complete high school and graduate from college.3 The first day of excavating was torture. Working in 43° C (110° F) heat overwhelmed me. As one of the youngest participants, I felt out of place, and the work wasn’t what I expected. I cried. How could I have been so wrong about my future? As I continued to dig, I thought about other careers, including geology, elementary education, and paleontol-

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ogy. After a week of adjusting to my new surroundings and job responsibilities, I felt better about my career choice. But it wasn’t until the last day of the field school that I knew archaeology was what I was supposed to do. As I was cleaning up around a hearth, I accidentally dug through the floor and unearthed a plainware ceramic jar. We removed a body sherd and found a smaller pot inside which held the bones of a baby. The archaeologists stated that the ancestral pueblo buried their babies by the hearth so that the babies could be by their mothers all the time. This statement struck a very powerful chord within me and moved me to write the poem that opened this essay. Why did I have such a strong reaction to the burial?

R EMAINS A RE N OT O BJECTS , BUT P EOPLE Throughout my upbringing, the sanctity of the grave was essential. They should not be disturbed, but respected. You don’t walk on the grave, talk loud, or run around the cemetery. It is a matter of giving honor to the lives of the people who came before us. As a result, my family viewed archaeology as grave digging and questioned my participation in it. I also had problems with this aspect of archaeology and reassured my family that I would not dig graves, just old villages and artifacts. After hearing the story about why the mother buried her baby where she did, I thought about my nine-month-old sister who had died ten years before. The burial I uncovered was not just bones or data. It was the remains of a person, a baby like my sister, and in that moment I felt the mother’s pain. Many have asked me why Native people are so “attached” to distant “objects.” For me, it’s because they’re personal. I’m not related to the ancestral pueblo baby, but I have experienced the pain the death of a loved one brings. It is only right that I respect the ancestral pueblo baby as I would want my sister’s body to be respected. This connection through the centuries reinforced my commitment to avoid excavating graves and to support in situ preservation of all archaeological sites unless there is no other alternative. If I must excavate, I will do it with humanity, dignity, and respect.

L EARNING THE WAYS OF THE O PPRESSOR Using my community as a starting point, I entered the University of Pennsylvania to learn the methods and theories behind anthropological research. I wanted to find out why anthropologists thought that the Gabrieliño were extinct and why this perspective persisted when the opposite was true. As I delved into the anthropological literature, I found that the problem stemmed from the limited definition of culture used by early ethnologists. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Native Californian populations were at an all-time low. The years of mistreatment, abuse, and violence at the hands of the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans left many Native Californians landless and powerless, working as laborers on ranchos residing on what were once tribal lands. During this time, many scholars engaged in “salvage ethnography,” the recording of

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Native languages and lifeways for future study before they “vanished.” However, their collections focused solely on gathering pre-Columbian information, cultural activities and beliefs practiced prior to their “corruption” by outside (i.e., European) influences. This strategy was based on the idea that culture was static. One could lose his or her culture by incorporating “foreign” ideas and objects into “traditional” lifeways. The idealized culture ethnographers sought was, in fact, an accumulation of hundreds of changes, sometimes spurred by outside influences, over thousands of years. Using this flawed definition, anyone who did not participate in the “pure,” and basically fictional, culture was not considered Indian. Alfred L. Kroeber used this benchmark when he searched for Gabrieliños in 1910. When he didn’t find anyone who fit this preposterous definition, he declared the Gabrieliño extinct. Since Kroeber is considered the father, the authority, of Native California ethnography, his perspective is given precedence over other perspectives. Later studies followed his lead; if Kroeber said it, it must be true.

T HE F IRST G ABRIELIÑO A RCHAEOLOGIST As I continued to learn about anthropology’s relationship to Native American cultures, I again confronted the perception of archaeology as grave digging and its perceived irrelevance by Native American communities. I had already dealt with my family’s concerns, but I needed to know if the greater Gabrieliño community also objected to archaeology. My goal was to correct the inaccurate perceptions many had about the Gabrieliño. However, if my community disapproved of using archaeology to do this, then who I was I doing archaeology for? To address this question, I talked with the late Vera Rocha, the chief of the ShoshoneGabrieliño Nation, one of several “bands” of Gabrieliño. I chose Vera because she lived in my hometown and was a friend of my maternal grandmother. As we sat together, I told her I wanted to become an archaeologist and asked if I was making the right choice. She explained that she and members of her family worked as Native American monitors on archaeological sites.4 Vera stated that although she and her children learned a lot about archaeology through this type of work, they were never sure if they were told the truth about the sites they were monitoring. The identification, protection, and/or removal of cultural resources can add thousands of dollars to a development project. Many Native American community members have witnessed development companies doing everything in their power to limit the time and money needed for archaeological mitigation. Vera believed that prior to the start of any actual archaeological work, it was not uncommon for a development company and a cultural resource management (CRM) firm to agree that no significant sites or artifacts would be found in the project area. The Native American monitoring program was created to prevent this type of deception and to ensure the protection of cultural resources. In spite of this, if the site has not been previously identified by the local Native American community as a significant cultural site, some Native American monitors will defer to the archaeologist’s interpretation of the site’s archaeological significance. If the monitor has no training in archaeology (the state doesn’t require monitor certification),

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then the CRM archaeologist might mislead the monitor regarding the site’s true import (i.e., by claiming the site is insignificant when in reality it is significant). Vera further explained that many times she did not understand the archaeological information given to her, limiting her ability to argue for or against significance. Thus, having a Gabrieliño with formal archaeological training, to question and challenge the archaeological interpretations, would be an asset. Although her personal support did not mean I had the whole community’s support, I knew that my skills would benefit the community in the future, a goal that I had built my life around thus far. The heaviness in my heart lifted.

W ORKING WITH THE O LD G UARD Throughout my undergraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, I met only supportive faculty members, both inside and outside of anthropology, who appreciated my goals and approach to researching Indigenous communities. However, when I began graduate work at Harvard, it became clear that not all archaeologists comprehended my “attachment” to the past and my refusal to treat human remains as data. For example, in my African archaeology seminar, the professor announced all students would have a human skull in front of them during a future class in order to discuss the identification of African ethnic traits on skeletal material. I knew this would be important training but did not want to work with skeletal material that hadn’t been donated expressly to be used for research—no matter what part of the world it came from.5 After advising the professor that I would not participate in the class, he stated that I had to explain to my classmates why. At the time, I didn’t think this was an unreasonable request, so during the next seminar, I explained that many Native people objected to the use of human remains for research, including me. Trying to think of an analogy to help my classmates understand my perspective, I used the now-worn question, “How would you like for your grandmother or grandfather to be dug up?”I had hoped that this rhetorical question would bring to the forefront the discriminatory practices of archaeology— namely, that as long as the human remains were not related to the researcher (i.e., not white), their excavation and use for research were acceptable. The professor immediately challenged me and stated that scientific interest should prevail over personal sentiment. Using himself as an example, he explained that since there were conflicting stories about his grandfather’s death, he dug up his grandfather in order to lay the controversy to rest. I was flabbergasted and didn’t know how to respond. Unfortunately, my analogy did not create the mutual understanding I had hoped; instead, my concerns were dismissed by the professor: if he could dig up his grandfather, then so could I dig up mine. As a first-year student, I was intimidated and did not object to his remarks as I should have. The next day, the late Rhys Jones, visiting professor of Australian archaeology, stopped me in the hallway and said he had heard about what occurred in the African archaeology class. After taking Rhys’ Australian Archaeology class, we had had multiple conversations about the relationship between archaeology and the Aboriginal people of Australia. He supported my interest in exploring the relationship between Native Americans and archaeologists in the United States. Rhys recounted to me how the previous

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evening he chastised my African archaeology professor for the horrible way he treated me, informing him that it was already hard enough for an Indigenous person to study archaeology. For him to make me explain myself and then belittle me for my beliefs in public was unthinkable and rude. Rhys gave voice to issues I had yet to fully experience during my journey. As stated previously, I had had only positive support that validated my perspective and presence within the academy. This was my first experience of blatant opposition to my approach. Later I would continue to confront this perspective more times than I could count. How does one learn to respond to this type of criticism?

C LOSET C HICKENS Although there were three other Native American archaeology graduate students at Harvard, we never discussed the issue of juggling our archaeological methods and the criticisms of those methods. As a result, I felt alone. I knew there were non-Native archaeologists (Randy McGuire, Larry Zimmerman, and Bruce Trigger, to name a few) who fought for Native people to be welcomed as active participants in archaeological research. However, for every Larry Zimmerman, there are 100 others who want to limit this type of participation. How do you bear to participate in a discipline when the majority of its practitioners do not accept your presence within it and believe that “You have an agenda,”“You have an ax to grind,” “You are too political,” or “You are not objective”? My life’s motto has been, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me”—but these issues are much larger than I could ever tackle alone. If permanent, discipline-wide changes are to be made, it will take a united front of like-minded individuals to demand, create, guide, and maintain that change. My life was transformed when I presented my work at a conference, “On the Threshold: Native American–Archaeologist Relations in the Twenty-First Century,” at Dartmouth College in May 2001. For the first time, I was surrounded by Native and non-Native scholars who had these same hopes for anthropology. We shared and listened to one another’s experiences, recognized commonalities, and expressed our relief that our archaeological convictions were not “crazy.” The conference laid the foundation for the Closet Chickens, a social, academic, sometimes political, and definitely revolutionary network of Native and non-Native individuals who question archaeology’s past, present, and future. Members work in a variety of subfields (e.g., history, law, and museums) and organizations (e.g., private and tribal CRM; government agencies; tribal, private, and federal museums; and public and private universities), and this enormous knowledge base informs our research and practice. The major (stated and unstated) goals include increasing awareness of and limiting the effects of archaeology on Indigenous communities; evaluating and ameliorating how Indigenous peoples are addressed within school curricula; identifying and supporting Indigenous archaeologists in higher education by increasing the number of Native Americans who obtain archaeological training on behalf of their communities (not necessarily to become archaeologists); and most importantly, ensuring “that there are too many Native American archaeologists to fit into ANY closet.”

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C REATING A C OMMUNILOG Membership and participation in this extraordinary and motivating group of scholars has changed the way I think about and relate to archaeology. Much of my growth as a scholar has come from my interactions not only with the Closet Chickens, but also with other Native American students and scholars outside of archaeology. The academic credentialing process is isolating and requires a dialog between the scholar and the data. Alone, the scholar is supposed to come up with unique and significant conclusions based on what the data say. The scholar is rewarded for that lonely endeavor. In reality, the scholar does not draw these conclusions by himself or herself. No one makes important contributions without the help of those who came before. My approach to archaeology first and foremost recognizes that my research couldn’t have existed without my ancestors, archaeological and biological. Additionally, my research derives from my interactions with a community of scholars who freely share their exciting insights, provide emotional support, and, most importantly, continue to challenge me to see the big picture. I’m not in dialog only with the data; I’m in a communilog. In other words, I am in conversation with the data and the people inside and outside the discipline. An essential aspect of participating in a communilog is creating and sustaining an environment in which all the community members can be nourished and allowed to grow. A responsible community member will seek input from others to ensure that her or his conclusions will not destroy the environment or the community.

I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGY As much as my journey in archaeology is my story to tell, I cannot convey the whole story without the inclusion of others who participated in it with me. For example, while writing the section on the Closet Chickens, I asked group members if what I wrote reflected accurately how they defined themselves, the group, and their participation in it. I did not want to describe the group, a group created by all of us, without first making sure my version (or vision) did not silence theirs. That’s the difference between current archaeological practice and an Indigenous archaeological approach. The future of archaeology lies in the acceptance, incorporation, and integration of the multiplicity of voices to narrate the stories of the past. Archaeology cannot and should not support separate but equal research agendas with “scientific archaeology”running parallel to “Indian archaeology”or “feminist archaeology.” Rather, archaeology needs to become a communilog where all members of the community participate and are self-reflexive to make sure that their research will not adversely affect the archaeological community or the descendant communities. There is room for everyone to participate in Indigenous archaeology. Indigenous archaeology, as Lee Rains Clauss stated in the Society for American Archaeology forum “Scratching the Surface: Implications of Indigenous Archaeology” in 2003, “is just good archaeology,” the way it’s supposed to be practiced.

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W HY A RCHAEOLOGY . . . B ECAUSE I T ’ S F UN ? As much as my poem at the beginning of this article attempts to capture the sorrow of a woman who has lost her child, it also speaks to my search for my ancestors whose history was not passed down to me because of the assimilationist policies of colonial governments. When I look at the archaeological work currently being conducted and compare it to the changes others and I are trying to accomplish, I realize that archaeology, for me, is not fun. It’s not fun having my humanistic methods challenged time and time again. It’s not fun to commiserate with community members over the cultural sites we were unable to protect from development or “research.” Trying to create a space for our communities’ concerns to be heard and addressed is hard work. Why do I do archaeology if it’s such hard work and no fun? I do archaeology not for myself; I do it to give honor to those who have come before me. I continue to challenge archaeology so that the ancestors’ objects are not discarded because they don’t fit within the current research agenda. I do archaeology so that the public realizes that minority communities are marginalized because they do not fit within the neat history that the dominant society is trying to create. I do archaeology to make sure that past lessons are not forgotten. I do archaeology in order to thank the archaeologists, Native and nonNative, who have made my journey less rocky by kicking the boulders to the side of the path. I do archaeology because if I don’t, future Indigenous archaeologists may decide not to take on this important task. I do archaeology so that those getting their archaeological training will not have as difficult a time as I did. Although I started this chapter by stating that I hate archaeology, it’s only half the truth. As much as I hate its past, the racist and discriminatory methods and practices Indigenous communities have had to endure in the name of “research,” I love the possibilities the future holds. I love the people who strive to make anthropology more inclusive and relevant to Indigenous communities. I love the new focus of capturing a myriad of voices to tell their stories on their own terms. I love the long-awaited recognition and embrace of our vibrant and growing communities by members of the anthropological community. I do archaeology because I love and hate it at the same time, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

N OTES 1 The original message asked “. . . why, from a psychological point of view, archaeologists do

archaeology?” (Michael A. Cremo, “Why Archaeology,” e-mail to the World Archaeology Congress (WAC) listserv, April 2, 2005, in possession of author. 2 Upward Bound, established under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (P. L. 89-329), provides tutoring, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) preparation, fee waivers, and opportunities to attend local cultural events to high school students identified during their freshman year. 3 For detailed information about how Upward Bound affected my education, see Martinez (2002).

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4 Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), public agencies and private entities

that need a public agency’s approval must identify the impacts their activities have or will have on the environment (including cultural resources). Cultural resource management firms (CRMs) are hired to write environmental impact reports that document adverse effects to the environment within the project area and provide strategies to limit such effects. During mitigation, a Native American monitor from the local Native nation can be recommended to be present to ensure the ethical treatment of human remains and other sensitive items, and help to identify cultural areas important to the local Native nation. They can stop archaeologists and/or construction activities at any time if they believe these activities will harm cultural resources. 5 With the passage of the Native American Graves Protection Act (NAGPRA), the Peabody Museum created a policy in which Native American remains would not be used in Harvard classes. Generally, the skeletal materials are from people who donated their bodies to science, supplemented by unprovenienced archaeological skeletons. If the issues to be discussed require specific examples not illustrated within the teaching collection, material is selected from archaeological sites from Europe, Central America, and South America (Michele Morgan, personal communication, May 2005).

R EFERENCE C ITED Martinez, D. R. 2002 Making My Way in Archaeology. The Archaeological Record 2 (4): 29–31.

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Photo courtesy of Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu

A PERSONAL REFLECTION

Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu y personal history is situated within the colonial history of Africa. I thus begin an historic overview of some of the factors that have shaped South Africa and its education system, before discussing my own career. By 1880, most of the African continent was still under African leadership. Soon after, there was a scramble for the African continent. Owning colonies at that time was viewed as an ideal embodiment of a country’s greatness and political power. Therefore, to be counted amongst the greatest, a nation had to possess colonies, which later became advantageous for military and strategic purposes. Colonisation may have been considered advantageous for Europe, but it was not for Africa. Instead, colonisation caused a number of divisions amongst Africans—along ethnic lines, language, or religious beliefs.

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In this century, famine, disease, and territorial conflicts are still synonymous with the African continent. Although South Africa gained its first independence from Britain in 1961, during the second colonisation by the Afrikaners, people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds were categorised into different social classes (e.g., White, Indian, Coloured, and Black [African] people). Homelands were specifically set up to ensure that African people were further divided along tribal lines.1 Under this form of colonialism, many South Africans lost pride in their culture and paid less attention to their diverse and rich cultural heritage. In today’s South Africa, this is most prevalent amongst those born in urban settings, a population that suffered considerably from the racial segregation policies and who pushed for independence from the Nationalist colonisers, which was eventually attained in 1994 with the first democratically held elections. During the recolonisation of South Africa by the National Party, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 produced an education system intended to teach Africans just enough literacy skills to serve the white people with cheap labour, rather than to support careers they might aspire to. This legislation was also divisive. Besides the oppressive legislation, the history that I learnt at school did not reflect positively on Africa, as it was written from the Western mentality. I could not relate it to my daily struggle for freedom in South Africa. This was well captured by Dr. Happy Joyce Mashamba in her address at the “Africa Day” celebrations: “It was of prime importance for an African child to learn about the “great warriors”such as J. G. Strydom, Hendrik Verwoerd, and Hertzog [Jan Smuts]. To [the architects of apartheid], it was important for an African child to know that Jan van Riebeeck arrived in South Africa on April 6th, 1652. However, they considered it less important to tell an African child of the gluttonous intentions of Jan van Riebeeck’s coming to South Africa.”2 Sadly enough, even the African history I was taught, which I should have strongly identified with, was politically motivated and thus did not mean much except dividing us as Africans even further. I grew up in the former KwaZulu homeland, which was under the leadership of Chief Minister Dr. M. G. Buthelezi, leader of Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), initially known as the National Cultural Liberation Movement and comprising mainly the amaZulu. Amongst other historical aspects, I was taught the history of IFP and its political leaders, under the subject called uBuntu Botho. This history lesson did not mention the names of other liberation leaders whom I heard about outside the classroom. It made me raise a number of questions, for which I was once heavily beaten by my class teacher while in Grade 4. As a result of my educational experience in the South African school system, I hated history-related subjects and preferred to study scientific subjects until I matriculated. When I first went to university, I did not even know about archaeology. This is the case for many other Africans, especially those of my age, and is clearly evident in the small number of African archaeologists in South Africa. Although our numbers are slowly rising, there are still not enough to encourage other aspiring archaeologists to consider a career in archaeology.

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H OW I G OT INTO A RCHAEOLOGY I attended Cacamezela High School in Newcastle, in KwaZulu-Natal, at the Osizweni Township. After matriculating, I decided to further my studies at a university. When I first went to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996, my intention was to obtain a bachelor of science degree (in mechanical engineering), a dream I had held since 1992. However, to do so I needed to upgrade my science scores, either by registering for a bridging course at a finishing school, or going to a technikon (technical school). I was not prepared to consider either option, so I opted to study climatology, which was also a good career choice because weather patterns had always fascinated me. However, due to the poor career guidance I received from my school, the subjects I studied in my first year of study—geography, international relations, and applied English language studies—did not complement one another very well. I sought advice in the Careers Division of the university and for the first time was introduced to archaeology, a subject that would complement geography. I have since met a number of people who told me they got into archaeology by mistake, as they had never intended to do so. The difference between most of them and myself is that they knew of the discipline whereas I had never heard about it before. I studied the subject in my second year and immediately fell in love with it because, for the first time in my academic history, I was studying about my people and the precolonial history of the continent. This was different from the history I studied in primary school, which was politically motivated. It is ironic that I had to learn all of this from Europeans. My parents are not academically educated but are highly qualified in the social aspects of life, which they passed on to me. My father never even went to school because he had to herd my grandfather’s cattle and work for the farmer on whose property they lived in Utrecht, near Newcastle. My mother went as far as Grade 7. Thus, I was born of parents who were very much eager to send me to school to achieve the best possible results, as they did not have such academic opportunities. Their limited academic education meant that they were, just as I was, naive about archaeology. They did not even take much interest in what I was studying or attempt to decide on my behalf what I should be studying; as long as my studies ensured a great future for me, they were fine with whatever subject I chose. The major focus during the apartheid era was on gaining independence. In this context, my community paid little interest to cultural heritage. A lot of our educated neighbours were teachers, policemen, or nurses—careers we identified with—but none were anthropologists or archaeologists. We knew nothing much about Bushmen,3 except that they were the short people4 who lived a nomadic lifestyle. Thus, many of my friends were surprised that I was going to a university to study towards an archaeology degree, especially since they had no idea where qualified archaeologists founds jobs—in contrast to the above-mentioned careers. It is only recently, due to my reasonably successful involvement in archaeology, that those around me are changing their attitudes towards archaeology by showing an interest in what I do.

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T HE VALUES I S EE IN A RCHAEOLOGY The concept of an African Renaissance is rapidly gaining popularity among many African leaders, scholars, and other friends of Africa. According to South Africa’s second democratically elected president, Mr. Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, in his address at the African Renaissance Conference,5 this is a “revival for the African continent and an opportunity for Africans to free and empower themselves against the legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism. The hope is that this Renaissance will empower Africa to help the world rediscover the oneness of the human race; after all, Africa was the origin of humanity.” This is not a new concept, however; a number of great scholars, including Marcus Garvey and Nkwame Nkrumah, have raised it. In South Africa, where African people have been subjected to the most horrendous levels of oppression, racism, and exploitation, an African Renaissance clearly has a big and central role to play. However, I strongly believe that a nation that does not know its roots is a nation without history and thus has no prosperous future. Because of “modernization,” we have witnessed our African cultures getting diluted by Western influences. This has to change for Africa and other formerly colonised countries. Yes, the same happens with other cultures because of interaction amongst people of different cultural backgrounds. Culture makes us who we are, and without it, we have no identity. A major contributor to the dilution of African culture is the educational system. Sadly enough, the education we are receiving contributes to a situation in which educated Africans become strangers to their own people. To start with, we receive this education in English, which is a foreign language to us Africans. As a result, we can hardly explain to our illiterate parents in the villages and townships what it is that we have learned. I know this from firsthand experience, as I had difficulty explaining to my parents and friends what it is that I was studying. For a nation seeking its roots, archaeology is highly significant. Although conveyed to me in a foreign language, archaeology taught me about the rich precolonial cultural heritage history of South Africa. It made me appreciate who I am, and also want to know more about my past, and wish to see more young people learning about ourselves. It is this passion that keeps the speech by Mr. Mbeki, then South Africa’s deputy president, ringing over and over in my mind: “I am an African”6 —for I know the rich cultural history of Africans. In his State of the Nation addresses (especially his 1999 inaugural speech), Mr. Thabo Mbeki has always highlighted the role that archaeology has played in the rebirth of perceptions about Africa and its people. Archaeology is the medium through which we can tap into a full comprehension of the African Renaissance. Mr. Mbeki said, “We will seek to educate both the young and ourselves about everything all our forebears did to uphold the torch of freedom. . . . We will also work to rediscover and claim the African heritage, for the benefit especially of our young generation. From South Africa to Ethiopia lie strewn ancient fossils which, in their stillness, speak still of the African origins of all humanity. Recorded history and the material things that time left behind also speak of Africa’s historic contribution to the universe of philosophy, the natural sciences, human settlement and organization, and the creative arts.”7 But being a student of archaeology has not been without challenges.

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T HE C HALLENGES OF STUDYING A RCHAEOLOGY I passed my first year in archaeology and decided to continue with it to the second year. It was at this point that I confronted a number of challenges. I felt weak and was being influenced by the attitudes people had towards archaeology. I was told, for example, that archaeology was a subject for white people and also that, as a person of African origin, I would not find a job. Such attitudes led me to question this career path: Should I continue with archaeology? Is it worth studying? Will I find a job as an archaeologist? It was at this time that I started to seriously consider these issues. Nevertheless, I continued on. We had a number of African people in our first-year class, most of whom had negative attitudes towards the subject, which they found boring and were only taking for the credits. They soon realised that it was not for them, and all dropped archaeology at the end of the term. I did not. It was not long after we started attending second-year classes that I realised I was the only student of African descent. I felt very isolated, as I was still very sensitive to racial issues, bearing in mind the history of our country, and always sat on my own in the front seat in the archaeology class. However, I had to come to terms with the reality of being the only African student. I soon made friends with my classmates, who accepted me and never showed any signs of resentment towards my presence in the class. The fact that I had known one of my classmates from the previous year when we were doing another course together also helped me a lot. Nonetheless, I was very selective in discussing the uncomfortable encounters I came across while becoming and being an archaeologist. The two incidents I choose to discuss here are representative of the main themes in the many challenges I have experienced. The first grueling experience I had in becoming an archaeologist came in 1998 during a rock art field school in the Eastern Free State and the Northern Cape provinces. After one of our busy days in the field, we visited a local nightclub for leisure. While at the pub, I met a man of Xhosa background, who must have been in his early to mid-twenties and worked as a barman. He was very surprised to see me amongst my white colleagues and asked, “What are you doing with white people,” which made me feel uncomfortable. This and similar statements came at a time when I was starting to feel comfortable with my skin colour in the class. He was not the only one to feel so; in fact, I turned a lot of heads when I went on archaeology trips around the country. In addition, a number of my African colleagues at the university thought that I was not proud enough of my skin colour because I preferred to associate with the white students from the archaeology class. They called me names behind my back, such as “coconut“ (meaning “brown on the outside, white on the inside”). Calling me this meant that I was pretending to be somebody I did not look like. My archaeology colleagues went out of their way to accommodate me, and I felt I had to show my appreciation to them. On the other hand, I did not want to dissociate myself from my African friends. It was very painful, as I was caught in the middle. A second incident occurred during my third year of university while at a Late Stone Age excavation field school in Tongaat. We stayed at Ballito Bay, a very beautiful town at the North Coastline of KwaZulu-Natal province. One evening we visited a nearby nightclub for drinks and entertainment. It was a white entertainment facility and thus made

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me feel very uncomfortable because of the attention I was drawing. The only other people of my skin colour were working as cleaners. I decided to leave the building to make a telephone call while my colleagues were still enjoying one another’s company at the club. To my great disappointment, the bouncers8 did not allow me back in again. I explained that I had been inside earlier, with my friends from the University of the Witwatersrand, but they would not listen. I eventually managed to convince them to accompany me to the table where my friends were sitting so they could verify that my colleagues knew me. Only then was I allowed to stay. I considered this experience a racial prejudice against me for being an African. This experience taught me that, as an African man, I could not go to their nightclub and enjoy myself on my own.

L EAVING A RCHAEOLOGY—AT L EAST B RIEFLY After completing my B.A. degree in 1999, I studied towards a B.A. honours degree in geography the following year. I did this for two reasons. First, because of the passing of my father the previous year, I was desperate to find a job. I became convinced by the negative attitudes that finding a job in archaeology would be difficult, unlike in geography, where seemingly more posts were available. Second, although I had become much attached to archaeology during my three years of study and field experience, I was still very interested in a career in climatology. I thus was interested in studying something that would link my archaeology and geography backgrounds: this was the study of paleoenvironments. However, I was advised that I could not register with the two different departments for my honours degree. I thus decided to continue my studies in the Geography Department, returning to archaeology after the completion of my honours degree in 2000. I think by this time I had dealt with the passing of my father and was in a position to make more rational decisions based on the social circumstances at the time. Since my family was able to manage, I decided I could spend another year of study before embarking on finding a job. In 2001, I wrote to the state president of South Africa, Mr. Mbeki, explaining the challenges I was experiencing as an archaeology student. I wrote to him because of his interest in rock art. To my great surprise, I received a hand-written response from the president in which he stated, “Please persist with your studies which can only help us as we work to recover our history and identity. None of us can afford that you get discouraged because of the uninformed comments of a few. . . . Please do not be discouraged.” This letter encouraged me to rise above all of the many challenges that were facing me.

B EING AN A RCHAEOLOGIST When I left the University of the Witwatersrand in 2001 after finishing my Postgraduate Diploma in Science (Rock Art Studies), I received an offer to work for Amafa aKwaZuluNatali9 as the cultural officer for rock art. My responsibilities included the management of rock art in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, with a strong focus on the uKhahlamba Drakensberg, which is a World Heritage Site. It was an opportunity for me, as a newly

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trained archaeologist, to make an impact in the heritage management field. Again, however, I encountered a number of challenges that made me feel that the field of archaeology was not ready for an African, especially a South African-born archaeologist who was very critical of the different methodological approaches in the field of heritage management. Some of my colleagues questioned my qualifications, calling me “an incompetent affirmative-action employee.” My personal integrity and self-esteem thus suffered a great setback. Isaac Jagusah (2001) could not have been more accurate in speaking to my own experiences when he said, “When an African scholar attempts a different approach it attracts attacks from entrenched colonial and neo-colonial scholarship.” Considering the debates in anthropology of “doing anthropology at home” (Kenyatta 1938; Munthali 2002), archaeology is no different. People of non-African origin have dominated the practise of archaeology in South Africa for many years. Africans have been study subjects who had to present themselves to the researchers and have rarely had any research power. I argue that researchers have interpreted, and continue to interpret, archaeological material from a Western ideology. Even when theories are based on local ethnographic material, the interpretation of that material may be highly debatable, especially when one considers such questions as: Who collected the material? What is his/her language? What is their cultural background? At the same time, I suggest that in this new period of archaeology in South Africa, one in which a number of Indigenous persons are qualifying as archaeologists, it is significant that archaeology appears to be more tolerant of Indigenous theories and methodological approaches. I am mainly referring to theories that challenge the mainstream thinking in archaeology (Ndlovu 2005). As one example, in response to ideological differences I had with my colleagues at Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali on methodological approaches to rock art management, I chose to further my studies by undertaking master’s research on the topic of “Incorporating Indigenous Management in Rock Art Sites in KwaZulu-Natal.” My thesis, completed in 2005, investigated the use of what I call the “Eurocentric physical approach” to heritage management, which is dominant in both academia and heritage management. Not only is this fundamentally different from the African spiritual approach,10 but it considers the latter detrimental. Heritage managers, for example, would consider it unwise to have people dancing inside the painted shelter (actions that could be considered part of spiritual management) because dust would deface the paintings. I wanted to explore how the interest of local communities who still attach spiritual significance to painted sites could be considered by those with power and become part of the mainstream heritage management. I am still very critical of the way in which heritage is managed in South Africa (Ndlovu 2009). Such ideological differences between Indigenous African and European scholars should not be ignored by merely concluding that there is something wrong with the education of an Indigenous archaeologist11 when he or she questions the dominant paradigm. The days of scientific colonialism are over, and we need to usher in an Indigenous archaeology that treats Indigenous people as much more than informants and indeed allows them a space to exist as professionals who have their own interpretations (see Nicholas 2008). We cannot continuously have one-sided interpretations that always object to opposing methodological approaches

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that question the basis of knowledge previously extracted (see Galtung 1967; Nicholas and Hollowell 2007). We are taught to be critical in our thinking; for the discipline of archaeology to develop further, we need many different voices. It does not help in any way to keep reciting all we have been taught without any challenge. However, when I was doing exactly that, I suffered considerably. The decision to undertake the kind of research I conducted for my master’s degree made my life even more difficult, and those who did not approve of my ideas made various attempts to stop me from furthering my studies. I was given no support by Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali, financially or otherwise. This and other difficulties eventually led me to resign in order to concentrate on my studies without any psychological battle, a decision I do not regret. It was only after my resignation that I felt a heavy load had been lifted off my shoulders. For the first time in months, I was at ease with myself. However, it was difficult to be without a job, considering the responsibilities I had, but I held on because I was very determined to restore my tarnished reputation and to succeed in archaeology. When I was about to finish my M.A. degree, I started thinking of a Ph.D. research project relating to heritage management. I even approached Australian institutions for possibilities of entering programs there because of that country’s experience in dealing with Aboriginal peoples and their interest in managing their own heritage. But later experiences, especially when I worked as the provincial heritage officer in the Western Cape Province, discouraged me from doing so. As I learned from having worked in heritage management for the last nine years, one of the challenges is that as professionals, we are not provided with a space to develop our own knowledge and thinking. Our professional environment is informed by committees of experts who make all the decisions; we have only to communicate them. In effect, then, we are just heritage clerks, discouraged from developing our ideas any further. I thus have a very critical opinion of these committees. When I finally decided to register for my Ph.D., I was opposed to the idea of a heritage management topic for my thesis. In addition to my concern about being a heritage administrator, I realise that the current crop of African archaeologists are employed mainly by government structures in heritage management. There are none in the academic or museum institutions, which are more research orientated. This is of great concern to me. As administrators, they are always recipients of knowledge yet almost never produce any. I am currently a Ph.D. student at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. My research interest is southern African rock art. I believe that research into this field will launch my career into the academic sector where my ideas will be appreciated—at least that is what I hope. My challenges in archaeology are not without historical context. Like any endeavour or organisation in the post-apartheid era, South African archaeology is operating under the imperative to engage in transformation. Even European scholars have commented that South African archaeology is the “most colonialist archaeology in Africa” (Trigger 1990: 316). Although this statement was written at the beginning of the 1990s, four years before the dawn of the democratic era, I believe it still holds true even within the present, almost two decades later. I am of the strong opinion that little transformation has occurred within the field since the fall of the apartheid regime.

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Attempts to address the past must not only rely on the democratisation of the knowledge production methodology. Reform must also be reflected in the professionals coming into the discipline. Archaeology must become more representative of the demography of the country, in order ensure that knowledge production reflects the broad spectrum of our population. Rather than sitting on the periphery of the discipline, African archaeologists must be in the centre, and I hope my Ph.D. degree will help me attain this. This must be ensured by properly nurturing the young talent, rather than discouraging it. I hope my negative experiences in becoming and being an archaeologist will not be repeated in the endeavours of anyone else. I have taken a personal interest in ensuring that, indeed, the discipline is transformed and African students are made to feel more comfortable. In taking this ideology forward, I joined forces with two other colleagues in archaeology. Our aim is to bring about transformation within archaeology. Africans should not end with being only “backroom staff” who never publish and never receive accolades anywhere. The African voice must be given space to exist. My colleagues and I thus approached the previous Council of the Association for Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA); we expressed our concerns about such topics as the cultural resource management accreditation process, the current disparities between contributions by various South African authors in the South African Archaeological Bulletin (SAAB), and adequate representation within the SAAB editorial board. Since then, we have been involved in a process of bringing about meaningful change. We have initiated this by drafting the transformation charter, which will help to achieve our objectives. Implementing change is proving to be an extremely difficult process, especially given the political environment in the country. Some previously advantaged South Africans, who are well represented in archaeology, are of the opinion that, in general, transformation attempts by the state have been to their disadvantage—not only to them, but to archaeology itself. I fail to understand how we can bring about meaningful transformation if we do not prioritise our intervention strategies and focus on the less represented. Yet transformation should not bring about uneasiness. I hope one day I can look back and be proud of the intervention that we brought into the discipline. As the current transformation officer for the ASAPA Council, it is within my responsibility to bring together the different voices and create a platform representative of all people.

T HE R EWARDS OF STUDYING A RCHAEOLOGY Although I have elaborated on some of the challenges I faced while studying archaeology and later as an employee, there have been rewards as well. The most important of them is that I felt very proud to be one of those students who wanted to know about the precolonial history of South Africa and the continent at large. With this in mind, I want to change the perception amongst a number of African people that archaeology is for white people; this is clearly negated by virtue of the number of African students now studying it in South African universities and their successes in the field. I also firmly believe that one does not need to be an archaeologist to know about the rich cultural heritage of

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South Africa—such knowledge is for everyone, whether they are engineers, medical doctors, or information technology consultants. Through being involved in archaeology, I have become interested in understanding the origins of my own clan. I continuously ask the elders for the history of where we come from, and seek to understand the various lineages within our clan. I intend to write a book on this subject once I have completed my Ph.D. degree. I likely would not have acquired such an interest were I not involved in archaeology. Therefore, archaeology has had a positive influence on me.

L ESSONS TO BE L EARNED FROM M Y E XPERIENCES Much has changed in South Africa since the first democratic elections a decade ago. Those students now going to universities, either white or African, were very young when South Africans witnessed a reasonably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. As a result, I would argue that they do not fully understand and appreciate the experiences that most South Africans had to endure during that process. On the other hand, this may explain why they tend to be more tolerant towards one another than my generation was when we first went to university. In any event, I hope that the dreadful racist prejudices I experienced will not be repeated, at least not on the same scale. The biggest lesson should be that academic archaeologists should learn to be more tolerant of new ideas, especially those by Indigenous people who approach the subject from a different perspective. I strongly believe that many of my difficulties as an archaeologist were initiated by my “controversial”ideas that questioned mainstream thinking in rock art management. This was a far cry from the lessons I had been taught, or the encouragement I received, to be critical and innovative. In looking at rock art management from a different perspective, in relating my “controversial” thoughts to my culture, I felt sympathetic to the Indigenous peoples who attached spiritual significance to cultural sites, yet I was expected to manage the sites using Western principles. It was at this juncture that I felt tension between what I call “spiritual”and “physical”management. The former is based on African principles, where people manage what they cannot see with the naked eye, while the latter is based on “scientific” principles, where people manage what they see (Ndlovu 2004; 2005; 2009). It is critical that, as we move forward into a better future as a country through concepts like African Renaissance, we are open to different ideas coming from different racial backgrounds. As for other aspiring archaeologists, my advice would be to persevere in order to achieve their goals and never to lose hope. There will always be people out there who will be more understanding, as I discovered firsthand. Institutions that employ archaeologists in their departments also need to be more supportive of their new employees of Indigenous background, especially those who are fresh from universities and still need to develop themselves. These organizations need to listen to the different concerns that staff may have that arise during their period of employment. By such means, I believe that my own harsh experiences could have been

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averted. It was evident that I did not receive the support of senior management of Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali, and that my concerns were always ignored. It is also important to address the lack of transformation in the discipline. I know this is a thorny subject, especially for a country that has suffered under a long era of racial discrimination. But we must all get over this suffering and address the challenges at hand. I wish to see a situation where various role players become willing to compromise their positions, as it is through such an approach that we can move forward. Compromises should not always come from one side. I am one of those who strongly believe we need transformation, and I am also conscious of the fact that there are challenges in the way the government has gone about addressing the imbalances. However, if we learn from the failures of transformation in other sectors, we may prosper and be proud when we look back.

C ONCLUSIONS Archaeologists of Indigenous background in South Africa have a big responsibility to challenge the stereotypes most Africans have about archaeology, which will help ensure that other Indigenous students aspire to be archaeologists. This is important for two reasons. First, a more informed public will be more accepting and supportive of archaeology. And second, instead of looking at “them” as subjects to be “educated” about the significance of different aspects of archaeology, Indigenous peoples will be looked at as equal players in the field. This will ensure that the challenges I faced in studying archaeology are not repeated to the dismay of someone else. Greater participation by African archaeologists will also ensure that established archaeologists and heritage managers are more understanding of the voices of those previously neglected. Surely, we do not need an archaeology association consisting only of Indigenous South Africans who have joined together because they are not accepted into the mainstream12—the playing field of archaeology must be level, with equal opportunities provided to all studying the subject, whether of African or European descent. This is especially important now that most communities in South Africa, and elsewhere, are beginning to claim their cultural heritage. In such a context, archaeology must reposition itself ideologically in order to be widely accepted by Indigenous peoples as a subject that represents something meaningful to them. The struggle for a truly postcolonial archaeology, one that would be demographically representative and allow more diverse voices to be heard, continues. My battles are not the last ones; more triumphs must still be recorded in the history books, both by myself and others of my generation, and by those who will come after us.

N OTES 1 These divisions were made through the use of racially segregating policies that were imple-

mented to undermine the majority in favour of the white minority (Sachs 2000). 2 Speech by the Limpopo Member of the Executive Council for Education on the Occasion of

the “Africa Day” Celebrations, Liivha Combined School, May 25, 2004.

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3 This word is considered by some academics to be derogatory, but is familiar to non-academ4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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ics. It is used without any insulting connotations attached to the term. We called them “O’bonabonephi,” which simply means that every time one meets a Bushman, the first thing he or she will ask is, “When did you start seeing me.” If one says, “from a distance,” he or she will be very excited, but if the opposite is said, a fight will begin. Speech by the deputy president at the African Renaissance Conference, Johannesburg, September 28, 1998. Address to the African National Congress, on the occasion of the adoption of “The Republic of South Africa Constitutional Bill 1996,” May 8, 1998. Inaugural address, June 16, 1999. Bouncers are security staff at the main entrance of nightclubs. Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali is the statutory body responsible for the protection and conservation of the province’s cultural, architectural, and historical heritage. The spiritual approach places emphasis on the spiritual power that the site has, in contrast to the physical management of the site, which emphasises the aesthetic value of the paintings. However, I am not convinced that it is appropriate to classify some archaeologists as Indigenous, when all other archaeologists are classified according to their research interest, not their cultural background. It is a label that I am not proud of or comfortable with. It still amazes me that at this time in our democracy, we still have particular professional associations with affiliation determined by the race of the particular professional (e.g., Association for Black Accountants of South Africa, Black Lawyers Association).

R EFERENCES C ITED Galtung, J. 1967 After Camelot. In The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between the Social Sciences and Practical Politics, edited by I. Horowitz, pp. 281–312. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jagusah, O. I. W. 2001 Education Policy in Africa and the Issue(s) of Context: The Case of Nigeria and South Africa. International Education Journal 2 (5): 113–125. Kenyatta, J. 1938 Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal life of the Gikuyu. Mercury, London. Munthali, A. C. 2002 Change and Continuity: Perceptions about Childhood Diseases among the Tumbuka of Northern Malawi. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Ndlovu, N. 2009 Access to Rock Art Sites: Is it a Right or Qualification? The South African Archaeological Bulletin 64 (189): 61–68. 2005 Incorporating Indigenous Management in Rock Art Sites in KwaZulu-Natal. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. 2004 Rock Art Management: Who Are We Managing Rock Art For? Paper presented at the SA3 Conference, Kimberley.

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Nicholas, G. 2008 Native Peoples and Archaeology. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3, edited by D. Pearsall, pp. 1660–1669. Elsevier, Toronto. Nicholas, G., and J. Hollowell 2007 Ethical Challenges to a Postcolonial Archaeology: The Legacy of Scientific Colonialism. In Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, edited by Y. Hamilakis and P. Duke, pp. 59–82. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Sachs, J. 2000 South Africa as the Epicentre of HIV/AIDS: Vital Political Legacies and Current Debates. Current Issues in Comparative Education 3 (1): 1–5. Trigger, B. 1990 The History of African Archaeology in World Perspective. In A History of African Archaeology, edited by P. Robertshaw, pp. 309–319. James Currey, London.

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M Y O WN Photo by Yann-Pierre Montelle, courtesy of the Ngai Tahu Maori Rock Art Trust

WORKING

Gerard O’Regan Ko Aoraki te mauka. Ko Waitaki te awa. Ko Uenuku te whare tipuna e tu mai ra i te matarae o Moeraki. A, ko Tahu Potiki hoki tera, toku whare tipuna kei Awarua. Ko Kati Rakiamoa me Kati Waewae nga hapu matua. Koianei nga karangaranga kei te mihi atu ki a koutou. Tena ra koutou katoa. The mountain is Aoraki, Mount Cook. The river is the Waitaki. Uenuku is the ancestral house that stands on the Moeraki Peninsula. Tahu Potiki is that which stands at Bluff. The people descending from the ancestor Rakiamoa, and those from the ancestor Waewae, are the main subtribes. These are the callings that greet you. Greetings to you all.

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ne day in the corridor of the Otago Museum, an irate colleague challenged me to decide whether I worked for Maori or for museums. I found it interesting that it had to be one or the other. Such challenges are increasingly rare in New Zealand museums. Over the last two decades, I have witnessed a huge shift in the mainstream museological attitudes, where Maori communities are being seen less as the subject of displays and more as a part of the museums and their purpose. Within the profession, Maori museum workers are increasingly recognised as just that, not one or the other. The attitudinal shift is echoed throughout New Zealand’s heritage industry, although it manifests itself differently in the various sectors. Museums have changed through the adoption of bicultural philosophies that have seen, amongst other things, a huge increase in the number of Maori people involved in the organisations. The archaeological sector, on the other hand, has legislation that forces working relationships between archaeologists and Maori tribes. The burgeoning field of natural and cultural resource management sees a large number of Maori engaged in projects that overlap with archaeological values. It is hard to imagine an excavation on a Maori site that has neither local Maori approval nor their presence at some stage during the work. Yet there are few Maori currently engaged as “archaeologists.” As such, Maori continue to have little input into shaping the agenda for archaeology in New Zealand, especially the research agenda. It was a rich opportunity, then, for me as a “Maori museum worker”with “archaeological tendencies” to be engaged by my own tribe to drive heritage initiatives among my own people. After twenty years, a quarter of which have been as the heritage manager for the Ngai Tahu tribe, I have reached something of a midpoint in my career. It is a point at which I am turning from an experience dominated by museums to one more focused on archaeology. In this chapter I reflect on what I believe have been critical factors in my having a career in the heritage sector in the first place and, then, some particular episodes that have honed my thinking about my future as a tribal archaeologist.

O

A M USEOLOGICAL PATHWAY TO I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGY The traditional home territory of my tribe, Ngai Tahu, comprises the greater bulk of the South Island of New Zealand, as well as Stewart Island, the smallest of the three main islands. My father, although born and raised in Wellington, outside of the tribal region, served as a political leader of the tribe, a role that dominated our home environment. His passion for Maori traditions, history, and genealogy was something I had a passing interest in as a youth, but it had little impact on my personal outlook of my future. As the capital city, Wellington has numerous government offices that used to regularly take on young Maori trainees. Having left school and worked in a hotel for several months, in 1985 I applied to the Department of Maori Affairs cadetship scheme in the hope of securing a government administrative job. One of the more odd cadetships was for a trainee technician in the Ethnology Department of the National Museum. I knew a little of anthropology, as both my parents had studied it. Betty McFadgen, the curator of

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that time, interviewed me and impressed upon me what museum work entailed. There and then my heart was set on working with our Maori treasures. I was fortunate to be appointed to the team at the National Museum, where my work focused on cataloguing and housing the Maori collections. My interest turned towards archaeology in particular after Janet Davidson, one of New Zealand’s preeminent prehistorians, supervised me in a project sorting some of the museum’s significant archaeological collections. I followed this by moving to Dunedin to study at the University of Otago, where Atholl Anderson, a leading archaeologist and fellow tribal member, gave me an opportunity to work on the Shag River Mouth excavation. He tasked me with liaising with the runanga (local tribal organisation) during the course of the excavation. This gave me a foot in archaeology outside of museums and seeded my long-term interest in the interface between archaeology and Maori heritage management. Since then, my professional engagements have strayed from these core interests, but never too far. After completing a bachelor’s degree, in 1990 I returned to Wellington and the Maori collections at the National Museum, again working with Betty, and more specifically under the supervision of Janet and the late James Mack. Over the years I have come to respect the tolerance that that generation of curators had for the growing pains of young Maori people like me making our way in the profession. Even though we did not always recognise it at the time, they also created great opportunities for us to extend ourselves and make our mark. A return to Dunedin came with a position at Otago Museum, from which I provided professional advice to almost a hundred smaller museums spread throughout the lower South Island. Through this work I came to see just how much of our national heritage is actually protected and researched outside of the professional sector, and how the handson experience of community volunteers working with heritage collections, sites, and stories gives rise to a huge part of the cultural strength in smaller townships. I saw this as having great lessons for a tribe trying to manage its heritage within a modern Western society. Being based in Dunedin also afforded me an opportunity to become more familiar with the southern territory from which my Maori heritage extends and to contribute more actively to tribal affairs. This included being a member of a Ngai Tahu committee that designed and implemented tribal policies on the repatriation of human remains and on the management of archaeological sites and material culture. These policy statements were a first for our tribe and, to the best of my knowledge, for New Zealand. At the time, museums were developing policies that sought to have some regard for Maori values but which failed to address the core issue of ownership and deaccessioning of skeletal collections. Our tribal policy statement was blunt on this point. The success we had in negotiating the return of hundreds of skeletal remains to tribal management was as much due to a shift in community and professional attitudes on museums holding human remains as it was due to our advocacy. Nonetheless, it buoyed my enthusiasm for working in the sector and strengthened my belief that empowering Maori to control and manage our own heritage was achievable in the current generation. By the early 1990s, the numbers of Maori working in museums had grown from a tiny handful of us only a few years earlier. We were mostly security, front of house workers, or

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curatorial trainees. Very few were in more senior roles. Whilst our numbers were small, our managers were generally supportive of us gathering to discuss issues pertaining to Maori museum workers and developing a strong sense of camaraderie extending the length of the country. I was particularly fortunate in being able to explore this at a deeper level in 1995–1996 by undertaking a major research commission on the substance and nature of Maori participation in New Zealand museums (O’Regan 1997). This study impressed two things upon me. First, Maori will change the museological agenda to one more responsive to tribes only when there is a sufficient number of Maori in the management ranks. This is where decisions relating to Maori matters and collections are made in the institutions. Second, I came to recognise just how crucial the Maori museum workers’ network was to clarifying within myself what it meant to be a “Maori museum worker.” It provided an opportunity to talk with others who were addressing the same questions themselves, about where they sat in regards to our own people, our employing institutions, professional organisations, and, most particularly, the treasures we cared for. Importantly, the network was a forum where we could delve into the issues at length and without the restraint of the cultural sensitivity required when discussing the issues either within our employing institutions or within our tribes. In 1989, Atholl Anderson had initiated the South Island Maori Rock Art Project, a program to survey and produce a definitive photographic record of all of our tribe’s rock art. It was the first large-scale archaeological initiative our tribe had adopted as its own. With Atholl’s encouragement, I took over the management of the project in 1993. Through this role, I developed a long association with Brian Allingham, a pakeha (European New Zealander) archaeologist who had been engaged to undertake the fieldwork. Brian’s enthusiasm for the rock art and southern Maori archaeology has been infectious, and his humble, people-orientated approach to working with our runanga has provided an important model for my own efforts. Initially, my roles in the rock art project and tribal heritage policy committee had been honorary. In 1998, they were integrated into my new role as heritage manager for our tribal administration, a position established following the settlement of Ngai Tahu’s historic land claim in that same year. The role required pulling together Ngai Tahu Development’s heritage unit to manage various arts and heritage initiatives, including some exhibitions, archival projects, and excavations. All of the projects were unashamedly focused on bringing culturally enriching experiences to our own tribal members. An early initiative of our heritage unit was a gathering for tribal members to explore the rock art. Several van loads of people visited rock art sites, some of which had not been visited by a Ngai Tahu for over a hundred years. During these visits, I could see people moving from a theoretical valuing of the art to an actual experience of it and feeling empowered by this. It crystallised my thoughts that in order for our people to meaningfully assert an authority over our treasures, they first had to really know what and where those treasures are, and also to actually experience them. Without such knowledge, any claim of authority would be hollow, especially as compared with that of the archaeologists, landowners, and developers who do have experiences of these treasures and places. Furthermore, it was also obvious that many of the tribe’s people simply enjoyed

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getting out in the field and exploring our heritage. This point was exemplified with the Bruce Bay archaeological project.

A T RIBAL E XCAVATION In 1999, Te Runanga o Makaawhio, the local Maori community in the sparsely populated reaches of South Westland, sought my advice about a large coastal midden that was eroding rapidly at Bruce Bay. Wave action was undercutting the midden, with the result that large portions were slumping onto the beachfront and then being dispersed by high tides. The runanga was concerned that something needed to be done to prevent a total loss of the heritage, but there was some apprehension about engaging archaeologists from a government agency or a university, due to suspicions that they would remove the deposits and develop the information in a forum beyond the local community. Their concern was about who might do a salvage excavation, rather than whether or not one should happen. I suggested that the runanga should do the excavation themselves. Once over the initial surprise, the runanga enthusiastically adopted the suggestion and became the excavators. Our Ngai Tahu Development heritage unit supported the runanga in liaising with the appropriate government agencies to get an authority to excavate, and we provided professional guidance on the site. Nonetheless, the excavation proceeded under the authority of and principally peopled by the local runanga. There have been few moments in my career more rewarding than the time I spent on that excavation witnessing some twenty

Local runanga member Helen Rasmussen (left) enjoys sifting midden at Bruce Bay alongside Mauriri McGlinchey of the Ngai Tahu tribal heritage unit. Photo by Gerard O’Regan, courtesy of the Office of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu.

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or so smiling Ngai Tahu caring for and handling their local heritage. The handling of physical heritage is, I believe, a hugely important process in itself. As we treasure things, we hold them, fondle them, and gaze upon them, reflecting on those of the past with whom they are associated. The more we do so, the more we end up treasuring these things and the insight they may allow. It is this active process of treasuring that underpins the protection of our heritage. I believe it applies to our archaeological sites and stories as much as it does to our family heirlooms. In archaeological terms, the excavation achieved what it was required to do. It salvaged a sample of a midden that was being eroded into the sea. Some significant artifacts and faunal remains were recovered, including a rare harpoon head associated with dolphin remains (Allingham and Symon 2000). The project was so successful that the locals extended a three-day salvage effort into a mission requiring three further visits by the Ngai Tahu Development heritage team. Members of the public recognised what the runanga was doing and started to inform them of other sites. One resident even donated a private collection of dozens of pounamu (jade) artefacts that had been collected in the district over the years. The salvaged midden material was taken to the Anthropology Department of the University of Otago, Dunedin, which kindly made their facilities open for runanga use. Several members of the runanga joined our heritage unit staff in the laboratories, sorting and processing the material. Under New Zealand law, the government owns all artefacts recovered from archaeological sites. The custody for the Bruce Bay artefacts was, however, granted to Te Runanga o Makaawhio, who now hold these treasures on their marae (traditional community centre). The key to the success of the Bruce Bay excavation was the fact that local Maori people were in control of the project from the outset. This allowed them and the general community around them to focus positively on what could be done. It is my experience that when outside people seek tribal permission to undertake archaeological work, our runanga typically default to a conservative and protective mode of thinking. This often means imposing restrictions and controls on the archaeological activity and, I believe, casts a negative mind-set among tribal members about the work.

R EPUTATION IN THE G UTTER Following the success of the Bruce Bay excavation, a similar initiative was developed in response to the active erosion of a site at The Gutter, a small inlet on the remote western coast of Stewart Island. The site was known for several burials that had eroded from the sand dunes and for canoe parts that had been found on the beach, including a unique carved prow. Atholl Anderson and I were fortunate to visit the site en route to another project. We noted the spread of the cultural deposit and considered that it may be the residual remains of a village. If so, it would have been the southernmost pre-European Maori village on record. If anything of the cultural deposit were to be analysed to determine the nature and antiquity of the site, then it would need to be undertaken quickly. This view was upheld in discussions I had with the late Paddy Gilroy, then the local Maori liaison manager for the Department of Conservation who administered the land,

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and the late George Te Au, one of the most senior and respected elders in the southern parts of the tribe. Accordingly, the Ngai Tahu Development heritage unit facilitated a consultation meeting that included flying representatives from local runanga to the remote locality for on-site discussions. Unlike for Bruce Bay where there was only one runanga involved, consultation about Stewart Island required discussion across four runanga, all located on the main South Island. A fifth, Rakiura Runanga, is actually located within the small community that lives on the island. It is comprised of tribal members but is not recognised as a traditional runanga in the tribal structures; thus it has no official authority in heritage sites. Nonetheless, the authoritative four runanga adopted an inclusive approach and included Rakiura Runanga in the consultations as well. The overall memberships of all five runanga supported the excavation. Budgeted funds were secured through the tribal heritage unit and, together with the Department of Conservation’s Maori liaison and historic heritage staff, arrangements were put in place to implement the salvage. Atholl Anderson agreed to travel from Australia, where he was then based, to lead the excavation. The excavation was announced in tribal magazines, and members from across the wider tribe were invited to participate. This further reflected the broad and inclusive approach to the excavation promoted by the tribal heritage unit and runanga alike. It was troubling, then, to learn shortly before the excavation that an elder who was one of the people to originally introduce me to the site had not been aware of the up-and-coming excavations. This followed the fact that he had distanced himself from runanga activity and was among a number of people promoting their tribal identity outside of the runanga mainstream. I took it upon myself to contact the elder, forward him the written information on the excavation, and extend the invitation to participate to all those associated with him. This effort was intended to ensure that everybody had the information. It is important to note that according to the current Indigenous rights recognised by the New Zealand government and the larger tribe, in order to be part of the decision-making process, our tribal members need to voice their perspectives through one of the authoritative runanga. Accordingly, even though the elder expressed his disapproval of the excavation, it could not change the runanga decision that had been made. There can be little doubt that those operating outside of the mainstream runanga felt disempowered in their ability to influence the excavation process. This was part of a wider tribal issue about representation. Despite those unresolved issues, I had personally made a special effort to ensure that there were avenues for participation in the project, should people, including those from disaffected groups, be interested. This, perhaps, and the fact that there were several rather than a single local organisation involved, gave my role a disproportionate and central profile compared with that in the Bruce Bay experience. Hence, when opposition was voiced, it was focused against my part in the activity rather than on relationships in the local arena, where the debate should have been. The opposition came in the form of a letter from the Rakiura Maori Lands Trust, which said they were not convinced that my “rational[e] for this work was genuine” and claimed that “there is no justification for your actions other than which are selfishly moti-

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Ngai Tahu recover a canoe piece at The Gutter, Stewart Island. From the left: Professor Atholl Anderson, kaumatua (elder) Peggy Peek, Te Awhina Arahanga, and Kylie Sooalo. Photo courtesy of the Office of Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu.

vated to enhance your professional expertise and that of your employer’s.”1 This letter had been copied to the chief judge of the Maori Land Court, the head of the Southland District Council, the Department of Conservation, and the chair of my own tribal council. Whereas I was firmly of the opinion that my efforts were for the benefit of the tribe and our heritage, I suddenly found myself accused by some of my own relations as being very much the “archaeologist” rather than the “Maori.” The Gutter excavation proceeded and was highly successful; it even included a surprise recovery of further parts of a wrecked canoe. However, it takes a tough skin not to be personally affected by such public criticism of one’s ethics. Regardless of my own sense of integrity, I recognise that when dealing with diverse groups, some people, including our own relations, may receive or choose to hear different information. The response they develop to that information may be partially informed, unbalanced, or

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even simply unfair. Nonetheless, it is important not to get too angry or disheartened by such accusations. Rather, I recognise that they are perhaps also fuelled by the same sense of identity and concern for heritage that other, more supportive tribes folk are. I knew this from an earlier experience I had had.

N OT Q UITE A STROLL IN THE PARK In 1998, the local District Council was building a new public swimming pool in Takaro Park, an open field in the centre of Oamaru Township. Some of the public strongly resisted the loss of the green space and what they considered poor community consultation by the council. A sit-in staged to prevent the earthworks had been met with an eviction by the police, and a perimeter fence was set up around the development. My role in the episode was as the deputy chair of the local runanga, Te Runanga o Moeraki. In an organisational sense, I was third in command, after the chairperson and the upoko, our senior leader who is especially responsible for providing direction on protocol and cultural practices. At the time, both were indisposed, which elevated me to first in command. The runanga had no organisational opinion on whether or not the pool should go ahead, but our upoko had advised us that, in past times, Maori travelling along the Oamaru coast would stop and refresh in the general vicinity of Takaro Park. As a fairly standard precautionary measure, then, the runanga asked for an archaeologist to supervise the excavation in case cultural deposits might be encountered. The council engaged a contract archaeologist to provide this service. Under New Zealand law, any disturbance of a Maori archaeological site requires consultation with the local tribe. Unable to gain any traction with the council by other means, and fenced out of the building site, the protesters sought to use the notion of protecting archaeological values as a rationale for stopping the development. This included their writing to my father over heritage concerns in the hope that, as a highprofile person with considerable political influence, he might intervene.2 The runanga’s request, however, was only that the council engage an archaeologist as a safeguard, as no archaeological deposit was evident a priori. Yet some of the protesters took this request as evidence that heritage resources were present and had to be protected. It was in this already tense atmosphere that a couple of people from the runanga felt they should also take a stronger interest in the heritage values at the park. These cousins of mine had recently experienced a strengthening of their connections with te ao wairua, the spiritual world. I considered it important to ensure that all values within the runanga were provided for, so I negotiated with the district council for these runanga members to be able to access the site and accompany the archaeologist. The younger of my cousins sensed that there were burials at the site that were being disturbed. Emotions escalated when a bone was found deep in the clay, even though the archaeologist had quickly identified it as subfossil moa (a large extinct bird). Work ceased temporarily. It was a delicate moment. On the one hand, a young cousin was convinced of his vision into the spiritual dimension in a very Maori framework. On the other hand,

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there was a lack of other traditional evidence or empirical archaeological evidence to support his assertion that the place should be treated as a wahi tapu (sacred place). As the runanga office holder, I was in the singular position of having to decide whether or not the runanga endorsed the construction’s proceeding or whether we should ask for the massive project to halt in respect for spiritual values. This would have inevitably required trying to invoke legislative measures that protect Maori heritage sites and archaeological values. As the episode unfolded, I felt that both my regard for the value of empirical evidence and my own respect for te ao wairua were being tested. Neither the archaeologist nor my cousins questioned my values directly. Nonetheless, I could see that my cousins would have trouble accepting a decision from me to proceed with the work. My background in museums and archaeology was well known, and I sensed they considered my perspective to be “scientific and Western,” not “spiritual and Maori.” It was coincidental that a respected elder, an auntie in the runanga, had just finished a meeting with two upoko from related marae who were still visiting in Moeraki nearby. In the absence of our own upoko, we asked these two gentlemen to join the auntie and me in visiting the site. They were well equipped to help, as both dealt with wahi tapu issues in their own local districts. This is notwithstanding the fact that they were familiar with the region, both having their own connections to the place. Both were also well senior to my cousins and me. We all visited the site and met with the archaeologist and my cousins. The two upoko advised us that, in their view, my cousins’ concerns were not substantiated; then they offered a karakia (prayer) to clear the way for the work to continue and to put any issues of te ao wairua to rest. Although my cousins remained convinced of their insights, they accepted the determination of the two senior upoko, as did the auntie who represented the elders within our own runanga membership. Subsequently, we approved the district council’s resumption of work. Different perspectives remained on the nature of the site, but all parties were able to move forward, accepting that they had done justice to their particular concerns as best as possible within the circumstances. The experience of Takaro Park alerted me to the fact that others might perceive my values as being suspect, or conflicted. Regardless of whether such perceptions are right or wrong, in some cases I just may not be the right person to lead a particular action. To resolve sensitive issues like these, then, requires guidance from others whose perspectives can be broadly respected. In this way, people will not get distracted by perceptions of personalities and will be able to remain focused on the actual heritage values.

C LOSING T HOUGHTS One may be tempted to ask, is the above account simply a series of rambling personal reminiscences, or might it have insights instructive for other Indigenous persons charting a career in archaeology? I would not presume the latter, but I do note that these are key experiences that have influenced my approach to archaeology. I offer them with the hope that they may resonate with some readers.

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There is immense satisfaction to be gained from seeing our people enjoying our heritage, such as in the rock art field trips, and empowered in it, as at the Bruce Bay dig. This sense of reward does not diminish the fact that it is important for us to be staunch in our purpose of working for the benefit of our tribal treasures and our people. If I weren’t committed to that goal, then the criticism of self-interest from the Rakiura Maori Lands Trust would indeed have been valid. As an Indigenous archaeologist, I need to be confident and comfortable with my perspective on matters archaeological, traditional, and spiritual. I need to be able to advocate these, accept when my advocacy is not taken on board, and respect the differing positions my relations may develop. Sometimes I will find myself holding a perspective alone and being considered “the other.” Sometimes this may have nothing to do with what people actually know of me, but rather assumptions they make about me as either an “archaeologist” or as “Indigenous.” Over the last few years, I have returned to university, this time in Auckland, to pursue my passion for archaeology in a more focused and committed way. To a large extent, it remains fuelled by the emotion I witness in other Maori stepping into museum basements and onto sites to engage with our treasures. As more Maori do engage with archaeology, I sense that I am about to see again the shift in the archaeological sector that I have seen emerging in the New Zealand museum scene over the last twenty years. It presents an environment in which both colleagues and cousins alike will find it easier to recognise some of us as Maori archaeologists, not one or the other. I am excited to be a part of it.

N OTES 1 Letter from Rakiura Maori Lands Trust, Bluff, 11 March 2000. Correspondence records of Ngai

Tahu Development Corporation, Christchurch. 2 Letters from Elizabeth Te Kahui Mareta-Ria, November 26, 1998, and Helen Stead, December

1, 1998. Correspondence records of Te Runanga o Moeraki, North Otago.

R EFERENCES C ITED Allingham, B., and A. Symon 2000 Salvage Excavation at Bruce Bay. Report, Te Runanga o Makaawhio. Hokitika. O’Regan, G. 1997 Bicultural Developments in Museums of Aotearoa New Zealand: What is the Current Status? Ki te Whakamana i te Kaupapa Tikanga-a-rua ki roto i nga Whare Taonga o te Motu: kei hea e tu ana? Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa National Services & Museums Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Te Ropu Hanga Kaupapa Taonga, Wellington.

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LIVING ARCHAEOLOGY FOR THE AINU IN HOKKAIDO BY

H IROFUMI K ATO

Photo by Hirofumi Kato

A N I NTERVIEW

Akemi and Rika Oshino he Ainu are the Indigenous peoples in Japan, and Hokkaido Island is their original territory. Currently, there are around 12,000 recorded archaeological sites on Hokkaido, which range in age from the Upper Paleolithic (about 30,000 years ago) to those of the historic Ainu culture. Approximately 80 archaeological sites are excavated there every year. These are ancestral Ainu sites. There are today no Ainu archaeologists, and the concept of Indigenous archeology has not yet been recognized in Japan. There is also a general lack of awareness on the significance of the archaeology and history of the Ainu peoples and their cultural heritage within the larger context of Japan. The Ainu are aware that knowledge of their past, and the means by which it can be derived from their archaeological sites, are important tools

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both in the recovery of Indigenous rights and in the protection and promotion of their culture. Why, then, haven’t Ainu people become archaeologists? The following interview with two young Ainu women provides an opportunity to examine some of the issues pertaining to the Ainu peoples and modern archaeology in Japan. Akemi and Rika Oshino are twin sisters who have studied the history and culture at university, and who are interested in archaeology. They graduated from the same private university in Hokkaido where they studied Ainu language and cultures. As with many of the world’s Indigenous peoples, the number of Ainu attending university is relatively low. Akemi told me about her decision to enter the university. When she finished high school, she had two interests she wanted to pursue: to become a nurse (because she likes children) and to continue her activities relating to Ainu culture. Her mother wanted her to go to college to become a nurse. Akemi was going to do this but then decided to to go to the university where Rika was studying Ainu culture. One of the main reasons why Akemi changed her mind was economic: the Ainu Association of Hokkaido helps Ainu children with scholarships, but provides twice as much to university students as to college students. Going to university would therefore reduce their mother’s burden in supporting the twin sisters. After completing university, they worked as research assistants on a cultural resource management (CRM) project.

D EVELOPING AN I NTEREST IN A RCHAEOLOGY Hirofumi: Please tell me what triggered your interest in archaeology? Akemi & Rika: After graduating from university in March of 2008, we were looking for a job that related to the Ainu culture. An acquaintance who was working at a rescue excavation at an archaeological site in the town of Atsuma (on Hokkaido Island) told us that they had found historical Ainu culture materials there that dated to the 15th and 16th centuries. So we decided to start working there, hoping to learn something about our Ainu culture. We had studied archaeology in university but only at the general level. We had not taken any of the specialist courses and had never tried archaeological fieldwork. Our knowledge of archaeology was only from the classroom, through textbooks.

E XPERIENCES AND C HALLENGES Hirofumi: What was your impression of archaeology? Akemi & Rika: We liked working under the blue sky but not getting sunburned. Now that we are working inside, we miss being outside. Rika: I liked to use different tools in the field. Akemi: But I didn’t like cutting all of the grass roots—they seemed to be endless!

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Akemi & Rika: We enjoyed being with the other field workers, relaxing with them, making jokes. Of course, we know that CRM involves big money and is serious public work. So this kind of archaeological work can be very stressful. In the Ainu culture, socializing with friends and family is important: adults drinking alcohol together and children playing near and with their parents. Ainu youth thus grow up and learn everything in their life under a very friendly atmosphere. In this context, we think the commitment made to children is very important to preserving our Ainu traditions. Our mother works for the public office in the town of Mukawa. She is also involved in teaching Ainu culture as a volunteer in the primary school. We sometimes joined our mother in demonstrating traditional dancing, songs, and musical instruments. Rika: I was very impressed by the excitement I saw in the children’s eyes at a class on Ainu culture studies. They learned some dances and some Ainu words from our mother. She demonstrated playing the mukkuri (a kind of Jew’s harp) and taught the children to dance. I remember when they called her Rika sensei [“teacher”]. I was strongly impressed by the joy they expressed in learning. Following such experiences, I wanted to become a curator at an Ainu museum, or take some part in any opportunities to teach others about the Ainu culture. However, I don’t have the necessary training for this kind of work. Akemi & Rika: We believe that it is important to inherit our traditional culture, and to make it part of our lives, enjoying ourselves and sharing it with others around us. How will archaeology create new understanding of the past through excavations? We know that the materials unearthed from archaeological sites are very important to the archaeologist. It seems to us that archaeologists are only involved in archaeological remains from sites. However, it is clear that the archaeological remains they find are related with the Ainu culture. But what they find is not new and doesn’t surprise us. It is already familiar to us.

C OMMENTARY Hirofumi: Akemi and Rika were involved in the excavation of a large ancestral Ainu site, which was part of an extensive CRM project in Atsuma. Many significant archaeological materials were recovered through this CRM project, including burials and the oldest chashi, an Ainu sacred site, in Hokkaido. What was being discovered by the archaeologists at this site was new to them, but for the Oshino sisters these discoveries—the chashi, iron swords, lacquerwares, and glass beads—were already part of their knowledge of Ainu history, known to them through their grandmother’s stories. It was thus perhaps less inspirational to them than one might expect. Also, that the Ainu already had such knowledge of the past may suggest that archaeologists are not always the best interpreter of excavated items. Akemi & Rika: Archaeologists like excavating sites and enjoying doing fieldwork. If they can excavate, then they are happy. For many archaeologists, it may not be important whether they work in Hokkaido or in Okinawa, as long as they are digging somewhere. However, for them, archaeology reveals Japanese history, not Ainu history. For us, finding archaeological sites is only the starting point—we want to know what really hap-

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The authors participated in the excavation of this chashi (Ainu ceremonial site) in Atsuma. Photo by George Nicholas.

pened in the past. Artifacts and other materials from archaeological sites are the primary means for learning about the past. However, we cannot be intellectually stimulated by archeology unless it provides previously unknown information about Ainu culture.

OTHER I SSUES Akemi & Rika: In preparing field reports, we sometimes felt it was wrong to use Ainu language in the text of archaeological papers. The words are correct, but often other Japanese archaeologists are less than careful with their full meaning. This bothered us. Before field excavations would begin, there would be prayers (a Kamuinomi ceremony), and there were also certain traditional Ainu taboos or prohibited behavior to respect. For example, there were some things women are never supposed to touch. This taboo was often broken by Japanese crew members, probably due to ignorance of Ainu culture. However, for us such taboos are still active, and so we wish to uphold them. I (Rika) told the staff about the women’s taboo, but was ignored.

F UTURE D IRECTION Hirofumi: After spending a year working in the CRM project at Atsuma, Akemi and Rika became more interested in the archaeology. At the same time, they felt frustrated in not being able to spend more time learning the Ainu language and culture.

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Akemi & Rika: Our much beloved grandmother is very important for us. She is the great teacher of our Ainu culture, a native Ainu speaker, a famous yukara [“storyteller”], and a traditional dance master. When we were wondering which direction we should go in life—toward archaeology or toward Ainu culture—we asked her opinion. Grandmother said that she wanted to pass down everything that she knows about the Ainu culture to us during her life. She also wanted us to keep learning the Ainu language, as it is the foundation of the Ainu culture. We therefore decided to follow her way of life and to quit working in the field of archaeology at the end of this year. We recognized the importance of learning the Ainu language all the more as the result of the year we spent doing archaeology and not studying Ainu culture.

C OMMENTARY Hirofumi: Who should archaeology (and history) be written for? In Japan, it was not until 2008 that the government finally recognized the Ainu people as an Indigenous people. This official status is now helping the Ainu to recover their dignity as an Indigenous population, with hopes for new policies and improved social conditions. However, in the field of archaeology, the researchers and scholars working in Hokkaido tend not to make the connection between what is represented in the archaeological record and the modern Ainu, who are the descendants of those who created that record. We should take it seriously that young Ainu today have a strong interest in their history but are unable to find much of value in archaeology. What is the point of the research in Hokkaido when Ainu people can find little meaning in the results regarding their heritage? Some may say that cultural heritage is public property and should not be monopolized by a certain social group. The Ainu are not demanding special treatment, only fair and equal access to their heritage. A colonial perspective still dominates the archaeology and history of Hokkaido—as it does elsewhere. In the process of interpreting the archaeology of Hokkaido, it is clear that Ainu perspectives and opinions have hardly been incorporated and that their history has been presented only as a part of the larger history of Japan. That is, Ainu history has just been an add-on to Japanese history. The Oshino sisters were strongly interested in the archaeology and told me that their interest persists.1 But they never felt that the archaeological research being conducted was teaching them anything new about Ainu culture. They were also uncomfortable with the lack of respect for the Ainu culture that they witnessed. This is an issue that require researchers and scholars to question why they do archaeology, how they do it, and for whom. They also need to think more carefully about how to be more effective and open in sharing the results of their research. They also need to ask how the process of archaeology, and its results, may affect or influence the communities in which they work. Finally, archaeologists need to consider what archaeology can contribute to Indigenous peoples’ cultures.

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Efforts are only now getting underway to develop archaeological approaches that are more satisfying to the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan (Kato 2009). I believe that there will be significant developments in the near future.

N OTE 1 Hirofumi reports that Akemi and Rika plan to return to university shortly.

R EFERENCE C ITED Kato, H. 2009 Whose Archaeology? Decolonizing Archaeological Perspective in Hokkaido Island. Journal of the Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University 4: 47–55. URL: http:// eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/37065/1/KATO.pdf (last accessed January 24, 2010).

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Photo by Maureen Pokiak

BEING AN INUVIALUK ARCHAEOLOGIST AND EDUCATOR FROM TUKTOYAKTUK

Myrna Pokiak was raised with the privilege of growing up practicing Inuvialuit traditions, as well as being exposed to the southern world. My parents, James and Maureen Pokiak, have raised me and my siblings, Jacob and Rebecca, so that we know our cultural traditions but are also capable of living away from home. My mom, a farm girl from Saskatchewan, moved to Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories (NWT) in northern Canada, to teach in the early 1970s. Here she met my dad, who grew up in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, where Inuvialuit have lived for generations. My parents raised us out on the land, in an area where my dad could hunt, fish, and trap for a living. My mom taught Jacob, Rebecca, and me our elementary and junior years of education. She was taught many of the Inuvialuit traditions from my dad’s mom, his sisters, and other women in the community. She and my dad have taught my brother, sister, and me many of the things passed on to them. For the most part, my family still practices Inuvialuit traditions but has adapted to the modern ways of life as well. I graduated high school from Tuktoyaktuk (also known as “Tuk”) but spent most of my high school years away from my home community and my parents. I lived in a resi-

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dential school in Inuvik, which is about 120 kilometers from Tuk. With my classmates, I visited areas of Mexico, Europe, and a number of countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea—Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Greece. I also studied in France for a semester in Grade 11, with the help and encouragement of my parents. During my years at residential school, I did return home for long weekends and school breaks throughout the years to participate with my family in many of the annual hunts, such as for geese and for whale. All of these experiences added to my upbringing, giving me the self-confidence to live away from home, yet leaving me with the knowledge needed to participate in Inuvialuit traditions as well.

L EARNING A RCHAEOLOGY During my first summer out of high school, I was hired as an archaeologist’s assistant at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, NWT, at a place called Cache Point. The crew of eight and I were uncovering centuries-old Inuvialuit sod houses. This was once a summer whaling village, about 500 years ago. Inuvialuit continue to hunt the beluga whale for subsistence purposes. The summer whale hunt is a very important time of year for Inuvialuit. As a summer student just out of high school, I was unfamiliar and inexperienced with the techniques and the overall job of an archaeologist. It was a new experience for me, one that took a lot of getting use to. A trowel was a new tool for me, and the daily use of it got tiring and often boring. It was not until the second summer that my appreciation and interests grew. I was given the opportunity to dig in an area that uncovered many treasures. This was the “working bench” of a sod house, as Max Friesen, the head archaeologist and professor at the University of Toronto, explained. Until my participation in the dig at Cache Point, I knew little of my ancestor’s way of life, even though I grew up practicing traditions passed down from them. I knew the current Inuvialuit culture, at least as I experienced it, but had very little knowledge of earlier times. I was intrigued by the thought of Inuvialuit living in sod houses and astounded by the huge number of sod houses at Cache Point and in the surrounding Tuk area. I was able to picture the sod house and the setup of the home after each area was uncovered. The midden was interesting, as it contained a lot of bone and broken tools that helped piece the puzzle together. Another student from Tuk uncovered five harpoon-head points in the midden: it was as if someone hid them in a bundle and between the logs in the wall for later use. The whale skulls, which were found in large numbers in and around the houses, were almost eerie. The presence of the whale bone helped me to see the importance of this animal and area to the Inuvialuit, both in the past and today. During the next two summers, after working as a student archeologist, I was hired by Parks Canada’s Western Arctic Field Unit. In this job I went on many trips within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. The farthest was on Banks Island, north of the mainland. I canoed down the Thompson River with a crew of six. We monitored archaeological sites and species of fish and bird. The Banks Island trip ended at a well-known site called Head Hill. Inuvialuit ancestors had used this area as a musk-ox hunting site. We mapped over

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300 musk-ox skulls at this site. As the crew and I were doing this, a few musk oxen roamed the area around us. It was an exciting experience to see them there. On another trip to Banks Island the following summer, I led a small archaeological survey team around Parks Canada’s base camp. We mapped several dozen archaeological sites. This was my first experience of being given such responsibility. It was something I enjoyed, and I appreciated the opportunity. I also participated in a huge archaeological survey of a section of Tuktut Nogait National Park. This is a beautiful park east of Paulatuk where the bluenose caribou herd give birth to their young. (Tuktut nogait is the Inuvialuktun name for “young caribou.”) I traveled and worked here for a month both summers with Parks Canada, which was a great experience. Over the two summers, 100 new archaeological sites were mapped in the park. With a crew of four during the first summer at Tuktut Nogait, we hiked from a base camp to areas where the head archaeologist hoped we would find evidence of human occupation. Sure enough, sites along creekbeds, small freshwater lakes, and rocky outcrops were found. Tent rings, food caches, caribou hunting sites with bone scattered throughout, and many hearths were remains that we came across. The scenery in this park is beautiful. We returned for a second summer, the same crew of four, plus two park wardens who canoed down the river with our gear. Four of us surveyed both sides of a portion of the Hornaday River on foot. We hiked approximately 10 to 15 kilometers daily. All but one day that we spent in the park was hot, sunny, and beautiful. Part of the time was also spent in a helicopter, searching for sites in areas that we could not walk to. I definitely prefer surveying over digging. The daily hikes, seeing many new archaeology sites, the beautiful scenery, and time for myself were what made this trip so rewarding.

The author during a fish survey on the Thompson River trip on Banks Island with Parks Canada. Photo courtesy of Myrna Pokiak.

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With Parks Canada, I also worked with archaeologist Elisa Hart on the Pingo Canadian Landmark outside of Tuktoyaktuk, surveying the entire area on foot. It was a great learning experience, as Elisa was a patient teacher with a lot of knowledge about Inuvialuit history. This was probably the most difficult survey of all, walking through lush vegetation with high willows and mosquitoes. Any breeze was appreciated. At the end, I had come to know many of the archaeological sites around Tuk, the area I grew up in. Until then, I had had no idea that many of these sites existed—sites like the reindeer corral, an icehouse (underground freezer), and reindeer herders’ cabins. It was insightful to see. Working for Parks Canada was an excellent way to learn about archaeology and the outdoors. Working outside was the most rewarding. All of these experiences doing archaeology increased my interest in anthropology, and I began to look for other possible related experiences I could take advantage of.

A U NIVERSITY E DUCATION AND M ORE In 1999, I enrolled in an anthropology program at Red Deer College in Alberta. This led to many new opportunities. For example, with ten other students from Canada, I spent twelve weeks in Oaxaca City, Mexico, where we studied anthropology and Spanish. We toured many cultural sites, including Monte Albán, Yagul, and Mitla, and visited many villages and observed celebrations such as the Day of the Dead. After returning to Canada from Mexico, I searched for universities that taught Inuvialuktun or a language related to it. The University of Alaska in Fairbanks was the only university that did so (for Inupiaq). In September 2000, I transferred to the anthropology program at the University of Alaska. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a minor in Alaska Native studies in May 2003. Although the Inupiaq language classes were not as strong and influential as I had hoped, I am able to carry on a basic conversation with my dad. When he calls me, we usually begin our conversation in Inuvialuktun, something I enjoy even if it is only one or two sentences. Inuvialuktun and Inupiaq are in the same language family, so when I speak Inupiaq, it is very similar to Inuvialuktun. Taking Inupiaq classes has also benefited me with work today. For a graduation gift, my uncle Boogie and my dad bought me a ticket to Barrow, Alaska, to meet our relatives. My great-grandfather’s family (from my dad’s mom’s side) is from Alaska, and I met many of the relatives who live there today. My uncle Boogie wanted me to write information on the Bowhead Whale hunt, which most community members were participating in at the time of my visit. I went out on the ocean ice with a hunting crew that was patiently waiting for a chance to go after a whale. It was a nice, calm, and peaceful day spent out on the ice at the edge of a lead. I could see the importance of the annual spring hunt to the families in Barrow. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the news from a successful crew. It was a great experience. The family in Alaska was very welcoming. As a parting gift, the brother of my great-grandfather, Charlie Kagak, gave me a beautiful muskrat parka that his mother made. After I graduated from university, I worked on the Inuvialuit Ethnobotany project for the summer, which was sponsored by the University of Laval.1 I traveled to all six

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Site recording. Photo courtesy of Myrna Pokiak.

Inuvialuit Settlement Region communities, where I interviewed elders and collected plant specimens. It was my first experience listening and partially understanding Inuvialuktun. I learned much from the Inuvialuit elder’s knowledge of plants. The Inuvialuit Ethnobotany Project was my last summer job. I began working for the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, NWT, in October 2003. I had worked there the previous summer on a website project called “Journey with Nuligak.” I did a lot of research for this project on Inuvialuit fishing, whaling, hunting, and many other topics. Before returning to university, I worked in the Education Department at the Heritage Centre. I developed an Inuvialuit education kit to be used throughout schools in the Northwest Territories. I have also conducted school programs and tours for the Heritage Centre. Another project I worked on extensively is an Inuvialuit Beluga Whale exhibit. This exhibit provides visitors to the Heritage Centre with a good idea of the Inuvialuit whale hunt in the past and today. The photographs, artifacts, and overall presentation of the exhibit are a great way to illustrate such an important tradition to the Inuvialuit. This is definitely an educational exhibit for visitors of all ages.

R ECENT E XPERIENCES AND O PPORTUNITIES Working in the Education Department at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre has sparked my interest in teaching. I had originally planned to do a master’s degree in anthropology, but my interests have changed. The research involved with the projects I have been working on, particularly about the Inuvialuit, has taught me a lot. The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre is a great place to research and learn about many of

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the Canadian northern cultures. The opportunity to work at the centre has provided me with a tremendous incentive to learn more about my heritage. There are a huge number of artifacts, written and oral documents, videos, and photographs housed at the Centre that I would not have known existed had I not worked there. I wanted to integrate my work experience and my knowledge of anthropology with teaching. In 2005, my boyfriend Eddie and I moved to Victoria, British Columbia so that I could pursue my degree in education at the University of Victoria. It was a comfort to have Eddie near, as he has made a huge difference in my life and has taught me some of the honest facts of life. In December 2006, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in education, and then, from January to June, taught students in Victoria about the Inuvialuit way of life. I moved back to Yellowknife and taught at Mildred Hall School, a Grade 4/5 class. After giving birth to my first daughter, Mya, I have begun a new career, as an Aboriginal education coordinator. This is a perfect fit for my interests, as it combines my anthropological, cultural, and teaching experiences. I believe my work and past university experience will contribute to my future success. Having experience in anthropology will also help me to teach students both the importance of their culture and the benefits of education. I realize the importance of reading and writing, but I also see how beneficial it is for students to learn about their values and beliefs and, most importantly, how to respect themselves and others. This, as I have learned, is best taught from the environment students live in. Teachers have the ability to be role models, especially in smaller communities. I grew up watching my mom work very hard at her multiple roles as wife, mother, and teacher. She worked hard to teach her students. She participated in many Inuvialuit traditions with the help of my dad. They ensured that my brother, sister, and I were given the opportunity to experience life in and outside the community and culture. The lessons and encouragement from my parents have definitely given me the skills I need to be where I am today. My career choices and educational opportunities stem from my first archaeology dig. The dig at Cache Point in the summer of 1997 introduced me to a whole new world. The summer jobs, particularly with Parks Canada and my two years with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, provided me with a great background in archaeology and anthropology. But I would not have gotten the interest or opportunities were it not for participating in annual Inuvialuit traditions with my family. I am grateful for the lessons my parents passed on and the life they continue to live. I would like to make others feel this way as well, and I think teaching is one way to do it.

N OTE 1 Inuvialuit Ethnobotany: Exploring the Relationship between People and Plants in the Inu-

vialuit Settlement Region (ISR), Northwest Territories (http://www.nasivvik.ulaval.ca/en/ inuvialuit-ethnobotany).

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Photo by Rudy Reimer/Yumks

N ACH ’ EN OR T RANSFORMING INTO A S QUAMISH N ATION I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGIST

Rudy Reimer/Yumks O'siyam en siyits, I chen tl’ik, Yumks kwe in sna, Skwxwú7mesh snachim, Chi’yak mesh, Snauq u’xwumixw, Rudy Reimer holatin snachim, an wanaxws ten skwalwen, chen ts’its’ap’ ya’kwnexw kwekw’in.’ Skwxwú7mesh Temixw, elksn, T’item’tsn, Sk’iw’itsut, Stlka’ya, Tsewi’lx, Elaho, Sts’ak’ay’s, Chi’yakmesh, Mámxwem. My English name is Rudy Reimer; my Squamish Nation ancestral name is Yumks. I carry these names with the pride of my ancestors and the cultures from which they came. Located near Vancouver, Squamish Nation territory includes all the lands and waters that drain into False Creek, Burrard Inlet, Indian Arm, and Howe Sound from the numerous landmarks of our sacred lands. am a member of the Squamish Nation and have been working in archaeology for fifteen years. I am interested in the archaeology of the Northwest Coast, Plateau, and sub-Arctic regions of western Canada. In particular, I study cultural landscapes, place-

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names, oral history, lithic technology and lithic sources, pre-contact settlement and subsistence patterns, and past, present, and future First Nations and provincial land-use and resource-management planning. In all these areas of research, I endeavor to increase the involvement of First Nations peoples in the methodology and theoretical development of archaeology. From my Squamish Nation background, I have learned that names are carried on behalf of families when they’ve determined you are suitable to take on the responsibility of upholding an ancestral name. By doing so, you carry that name in high regard and give it meaning by your actions and behavior. I do this by expressing my cultural background in archaeology, which is influenced by my experiences of the landscape that I am part of. I gain understanding of the archaeological record by learning about the place-names and oral history associated with places and the meanings they hold. To introduce myself in this manner is to do things right. Now that you know who I am and where I come from, I can relate to you in an appropriate manner that we can all respect.

M Y I NTRODUCTION TO A RCHAEOLOGY As early as I can remember, my interest in the past has been very strong. Fortunately, my family was fascinated by exhibits of archaeological materials, ranging from the possessions of King Tutankhamen to those of ancient China. To this day I still have indelible memories of these exhibits and fondly look back at them as integral experiences of discovering archaeology and experiencing firsthand the wonder of archaeological materials. Between the ages of five through twelve, I was guided to think about the past but without thinking of my own personal history. Having mostly grown up across many cities in Canada and away from Squamish Territory, I was outside of my culture for the first twelve years of my life. I was not sure who I was or where I came from. The schools that I attended glossed over Native history and focused on the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and especially the past 200 years of Canadian history. Things changed when my family moved from Calgary to Squamish, which is in southwestern British Columbia. At first I felt out of place, since I did not know the people or culture that I was part of. I quickly learned by participating in cultural ceremonies that things were very different in this new place, and I gained a sense of things being very old. For example, Squamish Nation elders talked about ancient events that did not exist in the textbooks I brought home from school. I thought that what I was being taught in school was incredibly interesting, but I could not relate well to the everyday experience of Canadian history or social studies classes. However, I learned that expressing these different ideas and experiences in secondary school was not important to the study of what was on the next test or necessary for getting the best grade in the class. I thought to myself that this was a flaw in the educational system, and I hoped that one day things would change to include a more holistic view of archaeology and history. I did not do well in secondary school; in fact, I barely graduated with the minimum educational requirements in English and the sciences. At the time, I did not care about

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this, since all I wanted to do was make money and contribute to the town’s economy by working either in the main industry of logging and milling or the emerging field of tourism. After many attempts to make my way working in these industries, I found myself asking: Is this right? Why am I doing this? What do people from around the world know about me and my culture and the values I have been taught outside of school? I plowed through many different jobs, eventually deciding that I wanted to go back to school to discover more about geology, since the landscape around Squamish is dominated by numerous volcanic features.

E ARLY S CHOOLING I decided to attend Capilano College first, to upgrade my skills in English, science, and mathematics. I enjoyed the first three years of post-secondary schooling. The learning experience and atmosphere were entirely different from those in secondary school. My fellow students in college expressed their ideas, and topics were discussed critically. I took the first two years of the geology program at Capilano College, at which point I needed to take calculus for the next set of courses in the program. I then proceeded to take the introductory calculus course but failed miserably. At the same time, I was enrolled in two anthropology courses. These classes became more and more interesting, as they included topics that I learned something about by going to museums and listening to my community’s elders and language speakers. After that semester I decided to focus more on anthropology, and, as luck would have it, that summer I discovered there was a local archaeological field school out in the Fraser Valley at the local historic fur trade post at Fort Langley. The field school changed my academic direction; I was immediately bitten by the archaeological bug. We learned not only about the fort’s recent history, but also that the site contained pre-contact materials extending back thousands of years. I reveled in the discovery of artifacts that people had used in their everyday lives millennia ago. A lot of my interest was honed by the field school instructor from Langara College, Stan Copp. Stan was a true archaeologist in every sense, wearing a denim jacket and carrying a trowel with him all the time. I wanted to be an archaeologist and dig sites all over the world. I was also fortunate to have many good friends and relatives in this field school, which made the experience all the more beneficial. After the field school, my cousin Kevin Rivers and I were lucky enough to get our first paid jobs in archaeology. We were hired by a consulting company called ARCAS which had secured a contract to conduct a salvage excavation at the famous Locarno Beach site, along the southern shore of Burrard Inlet near Vancouver. Kevin and I were ecstatic; we were doing archaeology and getting paid for it. The site is well known in Northwest Coast archaeology, as it had been the focus of many excavations over many years and served the basis for part of the local cultural historical sequence. The skills I obtained in field school were valuable on this job, so much so that ARCAS decided to hire me for other projects they had with the Squamish.

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WORKING IN CONSULTING A RCHAEOLOGY After attending Capilano and Langara Colleges for my first two years, where I focused on geology and anthropology, it was time to move on to Simon Fraser University (SFU) to continue schooling for my undergraduate degree in the Archaeology Department. I was intimidated by the campus and faculty at first but soon discovered that it was a highly specialized department with a diverse set of research interests. My fellow students enjoyed leaning as much as I, and we often continued our discussions at the campus pub. In fact, we learned as much in the pub as we did in the classroom, since the faculty and graduate students often met there for discussions following department seminars. My first year at SFU went by in a flash. But the challenges were much bigger than those in my college years, and I struggled in my scholastic work. After that first year, I realized I had to work much harder to make sure that I would become an archaeologist. During this time I was also frequently employed by the archaeological consulting community, as there was a lot of development occurring within Squamish Nation territory. This consulting work greatly aided my academic work, since I was readily able to take what I had learned in the classroom into the field and apply it to what we were examining, and vice versa. At first, I was enjoying the work and the people I studied under and worked with, but after a few years I began to realize that there were many failures in consulting archaeology. I began to feel that consulting was only part of a long checklist of assessments geared to facilitating development, and that true heritage site protection was going to be far more difficult than I anticipated. I was also witnessing firsthand the destruction of my traditional territory by logging, road building, residential construction, and mass tourism, along with numerous other impacts. I felt that I was just a small cog in the unstoppable machine of industrial progress. On occasion, we found things that were of high enough significance to stop a development outright, but these cases were few and far between. Doing archaeology had become a business in which the money was of great help to me while going through school, but I felt that I had lost sight of my original intentions in becoming an archaeologist—namely, to assist in the research, management, and protection of Squamish Nation cultural heritage. I had become angry at what I was doing and angry at the people involved in the process, yet I felt that anger would not solve things and unfortunately few options were available.

ACADEMIA AND C ONSULTING Just before finishing my bachelor’s degree at SFU, I was contacted by my good friend Geordie Howe at ARCAS Consulting. He had received an account from a fellow mountaineer who had come across a bunch of small, black shiny rocks that looked like artifacts way up high in the Coast Range Mountains of Squamish territory. We were to go on a “death march”to retrace the location of this supposed site. We set off early one fine morning to hike 2,000 meters up the side of Brandywine Mountain until we found a suitable base camp. The next day we set out to find the site, which to our amazement, we did—

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a lithic scatter site. We recorded the site and later discovered three additional sites on our way back to camp. I was totally amazed at these findings, since I recalled the many stories elders had told me and others about the use of the territory and its resources. Here was some direct evidence of this oral history that I had learned. I made sure to take numerous pictures so that I could show others what we had found. It took a few days to recover from the long hike in the Coast Mountains. As soon as my photos were developed, I rushed up to SFU. I immediately went to my geoarchaeology professor, Dr. Knut Fladmark, to show him the photos, as he had done similar work on sites in northern British Columbia at Mount Edziza. We were both very excited about these pictures, and I asked Knut a question that I had wanted to ask for some time. I thought this material was of interest to Northwest Coast archaeology since very little had been done in the mountainous areas of the region, and so I asked if he thought it would make a good master’s degree thesis topic. Knut did, and then agreed to supervise me. Doing my master’s thesis work was a revelation: running my own projects was a lot more work than just showing up in the field, doing the work, and then going home. At times there were also frustrating problems, such as getting the required permits from the provincial Archaeology Branch. Initially I found it difficult to ask permission from someone outside my culture to look at my culture and its history, especially when we had to examine claims to my territory by other groups. I had to refocus my thesis research a number of times to suit the requirements of organizations outside the culture I was studying. Another issue I had trouble with was getting people in my community to come out and help me in my research, especially since I was not offering any paid work and many in my community were unemployed and needed to focus on getting through the day and week and month. At this time, I did not realize how I could be in a position to help more people in my community; I was just worried about going through the steps to finish my degree. After two years of hiking and mountaineering in the coastal and interior ranges of British Columbia, analyzing the results, and then writing six drafts of my thesis, I defended my work in front of my committee, Professors Knut Fladmark, Roy Carlson, and Bob Mierendorf. It was a fun experience watched by many colleagues, friends, and family. After finishing my master’s thesis, I was given an ancestral name to carry. Thus I am also known as Yumks—the meaning of which is determined by the actions that I take while carrying that name. Receiving the name is a privilege and a great responsibility.

B UILDING C OMMUNITIES AND K NOWLEDGE After finishing my degree, I fell into a quandary of what to do next. I still wanted to carry on with academic work but needed a break to do something else. I continued to do consulting work, forming my own company, First Heritage Archaeological Consulting. Slowly the work and contracts came to me, and my reputation for quick, quality work paid off financially and professionally. I enjoyed much of the work but often felt that the clients for whom I worked failed to fully appreciate the findings and results of many of the studies I did. There were exceptions, but overall I felt no one really read my reports. Nonetheless, I was able to work with a few other Indigenous archaeologists during this time,

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Working with other Indigenous archaeologists. From left to right: Darryl Hobbes from Sechelt, Xanius/Elroy White from Bella Bella, and the author at the Sakinaw Creek midden and fish trap site, Sechelt territory. Photo courtesy of Rudy Reimer/Yumks.

including Johnnie Jones and Lex Joseph from Mt. Currie, Robert Sterling from Nicola/ Merritt, Charlene Allison from Upper Similkameen, Ed Thomas from Burrard, Simon Mack from Bella Coola, and Elroy White from Bella Bella. Working with these people helped me to stay focused on the positive outcomes of archaeology and learning to be an Indigenous archaeologist. By this time, the provincial government had begun the long process of the Sea-toSky Region Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP), which covered the area I lived and worked in. The goals of LRMP are to formulate management plans for governments and industry by zoning areas for use by communities, industry, and interest groups. The government had applied these plans to other areas of the province, with results that included input from First Nations communities; in some cases this worked well for everyone but in other instances fell far short of First Nations’ community interests. This planning process involved not only project design, but also balancing the needs of the forestry and tourism industries with environmental concerns. Many of the last stands of old growth forest1 in Squamish Nation territory were under threat of being cut down. These areas are widely acknowledged to be important places for ongoing cultural uses. Many interest groups in the Sea-to-Sky Corridor were going to have their say about these areas in the LRMP process, yet the Squamish Nation chiefs and council decided that we were to do our own land-use plan, with direct input from the Squamish Nation community.

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It was a huge task, especially in the short time we had to accomplish this plan before the province completed its process. We were fortunate to have an all-star team of land-use planners from Dovetail Consulting, Julia Gardener and Bryan Evans, along with a good friend, Drew Leathem, and many others who helped in getting the opinions of the community into a decisive and well-organized statement of Squamish Nation’s views on culture and heritage, forestry, tourism, air and water quality, and many other topics. Our land-use plan, Xay Temixw (“Sacred Lands”), surprised the local governments and industry with its strong and concise statement of Squamish Nation cultural views. In our land-use plan, the forestry industry and many other business activities would cease without the Squamish Nation’s input. At last I felt that I had been part of a project that not only included my interests, but also helped give voice to the community I worked for and lived in. The land-use document we developed in 2001 is still often consulted before developments and other activities in the region can proceed. In our plan, several areas were designated as “Wild Spirit, Sensitive and Rehabilitation” areas, reflecting the vision the Squamish Nation has for the use of land and resources within its territory, well ahead of the schedule and intentions of the provincial land-use management process. I continued to work in consulting but became more and more involved with the Squamish Nation community in planning, creating, and implementing culturally appropriate recommendations on how development projects could or could not proceed. For example, many large-scale projects were framed to include input from the Squamish

Working with the Squamish Nation elders on place-names and land use. Photo courtesy of Rudy Reimer/Yumks.

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Nation during project construction, use, and operation. I believe that consulting with and accommodating First Nations interests is integral to effectively incorporating the importance of culture and heritage within the modern reality of development and progress. People from the Squamish Nation have begun to see the results of their land-use plan and have been involved in many other projects, ranging from highways, forestry, microhydro facilities, and fisheries, to business and residential development. In the summer of 2002, I was approached by a colleague, Farid Rahemtulla, to coteach the University of Northern British Columbia’s archaeological field school with another colleague, Dave Hall. The field school was to closely involve the Cariboo Tribal Council at a site located on the shores of Gustafson Lake. We were not sure what to expect in this situation, since the area around Gustafson Lake was the location of an armed standoff between some of the local (and non-local) First Nations people and the RCMP and Canadian Armed forces in 1995. This conflict was over the area’s land use and ownership. Fortunately, the standoff ended without anyone dying, but tensions in the area were still high almost a decade later. No archaeological research has been done in this region, and we were to provide basic archaeological data, establishing a chronological framework and land and resource use over time. Yet both Dave and I felt it inappropriate for us to teach First Nations students their own culture. We were very fortunate to have the local Cariboo Tribal Council community elders, from Canoe Creek, Canim Lake, Alkali Lake, Williams Lake, and Soda Creek, in the field school curriculum. Elders from these communities made weekly seminar visits to pass along cultural knowledge of the area related to hunting, fishing, plant gathering and use, place-names, and oral history. It was this close community involvement and the discovery of a 7,500-year-old site that made this project a huge success. We were invited on tours of sites throughout the region, attended feasts and gatherings, and welcomed all into our field camp. The final feast held at our camp was attended by close to 200 people from the surrounding area, many of whom felt that they had reconnected to a part of their territory from which they had been alienated through an unfortunate series of events in years past. It is possible to incorporate community interests and archaeology together to form an alliance that speaks volumes for people and cultures. In the summer of 2003, it was announced that the Vancouver/Whistler bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics was successful. The reaction in the Squamish Nation community was varied: some welcomed the result, others threatened actions against it. Again, our leadership and community stood up to make the best possible result for our community. Both the Squamish Nation and our neighbors to the north, the Lil’wat First Nation, signed a protocol agreement to work together in any possible ventures that would benefit both communities. Through this protocol agreement, and by conducting many Aboriginal Interest and Use Studies (AIUS) in the Sea-to-Sky corridor, we strongly illustrated that our communities had to be meaningfully consulted and accommodated in the entire 2010 Winter Olympic planning, implementation, and participation processes. Our AIUS studies included much more than the standard provincial and federal environmental impact assessment requirements, in that they voiced the opinions of the communities of people we worked for. As a result of consultation and accommodation from

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these AIUSs, a number of so-called legacy packages were presented. The legacy packages included an agreement to protect certain areas for cultural use, and to provide employment, investment opportunities, land transfers, and funds. As part of the signed Shared Legacies Agreement formulated from the 2010 Winter Olympics, partial funding for a cultural center was provided. This will be a world-class facility and will help to present Squamish and Lil’wat Nations cultures to the world. Acknowledging our shared history in the Whistler area, the communities decided to name the cultural center Skwxwú7mesh Lil’wat7ul (Squamish-Lil’wat ).2 Together with a team of leadership, community youth, and culturally knowledgeable members, we are currently formulating a cultural inventory of the Squamish Nation. Currently, many artifacts from our Nation are located in numerous different museums and academic institutions. Eventually these collections will form the basis of the exhibits that will appear in this facility. It is a massive undertaking, but with the momentum of our success so far, and with the implementation of these plans, this place will be well known throughout the First Nations world and beyond. Many of these legacy packages have now proceeded from planning to implementation. The studies that my colleagues and I wrote have had a direct and positive impact on the communities we represent. We all thus feel very fortunate to have been a part of these projects. Again, I feel that I contributed to a large-scale project that was aimed at involving and building a community, my community of the Squamish Nation.

C URRENT WORK AND F UTURE D IRECTIONS After attending numerous conferences, reading many articles, and even writing a few book reviews on Indigenous archaeology, I felt I had still more to contribute to my field of study. In addition, the years of consulting work I had done resulted in a large number of personal research projects and data sets that needed integration into the regional archaeological record. In order to pursue these ends, I applied to continue my academic career at McMaster University through a Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. Aubrey Cannon. My goal is to incorporate Squamish Nation oral history and place-names into archaeological settlement patterns and resource use as a means to better plan for present and future land and resource use. Over the fifteen years of being involved in archaeology, the process of not only discovering archaeology but becoming closely involved with my culture and its people has made it possible for me to be and become an Indigenous archaeologist and to make a difference to past, present, and future communities. Upon finishing my Ph.D. at McMaster University, I will begin a tenure-track position at the First Nation Studies and Archaeology Departments at Simon Fraser University, where I wish to continue being and becoming an Indigenous archaeologist. Huy chexw a (“Thank you”).

N OTES 1 This refers to forested areas that had never been logged. 2 More information about the cultural center can be found at www.slcc.com.

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Photo courtesy of Makere Rika-Heke

H AERE T IKA T ONU A TU — K EEP G OING F ORWARD

Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke Ko Tainui Te Waka

Tainui is the Waka (from which I descend)

Ko Taupiri Te Maunga

Taupiri the sacred Mountain

Ko Waikato Te Awa

Waikato is the River

Ko Potatau Te Tangata

Potatau is the Ancestor (and First King)

Waikato Taniwharau

Great Waikato of many monsters, of many Chiefs

He Piko He Taniwha

A great monster (A Chief) at every bend (of the river)

He Piko He Taniwha

A great monster (A Chief) at every bend (of the river)

I Te Taha Toku Papa

On my Father’s side

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Ko Ngatokimatawhaorua Te Waka Ngatokimatawhaorua is the Waka Ko Whakaangi Te Maunga

Whakaangi the sacred Mountain

Ko Pupuke Te Awa

Pupuke is the River

Ko Parata raua ko Puhi oku Tupuna Parata and Puhi are the eponymous Ancestors Ngapuhi nui tonu-hi aue!!!

Long live Great Ngapuhi forever more!!!

He mihi nui ki a koutou

This is my greeting to you all, in the way of my people

Ko Makere Rika-Heke au

I am Margaret Rika-Heke (who am I?)

n my mothers’side of the genealogical line, I am a child of Waikato Tainui— principally Ngati Mahuta, Ngati Te Ata, and Ngati Koroki on the biological side, and Ngati Paoa-Waikato on the whangai1 side, with some Parininihi Ki Waitotara from Taranaki thrown in for good measure. On my father’s side I am principally Nga Puhi and Ngati Kahu, with ancestors who hailed from Mangakahia, the Hokianga, and Whangaroa. The second thing I would have you know is that I am intensely proud of my heritage, my surname, and my whakapapa (“genealogy”). My surname is one to be proud of and one that carries with it a rich tapestry of history. Several of my father’s direct ancestors, including two female rangatira (“hereditary chieftains”), signed the Treaty of Waitangi, our country’s founding document. Decades later, these same chiefs waged war against European and pakeha (European New Zealander) colonists, becoming known as the Northern Triumvirate. According to family tradition, my paternal great-grandfather, Te Hau Takiari Wharepapa, was one of the last northern cannibal chiefs, who in his younger days had travelled to England to meet with Queen Victoria and was painted by both Goldie and Lindauer.2 Likewise, several of my mother’s ancestors were also chiefs of war and industry; they too were painted by Goldie and Lindauer. The fiercest of them reputedly was my mother’s maternal great-great grandfather, Te Aho o Te Rangi Wharepu, architect and war chief of Rangiriri Pa, if family lore is to be believed. I want to be clear that I say all this not in an attempt at mana acquisition, nor to be whakahihi (“a show off”). Instead, I make these statements to acknowledge and honour my Tupuna3 without prejudice just once, without fear of being e te kai kumara reka (“the kumara [‘sweet potato’] who speaks of its own sweetness”).4 If not for the sacrifice of those men and women, I would not be here or be able to do what I do. Every Maori is born to a particular whakapapa. In any given setting, Maoris are expected to recite their whakapapa either in short or long form, so as to place themselves in our world and amongst the people. Not to do so is the utmost form of disrespect. Though I have always been intensely proud of my whakapapa and my heritage, I have also been at times deeply ashamed of other people’s responses and reactions to the family name. Some people have ridiculed and belittled my last name by finding humour in mangling the pronunciation. Pakeha teachers, in particular, used to find

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Te Hau Takiari Wharepapa (right) with Te Tuahu from Lake Tarawera (left). Photo courtesy of P. Parsons Album, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Portrait of Te Aho o Te Rangi Wharepu. Photo courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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doing so amusing at school prize giving, to the point where I actively dreaded hearing my name called out. Others have fawned over my surname, being overtly enamoured with it and, at times, rudely inquisitive, which occasionally happened during school visits to the Auckland Museum and art galleries. Others still have actively hated me for no other reason but my surname and for my failure to conform to their expectations.

S O W HY B ECOME AN A RCHAEOLOGIST ? Many have inquired but few have ever really bothered to listen to what I have to say on why I became an archaeologist. I thus take great care in setting the record straight. I have always wanted to be an archaeologist—from the age of five, I knew for certain that that was what I was going to be when I grew up. It’s all I have ever wanted to do, all that has ever really interested me or commanded my attention. Some may consider that a bit “off,” but as I’ve been told on numerous occasions, I was a really weird child, always asking questions, always reading books, and doing peculiar things that were considered a bit different. Like the time I conducted a home science experiment brewing ginger beer and blew up the hot water cylinder—I was nine years old. I can remember as a kid being intrigued with the past, forever thinking about the olden days, about what the land would have looked like in pre-European times and about the stories and deeds attributed to my waka5-voyaging ancestors—rather intense, admittedly, but that was the kind of stuff I was interested in as a kid and still am. I doubt that anyone ever took me seriously early on, be they whanau or otherwise. Now, of course, everybody knows I was serious because I followed it through. Like my Nan always said, “So let it be said, so let it be done.” Many Maori who read this may be especially horrified by the fact that I genuinely feel more comfortable around taonga or wahi tapu6 than I do around people. I just do. So where did that come from? People tend to assume that I caught the archaeology bug from watching one too many Indiana Jones movies, or that I blundered my way into it after being overtly colonised by a mainstream pakeha education system. Not so. Even now, there are those amongst the wider whanau and amongst my tribal confederation base who think I am a bit porangi, a bit gone in the head, for pursuing archaeology. Very few Maori actually take the time to ask me about my motivations and why I gravitated towards the discipline. Instead of actually asking me kanohi ki te kanohi 7 (“face to face”), they are seemingly content to make snap judgements based on their own prejudice and limitations. For the record, and I’m being honest, my motivations for becoming an archaeologist are tied to memories I would rather bury. They’re painful to conjure and are still quite raw; even grown as I am, they still manage to make me flinch. Mostly they’re recollections about my maternal grandmother and the stories she told me regarding the evils perpetrated against our peoples. My mother’s whangai mother, Miria Ruha Ruha Hohaia, was from Waikato Tainui, the daughter of Pekatawa Ruha Ruha Hohaia and Rawi Howard. She was in every sense of the word a matriarch, a survivor of a displaced generation and a dignified Maori woman not

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easily moved to tears. When she walked into a room, you knew she was there; when she was present, you minded your manners and you kept it clean. No booze, no smokes, no cards, and, by god, no swearing or, heaven help you, she’d go for the soap and wash your mouth out—I should know. Skinny Nan, as we called her, played a significant part in the shaping of my personality and in honing my ethical compass. It is she to whom I attribute my conservative streak and love of old epic movies like Ben Hur. One of the most profound memories that comes to mind when thinking about my grandmother concerns the final resting place of some of our tupuna on Taupiri Maunga.8 When I was young, my grandparents were always on the move. Since we stayed with them a lot in those days, where they went we were sure to follow. We went everywhere with them: to watering holes, to visit the volcanic cones dotted around greater Auckland, to the beach, to the bush—you name it, we tiki toured it.9 One trip in particular that I used to get real hoha (“bothered”) doing was the random pilgrimage to Taupiri Maunga, mainly because it was really hard to sit still for the long journey and even harder to behave if the four of us mokos (“grandkids of my generation”) had to squash up in the car. Anyhow, my grandmother had this funny kind of ritual she’d do each time we went to Taupiri. She would walk in the gates, turn right, and proceed along the fence line maybe 50 or 60 meters, and then stop at this fencepost. Then she’d walk back and forth slowly a few times staring at the grass, then hover over a certain spot and tangi (“cry”) for ages. As a child, that sort of carrying on struck me as quite odd, but it wasn’t until I was older that I realized the cause of her pain and heard the story behind Nan’s sadness. According to my mother, back in the old days when the government had put the railway tracks and state highway through, some bright spark thought it would be okay to bulldoze straight across the lower reaches of Taupiri Mountain. As a consequence, countless low-lying burials were desecrated and all but obliterated, some of which belonged to my whanau (“family”10). The government of the day knew that Taupiri was (and still is) revered as a sacred mountain and burial place for all of Tainui waka. They knowingly went ahead and put the road through, not giving a damn about us or our loved ones. The injustice of Raupatu (tribal confiscations by the colonial government), the blasé attitude towards wholesale desecration like that, coupled with the visage of my Nan going through the motions of her ritual, deeply affected me growing up. To this day I cannot stand shoddy treatment like that and can be especially combative when pricked by racial slights. So my grandmothers’ story is a large part of the reason why I chose to become an archaeologist; it is to ensure that no one could ever get away with doing that kind of thing to us ever again. I also chose to become an archaeologist because I found myself at odds with the way in which heritage management and archaeological research was being conducted in this country. The lack of real decision-making powers over our own heritage wreaks havoc with my mind—that and the fact that 80% of the heritage in this country is Maori, yet non-Maori hold the majority of custodial power over it. It is 2009 and we are still waiting for an identifiably Maori regional archaeologist to be appointed, the one person, aside from the minister for environment, with permissive powers to authorise or decline the destruction of significant sites. With that in mind, one could say

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I deliberately set out to become an agent of change where possible, my rationale being that if the structure was not working, then I would change it to make it work for Maori. That, of course, is a work in progress.

B ECOMING A M AORI A RCHAEOLOGIST In terms of education, school was a necessary evil. Now most people, including family members, assume I loved going to school, but the truth is far less ingratiating, in that I actually found school mind-bogglingly boring and monotonous. My primary and intermediate schools were as expected, necessary steps in the process. But it was during my high school years that I got serious about academic achievement and started mapping my way to university. I would characterise my high school years as being difficult but bearable. Though I loved learning and had an aptitude for it, I disdained the European bias of the curriculum’s subject matter. I also hated having to regurgitate antiquated subject matter I knew to be incorrect, and I disliked being made to conform. By the time I got to fifth form, all my cousins and 97% of my Maori and Polynesian peer group had dropped out of school. Only four ethnically Maori students made it to senior year (seventh form) and left with all their certificates; of these, only two, including myself, self-identified proudly as Maori. Being outnumbered wasn’t so much of an issue except that I can remember feeling terribly isolated and lonely at times. One thing that has always bothered me about those years was the treatment dished out to me and others (Maori and Pacific Island students, in particular) by certain teachers who were blatantly racist. I can recall one teacher telling me to my face that in ten years’ time, I would be working at McDonalds or waiting on tables. I recall another teacher telling me I wasn’t bright enough to go to university and that there was no need to apply because I was benefit bound. Yet another told me that my archaeological aspirations would never amount to anything because no Maori had ever done something like that before. Time and again I encountered this type of mentality, which irritated me greatly, seeing as many of my peers were vulnerable to these negativities and more often than not dropped out because of it. Luckily enough, I was fortunate to encounter at least one good teacher who pushed me to succeed, to focus on achievement, and to view education as a tool. Thank you, Mr. Lees. University was a whole other ball game, one for which I was not fully prepared. During my very first undergraduate year at the University of Auckland in 1998, my parents sent me to Grafton Hall, a student residence in the city of Auckland, which at that time housed mainly medical students and a few others doing specialist courses. My parents had sent me there in the hope that I’d be able to concentrate on my studies and not be distracted by outside influences. This was important to them because I was the first in my generation and my very immediate whanau to have gone to university at that stage. Though grateful to my parents, I found the atmosphere at Grafton Hall uncomfortable at best. There were maybe five Maori student residents, but only three of us identified as being Maori; the others didn’t even want to associate or be seen with us. That was

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an eye-opener for me, seeing other Maori who were ashamed of their heritage and trying to pass as pakeha—I guess there’s a first time for everything. In addition to this, I found being away from my whanau emotionally disturbing; it really affected my ahua (“my spirit”), and as a consequence I got really homesick, so I started trekking home to Manurewa on weekends and then any chance I could after that. I managed to stick the year out and finish my courses, but I returned home that summer and never looked back. I would characterise my university years as being a mixed bag of trials, tribulations, and good times. I spent a total of four years at university, specialising in archaeology, experimental material culture, and geomorphology. At a time when the majority of Maori students entering university veered towards Maori studies, I chose to pursue ancient languages and field excavation techniques. Those choices didn’t exactly endear me to various members of the Maori collective on campus, and a few problems ensued as a result. Though not overt at first, there was a definite air of disapproval that coloured some of my interactions with other Maori students. The situation progressed from instances of being politely ignored to being openly sniggered at, spat on, berated publicly, singled out for verbal attacks, and even, on one occasion, getting into a physical altercation with another person who tried to assault me. At the time, I found these experiences highly upsetting; that they were instigated by my own people was a doubly bitter blow. What many of those Maori students did not consider at the time was that not only was I suffering that sort of treatment from them, but I was simultaneously receiving similar treatment from their pakeha counterparts. The only difference was that their pakeha counterparts waged a smaller-scale but sustained psychological effort, most notably in the form of small slights and double-edged comments. Sadly, negative experiences were also not restricted to the student body—teachers and other institutional powers made life difficult as well. Though I won’t go into great detail about the difficulties I encountered, I will say that I will always retain an ounce of bitterness for some of the things they put me through. Once out of the university setting and into the real world, things got infinitely more complicated. I started writing academic papers, going to conferences, and working as an independent archaeological contractor. Gradually I built up my field portfolio and experience cache, working throughout the North Island of New Zealand and even sometimes in Australia. In the real world, there are roadblocks and obstacles; we have no choice but to navigate through them. One such obstacle that has always angered me is the double dose of prejudice directed towards Indigenous archaeologists like myself. This was brought home to me in 2005 after I had just finished giving a paper at a conference regarding archaeology and indigeneity. Soon after, a Hui a Maori (“Maori gathering”) was called. At that meeting, some of us were given a public dressing down because we had dared to give papers with controversial content. Straight after that but behind closed doors, those very same people who had led the charge in ripping us apart came seeking our help and advice. That kind of hypocrisy I soon came to find was quite normal. On one hand, our own people denigrate us if we appear too pakeha-ified, and yet pakeha turn on us if we seem too Maori or if we adhere to our own cultural tenets and ethics. It is a precarious position.

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Nasty comments were and still are commonplace; dealing with them requires a certain amount of stoicism. Some of the worst insults that have been aimed at me include “bone digger,” “grave robber,” “beige bunny,” “mallow puff,” “plastic Hori,” “house nigger,” and “race traitor.” For those of you unacquainted with the local colloquialisms, a mallow puff is a type of biscuit, but is also a racial slur used to denote someone with brown skin on the outside but white skin on the inside. “Beige bunny” is also a derogatory term, one that is often used to describe light-skinned women of mixed Maori parentage and spurious reputation. “Plastic Hori” is a term akin to mallow puff, the literal translation being “plastic George,” meaning the person in question is of malleable character—thus a fake Maori. In terms of consultancy work, the heritage industry is an extremely tough sphere in which to operate—more so if you’re Maori. For a start, it’s a very small industry, with approximately 120 or so mainstream consultant archaeologists, a handful of whom are Maori. Lecturing and museum jobs are hard to come by, being almost impossible to secure without at least ten years of experience. Secondly, the bigger companies tend to monopolise much of the work because they have faster turnover rates. It’s also a tough business because of the time lag between contracts, which means that if you’re a small operator, you have to work constantly to stay solvent and/or budget for the lean season. Many people seem to be under the impression that archaeologists make mega bucks, but the reality is that fledgling contractors barely make ends meet. The pay is good whilst you work, but work isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes clients refuse to pay for work done if they disagree with your report, or they try to harangue you into rushing an excavation to meet their timelines. For Maori archaeological consultants, it is twice as hard to operate as a contractor. Using myself as an example, I will try to illustrate some of the challenges faced by the young Indigenous archaeologist. When I started out, there were only four Maori archaeologists in the entire country working full-time as consultants. Initially after I left university, I enjoyed almost continuous employment, working with different crews and in different environments across the North Island. It wasn’t unusual for me to be the only brown face on an excavation crew; it didn’t particularly faze me and I enjoyed the work. However, as I built up my field portfolio, I started noticing a few things that didn’t seem quite right. I came to realise that on some jobs I was being used as the token Maori, partly for show and partly to smooth things over with hau kainga (“local”) Maori. I also found disturbing the quiet disregard for cultural protocols exhibited by certain individuals and project managers. As my consciousness solidified through these experiences, so did the need to assert certain ethical standards. The following are some of my personal ethics: 

Work only within my tribal boundaries.

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Respect the wishes of the hau kainga and the protocols they lay down.

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Respect the tenets of tapu (“tenets of sacredness and sanctity”).

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Do not take anything from tapu areas.

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Beware of tohu (“signs of or from the spirit world”).

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No working come nightfall.

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Build relationships, not case studies.

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As a matter or record, I have never worked on projects or in areas that weren’t traceable to my whakapapa (genealogy). This means that I have always worked within my own tribal boundaries and thus on my own wahi tapu and/or taonga. Oddly enough, things seem to have had a habit of working out that way. Many a time I have undertaken a job only to find out that the excavation site is highly pertinent to my family history, being either a place where an ancestor once lived or visited once upon a time. That kind of selfimposed restriction has been a boon and a curse. It has kept me relatively safe from physical, emotional, and spiritual harm, but it has also restricted my work base and thus my professional operating capacity. The complexities of ethical standards have also proved challenging, in that it has been difficult to keep my indigeneity from being subsumed by the pressures of work or by the non-Maori world. I have really worked hard not to compromise my cultural integrity, and at the same time have struggled to maintain my professional capacity. One thing I will say is that, more often than not, integrity doesn’t pay the bills, but it does allow one to sleep at night.

A DVICE FOR I NDIGENOUS P EOPLE P URSUING A RCHAEOLOGY For Indigenous academics in the making, I can only offer small snippets of advice. I will try not to fall into the trap of cliché, but can’t guarantee it. If you are going to become an archaeologist: 

It will be a hard road to travel and on occasion you will falter.

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Try to stand strong and walk tall.

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Do not bow to the antagonisms of others, and do not let your voice be drowned out.

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Silence will cripple you and eat at your soul, so be the mouthpiece and the tool.

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Maintain your dignity and keep your word.

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Remember that you are not alone, that your ancestors walk beside you. In times of despair, do not lose heart. If they had the strength to survive colonisation, then you have the fortitude to see things through.

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Don’t let others project labels onto you. Be your own person and develop all sides of your person.

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Try not to forget your Indigenous self. To step into the future you must look to the past.

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View education as a tool, embrace it, and arm yourself, so that you can be an intellectual warrior for your people.

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Be active, and not a passive bystander. Have the courage of your convictions. The sheer fact that you exist is a powerful form of resistance in itself.

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Ignore the slights and the humiliations; they are merely tests of character and heart. When you feel marginalised and alone, just know that you are not the first to have felt so.

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When all is said and done, remember your humility, respect, honour, integrity, and your word.

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Lastly, actions speak a truth louder than words, so tread carefully. Kia Whakaiti, Kia Rangimarie, Kia Tupato (“Humility, Peace and Mindfulness”)

N OTES 1 A Maori term meaning to foster or adopt, usually the children of close kin. Incidentally, I have

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provided the translations as best I could, given that Maori is typically poetic in prose and not given to literal translations. Gottfried Goldie and Charles Frederick Lindauer were prolific portrait painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were inspired by Maori motifs. They painted numerous Maori chiefs, all key historical figures. Those portraits have now become legendary artworks famed throughout New Zealand and Australasia. Ancestors along the genealogical line. An old Maori proverb about those who speak too highly of themselves and therefore show off, which is considered bad manners and a disgraceful form of behaviour. A watergoing vessel used to transport people or goods, most commonly a canoe. These are, respectively, treasures, but in an archaeological context, it pertains to artifacts and places of significance and/or sacred places. This is the primary form of communication considered acceptable in Maori society. Maunga refers to a sacred mountain and tribal landmark. That is, making a journey or visitation; the need to take a trip to keep the home fires burning. More fully, the family, kin, and those who share your familial and tribal connections.

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INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGY IN MEXICO

Photo by Aciel Sanchez

R ECOGNIZING D ISTINCTIVE H ISTORIES

Nelly M. Robles García fter several decades of writing about archaeological themes and the world of heritage conservation, it was gratifying to receive an invitation to write about my personal experiences within a new field called “Indigenous archaeology.” The nature of scientific disciplines varies in each society, each country, and each historical context, and this is certainly true of archaeology. Over the years, the discipline has diversified into a great number of subfields. Within Mexico, we now even have such new areas of research as underwater archaeology, colonial-era archaeology, and industrial archaeology. At this time, however, Indigenous archaeology—as defined by the participation of the Indigenous peoples (Watkins 2001)—does not yet exist here. This is primarily because being Indigenous is not restricted to a minority but represents a large middle class. Mestizaje, or racial mixing, in Mexico has been so

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prevalent that there are few examples of Indigenous peoples outside of the generalized mestizaje of Mexico. This essay provides me the opportunity to express what it is to be part of, or connected to, the Indigenous world through archaeology in Mexico. Here the majority of archaeologists, including myself, are mestizo—of mixed indígena (Aboriginal) and Spanish heritage. This is the result of historical circumstances that began in 1519 with the conquest and colonization of Mexico by the Spanish Crown. The Spanish entered a land populated by an enormous number of highly complex and sophisticated cultures, including the great Aztec Empire in the center of Mexico, Mayan cities on the Yucatán Peninsula, Totonac cities in Veracruz, and Zapotec and Mixtec cities in Oaxaca. The lives of these people were soon violently disrupted through bloodshed and epidemics. Most of the population was evangelized, and the leaders who survived the bloody conquest were baptized and converted to the new religion, and obligated to place entire communities at the service of the conquerors. The bulk of the population passed from being vassals of the Indigenous empires to being slaves and servants of the Spanish colonizers. Following the conquest, people of mixed race were subjected to discrimination in direct relation to their level of racial purity; those with more Indigenous blood were treated most poorly. Nonetheless, what emerged in Mexico was very much a mixed race. This background is necessary to understanding the nature of Mexican society, of the developing role of archaeology within it, and finally my own personal history as a mestizo archaeologist.

C ONTEXTUALIZING A RCHAEOLOGY IN M EXICO The establishment of the Mexican republic in the early 20th century had a definite impact on the formation of its federal institutions and on the role that archaeology would come to have. The archaeological record is considered a national resource, one deliberately designed to support the interests and identity of the major elements of the population. As a result, the opportunities that exist today for enrolling in the study of anthropology and archaeology in Mexico are largely due to the successes that the working class achieved through major social movements, such as the independence movement and the Mexican revolution. The working class is overwhelmingly composed of a broad gamut of mestizos, upon which has fallen the historic role of struggling for collective social benefits. The creation of the mestizaje that has occurred among the Indigenous population and the Spanish conquerors throughout the centuries of colonialism, combined with the political activism of the mestizos, has reduced the gap between Indigenous and nonIndigenous access to education and scientific training. In academia today, the character of archaeology is strongly mestizo in orientation. For this reason, archaeological research has generally paid little attention to such themes as identity, contemporary ethnic affiliation, ownership, or respect for ancestors, which would be of interest and value to Indigenous peoples; instead, discussions between archaeologists and communities focus on such

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issues as the possession and exchange value of archaeological objects, and the authoritarian behavior or the lack of action in preserving heritage on the part of institutions. There is also the relationship between archaeology and indigenismo, which has been a topic of discussion since the early 20th century. Some scholars have promoted the need to understand Indigenous origins and values in order to develop a richer interpretation of diverse archaeological discoveries.1 Perhaps the best example of this is Manuel Gamio’s anthropological study, La población del valle de Teotihuacán (1923 [1979]), which made the scientific community aware of the social and economic marginalization of Mexico’s Indigenous populations. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) was established in 1939 with the objective of bringing together within its structure one of the nation’s greatest resources, its historical and archaeological heritage. The mandate of the INAH has been to investigate, conserve, and disseminate materials and information relating to archaeological and historical patrimony, and to conduct anthropological, linguistic, ethnohistorical, and biological anthropological studies throughout the country. The creation of the INAH provided the setting in which Mexican anthropology was born, but also has helped to perpetuate the discipline through two colleges associated with it, the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) and the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía (ENCRyM). These offer many different courses in anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, architectural restoration, and museum studies. Admission to both schools, which is a great opportunity, is open to individuals of any social class or background. This, then, is the backdrop of archaeology in Mexico, and of the general nature of the relationship between the mestizaje and the indigenismo. My origins are partially Indigenous, and my access to university studies owes much to my hard-working middle-class parents, who were teachers and political activists. These circumstances gave me the fundamental ingredients for the study of any scientific discipline.

B EING A C HILD A NTHROPOLOGIST I am a native of Ayoquezco de Aldama, Zimatlán Oaxaca, Mexico. I was born seventh, a daughter in a line of nine brothers, children of rural teachers both of Mixtec heritage. My maternal grandparents were still 100% Mixtec-speaking, while my father’s side was a more racially mixed, Spanish-speaking family. Ever since I was small, I showed a strong and restless personality. My parents were both teachers, and I took advantage of the environment that surrounded me. As a child I always showed an inclination toward writing. My stories, sometimes written in the third person, were about things that happened to me in school or elsewhere or about magical and marvelous places. Sometimes these stories involved fictitious friends, and sometimes even ancient gods. Because my parents were employed by the Office of the Secretary of Public Education (SEP), we frequently moved between many different towns in the Valley of Oaxaca. This is how I came into contact with Native peoples and with the marginalized children of those communities.

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During my childhood in the 1960s, the teachers working in rural communities had a lot more responsibility than they do today. Back then, the teacher’s house was always a place of refuge. The teachers had many different roles: paramedics, nutrition counselors, conflict mediators, and community leaders. They also helped adults learn to read. At that time, a high percentage of the population of Oaxaca was illiterate, so the need to educate adults was as great as it was for children. The influence and responsibility the teachers had were equal to, if not greater than, that of the local priests. As a child, I quickly became familiar with the problems of poverty, health, nutrition, education, and marginalization that affected the communities of Oaxaca. The teachers tried to alleviate food shortages in the communities by applying to international relief programs such as the Alliance for Progress, which was established by the United States in the 1960s to provide social and financial assistance to Latin America. This offered some relief. There were also many health problems, including widespread childhood malnutrition and a lack of adequate medical treatment for such epidemic illnesses as measles, whooping cough, and poliomyelitis, among others. These were problems associated with the remote villages, where there were no roads and no doctors. I was deeply affected by the illness and then death of a young girl who was my same age. These events led me to take refuge in writing. Another problem communities faced was alcoholism, which was very common among the adult men, most noticeably at night and during weekends. It was difficult to witness the seemingly endless consequences of alcohol: crime, child abuse, and violence toward the women. Drinking also led to negligence and also frequent injuries—from falling down, being swept away by rivers, from fighting bulls, or street fighting. It was the teachers who responded in these accidents. Invariably the injured were brought to our house; sometimes the men died due to lack of hospital attention. Within these communities, there was also a basic, essential mandate to defend their land from encroachment by others. Several times we witnessed men and women leaving their village to fight. They would bring out hidden weapons and then go out to confront those from neighboring villages who had crossed the boundary into their land. Sometimes people got injured or died; all of them invariably were brought before the authority and the teachers. This experience helped me to understand the enormous importance of community life and the great value placed on their land. In these communities, I learned that women were often the head of the family because the men had left to find work. This helped to alleviate the poverty. The Bracero program, a temporary contract labor program between Mexico and the United States (1942–1964), was still in effect. Therefore, it was very common to find women alone, caring for many children, taking care of the home and the fields, and growing corn for the community. In this way they provided the basic necessities to feed numerous families. I was deeply impressed by the local customs in these simple communities, especially the rituals associated with death. In Ayoquezco and other villages in the Valley of Oaxaca, the death of a community member always brought (and still does today) everyone together for the funeral service. The deceased would be wrapped in a simple mat of palm, which was tied with rope. Everyone would pay their respects, amidst a lot of cry-

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ing, flowers, smoke of resin, prayers, songs, and the food that had been prepared by all the members of the village. Then the deceased was carried through the town to say farewell to everyone, in a long procession that was led by a band of musicians, the priest, and the family. They would stop at the most symbolic places (the plaza, the temple, the store, the deceased’s house), where music was played and flower petals thrown. All this before being carried to the cemetery, where other members of the community had prepared the tomb—one of the reciprocal acts of village life. Years later I was sent to the National Preparatory School, which is part of the University of Mexico, in Mexico City, to begin my high school studies. At that time, my interests were in the humanities: logic, philosophy, literature, history, and Italian and English languages. I now see that the cultural experiences I had in childhood and adolescence provided the direction for my professional life. When I was at high school, I watched the great restoration project of the wall murals in the precinct (Old School of San Ildefonso), which had been created by the great Mexican muralists—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Ramón Alva de la Canal y Fermín Revueltas—during the golden age of muralism around 1920. This is also when I first learned about the conservation of cultural heritage. I don’t know how many hours I spent watching the skilled hands of the restoration experts as they restored life to the large murals, which had been covered for decades for political reasons. This was another experience that helped shape my later career as an archaeologist. When I finished high school, I was drawn to the beautiful and majestic National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I discovered that the ethnographic collections were full of objects that were completely familiar to me. It was there that I decided I would study anthropology. I enjoy the study of archaeology and the pleasure of fieldwork, of living again with villagers, and exploring ancient history. Few situations give me as much enjoyment as walking through the country, observing the landscape, talking with the people, and watching and participating in the Day of the Dead, the Feast of the Virgin Juquila, town festivals, and other traditions. In such events I can join with the people of Oaxaca in celebrating the eternal links between the past and the present, between life and death, and between the real and the supernatural. One of my first true archaeological experiences came in 1977, soon after I began to study anthropology. By pure luck I was visiting Mitla, a prehistoric cave site in the Valley of Oaxaca, where I met Dr. Kent Flannery, who was giving a tour to historian Manuel Esparza, then the director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Oaxaca. Dr. Flannery talked about the nature of the relationship between people and their environment during the Archaic period in Oaxaca, and I found myself trying to imagine the hunter-gatherers who had utilized the spectacular cave we were in. This was a memorable experience for me, one that I try to share with students today. These episodes were all part of my introduction to the world of anthropology and archaeology—the pleasures of fieldwork coupled with an early awareness of the social problems found throughout Mexico. Although I was not educated solely within the Oaxacan communities my family lived in, I was nonetheless an active participant in their

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traditions. Because my parents were teachers, I enjoyed certain privileges that others didn’t have, but also experienced firsthand many of the problems within the villages.

W HY STUDY A RCHAEOLOGY ? The decision to orient my life toward the study of archaeology and the conservation of archaeological heritage is relatively easy to explain. There was, on one hand, the prevailing influence of my parents, with their strong Indigenous (Mixtec) roots and their role as excellent educators; from this basis, my family life revolved around family values and cultural activities (reading, music, dance, museums). On the other hand, living in Oaxaca, with Monte Albán and other monumental archaeological sites in our backyard, had a profound influence on me. Another determining factor was spending so much time in the countryside. Because of my parents’profession, our family often traveled between isolated communities. Much of my childhood was spent journeying throughout Oaxacan territory by cargo trucks, mules, or donkeys, crossing rivers on piggyback, occasionally riding in buses on dirt roads, but mostly just walking (endlessly, it seemed). We became accustomed to the light of candles and kerosene lamps at night, living together outside, and sharing with the local people a fine day of sun, a walk through the forest, and a good market-day. All of this, combined with my curiosity to know the origin of the many archaeological objects I saw during my childhood, and the influence of my mother’s love of reading and constant study, set the foundation for the development of a student life oriented to the humanities. Participation in archaeological projects early in my career was marked, as normally occurs, by the excitement of making discoveries, by learning how to carefully organize and classify the materials found, by a growing concern with protecting archaeological materials and sites, and by a growing admiration for the great teachers I encountered. I developed a strong interest in artifact and site conservation and protection. A source of constant uneasiness for me was such questions as: What should we do after studying these objects? What should we do after having exposed these monuments and sites? Are we going to leave them this way? I eventually found the answers by becoming a specialist in cultural heritage restoration and preservation. As a result of being named archaeological coordinator for the state of Oaxaca. I became responsible for protecting the innumerable archaeological sites and zones open to the public throughout the state. The university degree I received from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia provided me with the knowledge and methods needed to conserve the diverse material elements that comprise cultural heritage. But this education had done little to prepare me for dealing with the different values ancient sites and objects had in the different circumstances. If there is a criticism that we could make concerning the teaching of anthropological sciences in Mexico, and especially in archaeology, it is that little attention is given to competing value systems within which archaeological materials are placed. Each object may have scientific and historic

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values, religious values, community values, and market values, so the situation is complicated, and students are not well prepared to deal with these competing interests. It is precisely the experience of having been born and having lived among the rural communities of Mexico, and coming to share many of their values, that today helps me to comprehend the situations that communities are in when it comes to archaeological or cultural heritage issues. I have an insider’s perspective. In contrast, most other scientists and scholars are outsiders who have a limited understanding of the communities they may work with. They may not understand local values and may disrupt social relations, thus putting at risk the fate and the integrity of the material culture that is studied by archaeology. Some key elements in the community life of Mexico that today influence discussions between communities and federal institutions (such as the INAH) regarding the safekeeping of archaeological materials are: 

The indestructible ties between the past and the present, which are maintained through a relationship to the land. In this case, we are not speaking exclusively of the possession of the land, but of the land being a symbol of identity.

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Community organization, the system of social and economic responsibilities and obligations of community members, including their participation in the market dynamics.

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Respect for the elderly and their knowledge. Our archaeological interpretations and theories tend to ignore or underrate the knowledge of the oldest inhabitants. We must honor and treat with respect what they have to say to us, even if we are not Indigenous ourselves or do not fully understand the traditions they share with us.

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Death as a part of life. We need to understand the cycle of life that is rooted in the majority of the original cultures. In Mesoamerica, the duality of death and life explains the former as a means to the latter in an unending system.

My modest contribution has been to alert archaeologists to potential conflicts that their presence may generate in diverse social contexts, especially at the juncture that we have named the “site-society interface” (Robles and Corbett 1995). This refers precisely to that moment in which the different points of view regarding heritage safeguarding encounter each other—on one side, the state (INAH), and on the other, community interest, individual or collective, both seeking some type of use of the same object. This concept takes into account the idea that each object and each site can be interpreted in a very different manner by each individual, social nucleus, community, and even nation. The scope of this site-society interface as a conceptual construct attempts to go beyond the resolution of strictly academic questions of archaeology, and toward knowledge about the field, the character of the people, the importance of ritual conduct, the different values of the land (of use, and of exchange), and so on. It does not completely resolve the issues, but it opens the way toward a comprehension of the social values that are at play in the sphere of archaeological heritage.

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For these reasons, I am better known today for my proposals for specialized management of archaeological resources than I am for doing archaeology. While I remain dedicated to promoting the importance of new archaeological discoveries, my priority is to better understand the relations between the past and present value systems, and between the professional point of view and that imbued with local, vernacular experience and knowledge (Robles 2002). Given the circumstances in Mexico, then, it is extremely difficult to apply the precepts of Indigenous archaeology in the same way they are applied in North America. In Mexico, there are some archaeologists who are mestizos but who still retain their Native language, including José Huchim, a Yucatec Maya, and Roberto Zárate, a Zapotec from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Both have taught me much regarding the comprehension of the specific values of their cultures, but always within the institutional setting.

D ISCRIMINATION WITHIN THE P ROFESSION As exciting as the theme of Indigenous archaeology may prove to be, there are other aspects of Mexican archaeology that also require attention. The studies of gender and the role of women, both in the past and in professional practice today, now constitute an entire field of study and challenge the status quo. To combat the gender discrimination that is still ongoing, we must recognize it as something that occurs not just within archaeology, but throughout academia as a whole. In fact, the worst discrimination I have experienced in Mexico has not been based on my Indigenous background, but rather on my gender. And this discrimination came from a foreign male colleague in my profession, not from someone outside of academia. Similarly, we cannot deny that for women of Indigenous background in Mexico, the primary obstacle they face in their desire to educate themselves comes from within their own families. How many times have we observed young women struggling, sometimes in painful family disputes, against a fierce parental opposition to the education of women. There persists the expectation, especially outside of the cities, that women should conform to traditional roles of forming a family and caring for their children and their parents, for which a formal education is not needed. This is a major unresolved issue within archaeology and other social sciences in Mexico.

F INAL T HOUGHTS Indigenous archaeology, as proposed and developed in the United States and Canada, does not encounter the same conditions for its application in the Mexican context. This is due to the particular historical processes of colonization in Mexico, and our own ways of adapting to them, as much as it is to the more recent social and demographic changes brought about by the establishment of the Mexican republic—that is, by the cultural and political integration of the entire population. This does not mean we shouldn’t seek a major collaboration between mestizos and indigenismo, especially those who still speak their Native languages, because this can only enrich our archaeological interpretations.

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Nor should we ignore the social and economic marginalization in which, still today, the different Indigenous peoples and mestizos of Mexico find themselves; this remains part of our contemporary reality, a situation that, from every angle, remains an unresolved issue for Mexico as a nation. There is promise, however. The program of Museos Comunitarios de Oaxaca is the best example in Mexico of the communities themselves practicing the management of cultural resources (Morales and Camarena 2002). This program provides a way to recover traditional community values by establishing small museums in which archaeology plays only a small part, and in which discussions do not center on issues of ethnic membership or ownership. Greater emphasis is placed on community land titles and on the historic recounting of the economic activities with which they identify themselves at the present time. Such museums are set up in central sites within the communities with the hopes of attracting the tourism so important to the Oaxacan economy. Finally, my many experiences have helped me as an archaeologist to develop better relationships with the communities in which I work. Today I am director of the Monte Albán Archaeological Zone in Oaxaca. Because I am aware of local values, I can, in my role as institutional representative, have more meaningful discussions with community members. This contributes to more rewarding negotiations when developing archaeological projects. Anthropological studies in general, and archaeological projects in particular, have an obligation to first understand the social landscape they work within, and then to work with the villages, if their projects are to be successful and if they are to have a positive impact on the descendant communities.

N OTE 1 For background, see Bonfil Batalla 1987; Caso 1989; and García Canclini 1989.

R EFERENCES C ITED Bonfil Batalla, G. 1987 México profundo: Una civilización negada. CIESAS-SEP, Mexico City. Caso, A. 1989 De la arqueología a la antropología. Serie Antropológica 102. Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM, Mexico City. Gamio, M. 1923 [1979] La población del valle de Teotihuacán. Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Mexico City. García Canclini, N. 1989 Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Grijalbo, Mexico City. Morales, T., and C. Camarena 2002 Los museos comunitarios: Estrategia para resguardar el patrimonio arqueológico. In Sociedad y patrimonio arqueológico en el valle de Oaxaca, Memoria de la Segunda Mesa Redonda de Monte Albán, pp. 271–278. INAH, México.

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Robles García, N. M. 2002 Nuevas estrategias para la conservación de Monte Albán. In Sociedad y patrimonio arqueológico en el valle de Oaxaca: Memoria de la segunda mesa redonda de Monte Albán, edited by N. M. Robles García, pp. 53–66. INAH, Mexico City. Robles García, N. M., and J. Corbett 1995 Land Tenure Systems, Economic Development, and Protected Areas in Mexico. In 8th Conference on Research and Resource Management. The George Wright Society, Portland. Watkins, J. 2001 Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.

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Photo by Michelle Alaimoi

DIGGING FOR MY ANCESTORS’ THINGS

Eirik Thorsgard y English name is Eirik Thorsgard; my Indian name is Tmaakanik. My mother’s name is Ardyth Hoffer-Hallicola; her Indian name is Tatewyn. Her first Indian name, Shemama, was given to her by Nettie Shawaway from Warm Springs, Oregon. Her father’s name was Nathan Hoffer, and his Indian name was Kumuush. He used to fish the Columbia River for eulachon and salmon, including at Celilo Falls with a man named Peanut, the uncle of Ed Edmo, a Yakama tribal member and a rather famous storyteller in the Pacific Northwest. His father’s name was Fred Hoffer, whose Indian name was Ahantin. His father was Homer Hoffer, the last Indian in Grand Ronde with a flattened head; his Indian name was Tamaquin. His father was Lal-Bick, a treaty signer for the Confederated Tribes of the Willamette Valley Treaty for the Tumwata band of the Clalliwalla at the Oregon City Falls;

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his English name was John Kawache (Hoffer/Apperson). His father’s name was Tamaquin, a chief of the Slahala (Watlala) people at the Cascade Locks, who met with Paul Kane1 in the 1840s. This history of who I am is important because, according to how I was taught, only those people who know where they come from will know where they are going. As a child, I was raised primarily by my mother, but with a great deal of influence from my grandparents up until their deaths. My grandfather, in particular, had some unique experiences during his life. He was born in 1902 and passed away in 1992, so he lived from the time of covered wagons to the time a man walked on the moon. My grandmother was younger than he was (1920–1992); she was a basket weaver and an accomplished beader. When they lived on the reservation, she was also an active member of the social events on the Yakama reservation, among elders whose names are all that I have to remember them by. They had five children, my mother being the youngest. Growing up in various places across the United States, from Coos Bay in Oregon to Oklahoma City, I was taught a great deal about my family’s history and our connections to the land, and I heard stories that have been in our family for untold generations. Some of what I was taught I learned the hard way; for instance, my grandmother chased me out of the house when she was basket weaving because it was women’s work. I also learned about changing social mores: traditionally, food is served by women, and elders and men eat first—as is still the custom in some Northwestern tribes—but at times this is forgotten. I also heard stories about how the world was made ready for people by Coyote and others of the First People. People today may find some of the stories disturbing (because some have violent imagery or very suggestive sexual connotations) or a little outrageous; others may take them with a grain of salt. I don’t take offense at such perceptions in either case.

The author performing at the Camai Dance Festival, Bethel, Alaska, 2004. Photo courtesy of Eirik Thorsgard.

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E DUCATION O PPORTUNITIES AND C HALLENGES After high school, I got married and entered the Navy. During my four years in the military, I got to see a great many places and even managed to circumnavigate the world. When my enlistment ended, I decided to enter college to get an associate’s degree, in the hope of getting a good job. I moved back to southern Oregon, where my wife came from, and entered Rogue Community College. I enjoyed going to school and learning new things, but there was something missing—there were no Native American students in the area. I later heard that at the local university there was a very active Native Student Union and Native Americans teaching there, so I applied and started going to Southern Oregon University (SOU). I majored in history and thought about becoming a teacher. To supplement my income, I worked for the university as a janitor from 4 to 8 AM, and then attended classes from 8 AM until about 4 PM. I attended social functions with the Native American Student Union until about 8 PM, and then went home to help with my kids and spend time doing school work. While it was stressful, it worked well and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I took as many classes as possible that would qualify me for the Native American Studies Program, including anthropology classes. Attending the various anthropology courses, I often heard the lyrics from Floyd Red Crow Westerman’s song “Here Come the Anthros”2 echoing in the back of my mind: Here come the anthros, better hide your past away… Then back they go to write their book and tell the world that there’s more . . . Westerman’s lyrics hit directly on the inequities that he and others (notably Vine Deloria, Jr.), saw in the relations that anthropologists and archaeologists had with Native Americans, with few benefits returning to the communities, as he notes: And not a cent of funded money that the anthros get to spend is ever given to their disappearing feathered-friends. And there was little concern with the ethics of their actions, or respect for other belief systems: And the anthros keep diggin’ in our sacred ceremonial sites. As if there’s nothing wrong or education gives them the right. It was not that I felt a great deal of hatred toward the discipline of anthropology or archaeology, but the stories I grew up with from my mother and grandparents were very different from those in the mainstream society. While other people got the Disneyfied versions of the Little Mermaid and Cinderella, I got stories about how my people and ancestors were treated by early settlers and military forces. I was shown where battles took place and was told of various atrocities, and eventually came to the point that I could close my eyes and actually see what was done. It made me a very bitter person for quite some time. Additionally, my grandparents used to discuss how archaeologists would excavate graves: what happened at Memaloose Island definitively hurt my family. This was a large

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burial island in the middle of the Columbia River that was taken by the Army Corps of Engineers; all of the burials were relocated to a bluff along the river, and Celilo Lake and Memaloose Island were subsequently flooded to construct the Bonneville Dam.3 My grandparents also told us how anthropologists used to come to the reservation and attempt to talk to elders and people outside of the Shaker or Washat churches. Some of the community members used to joke about how they would refuse to speak English, while others would outright lie about things to make fun of the anthropologists who came to take knowledge from our elders in order to write their academic papers and get famous. My grandparents did not have a lot or respect for the discipline of anthropology. After about a year of going to Southern Oregon University, I learned that my job as a janitor was going to end due to budget cutbacks. I had children and a wife to support while going to school, so I started getting nervous about how to continue my education. As it happened, a friend from the Native Students organization told me that the archaeology lab was hiring students. I hesitantly approached the professor in charge and asked some very pointed questions about human remains and the breaking of taboos. He encouraged me to try to work in the lab and said that if things became too difficult, he would understand. I accepted and started sorting lithic debitage, cleaning the flakes and then classifying them based on the typology being used for analysis at the lab. The atmosphere in the lab was kind Zen-like, being with other students, all of us sorting little pieces of colored cherts and chalcedony. After a few months, the summer was quickly approaching and I was asked by the professor to take part in the upcoming archaeology field school. To be honest, I was very hesitant, but I agreed to attend. I was lucky in that a person very close to me, my adopted sister, was there. Her being Tlingit helped me immensely in not being scared or overwhelmed with what was going on. This first field experience was difficult because we found what, to my mind, was a sweathouse and some (possibly human) bones; later the bones were determined to be sea mammal. The instructor was very supportive toward me and the other Native student; during the backfilling of the excavation, we sang songs and the two of us were allowed to fill in the excavation unit that had exposed the sweathouse. After completing the field school, I became an Anthropology major, mainly so I could help to bring about changes in how tribes were consulted and archaeology was done. I also was influenced by my new major professor, Mark Tveskov. Mark had a very different approach to archaeology than most in Oregon, in that he was always offering assistance to tribes as much as he could, encouraging Native students and always trying to tie in ancestral connections to the landscape. His very post-processual approach, while not quite Indigenous in perspective, was very instrumental in opening my eyes to a different type of archaeology—which was, to me, very cutting-edge. During my tenure at SOU, the professors in the Anthropology Department, and very specifically the Native American Studies Program instructors David West and Brent Florendo, were very helpful to Native students and anyone interested in Native culture. They, along with the Native student body, created a set of organizations that always strove to create a familial atmosphere and to support students in getting assistance when it was needed. I honestly believe that had I not been encouraged, and at times cajoled, by these

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individuals, I would not have completed my education at SOU, nor sought to go any further. The lack of a formal mentoring program or a family-like atmosphere, I believe, jeopardizes Indigenous participation in collegiate settings. Many of us come from small communities with stars in our eyes, wanting to create changes in our communities or in the greater world. When we get to a college or university, there is no support network to assist us; sometimes such networks are present but dysfunctional because the people running the programs have no experience in tribal realities (i.e., haven’t grown up or lived on a reservation). Under these conditions, new Indigenous students may encounter a type of culture shock, which can be powerful enough to cause difficulty in pursuing their education or, too often, may force them to quit.

B ECOMING AN I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGIST One field school turned into two, and then I became a crew boss in charge of several others after that. During some excavations, we often found lithic material and groundstone objects; occasionally, sacred objects, such as small anthropomorphic clay figurines,4 were recovered. In several cases, both in the context of field schools and during contracting work, we would find human remains. What struck me was how the situations were dealt with: in almost in every case, the remains were handed over to the tribes for reburial by the archaeologists without any questions. This progressive stance was one that I was not prepared for, having grown up to think of archaeologists as grave robbers and looters. Soon afterward, I started working part-time for an archaeological contracting firm that worked for tribes in western Oregon. By this time, I was savvy enough to understand where I was lacking skills, but I was also aware that schools and teachers did not want an activist inside their student body. Nonetheless, I applied to the graduate program at Oregon State University (OSU) to study under a geoarchaeologist whom I had met on projects and respected. Once accepted, I started taking all of the classes I could in both archaeology and ethnic studies, focusing specifically on Native peoples. I also started working for my tribe, first as the vice-chair of the Cultural Committee and then as the cultural protection specialist in the Cultural Resources Department. During this time I was working on my master’s thesis, which was originally supposed to be about camas (Cammassia sp.—a tuber that was used as a food source) extraction sites and the development of a predictive model that would relate the location of ancestral sites to camas locales. However, when I started working in the Cultural Resources Department and explained my research topic to them, I was told “no” by my supervisor there. Since my tribe’s Site Protection Program had no policies or procedures, I was told that this is what I should develop on the tribe’s behalf. This interaction with my own community is something that I think is worth noting here. Having been to college, I came back to my tribe with the notion that I knew how archaeology could be useful to them, and I developed my original thesis statement accordingly. In this, I was right and wrong. My original thesis concept was warmly received, but the need for something else drove my research into a realm that I had not even considered. Instead of asking the community what I could do to help, I made the assumption

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that I had answers that would be useful to the tribe. So I had to return to OSU and work on getting my thesis changed. This process was not easy; my supervisor was hesitant about the new topic I had proposed, which created more hurdles for me. Eventually I managed to get it changed and, nine drafts later, I had a defensible thesis. The last stages of my master’s degree were the most difficult. I was under a Ronald E. McNair Scholarship that ran out because my professor had to leave to conduct fieldwork in Mexico and did not want to have me defend prior to his leaving. Additionally, after his return I was shifted from a Master of Arts into a Master of Interdisciplinary Studies program. One consequence of this change was that my entire chapter on theory was removed from my thesis. Personally, I think that the aggressive stance I took toward archaeology in that chapter was very heavily influenced by Indigenous theory, and this proved too much for my committee—but I may be wrong. I was truly worried by the absence of discernible Indigenous theory—about how archaeology could be used by the tribe—in my thesis. If I sought to effect changes in the practice of archaeology through my thesis, but a wall was being erected that kept me from accessing a new theoretical concept, then how then could I accomplish my goal? Even today when I interact with federal or state agencies, the inclusion of a Native voice about the landscape, for example, is often an afterthought, brought about by the desire of the tribes or by the government’s need to show an interaction that has a viable product for the consultation process. Even when individuals who are studying archaeology or anthropology contact the tribe, they are often in it for the agendas that they have preconceived. This conflict of agendas can create some problematic interactions. And since, as students, we have to discuss how the information gained from our research may or may not be useful or desired by the tribe, it is easy to become disheartened, leading many to look elsewhere, rather than sticking through the process and providing some real benefit to the tribe.

B EING A T RIBAL A RCHAEOLOGIST After finishing my master’s degree, I took a new position with my tribe as the cultural protection coordinator, a fancy name for a tribal archaeologist. One of the interesting things is that I was the first tribal employee with formal archaeological training. On top of this responsibility, I was also a tribal member. This has allowed me some unique opportunities, such as becoming the vice-president of the Association of Oregon Archaeologists, the only such professional organization in Oregon. Soon after taking on this position, I was contacted by a local artifact collector from Salem, Oregon. During our phone conversation, he mentioned some property that was for sale that had some phallic-shaped rocks on it, but he hung up without giving me a contact number or name. I did a search for property for sale and found only one in Salem that matched his description. Background research revealed that this area had been found by an amateur archaeologist in the 1920s and that a few of the rocks were being repatriated (as sacred objects under NAGPRA) to the tribe from his collection at Oregon State University. After some internal discussions, the tribe purchased the property.

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The author at the Chankal site, Oregon, 2007. Photo courtesy of Eirik Thorsgard.

Through this situation, I had found an outlet for my newfound skills: I was working on restoring a ceremonial shrine that had been lost to all but a few elders who retained the tribe’s oral traditions, and I was doing so with archaeology. This may not be much of a surprise to some archaeologists, but typically during excavations that I have participated in, the intent is to find what information is contained in a site, take the material, and leave very little other than an altered landscape. In this case, we had the opportunity to obtain what was taken away and return it to the tribe—quite a difference from standard archaeological practice. Today the tribe is aggressively working to restore the site to its original (or as close as possible) context for tribal ceremonial use. As with this case, I have found doing archaeology on behalf of my tribe very rewarding. However, I must admit that my interactions with tribal membership have been difficult at times. Some members of my family, and my tribe, as well as other tribal people have questioned me about being an archaeologist. I have been called an “archaeologist” as if I had no ancestral connection to the tribe, an “apple” (a derogatory term meaning someone who is red on the outside, but white on the inside), a grave robber, and a desecrator of ancestral material. Working in archaeology has also meant that I have sometimes had to break the social taboos of my tribe. There are, for example, very specific rules about disturbing ancestors or their belongings, so being on the other side (i.e., being an archaeologist) while trying to live as a Native person can create a somewhat schizophrenic situation. I thus regularly participate in religious/spiritual ceremonies to attempt to solidify my personal/tribal/social responsibilities with the work that I have to do.

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I recently started a Ph.D. program at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and am working on creating a new regional interpretive model based on oral traditions. I am hoping that this new methodology can be used in Oregon to better understand archaeological sites from a tribal and landscape-based perspective. Part of the problem about archaeology in Oregon is that it is almost all contract work done under requirements from federal and state laws. As such, most of the cultural resource management work is site specific, with no clear understanding of Indigenous people or their concepts of self and landscape. When you talk to archaeologists today, most of the conversations will center around culture history models, or new sites where unique or rare assemblages are being found, or where the oldest site is, rather than on what any of this means to people, most specifically, the inheritor communities of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas that left the archaeological record.

N EW C HALLENGES In the realm of cultural resource management, it sometimes happens that archaeologists and others may question the lack of continuity between the populations who created the archaeological sites some thousands of years ago and the Native population occupying that area today. Many Indigenous peoples, myself included, see this as a passive attempt to disenfranchise contemporary Indigenous peoples from their land and cultural heritage. A similar discussion has occurred relating to “cultural affiliation.” Historically in the Americas, part of the national consciousness was built on forgetting the past and separating from Europe—a sentiment not shared by Indigenous communities. In addition to our traditions and responsibilities, two other issues should be mentioned that relate to the treaties that were negotiated and signed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first is that legal authority over archaeological material and ancestral belongings were never ceded; this literally means that these rights and associated responsibilities are held by the tribes, and that authority over them is not allowed to be taken by state and federal authorities or agencies. The second issue is that these legal documents provided a tacit agreement by the United States government that our people were the Indigenous or Aboriginal groups, which implies an acceptance of connection to the past in perpetuity. And while this idea of connection to the deep past may be seen as a stretch of legal authority, it is one that needs to be discussed, because entities and individuals that have no connection to the ancestors of this land are the ones making the decisions about how to best treat them, something that is quite inequitable in the views of most Native peoples. Another dichotomy that I have seen between Indigenous societies and Western cultures is the concept of responsibilities and rights. In Western culture, emphasis is placed on the rights of individuals and the responsibilities that these rights allow them to take on. My understanding of my own culture and those of other Indigenous cultures seems to work in the exact opposite way: that is, responsibilities give some rights, but these cannot be earned without any sense of responsibility. This difference creates some confusion for researchers, especially archaeologists, who work with tribal communities. In

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order to be given access or the right to something, they have to take on responsibilities in the community, something that they are often unaware of, but which is also difficult to achieve due to mistrust and miscommunication.

C LOSING T HOUGHTS Overall, I have managed to become accepted into the profession despite the cultural baggage I carry relating to my ancestry and beliefs. I managed to get an advanced degree. That accomplishment was not so difficult from a work standpoint, but was surprisingly very difficult in terms of interpersonal communications, other responsibilities, and taking care not to become part of an ongoing problem in a system in which I inherently wanted to create change. Becoming an Indigenous archaeologist has been an interesting journey so far, but the further along I get, the more I realize that the things I set out to accomplish will only be finished when I become a footnote in tribal history. This is actually not an uncomforting thought, as I know that the things that I try to achieve will eventually become a reality even if I am forgotten. While I have been labeled many things—an archaeologist, an Indigenous archaeologist, an archaeologist who happens to be Indigenous, and others still—the only titles that seem to really encompass who I am are the ones that I earn from my family and community. Coincidentally, the words “archaeologist” and “anthropologist” are often not part of those.

N OTES 1 Editors note: Kane was a respected artist and explorer who traveled extensively throughout

western North America, producing hundreds of detailed watercolors and paintings of the Aborginal peoples of Canada and the United States. 2 An mp3 version of this song, and many others, are available for purchase at the official Floyd Red Crow Westerman website: http://www.floydredcrowwesterman.com/. 3 For information on this, see Aguilar 2005; Hunn 1990. There are also many websites and videos available. 4 For the last two years, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon have been fighting with the Bureau of Land Management to have these sacred objects returned under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriatiation Act.

R EFERENCES C ITED Aguilar, G. W., Sr. 2005 When the River Ran Wild! Indian Traditions on the Mid-Columbia and Warm Springs Reservation. Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland. Hunn, E. S. 1990 Nch’i-Wana: The Big River Mid Columbia Indians and Their Land. University of Washington Press, Seattle.

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Photo by Vernon L. Davis

W HAT B ETTER WAY TO G IVE B ACK TO YOUR P EOPLE

Davina Two Bears am a member of the Diné, or the Navajo Nation. I am Tódích’íi’nii, or Bitter Water Clan, which is my mother’s clan and also one of the four original clans of the Diné. I am born for the Táchiinii, or Red Running into the Water Clan, which is my father’s clan. In my culture, we are matrilineal, tracing the clans through our women, who also traditionally were the heads of households and owners/caretakers of the land, home, family, and livestock. I am from Tsídi to’ii (Bird Springs, Arizona) on the Navajo reservation, named for a spring that at one time drew numerous birds. Bird Springs is flat in some places, but also has colorful hills and mesas of the Painted Desert, through which the Little Colorado River “flows.” My grandparents and great-grandparents settled and made their living here, coaxing corn, beans, melons, and squash to flourish from the desert lands watered by flash floods, while they tended their sheep and goats along the Little Colorado River

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and into the Painted Desert. My Tódích’íi’nii (Bitter Water Clan) ancestors were known to be very kind, but if provoked we were the most menacing and excellent warriors. People called upon us long ago for protection against their enemies, and my ancestors answered those calls willingly and without hesitation (George 1968). Tsídi to’ii exhibits a long history of occupation, which became apparent to me as a child one day when I was playing in the dirt and found ancient pottery made hundreds of years ago—my first experience as a budding Indigenous archaeologist. The pottery was gray, painted with beautiful black designs. This pottery was once used by Anaasází, a name that refers to “the ancient ones” or “ancient ancestors” in the Navajo language (see Begay 2003: 36) I collected the pottery sherds, thinking what a wonderful gift this would be for Shimásáni, my maternal grandmother. Little did I know then that, as a Navajo, I was not supposed to collect or even touch this pottery. To show respect to our ancestors, we do not bother their belongings, but instead we leave them untouched, allowing old things to go back to Nahasdzáán, our Mother Earth. My grandmother was alarmed at what I gave her. In fact, she yelled at me to return the pottery back where I found it, while cautioning me never to do that again. She did not really explain why I had to put the pottery back, but I just knew that I was in trouble, and that I would not tempt my grandmother’s wrath again. It didn’t matter if it was something made by humans hundreds of years ago or fifty years ago, because on a different occasion, my grandmother made me return an old enamel wash basin, which I found and thought, since it had no holes, that it would be useful to her. I was wrong again. Shimásáni made me return the basin immediately, with instructions to place it exactly where I had found it. I speak often about my Shimásáni because, like many Navajo grandmothers, she was a significant figure in my life. My grandmother would have been my caretaker and teacher all of the time if I had been born a hundred years ago; as it was, our interaction was limited to my visits to her home on the reservation. To me and my sisters, my grandmother was loving, kind, and gentle, if not a bit loud when talking and laughing, which she did all the time. She was well known and respected by a great many Navajo people for her generosity and sharp intuition in problem solving, and especially for her knowledge of Navajo clans. She was also a matchmaker: my grandmother knew which marriages were allowable, and which were not, based on one’s clan, because Navajos cannot marry someone of the same or similar clan. To do so was considered incestuous. No matter where my grandmother was, she knew people and their clans, and people knew her. She was a musician, playing the harmonica to gospel music, and she was a weaver of Navajo rugs. Much of what I know of my tribe, the Diné, stems from the teachings of my grandmother, who unfortunately passed away in 1982 before she had time to teach us everything she wanted to. Although our time together was brief, I’m lucky to have spent the time that I did with Shimásáni and her teachings. I don’t know exactly how or when I became aware that I was Navajo, but I remember in my childhood often thinking about the history of America. I thought of how much land was taken from Native people, how Nahasdzáán, Mother Earth, was being polluted, and

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how this pollution was killing animals and plants. I thought of all of our ancient ways, which were no longer being practiced as much. I wondered how our ancestors must have lived before the coming of bilagáana (“white people”) and before electricity, cars, and modern buildings. I didn’t know what to call it, but I felt the injustice of it all, of not being able to live like my ancestors in those ancient times. I thought about why my parents did not teach me to speak Navajo, especially my dad who was quite a good speaker of the Navajo language. I learned from my mother that my father promised he would never teach his daughters the Navajo language, only English, because he did not want us to suffer for not knowing English, as he had as a child in boarding school. Indian boarding schools on the Navajo reservation were notorious for prohibiting children to speak the Navajo language, and the consequences of doing so were cruel. According to my mother, she too suffered because of the Navajo language. Her parents were not supportive of her efforts to speak Navajo. My mother remembers her parents ridiculing her with harsh words when she tried to speak Navajo; but at least she can understand it. I feel cheated and resentful because I do not understand my own language, which makes it difficult to communicate with my people and relatives, but I understand the circumstances and intergenerational trauma that led me to this predicament. As I entered junior high school, my family moved to Tsídi to’ii. Even though I am from Tsídi to’ii, I had never lived there until I was about eleven years old. When our family moved to Tsídi to’ii, it was the happiest time of my life. I loved it because for once we weren’t just visiting, and I could finally stay and get to know my relatives and people from my community. I also made friends with my peers, who all spoke Navajo. Needless to say, my time attending Hataa[ ii Yázhí Bi’ó[ ta’, the Little Singer School, taught me a great deal about my identity, language, and culture, all of which fed and strengthened my starved spirit. I learned to read and write in the Navajo language, sing songs and dance in Navajo, and just interact with people in my community on a continual basis, which was something I had never been able to do before. The time spent living in my home community of Tsídi to’ii, with my extended family on the Navajo reservation, is so dear to me that I cherish it to this day. Someday, I know I will live there again. In order to attend Winslow High School, I had to reside at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) dormitory during the school week, and traveled home to Tsídi to’ii on weekends to be with my family. Despite this arrangement, high school was an enjoyable experience, and provided me with an opportunity to live on my own and be responsible for myself. In the BIA dorm, I made friends with fellow students from the Navajo and Hopi tribes. As a teenager, I became aware of glaring stereotypes about Native Americans that were held by some people, including some of my peers. One such stereotype was that all Indians were alcoholics or “drunks.” Since Winslow, Arizona, borders the reservation, many Navajos went there to buy groceries or livestock feed, do laundry, and, yes, to purchase liquor, because these goods and services just weren’t available out on the reservation (alcohol is illegal on the Navajo reservation). It didn’t matter if you never drank a drop of alcohol in your life: if you were Indian, then you were labeled “just another drunken Indian.” I lived with alcoholism because of my dad, and I told myself long ago that I would not follow in his footsteps of alcoholism.

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Another stereotype was that all Indians steal. I remember going to grocery stores and being followed around by the people who worked there, and a couple of times being falsely accused of stealing, while enduring the humiliation of being searched. I did not steal, but because I am a Navajo, I was profiled as a thief. Still another false notion was that as a Navajo from the reservation, I should be thankful for everything I owned, because if it weren’t for the generous, hard-working people of America, who pay their taxes and support all of the lazy Indian people, who don’t work or pay taxes, then my family and I would have nothing. It was infuriating to me to know how hard my mother struggled to find work and finish her college degree, because her husband was never there to help, just to keep my sisters and me sheltered and fed, only to be told that Navajos live an easy life off the government. Of course, this was a ludicrous charge, not to mention a great insult to my hard-working mother. I knew deep down—and my mother reassured me of this—that I was not going to lose myself to alcoholism like my dad; that I wasn’t a thief or stupid; and that my ancestors suffered and paid a price for me to be here today, so I needed to be strong, and not give up. The final stereotype that I heard constantly in high school was that all Indians were dumb, as in the phrase “dumb Indian!” All of the negative stereotypes about Navajos and other tribes motivated me to prove wrong everyone who believed them. As a result, I worked even harder and made myself take the toughest classes in high school. It was quite satisfying to me when I learned, as did many of my classmates in high school, that I, a Navajo girl from the “rez,” was accepted into a prestigious Ivy League school.

DARTMOUTH Y EARS In college, I began my journey to becoming an Indigenous archaeologist in earnest. I was accepted into Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1986. Dartmouth was the first Ivy League school to actively recruit Native Americans and to develop an excellent Native American Program and Native American Studies department, which offered Native American students the rare opportunity and support to excel and graduate from one of the top colleges in the United States. Although I felt extremely lucky to be a part of the “Dartmouth community,” it was a long way from home and family on the Navajo reservation. My first year at Dartmouth was lonely, and I felt so out of place in New England, where I was intimidated by the wealthy, intelligent, and predominantly white students. I was pre-med, and could scarcely keep up with my hard-core science courses, but I thoroughly relished the Native American Studies courses, especially “Introduction to Native Americans,” taught by Sally McBeth, and “American Indian Policy,” taught by the late Michael Dorris. When I took these classes as a freshman, I could not believe how much my education was lacking regarding the history of Native Americans. In my high school American history textbook, for example, Native Americans were covered only briefly: in the first chapter, as an impediment to the progress of the colonists and pilgrims, and then at the end, where American Indian activism and the American Indian Movement was mentioned. I was amazed to learn about all the different tribes all over this country from my

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fellow Native Americans and from professors like Sally McBeth and Michael Dorris, and to discover how rich in culture and language Native Americans still are despite being removed from traditional homelands. I was so naïve, thanks to my American history textbooks, that I thought that all Native people east of the Mississippi River were gone. It was disturbing to find out how much was missing from my one-sided education—and from every American’s, for that matter—regarding Native American history. Michael Dorris, in particular, filled up that gaping hole in my education, and he was a welcome wellspring of information. His lectures were like sermons; they were so powerful that I felt I was being swept up in a flood of Native American history. All that we fought for, won, and lost from the United States government was finally laid out for me in careful, refreshing detail. This flood kept washing over me, cleansing and clearing my thinking about the real history of Native Americans in this land, and that flood once again nourished and fed my starving spirit and intellect. Although I did not speak up in class, I readily absorbed this new and exciting side of history, which I had been denied previously in my education in Arizona. The other courses that sealed my interest in archaeology were offered in the Anthropology Department at Dartmouth. Since I was “weeded out” of the hard-core science classes, I began to seek a different major, taking visual studies and anthropology classes. While I excelled in the art courses, I felt that they did not challenge me enough, so I began enrolling in more anthropology and archaeology classes. Once again I was introduced to the history of my ancient ancestors, and I also learned about the ancient history of all Indigenous peoples of this continent. A pride began to grow inside me, and I gathered strength from it. I realized how long Native peoples had been living here in America prior to European contact and settlement, and it was not hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of years. It was truly amazing to me what Indigenous peoples accomplished throughout time. Evidence of our magnificent intelligence was demonstrated to me time and time again, as I learned about each new ancient culture. My ancestors and other ancient peoples migrated to the most exotic environments of this continent, living off the land in the harshest conditions and most remote areas from the Arctic to the tip of South America. Everywhere people thrived, accomplishing great feats in religion and ceremony, agriculture, food procurement, architecture, engineering, and mathematics, as evidenced by their temples, mounds, irrigation systems, art, basketry, ceramics, jewelry, and weapons —the list could go on and on. Needless to say, it was very exciting for me to be learning about the ancient history of my ancestors and those of other Indigenous peoples, and I have Deborah Nichols to thank for that. Deborah encouraged my interest in archaeology at Dartmouth, and she was a kindred spirit to me, as she knew about Navajo people and understood where I was coming from. I didn’t realize that she had spent many years on Black Mesa, Arizona, in the heart of Navajo land, working with Navajo people, back when Black Mesa was still pristine, before the coal mining had scraped away Mother Earth’s skin and pulled out Her innards. Deborah befriended me right away, and it was refreshing to finally be able to excel in classes at Dartmouth and to speak to a professor who knew about my people and really

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understood me. At long last, I was learning how to take notes, study properly, and express myself in class discussion, a monumental feat for this shy Navajo student from the reservation. And Deborah Nichols was always there encouraging me. Deborah was also friends with another Navajo student, Richard Begay, who was a more senior student. Through Richard, I learned of a job opportunity that had just become available in Flagstaff, Arizona, where my family had recently moved. Richard told me that one of his co-workers had started a student-training program at Northern Arizona University for Navajo students interested in archaeology, and he suggested that during my term off, I should contact her.

L EARNING TO D O A RCHAEOLOGY IN N AVAJO L AND During the fall of my junior year at Dartmouth, I met Miranda Warburton, former director of the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department/Northern Arizona University (NNAD-NAU) Branch Office and founder of the student-training program. That fall was my “leave term,” and I came back to Arizona and began working for the Navajo Nation conducting archaeological surveys prior to development. As a student archaeologist, I traveled to many places on the reservation that I had never been to before. I was awestruck by how big and breathtakingly beautiful the Navajo reservation was, with its deep red canyons, towering geologic mesas and cliffs, radiant sand dunes and sandstone formations, and green

Author at Willow Canyon Dance Circle. Photo by Ruth Van Dyke.

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forests of piñon and juniper, and of the clear evidence that ancient people had lived in all of these places. Since I traveled previously only to Tuba City, which is where my father's family was from, and Tsidito'ii, I wasn't aware of what I was missing. It was also amazing to me that many of my people still lived in hogans,1 spoke Navajo fluently, and lived a very traditional Navajo lifestyle. I didn’t know that this was how many of my people still made their living. I also noticed that many Navajos still had no running water. Even though I knew this was true for my grandparents, I didn’t know it was also the case for a great many Navajos as well. This meant that people had to haul in the water they used for their families and livestock, and since many of the roads were (and still are) unpaved, when it rains all traffic comes to a complete halt, and people get stranded until the mud dries. Not only were my people still hauling their own water, they were also hauling their own wood, gas, kerosene, and butane, to cook their food, light their homes, and keep themselves warm. I hadn’t realized that most of the people living on the reservation were like my grandparents and that they had to work very hard for many of the things that I, and most Americans, take for granted, such as water, heat, and electricity. The next summer, in 1989, I attended an archaeological field school for minorities at Northern Arizona University (NAU). The field school was run by professors from NAU and was held at Wupatki National Monument, a national park located about 50 kilometers northeast of Flagstaff and adjacent to the Navajo reservation. The field school ran for eight weeks. The first week was spent in the classroom going over archaeological excavation methods. The next five weeks were held at the Wupatki Visitors Center, at a habitation site that had never been excavated, west of the primary (i.e., most visited) ruin. The final week was devoted to finishing our chosen research question, which we then presented to the students in the program. Although it was a unique experience to be working outdoors on an actual archaeological excavation, for me the experience was missing something. To be honest, I felt guilty for digging, because of what my grandmother had taught me. I remember being so excited to learn more about the people who lived at Wupatki hundreds of years ago, but I guess I was not 100% comfortable with the whole excavation process. Since I was not the only Native American at the field school—there was also an older, experienced archaeologist from the Zuni tribe and a fellow Dartmouth classmate from the Ho-Chunk Nation—it was reassuring to know that other Native Americans were interested in becoming archaeologists and were participants in this field school. As part of our responsibilities during fieldwork, we students took turns showing tourists around the site and explaining what we were doing. Tourists from all of the United States and other parts of the world came by. One day, an elderly Native American man from the Isleta Pueblo came to visit us. Since it was my turn to give the tour, I began giving him the regular speech about our field school excavation, but his response was different from everyone else’s. As an elder, he was gentle in scolding me, but very stern in condemning what I was doing there—excavating his ancestors; he said that as a Native American person, I should know that this is wrong, and I shouldn’t be participating in the excavation.

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Needless to say, I felt truly devastated for the rest of my time at Wupatki, and my level of enthusiasm for what I was learning dramatically decreased—along with my desire for pursuing a degree in anthropology from Dartmouth College. On my return to Dartmouth my junior year, I met with Deborah Nichols and told her what had happened, explaining that I was unsure of my decision to begin a career in archaeology. I know that Deborah did not want to lose me from the field of anthropology and archaeology, and so she said, Why don’t you use anthropology and archaeology to help Native Americans get back their sacred items and their ancestors from museums? Since I had never heard of this side of anthropology and archaeology, Deborah loaned me some of her books to read up on this subject; among these was a report of proceedings from a meeting sponsored by the Society for America Archaeology in the mid-1980s on the issues of repatriation and reburial. I was thunderstruck by what I was reading, and I knew instantly that this was my destiny. What Native Americans were proclaiming about caring for their ancestors and showing them respect by taking them out of museums and reburying them fit perfectly with my values and cultural teachings, and it made sense to my spirit and me. The idea of using archaeology for the betterment of both ancient and contemporary Native American people was so appealing to me that I could not think of doing archaeology any other way. All that I had felt as a child growing up and had experienced as a teenager in high school and college came together while I was at Dartmouth to influence my decision to become an Indigenous archaeologist.

Author at Escalon. Photo by Ruth Van Dyke.

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G RADUATE STUDIES AND B EYOND Continuing my education at Northern Arizona University as a student in the NNAD-NAU training program opened many doors for me. The anthropology professors at NAU were so encouraging, although it took several years for me to finish my thesis and graduate. It was refreshing to be around students with a common interest who were, for the most part, open-minded and sympathetic to Native American concerns. I also encountered archaeology students who were not so like-minded, and I felt it was especially important to speak up in class to ensure that alternative “minority” perspectives were heard, and to excel in class presentations to demonstrate that I, a Navajo woman, could. It was during my graduate years that I met a Navajo scholar who greatly inspired me to do well. At a Navajo weaving conference held at the Heard Museum one year, I was motivated by a Navajo presenter and scholar, Dr. Wesley Thomas, who was then pursuing a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Washington. His research and presentations on Navajo weaving were both powerful and scholarly, which positively impacted my quality of work and inspired me to finish my master’s degree. To those Navajo, or Native American, students considering a degree in anthropology or archaeology, I ask these questions: 

What better way to change the one-sided research and history of this country in honor of our ancestors than to become an Indigenous archaeologist, charged with the goal of eradicating insensitive research methods and questions and replacing them with more tribally appropriate ones?

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What better way to ensure that modern and ancient Native Americans, their sacred items, and sacred places on the landscape receive the protection and care that they deserve (which is in keeping with specific tribal protocols) than to become an Indigenous archaeologist, familiar with both one’s tribe and culture, as well as with the complexities of the history of archaeology in this country and historic preservation laws and policies? Who better to draft new policies, such as the Navajo Nation’s “Policy for the Protection of Jishchaa’: Gravesites, Human Remains, and Funerary Items,” which stipulates: Diné (Navajo) society is based on harmony and beauty. Issues related to death are treated with the utmost respect in our culture. In harmony with the Diné way of life, we do not talk about or discuss death. We avoid burial sites and do not handle materials belonging to one who is deceased. The Diné view is that human remains, associated funerary items, and unassociated funerary items all fit under Jischaa’, a term that refers to things that are associated with death as well as the burial itself. . . . This policy outlines procedures based on Diné cultural beliefs. The Navajo Nation is committed to protecting all gravesites, human remains, and funerary items under its jurisdiction. Human remains and funerary items, once interred, should not be disinterred. However, the Navajo Nation recognizes that under certain

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circumstances disinterment will occur. In these situations the human remains and funerary items must be reinterred as quickly as possible and as near to the original burial location as feasible. Except under extraordinary circumstances, analysis of human remains is restricted to in-field nondestructive visual determinations of age and sex. . . . The Historic Preservation Officer shall determine the treatment of human remains without identified lineal descendants and/or funerary items in consultation with other tribes, as appropriate. We expect that other tribes will make a reciprocal commitment. . . . The Navajo Nation expects all human remains and funerary items to be treated with the utmost respect from the time they are discovered until their final disposition. (Jishchaa Policy, Navajo Nation 1996: 1) 

What better way to learn more about your culture and language than by working as an archaeologist for one’s tribe, where one interacts with grassroots people, whether it be for developmental purposes, educating youth about archaeology, or interviewing traditional practitioners and/or oral historians, who are experts in tribal culture, history, religion, or language?

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Who better to document Navajo community concerns regarding sacred places and burials on the Navajo landscape than a Navajo person, rather than a non-Navajo cultural resource management company out to make a buck?

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And what better way to give back to your people than by doing the required archaeological surveys or other projects, so that they can receive homes, water, roads, electricity—the basic comforts of modern American society?

B EING A N AVAJO A RCHAEOLOGIST As the current program manager of the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department/Northern Arizona University (NNAD-NAU) Branch Office and an alumnus of the NNAD-NAU student-training program, I am making my own way as an archaeologist along with many other Navajo students, and the road is not easy. The Navajo Nation has supported our education here at Northern Arizona University and our desire to become professional anthropologists and archaeologists. Since October 2004, and for the first time in NNAD’s history, the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department is fully staffed by Navajo archaeologists and managers. We are entering a new era in archaeology on the Navajo reservation, because Navajos are being and becoming Indigenous archaeologists. We have emerged as a core group of qualified Navajo archaeologists with a powerful combination of Western academic training situated within a multifaceted background of Navajo cultural teachings. With this unique knowledge, Navajo archaeologists are primed to spread our wings and “test the waters” in our newfound roles as managers, future large-scale project directors, and qualified field archaeologists.

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The road so far is challenging, to say the least. It is difficult to conduct archaeological research as part of “mitigating adverse effects,” especially when you know that on the Navajo reservation the lack of infrastructure causes incalculable hardships to my people; therefore, justifying to local Navajos more time and money spent on archaeology becomes problematic. Some Navajo politicians constantly bemoan and question the necessity of protecting Navajo cultural resources in the face of development. They forget that it was the Navajo Nation Council that passed the Navajo Nation Cultural Resources Protection Act (CMY-19-88) in 1988, which states, “The cultural heritage of the Navajo Nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the Navajo People” (Navajo Nation 1988: 1). It is often the case that my co-workers and I are chastised for the work we do and must defend ourselves, both because it is a cultural taboo to touch or disturb the belongings of others who are now deceased, and because archaeology is perceived as an obstacle in the development process. Over the years, we have developed “thick skins” because we believe in what we do. As Navajo archaeologists, we understand that we entered the field of archaeology not only to conduct the cultural resources inventories that would help our people obtain services like roads, running water, and electricity, but also to protect our ancient ancestors and Navajo sacred and traditional cultural places, so that those important places will be around to benefit future generations of Navajos. Once we educate Navajo people about the importance of and reasons for protecting Navajo cultural resources, they begin to value what can be accomplished with archaeology; and if we are really lucky, they say “Ahéhee” (“thank you”). Our work as Navajo archaeologists is far from over; in fact, it is truly just beginning. Although the Navajo Nation Cultural Resource Management Program was created in 1977 and the NNAD department in 1986, for the first time NNAD is totally managed and staffed by Navajo archaeologists. How will Navajo archaeologists proceed differently in the stewardship of cultural resources on and off the Navajo reservation? One of the initial steps taken involves the curation of artifacts. The new Navajo Nation curation policy calls for reburial of artifacts once data recovery and analysis are completed. Given the constraints related to a lack of storage space and the scarcity of funding to maintain storage facilities, artifacts, and records, reburying artifacts is one solution in keeping with Navajo philosophy—allowing artifacts to return to the earth naturally. What about research? Previously, research designs were formulated by non-Navajos and focused on the Anasazi, but now Navajo archaeologists may seize the opportunity to devise our own research questions on Navajo history and culture. The development of a “Navajo preservation plan,” one that will ideally incorporate feedback from the Navajo people regarding what cultural resources Navajos think are important to protect, preserve, or study, is being contemplated. If created, a Navajo preservation plan would help guide research on Navajo lands, if that is what the people want. My people are known for their progressive nature, ingenuity, and leadership when it comes to protecting our families, homeland, religion, culture, and language. It is my hope that Navajo people will continue to make headway in the stewardship of our traditional,

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cultural, and sacred places, and of the final resting places of our ancestors on the Navajo reservation. I am nowhere near accomplishing my personal goals in the field of archaeology, especially since, as a program manager, my attention is necessarily devoted to administration, rather than my true passion of researching and writing about Navajo archaeology, history, and culture. The journey for me, and others, in being and becoming Indigenous archaeologists is far from over.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Vernon Davis and Ruth Van Dyke for providing photographs of the author.

N OTE 1 These are the traditional six- or eight-sided houses of the Navajo, constructed of log walls,

often covered with adobe or mud.

R EFERENCES C ITED Begay, R. 2003 Exploring Navajo—Anaasází, Relationships Using Traditional (Oral) Histories. M.A. thesis, Anthropology Department, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. George, A. 1968 Interview with Allen George (Navajo) of Red Rock, New Mexico. Manuscript on file, University of New Mexico, American Indian Oral History Collection 1967–1972, Tape 179, November 1968. Albuquerque. Navajo Nation 1996 Navajo Nation Policy for the Protection of Jischaa’. Navajo Nation, Window Rock, Arizona. 1988 Navajo Nation Cultural Resources Protection Act (CMY-19-88). Navajo Nation, Window Rock, Arizona. Young, R., and W. Morgan, Sr. 1987 The Navajo Language A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary. Revised edition. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

G LOSSARY * Tódích’íi’nii Táchiinii Tsídi to’ii Shimásáni Nahasdzáán Bilagáana Hataa[ ii Yázhí Bi’ó[ ta’

Bitter Water Clan Red Running into the Water Clan Bird Springs My maternal grandmother Mother Earth, the world White people Little Singer School

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B ECOMING I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGISTS The Navajo people A term that refers to things that are associated with death as well as the burial itself The Diné term for all ancient peoples who inhabited Diné customary lands. Medicine man, chanter Thinking Plan Life, living A self-evaluation process leading to assurance and security

*Navajo Nation 1996; Morgan and Young 1987

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Aribidesi Usman consider the invitation to contribute to this important book as a great honor and opportunity to add my little story to the interesting chapters that are assembled in this volume. Writing a personal account is like lifting a heavy load off my chest— the load I have been carrying since embracing archaeology as a profession. It is an experience full of challenges, trials, and tribulations. But as I look back at all these, I still consider such experience as quite worthy—a combination of luck, hard work, self-motivation, teamwork, and discipline. I have worked with dedicated and inspiring mentors, advisors, and colleagues both in Nigeria and in the United States, and I have loving parents who understand education as a panacea for ignorance. All these have combined in shaping my academic and professional outlook. I have also realized that being an Indige-

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nous African archaeologist educated in Nigeria and the United States does not necessarily guarantee equal opportunities to the means of succeeding in the profession. I am a Yoruba and my people are called Igbomina (Igboona), a recent terminology whose real meaning is unclear but which simply refers to those people who speak a related Yoruba dialect (Igboona), as well as the area they occupy (northern Yoruba) in central Nigeria. My research has focused on African urbanism and it origins and growth. I am also interested in small-scale societies, especially societies located on the edge or periphery of large states, their social, political, and economic organization, and their interaction with powerful large centers. My other research interests include African metallurgical traditions, early colonial contacts, and social transformations. I am presently an associate professor in African and African American Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I teach courses in anthropology, archaeology, and history.

H OW I B ECAME AN A RCHAEOLOGIST There is a high probability that a child of an attorney or physician will emulate the professional path of the parents. In a similar way, if my father or an immediate family member had been an archaeologist, then it follows that my motivation would have come from them. But this is not the case, and neither of my parents was an archaeologist or educated in the Western tradition. My late father was a subsistence farmer and an Islamic cleric, and my mother is a trader and raw-food contractor. This is why it is difficult to provide any definite answer on why or how I became an archaeologist. I cannot point to a single reason or factor that propelled me into my present career. A multiplicity of events and circumstances may have been involved. What I vividly remember was my love for history in high school (which unfortunately excluded the topic of archaeology). I only read about archaeology later, during my final year at Kwara State College of Technology (now Kwara State Polytechnic) where I took my advanced level diploma. The issue of archaeology arose during one of the career sessions with my European history teacher, Dr. Ann O’Hear, who is currently an editor with the Humanity Books publishing company. Even this meeting, while very motivating, did not spur me to choose archaeology as a desired course in my application to the University of Ibadan in 1982. Rather, I picked law as my first choice and history as second. Unfortunately, my score was too low for law, so the university gave me my second choice (history). In those days (as now), to tell someone you are studying history in college was an embarrassment because that meant you would ultimately end up as a classroom teacher. We all know that teachers are poorly paid in Africa and that the teaching profession has lost its old spark and respect. For example, among the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, teachers and the teaching profession have been referred to as Ogun mefun (“god of chalk”)—Ogun is the god of iron and war in the Yoruba pantheon—as a way of mocking the profession. It was probably a combination of the fear of being ridiculed by friends and the short tutorial on archaeology I received from Dr. O’Hear that led to my decision, at the end of my first year at the university, to change my course. The university allowed such course changes as long as the applicant satisfied the requirements for the new course.

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Both the Archaeology and History Departments offered combined honors degrees, so it was easier for me to opt for a combined degree in those subjects. While the change from history to history/archaeology was straightforward, presenting it to friends and family members in a convincing manner was not easy. Each time the question was asked about my choice of undergraduate discipline, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining a subject I knew little about at the time. I probably left most people in doubt and confused by my responses. Lest I forget, none of my parents or family members played any role in my career choice. But my parents were more than happy that I was in college, and were not concerned with what I was studying. To them, every college degree ended up with good jobs, cars, and great salaries. Unfortunately, my parents had to wait much longer for any of these to be realized. I graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1985 with B.A. (honors) in history/ archaeology and then did my National Youth Service Corps in 1986 in Niger State. Two factors led to my decision to go back to school for my graduate degree (M.A.). First, job prospects were not very promising at the time, and the thought of staying home with no job and being dependent on parents and family was something I dreaded. Second, there was an understanding that archaeology would be more rewarding with a higher degree. I therefore applied to, and was admitted into, the University of Ibadan master’s program in November 1986. The graduate program consisted of ten to twelve months of course work, plus a thesis. Although I finished on time in November 1987, it was a very expensive program. The declining national economy had led to a severe reduction in government financial support to universities, which survived mostly by shifting the financial burdens to students. My career in archaeology began to take shape during my graduate degree program at the University of Ibadan. I remember approaching the late Professor Ade Obayemi, then director-general of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) in Nigeria, for advice on a thesis research topic. His suggestions culminated in my focus on the Yoruba northern frontier, an area that has generated little research compared with western and southern Yorubaland. I designed my M.A. thesis around a small area of northern Yoruba, the Ipo settlements in western Igbomina. Using oral tradition and archival documents, I identified and documented ancient settlements in the area and wrote descriptions of surface relics. Although limited in scope, the project was an eyeopener for me and provided the basis for a more in-depth study in later years. In March 1988, I was employed as an archaeologist with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) in Lagos. The NCMM employed more professionals (e.g., archaeologists, ethnographers, curators, librarians) during Ade Obayemi’s tenure than in any other period in its history. Later that year, I was posted to the National Museum at Esie in Kwara State as a resident archaeologist, along with two other new staff members: James Ameje (archaeologist), who is currently stationed at NCMM in Abuja, and Chinyere (ethnographer), who is no longer with NCMM. The museum is situated about 3 kilometers from Esie, which is a small town in the Irepodun local government area of Kwara State. It houses over 1,000 figures carved of steatite stone, probably from as early as the 12th century AD (Stevens 1978; Usman

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1998). Until recently, the museum lacked essential amenities such as electricity and indoor plumbing, so it was a difficult adjustment for us, and even more so for my colleagues, neither of whom could speak the local language. Having come to the realization that this may be my home for some years to come, I decided to make myself useful and my stay as enjoyable as possible. I therefore drew up a research agenda that was approved by then Esie Museum curator Seyi Hambolu. It was also agreed that I could use the museum’s vehicle, a Volkswagen Beetle, for research on certain days of the month. Accompanied by the museum’s photographer, Kayode Adewusi, and driver Abudu Akinwale, we crisscrossed several villages in the Igbomina, Ibolo, and Ilorin areas of northern Yorubaland between October 1988 and January 1990, collecting oral traditions, visiting, and documenting ancient settlements. I continued to enjoy this opportunity when Ireti Tubi became the curator of the museum, after Dr. Hambolu was transferred to Maiduguri. I owe much appreciation to these people who facilitated my research in various ways and contributed to its success. In October 1990, I secured a teaching position about 45 kilometers from Esie, in the History Department at the University of Ilorin, which was where the late Ade Obayemi worked before he was appointed to head the NCMM. Though this new job was very promising and challenging (and offered me an opportunity to earn a Ph.D. degree there), I had developed so much affection for the museum job that the idea of leaving the organization felt like a betrayal. In the end, I reluctantly resigned my job at the NCMM and moved to Ilorin to face the new challenge in my life. My archaeological research con-

House remains, Oke-Oyan site, Igbomina. Photo by Aribidesi Usman.

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tinued at the university at a very slow pace, since my time was now divided between teaching and research. In June 1991, everything was again put on hold when I secured a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. degree in the United States. Pursuing a Ph.D. degree was part of the vow that I had made to myself—that if I was going to remain in archaeology, then it would be with a higher degree. And with my employment as faculty in the university, a Ph.D. degree now became mandatory, required for advancement and retention. My quest to find the right program began before I secured the university job: when I was working at the Museum in Esie, I would visit the foreign embassies and information centers in Lagos and Ibadan, and search other sources for information on study abroad. I learned quickly that graduate programs, especially for a doctorate, are contingent upon the availability of professors whose research matches the applicant’s interest and are willing to provide supervision and advising. I was attracted to the research of Anthropology Professor Geoffrey Clark at Arizona State University (ASU). Professor Clark later facilitated my admission and became the chair of my Ph.D. committee. I recall one of his conversations with me after I entered the program, in which he said he was impressed about me for two reasons: (1) my persistence, through constant communication, and (2) my clear research proposal. My admission offers from ASU and several universities in Britain did not come with full scholarships, so I was faced with the challenge of securing funding for overseas graduate studies. I applied to different foreign scholarships and agencies, including WennerGren Foundation and the LSB Leakey Foundation, but none was successful. I stumbled on the information for the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship by accident. The scholarship guarantees one year of full tuition and allowances for a graduate program in any approved universities outside the candidate’s home country. Only three or four such scholarships are awarded every year in Nigeria. I was awarded the 1991 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship from Rotary District 911. My host Rotarian counselor was Frank Crane, past president of Rotary Club of Tempe 1280 and past Rotary District Governor of Arizona. I began my doctoral program in August 1991 at ASU. My advisor and Ph.D. committee chair was Geoffrey Clark, and committee members were Roderick McIntosh (Rice University) and Barbara Stark and Katherine Spielmann (both ASU). While it is not possible here to acknowledge each one separately, the overall advice, support, guidance, and encouragements they provided ensured the successful completion of my Ph.D. degree program. The Rotary Scholarship ended in 1992, but ASU’s support continued. In 1994/95 I secured dissertation grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Ballantine Family Fund to go to Nigeria for research. My dissertation, State-Periphery Relations and Sociopolitical Development in Igbomina, was completed in May 1998 (Usman 1998). Since 1995, I have carried out two seasons of fieldwork in Nigeria. In 2002, I secured a postdoctoral grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to study regional interaction and ceramic distribution in northern Yorubaland, while a small grant from ASU in 2004 enabled me to investigate sociopolitical formation on the Yoruba frontier.

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L ESSONS L EARNED : W ORKING WITH N ORTHERN YORUBALAND C OMMUNITIES Northern Yorubaland encompasses the present-day Kwara and Kogi States of Nigeria. Known historically as a frontier zone, this region was inhabited by ethnically diverse communities who formed a mosaic of societies that pursued different but complementary economic activities which coalesced into the dynamic interlocking relations evident today. The northern Yoruba groups include the Igbomina, Ibolo, Ilorin, Ekiti, and OkunYoruba, several of which share borders with non-Yoruba. None of these groups ever formed a single, large political entity like Oyo.1 My research has been to document the Yoruba frontier experience. Using oral traditions and ethnohistorical, archival, and archaeological data, I have been reconstructing the daily life of the people and the dynamic relationships among the various communities in the past. How did these frontier states and communities respond to external intrusions, and what repercussions did these have on their sociopolitical institutions? What can we learn about the nature of warfare, diplomacy, and ethnic interactions in pre-colonial southwestern and central Nigeria through a study of the impact of the wars on these frontier zones? As frontier communities, the northern Yoruba peoples were both beneficiaries and/or victims of region-wide events, including the collapse of the Old Oyo Empire and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The research entails painstakingly collecting data relevant for understanding these vexing issues that have shaped modern-day relationships in Africa and beyond. My research has been carried out in three phases: (1) collection of oral tradition; (2) location of sites; and (3) survey and test excavations. To date, 57 towns/villages have been visited and have provided oral tradition. At the same time, a total of 72 archaeological sites (habitations, industrial or iron smelting sites, shrines) have been identified in the area of northern Yoruba. The approach I have employed in my research is community focus. There is no “no man’s land” in Africa. Lands, including archaeological sites, are owned, utilized, or recognized by the community. The people lay claim to these in the belief that knowledge of the past can bring benefit to the living. Our oral interviews at various communities often began with introductions and explanations of the purpose of our visit. We observed a general eagerness among the local informants to provide historical information. The enthusiasm of the people seems to be related to community understanding of the benefits of our research to their localities. Initially, the communities regarded us as representatives of a government agency and our research as signs of government’s interests in their localities. Two things may have created this impression. First, the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (a federal government agency) issued the research permit that we presented to the community ahead of every investigation. And second, at the time that I was with the National Museum, we usually used a government vehicle with an “FG” (Federal Government of Nigeria) license plate. Although oral tradition can be used to legitimize dynasties, claims to political power, or ownership of land, local communities generally think of historical information dealing with the past as having the capacity to resolve potential frictions between communities,

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restructure traditional sociopolitical imbalance, and provide the needed development in the region. As an Indigenous archaeologist from the region, I always found myself in this complicated situation: how best to convey my intention and still retain the trust and respect of the local people? Do you tell the people that the research you are doing would bring the much needed recognition and physical development to the area, or do you inform them that what you are doing is purely academic research for publication and for your own advancement and job security? Regardless of how you present your motive, the local people will eventually figure out your agenda. During my early years of fieldwork (1988–1990), most communities we visited usually provided food and accommodation. This is an African hospitality to visitors, though it may also be tied to expectations that we would do our work in a way that benefited the community. The general hospitality we received in each community contributed to the success of our research. However, my relation with the communities during research changed in later years. While we continued to receive cooperation from the communities, provision of our essential needs in the field, such as food and accommodations, became our responsibility. Now, even when these are provided by communities, we make sure they are paid for. Also, community members have become more involved in our work, as they are hired as guides and field laborers. By recruiting local people in the field, they become more knowledgeable about our work and less suspicious of our intentions; thus we gain more of their trust and respect. Doing archaeology in northern Yoruba is challenging, with its difficult terrain (hilly and rugged in most parts), bad roads, long distances to travel, and inaccessibility to sites

Excavation crew sieving through dirt for artifacts. Photo by Aribidesi Usman.

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from modern villages and roads. The region is not as developed in infrastructure as other areas of Yorubaland and is more remote than most other Yoruba centers. Getting to most sites can feel like trying to eat the honey inside a large rock. Distance to sites from a village is often 5 to 10 kilometers or more; the lack of drivable roads often means long treks by foot. The local people have been indispensable in locating and identifying archaeological sites in the region. Some owned farms at or near a site, or stumbled on archaeological sites during hunting trips and were able to recognize them by their surface relics. However, sometimes we would hear of a site but had trouble finding the right person to guide us there: recollections of or familiarity with a site may have occurred years earlier, or perhaps the knowledgeable individual no longer lived in the area. Even when a guide could be found, their age (between 50 and 70 years old) and other commitments (e.g., farming) sometimes prevented full participation, and availability was often limited to one day. We were therefore forced to make subsequent trips to sites on our own, much to the admiration of the communities, who were often surprised by our ability to navigate through the bush by ourselves, complete our work, and still return to the village. At the end of each day of work, curious villagers would besiege our residence to hear about our findings. We happily showed them our finds (e.g., pottery, charcoal, bones). We could easily sense when the people were surprised to see the ancient materials their forefathers had used; some materials, though, brought instant recognition, probably because they are still in use or have been used in recent memory. The people were amazed that we had taken so much trouble to get some of the materials, which could be found as well in their present villages. On this, we had to explain why artifacts from their old villages are preferable (for us) to those in the modern villages. Even for Indigenous archaeologists like me, with cultural links to, and personal affection for, northern Yoruba, doing research in the region has not always been easy. There are sensitive local issues that must be recognized and respected. You are not likely to succeed where intercommunity strife and land disputes are common, as I experienced in doing my 1995 dissertation research. Pee was one of the settlements chosen for investigation, but it is on disputed land between the Igbaja and Okeya communities. The oral tradition that I had earlier collected from Okeya suggested Pee was the ancestral settlement of the Okeya people, which was corroborated by traditions from several neighboring towns. Pee was abandoned after being invaded by Igbaja. It is today located closer to Igbaja than to Okeya and is being used as farmland by the former. On the day we were conducting reconnaissance of the site, a local farmer saw us with survey equipment and went to tell the traditional ruler of Igbaja village, who consequently sent out his hunters (about 20 of them) to stop our work. Being outnumbered, we cooperated with them and allowed them to take our equipment, after they promised it would be returned if we appeared before the village head to explain our mission. The village chief whom we met later in the day accused us of trespassing and surveying his people’s land: the similarity of our equipment to that used by surveyors convinced them of this. Nothing we said made any sense to the chief or his attendants. He

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insisted that we had not sought permission from him before going to the site. Nor was the research permit issued by the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, a federal government agency, helpful. In fact, we made the matter worse when we told the ruler (Igbaja) that the neighboring village of Okeya had granted us permission to work at Pee. He became angrier with us for having gone first to his subordinate (in chieftaincy hierarchy). I was careful not to reveal my own village, since the village head of Igbaja was not very friendly with my own village head, Olupo. Our experience at Pee reflects the type of local problems that archaeologists unfortunately can become embroiled in. My research at Pee has still not progressed beyond that limited survey, since subsequent requests to the ruler of Igbaja to continue our investigations there have not been successful. Nonetheless, Pee turned out to be a productive site, with pieces of soapstone figures found there similar to the ones at the National Museum, Esie (Usman 1997).

T RIALS AND T RIBULATIONS OF I NDIGENOUS A RCHAEOLOGISTS I joined the African and African American Studies Department at Arizona State University in 2001 as assistant professor. Though it is not a traditional anthropology department, I have been able to continue my research while also teaching courses in the history, archaeology, arts, and culture of Africa. My research and teaching interests intersect the traditional boundaries of history, archaeology, and anthropology. Since 2001, I have carried out fieldwork in Nigeria, and I am also developing a research agenda in Caribbean archaeology. But this account of my professional development has occurred not without some difficulties, especially working in a competitive environment with foreign archaeologists who may have more resources, often are better educated, and may have more connections to the proper places or people. These problems are not limited to Indigenous African archaeologists outside Africa, but are also shared by the few active African archaeologists living on the continent. Something I have observed and experienced since obtaining my degree and working in the United States is professional isolation. There is limited interaction between Indigenous African archaeologists and non-black archaeologists doing research in Africa. It is difficult to understand the reasons for this, although one would think it is cultural, or just because most of the Indigenous African archaeologists were former students of the foreign archaeologists. Annual conferences provide opportunities for contact, but this tends to be brief and with no follow-up afterward. On the other hand, Indigenous African archaeologists in the United States interact more frequently with fellow Africans to alleviate this problem of isolation. There is also reluctance or at least little enthusiasm from non-African-born archaeologist colleagues to assist African-born archaeologists in obtaining jobs and grants. Once again, Indigenous African archaeologists must look for assistance from their African colleagues who, in most cases, can offer only limited aid. It is very rare to find an African-born archaeologist, even with graduate training in the United States or United Kingdom, teaching in an anthropology department anywhere.

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The Indigenous African archaeologists who have been fortunate to find jobs are usually in non-traditional anthropology departments. Africa is going through stagnation in the development of archaeology as a result of the declining economic condition; and political turmoil in some of the countries has made it impossible for research to be conducted or continued (Musonda 1990: 9). Unless the economy improves and the political climate stabilizes, future development of archaeology in Africa will remain gloomy. Unfortunately, this downward trend occurs as Africans are just beginning to appreciate the usefulness of studying their past and preserving their cultural heritage. Fewer universities in Africa are now offering archaeology degrees than before, and producing fewer graduates, many of whom have since changed profession because they could not secure related jobs. In Nigeria, the University of Ibadan has the only functional archaeology department with degree-granting capacity. The paucity of trained archaeologists working in Africa is perhaps the main reason why large areas of the continent still remain archaeologically unknown. In the past, American and European universities have taken interest in the training of Africans, and the majority of Indigenous African scholars have received their training in North America and Britain. But today, the interest in teaching archaeology and training Africans in American and British universities seems to be declining. Obtaining funding for archaeological research in Africa is one of the most frustrating exercises that a young Indigenous African archaeologist has to undertake. A new graduate is unlikely to enter the mainstream of funded research because grant awards are largely dictated by past achievement (Musonda 1990: 12), which inhibits both advancement of knowledge and the ability to establish oneself in the field. Economic constraints, rather than lack of suitable skills, are thus responsible for the failure of Indigenous African archaeologists in Africa to make significant contributions to knowledge. The large agencies that fund archaeological research prefer projects that focus on the few remaining “ancients” whose contribution to knowledge has been outstanding (Musonda 1990: 12), rather than young scholars working on relatively “unknown” topics. The limited research funds available to Indigenous African archaeologists based in Africa have forced them to teach more, publish less, and thus struggle to compete with their colleagues in overseas countries. In most cases, they have to rely on the limited funding for fieldwork secured for “collaborative” research by African colleagues working in North America. The amount and quality of research are also affected by the scarcity of current periodicals, books, and other published works: someone recently commented that the book scarcity at our universities in Africa will soon turn the universities’ libraries into museums. Again, some African archaeologists rely on overseas colleagues for books, reprints, and journal subscriptions. The National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) is the second largest employer of archaeologists in Nigeria (after the university), so one would expect a substantial amount of research to originate there. However, typical of civil service jobs in Nigeria, there are few incentives for professionals, whereas there are irregular and discriminatory postings of personnel to distant areas, with no clear objectives or assign-

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ments to be accomplished there or the necessary provisions to accommodate them. The inability of the NCMM to serve as a truly professional institution—in which staff have opportunities for training, timely promotion, research incentives, and participation in workshops and conferences, nationally and internationally—has resulted in a loss of personnel (Usman 2002). Under the NCMM, archaeological work is done sporadically, and only the archaeologists in the top senior positions enjoy most of the available research incentives. Young archaeologists fresh from university quickly become disenchanted by bureaucratic red-tape, and leave to seek employment elsewhere; many never return to archaeology. To his credit, the current director-general of NCMM is making research and publication a requirement for promotion, especially for professionals such as archaeologists and ethnographers. Yet it is unclear what incentives and resources will be available to the staff to carry out the work needed to meet this requirement. Publishing of research findings by Indigenous African archaeologists is gradually increasing, thanks to a major improvement in the African Archaeological Review and to the new Journal of African Archaeology, which is publishing more research by Indigenous African archaeologists. On the other hand, the smaller and less well-known Indigenous publishing journals in Africa (i.e., West African Journal of Archaeology, Odu, Nigerian Heritage, Zambia Museums Journal), which provide important forums for Indigenous archaeologists to propagate their ideas, are hampered by financial difficulties. Competition aside, these should complement the better-established journals.2

C ONCLUSION This chapter is a personal account of my professional experience as an Indigenous African archaeologist. I realize that many things may have been left out of this account, omissions that likely reflect the complexity of the experience of being an Indigenous African archaeologist and the daily struggle to keep one’s head afloat in the difficult waters we find ourselves in. To succeed in the profession, Indigenous African archaeologists must have self-confidence, as well as the ability and desire to compete at any level. Indigenous African archaeologists must be able to accept criticism of their work, even though their ideas may sound to them to be the “absolute” truth. Adequate funding has been, and remains, a major constraint. Successfully obtaining funds often requires considerable effort and multiple attempts. Research aimed at contributing to the economic, political, social, cultural, and scientific development of a country has a better chance of being funded than that which is purely academic in character (Musonda 1990). Hopefully, Indigenous foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals in Africa will become more involved in funding archaeology. The use of the media to solicit funding and to advertise major archaeological discoveries should be encouraged, while the establishment of archaeology clubs and archaeology-related projects, including exhibits in schools and public buildings, would go a long way to increasing public awareness about archaeology. At the same time, there should be more collaborative efforts between home-based and foreign-based African Indigenous archaeologists and

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their expatriate colleagues regarding research, grant proposals, and publications. This would help reduce the unevenness associated with access to research facilities and resources. Although many challenges still remain in archaeological practices in Africa by Indigenous scholars, my experience in this profession has been a remarkable one. I hope future Indigenous archaeologists in Africa will be able to learn from this experience and carry the profession to a much higher level.

N OTES 1 They are a “decentralized” society, succinctly referred to as “mini-states” (Obayemi 1976). 2 These include the Journal of African History, African Archaeological Review, Journal of African

Archaeology, South African Archaeological Bulletin, South African Journal of Science, Azania, and Nyame Akuma.

R EFERENCES C ITED Musonda, F. B. 1990 African Archaeology: Looking Forward. African Archaeological Review 8: 3–22. Obayemi, Ade 1976 The Yoruba and Edo-Speaking Peoples and Their Neighbors before 1600 AD. In History of West Africa 1, edited J. F. A. Ajayi and M. Crowder, pp. 255–322. Longman, Ibadan. Stevens, P., Jr. 1978 The Stone Images of Esie, Nigeria. Africana Publishing, New York. Usman, A. A. 2002 The State of Cultural Resource Management in Nigeria. In Nigeria in the Twentieth Century, edited by T. Falola, pp. 157–167. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina. 1998 State-Periphery Relations and Sociopolitical Development in Igbominaland, Northcentral Yoruba, Nigeria. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe. 1997 Soapstone Figurines Revisited: New Evidence from Northcentral Yorubaland, Nigeria. Nigerian Heritage 6: 115–125.

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Photo by Carol Ellick

BECOMING ONE OF “THEM” . . .

Joe Watkins “Hello. My name is Joe Watkins, and I’m an archaeologist.” “Hello, Joe. Welcome.” “Thank you. I’m glad to be here among supporting people. It’s been more than. . . .” his may sound like the beginning of an AA meeting. In some ways it is, although not Alcoholics Anonymous—but perhaps Archaeologists Anonymous. I have told this story often, and have written it a few times, but it is the genesis of who I have become as an Indigenous archaeologist. Imagine a ten-year-old Choctaw boy, walking along a dirt road in an Oklahoma summer—hot and humid, with cicadas buzzing, chiggers and ticks waiting for someone to

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walk through the weeds. Imagine that ten-year old finding a projectile point made of milky quartz—not clear and pretty, but medium-sized, rather “clunky,” and anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 years old. I was that ten-year-old, of course. I showed the projectile point to my grandmother, and she told me (through my cousin-interpreter) that the point was not of my people’s history, but that of the people who lived in the area before us. The Choctaw had been removed from their original homelands in Mississippi in the 1830s to southeastern Oklahoma, replacing the original Caddoan people. Choctaw history thus creates a “nonconformity” over the Caddoan archaeology of the area. My grandmother made it known that, in her opinion, it was important that the precontact history of those original people not get lost. At the time, I was interested in dinosaurs and going to the Gobi Desert to discover clusters of dinosaur eggs in petrified nests. But I never forgot my grandmother’s words and ideas. About seven years later, in 1968, I did my first archaeological survey of the Canadian River bottoms near Rosedale, Oklahoma. I’ve been “doing” archaeology off and on since then—more than 37 years at the time of this writing. Archaeology was an effort, but I found it worthwhile. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost a sacrilege, I suppose. The social unrest that gripped the rest of the nation was not as rampant in Oklahoma, but it was still there. With the development of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area of Minnesota, American Indian ideas toward anthropology and archaeology became more pointed. There were actual confrontations that set the stage for a period of internal questioning. Vine Deloria, Jr., made me think of the implications of my actions, and news reports in Akwesasne Notes and other American Indian newspapers also showed that American Indians were no longer content to allow archaeologists, museum professionals, and other academics free rein over human remains, special artifacts, and other sacred items. The year 1971 witnessed an AIM takeover of an archaeological dig and an archaeological laboratory, as well as sit-ins at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. The protesters made it clear that the materials being studied and curated were of special importance to Indian peoples beyond the “scientific value” the scientists felt they held. The conflict within me concerning these materials continues to this day. I learned the archaeological method and theory prevalent during the later 1960s and listened as the New Archaeology attempted to explain changes in human culture over time and to create universal statements. I read archaeological articles that tortured and twisted ethnographic analogies to explain the past. And I stood by as archaeology searched for ways to become the “hard science” its practitioners felt it needed to be. I came to realize that archaeology’s practitioners were searching for their identities and, as a result, archaeology had none of its own. It was pseudo-science, social science, or nonscience, depending on who was searching for the past. Its practitioners were afraid to admit they were humanists rather than scientists. I loved playing with the cultural material of the ancients. In 1973 I went to France to work with François Bordes and was introduced to morphological typology and flintknapping, and to two of its key practitioners then, Jacques Tixier and Bruce Bradley. I spent enough time flint-knapping to make my first-semester graduate-school grades

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hover perilously close to flunking me out. Had it not been for the support of Dr. Fred Wendorf in the Southern Methodist University’s Department of Anthropology, I probably would not be writing about this. Who knows what I would have become, but it is likely I would not have become an archaeologist. I have not said “thank you” enough to Fred Wendorf, so “Thank you, Dr. Wendorf.” I am glad to have gone through my schooling when I did. It helped form me into the archaeologist that I am today. I struggled with archaeology and ethnology, physical anthropology, the history of anthropological theory, and, of course, statistics, but I became an anthropologist. Not merely an archaeologist, but a real, by God, anthropologist! I still consider myself to be an anthropologist with a specialization in archaeology. In 1975, I conducted what I had hoped would be my dissertation research. I constructed and occupied a subterranean “pithouse” at the Fort Burgwin Research Center near Taos, New Mexico. I built the structure with the help of friends and family—3.5 meters in diameter, 2 meters deep, with ponderosa log beams, juniper latillas, and sagebrush. All this was covered with a mud and dirt roof supported by four juniper posts. I lived there through a rather uncommon winter of snow, thaw, and snow. I recorded the temperature differential between the interior of the pithouse and the outside; I recorded the activities I did in the pithouse, as well as the locations of those activities. I skinned animals, ground corn, cooked meat, made pottery and baskets, flint-knapped, made arrows, and did hide-working. I worked like crazy and did scientific research in its most basic sense. My research program was aimed at gaining an understanding of the ways that activities performed in pithouses of the sort occupied in the Taos valley 800 years ago were constrained by the physical limitations of the structure, and I wanted to know what physical

Stretching a tanned hide. Photo by Susan Walkins.

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Making a ceramic pot. Photo by Susan Walkins.

manifestations would remain as archaeological evidence of the cultural activities that were carried out in the pithouses. I even went so far as to try to “seal” the pithouse floor by burning down the pithouse. The fire didn’t work, but that’s another story. My intent was to compare the activity area patterns derived experimentally with artifact scatters recorded on the floors of excavated pithouses in the American Southwest. As I was writing my dissertation, I got an offer from the University of California Los Angeles for a postdoctoral fellowship, pending my defense of the dissertation. However, Southwestern archaeologists had not recorded the artifacts from enough pithouse floors in sufficient detail, and I didn’t have enough archaeological examples for comparative purposes. Because of this, one of my dissertation committee members refused to allow me to defend my dissertation. Good-bye dissertation, good-bye UCLA—hello Department of the Interior’s Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services in Atlanta! The United States government did influence the archaeologist I have become. It taught me the intricacies of federal compliance archaeology and also the need to think beyond the constraints of academic research programs and ideas. And it taught me to think about the impact of the practice of archaeology on the people whose ancestors had created the archaeological record under study. In 1978, Congress passed a little-discussed law—the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. This law, P.L. 95-341, was aimed at forcing the United States government to recognize the ways that its policies impacted the practice of American Indian religious ideas and to change those policies. Ten consultations were held across the United States to take testimony from American Indians on the ways that government policy affected various issues that concerned the tribal communities. Among these, of

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course, were protection of sacred sites, access to sacred objects, and the protection of human remains and cemeteries. As I listened to those Native people talk about their concerns, I began to question further the impacts that archaeology had on Native people. The words of my grandmother still rang in my head, but I continued to struggle with trying to reach a middle ground—the unrecorded history of past people was too important to lose, but here were Native people telling me that they preferred that the unwritten history be lost if the past had to be disturbed in order to get the information needed to tell it. The conflict continued, and I left the federal government in 1980. In 1983, I quit archaeology. In 1986, I started again. Then came the discovery of a set of materials in Washington State known as the East Wenatchee Clovis Cache. The find intrigued me, but more so the social situation that developed as the situation played out. The conflict between one archaeologist and the local American Indian groups made me stop and think about the rights of both groups to influence the research and the ethics of the discipline in relation not only to the fieldwork, but to the discipline as well. It formed the basis for my second (and final) dissertation on the relationships between Indigenous populations and archaeologists and the ethical practice of archaeology. The dissertation was aided by the discovery of the set of human remains near Kennewick, Washington, and the resultant court case related to the attempted repatriation of those skeletal remains. Once I began examining the relationships between archaeologists and American Indians, it became difficult to continue practicing business as usual. It became obvious that archaeology could no longer pretend to exist outside of the contemporary social milieu within which repatriation existed, and repatriation was a movement that, if you listened to American archaeologists, threatened to dismantle the discipline. The internal reflection the discipline was experiencing as it questioned its relationships was criticized by some, but it got archaeologists to think about issues in a way they had not done before. The topic of my dissertation drew me to get more involved in trying to make a change within the discipline. In 1993, I was invited to participate in the joint Society for American Archaeology/National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop that led to the formulation of the Principles of Archaeological Ethics. While it might be considered that the discipline of archaeology had essentially ignored American Indian concerns (with notable exceptions!) prior to this, at least this time there was an opportunity to have a tiny American Indian involvement. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma (Jenkins) and I were there and found a place to voice our concerns. While lumped within the rubric of “affected groups” in Principle 2 (in the Society for American Archaeology’s Code of Ethics), at least they are there. At the same time, the Canadian Archaeological Association was examining its relationships with its First Nations. The codes and statements of ethics that the Society for American Archaeology and the Canadian Archaeological Association produced spoke of the necessity to openly acknowledge the relationships between archaeology and North American Indigenous populations. The time was ripe for change, and, while change was slow, it was at least

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happening. Archaeologists were actually paying attention to the voices of others around them, not just to the voices of other anthropologists. The discipline was opening up more and more, with different perspectives reaching wider audiences. In 2000, I was lucky to work with Deborah Nichols from Dartmouth College to develop a (successful) Wenner-Gren grant proposal to co-organize a conference that examined specifically the relationship between archaeologists and Native Americans. That conference, held at Dartmouth in 2001, brought together many American Indians involved in archaeology, including Roger Echo-Hawk, Dean Suagee, Janine Bowechop, John Norder, Richard Begay, Desireé Martinez, Dorothy Lippert, and Davina Two Bears. I apologize if I have inadvertently omitted someone from this list, but I felt like the “old guard” as I listened to and spoke with these younger archaeologists. But perhaps it was after the conference broke on Saturday that much of the impetus for my continued involvement with “Indigenous archaeology” was cast. Sitting in a motel room with these people gave me a renewed sense of vision. These younger archaeologists discussed the issues they faced in trying to operate along the margins of the archaeological and tribal communities of which they were a part. Many of the stories sounded similar—“My professors say I can’t be Indian and an archaeologist”; “My relatives ask how I can possibly dig up dead Indians and sleep at night”; “I don’t know how I can face more years of trying to deal with all this.” I didn’t want those people to have to struggle alone, as it seemed Dorothy Lippert and I had. The result of the conference is a closed support system that operates to cajole and counsel American Indians involved in archaeology. The name of the group—the Closet Chickens—is silly, perhaps, but it serves a purpose. Now when a member feels the need to vent or ask a question, there’s almost always someone there to offer guidance, condolences, or congratulations. Not all the members are Indigenous, but we all share an open commitment to discussion of issues relating to the practice of Indigenous archaeology and the opening up of archaeology as a discipline. I must admit it is easier to be an American Indian and an archaeologist at this point in time than it was in the past. The almost instantaneous electronic communication we now have makes it possible to keep in contact with a support system that almost defies belief, and we can communicate across time zones and across continents as well. Not all Indigenous archaeologists are here in the United States (as witnessed by the large number of non-American Indian contributors to this volume), and contact is imperative. For me, becoming an Indigenous archaeologist was a combination of culture and circumstance. I was lucky to have been brought up in a family where education was valued. My mother stressed my formal education, and my grandmother stressed my cultural education. My curiosity was a natural outgrowth of a child who spent time in both the city and in the wilds, and I was always eager to listen and learn from those around me. I consider myself blessed to have found a career that allowed me to blend the best (and sometimes the worst) of both worlds. I also consider myself lucky to have been blessed with friends and colleagues who share those worlds with me.

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BECOMING AN NGARRINDJERI ARCHAEOLOGIST

Photo by Duncan Wright

THE JOURNEY TO AND FROM SUBURBIA

Christopher J. Wilson am Ngarrindjeri. We are a collective nation of First People from the Lower Murray Lakes and Coorong in southeastern South Australia. I am Ngarrindjeri through my father and my grandfather, who were both born on Ngarrindjeri ruwe (“country”). My grandfather grew up on Raukkan (formally known as Point McLeay Mission), which is situated on the shores of Lake Alexandrina, the foot of the Murray River system and the head of the Coorong. It has always been a meeting place for Ngarrindjeri people, from before European colonisation. This region is where fresh and salt waters meet and is a significant place of creation as told through Ngurunderi, a Ngarrindjeri creation ancestor. After sixteen years on this settlement, which was controlled by the government under a “Protector of Aborigines,” my grandfather decided to make the journey from the mission upstream to the Riverland to seek employment and a new way of life. Whilst working, he met my grandmother who had travelled from Victoria to visit relatives across the border.

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My grandparents began their lives together along the banks of the Murray River in wurleys (“dwellings made from wood”) and heshen (“burlap”) bags sewn together. They had the first three of thirteen children whilst in the Riverland in South Australia. After several years working in the Riverland, they made the journey to suburbia, to the southern suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia, where they became very well respected in the community. Later, my uncles and aunts, as well as my father, began to make their own journey, just as I have begun my own. It was only recently that I began to understand the importance of sharing life stories and histories, and I will continue this journey by highlighting the experience that I had as a young Ngarrindjeri person who wanted to return to Ngarrindjeri ruwe and make the journey to and from suburbia.

F ROM THE B EGINNING : “M EMORY ” AND “P LACE ” I was born in Adelaide on the land of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. This is my birthplace, the country where I grew up and the place that continues to be associated with many memories. In particular, I remember the excitement of walking to the beach with cousins and spending the whole summer swimming, fishing, and embarking on expeditions through “unknown” landscapes that were within “dangerous” territory and walking the streets that bounded our suburb at night. Ultimately, it is my memories within “suburbia” and the “southern suburbs” of Adelaide that begin the first phase of my story and my journey of becoming an Ngarrindjeri archaeologist. In positioning my experience and connecting my “memories” with significant “place,” I also acknowledge that this journey is part of a much larger story that continues to be woven by generations of Ngarrindjeri people who have come before me and who will follow. At a very young age I always knew that I was “Aboriginal” but only understood this as being a Nunga1 person, which included the places I visited, the people I knew, and the languages I spoke (see Amery 1995). As a young child, I remember learning about aspects of my culture—language, kinship, creation stories, importance of ruwe and family, to name a few—whilst growing up with relatives, without even realising it. During the holiday break, mum and dad would take my two younger brothers and me to visit our relatives at Raukkan and Point Pearce (a former mission settlement on the Yorke Peninsula). The process of learning about family, culture, and ruwe became stronger, and I began to “rediscover”that my heritage extended beyond Ngarrindjeri and included connections to Narrunga (people of the Yorke Peninsula) through my grandmother and Kaurna (people of the Adelaide Plains) through my grandfather. It was this understanding that I carried into primary and secondary education. I began my primary school education in Reynella, the same suburb where my father grew up. Most of the knowledge gained in this context was similar to what many young people who attended public schools also learned. There were days when the school would celebrate “cultural difference” and engage in “Aboriginal” activities such as dot painting and listening to Indigenous music, but in hindsight these activities did not truly capture the significance of Indigenous cultural practices within Australia. I also remember many times when I experienced verbal and physical racism. My slightly tan-color skin and deep historical connection to the past seemed to incite racist

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attitudes. “Abo,”“Boong,” and “Coon”were common terms used by white students to point out “difference” within society, an experience shared by many young Indigenous peoples in Adelaide. Although daunting at the time, these experiences made me more aware of my indigeneity and made me form closer ties with other Indigenous youth, particularly towards the beginning of my secondary education. In one context, racism did marginalise many young people I knew. On the other hand, it shifted young people into a common and familiar space, creating a sense of communal identity and collective understanding. This drew many young Indigenous peoples together, and many of us were either relatives or very close friends. When I began my secondary (high school) education, I attended a school that was mainly white, with only three Indigenous students. At this time, I had moved from home in search of an independent life and had also begun to set goals and to identify obstacles. During my first year at secondary school, I felt isolated, being one of only two Aboriginal students. Like many youth, I endured racism, which made me felt dehumanised. I began to realise the importance of family and the sense of identity for young Indigenous peoples. Over the summer, I returned home and spent most of my time with friends and family. I returned to the same beaches to swim, the same streets to walk, and the same homes to sleep as I had in my earlier childhood years. It was the sense of familiarity, community, and family that made me feel at home again. As a result, I was encouraged to transfer to a school that had the highest numbers of Indigenous students in the southern suburbs. To my surprise, this school, which had a reputation for violence and high attrition rates, was best positioned to support Indigenous students due to their experience and to teachers who encouraged further education. In particular, it was Gunilla Stattin, my Year-12 art teacher, who provided me with many opportunities to grow academically and intellectually through expressing identity through art. Through the remainder of my secondary school years, I became more aware of the importance of having a good education, and so I worked hard. Whilst most of my friends and relatives decided to leave school for a job, sporting career, or for pure “freedom,” I decided to take a chance to further my education. I had always enjoyed learning and had a keen interest in the arts, culture, society and science. The thought of gaining employment and creating a good quality of life enabled me to “escape” from the socioeconomic factors that had affected much of my life. I set one path—to complete Year 12, gain entry into university, and complete a Ph.D.—something no one in my family had ever achieved.

B ECOMING AN N GARRINDJERI A RCHAEOLOGIST: D ESTINATION OR D ESTINY ? In telling you part of my story, I have arrived at the point where I am undertaking a Ph.D. in archaeology. It is a personal and professional endeavour that requires much dedication, resilience, and passion. It is simultaneously a pursuit for knowledge, a journey, a degree, and a challenge, among other things. Although I am undertaking it in the present, it is an endeavour that began in the past, a journey that has no end. When I reflect upon the goals I have achieved and the path I have followed, I realise that it may have been my destiny.

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Could a young Ngarrindjeri male who attended a public school and was burdened by the impacts of colonisation achieve goals that many non-Indigenous peoples could not? When I decided to apply for entry into university, I had many interests, including ambulance studies,2 forensic chemistry, and education. After much consideration, I chose archaeology, for four reasons: to study other cultures, to travel, to work outdoors, and because it sounded like an exciting career. Initially, my imagination was fixed in the classical past, particularly Egypt, Rome, and ancient Greece. I was interested in world cultures and exploring the past but also hoped that I would gain more information about Indigenous cultures and our existence within Australia. My mind had been shaped by previous educators, and my understanding of the historical roots of the discipline and its impact upon my own people was limited. Thus in university, I enrolled in every topic related to Indigenous archaeology3 and Indigenous studies to learn more about my own identity. During this period, I became heavily influenced by the ideas of a close friend, the late Naomi Anderson, an Indigenous woman from Broome in Western Australia. We had similar views, ideas, and interests as well as similar goals. We wanted to create change in the discipline and produce new ways of thinking and doing archaeology. Throughout most of my undergraduate studies, I was focused on completing every task, passing every topic, and trying to develop my knowledge base year by year; I made many sacrifices to achieve such goals. In particular, it was challenging to make new friendships and engage in interesting conversations and debates with old friends; and during the course of my degree I separated myself from my childhood friends. While I worked to complete the degree, I was also in the process of becoming a father; this kept me even more focused and determined for my work to meet the highest standards. As a result, I completed my undergraduate degree in 2003 and secured an academic position at Yunggorendi First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research at Flinders University in Adelaide. My main role at Yunggorendi was to recruit Indigenous students into university and support those who were already in a degree program. I was also expected to give lectures, tutorials, and workshops, and be involved in various university processes whilst supporting Indigenous tertiary (graduate) students. During this time, I enrolled in an honours degree program in archaeology to develop my research skills and continue my path towards a Ph.D. At this point, I had become increasingly interested in Indigenous Australian cultures and knowing more about my own, the Ngarrindjeri, and was advised to approach Steve Hemming, an anthropologist, historian, and former curator of the South Australian Museum. It was during our initial meeting that I began to realise how much knowledge and experience Steve had regarding my people and culture; his passion for working with Ngarrindjeri people inspired me to learn more about my own. I have had many mentors in my life who have been instrumental in helping me to achieve my goals and vision. However, I particularly admire the mentors who came into my life during the course of my Honours degree. It was during these two years that I began to shift intellectually and personally. I did not feel like an archaeologist, nor did I feel comfortable calling myself one. It is not surprising that my initial supervisor, Steve Hemming, took this as an opportunity to assist in my development as an archaeologist within the

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Repatriation of Ngarrindjeri Old People from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in the UK, July 2008. Daryle Rigney, Major Sumner, author, and representative from the Exeter City Council. Photo courtesy of Christopher Wilson. Ngarrindjeri community. I was interested in learning research skills and in “knowing”more about archaeology in Ngarrindjeri ruwe. I continued to plan ahead for my Ph.D. and to work closely with my elders, and I was particularly encouraged to learn more about the issues of repatriation and reburial of Old People (human remains)—a process that the Ngarrindjeri had been instrumental in developing within Australia. The first component of my transformation into an Indigenous archaeologist was negotiating research projects with elders and community members with whom I would be working at Camp Coorong Race Relations Centre (Wilson 2007). This process itself felt very awkward for me as a young Ngarrindjeri person. After several months of working with various Ngarrindjeri elders and researching the implications of repatriation for the Ngarrindjeri, I began to notice that I was not only engaging in an emotional community task to repatriate Old People (human remains), but was also engaging in my own process of repatriation to my community and making a significant shift from the “new graduate student” and “young Ngarrindjeri man” to an “Ngarrindjeri archaeologist” (Wilson 2005).

B EING A N GARRINDJERI A RCHAEOLOGIST: T HE L ESSONS AND C HALLENGES I never felt comfortable about calling myself an archaeologist until I completed my honours degree, as I have never been employed as an archaeologist or worked in a consulting organisation. I had a few options to pursue: continue working in a First Nations Centre supporting Indigenous students whilst undertaking a Ph.D. part-time; apply for a scholarship and undertake a Ph.D. full-time; or apply for a position as an archaeologist outside the

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university sector. I was at a crossroad. There were many options available, and I had extensive support from my colleagues. I decided to take a year off from any enrolled studies to consider these options and gain more experience prior to making a final decision. I subsequently worked on several projects that assisted in developing my research and project management skills. I also participated in archaeological fieldwork, conferences, and community meetings wherever possible. During this process, I was building my confidence, increasing my understanding of the issues and complexities of working collaboratively with communities, university researchers, and government agencies, and, more importantly, learning from the challenges. I began to understand the importance of the partnership developing between Flinders University and the Ngarrindjeri community and the dual training programs that were delivered for students (through archaeological field schools), which enabled greater awareness of cultural heritage issues (impacts of farming, development and environment) and the “reality” of archaeological research in southeastern South Australia. Ultimately, this created a “shared space”(Worby and Rigney 2005) for all interested parties that broke cultural barriers and created positive relationships. As a component of the community-initiated programs, I was also given responsibility to coordinate projects, provide teaching expertise to students, and complete tasks delegated by community members. This responsibility was an obligation and a critical point of knowing my place within the community. After five years, I now know what it means to be a Ngarrindjeri archaeologist. It indicates a Ngarrindjeri person who is grounded in the community, who is learning from the elders, and engaging in the process of kungun and Yunnan, which means listening to Ngarrindjeri people talking (Hemming and Trevorrow 2005). It is a reciprocal relationship between the community and the Ngarrindjeri archaeologist whereby the community provides training, direction, and leadership whilst the archaeologist develops a career and acquires more knowledge. It is about working with the community, in the community, and for the community (Wilson 2008) and never from outside. I had to operate within the community as an archaeologist and a community member, a major challenge personally but the main reason for deciding to undertake a Ph.D. with my own community. Whilst I am training under the supervision of experienced academics and gaining the necessary skills as an archaeologist, I am also training under the guidance and supervision of Ngarrindjeri elders and community members and thus continuing my journey.

CONCLUSION : M OVING TO AND F RO What makes me proud about being Ngarrindjeri and becoming a Ngarrindjeri archaeologist is that I know my family history. Ngarrindjeri people continue to move through the smog of colonisation that, historically, had stripped us of our ruwe, our culture (language, ceremony, belief systems), and our people (through frontier violence, removal from ruwe and family). Following two centuries of colonisation, there are many young Ngarrindjeri people who today remain trapped in the low socioeconomic cycle of poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, poor education, and poor health. Furthermore, this cycle operates in a society that views culture as either “black”or “white,” and where “traditional”people exist

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only in the “prehistoric” past or in the remote regions of the Australian outback. Despite the lack of knowledge about Indigenous peoples and the social and economic issues that impact cultural traditions, there are some Ngarrindjeri who are learning more about their cultural heritage and actively seeking it through processes of cultural reclamation and reaffirmation. Although there is positive growth and optimism within our community, many still do not think about university as an option, much less about becoming an archaeologist. My journey to and from suburbia is a continuous story of my family and their achievements throughout history, one that has extended many thousands of years. At this point in time, finding my ground as an Ngarrindjeri archaeologist and training within my own community are critical for developing the necessary skills that will benefit the Ngarrindjeri people and provide valuable input into the future of cultural heritage management, education, and training for the nation. This journey is not an isolated example of the challenges Indigenous peoples experience globally. In relation to archaeology, Indigenous peoples, whether trained archaeologists or experienced community caretakers, are continuously moving to and fro. It is a process of shifting ideologies, developing skills and knowledge, transformation, and, more important, making positive changes that will empower our communities.

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“Nunga” is a collective term used by Indigenous peoples in South Australia, particulary those from the Ngarrindjeri, Narrunga, and Kaurna nations. Also see Amery (1995) for a broader discussion about Nunga language and identity. Editor’s note: A training program for paramedical technicans. Editor’s note: In Australia, “Indigenous archaeology” generally denotes the archaeology of pre-European contact times.

R EFERENCES C ITED Amery, R. 1995 It’s Ours to Keep and Call Our Own: Reclamation of the Nunga Languages in the Adelaide Region, South Australia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 113 (1): 63–82. Hemming, S., and T. Trevorrow 2005 Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan: Archaeology, Colonialism and Re-claiming the Future. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonising Theory and Practice, edited by C. Smith and H. M. Wobst, pp. 243–261. Routledge, London. Wilson, C. 2007 Indigenous Research and Archaeology: Transformative Practices in/with/for the Ngarrindjeri Community. Archaeologies 3 (3): 320–334. 2005 Return of the Ngarrindjeri: Repatriating Old People Back to Country. B.Arch. (honours) thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide. Worby, G., and L. I. Rigney (editors) 2005 Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights. API Network, Perth.

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Photo courtesy of Eldon Yellowhorn

MY ECLECTIC CAREER IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Eldon Yellowhorn G ROWING U P P IIKANI grew up on the Peigan Indian Reserve in Alberta, though we now call it the Piikani First Nation. Our village, called Brocket, got its name from a train station situated on the prairie just south of the Oldman River near the western border of the reserve. When I grew up there, the village consisted of schools, churches, an administration office, some houses, and, of course, the grain elevators. Everyone knew one another and all spoke Blackfoot when they met. Our family farm lay out beyond the electrical grid, so we had no access to radio, refrigeration, or television. Although a highway ran through our reserve, for most people “horsepower” still referred to animals. Like the cars traveling on the highway, the amenities of modernity only seemed to speed past Piikani.

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Sometimes as we walked by our neighbors’ places, we would stop and visit. During those times, our parents would exchange stories they heard. My favorites were those they told about the ghosts that haunt us, and there were many of them. Even the railroad and highway had spirits traveling on them. Although these tales were unsettling, I still found them fascinating. According to Piikani tradition, when a person died, he or she went to live with our ancestors in that spirit land beyond the Sand Hills, which lay far to the east. This we knew because people who had died but returned to life related that vision of the immediate afterlife. They described a dark country that the soul must traverse before reaching that oasis of light. Sometimes spirits got lost on their journey to the Sand Hills, and these lost souls could not help but return to the life they led. However, when they got back to their relatives, they only inspired fear rather than the affection they knew. I learned that we should leave offerings of food and water as a kind gesture to these hungry ghosts haunting our reserve. For one week every summer, we would leave our wood frame house and pitch our tipi at Brocket, where we celebrated our annual Indian Days. Living like our ancestors was our vacation from our routine, and it planted in me the seed of another kind of historical awareness. From those powwows, I realized that Piikani people once practiced a lifestyle that was different from the one I knew. I did not have the vocabulary to articulate my idea. I knew, for instance, that in the old days, people lived in tipis all the time and they moved their camps with the season. They hunted buffalo and made their tipis from the hides of animals they killed, instead of canvas like ours. From what I could surmise, sometime before I was born, the world had changed into the one I knew. Still, for a few days each summer, the camp circle put a kind of excitement in my boyhood that farm life could not. After the Indian Days were over, we went back to our farm and resumed our rural life. There were chores to do, animals to tend, and the quiet isolation of summer to enjoy. While working in the field one day, my father discovered a stone spear point. He brought it home and showed it to us. I still recall the curiosity it instilled in me as I marveled about its meaning. When I asked how it got to be there, my dad replied that a spirit hunter had been chasing a spirit buffalo near our place the night before. His spectral prey had eluded his spear, which then came to rest in our field. Then I suddenly realized why our dogs had been barking in the dark, because they were chasing those passing spirits. I often climbed onto a chair to reach the jar where my dad kept the spear point. It inspired me to go searching around the fields, especially the morning after I heard the dogs barking. More than once I inquired about those old days when everything was different. Each time I asked, I got a few more details to create my own impressions. I learned of a time when our people rode their horses as they hunted with bows and arrows. They made all their tools from stone, and they learned many things from a person called Naapi. Many stories recounted his adventures and how the world came to be because of his influence. A person would say niitakksikaitapitsinikii (“I will tell old stories”) before proceeding with their “just so” tales that explained the nature of things. Blackfoot mythology related the beginning of time and everything since then. Naapi even walked the trails I trod, and swam in the same calm pools in his river where I once nearly drowned.

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Other mythologies entered my imagination when I started attending the Catholic school on our reserve. I dutifully took my training to become a Christian, and before long I received first communion and confirmation. Thereafter, I observed all the holy days and celebrated all the festivals. Perhaps because I grew up speaking Blackfoot and English, I had no trouble balancing the Piikani and Catholic faiths. Intuitively I knew that accepting one did not mean giving up the other. I only heard of Naapi at home, whereas Jesus was everywhere in our school. I believed that both had lived a long time ago, and the present would have been different without them.

M Y T IME B EYOND P IIKANI My years in high school were so different because I attended a provincial public school in a nearby town. Our days did not begin with the obligatory prayers, and catechism was nowhere in the curriculum. Of course, Naapi had never been welcomed in any of our school days, so I felt no surprise that nobody spoke of him either. There was one important difference about my years in public school. I was introduced to scientific inquiry through courses in the physical and life sciences, and I discovered my interest in earth sciences. Immediately after high school graduation, I started my university career, where I had the opportunity to learn about my environment through observational studies of physical processes. Enthralled as I was with science, I tended to neglect my religious training and instead fully embraced secular antiquity. Whereas Piikani tradition pointed out the Star People who lived in the Sky Country, I saw astronomical phenomena occurring light years across the universe. Where our rituals displayed the sacred buffalo stones, I only saw ammonite fossils. My interests led me to study more about natural history than Piikani folklore. As I got deeper into my science courses, I sought out explanations that began with geology or biology rather than with Naapi. My instructors had no trouble convincing me that Darwin had put forward a plausible explanation for life on earth. I accepted that the universe did not exist as part of some divine master plan. My career trajectory led me to seek out jobs in which I could apply my formal studies and combine them with my love for outdoor sports. I worked with the National Park Service as an interpreter, which offered me ample opportunities to pursue my interest in natural history. During summers off from university, I learned the common and scientific names of scores of plants and animals so I could inform visitors to the parks where I worked. As a geologist’s assistant, I hiked hundreds of kilometers, and I learned to recognize the traits of the many strata of bedrock that make up the Rocky Mountains. I even spent one summer in the southern Alberta badlands excavating dinosaur fossils along the Red Deer River. I never tired of those long expeditions traversing challenging terrain, because strenuous exercise was the daily regime that prepared me to step into any landscape with confidence. Living for weeks and months in small tents always invigorated my spirit and sustained my sense of adventure. Seeking evidence of long-past phenomena has in itself nourished my sense of wonder.

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When I learned that there was a whole discipline dedicated to studying ancient cultures, I did not immediately follow up on that knowledge. Each September as I returned to the University of Calgary, I had more experience to bring to my classes, and after every school year I had more knowledge to complement my fieldwork. Only after I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical geography did I turn my attention to archaeology. Through a series of summer jobs with people who were influential in shaping my future, I gained more experience and discovered my passion. I traveled to places I had only seen on maps and found objects that compelled me to imagine who held them last. I knew there was a reason I never gave up on that spirited-haunted worldview that made my young life so meaningful. After several seasons of toiling in museums and field excavations, I decided to pursue advanced degrees in archaeology. Considering the milieu of my youth, finishing high school, especially for males, was, and still is, regarded as an accomplishment. I admit a certain amount of astonishment that I had completed undergraduate degrees in geography and archaeology, so graduate school in almost any field was really beyond my imagination. However, once that possibility entered my mind, I could not shake the notion that I had found my career path. Leaving my family and familiar surroundings to step into the unknown was a daunting prospect, but one I wanted. While preparing for it, I encountered some personal trepidation about the approaching change. So when the time came, I found myself acting out the Piikani tradition that had originated since time out of mind.

Author’s first archaeological fieldwork was a survey in the remote Birch Mountains, in northeastern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Eldon Yellowhorn.

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I went to Ninnaisstako, the Chief of the Mountains in Blackfoot lore, which is the center of our spiritual universe. I climbed the treacherous cliffs, like some of my ancestors had, until I reached the summit to fulfill a vow I had made to the mountain. As the sun set, I cast my tobacco offering off the pinnacle, and then I wrapped my blanket around me and sat down in a circle of stones I had found at the peak. Through that long, dark night I watched the Star People follow their paths, unwavering in their commitment. Gradually the sky grew lighter, until only the brightest among the Star People kept watch over the world; but even they were gone long before the sun appeared. At sunrise I made another offering of tobacco to greet the Chief of Heaven, and then I began my descent. I made my way slowly down the mountain, tired, stiff, and shivering all the way. The sunlight had warmed me up a little when the trail brought me to the forest I had climbed through the day earlier. Exhausted, I reached my car where I left it in a clearing beside a fire road, but I also knew that I had found a purpose that would occupy the rest of my life. Graduate school made up the best parts of the subsequent decade and some years. My initial foray into the academic world began at Simon Fraser University in 1989. The novelty of the experience made me feel a little like a fish out of water. My first impressions were that the endeavor was beyond my capacity. However, I persisted and completed the required courses before embarking on my own fieldwork. During my undergraduate career, I grew accustomed to instructors and teaching assistants guiding me through the maze of assignments that form the unique curriculum of each course. This was hardly the case for graduate students. My research program was left for me to design and implement. Once that was done, I would write up the results for a thesis that could

Traveling by canoe often meant a quick lunch break along the shore of Eaglenest Lake, Birch Mountains, Alberta. Photo by Eldon Yellowhorn.

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withstand critical scrutiny. Beyond writing a document that exceeded anything I had attempted previously, the expectations of critical thinking and unsupervised work were my revelations. Although advanced study in archaeology was my main focus, the stimulating intellectual exchanges with other graduate students were a surprising bonus. The friendships I formed with people engaged in a common purpose put the shine on my time in graduate school. After completing a Master of Arts degree, I plied my skills in the archaeological consulting field and also took on the role of instructor in a post-secondary context. Together these occupations enhanced my expertise and propelled me to the next stage of my career path. From my experience, I felt I had gained sufficient insights about archaeology to support fully my pursuit of a doctorate when I arrived in Montreal to begin studies at McGill University in 1995. I discovered a program designed to elicit a high level of scholarly endeavor from the students in the Department of Anthropology. Living in a multicultural city in which the French language is omnipresent certainly constituted a novel experience for me. Montreal is an old city by North American standards, which makes citizens conscious of their place in history. The mid-1990s was an exciting time in Quebec because the prospect of that province separating from Canada was very real. A referendum to settle that question was scheduled, and the opposing camps were campaigning for their side. There was a sense of urgency floating in the civic atmosphere, as early polling cast doubt on the future of the country. The past was on trial, as the competing histories of Aboriginal, French, and English peoples figured prominently in public discourse. I witnessed the profound influence of politics on memory. I also saw the symbolic importance of ancient times in claiming rights of occupation and possession. It was the ideal environment for a student of archaeology. My response was to focus my attention inward to research the Piikani internal dialogue about the nature of antiquity. Ironically, my studies in natural history brought me back to Piikani mythology with a desire to scrutinize it from the perspective of an archaeologist. I found out how the old stories our ancestors passed down to us could contribute to modern learning. Deciphering the arcane ecological messages embedded in them gives me a great sense of fulfillment. Before finishing my dissertation, I moved back to Vancouver and stepped into the role of teacher.

A DVANCING M Y E CLECTIC C AREER IN A RCHAEOLOGY Despite working full-time, by the summer of 2002 I had obtained all the credentials necessary to bring my student days to an end. I had the distinction of being the first Piikanikoan to receive a Ph.D. in archaeology. Academia is a novel experience for me, but I enjoy the whole package. My research focus is a self-reflexive use of archaeological methods to elucidate the conditions affecting the Piikani Nation a century ago. I continue to refine the ideas I first articulated in my dissertation under the rubric of internalist archaeology. My basic premise is that the discipline provides the methods that Aboriginal people can appropriate to study the internal dialogue their culture holds about the

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past. This brand of archaeology eschews grand theorizing in favor of theories based on limited ranges of data unique to one people. So, for example, Piikani oral history can aid in better understanding the Plains archaeological record by contributing theories that interpret the artifacts, features, and sites that researchers find. At the same time, archaeology offers Piikani people a new way to appreciate their folklore. I try to disseminate my interest about archaeology to Aboriginal peoples, but I also have to consider the broad audience that I reach. Enlarging the coterie of Aboriginal peoples who share my interest in this profession is one goal I have set for my career. There is only one way to achieve it, and so I take every opportunity to talk up the potential of archaeological work. Ultimately, I wish to ensure that Aboriginal perspectives are well represented when public policy or academic research directs attention to heritage issues. In the process, I strive to overcome the skills deficit that is endemic to First Nations, especially the “male malaise” that robs our community of so much promise. I am delighted to report that I have already guided two Aboriginal men through the Master of Arts program in archaeology. I look forward to the day when such results are routine rather than exceptional. Supervising graduate students is among the activities that enhance my job satisfaction. I enjoy the chance to work closely with energetic people who possess such eagerness to share ideas about their work. It complements well the direction of my research agenda in historical archaeology. Besides meeting the expectations of academia, I do it as a service to my home community. Each summer I spend on the Piikani First Nation brings me new opportunities to appreciate more the community where I spent my youth. For me, studying local history is not just nostalgia run amok. Instead, it is about recognizing the sacrifices and hardships that Piikani people endured under the reserve system. I want to demonstrate to my contemporaries that our time has come to make our contribution to our community. Future generations should not look back to see no tangible evidence that we ever passed through this world. I am now firmly established in my self-selected career. With each milestone I reach, I can look back and take some satisfaction in knowing that I have beaten the odds stacked against Aboriginal men in Canada, and, for such reasons, I always put the interests of my constituency at the forefront of my agenda. I know I succeeded in spite of the system, and not because of it. I take heart in knowing there are others like myself who will find the same fulfillment I do from the choices that I made.

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A BOUT THE E DITOR George P. Nicholas is professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University. He was founding director of SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops, BC (1991–2005). Nicholas is director of the international research initiative, the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project. His research focuses on Indigenous archaeology, intellectual property issues relating to archaeology, the archaeology and human ecology of wetlands, and archaeological theory. He is series co-editor of the World Archaeological Congress’s Research Handbooks in Archaeology, and former editor of the Canadian Journal of Archaeology. Nicholas grew up in western Connecticut (he remains an American citizen). His early interest in archaeology and anthropology was fed by National Geographic magazine and Mr. Wizard’s science-oriented television show. At the age of eight, he announced at the dinner table to his parents and brother that he was going to be an archaeologist, and soon after was digging up the backyard. He hasn't stopped since.

A BOUT THE AUTHORS Miguel Aguilar Díaz completed his M.A. degree in anthropology in 2010 at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, focusing on social archaeology, and is also editor of Supay, a journal of the social sciences. He first discovered his family heritage roots after completing his B.A. degree in archaeology. He was born in Rimac, near Lima, Peru; his grandmother was from the Andean Indigenous community of Palca in the central Andes. Before beginning his university studies, Miguel was a political activist working against the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori, as well as a student looking to develop a social activist archaeology based on the needs of Indigenous Andean communities to achieve equality and a better quality of life. His research currently focuses on the restitution of artifacts from the Inca site of Machu Picchu to the Andean communities of Cusco. Miguel has been a member of the World Archaeological Congress since 2003.

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Clement Abas Apaak was born in Ghana, Africa. He is a human rights advocate, community organizer, public speaker, and educator, and holds a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University; an M.Phil. from the University of Bergen, Norway, and a B.A. degree from the University of Ghana. At Simon Fraser University, he became the first international student to be elected to a university board in British Columbia as a senator, and later was Student Society president there. An accomplished student leader and activist in the 1990s in Ghana, Dr. Apaak has been active in every part of the world he has lived in, including the United States, Norway, and Canada. He is the founder of Canadian Students for Darfur (www.csfdarfur.net), a humanitarian organization. Tautala Silauleleioamoa Asaua is a Samoan archaeologist born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, focusing on archaeology. Most of Tautala’s field experience has been in American Samoa and Samoa. She is now living and working in Samoa, teaching the new Archaeology Program at the National University of Samoa, which is offered under the Bachelor of Samoan Studies degree. Through this program, Tautala hopes to encourage and inspire more Samoans to become aware of their archaeological past and to take ownership of this knowledge by contributing and expanding knowledge further concerning Samoa’s 3,000-year history. Sonya L. Atalay is assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. Her work combines interests in Indigenous archaeology—including the use of Indigenous epistemologies, ethics, collaborative research designs, and heritage issues—with ceramic analysis related to cooking practices. As an American Indian (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) who has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork outside of North America, Dr. Atalay has had the unique opportunity to examine the wider implications of Indigenous archaeology by applying its methods and theories outside of an Indigenous land context. Her fieldwork interests include eastern North America, where she’s currently engaged in collaborative research with Anishinaabe communities in the Great Lakes region related to cooking practices, clay, and sacred sites. Kevin Brownlee is a Cree from Norway House. He is the curator of archaeology at The Manitoba Museum and the only First Nations curator of archaeology at a mainstream museum in Canada. Kevin graduated from the University of Manitoba with a B.A. in 2000 (anthropology major, Native studies minor) and a M.A. in anthropology 2005. He formerly held the position of Aboriginal liaison officer for the Archaeology Unit with the Government of Manitoba (1998–2004). He is actively involved as president of the Manitoba Archaeological Society, member of the board of directors for The Manitoba Museum, and heritage advisor to the community of Fox Lake. Kevin has focused his career on raising the importance of archaeology to Aboriginal people. He received an Aboriginal Youth Achievement Award in 1996 for his work in the Aboriginal community with archaeology. Margaret M. Bruchac, of Abenaki Indian descent, is assistant professor of anthropology and coordinator of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Uni-

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versity of Massachusetts-Amherst and, since 2003, has served as the repatriation research liaison for the Five College Repatriation Committee. Dr. Bruchac’s research focuses on Indigenous museum representations, cultural property, and oral traditions. She was a Five College Fellow at Amherst College (2004–2005), and Visiting Indigenous Fellow at Harvard University in 2006. She is co-editor, with Siobhan Hart and H. Martin Wobst, of Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader in Decolonization (2010). Bruchac is secretary to the Council for Museum Anthropology and a member of the Indigenous Archaeology Advisory Board for the World Archaeological Congress. Alan Burns is an Aboriginal man from the Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta tribal groups in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. His clan group is Ulupna, in Victoria, and his ancestors come from both sides of the Murray River. He has worked as a cultural heritage protection officer in Victoria for 22 years and is currently affiliated with the Brambuk National Park Cultural Centre in Victoria. He has long been an active member of the World Archaeological Congress. Iyaxel Ixkan Anastasia Cojtí Ren is a young Maya-K’iche’ woman born in 1984 in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. In 2009, she graduated with a B.A. in archaeology from Universidad del Valle Guatemala. Currently, she is a professor of archaeology at this university and hopes to obtain a scholarship to continue postgraduate studies. Her interests are the ethnohistory of Guatemala and Mexico, and the archaeology from the Postclassic period (and earlier); she considers these topics essential to the history of contemporary Indigenous peoples, which was interrupted and deformed during the colonial period. In addition, she believes that incorporating the prehispanic past into educational initiatives will contribute to the cultural vindication of Indigenous peoples and their demands in cultural and political arenas. Iyaxel would like to have more influence in the education of Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth to challenge racism and discrimination in her country. Antonio Cuxil is Kakchiqel Maya, born in Tecpan, Guatemala. He has studied English and hotel and restaurant management, and also earned a B.A. degree in tourism in 1987. Since 1990 he has worked as a tour guide throughout Guatemala and occasionally in Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Antonio has traveled and spoken widely on Maya history, including in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, and has participated in numerous Mayan epigraphy workshops in Guatemala, the University of British Columbia, and University of Texas in Austin. He has organized workshops and lectures on Mayan epigraphy and archaeology in Tikal and elsewhere for both tour guides and Maya people, as well as conducted fieldwork with Dr. Nikolai Grube in Campeche, Mexico, between 2001 and 2004. Brandy E. George is an Ojibway-Potawatomi from southwestern Ontario, Canada, and a member of the Kettle Point and Stoney Point First Nations. She earned her M.A. degree from the University of Toronto in 2004, and then began a career in cultural resource management as archaeologist and First Nations liaison. Brandy has been involved with many projects that have allowed her to work directly with other First Nations peoples, providing assistance in teaching archaeological methods and practices. In 2007, Brandy qualified for

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and received her professional license from the Ministry of Culture, allowing her to practice archaeology within Ontario and becoming the only First Nations person in the province to hold this license. She has prepared teaching and protocol documents for archaeological research in First Nations territories, participated in the collection of historic information and oral histories, and assisted in teaching a First Nations monitor-training program. D. Rae Gould is a member of the Nipmuc Nation in Massachusetts. She is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Connecticut and is currently a visiting instructor in anthropology at Connecticut College. Her research interests include Native American studies and historical archaeology in the southern New England region, as well as archaeological preservation, compliance regulations, NAGPRA, and global Indigenous rights. Rae has also worked with several New England tribes in a number of capacities: educator, researcher and archivist, historic preservationist, archaeologist, museum liaison, and consultant in the field of federal acknowledgement. In 2009 she contributed to and appeared in the first episode (“After the Mayflower”) of the five-part PBS series We Shall Remain. Sven Haakenson was born and raised in the rural Kodiak Island community of Old Harbor, Alaska, and is a member of the Old Harbor Alutiiq Tribe. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University. Since 2000, Dr. Haakanson has worked to share Native American perspectives with museums, and museum practices with Native people, as executive director of the nationally acclaimed Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. He has made collections more accessible to Native communities by researching objects in the world’s museums and developing traveling exhibits and educational resources around the information they hold. In 2007, his work was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Haakanson serves on many cultural organizations and maintains an active research program, including documenting Kodiak’s prehistoric petroglyphs and studying the Nenets culture of Siberia. In addition, he is an accomplished artist, known for his carvings and photography. Sven is married to Kodiak educator Balika Finley Haakanson. They have two daughters, Elidh and Isabella. Robert L. Hall is a senior Midwestern archaeologist who specializes in the analysis of American Indian cosmology, ritual, and identity and their manifestations in the archaeological record. He has carried out extensive research on the Mississippian and other Late Prehistoric Period cultures of the Plains and Midwest. Professor Hall received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin. He held positions at the University of South Dakota, the Illinois and Wisconsin State Museums, and Marquette University, before joining the Department of Anthropology of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1968, where he has been professor emeritus since 1998. He is the author of many articles and chapters over his long career, has written two books—The Archeology of Carcajou Point (1962) and An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (1997)—in addition to being co-editor of Hopewellian Studies (1964). Augustin F. C. Holl is curator and professor of anthropology and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in 1983 and subsequently taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and the

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University of California, San Diego. Dr. Holl has conducted fieldwork in the Negev Desert in Israel on Chalcolithic settlements, has worked in Mauritania, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, and is currently director of the Sine Ngayene Archaeological Project on the Senegambian megaliths, a collaborative program with L’Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire-Cheikh Anta Diop and the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal. He has published numerous journal articles in a range of journals, edited several books, and published ten books, including The Diwan Revisited (2000), Ancient African Metallurgy (2000, with Bisson, Childs, and De Barros), The Land of Houlouf (2002), Holocene Saharans (2004), Ethnoarchaeology of Shuwa-Arab Settlements (2003), Saharan Rock Art (2004), and West African Early Towns (2006). Ken Isaacson is the Indigenous director of Southern Gulf Catchments Management Group, and a Waanyi man from Northwest Queensland. He has worked in cultural heritage for 51 years in a wide range of capacities, including working with elders and young people with the Kalkadoon Tribal Council and, most recently, being in charge of Indigenous training for Extrata Mining. Ken is a former Council member of the World Archaeological Congress and a frequent participant at archaeology and heritage-oriented conferences. He is interested in how a digital information environment can be used to assist Indigenous people to control their heritage. Hirofumi Kato is a associate professor of archaeology in the Center of Ainu and Indigenous Studies at Hokkaido University, Japan. He has conducted archaeological survey in Siberia and Hokkaido for 20 years, and has organized community based archaeology with Ainu people at the World Heritage site of Shiretoko in eastern Hokkaido Island. Professor Kato is interested in Indigenous archaeology, intellectual property issues, cultural heritage management by Indigenous peoples, ethnohistory, ethnogensis, northern archaeology, and human evolution. Kathy Kawelu obtained her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, completing her research, entitled A Sociopolitical History of Hawaiian Archaeology: Kuleana and Commitment. She subsequently moved back to her hometown of Hilo and is now Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. Her research focuses on Pacific anthropology and archaeology. She is looking forward to contributing to her community in a teaching capacity and helping to encourage the next generation of archaeologists. Vincent Kewibu comes from the Siriputa clan of the Makanina tribe; he was born in a seaside village of Didiwa in Papua New Guinea. After completing his high school education, Vincent attended the University of Papua New Guinea and graduated with a B.A. degree in anthropology (major) and archaeology (minor) in 1996. He then completed a B.A. honours degree in archaeology at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. In 1999, he returned to the University of Papua New Guinea and became a tutor in archaeology. In 2003, Vincent was awarded a scholarship to embark on a Ph.D. program in archaeology at the Australian National University, Canberra, and returned to Papua New Guinea in 2006. On hiatus from his Ph.D. program, Kewibu is currently a lecturer in archaeology at the Anthropology and Sociology Department at the University of Papua New Guinea.

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Chapurukha Kusimba is curator of african Anthropology at the Field Museum and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Before joining the Field Museum and the University of Illinois, he had served for seven years as research scientist at the National Museums of Kenya. He has published extensively on the archaeology and ethnology of East Africa. His books include The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (1999), East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders (co-edited with Sibel B. Kusimba, 2003), and Unwrapping a Little Known Textile Tradition: The Field Museums Madagascar Textile Collection (2004). Chapurukha is conducting in-depth regional analysis of early East African interaction spheres, centered on the Swahili Coast, Tsavo, and Mount Elgon in Kenya. The National Science Foundation, Fulbright Fellowship, the National Geographic Society, and the Field Museum have supported Chapurukha’s research. He is currently the vice-chairman of the Anthropology Department at the Field Museum. Roger Lewis is a research archaeologist and now curator of ethnology with the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Roger received his B.A. from Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and M.A. from Memorial University of Newfoundland specializing in pre-contact Mi’kmaq land and resource use. He is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. Program at Dalhousie University. His research focuses on the reconceptualization of Mi’kmakik knowledge practices tied to land and resource use, and those derived from anthropological, historical, legal, and archaeological knowledge. He has extensive archaeological survey and research experience and for some years has been working closely with Mi’kmaq communities to record and map invaluable ethnographic information and stories. Dorothy Lippert is Choctaw and an archaeologist. She received her B.A. from Rice University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently works in the Repatriation Office of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Dorothy serves on the Executive Board of the World Archaeological Congress and is a past member of the Board of Directors for the Society for American Archaeology. Her research interests include the development of Indigenous archaeology, repatriation, ethics, and the archaeology and bioarchaeology of the southeastern United States. She views archaeology not just as a scientific pursuit, but as a tool for social justice, and is committed to bringing Native people into the discipline as a way of moving the profession forward. Irene Adziambei Mafune is a South African national of the VhaVenda ethnic group from the northern part of South Africa called Limpopo, near the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. She holds a B.A. degree in archaeology and a higher education diploma from the University of Venda, a B.A. degree with honors in archaeology from the University of Pretoria, and an M.A. degree in public culture and public archaeology from the University of Cape Town (awarded in 2004). She is currently enrolled for another master’s degree in Public and Development Management (MM-PDM) at the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management. Irene worked at Robben Island Museum (1999–2004) and then joined the City of Johannesburg, Department of Arts, Culture and Heritage Services, as the Projects Manager for Immovable Heritage. She

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has since moved to the City’s Development Planning and Urban management Department as the Manager: Service Delivery (2008–to present). Nola M. Markey is Saulteaux (Anishanabe) and a member of the O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation, Crane River, Manitoba. She was adopted and raised by the Markey family in Toronto, Ontario, and today has two grown children (Marie and Christopher) whom she raised while attending university. Nola first enrolled into the Anthropology and Native Studies Program at Trent University in Ontario, and transferred to Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, to complete her B.A. and then M.A in anthropology (minor in First Nations and archaeology). Her Ph.D. research at Simon Fraser (currently interrupted by professional commitments) critiques the historical and political context of CRM archaeology and Indigenous people. Nola currently is a senior anthropologist with Golder Associates in Kamloops, British Columbia, and is a registered Professional Archaeologist; she works on many CRM projects with First Nations in the southern interior of British Columbia. She received an Arthur C. Parker Scholarship in 2002 from the Society for American Archaeology. Desireé Reneé Martinez is Gabrieliño (Tongva) from Baldwin Park, California. She graduated with a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, and received her M.A. in anthropology from Harvard University, where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between Native American nations, archaeologists, and cultural resource managers. Desireé is the codirector of UCLA’s Pimu Catalina Island Archaeological Field School, a Native-centered course that melds traditional archaeology with tribal knowledge in collaboration with Gabrieliño (Tongva) community members. Desireé’s dream is to open up a Gabrieliño (Tongva) museum and cultural center to remind the southern California community of the Gabrieliño’s vibrant and lasting heritage. Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu, born at Osizweni in Newcastle (South Africa), is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Newcastle University, UK. A qualified archaeologist, he has previously studied at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Rhodes where he obtained a B.A. degree (1999), B.A. honours degree (2000), postgraduate diploma in science (2001), and an M.A. in anthropology (2005). He has about nine years’ experience in heritage management in South Africa, having worked for both national and provincial heritage authorities in various capacities, including as an Executive heritage clerk for almost a decade. Ndukuyakhe harbors a dream of joining academia after completing his Ph.D. studies. He has an interest in heritage management and rock art research, as well as in working to transform the archaeological discipline to include more Indigenous archaeologists, to make it easier to challenge dominant ideologies, and to support more public archaeology. Gerard O’Regan is Ngai Tahu, a Maori tribe of the South Island of New Zealand. Over the last two decades, he has been passionately engaged at marae (“local community”), tribal, and national levels in the management of New Zealand’s Indigenous heritage. This has included positions in museums, professional organizations, private practice, and as heritage manager for his own tribe. He recently completed a M.A. in archaeology studying Maori concepts of sacredness in relation to rock art sites, and is about to further

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pursue his rock art interests through doctoral study at the University of Auckland. Gerard is a trustee of his tribe’s Ngai Tahu Maori Rock Art Trust, and is also a ministerial appointee to the Maori Heritage Council of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust Te Pouhere Taonga, the national body responsible for promoting the care of and assigning legal recognition to places sacred to Maori. Akemi and Rika Oshino are twin sisters from the town of Mukawa in Hokkaido, Japan. They are Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido. Their grandmother is a famous Ainu storyteller from whom Akemi and Rika learned much about traditional culture, especially dances, songs, and musical instruments. After their graduation from university, they worked at an Ainu archaeological site in Atsuma for a year. They plan to continue to study their cultural heritage and to further their university education. Myrna Pokiak is an Inuvialuk from Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories, Canada. She was raised participating in Inuvialuit traditions, an important part of her family’s daily lives, and has always been interested in Inuvialuit culture, past and present. She received her B.A. in anthropology, with a minor in the Inupiat language, from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 2003, and a B.Ed. from the University of Victoria in 2005. She has worked on archaeological digs and surveys in the Mackenzie Delta, which gave her new knowledge and a better appreciation of the history of the Inuvialuit culture. As an elementary school teacher, she now combines her educational and cultural experiences to educate others on the Inuvialuit culture and also furthers her own knowledge by documenting her past and future experiences through stories and journals to share with others. She and her partner Eddie are raising their daughter Mya in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Rudy Reimer/Yumks is a member of the Skxwú7mesh Úxwumixw/Squamish Nation in British Columbia. Upon completion of his Ph.D. at McMaster University, he will be assistant professor in First Nations studies and archaeology at Simon Fraser University. His research interests are in spatial and temporal variability in lithic technology, geochemical material characterization and sourcing, geoarchaeology, settlement and subsistence, rock art, public archaeology and cultural resource management, museums and collections management, field methods, paleoecology, history, and land and resource management planning. He plans to use his cultural knowledge and experience to continue Indigenizing non-Indigenous institutions. Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke was born and raised in Clendon Manurewa-Manukau City, New Zealand. She is a proud South Aucklander living in the largest Polynesian city in the world. Margaret attended the University of Auckland and graduated with an M.A., specializing in archaeology, in 2000. She currently works as a Maori archaeologist within her own tribal boundaries and is a strong advocate of Maori kaitiakitanga over taonga and waahi tapu. Special interests include mahi huakanga (“archaeology”) reframed within a Kaupapa Maori framework, the future of Rangatahi Maori, tribal politics, Indigenous rights, and lithic studies. Ngapuhi raua Ngati Kahu Ki Whangaroa Tainui Pare Waikato ratou Ko Ngati Paoa me Parininihi Ki Waitotara (this “shorthand” list of my tribal affiliations is how I place myself in the world: Ngapuhi = Descendants of Puhi and people of a thou-

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sand man eaters; Ngati Kahu Ki Whangaroa = Descendants of Kahu, likened to a great bird of the long bay; Tainui Pare Waikato = From the great Tainui canoe descending from the peoples of the mighty Waikato River and also from Ngati Paoa. Descending from Pawa and an acknowlegment of descent from the people who held sway over land in Taranaki bounded by the Parininihi and Waitotara Rivers). Nelly M. Robles García earned her degrees in archaeology and architectural restoration in Mexico before obtaining a Ph.D. in anthropology, in 1994, from the University of Georgia, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She is director of both the Mitla Archaeological Research and Restoration Project, and Oaxaca’s Archaeological Zone of Monte Albán, a large pre-Columbian World Heritage site, both in her native state of Oaxaca. Widely published internationally, Dr. Robles Garcia received the Society for American Archaeology’s 2008 Presidential Award, and the 2007 George Wright Society Cultural Resources Management Award for excellence in the management of cultural resources and contributions to heritage protection in Mexico and Latin America. Eirik Thorsgard is a tribal member of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde community of Oregon. He works in the Tribes Cultural Resources Department as the cultural protection coordinator. He received his master’s degree in archaeology from Oregon State University, and regularly attends cultural events and practices sponsored by his tribe. Eirik is also an active participant in national and international archaeology conferences. He is the proud father of four children, and lives and works in Grand Ronde, Oregon. Davina Two Bears is of the Bitter Water Clan, Tódích’íi’nii, and born for Red Streak Running into the Water Clan, Táchiinii. A true Native of northern Arizona, Davina grew up in the towns of Flagstaff and Winslow, Arizona, and also on the Navajo Reservation in Bird Springs, her home community. A single mother of three children, Davina makes her home in Flagstaff, working for the Navajo Nation. She received her B.A. in anthropology from Dartmouth College and her M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Northern Arizona University, and is the first Navajo woman program manager of the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department-Northern Arizona University (NNAD-NAU). This program offers training for Navajo college students in archaeological field methods while they obtain their degree(s) at NAU and is the first tribal program of its kind in the United States. Davina was one of the original students to participate and graduate from the NNAD-NAU student-training program. Aribidesi Usman is associate professor of African and African American studies and anthropology at Arizona State University. His research and publications focus on African history and archaeology, especially pre-colonial and contact period, African urbanism, regional political and economic interaction, social transformation, frontier dynamics, Africans and the trans-Atlantic contact, and cultural resource management. Dr. Usman’s publications include State-Periphery Relations and Sociopolitical Development in Igbominaland, Northcentral Yoruba, Nigeria (2001) and several articles in anthologies and journals. He is co-editor of Movements, Borders, and Identities in Africa (2009) and is currently working on new book, The Yoruba Frontier: A Regional History of Community Formation, Experience, and Changes in West Africa.

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Joe Watkins became the director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma in 2007 after serving as an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to 2007. He is Choctaw Indian and has been involved in archaeology for more than 40 years. His current study interests include the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and Aboriginal populations, and he has published numerous articles on these topics. He serves as a mediator between various academic disciplines and members of Indigenous groups. Using such an approach, he hopes to continue developing the Native American Studies Program in Oklahoma so that its students will serve as cultural liaisons to translate information back and forth between Native American tribes and the institutions that impact them. Christopher J. Wilson is a Ngarrindjeri man from the Lower Murray Lakes and Coorong in South Australia. He has a B.A. degree in archaeology (Honours) and is currently investigating Ngarrindjeri life ways of the Lower Murray through the mid-late Holocene in South Australia as part of his Ph.D. research. He is a lecturer in Indigenous studies and archaeology at Yunggorendi First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research at Flinders University and has been working with Ngarrindjeri elders and community leaders around cultural heritage and archaeology, including repatriation of Ngarrindjeri Old People (human remains) from Australian and British institutions. As an early career academic, Chris is increasingly involved in archaeology, cultural studies, Indigenous education, and the arts through teaching, research, and involvement in his community. Eldon Yellowhorn grew up on the Peigan Indian Reserve, now the Piikani First Nation, in Alberta, Canada. He attended the day school on the reserve before completing his schooling in Fort Macleod, Alberta. He acquired his interest in natural history by exploring the countryside around the family farm. After high school, he began his academic career at the University of Lethbridge, then went on to complete his studies in geography and archaeology at the University of Calgary, and then completed graduate degrees at Simon Fraser University and McGill University. He participated in several research projects that examined antiquity on the Northern Plains. Dr. Yellowhorn is associate professor of First Nations studies and archaeology at Simon Fraser University. His interests include Blackfoot mythology and folklore studies, and he is currently directing a field study in historical archaeology on the Piikani First Nation.