Vin Steponaitis - Discussion
Part I before NOVA video of Kennewick Man Situation (followed by Part II)
MS- male speaker FS- female speakerVin- Ok. Somebody once said that the whole sort of key to telling a story in images is the way you frame the images. Clearly, this is framed in a certain way, and so let me open the floor. Many of you teach classes and are thinking about how to teach this. How do you think this was framed, or what are the dominant issues that came out in this piece?
MS- Well, it's really reduced everything to essentials. It's either, if it's not like present day Native Americans, therefore it must be a different people by implication a different race. And the Caucasoid, Caucasian sort of plays into that sort of folk essentialism that's so dominant, not just in this society, but in others. It's hard for people to think about polythetic, multiple relationships, but that's clearly what we're dealing with here. This guy is not identical to Native Americans, but he's not identical to other groups either. So either there's been change or multiple migrations. At least it's a lot more complex but the whole piece reduced everything to these essentials. Find out what he is....that's really hard to get past and then the sub themes were science vs. religion.
Vin- exactly.
MS- As if they're completely polar.
FS- Or the Indians are the only ones that have politics....
FS- And no anthropology. No anthropological awareness at all. Yeah, a few measurements and that scene of the calipers, but how anthropology integrates everything that's there. We're going to be teaching students presumably in the context of anthropology departments and courses, so the first thing to get them to zero in on if they haven't already gotten it is that those conflicting views within everything that is anthropology. That archaeologists are anthropologists first and too, although that's disputed these days too, but...
Joe- I think that one thing the tribal people that I talked with about this thing was that it depicted truth vs. Indians... the science was the truth and the Indians were opposed to it. That's what most of the people I know got out of it.
Rosemary Joyce — There was also another interesting opposition here. The army Corps of Engineers vs. the scientists, and the scientists are equal to the archaeologists which implies there are no scientists and no archaeologists in the army Corps of engineers which would be news to some people I know. Which is again one of these simplifications of the real complexity.
Rick Wilk- If I could just intrude, the other thing that came out very clearly to me is the idea that it's only the Indians who fetishize bodies. Who have religious beliefs about bodies and I think a good counterpoint to that might be Katherine Verry's work, for instance, on the incredible cycles of burial and re-burial that political figures go through in modern societies as politics change, people get exhumed and there's a lot of that stuff that goes on outside of the context of this particular issue. It could be a useful way to put it in a different perspective.
Ruth Tringham- So carrying on from that fetishization idea I think that we can see fetishization of the body right there in this program and it comes true a lot in early hominid research in general and that is this huge emphasis on a single person. This building up a gigantic polemic based on a single person. Who is this man???? Who cares??? My reaction is... are you 9,000 years old anyway so that's really....and so I spent the whole summer digging up these eight 9,000 year old bodies, but that's irrelevant.... It's this whole idea of a political importance made on who is first. If you follow that through and they started to and it was just disgusting, that's going to give the Native Americans, that's going to question the Native American's ownership, their rights to ownership. They own nothing, the poor things. Ok, they've got casinos, but they've lost their loves, they've lost their culture. Nothing is said about this idea that even if Kennewick man happened to be something entirely different, it still doesn't challenge the rights and the lives of the Native Americans who lived on this continent for many thousands of years. That's the... the logic of it, I think, is just disgusting. I couldn't show this in my class, I would get too upset.
MS- Well, legally, whether Kennewick man and Native American really shouldn't have any bearing on the sovereignty issue. This has to do with events that took place...
MS- more recently than that
MS- the underlying question here that gets past everything else is the one you pose, how do you decide on issues like this? I think that it's a hard case to make that you could in fact demonstrate affiliation with a particular tribe or even a group of tribes in some kind of evidential way outside of the religious beliefs, some kind of skeptical evidential way, over 9,000 years. That's a hard case to make. But that isn't even addressed.
Vin- and, one of the things that, my own view of this, there are so many different ways that one can use this, and we've just alluded to several. To me, actually, the way I teach, you could, this oversimplifies greatly and frames the issues in stark ways leaving out all the nuances. One way to play off this is to talk about what's left out in all the different nuances and how this thing could it be framed otherwise. But in some contexts, the simplicity of the way this is framed actually works to our advantage if we're teaching a class of students who are not anthropology majors, they've not thought about these issues a lot. One can also use this to seize on certain key distinctions or points that are made in this and use those to start a discussion even in the absence of a lot background information. The reason I stress this and I think it's a theme that came up in our last workshop down in Florida, and a theme that we have to keep in mind here is that every time we teach a course we can't cover all these issues in full depth and in a lot of cases particularly in lower levels you want to allude to issues, you want to get people thinking about them, but you have one lecture to do it in. One hour. And so if you're showing this in a context where you can basically have one lecture to do this kind of stuff, or even half a lecture, then the strategy can be just to seize on these things. Like science vs. religion. Who, when those conflict, should prevail and how do we handle that conflict? One can ask questions like the other question that was posed there very starkly was Whose history is it? Dr. Owsley's (?) says this is our American history. Armen Minthorn says this is our, the Yumatilla's history. Which is it? I don't expect yes or no's, but to get the students to grapple with that and to grapple with the fact that different people can view the same thing in different ways and how do you resolve conflicts that arise when that happens? So all these are good hooks for discussion and this film, I think because of its simplicity actually is a very good one. It's not the only one, but there's others like it where you can get the discussion even with relatively little effort and time spent laying the groundwork. You can also show this in a graduate seminar and talk about all sorts of other things that were alluded to here too. There's also a couple of things here that I find it good to focus on that relate back to things I think Rosie was saying this morning about teaching students to be critical about what they see. If its video it must be real just like if it's on the web it must be real. One of the things that's interesting to me about this film is that some of the key things that are portrayed, some of the issues that are portrayed as being the key issues in the debate in this film are really red herrings. Completely red herrings and beside the point. One is the issue of, the one that Bill so nicely summarized: Is he Indian or not? If he's Indian then he's Arman's, if he's not then he's Doug Owsley's. just because this person looks different does that mean that he's not Indian? Should anything that is Indian automatically revert to whichever Tribe is the closest? The sense of there being some time depth is important. The other one...
MS- Also it seems said that if he's not Indian, he looks like Patrick Stewart....
Vin- And this is, there's two things in using just this video that I give additional background on. One is the issue of Caucasoid and how that was interpreted by the press to mean Caucasian. It came up a little bit but not really in this one. One of the things that I also do is when I have time I also show a second film which is also sitting there. I'm not going to show you the whole second film. It's a movie called "The Mystery of the First Americans" that was done by NOVA which is also a very good film on this. In that other film Chatters talks about, the subject comes up and Chatters says on camera, "I never said he was a white guy". Caucasoid is just a certain skull type, but then, when you show this other film and you say, think back to what you saw here, he never actually said that he was a white guy in this film but he said when I first saw him I thought he was a white guy, and then I think he looks like Patrick Stewart. Any reasonable person is going to...
MS- I tell you what. I think the reductionism is just absolutely frightening. The other thing that you had mentioned earlier is this North American centric perspective which is also very frightening. The most classic example is that up until 15 or 20 years ago we had always thought that Neanderthals were middle-Paleolithic people. But all of the sudden in a cave in the middle east we're starting to find Neanderthal populations and Cro-Magnon populations with Upper-Paleolithic tool industry. All of the sudden! Holy-Moley! All our concepts of hominid, human evolution and specific tool kits, they're out the tubes because of this fortuitous discovery. What are the implications of that for here? They're incredible because we're saying we can't look at just dividing things in a dichotomous way. There's going to be interaction, there's going to be blending of populations. We don't even know what the line is. Our concepts of what was going on when the North American continent 10,000 years ago are so fuzzy, and it's turning on a dime. It's turning on the next discovery. And then all of a sudden, every single interpretation is universally overhauled. And that's very dangerous. We should look at some of these Old World perspectives because every new find in the "Afar" in Ethiopia is totally re-vamping our concepts of what hominid lineages are all about. It's scary, but we're used to it. We have to start looking at it now in the same way as these New World contexts that we deal with.
Vin-
I take your point and in this context, when a class of non-anthropology majors starts talking about this film, very quickly, we have certain kind of folk ideas about the way things work, and one of those folk ideas is that different peoples all have their own distinctive biological look, biology, culture and race all sort of go together. If Indians look a certain way, and Kennewick man looks different then Kennewick man can't be Indian. That's sort of, that's a folk assumption that a lot of people make and that this immediately plays into and so that starts coming out implicitly in a lot of discussions. One way to raise that issue, particularly for dealing with non-majors, is why should Indian people, 10,000 years ago, look the same as Indian people today? Did European people 10,000 years ago look the same as they do today? And then that opens the door to a discussion of these issues.
MS- I reviewed Dave Thomas's book and I liked it a lot. The one thing I criticized him for was dealing with the folk essentialism and the race concept and doing his best to demolish it and point out that it wasn't really serving our purposes very well. But then not replacing it with anything that was of greater utility. The word population was never introduced in that book and if we were to use that word and use it effectively and talk about variation in terms of populations, we might be able to nudge people away from the folk essentialism that is so deeply embedded especially here in the United States, in these concepts, and until we do that, we're kind of stuck with a vocabulary that doesn't serve us at all well, and in fact it's very counter-productive.
MS- Yeah. It's amazing how race permeates that show, and I'm not even sure they used the word. The folk understanding of race, but it's there and they make it an either/or. It's either Indian or its white, basically...
MS- A modern white. We've got all kinds of statements from professional organizations about the difficulty of defining what race is, what it means, and how you use it.
MS- But a substitute language has not been forthcoming.
FS- And not talking about it doesn't work either. It just came up in my class one day, I'm teaching this whole class on ethnicity, and how ethnicity is constructed and stuff, but they just had no concept of the biology of human difference, or similarity, and we just had to do that one day in class and it kind of cleared the air.
Rosemary Joyce-
But they sort of think of humans as like dog breeds. I don't mean that to be a laugh-line, I mean I think that students bring to the notion of human race the possibility of the logic of types. They understand that it's all one species, but then there's these very strongly patterned types.
FS-
The thing is they can't understand the difference between biological difference and race so they say, "well of course there's blacks, they're different, they look different" and so you say well, you go through a whole long thing to try to disabuse them of that but it has to do with well, like a person who is seven eights white and one eighth black gets, you say they're black in this country. What kind of sense does that make?
Ruth Tringham-
I was going to take us off on another track so I don't know if you want to continue...
MS-
Let me say one more thing, I think this is a good opportunity to talk about the difference between population thinking and typological thinking that Darwin shifted the argument from types to variations and it's taken a long time for that to, so again, even in biology, let alone in general population, but it is a useful thing, this provides an occasion for talking about something that pervades a lot of discussion about issues of this general sort, and that can be a healthy discussion.
Anne Pyburn-
I also think that it can be a good opportunity to talk about educating students to deal with the media, because I think Jeff Chatters has acknowledged that he did a bad job and that inadvertently he promoted a perspective that wasn't really his perspective. That he got carried away by context and that allowed himself to be misunderstood in the short term with long term very bad results. I think that Kennewick, is an opportunity to teach about mistakes in dealing with the media and how ....
Ruth Tringham-
Well I was going to say, that was exactly the point that I was going to make that I would use this movie in a lecture about archaeology and the media. I was watching it very carefully and I don't know whether he was led on to answer by her but she definitely had an agenda. Leslie Stahl, well she had an agenda. She was pushing everybody to say what she wanted them to say and she was actually the one who was, like a conductor in an orchestra, she was playing these different parties to come out and say, now, I don't know her very well, so I don't know if she did that as a result of interviewing them first. How do these programs come about? How are they actually constructed? Did she interview them first, and got an idea of the different views, or did she actually help to essentialize the views?
Anne Pyburn-
And construct a fight.
Ruth Tringham-
Yes.... That's what they do. That's the way they sell communication.
Vin Steponaitis-
Although there is a fight.....There is a sort of a motif...
Ruth Tringham-
When did the fight... can we see that the fight started outside of the media?
Vin Steponaitis-
In this case it did, but I take your point. They often take things that aren't a fight and turn it into a fight but in this case...
FS-
But they could have diffused the fight by handling this differently...
MS-
You don't doubt that Leslie Stahl has some role to play in the editing of this and that there were lots of minutes of tape available from all those interviews. I have a Leslie Stahl rule in my department which is you don't put anything on paper that you wouldn't be willing to defend if Leslie Stahl came bursting through the door with the cameras rolling. On the other hand, or Mike Wallace, he's the one who does that. On the other hand, you can have a perfectly innocent interview that can be edited to make it seem that you're saying things quite different from what you thought you were saying. It could be that Chatters got a little bit blind-sided here.
MS-
I think it plays into the fact that we are a capitalist society. We like black, we like white. It sells. Grey is boring to most people and so its subtle grays, the subtle interdigitations, they don't sell well and by and large you have someone with a head on their shoulders to be able to start to look at the various inputs into it and start figuring out what the sides of the issue are. This is much starker and people can grab onto whatever component of that equation they want to take that makes sense.
Vin Steponaitis-
And that actually is why this works so well in an interactive class because the issues are framed so starkly. Because of what you call conservation of knowledge, people immediately decide, they immediately take sides and you get people on both sides. Because it's presented in this culturally, in a way we are all used to seeing things presented on TV, there's controversy and cover-up. It's a familiar setting. That's why she puts that in there. Sixty Minutes needs a cover-up. People right away, because it's so simple, jump in, there's never been any hesitation after I show this film in a class for people to just jump in. it almost surprised me the first time I did it. Right away...
MS-
Didn't need any prompting did they?
Vin Steponaitis-
No. Well, I asked the question, but soon as I do, that's your opportunity to start showing them some of the nuances and arguing a little bit with their stereo-types and showing them, that draws them out but also then, that gives you the opportunity to start talking about all these issues. The discussion is never, not surprisingly, ever been exactly the same each time I've shown it. It depends on what people say but there are lots of different directions to take it in. How things play out in the media and how the media can manipulate and frame issues or you can take it in the direction of these ethical conflicts. Science versus religion. What would you do in a case like this? Who's right?
MS-
Another ethical question... Do you have the rights to this film? Did you buy it from CBS?
Vin-
I've never asked that question. I taped it off the TV.
Rosemary Joyce-
You can use it in teaching, though.
MS-
I was told you can use it once.... We all do this.... But now that we're entering the cyber age and we're starting to put a lot of this stuff online and we might want to make this available as a quick time movie, it's unclear to me how we can do this, if we can do it at all.
MS-
I think you just ask and they would arrange it. They love to have more publicity for Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes.
MS-
But you can't purchase this, I suppose, from CBS?
FS-
You can purchase segments, you know at the end of 60 Minutes and Nightline and all that they say "I you want a copy of this presentation" here's where you write to and you can buy it. Once you buy it, you own it and you're able to use it.
MS-
There are major problems with distance learning though, in using materials like this as part of the class....
FS-
You're right everybody does it, but there's going to be one big legal case that'll blow it for everyone....
FS-
You said that each time it ends up differently but where do you take this for a good class resolution at the end? It's a big question, critical thinking and certainly leads to other issues like the teaching of evolution and creationism, so you've got this conflict going on lots of places in society.
Vin-
Right. And that's a perfect segue into the next thing I was going to talk about. Thank you. There are really sort of three major hooks that I use when I try to talk about this in an undergraduate class. One is to focus on conflicting values and how that can be resolved or how you decided which set of values prevails in a certain situation. Closely related to that is who owns the past? Conflicting values in the form of science versus religion and who owns the past are two things that are very explicitly brought up in this clip and that one can talk about. We have this discussion and it's 3:50 and the class is over and the next on is something else, then it's over, but ideally it is interesting and useful, I think, where you have the time and you have the opportunity to take it to the next step. For me the next step is where you go from here. That's the rubric that I use. Where do we go from here? Ok, let's take it. You've got all these different communities. You've got the community of archaeologists and in this case, a community of Indians, but I'm talking about Indians because that's what I usually deal with, but you could do this in any part of the world with any descendant community. I should have said that right up front. Where do you go from here? Is it just conflict at every instance of this that just somehow gets resolved in an ad hoc way? Or how do you move forward to a point where, even if there is disagreement, there is no conflict in the strict sense. That's the answer that I would give to that question and that's what I try to channel into the discussion. This is why the second film that I brought with me, that I won't show you all of, we can decide whether we'll show it or not at all, but the second film is that NOVA film called "The Mystery of the First Americans" and what this film does is it juxtaposes; it talks a little about the first people of the Americas and all that, but it juxtaposes two case studies. One is Kennewick and the other is a case, the name of the site escapes me at this moment. We'll hear it on the video if we play it, in Alaska where human remains of similar age where found at about the same time that the Kennewick controversy was playing out. And there, the local native communities were consulted, and as a result of those consultations, they permitted study, including destructive study as I recall, carbon dating. And it shows an example of an excavation going on where members of this native community are actually excavating and they are talking about how they feel and how they view this site and why it's important to them. If I have time, I'll start with that Chatters piece that I showed you a minute ago and then the Kennewick part of that, the second film, also has Joe Powell does a really clear discussion of the whole issue of populations and biological diversity within populations. So that issue comes up, which again is a segue to talking about it. Another thing is that Chatters talks about the fact that he never said Kennewick man was a white guy, and I take him at face value because he probably never did, but then you can go back to that other film and say well, why did people think he said that?
Anne Pyburn-
Because he said Caucasoid.
Vin-
Right. And also because he showed Patrick Stewart. So you can bring up those issues. But mainly I like to show this second film because it shows the opposite situation. It shows a situation where communities that hold very different views about the past actually find common ground and work together and then one can then ask the question, why was it different in each case and talk about that.
FS- Do you show these both back to back or do you show them in different class periods? Because it would almost seem like when you show the second one, it could put the first group, the tribal group of people responding, in a bad light by potentially setting them up almost to say well, look, they're not being reasonable, but these guys were. I don't remember, I've seen the NOVA one but it's been a while.
Vin-
If I show anything what I propose to show is just the clip of the Alaska segment. I don't want to reprise all the Kennewick stuff, but in class I usually show the whole film, but I could probably just do it this way too in class if I had the time, but it's never worked out that way because, I suppose it could, it's just that every class can be so different. In the class there's usually a good representation of people who see the archaeologists as the bad guys. If I took an opinion poll on the first film, people take positions right away; you'll find a lot of people who are for science and a lot of people who are for religion, to put in those very simplistic terms. So nobody ever feels isolated enough so that they would feel ganged up on if that second film rolls. And that second film also is a very balanced presentation. It doesn't come down totally on one side or another. It really does kind of juxtapose the two cases and says here's a case where it's not working very well and here's a case where it is, but it doesn't, I don't believe the second film is one where the Indians are sort of caving in.
FS-
That's why I was wondering when you show that if you do that back to back or if you have your discussion after the first one and then go into the next one.
Vin- I usually have them, if I've shown them both I usually have them in adjacent lectures and often the first one will be the second half of one lecture so the film followed by say a 20 minute discussion and then the next lecture I'll lead off with the second film that runs for an hour and then there's 50 minutes at the end of class for more discussion. And this is in a class that doesn't have discussion sections, if there were discussion sections I would handle it differently.
MS-
It would be good if you had a clip that showed some archaeologists changing what they're doing, changing positions in response to commentary or advice from Indian communities. Such a film could be made but I don't know where one exists now.
Vin-
I don't know. I haven't seen that film. In the way I present this stuff that does come up a little bit because often I introduce this whole thing usually by talking about how archaeology has changed. I often tell that as a somewhat personal story, but you're right.
MS-
Say setting these folks up, here's these good cooperative native Americans as opposed to the ones who stood up to the scientists. Trouble makers.
MS-
And some would argue they're outside trouble makers. They don't even have claim to the same geographic area that they were in 150, 200 years ago...
Vin —
I hear what you're saying and I have to look at this whole film again to really ask myself your question with that question in mind... It's never happened and maybe that's because this film starts with Kennewick and the whole discussion of Kennewick is a lot more balanced and nuanced. So it doesn't, it just never seems to lead that way.
Rosemary Joyce-
So it reinforces the debate that you already had.
Vin-
It does really.
FS-
...but what do you do to bring it into the realm of problematizing the way archaeological constructs are made. Since they're sort of generally archaeology classes and I've used Alice Kehoe's reading of the whole origins myth as a manifest destiny, so we're justifying who owns the land so that's why this first is important. It doesn't necessarily resolve what you're talking about as far as conflict but it brings it to enough of a general level that it takes us back to an ongoing theme in the way I teach the class is why we frame issues the way we do. Origins of domestication or something and why do we frame it that way.
Vin-
That sort of ties up with the issues of sovereignty that were raised in the other piece, and it was sort of interesting to me because, this is an aside but, in this piece, the 60 Minutes piece, the issue of sovereignty, the issue that if Kennewick man turns out not to be Indian, Indians may lose their rights to land which is complete bologna, legally.
FS-
And casinos, it boils down to money too.
Vin-
That issue was raised by the archaeologists claiming that's why they don't want to find out, that's why the Indians don't want to let Kennewick man be studied. And Leslie Stahl says that the Indians say this is completely bogus. Purely for an anecdote, a few years ago I was on a show, a radio call in show by telephone, there's a show called Native America calling which is produced in Albuquerque and is just a call in show for Native American audiences that deals with Native American issues and Kennewick man was the issue. I was the archaeologist on this call in show. One of the issues that Indians kept raising as they called, this came up several times in several phone calls, the reason they're saying this is a white guy is they want to take away our lands. That issue came up again and again and again so Chatters isn't the only one, Owsley, the archaeologists weren't the only ones who were thinking that, there are a lot of Indian people who see those issues as being connected. Legally, I don't see how they're connected, but in people's minds they are, in perceptions they are. What I did before I left was I cued the tape to the beginning of this Alaska segment. But I did this as I was leaving for the airport and I thought that while I was here before Saturday I would sit down, review the tape and see how long it took. I think it's about a 10 minute segment and it's really up to you all if you want to see it now. Do you want to see it? Ok.
Vin Steponaitis- Part II Discussion after movie
FS- Female Speaker MS- Male Speaker
So this is a natural way to lead into a discussion of what's the difference? This film does not explore that question but it's one that I tend to talk about from my own experience although I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to find in some of these articles, case studies that point out some of the key things that come out of the discussion which is that a lot has to do with trust. And a lot has to do also with the history of the individual cases and sometimes even the personalities involved. But ultimately in the first case, in the Kennewick instance the way it developed had a lot to do with the fact that the tribal communities felt that there was not sufficient consultation and essentially were not willing to give the archaeologists the benefit of the doubt. I don't know whose fault that is but clearly there was already a certain amount of distrust at the beginning not to mention all the stuff the happened in the media which tended to polarize it even further. In this Alaska case I know that this find occurred in a situation where the archaeologists who worked in that area already had established ties with the native community and when this find was made there was consultation. Which they felt was genuine consultation and in that context they decided to permit study and tended to see this find in a much more positive way from their own standpoint. Not to say that they've become like the archaeologists, but they found a way to sort of braid those two sets of conflicting values together. One of the things that I focus on that I didn't focus on the first time is saw this film, but is also something that could come up in the discussion, is anytime you see the remains of Kennewick man or anytime in one of these documentaries, you tend to see the images of the remains themselves. That video and the images that Chatters took of the skull and of the bones. Here I just focus on the first time when he was handling the mandible was a cast and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in North Carolina it's a very different thing to put showing casts of bones in a public context as opposed to showing the bones themselves so that maybe that just happened to be an accident because the bone wasn't available but I have a feeling that it's a subtle example of how just by being sensitive about certain issues it becomes much easier to solve real world problems.
FS-
Vin, What's the name of this NOVA program again please?
Vin-
"The Mystery of the First Americans".
FS-
Isn't that Alaska case one of the cases that you had in the book?
Joe-
No. One thing that I had in my book is that there is a history beyond Kennewick that was 10 years ago, in 1987...an Alaskan Clovis cache. When that thing was excavated, huge Clovis points, there were some problems there between guys who came from Buffalo State came out and antagonized the Yakima and so the Yakima had basically gone through this thing 10 years before and so they still have strong feelings about how the archaeologists then said well, it doesn't matter what their concerns are, my concerns are doing archaeology and when the Yakima people came up to protest the archaeology this guy met them at the gate with a bullet-proof vest on, which really begins to be very antagonistic.
FS-
Somewhere I've seen this Alaska case written up and I was trying to think whether it was in your book or not. It's in Thomas's book? It's really an abject lesson; it's a great case to use. I knew I read it somewhere.
MS-
But Joe's example points out something else which is that the personalities of the people involved are really important here especially in the early stages of any of these kinds of things and that particular individual has antagonized every other person on the face of the earth. There is nobody that is not antagonized by him and so he's the worst possible person to be involved in any kind of controversial issue.
FS-
Even his friends don't like him.
MS-
That's true.
FS-
I've given up another good question. That girl, the native American girl who was in the movie, was that a student? Do we know? A volunteer? OK. Because that's part of what I was talking about here too and getting all those descendant communities, students involved. Whether its native American, African American, whatever, whether you're targeting specifically or not, is of course one of the easiest, well it's not easy at all, in fact it's something we ought to address how do we do that with this gathering? But it's one of the more optimistic ways of doing that dialogue. Marian White was giving scholarships to Native Americans in the 60's to do archaeology in New York state and a lot of people don't even realize that, but, she did something to get that going. Scholarships is one way, but also addressing those specifics in the classroom.
FS-
I think also an issue is research questions. You don't have to study race. There's all these other issues you can be studying but evidently the guys in Alaska were interested in those issues.
Anne Pyburn-
One thing that might be difficult, some of the classes that I teach are for very naïve, very intro-level students and in creating an ethical debate around these films you are asking students to both know something about science and to know something about Native American perspectives in a way. You're trying to get them to put them in place of two groups of people who are not them for the most part and so I do this same debate but I make the Anglo-American students into a descendant community. What I do is I pose a question for my intro-fresh-freshman class in which I say we have several thousand skeletons stored on campus here for scientific study. Take a position for or against the possibility that we would dig up the cemetery here on campus and study the people who are buried there also. Should we do this or should we not? That way they're the descendant community so they don't have to try to put themselves in the place of some other ethnic group that they don't know very much about.
FS-
But that's not, I understand your point but we don't have those same incredibly strong prohibitions or...
Anne-
Oh yes, some of them do!
FS-
But it's not a central component of our culture in the same way. You know, I wouldn't mind if it was somebody 10,000 years ago. I wouldn't want you to dig up my grandmother who was buried yesterday, but what's the big deal about a 10,000 year old person. That doesn't help us to understand the perspective of the Yamatilla.
FS-
The other thing is that the power differentials are; you don't want Native Americans coming in and digging up the cemeteries here on campus to do their...
Anne-
Right, but if you start with a simplified debate, it simplifies the question for a more basic group.
Rosemary Joyce-
And it gets it away from the polarization. The thing is that since there always is a considerable fraction of students that in fact would find, since you're talking about a historic cemetery, it would be there grandmother or great-grandmother, it brings it home and then the question you have to address is, your sense of family isn't very deep. What if your sense of family was deeper? I think when you're dealing with students who have no introduction I do think there's something to be said for making them think of this as something that could affect them...
FS-
I think it would work if it were something other than human remains, I guess, some deeply held cultural value that we have, how would we feel if someone came in and did that to us?
Bill-
Cultural values about burial are actually quite strong, but they're limited to linear relatives and family. But NAGPRA is an attempt to generalize that. To raise it or not in cemeteries is where it goes to the community relationship. So it's really an extension of these very well established... culture just generalizes it. But I think in your case you have to introduce the notion of time. A cemetery here is only a hundred and fifty something years old probably. You have to introduce time because that's the whole big variable in deciding whether you have a descendant community that you can identify as a descendent community or not.
Vin-
And just to add to that something that I haven't stressed up to this point, is the question of how, when you have competing claims, it's not always obvious who the descendant community is and that there can be claims made that may or may not be legitimate. And Kennewick is an ideal situation to discuss that because you have the claim of the scientists, who don't claim to be descendants, obviously, although maybe if he is Patrick Stewart, then who knows? But so there's the scientists, there's the Umatilla, but also legal claims on Kennewick have been made by a group in Northern California called (?Yasatro) folk assembly who see themselves as practicing ancient Norse religion. They see Kennewick man as their ancestor and most recently, I've seen a brief that was filed in Kennewick litigation, by a man who lives in San Diego, who is a Samoan Chief and he has filed papers with the Federal Court in Portland claiming that according to their traditional histories, Kennewick man is probably an ancestor of his.
MS-
He was denied standing.
Vin-
Oh, I didn't hear that, but it just raises the question and it just makes it clear that you have to ultimately make judgments about which claims are valid and which claims aren't.
Rick Wilk-
Well the Iceman would be a good example because it rules out the question of race and mixed... I mean the struggles that went on over who the Iceman, and the superficial remains and the incredible public attention focused on, you know, people were actually saying was he Italian or ....
FS-
One of the things that we have done is taken after the idea of relating it to students. In Arizona when I was back there, we actually got a law passed to protect burials on private land in a state where private land is second only to God, probably, but we did it because we had people who were very, very religious and they looked at it from a Biblical standpoint. They tied it to what would happen if they dug up Jesus, and they literally presented it, legislators presented it that way. Because we brought in the Tribal community, we thought, they'll make their case and people will buy it. What they said was, don't do that until we already have people because then people will say we don't care what they think. So they actually looked at it from that perspective, they really tied it closely to morality and ethics and the context of Christianity and that was the way they could identify with this issue. So you can really get some of that.
MS-
Just an anecdotal situation of actually some encouragement, with respect to how some parties are starting to work together to do these things and develop some cooperative arrangements in these very sensitive issues, we did a large pipeline for some reason these sensitive issues tend to occur in New York State. We did a pipeline that ran from Buffalo to Syracuse, and there was a twenty foot corridor that didn't allow you any latitude that went between the Tonawanda reservation and New York State lands and we went to the ... and said we have this problem here, we only have a twenty foot corridor and you're going to basically piss on everyone. And so the state said well, this is disputed land. The Tonawanda never recognized that the state's boundaries were anywhere close to them and so they said you'll never get this thing through. Pipeline people are extremely persuasive and all of the sudden lets start talking to the Tonawanda band of Seneca. And they started talking and all of the sudden the state became the evil people and they started basically to develop a cooperative arrangement until it was recognized that we were effectively on burial property. And everyone was saying, Proceed with all due caution. One of the components of our project was to do some deep testing and in the course of deep testing some bone was hit. Cover it up! Stop everything! And in the course of doing that we negotiated an agreement with the Tonawanda that covered every possible eventually including reinternment of whatever burials were going to be disturbed. And the whole thing was very, because of the nature of these negotiations, what put off for about a year. Pipeline people are not very patient, but because they had had very positive experiences negotiating with the Native Americans, they said, you know what, this pipeline is worth enough for us to deal with whatever strictures or restraints we have to deal with. And it took about a year and then all of the sudden, we went back out to the site, I'll never forget this, a very unforgettable experience, a physical anthropologist, we got the Native American chiefs, there was going to be a cleansing ceremony where the process of going through this whole procedure was entirely negotiated, everything was worked out, they started excavating and all of the sudden one of the chiefs yelled out this huge yelp. Basically, it was an elk bone and I had to call the president of the oil company and say this delay for a year was caused by an elk bone. I was standing there, I'll never forget it, with the cell phone and there was this dead, pregnant pause at the end of the phone and he just burst out laughing and I had one of the chiefs actually put his hand on my head and said " you did good, kid." So the whole thing ended up costing, no not costing hundreds of thousand of dollars, but they negotiated an arrangement with the Tonawanda Seneca to have a substation on the reservation because they really wanted it. And basically the state was effectively thrown out of the picture.
FS-
Some people bring up different examples and I think it is good to draw, and it would be nice in this curriculum project to draw together those cases, and bring it into a historical perspective as well as personal...and I completely agree with you, Anne, about making it personal to people, and its not just students, it's not just whether they just come from Indiana or come from the city, but a question that people deal with. If you walk down the street and say "what's your favorite color" people can tell you that. If you walk down the street and say "what do you want me to do with the bones of your relatives?" it's not clear to anybody, and we find this all the time. Is just working in one little city where different churches in religious groups and families make completely different decisions. Family members don't agree, and it actually takes quite awhile to work it out. I don't think it is, I think when this issue is taught it shouldn't be construed as simply a Native issue. It is a human issue in this point in time. Maybe many points in time and there's going to be a lot of resolutions and the resolutions have to be local and they're going to take on the idiosyncratic nature of the people and that if there's any message it is communicate, discuss, respect and maybe allow yourself to have some of your ideas change.
Ruth Tringham-
You have a wonderful example of how to really bring that home to people by asking them what would they think about all the people buried in the World Trade Center.
Vin-
Since I want to leave some time for Joe to talk, let me wrap up. I want to wrap up very briefly by just talking about why I chose the readings I did and one could have a 30 page bibliography on this topic and still not be done. I tried to take small samples of the kinds of readings that I found useful and one book that I find really great is KD Vitelli's book on archaeological ethics and a bunch of the articles I picked are from this one, and the other book that I really like, and of course there are many other really good ones, is this book that SAA published, "Native Americans and Archaeologists, stepping stones to common ground." Which was edited by Nina Swidler, Kurt Dongoski, .... and Roger Anean, and I guess that just the rationale for which articles I picked, several of them relate to this issue of conflicting values. The American Antiquity article by ... Goldstein is a sort of a look at this issue from an archaeologist's perspective. GaryWhitebear's article in this book is a good look at that issue from a native perspective, a gut feeling perspective in a way, or a political perspective, maybe that's a better way to put it. And there's also another article on this that's by Rebecca .... Who's a trained lawyer who kind of looks at that issue from a legal perspective and looks at the historic preservation law, but looks at it from an Indian perspective and talks about the various assumptions that are built into the law that not everyone might find. So three of the articles kind of look at different issues having to do with the conflicting values theme. Another them that's represented here is "Who owns the past?" and that is very succinctly looked at in a pair of articles here, one by Clem... and the other by Larry Zimmerman, that are juxtaposed and you can guess which side of the issue each one is on. And finally, "Where do we go from here?" which is a sort of the third theme that I like to use when I teach on this subject. One article in here that really talks about that is Roger Ecklebauk's article about how native's oral traditions and archaeological information might be productively merged. There are obviously other things that can be brought in. Case studies, there's lots. Kennewick we've talked about at length and I've put David Thomas's book on here as a good place to get information on that. I've got an article here on the African burial ground in New York city which is a case I don't personally know as much about, but that is equally rich and also has had a lot of press attention. And a third case study that I have used in the past, I didn't put it on this list, but I regret that I didn't, is Sloan farm, which is an archaeological site on the Ohio River not far from here in Kentucky. And that case is interesting because you were talking about stakeholders and I never really focused on stakeholders as a way of approaching this. Slack farm, oh, I'm sorry, what did I say? But there it's a freeway issue. Archaeologists, Indians, and pot-hunters. And it was pot-hunters that sort of set this off. The reason I didn't put it on is that I thought that there's probably some good things out there and I didn't have time to really look them up, but the one article when I have brought this up, that I've used and that actually, despite the venue, is a really good article for an introductory class, is an article that appeared in National Geographic magazine, which I had laying here just a minute ago... but it's really good because it lays it out in terms of three distinct interest groups. You've got the pot-hunters, you've got the Indians, and you've got the archaeologists, and the Indians aren't happy with the pot-hunters, but they're not totally happy with the archaeologists. On the other hand, the archaeologists and the Indians agree that the pot-hunters had no business doing what they did there, and it just adds one more level of interest and nuance to the whole thing. And the title of the article is "Who owns our Past?" which is appropriate. And let me end by just mentioning one other thing that comes up in my classes. As I told you before when you teach in North Carolina and you teach archaeology in North Carolina, it's not just an academic, ivory tower issue, but one has students in one's classes who, in some cases, fundamentally disagree with everything I say. And they come in two different flavors. There are people who are Christians, who take very fundamentalist views, and occasionally, very rarely, I expect this happens a lot more than people will admit, they will say, I really have trouble with a lot of what you're saying. And then there are Indian students in the class who also occasionally raise concerns, always politely, and my answer to the folks who raise those concerns is, you don't have to believe anything I say. If you have a different view of the way the world works, that's fine, but what I expect you to do in this class is to understand my point of view. This is a class about archaeology and so you have to understand what archaeologists do, how archaeologists think, how they gather evidence, how they evaluate it, how they tell their stories and make their interpretations. If you understand that, you'll get an A, but you don't have to believe any interpretation I offer you, but you have to know where it comes from and how to evaluate it. And so there could be other answers to that question, but that's my answer. I've talked much longer than I thought I would...