s02e01: Illicit Acquisitions (Season Two Overview)

Salvage archaeology. Buy those prices. Intellectual. That native American Slowly disappearing. And what we're always trying to point out is I said we were never planning to not be here. In the science world, that's that's an important aspect to us. It don't matter that much because we just know we've been here since time immemorial anyway. Western settler science does not include the Acknowledge or account. We have this connection to all sacred living systems. Colonialism.

A violation Welcome to Challenging Colonialism, a podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices of indigenous California. An important note from the start. The producers are two white male educator academics and these are not This podcast centers native voices, and our intention is to highlight the significance of Challenge. And to broadcast information about the remote. We launched season two with an overview.

Season two will center on a long history of ways in which the Have worked in extractive or exploitative. A final notebook. Contain graphic descriptions of slavery, genesis, Sexual violence.

Hey Young Kilit, Dr. Kutcher Rislingbaldi Ahoyek. I'm Dr. Ketcher Rislingbaldi. I am Hoopa Yurikin Karuk and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe, and I'm also the Department Chair of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. I asked my uncle about it one time, my great uncle, uh AWOC Dave Risling. I was talking to him and I said, you know, why why do you work with like these anthropologists? Like everytime they come to our ceremonies, he would invite them to our ceremony sometimes with him.

And we as kids, we'd always be like, that's the anthropologist. And the way we knew that was because he it was always a tall, skinny, white dude. And he had pants with lots of pockets in them and a vest.

uh and then in the best pens and stuff. And he had a leather bound journal and a giant hat and then he'd be writing like the whole time. And then as kids we'd be like like we'd always point right and i finally would ask my uncle i was like why why do you work with these people because all they've ever done is like write these things that then erase us from existence or all they've ever done is like make these books that don't actually help us

in our everyday struggles of doing things, all they ever do is like take all our baskets and they won't give them back. Like what, why do you do this? And he like paused for a minute and he goes, you know, Western science. And academia is very young. And this point of view that they have in Western anthropology. So he's so young to this place. They're like toddlers. Because that's why when you talk to them, they go, I know, I know. He's like, because they're like toddlers.

And we, the indigenous people, with our thousands and thousands of years of knowledge, we're the grown-ups, we're the elders. And we have to guide them to the point where they can start to learn how to ask the right questions. and know what they're actually doing in this place to create like the relationships they need so that everything can thrive. But that we got to help them grow up.

So my name is Cindy Alvitre. I am affiliated with the Gabriolino Tongva community. My direct affiliation is with Tiat Society. and traditional Council Pimu, which represents the maritime communities of the Los Angeles and Orange County coastal areas. I teach two classes in in the anthropology department. I teach uh California Indians and then I teach a class on Native North America.

Consistently, what I encounter is anthra students who are just coming in and taking a lot of the introductory classes, even though they're upper level, upper division classes. that have been exposed to one side of the story of anthropology. Anthropology being um broadcast as this discipline that embraces the culture, you know, the development of culture of our humans, uh, human and human history on our planet. But what a neglect.

is the story behind the story, you know, and uh with anthropology, obviously that's a larger discipline. um that emerges in the 19th century in this country, that is integrated and intertwined with the establishers of museums, which means you have to fill those museums right with collections. And that's the acquisition of uh the illicit, the unethical acquisition of ancestral human remains, associated funerary objects, cultural objects, and on and on and on.

So to distinguish that generalized discipline and the history of that. uh really goes into the more intricate practices, you know, archaeology being the excavation, you know, the physical direct. um displacement, disruption and interruption of cultural heritage and the sacredness of of human beings who have been placed in in their in their final resting place.

with the intent and and the faith by their own people that they would never be disturbed again. Whereas when we get into um ethnography, that's uh that also is another practice. It's another practice that was directly related to how anthropologists such as Alfred Krober, such as Franz Boas, how they they collected, or I should say extracted, information from living people. You know, and and there's a lot there's a lot that goes along with that.

you know so being able to just break this apart so they don't they don't leave the classes they don't leave our institutions thinking that anthropology is anthropology everything is embraced everything is acceptable Uh it it's got the stamp of approval from everybody because that's what we're doing is protecting the cultures of the world and having to be very explicit. And very specific to the students about what it means to do archaeology with those physical practices, both verbally.

My name's Mark Hilkema. I am the supervisor of the Cultural Resources Program. in the Santa Cruz district for California State Parks. I was a Caltrans archaeologist for eleven years, hard time. working for the Highway Agency and then I worked as freelance archaeologist both during those terms and after and have about forty years local experience in cultural resources.

Archaeology, I must say, is destructive. It's like doing an autopsy. You take a section out of the patient, your square holes that you excavate and analyze. through controlled volume and method. There is a method to the madness now that was unavailable to archaeologists of the past. But at that time archaeology didn't use sifting screens to look for smaller things.

there was no sense of stratigraphic relationships. And even while they talk about seeing changes in layers over time, They'd never thought about it as older on the bottom, younger on top, you know, basic stratigraphy, which is a you know, core of archaeological thinking now.

The work of salvage anthropology was always to document what they thought was a dying, vanishing native culture. A good story to tell yourself if you're a settler colonist who would like to be able to just settle this whole thing and be done with it and kind of move on. Not a story that I think would ever be told by the people who are who are navigating. resisting and and being like pushed against by the genocide that's happening. Up until that point.

in the late eighteenth century when um salvage ethnography, salvage archaeology, what does that mean? It meant that there was a belief By those practitioners, those scientific racists, those people who were the leaders in the establishments of museums and intellectual academic institutions, that Native American people would become extinct. So that's that urgency to collect to collect. Collect who do I you? Subsia knew you at a La Hulam's deal Watku.

Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn I just explained that Touetk is my Timtian name and Robin Gray is my English name. I am Timtian from unceded territories in La Holams, British Columbia, up in Canada. And I am Gisputwada or Blackfish Killer Whale Clan from the House of Liam Laha and the Gidahan Geek tribe. I'm also Miksu Kri with Deneirout. from uh Fort Chippewan, Alberta in Treaty Eight territory.

I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. which includes a non-budgetary cross-appointment in the Graduate Department of Sociology at the downtown St. George campus for U of T. And I'm also cross-appointed with the Department of Anthropology. And this year, this academic year, I have uh accepted a new and unprecedented role as a special advisor on rematriation to the vice.

President and Principal at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. I would say the birth of uh the discipline of of American anthropology is based on the knowledge of uh Timxian peoples. Because the earliest anthropological texts are about our people. So Franz Boaz wrote Timxian text. Um, which was right around the time the American anthropology community was created, like institutionalized, right? Where it becomes a discipline and has its own identity.

It was after Franz Boas, um who was uh a researcher, I you know, he founded, I think he was involved with the Museum of Natural History back East. started codifying anthropology as a field of science and it developed from the field of psychology and linguistics. and branched into the social order of the study of humans. The new University of California at Berkeley

began to expand their psychology program into anthropology and one of its founders was Alfred Krober. Well I'm gonna approach this uh from the experiences of my Tibsian people. Because the Simsian nation has been disproportionately impacted by the legacies of Salvage paradigms, including from salvage anthropology, because it created a sense of urgency in early anthropologists, missionaries.

um adventure travelers, amateur collectors, you know, all types of folks who were interested in salvaging or saving the remnants of a so-called banishing Indian race before we were supposed to disappear.

If we think about the role of the anthropologist, encouraged by the various salvage ideologies. In general, we're talking about three domains of collecting. uh which include of course ancestral human remains, bodies, objects, cultural, um material and knowledges, in this case, the intangibles that have b been made tangible through the process of documenting. Just by going into any major museum across the world, you're very likely to encounter the material culture of my people.

So totem poles and masks and rattles and all types of regalia and bentwood boxes and Cedar baskets and headpieces, frontlets, all types of aspects of our head. Shamo Sakish, Mishishtu, Hershatuhi. I'm Greg Castro. I'm Totroll Slinen and Ramsin and Rama Tushaloni and involved in way too many organizations and in many too many events doing too many things. Um but I feel compelled to do that because um I'm so grateful for the culture I have and I want to get back.

One of my friends in the industry talks about the the hoarding aspects of archaeology because the archives are bulging at uh walls uh because they don't have room for all this stuff. Certainly not in a i in in in a proper storage sense, but actually any storage at all.

There's stories of North of us in San Francisco Bay Area, a very well known and should have been well versed in the process institution with story and stuff and hadn't looked at it in years and they walked into it and they saw in a w in a uh warehouse that had holes in the roof. right over the boxes, which were cardboard, what was left of the cardboard. And of course all the things were disintegrated and um the the documentation that was in there was you know piles of ooh and goo and and mold.

and of course the material all the m m organic material was destroyed and the inorganic material was was damaged. And it was like boxes and boxes and boxes of it. These are supposed to be a a state-sanctioned appropriate institute that should know how to do this and wasn't doing it.

Conrocott Canyon, Coyote Woman, Sarah's Roots. My name is Canyon Sayers Roots, also known as Coyote Woman. My pronouns are she the coyote. I come from Indian Canyon Nation or another term uh in some documents, the Indian Canyon Mutsun Band of Costano and Alone people. Also in some documents uh that my mother and my great grandfather Sebastian Garcia great great grandfather the Cosinoan Chular Band of Moots and Indians.

And Indian Canyon is the only federally recognized Indian country between Sonoma and Santa Barbara along central coastal California. So we're in the Mutsin linguistic territory. And I'm just a local active loudmouth coyote that is an advocate for truth and history. I'm going to call out Western settler science. Scientific theory is a parameter of break apart put together and see how it works. It does not include holistic systems, it doesn't acknowledge or account for

Uh communal knowledge and environmental knowledge and how we have this connection to all sacred living systems. Traditional ecological knowledge. knowledge of indigenous peoples and ways of life and and and and knowledge of what is connected. And so when we have anthropologists that are informed by this system It's an outsider visiting an environment looking through the lens of its limitations. is Maya Poston. I work for state parks in the tribal affairs program.

specifically within the NAGPRA program and NAGPRA stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. While that is my job position, I'm not Here as a representative of the program. When academia becomes somebody's entire life through being their career, their field. you know, scholarly work, it necessitates an emotional distance between the academic and the focus of the research.

And taking that very emotionally distant, you know, quote unquote objective scientific perspective leads to excessive amounts of dehumanity. The history of anthropology is extremely white male upper class. It began as a hobby of the wealthy. And probably the the easiest example of that would be looking at Egyptomania in Victorian England as a result of uh Napoleonic forces.

looting and profiting off of all of these things that they found. Early early anthropology was little more than grave robbing. There was very little scientific interest in it to begin with. It was more of this morbid fascination. And then as it became more scientific, it became significantly more racist. You have the field of phrenology, the the idea that you can determine somebody's intelligence and genetics based off the size of their head, their skull.

And that all kind of culminates to A field that is overwhelmingly dominated by wealthy white men who exoticize and fetishize cultures. that they think are relics of the past or are too separated from Western Anglo culture to be considered like human or civilized.

And just that constant dehumanization and fetishization of you are quaint, you're a novelty. When a who? My name is Ron Good. I'm the tribal chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe. We're located in eastern Madeira County, text in a little bit of Mariposa, Fresno, and Inyo. Our homeland is about 1.4 million acres. So we've been around for you know some fifteen thousand years the on the land. We are

Currently not a federally recognized tribe. That doesn't mean that we were one before. You know, I've been an archaeologist since 1978. The tribes had to deal with archaeologists and anthropologists. Um Going clear back, you know, into the 50s and beyond. And even way back into the 1800s, early 1900s. the Krovers and the Cooks and the Giffords and you know Huntingtons and all these people.

They did manage to do a lot of recording and, you know, they saved maybe a lot of history, but they also damaged a lot of history. They were not Indian. They were white folks. And they only understood one thing, you know, that you know the Indian was a subject. We were showing that we were uh processing and in the settlement mode, not just hunters and not just gatherers. Um in science world, that's that's an important aspect.

to us we it don't matter that much because you know we just we just know we've been here since time immemorial anyway. That's how important it was when anthropologists and archaeologists started coming back in. And then anthropologists are different than archaeologists, so they're always coming in and and and they know the game. So they come in to us in our tribal communities, gain our trust by volunteering their time, working on our events for free, bringing us stuff.

So they can get information and when they've earned the trust, every elder and every historian in the tribe gives them what they want. Then they write their book, they get their masters, and they've got their book, and we're nowhere's in it. Except for the information we've given. Many of the tribes, including mine, in the 1970s.

busted up their screens and their shovels and reburied their burial sites and ran them off and So it wasn't until the late 70s when we finally all sat down and had quite the discussion to be able to allow them to start coming back into our area, our homeland. That first that first one was Fresno State.

And um and they still made a lot of mistakes as they went, you know, taking photographs of burials, um, when they were told not to, and then going to conventions showing it to all their people and all their buddies because it's getting them points, except for the fact it got back to us before they got back from the convention. So we did the same thing. We just covered everything up and said we're done here.

This is it. You know, you were told the rules, you couldn't abide by the rules, we're done. And when I first got in a council, one of the first things I did is started working with the archaeologists because nobody else wanted to. And I was fortunate to meet somebody who was very good, who had worked with Native people. And so my first experiences with good, with individual people. But as soon as I entered the profession

I could tell there was a difference. And I knew enough before I walked in the door that there was a difference. And then I saw it. you know, people like we discussed earlier, where there's old school archaeology, old school history, they still had that old paradigm. You know, they're more than happy to talk to the descendants. But they want to study the Indians.

And then they'll talk to their descendants later, because they make that separation, that distinction. So I walked in knowing that. The practical part comes simply because of this. When you when you go to something like the Society for California Archaeology Conference, and you look at their program, you're gonna see three quarters of the papers at least are native culture.

Let's go back to Linda Tuhifai Smith, Maori scholar, who back when in the 1990s, I guess. I don't even remember when she published her book, Decolonizing Methodologies. She really laid it out.

She articulated it when she said that one of the dirtiest words to indigenous people is research. is research because indigenous people have been the core of research of anthropology. Without indigenous people, anthropology would not exist as a discipline. my opinion. Plenty of evidence to support that.

Who were these early scholars and Well, they're generally wealthy sons, very few females, sons of wealthy, you know, landowners putting their kids through college and university and now they're working on their doctoral dissertations. And all that's playing out on how they look at the archaeology too. They are products of their time. And so they're only asking the questions relevant to the times they live in. And so we see a great loss of opportunity.

I think within California you have Al Krober. who's regarded as like the father of California anthropology, mostly because he wanted his legacy to be the father of something, and he was fascinated with Indigenous Californians. So he kind of wrote like the anthropologist's Bible on California India.

you have in his time into the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies You have stories of people just going into a village and taking whatever they wanted, finding a burial mound or finding a sacred site. seeing a skull and taking it because, ooh, a skull, you know, or coercing tribal members into selling objects because they offered a lot of money or

they were using it as leverage or, you know, something really underhanded and shady like that. They claim scientific research, but It's to be put on a shelf and to collect dust and be completely disrespected. And then Krober comes in and the salvage ethnography comes in and they're like, oh no, all these Indians are disappearing. Somehow we won't acknowledge that it's actually structurally being supported by our own government to kill them in front of us.

We should write it all down before they go away. And that to me is like a salvage ethnography that is participating in that process. Because you're not you're not using it as a way to say, these are human beings. You are committing genocidal offenses against them. They're not trying to document that. What they're trying to say is we're going to get all this knowledge from you. And then we're going to uh continue this process of displacing you.

Salvage ethnography in itself too is always an exercise in like uh I don't know what like um disassociation almost. I said to people like what does it mean when you go into a community and you're like Hey, you're all dying, so we have to write about you. Like nobody goes, wait, I'm dying? Like Well could you like stop that part? How can we not be dying? Like and then you just go, oh no, no, no, that's not important. Uh but just let me write down everything you know before you die.

Science doesn't lie. Science is accurate. Science is objective, so we're not putting our emotions into it. They justify that. And that concept of descendants where we have the separation because we're not living in Thule Hut. or plank house huts. We're not living our traditional way. I use a computer. I drive a car. Somehow that makes me different than my ancestors. That's starting to fade and we're part of that.

breaking down of that barrier. But it's still there to a certain extent when people use that word. These are the descendants. Knowledge shouldn't define us strictly. There's a lots of things that define us. It's not DNA, it's strictly DNA either, but that's part of it. Knowledge is part of it. But what part of knowledge? Do I know how to weave a basket? Not myself personally. Does that make me not native? Because I don't make my own bow and arrow?

I know enough to know I could probably take a good shot at it if I had the time, but I'm busy fighting these other battles. So I don't I haven't taken that amount of time. But I support other people in doing that because that's an important part of our culture.

Sometimes California people couldn't share about certain things. They couldn't share certain things with Krober. They didn't know what would happen to it. There was a period of time where if you practiced women's ceremonies, you would be killed, rounded up. That th that that girl would be particularly targeted for sexual violence.

that people would sell her into slavery. Like, so of course we at a point we're like, we're not gonna share with you what that's about. We're not gonna tell you if we still do it. We're not gonna show you where the women's house is. Because it would be so dangerous. So those adaptations happen and salvage ethnography comes in and then says they don't do the women's ceremony anymore. Because they got civilized.

And I always say to people, we didn't like lose any, like people always say, oh native people, they lost their culture, they lost their ceremonies. I always say we didn't lose anything. It was violently wrested away from us. Like stop the this this like language of lie. We didn't lose it. It was taken. And it was taken in the most violent way possible. We don't make no distinction and certainly the fact that we don't have that same knowledge base is is hardly our fault.

It wasn't our choice. Our culture is so important to us. It's part of our life. It is our life. So when we talk about genocide, we're talking about cultural genocide. And if we're only talking about cultural genocide, it's still genocide to us. It's still happening right here, right now. What is really beautiful about it is even with all of that violence.

We found some way to carry that memory forward. And I I love the moments in the archive where I find people who say things like, I always said that I couldn't remember everything, but I could remember this. And so now I'm going to share this thing with you that I remember. because I know that that's going to contribute to all the little pieces we're going to need to rebuild this someday.

So Crover's talking to a people who are also thinking like what are we gonna do to build the future and he can't even at the time he's doing that he can't even understand the power of the fact that they're sitting there with him going this is what I will share with you. This is what I will have you write down. This is what I will say because I know how important it is for what we will be. They're talking about future us, indigenous futures. They're building an archive of indigenous futures.

And that's not because of Krober. That's like in spite of him. Anthropologists love to say that California Indians were primitive hunter-gatherers. I would say to people, it's so dismissive, but also, yeah, we hunted and we gathered. We also were mothers and fathers and doctors and lawyers and chefs.

We also like were petty and told dirty jokes and maybe got in bites sometimes with our best friend and then said we were never gonna talk again, but then started talking again. I was like like we were human beings. And when you make us into primitive hunter-gatherers, all that does is justify for you that somehow we're less than human.

Because in all of our languages, when you ask us who we are, and we introduce ourselves, like in Hoopa we say, I'm not Tinahwe. And what that means is I'm a person of the valley. Academia likes to call native history. And legends and supposed oral tradition and Western academia likes to dismiss us as prehistoric. My ancestors are called prehistoric. And is our oral tradition and oral narrative and oral histories Somehow not?

Valid in your eyes? Your community who's quite primitive, the Western settler primitive decision making that is devastating to the ecology and the environment, whose short-term presence has devastated But so much of the Americas. who can't keep a story straight can't even see that indigenous peoples have integrally maintained our oral traditions and narratives for generation after generation after generation because some of our community members can still tell stories that our grandmother taught

our mothers that their grandmothers taught their mothers, that their grandmothers taught their mothers. We can tell the story exactly the same way.

So part of it is the erasure that we talk about in colonialism and old school archaeology and western thought in general. If it's not Indiana Jones, no one knows, right? And what a lousy archaeologist he was. destroying the temple with no notes, taking the gold idol with the natives running after him, they want it back.

You know, what kind of archaeologist is that guy? Well, very much like the Victorian Age archaeologists of the day, tomb raiding, pulling things out, and maybe that's why he appeals to so many people because Forget the rules. Where's what's the fun in the science? You know, look at the goodies, right?

And that still permeates our world view. As a youngster I saw construction workers trying to meet their timeline and build the thing they want to build and meet the timeline and meet the budget. Then I would see archaeologists want to study and dig up and study and learn. And then I see the native community saying, Can we leave it alone? Leave it, don't disturb it and so I used to see that in a very kinda like binary fashion. It's this or this. That's why you collaborate. That's why you consult.

We're giving you information you wouldn't have got otherwise. In other words, why study the stones and bones and figure out what they did? Why don't you just ask the people who made them? And are still making them in some cases. We have degreed archaeologists within the Native community. We have the TIPOs, tribal historic preservation officers.

who started out as allies who came in from the outside with archaeology degrees, but now we have a bunch of tippos that are Navy people. And some of them have archaeology degrees. Some of them have doctorates. Some of them are teaching and creating collaborative projects and are being pretty assertive about the issues. We have this organization that's come together of people of color and native archaeologists.

They're teaching. They're teaching our people. They're teaching the next generative arc archaeologists who aren't native, but are gonna be working with natives. So uh again this is another issue where uh it's happening. I just didn't think I'd lived long enough to see it happening. It's happening now right in front of me. And it's kinda cool to see. Anthropologists where they were like, eventually they're all gonna disappear. And we were like, 150 years from now, 500 years from now.

Like when this is going on we gotta get ready for this. We still make really long-term plans. You have been listening to Challenging Colonialism. This episode introduces our And in future episodes we'll dive deeper into topics such as collections. Berkeley and the renaming of the book. Museums, ownership and intellectual. property, federal recognition. There's much more to come. Doctor Kutcher Markel, come on. Music. This podcast is supported by Parks Foundation.

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