s02e02: Salvage Anthropology "A Nasty Business"

Just the term salvage denotes things. as far as their value. Salvage also denotes that you're you're attempting to collect to save. Those practices were contrived. They were very violent. Salvage anthropology. Many people think that everything. There's all these very paternalistic ideas that trickle down into behavior and attitude. That of course feeds the system because it Welcome to challenging collaboration. In this appearance. You will hear from doctor Kutin. Robin Gray and Cindy Lv.

Episode two is a deep. Apology and it's not a little bit more than a little bit. Alfred Krober. And you see Berkeley. 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. Salvage anthropology. Wow. Salvage anthropology. Oh geez. Well, you mean in the past or in the present?

Do we still practice selfish anthropology? Uh salvage anthropology again was the legitimization of an intellectual academic practice within this this discipline. Without permission, I mean, this is what we see in museums. You go back and do the research and um the chronological history of how an object, what has been that path they have traveled on.

So our museums and not only museums and institutions, but I think we have to acknowledge, you know, who was collecting what. Salvage anthropology implies collection of not only physical material culture, but also um the recordings of people too. But also where we're still missing a lot is from private collections.

And I experience it, I know a lot of people out there probably experience it if you work in institutions or museums or even with tribes, with our tribal entities, that families are coming to us wanting to return. things that were collected. Talking salvage anthropology is a legitimized intellectual academic process.

Private collecting is another one that also intertwines with, you know, um art collectors for profit, because a lot of stuff from anthropology finds its way into the art market and a lot of things. that were never made their way there end up in private collections and then garages and at yard sales. But I think what's happened too is maybe there's a little bit of a development of consciousness.

and uh and questioning the ethics of how one's parent or grandparent or great grandparent uh received this skull. that remained on the mantelpiece that was collected uh at Biona Wetlands in the 1920s. And uh the individual may or may not have said anything until that grandparent or those individuals were also deceased and they finally had the freedom to to do what was right. And then go to the communities and say, this is what I have. I'm sorry. I'm returning it.

And that's that's one experience that we've had of many, many ex many, many, many um different instances of people returning things. So uh just the term salvage, you know that. denotes things that are disposable. You know, that uh the as far as their value, something that is salvageable. I mean salvage also denotes that you're you're attempting to collect to save, you know, for the future.

But those practices we know uh were contrived and they were They were very biased and intentional and motivated by the colonial practices of this country in order to further develop and expand their resources, their territory, and their presence. in what is now California and what is now the United States.

I am Samuel J. Redman and I am a historian and a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I'm especially interested in the history of anthropology.

So between about the Civil War and the early decades of the 20th century, it was a commonly held idea in that era that Native people, especially Native Americans, were uh essentially doomed to vanish, that uh uh in the light of population decline and ongoing genocide and and the impact of disease and and a whole host of other factors.

Um, but especially to people were worried about cultural decline that um sort of what the the traits or characters or or habits that made uh a culture group unique would uh somehow uh disappear or or vanish. So in response to that, anthropologists, but also a whole host of others, so missionaries. uh uh private amateur collectors, US Army officers and Navy officers uh became committed to this idea that they needed to salvage

human cultures. So this included tangible things, everything from material objects and and sacred c uh you know, objects uh to uh human remains or ancestral remains, as some uh would prefer for us to talk about it as. Um, and so this this phenomenon of salvage anthropology actually had this pretty wide-ranging impact in terms of how we think about history and human cultures and societies today.

To it du at uh Robin Gray D Wam Gamsky Wamach. Subsia knew you at a La Hulam's deal well watku. Get a hangi de Tabu, mixu cre nu you, uh at uh Port Chippawanda well what goo. I just explained that Touetk is my Timtian name and Robin Gray is my English name. I am Tiptian 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 Lacha and the Gita Hang Geek tribe. I'm also Miksukri with Deneirut.

from uh Fort Chippewan, Alberta in Treaty Eight territory. The interventions of what I like to call salvage entrepreneurs who are all sort of invested in this. Myth that indigenous peoples were destined to disappear either literally or at least culturally.

So, you know, the legacy is there. We can see it. It's visible. Um, but the history is not so visible. So many people will encounter our heritage and It perpetuates this idea of a bygone indigeneity and um expectations around authenticity in the contemporary period.

this whole history of collecting uh indigenous cultural heritage is just part and parcel to that entire process and the underlying assumptions that drive people to believe in the myth and to seek out the stuff and to claim it as theirs and create all types of industries, new industries around it. is really a matter of quite frankly, white possessiveness, right? This idea that everything is up for the taking and that they know what's better for us.

You know, they know how to treat our stuff better than we could. There's all these very paternalistic ideas. That trickle down into behavior and attitude. And that of course feeds the system because it encourages the keeping, right? Not just the getting, but the keeping. And the keeping. Not just the the the physical

possession of something, but the gatekeeping of it as well. Um also is tied to that possessive logic that underscores the settler colonial project and and all those who are required to sustain it. You know, and in and in the early years, yeah, those are white folk, right? And it continues to be white folk. And because whiteness is a very real thing, you know, people tend to have uh investment in sustaining that privilege.

Right. And in in some way. And it's easy to sustain it when you don't have to confront the legacy or be responsible for part of that legacy. So right now with all of the discussions about race and racial justice. long time coming. But either way, people are going, oh my gosh, wow, it's it's actually a whole system. And you know, they realize you can't just a attribute. racism or racist behavior to single individuals and think of them as outliers.

But in fact, you have to see it as individuals critical to a structure. And that's what created our systems that we find ourselves in and the attitudes that accompany them. And and just like we needed collectives to create.

those colonial structures and systems, we need collectives to dismantle them as well. And so it's really critical that those who are invested in Um things like social justice or restorative justice or you know, up here in Canada, you know, reconciliation is the buzzword and indigenization and everyone's trying to flag that they're they're about it, you know, that they're about the humanist.

you know, the humanist imperative, I guess we could say, um, that people are invested in, well at least discursively invested bit invested in today. Um, so I think that's really important, right? That people understand those underlying assumptions and work actively work to decolonize their their minds and their spirits, honestly. Um because colonialism is a violation not only of the mind and the body, but also I think of the spirit and of emotion.

Hey Young Kilit, Dr. Ketcher Rislingbaldi Ahoyet. I'm Dr. Ketcher Risling Baldi. 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. Again, I think that's why the intervention that Native American Studies gives to so many disciplines is to show them that like it's never a depolitical act.

to do that. And it's never a depolitical act to do research. And it's never a depolitical act to decide sort of like how you're managing the work that you're doing in community. And you have to reconcile that and understand that and then know what you're doing there. Uh and if you're not there in support of indigenous self-determination and sovereignty and futures, then Don't do that work, do something else, right? Uh I constantly point out to people if uh contemporary history starts in 1492.

Um, and everything before that is prehistory, which oftentimes that's what happens. People are like, everything before 1492 is prehistory. These are prehistoric cultures. What else is prehistoric? Dinosaurs. When did they live? Millions of years ago. So it's like 1492 to 2022. That's history.

And then everything before that's prehistory and that includes the dinosaurs. So that's millions of years of history. And we're saying that at minimum in California, you're talking 10,000 years of history. But if you're looking at new studies that are coming out. Hundred thousand years of history, right? Californians are always like, you'll keep finding older and older stuff and then we'll be like, Yep, we told you, right? But right now, 100,000 years of history, that's a long time. That's like

A lot of 1492 to 2022, if that's 500 years. That's a lot of 500 years. And look what we did in 500 years. Like we invented Twitter. Like we can order food on our phones and then like take pictures of that food and then people can like it, right? Like we've done a lot. So for us to act like all those eras of history before, they all stayed the same, nothing ever changed.

We didn't have moments. Like, I think it's really important for us to understand as California Native people that our histories are long, complex. And ever adaptive and changing, much like our knowledge is, much like our understandings of place. And that the beauty of it is that we had taken that knowledge to build a culture and society that we wanted everybody to be able to like.

drink the water, breathe the air, feel good about themselves, have enough food. Like that is what our values were, like our fundamental values of our society is everybody should have a place to live and everybody should have enough food. And everybody should have a ceremony, ceremonial culture that they want to practice. And everybody should come together in a good way. And we should not be fighting over things. Like that's how that's our society we built.

And my great grandfather will would always point out in his own writings, he would say you know the culture and society that develops itself around uh how to take care of everybody or the culture and society that develops itself around how to kill the most people who's primitive He's like, who's primitive? And I would always say, I said, you that's what it is. We didn't take all our smart people and try to figure out how you develop the best way to kill the most people. We were like

Nobody likes to kill people. Let's develop all the ways we would need to make sure that that doesn't happen. And I feel like that took A moment. We didn't come into the world going, here's the perfect way to live. We were like, 10,000 years of figuring out how do you live here so that you don't overuse the resources, kill the planet, displace your more than human relatives, hurt people.

Right? How do you live here together so you can respect each other's languages, so that you can have different creation stories, so that your political negotiations are demonstrative of everybody should have enough. Like, how do you make sure that your culture works that way? I think people forget all the time that Indigenous histories are a lot of starts and stops to different things. And then we lived through pandemics.

We lived through climate changes. We lived through the changing of the oceans. We like we and then we had to adapt to those things. So there was a lot of knowledge there. And the fact that then Uh they come in, you know, in California you're like 1600s, right? Sixteen, fifteen hundreds and start coming through. But then by the start of the mission system and then the gold rush, they they're not trying to learn from anybody. They're just trying to destroy everything.

Uh so the fact that between eighteen ninety nine and nineteen twenty-five. You have a whole host of anthropologists who are deeply committed to collecting, documenting, and naming things and trying to preserve that on some level, really shape. uh this sort of story as it as it stands today. This includes all of the things that they got right, but it also includes their biases and things that they got wrong.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that's an important time, right? In terms of colonialism and westward expansion and and nationalism, there are a whole bunch of uh things happening at that time. Um, it's also the case that federal government is trying to engage in studies to determine who the different native people are in in North America.

And uh those sort of decisions that are are made at that time have a cascade of ramifications, very real world ramifications for Native people today in terms of land claims. uh in in terms of their uh situation as as sovereign nations uh and and federal recognition as well as a whole host of of other factors. But it's also the case that there's something much broader and and bigger that I also became interested in.

And that is the way in which these things are written about in newspapers and museum exhibitions and in fiction and in in many, many other sources. uh really uh helped cement in American consciousness or in sort of popular minds as well as in intellectual history, uh these motivating desires that Native people were doomed to vanish. And that a response to this was to document the things about that culture before it ended up uh vanishing.

And not only were they collecting information about us and and and making observations about us, they were also working within these social networks, right? And this is where I talk about salvage entrepreneurs. So they like provided access and gateways into indigenous communities because of that early ethnographic work and their work with early informants from the community.

So other people wanted to get access to our community too. So they'd go to the anthropologist and the anthropologist would connect them with the informant. And then they would um make a trip up there to collect songs or to come and view our old village sites or where the totem poles are or whatever it may be.

Um and in that process they would collect things and get things and leave. Archaeology is becoming sort of a formalized discipline and and practice at the same time. Um and there's a belief, an overriding belief, that through this sort of structure. That's the that's the best way to sort of capture, if you will, this knowledge and uh disseminate it to a broader public. Uh and it assumes, right, that native people are incapable.

of doing this sort of preservation on their own, which in fact They were quite capable of uh preserving this knowledge and and material through uh different means, including the written word, but also oral traditions and through drawing and and and in many other ways, they were able to preserve knowledge. My name is 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. These guys were going out in their three piece suits on horseback, meeting the poorest of the poor, interviewing them, trying to graft the last remembrances of the past. And the sad part is they never once thought about saving the people.

They wanted to save the data. Well, in some ways we're grateful they did'cause many of the descendants of those folks now are dependent on those anthropological reports for rediscovering their identities. It's a strange twisted kind of outcome. Unfortunate and yes also fortunate, for instance the Alma Mudsen and Moekma tribes of today are dependent on the l the linguistic records that were taken by those early anthropologists who recorded the languages of their great grandparents, right?

So I I think there are two really important, really basic assumptions that are operating here. Um, sort of the the the first one, this this vanishing Indian myth, as historians very often describe it, right? This uh understanding of the inevitability of decline of native people. And uh it it also rests on it's sort of attached to that, uh, this this idea that that cultures uh sort of exist almost in these like static bubbles.

And, you know, today I think we understand culture as a much more sort of dynamic force. that it is permeable in important and meaningful sort of ways, right? Like, you know, there are people who are living on the Crow Reservation who are really into basketball. And that's been a a phenomenon for now several generations.

But it it's it strikes us today, I think, as problematic if someone's like, oh, well, Native people don't play basketball, these sort of stereotypical views that are based in assumptions about history and the past. Um, but a lot of those come from this idea that cultures sort of are the way they are and and they're sort of static and unchanging since sort of the dawn of time. Um, and these are really problematic notions, right?

Another idea and referencing something that I said a moment ago is that there was a Western sort of model for preservation and documentation in response to that. And here we have the birth of fields like anthropology or ethnology, these, you know, uh figures who are committed to studying human cultures and and writing about religion and and ritual, but also language and. day to day uh interactions, uh as well as a whole host of other things.

When they talk about ancient California Indian people, uh, they'll I still think they kind of think of them as different than people. Like they're sort of like some they're sort of more like animals in. year one or five thousand, ten thousand years ago. And I constantly have to be like, well, so one example is I remember they were saying, they were looking at this set of remains and they were like, we don't think that this

Set of remains is related to this current California current indigenous group that we're studying. Because we studied the bones and the this person's diet is different. And he eats much less seafood than they would have eaten in this cultural group of people. And then I raised my hand and I was like, what if he didn't like seafood? And then they're like, what? And I was like, well, what if you just didn't like seafood? Like, I don't like tomatoes.

Would someone be like Oh my gosh, she's not a part of this family because she never ate tomatoes and the whole family ate tomatoes. Like, no, they'd be like, what if she didn't like tomatoes? And they were like, no, that's not how that works. And I was just like, why not? Like we're not human beings navigating. Like maybe he just didn't like seafood. And so he ate lots of other things.

Maybe he was allergic to seafood. So I just I think sometimes I still have to push back against an anthropological discourse that treats ancient California Indian peoples as somehow less than human, as somehow differently human than who we are today. I write about in my book Bone Rooms. Boaz writes a letter and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit the letter. He says, you know, I have for sale some some Native American First Nations from the Pacific Northwest.

uh uh uh skulls that I'm offering you for sale for five or six dollars each. And at one point in the letter he says it's a nasty business to rob graves, but someone has to do it. So Boaz, I argue in in many episodes actually throughout the course of his career, is willing to suspend codes of ethical norms and and behaviors in order to get what he wants, that science sort of subsumes.

uh uh this this story. So we'll step back. So who is this guy? So Franz Boas is a German uh American immigrant. And he uh is born to liberal Jewish parents in Germany. Um he uh is one of the the the main people who develops an incredibly m large and important anthropology display for the eighteen ninety-three Chicago World's Fair. But is uh disappointed when he doesn't get the job as curator there, probably as a result of anti-Semitism.

and some other factors. Uh, but he, you know, in that interim, he's doing things like trafficking in in human remains and and other materials and and doing scientific studies, but lands on his feet at the American Museum of Natural History as a curator. And once in New York permanently and and established as a curator there, um, it's sort of interesting that so much of the story about California is happening in New York City.

But he's managing to pull a lot of the strings and encourage and influence young students and scholars, including his protege, Alfred Krober. To go to California and do really intensive studies of California Indians at the turn of the century and into the first two or three decades of the the twentieth century.

Um, Boaz is also an advocate for cultural relativism. So at a time when a lot of people took for granted this idea that cultures evolved and moved through stages from lesser civilized to more civilized. Boaz and a lot of his students saw things differently that Uh, cultures were in fact adapting to each situation that they were facing environmentally and historically. So we do need to credit him for for coming up with some some major advances in the field of of anthropology.

Uh, but we s also need to look holistically at his legacy, right? Including uh some of the abuses of of Native people and and informants that he worked with. Um, as well as developing at times close relationships with them. I mean, you know, much like really understanding any human, it they become challenging figures. Uh, which is why in fact several new recent great books have been written about Boaz.

But rarely do we really dive into his connection to California, which was really numerous, right? He's writing many letters. Uh, describing what these surveys would look like. He's uh raising funds from wealthy donors to do collecting expeditions in California. And he's informally advising the University of California or formally advising, I should say, University of California when they establish an anthropology museum and an anthropology department.

So going in, rushing in to do field work in our community. which resulted in the accumulation of knowledge about our people, right? Ethnographic knowledge about our people, observations about who we are culturally, um and interested in our cultural heritage to see how that makes us different, right, from other people. And then that gets turned into a publication, an early publication, which sets the standards.

for the Timxian canon. And so you have generations of non-Timxian people. Um relying on that early body of knowledge about Timtian that was produced by a non-Timptian anthropologist. um and sort of reproducing the ideas about our culture, about our society, about our laws throughout the generations until finally there's you know, me in the 2000s who comes up as essentially an anthropologist, right? Which is very um rare in the whole history of of that situation.

Alice Erdlichka. He is a curious and really important guy for a number of reasons. A Czech American immigrant. Um and he is uh trained as a medical doctor. But eventually gets into the emerging field of physical anthropology, or sometimes we call it biological anthropology today. But um essentially the study of human difference and human evolution and and human uh uh then human races and human types.

through the study of their remains. So this sometimes is Uh, you know, uh a contemporary study for people in this era, uh, in that they're working with the remains of the recent dead. Um, but it's often working with with archaeologists and others. And and over time, especially historical questions become more and more of a driving force to this. So they become more interested in older remains.

to try to answer questions like uh that relates to something else you were asking uh about the the the quote unquote peopling of the americas. So for archaeologists and historians and others, this has been a major question for many years. Um, and it is something that often juts up against traditional beliefs and and ideas that indigenous people have about uh the story of of their arrival and and uh their origin stories.

Um, you know, for certain some people, they they believe that they're they have been there since the dawn of time. So for an archaeologist, in the nineteen thirties to say, well, I think you uh, you know, your community has actually been here for five thousand or seven thousand years. I mean, it just it didn't jive. But Erdlichka was committed to this idea that Native people were a fairly recent arrival in the Americas.

So he wanted to find certain what he believed were connections with the sizes and shapes of the skulls and and and um uh morph, you know, the morphology, uh, and and and he believed that by studying and amassing many different collections from across North America, you could prove certain things about how people arrived in in the Americas.

He came to the belief that that Califor that Alaska was really important because of what ultimately becomes the Bering Strait Land Bridge theory. Uh, but he also believed that California was really important as a location, that there was a lot of uh sort of the the traffic happening, uh, if you will, uh throughout the course of the the previous millennia. Um now uh Erdlichka is also intensely complicated and problematic in that he was willing to do almost anything to get a hold of human remains.

Um he uh intensively studies in uh Alaska and and South America. Um, but it's it's sort of interesting. It's he doesn't spend a whole lot of time in California himself. But he recognizes its import. So he wants to coordinate for the Smithsonian institution, others to go out and and collect. So I think the letter that I cite of his in the book is is like this plea, this almost desperate plea that he has.

uh that, you know, it's almost like we've been given certain puzzle pieces, but this is the puzzle piece we really don't have and and we'd like to to see uh what's what's on it. We're back to nineteenth century, a little bit earlier, with the belief in this country by academics that Native American people would become extinct. That sense of urgency kicks in and the collection processes begin. But let's not be naive about this.

because that was also to support the continued annihilation and political, cultural and physical genocide of Native American people and California Indians, because that's what we're talking about in this country.

It's very real when you're talking about uh the father of anthropology, American anthropology, Franz Boas, who Alfred Krober was his first student. imported to California, Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley. That whole mentality, uh, it really is an imposition of of a superiority over a native people. And even as progressive as they may have thought they were in their minds and their alleged practices that they had contact with native people.

Um, they come from European backgrounds. They have the privilege. of gaining an education. So what was their training? What were those perceptions? How was that laid out academically and even scientifically about who these people are? And when you when you tie it in and you really do a genealogy and you do a mapping of of all the fingers, you know, go from Franz Bus or you can start over here with Alfred Krober.

You know, look at Arlus Hardlika. He was an individual who's practiced physical anthropology, really into craniometrics and establishing and trying to find the physical evidence for um, you know, who who was more superior. Were these really human beings? intellectual capacity of people. You know, we're back to this the the very core of this whole thing and the questions that I believe and what I have observed in my own in my own research on a lot of these anthropologists.

is are these people fully human? What is that evidence? you know, their brains, their bodies, their teeth. Uh you look at the case of Minic, the uh Inuit. uh family that Franz Boaz brought from Canada, from Greenland, collaboration with Robert Perry, the alleged discoverer of the North Pole. And Robert Perry, you know, Franz Boaz, Hey, can you get me some Eskimos to bring me to the to the museum here in New York. And he did.

So uh for for California Indians today to see their uh uh ancestors really exploited in terms of these almost scientific experiments and for uh what sometimes seem more like antiquarian questions than than truly historical questions. Um that that uh l uh created a a traumatic reality. Salvage anthropology is espe especially uh work to make uh native people appear like historical artifacts themselves.

Right. That okay, they were creating these materials, but they were sort of something of the past and that there was an authenticity uh factor, an originalism factor that then shuts down sort of future possibilities and and and viewpoints, right?

You know, and and when I see native art to a lot of native art today uh and a lot of museum display today, it's i i in no small part about pushing back against many of these ideas, right? That prominently right at the National Museum of the American Indian, the We Are Still Here. uh both i in text on the wall, but also just imbued through the the the the ways of the the the exhibits are constructed.

So I think salvage anthropology uh created that reality that that that this many people think that Native people are just think this thing of the past that maybe they can see at a museum, quite literally alongside dinosaur fossils and um, you know, uh uh things of the past. So That

creates this misleading uh uh perception. Um and it still, you know, it it it shrouds uh, as we've been talking about it, it shrouds our legal conversations and and in many other ways as well, uh, how we think about the the reality of uh native people today.

Keep in mind that this problematic way of thinking informed much of early American colonial study of California. Nineteenth century linguists such as Alphonse Pinard and Henry Henshaw worked to record vocabulary lists. thinking about the welfare of the people that they interviewed. And twentieth century ethnographers like Seahart Mary JP Harrington continues to be With the salvage. And even the general public today. their voices rather than listening to indigenous Californians themselves.

There are times where these people do advocate importantly, uh, but by and large, they're obsessed with objects rather than people. And uh that's really one of the core failings. Of salvage anthropology. I think it should push us in a direction of of greater collaboration.

and more listening and reflecting and respecting still these amazing treasures that that we're we're left with because there were were times and places where Native people with very clear intent said, I am giving you this for the purpose of you keeping it and preserving it because I want uh my grandchildren to know the ways in which their grandparents will.

I don't think we would ever tell this story that we were dying and vanishing. I think we'd be like, we're being invaded and killed. Uh there's two very different understandings of like what's happening here, right? And uh this kind of passive aggressive like, I don't know how, but they're just dying and they're vanishing and they're going away. It makes it almost inevitable, like like there's nothing that can be done to stop it.

And this is some of the commentary that happens, especially around Krober, where his initial methodology, which actually Lightfoot and Parrish call like a hell, a memory culture methodology. What they're doing, it he's they're like he's not an observer, he doesn't just go in and observe. He's working with people. I'm trying to create a documentation of a time before genocide, of a time before invasion, of a time when you're sort of like in Krober's mind. spoiled Indian

group of people. It doesn't acknowledge that we were always like a Our cultures are changing. Our histories are long. You've been listening to Challenging Colonialism. In this episode, focused on understanding salvage anthropology in greater depth. doctor Kutcha Rislinbaldi, Dr. Dr. Robin Gray and Mark. Check the resources and notes for more information. This podcast is supported by California Society. Please share and promote this podcast in your