Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology

Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology: From Conflict to Coalition. Anth 3510, Sept - Dec 2005. Dr. Kathryn Denning

It wouldn't be surprising if there was a tiny quiz in class next week, Oct 31, based on the readings for Oct 31. If you do the reading, you'll do fine.

Archaeology Basics, and an Introduction to Archaeology and Indigenous Peoples. These are available in a folder outside my office (Vari 2029).

Wendy Ashmore and Robert Sharer. 2005. Discovering Our Past: A Brief Introduction to Archaeology, 4th edition. Boston: McGraw Hill. Read "Introduction" (pp 1-23) and "Archaeology Today" (pp 238-255).

Joe Watkins. 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek: AltaMira. Read "American Indians and Archaeologists: A Stormy Relationship" (pp 3-22) and "Ethics in Anthropology and Archaeology" (pp 23-36).

a) H. Martin Wobst. 2005. "Power to the (indigenous) past and present! Or: The theory and method behind archaeological theory and method." in Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. pp 17-32.

b) Heather Harris. 2005. "Indigenous Worldviews and ways of knowing as theoretical and methodological foundations for archaeological research." in Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. pp 33-41.

ASSIGNMENT 2 Preliminary information. Remember, it's a great idea to get working on your main paper topic now. Your outline with preliminary bibliography is due on November 7th.

Come and talk to me about your topic. I can help you figure out the keywords to use, and good sources. Extra office hours this week: Wednesday 26th 2-4, Friday 28th 12-3

I've placed the following books on reserve for this course (3510) at the library. I'll put some more on reserve this week.

The archaeology of contact in settler societies / [edited by] Tim Murray CC 77 H5 A7175 2004

At a crossroads : archaeology and First Peoples in Canada / edited by George P. Nicholas and Thomas D. Andrews E 78 C2 A884 1997

The changing presentation of the American Indian : museums and native cultures
National Museum of the American Indian (U.S.) E 76.85 C49 2000

The dispossessed : life and death in native Canada / Geoffrey York E 78 C2 Y67 1992

Indians and anthropologists : Vine Deloria, Jr., and the critique of anthropology / edited by Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman E 76.6 I53 1997

Museums and the representation of native Canadians : negotiating the borders of culture / Moira McLoughlin E 76.85 M38 1999

Public archaeology / edited by Nick Merriman CC 75.7 P83 2004

Loot, legitimacy, and ownership : the ethical crisis in archaeology / Colin Renfrew CC 135 R46 2000

It is very well worth it to work on your writing. Effort spent on this -- whether you clear up citation problems, become more proficient at paraphrasing, or learn exactly how to use a semicolon -- will make a difference to your grades, and will also pay off after school. If I have recommended that you go to the Writing Centre at York, please do consider it. If I have indicated a couple of problems in your writing, I recommend working through the appropriate exercises below, from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue. There is no need to keep making the same errors.

Note: Many of the errors I observed were discussed in the handouts I provided for this assignment. Read them and follow the instructions.

Don't ever change words within a quote without indicating that you have done so. When writing, check your paper against the original text to ensure that you have transcribed exactly. If you are leaving out words, then you must do so in a way that preserves the author's intentions, and use ellipses ... If you are inserting words, then you must do so in a way that preserves the author's intentions, and use [square brackets]. If you change the case of a letter in a quotation, you must indicate this using [s]quare brackets. All of this is covered on the handout sheet "Using Sources Correctly in Your Paper: Representing Authors Fairly."

Paraphrase precisely. First, be very careful to ensure that you understand the author's meaning in the original text, and then be very careful to ensure that your version preserves their meaning. Don't just take an author's interesting expression out of context -- the words mean something, and it's important not to distort that meaning.

If you are inserting a quote into your sentence, the sentence still must make overall grammatical sense.

Never just use a quote without introducing it and ensuring that it flows with the rest of your paragraph.

Use 'single quotes' for emphasis or an expression, and use "double quotes" for quotations.

Perhaps in the weeks since you submitted this assignment, your ideas have evolved. But these are some trouble spots I observed.

Avoid clichés about Native peoples. I saw a lot of assumptions in your writing, e.g. that Indigenous peoples are all hunter-gatherers, or that they all had 'inferior' technology to the technology used by Europeans at the time of conquest. Neither of these is true.

"Indigenous" is not the same as "Indian". Yes, Indian people are Indigenous. But not all Indigenous people are Indians. Do not use those terms interchangeably. And remember that "Indian" is not necessarily a preferred term, either - King uses it, but many Indigenous people prefer not to.

Native religions and stories are not myths or entertainment, any more than the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text or story. Of course, you can believe what you like about what is true, but do NOT diminish Native religions by referring to them using less respectful language than you would use for your own religion.

Do not mix the specific and the general. If, for example, Hughes was writing specifically about Australian Aboriginal people, do not take that quote as something that is necessarily true of all aboriginal people.

Do not equate Native with being natural, and Western/colonial with being cultural. Native people are thoroughly cultural too. Their lifestyle is not "natural".

Do not reduce the Indigenous/Other opposition to Indian/White. It is much more complex than that (as mentioned in Hughes): e.g. Asian indigenous minorities within China or India; European indigenous minorities within Europe; African indigenous minorities within Africa. Etc.

Be careful in the language you choose. Is it a "privilege" or a special bonus for a Native person to be entitled to vote in band elections? (etc). Or is it a right? The whole issue is that really, it should be considered a right.

"Plight". Yes, Indigenous peoples have been, and are, in a difficult situation. But as Native scholar Suzan SHown Harjo has noted, the word "plight" carries distinct connotations of helplessness. It doesn't reflect, for example, the high levels of legal competence etc. that Native groups often have, and need, in their discussions with governments.

The search for an identity: Some of you seemed to feel that the major problem facing Indigenous peoples today is the search for their own identity. This misses the point about the legal definitions about "indigenous peoples", which are not about their own personal identities, but about their legal identities and legal rights. That's not simply a matter of personal soul-searching. Of course cultural loss and personal identity are also factors. But there's more to it than that.

Finally: I read a lot of papers which contrasted Thomas King's book and Lotte Hughes' book, saying that King was writing from his personal experiences and traditions as a Native person, whereas Hughes was taking a more scholarly approach. Very rarely did any of you acknowledge that King was also carefully distilling large quantities of historical and legal research, and that his authority on this subject comes not only from being Native, but also from being a scholar and professor with a tremendous amount of 'book knowledge' (PhD in literature and American Studies, as it says at the front of the book). Yes, he uses a conversational tone in The Truth About Stories (these were lectures), and yes, he does use personal anecdote to illustrate his points, and yes, he also uses traditional Native stories, but none of that diminishes his authority or status as a scholar. Nor does it mean that he is less objective than Hughes. (We are all subjective.) This kind of caricaturing is an illustration of exactly what King was talking about in his book -- that people can't handle someone being an Indian AND an expert, an Indian AND a modern professional, etc.

For class last week (17th), you were asked to write a reflection and be ready to talk about it, on this topic:

Answer any one of these questions, or write on another theme emerging from the readings.

How much of this history of Canada and North America did you already know / which parts of this are new to you?

Does this information contradict anything you believed, or impressions that you had?

What do you think about the processes by which reservations were established, and land treaties were signed?

How does this information connect to the patterns outlined by Hughes, or the stories told by King?

Didn't discuss the following section in class.

Some key points from those Oct 17 online readings

Overall: these readings are intended to give you some sense of the depth and diversity of First Nations cultures, and the processes of colonization as they unfolded in Canadian history.

But there are other lessons, too, about how to learn about the past.

From the First Nations Tutorial page on Possible Approaches to and Perspectives of Native History http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/firstnations/approaches.html

- different approaches to how we might really know the Native past

- to this we would add both Native oral history and scholarship, and archaeology

Similarly, in the section on Contact
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/firstnations/encounters.html , there is a discussion of the uses of oral history and archaeology as well as historical documents

Why is this question of methodology so important?

In the video we saw last week:

We talked briefly about it... considering both the information imparted about Canadian history, and the images given of Native Canadian peoples. How does this popularized national history compare to the versions you read for today? Are there stereotypes or conventions in the representation of First Nations?

Further, I'd like to add: The way we portray Canadian history now, as White vs. Native -- that's a very coarse analysis, and doesn't really reflect what happened 'on the ground'. The reality on the ground was (and is) much more complex: the history unfolded group by group, e.g. British/Dutch/French/Iroquois/Huron.... and it all happened slowly, by today's standards, to one community at a time. There was no national or global media, no telephones, and so people's understanding of what was taking place would have been more fractured and localized than now.

* Read selections from Geoffrey York's book, The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada Required selections to read: Foreword, Introduction, Chapter 2 (From Lytton to Sabaskong Bay: Fighting for the Schools), Chapter 3 (Inside the Reserves), Chapter 8 (From Manitoba to Massachussetts: The Lost Generation), and Chapter 9 (The New Militancy). The rest of the book is well worth reading, too, but not required for this course.

Two copies of the book (not photocopies) are reserve at the Scott library, and there are also several photocopies available for borrowing outside KD's office, Vari 2029. In addition, there are multiple copies of the book on the shelves in the Scott Library, available for borrowing. There are different editions (different years), but all will be fine for this reading. These are the call numbers: E 78 C2 Y67 1999, E 78 C2 Y67 1992, E 78 C2 Y67 1989

of issues from The Dispossessed - and how they connect to a video, Commandos for Christ (York video #3782) (the missionary group discussed in the video is here: www.ntm.org)

Initial classes: introduction to the general issues of being indigenous today, and to the problematic relationships between the colonizers and the colonized.

Last week (Oct 17): the specifics of the population history of Canada and North America -- who lived here when -- and this week (Oct 24): the contemporary and recent realities of life for Native peoples living within Canada.

Rest of the course: a series of themes specifically concerning Indigenous peoples and archaeology:

Bodies: Stealing them, studying them, displaying them, returning them, honouring them