Joe Watkins Presentation
I'd like to remind everybody that descendant communities are
not just American Indian groups and in fact, I'm in somewhat of
a reverse order if you will, I work with American Indian
groups, but my job is usually teaching them what archaeologists
do. And so I'm on the other end of, perhaps a descendant
community, in that I have to convince them that our stewardship
is almost as good as theirs. That the diverse pasts that our
archaeology represents is not really at odds with their pasts.
That we do have ethics and values and sometimes that's the
hardest part… again we talk about the written and oral
communication. This one is very important for those of us on
the front line, if you will, because we have to translate what
everyone in this room says to tribal people who are a little
bit reticent to listen to anyone else in certain regards. And
social relevance, that is something that I'm still wrestling
with at times about how to present that. Again, some of the
views that you've seen this afternoon are not quite so common
down in southwest Oklahoma but there are a couple of people who
believe that tribal sovereignty is at the forefront of every
issue that comes about in any issue of the newspaper. So often
times it's trying to convince them when I find a lithic scatter
out on someone's property, it doesn't mean that I want to take
their land away from them and make a museum on it. Really what
I had prepared for this was what I had thought I had been asked
to prepare in relation to a couple of short case studies. Let's
start with Janet Spectre's. I think many people have read this,
or been involved with it or have an understanding of what it is
about. And she talks about how when she got involved in this
property, she wanted to get out and talk to the community. The
first three years of the project, the first two years of the
project, she didn't have much luck. She went out and talked to
people and they said, Well, no, we don't want to talk with you,
we don't want to deal with you, we know our history, that sort
of thing. Finally in the third or the fourth year, she was able
to make a connection to some people who actually had relatives
that they had known had lived in that village. So Janet talks
about at the beginning how her academic training did not serve
her will in trying to deal with descendant communities. She
says again, it's up here and it's also on the web so many of
you have seen it, that she was taught that artifacts are more
important than people and I think that's one of the things that
we may not specifically teach students, but it comes out in the
training when we talk about the Clovis culture, the Folsom
Culture, or we start talking about how at one site we had
10,000 pieces of sander's plane or red wares or whatever. We
lose the idea that there are people making those artifacts.
Second, she was taught that native people do not participate in
archaeology either as students, teachers, excavators or authors
primarily because there never really has been an American
Indian presence, or at least a documented presence, however
anyone who's ever worked in the Southwest knows that the
pre-history of the Southwest was built on the backs of the
Navajo. You had the field director sitting out on the edge
sorting pot sherds while the Navajo were down there digging. So
there's never been an appreciation of the amount of American
Indian involvement in archaeology, at least from the early
times. She also talks about how she was taught that there's
very little connection between contemporary Indian people and
the archaeological materials, i.e. pre-historic or historic
because, again there is a tendency in the academy to separate
the two. We study sites. We don't study dead people. We study
artifacts. We study the things that people left behind, not the
people who made them or the processes that were used. This was
very common I remember, even as a grad student in '72, '73,
that time period, that was the way things were taught. You
compared artifact trade lists and then you combined those trade
lists that were similar and that became a culture. The culture
itself moved across the landscape and you had the Sander's
plane people over here and the punctuated over here and they
didn't meet, they didn't intermarry and if they did …. So
we lost track of the people very early on, she's saying. And
then the fourth point was that contemporary Native Americans
are interested in archaeological sites and site materials for
political reasons, and again, the discussion on Kennewick seems
to reinforce this… they're out to make a political
statement. They don't really have spiritual ties, or cultural
ties to a landscape or to an archaeological site. She talks
about her involvement with a Dr. … and Miss Shunner and
she says she developed the relationship with them because when
she got to know them, got to communicate with them, they got
involved because they demonstrated that they had a relative, a
great grandfather, a named person who had been recorded in the
historical documents that related to this site. And so she was
able to get an in with the tribal community in that regard.
Once she got that personal perspective, that's when she started
thinking about adding, not only a feminist perspective, but
that the artifacts were more than just bits and pieces of stone
or pottery or wood or bone. Again, this is on the web…
but it is available. And the second case study was provided by
Lian Goldstein, this was one of the examples we used in the SAA
book on the principles of archaeological ethics. I just have it
back up here again because it demonstrates the multiple
populations of people that we can deal with at a single
situation. The guy in here that he talked about the Native
American heritage commission, the state parks department, the
county coroner's office, Pomomi web tribe, Athabascan groups,
two branches of the church. All of these people she was having
to juggle at one time. The relationship she developed, she was
able to do it because of developing those personal
relationships with those people. And not just treating them as
just interested bystanders, but as people who had a stake in
the excavations, or the movement of the cemetery. And so again,
I'm just going to go over that real quickly. What I did
develop, we were asked to develop a couple of activities or
assignments and this is where I had a lot of fun actually, is
thinking about, ok well, how would I do this if I were teaching
to an Indian group, or to a group of Indiana students. So what
I wanted them to think about is that again, descendant
populations are not just American Indians. Unfortunately, it
seems I've become the American Indian perspective in
archaeology at least in North American archaeology, so I'm
trying to get beyond just that. But this is something that you
could do in any classroom you're teaching. If you're teaching
ethnology, archaeology, history, political science, government,
any of these, because once you start developing the idea of
community, then you start thinking about the relationships
between the communities, between the people in the community,
the kind of power that an archaeologist might have, the kind of
power an anthropologist might have, in dealing with the
communities, providing help to the communities, making
archaeology a little bit more relevant to the communities. And
so just going over this quickly, I thought that we might sit
down and get together and write this out and then start
thinking about how it works, but I think that rather than do
that, I think I'd just like to do a quick discussion as an
example. It pretty much is self-explanatory, but it's one that
you can do either for an overnight assignment and have them
bring it back the following week, you could make a term paper
out of it, you can expand it, you can contract it to fit just
about any need you want. But it does involve research, both in
terms of historical as well as just out there talking to
people. Again, just to choose a descendant community within
your own group. Either on campus, in Bloomington, Indianapolis,
wherever, and then start defining its history. Look at how they
got here, the origin of the group, how they got to where they
are now. Their geography, where they came from, where they are,
how they settled, why they settled. Give some people an idea
about the different social organizations of the groups. We have
a tendency to believe about mother, father children. Other
groups mother, father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, grandfather,
cousins, sisters, children, you know, big extended families.
Something that most of the people probably who attend
universities are not that familiar with. It is changing. The
diversity in university populations is changing but it is still
primarily white, male, although it's getting a little bit more
mixed, but very few people of color, very few people of really
divergent backgrounds. Also, and this is just trying to get an
idea of making people aware that when people come to an area,
they come for a particular reason. Some people come to escape
something, some people come here in search of something, some
people come because they've been pulled here by a family, a
relative, or some other relationship. So then as you go on
through this activity, you start learning to do what I think is
important before you do archaeology of a descendant community,
is you start doing an ethnology of the descendant community
that you will be working with. You start learning about the
kinds of things that can kill a project, or you start learning
about the kind of ways that you could present a project to a
group to keep them interested in what you're talking about.
Developing an ethnology of the people, the public that you'll
be working with, the public that you'll be studying, and trying
to integrate their views as well as your own research program
into some sort of a workable program after that. And then
number four, something that we haven't talked about, but
something that I like to talk about with my tribal groups, "my"
tribal groups, the tribal groups in Southwest Oklahoma, I'm
sorry, I'm the BIA employee…. What makes these descendant
communities, what holds them together? We talked about Indians,
we talked about Hispanics, we talked about the Jews, but we
don't really think about what it is in the community that
continues to bind them together. It's those community ties,
that to me, I find much more interesting because that's what
I'm hoping to discover about the past. What there was in the
past, why people stayed in either a village or an area, what
bound the people together so that we could talk about
relationships between sites, relationships between cultures and
between different houses within a group. I'm interested in
letting archaeology students or whomever, become aware that
there's more to it that just houses, and just bits and pieces
of things. Then number five would require the student to stop
and think based on what they have learned, what they hopefully
will have learned, to think about what would be the best way of
presenting a project or the results of a project to this group.
Depending on the group you choose, it might be a presentation
at a church. A Greek Orthodox church or something, or Wednesday
evening prayer union, or Baptist or after school, or at a feed
or at a Pow-Wow or to think about the different kinds of social
functions that these descendent communities might have and how
better to reach the public you're talking about. Some of them
you're not going to get at publishing it in a newspaper. Some
of it definitely you're not going to get putting it on CNN. But
a lot of people can be reached, especially in like Oklahoma and
Texas by going to a church, church organization, PTA. And so
this forces people to think beyond just publications, academic
press, that sort of thing. To start trying to get and ideas of
different ways of working through different sets of systems
that aren't just upper middle class, lower middle class, white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant or whatever, and to think about just the
different relationships and structures that archaeologists
should be developing if they really want to empower and involve
descendent communities. And the second assignment, I've tried
to do it in a little more personal, and it's my, just because I
started running out of time as is got a little closer, is to
talk about descendant communities within the student's own
family. If you go back two generations to the grandmothers and
the grandfathers, like in my family, grandparents on my
mother's side would be part French, part Irish, part American
Mongrel, and I don't really know all that, I don't think anyone
in my family does, and on my father's side it's full-blood
Choctaw, but it's different families within the Choctaw, and we
know those families and those families, one was from the east
side of the river and one family was from the west side, and
that had some cultural connotations a hundred years ago. Now it
means nothing, but just looking at the relationships the
foundations of your own family. Which descendent communities
can you tie to, or would you tie to, or would you wish to tie
to, and how you can pull that type of training, I guess to your
won use. Among many tribal people you would announce yourself,
Hello, my name is Joe Watkins, I'm Choctaw, my mother was from
the Hills and the Flowers, my father was from Watkins and the
Willis's. Our relationship is, we're related to the May Tubbies
to the 7 or 8 different groups, but we define ourselves by
tribe, by family, by relationships, so that anyone out there
who also might be Choctaw can say, yes, my uncle was your
cousin's niece's brother's friend's whatever, but that
establishes a relationship. It establishes a way of working
with people and also establishes certain responsibilities that
one has to those people. And I've found especially working with
Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Wichita, Delaware, and Fort Sill
Apache, they consider me, I'm one of the off tribes, I'm not
from Southwest, I'm not one of the Plains tribes, I'm one of
the off tribes. But the fact that I am tribal, I'm a little bit
higher up on the ladder than the other archaeologists, not
much, there's still some questions because I'm not of their
tribe so they can't trust me fully yet. But it does establish
relationships that will impact, the kind of responsibilities
that you demonstrate to those tribal people or to any
descendent population. And I think all those other populations
have the same sort of thing. When you think about, you
recognize someone else's name, oh yeah, I had a friend in
college who was a such and such, do you know him? Well there
are 10,000 Lithuanians in wherever, well, I don't know him, but
my grandfather was from this town, well my father was from that
town. Oh yeah, well, they're still about two hundred miles
apart, well what about, did you know anybody here, so you start
getting kinship whether it's real or fictive. Eventually you
say, oh yeah, I think I knew him, he was OK. Well. Maybe it was
his brother, but so you still you learn how to develop these
relationships and those are very important because once you get
a relationship going, again, it's that responsibility that
springs from that. You feel a little bit better about
representing yourself to that individual, you become a little
more truthful, I think. You stop speaking in terms of
scientific jargon and you start talking in terms of
relationship words that becomes easier to say, well I think
this, this, and this and how do you think? And you can also
take their perspectives a little easier to heart too. Let me,
one thing I did want to emphasize in this number two too is
that descendent communities don't have to be ethnic cultures,
although I've heard people say that Yankees are definitely a
different ethnic group, but I did want to point out that they
can be geographical. You definitely have some "Georgia Peaches"
that no matter where they go, they're still "Georgia Peaches"
and they know each other, I think…. And then number two
forces people to think about how these communities within their
own family, if you were an archaeologist and you were to go
back and excavate something of theirs, how do you think the
cultures would manifest themselves within an archaeological
record? So it gets them again to start thinking about people.
What would these people have with them? What would they leave
behind? What would you discover of them? How could you relate
it to them? Most family's have a family heirloom of some sort.
I think in my family it was a dollar bill. We passed that down
from generation to generation, until it got worthless. We have
some people I've known that have soup bowls or tureens. Great,
great grandmother's ladle that she carried with her on the
trail or something like that. You'll find again, it's making
that connection. You'll have an individual that will remember
what it was that was the most revered object within the family.
And they'll write about it, they'll think about it, and they'll
think about how it relates to their culture, in what way, and
they personalize with it. I think probably I had the most fun,
again, working with this first assignment, because it does make
you stop and think about the different types of communities
that we do work with. Vin prepared a great deal of a formal
presentation in terms of talking and lecturing, because I
thought what I wanted to happen was really just to get into
discussion, and like I said originally, I'd hoped to be able to
get groups together and do something like this. I think now
what I would rather do is talk and listen, well, rather listen
than talk.