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Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?
Kennewick Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-By1a-z0k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdhc4xDjL-E
Kennewick Man• How is archaeology presented in this story?
• How are Native Americans are presented?
• What does Owsley mean by describing the burial of the remains as an act that is “just as narrow as a grave”? (p. 4)
• Why does Minthorn have such a low opinion of archaeology? (p. 4)
Kennewick Man
Archaeology’s perception
Patrick Stewart
Native American perception
Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (Black Sparrow Hawk, alias,
"Black Hawk")
Critical Thinking about Kennewick Man (Following Yellow Bird)
• Competing knowledges between scientific and Native American standpoints
• Also competing with “objective” media standpoint
• Native Americans operate at a disadvantage because of a legacy of historical injustice
• Also because of their appeal to the non-static basis of knowledge, the partiality of truth, and a foundation in oral tradition
Critical Thinking about Kennewick Man (Following Yellow Bird)
• Conscientization (critical consciousness)– P. 21 in For Indigenous Eyes Only
• An approach to thinking that is – poised for change and instability– open to dialogue and challenge from unfamiliar
sources – appreciates the historical basis of social action – especially in how subject positions (e.g., Native
American, Scientific) individually regard their own histories and temporalities
Medicine Deer Rock, Montana
Creation story exerciseAssignment: as you read creationmyths make a record ofthree things• what might a believer
point to as evidence of its truth?
• what lessons about human behavior are explained?
• are the characters heroic or tricksters?
evidence of creation
evidence of creation
evidence of creation
Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona
The Present Past
• The world of creation is neither ancient nor complete – exists as a parallel world to this one – creation is constantly occurring b/c we live it everyday
• accessible through dreams and visions• Also by “seeing things as the really are”:
– that the coyote or the raven are merely humans in costume
• Also by telling the stories: – storytelling is an “enchanted time” – we are focused – we are appropriately prepared for the spirit world to be
revealed
Truth and Reconciliation: subalterns telling stories
• First instituted in South Africa to address injustices committed during the apartheid regime
• Anyone who felt that he or she was a victim of apartheid violence was invited to come forward and be heard.
• Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution.
• Desmond Tutu: – No one in South Africa could ever again be able
to say “I didn’t know” and hoped to be believed.
Truth and Reconciliation• In For Indigenous Eyes Only Wilson proposes the
creation of a Truth Commission of injustices against Indian people in the United States
• Argues this is cultural issue: – Compares to 9-11 reparations commission– in the United States Native Americans are not seen
as full citizens– Indian injustices are part of the past, cannot be
addressed now– Propping up American Culture– TRC instead addresses American culture
Decolonization Exercises
Pages 2, 32, 55-6, and 140 in For Indigenous Eyes Only
Dakota Commemorative MarchFor the Dakota this commemoration signifies an opportunity to remember and grieve for the suffering endured by their ancestors as well as to relate a perspective of the event which has rarely been told.
• On November 7, 1862, a group of about 1,700 Dakota, primarily women, children and elderly, were force-marched in a four-mile long procession from the Lower Sioux Agency to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Two days later, after being tried and convicted, over 300 condemned men who were awaiting news of their execution were placed in wagons while they were shackled and then transported to a concentration camp in Mankato, Minnesota.
• Both groups had surrendered to the United States army at the end of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, believing they would be treated humanely as prisoners of war. Instead, the men were separated out and tried as war criminals … 307 men were condemned to death. The remaining Dakota people, primarily women, children, and elderly were then … forcibly marched to Fort Snelling and imprisoned in Minnesota's first concentration camp.
• As both groups were paraded through Minnesota towns …, white citizens … lined the streets to taunt and assault the defenseless Dakota. Poignant and painful oral historical accounts detail the abuses suffered by Dakota people on these journeys. In addition to suffering cold, hunger, and sickness, the Dakota also endured having rotten food, rocks, sticks and even boiling water thrown at them. An unknown number of men, women and children died along the way from beatings and other assaults perpetrated by both soldiery and citizens. Dakota people of today still do not know what became of their bodies.
• After 38 of the condemned men were hanged the day after Christmas in 1862 in what remains the largest mass hanging in United States history, the other prisoners continued to suffer in the concentration camps through the winter of 1862-63. In late April of 1863 the remaining condemned men, along with the survivors of the Fort Snelling concentration camp, were forcibly removed from their beloved homeland in May of 1863.
Truth and Reconciliation: Interjecting and acknowledging culture and history
• Individual storytelling: cathartic release• Creating understanding: Building communities
across cultural and temporal divides• Empowerment:
– validation of subaltern existence and historic suffering
– Identifying and addressing the perpetrators– Perpetrators must be included in
reconciliation
Reparations• Compensation for past injustices
• Japanese American descendents of WWII concentration camps were awarded $20,000 each in 1988
• German government and private companies paid out $65.2 billion to survivors of death camps
• Germany has also provided reparations to Israel as a collective payment to Jews
Reparations: victims to creditors• “reparations changes the discursive image of African
Americans from victims to creditors”• “… makes us rethink what drove racial domination in
the United States”• “… shifts … the paradigm of antiracist struggle away
from African Americans as supplicants ‘asking for concessions’ towards seeking what is properly due to the descendents of slaves.”
• “… fundamental transformations …in how Americans understand class formation in the past and present”
• Martha Biondi, The Rise of the Reparations Movement, Radical History Review 87, Fall 2003, pp.5-18.
Our earth is full of skeletonsNew York African Burial Ground
Prestwich Street, Cape Town
To Give the Past Back to the People• “In order to give the past back, it must first of all be
yours to give.• In the second place, it implies a conception of ‘the
people’, who stand in a separate relationship to both the givers of the past and ‘the past’ itself.
• In the third place, it raises the question of the format in which the past is to be returned – [i.e. texts, bones, that represent the past]
• Nick Shepherd “What Does it Mean to the Give the Past Back to the People?
To Give the Past Back to the People• Archaeologizing” the remains
– Compare to Chakrabarty’s anthropologizing
• Translating remains as the subject of history through what skeletal and archaeological analyses can speak about (vs. their use in other symbolic ways and metaphorical venues)
• Translating the making of these stories as expertise, giving archaeologists, whose stake is assumed valid, authority in the form of their access, opinions and reports
Alternative archaeologiesNYC
Alternative archaeologies
Prestwich
History of Stonehenge• 3100 BC no henge, causewayed enclosure• 3000- 2800 BC first henge: simple circular ditch, burial site, part of
the existing settlement space• 2800-2500 BC abandonment• 2500-2100 BC henge rebuilt in stone, added to in about 5 stages• 1600 BC abandonment • Roman and Medieval era: came to mark the edge of the wilderness,
associated with Witches, • Christian era: Devil “malignant part of a Christian iconography” • Early modern era: appropriated by secular nationalism, invention of
Druidic builders “Apostles of freedom”• Present: National heritage site and preservation commodity:
– “Focus on monuments, on things, rather than ways of life or social practice; on origins rather than historical process…”
– Frozen past and bona fide tourists (25 minute dwell time) vs. druids or free festivalers
Stonehenge as “History”
Babbacombe Model Village
