Materiality and Memory Practice: Tools of Collaborative Decolonization
Session 1: Beginning with the Community
Sunday, May 2nd
9:00 am-12:30 pm
Session Organizers: Diana D. Loren, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, dloren@fas.harvard.edu and Christina J. Hodge, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, chodge@fas.harvard.edu
Session Theme and Scope:
Colonialism is a material process—the establishment of new orders according to an imperial vision of “colony,” which concomitantly destabilizes preexisting relationships between people and their material worlds. As we know, there is often discordance regarding how the entanglement of persons and objects is represented in the archival record versus how it played out in the material record of lived experience. In these entanglements, objects are given new significance and meanings. There is a subtlety to these new meanings both in their unique cultural contexts and in the modern imagination and remembering of past peoples, a concept that Raymond Fogelson refers to as “events” and “nonevents.” The collaborative study of colonial contexts, involving archaeologists, historians, museums, descendant communities, and other stakeholders, becomes a decolonizing practice. It supports a redistribution of power/authority through the creative flow of knowledge among different partnering groups. The new meanings of colonialism exist not only in primary processes of creation and negotiation, but also in present-day recovery and remembrance. In this session, we consider how materiality, as a specific archaeological concept, supports decolonizing narratives of collaborative archaeological practice.
Effective projects can originate from different starting points. In the first session, authors present papers on projects driven by community needs and goals for archaeology of social action. In the second session, authors discuss those projects that begin with material findings. While the origin of the projects can differ, they share the goal of collaborative action towards decolonizing narratives.
9:00: Diana D. Loren and Christina J. Hodge (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University): Introductory Remarks
9:15: Elizabeth S. Chilton (University of Massachusetts Amherst): The Intangibility of Things
9:40: Craig N. Cipolla (University of Pennsylvania): Decolonizing Cemetery Analysis?
10:05: Matthew Liebmann (Harvard University): Re-Imagining Seventeenth-Century New Mexico through Twenty-First Century Collaboration
10:30: Coffee break
11:00: Stephen W. Silliman (University of Massachusetts Boston): Archaeology of Social Memory, Archaeology as Social Memory
11:25: Christina J. Hodge, Diana D. Loren, Patricia Capone (Peabody Museum, Harvard University) and Nathaniel Amdur-Clark (Harvard University): Materializing Harvard’s Colonial Indian College
11:50: Liam Frink (University of Nevada, Las Vegas): Native Alaskan Children and Early Historic Religious Colonialism
12:15: Discussion
Abstracts and Participants:
The Intangibility of Things
Elizabeth S. Chilton (Department of Anthropology and UMass Amherst Center for Heritage and Society, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
I take as a basic premise that the goal of ethical archaeological theory and practice should be, as the abstract for this session indicates, to redistribute power and authority in the creation and communication of cultural heritage. It is only possible to do this if we move away from the notion of historiographical experts—archaeologists and historians—as the ultimate authoring on historical truths and significance. But to what extent has collaboration among heritage stakeholders contributed to “decolonizing” archaeological practice? In what ways can attempts at engaging stakeholders actually strengthen the colonial power relationships that exist between archaeologists their “subjects’? And if the goal is to move beyond hegemonic narratives, how does one avoid replacing one hegemonic narrative with yet another? One way forward it to turn to a definition of materiality that acknowledges that tangible and intangible heritage are inextricable, and their meanings and values are continuously created and recreated in the present by a variety of memory communities (see, for example, the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage). In this paper I examine several case studies from the Northeast U.S. as a means to explore how collaborative praxis can or cannot be used for building decolonizing theory.
Decolonizing Cemetery Analysis?
Craig N. Cipolla (Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania)
Beginning with the Pilgrims’ 17th-century exhumations of Native graves on Cape Cod and Thomas Jefferson’s 18th-century excavations of Native burial mounds in Virginia, Europeans and Euroamericans have long held interest in the burial practices and “grave goods” of Native Americans. Unfortunately, these interests often led to the desecration of sacred sites in the name of Western knowledge with little to no regard for the sensitivities, interests, and insights of descendant communities. This paper explores means of decolonizing archaeological cemetery analysis with specific reference to the Brothertown Archaeology Project, a collaborative research endeavor between the Brothertown Indian Nation and the author of this paper, a white archaeologist. It focuses specifically on the shifting materialities of Brothertown commemoration practices between the late 18th- and early 20th centuries, assessing the role that these data play in engendering social memories and fostering counter-narratives to colonial mantras of progress, cultural evolution, and the “vanishing Indian.”
Re-Imagining Seventeenth-Century New Mexico through Twenty-First Century Collaboration
Matthew Liebmann (Department of Anthropology, Harvard University)
In this paper, I discuss the multiple benefits that have resulted from my 10-year collaborative relationship with the Pueblo of Jemez, focusing particularly upon the new interpretations of the Spanish colonial period that have emerged as a result of this partnership. Far more than a mere exercise in political correctness, the process of collaboration has resulted in a discernibly different--and, I think demonstrably better―understanding of the archaeology of the 17th century in the Jemez Valley for all parties involved. This paper will also examine how the concept of materiality (by which I mean the ability of physical objects to create, mediate, and be shaped by ideology) should be considered by archaeologists not only as a valuable theoretical device, but also as a powerful methodological tool for discerning new, decolonized understandings of colonized pasts.
Archaeology of Social Memory, Archaeology as Social Memory
Stephen W. Silliman (Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Boston)
Understanding social memory is paramount to the success of postcolonial and collaborative projects. This paper highlights two features of social memory that operate in tandem and in very material ways. At one level, archaeologists need to understand the scales and practices of social memory and materiality for Indigenous people who navigated colonialism in the past. Without this, cultural change and continuity are interpreted as either/or states rather than as strategies of persistence. At another level, archaeologists must realize that their disciplinary practice plays a role in social memory of the present. Rather than always being a destructive or disrespectful practice, as it has rightly been criticized for years, archaeology can take a self-critical, active, and authentic role in social memory for Native and non-Native alike.
Materializing Harvard’s Colonial Indian College
Christina J. Hodge, Diana D. Loren, Patricia Capone (Peabody Museum, Harvard University) and Nathaniel Amdur-Clark (Harvard University)
Harvard University’s 1650 Charter dedicated the institution to the education of “the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godlines sic.” The Indian College was built next to the Old College in 1655 to fulfill these purposes. Today, the Charter reads as an enlightened document, which was also its intent in 1650. Five indigenous students attended the physical Indian College. Within twenty-five years, however, the mission of Harvard along the Massachusetts Bay Colony had shifted away from Indian education, and by 1692 the Indian College was physically dismantled. The Indian College traditionally has been memorialized as a footnote in colonial New England histories, as a failed experiment with limited impact. Collaborative remembrance by different stakeholders, however, demonstrates that the Indian College has ongoing relevance and power. In this paper, we discuss the mission of the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project: to materialize the historical narrative of Indian and English students at Harvard, provide experiential learning, and facilitate community and civic engagement.
Native Alaskan Children and Early Historic Religious Colonialism
Liam Frink (Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Colonial history matters in understanding contemporary issues with Native North American groups and especially issues connected to “historical trauma”. Archaeology has much to offer our understanding of the process and repercussions of the colonial experience and although children were one of the primary components of domination and cultural change around the world, until fairly recently they have been disregarded by archaeologists—relegating us to the status of Faimons’ “bystander”—complicit by our inattention to this critical history. In Alaska indigenous children were a primary source of labor for the colonial project of Jesuit missions in the early 20th century. Boarding schools were the nexus of resource allocation and Native children processed enormous amounts of subsistence foods such as fish that provisioned the priests in the outlying locations and were commercially sold. Child labor was the backbone of the religious arm of the colonial project and yet these practices and repercussions have not been examined—relegating this event, nestled in a history of unparalleled disease outbreaks and significant cultural change, to Fogelsons’ silenced “non-event”. This paper will explore the experience of these children by contextualizing archival records with interviews of Yup’ik people who lived and worked at the missions.