Read on Twitter
this is anti-Indigenous and has no place in archaeology.
"Repatriation ideology...regards Native Americans as victims"
1) Repatriation regards Indigenous people as human beings w/ sovereignty over their own relations & history
2) THE US DID AND CONTINUES TO DO GENOCIDE TO THEM https://twitter.com/UVicAnthro/status/1338990224613883904
"Repatriation ideology...regards Native Americans as victims"
1) Repatriation regards Indigenous people as human beings w/ sovereignty over their own relations & history
2) THE US DID AND CONTINUES TO DO GENOCIDE TO THEM https://twitter.com/UVicAnthro/status/1338990224613883904
The authors are Elizabeth Weiss (anthropologist at San Jose State) and James W. Springer, a "retired lawyer and anthropologist".
How they came to write together is not clear to me, but they have both been involved in "anti-repatriationism" for decades.
This isn't new for them.
How they came to write together is not clear to me, but they have both been involved in "anti-repatriationism" for decades.
This isn't new for them.
The indefatigable @Cult_Archaeo has documented their (esp. Springer's) outdated, racist ideas in this thread and noted that he keeps extremely suspect company, Friends of America's Past: https://twitter.com/Cult_Archaeo/status/1339063230057115648
In a 2009 article, Weiss is already citing Springer (who here is cited as "an Illinois attorney" no anthropology credentials anymore), having discovered that they share simpatico views about how they should be able to do whatever they want with other people's dead family members.
In much of this work (see previous screenshot, from this article: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=anth_pub), they seem to have missed the decades of anthropological & Indigenous scholarship on how the separation of "religion" from other parts of life is a culturally-specific construct, not a fact
Weiss began publishing on "repatriation ideology" in 2001. Again, this is not new for them-- Weiss, at least, has acted within the academic anthropology community for decades and has clearly been vocal about her disdain for NAGPRA and Indigenous people for that entire time.
From her faculty page at SJSU. This is not someone who has relationships with actual Indigenous people. "Amerindian populations" is an incredible way to create cognitive distance from the fact that Native nations continue to be her literal neighbors in California.
My point is (well, I have several, but here's one): while some of us in certain archaeology circles organize conferences on decolonization, publish on "decolonial" work, champion anti-racism, and get to operate as though anthropology were a radical, politically engaged field...
...the day-to-day work of archaeology is still done in exactly this manner, by people who very much complain in small (water cooler talk) and big (publishing) ways that NAGPRA is bad, who chafe when other people expect them to remember human beings when they do science.
ideology like this IS shared by our colleagues, by people we know, by work we review. it isn't perpetuated in a vacuum. we aren't distinct from this. this isn't a minority view in majority-white, majority-settler archaeology, and WE KNOW IT.
so i'll suggest that 1) our anti-racist work should start AT HOME. the call is coming from inside the house! this isn't a problem "out there". this is a problem in your department, at your firm, on your project, TODAY. it's past time to get brave and start facing that directly.
2) we don't just need to talk about this more. we all see the same people at our "decolonization in archaeology" events all the time. Indigenous archaeologists and community members have been TALKING TO US for so long.
so instead of defaulting to talk (or writing, as we love to do in academia), it's time to focus on material change. use your money, institutional power, & personal relationships with settler archaeologists to make material change, even (especially) if you can't put it on your CV.
@LewisBorck's thread yesterday summarizes it well. we need to actually prefigure the world we want to see, not just talk about how things should be, how we say they will be at some unspecified point in the future. time is now, folks! do the work. https://twitter.com/LewisBorck/status/1338907427446517760
to end where we began: a bioarch co-authored a book w/ anti-Indigenous ideas that they have cultivated within a scholarly community for years. an academic publisher w/ editorial team thought those views deserved a book contract. other archaeologists reviewed this book & approved.
a huge network of people directly and indirectly have come into contact with this book, with the authors' ideas and research, and said "yes, this is valid scholarship" despite its clear anti-Indigenous argument and lack of engagement with contemporary anthropological research.
this IS our discipline. to pretend otherwise or claim we "didn't know" that colleagues harbored these views is itself racist. we know. we've known. it's time to stop reproducing our racist discipline, starting first with our (white settler) selves & our workplaces. /FIN
popping back in to add this for the record:
i think NAGPRA doesn’t go far enough and real “repatriation ideology” is actually deeply settler in policy & execution. it requires Indigenous nations to provide “evidence” deemed valid by settler regimes to prove their own relations.
i think NAGPRA doesn’t go far enough and real “repatriation ideology” is actually deeply settler in policy & execution. it requires Indigenous nations to provide “evidence” deemed valid by settler regimes to prove their own relations.
NAGPRA is ultimately written for and adjudicated by settler institutions. it’s not even close to “decolonial”/“decolonizing”. we have so much further to go, and so many more beautiful, radical futures to imagine and bring about instead of settling for NAGPRA.
