Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School

Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman, Christopher C. LeBlanc

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781948908269
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2019 Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology, the collaborative archaeology project at the former Stewart Indian School documents the archaeology and history of a heritage project at a boarding school for American Indian children in the Western United States. In Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, the team's collective efforts shed light on the children's education, foodways, entertainment, health, and resilience in the face of the U.S. government's attempt to forcibly assimilate Native populations at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as school life in later years after reforms.This edited volume addresses the theory, methods, and outcomes of collaborative archaeology conducted at the Stewart Indian School site and is a genuine collective effort between archaeologists, former students of the school, and other tribal members. With more than twenty contributing authors from the University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada Indian Commission, Washoe Tribal Historic Preservation Office, and members of Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes, this rich case study is strongly influenced by previous work in collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies. It elaborates on those efforts by applying concepts of governmentality (legal instruments and practices that constrain and enable decisions, in this case, regarding the management of historical populations and modern heritage resources) as well as social capital (valued relations with others, in this case, between Native and non-Native stakeholders).As told through the trials, errors, shared experiences, sobering memories, and stunning accomplishments of a group of students, archaeologists, and tribal members, this rare gem humanizes archaeological method and theory and bolsters collaborative archaeological research.

CHAPTER 1

A Multivocal Collaboration Story

Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman, Christopher C. LeBlanc, Terri McBride, and Ashley M. Long

The woman who initially reprimanded us began to weep as she told us her story. We were in the midst of a collaborative archaeological field school at the site of Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada, with a great deal of involvement from tribal members from multiple tribes, many of whom had members that passed through Stewart, as this alumna had, during its complicated ninety-year history as an off-reservation boarding school in Nevada. Like many other alumni and community members, she had heard about our widely advertised project and was visiting Stewart, as many alumni do on a semiregular basis, to reconnect with the place and the memories associated with it. She had been shouting at us from a distance as she passed by, saying that we didn’t know what we were getting into with excavating this place, that terrible things had happened here, and that we should leave such things alone. This is a common sentiment among many American Indians about archaeology in general, that things left by people in the past are too powerful to tamper with, especially things associated with negative experiences. Most people that talked to us about the project were either supportive or curious, but occasionally someone expressed concern. One tribe’s attorney contacted us, concerned that we might excavate graves of children who had died at the school, assuming that digging up graves was archaeologists’ primary occupation. On each of these interactions we had the opportunity to learn more about the school and what it meant to alumni, their families, and their tribes, as well as the history of the federal government’s attempt to forcibly assimilate Native Americans. We also had the opportunity to do better archaeology through public involvement, train students in a multivocal and collaborative approach to archaeological field methods, and demonstrate that archaeologists are not always grave robbers.

As this alumna was admonishing us, we might have ignored her, and continued our excavations as she passed by. But being a public archaeology project designed to learn from tribal members, instead we tentatively approached her and listened.

Her story was a complicated one, as many stories of this place are. There is so much sorrow and trauma here associated with the practices and repercussions of attempted assimilation. But she also wept as she described her childhood, in which her parents could not care for her, and how she wanted to attend Stewart to be a part of that community. She wept as she explained how important this place was to her; good and bad, it was her home. She said more people should know about Stewart Indian School’s significance, and agreed that our collaborative project might help raise awareness of Native peoples’ experiences there. She embraced some of us who listened to her story, and then she went on her way, walking to another part of campus with her memories.

Who could not be moved by such an experience? This interaction was typical on this project; it and many others humanized the experience of conducting archaeology here. It shows how place-based learning evokes knowledge and memories that are not so accessible elsewhere. It also exemplifies how valuing human relations can overcome seemingly conflicting worldviews, for example, between science and spirituality, or between federal heritage laws and a personal sense of what is right. Such discussions are critical to building relationships, and providing space for historically suppressed voices to tell their truths. Throughout this volume, our work is guided by a large body of literature on decolonizing methods and Indigenous archaeology, with inspiration from Native archaeologists working in their communities and guidance from foundational scholarship in Indigenous heritage studies (e.g., Atalay 2006, 2012; Colwell 2016; Deloria 1969; Dongoske et al. 2000; Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006; Gould 2013; Gonzales et al. 2018; Laluk 2017; Martinez and Teeter 2015; Nicholas 2010; Schneider 2018; Silliman 2008; Smith 1999; Smith and Wobst 2005; Thompson 2011; Teeman 2008; Two Bears 2010; Watkins 2000).

We combine many voices in this volume: Native and non-Native; elder and younger; academic, traditional, scientific, and personal. This created a manuscript that is multivocal and shifting in voice, with varied perspectives that may or may not mesh precisely with one another. We hope readers can appreciate the necessity of presenting different discourses in collaboration with each other and have patience with our approach. The result is that we are able to address a wide variety of topics and put them in conversation with each other.

For example, on the one hand, this volume is a historical and archaeological study of Stewart Indian School and its place in the wake of violent state formation processes and settlement in the Great Basin. As historian Ned Blackhawk (2006, 147, 230, 268, 280) details, the 1800s were characterized by violent circumstances for American Indian communities in this region, who experienced not only physical violence and brutal massacres at the hands of settlers and the military, but also experienced devastating ecological and social transformations that left many Native peoples displaced, enslaved, and starving. Eventually, many Native populations, especially those who had been denied reservations, adapted to wage economies to survive. They often created “liminal” spaces for themselves within and near mining and other settler communities (Blackhawk 2006, 15, 281). Federal and state officials sought to address the “Indian problem” of displaced and impoverished Native peoples whom many considered disdainfully as an eyesore. Influential media figures also called for action, as did Mark Twain, who, in his book Roughing It, described Shoshones in Nevada as a “silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race . . . eating what a hog would decline” (as cited in Blackhawk 2006, 276). Off-reservation boarding schools such as Stewart Indian School were instituted in the late 1800s by the federal government in an attempt to forcibly assimilate Native Americans and facilitate the federal confiscation of their traditional homelands. Historian Andrew Woolford (2015) maintains that these boarding schools were more than experiments in social engineering or even cultural genocide. He asserts that the brutal early years of these schools were in fact part of the process of genocide itself, the intentional destruction of a group. Drawing from early anthropologists such as James Frazer and Bronislaw Malinowski, who held that culture was necessary for the survival of a collective, Woolford asserts that schools attempting to erase Native languages and spiritual/cultural practices were seeking to destroy Native cultures, and as such, fit the United Nations’ description of genocide (Woolford 2015, 9, 26). In other words, “To remove the tools of culture is to seek to eliminate the group as a group (Woolford 2015, 289; for related research on genocide of Native peoples in California, see Lindsay 2012; Madley 2016). This is not to say that Native children and their families were passive recipients of such brutal treatment. Clearly, Indigenous children and their communities had agency and used it to resist and negotiate boarding school systems, even within severe constraints (Woolford 2015, 44; Lomawaima 1994), and we document similar efforts at Stewart Indian School here.

Thus, this volume is certainly about Stewart Indian School. But on the other hand, it is also about interrogating colonialist policies within heritage preservation law and current archaeological practices that perpetuate the oppression of Native peoples today and dismiss both their history and agency. Here we decolonize our own archaeological methods within Indigenous archaeology and take direction from foundational Indigenous perspectives on heritage management (especially Atalay 2006; Smith 1999; Watkins 2000). We also follow cues from holistic perspectives in traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), a framework that recognizes Native sciences as having collected data on complex human-environmental interactions since time immemorial. TEK has begun to be productively applied in other fields such as biomedical and environmental sciences research (e.g., Finn et al. 2017). We argue that archaeologists also can and should welcome TEK’s holistic perspectives connecting past and present, and recognize that how we handle heritage will have an effect on the health and well-being of present and future generations. Archaeologists have some catching up to do, changes to implement, and amends to make. Native peoples of the Great Basin have not forgotten that famous anthropologists caused them harm in the past, which continues to have lasting effects. For example, as Ned Blackhawk (2006, 12, 278–79) observes, famous anthropologists Elman Service and Julian Steward argued that Shoshones were underdeveloped and primitive. Steward went so far as to petition the federal government, arguing that they should deny Shoshones’ requests for federal recognition and reservations. In anthropology’s neoevolutionary paradigm, family bands such as theirs were assumed to be incapable of self-governance; Steward asserted it would only “baffle them” (as cited in Blackhawk 2006, 279). Today, as it was then, there is a disconnect between what non-Native land managers and archaeologists consider best practices, and what Native communities know from human-environmental data gathered for millennia. In this volume, we hope to troubleshoot that impasse in communication and demonstrate how collaborative research can be more productive than tackling issues from separate corners.

Likewise, and again drawing from TEK frameworks, we assert that archaeology should not be conducted in a theoretical vacuum, informed only by archaeological sciences and standard historical and ethnographic methods. Rather, archaeologists would benefit from acknowledging and respecting Native sciences and spiritualities and how they inform broader understandings of related research. This would be a corrective to current practices that often use Western science to validate or—more often—invalidate Native understandings of their pasts. For example, in this volume we address the concept of puha, which among Numic-speaking peoples represents the life force that resides in all things and connects past, present, and future; it constitutes the fabric of the universe (Carroll et al. 2004; see also chapters 7 and 8, this volume). Puha is remarkably similar to recent research from quantum mechanics in which physicists have successfully entangled particles whose relationships to each other then cross time-space continuums. This phenomenon is known as a quantum nonlocality, which historian and philosopher of science Elise Crull (2018) describes as:

the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles. If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.

The entanglement of particles in this way is similar to many Native peoples’ assertions that artifacts left in place by ancestors still contain energies that can have effects on modern peoples’ well-being. This isn’t to say that Native metaphysical perspectives need to be validated by the field of physics. Rather, we should acknowledge that researchers in quantum mechanics have only recently begun exploring entanglements, whereas many Indigenous peoples have been making similar observations since time immemorial.

Of course, we are not able to delve deeply into TEK or quantum mechanics in this volume. But we hope that raising these broader issues brings awareness of what archaeologists can explore someday as we increasingly emerge from our archaeological echo chambers. With that said, our primary contributions in this volume are twofold. In some chapters we provide a case study of an Indian boarding school that will be helpful to historians and archaeologists working at related sites. This includes a history of Indian boarding schools in Nevada, including Stewart Indian School (chapters 3, 4, and 5), and archaeological methods and data regarding Indigenous archaeology and archaeologies of childhood and institutional life (primarily chapters 6 and 8). Other chapters contribute to our goals of demonstrating that collaborative archaeology is necessary for best practices in heritage management and for working through conflicting goals and discourses. This includes a discussion of current scholarship in collaborative archaeology and decolonizing methods (chapter 2), how collaborative research design led to choosing Stewart Indian School for this project (chapter 3), multivocal interpretations and discussions of best practices in heritage (chapter 7), and concluding thoughts on how conflicting discourses can be mitigated through collaborative work and social capital (chapter 8).

Why We Embarked on This Project: Conflicting Discourses in the Management of Indigenous Heritage

Conflicting discourses around Indigenous heritage arise from a variety of factors and what much can be done to improve miscommunications. Many American Indian and Native Alaskan tribes are recognized by the U.S. government as sovereign nations. Federal and state mandates require agencies to consult with tribes regarding heritage resources on their traditional homelands now administered by the federal government as public lands. In the United States, the federal government holds a trust responsibility to federally recognized tribes. Additionally, some treaty tribes interact with the federal agencies regarding the protection of their reserved rights to their usual and accustomed places. Government agencies are often not required to interact with tribes beyond immediate heritage project needs, and there is usually very little personal, face-to-face interaction. Tribes are often notified of projects in writing, but they have little control over proposed projects.

This project studied what appears to be a longstanding impasse in federal/tribal communications caused at least in part by institutional norms manifested in the day-to-day interactions between federal and tribal interlocutors. To address conflicting discourses surrounding current heritage management practices, the concept of governmentality (a disciplinary power accomplished through legislative and institutional practices) was applied as an evaluative lens. Throughout the process, points of potential conflict were identified, evaluated, and their potential acceptable alternatives evaluated. Our process engaged all parties collaboratively toward potential solutions by addressing the utility of building social capital (i.e., valued relations with others) as described in practice and agency theories that emphasize the embodiment of personal experiences in creating change.

In an effort to address the conflicting heritage discourses, the contributors to this volume participated in a collaborative archaeological project at the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada, a site currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The project was designed to examine the utility of face-to-face discussions among Native and non-Native participants to address different conceptions of heritage preservation and develop a model for improved heritage practices. The project traced the challenges of incorporating the diverse stakeholders’ voices (i.e., multivocality) and conflicting discourses at all stages of the project, from its very inception, to the interface with government agencies and legislation, to the production of knowledge through publication.

History of Relationships between Federal Government Agencies, Tribes, and Heritage Management

Colonialist practices of the past several hundred years continue to be a part of today’s heritage discourses. In the 1960s Indigenous groups all over the world voiced their concerns about heritage management and the treatment of their cultural and ancestral remains. Custer Died for Your Sins is a well-known example of such criticism (Deloria 1969). Vine Deloria describes anthropologists as “creatures” that objectify Native Americans for the sake of science and to produce “useless knowledge” that has “contributed substantially to the invisibility of Indian people today” (Deloria 1969, 81). This issue persisted into the following years and by 1971, the American Indian Movement (AIM), as well as other activists, were protesting excavations like those in Welch, Minnesota, and taking over the laboratory at Colorado State University (Watkins 2000, 7), as well as protesting various roadside attractions where artifacts were on display (Atalay 2006, 291). These protests forced archaeologists to acknowledge Indigenous communities’ trepidations over archaeological procedures, and although some archaeologists had begun acknowledging Indigenous peoples’ concerns, these events forced the issues into the public eye and eventually brought them to the forefront of discussions in archaeology.

Zimmerman (2001) argues that the basis of these discrepancies is the epistemolo...