Negotiating Culture: Heritage, Ownership, and Intellectual Property

5. Archaeologists, Indigenous Intellectual Property, and Oral History

122 5 Archaeologists, Indigenous Intellectual Property, and Oral History R H. Martin Wobst This chapter focuses on interactions between professional archaeologists and members of Indigenous populations, in the traditional lands of Indigenous people. The world’s Indigenous people as defined here are not neatly or categorically different from other descendant groups, and they are not a racial category. Instead, they are culturally and politically defined, and they are quite different from each other. I have chosen them as my topic primarily because the cultural differences between many Indigenous people and archaeologists are often quite massive , particularly when it comes to cultural patrimony and intellectual property .1 Pragmatically,that makes it easier to think about potential problems that the interaction between archaeologists and descendant populations might generate when archaeologists work with another population’s intellectual property. While my discussion logically applies to all descendant populations, it is focused particularly on Indigenous ones,that is,those who were subject to colonization and now occupy minority status in the nation-states that were established following decolonization, including Native Americans and First Nations, the Australian aborigines, the people of the North in Russia, and similar groups.2 These are the kinds of populations that fall under the purview of the United Nations Secretariat of the Permanent z 123 Archaeologists, Indigenous Intellectual Property, and Oral History Forum on Indigenous Issues, which also provides a very legalistic and detailed definition of the term “Indigenous.”3 I consider Indigenous intellectual property to consist, very broadly, of a group’s language and lore, art and music,history and material record,ritual and religion,custom and knowledge, and the like. I am not concerned here with the “intellectual property”of archaeologists, as in the copyrighted publications archaeologists may generate for themselves, their institutions, or their sponsors, on Indigenous intellectual property. In the sections that follow, I first sketch how a more professional archaeology became logically separated from the descendants whose ancestors produced the artifacts (that is,the Indigenous intellectual property that constitutes the databases of the archaeological profession). I then survey some developments, beginning in the 1970s, that are generating a rapprochement between archaeology and Indigenous populations. In the final section, I suggest that the most well-meaning attempts to decolonize relations between archaeologists and Indigenous populations, in themselves, are often deeply problematic when it comes to intellectual property. I illustrate that with “oral history,” a method championed by archaeologists and, often, the Indigenous populations themselves, to work together toward shared goals again. Yet often such a collaboration introduces as many problems as it seeks to overcome. The Profession of Archaeology Constitutes Itself as “Archaeological” Before the middle of the nineteenth century, interest in the past seamlessly integrated the many ways of knowing about it. Before there was an archaeology, that is, before the latter half of the nineteenth century, antiquarians would illuminate the past of the people in their surroundings from many different angles. For example, they would record written and oral histories and literatures, carry out language and dialect work, and report on myths and folklore, standing ruins, and (fairly rarely) “archaeological ” (subsurface) finds. For antiquarians, access to the past could be gained in a number of different ways, and often the same antiquarian reported about it in several different modes. Many of these modes of access involved direct interactions with the living descendants of the pasts in which the antiquarians had an interest.4 Antiquarians, broadly speaking, were neither hard scientists nor social scientists, though their 124 å H. Martin Wobst interests covered the width and breadth of these later branches of inquiry, but they were broadly interested humanists. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,against this background of a considerably more integrated and holistic access to the past, archaeology gradually established itself as a profession.5 It saw its niche increasingly as bringing the material past to the attention of scientists and the public, and it developed a set of methods for uncovering, documenting, conserving, and analyzing material remains, and relating them to the events, actions, processes, and behaviors that had generated them in the past. In short, archaeologists became the professionals who used information from artifacts to scientifically unravel human histories, human evolution, and past human behavior.6 Yet in contrast to the savants who preceded them, this disciplinary niche essentially closed archaeologists off from interactions with the modern descendants of the people whose past they tried to elucidate.The...