Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School ed. by Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman and Christopher C. LeBlanc (review)

despite what the title of this volume foregrounds—archaeology and the specific site of Stewart Indian School—the tremendous intervention of the authors is to reimagine the way that we (scholars and professionals) consult and collaborate with Native communities. They foreground the question: How can archaeologists stop thinking of themselves as archaeologists first and instead operate as heritage protection collaborators who happen to have archaeology in our toolkit? The volume is a model of where such a reorientation might lead us.

The volume is the result of an intentional effort to foreground relationships first while coming to the focus and methods of study second and in a collaborative fashion. These concerns highlight some of the tensions that exist between academic and cultural resources management (CRM) archaeologists, on the one hand, and the communities most impacted by their work, on the other. Archaeologists generally operate from a nearly ontological assumption that our work is grounded in a site and a historical question and that the needs of descendant or stakeholder communities are important yet secondary considerations. Sarah Cowie, the lead editor on the volume, did not begin this project with a grant to focus on a site or an anthropological question; instead, she had the goal of changing the way federal agencies think about and approach tribal consultations on heritage management issues. Who chooses the research questions and designs (including the site and context to be investigated)? What epistemological frames drive our work, and how could multiple ways of knowing be drawn together? Whose voices are heard in the interpretations and in what venues? Above all, how do we address these questions before a project with potentially invasive or destructive techniques even begins?

The result is descriptive of both the process and the project, modeling the multivocality that project participants valued. The book is organized as an edited volume, a form often used to bring disparate scholars and projects under a unifying theme; but it should be read as a multiauthored monograph in which each author's voice and standpoint are made evident in a variety of ways. The organization is, in and of itself, refreshing. The first two chapters describe the broader intervention and the context of how archaeologists have come to decenter themselves and their research questions in Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies. In the third chapter, we read about the selection of the Stewart Indian School as the focus for collaborations and the theoretical and thematic framing for this project. Here we begin to hear about the particular meaningfulness of this school for the Washoe Tribe, as well as other communities whose children were compelled to attend, such as the Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake Paiute and Western Shoshone.

The Stewart Indian School's history, described in greater archival and oral historical detail in chapters 4 and 5, demonstrates the complexities of their selection. From its opening in 1890 it was a location of compulsory education for Native children across Nevada but was later an elective school option remaining open until 1980, and thus some former students could speak directly of their experiences in oral histories. The collaborative team carefully planned fieldwork in accordance with questions and conditions set by tribal partners: beginning with noninvasive survey methods, targeting very specific locations, using low-impact field methods like "catch-andrelease" and in-field analysis and documentation, and bringing ceremony to frame the fieldwork. Project partners intended a broadly multivocal cocreation of interpretation, relating their findings to both institutional life and the complex experience of childhood while always considering the benefits of their findings to the contemporary community.

The volume includes an extraordinary collection of first-person voices in a chapter of essays by project participants. These are drawn from academic archaeologists, Tribal Historic Preservation Office professionals, non-Native CRM professionals, Native and non-Native student participants, former Stewart School students, and, notably, individuals who occupied more than one of these positions...