Where the Wind Blows Us: Practicing Critical Community Archaeology in the Canadian North

1. An Outline of Community-Based Archaeology

3 1 An Outline of Community-Based Archaeology The Rise of Community Archaeologies In the 1980s, Bruce Trigger made two observations that anticipated the emergence of a spectrum of alternative archaeologies as part of the postmodern movement. In his landmark article “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian,” Trigger averred: “The New Archaeology continues to treat native peoples as objects rather than subjects of research. It is suggested that greater concern with Indian and Eskimo history might help to correct this” (Trigger 1980:662). Trigger (1984) later divided global archaeology traditions into those associated with nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist regimes. Colonialist archaeology was practiced in regions where Europeans had besieged and colonized Indigenous populations. In order to sustain the new status quo, Trigger observed that it was in the colonists’ best interests to “denigrate native societies and peoples by trying to demonstrate that they had been static in prehistoric times and lacked the initiative to develop on their own” (Trigger 1984:363; also see Trigger 2008). The twin observations that archaeology and anthropology have routinely objectified Indigenous peoples and suppressed their rights to selfdetermination formed the crises of authority and representation that emerged as our disciplines took a self-reflexive turn in the late 1980s (e.g., Clifford 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986). These crises sparked from a shifting social milieu, in which the anthropological disciplines were no longer seen to have the right to speak on behalf of descendant, and other marginalized, populations (Bond and Gilliam 1994:2; Scham 2001). This period of self-reflection was brought on by wider social movements fostered by the social liberalism of the 1960s, including the women’s movement and the American Indian Movement, which called society to task for marginalizing large segments of our populations (e.g., Brown 1970; Conkey and Spector 1984; Deloria 1969, 1974). Members of disenfranchised groups claimed the right to be 4 chapter 1 producers—rather than receivers—of knowledge, and through this process, to become socially and economically empowered and politically aware (Bond and Gilliam 1994:3–4; Lincoln and Guba 2000). These crises emerged slowly in the archaeological consciousness as archaeologists were increasingly forced to come to terms with their long-held lack of political acumen (Trigger 1997:xii). Michael Blakey (1997:142) articulated : “The traditional position, that archaeologists are equipped as apolitical individuals to discern objective truth, is materially baseless.” Perhaps the most substantive outcome of the politicization of the discipline and the rejection of scientific colonialism is an increasing plurality of practice in which no one paradigm takes precedence (Cunningham 2003; Nicholas and Hollowell 2007). The alternative approaches to archaeology formulated in the 1980s and ensuing decades particularly critiqued the “scientistic” model, whereby science is identified as the source of knowledge rather than as one possible form of knowledge (Habermas 1971:4). Feminist philosophers made a particularly forceful and articulate critique of science (Haraway 1991; Harding 1986, 2004; Wylie 1999, 2000a, 2000b), which helped lay a theoretical pathway for critically derived archaeologies. By the twenty-first century , the panoply of archaeologies drawn from postmodernist sentiments included gender (Conkey 2010; Conkey and Gero 1997; Gero and Conkey 1991), queer (Dowson 2000; Voss 2008), applied (Little and Shackel 2007; Shackel and Chambers 2004), internalist (Yellowhorn 2002), Indigenous (Atalay 2006; Bruchac et al. 2010; Nicholas 2008a, 2010b; Silliman 2008; Smith and Wobst 2005; Watkins 2000), ethics-based (Meskell and Pells 2005; Zimmerman 2003), and a host of other practices. These archaeologies depart from earlier “public” archaeologies in their conscious critique, political intentions, and focus on more specified notions of community. Public archaeology has roots as a pedagogical practice developed to interface with and bring archaeology to greater public awareness (e.g., Ascher 1960; Ewers 1940; Fagan 1977; McGimsey 1972). The turn toward specific communities commenced in the 1980s, transforming the practice from how-to handbooks and concern about public perceptions of the discipline to a suite of practices informed by higher level theoretical concerns (e.g., Liddle 1985; Little 2002; Merriman 1994; Stone and Molyneaux 1994). The discipline remained little attuned to the growth of communitybased approaches worldwide for much of the ensuing decade, largely due to the location of this practice within the context of heritage and cultural resource management (cf Marshall 2002:213). This situation created less of an impediment in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, where academic and commercial interests intersect to a greater degree than in an outline...