In the first part of our conversation, State Archaeologist John Doershuk and I discussed what a State Archaeologist does. Next, we turn to NAGPRA and its role (along with Native activism) in re-defining the job of the state’s lead custodian of the material past. How does the State Archaeologist partner with indigenous communities on culturally sensitive issues?
PR: That takes us into the question, “What do you talk about?’ Have you experienced these kinds of challenges from Native people or communities?
JD: Yes, some of my first experiences were well before I got my PhD. My very first field activity I did in archaeology was right out of high school. We’re talking mid-seventies, and at that time the model was that if an archaeologist wanted to dig a site, they did so. They didn’t think they had to ask for permission. The nineteen seventies was when the American Indian movement was reinvigorated, and I didn’t know at the time, growing up in Ohio, that out here in Iowa is when this first in the nation law was being formulated—because of events that were going on here that were controversial. But I got onto a project with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History working on a Hopewell burial mound. We found skeletal remains and objects of cultural patrimony, as they would be called now, under NAGPRA.
But there was this general awareness of the fact that there were “Indians” out there protesting this kind of work. I remember one day, we had this special meeting of the crew (and this was a big crew, there were thirty of us on this dig) where the field director was very concerned that we had procedures in place, if the Native people showed up. How would we make sure things were taken care of and not taken away from us? It never came to pass—happily—but that was my first inkling that there was something bigger going on here, some politics here. I realized it’s a now issue, we’re not just exploring the past.
It was American Indian empowerment that led to NAGPRA.
PR: Thus, the State Archaeologist in now in partnership with the tribes?
JD: Yes, absolutely, the primary responsibility of the State Archaeologist is direct consultation with Native Americans. Over the years, before I took over this position, I had met people like Maria Pearson, and archaeologist Larry Zimmerman and I designed some special field schools that involved Native Americans. That was through the University of Iowa’s American Indian and Native Studies program. We had Native American speakers every week of a dig and these speakers provided input as we moved forward in our explorations. Joe Watkins was involved; Maria Pearson was involved. That really helped me out when the time came for me to become the State Archaeologist because a major component of the job is Native American consultation.
PR: Ok, that leads me to another question about consultation. Here in Iowa, the Ioway Nation was “removed” in the 1830s to Kansas and Oklahoma. So what do you do if you run into something that looks Ioway?
JD: Well, once the Iowa law was passed, it became a question of “who do you talk to then?” That became the problem for the state archaeologist, so he—as part of this law— said, “we should have a committee (Indian Advisory Committee, now called Indian Advisory Council). Maria Pearson was involved in that from the beginning, and Don Wanatee (of the Meskwai Nation of Iowa). The idea was that for most of the prehistoric record there is no definable descendent community that you can be precise about. So rather than worrying about that, we would assemble a group of Native people who lived in Iowa who could represent the others (from out of state).
That worked great for an extended period of time, but as Native American empowerment kept expanding after NAGPRA, the next step was the creation of tribal historic preservation offices (THPO, pronounced “Tippo”) which parallel the state historic preservation offices, and those THPOs more and more became the voice of tribes in the compliance activities that are governed by the NHPA What we’ve seen in the last ten yours is that, as more and more THPOs are out there, there are more and more people to go to and talk to directly about a particular discovery of ancient human remains. So the Council is still critical for my office as a general advisory body, and we meet three or four times a year, and they advise us where they can. But they also tell us who to talk to within this growing body of tribes that—because of the emergence of THPOs—we can now connect with.
PR: My final question has to do with the not-so-sensational aspect of NAGPRA—what the law calls “objects of cultural patrimony.” That’s the real focus of the Repatriation Files. So, what is an “object of cultural patrimony?” As I understand it, the same kind of object might be important to cultural patrimony in one context and not subject to repatriation in another.
JD: Well, pipes like the one you have in an earlier blog are really fascinating examples because they do come out of what we would call as archaeologists an everyday habitation context—everyday life. But they also can be sacred objects, used in different types of ceremony. So when you get a pipe that is clearly associated with human skeletal remains, then it’s an “associated funerary object” as defined by NAGPRA. That is easier to deal with because you can say, “we have these human remains; there’s the object that was with that person,” and you know what to do. But when you get pipes that are not found with human remains—maybe they are part of a mound fill, maybe part of a habitation site—they may have been used in ceremonies to bury people, but they aren’t connected to any one individual or even a cemetery. These objects that fall into the category of “cultural patrimony.” Things that are important to a group of people—recognizable to their descendants today as objects that were used in some ceremonial or sacred way. Those are fuzzier lines. It depends a lot on the knowledge of the current descendants, how much they care about that object, how comfortable they are in dealing with it.
PR: What do you mean when you say that some communities are not “comfortable” with dealing with these objects?
JD: Well, sometimes a pipe is considered to have a lot of power and the community does not want to deal with it. But they also don’t want to see it up on the shelf of a museum.
PR: Yes, that’s a concept that we want to explore in the Repatriation Files, the idea that while you want something taken care of, you don’t want it misused, you don’t want it on display. Perhaps it is no longer proper for you or this time.
JD: Yes, so sometimes museums and tribes arrive at an understanding whereby the archive keeps the object in a respectful way out of the view of its general audiences, but the elders of the tribe can view it whenever they feel that is proper.
John Doershuk has been with the Office of the State Archaeologist since 1995. In 2007, he became the State Archaeologist.
