Because of the feeling with which he said it, Cisco's Ko'an has kept recurring
in my mind over the ensuing years. I have realized a great step in
understanding what anthropology is all about. After almost 40 years since I
took my first undergraduate anthropology course from David Olmsted at the
University of California-Davis, I feel that I can understand the implications
of a commitment to the concepts behind the buzzwords "cultural diversity" and
"multicultural society."
I am using "it" to refer to the matrix, the framework, the medium within which
cross-cultural understanding must occur. This has not yet happened. Currently
the principle used is still "might makes right," a principle which could
backfire in one's face.
People in the mainstream, European American economy, and political system have
been going along under the old delusions that these "minority" groups will
someday "advance" to their self-same values and perceptions and maybe even the
same skin color--witness the old Mormon myth that Africans were cursed with
dark skins and that the lighter color of the palms of their hands is an
indication that they have been good and God is beginning to remove the curse.
The "disappearing" Indians, Asians, Aftricans, Mexicans, etc., are expected to
put the past behind them and take on the ways of the currently dominant social
group, the "Americans."
At the same time, these whites are making every effort to sustain a European
frame of reference into the future. They are admonished by their war chiefs not
to forget the sacrifices of their ancestors who came on the Oregon Trail, even
though the greatest numbers of "settlers" arrived on the railroad. They
maintain their Finnish, Italian, Swedish, German, English, and French social
fraternities and festivals. White supremacist groups are gaining power among
the European Americans in response to the cultural solidarity of Mexicans,
blacks, Indians, Asians, and others. The white "sciences" carry with them not
only the objective method, but the philosophical assumptions and interests of
their European forebears.
Like most students of anthropology--especially archaeologists--I managed to
insulate myself from really understanding the nature and importance of the
differences between the worlds in which the differing peoples live; the depths
of these separate realities. We "professionals" tend to cover the actuality of
these differences with concepts that allow us to believe that these are
mutually intelligible. We also tend to retain a linear framework for social
evolution from "simple" to "complex," based on our own perception of others'
reality. We don't want our boat rocked. After all, we are the experts on these
things, and we don't want any uneducated people disturbing our cosmic order.
There are a lot of jokes among tribal people about the ignorant anthropologists
asking ridiculous questions and getting ridiculous answers from people who
don't trust them.
Now is the time to confront the hard reality of the actions necessary to
provide the various needs of maintaining this cultural diversity apparently
valued by our government. We must ask "What are the primary, critical,
constituent elements--the cultural ecology--necessary to maintain and enhance
these separate social systems and their cultural vitality?"
There are some universal primary elements of a critical cultural ecology for a
multicultural nation, varying in specifics from one cultural group to another.
Without government, private, community, and corporate support for this ecology
for cultural diversity, the drive of these separate cultural groups to survive
and grow will break down into open social conflict. We see the makings of this
in the polarization that is being recognized in the United States as a result
of such events as the O. J. Simpson trial, the siege of Wounded Knee, Ruby
Ridge, the Rodney King disaster, the César Chavez leadership of the
Mexican farmworkers union. We see it worldwide in such events as have recently
taken place in the former Yugoslavia, the former U.S.S.R., the transformation
of South Africa, the uprising in Chiapas, and numerous other situations.
If America really wants internal peace and a truly culturally diverse nation,
one of the most obvious of these needs that must be supported is education
within the "separate reality" of one's own cultural values and of one's own
view of history. For most indigenous or "tribal" groups, the connection to
their own landscape and its features is probably rivaled only by
self-determination in education of their children. Among Native American
populations, it is universally documented that their cultural life, in its
spiritual aspect as well as its economy, is closely connected to the earth and
specifically to the features and qualities of their indigenous landscape. My
recent "ethnographic landscape inventory" for the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin
peoples documents this in detail (1994, The Cultural Landscape of the
Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Peoples: Spirit, Nature, History. National
Park Service National Historic Preservation Grants to Indian Tribes and Alaskan
Natives. The Klamath Tribes, Chiloquin, Oregon).
When these bases for cultural integrity are taken away, it is like putting a
noose around the neck of that cultural entity. They are then on their way to
extinction as a distinct, self-regulating society. Such deprivation of the
basic elements necessary for a group to control its own people's destiny is a
common and complex process that goes with colonial conquest such as the one
that took place in the United States. This process is sometimes called
"enclosure."
So, I tend to get a little impatient, in 1995, reading articles by
archaeologists who still don't get "it." They continue to fail to recognize
that what they are calling cultural resource "sites" are--for the most
part--archaeological deposits whose components are divided by soil. The "site"
or the place means nothing to them. They don't write their professional papers
or teach their students about places. They deal in the distance between and
physical-chemical qualities of the archaeological items or areas in time and
space and in a story about how these relate to species of animals and plants in
the landscape contemporary to a particular timeframe. They couldn't care less
about the actual place as an experience, at least not in the articles I've
read. Oh, they may also make some remarks or write a poem about the place, but
their "professional" reports do not make this central to their "scientific"
focus.
These archaeological items and soil residues, etc., in the context of their
temporal-spatial relationships do not comprise "cultural resources," but are
merely a resource to archaeologists who make up stories about these
relationships between a people's marks left long ago and the other aspects of
the physical landscape at that time. "Cultural resources" are resources to a
living culture, not just the stuff of inquiry and theory-building for a
specialized intellectual path descending from European cultures.
The only case in which the archaeological markers that say "site" to the
archaeologist are not cultural resources is when there are no concerned, living
descendants of the aboriginal or invading group who made it an "activity area."
And whenever it is a cultural resource, the group for which it is that has
prior rights in management and planning for that place. Of course if there are
no legitimate heirs still alive who claim or would like to claim these rights,
then it is strictly an archaeological site, and not a cultural resource site;
and you guys who dig it can have it. But, if there are real attempts at
locating these peoples and if real consultation takes place, there are few
sites with archaeological values that are not also someone's cultural
resources.
Archaeology is a part of the study of cultures and histories known as cultural
anthropology. It is a set of tools and associated techniques for using these
tools for their contribution to what any individual in any society can observe.
A shovel, a screen, a compass or surveyor's instrument, a meter tape, a
magnifying glass and microscope: these are the main tools, ones that can be
mastered by any person with basic learning skills. Beyond this they may use a
set of hi-tech tools and techniques borrowed from geology and biology using
mathematical notations and statistical theory to analyze such things as the age
of a broken rock or to determine the animal source of residue of blood on an
arrowhead--work that is usually contracted out by the archaeologist to a
specialized laboratory. All the rest of academic European American archaeology
is a conceptual framework that can be shown to derive from interests and
assumptions inherited from European intellectual history.
The definition and value of cultural resources are both relative to each
specific culture. For example, if "site" means anything at all to members of a
specific society in a way that approximates its general use in cultural
resource management in the English language, it has more to do with the nature
of that place than with the deposits that that society's former activities
leave there, even when those things were left there intentionally, such as rock
art.
Some cultural resource managers are, finally, getting "it." See some of the
recent literature by anthropologists/archaeologists who are now serving
indigenous peoples' governments in the field of cultural resource management.
For example, see John Kinahan's "The Hills and the Rain Are Also an Elephant:
Ritual and Environment in Namibian Rock Art" (paper delivered at World
Archaeological Congress 3, New Delhi, India, 4-11 December 1994).
"Not only is there close similarity between trance experience and the habits
and appearance of certain animal species, but the depiction of these in the
rock art takes into account both natural features of the rock and the
positioning of the site. In this way, the rock art gives the impression that it
is mapped onto the physical and biotic environment of the sites. This supports
the further proposition that rock art sites define a landscape mediated by
ritual activity" (Kinahan 1994).
This is not a new idea around this area where I live either, where the World
Renewal ceremony stops cars on the Klamath River Highway once a year as the
Karuk people ceremonially walk from one important spot to the other to complete
the necessary ritual relation with the Earth. The walking and the place(s) with
all its lifeforms and landforms and that above and below is the "site."
Now, a particular society has a choice to use or not use the archaeological
methodology associated with European American tradition, depending on other
values and their own approach to telling the history of their place(s).
With this kind of orientation in mind, the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin
Cultural Resource Management Enterprise (KLAMOYA CREME) was formed by a board
of directors all of whom are acknowledged as members of these local
communities. CREME has been trying to educate those who control the land use
planning process across the aboriginal lands. They believe that even within
United States' law, there is a tacit acknowledgment of cultural relativity.
This is the premise, for example, of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act,
and in the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act, which
specifically acknowledges their inherent, aboriginal right to act as their own
"SHPO," according to their own self-determination in CRM on "Indian Lands" (a
term that varies from the perspective of one group to another, from indigenous
peoples to U.S. agency employee).
The board of directors is taking this to the county and city planning
departments, and both parties are learning new things. One of the things that
the city and county planners and the federal agency cultural resource/heritage
resource managers are learning is that they can no longer dictate "a precise
definition of `cultural resources'" as W. R. Haase did for Ledyard,
Connecticut:
The paragraph above may define resources to the culture of archaeologists, but
I doubt that it defines resources to the culture of the local peoples who each
hold long-term and recent simultaneous versions of the history (not the
"prehistory" and "history") of the place(s) he calls Ledyard. It seems--from
the perspective of an indigenous people's cultural resource management
rights--to be a totally inappropriate and a nakedly political/business sales
pitch on the part of an archaeologist for him to preach:
There will be no nice and neat bulleted lists of step-by-step recipes that must
be followed by the member societies in a multicultural national society--each
member a sovereign society living in "it." There will be no simple recipe for
"mitigation"; these must come from the consensus of individuals in each of the
member societies that share the land of this multicultural society. There is
only one process that I can tell you to follow--to be defined in each case
anew--and that is the process of "consultation."
After witnessing Chiapas, South Africa, the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia; after long
ago reading the work of American anthropologists such as Kathleen Gough Aberle,
who understand that there is a relationship between the historic development of
anthropology and imperialism; and, after all these words, need I explain any
further? You shouldn't need a professional weatherman, certified by the
American Meteorological Society, to tell you which way the wind blows: "The
times they are achangin'."
John Allison is technical advisor to the all-tribal board of directors of the Klamath, Modoc, Yahooskin Cultural Resource Management Enterprise (KLAMOYA CREME).
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Toward a Multicultural Nation
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The Current State of CRM
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Changes Are on the Way
Cultural Resource: consists of historic or prehistoric archaeological
sites and standing structures; cemeteries, human burials, human skeletal
remains, and associated funerary objects; and distributions of cultural remains
and artifacts. (Haase 1995, "Archaeology, Land Use, and Development: Educating
Communities Through Comprehensive Planning" CRM: 18(3):18-20).
"But the archaeological community--both professional and amateur--must take the
lead and carry the banner of archaeological protection to city hall, and to the
local boards and commissions who must in turn adopt comprehensive plans and
enforce the regulations" (Haase 1995:20).
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