1 / 30

Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?

Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?. Kennewick Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-By1a-z0k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdhc4xDjL-E. Kennewick Man. How is archaeology presented in this story? How are Native Americans are presented?

thina
Download Presentation

Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?

  2. Kennewick Man http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-By1a-z0k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdhc4xDjL-E

  3. Kennewick Man • How is archaeology presented in this story? • How are Native Americans are presented? • What does Owsley mean by describing the burial of the remains as an act that is “just as narrow as a grave”? (p. 4) • Why does Minthorn have such a low opinion of archaeology? (p. 4)

  4. Kennewick Man

  5. Archaeology’s perception Patrick Stewart

  6. Native American perception Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (Black Sparrow Hawk, alias, "Black Hawk")

  7. Critical Thinking about Kennewick Man (Following Yellow Bird) • Competing knowledges between scientific and Native American standpoints • Also competing with “objective” media standpoint • Native Americans operate at a disadvantage because of a legacy of historical injustice • Also because of their appeal to the non-static basis of knowledge, the partiality of truth, and a foundation in oral tradition

  8. Critical Thinking about Kennewick Man (Following Yellow Bird) • Conscientization (critical consciousness) • P. 21 in For Indigenous Eyes Only • An approach to thinking that is • poised for change and instability • open to dialogue and challenge from unfamiliar sources • appreciates the historical basis of social action • especially in how subject positions (e.g., Native American, Scientific) individually regard their own histories and temporalities

  9. Medicine Deer Rock, Montana Creation story exercise Assignment: as you read creation myths make a record of three things • what might a believer point to as evidence of its truth? • what lessons about human behavior are explained? • are the characters heroic or tricksters?

  10. evidence of creation

  11. evidence of creation

  12. evidence of creation Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

  13. The Present Past • The world of creation is neither ancient nor complete • exists as a parallel world to this one • creation is constantly occurring b/c we live it everyday • accessible through dreams and visions • Also by “seeing things as the really are”: • that the coyote or the raven are merely humans in costume • Also by telling the stories: • storytelling is an “enchanted time” • we are focused • we are appropriately prepared for the spirit world to be revealed

  14. Truth and Reconciliation: subalterns telling stories • First instituted in South Africa to address injustices committed during the apartheid regime • Anyone who felt that he or she was a victim of apartheid violence was invited to come forward and be heard. • Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution. • Desmond Tutu: • No one in South Africa could ever again be able to say “I didn’t know” and hoped to be believed.

  15. Truth and Reconciliation • In For Indigenous Eyes Only Wilson proposes the creation of a Truth Commission of injustices against Indian people in the United States • Argues this is cultural issue: • Compares to 9-11 reparations commission • in the United States Native Americans are not seen as full citizens • Indian injustices are part of the past, cannot be addressed now • Propping up American Culture • TRC instead addresses American culture

  16. Decolonization Exercises Pages 2, 32, 55-6, and 140 in For Indigenous Eyes Only

  17. Dakota Commemorative March For the Dakota this commemoration signifies an opportunity to remember and grieve for the suffering endured by their ancestors as well as to relate a perspective of the event which has rarely been told.

  18. On November 7, 1862, a group of about 1,700 Dakota, primarily women, childrenand elderly, were force-marched in a four-mile long procession from the Lower Sioux Agency to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Two days later, after being tried and convicted, over 300 condemned men who were awaiting news of their execution were placed in wagons while they were shackled and then transported to a concentration camp in Mankato, Minnesota. • Both groups had surrendered to the United States army at the end of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, believing they would be treated humanely as prisoners of war. Instead, the men were separated out and tried as war criminals … 307 men were condemned to death. The remaining Dakota people, primarily women, children, and elderly were then … forcibly marched to Fort Snelling and imprisoned in Minnesota's first concentration camp. • As both groups were paraded through Minnesota towns …, white citizens … lined the streets to taunt and assault the defenseless Dakota. Poignant and painful oral historical accounts detail the abuses suffered by Dakota people on these journeys. In addition to suffering cold, hunger, and sickness, the Dakota also endured having rotten food, rocks, sticks and even boiling water thrown at them. An unknown number of men, women and children died along the way from beatings and other assaults perpetrated by both soldiery and citizens. Dakota people of today still do not know what became of their bodies. • After 38 of the condemned men were hanged the day after Christmas in 1862 in what remains the largest mass hanging in United States history, the other prisoners continued to suffer in the concentration camps through the winter of 1862-63. In late April of 1863 the remaining condemned men, along with the survivors of the Fort Snelling concentration camp, were forcibly removed from their beloved homeland in May of 1863.

  19. Truth and Reconciliation:Interjecting and acknowledging culture and history • Individual storytelling: cathartic release • Creating understanding: Building communities across cultural and temporal divides • Empowerment: • validation of subaltern existence and historic suffering • Identifying and addressing the perpetrators • Perpetrators must be included in reconciliation

  20. Reparations • Compensation for past injustices • Japanese American descendents of WWII concentration camps were awarded $20,000 each in 1988 • German government and private companies paid out $65.2 billion to survivors of death camps • Germany has also provided reparations to Israel as a collective payment to Jews

  21. Reparations: victims to creditors • “reparations changes the discursive image of African Americans from victims to creditors” • “… makes us rethink what drove racial domination in the United States” • “… shifts … the paradigm of antiracist struggle away from African Americans as supplicants ‘asking for concessions’ towards seeking what is properly due to the descendents of slaves.” • “… fundamental transformations …in how Americans understand class formation in the past and present” • Martha Biondi, The Rise of the Reparations Movement, Radical History Review 87, Fall 2003, pp.5-18.

  22. Our earth is full of skeletons New York African Burial Ground Prestwich Street, Cape Town

  23. To Give the Past Back to the People • “In order to give the past back, it must first of all be yours to give. • In the second place, it implies a conception of ‘the people’, who stand in a separate relationship to both the givers of the past and ‘the past’ itself. • In the third place, it raises the question of the format in which the past is to be returned • [i.e. texts, bones, that represent the past] • Nick Shepherd “What Does it Mean to the Give the Past Back to the People?

  24. To Give the Past Back to the People • Archaeologizing” the remains • Compare to Chakrabarty’s anthropologizing • Translating remains as the subject of history through what skeletal and archaeological analyses can speak about (vs. their use in other symbolic ways and metaphorical venues) • Translating the making of these stories as expertise, giving archaeologists, whose stake is assumed valid, authority in the form of their access, opinions and reports

  25. Alternative archaeologies NYC

  26. Alternative archaeologies Prestwich

  27. History of Stonehenge • 3100 BC no henge, causewayed enclosure • 3000- 2800 BC first henge: simple circular ditch, burial site, part of the existing settlement space • 2800-2500 BC abandonment • 2500-2100 BC henge rebuilt in stone, added to in about 5 stages • 1600 BC abandonment • Roman and Medieval era: came to mark the edge of the wilderness, associated with Witches, • Christian era: Devil “malignant part of a Christian iconography” • Early modern era: appropriated by secular nationalism, invention of Druidic builders “Apostles of freedom” • Present: National heritage site and preservation commodity: • “Focus on monuments, on things, rather than ways of life or social practice; on origins rather than historical process…” • Frozen past and bona fide tourists (25 minute dwell time) vs. druids or free festivalers

  28. Stonehenge as “History”

  29. Babbacombe Model Village

More Related