Archaeology of Contemporary Native American Protests

One of the more intriguing developments over the past two decades is the archaeology of  contemporary protest sites. The two best known examples are associated with the Cold War military sites at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site and the Greenham Common Airbase in the UK. These sites mark places of sustained encounters between protestors and the military establishment and the relatively long and intensive period of activity at the sites ensured that they preserved a material assemblage for documentation and study and as well as a community of former protestors interested in providing additional information about the sites and activities there.

The most recent issue of Historical Archaeology includes an article by April M. Beisaw and Glynnis E. Olin that considers two Native American protest sites: Alcatraz and the DAPL protest site in central North Dakota. This is significant for three reasons.

First, archaeology of the contemporary world has tended to be rather white in its focus especially in the United States (with obvious exceptions such as Krysta Ryzewski’s work in Detroit and recognizing that part of the protests at the Nevada Test Site were in association with the Western Shoshone tribe whose land the test site occupied).

Second, the archaeology of the contemporary world has often operated at the intersection of production and consumption particularly in the context of the American West. This attentiveness to the processes of capitalism (and colonialism) entered the field from Historical Archaeology and provides a solid interpretative foundation for considering events like the DAPL protests.

Finally and to my mind most significantly, the protests of 2020 witnessed the removal of racist monuments across the United States as the most visible manifestation of a sustained critique of the structural racism of both our society and the contemporary American landscape. There’s a risk, of course, for these tactics to define these protests as largely destructive strategies in the long struggle against racism. Beisaw and Olin’s article reminds us that supporting the struggle for equality and recognition also can involve working to document protests as historically significant moments of solidarity and insistent presence in American landscape and political consciousness.

Beisaw and Olin explore the evidence for the Native American occupation of Alcatraz island in 1969-1971. They both praise the efforts of the National Park Service to preserve evidence for the occupation through the restoration of protest graffiti at the site, but also criticized the marginalization of this phase in the history of the island and the prison site. They suggest that the current strategies implies that the protests were simply something else that happened on the island rather than part of a longer and more complex narrative that exists at the intersection of land, human rights, incarceration, ethnicity, and protest. As a result, visitors often left confused as to the purpose and meaning of protest graffiti (associating it at times with the dominant narrative of the site as a prison rather than its longer history). The interpretive spaces which document and unpack the Indian occupation of the island are similarly detached from the main description of the prison’s history. Beisaw and Olin argue that the NPS missed opportunities to produce a cohesive narrative of the island’s history in and around existing structures by connecting the use of the guard’s apartment buildings not only to house prison guards, but during the occupation as kitchens and a day-care center. In short, there were ways to make the Alcatraz occupation visible and significant to visitors today that both complicates and expands the meaning of the site.

The site of the DAPL protests offers another opportunity to consider how we will document sites of protests. The relatively short-lived protest camp itself represents an effort to preserve and protect spaces sacred to the regions Native American tribes from the damage caused by the DAPL pipeline. The DAPL protests represented a complex history of structural inequality in the American landscape. Not only does the route of the DAPL pipeline underscore the unresolved conflict concerning unceded treaty lands, but also failures of bureaucratized archaeological reviews, the incommensurability between settler and indigenous views of territory, and different attitudes toward social responsibility. The DAPL protests site represents a significant place in the landscape at the confluence of range of historical and contemporary pressures. Efforts to preserve and document this site (and the protests that transpired there) stands as a complement to efforts to produce more anti-racist urban spaces by the removal of statues celebrating Confederate generals or genocidal conquerers. 

One little note:

The publisher and editor in my couldn’t help but notice that ALL of the hyperlinks in the PDF version of the article are broken. The URIs published can be cut and pasted into a browser and link to the right site, but the blue marked hyperlinks all resolve to a broken DOI page. 

The links work just fine in the HTML version of the text. So I suspect that the problem has something to do with the automated conversion of the text from some kind of xml based format to HTML and PDF. 

More significantly, I regard almost none of the hyperlinks cited in the text as archival. This means that in a few years it seems probable that these links will all break. I’m disappointed that there are no archival links (say via perma.cc). In some ways, articles like  these that capture the conversation at a moment in time also serve as archives. Permanent URLs are part of that archival responsibility.