Rethinking Bases and Campuses

Last year, I wrote a chapter in my book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience that explored the archaeology of military bases and college campuses. If you want, you can read the chapter here. The idea here was that both places were sites that reinforced social norms and, more specifically, embodied the logic of the military industrial complex.

They also reflected places where various forms of resistance subverted the outward order of these spaces and archaeological work has revealed complexity obscured in historical documentation and counter narratives left opaque or marginalized in the dominant sources. I was moderately pleased with this chapter in that it managed to demonstrate how archaeological work can reveal disorder and adaptation even in the orderly landscapes associated the campus and the base. This chapter likewise contributed to my larger discussion of workforce housing in the Bakken where the order of workforce housing sites certainly appealed to local communities who worried about the influx of workers introducing disorder to their lives. Of course, these orderly camps often belied the subtle and not so subtle efforts to modify these orderly spaces to accommodate their needs.   

One of the most embarrassing things about my first draft of this chapter is that I overlooked the work being done in two key areas that contributed directly to my arguments. First, I overlooked work being done on Indian Residential Schools in both the US and Canada. This work, which I’ll unpack more below, reveals a complex landscape of colonialism, resistance, survival (and survivance), and genocide.

Second, I overlooked the work done at the Dozier School for Boys on the Florida Panhandle. This site produced the horrific remains of a number of mostly Black children killed at the school over its 111 year history. The school was a reform school whose neat outward appearance hid its history of violence from the public. 

While most of the archaeological remains at Indian Residential Schools and at Dozier fall outside the narrow chronological range of my book, which focuses on the period from 1970 to the present, these institutions persisted beyond the end of the 20th century in many cases and continued to obfuscate their complicated and sometimes tragic histories. The tension, then, between the present and the past at these sites reflects both the desperate measures to preserve an outward appearance of order, propriety, and safety against a backdrop of violence, disorder, and resistance. The efforts to suppress the history of physical, emotional, and cultural violence needed to preserve order at these sites shaped our failure to recognize or fully understand the impact of these places on the individuals and communities who survived their experiences. 

In some ways, the stories associated with these sites reflects the darker reverse of the frivolous campus novel or film which mocks the pretentious gentility of campus life by celebrating those who ignore or flaunt its rules. A major revision of this chapter will fold in the recent work done on these sites as a way to stretch my chronology a bit (for a good cause, though, I think) as well as a way to reflect on the repressive tension that exists between landscape dedicated to evincing and announcing order and the complicated realities that these landscapes overwrite. 

Finally, writing on this stuff is hard. Not only is it forcing me to deal more thoughtfully with issues of race and to communicate the horrors of the situations at places like Dozier without minimizing some consideration of resistance, but it also has pushed me to think about how our very concept of the contemporary has shaped how we see the past. The issues and experiences at Dozier and in the Indian Residential Schools is not some closed chapter, but part of the ongoing struggle of individuals and communities to claim their place in our world.

More on all of this in the coming days as I get stuck into a major revision of this chapter.