How much do you know about the history of Indigenous people under Canadian rule?

Posted by: chupacabra

Posted by: syncro

For them, the connection to the people from thousands of years ago is about far more than just geography, it is about identity, culture, spirituality and family.

I get that Syncro, but that is part of their religious belief system and is not designed to answer the question of who these people from the deep past really were (ie - archeology). Our cultural identity is always changing and often completely upended and if we are not seeking to use all available evidence to write that story we are not doing real science. I can understand what their beliefs are and how they might differ from mine, but I am not going to accept them as my own. We can speculate all we want but we know from DNA that almost all of the genetic makeup of the indigenous populations in both N and S America is from Beringia and we also know that this group split from other Asians about 20K years ago. There is nothing wrong with this story and it aligns with a lot of oral history as well.

I think you need to understand that I am more than capable of understanding who they say they are, but I don't indulge in superstition over proof regardless of where it comes from. I am an atheist. Accept my worldview goddamit! :)

I want to know how humans got to the Americas and what their stories are. If indigenous archeologists are not interested in this story and prefer to just say that they are simply a part of the land they are welcome to it, but that is not science. I have a hard time listening to someone that disparages the entire field as hobbled by racism and then uses her own cultural bias as the antidote.

What would you have me do? I think I understand all of this clearly, but I am not going to blow smoke up anyone's ass out of "respect".

We need to understand who they are as a people, not just as people that have take up a specific place we have set for them in our history.

I would argue that it is the First Nations themselves that have defined themselves by the land they live on. I see them as people that formed over generations to become who they are.

There's a couple different things going on in the article which takes a look at Steeves' book. One is about the history of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) and the other is about bias, or racism as the article puts it, in the way the West has looked at the history of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. From the article:

"Anthropologists and archeologists began the scientific study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 19th century. They started from the premise that those peoples were literally moribund, doomed to disappear as European settlers overwhelmed them. Science could record the death pangs of Indigenous cultures, but little more. And those cultures certainly couldn’t provide anything that might enrich settler cultures. Of course it was a European science, asking European questions and demanding European standards of evidence. And consciously or not, its purpose was to assert European superiority over the benighted peoples it studied."

Both of those two things are strongly interconnected, and also connected to my comment on understanding who Indigenous persons are as a people - which includes taking into account their spirituality. You used the word religion, but the word spirituality is a much better fit, as that system of beliefs is integrated with the way they live their lives at every level. It's about the idea of Relationality I've talked about before, being in relation with the universe. From a science perspective you could compare Relationality to Quantum physics - something Jung did, but from a perspective of spirituality and not Indigenous relationality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217602/

So this isn't about indulging in superstition, it's about meeting people where they are at, not where you think they are at or think where you think they should be at. I can't speak for what Indigenous archeologists want, but part of their understanding includes that spirituality which is linked to science in a way. Just because Indigenous peoples didn't have a written history ii doesn't mean they didn't practice science. It may not have been in the white lab coat tradition of the West, but it included the basics of observation, experimentation, induction, repetition and testing. Things such as reef net fishing, clam gardens, ocean going canoes and controlled burning are all great examples of Indigenous science at work. And their spirituality is tied to all of those things. Great link to info on Indigenous science in the PNW: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/knowinghome/chapter/chapter-7/

When it comes to the archeology, neither I, nor the article nor Steeves make the claim that for sure this is how things happened. The articles author says so when he says Steeves "doesn’t argue that they make an open-and-shut case for very early humans in the Western Hemisphere. But given the implications of those dates, they certainly deserve more research". For myself I am less concerned with the actual archeological history - although it does interest me - and more concerned with the other part of the conversation that involves recognizing who Indigenous people are on their own terms. I think we need to do that first and then we can walk together with them in not only discovering the past but creating a future where we can learn from each other and create a better future to live in together.

Of course it was a European science, asking European questions and demanding European standards of evidence. And consciously or not, its purpose was to assert European superiority over the benighted peoples it studied.

This is a pretty strange way to look at what happened.  I have no doubt that racism played a huge role in their early assumptions about the history of the new world but European standards of evidence were not created just to subjugate people.  If anything the problem was that they didn't adhere to the standards and assumed their racist biases were correct without good evidence to support their theories.  It is those standards of evidence the eventually prevailed and killed the Clovis first theory.  Also connected to this and not from racism is that they base the theories on available evidence and there is not much to find even today.  

You used the word religion, but the word spirituality is a much better fit, as that system of beliefs is integrated with the way they live their lives at every level.

I think this just comes from the current feeling that religion=bad and spirituality=good.  If they all follow the same set of beliefs and practices related to spirituality it is a religion by any definition I can find.  Any devout follower of religion would tell you that they integrate their beliefs into their lives at every level as well.  I am not judging their system of belief one way or the other, but it is their belief system and not mine.  Their truth if you will.

When it comes to the archeology, neither I, nor the article nor Steeves make the claim that for sure this is how things happened.

She wouldn't make that claim because it would be highly unprofessional, but what she does do is make it clear that 1,000 or 100,000 years ago doesn't matter, they are all her people if they were on this side of the globe.  Perhaps I am misreading her statements and she understands that they may not literally be her ancestors but that the land itself makes them her people like the mammoth, but the real world effect is that all archeological sites are theirs to control and that means answers will likely be buried.  They are not interested in finding out if there were multiple different people that came here in different migrations.  It also means that there is no incentive for a non-native to do this kind of research in our part of the world because they know anything they find will not be theirs to study.    

Anyhoo, I have beat this dead horse enough.  This clash is real and I just don't love the implications that our current understanding of the ancient history of the western hemisphere is steeped in racism.

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Posted by: chupacabra

Anyhoo, I have beat this dead horse enough. This clash is real and I just don't love the implications that our current understanding of the ancient history of the western hemisphere is steeped in racism.

If you consider what racism is and how it operates, then the idea that our understanding of ancient history of the western hemisphere is steeped in racism is not so far fetched. If the people doing the work of uncovering history have a bias against, and disdain for, people of colour, it's not a leap to suggest that they would relate their version of history in a manner that dismisses Indigenous peoples and favours their own people (Europeans).

There's been few more things come up over the past month that add to the previous discussion on Steeves. One is the CBC program Ideas which interviews Steeves in a manner that comes across much better than the Tyee article.

"The dominant story in archaeology has long been that humans came to North America around 12,000 years ago. But Indigenous archaeologist Paulette Steeves points to mounting evidence suggesting it was more like 130,000 years ago"
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/15888973-the-old-stone-age-western-hemisphere - The full one hour episode is an interesting listen and one of the concepts that gets presented is that there may have been more than one migration and it may not have only happened in the direction of Asia to America

There was also the recent segment on Quirks and Quarks. "The story of how humans first moved into North America is now clearer — and more complicated — thanks to a few recent studies. A geological analysis of ocean nitrogen isotopes and ice sheet data suggests the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska opened up later and for a shorter period than we previously thought. Jesse Farmer, who did this research at Princeton University, suggests sea levels dropped enough that the land bridge surfaced about 35,700 years ago. Because of the difficulty of passing the vast ice sheets, many authorities now think people took a coastal route down into North America. Summer Praetorious, a research geologist from the U.S.G.S. ran climate models with paleo-ocean data to identify two periods when coastal movement would have been most practical. Though the land bridge was submerged again at the end of the ice age, that didn’t stop people from crossing between the continents, but not always in the direction you may think. Cosimo Posth from the University Tübingen said their study of ancient genomes in East Asia suggests there was also a backflow of migrants moving North America back into East Asia."
This segment is shorter at only 17 minutes so a quicker listen. One good thing here is that it gives us reason to consider that what we have known from the Western science perspective may not be right.
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-51-quirks-and-quarks/clip/15965702-crossing-land-bridge-back-again.-the-travels

Even if you don't agree with Steeves pov, I think you'll still find it an interesting listen.

She seems to have toned down her message a little since getting so much press.  

I don't doubt that racism has played a role in archeology and probably still does, but this is a lot more complicated than she makes it seem and her racism angle just feels contrived to me.  I am about 95% on the same page as Steeves when it comes to the idea that the peopling on the Americas likely happened much sooner, but as I have said before, the Clovis First theory hasn't been in vogue for a long time so this is not exactly groundbreaking.  Same with the coastal route theory which has been discussed for decades but it is hard to find evidence to make it a solid theory.

IMO there are 2 main reasons for the delay in looking past 12K years ago in the Americas.

1) The field of archeology has followed this idea of progression so they can't seem to get their head around the idea that anyone that long ago could sail across an ocean.  It should be obvious that it can happen since Australia is hard to get to without sailing skills and the Polynesians lived across the pacific without agriculture but that is how they think.  So even when they found earlier sites they would just modify the Clovis theory.  The same thing happens in Europe.  Archeologists would have told you the building Gobekli Tepe in Turkey which is 12,000 years old was impossible for hunter-gatherers, but then they found it. 

2) There is so little evidence of humans in the Americas before Clovis.  We still only have a handful of sites.  Clovis sites on the other hand are all over the place.  They have over 10 thousand Clovis points and they can often date them so when they started studying the ancient past of the Americas they found evidence everywhere of these amazing hunters that just appeared at exactly the right time for the land bridge theory.  It did seem rock solid as a theory in the early days and everything was built on that foundation.

I don't think she walked her position back so much as that the way people view her position has changed. But that's natural when people are first exposed to something controversial, they tend to react negatively and over time adjust their position as they come to understand the new information better or are presented with even more info.

Posted by: syncro

I don't think she walked her position back so much as that the way people view her position has changed. But that's natural when people are first exposed to something controversial, they tend to react negatively and over time adjust their position as they come to understand the new information better or are presented with even more info.

Maybe. None of this is new to me so maybe I just don't see it. To be fair my reaction to her claims comes partially from my personal worldview, but the bias of her research is just too out there to ignore. This is from the abstract of her thesis;

To allow that Indigenous people have been present in the Western Hemisphere for a much greater time is to support Indigenous ownership of the past and present, and lands and material heritage. To accept that Indigenous peoples have been in the Western Hemisphere for over 60,000 years and possibly prior to 100,000 ybp is to put them on equal footing with areas of the so called Old World.

IMO this is nonsense. We are all ancient people. It doesn't matter where our family tree has travelled. 14K or 50K or 150K, what difference does it make? She has more incentive in pushing the date back than any racist did in arguing against pre-Clovis sites. As of right now, the oldest irrefutable evidence is human footprints at White Sands that are about 23K old which is already old enough to destroy the Clovis First theory. I think this date will keep getting pushed back just like she does, I just don't see how it changes indigenous ownership of past and present. 23K already confirms that some form of sea travel was required, so there is no cap on when that could have happened.

I think her worldview that says there is no separation of past and present (something she often mentions) is why she sees so much racism. She sees white archeologists as dismissing the capabilities of the ancient indigenous people as a diss to her people (racism), but I see archeologists of all colours dismissing the capabilities of all ancient people because they assume that hunters/gathers could only do basic things and if they can't prove something it didn't happen (stuck in a model where they can't speculate).

Ultimately I agree with the facts and I agree that it appears that the Americas were populated much earlier than previously thought. I also agree that we should be listening to oral history for clues. I have been fascinated for decades with the concept that human history is incomplete and that the prehistory of the Americas is way older and more interesting than archeology says it is as well. It is our human story. We are on the same page but I don't see this as a battle between cultures and I am much more interested in the full story of who came and where they went. When she argues for ownership of their story she means ownership of archeology in the Americas and my fear is that would mean politics will trump science. I don't think she would want to show Clovis people displacing previous cultures for example because it goes against the idea that they are all one people that were on the land first. I know they don't want to look too closely at DNA and there is a habit of burying it before studying it as well.

There is a lot more to this than racism and ironically I think the reason Steeves isn't being dismissed like so many archeologists before her is that she is indigenous.

"Our home on native land..."

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9OFQUXpr8g

Haha. I have heard the word change before but not in a performance. Now we just need to get rid of 'god' and change it to 'Gord keep our land glorious and free' to honour our Gordons. Whether it be Howe, Downie, or Lightfoot. Not Campbell though obviously. Fuck that guy.

Posted by: chupacabra

Haha. I have heard the word change before but not in a performance. Now we just need to get rid of 'god' and change it to 'Gord keep our land glorious and free' to honour our Gordons. Whether it be Howe, Downie, or Lightfoot. Not Campbell though obviously. Fuck that guy.

This is the unceded land of the Gords.

....and now we lost a good Gord.

Posted by: three-sheets

....and now we lost a good Gord.

Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, who starred in 'Away From Her,' has died at 92

He had one hell of a run.

A good example of what systemic racism is and how it operates is shown in this article.

https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/complaints-commission-condemns-rcmp-for-lack-of-investigation-into-allegations-mounties-abused-first-nations-girls/

"First Nations leader Bill Wilson cynically shrugged: What did you expect? Of course they covered it up. … This case called into question the validity of the entire white man’s legal system and its relationship to Aboriginal people."

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/allegations-that-b-c-rcmp-officers-abused-indigenous-women-swept-under-the-carpet-ex-mountie

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/ian-mulgrew-rcmp-management-more-than-dysfunctional