Mychaela  slowly pulls a  two  of  diamonds  towards  her,  no attention drawn her way. That  was the last of the set of twos in the deck of cards. Now she has to signal to her partner,  Ian,  to win the game. Almost instantly  Ian yells “KEMP!” And the other team flings their cards on the table and shouts “How are you so  stealthy!?”

This example is somewhat  exaggerated,  but I want to give a  snapshot of our life in camp. Kemp is one of the many games that we play after dinner and on the weekend. The games we play  are important because they are a key component in building a functioning  archaeological  team. Through verbal and non verbal communication in the games  facilitate, we are able to learn about and bond with our teammates. For example, we know from this little short story that Mychaela is very stealthy (I don’t know how that’s going to help in the field but it could come in handy?). We use this knowledge of our teammates to learn how to communicate with one another. Games also serve another important role.  We are able to lower our inhibitions enough to not only to show those around us who we are as individuals, but to also to abandon the biases we might have about other people. Our own hesitation and the biases we hold color our perceptions and judgments and stand in the way of creating open communication. The type of learning and knowing that happens through games like Kemp or Werewolf or CatchPhrase helps to break down these barriers.

The FMIA team playing CatchPhrase. Photo by Tiauna Cabillan, FMIA student.

Photo by Tiauna Cabillan, FMIA student.

The reason I am writing about this today is because I have anxiety and these components allow for a comfortable space where I can speak out instead of freaking out. I had so many professors and teachers that did not know how to make a comfortable work space, which always led to a terrible experience, not to mention an unbelievable amount of attention on how I should ask a question rather than clarifying my confusion. That is why building a community through the use of games is so important to me and I hope this blog will influence others to try to make a safe work environment for their students.

Photo by Tiauna Cabillan, FMIA student.

Whenever I talk to my family while at the field school they always ask me what I am doing and what I am learning about. If I tell them that we went on a field trip that day they always seem shocked like they thought we would always be working outdoors learning about archaeological methods and strategies of excavation. While a big part of the field school is learning about these techniques, a large part is also about when and how to use archaeology to both include and benefit the wider public. Recently, we visited Fort Vancouver to learn more about this approach to archaeology.

At Fort Vancouver we met a team of archaeologists and their students who were practicing public archaeology. They were doing work in what is believed to be a WWI Spruce Mill. They explained their excavation methods to us. I noticed a lot of similarities and differences between the excavations being done at the schoolhouse and the mill. For example, logistically our excavation techniques are very similar. Their units consist of 1 x 4 meter trenches and larger 3 x 3 meter open area excavations. While our project with the Grand Ronde THPO emphasizes low-impact methods, we are using similar open-area excavation units to investigate a privy at the Grand Ronde School.

While the techniques of excavation are similar, the communities for which we are doing this work are different. The archaeologists of Fort Vancouver do their work to educate the public, while the work being done at the schoolhouse is part of an indigenous approach to archaeology. Therefore, the work we do through FMIA is directly informed by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’s needs and cultural values. This means that all of the knowledge that is gained from working at the schoolhouse site would not be possible unless the tribe, THPO, and the archeologists doing the work had a respected trustful relationship.

Fort Vancouver uses different methods to inform the public about what they are doing. All of their work is on display to the park’s visitors and they regularly host family fun activities. Both the open lab display, where there is a large window that allows people to observe the students processing artifacts, and excavations outside the fort allow anyone to walk by and see what the team is doing and ask questions.

I thought it was interesting that Fort Vancouver has a children’s dig. It was explained that the artifacts were organized within mock excavation units by time. As the children dig in these units they first encounter mostly trash. As they dig further they find older items like a grenade, representative of the fort’s history a US Army base, and finally a hearth associated with the early fort. They explained how after the children have dug up the artifacts, they are returned and not kept. I thought this was an effective way to get children and the community involved with archaeology, and to learn at a young age that archaeologists do not keep what they find. An important aspect of public archaeology is engaging the general public and letting them know what’s going on. Fort Vancouver does this by working with the local news to help spread the word about what they are doing.

It was nice to see archaeological work in a different setting, and to see the methods being used to include the community.

I write this having just ate my second dinner for the night, full of salmon – The first salmon harvested by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde at Willamette Falls in over a hundred years, as they negotiate their hunting and fishing rights with an assortment of government agencies.

As I sat in the plank house, I couldn’t help but feel honored to be a part of a historic moment of healing and restoration. But opportunities such as these aren’t built from nothing. As part of the second year of the University of Washington’s field school, Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology (FMIA), I am able to benefit from a relationship built over several years between the university, the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO), and members of the Grand Ronde community.

Guided by Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methods, the FMIA field school developed a research partnership with the THPO and members of the Grand Ronde community that contributes to the capacity of the THPO to care for tribal cultural resources on the Grand Ronde reservation. This partnership is based on the values of respect and reciprocity in order to cultivate a meaningful and lasting relationship between all parties. The viability of our research is assessed based on its potential contributions to everyone involved. While archaeology has a deep rooted colonial and extractive past, the CBPR framework (Atalay, 2012) encourages a long term positive exchange with indigenous communities. Who stands to benefit from our work as archaeologists, and how to involve the community, as well as their perspectives and ways of understanding are critically important.

Although the concept of building rapport in the field is not foreign to anthropology, its important in archaeology is often overlooked. Community-based and indigenous approaches to archaeology illustrate how forming long term, meaningful relationships with and to a community is a critical part of creating a respectful archaeological practice.

At this point, at the end of week five in the FMIA School, we have had opportunities to participate in important cultural practices fostered by the Grand Ronde community. We’ve taken a trip into the woods to harvest maple bark, an important resource for the manufacture of clothing.  The maple bark we were peeling, in this instance was going to be used to make maple bark skirts for the young dancers in the tribe. We learned how to peel the bark from the tree in a single piece, inserting our fingers between the bark and the trunk of the tree, and how to separate the flexible inner bark from he fragile outer bark that is prone to cracking and breaking.

We were also invited to the plank house for the opening ceremonies of the annual veterans powwow. This was our first time in the plank house, and as the tribe sang, danced, and pounded drums, learning how to act appropriately (what songs to stand for, and when to remove my hat) has largely been a crash course in mimicry. We’ve even been provided the opportunity to set up our field camp on the powwow grounds themselves.  These are opportunities grown out of the equitable relationship that the FMIA field school has built with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Experiencing culture as it is practiced, understanding it as living, gets us away from a reductionist history produced by Western science and archaeology that sees Indigenous cultures as timeless and stuck in the past. We’ve been provided the opportunity to experience Grand Ronde tribal culture as it is today, as a living, changing thing, not the static history of a textbook.

Experiences such as these, in addition to being fun, exciting, and a welcome break from the labors of field work, enlighten our perspectives and make us better archaeologists. Mutually beneficial, long term relationships aren’t just useful, they’re sustainable.

Works Cited

Atalay, Sonya (2012) Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press.