Ideas - Indigenous Archaeologist Reclaims Pleistocene Epoch Story from Colonial Scholars

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

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. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 13, 2022.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. For many, many years, people thought that Clovis were the first people in North America, and that was the primary paradigm. When archaeologists say Clovis, they mean people living on this continent 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Ask any First Nations, any tribal member, they will tell you they've been here time immemorial. When we hear the phrase time immemorial, we consider that to mean that the initial event of the peopling of the Americas is indefinitely ancient.

Indefinitely ancient versus 12,000 years ago. That is the incendiary question. 12,000 years ago? That is the incendiary question. I think that many oral traditions, especially around since time immemorial, are not understood at all by Western sciences because they don't understand the intricate and deep thinking patterns. The language and the stories are far too complex for them to understand. I know there are much older sites. We're talking the 50 and the 100,000 range. I certainly don't think research should be discouraged from those sites.

We think this question is wide open and that people should take an open-minded approach to answering this question. approach to answering this question. The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, is more fluid than its name suggests. Our lineage of Homo sapiens, for example, is said to be approximately 300,000 years old. But just five years ago, the prevailing view was that we were only 200,000 years old. Five years from now, depending on advances in measuring tools and the outcome of some scholarly feuds, we may be saying modern humans have been here for 500,000 years, or 700,000 years.

Nevertheless, it's the tough job of archaeology to search for any certainties and solid ground amid all this approximation. Archaeologists, like most people, we like benchmarks. We like to say it happened at this event. It happened at this time. Tom Williams is a researcher at the Gold Site, an archaeological dig in Texas.

We excavated down through about three and a half metres of dirt, of sediment. And within that, in the upper layers, we found sort of, you know, recent, or I say recent, the last 5,000, 6,000 years. As we excavated down, down close to the bottom, we found Clovis. And to put the site in context, you have to understand that Clovis was originally considered to be the oldest cultural assemblage in the Americas. originally considered to be the oldest cultural assemblage in the Americas. So-called Clovis people made stone spear points with scooped or fluted sections so they could attach a wooden handle or spear shaft to the point.

So we found a layer that basically contained Clovis stone tools. We had Clovis projectile point, a small base, and we had some other indicators. But what we discovered is below that, we had another assemblage. We had another group of stone tools that looked completely different to the Clovis material above. And that's important in archaeology just in general. As you dig down, you're digging older. Digging older than Clovis can be a risky move. Since the 1930s, American archaeologists tended to believe

they could be sure of one thing about the distant past. They could hold on to the Clovis first theory. The people who made those Clovis points were the first humans in the Western Hemisphere. They crossed over from Siberia at the end of the last ice age. And I would say that the idea of Clovis being first became so entrenched and so sort of repeated that when people spoke out, they actually got quite voraciously attacked. I don't think any scientist expects to be accepted out of hand. I'm Kathleen Holan, and I'm the administrative director of the Center for American Paleolithic Research.

And I'm Stephen Holan. I'm the director of research for Center for American Paleolithic Research, and I have about 50 years of experience in archaeology. And there was a minority back in the 70s and 80s and 90s that thought that people were here before that and published articles, and they all got attacked. And after they were attacked, then generally their publications were largely ignored after that. Research is meant to be questioned, but it's meant to be questioned with data, not with opinion. And it's gone beyond what I consider the normal scientific process

of question, response, prove, disprove. There's an element of animosity there that people can sense. And I don't think that's good. I think that's a bad thing. Stick in the muds, let's call them that. There is some people that really dislike the idea of there being anything older and it's sort of, you know, this is science, you have to follow it where it takes you. And that has led to, I know people that have not published information that they have. There's no good reason for not publishing archaeological data unless you're just, you know, essentially afraid of, you know, where it might lead. And one colleague in particular, I won't mention his name, he has looked at these sites that I've excavated and he looks at that and goes, this would be an archaeological site if it wasn't so old.

So there are people out there who judge what an archaeological site is based on age, not on the content of the site. There are signs that the Clovis First story is finally loosening its grip on the archaeological profession. But how much loosening is in order? That part remains hotly contested. in order. That part remains hotly contested. What we have now is what we call the day before Clovis First hypothesis, and that is that people came down the west coast of North America by boat about 15 or 16,000 years ago. That's the new kind of Clovis First, and that's the majority opinion

now. And then there's a few of us still out there really pushing for older and older dates. There seem to be more younger archaeologists who are taking an interest in this controversial topic and feeling more free to explore it, and I think that's a real positive thing. There was just a site published in New Mexico where there's human footprints in a lakebed and they're about 22,000 years old. So that's probably the most recent actual scientific discovery that has

changed things. And I think it's going to help open up the door for other people to do research in older deposits once they see that that was accepted. The last thing that I've noticed is that, for once, Indigenous voices are being able to be heard. I think Paulette's work has really gone a long way to do that. Okay, Tansi, hello, in Cree. My name is Dr. Paulette Steeves. I'm an Indigenous archaeologist. I teach at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie,

Ontario, and I am the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History, Healing, and Reconciliation. Paulette Steeves is the author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. May I begin just by asking you where you grew up? May I begin just by asking you where you grew up? I was born in Whitehorse in the Yukon, and we lived in a few small towns. We lived in Vancouver, actually, for a few years until I was five, and then Rossland, Ashcroft. I consider Lillooet, British Columbia, my hometown. It's along the Fraser River, sort of in northern central BC.

Do you get back there very often? I haven't in a few years, but my daughter still lives there. So I do try to get back from time to time. I wonder if you remember at all being taught anything in elementary or high school about the human history of this hemisphere. No, I don't. I remember in graduate school reading about the Clovis first hypothesis of the initial peopling of the Western hemisphere, and it didn't always sit well with me because I had heard from different community members, and I had learned through community videos and stories and Indigenous

publications, that Indigenous people have a much different view of their own history than Western archaeologists have. At what point did that questioning or that realization turn into a decision to pursue this as an area of study? In graduate school, I emailed Steve Holan, who was the archaeologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He had written on one site that was earlier than 12,000 years. And I asked him, because I didn't know, you know, if there were many sites that were earlier than 12,000 years. So I asked him, do you know of any sites? And he emailed me back and he said, well, here's a list of 10 sites, but don't tell anybody what you're researching. They're just going to call you crazy. And I looked at those 10 sites. I found all their papers. And every time I read an archaeological

report, I learned of more sites. And within two weeks, I had a list of over 500 sites that predated Clovis. And I knew right then that something was really wrong. But I also knew that this was an area that was an academic violence against Indigenous people, limiting their timeframe on these lands and denying this history when there was all this evidence didn't seem to make any sense to me. For those of us who are outside the field of archaeology, how big a change to the standard storyline does your work demand? Well, it's a really big change. But I'll share with you briefly one short story about my path and my being in this area. In 1988, in Lillooet, I was going through a very difficult time.

I was getting divorced, becoming a single parent with three children. I had at the time a great education, a truck and about 26 cents. And so I went to talk to a local elder, Leonard Sampson, that had been a really good friend of my mom's, to get counseling and guidance. And he said that the elders had watched me grow up and they knew I had a job to do that would be extremely difficult and that this was training. So what I was going through at the time was hard, but it was training because he said in the future I would do a job. I would do something that would really help Indian people, not just our community, but all people. And it would be even harder. Well, at the time, I couldn't imagine anything harder. And I had no clue what he was talking about.

But 25 years later, when I was defending my dissertation, it came to me, oh, this is what they meant. I just have to rewrite, you know, part of world history and reclaim over 100,000 years of Indigenous history. So really, it seems that the elders sensed I had a job to do. And although they didn't name it specifically, I know now this is really what they were alluding to. How much did that premonition help guide you through the difficult period afterwards? Oh, it absolutely supported me. There was many times in graduate school where I faced extreme racism, and it was very difficult. It was not difficult to tell the truth. It was not difficult to find the archaeological reports because there's a small number of archaeologists that did work in this area. And if it wasn't for their work and their publications, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

But they had really paid a heavy price for publishing on sites that were earlier than 12,000 years, yet they continued, and many of them continue to this day. And without them, I wouldn't really have had anything to go on. So that's really important to acknowledge that, yes, Western archaeologists have denied our history. They've created this story that is dehumanizing and cleaves us from our links to, you know, our homelands. But there is a small group of those Western archaeologists that without them, we wouldn't have had this knowledge to go on. And a lot of the knowledge that comes out of those archaeological papers can be woven through and support the oral traditions

that Indigenous people have of their own histories. And a lot of days I think, my gosh, you know, this was really easy for dissertation work. All of the data and evidence I needed was there. All of these people have done this extreme amount of work to disprove the Clovis first theory and to provide the evidence for rewriting the history of the Americas. Professor Steeves attributes the long reign of this Clovis first story to a colonial mindset among American archaeologists. Early in that field, Alex Herlishka was the main archaeologist at the Smithsonian, and he argued that we had only been here 3,000 years. And that really wasn't even based on any data. That was his opinion. And in the late 1920s, Jesse Figgins, who was an archaeologist from the Denver Museum,

excavated at the Clovis site in New Mexico. And he then argued based on, you know, a Clovis point being found in an extinct bison rib that people had been here over 10,000 years, and he really had to fight to get that accepted. I mean, Alex Herlishka held a lot of sway and a lot of power in American archaeology and to change what he believed was, you know, a battle. And Jesse Figgins did that. But our time frame of initial human migrations to the Western Hemisphere has been stuck at 10,000 to 12,000 years since the 1920s. You know, but we see all these other areas of the world

where our understanding of early humans changes because we gather more information and data and we have amazing scientific tools to use now to date and to understand early human evolution. But for some reason in the Americas, and it's likely linked to that early racism and ongoing racism in the field, human history is not supposed to change. Anyone who published on an earlier than Clovis site was violently critiqued, and this area has been discussed in publications as an area of academic suicide. So even Louis Leakey, he was, you know, the famous paleontologist that found all the early hominids in Africa. He worked on a site in California. And when he said that site was much older than Clovis, older than 50,000 years and possibly

200,000 years, all of a sudden he was a crazy old man. So he was, you know, really critiqued and insulted by American archaeologists. And people don't usually get this information or understand this, but archaeologists depend on Indigenous archaeological sites. That's their academic capital, right? They've created this story across time. They don't want that to change. created this story across time. They don't want that to change. They don't want most of them to have Indigenous people involved in archaeology or reclaiming their artifacts or their right to tell their own stories because it's their academic capital. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand

that it is fairly unusual still for an Indigenous person to actually be an archaeologist in North America. Oh, yeah, there's not very many of us. And when I went to undergrad from 1995 to 2000, I never had one Indigenous professor. I never met another Indigenous student. I met one Quapaw community member who was the NAGPRA, Native American Graves and Repatriation Act officer for her community. I didn't meet another Indigenous archaeologist until about my third year of grad school when I went to a conference. And then I met, I think, four. But there's really not very many of us. It's not just that Indigenous people may not be comfortable with the field of archaeology, but that it's a field where you have to really be aware of being taken advantage of, right, to support non-Indigenous archaeologists' goals. And you have to really have a clear vision

of what it is that you're going to do or want to do. And you have to really be able to think critically and analyze those relationships so that you don't get used or taken advantage of. So it's got a lot heavier load than if you were just going into, say, writing or English or biology. Are you mentoring any young Indigenous archaeologists now? I've mentored a few students online, and I hope in the future to be able to work with communities. So Indigenous archaeology is always community-centered, and that's where it starts. But I'm really hoping that we're able to open the field to other Indigenous students, because there needs to be more of us to, you know, correct and rewrite our

histories. So that's the larger goal, which is an important one. But I wonder what the personal goal was for you. I really didn't have a personal goal. I had a son who was terminally ill from the time he was very young. I'm sorry. And he wasn't given long to live, but he made it to be 21. and long to live, but he made it to be 21. And the last conversation we had, I'd gone into this old bookstore in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I did my undergrad school, and it was a beautiful small town and a beautiful place, and they had this huge counter with all these nickel candies, and so I'd look through books, and then I'd make three bags of candy,

one for each of my kids. So that day I came out of the bookstore with my bags of candy, and my son Jesse ran up to me. And he was 21. He'd lived to be 21. He said, no matter whatever happens to me,

don't you ever give up. Don't you ever stop. He said, go on to be a lawyer, a doctor, whatever it is you're meant to do. He said, promise me, no matter what happens to me, you'll never give up. And he died two weeks later. That was the last conversation we had. I'm so sorry. So there was a purpose that those were his last words to me.

And one of the things of being indigenous and being raised in a Western world and being disenfranchised is that we have to recover our practices. We have to recover our beliefs. Listening is very important. So growing up in a non-Indigenous world, you're taught not to listen. If you listen to your dreams, to voices, well then, you know, there's something wrong with your brain. So I had to teach myself to listen. And I often thought about what the elders had shared with me. And I listened to their words every week. And I listened to elders that showed up out of the blue and would talk to me about what I was doing and how much they appreciated it. And I listened to my son's words.

And I knew that those came from our ancestors. So I had to keep going. Thank you, Paulette, for sharing that with me. And I'm sorry. I'm very sorry about the loss of your son. And I'm sorry to upset you. If you need a moment, we can. It's up to you.

I'm good. I'd like to get to the heart of what it is that you have done. If you could give us one or two strong reasons why you believe that the Clovis story is wrong. Many things make this story implausible. People are known to have been present throughout North and South America by 12,000 years ago, that's accepted. So there's sites everywhere from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina, from California to Nova Scotia, that date to 12,000 years ago. And for people to have been here then and covered both continents in their entirety,

pretty much, they had to be here for thousands and thousands of years prior to that. So we're looking at one third of the global landmass, North and South America, almost one third of the global landmass, extremely ecologically diverse. It takes time to not only migrate to a new area, but to successfully settle that area. So people had to be here for quite a bit longer. And then Joanna Nichols is a linguist, and she argued that considering languages from Alaska to Chile, at an average rate of language speed, it would have taken 50,000 years, requiring a much earlier entry date for people to have developed those languages. So Nichols has said that a new language family can take minimally 6,000 years to form. We have about 320, maybe a few more language families throughout the world. Half of those, more than half of those language families are found in North and South America. That takes an extreme amount of time to be able to develop that high level of linguistic diversity.

Right. And that we know that hominids, early human ancestors, were at sites in northern Asia over 2.1 million years ago. So they had walked from Africa over 14,000 kilometers and settled in areas of Northern Asia 2.1 million years ago. So are we supposed to believe that they got to Northern Asia and stopped? So between glaciations, there was a land connection between the Western Hemisphere, North America, the Eastern Hemisphere, Asia. We know this from paleontological evidence in mammalian migrations. Mammals were crossing a viable landmass for millions of years. And we're supposed to believe that early hominids got to northern Asia 2.1 million years ago, and then for some reason didn't go any farther north. A few thousand more kilometers, they would have been in North America.

And we know that people were in areas as close as 500 kilometers to the Bering landmass area, you know, at 30, 40,000 years. So it does not make any sense whatsoever. It's absurd to say, to argue that people couldn't have possibly been here earlier. There's nothing that makes it impossible. And human evolution shows that that would be an anomaly if they were not here much earlier. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Paulette Steeves is a professor of sociology at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie.

Her first book is The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. It's the product of her research on late Pleistocene sites in North and South America. The late Pleistocene is when our species migrated from Africa across the Eastern Hemisphere, thus supposed to have occurred between 35, 35 and 80,000 years ago. But to say that modern humans also entered the western hemisphere around that time has long been a potentially career-ending move for an archaeologist. The prevailing view now appears to be shifting, or at least it's more broadly contested.

But Professor Paulette St Steves argues that archaeologists in general still need a more open-minded and humbler approach, especially when it comes to assessing evidence that doesn't fit preconceived theories. Oh yeah, a lot of archaeologists still try to frame the earliest arrival now as people coming in boats during the glaciation. Glaciation is what many of us would call an ice age. The more technical term emphasizes the dynamic aspect, the multiple periods of advancing and retreating ice, the falling and rising sea levels. The peak of the most recent glacial period occurred around 22,000 years ago. That was followed by alternating periods of melt and freeze until the time we call the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago.

So during the glaciation, mammals aren't migrating. There's no food. It's not a viable landscape. Oh, so people took boats and came at 15,000 years along the coast. No, that doesn't make any sense either. If you have an open viable landmass and all of North America and Northern Asia at times between glaciations was forested, mammals were coming and going. We know, for instance, that like camels arose in the Americas. To get to Asia, they had to walk across a landmass. Horses arose in the Americas. The saber-toothed cat arose in the Americas.

So we have a huge amount of evidence of mammals using that land area across millions of years. If four-legged relations are walking across that land area, there's no reason why the two-leggeds wouldn't have, because quite often they followed their prey. are walking across that land area, there's no reason why the two-legged wouldn't have because quite often they followed their prey. Or when populations grew, they expanded and moved further north, east, west, moved out from where they were. And early humans were very good at expanding their populations as we can see from human evolution on a global scale. So it's really kind of absurd to say that, oh yeah, well, you know, mammals were coming and going, but humans didn't into the Western Hemisphere.

Tell me why. The activity of non-human animals during the Paleolithic period falls under paleontology. Archaeology concerns itself with our own species. For Paulette Steeves, evidence from animal studies is key to understanding the human possibilities. Paleontology and other sciences have provided a huge amount of really good strong evidence of the time frames of when that landmass between the eastern and western hemisphere was viable. There's also been evidence on the east coast. So during glaciations, a lot of the water in the oceans was taken up in glaciers. We know that

the continental shelf along the east coast was all dry land for thousands of years. A shrimp trawler pulled up a mastodon skull with a very beautiful large point called the laurel leaf point that is very similar to points that are found in an area we know today to be southern France. So that kind of hints that the water was low enough at the time where the people had a way of crossing from areas we know today as Europe, perhaps into North America, because their technology, their stone tools have been found on the eastern coast of North America. And we can't just brush that off as impossible. We need to ask the questions and do the work and the research to show if humans were possibly traversing between the continents on those coasts also. So this is one of my new pieces moving forward now

is to gather all this data that's been provided by geologists and environmental studies and paleontology, and to see that picture of when over the last 2 million years, there were viable routes for humans and mammals to migrate. I'm wonder if you could tell us a little bit about some of the sites that you mentioned earlier, the evidence that they presented for earlier presence of people here. So the Topper site is one site in South Carolina. Alan Goodyear has been the archaeologist that's worked on it for years. And he identified what we call an intact archaic occupation. And he discovered there was a Clovis occupation, but he decided to look a little deeper.

And the stone tools that he found beneath the Clovis level dated to as early as 54,700 years before present. Of course, he was very worried about publishing this data and these dates, but he did. And a graduate student, Douglas Sain from the University of Tennessee, did a monster doctoral dissertation, like the biggest one I've ever seen. And he studied the useware on those tools from those very early dates. And he said that some of the tools did show signs of use through edge polish, what we call edge polish striations and edge polish damage, and plant and animal residue was found on the tools. And he concluded that these pre-Clovis

tools at this at least 50,000 yearyear-old level had been used by humans. So that's a pretty amazing site. There's a number of sites where some archaeologists are going back and they're reviewing the work that was previously done. Because Jacques Saint-Mars did the Bluefish Cave site from, I think, 1977 to 1987. And he argued that that site was very, very old and had signs of human butchering on some of the animal bones. Of course, his work was kind of denigrated and denied. And another graduate student re-examined the bones from his site and found that they bared marks consistent with butchering. So there's also a number of pre-Clovis sites in the Yukon. So you can look at it as a regional area. People, archaeologists that are working at these sites are very, very careful

because they know they're going to face extreme criticism. So they're very careful with their work, with their dating, and they don't publish if they don't have solid data. And we see this at a lot of these earlier sites. It's not just one site. So every site that I look at and that I discuss in my book, I look around if there's other sites in the area that date to the same time. And pretty much there always are. I'm just curious, even just what it what it looks or feels like to be arriving or working at one of these sites. I haven't gone to that many of the sites personally, I worked at the Lucina site. So this is a site that Steve Holan did when he was at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

And the Lucina site was excavated for over 11 years. There were a lot of field schools held there. And it's a site that has mammoth bone with spiral fracturing. And there's been a lot of studies done to show that spiral fracturing on that heavy, dense mammoth bone is done by humans with a boulder. So even a great-faced bear couldn't get his mouth around a mammoth's femur and break it, because they're very dense bones. And there's a pattern of fracturing that we know from the marks on the bone and the way the bone fractures, this was done by human with rocks or boulders. So the

Lacina site has a really good collection of spirally fractured bone. And around the Lacina site, which dates to 22,000 years, we call calibrated years before present, around the Lacina site are a number of other sites that also show humans were fracturing mammoth bone or camel bone in those areas. And some of the sites actually have stone tools. That was really interesting to get to actually go and work on the sites. Other sites I've gone and studied the collections in the museums. And I think that's really a really promising area for future graduate students is that all of these sites, artifacts are sitting in a museum in boxes somewhere. So here's a dissertation and a study just waiting

to be done. Maybe you'll inspire somebody listening to the show, I hope. Oh, I hope so too. How would you describe how oral traditions, cultural knowledge, cultural protocols play in your approach to archaeology? mammoth dance. There's a mammoth song. There are oral traditions about mammoths. There are lots of oral traditions about thunderbirds. So what is a thunderbird, right? Can we link the thunderbird to maybe an archaeological site or paleontological site? Well, there were very large, gigantic birds with enormous wingspans during the Pleistocene called Tetronus. And so the oral traditions of Thunderbirds really tell me, oh, that was a Tetronus. And Indigenous people have ways of recording their histories and passing these stories over generations that won't be forgotten. They're very colored. They're very intimate. They mean something so that people

don't forget them. So, Thunderbirds have been accused of stealing children, wreaking havoc, rolling thunder rocks down the mountains. Well, this is something that a tetronus was very capable of. And can we find tetronus in the archaeological and paleontological record? Yes. How has that kind of knowledge contributed to the argument that you're making of the longer history, the deeper history than what we know? Well, when Indigenous people have oral traditions and songs and dances that talk about extinct species, they had to be here to experience them,

right? They had to have witnessed it. So we know that oral traditions have been passed over at least 40,000 years, right? They're talking about extinct species, they're talking about extinct plant species and animal species, not just talking about them, but telling why they were important to their culture. So the Osage have a story from their homelands of a battle between giant beasts, mammoths and mastodons, and it wasn't safe for them to go out and hunt until after the mammoths and mastodons had this huge battle, and a lot of them died, and the Osage people went out and burned their carcasses out of respect, and every year after that, they had a ceremony at that site for those beasts. And what do we have exactly at that site now that we've known about since

the early 1900s? We have an archaeological site called Kissimwick, where they found, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of bones, burned mastodon and mammoth bones and stone tools. So the Osage story tells about that battle that they witnessed, and later on, the archaeologist excavated. So you can weave those knowledges together and show that those oral traditions are a factual history from the Pleistocene. The story that we have come to understand is that early hominins evolved in Africa. I wanted to start there, if we could, and then work backwards to the Western Hemisphere. What's missing from that account of our origins? There's a lot missing from the story that people aren't taught.

And this is, it's kind of a pattern in the Western Academy that even if they know about some knowledge, they don't teach it. a Western Academy that even if they know about some knowledge, they don't teach it. If it's going to support people maybe viewing things in a different way, because they want to maintain the status quo of the Western story of history. So Nova, which is a documentary science TV channel that's very well respected, you know, everyone sees Nova on Discovery. They had this clip online, and it was called Our Earliest Human Ancestors. So here was this maybe white graduate student dressed up in feathers. And he was trying to be funny. And he was telling us about, you know, human evolution. So he talked about you know homo sapiens homo erectus australopithecines he

goes back in time parenthesis boise then he gets into the primates so this is all happening in africa but then he goes oh our earliest ancestors are the earliest proto primates and they're from Montana. So the largest collection of earliest proto primates in the world are from Montana and Saskatchewan from the Badlands. So we know that primates evolved from these earlier species 65 million years ago. So can Indigenous people say that we have been here forever since time immemorial? Is that a thought that we can weave through the discussion of human evolution? I always ask students where humans originated or evolved, and they say Africa. Yep. What about primates, Africa? Nope, nobody has this knowledge, right? There are some great researchers out there that are publishing on these early proto primate species.

And it's really important work, but it's important that we discuss that. And we teach that not just about the out of Africa line, but about the global history of early primates, and how they migrated throughout, you know, the globe. So then if we look back and look at specifically the Western Hemisphere, ultimately, what is your sense of how long humans have definitely been living on this continent? I don't think we know, I think we need to be open-minded. So as archaeologists, our job is to research and study the human past. There's nothing in our job description that says you have to deny it, erase it, or dislink people from it. And you see that archaeologists still discuss Indigenous people of the Americas as Asians from Asia, right?

Using those geopolitical terminologies is a really violent and damaging thing to do. Indigenous people, whether they've been here 15,000 years or 150,000 years, they're Indigenous to the continents of the Western Hemisphere. This is where their languages, their cultures, their families grew. This is where they're from. But you don't see archaeologists to this day discussing early people as indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. They continually call them Asians from Asia, right? Asia did not exist or an Asian culture 12,000 years ago. There was no such thing. So why would you do that? I use terminology, the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, the area known today as North America or the area known today as

Asia. But I would never go say to Italy and tell the people there that they were Africans from Africa, right? You wouldn't live very long. So you can see how that would really negatively impact people in other areas, yet that's a common practice here, and archaeologists really need to realize how violent that is, and stop doing it. We are indigenous to the Western Hemisphere. This is where we're from. Maybe our ancestors came from other areas. But those areas at the time were not known as Asia, there were no Asian cultures. So why would you call us Asians from Asia, unless you had some kind of intent? You raise a really important point. And it's sort of a double barreled question. But what what effect

have you observed in indigenous communities when there are stories that reinforce the idea that there has been a much longer human history in this hemisphere than what we're told? I'll tell you a little story. My daughter, my adult daughter, went to a gathering, a young woman's gathering in northern British Columbia. So there's been a lot of challenges for Indigenous people in reclaiming their languages, their ways of life after colonization and after, you know, genocide. And there's a lot of high suicide rates. And so it was always on my mind,

what can we possibly do to support communities in healing? You know, what are the many ways, you know, or even one way that we can support people? And I started thinking about reclaiming our history and relinking people to the land and to their homelands and supporting their own oral traditions of their own history. So, you know, that was always been a part of my work. But my daughter went to this gathering and all of these girls were sitting around in a large circle and they were supposed to discuss one thing that brought them hope, right? This was a sort of a healing thing. What brought them hope? And she said, this girl's face just lit up and she got real excited. And she said, wow, there's

this archaeologist. And she's saying we've been here 50,000 years. And that gives me so much hope that we'll get our land and our identity and everything back. And my daughter said, tee hee hee, I didn't tell her it was my mom. But that told me that the existence of our stories on the land, I call archaeological sites stories on the land that are older than 12,000 years in our ancestral connections between ancient first people and contemporary indigenous people are empowering to Indigenous people. The existence of hundreds of archaeological sites in the Pleistocene creates a dialogue from which Indigenous people can challenge erasures of their histories. It foregrounds their Indigenous identities and their links to the land, and it empowers them in seeking justice. So

to allow that indigenous people have been present in the Western Hemisphere for a much greater time is to support ownership of the past and the present, their lands and material heritage, to accept that indigenous people have been in the Western Hemisphere for over 60,000 years and possibly over 130,000 years is to put them on equal footing with some areas of the so-called old world. Vine Deloria Jr. has a quote in one of his books that said, you know, Indigenous peoples will never be accorded full humanity until they are equated with global history in an ancient time frame. And he made a good point, defining us and creating us as recent immigrants from Asia who just got

here before Columbus, that is very dehumanizing. But to acknowledge that we have been on these continents for thousands and thousands of years, you know, and gone through processes of human evolution and human ingenuity and, you know, the building of great pyramids, the earliest mummies in the world are found in Chile, to acknowledge the science of turning a grass into corn, which now feeds the world everywhere. That's not done often in archaeology. It's certainly not done often enough. So it's very important to acknowledge. But I mean, we're archaeologists. That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to find out the truth we can find out about the human past and teach them. I know that there's a range that you've spoken about. And I wonder if that young woman were to

ask you, like, what is your best guess? What's your best hunch based on all your research so far of what we're talking about in terms of years? I've seen really good evidence, dates taken by the United States Geological Survey that show that levels of soil with tools date to 200,000 years before present. And it's not one site. There's a group of sites in central Mexico around a reservoir that have old dates. There's a group of sites in Southern California. I think we need to remain open-minded, specifically when we go back and we say, wait a minute, early hominids were in Northern Asia 2.1 million years, minimally, some say 2.4 million years. So like the White Sands site now in New Mexico, 23,000, they claimed

it was, you know, the best oldest evidence. It's not, it's great evidence. It's a wonderful site. Those human footprints are amazing, but it's not the oldest evidence in New Mexico. There's another site there that's been argued to be 50,000 years old. And if you've got a site like with human footprints, that's 20 to 23,000 years old, where were those humans living? It had to be around there somewhere. So get out there and look for them, right? Get out there and do the excavations. I think part of the challenge over the years has been, it's been very difficult for archaeologists to get funding. So if the majority of archaeologists violently deny that people were here before 12,000 years, how does any archaeologist get a major funding organization to believe them so they can get funding to excavate older sites quite often when these sites have been

found they've gotten funding for an excavation that was assumed to be ending at 12,000 years and dug deeper right so archaeologists a lot of them have taken a very brave step and look deeper. We shouldn't be stopping. Thomas Stafford is a dating expert in the United States, and he was interviewed about the White Sands site, and he said for many years, archaeologists would send him samples to date and tell him to stop at 13,000 years. Like, tell him to stop. We don't want to know of any, there's nothing older and we don't want to know if it is. That is not archaeology. That's blatant racism and blocking of Indigenous histories. And that really needs to stop. And I just, my hopes are that people will just somehow miraculously become open-minded and look at the actual data and the actual science rather than stopping in a specific time frame because that's what's accepted by a bunch of Eurocentric archaeologists.

In your book, you write about research as ceremony. Can you explain what that means? Yeah. Sean Wilson is Cree. He teaches in Australia. And he wrote a book called Research as Ceremony. And research as ceremony, you include respect, relationality and reciprocity. If research is not going to give back to a community, why bother doing it, right? So research is not owned by or for the benefit of somebody's academic career. Research needs to be reciprocal and do something good or provide something that the community wants. And respect, right? We go out with respect. We offer tobacco. We say prayers. We ask our ancestors, is it okay to excavate in this area? What do you want us to know? Every community has their own Indigenous method and

theory for doing research, their own ethical guidelines. That's not something that's included in Western research, which is owned and controlled by the researcher. But for indigenous people, it's for community. So it's really important for indigenous scholars and for up-and-coming students to realize that there's a way, a good way that they can do this. We call it Pimatsowin, living the good life. So, in carrying out my research as ceremony, I've learned that stories often weave through intricate webs of experience that link back in many ways to the questions that I've asked. In this, I've learned the value of silence from which one must always be willing and ready to listen to the questions that I've asked. In this, I've learned the value of silence from which one must always be willing and ready to listen to the spirit world, to our ancestors who guide us.

In my research, I've listened to the pain of people's disconnects from the land, their identities, and their past. I've listened to the spirits of ancestral sites, of which there are thousands covering the Western Hemisphere. I have listened to Indigenous elders who have informed me of the work I have been given to do. I have listened to the questions from many students who found that traditional Western archaeological stories of initial peopling of the Western Hemisphere did not make any sense to them. For me, this has been an epic journey across thousands of years, unearthing histories that were buried beneath a dark veil of colonial oppression. Many archaeological sites have been destroyed without being recorded, yet thousands of Pleistocene archaeological sites

holding Indigenous people's stories of the past were kept safe within the land. There are many stories held within the land that are waiting to be told. We just need to step up and reclaim our histories and retell our stories and hope that archaeologists will get out of the mind frames of colonization and become open-minded to the human history of the Western Hemisphere. Thank you so much, Paulette. Extraordinary to listen to you. Thank you for much, Paulette. Extraordinary to listen to you. Thank you for having me. You were listening to an interview with Paulette Steeves, author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere.

Thanks to Stephen and Kathleen Holan of the Center for American Paleolithic Research and to Tom Williams of the Gould School of Archaeological Research. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for more information about all of the guests on today's program and to see some of the artifacts at the heart of the debate over how long people have been on this land. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad.