Upstream - Decolonizing Archaeology with Dr. Paulette Steeves

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Colonialism and white supremacy have shaped the field of archaeology from its inception — and to this day continue to dominate the cultural and scientific paradigms of this field of study. One of the most significant ways that this has shown up in the discipline is through the hegemony of a single theory — the Clovis First Hypothesis — which claims that the Americas were populated roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago — and not earlier.  In her book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, Dr. Paulette Steeves meticulously deconstructs and dispels the myth that human beings have only been in the Americas for ten thousand years. She builds on decades of research which has been suppressed and erroneously refuted by those in the field who have never wanted to accept the fact that the Indigenous people of the Americas have been here for much, much longer than was ever admitted by the most influential and powerful archaeologists. Dr. Paulette Steeves is an Indigenous archaeologist, professor at Algoma University, and the Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation. In this Conversation, we discuss exciting new findings in the fields of archaeology and paleontology and what they tell us about the real history of Indigenous people in the Americas, the ways that white supremacy and racism still permeate the fields of anthropology and archaeology, what a decolonized archaeology could look like, and how to get there. Thank you to Willie Mitchell and the Desert River Band for the intermission music and to Bethan Mure for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh those days, but it is still a child of those days, a child of colonialism. And when it comes to Indigenous people, there's no shortage of documentation on how archaeology dehumanized Indigenous people,

erased their cultural identities, erase their distinct cultural differences to create a simple group of savages. And we're still working to erase that damage. And it's not safe for archaeologists, specifically archaeologists of color, to discuss that. A lot of archaeologists find it distasteful. Oh, we don't need to discuss that history. Well, if we're trying to make

changes and we're trying to build paths to healing for everybody, we need to discuss why, right? And the history of racism and bias in archaeology has to be discussed so that we can understand how to change that and how to heal. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Colonialism and white supremacy have shaped the field of archaeology from its inception, and to this day continue to dominate the cultural and scientific paradigms of this field of study. One of the most significant ways that this has shown up in the discipline is through the hegemony of a single theory, the Clovis First Hypothesis, which claims that the Americas were populated roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and not earlier. In her book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere,

Dr. Paulette Steeves meticulously deconstructs and dispels the myth that human beings have only been in the Americas for 10,000 years. She builds on decades of research which has been suppressed and erroneously refuted by those in the field who have never wanted to accept the fact that the indigenous people of the Americas have been here for much, much longer than was ever admitted by the most influential and powerful archaeologists. Dr. Paulette Steeves is an indigenous archaeologist, professor at Algoma University, and the Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation. In this conversation, we discuss exciting new findings in the fields of archaeology and paleontology and what they tell us about the real history of indigenous people in the Americas, the ways that white

supremacy and racism still permeate the fields of anthropology and archaeology, what a decolonized archaeology could look like, and how to get there. Here's Robert in conversation with Dr. Paulette Steeves. Hi, Paulette. It is great to have you on Upstream. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, and to start, I'm wondering if you could maybe just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Tell us a bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Well, my name is Dr. Paulette Steeves. I'm Cree Métis.

I was born in the Yukon and I grew up in a small town called Lillooet, British Columbia. Prior to starting this work, I wasn't raised to be a person who would go to college or university or do research. You know, I was raised in a typical Cree-Métis disenfranchised family. And we did, though, live in Lillooet around many Indigenous communities, and all of my friends were Indigenous. So we didn't live on the reservation or in our traditional community, but I was surrounded by a lot of very gracious and very knowledgeable elders. In 1988, I was going through a really hard time, and I went to visit with an elder, Leonard Sampson, who was a close friend of my family, and I asked for his counsel and guidance, and he told me, he said the elders in the local community

had watched me grow up, and he said they know I had a different future than a lot of the local children, and that what I would do in the future would be difficult. And he told they know I had a different future than a lot of the local children and that what I would do in the future would be difficult. And he told me what I was going through at the time was training to learn to deal with very difficult situations. Because he said what I would do in the future would really benefit Indigenous people, not just our local communities, all Indigenous people. But he said it would be even harder than what I was going through at the time. And at the time, I was a newly divorced single parent with three kids, one terminally ill, a truck, and 26 cents. I couldn't imagine anything more difficult.

But I never forgot his words. And when I was graduating with my PhD in 2015, I realized what he meant. Oh, the job I was given to do was to rewrite indigenous histories of the Americas. And in doing that, in starting that, I started graduate school in a molecular program, a genetics program, and found that it wasn't really meshing with what I knew of ethical practices. And so I switched to archaeology. And when I started thinking about archaeological discussions and the violence I have heard of against archaeologists who published on earlier sites in the Western

Hemisphere, and such a strong denial of the earlier sites, it got me interested in earlier sites. And then I began to realize the high degree of bias and colonialism in archaeology against early sites. And it did not make any sense to me that humans had traveled to places such as Australia and Northern Asia. We know at least 60,000 years ago, but that was absolutely denied for the Americas. And our job as archaeologists is to understand the human past. And we certainly cannot understand a human history that is denied before it is even thoroughly investigated. So I knew of one archaeologist, Steve Holan at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And so I emailed him, cold emailed him, I didn't know him,

and asked him if he knew of any sites older than Clovis. And he told me, well, I'll send you a list of about 10 sites. But he said, don't tell people what you're researching. They're just going to call you crazy. So he sent me the name of 10 sites and I got the published papers and I read on the sites. And every time I'd read about one site, I'd learn about another site. And after numerous published academic journal articles, I had a list of over 500 sites that predated Clovis. And that was far too many for this to be just bad archaeology or an anomaly.

And, you know, they were spread out through the Americas. And really, the archaeologists that had done that work and published on those sites had a long, long history of doing very good archaeology. So it really got me fired up because it really limited the time for Indigenous people, and it cleaved their links to their homelands, and it didn't agree with a lot of their oral traditions. So there was just so much evidence to consider. It got me really excited. It got me really fired up that, you know, do we really have such a high level of white supremacy in archaeology that the entire deep history of two continents, North and South America, is absolutely denied? And that doesn't matter what your background is.

That doesn't sit right with a lot of people. So that really got me going and got me onto the path that I know now that I was meant to follow. Yeah, thank you so much for that. You just covered so much important and rich ground. So I majored in anthropology and, you know, I took some archaeology classes as an undergrad and, well, just sort of always remember that it felt like pretty settled that human beings had only been here in the Americas for about 10 or 11,000 years. And before we get into sort of your research and your journey and what you've discovered and what you're uncovering, I think

it would be helpful to orient ourselves on this idea of the mainstream narrative in anthropology and archaeology around when human beings first arrived in the Americas. So yeah, I'm wondering if you could just outline that for us, what the traditional sort of understanding is in mainstream science and that has been that way for decades and decades now. And also maybe if you could outline what the Clovis first hypothesis is. In the late 1800s is when archaeology really started to get going in the Americas. And it was carried out mostly by, you know, treasure hunters and people that wanted to collect relics and lawyers with money that could do this.

And then Alex Herlishko was the first archaeologist for the Smithsonian Museum. He was a physical archaeologist. He didn't train in archaeology. He trained as a doctor. But he argued that people had only been in the Americas for 3,000 years. And because he was the archaeologist for the Smithsonian, his word held great sway over everybody. everybody. And then Jesse Figgins from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science found out about a site that had actually been discovered by a African-American cowboy in New Mexico. And anyways, Figgins went to check this site out and he found stone tools in the rib of a bison

that had been extinct for over 10,000 years. And this was near Clovis, New Mexico. So subsequently, that type of tool technology with a nice flute in the middle of the stone tool were called Clovis tools. And Figgins had to argue with people for a few years, and he never did convince Herlishka that people had been here over 10,000 years. But he convinced enough people that in the late 1920s,

it became accepted that, as they said, the Indians had been here for at least 10,000 years. It's been stuck there for 100 years. And so archaeologists have held this Clovis first hypothesis in high regard for over 100 years. And if you look around the rest of the world and see how much our understanding of human history has changed over 100 years, it's been immense. But it's not changed in North America. So the majority of archaeologists have historically supported a timeframe of000 to 12,000 years for humans being in the Americas. And the Clovis hypothesis claims that the first people to enter the Western Hemisphere

walked across the Bering landmass near the end of the late glacial maximum. However, every tenant of the Clovis first hypothesis has been disproven as incorrect. And one of the most glaring issues is that if, you know, people were going to migrate to a new continent, just like mammals, we have a really strong history of mammalian migrations, they wouldn't do it for 1000s of miles during a glaciation or at the end of a glaciation when the land has not had time to regenerate a viable landscape with food for humans and mammals. But archaeologists invented the Clovis people from the Clovis tool. So Clovis tools were subsequently discovered throughout North America and some parts of South America, an archaeologist invented this story of the Clovis people, which assumes that there was a pan-hemispheric wide cultural group of people.

And we don't see that anywhere in the world ever. A cultural group of people is usually a regional area. You know, there are differences in language and foods and customs and in housing and spiritual practices. But really, the only place the Clovis people ever existed was in the wildest imagination of the archaeological mine. And what that did was it erased the immense diversity of Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. And the Clovis tool was a technology that was shared. Like so many other places in the world, it's well known that one group of people will share technologies with other people who will adopt it. So the Clovis first hypothesis

is being disproven. And there's a wonderful group of scientists, including a biologist and environmentalist that have shown that it was completely impossible that, you know, people came here at that time and then populated the continents in as little as 200 years. And so, right, as you said, the Clovis first hypothesis has been largely disproved. And yeah, I'm wondering, so you've shared what's wrong with that narrative. And what you're putting forth as an alternative and much more accurate explanation is that humans have been in the Americas for much, much longer than just 12,000 years or so. And we'll get much more into why that mainstream narrative has become so predominant. Spoiler alert, colonialism and white supremacy have played a part. But yeah, I'm wondering if you would be able to just get into

more detail about what the more current consensus is moving towards, what we might be able to call perhaps a new paradigm in this field of science, what that's really suggesting. a new paradigm in this field of science, what that's really suggesting. Yeah, I don't think we can even limit it to a new paradigm. I think there's going to be many paradigms. And I've always said, I'm not that interested in where people came from. Indigenous people are indigenous to the continents of the Western Hemisphere and have been so for thousands of years. This is where they're from.

It's really unfortunate that archaeologists and geneticists still use very damaging terms. And this, to me, is really racist. It's based in completely illogical thought that Indigenous people are Asians from Asia. Asia did not exist 12,000 years ago, neither did Asian as a distinct cultural group. So I would say Indigenous peoples may have had ancestors that came from the area we know today as Asia, but I would never say they were Asians from Asia. of the world, you might get your throat cut if you went to Italy and said, oh, you're just Africans from Africa. How do you think they would react? But that is never considered in America. So I'm really hoping that through some of my publications, archaeologists will learn to be a lot more careful about how they apply terminologies and words to Indigenous people. But I mean, there's been archaeological evidence of human occupation in South America that dates to the same time as the Clovis cultural materials.

And so for people to have been throughout South America at the same time as Clovis, they had to be here for a long time prior to that. have archaeologists in 2022 publishing arguments against people being here earlier than 13,000 years and saying we've only been here 13,000 years. That's really ludicrous, given the amount of evidence. And it's highly unlikely that Indigenous people or Clovis people would have moved down within 200 years to cover every area of South America and the Amazon. I think that human migrations on a global scale, people migrated different ways at different times. And people were across North America from coast to coast and north to south during Clovis times. So how can you say they just arrived here during Clovis times, you have to really look at the environment, look at the paleo environment and think about where people were because the Clovis tool is being defined to a very short timeframe of about 500 years,

between 10,800 and 11,200 or 300 years. So we know that was the timeline for Clovis tools. So we have to back up from all those sites and say, how long did it take people to create this tool technology, because it was created in the Americas, that's now been proven, and for it to spread that far and that fast, you know, and people were obviously already in those areas. So human migrations on a global scale testify to the ability of early humans to travel great distances. So there's numerous sites in the area we know today as Asia that date to earlier than 24,000 years, and some date to as early as 2 million years before present. So we know that humans traveled 2 million years ago, over 14,000 kilometers from Africa to areas we know today as Northern Asia. So they were very

capable of travel, of migrations, of adapting to new environments. And we're supposed to believe that even though early humans were in the area we know as northern asia over two million years ago they didn't cross that 57 mile piece of land that linked the eastern and western hemispheres until 12 000 years ago when when we were still in the grips of a glacial maximum none of that makes any sense so it's um there's not yet a new paradigm. And I would suggest it would be not one event. It wouldn't be one linear event. Human history throughout the globe is not simple. It's not a simple linear event, A, B, C, D. People went out like vines of an ivy that just go everywhere. People travel, they learn new environments,

they built new types of shelters, they left their signal on the land everywhere they went. And so I don't think it will be one paradigm. I think it has to be an overall view of a number of paradigms of places where we find signals of humans on the land, including the East Coast, the West Coast, South America, North America, we have to remain open-minded to the possibilities of early humans. But we do know that there is solid evidence for people being present in the

Americas prior to the beginning of the last glacial maximum. So prior to 24,000 years ago, the paleo environment in the northern hemisphere was much like a subtropical forest, and there were land connections. So at different times in between glacial events, we know there was a land connection. And we know that because we know from the paleontological record, we know that horses evolved first in the Americas. And to get to the rest of the world, they had to cross a landmass. Camels evolved in the Americas. Sabertooth cats evolved in the Americas. They don't get to the rest of the world without crossing a landmass. So there's a lot of really great evidence within our four-legged relations histories for the timeframes and possibilities

also for human migrations. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting how you're mentioning about the differences in landscapes in the pre-ice age climate and sort of like what that means for our current understandings of how people were moving around. And yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I was talking to a friend of the podcast, Shumani to Bluebird, one of the guests in our last documentary episode exploring indigenous resistance and regeneration movements. And he's an Oglala Lakota activist. And he was telling me about stories he's heard growing up of the Black Hills, you know, in South Dakota being a jungle. And that's just like, well, we'll get into the whole conversation around traditional oral histories and how they're oftentimes discarded and ignored by mainstream

science, despite the fact that they're like such a rich and important part of understanding the past. But yeah, the next topic I'd like to dive into with you is that despite the fact that there's been evidence accumulating for a very long time, disproving the Clovis first hypothesis, evidence strongly suggesting that people have been here much longer, this evidence was always suppressed and was always pushed out. And I'm wondering if you can just talk about that and the role of white supremacy and colonialism in the field of archaeology more generally. Yeah, this has been denied for so long, not just denied, but violently denied. So this area of archaeology in the Americas has been discussed as an area of academic suicide. So think about that. Why would any area of research be so dangerous that it would be

discussed as academic suicide? I can't remember the name of the scholar, but there was one white scholar who said that, you know, the longer that Indigenous people are linked to a specific land area, the stronger are their rights to that area. So archaeologists have owned the archaeological record. They've owned all the archaeological artifacts. This is their financial capital. Our history, our artifacts, our sites became the financial capital for white Eurocentric archaeologists to build their careers on. And from the earliest archaeologists who said we'd only been here 3,000 years to the current, they uphold each other, right?

Colonialism pays and hires the people that support colonialism. You can look at the history of archaeology, and I talk about it in chapter two of my book, but the reason that the Nazis came up with the plan they did for the Holocaust and genocide was based on the work of American archaeologists who wrote books called Up from the Ape, you know, was one of their books. And these early archaeologists created characteristics of different primary races, with the indigenous being the most savage and most uncivilized. And the longer that we've been in an area, the longer that we've been evolving in an area, the working to keep us from claiming the land, claiming the artifacts in the land, claiming our history and our links to the land. So it's about power and control,

and white supremacy has ruled over the histories of Indigenous people from day one, when the stories began that all of the mounds, and like just in Minnesota alone, there were 12,000 mounds. But early archaeologists stated they were built by Europeans or even Africans, but certainly not by indigenous people. And that didn't begin to change until in the 40s and 50s. And after the Holocaust, some archaeologists tried to move archaeology away from the work of creating races and creating undesirables and creating, there was an office of eugenics in New York State. And it was seen as quite acceptable that if somebody didn't fit into the white scholar's idea of a reasonable person, then it would be fine to kill them. So archaeology in

North America has come a long way since those days, but it is still a child of those days, a child of colonialism. And when it comes to Indigenous people, there's no shortage of documentation on how archaeology dehumanized indigenous people, erased their cultural identities, erased their distinct cultural differences to create a simple group of savages. And we're still working to erase that damage. And it's not safe for archaeologists, specifically archaeologists of color, to discuss that. A lot of archaeologists find it distasteful. Oh, weologists of color to discuss that a lot of archaeologists find it distasteful oh we don't need to discuss that history well if we're trying to make changes and we're trying to build paths to healing for everybody we need to discuss why right and the

history of racism and bias in archaeology has to be discussed so that we can understand how to change that and how to heal. I had my research assistants do a huge survey of archaeology programs last year, and I was looking to see, are there any archaeology programs that require a course on Indigenous history to get your degree in archaeology. Because when you get your undergraduate degree in archaeology in the Americas, basically it becomes a license to go out and work as a field archaeologist and excavate those sites with cultural management firms that excavate sites when they're in processes of road building,

pipe building, construction, anything that's going to be disturbed, you have to assess the archaeology. And I worked in that field for five years before graduate school. And I can tell you that I worked with a few hundred archaeologists and not a single one of them had ever taken a course on Indigenous history. So you have all these archaeologists digging up sites throughout North America, and not a single one that I knew had taken a course on Indigenous history. And to this day, they are not required to take a course. They are offered a few electives.

They are offered a few tidbits of Indigenous history and knowledge, but no one is required. If you went to do work, say, in the area of Greece, you would have to have all the courses of Greek history, or you would not be allowed to do archaeology in that country. I know people that have been refused and sent back to the Americas. So it's not like there isn't a precedent sent in other places in the world where you need to have a background in the history of the people of that area to do the archaeology there. But that still is not happening in North America. And so you can see there is still a lot of bias and control in the field on what is taught, what is valued, and what is important.

on what is taught, what is valued, and what is important. So it seems pretty apparent that the history of archaeology is intimately tied up with white supremacy and colonization, and that it's baked into the foundation of the field, and really not just something of the past, right? It's definitely something that continues. And I want to talk about that continuation a bit more shortly, but I also want to maybe just get into a couple of specific examples of the ways that scientists and their science was suppressed for sort of going against the traditional or the Clovis first hypothesis. And can you maybe give us some specific examples of folks whose research was suppressed and maybe even, you know, who were threatened? folks whose research was suppressed and maybe even, you know, who were threatened?

Tom Dillehay has done the Monte Verde site in Chile, which is just, you know, we would call it a rock star site. The preservation was absolutely amazing. There was food, there was plants, there were tools, there were structures. I mean, you just had so much evidence there that it's really an incredible site. The problem with the site is that it predated Clovis. So when he first published on the site, you know, and he talks about it himself, a lot of archaeologists do that when they get older dates, they can't believe it. And then they have this moment like, oh, I'm really in trouble now. And we shouldn't think that way. We should just celebrate sites. And you know, especially if you have such an amazing site like Monte Verde with so many, so much strong evidence. But Tom Dillehay lost his funding. He had his funding pulled and he had to fight to get it back. And

he had to have the archaeologists that were criticizing him come to the site and see what he was doing because, you know, he had done great work. He had a good reputation, but that's not enough. If you publish on anything that's older than Clovis, you better be God himself because otherwise, you know, nobody's going to believe you. Even people like Louis Leakey, so the famous archaeologist, paleontologist, who found a lot of early humans in South Africa and created this amazing leaky foundation. This is a man that knows the earth, he knows the soils, he knows an artifact. And he came and worked on the Calico site in Southern California. And when he said it has,

levels between 50,000 and 200,000 years, he was called a crazy old man who was just, you know, an alcoholic cheating on his wife. So he was absolutely dehumanized. And any archaeologist that has published on a site that's older than Clovis has expressed their emotions of fear as soon as they found those dates. But I really owe a debt of gratitude to those archaeologists that had the fortitude to publish even though they knew they'd be severely attacked. And, you know, understanding human history, severely attacking people is not a part of it. Criticizing people, you know, and finding ways that maybe they can create better evidence or do more testing is great. You know, that's what we should be doing. There should never be a fear

to discuss what you know to be the scientific truth and facts in archaeology anywhere in the world. But that is the absolute gold standard in North American archaeology. If you're going to publish on a site that's older than 11,000 to 12,000 years before present, you are going to be severely persecuted. So for the Ceretti site in Southern California near San Diego, Richard Ceretti and Steve Holan and a number of others curated those artifacts at a museum, I think, for over a decade, waiting for new dating technology to get to a place where it could absolutely not be questioned. So this, you know, site was excavated and found and it was in very,

very old soils. And when they finally did get those artifacts dated, the site dated to over 130,000 years before present. They never thought they would get a publisher to publish that, but they did. I believe it came out in Nature or Science. And of course, they were immediately and violently critiqued and attacked. But they knew that was coming. They were prepared. And I think they did very good work. I personally went and studied the artifacts and the history of that site. It was a part of my dissertation, and I fully support their analysis of that site, but there

should not be a fear. And with all of the evidence, and now we have the White Sands site where you have footprints that date to over 20 or 23,000 years, right? The question is not about the footprints. I think they did good work. They dated seeds between the toes of the footprints. The footprints were there along with the footprints of many extinct species. Rather than attack it, why are people not looking around? Well, where did the people that left these footprints live? Let's go find their sites and find and date more evidence, right? But no,

it is immediately and violently attacked. And I weighed in on the film that was recently released on that site. And, you know, sometimes you don't realize the level of violence and the level of denial. Like, I'm so busy doing research, I don't always pay attention to it. But Creator has a way of bringing things to our attention. And so I was accidentally tagged in a couple of email change where I saw Indigenous archaeologists saying that, you know, we hadn't been here more than 12,000 years ago. And when I look at those Indigenous archaeologists' history, I realize that their supervisors, the people that trained them, were adamant Clovis First people that denied earlier history. So this is still being perpetrated in North American archaeology, which is incredibly sad. And I'm really glad that

my book got out there, that a lot of, you know, faculty are using it, that it's actually received really good reviews. There hasn't been any over-aggressive reviews. I'm sure there's been a lot of ignoring it. But, you know, an archaeologist from the Smithsonian reviewed it and said it's a must read and, you know, really supportive because the amount of evidence that's accumulated is just immense. I probably know now of over 4,000 sites in North and South America that predate Clovis. And the other thing that should be very obvious to archaeologists is that when you disconnect people from their homelands, you deny their identity, you deny their homelands, you deny their oral traditions, you're doing harm, right?

And there's no reason to do that. There is no reason whatsoever for the denial of people being here prior to the last glacial maximum, prior to 24,000 years. You have people in areas we know today as Northern Asia from 24,000 to 2 million years. That's 57 miles across from the tip of Alaska. You have mammals coming and going. You have hundreds of sites. Why would you continue to deny it? That why is linked to bias and racism in American archaeology.

You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Dr. Paulette Steeves, author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. We'll be right back. I see the tree sitting round the fire Burning grass and chanting to himself The only sound you heard was someone talking And the sound of the fire making love Leaving side their soul

the spirits listening Keeping them in line with nature's own Up above the silver bow is gleaming Giving light to guide us through the night Ah, but now we have

an ugly spirit And he walks around in a good disguise And he comes in the color of our people you can always see it in their eyes killing their mind, killing their kind always wonder if they do mind killing their mind, killing their kind

always wonder if they do mind killing their mind, killing their kind always wonder if they do mind Killing the mind, killing the kind Always wonder if they do mind Killing the mind, killing the kind Always wonder if they do mind when they're confused Thank you. That was Killing Your Mind by Willie Mitchell and the Desert River Band. Now back to our conversation with Dr. Paulette Steeves, author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. Before the break, you mentioned that your book has actually been received pretty positively,

which is not at all a surprise. I mean, it's a fantastic book. I guess I'm just curious, though, more broadly about your own personal journey and what kind of pushback you've received in the past, just in general, in response to your work. Well, archaeologists do two things when they don't accept something. They either ignore it or they push back against it. I'm Indigenous. If you push back against me, the Indigenous community is going to see that. Who do archaeologists want to make friends with now,

specifically since NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, and specifically since all the social media and obvious discussions around, we need to work with Indigenous people, we need to respect Indigenous people. So I don't, I think that, you know, a lot of scientists or archaeologists don't want to come off as being disrespectful. So they just ignore me. But like I say, I get their real view coming to me in different ways, through different people, through students, through word of mouth, and through accidentally linked email chains. So I know who accepts my work and who doesn't. I know who's being silent, and I know who's stood up and reviewed my book and gave it a good review or, you know, highlighted any issues they find for archaeologists.

And I know who's actually willing to work with Indigenous people to support them, not just to build their own career. So I see a lot that other people don't see. But we live in a big world. And my book has gone worldwide. It's a pricey book for a lot of people. It'll be coming out in soft cover next year. And it be coming out in soft cover next year. And it's coming out in soft cover because of its popularity. So that's a really good sign. I really want my book to get into the hands of a lot of people, a lot of indigenous people, and a lot of students who are still taught that we've only been here 12,000 years. I want them to read it and learn to think critically for themselves. And I'm working on a new database that will be spun into numerous publications.

I've been asked to do a few more books, and I'm working on things as fast as I can. But the database is not going to shrink. It's going to keep expanding. And I see now that other archaeologists are less fearful of speaking out. So we have a site in Mexico. That site dates to over 30,000 years. And there's a number of sites in Maryland and along the East Coast that date over 20,000 years. Dennis Stanford initially was a strong Clovis firster.

Dennis Stanford initially was a strong Clovis firster. He changed his mind after finding evidence along the East Coast of salutary points. And salutary points are known from an area that we know today as Southern France. They're a big, beautiful laurel leaf point. And he realized that this was likely the very same point and that, you know, 23,000 years ago, there was a lot less water. The entire continental shelf was dry land. So the migration route across possible ice or water was much shorter. So he realized a possibility, and he began to tell the truth about that, which is great. I had someone tell me just a couple weeks ago, oh, well, we can't talk about the salutary

points because archaeologists are going to claim Europeans settled North America. Hello. I really have to bite my lip with people sometimes because Europe did not exist 23,000 years ago. Neither did Europeans. You had indigenous people in those areas, just like you had indigenous people here. Europeans cannot be said to have populated North America when they didn't exist. But this is how embedded these discussions from archaeologists are.

They're immediately going to stop any talk about finding tools and sites that date to 23,000 years on the east coast of North America, because somebody is going to claim they were Europeans, when those highly educated archaeologists know that Europeans did not exist 23,000 years ago. And so that's really so simple to counter what a lot of archaeologists say that it's ludicrous because they begin to talk like uneducated children when they make those kinds of statements. Mm, yeah. And so, yeah, just to clarify, the solutarian points, they are indicative of potentially

people having come to North America over the Atlantic Ocean area from what's now known as Europe, which to me is just like so interesting and fascinating. And like, it's just so exciting when you think about all of the different paths and all the different journeys and all the different research that's pointing to like new ways of thinking about these things and in a field that was so constrained for so long by this one hypothesis, right? And yeah, I just, I find it all so fascinating and exciting. Yeah, Dennis Stanford put out a book and a film called Across Atlantic Ice. You know, the water levels were 300 to 400 feet lower than today.

The entire continental shelf was land. People were living out there. I did a huge study of that area for six tribes in the Northeast and showed the government of the United States that the entire area has the possibility of having cultural artifacts. Thus, when you are thinking about doing any work on the continental shelf, like drilling to put in windmills, you have to consider you may disturb cultural content on the land. And their oral traditions also link them to specific islands and place on that land so it is it's really interesting and if you ask you know inuit people from the north today how far across the ice could they travel for how long there's no

limit right this is what they do this is how they live So people that are adapted to those environments could cover areas of ice to migrate across the Atlantic because the Atlantic was much, much smaller at the time. And we have to be open to considering these possibilities when we find the exact same tool on the east coast of North America that we find in what today we know as southern France, right? America that we find in what today we know as Southern France, right? That means that Indigenous people may have been traveling back and forth both ways and sharing tools and technology. And that's another thing that people are stuck on. It's like one-way traffic. People came across and that was it. No, there's been two-way traffic for millions of years. We know that from mammals, right? And we look in other areas of the world, people are coming and going back and forth all the time. And so we really have to be open-minded about understanding the possibilities of human migrations to and from the Western to the Eastern Hemisphere. And so we've mentioned Indigenous oral histories a couple times now.

And I'd like to get a little bit more into that because a lot of the times these oral traditions have been ignored in traditional official accounts, and they oftentimes refute the more mainstream science. And so yeah, I'm wondering, like, what is the significance of traditional oral histories? And how do they butt up against these narratives of like the Clovis first hypothesis? And why haven't they been accepted as like meaningful and legitimate forms of evidence? Well, for a lot of global populations, like European populations, stopped using oral traditions as a main form of documenting history a long time ago. Indigenous people have never stopped. Their capacity to hold stories in their mind and pass them on for thousands of years has always remained. So we know there's a lot of oral traditions that include discussions of extinct species.

So when we hear that, we know that these people, people's ancestors passed on these oral traditions over, say, 10,000 and some people argue 40,000 years. over, say, 10,000, and some people argue 40,000 years. And there's a particular site along the Palm de Terre River that the Osage had an oral tradition of a battle between the great beasts. And so it became dangerous to go on the land. There were too many of these big beasts. And one day the beasts had a huge fight, the beasts from the east and the ones from the west. So these would have been mammoths and mastodons. And a lot of them killed each other. And then there were fewer, and the Osage should go on the land again, which they really appreciated. So they burned a lot of the bodies of those great beasts to honor them. And then every year, they had a ceremony at that exact site in memory of those beasts and thanking them.

And that's called the Kissimwick site. And when archaeologists got around to excavating that site, they found many stone tools and many burned bones of mammoths and mastodons. So this is one case where we can show that oral tradition supports the archaeological record, right? That these two things match pretty much exactly what happened at that site. So we know that oral traditions are legitimate. There's been a lot of oral traditions about floods, about volcanoes, that some geologists and biologists have linked to oral traditions.

So we know that Indigenous people have had the ability to pass on history across time, across thousands of years. For non-Indigenous scholars or for white scholars, they don't understand Indigenous languages. They don't understand Indigenous thought. Many of them have never met an Indigenous people, and they've been taught that Indigenous people are not intelligent, are not highly evolved, and so they don't believe oral traditions. And I think that's still a part of racism in American archaeology that we need to change, and we need to pay a lot more attention to Indigenous people's knowledge about their own histories. There's songs that sing about mammoths. There are dances that mimic mammoths, right? There's rock art all over the country with depictions of mammoths and horses and extinct species. These are recorded histories.

These are like libraries on the land. There is a lot of Indigenous knowledge that tells us about Indigenous people's histories. And if Indigenous people have an oral tradition that say they have been here forever then listen to them and try to understand that when you think about forever nova has a clip a video clip online about human evolution and they have this uh blonde student looking guy with feathers on talking about you know our earliest human. And he goes through Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Australopithecines, and he goes all the way back to primates. And he ends up with the oldest primates in the world being our earliest human ancestors. And you know what? Those primates are from Montana. So have we been here forever? Yes. We're saying the same thing. Indigenous people

are saying the same thing that Western scientists are saying. But when Western scientists say it, it's accepted. When they say it, it's not accepted. They also say we came from the stars. What is the Big Bang Theory? Everything began with an interplanetary event, and everything, all life began, it came from the stars. When Western scientists say it, they call it the Big Bang Theory and it's scientifically sound. When Indigenous people say it, it's ignored. But Indigenous people were saying this for thousands of years before Western

science even existed. They've had these stories, they've had science, they've had technology, they've had a documentation of their history for thousands and thousands of years before any Western science existed. When I think of that, I start to think about how can I understand their ways of knowing, doing, and being, and documenting science so that I can inform what I do very robustly and very holistically with both Western and Indigenous science and knowledge. And I don't just silence that one side because I don't understand it. I try to learn more about it. And I think it's going to come down to archaeology programs need to change what they teach. They need to require students to take

courses on indigenous history and knowledge, and they need to take the time to learn about it themselves. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. And I guess, yeah, just I would like to offer a couple of examples of this that I've come across sort of in my personal experience. And so one of them is like, i remember seeing this movie a few years ago called contiki and it's about the contiki expedition that was a journey in like the 1940s a raft journey like a balsa wood raft journey across the pacific ocean from south america to the polynesian islands led by a nor explorer Thor Heyerdahl. And so the whole idea was he was out to prove the claim by the indigenous people in these Polynesian islands that they had actually

come to the islands from South America. So from the East, not from the West. And this is something that was part of their traditional oral histories, but the mainstream sort of consensus in the scientific world was like, absolutely not. They came here from like other islands to the West. There's no way they could have crossed the Pacific Ocean. And so like this expedition was successful, like this raft made it from South America to the Polynesian islands. And it was like seen as this big moment where it was like, oh, you know, maybe the Polynesians were right this whole time. have some like Norwegian explorer prove that, right? Like we could have just trusted the received wisdom of generations and generations of people. But yeah, I mean, so just another example of like, you know, this weird sort of like almost white saviorism mixed up with like white supremacist science and not trusting and believing like their own, like the Polynesian people's own accounts of how they came to these islands in the first place.

But yeah, so another example of this that I'm thinking about is, yeah, so I'm thinking about Ernie LaPointe, who is the great grandson of the legendary Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who just a few years ago had to actually take a DNA test to prove his ancestry. And, you know, I don't know, I don't think it was ever really contested point that he was Sitting Bull's great grandson. But like, you know, and it was done by this Danish evolutionary geneticist, like, as far as I know, like a white guy. And, you know, it just, again, like, just so dismissive of traditional culture and history, oral history. And, you know, Ernie LaPointe's response to this was, quote, people have been questioning our relationship to our ancestors as long as I can remember. These people are just a

pain in the place you sit. So a pain in the ass. And we'll probably doubt these findings also. And like, you know, I don't know. I could be wrong, but I just I don't feel like it's that common in terms of like, I don't know, European ancestry to like have to take DNA tests. And maybe I don't know enough about that, but it just seems like the whole thing is a big dismissal of this idea of oral traditional histories and oral culture. And yeah, I don't know. I'm just, I guess I wonder what you think about that. Yeah. So I know that some European people take DNA tests to prove links to famous ancestors, but it's not required of them to support that they're European. They don't have to prove they're European.

For an Indigenous person or any person with a documented family history, whether it's written down or oral, this should not be required to have to do DNA to prove their ancestry or their links to their ancestors. And even like within the case of the ancient one, Kennewick Man, he was not returned to the tribes for burials for years until they could prove through DNA that, yes, he was indigenous. Like I knew in the 90s he was indigenous because the federal government sent 18 specialists to look at those remains when they were first found in Washington state. And Professor Rose that I was working with at the time was one of those

specialists. And he came back and said, yeah, he looks like someone from the Northeast, Great Plains, Great Basin. And obviously, if it's over 9000 years old, and he's in the Americas, he's indigenous, you know, but archaeologists filed for those, you know, a lawsuit to own those human remains and do research on them, and then drew pictures of them making them look like Jean-Luc Picard and claiming he looked Caucasian. And I think it was that same geneticist that did this work, although I know that I'm not his favorite researcher, because I critique, you know, what they do. But um, yeah, I mean, DNA finally did prove that Kennewick man was, you know, affiliated to the peoples of the Northwest, but I never doubted it. And I don't think that DNA research was required. And it's like white

supremacy, white power, white control, unless the white people say it's not right. No matter what the indigenous people claim, there's getting to be a few indigenous geneticists now. But genetics is a very, it's not archaeology. So it can't give you the proof that people were in a certain place at a certain time, it gives you ideas. But geneticists have less than one 10th or 1% of the DNA of the ancient populations of the Americas, and less than probably 5% of the contemporary population. You can't base an entire history of two continents on less than one-tenth of 1% or even 5% of the data. But they make these overreaching claims that were all related to people from Asia. Asia didn't exist, remember? And you don't have the data. So it's also a field where people really need to put on

their critical thinking caps when they read those broad reaching claims that some of the geneticists are putting out. So one thing that I wanted to explore in terms of the evidence that refutes the Clovis first hypothesis is this idea of what we can learn from language and language families, and also from studying other than human animals and just paleontology more broadly. What kind of evidence and data can we get there that also helps us to refute the Clovis first hypothesis and explore alternatives to that? Okay, when it comes to languages, it's very well documented how many language families there are in the world. You have to keep in mind for the Americas, the majority of what we understand is based on less than 5% of the pre-contact population, because after contact, we lost 95% of our communities, though some of that is documented. So Joanna Nicholas is a world-renowned linguist, and she had argued that for the number of language families and languages we see in Americas to form,

it would have taken over 70,000 years. She was really critiqued, and she turned that back to 35,000 years. But she makes a very good point. So we know that I think it's now over 360 language families throughout the world. More than half of those are in the Americas. So some areas of Europe have, most of Europe has four language families. California alone has 15. So Nicholas had argued that it takes about 6,000 years for even one new language within a language family to form. So if you are in a place and humans are just beginning and they're going to form all those languages, it's going to take thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Right. And so linguistics gives us a really good another form of evidence for possible time frames of people. If you've got

more than half of the language families in the world in one place, you would think the humans had been there longer than anywhere else in the world. Like we have more language families than Africa, right? And so that's pretty incredible. And a lot of people aren't informed about that. So I think it's really important. And another bit of evidence that people aren't really informed of comes from paleontology. So when I discuss with my students that camelids first arose in the Americas, they're astounded. No one has taught them that. Or that horses arose in the Americas, or that the saber-toothed cat arose in the Americas. Students are not taught this. And it seems that, you know, education on the history of the Americas has been based on agontology. So agontology is an intentional teaching of ignorance. It's not about what you teach. It's about what you intentionally do not teach. None of the students in my class were ever aware of the fact that our earliest human ancestors, the earliest proto-primates in the world, for over 47% of them

are known from the badlands of Montana and Saskatchewan. So early proto-primates, our oldest human ancestors arose here. Why does nobody know that? Kids would find it really exciting. Ooh, there were monkeys here, right? Much older than other areas of the world. So I think when it comes to education, it would be really beneficial for students to have a broadened and more holistic education that includes the history of our four-legged relations. Wherever our four-legged relations went Wherever our four-legged relations went, the two-legged relations went. Humans were known to hunt buffalo, to hunt deer, to hunt elk, to occasionally hunt mammoths or mastodons.

And wherever they went, humans followed. And if you have humans coming out of Africa over 2 million years ago, and you definitely know you have humans living in the Arctic Circle, the North, at 24,000 years ago, it's really an anomaly to say they weren't in North America or anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And I think when students are given more of a robust picture of, you know, the physical and environmental past, they're going to be able to ask better questions and have a deeper understanding. And they're going to be able to

challenge biased racist assumptions about human history. Yeah, that's such an important note. And yeah, I mean, I guess just to wrap up, although it seems like things are shifting, it does still seem like there's a lot more decolonization that needs to take place in the fields of anthropology and archaeology. And well, I mean, I would argue all of the sciences and everything means a lot more decolonization. But I guess aside from some of the things that you've already suggested, like what else needs to be done? And what are folks currently doing to like actively decolonize these fields?

And yeah, I mean, just, yeah, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think first of all, you have to realize that it's not safe to try to decolonize the institution, specifically archaeology or anthropology. There have been a few archaeologists that have really spoken out strongly about how archaeology has dehumanized indigenous peoples on a global scale. And kudos to them. It's just amazing. Some of them were from Australia. But there is still a lot of work needed on decolonizing archaeology, educational institutions, and the world in general. While some white European archaeologists have discussed racism in the field and how it's impacted Indigenous people, many avoid those discussions. Many find them threatening

and may not yet have accepted that there are links between the histories they write and the ongoing damage to Indigenous people and ongoing colonization. For example, I was recently asked in a job interview by archaeologists who presented themselves as being very decolonized that if I were to work at their university, would I change the way I talked about archaeologists? I said resoundingly, no, I would not. But imagine a white European North American archaeologist asking an indigenous archaeologist, scientist, and Canada research chair if they would change how they talked about archaeologists. that I needed to talk more about the nice things they do.

So no recognition of the fact that the basis of my work is focused on creating paths to healing. How do we positively impact the high suicide rates in Indigenous communities after going through genocide and colonialism? How do we make positive paths? So my daughter went to a young woman's gathering in northern BC. She lives on her dad's reservation out there. And this big group of young girls was sitting around in a circle, and they had been discussing the high levels of suicide and social political disparities.

And each girl was supposed to say one thing that gave them hope for the future. And she said, this one girl's face just lit up. And she was so excited. And she said, there's this archaeologist down in the States who's saying that we've been here for more than 50,000 years. And she said, that gives me hope. We'll get our identity, our history, our lands, we'll get things back. And that gives me hope for living. And my daughter said, tee hee hee, I didn't tell her it was my mom, you know. And so I'm really focused on reclaiming our history, reclaiming our links to the land. This is a part of our healing. And the main concern of a white archaeologist during a job interview is if I would please stop critiquing archaeology. I was in shock for a

couple of days after that. I was literally in shock. But now, after discussing it with a few archaeologists I know, I realize how very wrong and how very controlling that was and how very deceptive archaeologists are about their true intentions within their field. There is very little decolonization going on in archaeology. People may be checking boxes. They may be putting on that shirt every day that says, I like Indians. But in reality, what they're not telling you in public comes out in things like my interview. That archaeologist was livid. I thought they were going to explode when I was giving my presentation. They were so angry. So I was invited to an interview by people who know what I do, who read my books, who know my reason for being in this field. And even though

they didn't accept it, I was invited that checked off their box, and then I was insulted. So is there decolonization in archaeology? I would argue very little. And I would argue that it's not safe for indigenous or non-indigenous archaeologists to discuss ongoing racism in archaeology, to discuss the need to decolonize. People that have done this have been blacklisted, and I don't know how we're going to change it, but I know that if I remain silent, it will not change. And I know that a lot of other people need to step up, not just on earlier archaeology sites, but ongoing colonization and racism in archaeology and discuss it. But you'll notice with a lot of the other Indigenous scholars throughout the field, they're not actively thinking critically. that do stand out. People like Hannah Trask and others have written amazing papers and really supported me and my education on understanding the level of colonization that's still embedded.

And I think that people now are painting a picture and checking the boxes, but they haven't changed. And yeah, I guess I'm just going to turn it up so that we can get the discussion going more because what remains undiscussed remains unchanged. And I think you'll see that as other archaeologists have stepped forward now, they feel safer to now publish on older sites. In the last five years, 10 years. Many more sites have been published. I think we're going to see change. It may be painfully slow, but I'm trying to turn up the dial with speed on that as much as I can because there's a lot of evidence.

But the other side of that coin is that we still have to discuss ongoing white supremacy, racism, and bias in archeology that keeps people silenced, that keeps Indigenous and their supporting peers silenced within their field. So anyways, we know things like we know the history of human evolution has changed everywhere in the world, except for the Americas. We now know that early humans were diverse, and that they lived together and had children together. 20 years ago, it was discussed as impossible for Neanderthals and Homo sapiens to have ever

interbred. Now we know they did. Great. Science has been an amazing tool for changing what we know of human evolution. And we now know that early humans had traveled globally as early as 2 million years ago, except to the Americas, according to the majority of archaeologists. We know early humans used open water transporters early as 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. We know that many mammalian species that arose in the Americas migrated between the eastern and western hemispheres for millions of years, so we know there were land connections. We know early humans utilized some of those extinct species for food and for bone to make tools

and shelters. Science in the last 20 years has completely changed our understanding of human evolution and migrations on a global scale, but that global scale is limited by bias and racism to the eastern hemisphere due to archaeological denials of pre-Clovis archaeological sites when they're denied. Imagine trying to get state funds to protect an archaeological site that's older than 12,000 years when they don't exist. So there are definite impacts to the archaeological record, to human history, that really need to change. I know that some of the pre-Clovis sites in the Americas are now National Historic Sites in the United States. They've gotten the protection. That is amazing.

And I really hope to see more archaeologists be able to get funding to do research on pre-Clovis sites. We get a lot of support now from the science. You can get human biomarkers from soil. One recently came out of a lake in Alaska that dates to 32,000 years, a human biomarker in the soil. So there's a lot of new ways emerging of showing where humans were on the landscape. But most importantly, you know, this work needs to be centered in indigenous communities and indigenous histories and include indigenous knowledge.

Yes, there is a lot of talk about decolonization and a lot of it is hollow and performative and very superficial. And if we're really going to be looking at decolonizing our white supremacist institutions, then there's going to have to be some real material backing to that or else it's just meaningless. And yeah, like I said, performative. And so yeah, I just really want to thank you so much for the work that you're doing and you know, how important your book and your research is to this conversation. And yeah, I just really want to thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was really, really fascinating talking to you. And, you know, this stuff is, it's stuff that I studied a long time ago in college and haven't kept up with as much as, you know, some other topics. And so it's really nice to

get sort of a catch up on the field from you and to know about all the work that you're doing. It's just really, really exciting. So yeah, thank you so much again. Well, Migwetch, thank you so much for inviting me and for listening. Willie Mitchell and the Desert River Band for the intermission music. Upstream, the music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored Thank you. please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you.