s02e02: Salvage Anthropology "A Nasty Business"

[ Music ] >> Just the term salvage denotes things that are disposable as far as their value. The salvage also denotes that you're attempting to collect to save, you know, for the future. But those practices were contrived. They were very biased and intentional and motivated by the colonial practices of this country. >> So I think salvage anthropology created that reality that many people think that native people are just think this thing of the past that maybe they can see in a museum. Quite literally alongside dinosaur fossils and things of the past. >> By the start of the mission system and then the gold rush, they're not trying to learn from anybody. They're just trying to destroy everything. >> There's all these very paternalistic ideas that trickle down into behavior and attitude. And that of course feeds the system because it encourages the keeping, right? Not just the getting but the keeping. >> Welcome to Challenging Colonialism, a podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices of Indigenous California. An important note from the start, the producers are two white male, educator academics, and these are not our stories. This podcast centers native voices and our intention is to highlight the significant work being done by Indigenous communities to challenge ongoing colonialism and to broadcast information about the resistance and resilience of Indigenous California in the past, present, and the future. >> In this episode, you will hear from Dr. Kutcher's like Baldy and Dr. Sam Redman as well as Mark Hilkma, Dr. Robin Gray and Cindy Elvichre. Episode two is a deeper dive into salvage anthropology and its origins. In the next episode, we'll be focusing on Alfred Crowberg, Ishi, and UC Berkeley. >> So my name is Cindy Elvichre. I am affiliated with the Gabberlin O'Tongva community. My direct affiliation is with T.O.T Society and Traditional Council Pima, which represents the maritime communities of the Los Angeles and Orange County coastal areas. Salve anthropology. Wow, Salve anthropology. Oh, geez, well, you mean in the past or in the present? Do we still practice Salve anthropology? Salve anthropology, again, was a legitimization of an intellectual academic practice within this discipline without permission. I mean, this is what we see in museums. You go back and do the research and the chronological history of how an object, what has been that path they have traveled on. So our museums and not only museums and institutions, but I think we have to acknowledge, you know, who was collecting what? Salve anthropology implies collection of not only physical material culture, but also the recordings of people too. But also where we're still missing a lot is from private collections. And I experienced it. I know a lot of people out there probably experience it. If you work in institutions or museums or even with tribes with our tribal entities, that families are coming to us wanting to return things that were collected. Talking Salve anthropology is a legitimized intellectual academic process. Private collecting is another one that also intertwines with, you know, art collectors for profit because a lot of stuff for anthropology finds its way into the art market. And a lot of things that were never made their way there, end up in private collections and then garages and at yard sales. But I think what's happened to is maybe there's a little bit of a development of consciousness and questioning the ethics of how one's parent or grandparent or great-grandparent received this skull that remained on the mantle piece that was collected at Bione wetlands in the 1920s. And the individual may or may not have said anything until that grandparent or those individuals were also deceased and they finally had the freedom to do what was right and then go to the communities and say, this is what I have, I'm sorry, I'm returning it. And that's one experience that we've had of many, many instances of people returning things. So just a term salvage, you know, that's denotes things that are disposed-cible, you know, that as far as their value, something that is salvageable. I mean, salvage also denotes that you're attempting to collect to save, you know, for the future. But those practices we know were contrived and they were very biased and intentional and motivated by the colonial practices of this country in order to defer the developed and expand their resources, their territory, and their presence in what is now California and what is now the United States. I am Samuel J. Redman and I am a historian and a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and I'm especially interested in the history of anthropology. So between about the Civil War and the early decades of the 20th century, it was a commonly held idea in that era that native people, especially Native Americans, were essentially doomed to vanish, that in the light of population decline and ongoing genocide and the impact of disease and a whole host of other factors. But especially to people who were worried about cultural decline, that sort of what the traits or characters or habits that made a culture group unique would somehow disappear or vanish. So in response to that, anthropologists, but also a whole host of others. So missionaries, private amateur collectors, US Army officers and Navy officers, became committed to this idea that they needed to salvage human cultures. So this included tangible things, everything from material objects and sacred objects to human remains or ancestral remains as some would prefer for us to talk about it as. And so this phenomenon of salvage anthropology actually had this pretty wide-ranging impact in terms of how we think about history and human cultures and societies today. So for today's stories in La Houlam's British Columbia up in Canada, and I am Gisput Wada, our Blackfish Killer Whale clan from the House of Liam Laha, and the Gidahangique tribe. I'm also mixukri with Denny Roots from Fortchipuan Alberta in Treaty 8 territory, the interventions of what I like to call salvage entrepreneurs who are all sort of invested in this myth that indigenous peoples were destined to disappear either literally or at least culturally. So you know, the legacy is there. We can see it. It's visible. But the history is not so visible. So many people will encounter our heritage and it perpetuates this idea of a bygone indigeneity and expectations around authenticity in the contemporary period. This whole history of collecting indigenous cultural heritage is just part and parcel to that entire process. And the underlying assumptions that drive people to believe in the myth and to seek out the stuff and to claim it as theirs and create all types of industries, new industries around it is really a matter of quite frankly white possessiveness, right? This idea that everything is up for the taking and that they know what's better for us, you know, they know how to treat our stuff better than we could. There's all these very paternalistic ideas that trickle down into behavior and attitude and that of course feeds the system because it encourages the keeping, right? Not just the getting but the keeping and the keeping, not just the physical possession of something but the gatekeeping of it as well. Also is tied to that possessive logic that underscores the settler colonial project and all those who are required to sustain it. And in the early years, yeah, those are white folk, right? And it continues to be white folk. And because whiteness is a very real thing, people tend to have an investment in sustaining that privilege, right? And in some way. And it's easy to sustain it when you don't have to confront the legacy or be responsible for part of that legacy. So right now with all of the discussions about race and racial justice, long time coming, but either way, people are going, oh my gosh, wow, it's it's actually a whole system. And you know, they realize you can't just attribute racism or racist behavior to single individuals and think of them as outliers. But in fact, you have to see it as individuals critical to a structure. And that's what created our systems that we find ourselves in and the attitudes that accompany them. And just like we needed collectives to create those colonial structures and systems, we need collectives to dismantle them as well. And so it's really critical that those who are invested in things like social justice or restorative justice or, you know, appearing in Canada, you know, reconciliation is the buzzword and indigenization and everyone's trying to flag that they're they're about it, you know, that they're about the humanist, you know, the humanist imperative, I guess we could say that people are invested in what at least discursively invested in today. So I think that's really important, right, that people understand those underlying assumptions and work actively work to decolonize their their minds and their spirits, honestly, because colonialism is a violation not only of the mind and the body, but also I think of the spirit and of emotion. Hey, I'm Kylette, Dr. Ketchar Rizling-Baldi Ahoyet. I'm Dr. Ketchar Rizling-Baldi. I am Hupa-Yuriken-Karook and enrolled in the Hupa Valley tribe and I'm also the department chair of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. Again, I think that's why the intervention that Native American Studies gives to so many disciplines is to show them that like it's never a depolitical act to do that and it's never a depolitical act to do research and it's never a depolitical act to decide sort of like how you're managing the work that you're doing in community and you have to reconcile that and understand that and then know what you're doing there. And if you're not there in support of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty and futures, then don't do that work, do something else, right? I constantly point out to people if contemporary history starts in 1492 and everything before that is prehistory which oftentimes that's what happens. People are like everything before 4992 is prehistory. These are prehistoric cultures. What else is prehistoric? Dinosaurs. When did they live? Millions of years ago. So it's like 1492 to 2022. That's history and then everything before that's prehistory and that includes the dinosaurs. So that's millions of years of history and we're saying that at minimum in California you're talking 10,000 years of history but if you're looking at new studies that are coming out 100,000 years of history, right? Califrignans are always like you'll keep finding older and older stuff and then we'll be like, yeah, we told you, right? But right now 100,000 years of history, that's a long time. That's like a lot of 1492 to 2022 if that's 500 years. That's a lot of 500 years and look what we did in 500 years like we invented Twitter. Like we can order food on our phones and then like take pictures of that food and then people can like it, right? Like we've done a lot. So for us to act like all those areas of history before they all stayed the same, nothing ever changed. We didn't have moments like I think it's really important for us to understand as California native people that our histories are long complex and ever adaptive and changing much like our knowledge is much like our understandings of place and that the beauty of it is that we had taken that knowledge to build a culture in society that we wanted everybody to be able to like drink the water, breathe the air, feel good about themselves, have enough food. Like that is what our values were like our fundamental values of our society. If everybody should have a place to live and everybody should have enough food and everybody should have a ceremonial culture that they want to practice and everybody should come together in a good way and we should not be fighting over things like that's how that's our society we built. And my great grandfather would always point out in his own writings he would say, you know the culture in society that develops itself around how to take care of everybody or the culture in society that develops itself around how to kill the most people. Who's primitive? He's like who's primitive and I would always say I said that's what it is. We didn't take all our smart people and try to figure out how you develop the best way to kill the most people. We were like nobody likes to kill people. That's developed all the ways we would need to make sure that that doesn't happen and I feel like that took a moment. We didn't come into the world going here's the perfect way to live. We were like 10,000 years of figuring out how do you live here so that you don't overuse the resources kill the planet, displace more than human relatives, hurt people. Right? How do you live here together so you can respect each other's languages so that you can have different creation stories so that your political negotiations are demonstrated of everybody should have enough. Like how do you make sure that your culture works that way? I think people forget all the time that indigenous histories are a lot of starts and stops to different things. And then we lived through pandemics. We lived through climate changes. We lived through the changing of the oceans. We like we and then we had to adapt to those things. So there was a lot of knowledge there. And the fact that then they come in you know in California you're like 1600s right 1600s and start coming through but then by the start of the mission system and then the gold rush they they're trying to learn from anybody. So the fact that between 1899 and 1925 you have a whole host of anthropologists who are deeply committed to collecting, documenting and naming things and trying to preserve that on some level really shapes this sort of story as it stands today. This includes all of the things that they got right but it also includes their biases and things that they got wrong. In the late 19th and early 20th century that's an important time right in terms of colonialism and westward expansion and nationalism. There are a whole bunch of things happening at that time. It's also the case that that government is trying to engage in studies to determine who the different native people are in North America and those sort of decisions that are made at that time have a cascade of ramifications, very real world ramifications for native people today in terms of land claims in terms of their situation as sovereign nations and federal recognition as well as a whole host of other factors. But it's also the case that there's something much broader and bigger that I also became interested in and that is the way in which these things are written about in newspapers and museum exhibitions and in fiction and in many many other sources really helped cement in American consciousness or in sort of popular minds as well as in intellectual history. These motivating desires that native people were doomed to vanish and that a response to this was to document the things about that culture before it ended up vanishing. And not only were they collecting information about us and making observations about us, they were also working within these social networks right and this is where I talk about salvage entrepreneurs. So they like provided access and gateways into indigenous communities because of that early ethnographic work and their work with early informants from the community. So other people wanted to get access to our community too so they'd go to the anthropologists and the anthropologists would connect them with the informant and then they would make a trip up there to collect songs or to come and view our old village sites or where the totem poles are or whatever it may be. And in that process they would collect things and get things and leave archaeology is becoming sort of a formalized discipline and practice at the same time. And there's a belief, an overriding belief, that through this sort of structure, that's the best way to sort of capture, if you will, this knowledge and disseminate it to a broader public. And it assumes that native people are incapable of doing this sort of preservation on their own, which in fact, they were quite capable of preserving this knowledge and material through different means, including the written word, but also oral traditions and through drawing and in many other ways they were able to preserve knowledge. My name's Mark Hilkama. I am the supervisor of the Cultural Resources Program in the Santa Cruz District for California State Parks. It was a Cal Trans Archaeologist for 11 years, hard time working for the highway agency. And then I worked as freelance archaeologist, both during those terms and after, and have about 40 years' local experience and cultural resources. These guys were going out in their three-piece suits on horseback, meeting the poorest of the poor, interviewing them, trying to grasp the last remembrances of the past. And the sad part is they never once thought about saving the people. They wanted to save the data. Well, in some ways, we're grateful they did, because many of the descendants of those folks now are dependent on those anthropological reports for rediscovering their identities. It's a strange, twisted kind of outcome. Unfortunate and yes, also fortunate, for instance, the Alma Mutzon and Malekma tribes of today are dependent on the linguistic records that were taken by those early anthropologists who recorded the languages of the great grandparents, right? So I think there are two really important, really basic assumptions that are operating here. Sort of the first one, this vanishing Indian myth, as historians very often describe it, right? This understanding of the inevitability of decline of native people. And it also rests on a sort of attached to that, this idea that cultures sort of exist almost in these static bubbles. And today, I think we understand culture as a much more sort of dynamic force that it is permeable in important and meaningful sort of ways, right? Like, you know, there are people who are living on the Crow reservation who are really into basketball. And that's been a phenomenon for now, several generations. But it strikes us today, I think, as problematic if someone's like, oh well, native people don't play basketball. They sort of stereotypical views that are based in assumptions about history and the past. But a lot of those come from this idea that cultures sort of are the way they are, and they're sort of static and unchanging since sort of the dawn of time. And these are really problematic notions, right? Another idea, and referencing something that I said a moment ago, is that there was a Western sort of model for preservation and documentation in response to that. And here we have the birth of fields like anthropology or ethnology, these figures who are committed to studying human cultures and writing about religion and ritual, but also language and day-to-day interactions as well as a whole host of other things. When they talk about ancient California Indian people, they'll-- I still think they kind of think of them as different than people. They're sort of more like animals in year one or 5,000, 10,000 years ago. And I constantly have to be like, well, so one example is, I remember they were saying, they were looking at this set of remains, and they were like, we don't think that this set of remains is related to this current indigenous group that we're studying because we studied the bones, and the-- this person's diet is different. And he eats much less seafood than they would have eaten in this cultural group of people. And then I raised my hand, and I was like, what if he didn't like seafood? And then they're like, what? And I was like, what if he just didn't like seafood? I don't like tomatoes. Would someone be like, oh my gosh, she's not a part of this family because she never ate tomatoes in the whole family ate tomatoes? Like, no. Maybe like, what if she didn't like tomatoes? And they were like, no, that's not how that works. And I was just like, why not? We're not human beings navigating. Maybe he just didn't like seafood. And so he ate lots of other things. Maybe he was allergic to seafood. So I just-- I think sometimes I still have to push back against an anthropological discourse that treats ancient californian peoples as somehow less than human, as somehow differently human than who we are today. I write about in my book, Bone Rooms, Boaz writes a letter, and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit the letter. He says, I have four sales, some Native American first nations from the Pacific Northwest skulls that I'm offering you for sale for $5 or $6 each. And at one point in the letter, he says, it's a nasty business to rob graves, but someone has to do it. So Boaz, I argue in many episodes, actually throughout the course of this career, is willing to suspend codes of ethical norms and behaviors in order to get what he wants that science sort of subsumes this story. So we'll step back. So who is this guy? So Franz Boaz is a German American immigrant, and he is born to liberal Jewish parents in Germany. He is one of the main people who develops an incredibly large and important anthropology display for the 1893 Chicago world's fair, but is disappointed when he doesn't get the job as curator there, probably as a result of antisemitism and some other factors. But he-- in that interim, he's doing things like trafficking in human remains and other materials and doing scientific studies, but lands on his feet at the American Museum of Natural History as a curator. And once in New York permanently and established as a curator there, it's sort of interesting that so much of the story about California is happening in New York City. But he's managing to pull a lot of the strings and encourage and influence young students and scholars, including his protege Alfred Crowder, to go to California and do really intensive studies of California Indians at the turn of the century and into the first two or three decades of the 20th century. Boaz is also an advocate for cultural relativism. So at a time when a lot of people took for granted this idea that cultures evolved and moved through stages from lesser civilized to more civilized, Boaz and a lot of his students saw things differently that cultures were in fact adapting to each situation that they were facing environmentally and historically. So we do need to credit him for coming up with some major advances in the field of anthropology. But we also need to look holistically at his legacy, including some of the abuses of native people and informants that he worked with, as well as developing at times close relationships with them. I mean, much like really understanding any human it, they become challenging figures, which is why in fact several new recent great books have been written about Boaz. But rarely do we really dive into his connection to California, which was really numerous, right? He's writing many letters describing what these surveys would look like. He's raising funds from wealthy donors to do collecting expeditions in California and he's informally advising the University of California or formally advising, I should say, University of California when they establish an anthropology museum and an anthropology department. - So going in, rushing in to do field work in our community, which resulted in the accumulation of knowledge about our people, right? Ethnographic knowledge about our people, observations about who we are culturally, and interested in our cultural heritage to see how that makes us different, right, from other people's. And then that gets turned into a publication, an early publication, which sets the standards for the Tomsyan canon. And so you have generations of non-tomsyan people relying on that early body of knowledge about Tomsyan that was produced by a non-tomsyan anthropologist and sort of reproducing the ideas about our culture, about our society, about our laws throughout the generations until finally there's, you know, me in the 2000s who comes up as aomsyan anthropologist, right? Which is very rare in the whole history of that situation. - Alessert Lichka, he is curious and really important guy for a number of reasons. A check American immigrant. And he is a trained as a medical doctor, but eventually gets into the emerging field of physical anthropology, or sometimes we call it biological anthropology today, but essentially the study of human difference and human evolution and human, then human races and human types through the study of their remains. So sometimes is a contemporary study for people in this era, in that they're working with the remains of the recent dead, but it's often working with archaeologists and others. And over time, especially historical questions become more and more of a driving force to this. So they become more interested in older remains to try to answer questions like, that relates to something else you are asking about the quote unquote, "peapling of the Americas." So for archaeologists and historians and others, this has been a major question for many years. And it is something that often juts up against traditional beliefs and ideas that indigenous people have about the story of their arrival and their origin stories. For some people, they believe that they have been there since the dawn of time. So for an archaeologist in the 1930s to say, "Well, I think your community has actually been here for 5,000 or 7,000." I mean, it just, it didn't jive. But Urdlichka was committed to this idea that native people were a fairly recent arrival in the Americas. So he wanted to find certain what he believed were connections with the sizes and shapes of the skulls and morphology. And he believed that by studying and amassing many different collections from across North America, you could prove certain things about how people arrived in the Americas. He came to the belief that Alaska was really important because of what ultimately becomes the Baring Strait Land Bridge theory. But he also believed that California was really important as a location, that there was a lot of sort of the traffic happening, if you will, throughout the course of the previous millennia. Now, Urdlichka is also intensely complicated and problematic in that he was willing to do almost anything to get a hold of human remains. He intensively studies in Alaska and South America. But it's sort of interesting. He doesn't spend a whole lot of time in California himself, but he recognizes it's important. So he wants to coordinate for the Smithsonian institution, others to go out and collect. So I think the letter that I cite of his in the book is like this plea, this almost desperate plea that he has, that it's almost like we've been given certain puzzle pieces. But this is the puzzle piece we really don't have. And we'd like to see what's on it. We're back to 19th century, a little bit earlier with the belief in this country by academics that Native American people would become extinct. That sense of urgency kicks in and the collection processes begin. But let's not be naive about this, because that was also to support the continued annihilation and political cultural and physical genocide of Native American people in California Indians, because that's what we're talking about in this country. It's very real. When you're talking about the father of anthropology, American anthropology, Franz Bois, who Alfred Cobra was his first student, imported to California, Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, that home mentality, it really is an imposition of a superiority over Native people. And even as progressive, if they may have thought they were in their minds and their allergic practices, that they had contact with Native people, that come from European backgrounds. They had the privilege of gaining an education. So what was their training? What were those perceptions? How is that laid out academically and even scientifically about who these people are? And when you tie it in and you really do a genealogy, and you do a mapping of all the fingers, go from Franz Bois, or you can start over here with Alfred Cobra, look at Arles Hartlicka. He was an individualist, practiced physical anthropology, really into craniometrics, and establishing, and trying to find the physical evidence for who was more superior, were these really human beings, the intellectual capacity of people. We're back to the very core of this whole thing. And the questions that I believe, and what I have observed in my own research on a lot of these anthropologists, is are these people fully human? What is that evidence? Their brains, their bodies, their teeth. You look at the case of Minic, the Inuit family. That Franz Bois brought from Canada, from Greenland, collaboration with Robert Perry, the alleged discoverer of the North Pole in Robert Perry. Franz Bois, hey, can you get me some escemasks to bring me to the museum here in New York? And he did. So for California Indians today to see their ancestors really exploited in terms of these almost scientific experiments, and for what sometimes seem more like antiquarian questions than truly historical questions, that created a traumatic reality. Salva Jantropology, especially, worked to make native people appear like historical artifacts themselves, right? That, OK, they were creating these materials, but they were sort of something of the past and that there was an authenticity factor, an originalism factor, that then shuts down sort of future possibilities and viewpoints, right? That, you know, and when I see native art, a lot of native art today, and a lot of museum display today, it's in no small part about pushing back against many of these ideas, right? That prominently, right, at the National Museum of the American Indian, the "We Are Still Here," both in text on the wall, but also just imbued through the ways of the exhibits are constructed. So I think Salva Jantropology created that reality, that many people think that native people are just think this thing of the past, that maybe they can see in a museum quite literally, alongside dinosaur fossils and, you know, things of the past. So that creates this misleading perception. And it still, you know, it shrouds, as we've been talking about it, it shrouds our legal conversations and in many other ways as well, how we think about the reality of native people today. Keep in mind that this problematic way of thinking informed much of early American colonial study of California. 19th century linguists, such as Alphonse Pinar, Nhanri Hensha, worked to record vocabulary lists without thinking about the welfare of the people that they interviewed. In 20th century ethnographers like Seahart Merriam and J.P. Harrington continued with the Salva Jantropological methods and traditions. Furthermore, anthropologists historians, and even the general public today, continue to purplish these studies as authoritative voices rather than listening to indigenous Californians themselves. There are times where these people do advocate importantly, but by and large, they're obsessed with objects rather than people. And that's really one of the core failings of Salva Jantropology. I think it should push us in a direction of greater collaboration and more listening and reflecting and respecting still these amazing treasures that we're left with, because there were times and places where native people with very clear intent said, "I am giving you this for the purpose of you keeping it and preserving it because I want my grandchildren to know the ways in which their grandparents walked." I don't think we would ever tell this story that we were dying in vanishing. I think we'd be like, we're being invaded and killed. There's two very different understandings of what's happening here, right? And this kind of passive-aggressive, like, I don't know how, but they're just dying and they're vanishing and they're going away. It makes it almost inevitable, like, like there's nothing that can be done to stop it. And this is some of the commentary that happens, especially on Crober, where his initial methodology, which actually Lightfoot and Parrish call like a memory culture methodology. So what they're doing, they're like, he's not an observer. He doesn't just go in and observe. He's working with people and saying, I'm trying to create, I'm trying to create a documentation of a time before genocide. Of a time before invasion, of a time when you're sort of like, on Crober's mind, like an unspoiled Indian group of people. people. It doesn't acknowledge that we were always like a dynamic, inventive group of people, our cultures, our changing, our histories are long. You've been listening to Challenging Colonialism. In this episode, focused on understanding salvage anthropology and greater depth. You've heard from Dr. Kutcha, Rizlian Baldi, Dr. Samuel J. Redbin, Cindy L. Vitray, Dr. Robin Gray, and Mark Hilkema. All our interviews were conducted by Martin or Somartinas, all music by Jekyll Zalis, and all audio production by myself, Daniel Stonebloom. Check the resources and notes for more information and additional links. This podcast is supported by California State Parks Foundation. Thank you for listening and please share and promote this podcast in your networks. [Music]