Public Archaeology

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Who's indigenous? Whose archaeology?
Bill Sillar
To cite this article: Bill Sillar (2005) Who's indigenous? Whose archaeology?, Public Archaeology,
4:2-3, 71-94, DOI: 10.1179/pua.2005.4.2-3.71
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PUBLICARCHAEOLOGY(2005)VOLUME

4 PAGES 71-94

Who's indigenous?
Whose archaeology?
Bill Sillar
ABSTRACTThe International Labour Organisation, the United Nations and various indigenous
Organisations have raised and/or objected to diverse criteria through which indigenous
groups have been defined and the rights that should be accorded to them. This paper
discusses the implications of these issues in relation to archaeological research andheritage management and uses this to position the other papers in this volume.
Specific themes that are addressed include: the impact of colonialism and nationforming on indigenous groups; the continuing influence of 19th and early 20th
century social evolutionary concepts on the representation of indigenous groups andthe role of archival material from this period today; the contrasting processes ofcultural continuity and assimilation within 'dominant' societies in which indigenous
communities have participated, and the effects that this has had on more recent claims
over land rights; the cultural differences that surround the concepts of individual andcommunity ownership, particularly in relation to copyright; the role of academia,
museums and the media in the representation of indigenous people in the past andthe present.
WHO'S INDIGENOUS?
In recent years the concerns of many indigenous
groups have gained wide publicity and organizations
such as the United Nations (UN) have recognized thefrequent infringement of human rights suffered byindigenous peoples. But, the fact that indigenous
peoples are at last gaining some political power has
meant that even their claim to be indigenous may
now be treated with suspicion. Two of the mostfrequent questions that students ask are 'Why should
indigenous peoples be given special rights?' and'Who decides who is, and who is not, indigenous?'.
When sitting in a classroom in London, listening to
the many and varied demands made by indigenous
people, and the special treatment and support offered
to some indigenous people, these questions seem
important and valid. Some students have therefore
been surprised when visiting speakers have beentaken aback, or offended, by these questions. It isperhaps ironic that people who were dismissed or

marginalized as indigenous through classification
systems imposed by explorers, colonial powers,
nation states and academics are now usitig this samedefinition to fight to reclaim basic rights. But, it iseven more ironic that people coming from areas of
the world where descriptions such as 'Native''Aborigine' or 'Indian' have been, and frequently
still are, terms of abuse, are now expected to proveor justify their indigenous status. When people areclaiming specific, and sometimes exclusive, rights
because they are 'indigenous',and increasing
numbers of marginalized groups are 'becoming'
indigenous (Hodgson, 2002: 1 p. 1037) it is legitimate
to ask what is the basis of this claim. But, it is also
important to' ask: 'Who is asking the question?''Who is. setting. the definitions?' and 'For what
reasons?' .. All of the papers· in this volume address
the issues that surround previous categorization andcurrent concepts· of indiginiety and how these haveaffected past treatment of,. and current demands by,indigenous peoples.

72

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

Archaeology is at the core of these debates, withthe definition of 'indigenousness', the longevity ofoccupation and the continuity of cultural practices
frequently resting on archaeological,
historicaland anthropologicalevidence.
Yet, many
indigenous people are suspicious of such academic
pursuits,
not least because archaeology
andanthropology were themselves a part of the colonial
process. These disciplines helped to categorize
and describe indigenous peoples, information thatwas frequently used by colonial administrators as
they deprived the indigenous inhabitants of theirland, their rights and their dignity, and eithersought to re-educate them to be subservient citizens
or marginalize them at the edge of the dominantsociety's economic and social life.
Indigenous people are the descendants of the firstoccupants in each area of the world; there is obviously
enormous diversity amongst all these different culturalgroups, who have· experienced different histories of
expansion, conquest and colonization, and now
have different aspirations
and demands. The
fundamental meaning of the term 'indigenous' as theoriginal inhabitants of a particular place is relatively
clear, but after many centuries of colonization,
migration, intermarriage and acculturation, who is'indigenous' today is frequently less clear. While
many people in the world can claim descent fromindigenous ancestors, it is not always clear who is
included and who is excluded when discussing
indigenous groups. Yet indigenous groups aredemanding exclusive rights over human remains,artefacts and land, demands that prompt us toquestion the basis for these identity and ownership
claims. At the start of the United Nations Decade for
Indigenous Peoples in 1995, the UN provided arough estimate of 300 million indigenous people in
the world today, with the majority of these in India
and China. But, as Arnold and Yap ita (this volume)
point out in their paper focusing on Bolivia, moststatistics stating the number of indigenous people areunreliable,
depending as they do on external
categorizations, political expediency and a lack· ofdetailed information. Arnold and Yap ita also draw
attention to how different groups in the Andean
highlands have drawn upon different periods inhistory when constructing their diverse claims toindigeneity. Some place greater emphasis on theirkinship and community of origin, whereas others

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

place greater emphasis on racial differences andlanguage use within urban and industrial settings,
and political activism.
The m~aning of terms such as 'Native', 'Indian','First Nation' or 'Aborigine' varies depending on
the country or people being referred to and thecontext in which the terms are used (in academic
discourse, national law, to sell arts and crafts or
during a social conflict).
Such variability,
imprecision and flexibility is not surprising, given
the wide range of groups and complex histories thatare being referred to, but it does highlight one of the
problems
inherent
in developing
universal
approaches to indigenous peoples' rights (Bowen,
2000). In the past, the African Commission on
Human Rights has insisted that all Africans are
indigenous to Africa .and that no· particular group
could claim indigenous status, and in this volume
Abungu makes a similar argument. However,
Kenya declared the visually distinctive
andpolitically powerful Masai as their indigenous
population for the 1991 United Nations' Year of
Indigenous Peoples, even though they probably
only migrated into the region that is now Kenya
some 300 years ago. Yet, like other indigenous
groups, they have a history of cultural distinctivenessand marginalization by the nation state, they 'selfidentify' as indigenous, and increasingly NGOs
and others are referring to them as indigenous (cf.
Hodgson, 2002). Like Pueblo societies who migrated
from
Anasazisites,or Quechu-speaking
communities that were relocated by the Inka· State,these groups are no less 'indigenous' for having
moved from their previous homelands, and yet it
raises. the question as to how movement affects agroup's 'indigenous' rights and what it takes totransform them into 'colonizers'. Largely in responseto the United Nations focus on indigenous peoples,the African Commission on Human Rights set up a
Working Group on the Rights of Indigenous People/
Communities in Africa in 2001; the report from thisworking group, which was adopted in November
2003, primarily identifies the term indigenous withnomadic subsistence modes:
A misconception
applicable

is· that the term indigenous

is notin Africa as 'all Africans are indigenous'.

There is no question that all Africans are indigenous toAfrica in the sense that they were there before the73

BILL SILLAR

no way question the identity of other groups. When someparticular marginalized groups use the term indigenous
to describe their situation, they use the modern analyticalform of the concept (which does not merely focus onaboriginality) in an attempt to draw attention to andalleviate the particular form of discrimination they
suffer from .... those groups of peoples or communities
throughout Africa who are identifying themselves as

Mashantucket Pequots, like the richer Saami herders,
could hardly be called marginalized or vulnerable,
but they are proudly
indigenous.
Secondly,archaeologists and other academics are increasingly
being asked to give evidence in court to assess thelegitimacy of indigeneity claims, where their evidence
may be critical in making major decisions (Leclair,and Sutton, this volume), it may therefore undermine
more legitimate claims if archaeologists are too
carefree with the use of the term 'indigenous'.

indigenous peoples or communities and who are linking
up with the global indigenous rights movement are first

DEVELOPING DEFINITIONSEuropean colonialists arrived and that they have been
subject to sub-ordination

during colonialism. We thus inand foremost (but not exclusively) different groups ofhunter-gatherers or former hunter-gatherers and certain
groups of pastoralists. (African Union, 2003: 62-63)

Perhaps academics should not be too quick to critiquethe precise justification used to claim indigenous
status, as to do so would undermine the very realpolitical
and moral power that previously
marginalized indigenous people are finally gaining
at local, national and international levels. However,
although it is understandable to use any methods
available to fight for the rights and needs of all
marginalized and vulnerable populations, we should
be careful of grouping them all as 'indigenous
populations'. Firstly there is a danger of equating
indigeneity with poverty. The homeless, jobless andexploited peoples of the world include recent migrants,
Creole and others, who may quite justifiably consider
the use of indigenous, ethnic or racial identity claims
to demand basic social and economic rights to be adivisive influence on a more fundamental classstruggle. Although a primary aim of most secondarycolonizers has been to acquire the wealth of theindigenous population (primarily their land, but also
livestock, raw materials, labour and artefacts), someindigenous populations have managed to retain or
regain some of their wealth. For instance, although
the Pequots were so decimated by English colonists
in 1637, that they were thought to be extinct, with
their members killed or placed in slavery under thecontrol of other Native American groups, thoseplaced under the Mohegans eventually became known
as the Mashantucket (Western) Pequots and havesubsequently won back their reservation lands andnow have one of the largest casinos in the USA,funding a major museum and making tribal members
much richer than most North Americans. The

In many countries of the world indigenous people
continue to be among the poorest and mostmarginalized
membersof society who areparticularly vulnerable to economic exploitationand disenfranchisement.
It is for this reason thatorganizations such as the International
LabourOrganization and the United Nations have drawn
attention to the predicament of such peoples. In
raising awareness about indigenous rights theseorganizations
have, at various stages, tried todescribe and define indigeniety and their attempts
to do so have been the source of debate anddispute, as various nation states, aid organizations
and indigenous groups have first raised and thenobjected to the implications of diverse criteria (seeHodgson, 2002).
In the International Labour Organization's (ILO)
Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention
107 of 1957 'tribal and semi-tribal' populations
were described as 'at a less advanced stage thanthat of other sections of the national community'(ILO, 1957: Article l:l[a]) defining semi-tribal as
those 'groups or persons who, although they are in
the process of losing their tribal characteristics, are
not yet integrated into the national community'(ibid.: Article 1.2). A key objective of the 1957
Convention was to 'facilitate ... their progressive
integration
into their respective
national
communities'(ibid.: preamble).
This 1957
convention expressed the widely held assumptionsof the period: that indigenous people were primitive,
underdeveloped •peoples who should be protectedduring the period of assimilation into the norms ofcivilized society. However, wi th an increasing
participation of .indigenous. representatives in. theILO, Convention 107 was replaced in 1989 with a

74

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

new Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention,
number 169. Convention 169 has probably been
the most widely referenced,
and influential,
statement of indigenous rights~ providing a basis
for continuing
campaigns
at national
andinternational
levels. It removed the patronizing
assumption that indigenous people would eventually
abandon their customs and identities, in favour ofasserting indigenous peoples' rights to regain theirautonomy and maintain their distinct society. The
1989 Convention recognized the 'aspirations of[indigenous] peoples to exercise control over theirown institutions,ways of life and economic
development and to maintain and develop theiridentities, languages, and religions, within theframeworks of the States in which they live' (ILO,
1989: preamble). The ensuing Articles outlined abroad set of governmental responsibilities withregard to indigenous rights, including: a preference
for· customary legal solutions; recognition of therights of indigenous peoples to ownership, possession
and access to their traditional lands and resources;
prevention of discrimination in the terms, practices
and benefits of employment; government provisionof adequate and appropriate health services andeducational
programmesin co-operation
andconsultation with the people concerned; and support
for indigenous language instruction for children.
Convention 169 defined Indigenous Peoples as:(a) tribal peoples in independent countries whose social,
cultural and economic conditions distinguish themfrom other sections of the national community, andwhose status is regulated wholly or partially by theirown customs or traditions

or by special laws or

regulations;(b) peoples in independent countries who are regarded
as indigenous on account of their descent from
populations which inhabited the country, or ageographical region to which the country belongs,
at the time of conquest or colonisation· or theestablishment of present state boundaries and who,
irrespective of their legal status, retain some or allof their own social, economic, cultural and politicalinstitutions. [ILa 1989: Article 1.1](c) 'self-identification as indigenous, or tribal, shall be
regarded as afundamentalcriterion
for determining
the groups to which the provisions of the Convention
apply' (ILO, 1989: 1. 2).

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

In 1982 the United Nations established a Working
Group on Indigenous Populations which prepareda Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples. Partly in response to the strong protest by
the indigenous peoples throughout the Americas
against 'celebrating'
the SOOth anniversaryofColumbus's 'discovery' in 1492, the United Nations
declared a Decade for Indigenous People (19952004), and in 2000 the UN established a Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues.
The United Nations has been unable to developa legally binding definition of indigenous peoples
that the individual nation states and indigenous
groups have been prepared to. ratify, but the UN
frequently quotes the definition proposed in 1986
by Jose Martinez Co bo (Special Rapporteur to theUNEconomic and Social Council Sub-Commission
on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of
Minorities):
Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are thosewhich, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion
and pre-colonial societies that have developed on theirterritories, consider themselves distinct from other sectorsof the· societies now prevailing in those territories, orparts of them. They form at present non-dominantsectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop,
and transmit to future generations their ancestral
territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of theircontinued existence as peoples, in accordance withtheirown cultural patterns, social institutions and legal
systems. (Cobo, 1986: 379)

Cobo (1986: 380) goes on to outline
determine 'historical continuity':

how toThis historical continuity may consist of the continuation,
for an extended period reaching into the present, of one
or more of the following factors:(a) Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least part of them.
(b) Common ancestry with the original occupants ofthese lands.
(c) Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (suchas religion, living under a tribal system, membershipof an indigenous community,
livelihood, life-style, etc.).

dress, meansof(d) Language (whether used as the only language, as
mother tongue,
as the habitualmeans of

75

BILL SILLAR

communication at home or in the family, or as themain, preferred, habitual, general or normal
language).
(e ) Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain
regions of the world.

•(f) Other relevant factors.

All this contrasts with the unequivocal
final
statement that emerged from the Consultation on
Indigenous Peoples' Knowledge and Intellectual
Property Rights, in Suva, in April 1995, where theindigenous representatives refused to be confinedby any single definition and stated: 'We assert ourinherent right to define who we are. We do not
approve of any other definition'. Or the Report of
the African Commission's
working group on
indigenous populations in 2003, which stated:
This report does not aim at giving a clear-cut definition ofindigenous peoples, as there is no global consensus abouta single final definition. The global indigenous rights
movement and the UN system oppose recurrent attempts
to have a single strict definition. Other peoples of the world
are not required to define themselves in similar ways, andthe danger of a strict definition is that many governments
may use a strict definition as an excuse for not recognizing
indigenous peoples within their territories. For relevant
comparison, it should be noted that the category minority
is not defined in the UN Declaration on Minority Rights.
(African Union, 2003: 62)

•

•

•

as a loss of identity, and indigenous groups aredefined partly in contrast to the wider nationalsociety through asserting a continuity of traditionand land use.
Conflict with the nation state: the assertion ofland claims and distinct native legal and politicalstructures is inherently a challenge to the nation
state.
Ancestral lands: homelands and some specificplaces are important to the identity of mostindigenous peoples.
Ownership and copyright: the desire to reclaim
not just land but other resources (both naturaland cultural)and protectthese throughcommunal ownership.
Representation: after centuries of categorizationand manipulation by others many indigenous
people object to external attempts to define andlimit who belongs to their group, and assert theright to self-identificationand the ability tomaintain and develop their own culture including
the importance of educating their children using
their native language.

Each of these issues has implications in relation to
the material remains of the past and the work ofarchaeologists; it is this relationship to archaeologythat provides the focus for the discussion below,
which also seeks to position the papers in thisvolume in relation to current debates over therights of indigenous peoples.

From this summary of influential international
statements about identifying indigenous peoples anumber of important issues can be identified:

COLONIAL ORIGINS AND THE PEOPLEWITHOUT HISTORY• Colonial origins: indigenous groups are usually
identified in contrast to secondary colonizers
who have become the dominant society ofmodern nation states.
• Less advanced: attitudes to indigenous groups
continue to be influenced by the 19th century
social evolutionary concept of the 'primitive
tribal savage'.
• Descent and ancestry: being able to prove
kinship and descent from indigenous ancestors
is assumed to be central to claiming indigenous
rights.
• Assimilation versus continuity: adopting aspectsof the 'mainstream' lifestyle is potentially seen

Current debates over indigenous rights are primarily
framed within the legacy of European colonial
expansion and the emergence of nation states. A
major definition of indigenous peoples is that they
are distinct from those peoples who took their land
and marginalized them from the structures ofgovernance.
The appropriationof indigenous
peoples and their resources by 'foreigners' started
with ·the. colonial act. of 'discovering' new lands andthe renaming of 'native' places. Duringrheprocessof colonization, indigenous groups were commonly
subjugated, classified and regulated by. external
cultures, and this was frequentlyrhe defining process
by. which indigenous cultures. were described and

76

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

represented as 'other'. Perhaps the most significant'difference' was religion, as it was a papal edict thatprovided a moral and legal justification for Christiannations to impose missionaries and obligations to
trade on non-Christians;
any resistance to thisprovided an excuse for full conquest. The papal
decree or charter referred to as the bull Romanus
Pontifex that· Pope Nicholas V issued to King
Alfonso V of Portugal, specifically sanctioned andpromoted the conquest and colonization of nonChristians and their territories. On May 4th 1493
Pope Alexander VI issued bull Inter Cetera, which
granted Spain the right to conquer the lands that
Columbus had 'found', as well as any lands that
Spain might 'discover' in the future, with the single
proviso that Spain must not attempt to establish its
dominion over lands that had already 'come into
the possession of any Christian lords'. While pious
Christians from Bartolome de las Casas([1552]
1992) onwards have been important defenders of
the rights of indigenous peoples, religious conversion
has provided a central excuse for the destruction ofindigenous social and religious structures. Indigenous
belief systems regarding ancestral remains or sacredobjects were dismissed as pagan superstitions andidolatrous practices, justifying their destruction or
their removal· to museums.
Europeancolonizers
encountered
huntergatherers such as the San of South Africa, theSelk'nam of Tierra del Fuego and 250 or morelanguage groups of Australian Aborigines, as wellas large complex societies such as the Aztec andInca states. From the colonizer's point of view, allthese peoples were 'Natives', but different colonizing
nations, encountering different societies at different
times responded to these indigenous groups inmany different ·ways. This focus on the colonial
process can make the identification of indigenous
peoples in Australia and New Zealand, wherecolonization took place relatively late and theprimacy of Aboriginal and Maori occupation iswell understood, seem much clearer than in places
with written documents
recordingsuccessive
movements of different peoples in India and Europe,or the complexity of a sequence of expansionist
states in Central and South America. Yet politics

occupation by aboriginal populations. Until 1967
Australian Aborigines did not have the vote andwere not included in the census even though they
were conscripted into the military. It was not until
the Mabo decision of 1992, that the High Court ofAustralia
conceded that the Aborigines
hadownership of the lands prior to 1788, leading to acontinuing debate about the return of Native Title(see Sutton, this volume). Whereas the Britishcolonizers of New Zealand negotiated with theMaori chiefs and drew up the Treaty of Waitangi(1840), which at least guaranteed Maori citizenshipand referred to Maori self-government. The Treaty,
with its somewhat different wordings in thecontemporary
English and Maori versions, hasreturned to prominence with the setting up in 1975of the Waitangi Tribunal, which has a mandate to
identify and define the meaning of the principles of
the treaty, including settling recent ·land claims.
Earlier in North America the British had been
forced to recognize the sovereignty of distinct
Indian Nations over discrete territories, drawing
up separate treaties such as the Treaty of Albany(1722) and Treaty of Lancaster (1744) with the Six
Nations, and the Treaty of Logstown (1752) with
the Delaware and Shawnee. In 1763 King George
III issued a Proclamation that prohibited further
settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, andfor those settlers seeking further land holdings thiswas one of the contentious
pieces of British
legislation during the war of· independence .. Even
with the same colonizing power, the degree towhich indigenous groups were recognized andnegotiated with has been very different.
The distinction between indigenous peoples
and others is a continuing reminder of the legacy
of long-term processes of human colonization.
However, the conditionsof colonizationareconstantly changing (Gosden, 2004): the factorsthat influenced the first humans to move 'out of
Africa', the movement of peoples and ways of lifethat characterize the development of agriculture
and urban societies, the expansionist states ofEurope, Africa, Asia and America, and thecontinuing economic and political incentives for
migration
today, have led to very different

is strangerofencounters between human groups in each specific

Australia declared the land terra nullius, denying
what we now know to be at least 40,000 years ofsituation. A major factor that characterizes theperiod of colonization by European and otherthan fact. The British colonizers

77BILL SILLAR

states was the acquisition of indigenous land andthe imposition of colonial rule; however, in casessuch as the Andean Ayllus and Maori chiefs,
indigenous elites retained some power during thecolonial period and the decline in native jurisdiction
was most fully realized during the succeeding
periods of independence and nation building.
For many parts of the world the colonial period
was characterized by the imposition of Westernbureaucracies, particularly the use of written records.
The traditional separation of the historical andanthropological study of colonial and later periods
from the archaeological study of pre-history was
justified both by the disjuncture between the study ofpre- and post-European contact and the primacy that
we give to the use of textual evidence, even thoughthe. place and many of the people were the same.
Archaeologists have contributed to breaking downthese boundaries in order to offer a critical appraisalof the colonial process in each specific instance andquestion the documentary records created by thecolonizers through a detailed analysis of thearchaeological evidence (Funari et ai., 1999; Gosden,
2004). Recent years have also seen a re-appraisal of
documentary evidence for a wide range of indigenous
rebellions and resistance to colonization, including
the using of colonial legal structures to fight for
indigenous rights (e.g. Stern, 1987, 1993). Nowhereis the primacy of colonial texts stronger than withincourts of law. Despite the care and precision withwhich reported speech is used in many oral cultures,
most courts have considered this oral history ashearsay, in comparison with the validity given to the
documents of the colonizers. However, the courts ofmany countries are now giving much greater
legitimacy to both the oral traditions of indigenous
groups and the use of archaeological evidence. As
Leclair (this volume) describes in his analysis of legal
disputes over native land claims, Canadian law has
shifted to a cautious acceptance of oral histories asvalid evidence; the identification and interpretationof archaeologicalevidence is also considered
important, but concern is expressed because it may
be insufficiently
precise to establish proof ofoccupation by ancestors of a specific modern group.
Archaeology provides an important source forunderstanding indigenous society prior to the colonial
period, however identifying indigeneity implies anability to categorize and separate prior local culturesfrom later 'intrusions' or the remains of native
activities
during the colonial
period.
Even
distinguishing between the artefacts or human remains
of indigenous peoples and colonizers is not always
self-evident. The initial identification of Kennewick
Man by Jim Chatters as of 'European type' (althoughlatter dated to between 7200 and 7600 BC) has
shown how what at first seem innocent analyticallabels can bring with them highly loaded culturalvalues and assumptions (Hurst Thomas, 2000).
Similarly, the handmade, unglazed pots originallyreferred to by Noel Hume (1962) as Colono-Indian
ware and thought to be of Native American
manufacture are now more commonly referred to as
Colono ware and widely believed to have been
largely made and used by African Americans, becauseof the similarities with some West African pottery
and the preponderance
at slave plantation sites(Ferguson, 1992). Equally, archaeologists
havefrequently referred to the artefacts and sites ofsuccessive periods as distinct cultures (e.g. theSatsumon as the pre-historic Ainu, named after a'type-site' where the pottery was first identified, or
the Anasazi as the ancient Pueblo society that originatesfrom a Navajo term meaning 'enemy ancestors').
While there may be important debates over what thechanges in the form and function of artefacts insuccessive phases mean in relation to cultural change,
the terminologies
frequently serve to separate
indigenous peoples from their pasts. As the discourse
between archaeologists and indigenous people shifts
such categorization will become more problematic,
as archaeologists feel less justified in imposing
external classifications upon local understandings oforal history, ancestral remains and sacred sites.
PRIMITIVE SAVAGES? CATEGORIZING'TRIBAL' PEOPLES
A central feature of 19th and early 20th century
social evolution was the use of indigenous societies,
encountered during the period of European colonial
expansion, to illustrate and explain the 'earlystages' .in •human. development.
Following·. thetradition of Lubbock's (1865) Prehistoric Times; As
Illustrated by. Ancient Remains and the Manners
and Customs of Modern Savage, indigenous people
provided the living examples to be compared withthe archaeological. evidence of 'our' primitive past.

78

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

Every social evolutionary
typology identifies'progress' within aspects of the economic, socialand religious organization of past societies, leadingfrom savage mobile hunter-gatherers to the hierarchyand specializationof urban civilization(e.g.
Morgan, 1877). In fact, all these. models reveal an
ethnocentric bias of identifying the inequities ofcolonialism and capitalism (such as hierarchicalsocieties, urban settlements, bureaucratic record
keeping, industrializationand trade) as central
featuresof social progressthat mark theachievements of civilization. 'Tribal' groups werecharacterized as primitive because they had not'achieved'
the hierarchicalorganization
andeconomic exploitation that characterized Europe.
Although The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State (Engels 1884) offered a Marxist
critique of the emergence of capitalism,
theevolutionary categorization that it adopted also
became the dogma of Soviet archaeological andanthropological investigations (Gr0n, this volume).
The Ainu of Japan, the Selk'nam of Patagonia, theEvenks of Siberia and Australian Aborigines haveall been used as models for European and otherprehistoric societies. To illustrate Darwin's Theoryof Evolution, collectors vied for the body parts ofindigenous populations· to classify human diversity
in museum displays (Fforde, 2004). Even todaymodern hunter-gatherers
are frequently seen as
direct analogies for Palaeolithic and Mesolithic
societies, despite the fact that present-day huntergatherers have been marginalized onto the poorest
land by settled agriculturalists, urban growth andindustrialization (see Gr0n, this volume). But theseevolutionary categories were not used consistently,
and it is primarily the 'otherness' of the native
communities that was being identified. Thus theconcept of 'tribe' is usually considered to be a stage
during the social evolution from Band throughTribes and Chiefdoms to State societies (e.g. Service,1962). However, in practice, the same term can beused for the vast Zulu state or small bands of Kung
hunter-gatherers and it is used primarily to identify
non-Europeans. A large percentage. of the public
today continue to view terms such as indigenous,
aboriginal or tribal as implying a primitive life
style. This raises important issues about the role ofeducation and exhibitions in critically debating theconnotations and uses of these terms in the past and

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

the present (see below), and requires us to criticallyconsider how we can best use the documents,
museum collections and photographs that .were
created within a social evolutionary framework(see Fiore, this volume).
The people we refer to today as the Ainu werefirst written about by Japanese sources, referring to
the inhabitants of Emishi using the Chinese character
Toi, which can be translated as 'eastern barbarian';even the name Ainu has been considered derogatory.
In the past the Ainu have been described as
descendants of European Stone Age people, andtoday both Japanese and foreign archaeologists use
the Ainu as a parallel for the 10,000-year-old preagricultural Jomon. Yet the Ainu (or the Satsumonas archaeologists have named the prehistoric Ainu).were involved in agriculture and in using iron
before the expansion of the Japanese state (Crawford
and Masakazu, 1987; Fukasawa, 1998: 12-13).
This suggests that the Ainu hunter-gatherer life style
was partly the result of political pressures from the
Wajin who demanded Ainu fishing and craft
products. But this image of the Ainu as nonagricultural people is now central to their selfperception, which emphasizes hunting and the bear
ceremony (Siddle, 1996: 37) and in this volume
Kaori T ahara discusses changes in the aspirationsof Ainu, from apparently seeking assimilation within
Japanese society to increasingly working to maintainthe features that differentiate
the Ainu frommainstream Japanese society and preserve theircultural identity (see also Katarina, 1993).
The widespreadinfluenceof these social
evolutionary ideas, particularly the classificationof indigenous groups as the primitive bottom rungon the evolutionary
ladder, provided a false
legitimacy to a wide range of colonial and national
policies. The 'primitive' life style of hunter-gatherers
and nomads was, it was assumed, inevitably doomed
to extinction; th~9uestion for the authorities was,
how to manage this transition. The 'Indian Problem'
was to be cured by one, or more, of the four major
strategies:
extermination,intermarriage
withEuropeans, assimilation by bringing into the national
economy as labourers,
assimilation
throughseparation and re-education of the children. It is a
sad comment on the depth of this colonial legacy
that it is precisely the degree of resistance to thesepolicies that is being used to assess indigeneity

BILL SILLAR

today. All of these policies were accompanied by
the acquisition of much of the land occupied byindigenous groups. The land, like the people, needed
to be 'improved' to become productive, so thatthrough mining, planting, grazing and building theland could also contribute to 'progress'. This is theorigin of the legal conception of Territorium Res
Nullius or terra nullius, which stated that to be truly
owned it was necessary that land be 'improved',
whoever failed within some reasonable period tobuild upon, cultivate or otherwise transform theirproperty from its natural 'state of wilderness'
forfeited title to it. An argument that was justified
with reference to ethnography and archaeology:
What perhaps is most impressive in each of the cases wehave discussed isthis; that the dispossession by a newcomerof a race already in occupation of the soil has marked an
upward step in the intellectual progress of mankind. It is
not priority of occupation, but the power to utilize,
which establishes a claim to the land. (Sollas, 1911: 383,
quoted in Bowler, 1992: 728)

In 1810 Chief Justice John Marshall in the USA
used terra nullius to argue that portions of Native
American 'Indian Country' that were not cultivatedby indigenous peoples might be construed asunowned and therefore open to claims by settlers.
This began to be used as the basis for forming
reservations - multiplying the number of Indiansby the land they could use 'productively'
anddeclaring· this aggregate amount as sufficient for
Indian needs, thus 'releasing' any surplus foracquisitionby others (Churchill,2002). The
enclosureof land holdings,
the mapping ofboundaries and the granting of land titles, each ofwhich legitimated the separation of indigenous
people from their land, were considered essential
aspects of these developments. In Australia thedoctrine of terra nullius was upheld until as late as
1992 and only now are native title cases being
considered by the Australian courts (Sutton, thisvolume).
DESCENT AND ANCESTRY: BLOOD QUOTAS
AND LAND RIGHTS
One response to asking individuals what makes
them indigenous is for the speaker to name their79

parentage back to their grandparents or further.
As stated by the Khoi-San at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development'We are the original
peoples tied to the land by our umbilical cords andthe dust of our ancestors ... ' (Kimberley Declaration,
2002 - see Ormond-Parker,
this volume). The
highly emotive language that justifies indigenous
peoples' identity claims and their access to theirlands through the blood of their ancestors is nodifferent to how the British aristocracy justify theirownership of their estates and inherited titles;
indeed descent from one or more common ancestors
is one of the strongest ties within human society.
Yet, two centuries of anthropologicalstudies ofkinship have shown how complex and variable thereckoning of familial allegiance can be. As well as
descent, membership of a kin group may also be
achieved through marriage and adoption, and thenaming and claiming of ancestors is always open
to negotiation. Also, the degree to which indigenous
societies were integrated
or divided prior tocolonization is difficult to assess as the processesof colonization and resistance were frequently an
impetus for a restructuring of indigenous societies
and a strengthening of ethnic identities (Smith,
1986; Shennan, 1989). For instance, Gr0n (thisvolume) mentions how the Russian authorities
fostered differences between the ethnic groups inSiberia.
Although many indigenous groups express astrong interest in an individual's parentage or clan
membership, this has rarely required proof beyond
the aural testimony of the individual and the sharedknowledge within the group of lineage reckoning.
This is partly the basis of the current approach of
government
departments
in Australia,
where
indigenous programmes
are recognized on thebasis of decent, self identity and the community inwhich someone lives identifying them as indigenous.
The current approach is a response to the traumatic
history of the 'Stolen Generation' in Australia,
which primarily removed children that were thought
to be of mixed inheritance - typically those with an
Aboriginal mother and a European father -to besocialized into white society.·WardChurchill(1999)
claims·.that in the USA it was the treaties set up .by
the federal government that first begantouse.blood
purity as an official strategy to differentiate between
those who were 'more' and those who were •'less'

80

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

Indian. Most Native American groups traditionallyintermarried and adopted others such as children
and ca pti ves into the tri be, including
theincorporation of Europeans and Africans during thecolonial era. The. idea of reckoning indigenous
membership in terms of blood purity derives from
European concerns over racial differences andattempts to develop 'objective' criteria to classify
people for taxation and land allocation.·The treaties
set up between the USA and the Indian nations
between the 1830s and the 1860s 'gave' larger plotsof land to those of mixed blood. or those who hadintermarried with Whites (and were thus expected
to farm the land more successfully), whereas 'pure'
Indians were given smaller amounts of land thatwere to be held in common by the tribe (Churchill,
1999: 48-49). In 1887 the General Allotment Act
was intended to dissolve this collective ownershipof Indian land in favour of individual property
rights. The practice of .allotting these land-grants
focused on a blood quota, with most federal
authorities refusing land to anyone that was lessthan a half-blood member ofa specific Indiangroup; however, while 'mixed bloods' were given
their land directly, full-blood Indians were not yet
considered competent and, as· an interim measure,their land allotment was to be held in trust by local
Indian agents for a further quarter century (Churchill,
1999: 49-50). However, in 1934 the Indian
Reorganization
Act (IRA) legitimatedthecontinuationof Indian reservation lands to beadministered by federally designated tribal councils.
The IRA constitutions for reservation lands applied
the prevailing federal standard to define tribal
membership by blood with a quarter-blood usuallystated as the minimum. In time, this was reinforcedby the tribal councils who felt the need to limit the
number of people eligible for health care, benefits
and land rights, etc. In 1990 the Act for theProtection of American Indian Arts and Crafts
proposed that only people with at least one-quarter
Indian blood or enrolled in a federally recognizedtribe could describe themselves as 'Indian' for the
purpose of authenticating the making and marketingof Native American crafts and artwork (Churchill,1999). (Similarly when·. the National Indigenous
Arts Advocacy Association (NIAAA)· of Australia
developed a Label of Authenticity for Aboriginal art
in 1999, concerns were raised about how indigenous

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

artists would, or should, validate their 'authenticity'
to others.) Thus some Native American concepts of
who is, or is not an Indian have gone beyond a
flexible concept of tribal membership to internalize
some Euro-American concepts of racial purity.
Ward Churchill's (1999) review of the origins
and development of blood quota as a measure ofauthenticity has gained a particular poignancy, as
his own claims of Native American ancestry havebeen called into question in recent months. Churchill
is a professor of ethnic studies at the University ofColorado, who has come into greatest prominence
through suggesting that the 11 September 2001
attack on the World Trade Center was both a
response to and a consequence of US violations ofinternational law, disregard for human rights andviolence abroad. Churchill claims descent fromboth the Keetoowah tribe on his mother's side andthe Creeks on hisfather's.Although
the Keetoowah
Band requires that: 'a person must be 1/4 degree ofCherokee Indian ancestry or above to be a memberof the United Keetoowah Band', in 1994 theBoulder campus chancellor of the University ofColorado concluded that in relation to employment
the Universities policy considered self-identification
as the most reliable indicator of ethnicity. However
Colorado's
Standing Committee
on Research
Misconduct
is currently (May 2005) debating
whether Professor Churchill has attempted to 'gain
a scholarly voice,credibility,
and an audience forhis scholarship by wrongfully asserting that he is
an Indian' (http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/
churchill/report.html).
In Tasmania the assumption that blood purity wascentral to indigenous status was used to claim that thedeath of Truganini, the 'last Tasmanian', marked theextinction of Tasmanian Aborigines in 1873. However,in the 1970s, descendents of indigenous Tasmanians
who had married white settlers campaigned for the
return of Truganini's body, which was eventuallycremated in 1976. It is now widely accepted within the
Tasmanian community that some 10,000 people have
Aboriginal heritage. This has resonances within Fiore's
article (this volume) as it is has been claimed that the
Yam ana Indians from Tierra del Fuego and the Taino
Indians of Cuba •were also extinct. This may be
because it is easier to be sympathetic about the fate ofthe dead than acknowledge the rights of the living, butwhen descendents .are now geographically spread

BILL SILLAR

with diverse life experiences and cultural identities it
is also less clear what rights can or should be returnedto them.
Lineal descent has gained an added significancewithin North American archaeology as the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA) states that human remains and artefacts
can be reclaimed if the applicant can show either
lineal descent or cultural affiliation with the burial.
A lineal descendant is an individual tracing his or herancestry directly and without interruption by means of
the traditional kinship system of the appropriate Indian
tribe or Native Hawaiian organization or by the common
law system of descendence to a known Native American
individual whose remains, funerary objects, or sacredobjects are being requested under these regulations. This
standard requires that the earlier person be identified as
an individual whose descendants
can be traced.
(NAGPRA, 1990: section 10.14)

As Ormond-Parker(this volume) discusses inrelation to human remains held within British
institutions, claims for repatriation to descendantfamilies are only possible if there is also a full andfrank disclosure of all the documentation relating
to the collections.
ASSIMILATION VERSUS CONTINUITY: GOING
NATIVE IN THE NATION STATE
Another factor that distinguishes
indigenous
communities from other citizens of a country is
continuity of some aspects of their traditional life
style. In contrast to this, a major aim of many nation
states in the 19th and 20th centuries was to incorporate
their citizens within the norms of national society, andfrequently the distinctive languages, laws, religions
and economies of indigenous peoples were seen as achallenge to this aim. For this reason many nations
adopted explicit policies to transform 'undesirable'
aspects of native culture and incorporate indigenous
people into the national economy. Frequently state
education policies have been a primary tool used tobring indigenous children into the norms of nationalsociety and modernity (see Arnold and Yapita, thisvolume). As Tahara Kaori highlights in her discussionof the Ainu (this volume), some indigenous people
adopted. the aspirations of the time and sought

81

assimilation, however many others worked to maintainindigenous identities through active or passive
resistance to these policies. Although indigenous people
today articulate with national and world economies,
many communities have apapted and maintained
aspects of their cultures and some have sought toreaffirm their identities by retrieving abandoned
traditions. But while the more traditional San ofSouthern Africa are able to use their distinctive life
style and dress to argue for land rights and local selfgovernance, those San who have been incorporated
into the urban economy and class segregation do not
fit into essentialist models of indigenous groups; therural and urban San have been able to combine
resources in developing a pan-San indigenous
movement but their distinctive histories and aspirations
also raise tensions (Sylvain, 2002).
One of the most devastating influences on indigenous
cultures has been the forced removal of children fromtheir families, such as the Indian boarding schools of
the USA where separation from Native American
families was accompanied by a ban on speaking
native languages and wearing indigenous dress, andwhere indigenous beliefs and histories were replacedby the doctrines of Christianity as well as forced
labour. By the 1920s approximately 80% of Native
American children in the USA were sent to boarding
schools to be acculturated away from family andtribal influences (Hurst Thomas, 2000). Similarly
from the 1800s till as recently as the 1960s, over
100,000 Aboriginal children were systematicallyremoved from their parents and placed with whitefamilies in a policy that was actively supported by the
British and Australian governments. Article II of theconvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in
1948, includes the forcible transfer of children fromone group to another in its definition of genocide. In
May 1995 the Australian National Inquiry into thepast and present practices of separation of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander children from their families
was established, supporting a very wide-ranging reappraisal of the treatment of Aborigines in Australia.
The. resulting books recording. individual experiences
and reactions to the history of the Stolen Generations
have recently been recognized as one of nine significant
items of documentary heritage inscribed as Australia's
contribution. to .UNESCO's· Programme to protectand •promote. documentary. material.

82

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

Where indigenous
communIties
maintaincontinuities with earlier cultural practices these areoften in spite of colonial policies that either removed
indigenous people from their land and their families
or marginalized them on poor quality. reservation
lands. It is therefore particularly ironic that it is now
becoming a feature of legal battles for indigenous
land rights in both Canada and Australia that the
courts seek evidence for continuities in social,economic and religious practices within indigenous
communities to justify rights of access to land
(Leclair, Sutton, this volume). In a reversal of theassimilation policies of earlier. periods, indigenous
peoples now gain rights by asserting their cultural
distinctiveness. Archaeologists, anthropologists andhistorians may be drawn in to identify evidence ofcontinuity of cultural practices. Similarly the request
for the return of human remains under the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
of the USA stipulates that the applicant has to show
some aspect of continuity of cultural affiliation inorder to claim the remains. These claims can use thefollowing types of evidence: 'Geographical, kinship,
biological,
archaeological,
anthropological,
linguistic, folklore, oral tradition, historical orother relevant information
or expert opinion'(NAGPRA, 1990: section 10.14).
Archaeologists,
anthropologists
and heritage
professionals could all have an important role toplay in. supporting indigenous efforts to maintainculturalcontinuity
throughpromoting
local
languages (Arnold and Yapita, this volume),developing relevant aspects of indigenous economic
activities (Kendall, this volume) educating future
generations about their culture. and history (Ramos
Lopes, Abungu, this volume). Such efforts at
maintaining and revitalizing indigenous culture
are upheld as a. right under the UN's D.raft
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples(Article 12). While many museums played an
important role in the nation building of the 19th and20th centuries, Abungu (this volume) asserts theirpotential in revitalizing an interest in .local cultural
traditions for future generations of African children.

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

colonizers demanded to be freed from the economic
and legal control of the colonial power. In many
areas, such as Peru and Bolivia, once independence
had been achieved new laws were enacted that
consolidated settlers' land ownership, and removed
much of the authority of native leaders and thedistinctive legal protection
extended to native
communities in an effort to draw them into thenational economy. For this reason any demand to'indigenous rights' is inherently a challenge to
National Sovereignty because it is a claim ofprimacy and a demand to rights that pre-date theforming of the modern state, its national laws, andthe written titles of land ownership (see ·Leclair,and Sutton, this volume).
At the time of independence 'Indian Title' was wellrecognized by. the· founding fathers of the. USA andThomas Jefferson (1793) conceded that 'The Indians[have] full, undivided .and independent sovereignty as
long as they choose to keep it, and ... this·.might beforever'; only the voluntary sale of title or concessions
given through treaties could extinguish title orsovereignty (Catanzariti, 1992: 272). However, in
1831, Chief Justice John Marshall made a rather
different ruling in the case of the Cherokee v. Georgia.
After conceding that the arguments 'intended to provethe character of the Cherokees as a state, as.a. distinct
political society, separated from others, capable ofgoverning itself, has ... been completely successful',
Marshall went. on to observe:
Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an
unquestionable and, heretofore, unquestioned right tothe lands they occupy until that right shall be extinguishedby a voluntary cession to our government, yet it may well
be doubted whether those tribes which reside within theacknowledged boundaries of the United States can, withstrict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They
may more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic
dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we
assert a title independent of their will, which musttake
effect in point of possession when their right of possession
ceases. Meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage. Theirrelation to the United States resembles that of a ward to
his guardian. (Marshal, 1831)

CONFLICT WITH THE NATION STATE
Many nation states emerged within the context ofliberal reform where the descendents of the original

Although it could be argued that the very existenceof a treaty suggests that both nations were equivalent
sovereign states, this ruling clearly expresses the

83

BILL SILLAR'problem' that the newly formed Nation of theUnited States had in dealing with claims for selfdetermination
within their national boundaries.
These .•arguments remain pertinent to the power
and authority of the native nations within the USA
and were recently quoted by Justice Thomas inrelation to the case of the US v. Billy Jo Lara,
where he concluded 'The Court should admit thatit has failed in its quest to find a source ofcongressional power to adjust tribal sovereignty.
... We might find that the Federal Government
cannot regulate the tribes throughordinary
domestic legislation and simultaneously maintainthat the tribes are sovereigns in any meaningful
sense. But until we begin to analyze these questions
honestly and rigorously, the confusion that I haveidentified
will continue
to haunt our cases'(Thomas, 2004: 13).
When national
institutions
and laws fail,indigenous peoples may try to use international
bodies to place pressure on their national government
to recognize their 'indigenous' status (see OrmondParker, and Tahara, this volume). Organizations
such as the United Nations are in the process ofgenerating international norms that seek to define
and protect the rights that indigenous people should
ha ve over their cultural practices and material
heritage. Through this process a new generation ofindigenous
peoples has grown up who areknowledgeable
and competent in the areas ofinternational diplomacy and legislation. However,
one of the great hopes of the United Nations
International Decade of the World's Indigenous
People, which ended in December 2004, was the
adoption of an international declaration for theprotection and promotion of indigenous peoples'
human rights. The working group met for its 10th
session in Geneva in September 2004, but the
adoption of the declaration was blocked by several
governments. Two of the major sticking points
have been Article 3: 'Indigenous peoples have theright of self-determination. By virtue of that rightthey freely determine their political status andfreely pursue their economic, social and culturaldevelopment' and references in several places within
the draft treaty to the collective rights of indigenous
peoples. These demands to self-determination,collective rights and indigenous law are seen as aparticular challenge to the authority of the nation

state (Arnold andYapita, this volume). The United
Kingdom's government has been accused of acting
in concert with the USA, Canada, New Zealandand Australia to prevent the concept of collective
rights being enshrined in the declaration (Whall,
2002). To date no indigenous group has made any
serious attempt to succeed from the nation states
within which they have been incorporated; on thecontrary, indigenous groups have largely worked
through the legal frameworks of their nation states,
relying on the moral pressure of international
agreements and media coverage to place pressure
on their governments
and judicial systems torecognize indigenous rights (see Leclair, Sutton,
Ormond-Parker, Tahara, this volume).
ANCESTRAL LANDS: WHO CONTROLSINDIGENOUS HERITAGE?
In recent years indigenous activism at national· andinternational levels has led to a renewed focus· onindigenous rights and the return of land to indigenous
groups in many parts of the world. This has resulted
in several prominent court cases, although providing
strong evidence for a legal case that can demonstratespecific links between present-day indigenous groups
and the pre-colonial
occupants of the land iscomplicated (Leclair, Sutton, this volume). It is
widely recognized that attributing artefact groups or'archaeological cultures' to specific peoples in thepast, and then to their living descendents today, isextremely difficult and politically risky (Shennan,
1989: Jones, 1997). This has enormous implications
for the use of archaeological evidence and thetestimony of archaeologists in court. Leclair describes
how Bruce Trigger's advice that archaeologists
should not accept oral histories uncritically, wasapplied in a very different context when it was citedextensively to undermine the use of oral tradition
during a legal challenge to First Nation land claims
in Canada. In another case, Richter's interpretationof archaeological evidence relating to Five Nations
trading practices across the St Lawrence River
became .central to a legal claim over·· the·. right tocontinue cross-border international trade. unhinderedby importation duties (Leclair, this . volume). No
archaeologist can predict how their research, analysis
and interpretation
will be used by others,but
archaeologists need to be· more. considerate of •the

84

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

wider forum within which our work maybe used. At
the other end of the scale some anthropologists andarchaeologists have worked actively with indigenous
groups to support their claims, and Leclair also
points out that within a court of law this may meanthat these individuals will lose their potential statusas expert witness because they have become too
associatedwith the plaintiff's
cause.
Anarchaeologist's or anthropologist's primary duty to
the well- being and care of the people they are
working with may be best served by the clear
reporting of evidence and the sensitive interpretationsof their situation, but not by pushing ambiguous data
to their interpretative limits.
The 'old' nations of Europe have frequently drawn
upon their distinctive pasts to develop a sense ofnational unity, and during the process of gaining
independence from colonial powers many 'new'nation states appropriatedthe heritage of theirindigenous peoples as emblems of the state. This canbe· seen with regard to how Peru has portrayed theInka as symbolic precursors of the modern nation
state, how Mexico has adopted symbolism from the
Aztecs and the Maya, or Rhodesia was transformed
into the nation of Zimbabwe. For Bolivia it has been
the site and culture of Tiwanaku that has provided
the key symbols for nation building and, in thisvolume, Arnold and Yap ita discuss some of thetensions that this raises for indigenous Bolivians who
also identify with Tiwanaku and have revived
ceremonies. at the site and recently campaigned toreturn one of the enormous monolithic statues fromthe national capital of La Paz back to Tiwanaku.
Similarly, Endere describes a revival of indigenous
ceremonies and rituals at 'national monuments' inArgentina, and on some occasions the indigenous
groups demand exclusive use of the sites so that theserituals can be undertaken in secret. Endere also
discusses changes in law, policy and approach toindigenous heritage in Argentina, debating theimportant question of who owns and manages'national' heritage when it is within the territory of
specific indigenous groups and seen as 'their' heritage.
This may include sites that were not previously
known about by the group or necessarily constructedby their ancestors. For instance the three and a half
million year old hominid tracks in the volcanic ash
at Laetoli, Tanzania, discovered by Mary Leakey,
have been adopted by the local Masai who revere

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

them and guard them on behalf of the Antiquities
Unit of Tanzania (Stanley-Price, 2000).
It should be remembered that the 'conservation'of some World Heritage Sites and National Parks
has been achievedby removing
indigenous
inhabitants. Many National Parks were created topreserve 'wildernesses', a concept similar to thatof terra nullius that assumes a lack of permanentbuildings and fences meant that the land was
unaffected by the presence of humans and would
be better protectedby removing indigenous
residents and preventing nomadic groups fromusing the area. For instance, Yellowstone National
Park was created by expelling
the resident
Shoshone, and Blackfeet were removed from Glacier
National Park, helping to develop an approachthat has been exported to many other parts of theworld (Spence, 1999). The conservationofarchaeologicalsites and landscapes and theirrecognition as National or World Heritage has
occasionally resulted in the removal of ownershipand control from the local population
who
originallyconstructed
them and previously
maintained them (Endere, this volume). It is not
surprisingthat indigenous
people sometimes
consider earlier archaeological work to have been
little more than legalized grave robbing and land
grabbing with the support and authority of national
legislation to back it up (Watkins, this volume).
This insult is compounded when information at
the site describes the people who built and used itin some period of deep prehistory
without
discussing any links with the cultural traditions
and the concerns of the living communities (Endere,
this volume). In 2000 the Timbisha Shoshone
Indians of California and Nevada regained 7600
acres of land, some of it within Death Valley
National Park, to be held in trust by the USA forthe benefit of the Tribe in recognition of 'thecontributions by the Tribe to the history, culture,and ecology of the Park and surrounding area'(Timbisha Shoshone Act, 2000). The Tribe and the
National Park Service will manage the Park land
co-operatively, including a provision to temporally
close parts of the park when the tribe wish to carryout traditional cultural and religious activities.
This is the first time that Native American
ownership has been recognized within a National
Park and Congress also stated that portions of

BILL SILLAR

lands previously designated as 'wilderness' would
be recognized as Timbisha Shoshone Natural andCultural Preservation Area.
At the centre of these debates is the question of
how national bodies that own, manage and/or
publicize'national'
heritage can work withindigenous groups to include concerns aboutownership and access to 'their' heritage. This may
require a dualistic approach such as that of Norway,
where successive Cultural Heritage Acts since1978 have included legal protection for any Saami
cultural remains over 100 years old, whereas most
historicalremainsmust be older than thereformationin 1537 to be given automatic
protection. Or they may relate to specific territories
such as Nunavut, Canada's newest and largest
territory, established in 1999 to be a homeland forthe Inuit,
where the conservationof thearchaeological heritage comes under the remit of
the Department of Culture, Language, Elders andYouth, which aims to create 'a territory of strong,
self sufficient communities that reflect traditional
values and culture'. In relationship
to World
Heritage Sites the idea of an Indigenous Peoples
Council of Experts was presented to the 24th
session of the World Heritage Committee byrepresentatives from Australia, Canada and New
Zealand. The initiative was taken by indigenous
peoples wishing greater involvementin thedevelopment and implementation of laws, policies
and plans for the protection of their knowledge,
traditions and cultural values relating to theirancestral lands, within sites now designated as
World Heritage properties. This proposal was
turned down by UNESCO's
World Heritage
Committee in December 2001; however, the debate
about how to include indigenous peoples has had
some influence on UNESCO's Convention for the
Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
adopted in 2003. This defines intangible cultural
heritage as
the practices, representations, expressions, as well as theknowledge and skills, that communities, groups and, insome cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural
heritage. It is sometimes called living cultural heritage,and is manifested inter alia in the following domains: oral
traditions and expressions, including language as avehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; performing

85

arts; social practices, rituals and festive events; knowledge
and practices concerning nature and the universe;
traditional craftsmanship. The intangible cultural heritageis transmitted
constantly

from generation

recreatedto generation,by communities

response to their environment,

and isand groups, intheir interaction

withnature, and their historical conditions of existence. It
provides people with a sense of identity and continuity,and its safeguarding promotes, sustains, and develops
cultural diversity and human creativity. (UNESCO,2003)

OWNERSHIP AND COPYRIGHT: WHO OWNSINDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE?
There is currently a heated debate over the rights
indigenous peoples should have to own and protect
their resources, .including genetic materials, artistic
designs, music, ceremonies, artefacts or sacredsites. These issues have been debated particularly
strongly within the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO), which has been discussing
the protection, promotion and preservationof
traditional cultural expressions for at least two
decades. However, this debate has not yet resulted
in a consensual policy at WIPO, largely because it
raises major challenges in relation to most copyrightlaw. The Western ideal of 'invention' identifies
adaptations in creative art or technical advancement
as individual originality. Copyright laws have beenformulated to protect the innovative creations ofspecific authors for a prescribed period in order thatthe author can gain economic benefit from theirinnovation. This can be contrasted with thoseindigenous groups who consider the making of art
or the breeding of plants and animals as a communal
obligation.
Here individual creativity may be
acknowledged, but it is also the individual's duty topreserve the communal resource through appropriate
use and by passing it on to succeeding generations
within the group with an emphasis placed upon
protecting customary knowledge and skills andoccasionally restricting who uses them. However,copyright· law has ..·been developed to. encourage
rapid innovation, not to restrict access to collectively
owned traditional knowledge and protect. it frominappropriate borrowing (Blakeney, 1999).
Perhaps the best known of these debates has beenin relation to Aboriginal art in Australia ..The form

86

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

and style of Aboriginal art may be constrained byother members of the community to prevent themisuse or misrepresentationof the imagery,particularly
where the designs are sacred or
meaningful within a specific context. Aboriginalartists are free to create original pieces of commercial
work, but the style and content of certain images
may belong to a specific group and the context anduse of the images may be constrained by traditionalrules. Although there. has been a long history of
misuse and unauthorized reproduction of works of
Aboriginal art, a number of cases in the Australian
courts have extended some protection to Aboriginalartists through the Copyright Act. In 1988 Johnny
Bulun Bulun and 13 others sued a T-shirt
manufacturer who had used their designs. Although
this case did· not proceed to judgement, the out-ofcourt settlement forUS$150,OOO
was widelyreported. In 1994 the copying of an Aboriginal
design to decorate carpets led to a court case inwhich a large award of damages established thatcopying a part or the whole of an Aboriginal work
was a copyright infringement. However, it was theview of the recently disbanded Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Commission that, despite
these developments,
effective protectionofindigenous intellectual property was beyond thescope of existing laws. Problems with the applicationof copyright law .can be seen in the case of The
Reserve Bank of Australia being sued by the Galpu
clan for using the design of a morning star pole on
a commemorative banknote. Although the pole had
been created by an initiated member of the clan, theGalpu asserted that the artist was under obligation
to the clan to prevent the design of the pole frombeing used in inappropriate contexts. In this case theJudge expressed sympathy for the Clan's concerns,
but stated that Australia's copyright law did notprovide adequate
recognitionof Aboriginalcommunity claims to regulate the reproduction anduse of works that are essentially communal inorigin (Blakeney, 1999). As another example,
Blakeney (1999) discusses the painted images of the
Wandjina, the Creation Ancestors of the Kimberley
Aboriginal People, which form a notable part of theKimberley area .rock art. These images may be
retouchedor painted today ~provided
thatappropriate deference is given to the ancient spirits.
Although the Kimberley Aborigines. believe that

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

inappropriate treatment of these images will cause
death and devastation, there is currently no law toprevent the use of these images by commercial
en terp rises.
Knowledge about 'wild' plants with specificproperties
has been maintained
within many
indigenous communities, similarly crops and animals
have been nurtured. and developed during thethousands of years of labour involved in theirdomestication. This raises the question as to whoshould have the right to control or own modificationsof these in the future. The 1975 European Patent
Convention forbade the patenting of plant varieties
both because small changes in plant varieties could
not be easily patented as 'inventions' and because thefreedom of farmers to breed and develop plantvarieties was considered essential for food security
and crop protection. The European Patent Office(EPO) started to.· grant some patents on plants. andanimals in the early 1990s, but in 1995 Greenpeace
successfully brought a case against a patent on GM
plants and the EPO's Court of Appeal confirmed its
original ruling that plant varieties could not bepatented. In 1998, in response to pressure from thebiotech industry, the European Union (completely
separate from the EPO) enacted a directive that
explicitly allowed the patenting of living organisms,
such as plants and animals (Directive 98/44IEC on
the legal protection of biotechnological inventions)in direct conflict with those of the European Patent
Convention. Restrictions on the patentability ofplant varieties are not present in the patent laws of
the USA, Japan or Australia. Previously, directives
from Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (partof the World Trade Organization)required all
countries to extend their patenting to include microorganisms and microbiologicalprocesses, but
permitted countries to exclude plants and animals
and stipulated two major exceptions -breeders
should be allowed free access to registered varieties
during the period of experimentation, and farmers
should be allowed to reproduce varieties for seed andeven to sell the seed as long as this was not the main
business of the farm. However, further revisions in1991 to the International Agreement on Plant-Variety
Protection (UPOV) allow nations to revoke either ofthese exemptions and in 1994 the US eliminated thefarmer's· exemption (Brush and Strabinsky, 1996:
15). Recently farmers in the USA have been obliged

BILL SILLAR

to sign contracts that forbid them from replanting theseed they have grown, and Monsanto have taken
farmers to court for re-sowing Roundup Ready
Soybeans and even crops that have hybridized with
their strains. Apparently
unaware of George
Washington's advice 'It is miserable for a farmer tobe obliged to buy his Seeds; to exchange Seeds may,in some cases, be useful; but to buy them after the firstyear is disreputable.' (George Washington to his
farm manager William Pearce, 16 November 1791).
Multinational seed companies have used patenting
law to gain rights over traditional crops; sometimes
forcing farmers to pay for growing crop varieties
based on local domesticates (Shetty, 2005), such
'improved' varieties are usually dependent on theuse of expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides(Kendall, this volume).
However, many indigenous and small-scale farmers
have resisted these movements. For instance, theBolivian government's
attempt to introduce a
Genetically Modified potato strain resistant to Cyst
Nematode was thwarted by protest from politically
active peasant farmers, who demanded that greaterattention be paid to existing local varieties. At ameeting in Mexico in November 2004, environmental
activists and indigenous representatives complainedthat the 15 research centres of the Consultative
Group for International Agricultural Research, whohold seed banks of all the main crop varieties in theworld, were building overly strong links with large
biotechnology corporations giving them free accessto indigenous crop varieties that were being geneticallymodified to develop expensive commercial strains.
Perhaps in response to the protest in Mexico, theInternational Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru,
recently returned commercial rights over potato
varieties to Quechua-speaking farming communities.
The 206 potato varieties will be 'repatriated' from
CIP's collections to be maintained in a 'potato park'.
As well as providing food for the six communities
that jointly own the land in southern Peru, the 15,000
ha park will serve as a 'living library' of potato
genetic diversity (Shetty, 2005). The agreement,
which is the first of its kind, aims to ensure that thecontrol of genetic resources is kept with local people,
that it does not become subject to intellectual property
rights in any form, and that the diversity of Peruvian
potato varieties is maintained. This could lead tosimilar deals elsewhere to return rights in major

87

crops to the communities that domesticated them.
While archaeologists have been very vocal about thetrade in antiquities (which impacts on our own
resource and livelihood) we have largely ignored theimportant political implications of our research into
domestication, offering little criticism of commercial
companies that have claimed ownership of indigenous
crop varieties through relatively minor changes.
These arguments over copyright have also affected
the ongoing debates about the ownership of humanremains. Ormond-Parker (this volume) describes how
the Australian Law Commission, following an earlier
ruling in Britain, have overturned earlier assumptions
that the human corpse was not an object of property
and declared that body parts and DNA may beretained by institutions that have modified the sample
through their skills and expert work. Like GM crops,
access to the technical skills can be a route to claim theoriginality and inventiveness that justifies ownership,
an argument that seems to echo previous claims thatindigenous people's lands were terra nullius and could
be claimed by settlers able and willing to 'improve'them rising 'alien' technologies. Ormond-Parker
considers the argument that genetic research may
have benefits far beyond the indigenous community,
but he highlights how rarely indigenous people havegained any benefit from such research. Only when
indigenous people have given their 'free, prior, andinformed consent' can such research be justified.
Conflicts over the ownership of human remains
and artefacts, particularly grave goods, are now afamiliar issue within archaeology and museum
practice (Fforde et al., 2002). One of the bestreported examples has been the ongoing work to
repatriate the Zuni Ahayu:da (the 'twin deities'
Uyuyemi and Maia'sewi). The Zuni believe thatafter formal use these cylindrical wooden sculptures
should be allowed to disintegrate and return to theland, their removal and conservation in museums
was considered to be a major cause of tribal decline.
The Zuni were prepared to take a long-term approachto retrieving the Ahayu:da, negotiating with museums
and collectors for their return and arranging asecure facility for their retention (Merrill et al.,
1993; Ferguson et al., 2000). In this volume Edward
Halealoha Ayau describes the reasons for reclaiming
four wooden sculptures that had been removed fromthe burial cave of a high-ranking Hawaiian chief.
These ancestral deities, ki'i aumakua, had been part

88

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

of a funerary assemblage in a burial cave and were
removed from the cave to the Bishop Museum in
1905. Hui MaZama 1 Na Kupuna 0 Hawati Nei(Group Caring For the Ancestors of Hawai'i) placed
the ki'i aumakua back in the original cave. Sadly
this cave has since been desecrated a second timeand many of the funerary items were removed
again. This raises important questions about theneed to secure repatriated artefacts to prevent further
theft. In other cases the communal ownership ofartefacts· and their return to indigenous owners has
been upheld and protected by the law. For instance,
the Aymara people of Coroma, Bolivia, own a wide
range of ancient fine ceremonial weavings, whichhave been used to defend community land claims(Bubba, 1997; Arnold and Yapita, this volume),
and· the responsibility for caring for these rotatesamong families who take on positions of authority
in the community. In the late 1970s,. a number ofthese sacred garments were sold by individual
community members put under pressure by North
American art dealers. As both the USA and Bolivia
are parties to the UNESCO conventions on culturalproperty, which prohibit commerce in items that areheld communally and constitute spiritual and cultural
patrimony,the sale by individual community
members. was deemed illegal and the items were
eventually returned to Coroma (Zamora, 1996).
There
is a widely
accepted
ethic thatarchaeologists have a duty to promote public accessto sites and publish the results of their research; thisethic is particularly strong both because the researchis frequently publicly funded and because the process
of excavation destroys evidence. For instance, theSociety for American Archaeology stresses thatarchaeologists
should 'advocate
use of thearchaeological record for the benefit of all people'(SAA, 1996). But, this ethic is challenged byindigenous groups, who assert that access to sacredsites or ritual knowledge is an exclusive rightbelonging to certain members of the indigenous
group. For instance, the Hopi have prevented therelease of archaeological and oral history reports
for scholarly research or public interest, restricting
them to use within the tribe (Ferguson et aZ., 1995).
The preventionof public disseminationof
confidential information can also be endorsed· by
the court, for instance in 1976 the Australian court
prevented the sale of the book Nomads of the Desert

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

by the anthropologist Dr Mountford, which included
descriptions and photographs of Pitjantjatjara sites,
artefacts, totemic geography and art. The court
believed that. disseminating this information was abreach of confidence and it went on to state that'revelation of the secrets to their women, children
and uninitiated men may undermine the social andreligious stability of their hard-pressed community'(McDonald, 1997). Here, indigenous desires toretain ownership of knowledge conflicts with our
ethic to promote the public disseminationofknowledge (Tarlow, 2001).
MAINTAINING CULTURE OR PRESERVING
MATERIAL CULTURE?
Archaeologists,
heritagemanagers
andconservators all profess as a primary aim theirintention to preserve the material remains of thepast. This can be compared with the continuing
struggle of most indigenous people to preserve
their culture. Frequently these two approaches arevery closely allied, with archaeologists
andindigenous groups working closely together topreserve ancient sites. However, there are times
when the potential shared interests of these groups
are confronted by somewhat different priorities. In
this volume Wharton describes how indigenous
responses to conservation have sometimes objectedto the focus upon preparing objects for static
display rather than for cultural use, but he also
highlights how museums have frequently preserved
the patina and damage on indigenous remains,
whereasEuropeanpaintings,
weavings
andsculptures are restored to the original glory of the'artists intent'. These differences in conservation
practice appear to reflect a bias in how museums
represent indigenous and Western cultures.
There may be times when the priorities ofindigenous communities will seem at odds with ourconcerns to preserve the vestiges of past activities. In
Sri Lanka a statue of the Buddha, which had been
defiled bya tourist sitting on it, was 'restored' by
washing it with milk, a process that removed centuriesold painted decoration(Wijesuriya,
personal
communication, 2001). Those of us concerned forthe preservation of· the evidence of past activities
may be horrified by this, but this act of ritual
purification is understood to have restored the statue

BILL SILLAR

back to its divine state (cf. Wijesuriya, 2001). Wharton
highlights how various indigenous groups may haveextremely different ideas about what should andwhat should not be conserved for posterity, and there
are also differences of opinion within indigenous
communities. Ayau (this volume) echoes the Zuni instating that 'our duty is to assure that the iwi ku-punaand moepu- (ancestral remains and funerary items)
are properly buried and protected so that the centurieslong process of deterioration and eventual absorption
back into the land may take place undisturbed, sothat the cycle of life can be renewed'. As Ayau
acknowledges his recovery of traditional Hawaiian
indigenous views on cultural 'conservation' processes(the removal of funerary goods from the defilementof public display in museums to be entombed again
within the sacred context of a burial cave) may bedescribed as 'destruction' by Western notions of'conservation' .of the material fabric of art andartefacts, but he considers it an obligation to hisancestors to restore funerary items to their originalcontext, and in so doing help to preserve Native
Hawaiian cultural values. However, the act ofremoving the wooden sculptures from the Bishop
Museum was not considered desirable by all
indigenous Hawaiians, some of whom argued thatthe preservation of the statutes was an opportunity to
educate their children about Native Hawaiian culture.
While Ayau argues that the only way to revive andmaintain Hawaiian culture is to respect the intentionsof the ancestors, others see the survival of theancestral statues within the museum as a potential
focus for young Hawaiians to see the achievementsof their ancestors and nurture a desire to maintaintheir culture. A very similar situation is described by
Watkins (this volume) with regard to the artefacts
recovered from excavations in the Spiro Mounds,
Oklahoma, where the Caddo tribe (who would wish
to display the artefacts to educate their children) andthe Wichita (who would choose to rebury them) haveequivalent claims to be the descendents of the people
who originally made and buried them.
The complex relationship between conserving
artefacts and maintaining culture resonates throughKendall's article (this volume). Kendall had no
doubt that it was more important to bring Native
Andean agricultural systems back into active use byrebuilding. them, and she was able to persuade the
Peruvian National Institute of Culture that it would89

be better to reconstruct the Inka canals and terraces
rather than preserve the partial archaeologicalremains. This is combined with an appreciation of
the appropriateness of indigenous technology, using
local materials
and techniquesthat can be
economically maintained by community members
willing to contribute their labour. In Andean
communities the maintenance of canal systems has
traditionally been a major focus for rituals and areaffirmation of community organizations (Isbell,1985), and Kendall describes how the archaeologicalproject's renovation of a disused canal system also
provided a renewed focus for social cohesion within
the community. However, there is a further issue:
the intensified agricultural production results inincreased yields, just as it would have done for theInka, but it is labour intensive and the 21st century
economy does not value the produce as highly.
Maintaining or reviving indigenous cultural practices
may be as important as conserving ancient artefacts,
but it is only feasible if it is socially desirable andeconomically viable for the modern community.
Museums have traditionally been repositories
for artefacts removed from their original culturalcontext. However, more recently museums haveemerged as an additional locus for indigenous
identity, and their collections and exhibitions canplay a very active role in the maintenance orrevival of indigenous culture, customs and crafts.
Museums that incorporate the intentions behind.UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of theIntangible Cultural Heritage into their function
may see a major role for themselves in maintaining
skills and design practices for future generations. In
this volume Ramos Lopes discusses how the creationof an ethnographic museum in the Amazon becamea major focus for the cultural identity and activismof the Ticuna Indians. His account describes how
this museum was a powerful source of indigenous
pride and affirmative action, but that it was also
seen as a threat by settler society at a time when the
Ticuna were working to retain and regain some of
their landholdings. In this case it was the Brazilian
State military that.·provided essentialprotectiontQ
the Ticuna.· The museum .•also provided· a focus fortheclevelopmentof international.relationsand
helped to draw attention to the Ticuna . cause.
Abungu •.describes a similar role for museums in
Africa, but she highlights that museums will have

90

WHO'S

INDIGENOUS?

to change if they are to support community
involvement. Museums have tended to treat theirown collections as 'sacred objects', restricting
access to the curatorial
priests and initiatedresearchers and excluding visitors from contact
with the artefacts through prominent display of thesacred prohibition'do not touch'.
Similarly
indigenous beliefs can also impose taboos about
who should see or handle particular items held inmuseum collections (such as some Australian
Aboriginal bull roarers). There is obviously a need
to be creative in rethinking which restrictions
matter and how the display and/or the active useof artefacts can help to retain their cultural
significance. For instance, recently the Cambridge
Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology
accessioned a set of Naga shamanic equipment;
however, the ownership of this collection continues
to reside with the Naga who can request the returnof the equipment when it is needed and who have
imposed conditions upon the museum as to which
items can be stored or displayed together andwhich must be kept apart (Anita Herle, personalcommunication,1994).
REPRESENTATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES:
WHO SPEAKS FOR WHOM?
Indigenous peoples have frequently been delimited,defined and displayed by external authorities,. so it
is no surprise that indigenous representatives at
Suva reacted against further external definitions
and stated: 'We assert our inherent right to define
who we are. We do not approve of any otherdefinition'. But, such assertive statements, and theiruse of highly emotive language to make politicaldemands, may be challenged on the grounds that it
is frequently unclear as to who has the authority to
speak for indigenous groups. Different groups havediverse traditions
for selecting
leaders andspokespersons. Like internal indigenous legal systems
these may not conform to national norms of
democratic election. For instance, as Arnold andYap ita (this volume) briefly mention in relation to
Bolivian Ayllus, there may be distinct gender
structures and a heavy reliance on kinship alliances.
Some groups
have developed
more recent
representative organizations in the form of NGOsor cultural associations, whereas others have never

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

recoveredinternalstructuresof governanceappropriate to the shifting nature of their populations
since the colonial impact and are largely represented
by activist individuals or external aid agencies.
Arnold and Yap ita describe some of the tensions
between traditional community elders and politicalactivists of urban groups in Bolivia today.
Hui Malama I Na Kupuna a Hawai'i Nei(Group Caring For the Ancestors of Hawai'i) was
formed in December 1988 by Native Hawaiians toprotest against the archaeological disinterment ofover 1000 burials in preparation for the constructionof a Ritz Carlton Hotel. More recently, the Bishop
Museum has suggested that it may also request to
be recognized as a Native Hawaiian organization
pursuant to NAGPRA. The Bishop Museum, foundedin 1891 in the name of the Princess Pauahi Bishop,
whose collections it contains, has acted as stewardof the Native Hawaiian collections and some of its
staff (although not the current director) are Native
Hawaiians. Ayau has protested at the conflict ofinterest that will be inherent if a museum that isa
repository. of Native Hawaiian collections is also
the critical monitor of appropriate cultural practice(Ayau, 2004). Who can judge the degree to which
either of these organizations are representative of
Native Hawaiians, living or dead?
But what of archaeologists and anthropologists,
who are sometimes placed in the privileged positionof 'experts' on indigenous· cultures within court
cases? In some cases their professional training
gives them an ability to sum up a variety of data
and describe patterns in behaviour or material
culture in a way that the courts will accept as
relevant (Sutton, this volume). But, unless trainedin forensic work, few of us would feel prepared topresent our academic work in such a context. Thishas been particularly
frustrating
for some
indigenous groups, which have had to request or
pay 'experts' to present their own culture to thecourts. Frequently,
changes in the law havebenefited the experts in providing further work.
For instance,
NAGPRA
resultedin paid
employment for archaeologists and curators inregistering Native American collections; similarly
Tahara (this volume) describes how the Act topromote Ainu culture· has created more work foracademics. It can be little surprise that indigenous
groups have frequently preferred to use moral

BILL SILLAR

pressure or media publicity rather than the much
more expensive and time-consuming route of thecourts (Ormond-Parker, this volume), such as the
Kayapo's successful use of media interest inthemselves and their confrontation
with miners
and loggers to pressurize the Brazilian government
and the World Bank to change policies and help toprotect a series of reserves totalling roughly thearea of Scotland (Turner, 1992).
The public perception of indigenous people haslargely been constructed through the writings,
drawings, photographs
and collections used tocreate museum displays, films· and publications.
Today we all 'consume' images of indigenous
people through magazines, television programmes,music and the tourist industries. These representations
maybe produced by indigenous peoples, have theco-operative involvement of indigenous peoples or
be produced by external agencies, but whoever
produces them there are further issues about who
controls. the representations, who distributes themand who benefits from them.
Alan Ereira (this volume) discusses the productionand editing of his influential film From the Heart of
the World and his deliberate attempt to be true to theintentions lying behind the Kogi's original request to
be filmed by highlighting their isolated status in
relation to wider Columbian society and their request
to us, 'the younger brother' , to respect and protect
their cultural traditions, their environment and theirisolation. Ereira acknowledges that he sometimes
deliberately excluded a few disruptive details (suchas .a shot of saplings growing in coca cola cans(personal comment 2002)) and agreed to Kogi
suggestions (such as the use of a newly constructedgate to represent the gulf between 'us' and 'them') tomake the film much more true to the Kogi's own
vision that the film should be deliberately advocatory.
The wide-ranging effects of this film have included
the setting up of the Tairona Heritage Trust, whichused its resources to help buy-out recent settlers toprovide land for the Kogi until such time as theColombian state also came to support this policy(Ereira). However, since the making of the film thesituation in the Sierra has changed fundamentally,
with paramilitaries and the army vying for controlof the region, although this did not gain international
media attention until eight tourists were kidnappedat the end of 2003. The film also contributed to the91

public image of indigenous peoples as being respectfulof the environment. The image of indigenous peoples
as guardiansof the environment
may havecontributed to some of their enhanced politicalpower in recent years (Leclair, this volume), but it isjust as dangerous and partial as the previous
stereotype of the primitive savage. The archaeologicalrecord attests to large-scale processes of deforestation,soil erosion and occasional faunal extinctions brought
about by human activities throughout much of theworld prior to European colonization (Bahn andFlenley, 1992). Yet many indigenous groups do havea close engagementwith their land and areunderstandably critical of the impact of large-scale
agriculture, industrialization,mining, dams andpollution. In some cases indigenous technology andland management was more productive and able tosustain a larger. population prior to the impact ofcolonizationand the impositionof European
agricultural techniques (Uribe Botero, 2005-07;
Kendall, this volume).
The question
facingarchaeologists, museums and the media is how to
explore these issues in a nuanced and critical way
that includes the presentation of indigenous people'sviews without constructing false stereotypes - and all
within the short space of a newspaper article, adisplay case or a short documentary. As the Kogi
now have access to equipment to make their own
films through the 'Indigenous Media Project' it will
be instructive to see if they choose to present an
idealized vision of traditional Kogi society or if, likefilms made by other indigenous groups, they focus
more strongly on active identity construction andareas where they are in conflict. with local andnational society (Turner, 1992). The process ofcreatingand disseminating
films and otherrepresentations is now an active aspect of many
indigenous groups contributing to the maintenanceand change of society, and Turner (1992: 7) reportsthat some of the younger Kayapo chiefs gained theirchieftainship partly because of the renown andmediating skills they developed as camerapersons.
Public archaeology is primarily concerned withpromoting access. to sites, artefacts and information
aboutthe past. But, when dealing.withthepastandthe present of indigenous peoples, the usual concerns
over •who decides what to display and who. hasaccess to the. display become .ever. more· pertinent.
Every museum exhibition, whatever its overt subject,

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INDIGENOUS?

inevitably draws on the cultural assumptions of thepeople who make it. For this reason more and more
exhibitions are being produced in close co-operation
with representatives from diverse groups, in orderto encourage self-critical internal discourse prior to
finalizing the exhibit. The collections
withinmuseums are the primary resource and raison d' etrefor most museums, but they are also a problematic
inheritance when it was precisely these objects thatwere used to construct earlier representations ofindigenous groups as 'primitive'. For this reason
many museums are reconsidering how they use these
problematic collections and how their displays will
be understood and received by different audiences
today. Perhaps one of the most well-known examplesof this issue has been the full-sized figures modelledon the bodies of Khoisan living in Cape Town in
1910,that were used in a representation of bushmenaround a camp fire at the Cape Town Museum. The
museum became increasingly embarrassed by theevolutionary stereotypes that it was displaying, but
the popularity and historical significance of thedisplay meant that the figures could not simply bedisposed of and needed to be re-contextualized(Lane, 1996; Davison, 2001). The same issue of reevaluating images that were created at the time ofsocial evolutionary dogma confronts Danie Fiore in
her article discussing the photographs and drawingsof Indians of Tierra del Fuego, particularly when
dealing with the 'then' and 'now' photos of indigenous
people apparently persuaded to abandon traditional
body paint and masks and don the European-style
clothing of 'successful' assimilation. There is a needto consider the original purpose of these images(createdby explorers,
missionaries
andanthropologists) and the degree to which they justified
and constructed the image and ideal of the civilized'white-man' as much as the 'Indian', and Fiore goeson to consider the use of these images in a modern
self-critical exhibition. But, there may also be a
problem if museums see their role as primarily oneof promoting tolerance if this implies 'pacifying
activism'. Throughout Africa some culture houses
have played an important role in providing a platform
for traditional elites to challenge the authority ofnational politics. This raises further questions about
the audience that museums address - can they be
relevant to local community and international tourism
at the same time, and how should we measure the

WHOSE

ARCHAEOLOGY?

success or failure of a museum's activities? (See also
Abungu and Ramos· Lopes, this volume.)
DEBATE OR DISPUTE?
While writing this introductoryarticle, I havebeen very conscious of the curious responsibilitiesof the editors of an academic journal when
discussing issues of such emotional and politicalstrength. It is surely the purpose of academia notsimply to pander to the norms, prejudices orstereotypes on a given subject, but to seek out thecontradictions,problems and pitfalls of current
practice. As Leclair discusses, we should be aware
when legal decisions and sensitivity over indigenous
politics are restricting
justifiable
debate. As
discussed in this article, indigenous demands area major challenge to many of the most fundamental
assumptions and· practices of archaeology andheritage management.
But,while I am keen todevelop an informed discussion, I do not think itshould be our role to. create contestation throughour own polemic. As is probably clear from thistext, I am broadly sympathetic to many of theconcerns of indigenous peoples and appreciativeof the difficulties inherited from past conflict aswell as current issues. Yet, at the beginning of the
21st century it is rarely clear how the return ofindigenous peoples' rights can best be achieved, as
even in relation to specific situations it is difficult
to identify to whom such rights would now apply,or the impact returning such rights will have onothers. What is clear is that archaeological remains
and the rich heritage of indigenous peoples. willremain at the centre of these debates. I hope thatthe papers in this volume will contribute to theincreasing awareness within the archaeologicalcommunity that these are issues that affect ourpractice and require. our consideration.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper and this volume would not have come into being
if I had not been asked by Peter Ucko to help co-ordinate athird-year undergraduate course on Indigenous Archaeology
with him. lowe enormous debts to Peter for being both an
unstinting provocative critic and a kind and supportive
colleague. The many and varied contributors to that course
and the seminar series from which the collection of papers
in this volume emerged gave me a wide-ranging introduction

BILL SILLAR

to the complex relationship between indigenous peoples andarchaeological practice. I greatly appreciate all the time andenergy that speakers and students have given to discussing
and debating these issues with me. I am particularly grateful
to Peter Ucko, Cress ida Fforde and Lyndon Ormond-Parker
for taking the time to offer useful comments on an earlier
version of this paper.

Bill Sillar is a Lecturer
at the InstituteofArchaeology, UCL, where he co-ordinates an MA
in Artefact Studies and a course on Indigenous
Archaeology.
He previously
taughtat theUniversity of Wales, Lampeter. Bill's research has
focused on how people make and use material
culture to shape the world they live in. His PhD(Cambridge 1994) was based on research into the
production, trade and use of pottery in Peru and
Bolivia. He has also undertaken archaeologicalwork at Raqchi, near Cuzco, Peru, studying thechanging fortunes of the site and the community inrelation to successive expansionist states (Wari,
Inka and Spanish).
Contact address: Institute of Archaeology, University
College London, 34 Gordon Square, London
WC1H OPY, UK. Email: b.sillar@ucl.ac.uk
REFERENCES
African Union. Report of the African Commission~ s Working
Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities(2003) http://www.iwgia.org/sw2186.asp
Ayau, E.H. Bishop Museum doesn't qualify as a claimant to
artifacts. Star-Bulletin Hawaii, 29 August (2004).
Bahn, P. and Flenley, J. Easter Island~ Earth Island: A
Message from our Past for the Future of the Planet.
Thames and Hudson, London (1992).
Bartolome de las Casas. A Short Account of the Destructionof the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. Penguin
Classics, London [1552] (1992).
Blakeney, M. Intellectual Property in the Dreamtime Protecting the Cultural Creativity of Indigenous Peoples.
Seminar presented at the Oxford Intellectual Property
Research Centre, 9 November (1999) http://www. oiprc.
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