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Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
00:40:01
An interview with Paulette F. C. Steeves
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- [00:00]
Interviewer
Hello everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
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Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Lucas Rappel
Welcome to New Books in Science, Technology and Society. I'm Lucas Rappel, and today I'll be speaking with Dr. Paulette Steeves. Paulette is an associate professor of sociology at Algoma University in Ontario. She's Metis and Cree, a Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation, and she recently published the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. Paulette's book challenges the claim that human beings migrated across the Bering Strait and into the Western Hemisphere after the last glacial maximum about 12,000 years ago. This notion, which remains widespread among practicing archaeologists, dehumanizes the Western Hemisphere and threatens the temporal sovereignty of Indigenous people by erasing their deep roots in the Americas. As Paulette writes in the conclusion to her book, Indigenous people have been here since time immemorial. They have always known this, and it is discussed in many First Peoples oral traditions. Insisting that Indigenous people have an inalienable right to tell their history and their stories in their own voice, she provides a deeply researched challenge to the colonial legacy of American paleoarchaeology. Paulette incorporates a remarkably wide variety of evidence to substantiate her claims. This includes a detailed survey of dozens upon dozens of Pleistocene sites that contain archaeological evidence of a rich Indigenous history in north and South America that is much more than 12,000 years old. She also covers evidence from linguistics, population genetics, and paleobiogeography. What makes this book especially compelling, though, is that Paulette also weaves oral histories and other ways of knowing the past into her account. This allows her to rehumanize ancient landscapes, people and places, and decolonize deep time by bringing the present concerns of Indigenous people into direct relationality with the deep past. Finally, this book makes a compelling case that archaeology and other scientific discourses about what is often dismissed as prehistory must be understood within the context of Settler colonialism. Just as geology contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous communities by documenting the location and abundance of valuable mineral resources for imperial extraction from their ancestral homelands, so too did the insistence that Indigenous people only arrived in those places relatively recently help sever their deep roots in lands that they know to have occupied the since time immemorial. I quote, to accept that Indigenous people have been in the western hemisphere over 60,000 years and possibly prior to 100,000 years ago is to put them on an equal footing with areas of the so called Old World, she writes. The ongoing denial of human antiquity in the Western Hemisphere is not due to a lack of archaeological evidence, she contends. Rather, it is quote, unquote, based on the colonial history of American anthropology and archaeology, which continues to assert power and control over Indigenous heritage material remains, history, and humanity. The Indigenous Paleolithic is an incredibly powerful and provocative book. It's also a moving account of what Dr. Paulette Steeves calls her research ceremony. I found it enormously challenging and thought provoking, and I absolutely cannot recommend it highly enough.
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Interviewer
Thank you so much, Paulette, for joining me to talk about your recent book, the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere.
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Dr. Paulette Steeves
Thank you for inviting me.
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Interviewer
I wanted to start by just asking you a little bit about your own background. So who you are, where you come from, and then how you found yourself researching this project.
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Dr. Paulette Steeves
Well, I'm Creemeti. My grandparents were all dispossessed of their lands. They signed what's called scrip payments in Manitoba and lost all their lands there. And so I don't have a. What I call a home community, but I have a lot of relations. And I grew up in British Columbia. And in 1988, I was leaving British Columbia. I was a young, just newly divorced single parent with three kids, a truck, and 26 cents. And I went to speak to Leonard Sampson. He's a Salish elder from Lillooet that knew my family really well, just to get his counsel. And he told me, he said, you know, the elders and I have watched you grow up, and we understand you have a job to do that's going to be really hard. And he said, what you're going through now is difficult, but it's a lesson to learn how to deal with really hard things, because we know that in the future, future, you're going to do something really good for all Indian people. He said, not just us, all Indian people everywhere. He said, that's going to be even harder than this. Well, at the time, I couldn't imagine what could be harder than going through a divorce and three kids and, you know, no education. I had a great education at the time, but I never forgot his words. And I left Lillooet and, you know, I traveled with my kids and we moved around, and I ended up moving to Fayetteville, Arkansas, I think it was in 1994, because my oldest son had a lot of health issues, and that was a place that was supposed to be really good for him to live. And. And I began my undergrad, and I always remembered those words that Leonard Sampson told me. And then in 2015, when I earned my PhD, when I received my PhD, his words were just like in a billboard in my mind. Oh, this is what they meant. I just have to rewrite all the history of the Americas and reclaim Indigenous links to the land. So that's, you know, was a long journey between leaving a little bit in 1988 and getting my PhD in 2015. But I learned to listen. So listening to, you know, the thoughts in your mind, your dreams, your elders, the spirits, the land, this is something that Indigenous people have always done. When you grow up in a non Indigenous community, you're taught that if you do that, you're crazy. So. So I had to relearn how to listen. And over the years, my listening skills got better and better and better. And I never doubted that Creator had this path laid out for me. And I just had to go as fast as I could to keep up to everything they'd given me to do. And now here I am. I'm a tenured associate professor and a Canada Research Chair with the funding to continue my research. And I know that Creator has opened a lot of these doors for me, and I continue to follow the path that I was given to do this work.
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Interviewer
Yeah. Thank you. It's an amazing story. Do you want to maybe tell us a little bit more about what you mean when you talk about reclaiming the history of the Western Hemisphere for indigenous people?
- [09:15]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Right. So Western or settler archeologists for a long time argued that we've only been here maybe 12,000 years. Actually, Alex Hrulisko was the first physical archaeologist anthropologist at the Smithsonian. And he argued till the day that he died that Indians had only been here 3,000 years. And that was based. Really wasn't even based on a big body of data. That was more or less conjecture based on one site he had studied and looking around at the Americas. But Jesse figgins in the 1920s, of course, heard about these large bison bones over in New Mexico, and he went over there and excavated and found a Clovis point right in the rib of a bison that had been extinct over 10,000 years. So after a few years of arguing with Alex Hrulichka and others, it was finally accepted that we'd been here at least 10,000 years. And, you know, in the last 20, 30 years, that's crept up to maybe like 14 or 15,000 years. And now archaeologists start coming up with scenarios of how we couldn't have been here before and that we stayed put in Northern Siberia or, you know, the eastern side of the land bridge for thousands of years before we came over. But when I really started looking at the data, I emailed Steve Holland at the Denver Museum as a graduate student, I asked him, do you know of any sites that are older than 10,000 years? Because I had no clue at that time if there were very many. And he sent me a list of 10 sites. And he said, don't tell anyone what you're studying. They're just going to call you crazy. And I'm like, okay. And so I started learning about the history of violence against archaeologists that had published on what they call pre Clovis or pre11200 year before present sites in the Americas. And it was pretty interesting. But after two weeks of getting the name of those 10 sites and starting to read Archaeological reports and published papers. I had a list of over 500 sites, and I went, oh, yeah, obviously, people were here long before the beginning of the last maximum glacial maximum. And that's important to look at. So indigenous people have been erased from. From the continents of north and South America prior to 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. And that is incorrect. And a lot of archeologists are very concerned, like when the NAGPRA law came in, which requires them to speak to Native American communities and to return human remains and objects of cultural patrimony to those communities that reclaim them. Then all of a sudden, they. They began to work for ways to say that while any human remains older than a few thousand years, you can't say they're connected to a contemporary community. You can't prove it. The Quapaw tribe has proved that. So the museums in Arkansas and universities had a lot of human remains, 500 sets at least, that the Quapaw claimed were from their home village areas. And indeed, the Quapaw villages, homelands along the Arkansas river are very well documented. And that's where those human rem. So the Qapa knew that was their ancestors, but the museums and universities weren't returning them. They were trying to use loopholes in NAGPRA to maintain control of them, because that's their academic capital. Right. So the Quapaw got a hold of me. I was an undergraduate student, and they said, is there any way you can help us in supporting our NAGPRA claim to get our ancestors returned? They said, can we use genetics? And I said, well, I don't see why not. So I applied for an honors thesis grant, got into the honors program, got the grant, did the work, sent it out, sent some modern Kaupa hair samples from elders to a university in California who did the DNA extractions for me. Well, then the universities and museums knew as soon as I had that all I had to do was match those DNA to some of those remains. And before we even could do the second step, the quapaw had 500 ancestors returned and reburied. So that really taught me that there's a lot of ways we can use modern science and archeology to do the work we need to do to support our communities. And to see those elders just in tears when they got the news that they could rebury their ancestors and get them back was, oh, my gosh, just so amazing for me. And, you know, it's great to know now that those elders, most of them, have gone on to the spirit world and they've joined their ancestors. But they felt it was so important to do this work and to rebury their people in their homelands before they crossed over.
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Interviewer
Yeah. I mean, we often think of science as a tool of colonial domination, but what you're showing here is that it can be its opposite as well, that there's a kind of liberatory potential to scientific knowledge. In some cases.
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Dr. Paulette Steeves
Yes, there is. And there are not very many Indigenous archaeologists. Indigenous, First Nations, Native American, Metis, Inuit people are coming into science and into academia now in big ways, which is just so wonderful. When I began as an undergraduate student at the University of Arkansas, I didn't know another Indigenous student, Native American student. I never had a single Native American professor. Now there's many, which is just wonderful. But I think it would benefit us if there were more Native American or First nations students coming into this field. So for what I do, what we call paleoarchaeology or Pleistocene archaeology. I don't know another Indigenous archaeologist that's specifically working in this area or reclaiming homelands. And so it's really important for Indigenous. They have oral traditions, they have histories of their areas of land and their homelands. And when we can show that there is an archaeological site there, we're providing the hard evidence that the Western world requires to link them to those lands, like New Mexico. Now they have that site that's 23,000 years before present, the footprint sites. Yeah, that's a great site. It's not the oldest site in the Americas, but there were footprints there, there were humans there. Where were their communities? Where were they living? We need to start getting out there and looking for those sites and linking them to the contemporary people of that area.
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Marshall Po
Yeah.
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Lucas Rappel
Thank you.
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Interviewer
I wanted to read a quote from the introduction. I think it's from the introduction to your book that really caught my attention. You write that. Excuse me. Let me find it here. You write that Indigenous discourses are paramount to rehumanizing ancient and contemporary landscape. Rewriting the Indigenous past creates space from which to decolonize the public consciousness of the present. I found that really arresting quotation. I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how you bring Indigenous knowledge traditions into dialogue with modern scientific research. Paleoarchaeology, paleogenetics, other kinds of scientific research, how you weave them together to create a new narrative. Narrative about the Indigenous Pleistocene.
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Dr. Paulette Steeves
Right. Well, there's a number of ways of doing that. So I look for examples of oral traditions that maybe include discussions of extinct species. So now we know that these species have been extinct. Since the Pleistocene. And so these oral traditions are coming across thousands of years. And there's a really good example of that at the. I think it's called the Kisimwic site on the Palm de Terre River. So the Osage have an oral tradition about a battle between these huge beasts. It became unsafe to go out hunting or go out on the land because there were so many of these big, huge beasts. And one day, the beasts had an enormous battle that shook the whole valley, they said, shook the mountains. And a lot of them killed each other off. So there were all these dead beasts, mammoths and mastodons, and. But then it was safe to go out on the land. So the Osage, out of respect and gratitude for that, for being able to go back on the land, they burnt a lot of the carcasses of the huge beasts. And every year, they went back to that exact site, and they had a ceremony, a ceremony giving thanks for that event and for making it safe to go back on the land. While the Osage were removed from their lands on the Palm de Terre river, and the settlers that came in started digging, digging up big bones and finding stone tools. And of course, you know, a few years later, along come the archaeologists and record this amazing site that has thousands of mammoth and mastodon bones, many of them burnt, and stone tools. So right there, the Osage story, oral tradition, tells you the history of that archeological site and how it was created. So that's one way of weaving knowledge. And to do that, archaeologists need to begin to understand indigenous languages. They need to go out and meet with, you know, and, you know, hold those communities at the center of their story. So if I was going to do an archaeological site somewhere, you know, do excavations, I would want to speak to all of the local communities and ask them, you know, if they wanted to. To share their knowledge about this area and include that in. In any archaeological report of any site.
- [19:18]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to. So you spoke about oral traditions, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about. In your book, you also write about the different kinds of temporalities that these different oral traditions often embody and how they challenge conventional, maybe western, maybe you could say, colonial assumptions about the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that, how these oral traditions have caused you to think about those different temporal relationships.
- [19:51]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Yeah, there's a lot. You know, I'm really grateful for social media and for things like YouTube, where a lot of communities have begun to record their oral traditions. And to have little videos of them where we can learn from their knowledge. But one thing that's really been missed in education of indigenous people is about how incredibly diverse they were. And so when you look at language families, there are over, I think it's now over 360 language families in the world. More than half of those language families, representing hundreds of languages, are from north and South America. And if you ask archaeologists, well, how many of the original languages of this land do you know? They don't know them. Right. How do you understand people's oral traditions, you know, told or written in their indigenous languages, if you don't know the language? So indigenous languages are incredibly complex. Oral traditions are extremely complex and metaphorical. So if you're telling an oral tradition a story, and you want it carried over 10 or 20,000 years, you don't just give the main points. You color that story so that it can never be forgotten. Right. And I had to Translate for my PhD or, no, my master's, I had to translate something from a foreign language. So I found this French recording. These Frenchmen had gone down the Mississippi river and they recorded some stories of the Indians. And this was probably near Quapaw territory because they said the Indians were all going to die and they didn't want their stories to be lost. They took those stories down to New Orleans and then back to France. Somebody in museum in France, just the very year that I was doing that, it was 2010, digitized those and put them online. So I was translating from French into English and trying to wrap my mind around my little bit of understanding of indigenous languages and what these stories meant. It was not easy. It was very difficult because I didn't know the language. I didn't even know the tribe. And they're very, very metaphorical. So I have some understanding of that. But scholars, modern archeologists or scholars aren't taught to understand indigenous languages. They aren't even taught to appreciate the diversity of indigenous languages. I just was recently told there's a phrase in the Cree language that translates to when the ice went home. So what does that tell me? People were here when the glaciers receded. If we learn indigenous languages and we listen to indigenous histories, that can really inform the work we do, and it can really inform the stories about archeological sites. I think it's really important, but we have a long way to go. And I'm still trying to even learn some of the Cree language, but I have an understanding of the diversity of those languages and how difficult it's going to be. Moving forward, archaeologists working in a specific area should do a few things. One, they should learn the history of the area, the indigenous people of the area, the languages of the area, the rock art of the area, the oral traditions of the area. None of that is ever considered by archaeologists. Right? And that can really support the work that you do and really inform how we write histories of indigenous indigenous people.
- [23:34]
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- [24:05]
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Marshall Po
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- [24:41]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery?
- [24:45]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely.
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Lucas Rappel
I'm struck even now as we're talking.
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Interviewer
To each other, the way that you're your approach to talking about your book is very personal. It's often rooted in your personal the story of your personal experience doing the research, writing the book, how you came to the project. And that's something that I found very striking about the way that the book itself is written as well, that it's written in a very kind of personal register. So it's both very scientific. Parts of it are very, very technical. It's very sophisticated. But then it's also very personal. And you even, I think, at various points describe the research that you did for this book as a kind of ceremony. And then there are poems in the book. So it's a very kind of there's also a lot of diversity, I guess, in the book. So I just wanted to ask you about kind of stylistic choices that you made in terms of how you tell the story, why you made the choices that you did in telling the story that way. And the Kind of personal resonance that writing has for you.
- [25:41]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
It probably links to epigenetics. It's in my blood. So Indigenous method and theory has become known in the last, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. I've always known that I wanted to write a book that anybody could read. I knew that it had to be very strongly supported by scientific data, very strongly scientific. And I told my publisher, you know, I'm not just writing an academic book for academics. I said, I want every high school student, every first nations or Native American person, anyone interested, to be able to read this. And in Indigenous method theory, we don't sit down to ask a question, answer a question with science, and that's the end of it. You know, I pick up some of those books and papers, and I can barely stand to look at them when it's just 12 pages of charts of like, no, tell me the story. And so my publisher had said, well, that's never been done. I don't think you can do that. And I didn't say anything to him, but in my mind, I was like, just watch me. Because I am a first. You know, I'm cre. Meti. I'm an Indigenous person. And storytelling telling is how we have told our history since time immemorial, right? You have to be a really good storyteller. If you're a First nations academic, and it is a ceremony when you're doing research, you approach it with respect, reciprocity, and relationality. If it doesn't serve a community or a people, what's the point in doing it? And so I learned early on how this could really support so many first nations and Native American communities. And I've kind of written poetry since I was very young. I think I had my first poem published when I was, like, 10 years old. And it was just a natural thing for me to end on a lighter note. So one thing, if you get to know Native American and First nations people, we have a sense of humor. We have to have a very strong, healthy sense of humor. How do you survive, you know, 500 years of genocide and erasure? How do you go into a Western, academic colonial institution and survive? You better have a really good sense of humor, and you learn not to take things personally, right? So I know this history is there, and it is personal, but I don't take it personal. And I try to always remember the lighter side. And after I finished writing some chapters and getting the book together, I just. I just felt like there was a poem ready to burst out to talk about this in Many ways. And I know that most archaeologists don't include poems in their book, but let me tell you, they sure do tell some tall tales. So I don't think I was doing anything that outside the field. I was just doing it maybe in a little more eloquent, poetic way.
- [28:42]
Interviewer
Yeah, I thought the poems, yeah, they really add a really important dimension to the book, which I have to. Yeah, it's. There's just so much richness in the book in terms of the different. The different lines of evidence. We were. You were just talking about the vast diversity of indigenous languages that you use that itself as a line of evidence for the antiquity of, you know, how long indigenous peoples have been in the Western Hemisphere, how long it would take for that diversity to evolve over time. So anyway, just kind of the amazing diversity of evidence, but also of storytelling styles, of. Of stylistic conventions, from poetry to epigenetics and other forms of scientific analysis, it's really a remarkable feature of the book.
- [29:24]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Oh, thank you. Yeah. And I've heard back from a lot of people, and I'm really happy that archeologists, of course, can read this book, but that everyday people and communities can read this book and understand it. And really, I've gotten a lot of amazing emails and thanks from people for doing this work. And I'll share one story about highlighting the importance of this work. So my daughter went to a young woman's gathering in Northern bc. So a lot of first nations communities, Native American communities, have suffered greatly with social and political disparities, high rates of suicide. There's been this intergenerational trauma and sadness, and it can be very difficult to find points of hope. At this meeting, all these young girls sitting around, young adults sitting around in a circle asked to share one thing that brought them hope for the future. And my daughter said, there was this girl, she said her face just lit up and she was so excited. And she said, there's this archaeologist saying, we've been here over 50,000 years. And that gives me hope that we'll get our identity, our land, our culture, that will get it all back. And my daughter said, te. I didn't tell her it was my mom, so. So that was great, you know, for me to hear that feedback, because that was one of my main goals. If there was a. A top of the mountain goal for anything you do for research and publishing, for what I was doing was how do I become? How do I make this one flame in that fire of healing? So when you, when you're going through healing after a genocide it takes a lot of flames. They got to come from every direction, and you create this healing fire. And I often thought about the high rates of suicide. They're just through the roof in many communities, like, how can I be a piece of bringing hope back? And so that was such an important message for me. What I'd like now is to try and find a benefactor to purchase enough books that we could send one out to at least one out to every first nations high school in. In Canada. It would be great if it was the States, too. But just to get this story into their hands and to share it with them in that way.
- [31:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to. I mean, this story you just told about your daughter, I think is a good way. Well, first of all, it's an amazing story, but it's. It's a good way to transition into. A couple questions I had about what you might call the politics of the Paleolithic. So I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about why it's so important, both for you personally, but also politically, why it's so important to show that indigenous people have always been indigenous to the Americas rather than being a recent arrival across the Bering Strait from Asia.
- [32:13]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Right. So a lot of geneticists talk about, you know, indigenous peoples of north and South America, and they call them Asians from Asia. First of all, Asia and Asian culture did not exist 12,000 years ago. So use proper terms. Maybe some of our ancestors were people that came from the Eastern Hemisphere, but they weren't Asians. And so when they use those geopolitical terminologies, they erase our identity as being indigenous people to the Western Hemisphere, to what North America. Many communities call Turtle Island. Right. And I've asked a few archaeologists. Well, where are you from? Well, I'm from Italy. Oh, so you're really African from Africa. And they just are astounded. They're like, what? And then I explain it. If you said that in Italy to people, you wouldn't live very long. But that's what geneticists and archaeologists do of the Americas. They have no problem continually calling us Asians from Asia who just got here 12,000 years ago, which isn't even a speck in the timeframe of human evolution. So I really hope that archaeologists will start to use the proper terminology that's available to all of us. Right. We may have some ancestors that came from the northern parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, the area we know today as Asia, but when they came 12,000 or 20 or 50,000 years ago, they certainly were not Asian. So I think that there's a lot of ways that we can weave decolonizing and healing through academ if people will take the time to read, to listen, and to write carefully.
- [34:01]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask you about another.
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Lucas Rappel
Maybe you would call it a figment.
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Interviewer
Of the archaeological imagination, the Clovis people.
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Lucas Rappel
Can you tell us a bit about.
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Interviewer
Who the Clovis people were, whether they existed and what role they play in the colonial project of American archaeology?
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Dr. Paulette Steeves
Right. So the Clovis tool was a really beautiful tool, and it had this big concave scoop out of the middle of it where they assumed that people attached them to different throwing devices. And the Clovis tool was known to date to around 10 to 11,000 or a little more years ago, and it was found throughout North America. So archaeologists have often talked about the Clovis people. Okay, this is so ludicrous. It doesn't make. It's not seen anywhere. You don't see a cultural group of people bigger than a regional area, even a big regional area. But to say that one culture covered the Americas, never happened in the history of the world. What does that do? It erases the identity and diversity of all those people that maybe use that Clovis technology to make tools. So this was a technology that was obviously shared between many different groups of people. When it really got to me, I went into the beautiful, huge, I think it's 15 story library at the University of Massachusetts. And I was looking through their cultural sections. So they had the Cherokee people, the Catawba people, and then they had the Clovis people. And I'm like, what? Clovis was not a pupil. Clovis was a tool, technology that a lot of people shared, but it is so strongly embedded that you have a major university placing it in the cultural group of people. And I'm like, Clovis was never a people. Right. A culture is language. It's clothing, it's music, it's food, it's housing, it's dance. It's everything you do. It is not one tool. And so I wanted to make that really clear in the book. It's obvious that when archaeologists or scholars use that term, they're erasing the immense diversity of indigenous people of North America.
- [36:25]
Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask one final question. Thank you for this amazing interview. And I want to ask one final question, which is you. You coin what I thought was a really evocative term in this book, which you call pyro epistemology, and that really, I have to say that really captured my imagination thinking about pyro epistemology. And so I wanted to ask you just to explain to our listeners a little bit about what you mean by pyro epistemology and how you think that it might serve as a. Might serve us as a. Might serve a purpose of healing as well.
- [37:00]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Yeah. So there is a very strong healing aspect to fire. And you know, in traditional ways, indigenous people used fire to clean the land. So when land becomes overgrown, our birds bring in seeds and the plants shouldn't be there growing and they're smothering what should be there. Indigenous people use fire to clean the land. What that does, it cleans the land and it allows fire for the sunlight to come in and for the indigenous plants to take root and grow again. So it's. You're giving, you're giving a renewal of life. Right. And so when I thought about the literature, this dehumanizing literature that's been written about indigenous people. So in one textbook in grad school, I had to teach the professor's course and I had to use the textbook he assigned. And the textbook described an artifact. Could be a beautiful 20,000 year old spear point from France or an indistinguishable flake some weary Indian chucked out in a Mississippi cornfield a thousand years ago. Exact words. So what are you teaching first year archeology students? Right. What is the vision you're giving them of some Indian chucking out a little piece of flake and he was weary and tired. Like, seriously, were you there a thousand years ago? And why wouldn't you say that about France and say there was a beautiful 20,000 year old stone tool in the Americas or 10,000 year old stone tool? Right. So I'm thinking about how do we clear the academic landscape, the literature landscape of these dehumanizing talks. Vine Deloria Jr. Quite often stated how dehumanizing a lot of the discussions were. So we need to burn all that literature. We need to burn all of that racist, hateful talk that teaches students and people to be disrespectful, to dehumanize us. And when we do that, we clear that academic landscape for new literature to grow up that comes from informed mind and indigenous minds. Does this make a difference? Yes. I did a little bit of research with one of my big classes when I taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I think there were 320 students. One of the parts of the final exam, I asked them, what did you know before this class about indigenous people? What do you know now. And did that change your view of Indigenous people and the majority? Yes, it did. So when people become more informed, we inform racism, we inform discrimination, and we make the world a better place. I know that pyro epistemology is a term that. That I hope many people will come to understand as a need to cleanse the academic landscape of dehumanizing discussions of Indigenous people and to fill that landscape with truth and stories from Indigenous people.
- [40:04]
Interviewer
Well, your book is certainly an important contribution in that direction. So I wanted to thank you so much, Paulette, for having written the book, sharing your knowledge with us, and for having talked to me about your book.
- [40:14]
Dr. Paulette Steeves
Thank you so much for inviting me today.