The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

Medicine for the Resistance

Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

With Dr. Paulette Steeves

Patty Krawec

We're here with Dr. Paulette Steves.

Josh Manitowabi made a remark that the Anishinaabe word Giiwedin contains the idea of going home. And that what it was referring to was the glaciers, that the glaciers were going home. And this is knowledge that's contained with elders. And he gave me you know, reference to a couple of books where elders are, you know, talked about this, in the Cree have a similar word. I think it's a kiiwedin rather than with the G. And I was just so captured by this idea that our language contained knowledge, not only of the glaciers, but the fact that they hadn't always been there. And then I encountered somebody was talking on Twitter was talking about talking about Paulette’s book, Dr. Steeves Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere kind of expands on that hugely on Indigenous presence, not just 5000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago. Like, like your dissertation. You know, it's more than 100,000 years ago,

Kerry: we love it so much

Patty: that’s an extremely long time. And I was just like, when I saw that this book existed, I was like, this needs to be in my and I rewrote part of the beginning of my book based on it. I was like, I need to get this book into my book. Because it is a story of beginnings, right? I don't focus on that. But creation stories ground us, they say so much about what we believe about ourselves.

Dr Paulette Steeves:

And that's, that's important. That language you Giiwedin, because that tells us that the people were here, before the glaciers came, right. And they were here when the glaciers went home. And white faculty, white archaeologists don't know our language, don't value our language, and don't understand that not just Indigenous history, but World History is held in those languages. So that's really, really an important point about the language.

Patty:

And then I came across it in your book, I came across more examples of that, right, where you talk about Thunderbirds and the terratorns, and the story of the Osage have, and then they went and found all these bones. And it's like, wow, it's like, if you talk to the people, maybe you could learn something.

Paulette:

Right. But archaeologists typically for decades forever wouldn't talk to Native American or First Nations people, because they didn't give their knowledge any value. And because their academic capital was built on our history, our artifacts, and how the archaeologists told the story. So, they owned it, they own the artifacts, if they talk to us, they were terrified, oh we might have to give them something back and acknowledge them, that is slowly beginning to change. But, you know, I worked in field archaeology a lot in the US and archaeologists were supposed to by their agreements, consult with tribes, and they didn't, and none of the archaeologists on the crew had a clue, even whose land they were on. So it was really sad. I learned a lot about how devastating archaeology can be to Indigenous history from working in field archaeology for I don’t know, six years in the US. And seeing that, you know, how terrified archaeologists were that, you know, the Indians were going to take everything back and, and they wouldn't own it. And that was their academic capital.

So in an upcoming coming, grant, I have some collaborators and one of them is going to talk about the capitalism of history and how that is controlled by non-Indigenous archaeologists. And so there's a lot of points that people don't think about. They don't realize it's not just archaeology and history, capitalism is involved in a big way. The nation state is involved in controlling that story, because they stole all the land based on Oh, it's a terra nullius. nobody's using it, we can have it. Right. And so when we show that's not so it makes it unsafe for the nation state. But I mean, I got an email yesterday from an archaeologist that um, his wife is Colombian. And they went down to Bogota. And he talked to a lot of archaeologists there. And they don't even discuss what we call pre Holocene or pre 10,000 year before present sites because of the pressure from archaeologists in the US to deny it. And not to acknowledge that these these ancient Pleistocene sites exist. So a lot of the field of archaeology has ignored this timeframe for Indigenous people, because it's dangerous to go there. Because archaeologists in the US say so

Kerry:

I'm fascinated with the world of archaeology and and the, the sense the knowing that we, as people who are Indigenous to the land, people who have existed beforehand, people who have been colonized in this space in time, I think we have an innate understanding that that existence began beyond what we are allowed to claim. And then, you know, the truths of those existence are scattered all over the world, you know, that were they there's these artifacts that show up, that can't be carbon dated within the timeframe that suits the world archaeological space that exists right now.

And you mentioned something that brought up two questions for me, one being that, you know, you mentioned the capitalism, the capitalist kind of system that exists around archeology, as it exists now. And that brought to mind also how the colonial system managed to take the wealth out of our, you know, our peoples, and turned it into their ownership, their, you know, history, and also, my understandings or studies of things has always shown up that for, for the origins of white folks like that understanding of what it is to be white, you know, whatever we're going to use that they they that understanding isn't found everywhere, like it normally comes from, you know, people who have color involved in the spaces, and then somehow they show up, like we are older. We are older forms of existence, or older species that existed. And I find that an interesting space, like for you does that. Do you think that's one of the things that fuels this colonial way of being? Is that sense of wanting to know where they come from? Do you know what I mean?

Paulette:

Yeah, no, in, in a lot of the things that I've studied, I've really come to understand how archaeology is a child of colonization. And so if you go back into early archeology in the Americas, you'll see that Aleš Hrdlička was sort of a self trained archaeologist, he trained as a physician. But, he was extremely racist. And he claimed that the Indians had only been here 3000 years. And the thing is, if you if you look at what's required in archaeology, to make claims, and to write histories, you have to have data, you have to have evidence, you have to have science. And he was basing this on one graveyard he'd done up in Alaska. He wasn't even looking at, you know, all of the evidence from all of the continents. And he went to his grave denying that we been here for more than 3000 years.

So it was actually an African American, freeman, a Black man in Texas who was working as a cowboy that found the site that broke that barrier and prove that we've been here at least 10,000 years. He found this site with these huge bones and realized they had to be extinct animals because they were way too big. And he told his story. And his story got to Jessie Figgins at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And in 1927, he went out and started excavating this area in Texas, and actually found what they call a Clovis point in the ribs of an extinct bison. And he had to fight for a few years and have people come and see it. Nobody would believe them because everyone believes Aleš Hrdlička, right. This white or white guy who was racist. And eventually that was accepted and they're like, Okay, so the Indians have been here at least 10,000 years. Right, but it's been stuck there since the 19, late 1920s. And all this evidence has surfaced are our ancestors left us their stories in the land to tell us of their time here. They left it on the rocks with rock art. They, they've held it in their oral traditions. Archaeologists have traditionally ignored all of that. But since I've started publishing and writing more or listening, and they're stepping out of that box, so there was there's a huge fear in archaeology, it's it's been said that if you talk about sites or published on sites that are older than then 11 or 12,000 years, that's academic suicide. Right? The violence that violence against archaeologists that found older sites that's not scientific, that's not academic, that's racist..

Kerry:

Mm hmm

Could you tell us some of the stories tell us what, what, what the ancestors know and what was left in the rock art?

Paulette:

Oh, there's, there's so much in the rock art, it's immense. So I just had my students completed database of rock art sites whose location was known and made public. And we have, I think, over 2000 sites, there's another 1500 that are held within another database, and their their locations aren’t public. So I won't publish on those. But what that tells us is that, you know, those rock art sites are like mnemonic pegs. So I have heard that one person worked with elders in the Yukon, and they wouldn't tell certain stories. But if you took them back to a rock, or a certain area, they would sit down and start telling the story because the rock held that story. Right.

So they have an amazing, amazing, very rich oral tradition of history. And when you hear, like, they have words in their language, that mean, the glaciers went home, you know, they were here, then. And that's anywhere from 8000 to 12,000 years ago. So you know that people have been here for such a long time. Archaeology sites, they left stone tools, they left bone tools, they left their history of butchering mammals, they left botanical plants and medicines. And they left us those stories. It's up to us to retell those stories. Tom Delahaye, is an archaeologist who worked on a site in Chile. And he was trained like all archaeologists are trained to, you know, people were never here before 12,000 years or 11,200 years, when his site, Monte Verde data to 12,500 years, there was so much evidence there, he couldn't deny it. You know, there was meat, there was seaweed, there was medicine, there was botanicals, there was tools, it was in a peat bog. So that means the oxygen couldn't get in, everything was just really well preserved. He lost his funding, and he had to fight to get it back. That's how violent it is. So nobody would believe him. They hadn't been to the site or, you know, experience his data. But they just said, Oh, no, you're wrong, because people haven't been here. And he had to fight for years to get that site accepted. Now, he now has another area close to there that dates to over 30,000 years. But he, you know, he had he lost all of his funding, and he had to fight to get it back.

And that's not right. We're supposed to be archeologists. We're supposed to study the history of humans, right? We're not supposed to deny it and say it doesn't exist before we even look. But that is the case for the Americas unfortunately.

Kerry:

And I I'm I'm, I'm really like hearing this, because I also know that that seems to have been something that happened even when we study Africa, and my understandings of you know, how they've carbon dated, you know, the Sphinx, there's been arguments in and around, that the Sphinx has existed for far longer than the 5000 years that they've dated it, give or take, you know, they mean that some people believe it's actually 25,000 years old, depending on how you carbon dated it. And I'm so curious to understand, you know, you mentioned it being archaeology, archaeological suicide. Why? What do you think is that that, you know, rigid buffer that is hit that space? Why?

Paulette:

Racism? So So you look at it, the nation state controls history, and so whoever controls the past controls the present, right. So if we are very infantile in time compared to global human history, we are the babies right? And so we're not evolved. We're not anything, we're dehumanized. So Vine Deloria Jr. talked about this and Vine Deloria Jr. has a quote and it was somebody thing like, you know, until we are equated with human history on a global scale in in ancient time, we will not have full humanity. So he knew that there were oral traditions and stories and evidence of being here much earlier. And he knew that like, the first archaeologists like Aleš Hrdlička said, We'd only been here 3000 years. So we're newcomers.

So if you look at a lot of archaeological textbooks, or you hear archaeologists talk, they talk about the Indigenous people of the Americas being Asians from Asia, right? So totally disenfranchise us from our identity of being Indigenous to the Americas. Pardon me, Asia did not exist. Neither did an Asian culture 10 or 12,000 years ago, we are not Asians from Asia, we are Indigenous to these continents. And we have been for a very long time. But they teach. They they preach and teach this worldview that disenfranchises us from the land. Why? Whey all live on the land that the colonizing government stole, you know, through a genocide and intentional genocide, of putting they put rewards on Indian scalps, you'll get 50 bucks for a woman and 500 for a chief. Those were lost. So people were intentionally killing Indians. If people thought that Indians were human, you know, and it had been an established, you know, advanced culture, they wouldn't have been out there shooting them for 50 bucks.

So so this started back, you know, what, when America started the dehumanization, and linking us to nature, not to culture, right, and it's taken over 100 years for people to realize, oh, they did have very advanced cultures, they have some of the earliest areas of agriculture, they have more Indigenous languages in the Americas than the whole rest of the world put together. Right, that really all humanizes us. And archaea, a few archaeologists have spoken out and said that, you know, archaeologists understand the importance of the past to people, and the importance of human, you know, history to humanizing people in a certain area.

So our history was built in colonization, to dehumanize us, and we're rewriting that history. And that's important because that frames people's worldviews, and when you push back against that, and you inform their worldviews, and you give them all this new knowledge, they're going to see us different, right? They're going to vote different policies are going to be different. Land Claims are going to be different. We're still in a place where we're very dehumanized, and we're starting to reclaim that, and make it public. And people are just starting to understand it. It's like, all these settler people are scratching their heads going really holy. I didn't know that. Right? Like, people don't know. And so they just believe what they're taught.

But one of the first things I teach students is to think critically, I mean, don't believe what's in that book, study it, find out for yourself, you have the skill to do that to become informed. And you see people and events in an entirely different way.

Patty:

Mm hmm. Your book it, you make a couple of interesting points that I've been, I mean, you talk about evidence is not found, because it's not looked for, you know, because they've got a particular story, you know, that they want to tell. And, you know, and we talk about different peoples being, you know, Asiatic or Caucasoid, or whatever. And, and these are modern, you know, these are modern racial categories, people who existed 12,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, they weren't any of those things. We're taking contemporary ideas, and imposing them. Like when we talk about how humanity started in Africa. Africa didn't exist 100,000 years ago. Africa is a very recent invention, that has a lot of colonial baggage attached to it, you know, and you look at kind of, I remember going to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and you see, you know, that poster of the evolution of mankind. And that start, he starts dark and hunched over and then becomes of white, he starts Black and becomes white.

Paulette:

There's this term called agnotology, which is the intentional teaching of ignorance, and the hiding of facts and data, right. So, US and Canadian education is based on agnotology. It's not so much what you're taught is what you're not taught. Right.

So I asked all my classes this Where did humans begin? Africa. Okay. And what did humans evolve from. Well, primates and where did did primates evolve? Africa. No, the earliest primates in the world are from Wyoming. Right? 47% of the earliest proto primates are from Wyoming and Saskatchewan. So if primates as Nova has a little video that shows our earliest ancestors were did everybody first evolve? North America, North America, Hello. People aren't taught that I have a book chapter out there on that also.

And that's really a great example of how agnotology is used. They don't teach students that the earliest primates are from the Americas. Right? And that's intentional, because that would make North America important. Imagine if people thought that it that everybody evolved from the earliest primates from North America, right? Could we say we have been here forever? Yes. Hello, of course. And it's scientific data to show it so. Agnotology unfortunately still plays a huge role in how students are taught, and so does racism and bias. I had to teach from one textbook. As a graduate student, you know, we have teach the professor's class and the textbook was talking about what is an artifact and these two authors said, Well, an artifact can be a beautiful 20,000 year old spearpoint from France. Or it could be an indistinguishable flake some weary Indian chucked out in the Mississippi cornfield 1500 years ago. So what kind of worldview are you framing? Beautiful ancient things come from Europe, but some weary Indian chucked out an indistinguishable flak? Why would you even say that

Patty:

You weren't here 15,000 years ago, how did you know, he was tired?

Paulette:

And so I take that book, every chance I get. And I brought it up to the professor. And I said, do you understand how dehumanizing and wrong this is? He was really embarrassed, because he hadn't realized how bad that wasn't, he's been using that textbook for a while. Right? So first year, students, this is what they're taught.

Patty:

Right? And that becomes foundational, to how they, how they think their perspective. Alexis Shotwell does some really nice writing in her book, Knowing Otherwise about our implicit knowledge, you know, things that we know, but we don't articulate, you know, like the way our hands know how to do things. We don't have to think through how you know how to do stuff, our hands just know what to do. And, you know, we feel and, you know, and we have, we just know some things, and that it's this kind of stuff that that forms the basis of that, that, you know, nobody has to tell them that Indigenous people are, you know, backwards. And you know, less than and all of that they just know,

Paulette:

It’s normalized violence against Indigenous people. And that plays into how people frame and vote for and create policies for land claims for clean water, for human rights, right, for funding, for schooling, for everything, you know, and so people just normalize that we're worth less, because we're less human. So let's fund their schools like at only two thirds of what we fund, settler white schools, right? This, these are the kinds of things that play into it. And I'm kind of beginning to push the envelope further.

So if we look at Northern Asia, we know that there were early hominids there 2.4 million years ago. So there's archaeology sites there where we know that Homo erectus or homo sapiens were home erectus like 2.1 million years ago at one site. We know there are sites in Siberia that date from 24,000 to 340,000 years. So why then, wouldn’t it have early humans? Because they follow animals, they follow herds of animals, because that's their sustenance, their food, right? Why would they have stopped there? If they already walked 14,000 kilometers from Africa? to Asia?

Kerry:

Why wouldn’t they just go ahead.

Paulette:

Why would they just stop? Oh, no, we can't cross there. Yeah, no, that doesn't. That's an anomaly. That does not make sense. So I'm now looking to start a new body of research where we'll actually look at what was the Paleo environment in Northern Asia and in northern North America, like at specific points in time, so we know, between glaciers, there was a land connection, and the entire land in the North was like a subtropical forest. So there was plenty of food we know because we know that mammals were coming and going. So camelid camels arose in the Americas. They had to migrate across there to get to the rest of the world. As did saber toothed cats, and and primates, right? So if they're all going from the west to the east, and humans are over there in the east, you know, when mammals are migrating back and forth, why would the humans stop? Right? Right? Like it doesn't make any sense.

So I'm starting to build this new body of evidence and knowledge to show that it has never been impossible. From the earliest times we see, you know, 2.1 or 2.4 million years in Northern Asia, it was never impossible for mammals or humans to have come to North America, there's no way you can convince anybody really, if you're looking at the facts that they waited in, you know, 2 million years to do that. They were there the whole time. No.

Patty:

And you make sorry, you make a really good point about Australia that I just kind of want want to bring up because they accept presence, you know, human presence in Australia much further back then they accept human presence in North America. And they also accept ocean travel. We always walked. We always walk, we had to wait for the snow to clear and we walked. But in Australia, they could take boats. So why couldn't we take boats? You know, like, and I thought that was a really, I thought those were some really good points, because I never thought about that.

Paulette:

Like, yeah, well, they don't teach you. They don't teach you didn't think about that at all right? You're not supposed to. But Crete, it was in Ireland that you always needed some form of water transport to get to. And there's sites on Crete that date to over 100,000 years. So we know that early humans were using forms of water transport to cross open bodies of water over 100,000 years ago. Well, now they're trying to say all the earliest, yeah, the earliest people in North America came 15,000 years ago, and they used boats and went along the ice. No, you know, we have points in Eastern Canada, one that was dredged up from the continental shelf that dates to over 22,000 years, that are exactly the same as points found in the area we know today as France that date to that same time. And people are like, Oh, no, that's impossible. Why? During times of glaciers, the water was less the oceans were sucked up in the glaciers. And that made the land crossing much more viable. And if you talk to a lot of Inuit people today, and you ask them, also, would you have any issues going, you know, a few 1000 miles across snow and ice? No, we do it every day. We do it all the time. That's our way of life right, people were accustomed to crossing through glacial areas. Awesome. Right?

Kerry:

I love what you're saying so much, because a part of what I've always felt, when you when you take a look at the the history of the world, is how much it's kept fragmented. And yet, just like people, you know, like, I always feel this even with history, just how segmented we you know, the colonial system will take pieces of, and yet it doesn't take into accountability, that flow that ebb and flow that we as human beings just naturally have. Also, our relationship with the land, you know, we've had to live on Mother Earth forever. And, you know, wherever we, wherever she throws at us, we've had to adjust. And so I always find it fascinating that, um, you know, one of the beautiful things about the the human species is our ability to, you know, to innovate and to create, so why wouldn't we be able to adapt, create and innovate to move with whatever the environmental, geographical areas are presenting for us, like, why would that not be possible? And I agree with you, if you're really bringing forward for me, the sense of how the colonial system even used archaeology as a tendril to keep us controlled and in bay and to lessen the humanity of, you know, Indigenous peoples from all over the world.

Paulette:

Yeah, archaeology is the handmaiden to the nation state and they only produce stories that the nation state would approve of that made it safe for the nation state. Right. And it's like when you look at areas in in Mexico and in Central America, and they call people in Mestitzo and Latino, those are names. That's how you erase Indigenous identity. Right? Those people now are learning to speak out and reclaim their Indigenous identities. You know, they're not Mestitzo, they're not Latino. They're Indigenous communities had names had identities. But the nation state and archaeologists assisted them in this erases many Indigenous identities as they can, if you read a lot of archaeological stories oh the people disappeared, or there was a huge community there were 1000s, or they mysteriously disappeared, people don’t mysteriously disappear. They move, right, they migrate. Whoa. So when we,

Patty:

we, we traveled in the American Southwest a number of years ago, we went to Mesa Verde, beautiful site, we were we'd gone to go look at the cliff dwellings and our guide was the Navajo Ute, man. And, you know, he's showing us around, and he's showing us this one Cliff dwelling, and he says, you know, people lived here 1000, you know, 1000 years ago. And, you know, and he's going on about how they vanished. And it was so mysterious, and everybody's just really soaking this up, right, this great mystery of Where did these people go? Civilization that just vanished. And then he breaks character and says, Have you ever been to Detroit? people move. Yeah.

Paulette:

I did a I did an article on Mesa Verde. And got to go there and experience it. And yeah, people move, floods come droughts happen, people pick up and move, they don't mysteriously disappear. But that's how archaeologists erase us. And so what one of the kind of unspoken goals of archaeology is to cleave connections between ancient sites and ancient people and contemporary people, right. So they won't let anybody reclaim human remains older than 2000 or 2500 years because you can't prove they're yours?

Well, you know what? as an undergraduate, the Quapaw tribe came and asked me if I could help them. So they were trying to reclaim over 500 ancestors, from their very well known towns, Quapaw towns that were along the western side of the Mississippi River. Right, so archaeologists know, these are Quapaw towns, they know the remains came from that area. But they were using a loophole in the Native American Graves Repatriation Act to not return those remains to the Quapaw. And there were a lot of elders that were maybe in their last years, and they would just be in tears when I met with them, they really wanted to rebury their ancestors. So I was only an undergraduate student, we didn't have a DNA lab there. But when they asked me, I realized we could do this. And I got one of the top DNA labs in the US to work with me. And we extracted a Quapaw DNA from a couple of elders, so we had something to match to those ancient remains. When I announced that I was successful in getting modern Quapaw DNA, then museums pretty much immediately gave the 500 ancestors back to the Quapaw. And two weeks after that results, they were re-buried. So the museums and universities knew that these human remains were Quapaw. And they knew they'd be really embarrassed if I brought it out and proved that they were withholding them. You know, and I showed that they were linked through DNA.

So one thing I learned from that is that we can use those tools, those scientific tools to support communities, right. And that was kind of a turning point, I was headed for med school. And that was a turning point that headed me to archeology instead.

Kerry:

Thank you for sharing that. I think that's so important and riveting, because I know that the African continent, so many of the countries in Africa are starting to, you know, knock on some of those museum doors, and are claiming back their ancient artifacts as well. And it's been so interesting to hear like the Smithsonian, for example. My understanding is they have 1000s and 1000s. of stolen, you know, goods, merchandise artifacts, you know, ancient tribal, you know, heirlooms that they have taken and they're just sitting in boxes in a warehouse somewhere. And what came to mind even is the remains of you know, Sarah, Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, that African woman who they had encapsulated all of her human remains and it took them what's it 19 It was in the 90s, I think before they actually returned her back to her native land. And so, once again, I did not realize there could you explain a little bit you caught me there. Explain a little bit about this. This, you know, loophole legislation that exists where any you can't claim remains that are 2500 years older, then could you can you speak a little bit about that

Paulette:

You have a lot of archaeologists who are very vested in those policies. And so it's it's, there's a there's a law in the States came in in 1990, I think called NAGPRA, Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. So that required archaeologists, museums, to create lists of everything they own, including the Smithsonian, all these museums, everything right. And to to put make those lists public so that if Indigenous communities wanted to reclaim human remains, or affiliated spiritual artifacts, they could start that process. So as soon as that law came in, a lot of archaeologists in museums that are looking for loopholes to deny that right, so like I said, that was capital, they were sitting on millions and millions and millions of dollars of capital that got 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s of archaeologists their degrees. Right. And they did not want to give it back.

Oh, my God, there was some a hateful, hateful talk going on, in the Society for American archaeology. Right. And they were supposed to have this done within I think it was 10 years. And you know, we're, we're couple decades past when they were supposed to have it done. And there's a lot of them are still denying returning artifacts and, and ceremonial, sacred artifacts and human remains, because that's their capital. So, tribes pushed for that law, we wouldn't have that law, a lot of tribes hadn't pushed for it, and example of how they treated us differently. There was a road being built in an area of the northeastern United States, and they hit a bunch of burials, they hit a historic burial site. And they took all the remains from that the settler remains and the African American remains were re buried in a new cemetery. The Native Americans were sent to a museum. And that really, really angered some Native Americans. And they began to push for laws, so that our, our ancestors, our artifacts, our remains were treated the same as everybody else's.

So there is that law in place. It does have loopholes that people try to use. And communities like the Quapaw said, you know, what, watch us, we're gonna, we're going to take care of this. And then they came and found me I was only an undergrad student at the time, I had to quickly learn a lot. I had to apply for grant for an honors thesis. But we were successful in doing that. And I got to work with the Quapaw NAGPRA Office for two years. So I got a lot of training in that area, seeing what they faced. And that ended up having to be the mediator in meetings between the museums and the tribe because there was so much aggression coming from, from the museums, right.

Patty

There was another highway that was built in California that found a bunch of bones.

Paulette:

Every highway they build there finds bones.

Patty Krawec 38:31

The one, was there were Mastodon bones ..

Paulette:

That's the Cerutti site. It was called the Highway 54 site. So when in California, highway five goes up the coast of highway 15, goes up the interior and goes around and coastal mountains. And just north of San Diego, they wanted to join those two highways, they wanted to make a connector highway. So when they cleared that it wasn't that long ago, it wasn't 15 or 20 miles I forget, it wasn't that long of a highway, but they found over 114 archaeological sites. And one of the sites they found they hit this big mammoth tusk and it was standing straight up and down. So the archaeologist had them stop. The specialist came in and started looking at this area and they said, these bones are not disarticulated like they should be. So if this mammoth had died, his bones would kind of be scattered here and there but they weren't. There was two femur heads over here, there was a tusk vertically straight up and down on the ground. There were signs of what we call spiral fracturing.

So mammoth bone is so big that even an ancient short faced bear couldn't bite it and break it right. The only way to break a mammoth femur would have been to take a big boulder and smash it. So we know that early people liked the marrow. They like the bone for making tools in the marrow was highly nutritious, right? So we know that there is a body of science that shows how people broke the bone and that bone when it's broken by humans, fractures spirally. And we can tell by looking at the bone if it was broken when the animal was alive or when he just died, or if it was broken later. So is it a green break when he you know when he's living? Or is it a later break?

So Um Dr. Steve Holen, who was the head archaeologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He retired, I actually got to do my fieldwork with him on Pleistocene sites in the Great Plains. So I worked on mammoth sites with camelid bone, rhinoceros bone, like just amazing, amazing sites. So Dr. Holen, and another team of scientists that, you know, a huge team of scientists, they knew that if they claimed that this site was a human site, and they thought at the time that was over 200,000 years old, that they would just laughed out of the business, they just be slaughtered. So they waited they that was beautifully curated at the Museum of Man in San Diego. And they waited till technology and dating got to a place that could not be questioned. And then they had those bones dated, and they dated to over 130,000 years. So they finally published that. So I studied that for my dissertation, that collection from that site, they published on this in 2017. And there was an immediate firestorm of ridicule, immediately. But they were absolutely convinced this was human workmanship on this bone. The site was not in an area where the water didn't put those boulders or bones there, it was not in the water at what we call fluvial area.

Some archaeologists have supported them. So that's like, within that area. We have some other sites. Louis Leakey, who was the famous paleontologist from Africa, right found a lot of the earliest humans, the man knows what he's doing when he's looking at stone tools and bones. He came in and worked on the Calico site, just north of that area in southern California. He said that site was over 200,000 years old. What did the archaeologists in America say? Oh, he's just a crazy old man who's cheating on his wife. Right? Immediately start bad mouthing him, calling him a crazy old man. Because he said this site was over 200,000 years old, I believe him.

Right, there's a few other archaeologists that believe him, south of that area in central Mexico, around this reservoir, there have been four or five sites that have been dated to over 200,000 years. So we have what we call a regional area with not one site, but a bunch of sites that date between 100,000 and over 200,000 years. And but you know, if you talk about them, you're just crazy. When when I first got a hold of Dr. Holen, and I was asking him about older sites, he said, Don't tell anybody what you're studying, they're just gonna call you crazy. But you know, if it's gonna be your dissertation, you kind of got to talk about it. So I actually after initially talking to him, and he told me about 10 sites, I started reading about those sites. And every time you read a paper, you find about another site or another site. Well, in two weeks, I had over 500 sites, and I went, you know what, this is insane. The whole story, the whole Clovis first story is based on conjecture, every piece of it now has been proven to be wrong, incorrect, and not based on scientific data.

People were here way before, way before, if you got people, I worked on the [intelligible] site in Nebraska, that dates to 22,000 years before present. If people were here, 22,000 years ago, you got to back up and go, How long before that did they have to get here? And then you start seeing all these other sites that date to 5060 100,000 years? That makes sense, right? We see a pattern, but saying that people got here 12,000 years ago, and in 500 years, they went all the way from Alaska to the southern tip of South America and east to west to the Amazon. No, humans didn't move that fast. They would have needed jets. Hello

Patty Krawec 44:08

And then there's also the matter of the languages that you brought up, it takes time for languages to evolve and split and become new languages. You know, I've read you know, The Horse, The Wheel and Language, which is you know, fascinating story about the Steppes and the development of the horse and wheel and language. You know, and he, they talk about how much time it takes just to branch off and evolve.

Paulette

[unintelligible] said it takes minimally 6000 years, even within the same family tree for a new language in that family tree to be, it takes 6000 years, right? So if you look at the Americas, and we've only been here 12,000 years, we should have the smallest number of languages. There shouldn't be very few, right? I think Europe only has between four and nine, depending on who you talk to, but the Americas, California alone has 15 different language families, the Americas has about 180 to 320 language families in the world more than anywhere in the world, that tells you that people had to be here longer than anywhere else in the world. So maybe there's something in that science of timing languages or whatever that is. Right. But when you look at a continental area, hemispheric area that has more languages than the rest of the world put together, you got to realize people been there a very long time for those languages to develop. Students are not taught that either.

Patty:

Or not taught put those things together. Right.. You know, I just I want to switch gears a little bit because I'm just mindful of the time. You coined a phrase in your book that you know, as an Anishinaabeg person just fascinated me and I wanted, pyro epistemology, Could you talk about that? Because that was just so such an interesting idea, particularly to me, because we have eight fires, right?

Paulette:

Yeah, well, that came to me in graduate school. So I've been reading about the seven fires, and you know, how we're coming into the aid fire. And, and I know, because I've done this, I learned how to do when I was younger, and we use fire to clean land. Right, so So forest areas get really choked up, they get a lot of underbrush, and the new baby trees, you know, can't get up and get the sunlight. So, Indigenous people to keep the land healthy would do controlled burns, right, they would cleanse the land, and that allows that new life, good life to grow and to come up and to get the sun. And somehow it just hit me that this is what we need to do with all of these horrifying, dehumanizing discussions and books, we need to burn them. Right. And we need to make space for new discussions of Indigenous people to come up and grow up in academia, that will really bring a healthy life and healthy thoughts to people.

So epistemology is how we learn the truth or how we learn what we learn. So I thought, we need to fire epistemology, we need to clean the academic landscape of all these dehumanizing talks, all of this settler, white Eurocentric view of Indigenous people, we need Indigenous people and their informed peers to rewrite our histories. And those histories need to be informed by Indigenous knowledge or traditions. You know, stories in the land, rock art sites, there's so much beautiful, beautiful data that that could be recorded.

The problem for most non Indigenous scholars is that our languages and our stories are very, very advanced. They're very intricate, they're far too advanced for those white scholars to understand, nevermind that they don't understand the language, right? They cannot understand how we spoke in metaphors. If I told you, oh, there's a black and brown deer over there. In 10 days, you're gonna forget it. If I told you. There's this amazing four legged creature with this beautiful coat that is red and brown and silver and white. And I colored this story with all these metaphors, you would never forget it. And that those are oral, I get goosebumps. Those are oral traditions, right? They were, their language and thought and the power of their intelligence was so much greater, that you can't give that story to a non Indigenous scholar because they would never be able to decipher it or understand it.

It's hard for me I had to translate stories from another language I had to translate from another language for my, my PhD. And so when I did a masters, I found these articles that were written in French, the French men were going down the Mississippi River and they wrote that they were afraid that the Indian stories would be lost because they were all being killed. So they stayed long enough to write some of their stories and they took them back to France. And they stayed there in a museum for over 100 and something years. I just got lucky and found where they had just been digitized and put online and I chose one. It was difficult for me. It was easy to translate the French but then I had to sit with those words. And go what is the story they were telling me and the story was it was a man who was teaching his daughters proper safe, ethical protocols for where they I lived at the time. But I realized, you know, it's this difficult for me. And I have to really dig deep into my spirit and listen to their voices. How could someone who's not Indigenous do that? They can't, right?

Kerry:

Oh, there this is such a juicy, amazing conversation I really, oh, oh, Paulette, you are just making my soul sing. I really enjoy, when, you know, we get guests on which all of our guests are, but that can just break this down into that soul place. And that's what I feel like you're doing when you are, are telling us and giving us this knowledge. It's it's literally about shattering the fabric of what we have created, or what the colonial system has said we must be. And so are you finding that it's starting to you know, are the cracks real? Are we, are you beginning to chip away? And feeling that ripple effect of chips are getting, the chunks are getting a little bit bigger?

Paulette:

Yeah. And and I'm starting to see now that more archaeologists are reaching out to me with their stories about older sites and how they've been denied. And they're getting bolder and braver. They're feeling safer now in publishing on sites that are older than 12,000 years. So we're starting that fire, right. And every time I write something, I'm just flicking my bic and just lighting that fire. Because the only way we're going to re humanize our history and revive and reclaim our history is to burn that history that this group of white people said we had to have. Right.

And and that begs the question, Who has the right to tell history? Who owns the right to tell the story for someone else? Nobody. The people who own that history, have the right to tell their history. And they don't have to tell it in the way that you say, right. And, you know, people that know me, were really afraid Dr. Holen was terrified for the critique I'd face when my book came out. There hasn't been one peep of critique, not one. I have gotten really good feedback. Archaeologists like Ruth Graham, she actually worked in the field for decades. And she did publish on older sites. She got a hold of me through a friend last week so that she can make sure she attends my seminar with the Peabody tomorrow, right? Archaeologists are now talking, I've gotten emails that people are just thanking me for telling the truth, because it makes the field a safer place for them. Right?

I'm sure they will come a point when some really angry archaeologists who, actually you see them at conferences, and you bring the subject up and they get screaming and shaking, they get really angry, you know, and I'm just like, what's your issue? This is what we're, we're archaeologists, right. But when it comes to the Americas, they want that to stay in a box, if you look at the rest of the world, human history in the last 20 years has completely changed because of the work that people have doing, because tech technology supports it. And we should not expect that it won't change just because it's our homeland and territories, of course, it's going to change.

And you know, they found a new site off of Vancouver Island that dates to over 14,000 years. They're publishing on it. So now I'm seeing more and more people publishing and publicly discussing on older sites since I started talking about this and writing about it in 2015, right when I got my PhD. And so I think we're starting to see cracks, I think people are starting to open their mind. And they're reading my book and going this makes sense. So in my book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, I reclaim over 120,000 years of our history, and I do it using those Western tools and the Indigenous tools. I use archaeology, I use science, I use data collection, I use oral traditions, you know, I understand, I use mammalian evolution, mammilian migrations I use paleo environmentalism, I use paleo geography. And I show that people being here before 100,000 years make sense. People not getting here to 12,000 years it makes no sense at all. It never has. And I have people saying that to me that you know, I always said that and never really made sense. But I didn't know how, you know, well now, you know, get my book and you know how to make it make sense that we've been here much longer.

Patty Krawec 55:10

Mm hmm.

So what is the best place for people to buy your book? I just there was a question in the chat.

Paulette:

Yeah. So people can buy my book from the publisher, University of Nebraska Press, any of the bookstores, it's available on pretty much every bookstore online, Amazon, Walmart, you know, every every bookstore has my book available. It's in production, audio version is in production, I can't wait to hear it. I want to hear the voice who, a professional voice person. Yeah, and then if other people are interested, I'm starting to think now to where we need to get it done on some other languages, you know, like Spanish, and maybe some Asian languages and Middle Eastern languages, because archaeology is a global field. And Human Evolution is a global field. And, and I do believe that North America has a very good place in human evolution, specifically, since we know that the earliest primates were from the Americas. And so if we look at that, and we go, Well, how did they find out to the rest of the world? And when were people coming and going? And you know, they Yes, yes, early humans evolved in Africa. But they left there look, they were in Northern Asia over 2 million years ago. So hello.

They wander? Yeah. It's, it's a global thing. And so North America plays a part in that. You know, it's it's important. And people in countries are very proud people in Africa are very proud that humans evolved there. People in you know, Germany and other areas are very proud of what's their earliest archaeology site? What's the earliest tools, right? Why should North America be left out of that? Because we do have a history based on Indigenous knowledge and archaeological knowledge that goes back over probably 200,000 years, at least, if not earlier, people haven't looked for it. They weren't supposed to look for it. It was very dangerous to look for it. It was dangerous to discuss it. The few people that did left some very valuable clues for me that a lot of early sites were very, very deep. And so I'm starting to think now where would we look for early sites? Where have they previously been found? There was a skullcap found in South America that had heavy heavy brow ridges that looked really like a Neanderthal brow ridges would look right. Of course, that disappeared, but not before they were pictures, and a discussion of it published.

Kerry

So really, do you know when that was, when was that published? You know how long it

Paulette:

was a long, long time ago? Okay. Long, long time ago. Yeah, it wasn't recent. So we need to look at, you know, gather all that evidence, gather all those pieces and start really looking at those sites, with an open mind with a very open mind as to the science of the data. And not with this constraint that a bunch of all white archaeologists in the Americas put that is not even supported by any data or science.

Kerry:

Wow, I am, I am absolutely riveted. I would love like, we always say this, but I'd love to have you come back on and to go a little bit deeper in because for what's coming up for me as even I was reading a study, or an article recently that was talking about the Amazon. And as they're doing, you know, the, the burning of the Amazon and clearing the land, they're actually doing I think it's I'm not sure what the technique is, but they're offering UV or they're doing infrared, that LIDAR that's scanning, and they're realizing that there might be older civilizations that were actually overgrown by the forests. And so there's a whole worlds

What I think I love so much about you Paulette and the work that you're doing is that you're you're literally just you know, you're taking a sledgehammer to this idea of the history of the world. And I believe it anchoring for those of us who have been so displaced in the story. It gives us an opportunity to reclaim this truth, to to recreate I loved when you said, you know, who decides who creates history? I think that is such a powerful thing, because what you're doing is allowing us this truth to question what we've been told as the narrative and decide what pieces of it we're going to choose, if any at all. And I think it's so important that we continue these conversations that we keep the digging, the digging going, that we offer ourselves the spaces of truth. I'm just so impressed. with what you've done your work

Paulette:

The more people that will discuss it and realize the absurdity that people were only here 12,000 years ago, the more we open up the possibility. So to do work to do archaeological, you need funding. Can you imagine applying for grant to excavate a site that might be 80 to 120,000 years old, they just, they're crazy, right? We have to normalize that discussion. And so I'm really hoping I'm doing that for the next generation of archaeologists, that they'll be able to be funded. And I, you know, in the back of my mind, I just see this big field of have young archaeologists coming out and looking at the 100,000 year old sites in the Americas, because now it's acceptable, and they can get funded.

And so we really need to normalize this discussion and to show how absurd that the archaeological story of people, Clovis first people, that's another thing, right? They said the Clovis first people, right? So I found a book. If you look in a library and you find cultural books, you got the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, the Clovis people, the Clovis people were never a people except in the wildest imagination of archaeological mind. There is nowhere in the world, a cultural group, the size of a hemisphere, cultural groups are small. So they so they frame that also to erase the diversity of early Indigenous people. Right? So there's so much that we need to normalize that I like what you said, I kind of think I'm like, I'm like the bull in the china shop of archaeology. And I'm just kicking the hell out of it

Kerry:

I love it. Oh, yes.

Patty:

And I particularly like even the title of your book, the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, because that's something that we have talked about quite a bit on this podcast is the way the word Indigenous is used, particularly in Canada, to refer very specifically to this place Indigenous people live in North America.

Paulette:

That's, that was an intentional bit of humor on my part. So, us Indians, we have a way of silently kind of getting back in a humorous way and other people. So when I was a grad student, I had this great title decolonizing Indigenous history. And I talked about it and I used it in papers and a professor before I graduated, used that title for her all white scholar book, right? And I'm like, well, there goes my title. And so I thought about it for a while. And you know, there's always been a denial that that there ever was an Indigenous Paleolithic. So that's their big, it never exist, it never existed. So I'm like, How do I poke those guys? How do I poke those people that deny it? I call it the Indigenous Paleolithic of the western hemisphere. So paleo is not our word. That's not how we recognize our history. But I needed to have, you know, I wanted to have a strong title that really pushed back against that racism, that there was never an Indigenous Paleolithic. And I'm like, watch me. Indigenous Paleolithic. That's my humor, like, watching me. Getting back at angry old archaeologists.

Kerry Goring 1:03:19

Right, I enjoy you so much, Paula, you are just exactly what we what we talk about on this show. It is that Reclamation, you have stood up in your way. And just created true medicine, like this is true medicine that feeds the soul of I think I Indigenous people, absolutely. But as somebody who is an ally, as a person of color, who's also, you know, can can understand this idea of the displacement, you fed my soul as well, because I knew that as I followed, you know, Black archaeologists and same ideas, they're saying the exact same thing and our voices have not been able to shine through and be heard. So to hear that you have managed to, you know, be the bull in the china shop, and you're definitely breaking some teacups, and getting to sip tea at this one. I think it is fabulous. And I really love that we got a chance to have this conversation. And let me tell you, I just bought your book, as we've been speaking is it is definitely going to be here. I can't wait to read it.

Paulette:

It is it is medicine to reclaim your history right and reclaim your right to rewrite and retell your history and to tell the truth, that is a part of healing and reconciliation. So briefly, I'll tell you, I met with an elder in 1988 in Lillooet British Columbia where I grew up. And then I was going through a very difficult time separating single parents, three kids, blah, blah, blah. And he said, This is training. He said, the elders have talked about you. And we understand that you have a job to do in the future. That's gonna be really, really hard a lot harder than this. Well, at the time, there was a single parent, three kids greater education. 26 cents and a truck, what could possibly be harder, I had no clue. But his words went to my heart. And I never forgot what he said. And coming close to my graduation, I realized, Oh, my God, this is what he meant. I just have to rewrite World History. Okay, I think, right. But he said creator raised me for this from the time I was born. And that's a whole nother story. But he was right. I'm fiercely independent. I didn't know any other way as a child. That was how I survived. And that was how I had to be in grad school. Because I faced a lot of racism, people tried to push me out in so many ways, professors, students, I faced a lot of more aggressive racism in grad school than I faced anywhere in my life, I had to be fiercely independent and strong and think for myself. And so you know, my elder was right. And they knew they knew I had this job to do. And they were right, it was much harder. But I got it done. And it's not done. Now, I'm going past the 130,000 years and saying, why couldn't we have been here, just as long as people were in Northern Asia.

Kerry:

I love it. I love it, that you are a force to be reckoned with. And I'm here, I am here for all of it. Definitely, I'm glad that you got a chance to tell us about your book, tell us where they can find you. Anybody who wants to because I also need to definitely be following you.

Paulette:

People can look me up Paulette Steeves, I'm on Facebook, I have a Research website online, I'm on Twitter, you can find me at Algoma University [e-mail], you can email me My book, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is in all online bookstores. And so I'm starting to get more of a I'm trying to keep up to having a social media presence like I'm in a few places, but I'm so busy with writing and doing everything else. And I still have to teach. I am a Canada Research Chair. That's a very kind of prestigious position here in Canada where I get a huge chunk of funding for five years. And I only have to teach two courses a year. That gives me more time for writing and research. So I like I say I'm starting to work on that second piece of this. And I have three, four book chapters that will be coming out next year and two the following year one, one on Vine Deloria Jr. So that's probably the nicest comment I've gotten from someone who read my book, another archaeologist and an Indigenous archaeologist who said I write in the vein of Vine Deloria Jr. and I was just like, Oh, my life is made I can finish now.

Patty:

Well, I mean, I'm what I really, I think what what I didn't, what I didn't expect, but it didn't surprise me at all was your ferocity regarding the nation state and colonial and capitalism's investment in the way that the story is currently being told. Because I mean, that's I mean, that's practically every conversation Kerry and I have is. Why is this terrible thing happening? Well, the nation state and it’s investment in capitalism.

Paulette:

Yeah, it took a long time to pull that together. But there's a lot of really good published discussions within Archaeologists from Latin America, South America and other ones that are more open minded. They realize the politics of the past and how it plays into the present and how it disenfranchises you know, Indigenous people, they take all of our artifacts, and they put them in a museum and they remove them from their cultural place and their cultural stories. And they give them new stories that are safe for the nation state. Oh, look what we found because they disappeared. Hello, we're right over here. Hello.

Patty:

We didn't take care of them that keeping the eye we didn't say anything so that they can take care of them for us keep them say yes, because we don't know how to do that.

Paulette:

yeah. Oh my god. Yeah, a lot of you know, I owe a debt to a lot of really good scholars that have discussed that and talked about that. And, and it's really important for students and people to understand that that kind of control has been over us forever. And we need to reclaim our right to tell our own stories in our own way. And, you know, be able to have them thank thank you to the University of Nebraska Press. They asked me for this book, like almost immediately when they heard about my research and my dissertation, and they waited a long time. There's a lot of data. And because it was, might face severe scrutiny and critique, I had to be so careful that there was no mistakes anywhere. And, you know, I finally just sat down and said, the Indigenous way is to tell a story. So I'm going to start telling this story. And it took me from 2015 Till this year to do that. So

Patty:

well, I am so glad that it came across my Twitter feed. And then really surprised when I went looking for you that you are already following me. So I'm so glad that you came across my Twitter feed, we've got a couple of more really neat conversations in this vein coming up. We're going to be talking with Dr. Keolu Fox, we're actually we're taking a break. Next week, we're not going to be here, I'm out of town. But then, so but then the week after we're gonna be talking with Dr. Keolu Fox about how the land is our ancestor. He's a genomic researcher. So it's going to touch on some of the things that you brought up regarding genomics and our and our place here. And then we've got Dr. Deondre Smiles, who's going to be talking with us about Indigenous geographies? So again, you know, some of this, you know, kind of some of the things that you talked about more into our present. So this is kind of a really neat trilogy.

Paulette:

Yeah, I just worked with Deondre as a collaborator on on some research I'm doing because he's a sort of just graduated as a junior faculty, and I've met him before. And you know, what the genetics of geneticists say that, you know, we're all Asians, and we're related to Asian, they have less than 1/10 of 1% of the data that would say what, you know who we really are and how we're all related. They can't even say that. Yeah, right. I called the Max Planck lab, and I emailed a guy and I said, is it still? Do they still have less than 1/10? Of 1%? Yes. They don't have the data. So they can't make those stupid, crazy. claims

Patty:

yeah, so I'm pretty excited to talk with Dr. Fox Because he's really a different, a different, a much different way of talking about and thinking about genomics.

Kerry:

Yeah, I was gonna say, What a delicious space guys for as we turn history, anatomy, you know, you name it, we're gonna be turning it on its head. Yeah. And I'm here for all of it. I hope you all will be too.

Paulette:

Thank you for having me.

1:13:06

Thank you for having me.

Kerry:

I really would love for us to maybe get everybody back on. Wouldn't it be interesting

Patty:

panel would be fun. Having all three of you at the same time. Something to think about for the news of the day plan for the new year. Get our January going?

Paulette:

Wow, what a good start to the new year. That would be

Patty:

amazing. All right. Just put all three in a room and see what happens. Right. Right. So thank you guys so much. Thank you for listening. We did have some people in the chat. So that was fun today. Um, I will talk to you guys later. Right. Thanks. Bye.

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