Truth before transition: Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice

Anthropology is a discipline that is always in a state of transition and becoming, but the current moment has a sense of being a tipping point, a crisis, a sea change. Whether a case for letting anthropology burn (Jobson, 2020) or a call to decolonize anthropology (Gupta & Stoolman, 2022), the conversations happening in the field are coalescing around the need for change at a scale we have rarely faced before. In the current reality, people are desperate for futurities beyond late modernity, beyond the climate crisis, beyond the crush of neoliberal capitalism, beyond the ongoing violences of colonialism, and beyond the limits of Western knowledge. Emerging from the chrysalis of the COVID-19 pandemic, a powerful need for some sense of collective care for humanity as we face an uncertain future has resonated across the discipline (d'Alpoim Guedes et al., 2021). As a discipline that claims the study of humanity and promotion of cross-cultural understanding at our core, this moment should be a time when anthropology can be more relevant and meaningful than ever. But as tides of hate rise around us, we are struggling, sometimes flailing, sometimes failing, to make sense of our role in a different future when faced with necessary change (e.g., Joyce, 2021; Nelson, 2021b). In the face of a cataclysmic climate crisis and increasing global conflict, an insecurity about what a radical reimagining and reorientation of anthropology might mean permeates disciplinary discourse (A. Gupta & Stoolman, 2022; Lewis, 2023; Pierre, 2023). No accounting of an imagined future is possible without a reflection on how the past influences the present (Pels, 2015). In this paper, I offer my perspective on what this moment means, first by reminding us of our collective disciplinary truths before offering an example of an anthropology of restitution and restorative justice drawn from my own work as an Indigenous archaeologist. My perspective is grounded in my position as a Métis woman, an anthropological archaeologist, a mother, and someone with deep responsibilities to my relatives in the lands we now call Canada (Supernant, 2020a). While I will tell some difficult truths in this paper, it is my sincere hope that when facing down the specter of transition, we see possibilities, not insurmountable barriers. We see different possible futures, not the bleakness of the apocalyptic void. But truth first. Transition requires a reckoning with the truth. Without a reckoning, the past becomes a tether, tying our collective discipline to a legacy from which we cannot break free. Transition invites a release: a surrender of that which no longer serves our vision of what we wish to become. I am not the first to call for a reckoning, nor will I be the last. Many voices at the margins of anthropology and our allies have been telling difficult truths for generations and calling for disciplinary change (Deloria Jr., 1973, 1969; Gupta & Stoolman, 2022; King, 1997; Magubane & Faris, 1985; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022). I will share my own understanding of the truths of the discipline; I cannot claim to speak for all anthropologists, all Indigenous people, or even all Métis people. However, as an Indigenous woman educated in four-field, Americanist anthropology at the turn of the 21st century, I have a perspective on the transitions necessary for anthropology to be ethical, relevant, and a positive force for change. In 1969, Vine Deloria Jr. published what many saw as a damning satirical takedown of anthropology, or more specifically, of anthropologists, first in Playboy magazine and then as part of his book Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria, 1969). The reaction was swift; anthropologists went on the defensive, pointing to their long-standing relationships with Indigenous interlocutors as evidence of their relevance (Officer, 1973). At the American Anthropological Association meetings the next year, a symposium was organized entitled "Anthropology and the American Indian" to discuss the relationships between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples in North America (Officer, 1973). Many of the presenters were Native American anthropologists, alongside some luminaries of the field, such as Margaret Mead, with Deloria offering a response (Deloria, 1973; see also Hancock, 2019). The presentations were recorded and transcribed into a short volume for publication (Officer, 1973). While a lot of the language is dated, the issues discussed by the presenters remain fundamentally the same today, over 50 years later. The heart of Deloria's critique, as well as similar critiques from other Indigenous scholars in that volume, was not about anthropological methods or even the value of anthropology as a discipline (Deloria, 1969, 1973). He was criticizing the reasons why anthropologists were studying Indigenous people, questioning the purpose of anthropological research, which at the time was still largely focused on saving traditional Indigenous culture rather than supporting contemporary Indigenous communities as they grappled with the impacts of colonization and fought for their rights. Rather than studying the ongoing harm of colonization, many early ethnographers in the Americas focused on salvaging what remained of the Indigenous cultures they perceived as being under threat of disappearing forever (Bruchac, 2018, 13; Darnell, 2001). The goal was preservation of a disappearing culture, not ensuring Indigenous survivance, an ethic that was still alive and well in the 1970s. This is best exemplified in Margaret Mead's response to Deloria, where she declares that her generation of anthropologists has said "We value your ancient cultures, we think they are very important for the world, and we will work with those of you who also value them, and we will all belong to a nice, scientific community, where the values are the same" (Mead, 1973, 70; emphasis added). I read Deloria's critique to be exactly of this paternalistic attitude, something that persists in various anthropological spaces today. What about those Indigenous people who care about their present and their future rather than merely their ancient cultures? What about using the powerful tools of anthropology to resist and critique the colonial policies that were (and are) actively harming Indigenous people while enabling white anthropologists to study them? While the narrative that sometimes emerges now is that the work of early ethnographers can help Indigenous communities reclaim their language and culture, I want to stress that this was not the intention of those ethnographers. They never imagined we would have a future where we would be reclaiming our languages, our rights, our stories, where we would have to deal with non-Indigenous anthropological "experts" gatekeeping our cultural knowledge. In his closing remarks, Deloria asks the room of anthropologists where they were during the termination policies of the 1950s in the United States (Deloria, 1973, 95). At a time when anthropological knowledge would have been a powerful voice against termination, anthropologists, seemingly resigned to the inevitability of Indigenous assimilation and termination, were saving what they thought could be saved for posterity rather than helping protest termination. Some notable anthropologists during this time, including Julian Steward, actually argued against recognition of tribal nations, as it would harm assimilation (Blackhawk, 1997, 74−75). In the Canadian context, when Indigenous children were being stolen from their families and forced to attend residential schools, where were the anthropologists? The first residential school was built in Alert Bay on Kwakwaka'wakw territory in 1882.1 Not long after, Franz Boas came to this area to record stories and study kinship systems (Boas, 1889). He was not there to decry the practices of stealing children; he was there to capture what he could to support his anthropological vision of humanity and to steal ancestors from their graves to put on display in museums, even though he found grave-robbing distasteful (Boas & Rohner, 1969, 88). The foundational ethnographic work Boas carried out with George Hunt among the Kwakwaka'wakw was very influential in shaping Americanist anthropology; however, the invisible backdrop to all this work is the residential school, assimilation, and the assumption of Indigenous disappearance. The knowledge being shared with Boas and Hunt by Indigenous people was not always being passed on within Indigenous communities to the next generations; instead, it was being studied and interpreted for colonial audiences. Did Boas and all those who came after him have good intentions? Quite possibly. I have no doubt that they were doing what they believed to be necessary given the time and place that they were working. But good intentions are not enough to excuse the harm caused by those intentions or the legacy of those actions, which is the foundation of the discipline of anthropology in North America today. Audra Simpson (2018), Mohawk anthropologist, notes that even with Boas's important work on pushing against race science and eugenics, Indigenous peoples were barely factored in because we were considered too insignificant a part of the population to matter, as we were on our way to irrelevance and assimilation. This is the truth of anthropology. Beyond intentions, there has been sustained critique of the entitlement of anthropologists. As Pueblo anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz (1973, 88) notes in the same symposium as Mead, "I have met too many members of the field who regarded it as a sacred calling and operated as if they had an inherent and inalienable right to the information they were seeking." The sense of an inherent and unquestioned right of anthropologists to come into communities and learn whatever they want to learn about other cultures has long been critiqued as problematic. This extends beyond sociocultural anthropology to the other subdisciplines—archaeologists assuming they can dig up the belongings of Indigenous ancestors (McGhee, 2008), linguistic anthropologists recording and analyzing Indigenous languages and then taking those recordings away from communities (Kroskrity & Meek, 2017), or biological anthropologists assuming that they can use ancient DNA of Indigenous ancestors to tell the story of human migration (Cortez et al., 2021). As anthropologists, we are trained to seek knowledge from other peoples and contexts; cross-cultural understanding is the foundation of our discipline. We learn method and theory in university classrooms, proceeding through academic systems where we gain clearance from our institutional ethics boards (if we are doing ethnographic research) or get permits from regulatory agencies (if we are doing archaeological research) and set out into the field. If we work with living subjects, we ask them to provide consent to the research and we begin gathering data about them. If we are not working with living subjects, we may not even need consent from the living community before we begin our research. For generations, we have taken that information back and written it into academic publications, sharing what we learned with other scholars, but often not with the community, and depositing that knowledge into archives, universities, and other institutions. Why do anthropologists have the right to the knowledge of other peoples? I want to reflect, for a moment, on how we use concepts such as academic freedom and free inquiry to justify extractive research practices and the right of academics to know. While overall I am supportive of academic freedom, meaning scholars should be able to ask questions and conduct research without government interference or censorship, I do see it being weaponized to claim the right to do research that harms other people. The discipline of anthropology has always collectively decided on what constitutes valid research, for better or for worse. When research does active harm or has been widely disproven using evidence, we consider it to be unethical and invalid. Harm can also only be determined by those being harmed; if a researcher claims their work is not harmful but the community says it is, the community is right. The actively harmful research of past scholars is the very reason we have institutional ethics or review boards and why the first clause of the AAA Statement of Ethics states "Do no harm."2 But those ethics boards reflect the ethics of academics, not the ethics of the communities with whom we work. Imagine if every anthropological project went through an ethics review with the community? How would our work look different? I do not tell these truths to condemn those who came before or to denounce anthropology as a discipline. I am not here to call out individual anthropologists—our field has a diversity of practices and many individual people who have done work in a good way for decades—but I also want to caution against a "bad actors" argument. The very structure of our discipline was built with specific purposes and has never been, following Gupta and Stoolman (2022), a decolonizing project. I share these truths to remind us that we can be more than the legacy of our most hallowed intellectual ancestors and the structures they created. I share these truths to remind us that we do not have an inherent right to tell other people's stories just because we are curious about them. We do have the responsibility to do better. Deloria himself makes this point: he states that "it is time for Indian organizations and the American Anthropological Association to sit down and discuss what issues are relevant in the Indian community; what studies you have that are relevant to the things we are doing; what needs we have that would be relevant to future research that you might want to undertake on a professional basis. . . . Let's do better this time" (Deloria, 1973, 97−98). Deloria's critique, and my own, is an invitation to reflect on the process of anthropological research and who that research ultimately serves. Where do the questions you ask come from? What gives you the right to ask them? Who initiates and drives the research? Who does the research serve? How do we do better this time? In the wake of the critiques of Deloria and other Indigenous activists, there was a standstill on ethnographic research with North American Indigenous peoples for about 20 years (Cattelino & Simpson, 2022; Strong, 2005), and when it began again, work has generally become more collaborative (Cattelino & Simpson, 2022). More Indigenous anthropologists have engaged with the discipline, both from a position of refusal (Simpson, 2014) and of using the tools of anthropology to study scientists and scholars who build their careers on extracting knowledge from Indigenous ancestors (TallBear, 2013). The scholarship over the past couple of decades demonstrates that the discipline is already in transition, but the question is how to continue moving through the process of transformation to arrive at a place where anthropology is not extractive but restorative. I conceive of anthropology as an agent of restorative justice, a concept not original to me but one that has great meaning in my work (Baker, 2021; Colwell, 2016; d'Alpoim Guedes et al., 2021; Flewellen et al., 2021; Hamilakis, 2018; Laluk et al., 2022; Lau-Ozawa, 2018; Spencer-Wood, 2021). If anthropology has a history of extracting, how can it transition to restoration? It is no longer sufficient to say anthropology should do no more harm; rather, it should be working to redress those past harms for which it is directly responsible or in which it is complicit (Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Supernant & Warrick, 2014). Anthropology possesses powerful tools and techniques that can be mobilized; the challenge is to harness these for the benefit of community needs, as defined by that community, and the pursuit of justice (Hamilakis, 2018; Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Montgomery et al., 2023). This transition toward restorative anthropology becomes most evident in my work with unmarked graves, which is inherently about seeking justice using the tools of archaeology to support Indigenous communities, but there are many other pathways where anthropology can move toward restitution. Archaeology has a uniquely problematic history as a subdiscipline of anthropology, as archaeologists have been complicit in the literal removal of Indigenous ancestors from their graves (Thomas, 2001) and the telling of Indigenous histories through Western frameworks (Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al., 2010; McGhee, 2008; Wilcox, 2010). Archaeology has been extractive, both in the literal sense of digging out material remains from the earth and in the epistemological sense of taking away knowledge and history from the people whose ancestors left that record. This is related to the colonial origins of archaeology and its adherence to Western frameworks of knowledge production, based on empiricism, objectivity, and free inquiry (Trigger, 1984, 2006). Archaeological practice in North America has been in transition for several decades in response to a sustained critique from Indigenous people and others who have been harmed by archaeology (Cipolla et al., 2019; Marek-Martinez, 2021; Martinez, 2014; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023; Nicholas & Watkins, 2014; Panich & Gonzalez, 2021; Schneider & Hayes, 2020; Supernant, 2020b; Watkins & Nicholas, 2014; Wylie, 2019). Even with changing relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples, many ancestors and belongings remain incarcerated in institutions where archaeologists work and study (Lippert, 2021; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023). Many projects still happen without the consent of Indigenous peoples. In our year-in-review article for American Anthropologist, Lindsay Montgomery and I noted that in many academic publications about archaeology in Indigenous lands in 2021, there was little to no mention of collaborations or involvement of community members in the research (Montgomery & Supernant, 2022). There remains much work to do to move archaeology toward restorative justice, where we use archaeology's tools and techniques to serve the needs and recognize the inherent rights of descendant and ancestral communities to their own heritage (Flewellen et al., 2021; Franklin et al., 2020; Laluk et al., 2022; Montgomery & Fryer, 2023; Montgomery & Supernant, 2022; Montgomery et al., 2023). Indigenous rights, as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, includes several articles of which recognize and affirm Indigenous rights to our own cultural heritage and intellectual property. Upholding Indigenous rights as human rights, including rights to cultural heritage, requires us to change the way we approach anthropology that engages with Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Stories, songs, belongings, lands, languages, and knowledges belong to the community, not to anthropologists. Upholding Indigenous rights means imagining different ways of doing archaeology that focus on redress and restorative justice, rather than reproducing colonial structures. 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