The Clash of Stories at Sacred Sites: Reframing the Task of Protecting Indigenous Sites

Summary

Efforts to recover and protect indigenous sacred sites in the United States by framing conflicts over them in adversarial terms that employ the vocabulary of conventional legal doctrine on religious liberty and property rights have failed to succeed despite the creative efforts of many advocates. One cannot understand these failed efforts and move toward the development of a more hopeful approach to these conflicts without taking seriously the contrast between Indigenous views of the land and the view of land embedded in the legal vocabulary of individual property rights. These different views of land are not susceptible to resolution in decisionmaking bodies shaped by the dominant conception of land found in the principles of property law. This paper describes these difficulties and offers a constructive proposal for addressing the conflict in a non-adversarial setting through collaborative dialogue that takes seriously the clash of master stories underlying these conflicts. Such an approach takes the narrative dimensions of these conflicts as of utmost importance and reframes these conflicts by asking the following questions: (1) "What is sacred?"; (2) "What is authentic knowledge for the purpose of determining what is sacred?"; and (3) "Who gets to decide these questions?"

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Intersection of Sacredness and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage