Observations on Collaboration between O'odham and Hendrix Students

Summary

Historically, anthropologists have tended to treat Native Americans as subjects more than as colleagues. This tendency is in the midst of reorientation as Native people everywhere assert their interest in heritage through the modes of Western professional discourse. We have recently worked together on a collaborative educational project to bring together O’odham and non-Native students to consider heritage from multiple perspectives. Together, we visited museums, monuments, archaeological sites, and other ancestral locations in Arizona, Arkansas, Washington D.C., and New York. Through shared travel and discussions we experienced diverse places where Native American and Euro-American expressions of heritage are created. We considered the nature of concepts like ancestor and native in different contexts, and discovered new insights. At the same time, we discovered challenges and some solutions to practical problems facing collaboration. Disparities in training, funding, and expected benefits influenced decisions and outcomes. Approaching these challenges with a sense of partnership, we achieved synergy that suggests productive new possibilities for anthropology. Far from producing a compromise, we found exciting new opportunities for anthropology as a field of understanding and relationship building.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22420