Tribal Youth Engagement: Establishing a Model for Archaeological Outreach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster provides an overview and analysis of four Tribal youth events attended in the Southwestern United States in 2018. Educational outreach is an important field to explore, because Tribal representation in educational institutions is despairingly low (PNPI 2017). The goal of this research was to learn the best methods for performing outreach to youth. I was particularly interested in analyzing if archaeology was present during outreach events and career camps, and how various Tribes conveyed archaeology, if at all. Through participant-observation, I noted that archaeology was not represented at any of the events. Though formal archaeology was not present at all the events I observed, significant time was devoted to cultural preservation activities. In two instances, I observed at least half of the allotted time spent on language and cultural traditions. Pulling from my personal experience and my current research, I argue that archaeology is an underutilized resource for connecting Tribal members to cultural traditions and strengthening cultural appreciation. This poster explains the links I have made between archaeology and cultural preservation, and how this information may be used to connect Tribal youth to their heritage, and hopefully increase the number of Tribal archaeologists in the future.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25311