Native American Identity through the Critical Discourse Analysis of NAGPRA: Parties, Politics, and Prospects

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The goal of this project is to show the significance of language in the cultural heritage management and protection efforts. In heritage law, language is the tool that reifies morals into (looked-for) action, thus shaping behaviorism. Since legalese defines what heritage is, it affects the way that archaeologists see, understand, act on, and preserve heritage. Therefore, examining the legal language used to draft the laws safeguarding cultural patrimony is a solid strategy to identify the dogmatic notions that underpin anthropological practice and to assess their validity today. In this project, I apply Critical Discourse Analysis on the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to study the connection between cultural heritage and identity, and its reflection in legal language. The analysis delves into the construction of the legal Native American identity through explicit and implicit linguistic strategies, which are proven to be outdated, inaccurate, and based on antagonistic relationships of otherness that are not only essentialist, but potentially harmful. Also, it focuses on advertent and inadvertent ambiguities, contradictions, and biases that affect the adequate enforcement of the Act. I propose to critically review the existing laws in order to build legally viable, fair, and inclusive cultural notions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35993.0