Who’s “Public”? Whose “Outreach”?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Within CRM, completing public outreach as part of a mitigation program is common practice. Public outreach is an important mechanism to engage the public, but generally centers on archaeologists educating the mainstream public through books, fliers, signs, and videos. For the CDOT 550/160 Interchange Project, the consulting parties agreed that appropriate mitigation should include a combination of archaeological data recovery, tribal engagement, and the production of a film. Ultimately, mitigation moved beyond obtaining and sharing archaeological information, into a program that sought to support the affected tribal communities through partnerships between tribal elders, tribal youth, cultural specialists, and professional archaeologists. The project funded tribal interns during their training by tribal elders, cultural specialists, and archaeologists equally. The intent of the program was to value multiple perspectives, democratize the narratives, and provide equal funding opportunities for traditional and archaeological knowledge transmission. This multidirectional system was enriching to tribal youth and professional archaeologists and was further bolstered by the publicly available film that recognized tribal perspectives alongside archaeological ones, providing a more holistic understanding of these places.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39777.0