Racism is 'embedded in American archaeology': Q&A with Cree-Métis archaeologist Paulette Steeves
Most archaeologists in North America have spent the last several decades believing that humans arrived in the Americas around 12,000 - 14,000 years ago by crossing the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska.
But Paulette Steeves isn't most archaeologists.
Steeves is a professor at Algoma University and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History, Healing and Reconciliation, and her work focuses on the Pleistocene history of the Western Hemisphere.
She believes that Indigenous people were present in the Americas far earlier, and has created a database of North and South American archaeological sites that are thought to date from 250,000 to 12,000 years before present day.
Steeves is featured in Walking with Ancients, a documentary from The Nature of Things that explores how new archaeological discoveries are challenging our understanding of when the first people arrived in North America, featuring findings from dig sites from the Yukon to Mexico.
In an interview with documentary director Robin Bicknell, Steeves shares her story, and explains how conversations about colonialism and racism have largely been absent from archaeological research, impacting the way it's been funded, presented and taught.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Robin Bicknell: Can you start out by telling me a bit about yourself and how you became an archaeologist?
Paulette Steeves: Tanisi, hello in Cree. I'm Dr. Paulette Steeves. I'm Cree-Métis. I was born in Whitehorse, Yukon, and I grew up mainly in Lillooet, British Columbia.
I've done many different kinds of work in my life. But in 1988, I was living in Lillooet, and I was becoming a newly divorced mother — single mother — of three children. I went to visit with a local elder that knew my family well, Leonard Sampson, just to get his advice.
He said, "We know you have a different path. We know you have a difficult job. What you're going through now is training to learn to deal with difficult situations, because it's going to be even harder for you in your future."
I couldn't imagine, at the time, anything harder than becoming a single parent.
But he said, "What you're going to do for Indian people, not just us here [but] everywhere, it's going to really help them. We don't know what you're going to do … but we know that you have this purpose."
I never forgot his words. And when I was graduating with my PhD in 2015, his words rang true: "Oh, this is what I have to do: I just have to rewrite global human history for Indigenous people."
And it was hard! But I'm here and I'm doing this work. And I remember his words every single day.
How did you come to challenge beliefs around humans arriving in the Americas, specifically?
There was so much talk in grad school, "Oh, Indians have only been here 12,000 years."
And I'm like, "I don't see the data or the scientific evidence for that anywhere. And I know there's a couple sites that are older than 12,000 years."
So I emailed Steve Holen at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and I asked him: "How many sites do you know of in the Americas that are older than the level of 12,000 years?"
He said, "I'll send you a list of 10 sites, but don't you tell anybody what you're studying. They're just going to call you crazy."
So then I started reading about the history of archaeology, and I realized there was a lot of documented evidence of violence against archaeologists who reported on sites that were earlier than 11 or 12,000 years.
I read about those 10 sites. And every time you got a paper, they mentioned another site, another site. In two weeks, I had 500 sites that were older than 12,000 years. That is when I knew this would be my life's work.
Why do you think there has been resistance to accept a paradigm shift?
One really important thing to understand — that is not often taught in academia — is the legacy of colonialism. So how did we get to this place?
In American anthropology, Indigenous peoples have been framed as savages in a linear human civilization where you went from savage to civilized. We were savages, so we weren't intelligent, we weren't inventive.
50 per cent of the global food economy right now is based on Indigenous foods of the Americas: tomatoes, potatoes, corn. In early educational textbooks, you don't see Indigenous people, and if you did see them, you don't see them credited for these great innovations.
This is being framed by people who are living on those stolen lands, making their living from stolen Indigenous human remains and artifacts.
They're still living on stolen Indigenous lands. They're still making their living on Indigenous histories, and they want to keep control of that.
How much earlier would you say Indigenous people were here, and what do you base that on?
I think people have been here over 100,000 years. I study the human-made artifacts of archaeological sites.
Many Indigenous people believe that you've been here since time immemorial. Can you talk a little bit about that?
So my continuing work is to link all of these [archaeological] sites and to support people doing this research — and to get people to understand that everywhere in the world, people have a human right to be linked to their homelands, to be linked to their identities, to claim their homelands.
No archaeologists or scientists have any right to erase anyone's history or connections to their homelands. Specifically, when we know there is a well-documented history of racism and bias in archaeology.
Our people say we have been here forever. They have every right to tell their story in their way, whether it's literal or whether it's metaphorical. This is where Indigenous cultures began. This is where their languages began. This is where their families began. They have been here since the beginning of their time — since time immemorial.
Looking to the future, how do we address the issues embedded in the archaeological field?
The future comes from the past. The future comes from the voice of Indigenous people who say they have been here for time immemorial.
The future comes from all those archaeologists that stuck their neck out, and even though they knew they would get violently critiqued and attacked, they published and reported their sites. And they continue publishing their discussion on archaeological sites in the Americas that are dated 12,000 years before present.
I think we're really going to see a lot of change in the next 10 years. But people absolutely have to have an understanding of colonization and racism and how deeply it's embedded in American archaeology.
Do you think we need to teach young people to enter into archaeology in a new way? Do we need an influx of more Indigenous archaeologists?
Of course, the more diversity you have the better — in any field of academic science.
We have to get to a place where there are a lot more people from diverse backgrounds in the field of anthropology and archaeology.
I think in American archaeology, we need safe spaces to talk. We need to change this ideology of ownership of the Indigenous past. We need to change the suppression of the dates and times that people have been here. We need to listen to and understand Indigenous people, their histories, their oral traditions. We need to bring in the new sciences and to apply them. We need funding to do that.
Historically, many archaeologists have refused to talk to Indigenous people. We do have some archaeologists that have been willing to change and are willing to work with Indigenous people — to listen to oral tradition and to try to weave Western and Indigenous knowledge. We're just at the beginning of that, and I really appreciate the archaeologists that do that. But I see so many red flags in the ones that don't, and they make archaeology a very unwelcome and unsafe space.
We need to create safe spaces where anybody can think freely and openly, ask a research question, work on that research question, and not be admonished and victimized and face violence and criticism for asking a question.
Our work as archaeologists is to study the human past.
Nobody has a right to deny the human past when we don't even know it. We're still discovering and learning about it — on a global scale.
