4 Decolonizing Research for My Diné (Navajo) Community: The Old Leupp Boarding School Historic Site

Abstract

The Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS) was a Federal Indian Boarding School in operation from 1909–1942 on the southwest Navajo Reservation. It currently exists as a historical archaeology site, and it is an important place to the local Navajos of Leupp and Birdsprings, Arizona. Due to the nature of cultural resource management projects on the Navajo Reservation, which occur prior to development, in‐depth research of Navajo archaeological sites and collaboration with the Navajo public does not usually occur. With the support of local Navajo communities, my decolonizing research documents the history of the OLBS from a Diné (Navajo) perspective, as I explore Diné survivance and resistance within the context of this school. I argue that children utilized their Diné traditional cultural foundations to survive and resist assimilation imposed upon them by the U.S. government at Leupp. In keeping with Navajo cultural norms, I incorporate non‐destructive research methods including oral history interviews with Navajo elders, who attended the OLBS in the early twentieth century, and archival research to investigate the history of the OLBS. My research contributes to decolonizing and post‐colonial anthropological/archaeological research, Navajo Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies.

1 Exploring the Contemporary in Old Places

“…Memory, and especially collective memory, proves to be a powerful force and an incredibly useful tool in our contemporary archaeological repertoire. Sesma ([2022] this volume, Chapter 2), Oliver and Cox ([2022] this volume, Chapter 3), Two Bears ([2022] this volume, Chapter 4), and Wilkinson ([2022] this volume, Chapter 5) each demonstrate ways of engaging collective memory about meaningful places through archaeological‐ethnographic methods. In these cases, memorywork is also a deliberate way of maintaining community connections to place when development projects or conventional heritage narratives would erase or obscure local pasts.…”

“…In Chapter 4, Two Bears (2022) offers a powerful case study of contemporary, collaborative archaeology in the examination of the Old Leupp Boarding School on the Navajo Reservation, moving beyond a history of suffering to acknowledge and celebrate the resiliency and survivance of Diné (Navajo) people. Explicitly practicing a decolonizing and Indigenous archaeological framework, Two Bears stresses the necessity of consultation and collaboration with local and descendant communities, in accordance with Diné protocols, to determine the goals of a project that has potential to give back and improve the lives and wellbeing of those involved.…”

“…Site formation, in addition to deep histories of spatial and material transformations, also incorporates contemporary land use and ecological processes, and, not to be forgotten, archaeological intervention. Each author in this volume extends archaeological analysis of an old place into the contemporary moment in order to reflect on evolving relationships between people and place and respond to contemporary issues with deep historical roots: urban planning and community dislocation and relocation (Chapters 5 [Wilkinson 2022] and 7 [Danis 2022]), contemporary manifestations of historical trauma (Chapter 4 [Two Bears 2022]), the afterlife of industrial toxicity (Chapter 6 [Stewart 2022]), meritocracy in heritage activism (Chapter 8 [Lorenc 2022]), place‐making at the margins (Chapters 2 [Sesma 2022] and 3 [Oliver and Cox 2022]), and community responses to gentrification and tourism development (Chapter 9 [Taylor 2022]). Authors demonstrate how the material traces of the past accompany, constrain, and open possibilities for people today.…”

2 Materializing Memory and Building Community: Contemporary Landscape Archaeology of a Nineteenth‐Century Bahamian Plantation

“…What I am especially interested in here are the ways that memory and landscape coalesce, and examining such coalescence through an archaeological lens. In doing so, this work is in conversation with the school of southwestern landscape archaeology that attends to historical and contemporary materiality and social relations of a place, and does so in ways that transcend the traditional boundaries of anthropological subdisciplines (Fowles 2010, 459; see also Two Bears [2022] this volume, Chapter 4). That blurring of the subdisciplines is not unlike the transdisciplinary approach to contemporary archaeology called for by Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos (2009; see also Taylor and Sesma [2022] this volume, Chapter 1).…”

“…Materializing memory on a particular landscape creates a memoryscape that links the past and the present through material and social interactions. In the case of South Eleuthera, as in many places around the globe, people inhabit a landscape that is imbued with memory, and thereby, with cultural meaning and value (see also Oliver and Cox [2022] this volume, Chapter 3 and Two Bears [2022] this volume, Chapter 4). The rich layers of historical memory coalesce over time around specific sites and throughout the broader landscape.…”