Echoes from the Bones: Maintaining a Voice to Speak for the Ancestors

Title: Echoes from the Bones: Maintaining a Voice to Speak for the Ancestors
Creator: Dorothy Lippert (IA-Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) See all items with this value
Date: 2011
Bibliographic Citation: Lippert, Dorothy. 2011. Echoes from the Bones: Maintaining a Voice to Speak for the Ancestors. In Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists, edited by George Nicholas, pp. 184-190. Routledge, New York.
annotates: Short account of Lippert's path to being an Indigenous archaeologist and the cultural conflict experienced as such.

pg. 186 A profound statement is that in the face of the utter ridiculousness of the performance of her job, primarily dealing with NAGPRA and ancestral remains, "In fact, keeping my ethnic heritage and my scholarly discipline firmly entwined is what allows me to continue this work, even as the work itself provides daily challenges."

While speaking from an emic Indigenous perspective on the way archaeology conflicts with her heritage, she perhaps provides an insight that applies from the etic as well, in that the training of archaeology ties you to a set of rules that does not allow you to speak about certain things, and therefore you lose the ability to think about them, "academic obfuscation" and that finding a way out of this is key to making archaeology understandable and therefore useful to the broader audiences.
Subject: Indigenous Perspective See all items with this value; Human Remains See all items with this value
Temporal Coverage: Contemporary See all items with this value; 21st Century See all items with this value

Item sets: Chahta Knowledge Sources; Native American Studies