Excavations at the Howe Pottery: A Late Nineteenth-Century Kiln in Benton, Arkansas

Abstract

careers in bioarchaeology. Read this book for yourself and think deeply about its implications for our profession. The free exchange of ideas is important to any pursuit of knowledge. I imagine that is why the University of Florida Press published it. But, while you are contemplating the role of “science” in seeking knowledge about Indigenous lives, particularly here in the American Southeast, make time to refresh your perspectives on the colonial past in this region. For instance, we all know about “Indian Removal” policy of the 1830s, but it takes on modern relevance in the way University of Georgia (UGA) historian Claudio Saunt narrates removal as deportation (Unworthy Republic, 2020, Norton). And we all know about the college land-grant legislation of 1862, but missing in popular narratives of its benefits are details of the dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi whose sale seeded endowments for institutions like UGA and my own. The state of Florida, for example, received scrip for 90,226 acres from 996 parcels of Indian land distributed across nine states west of the Mississippi, and that was a small allotment, keyed to the size of the state’s white population (High Country News, March 30, 2020). Historian Margaret Nash (History of Education Quarterly 59(4):437–467, 2019) refers to the college land-grant system as an extension of settler colonialism, much like the Homestead Act (1862), the Dawes Act (1887), and earlier precedents like the Florida Armed Occupation Act of 1842. Consider these current perspectives on Native American experiences since the arrival of Europeans and ask yourself how you would feel being on the victimized side of dispossession. The narratives have not changed simply because society has become more progressive or liberal; they have changed because the evidentiary basis for knowledge claims has grown, particularly from the bottom up, from those whose stories were silenced in the narratives of a dominating state. In this sense, the central thread of this book’s argument is valid: the free pursuit of knowledge is paramount. However, we need nuanced and dialogical approaches, not diatribe. I await a more reasoned argument as to why the value of studying the skeletal remains of Native Americans supersedes the costs of inflicting yet another insult on people whose historical relationship with anthropology, science, and the state has been anything but patriating. In the meantime, I hope most of my colleagues of European ancestry agree that the descendants of those whose land and culture were dispossessed by our forebears are owed our deference.