The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

With Dr. Paulette Steeves

Patty Krawec

We're here with Dr. Paulette Steves.

Josh Manitowabi made a remark that the Anishinaabe word Giiwedin contains the idea of going home. And that what it was referring to was the glaciers, that the glaciers were going home. And this is knowledge that's contained with elders. And he gave me you know, reference to a couple of books where elders are, you know, talked about this, in the Cree have a similar word. I think it's a kiiwedin rather than with the G. And I was just so captured by this idea that our language contained knowledge, not only of the glaciers, but the fact that they hadn't always been there. And then I encountered somebody was talking on Twitter was talking about talking about Paulette’s book, Dr. Steeves Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere kind of expands on that hugely on Indigenous presence, not just 5000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago. Like, like your dissertation. You know, it's more than 100,000 years ago,

Kerry: we love it so much

Patty: that’s an extremely long time. And I was just like, when I saw that this book existed, I was like, this needs to be in my and I rewrote part of the beginning of my book based on it. I was like, I need to get this book into my book. Because it is a story of beginnings, right? I don't focus on that. But creation stories ground us, they say so much about what we believe about ourselves.

Dr Paulette Steeves:

And that's, that's important. That language you Giiwedin, because that tells us that the people were here, before the glaciers came, right. And they were here when the glaciers went home. And white faculty, white archaeologists don't know our language, don't value our language, and don't understand that not just Indigenous history, but World History is held in those languages. So that's really, really an important point about the language.

Patty: 

And then I came across it in your book, I came across more examples of that, right, where you talk about Thunderbirds and the terratorns, and the story of the Osage have, and then they went and found all these bones. And it's like, wow, it's like, if you talk to the people, maybe you could learn something.

Paulette:

Right. But archaeologists typically for decades forever wouldn't talk to Native American or First Nations people, because they didn't give their knowledge any value. And because their academic capital was built on our history, our artifacts, and how the archaeologists told the story. So, they owned it, they own the artifacts, if they talk to us, they were terrified, oh we might have to give them something back and acknowledge them, that is slowly beginning to change. But, you know, I worked in field archaeology a lot in the US and archaeologists were supposed to by their agreements, consult with tribes, and they didn't, and none of the archaeologists on the crew had a clue, even whose land they were on. So it was really sad. I learned a lot about how devastating archaeology can be to Indigenous history from working in field archaeology for I don’t know, six years in the US. And seeing that, you know, how terrified archaeologists were that, you know, the Indians were going to take everything back and, and they wouldn't own it. And that was their academic capital.

So in an upcoming coming, grant, I have some collaborators and one of them is going to talk about the capitalism of history and how that is controlled by non-Indigenous archaeologists. And so there's a lot of points that people don't think about. They don't realize it's not just archaeology and history, capitalism is involved in a big way. The nation state is involved in controlling that story, because they stole all the land based on Oh, it's a terra nullius. nobody's using