 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. Indiana Jones is a photocopy of a photocopy that points back to an original person that also helps us understand why these histories of archeology had really problematic roots and how there's some pieces of Indiana Jones we might think are totally unreal, but if you look closely, you realize, oh, this is actually related to a moment in history. I love watching a good adventure movie, especially at the start of summer. I have some great memories of eating popcorn in my suburban movie theater, watching aliens take over a spaceship, or a group of kids hunt down lost treasure in an underground cave. At the same time, even as a kid, I remember thinking how awful some of the racial and gender stereotypes were. I specifically remember watching Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, and cringing at the representations on screen, especially the ruthless and flat-dimension South Asian characters, and the ridiculous idea that South Asians ate monkey brains. And then there was little short-round Indy's child sidekick. Anyway, those of you who grew up watching Indy know what I mean. Need to mention the fact that Indiana Jones comes from that mid-century brand of Euro-American white archaeologists who believed foreign artifacts belonged in a western museum. Well, the final Indiana Jones movie is coming out tomorrow, 42 years after the first movie was released, and as the series comes to an end, it's hard to know how to feel about it, highly problematic stories, or guilty pleasure, or canopy bull. Christopher Haney has spent a lot of time thinking about this. He's written a book about the original Indiana Jones, and this week wrote a great piece in The New Yorker about it. He's a professor of Latin American history at Penn State University, and he's here today on the pod, our last episode of the season, to unpack everything Indiana Jones. Welcome, Christopher. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me, Vinita. I read your article in The New Yorker, and you do. You clearly have a lot of love for Indiana Jones. Can you tell me how that started for you? I'm 42, and I'm about a month older than the original Indiana Jones movie. So I did not see it in the theaters, but the very first one I saw was Last Crusade on video, and there was just something about the story and also the relationship between Indy and his dad that made me fall in love with it, because it seemed to be all about learning about the past, solving mysteries, maybe fighting more over the past than necessarily learning about it, but also being with a parent and adventuring together. But it took me a long time to figure out how I felt about it in a more complicated way, because as a white American male who was very easily able to identify with the main character, it took me a while to realize the problems in it. Did it spark a kind of love for you for some of the work that you do today? Absolutely. Soon after seeing that first movie, I remember getting a book about The Legends of the Holy Grail, which now I, looking back and not realizing it was mostly myth and not actual history. And when I went into college, I thought I was going to be an archaeologist of the Andes and studied Peruvian archaeology for one hot semester, but I had a professor of Latin American literature who showed me the manuscript of an Andean chronicler named Guaman Poma de Ayala, who was writing about the Incas in the early 17th century. And I had my mind blown. I realized, oh, archaeology seems to have told me that it's the story of the past and of people who have disappeared and that there's some sort of mystery to be solved. And here's somebody from the Andes talking about the Incas as a present thing and who lived on. And so after that, I shifted from archaeology to Andean history, but retained a love and interest to exactly what kind of stories are we telling ourselves when we talk about lost peoples and lost cities and who are people of the Andes and the Incas and what can they teach us? And I think there is that still piece of that spirit, maybe not in Indiana Jones because there's not much time about the cultures being encountered, but in what archaeology is that I still think is special. Is the Department of Archaeology glad for Indiana Jones or are they mad? I like the line that you use, you get into it, how you get into it. I watch those Indiana Jones movies as a kid also and very attracted to the adventure and the swashbuckler and all of those things. But Indiana Jones, obviously we've mentioned, he's also a really problematic character. So can you walk me through some of that? I mean, it's there from the very first frame almost of the very first Indiana Jones movie. He visits this temple on the eastern slopes of the Andes and I think it's really interesting and important for movie starts in Peru, because I think it also has a lot to do with where the character comes from. But he walks into this temple and there are killer traps and the remains of past explorers that he's stepping over to get to a golden icon in the middle, which would have probably, if we're going to take Indiana Jones as some sort of reality, would have been a god or deity to the people who built that temple. And he grabs it and runs. And one, the archaeologist will probably object that that's not what an archaeologist is supposed to do. And two, everything in that temple is so much more interesting than running off with the gold piece. He's walking into a temple that obviously shows incredible technology and traps and steps out of it in a way that destroys it as he goes. And then the second step is that he is taking all this stuff back to the United States and discovering it quote unquote for white scholars. And if you follow that on through the particularly the second movie, Temple of Doom, and then Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you see how the movie series uses other people's history as a backdrop for this white American adventure. Great set pieces, but people become objects and their history becomes something to fight for, fight over, not necessarily for and end up back in a museum, which is one of Indiana Jones's classic lines. It belongs in a museum. Right, right. So it's kind of funny that you say that it belongs in a museum, but you also said something interesting, which is that you said the movie, the very first movie, starts in Peru, which says something about the character's origins, perhaps. And I didn't know this, but you wrote in your piece that Indie is actually based on a real person or maybe it's a composite. But can you tell us about that? It's like Indiana Jones is a photocopy of a photocopy and that points back to an original person that also helps us understand why these histories of archaeology had really problematic roots and how there are some pieces of Indiana Jones we might think are totally unreal. But if you look closely, you realize, oh, this is actually related to a moment in history. That was the part that was really surprising to me. Like I thought, well, this is outlandish. This story is outlandish. But then I saw that you said, well, this is based on 19th century scholarship. Right, the kingdom and the kingdom of the crystal skull. There is the MacGuffin, the thing they're all fighting for is a crystal skull with an elongated head that turns out to be an alien skull. And the movie ends with the aliens taking off and discovering that this Andean temple in the jungle is actually an alien spaceship. All of that's indebted to Eric Fondanikin's theories of human contact with space aliens from the 1960s, where everything that connects humanity is from outside influence, which is really damaging to indigenous people and goes back to the 19th century, where American scholars collected Andean skulls and said, oh, their strange shape suggests that they are of a race apart, which was another way of saying that indigenous people didn't make the temples or weren't responsible for the heights and lasting culture of their descendants. I've always placed a lot of faith in scholarship. But then at the same time, when we look at the history of scholarship, the history of eugenics and so some of the scholarship is changing, I'm sure. But before we get into the changing scholarship, I really want to hear a little bit more about this real person that Indiana Jones is based on. In fact, you've actually written a book about this. So maybe tell me a little bit about this guy. My first book was about Hiram Bingham. He was a Yale historian who also thought that he was an explorer and he had the family money to make that true. And in 1911, he traveled to Peru to find the last cities of the Incas. These were the citadels that the Inca emperors that rebelled against the Spanish fled to and held out for 40 years, holding off the conquest. He was pointed that direction by Peruvian scholars, one of them and Andean archaeologist named Julio César Teo, who was studying in Harvard and wanted to go with Bingham. But Bingham seems to have wanted the credit for himself, so did not respond to his invitation when asked. And along the way to these last Inca cities, Bingham is told to look at a place named Machu Picchu or Huayna Picchu. And on July 24th, 1911, a man who lived on the river below named Melchor Artiaga, a Peruvian soldier named Sergeant Carrasco and Hiram Bingham hike up to the site where they're met by the families who already live there, the Ricarte, Alvarez and Fuente families. And the son of the Ricarte family leads Hiram Bingham into what is his backyard and his home. But we know today as Machu Picchu, the Inca citadel built by Pachacutec. We talk about the idea of fiction coming from fact and the idea that this scholar and explorer was led by a young person is very much like what we see in Indiana Jones and that story where he's led by the young boy, I guess it's very much taken from this time period and from this scholarship that, as you say, itself was it's many things that are embedded in that scholarship that since the 19th century was very racist. And that's where the filmmakers borrowed from. So in some ways, that's how we ended up with this kind of film. I'm sure there's other complicated reasons. But thankfully, archaeology and anthropology, like many studies and social sciences have expanded since the first Raiders film in 1981, and perhaps more rapidly in the last few years. What are some of the changes that you see in these fields? One really important one is finally listening to the cultures and nations and indigenous peoples who see this not as their past or as objects or specimens, but as their ancestors or continuing continually surviving beings that have ended up in the museum or national patrimony. And this also goes back to the Hiram Bingham story, the story and our sensitivity and awareness of it. And when I say we, I mean, I'm speaking very consciously as scholars who identify as white in the academy and then the culture that has been trained to listen to them in the mainstream media has become a lot more sensitive to it over the last 10 to 15 years. But it's not like the indigenous peoples being collected or the nations being looted weren't protesting. In fact, in the case of Hiram Bingham back in 1912, when Bingham came back to excavate at Machu Picchu, the outcome was that the Peruvian government said this material can leave the country, but then it has to come back because it belongs to Peru. And it took another hundred years for that to happen because when Bingham came back, it seems like he might not have told Yale about that deal. And then the Yale dug its heels in when Peru asked for the stuff back. But in the meantime, that sort of question of who does this belong to also gets into the culture and it shows up in the Indiana Jones story in interesting ways that are unexpected. The character of Indiana Jones was, you know, partly a creation of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But to craft the movie, they really looked at an earlier movie named Secret of the Incas starring Charlton Heston from 1953. And that movie set at Machu Picchu. And it's about an American explorer who wants to take an Incas sun disk for himself, but then has doubts about it and gives it back to the local people. The main character played by Charlton Heston has Indy's hat and leather jacket. But the story is inspired and affected by the Machu Picchu and Hiram Bingham story. In fact, they're representatives of the Peruvian government and local officials sort of devising on the story and saying make sure that you say in this movie that all this stuff belongs to the Peruvian people. And so is that in Raiders of the Lost Ark? No, but I think it's also ironically thereby its absence, a decision to turn this real and hard story of broken promises, racist belief that this stuff should be in the hands of white American scholars. It's there because it's being hidden. And I think one of the reasons why Indiana Jones is so useful to think with is that we can look at these absences and presences and figure out what archaeology and humanities and scholarship can do better. And to your original question, I think anthropologists in particular, and now historians too, have really been at the forefront in the last 20 to 30 years of listening to their fellow indigenous scholars and scholars of color to think about what that responsibility is. What does it mean to not just share authority, but concede it to give it, return it to collaborate in a way in which the community drives the questions. Historians are learning to do this, but anthropology is at the forefront, I think. And it's interesting too, because you mentioned Yale and I feel like right now there's a movement of course the idea that museums are not neutral. There's a lot of protest right now at the British National, probably if you go outside the British National Museum, all of these things that are occurring right now, but universities with their institutions, they also have ownership of things that need to be returned. When you say Yale dug their heels in, I think it's very interesting because museums are filled with skeletons, and as you said, but so are universities. And we tend to look at universities and museums as these places that are, I don't know, not capitalist or whatever it is. And I think it's something I read that you wrote that said returning something doesn't necessarily have to mean the closure of something, it's the opening of something else. And I'm wondering now when we're talking about this, it's been 15 years since the last Indiana Jones movie came out. And given what we've just been talking about, that this field has changed so much. Do you have some high hopes for this film? What do you really hope to see with this? Oh, that's a complicated question. Well, I mean, will this film be a redemption for Indy's past mistakes? There's so many past mistakes that we can talk about. Is this an opportunity for redemption? It could be, but I'm not sure that there are parts of this history that can ever be redeemed. And maybe to be fair to the character of Indiana Jones for a moment, we never see him doing the worst that we know that anthropologists did. But when we know and think about anthropology's history, Indy is still in some ways like an idealized version of it. And so he's doing everything for the right reasons. He's fighting Nazis. Yeah, he punches the Nazi. We're happy that he does that. He's a professor. He's in it for the the knowledge, the common knowledge, the common good. As you say, his famous line is it belongs in a museum. Yeah, but not everyone's idea of where the past or their ancestors belong should be a museum. I think that there's no way to have it be redeemed because it's his character is the character. And I think when with these complicated cultural characters, when we work to try and make them better, I mean, sometimes it works. But I think it's far better to create new things and create new characters that reflect different ideas and reflect all of us, which is one of the reasons why Dora the Explorer in the Last City of Gold is such a great movie. But for this new movie, there's some hints that it's going to be about sort of the Greek time travel device. And I know my friends in classics and ancient Greek history are already a little bit squirrely and upset about this because it's another sort of seems like ready made history channel idea that is now bleeding into the Indiana Jones movies. But at least I think it's the power move is a lot more lateral there towards ancient Greek culture. It's a European setting versus the global south. Exactly. Exactly. But there are hints that this is it for Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford has said he's not doing it anymore. There's a character played by Phoebe Waller Bridge, who seems to be his goddaughter. And other characters besides the suggests that this story is moving beyond mid century white Americans and Europeans fighting over other people's past. We don't know. I think it's a character to take on balance. And I think character to take on balance and root for it being better. I like when you talked about Dora too, because like I have kids and I'm always looking for stuff that I feel comfortable and happy sharing with them. I'll tell you, I haven't shown them Indiana Jones, none of it yet. But I have shown them Dora Dora and the Lost City of Gold and they love that. And we also watched the remake of National Treasure. It's a TV show, but the lead character is a Mexican American DACA resident. And she's chasing her mother's lost and stolen research. She was Mexican PhD student and so the interesting that's very different like who is the main character, whose story is being centered, not to say that there's not problems and things in there. Of course, there are because it's Disney, it's Hollywood. I want more Dora movies, honestly. I was so in love with that movie and a friend of mine, Amerigo Mendoza Mori. He's a professor of Ketua at Harvard. He consulted on Dora and Lost City of Gold about the Ketua that the Incas at the end would be speaking. And one of the things I loved about those Incas at the end, they weren't all wearing Inca clothing. Some of them were wearing Spanish clothing too. It's like they thought about this is not a people trapped in the past. Yes, it's a living culture. Exactly. Another shout out for your listeners, Pachamama, another movie made by South American creators about not just the Spanish invasion, but what also the Inca empire looked like to indigenous people in the Andes who weren't the Incas and saw this as two empires fighting over one another. It's a beautiful movie, computer animated. I hope that this means like what you're saying right now about these beautiful films or the films that you really like and the people that they consulted with. Maybe it's a sign that filmmakers need to have more true consultants, get those consultants onto your film studio into your screen writer's room. Okay, what we're saying is that this dashing, wonderful, problematic archaeologist is headed for the Pop Cultural Museum, as you say in your article. What kind of a send-off should we give? Do we celebrate this character or should we put it in a box and never open it? And I'm wondering for you, this is just kind of an envisioning question for you. If you were to hold a museum exhibit about the movies, what would you include in that exhibit? Oh, what a wonderful question. There would be stuff that represents and reflects the creativity that the filmmakers tried to bring in, but it would also be really strongly about all the other places that Indiana Jones has been that isn't Nazi Germany and that doesn't have to do with European history that would give power to curators of all the cultures that he dances through and knocks over and at times ridicules, especially in Temple of Doom, to say this is what matters to us. And these are the true and exciting things from our past and present that are being rediscovered. I think it's striking that I've talked to a few people, scholars who are archaeologists, anthropologists, and are from Peru or African-American who said, yeah, Indiana Jones was one of their ways in that sort of feeling of finding out something and a secret. That's real. That's what scholarship does, but then we've got to learn how to put it in context. And so putting them away in the back, I think, is actually dangerous to say we're not going to talk about this anymore. We're not going to think about why this is at times so pleasurable. It gives us a chance to build a better, I'm not going to say Jones, but a better hero. Yeah, I mean maybe it's not a Jones as you say, but maybe it could be some different type of lead role. Something that you said there is just making me think about it, but there is something very human about that curiosity that we have. I think it's normal for us to want to be that curious person, the adventurer, the person who wants to go explore, and as you say, can we do all of that and can we envision all of that and at the same time think about doing this respectfully and think about this more holistically than these movie franchises allow. And I think an important part of being a grown-up and also being a kid learning to grow up is learning how we or the people that we might love have been responsible for some awful things and that there is obligation to listen and make things better. And I think that's one of the things that's happening in museums and scholarship now, the sharing of power and also giving away that lets us understand when things shouldn't be in a museum. Oh, I love that. That's back to what you're, what we were talking about with the redemption, but in a way what you're saying is, I guess what I was asking too is now the, not the actor, but the character is retiring and as he retires, is there a room for redemption for his past misdeeds or mistakes? And in a way partly what you're saying is this character is very human. He's presented as human, he's made his mistakes. Can he also acknowledge, can one also acknowledge these mistakes and move forward to it? That's part of it is accepting the past misdeeds and moving forward. The acknowledgement is part of it. Yeah, and I think it could be really hard for the people of that generation who did it and were responsible for it, but often it falls to the children and the grandchildren to work out how they are still responsible and what they can do. You know, it's actually kind of an important moment for the character in the Neon Jones movie, Last Crusade. If this were the end of the character it would have been pretty perfect. There's a moment where he has the Grail and then the Austrian colleague betrays them by trying to run out of the temple with the Grail and an earthquake opens up and the Grail begins to be swallowed by the earth and she falls into the crevice trying to get it back. But then Indiana Jones almost does too until his dad says to him, let it go and he lets his dad pull him out. And I think there's a lesson there when we treat beings and other people as objects and things. We get worried about possession. I think understanding how we're the human connection and just living in a way that we can take care of other people better is, you know, that's a lot to hang on the end of The Last Crusade. Harrison Ford in an interview someone asked him what's the most precious thing you held in your hands and he said a newborn baby just to reflect what you're saying about the end of that, letting it go. Part of your story is also about the relationship Indy with his father and how that is so special and how their their tension is resolved in this movie that you're talking about The Last Crusade. They are able to be at peace with each other as well. One of the ways I land the story for me is that my own father was an anthropologist. I write what I write about the history of archaeology and anthropology. In part to understand where he came from and to be clear he was a very different kind of anthropologist than Indiana Jones but for me it's also unpacking this complicated relationship between like passion and interest and then power and privilege and doing it in a way that understands how things can change and we can do better. It's a very complicated thing to think about in the context of the larger history of museums and other people's dead in communities and it's one where I think the personal can sometimes get in the way. Does it matter that the archaeologist who looted Pueblo tombs was also a human with parents and children at the end of the day? Maybe not. For understanding who is harmed there it matters a little bit less but in terms of how we talk about their legacy and work out how to do better recognizing that we are as human as they and also capable of making mistakes that we don't even understand or that maybe we're being told about in the moment but we're choosing to ignore then it does become important. There's lots of room I think to grow from this time. I really want to thank you for all your time today it's been really a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you Vinita I've really enjoyed this. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. What a great conversation to end the season. I'm definitely considering booking my tickets for me and my family to see Indiana Jones and his final ride. What about you? I've dropped some links in the show notes on theconversation.com. I've also put together the few movies that we recommended in our chat but I'd love to hear some more movie suggestions so please share if you have some. Come find us on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast or find me on Twitter at W-R-I-T-V-I-N-I-T-A or email us at DCMR at theconversation.com. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great summer everyone. In the meantime please consider sharing this pod with a friend or a family member or drop a review on whatever podcast app you use. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me Vinita Srivastava. Bokeh Sai Si is our producer. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. The audio editor for this episode was Krish Dinesh Kumar. Our regular audio editor Remitula Sheikh is on holiday. Athika Kaki is our marketing and visual innovation consultant. Journalism student Kikachi Meme is our assistant producer and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.