 Thank you, Bill, for hosting us today. Welcome, everybody, to ARF, our first bag lunch of the year. I'm Christine Hastorf, and we have this spectacular group of people that we have a very short amount of time to hear from. So I'm going to turn it right over to Professor William White, Bill, as we call him, to host this program today for you. Good morning, everyone. We have a unique and interesting talk today with several of my other colleagues here. So normally, here at the ARF, we'll have just a single individual who's giving a talk. But today, we are fortunate enough to have five speakers. So this is going to go quite quickly, but we'll find some kind of a way for it to work itself out. Today's ARF discussion is on archaeological pedagogy in the era of Black Lives Matter. And before we go any further, and I introduced my co-hosts, I have to acknowledge that I'm giving this talk right now at my house in Hercules, California, which is on unceded Ohlone land in the University of California, which hosts the Archaeological Research Facility, is also on unceded Ohlone land. So I always have to make a statement and give gratitude and respect to those who came before me. So today's talk, because we are working against the clock right now, I'll just introduce my other four colleagues who are here and myself. I'll start with Dr. Ayanna Flouellen. She is a Black feminist archaeologist, artist, and storyteller, who is one of the co-founders of the Society of Black Archaeologists. She is also a recent, a new assistant professor and in the anthropology department at the University of California, Riverside. My other esteemed colleague, Justin Denevant, he's currently an academic pathways post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt Spatial Analysis Research Lab, but he will be joining UCLA's Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor in the fall of 2021. And he is also a co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists. Currently, he is the president of the SBA. My colleague, Alexandra Jones, graduate of UC Berkeley, earned her PhD here. She is the founder and CEO of Archaeology in the Community, which is a not-for-profit company dedicated towards teaching America's youth about archaeology. She is a professor at Gautier College and the University of Baltimore. And for 16 years, she has been working with America's youth in museums, universities, and primary schools. I take that back. She has actually worked in several other countries too. So she's based in Washington, DC area, but she's worked abroad as well. Dr. Alicia Odoale is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa. For many years now, she has been researching Afro-Caribbean heritage in St. Croix and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but she has started a new exciting project on the archaeology of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Hi, myself, I'm Bill White. I'm an assistant professor of anthropology here at UC Berkeley. I specialize in African diaspora historical archaeology and I also teach heritage conservation and cultural resource management based on my extensive career in cultural resource management. So the other thing that we all have in common, we are all friends, we're all colleagues and we're all working together at a state little princess in St. Croix as part of a team of scholars from the Society of Black Archaeologists. Our field school there at a state little princess is an award-winning project that's been recognized by the Society for Historical Archaeology. And if you wanna know more about our collaborations together, you can check out the recent coverage of our work in Nature Magazine and Sapiens. Okay, I have some slides to show here and I will see if I can share them now. I wanted to start off talking right now about, give a snapshot of why it's so important for us to work on adapting our pedagogy and archaeology. So currently in the United States, we spend about a billion dollars on archaeology in the cultural resource management sector. That contrast with the 17 to $25 million that's being spent in academia. So at university institutes of higher learning. There's no strong summary or estimate of how many archaeologists there are in the United States. But there's between 11 and 17,000 archaeologists working in the United States. The majority of those folks are working in cultural resource management. So that's 17,000 includes the 1600 academic archaeologists. And this is important to note because in the United States, archaeologists almost all of them have a college degree. So the most recent survey of archaeologists in the United States show that 60% of professional archaeologists had a graduate degree, but well over 90% have a college degree of some sort. So that 1600 academic archaeologists have a disproportionate impact on archaeology as a whole because they're the ones who are teaching, they're the ones who are teaching the field schools. And that goes on to influence strongly that billion dollars of archaeology that's spent in the United States. Now, one of the other things that archaeology is well aware is that in the United States, about 90% of archaeologists who responded to a society for American archaeology survey in 1997 were white, only 2% were black. And that contrast with the United States, it's 60% non-Hispanic white. So the folks that are teaching and practicing archaeology in the United States disproportionately are coming from one ethnic background. And if we are going to talk about moving forward and changing pedagogy, especially creating the kind of teaching that's going to increase diversity and bring about positive change through archaeology, we are gonna really have to focus on that 90% of archaeologists who are white. So one key element in this is for university programs or those who are interested in addressing racism to honestly accept a critical anti-racism theory as a perspective of their teaching. So these things are coming from pedagogical practices, coming from public education, but really the idea is to center race and racial identity as a major part of being an American. So this is not just centering this in what we're teaching or what we're explaining to students, but also internalizing it and centering it as an aspect of who we are as individuals and as archaeologists. Of course, we all understand that the racial dynamics and history in the United States have, they overlap with all the other identities that we have as scholars, colleagues, as students, as cultural resource management practitioners, but also that this entire hierarchy that we're living in that has influenced us on a very real everyday basis was based on the idea of othering and that there was a creation of whiteness as a normative identity and that the rest of us are compared against that, which means that whiteness is a major aspect of what we actually need to start addressing. So at the heart of this anti-racism is a de-centering of whiteness and dislodging it from the position of dominance from a position of a normative value that has been associated with the differences in the United States. So if you're an anti-racist educator, you're trying to deal with the colonial and the recolonizing fantasies associated with whiteness as the normative value of the American identity. So this really is an iterative process that happens at the individual level that has echoes and reverberates throughout the institutional level. And one of the key things is acknowledging race. So that 90% of many of those folks, this is gonna be a very difficult process because they are not used to addressing the fact that the racialization process has also affected them, that they have race and that comparing whiteness against others is something that replicates the division and actually kind of continues the harm that's happening in our institutions and in our industries. So as archeologists, we have to think of ourselves as citizens. And if we wanna be agents of change, we have to think about the narratives and the things, the constructs and the entanglements that really have created us and given as contributed to who we are as individuals. And one major part of this is confronting whiteness. And this kind of work is not really gonna happen with only 10% of the folks being of a non-white ethnic background. A lot of this work really has to begin with those who identify as white. The first step is really engaging and confronting whiteness. So many of us who have been engaging in this kind of stuff and moving towards a more of an anti-racism practice, we understand these six hindrances that have been identified, but some of them actually are more common and in some ways they either created drag against positive change or suck the momentum out of it. And so some of the things that kind of stand in the way, not only just the divisions that we've internalized as racialized individuals but kind of these themes that we have of the other people, BIPOC communities and scholars are the ones who really need to be taking this on because they're advocating for their own rights. When in a field like archeology, if that happened, that would mean that we only have one out of every 10 archeologists working towards anti-racism practices. And then also the other reality is the fragility and privilege that comes along with being white. So the ability of having the option of choosing whether to engage or whether not to engage, dictating the terms of engagement and policing the responses of other individuals, those are all aspects of engaging and confronting whiteness that are gonna be important if we're gonna move forward in this whole thing. So before I pass on the cursor to my other esteemed colleagues, I just wanna think about an analogy that's kind of guided me through thinking about this for a long time and it's the analogy of watching trees grow in the forest. And if we wanna have strong healthy trees, we have to take care of the roots and we have to take care of the soil and we have to provide a positive place for that tree to grow. So the stronger the roots, the stronger and the cleaner the environment, the stronger the tree is gonna grow. But if the tree is growing in unhealthy soil, its roots are gonna suffer. And if it suffers for too long, it's going to die. But that's not really the end of the story because we always have the option to plant a new tree and we always have the option to take care of the soil and to cultivate healthy roots. So those of us who are working from an anti-racism pedagogy, we are working on planting a new tree. We are working on trying to grow a strong healthy tree that can possibly remediate some of the harm in the unhealthy context that are in the soil. And hopefully by doing that, we'll actually make the existing tree of American archeology and academia become even more strong. So before I move on, archeology, change, individual practice, if we're ever going to internalize an anti-racism standpoint, if we're ever gonna change a pedagogy to adapt to the new world, this Black Lives Matter era, we will have to individually internalize anti-racism as a way of life, as a way of thought and a way of practice. We have to do that both inside and outside the institutions that we live because this kind of change is really gonna come about through an archeology that's accountable to those who have been disenfranchised by the predecessors work, by the structures that maintain archeology. And the idea is that we would work together and that we would understand that there's more than enough success for everyone, but this change is really only gonna move at the pace of trust. So building that trust, doing that restorative justice work, that's the pathway towards us bringing wider change throughout American archeology. Okay, I will end my slideshow and I will move on and pass the baton, the cursor over to my colleague, Alicia Odoale, who's gonna talk about training archeologists in higher education. Okay, Alex, are you sharing my slides? Okay, great. She is. Great, okay. So I'm gonna talk about, well, piggybacking off of Dr. White's assessment of the need to diversify archeology and bring it into the need to diversify the field of academia, really, and how to attract, support and retain students of color and what that looks like for in terms of mentorship. So that's my focus today. And I'm starting today with the current trends in academia from the National Center of Education Statistics and just recent studies, 2015, estimated that about 10.5 million students are in degree-thinking institutions, four-year institutions in the United States. And out of that, you can see from the chart, a majority of those students are usually white. And then these other ethnic proportions are disproportionate to that overall total. So out of the 10.5 million, we have a problem here just within the student population that we need to diversify. But then if we shift to the faculty trends, where we have a total of about 1.5 million faculty at degree-seeking institutions in the United States, you've got another trend aligning with what the student population was, but it's even more of a stark comparison because now we have 79% primarily white professors while the student population had 67%. And so those proportions of different black indigenous people of color that are being represented among the faculty or even less than at the student population. So now we have a gap that exists between the number of students that are graduating from institutions and the number of students that are graduates that are hired into academic settings and what those demographics actually look like. So there's a gap in terms of the availability of mentorship to actually get mentors that are similar to your ethnic or racial background. So you are now being forced to reach across racial or cultural lines to find a mentor. And also you have another problem where in the hiring practices, they're often at a disadvantage yet again. We're shifting again. But there are some programs that are actively doing work and have been doing work for years to specifically address this problem, to not only increase the number of minority students seeking PhDs and graduate with PhDs but are choosing to go into academia. So in that, it's not just about increasing the numbers, it's about providing mentorship in a network of support to actually be able to survive in that academic system. So SREB, specifically the State Doctoral Scholars Program of which I'm a graduate is one of those programs that I think does this well. So I wanted to highlight that. And next slide. One of the biggest impacts for SREB comes from its Institute that they do every year. And this is considered the largest gathering of minority doctoral students in the country. It happens every year where you have over a thousand graduates and an alumni coming together to engage in not only sharing scholarship and resources but we go through an intensive amount of training and workshops to learn how to move through academic life as a person of color. But there's also this fight among colleges and universities to have a table represented there because this is where recruitment happens. And a lot of people are actually being recruited into academic settings from this Institute. So outside of SREB, that's just one program. There are a number of different what we call GAP programs out there that are designed to attack this problem, to increase the number of students choosing to go into academia but are prepared to do so and are given the support to do so. So these are just some future faculty building programs that are designed to kind of help that that I wanted to highlight. But for the students in the audience I wanted to make sure you're least aware if you're not able to take advantage of the GAP programs I mentioned there are a number of resources specifically for students of color in archeology that you can take advantage of if you belong to one of these professional organizations and I recommend joining one just to get access to some additional support. Okay, but the most important thing to address this problem of trying to not only attract more students into departments but to make sure they are supported and they are able to successfully thrive in this system that's not designed to support them is to avoid some of the pitfalls of mentoring. And so the highest attrition rates that studies are showing and I'm citing some of the studies at the bottom of the screen here that these attrition rates are primarily due to dysfunctional mentoring relationships and these dysfunctional mentor relationships specifically hurt students of color because they're already at a disadvantage due to their minority status. And then on top of that there, as I just mentioned having to do extra work to reach across lines to find a mentor in the first place. So it's like when they do find a mentor, hold up, hold up, Alex. When they do find a mentor it's even more challenging for them once they are now in a negative mentor relationship that they cannot escape. So the first thing to avoid would be reinforcing student isolation or feelings of inadequacy. And that's something we all suffer from the age old imposter syndrome but for students of color it's even worse because they're, again, already at a disadvantage and usually a different cultural identity or different identity from the rest of their peers. So we have to be cognizant of that and as mentors and as advisors, reinforce that they bring value, unique value to the table. And they're an important part of the department we have to be continually reinforcing that. And then the second one to avoid would be linking students to problematic mentors. So that typically happens in especially smaller departments where you're trying to spread out the workload so you're not over burdening any one faculty member but forcing students of color to be assigned to a person that you know is either problematic, dismissive, combative or even racist towards students of color is that much more damaging. So no matter how small a department is, a student should not be forced to navigate problematic behaviors of their mentor or advisor. And then number three, avoid exploitation and strive for mutual growth. This is what happens most often in these unequal power dynamics between faculty member and a graduate student because we depend on our graduate students to teach grade and do research but it should be a mutual benefit to both student and professor. So if the graduate student is only being forced to sort a bunch of sherds and they're not actually being able to assist in teaching or contribute to grants or contribute to publications or even supervise other students, then they are left feeling like they're being exploited. And especially if their contributions are going unacknowledged to larger projects. So that that is even more problematic when the student is the person of color. And then fourth, avoiding static blanket expectations for all students is really important. We wanna strive for equitable standards for everyone but it should be adjusted based on the student's circumstances. We have specific milestones that we have to meet but pitting students against each other, comparing students to each other when they don't have the same challenges, roadblocks ahead of them is just again, putting them at another disadvantage and negative mentor and relationship. Then lastly, I would encourage all your students to bring their cultural perspectives into their work and into their research. And it should be something that you are focusing on mastering not just the basics in sort of how to do independent research, but you're encouraging them to sort of celebrate their own unique perspective within their work. And you are actually encouraging them to work outside of this oppressive system to do that. And so it's something that can be really helpful to decolonize this system when you're working as an accomplice with your student, take Dr. Jones's words, to really sort of shift the entire narrative and a whole new perspective on mentoring. Okay, next slide. So just to wrap up, this is a protocol that I developed. What I see is the best way to attract, support and retain students of color and really help bridge this gap from student graduate to a professoriate is the old adage there's safety at numbers. So one, there's never gonna be a solution that rests on a singular hire or a lone student entering the department. The goal has to be building a cohort of scholars and network and then there's funding to match that. So you can't expect a singular hire to solve systemic problems. And A would be to acknowledge barriers of inclusion to your work and your department but actively work to dismantle once you actually are acknowledging those systems. F to foster positive mentoring relationships for students of color, which I already mentioned. And E would be to just encourage your students to be growing in their intellectual development, the research and in their professional life simultaneously. And then T would be to try both on and off campus resources that are designed to support, advocate and sort of speak to those experiences of students of color. And then lastly, why would be just yield? Be open to sort of continual development for yourself and be learning from your students and how you might improve your various programs from your students so that the program works better for them. And that's my last slide. And I made my time. So now I'm gonna pass the baton over to Dr. Fulwellad. Yeah, thank you so much, Dr. White and Dr. Odoale for sharing so much useful information. For this presentation, I don't have slides attached to it. I'm just gonna be speaking to you all. But I wanted to talk more about what it looks like to engage black communities in this work. And I wanna draw us to the Society of Black Archaeologists our 2020 Archaeology and the Time of Black Lives Matter resource list. So a number of you know about the panel that took place on June 25th, 2020. Two weeks following that presentation, there was a workshop that lasted for about two hours where 60 participants really came together from across the country and across the world, both within academia and those who are outside of it. There were graduate students, museum professionals, as well as folks who are in cultural resource management. And we got together to talk about and work through what it looks like to do organizing and activism within the field, capacity building, pedagogy and curriculum development for both professors as well as graduate students, community engagement, field schools and research as well as museums and heritage. So that resource list is a 40 page document that's available online for free at societyofblackarchaeologists.com that can be utilized throughout classroom settings, throughout serum firm settings and within our academic conference spaces and organizations as well. So I wanna pull us to that resource list and really look at the section that talks specifically about community engagement and really think through the sort of key challenges that we face in terms of how to engage black communities. Oftentimes this work is undervalued within academia and within CRM. My colleagues and I, we've all experienced this being professors in our own institutional spaces trying to find articulations for what this work that we're doing down in St. Croix, how it articulates with our institutions but also how we can gain funding to do this work as well. Dr. Maria Franklin has spoken about how community work is often undervalued within CRM as well. There was a very large project in Texas that really it took years to really get through this process of not only connecting with community but also assessing their needs. And that's the Ransom and Syrah Williams Farmstead Project. But they're often very difficult ways to engage stakeholder interest. Oftentimes when we say community engagement we think of community as a monolith. However, community is very diverse and the multitudes of people who we come in contact with that constitute stakeholders within our project are vast. And oftentimes what that means as scholars is really having to do a lot of groundwork to even build relationships with individuals. So for instance, at the estate little princess Justin and I were the first archeologists to really go down to that site as part of a larger project under the umbrella of the slave wrecks project and that was in 2016. It took between 2016 to 2017 for us to actually have conversations within community, do community assessment projects that look like a lot of self-funding trips down to St. Croix to actually address what community needs. And oftentimes what came out of that wasn't so much the research questions for our project, my apologies, wasn't so much the research questions for our projects, but really the capacity building that the community down in St. Croix desired for their students, which Dr. Alexander Jones will be speaking to shortly. So getting back to the needs for pedagogical approaches, Dr. Otowale just mentioned a great deal about what mentorship looks like for students. UC Berkeley is actually one of the institutions, one of the only institutions I know that actually mandates for their graduate students to have community engage components of their projects and for their research. This is something that could be institutionalized across a number of archeology departments and archeological centers throughout the country. It also was something that needs to be mandated policy-wise to actually have CRM firms be accountable to A, funds to put towards research and outreach to communities that does more than lip service to these organizations. And also the need and desire for field course experiences that are beyond just field school experiences. So for instance, at the University of Michigan in the psychology department, students are actually required to attach themselves to institutions in Detroit, for instance, and actually work with those institutions over the period of a semester or two to really work alongside communities that are doing community-engaged research. Something akin to that could actually be done for community-engaged projects as well. And it requires students to actually begin thinking about what community initiatives are already set up on the ground that actually need and could value the infrastructure and support to really get their own projects around heritage and preservation off the ground. I'm looking at the time because I wanna make sure that Dr. Alexander Jones and Dr. Justin Dunnevant have time to speak. So I won't take up any more time but I do wanna just state once again that there's a 40-page document that collectively was put together by 60 amazing individuals to really continue this conversation around how we can combat structural instances of anti-blackness and racism within our field. So the tools are out there for us to run with and this document is living and breathing so that we can continue building off of it. So thank you. I'll hand it over to Dr. Jones. Hello, everybody. So as many of you know, I started archeology in the community 11 years ago while a graduate student at Berkeley. It was partially a baby of the department and the community archeology mandate. I just of course took it and ran way further with it starting a company that has now teaches kids internationally as well. But there are lots of things that I've learned and parted and as a result have a strong core of interns and internationally who work with me to learn and to work with children. So there are a couple of things I just wanted to talk about as far as education around youth. And when I say children, most people automatically think school age or middle school but I'm actually talking youth pre-K all the way through high school and kind of how we re-envision what we do as education and outreach. So when I refer to education to me, education means that I'm staring you into a STEM or specifically an archeology career. When I talk about outreach, I'm thinking more of just what we do in the quick day-to-day just to get interest out there. So in looking at both of them, anybody who works with youth, any youth needs to actually be trained or participate in an anti-racist training period. And it's one of those things that is undervalued and there's a lot of assumptions that go into the fact that being very realistic we saw the stats Dr. Odewale did show us as far as what the number of archeologists look like. So the majority of my volunteers are white, women and men who are teaching youth of color. So having that background to understand language choice, it's one of the things that I have conversations every time an intern comes in. Let's talk about language to consider, value-latent languages, the sites that we select, how do these sites come across to children? How do you explain these sites? How do you make sure that when we're working in a multi-ethnic group, that you don't allow one group of students to think that their heritage or their value is more important than another's? So by having this anti-racist training, it actually helps you. So for anybody who's a historical archeologist, one of the things that I do commend Mount Pilier Forest, they make all of their interns attend this actual training. It's inexpensive. So thinking about moving forward, this is something that all graduate students, professors need to attend. Also intersectional theory. At the base level, understanding critical race theory and intersectionality. You are working with people from diverse backgrounds, specifically kids who are from different social economic backgrounds who have varying education, depending on what school system they came from or whether or not they're a home school. So also understanding how does intersectionality play into the conversations that you're gonna engage with with these students. The other thing is know your cultural group. So one of the things that I find particularly interesting is that there's this weird perception that because you're an archeologist, you also know all things about every cultural group. You'd be amazed at how many of you know nothing about children. You need to take an education course. You need to actually go in, take one course in the education department on how to teach children. What's the appropriate vocabulary? Classroom management, something basic. There are little things that we do as teachers in order to get the kids back in order to have them pay attention, understanding your audience, having analogies that work with your audience. So when you're explaining things, you're not on this high level talking about in situ. High school kids do not know in situ means, but if you lower it down to a vocabulary that they could actually understand in place that we're looking at it where it's at, those sort of things, base level things, making sure your programs are accessible. The other thing is a lot of us offer programs will out offer a small fee. So most parents right now can't pay that small fee. Parents are considering tuition. They're considering buying groceries. They're considering transportation. On top of everything else, now we're in the age of COVID. Many parents cannot afford to pay for an outreach program. So offering these programs free of charge. So if we're gonna dive into education and education, meaning we're looking at creating the next generation of students, thinking about what are we teaching the kids in regards to archeology? Are we actually trying to create the next generation of knowledgeable citizens, or are we just hosting a general archeology project? Is the idea that the site that I'm utilizing, how does this translate to students of different backgrounds? How can I use this to empower my students to move forward to get excited about archeology and then to move into undergraduate departments further on? Representation matters, period. There've been plenty of studies that show students of color who see people that look like them in the field can actually envision themselves in. So what we know is the majority of us don't look like me. The majority are white females or white men. So then what happens is you have to be a little bit more creative in your representation, meaning selecting books, articles. When you create PowerPoint slides, making sure that there's balanced representation of all people of color in this so that kids can actually see people that look like them doing this so that it encourages them to move forward. Making sure your program is well thought through and intentional. Meaning if we want these kids to come in, are you actually challenging them? Are you actually pushing them? Are you actually being creative in the material that you're creating so that you are now preparing them to the equal level? The kids that we teach in St. Croix, they actually have the equivalent of a field school experience. The same one that you would get on undergrad is the same thing that I do to the high school kids. I challenge them. And I love it when the college students come around because they get to kind of flex on them and show how much they know, whereas the undergrads may not know at that point. But that is me being very intentional and strategic that these are scholars that I want to come into the field of science and I want one day to appreciate archeology, understand it and also vote for things that support cultural heritage management. Outreach. Outreach is these shorter programs that we have, introducing them to archeology. What sites do you highlight when you do these outreach programs? Are you highlighting sites that are diverse? Are you picking a variety of sites? And when you're working with specifically African-American children, are you highlighting sites that are not based in enslavement? We all know about enslavement, but there are a ton of sites that go back and look at the resilience and the empowerment of people. So when you're selecting these sites, are you selecting sites that highlight empowerment? Or are you selecting sites that continue with the same status quo of the history that's already been put out, which wakes one group look like they're superior to another? And then last but not least, in outreach programs, watch your language, meaning consider the language are you using? Are you using slave? Are you using master? Are you using, or are you using words like colonizer or enslaver? Are you empowering these different communities by actually using their names and not just calling them a general stereotype? Are you going beyond this idea of black and white? And you're also talking about ethnic groups. So just kind of being very intentional and thoughtful, but I think all of this work starts and being educated about anti-racism. So with that said, I'll switch it over to Dr. Dunhamette. Thank you, Dr. Jones. I just kind of wanted to sort of bring everything that's been said together and really have us have a critical reflection and sort of evaluation about archaeology as a discipline. And I think a lot of this can be said, not only about archaeology, but about the fields of social sciences and humanities as well, which is this idea that these disciplines are constantly going through a shift, a change and new iterations. And they're not meant to be static. They never were static. And I think we need to more intentionally foreground the ways in which these disciplines are changing. I know oftentimes departments or individuals or in some cases small groups of individuals have these conversations around new directions in the field, but rarely do we have this on a national conversation on a national level and rarely do we have it on an international level. And I think now we're in a critical moment where this conversation is really blown up into an international moment, where we're reevaluating again as people have been sort of pushing throughout the last 60 plus years, we're reevaluating what is it that the discipline looks like? What is it that the discipline values and how does it measure those values? And I think that that's important for us to recognize and to foreground when we talk about the pedagogies of teaching archaeology and about our intentions in establishing the State Little Princess Archaeology Field School, as well as our intentions in establishing the Society of Black Archaeologists. And I would draw it back to the article by Cheryl LaRouche and Michael Blakey that talks about seizing intellectual power. And I think one of the critical things about that piece and Dr. LaRouche has told us about this explicitly. Many people cite the fact that it's community archaeology but don't critically engage that the title itself is talking about seizing intellectual power. And we have to reanalyze and re-understand what that means. So we have to understand that as this discipline is changing, just as it changed to a Marxist anthropology at one point in time, just as it changed to a post-processual archaeology at one point in time, oftentimes the metrics aren't in place to keep up with that change and to acknowledge that change. So one of the sort of main contentions that we came up with initially that we still combat today and judging by one of the questions in the YouTube stream that certain students still face today is this idea of if you're engaging community or if you're engaging in conversations of race and discussions of larger social structures, you're not doing as scientific in archaeology as we would like to see. And we think that there's a fundamental problem in that and that there needs to be a fundamental shift in how we actually value what archaeology looks like and what is considered archaeological work. We're often told whether we're in the faculty positions, we're told service is really, people say it's 10% but in reality it doesn't even exist. So don't waste your time on service. We're taught as graduate students, that's a great project but you're gonna have to take out that community piece because it needs to be quote unquote more scientific in order to get funded or to get pushed forward. And we're saying that it doesn't have to be either or it can be both end. And we realize that it can be done because oftentimes we have had to do it because it was not a negotiable situation where we said, okay, well we'll step back and then when we get to this position, then we can show how we're engaging community. Oftentimes those conversations had to happen in tandem and it left us in a conundrum. For some of us we either said we have to let it go and do what they wanna see for the PhD. For others of us, we said we had to do both end and just do twice as much work. Or for some of us we had to say, we're gonna leave the system that doesn't value our work and we're gonna do something completely separate. And I think that there again, there's a need for us to reevaluate and redesign these metrics. And I'm happy to say that these are things that I think are conversations that are happening now with archeology center directors around the country, with major funders around the country. And I'm hoping that they will transition as well into departments and into CRM and community-based conversations as well. So just to put this in a little bit of perspective, when we established the estate little princess archeology field school, we recognized that it didn't fit traditional models of archeology. And that was intentional. I think there are community needs that our community in the sense of a larger group identity, which in this case is African diaspora people, realizing that we have a shortage of capacity. There are also community needs at a local level in St. Croix, for example, that in this case dovetail with the need for capacity, but also dovetail with a larger conversation of us needing to be able to re-engage community in discussions of heritage preservation in many places where they've been left out. So again, it's about seizing that intellectual power. We intentionally created the estate little princess field school to be a collaborative research site. And again, we were told because of university metrics, there's a PI on a project and a co-PI and you generally don't go beyond that. But we intentionally got five PhDs onto this project to develop a larger collaborative project in part because of the expertise that everybody on this panel presents and also in part because we set sustainability to us as more important than credits on some academic CV. And we knew that we would all go off into different spaces and we needed something to be sustainable. We also foregrounded training over research. Again, academic metrics tell us you need to be pumping out research consistently. You need to focus most of your time in the field on excavating as much as possible so it can be analyzed and you can write up reports. We explicitly stated that we're focusing on training and capacity building as the main focus. So while we're doing the research, we understand that the research project may take longer and the work may get done slower. But the residuals of that will be much more influential if we're successful. We're incorporating Black Studies into archaeology and I'm gonna speed through some of these. And we're also learning lessons from communities and from other projects in which we engage in. And one of those critically, I'd like to point to the work of Diving with a Purpose, DWP. It was with Diving with a Purpose that it taught us that we can not only do the archaeological work and explore this history of the African diaspora underwater, but we can also recognize what those issues are and operate some sort of plan to engage with those. So while they do underwater archaeology work, they also do underwater core restoration work because they realize there's a direct connection between the ways in which people are sort of dehumanized and controlled and there are ways in which the environment as well is degraded and controlled. So I think it's important to also keep open that conversation as well. I wanna let people know that this is messy work. This is scary work in some places and we're entering uncharted territories in other places. We realize that we will make missteps, that nothing is perfect, but it's through the struggle that we begin to develop new ways and new ideas in which an archaeology can look to really benefit the communities by which we work. And I think that that's important and it's important to recognize that moving forward and I'm wrapping it up here, that we continue to connect globally with people from these communities that have traditionally been left out of general archaeological conversations. So we're actively building ties with archaeologists of African descent in South America and the Caribbean and Africa and in Europe because we know that these are conversations that they also have been having and they provide unique perspectives too and we hope to raise those voices. Another part of this again is probably considered more esoteric but there's a need to bring back spirituality in some of this work. And that's important specifically when we're talking about African burial grounds and African remains. So for those of you who finished this conversation you can log right on to the talk right after this that's co-hosted by the Winner-Gran Foundation and a few others on repatriation with indigenous and black archaeologists. But it's important to also re-energize these black sites as sacred sites. And that's something that often gets lost when we have these larger discussions. But again, that's something that our work in collaborations with groups like the Indigenous Archaeology Collective can begin to expose. And I'm gonna close it there so that if there is any time we can get a question in and I hope I address the one question in the YouTube channel. Thank you. Okay, we have one question. Let me look closer. Oh, there's definitely a question about addressing faculty members. So the question is, how do you address a faculty member who sees creating space for issues of race and alternate methods of teaching as lowering standards given the power dynamics? I'm new to being a professor so I don't know the actual response to that. I mean, what I would tell a student of mine if this was going on is, how can you finish your degree without having to engage with that individual? Because as a student, you don't really have the same level of interaction with folks like that. So if there's a way for you to finish your degree without having to have that individual on your committee or engage with that person in the department or on campus, I mean, I guess I would say at that point, student avoidance, the more difficult problem is when we look at that, small percentage of faculty that are of color and they have to work and try to attain tenure and be in that kind of system. And I don't know, I'll open this up to Alicia and Alex if you have any comments on that one because it's not something I have a lot of experience with right now. So I'm currently teaching courses on African American archeology and I have my course in the spring on community archeology. At the end of the day, what you have to challenge back to your professor is this, is that we understand all, because I had the same problem writing my dissertation is that archeologically you want the science, you have to focus on the science. That's what's most important. However, the science is adding to this whole story. So if you avoid the community, if you avoid the backdrop, you're essentially at the end of the day, not providing a full explanation of what is actually taking place. Yes, you can highlight, and this is why honestly, we have chapters in our dissertation. You do have that chapter, which looks at the science, but you also need to talk about the community engagement, what she went through. How are you lending to this community? Because the one thing I think that bothers me more is that what we have is professors continuing this neo-colonialist idea of you go into a community, you take the research, you write the report, and you leave nothing back with the people that you just did your work with. I can attest right now. 10 years later, I am still doing the work and giving back to the community that basically I use for my dissertation. So there is this cyclical thing. We can't continue to go in and give nothing back to the people that we're working with. And I think we need to get out of this idea that archeology is only about going into this place, dropping in for a season or two, getting what we need and moving away. So I think if you also reframe what you're looking at, if you have a conversation with your advisor, talking about how the work that you're doing with this community actually aids in the science and then informs the science, maybe that will help is maybe just in the description and the delivery that you get. But I really do think it's an essential part as archeologists that we just do not continue to go in, take and give nothing back to the community we're working with. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, Alex. So I'll not take up any more time. Okay, I believe that was the last question. That's the last question. I'm not on YouTube, but they're sending the question to me. So I guess if we have no more questions, I would definitely thank Alicia, Alex, Justin, and Ayanna who had to leave early and go to the other talk. Thank you for your time. And I really hope that folks who watched this and were part of this get something valuable that they can use to help them move forward. I mean, all of us are kind of figuring it out as we go as the whole world changes around us. But I do hope that you can find something from this talk that will really help you in your research and your practice. So thank you, everybody. Thanks for your time. Thanks for folks who watched. Thanks for my colleagues.