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The last decade or so has seen an increasing awareness that control of archaeological resources and knowledge must be shared with “descendant groups, other impacted communities and the public at large” (Franklin 1997:39)—especially given the growing concern that we demonstrate what has been termed the “public benefits of archaeology” (e.g., papers in Little 2002).  This is, of course, doubly true within the archaeology of the African Diaspora where researchers “must be informed by an awareness of long-standing debates about the politics of the past among African-Americans” (La Roche and Blakey 1997:87).  In some ways, however, I agree with Ann Pyburn who stated in relation to Mayan archaeology that…

While the needs and wishes of local people and descendant communities must figure large in the archaeology of the next century, we archaeologists are not quite ready to meet them. We clearly have good intentions…Nevertheless, in our very enthusiasm to do something big and good, to make up for errors of the past and of course to outdo each other, we run the risk of promotions that will backfire…(Pyburn 2003:287)

Pyburn asserts that we need to rethink our craft with an eye towards engagement before we can go out into the world and “do good”…we are trained as archaeologists and that, at least at present, leaves most of us ill-suited to negotiate the terrain of community engagement.  Thus, what we are still not clear about, and what many of us are talking about today, are ways we should go about our engagement with descendant communities and the broader public.  Clearly (as our session abstract states) there is not a single answer—nor should there be.  On the other hand, researchers influenced by critical race theory (e.g., Epperson 2004) have pointed out (quite correctly in many instances) that there may be established ways to not engage descendant communities.  They have charged that many white scholars still commonly deploy strategies of incorporation and vulgar anti-essentialism in order to retain control of knowledge production.   

My own work, in collaboration with James Davidson and Maria Franklin, underscores the complex diversity of descendant communities and stakeholders in any given project.  The two principle projects that I will reference in my comments today are Van Winkle’s Mill, a late nineteenth-century sawmill community in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains which used enslaved labor and continued to use African-American labor after emancipation (Brandon 2004; Brandon and Davidson 2003, 2005, Brandon et al. 2000); and Juliette Street in the old Freedmen’s Town section of what is now downtown Dallas, Texas where we’ve just begun work on an abandoned street that physically symbolizes the history of Black Dallas—A historical geography that is rapidly disappearing through rampant commercial development (Brandon 2000, Brandon and Davidson 2001; Davidson 2004; Davidson et al. 2004).

My personal approach to involvement may seem overly simplistic, but as we are at the American Anthropological Association meetings it seems appropriate to make the point here.  This panel is discussing applied methods that we develop to help us engage these complicated, contradictory, multifaceted, polyvocal things called descendant communities.  It seems to me that a basic, overall operational answer to this dilemma has already been prescribed by researchers engaged in the archaeology of the African Diaspora.  I heard it when Linda Derry explained how she got past community disinterest in Selma, Alabama: “I had to find someone willing to talk to me, and I had to start listening” (Derry 1997:21, original emphasis).  I heard it when Maria Franklin said that the “success or failure of our attempts to establish ties with black Americans will hinge upon our level of sensitivity, openness, and understanding of the histories and viewpoints that they bring to the exchange” (Franklin 1997:37, original emphasis).

Our colleagues in social and cultural anthropology who work with contemporary cultures do this on a daily basis.  They have to constantly negotiate a balance between their wants/needs/interests as researchers and those of their informants.  Further, it is understood that the process is dynamic and continuous; it should be initiated in the project design and continue through implementation by way of dialogue and negotiation with those studied (AAA 1998 A:4).

In short, we as archaeologists—especially those of us who see ourselves as activists—should learn to put some training as cultural anthropologists to work—take the time to learn the political terrain, identify the diverse stakeholders, listen to the discourses and negotiate as best we can a working relationship. 

At the risk of sounding trite I will say this: as we have now entered a time when archaeologists consistently engage living communities—and diverse, contradictory ones at that—the old Willey and Phillips maxim that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing” takes on a whole new meaning.

Cultural Memory, Historical Narratives and Descendant Communities

This careful attention to the discourses that descendant communities use when talking about their relationship with the past(s) is not only a way of forcing us as researchers into becoming aware and sensitive to the communities’ viewpoints, it may also become instructive as to the construction of historical narratives and the power struggles that created them.  This leads me to the one aspect that ties these two projects together¾the fact that working with descendant communities inevitably involves dealing with cultural memory and historical narratives. 

Cultural memory can be seen as a piecemeal integration of various different personal pasts into a single common past(s) that members of a larger community come to identify with and remember collectively (Misztal 2003:11).  It is a “collective project that is crucial to the consolidation or construction of group, community or national identities,” but it’s also (and we often do not talk about this aspect as much) “a site of hegemonic struggle, as a fluid ideological terrain” (Swedenburg 2003:xxix). 

What does this theoretical construct have to do with the applied research strategy of partnering with descendant communities?   I will briefly outline how cultural memory(ies) have framed our dealing with descendant communities in each of the two aforementioned projects and then I will offer some broad observations about descendant communities that, I hope, will be fuel for our panel discussion.

Narratives of Loss & Narratives that make Community:Juliette Street

The area that was Freedman’s Town in old North Dallas is now a bustling arts district in the throws of revitalization.  The African-American residents have long since been pushed out of the geographical area that had once been synonymous with “Black Dallas.”  In latter half of the twentieth century, however, through processes such as urban renewal, the area was stripped of its historical precedence and African-American residents.  The current name given to this same area is “Uptown” or the “Citiplace Neighborhood,” the latter named for the adjacent Citiplace Tower, which is the headquarters for the Southland Corporation (home of the 7-11 and the “Big Gulp”). 

In the summer of 2002 the University of Texas archaeological field school was held in the city; its focus was the Freedman’s Town area.  The UT field school worked within a community partnership with the staff and congregation of Saint Paul United Methodist Church.

Of all the structures that once lined Juliette Street, St. Paul is the only survivor, and its congregation and ministry are still very active.  Saint Paul was founded at its present location in the summer of 1873.  The present day Gothic style brick structure, was begun in 1901, and finally completed in 1925.  Despite the microdiaspora which has driven the former residents of the Juliette Street area to the outlying areas of Dallas, St. Paul serves as a tangible articulation point for this non-geographic community.  Every Sunday former area residents and their descendants come to the church from all over the Dallas Metroplex, renewing their ties, creating a community and keeping the cultural memory of Freedman’s Town alive. 

The congregation includes many who remember Juliette Street and the surrounding blocks fondly as well as lineal descendants (including the descendants of the couple who lived in the shotgun house we excavated in 2002).  Through archaeology, we hoped it would become possible to examine the processes of community and social construction that occurred in Black Dallas in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  This insight is especially important because these communities were formed within inherently racist societal structures, revealing at least some of the outcomes of racism on the lives of individuals.

For our first meeting, we (Franklin, Davidson & Brandon) drove from Austin to Dallas to meet with Reverend Sharon Paterson and key members of the St. Paul congregation, to explain what we had in mind, and also to solicit their input regarding what they would like to see accomplished (and questions that they wanted asked) during the course of the summer and beyond.  We listened to the members of the St. Paul congregation as they spoke about community loss and specifically spoke about the attempts to silence the African-American heritage of historic Black Dallas. 

I have to admit that we where excited—here was a descendant community that spoke in similar ways and was interested in similar questions as the archaeological researchers.  My most vivid memories of the project revolve around our shared language—one example was this first meeting between archaeologists and congregation members where my colleague James Davidson, who had been involved in research in Dallas since the 1990s, became very animated while describing past racial and political injustices in Dallas.  Just when I was becoming apprehensive at the shocked look on congregation member’s faces, they began to join in adding supportive historical elements to Davidson’s narratives.  Franklin and I certainly learned a lot about Dallas history—much of it unwritten—from the interplay of Davidson and the congregation that day.  Also, Davidson had inadvertently let the members of St. Paul know 1) that he had “done his homework” on Black Dallas and came prepared to the project and 2) that he was deeply passionate about Dallas’ history and respectful of the community’s story.

The Church elders implemented several excellent elements in our research design, many of which revolved around engaging young people in the church and the community’s history (St. Paul was celebrating its 129^th anniversary on Juliette Street).  It was decided to merge elements of the Church’s summer youth program, Camp Succeed, into the field school, so that in the weeks to come the field school students, having been taught basic excavation techniques, would in turn teach children from the community. 

Our relationship with St. Paul may have gone smoothly, in part, because we shared similar ideas about the stories we wanted to tell about the past, but there were, of course, elements of tension in negotiating the Juliette Street Project.  These tensions did not, however, stem so much from our relationship with the St. Paul congregation, but with other stakeholders in the project—such as Alexander Troup, the avocational archaeologist who had first discovered intact archaeological features on Juliette Street in 1990 and many other local historians of Black Dallas (many of whom were also a part of the larger descendant community).  Many were suspicious of us as outsiders to the Dallas community.  Thus, in retrospect, our success in this project involved not only a concordance of interests between us and our research partners, but also from the specificity of the community with which we partnered (not necessarily a good thing).  Juliette Street, however, is still a relatively young project.  As such, I am sure that we have much to negotiate with the broader spectrum of stakeholders when we return to Dallas in the future. 

The potential difficulties that lie in front of us can be seen in the specter of a previous archaeological project in Dallas’ Freedman’s Town.  Our project’s partnering with St. Paul

was a very different set of experiences from those of the archaeologists involved in the Freedman’s Cemetery project in the mid-1990s.  When that project broke down during its later stages it was often portrayed in the press (and among archaeologists) as being due to political tensions between the descant community and the archaeologists.  My understanding of the political reality of the break down, however, although secondhand, makes it seem much more complicated.  The “battle lines”, if you will, seemed to be drawn with a split within both the descendant community and the various groups of researchers—with members of each on both sides.  Some archaeologists and descendants who are veterans of the Freedman’s Cemetery conflict point that one of these factions was at least nominally spoken for by a lineal descendant while another was the head of a city-wide black heritage organization.  I will return to this point later when I discuss multiple scales of descendant communities, but first I want to quickly discuss our second project—Van Winkle’s Mill.

Regional Narratives & Lost Narratives: Van Winkle’s Mill

I should point out that Van Winkle’s Mill, unlike our work in Dallas, was not initially conceived of as a project that would partner with descendant communities when it began in 1997.  The fact that one of the descendant communities—the white Van Winkle descendants—came to us touched off a larger dialog with both lineal descendant communities and larger, more general stakeholders during this nine year project.

Van Winkle’s Mill in the rural Ozarks—is a place where African-American heritage has been silenced in the local, regional and national historical narratives (Brandon 2005:111-117; Brandon and Davidson 2005:125-126) and much of the lineal African-American descendant community has also almost completely dispersed geographically as well.  The dominant historical narrative in the Ozarks is a regional- and national-level trope that re-members the Ozarks as a place historically inhabited by white, anti-modern yeomen farmers—the “hillbilly.”  The combination of physical diaspora (which itself was due to economic factors and racial discrimination) and the oppressive force of historical memory made engagement with African-American descendants at Van Winkle’s Mill extremely difficult. 

The opportunity to engage this regional and national-level narrative is, however, what originally drew us to the Van Winkle’s Mill.  Here we had the opportunity to talk about many diverse aspects of Ozark history that were often silenced—African-American Heritage in the Ozarks was at the top of the list (e.g., Brandon and Hilliard 1998). 

The lineal descendants of Peter Van Winkle, the white owner of the mill who enslaved a part of the workforce, were already aware of the site and had written a family history including the site.  They were well organized (they even had a round-robin newsletter that they sent out at intervals) and were actively engaged throughout the project not only with the archaeologists, but also with Arkansas State Parks who were developing the site as a park that interpreted the “hidden diversity” of the Arkansas Ozarks. 

Listening to the white descendant community, it was clear that they had their own silences they were fighting and their own narrative they were attempting to inscribe on the past of Van Winkle’s Mill.  Remembering the forgotten figure of Peter Van Winkle was so important that the Van Winkle family history, published in 1993, made Peter the central icon— Peter Marseilles Van Winkle: His Life and Times, His Ancestors Back to the 16th Century and Most of His Descendants.  Also, several (but not all) members of the white descendant community were not opposed to (or even in favor of) confronting the legacy of slavery at Van Winkle’s Mill.  However, some of these descendants—in keeping with the dominant cultural memory of the region and in an effort to protect their ancestor’s heroic place in the historical narrative—were against even the mention of slavery at Van Winkle’s Mill.

In an attempt to tell the complex story of diversity in the nineteenth century Ozarks (and how it has come to be forgotten), in 2002 we partnered with The Rogers Historical Museum, lineal descendant communities, Hobbs State Park, the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Bentonville and Rogers School Districts to launch a project as a part of their educational programs for schools.  Using historical documents, archaeological information, family history and other sources, we proposed to expose some 1,300 fifth-grade children in Benton County schools to critical history through the story of Van Winkle’s Mill.

The curriculum was multidisciplinary and sought to introduce students to aspects of the natural environment that made the lumber mill possible, the social, political and economic history of Northwest Arkansas, the concept of industrial slavery and African-American heritage in the Ozarks, the impact of the Civil War on the region, and how different types of sources (including historical archaeology) come together to reconstruct the history of a site.  The program included a class visit to provide background information for (and primary documentation of) Van Winkle’s Mill and a field trip to the site where students rotated through several key interpretive locations.

The Van Winkle program was widely considered an overall success from an educational standpoint.  Thirty six fifth-grade classes participated and the Rogers Historical Museum won the "2004 Educational Program of the Year" award from the Arkansas Museums Association for the program. Yet some aspects of the program were clearly more successful than others and I believe this is due to several forces—the resilience of cultural memory and the confusion caused by the complexity of the two historical narratives being presented (i.e., the story of the African-American community at Van Winkle’s Mill and the story of Peter Van Winkle and industrial heritage in the Ozarks).  Student evaluations made it clear that while we were successful in tackling the hillbilly stereotype through the story of Peter Van Winkle and his mill, the critical history of enslavement at the mill was lost in the translation.

It should be evident that although highly flexible and contradictory, there is also a certain resilient quality to cultural memory.  This can be seen in works such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s The New History in an Old Museum (1997) which chronicles the complications and difficulties of the attempts of social historians to introduce critical views of colonial America (including a revised examination of slavery and the African-American colonial experience) into the public interpretations at Williamsburg.  The identity of Williamsburg’s white citizens had been actively remade in cultural memory with the American Revolution as its focus (Handler and Gable 1997:33).  This substitution of the colonial trope for the Civil War trope in both local and national cultural memory is not unlike the hillbilly trope’s ascendancy in the Ozarks—focusing attention on a favored protagonist and erasing the diversity of Williamsburg

from memory.  This resistance to constructionist views of history and alternative historical narratives at Colonial Williamsburg strikes a resonance with some of our experiences at Van Winkle’s Mill.  It is difficult to complicate the cultural memory of the Ozarks with such topics as diversity, modernity, industrialism, slavery and racism.

Multiple Scales (Analytic Registers) of Descendant Communities

Researchers in the African Diaspora face—and this is something we talk about but have some difficulty operationalizing—that there is a complex layering of descendant communities, other impacted communities and publics who are stakeholders in our work.  Mack and Blakey (2004:14), for instance, have pointed out that the “descendant community is not a monolithic entity but is comprised of individuals and groups with widely divergent ideologies, cultural backgrounds, and belief systems as well as various age and socioeconomic groups.”  Descendant communities are...

…heterogeneous and composed of individuals who do not necessarily share the same vision of archaeology, archaeologists, or the study of their heritage.  It is one thing to hope that we can be successful in forging relationships with descendants; it is quite another ride into town expecting blanket enthusiasm and full cooperation simply because we reach out with good intentions. (Franklin and McKee 2004:4).

This aspect comes to the foreground when researchers are faced with choices about which analytic register they are going to use when dealing with descendant communities.  For Wilkie’s work in Louisiana she was “most comfortable, from an intellectual and emotive perspective, when addressing directly the concerns and research questions of those most intimately involved” with the site she was studying—the direct lineal descendants of the plantation tenants (Wilkie 2004:117).  Linda Derry found that listening to the larger, metaphorical descendant community placed her in conflict with the lineal descendants when they teased her about listening to those “big city blacks:  “After all, one said, ‘what did they know about things down here?’” (Derry 1997:20).

These examples remind me of the situations that prehistoric archaeologists face fairly regularly when dealing with Native American stakeholders in the context of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; 25 U.S.C. 3001)—both in the context of pre-removal consulting and repatriation.  The letter of the NAGPRA law is that lineal descendants have ownership of these human remains and archaeological materials.  In the vast majority of cases, however, archaeologists, Native American groups and policy makers—thanks to the “fuzziness” of the material record, ever changing identity, racist policies of genocide, contradictory ways of understanding historical narratives and many, many other overdetermined factors—reach no agreement about who are (or were) the lineal descendant communities.  This becomes, to borrow a phrase fromCarol McDavid (1997:1), “a source of discord and conflict” when several very disparate groups claim to be THE descendant community; each claiming their rights to their cultural patrimony. 

Many prehistoric archaeologists (but not all, of course) have come to terms with this political struggle and recognize that in lieu of a clear “lineal” descendant community the spirit of the NAGPRA law mandates that they address(and empower) the often contradictory  wants needs and expectations of the diverse larger descendant communities of current regional Native American communities.

“…when present-day social contexts are not taken into account the archaeology can appear to be irrelevant, boring, or, even worse, can become a source of discord and conflict.  However, if present-day contexts are taken into account, discord and conflict, if they do occur, can lead to productive problem-solving and resolution (McDavid 1997:1-2, original emphasis).

Researchers who work with the archaeology of the African Diaspora in America—especially those such as myself who work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—usually have both a lineal descendant community and the larger African American community of the area and/or region.  These overlapping communities are highlighted in these two projects.  In Dallas both the Freedman’s Cemetery project and, to a much lesser extent, our work on Juliette Street feel the tensions between lineal descendants, the larger community of Black Dallas.  At Van Winkle’s Mill the tensions were complicated and the analytic registers ranged from the large-scale regional identities of Northwest Arkansas and the Ozark Mountains, to the very well organized white descendant community, the very small lineal African-American descendant community and the larger (but still small) Northwest Arkansas African-American community.

Although Van Winkle’s Mill has a very small lineal African-American descendent community, the importance of the site in telling the silenced story of African American heritage in the Ozark Mountains has certainly made the larger African American population in the Ozarks stakeholders.  Increasingly, however, this includes a new element—the large influx of newcomers to the area who are coming to work for the local corporate giants headquartered in Northwest Arkansas (Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and their vendors).  The African-American population of Northwest Arkansas has more than doubled since 1990 due to this influx.  I have already noticed, however, that although these stakeholders are very interested in local African American history and culture (once they realize that it exists), they use a profoundly different set of narratives when talking about the past(s).  Like my thoughts on the future of the Juliette Street project, I predict that we will have interesting negotiations ahead—especially between the local African-American community with historical roots in the area and the new stakeholders with a very different history and class aesthetic.

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