http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/native/debate.html Go to link above to see full context including Clement Meighan’s opposing ǀieǁ. Debating NAGPRAS's Effects "Native Americans and Archaeologists" February 26, 1999 Sharing Control of the Past by Larry J. Zimmerman Scholars have been slow to realize that the scientific archaeology that sprang from Euroamerican rationalist and empiricist roots may not be the only valid archaeology. Part of the rift between archaeologists and Native Americans stems from a fundamentally different conception of the past. To archaeologists, the past can be known because it has already happened and left markers--artifacts--that give clues about it. To know the past requires that it be discovered through written sources and archaeological exploration and interpretation. To Native Americans, the idea that discovery is the only way to know the past is absurd. For the Indian interested in traditional practice and belief, the past lives in the present. Indians know the past because it is spiritually and ritually a part of daily existence and is relevant only as it exists in the present. In fact, Indians object to heavy reliance on artifacts, preferring instead to focus on people and how they experienced their lives. Archaeologists often claim to speak for past peoples, however remote. Implicit in this claim is the notion that they, as practitioners of a science, are the only ones capable of doing so. Native Americans do not accept this and challenge the very authority of archaeological knowledge. Cecil Antone of the Gila River Indian Tribes said at a conference on reburial, "My ancestors, relatives, grandmother so on down the line, they tell you about the history of our people and it's passed on...basically, what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that archaeology don't mean nothing." When archaeologists say that the Native American past is gone, extinct, or lost unless archaeology can find it, they send a strong message that Native Americans themselves are extinct. University of Arizona anthropologist J. Jefferson Reid believes that Native Americans see archaeological accounts of their past as a threat to traditional, Indian accounts of that same past. They fear that the archaeological version eventually will replace the traditionally constructed past and their culture, once again, will be eroded. Indians told Reid, during a recent archaeological conference, that the archaeology of the Southwest had no relevance for southwestern Indians; in their view "...archaeology was only relevant to other archaeologists."