Like you Zoe, I view teaching as public engagement and an opportunity to discuss these issues of privilege, colonialism, and power – problems I’m working my way through – with my students. The classroom is where I can invest and challenge their ideas about issues in BC. Thinking through how to cause change is important for eager young minds that we get to interact with as well as dispel myths: as I often do in my First Nations of BC course, ironically taught by a honkey (i.e., me), which I address on the first day of class, especially my approach and shortcomings. Coming from a place of honesty and sharing my experiences (mistakes and all) to push ourselves to understand the complexities, relationships, and difficulties that exist is critical. But it’s also important to build relationships with young students (and with Indigenous communities), and discuss examples of accountability towards the communities that allow us to work with them to find solutions.

I appreciate the thoughts you shared on this post and I also value supporting one another, given our varied backgrounds and experiences, to come together and acknowledge the many voices important in working towards decolonizing anthropology. For me, causing internal structural change within CRM is critical given the overwhelmingly imbalance in power, control, and ownership over Indigenous heritage on Indigenous lands by industry and non-Indigenous archaeologists.

Thank you for this comment! You are right–we have a responsibility to engage cross-border and inter-regional conversations–and I’m so grateful for spaces like this where we can have these conversations. It’s so empowering to hear about how you are working to centre the work of women, scholars of colour and non-US/European scholars in your teaching! And we have a lot to learn, here in Canada, from places outside of mainland US and Canada. best, Zoe

Then, however, I remember what I thought was anthropology’s mission, to understand humanity as a whole, a fabric woven of all sorts of human lives. I think of my neighbors, who live in an affluent neighborhood in one of the planet’s most livable cities, heirs of ancestors who were forced to open their country to unwanted foreigners, learned from them, domesticated what they had learned and built their own empire, were defeated in a global war and the target of atomic bombs, came back and built the world’s second largest economy. I think of my friends in Taiwan and their cousins in China, heirs to a civilization that has collapsed and rebuilt itself multiple times and is now emerging once again as a great power. I think, too, of our Croatian and Slovenian colleagues, who organized this year’s meeting of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Dubrovnik, whose anthropology is largely focused on the complexities of their countries’ Balkan neighborhood. I wonder where all of us fit in that binary opposition in which the pain that drives decolonization is rooted.