As I mentioned in the first post of my series, anthropologists and ethnobiologists have played an outsized role in studying and popularizing ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism, and more recently, attending to its internationalization. This history affords anthropologists a stake in discussions of drug policy issues pertaining to the subjects; one might even suggest it requires their participation as a matter of ethical concern. One topic of interest among scholars and activists right now is whether and how to regulate ayahuasca practices within a framework of increasing legalization and legitimation in the global north. Some scientists and activists seem to believe that legality alone will bring increased transparency and safety by eliminating the need for practitioners and participants to navigate in what is effectively a criminal underground. However, the assumption of legality among the practitioners and participants of the new ayahuasca churches, particularly Ayahuasca Healings, sheds light on numerous other problems that legalization alone will not solve—in fact, may exacerbate. These include the misappropriation of indigenous culture, the hyper-commodification of spirituality, and a rapid increase in demand for the vine, which is already being overharvested in some areas.

As we saw in post #6, a major issue that arises in the face of legalization is how to ensure the physical and psychological safety of participants and the qualifications of practitioners—an issue which remains problematic even in the Amazon. How would ayahuasca practice be regulated and policed if it were legalized in North America—or should it be? Scholars and researchers are beginning to discuss options for such a scenario (Blainey 2015; Haden et al. 2016). However, given the privileged role of religion in U.S. culture and the lack of regulatory oversight of religious organizations and their leadership, even in the face of some of the nefarious practices associated with religion in our country, it is questionable whether legalization under the rubric of religious freedom will provide for the safety and wellbeing of participants—especially given the rise of these new ayahuasca churches, their often young and inexperienced leaders, and the DEA’s lack of regulatory powers with regard to the level of training and experience of “ministers” or “clergy.”

Contributing to this issue is the lack of discernment engendered by anything-goes New-Age eclecticism and the emotional neediness—and therefore, vulnerability—of a population scarred by the excesses and violence of modernity. Such a population is easy prey for a charismatic leader promising transformation, awakening, and freedom. While such leaders, and the dangers they represent, are not confined to ayahuasca shamanism, it may be that ayahuasca use exacerbates the problem. Despite the common wisdom that ayahuasca “dissolves the ego,” the very opposite may be true. One gringo shaman that I know calls it “the ego explosion.” “We warn people about it when they come to visit our center,” he said. The UDV has systems of accountability in place that help keep a lid on excessive egotism and ensure acceptable behavior from leaders and members. Traditionally, the egalitarian social structure of Amazonian culture has performed the same function. However, with the expropriation of ayahuasca use to new cultural settings, particularly the Western world where personal freedom and individuality are cherished above all, social controls over individual transgressions are in short supply. Thus the privileged position of religious freedom in U.S. culture, along with the premium placed on individual freedom, are a recipe for danger when it comes to the legalization of ayahuasca within the current framework.

Whether or not Ayahuasca Healings succeeds in winning their DEA exemption—and most observers believe that they won’t—the controversy has exposed the ongoing rift between the neo-shamanism community in the United States, which invariably lays claim to romanticized images of Native American and indigenous Amazonian spirituality and worldviews, and various sectors of the Native American community, in this case, the Native American Church. It is a humorless irony that the new ayahuasca churches purportedly idolize and seek to mimic those very Native American peoples who have consistently denounced such misappropriation of Native American spirituality and culture, and who have so consistently and vehemently distanced themselves from James Mooney and ONAC.

The disjuncture is not just between New Age and Native American spirituality, but also between Amazonian and Native North American forms of shamanic and religious practice, colonial histories and socioeconomic settings. Contemporary ayahuasca shamanism evolved in a context of interethnic travel and trade. Shamanic power in the Amazon relies on the ability to live, act, communicate, and negotiate across the boundaries between various groups of humans, between human and non-human, and between material and spiritual worlds. Kinship and personhood among indigenous Amazonians are based more on relations of nurturance and reciprocity than on genetic speciation. Jaguars, for example, may be considered people, even kin, whereas members of other tribes may be considered not fully human. Within the field of genetically human relationships, where the social structure is based on colonial ethnic hierarchies, the use of ayahuasca is used variously to index ethnic distinctions, to subvert them, and to blur them in the process of interethnic alliance building. Ethnicity in the Amazon tends to be fluid. This cosmopolitanism, the cross-boundary exchange and multi-ethnic eclecticism that characterizes Amazonian shamanism has made it a good fit for an international audience. Furthermore, due to the interethnic nature of Amazonian shamanism, services have historically been rendered for a fee. This practice was readily expanded to incorporate the current wave of seekers to the Amazon.

In North America, however, ayahuasca shamanism has been juxtaposed onto an indigenous context that is completely anathema to the commodification of anything spiritual, and in which ethnicity is far from fluid. In Native North America, ethnic identity is measured by blood quotient and by registration in a federally recognized tribe, and identity politics are a serious issue with very real ramifications for tribal membership and access to the benefits that it affords. Furthermore, New Age appropriation of indigenous spirituality has been a sore spot for Native American people for decades, and even inter-tribal appropriation (e.g. the Sun Dance and sweat lodge ceremonies), as well as the sale of native spirituality by indigenous people to outsiders, have led to bitter acrimony within the Native North American community (Churchill 2003).

Equally salient are the different religious and colonial contexts that predate contemporary indigenous spirituality in North and South America. Ayahuasca shamanism developed largely within the socio-cultural and economic context of Jesuit missionization, which was relatively tolerant of shamanic practice, even incorporating it into the Jesuit system of indirect governance. Similarly, Amazonian healers often eagerly adopted the symbols and imagery of their powerful Christian counterparts. Some scholars claim that the ayahuasca ceremony itself is a hybrid form born within the missions that later spread to the hinterlands (Gow 1994). To the contrary, Native North American peoples still remember vividly the missionary boarding schools to which their grandparents were abducted, where they were violently stripped of their families, their languages, and their cultures. They also remember vividly the centuries of persecution that they suffered for the practice of their religions. The passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act have only begun to repair this damage, and yet it is these hard-fought and long-suffered victories to which proponents of New-Age indigeneity now lay claim.

One one level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is just one example of many in which non-indigenous people seek to appropriate indigenous culture and in so doing, colonize the territory of the spirit in the same way we have colonized their lands. On another level, the Ayahuasca Healings story is one of youth, idealism, and naiveté, coupled with a millennial culture of narcissism, self-promotion and entrepreneurialism, inflamed by the runaway egotism that appears to be a possible side-effect of frequent ayahuasca use. On all levels, however, the story is a cautionary tale about the practical, ideological, and ethical problems that confront the legalization of ayahuasca, problems that the current framework, based on a religious-freedom exemption, fails to address.

Author’s note: Thanks to Jade Grigori for help with wording. Also thanks to the editors and April guest blogger of Savage Minds for allowing me to overstay my welcome and continue posting until the story was complete.

Works Cited:

Blainey, Marc G. 2015. “Forbidden Therapies: Santo Daime, Ayahuasca, and the Prohibition of Entheogens in Western Society.” Journal of Religion and Health 54(1):287-302.

Churchill, Ward. 2003. “Spiritual Hucksterism: The Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men.” In Shamanism: A Reader, edited by Graham Harvey, 324–333. New York: Psychology Press.

Gow, Peter. 1994. “River People: Shamanism and History in Western Amazonia.” In Shamanism, History and the State, edited by Nicholas Thomas, and Caroline Humphrey, 90–113. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Haden, Mark, Brian Emerson, and Kenneth W Tupper. 2016. “A Public-Health-based Vision for the Management and Regulation of Psychedelics.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 48(4):243-252.

Last week (March 18, 2017), I received an email that read, in toto:

Just like I promised:
Get the free eBook here (right click, “Save Link As…”)
I wrote this back in 2010, and the secrets contained within this eBook, have allowed me to create and live the most beautiful, fulfilling life I could have ever imagined.
It is actually a “channeled” book, are you familiar with what channeling is?
Back in 2010, I met The Teachers who showed me how to create my ideal life experience, no matter where I was at.
(The Teachers are the true authors of this eBook)
Following Their words, led me down a path more magical, more beautiful, more filled with joy, love and freedom, than anything I could have ever dreamt up.
Because they taught me, how to truly follow my heart. There’s no secret, that following your heart, is
the key to creating the life of your dreams.
The question is:
How?
You know you want a life of freedom, but how do you get there?
The mind can be so strong in it’s fears and doubts.
And we can be so controlled by other people’s expectations of us…
So the question is, above all of that, how can you still follow your heart?
This is the key to your most fulfilling life, ever.
And this eBook gives you the answers, and shows you, how you can move forward, to create the life that your heart and soul, so deeply yearn for.
It’s time!
So enjoy this eBook, and I’ll talk to you soon! [To be continued..]
With infinite gratitude, so happy to share this,
Trinity de Guzman & The Ayahuasca Healings Family

About once or twice a week I get a missive like this from Trinity, the messianic young founder of Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church. Since I initiated my membership in the Ayahuasca Healings community (by reluctantly giving them my e-mail address), I have received at least 48 of these love bombs, with subject lines ranging from “Welcome Beautiful Soul” to “Day 6 – How To Choose The Right Shaman” to “…I’m going to be a father!! Yay!!”

Gayle Highpine likens Trinity’s writing to a New Age version of prosperity gospel:

Psychological triggers are his stock in trade. “You can manifest the life of your dreams” is powerful bait, not a religious teaching. Who wouldn’t want to live like Trinity, traveling the world skiing and surfing and having adventures? If he has any metaphysical beliefs, they appear to be “The Secret,” the New Age version of prosperity gospel, which uses the “law of attraction” and the “art of manifestation.”

Prosperity gospel just happens to be the brand of Christianity with which Donald Trump has aligned himself—and one that many Christian groups themselves have a hard time stomaching. The promise of wealth, power, and success in exchange for unlimited and unquestioning faith is a powerful draw for the suffering. Someone ought to do a thesis on the parallels between Trumpism and Trinity-ism—call them legion, for like the biblical demons of the man of Gadarenes, they are many.

A few prelims

In my second post of this series, I mentioned the existence of a set of organizations calling themselves branches of the Native American Church who, under the aegis of the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), claim to be serving ayahuasca legally in the United States. I’ll be calling these groups the “new ayahuasca churches” (to distinguish them from the Santo Daime and UDV). I also characterize these groups as “neo-shamanic.” A complete unpacking of this term is beyond the scope of this discussion, so for the sake of the current argument, I’ll define “neo-shamanism” as any of a variety of novel forms of shamanic practice based on the Amazonian model but modified significantly through their adoption into a New-Age, Western, scientific-industrial cultural context. Changes generally include the elimination of tobacco smoke, the erasure of sorcery, the lack of knowledge or use of the sopla and chupa (blowing and sucking) methods of curing, the use of bottled ayahuasca bought on an underground market, the use of recorded and non-Amazonian music, an ideology heavily influenced by Eastern religion and medicine, and the appropriation and incorporation of idealized elements of indigenous and Native North American religious culture. I’ll also recognize that neo-shamanism and “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism represent points on a spectrum of shamanic practice, as even “traditional” ayahuasca shamanism is adaptive and eclectic.

It’s also important to clarify up front that ONAC is an organization drenched in controversy. They’ve been repeatedly renounced in the press and in the courts by the National Council of Native American Churches, the governing body of legitimate NAC organizations in North America. ONAC’s leader, James Mooney, claims membership in a branch of the Seminole Tribe that, according to the Seminole Tribe, doesn’t exist. Most recently, they’ve had a very public and tawdry falling out with their own lawyer that appears to have culminated in the installment of Howard Mann, pornography and gambling magnate, as head of ONAC. But I’m going to hold off on the ONAC discussion for now, and lead instead with the Ayahuasca Healings story, which brought ONAC to our attention in the first place.

On with the story:

Among the new ayahuasca churches, Ayahuasca Healings, also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), is the youngest and newest, has (or had) the biggest ambitions and the most successful marketing operation, and as a result, gathered the attention of the press, the National Council of Native American Churches and, finally, the U.S. federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Ayahuasca Healings came on the public scene in the second half of 2015. They immediately claimed to be the first, public, legal ayahuasca church in America, a feat accomplished, they asserted, through their affiliation with the New Haven Native American Church. They advertised retreats both  in Peru and on their 160-acre retreat site in Elbe, Washington. The domestic retreats were offered in exchange for a “suggested donation” of $1497 to $1997 for a four-day retreat (Ayahuasca Healings 2016a). Their stated mission was to build 30 retreat centers in the U.S. at the rate of two per year until 2032, “the start of our New Golden Age” (Ayahuasca Healings 2016b). [Note: The content of some linked webpages may have changed since the date of research, and thus do not reflect statements made in this post. The bibliography at the end of this post will provide original access dates, and archived pages are available from the author upon request.]

The tone of Ayahuasca Healings’ message and mission are characteristic of the general tenor of public conversation around ayahuasca: That it’s a panacea, that it’s a step to ultimate awareness and personal empowerment, that ayahuasca will change the world:

Just like yoga and meditation have come from the East to help Westerners return back to the essential Truth of Presence & being in the heart…
Ayahuasca has come from deep within the jungles of the Amazon, for the exact same reason.
And I truly believe that Ayahuasca will be just as ‘mainstream’ as yoga & meditation are becoming…
We’re going through a massive, collective Awakening.
[automated email, “Day 2: The Great Awakening & Ayahuasca”]

Ayahuasca Healings is headed by a messianic young leader named Trinity de Guzman who says that in his first ayahuasca session in 2013, “I was curled into a fetal position, crying, shaking, and vomiting. And I knew that at that moment that I was here to share [ayahuasca] with the world” (Rose 2015). Formerly an internet marketer who was making five figures a month by the age of 19 (by his own account), De Guzman is profiled on the website Entrepreneurs for Change under the episode title, “Travel The World For Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work” (Li 2016). After people began to look more deeply at Ayahuasca Healings, this profile story became the focus of significant criticism, especially de Guzman’s statement that he paid his offshore employees a dollar an hour for their work, saying, “that is actually a normal, good wage in these countries where we’re hiring.”

De Guzman is flanked by Marc “Kumooja Banyan Tree” Shackman, whose now-defunct website (http://balancingbetweenworlds.com)/ billed him as a “contemporary shaman, transformational life coach, inspirational guest speaker and Heart Energy Medicine therapist.” Videos released by the group (here, here and here are but a few) show a small group of young people, working and living together on their land in Elbe, celebrating, sharing food and the warmth of a fire, expressing their joy at the transformations they’ve experienced through ayahuasca and the hope that they feel at being a part of this new spiritual community.

AH’s promises of love, healing and community; the charisma of their leadership and of their young and idealistic participants; and particularly the promise of legal and open ayahuasca ceremonies in the United States attracted a ready following and a significant amount of press coverage both in the local press and online media outlets such as Reset.me, Munchies and The Daily Beast (Rose 2015, Siegel 2015, Malandra 2016). It didn’t hurt that de Guzman has a professional background in internet marketing. In fact, Ayahuasca Healings’ ability to market themselves appears to be one of the factors leading to their downfall, when it brought them to the attention of James Mooney and the ONAC church. On Dec. 3, 2015, in two posts on its Facebook page, ONAC disavowed knowledge of New Haven NAC, under whose aegis Ayahuasca Healings purportedly was operating, and asserted that only those groups and individuals with an explicit relationship to ONAC enjoyed the legal protections they offered. In a Dec. 4 comment to one of these posts, a Facebook user posted a comment which stated (incorrectly) that only two organizations in the United States had the right to administer ayahuasca in their religious sessions: the UDV and ONAC. Following the opening comment was a piece of text entitled “Buyer Beware,” which detailed why Ayahuasca Healings was not protected. The comment appears to be signed by a “Chief Oklevueha NAC,” presumably Mooney, although my queries as to the authorship remain unanswered.

That same day, Dec. 4, 2016, the “Buyer Beware” text appeared on the website of anthropologist Bia Labate, expert in the internationalization of ayahuasca, as an anonymous blog post (Anonymous 2015). Differences between the blog post and the Facebook comment suggest that one was not a cut-and-paste of the other. Instead, they appear to be two derivations of the same source material, making the apparent signature of “Chief Oklevueha NAC” intriguing indeed—and ironic: Did Labate begin her series of anti-AHNAC blog posts with a piece written by James Mooney, head of ONAC, or one of his proxies?

What is clear is that Ayahuasca Healings had attracted Mooney’s attention—and that he was not happy with the fact that they were operating as a branch of his church without his acknowledgement and blessing. On Dec. 4 Mooney issued (via Facebook) a 2-page letter to the New Haven NAC disavowing their relationship to ONAC and demanding that Ayahuasca Healings deal directly with ONAC. Mooney closed by stating that his lawyers would be in touch with a formal cease-and-desist order, and that ONAC would notify local law enforcement of NHNAC and Ayahuasca Healings’ activities. “They will have to decide at that point whether to arrest you and those you participate with, or leave you alone.” (Council of Elders, Oklevueha Native American Church. 2015. “Letter of Distrust.” Posted to Facebook.com/OklevuehaNativeAmericanChurch/, Dec. 4. Accessed May 25, 2016.) The next day, Ayahuasca Healings announced their intention to join ONAC.

By this time, however, ayahuasca watchdogs had had enough. On Dec. 7, 2015, another post appeared on Labate’s blog, this time written by a law expert, exposing the false claims of legality offered by ONAC (Hudson 2015). The post also detailed AH’s market-oriented approach:

The [Ayahuasca Healings] website is a lead generation factory collecting email addresses. The multi-step marketing process…can have the unfortunate effect of entrapping customers in commitment-to-buy. This is Sales 101…It exploits people.

The scary thing is that so many people have bought into this in the past week that Ayahuasca USA stopped accepting applications.

Ayahuasca Healings, however, continued to move forward with their plans. On Dec. 12, they announced a formal affiliation with and blessing by James Mooney, whom de Guzman, in his enthusiasm, described as “literally no higher authority in the Native American Church in all of America” (Ayahuasca Healings 2015).

On the same day, Labate released another blog post, this one entitled “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church” (Highpine 2015a) examining the specifics of ayahuasca law in the US, how the UDV had gained their exemption, and why ONAC’s (and therefore AHNAC’s) claims to the legal use of entheogenic sacraments were false. On December 21, Indian Country Today published an opinion piece denouncing ONAC and the use of marijuana in Native American ceremonies—a piece that drew a swift and sharp rebuttal from Mooney (Hopkins 2015, ONAC 2015). The next day, Highpine published another blog post on Labate’s site examining the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States (Highpine 2015b). These blog posts had become a five-part series targeting Ayahuasca Healings, and they managed to get the attention of some members of the public. Using the blog posts as fodder, moderators of some of the ayahuasca forums initiated conversations about the issue, and the news media, who had previously covered the story uncritically, began to look more closely at the claims and ambitions of de Guzman and ONAC (Malandra 2016).

Finally, on January 11, 2016, a Facebook group was launched called “Ayahuasca Healings Is NOT Legal.” “This group is dedicated to refuting the claims of ‘Trinity de Guzman’, James ‘Screaming Eagle’ Mooney, the ONAC, et al. in regards to illegitimate claims of their ability (and intent) to distribute ayahuasca in the state of Washington legally,” the description reads. Their first post was a link to the Dec. 12 Highpine article, “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under ONAC.” Membership of the Facebook group approached 150 people by March. However, in Elbe, things continued as planned, with the group’s first weekend retreat taking place on Jan. 22 (automated email, “Please Help”).

Towards the end of January, Trinity’s business partners in Peru sent out a press release disavowing any relationship with Ayahuasca Healings and clarifying that de Guzman’s role in their operation was as investor and booking agent, nothing more (Polley 2016). At least one more well-known retreat center in Peru later declined to do business with Ayahuasca Healings after learning of the controversy. And on January 24, a former member of the Ayahuasca Healings inner circle released a YouTube video denouncing the group on the basis of four major complaints: the lack of elders within the operation, the lack of indigenous representation, the excessive price of the retreats, and the lack of support from within the “global medicine community”—in addition to the overarching fact that they were telling people their U.S. retreats were legal, but they were not (Montgomery 2016).

The Ayahuasca Healings controversy attracted the attention of the Native American community as well. On Feb. 18, Indian Country Today published a formal statement by the National Council of Native American Churches denouncing ONAC and the use of any sacrament other than peyote in NAC ceremonies. Although this was the same message they had issued in various amicus briefs and other memoranda in the past, this time they named ayahuasca specifically:

Some of these illegitimate organizations, comprised of non-Native people, are now claiming that marijuana, ayahuasca and other substances are part of Native American Church theology and practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. We, the National Council of Native American Churches are now stepping forward to advise the public that we do not condone the activities of these illegitimate organizations. [NCNAC 2016]

Then, sometime in the end of February, Ayahuasca Healings received a “friendly” letter from the DEA requesting that they file a formal petition for exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (automated email, “Please Help”).

On March 8, 2016, Ayahuasca Healings announced that they had made the decision to go on a “temporary hiatus,” and that they would “not be conducting ceremonies or holding retreats for a limited period of time” (automated email, “Please Help”).  Their stated intention was to bring the operation into full alignment with RFRA, and yet later in the letter, they assert, “Although AHNAC has repeatedly faced criticism from detractors who believe that our interpretation of the law as it currently stands is mistaken, we are 100% confident that what we are doing here is 100% legal.”

The news of the hiatus came as a shock to those “members” who were in the process of packing for their pre-paid ayahuasca retreat in Elbe. No refunds were offered, as the money had apparently all been spent. Besides, as AH’s new representative pointed out, AH’s terms and conditions stated that monies paid would be considered a gift or an investment in the future of the church, not a fee for service (Dylan Ayahealings, Facebook comment, April 15, 2016). Participants quickly discovered that the credit card companies were treating the situation as a case of fraud and refunding payments on that basis. Meanwhile, de Guzman had been in Peru since February, and according to complaints from AH members, neither he nor Shackman were in contact with members or with the public.

As of March 8, according to the new homepage of the Ayahuasca Healings website, information on retreats would be available only to members. The first step in obtaining a membership was to provide your email address, at which time they would begin to send you one email a day for ten days. The welcome letter, which, like all missives from AH, is signed by Trinity de Guzman, reads:

Together, we are going to take a journey. The Inner Journey.
The most valuable, beautiful, rewarding journey we could ever take.
The emails I send you, will be like a map for you. To a treasure chest.
To the peace, love, joy, and happiness you know you came here to live.
A way out of being trapped by society. A way out of any depression or anxiety.
And a way to let go of the deepest rooted fears that keep you stuck.
So please follow these steps to make sure you receive our emails from here on.
If you are using Gmail, here’s how:
[automated email, “Welcome beautiful soul!”]

To be continued.

Works Cited (links without parenthetical citations will be listed, in order of appearance, at the end)

Anonymous. “Let the Buyer Beware: Advertised ‘Ayahuasca Healing Retreats’ Are Not Legal in the United States.” 2015. Bia Labate Blog. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/let-the-buyer-beware-advertised-ayahuasca-healing-retreats-are-not-legal-in-the-united-states.

Ayahuasca Healings 2015. “Ayahuasca Church in America, Video Blog – Week 1, CELEBRATE!” Dec. 12. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ek0HtGxQfCo.

——— 2016a. “FAQs.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/faqs/.

——— 2016b. “ONAC of Ayahuasca Healings – Vision, Mission & Philosophy.” Accessed May 24, 2016. https://ayahuascahealings.com/ayahuasca-usa-church-vision/.

Highpine, Gayle. 2015a. “The ‘Legality’ of Ayahuasca Churches Under the Oklevueha Native American Church.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 12. Accessed April 19. 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-legality-of-ayahuasca-churches-under-the-oklevueha-native-american-church.

——— 2015b. “Is Ayahuasca Actually Illegal in the United States?” http://www.bialabate.net/news/is-ayahuasca-actually-illegal-in-the-united-states. Published Dec. 22, accessed April 19, 2016.

Hopkins, Ruth. 2015. “Pot and Pretendians.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 21. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/21/pot-and-pretendians.

Hudson, Hamilton. 2015. “Don’t believe the hype about the ‘Legal Ayahuasca USA Church’ Going Around Facebook—It’s Not Legal, It’s Dangerous, and Here’s Why.” Bia Labate Blog. Dec. 7. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.bialabate.net/news/dont-believe-the-hype-about-the-legal-ayahuasca-usa-church-going-around-facebook-its-not-legal-its-dangerous-and-heres-why.

Li, Lorna. 2016. “Travel the World for Years While Your Remote Team Does All The Work – Trinity De Guzman.” Entrepreneurs for a Change. Accessed May 25, 2016. http://www.entrepreneursforachange.com/25/.

Malandra, Ocean. 2016. “A Closer Look at That ‘First Legal Ayahuasca Church in America”’ Story You’ve Seen Hyped In The Media.” Reset.me. Feb. 1. Accessed April 19 2016. http://reset.me/story/first-legal-ayahuasca-church/.

Montgomery, Scott. 2016. “USA Plant Med Communities! Ayahuasca Healings: An Ex-Insider’s Fiery Perspective.” Jan. 24. Accessed April 19, 2016. https://youtu.be/Ti_YUXmrF5M.

NCNAC (Native American Church of North America). 2016. “National Council Does Not Condone Faux Native American Churches or Marijuana Use.” Indian Country Today. Feb. 18. Accessed April 19, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/02/18/national-council-does-not-condone-faux-native-american-churches-or-marijuana-use-163464.

ONAC 2015. “Pot and Pretendians: ONAC Rebuttal.” Indian Country Today. Dec. 29. Accessed May 24, 2016. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/12/29/pot-and-pretendians-onac-rebuttal.

Polley, Lara. 2016. “Media Release–El Jardin de la Paz and ayahuascahealings.com.” January 27. Accessed. April 19, 2016. http://www.eljardindelapaz.com/#!Media-Release-El-Jardin-de-la-Paz-and-ayahuascahealingscom/cay8/56a968a10cf215a9bb9eacdd.

Rose, Nick. 2015. “America Is Getting Its First Legal Ayahuasca Church.” Munchies. Dec. 11. Accessed May 17, 2016. https://munchies.vice.com/articles/america-is-getting-its-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.

Siegel, Zachary. 2015. “America’s First Legal Ayahuasca ‘Church’.” The Daily Beast. Dec. 6. Accessed May 17, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/america-s-first-legal-ayahuasca-church.html

Other links:

https://ayahuascahealings.com/

http://www.bialabate.net/news/the-religious-freedom-restoration-act-the-dea-exemption-process-and-ayahuasca-healings

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509558608/with-his-choice-of-inauguration-prayer-leaders-trump-shows-his-valueshttps://www.ncronline.org/blogs/small-c-catholic/beware-prosperity-gospel-trump-administration

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/january-web-only/paula-white-donald-trump-prayer-partner-inauguration.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/15/how-the-prosperity-gospel-explains-donald-trumps-popularity-with-christian-voters/

https://nativeamericanchurches.org/

http://www.newhavennativeamericanchurch.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0HtGxQfCo
https://youtu.be/dAYl3yv4ZGk

https://youtu.be/wp5UlFyBTDw

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Yesterday I sat in on a webinar sponsored by ICEERS (the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service) and organized by anthropologist Bia Labate. Entitled “Myths and Realities about the Legality of Ayahuasca in the USA,” the webinar featured three experts on the subject. The first was Jeffrey Bronfman, a leader of the União do Vegetal church in the US whose shipment of ayahuasca (the UDV calls it hoasca) was seized in 1999, leading to a protracted court battle and, eventually, a supreme court decision in favor of the church’s right to use the tea as their sacrament. The second was Rob Heffernan, member of the Santo Daime church (which also uses ayahuasca as a sacrament) and chair of its legal committee. The third was J. Hamilton Hudson, a recent graduate of the Tulane law school who has been following legal developments surrounding ayahuasca-using groups who are affiliated with neither of the aforementioned churches.

The webinar—and the series of which it is a part—are a response to the apparent confusion regarding the legal status of ayahuasca in the United States. This confusion, and some of the factors contributing to it, came to light over the past year and a half with the rise and fall of a group called Ayahuasca Healings, the self-proclaimed “first public legal ayahuasca church in the United States.” Also known as Ayahuasca USA and Ayahuasca Healings Native American Church (AHNAC), AH is one of a number of groups who use ayahuasca in a neo-shamanic setting and, more importantly, who claim that they have the legal right to do so. Unfortunately for AH, they don’t, and a friendly letter from the DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) was enough to finally convince them of that fact—at least for now.

AH is one of a number of groups under the aegis of a shady organization called the Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC), which promises its branches and branch members legal protection from controlled substances laws. ONAC rests its claims on the idea that, if such substances are used in a religious context by members of a church congregation, then that use is protected by laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by congress to protect the use of peyote (which contains mescaline, a controlled substance) in the context of the Native American Church. ONAC’s claims, however, are false; thus, the churches under ONAC, which claim to serve ayahuasca legally, are acting in contradiction of the law and endangering the people they purport to serve.

In a series of blog posts this month, I’ll look at this whole story in quite a bit of depth, from the fundamental issue of why ayahuasca is (for most users) still illegal in the United States, to the rise and fall of Ayahuasca Healings and the ongoing developments in that story. I’ll also pull back for a look at the bigger picture of ONAC, its founder and the controversies therein, and the various other groups serving ayahuasca and other sacraments under ONAC’s aegis. Finally, I’ll discuss why all this activity is a kick in the teeth to the Native American Church and to the indigenous people of North America more broadly. Anthropologically speaking, one of the keys to the issue is the incongruity between attitudes toward religion and spirituality, race and ethnicity in the Amazon and in the United States—and how the superposition of an ethnomedical practice from the Amazon onto the religious structures of North America is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

Next time I post I’ll get started with a little more explanation of what goes into ayahuasca that makes it the concern of the DEA, and why some people in the U.S. can drink it legally while others can’t. Stay tuned.

I’m guessing that by now most of my readers will have heard of this stuff called “ayahuasca.” Everyone from Stephen Colbert to the New Yorker is talking about it, some in terms more cringe-inducing than others. A quick primer for those who don’t know: Ayahuasca is a psychoactive (read: psychedelic) brew developed by the peoples of the Amazon for ritual purposes ranging from ethnomedicine to divination. It’s just one in a pantheon of sacred plant and multi-plant concoctions used by Amazonian shamans, but it’s one that has sparked the fascination of peoples everywhere, from the Amazon itself to the distant corners of the urban and industrialized nations. Ayahuasca, along with other “entheogens” such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, is a centerpiece of the new Psychedelic Renaissance, an artistic and scientific movement which has, as one of its primary aims, the legitimization of these currently illegal substances by researching and promoting their efficacy as treatments for intractable ailments, usually psychological, including depression, end-of-life anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Once a footnote in the annals of Jesuit missionaries and Spanish explorers, Western awareness of this mind-altering and nausea-inducing beverage grew slowly throughout the 20th century, with not a little assistance from anthropologists and ethnobotanists such as Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany; his student, the golden-penned author Wade Davis; and the well known ethnographer-turned-shamanic evangelist, Michael Harner. In Brazil, awareness and use of the tea spread to urban areas with the development and growth of two syncretic religions that use ayahuasca as their sacrament: the União do Vegetal and the Santo Daime. Elsewhere in South America and the world, Amazonian shamans traveled to urban areas and later, to distant countries to perform healing ceremonies for growing audiences of gringos looking for emotional release, a spiritual experience, or physical healing. Today, numerous US and European practitioners, some trained in the Amazon, some not, have taken it upon themselves to serve the brew and to conduct ceremonies. Therein lies the subject of my guest series for Savage Minds.

To be continued.

An anarchist archaeology embraces considerations of social inequity as a critique of authoritarian forms of power and as a rubric for enabling egalitarian and equitable relationships.

The term anarchism derives from an– (without) + arkhos (ruler), but a better and more active translation of it is perhaps ‘against domination.’ An anarchist archaeology insists on an archaeology that is committed to dismantling single hierarchical models of the past, and in that sense, its core incorporates tenets of a decolonized, indigenous, and feminist archaeology, contesting hegemonic narratives of the past. It is a theory explicitly about human relationships operating without recourse to coercive forms like authoritarianism, hierarchy, or exploitation of other humans. Some anarchists extend this argument further to non-human relationships with objects, other species, and the environment.

In keeping with these principles, there is no orthodox, overarching, uniform version of anarchism. There are multiple approaches to anarchist theory and practice tied together by common threads, and it is these commonalities that inform our anarchist archaeology. Here we outline principles for an anarchist archaeology that can be applied towards studies of the past, toward archaeologically informed examinations of contemporary societies, and to archaeological practices, including professional ethics. We offer this as both a manifesto and as a living document open to constant contextual review and revision.

Critiquing Power. We recognize that there are many ways to evaluate and interpret topics like value, domination, coercion, authority, and power. Anarchists, and thus anarchist archaeologists, have long recognized that organizational complexity is not produced simply from elite control, but also forms through heterarchies and networked collaborations. Many anarchist archaeologists strive to uncover lost periods of resistance to domination and exploitation of people by a few elites, which can be termed vertical power, or power of some over others. Thus, an anarchist archaeology seeks to examine forms of horizontal power, the power of people working to coordinate consensus, often in opposition or parallel to emerging or extant forms of vertical power.

Recognizing the Arts of Resistance. Anarchist archaeologists recognize that periods of change, as well as periods where change does not seem to be present, do not require connotative evaluations of either good or bad. An anarchist archaeology does not give preferential treatment to any particular arrangement of ‘civilization.’ In practice and in popular culture, periods of heightened inequity are often seen as periods of cultural fluorescence or ‘climax.’ Terms such as ‘collapse,’ ‘decline,’ or ‘dissolution’ are often applied by archaeologists and others to describe periods in time in which hierarchies end. Language about cultural ‘climax’ and ‘decline’ retains Victorian notions of progress, identified with the state, as opposed to a more active notion of societies against the state. Alternative perspectives reveal the complex and sometimes conflicted struggles of humanity against entrenched exertions of power in hierarchical societies. Many of the so-called ‘collapses’ of the past were periods of greater assertions of local autonomy in the face of hegemonic centralizations of power. Such times are often the product of unrecognized acts of revolt, resistance, and resurgences of alternative ways of life. Thus, these periods can be successes for the majority of people in terms of increasing self-determination and independence. Anarchist archaeologists are committed to theorizing and identifying the material manifestation of such cultural transformations.

Embracing Everyday Anarchy. To understand histories of human resistance, resilience, and maintenance of equity or heterarchy, an anarchist archaeology must also be an archaeology of everyday life, not just elites and monuments. We acknowledge that people operate outside structures of power, even when entangled in strong power structures. Contextualizing a quotidian anarchy allows an interrogation of when different sources of power are in operation and when they are silent/silenced or unused. This is where an anarchist archaeology can build upon an existing strength of the discipline, as archaeologies of non-elites and of resistance movements are already prominent fields of knowledge. The interests of an anarchist archaeology lie in the building of coalitions and consensus, so contexts where we can find alignments with people in the field of archaeology and outside are critical to the development of the movement. The archaeology of everyday anarchy is also a good reminder of the ways we can integrate anarchist practices into our own present, with an eye towards the future. One does not have to self-identify as an anarchist to embrace and contribute to everyday anarchy. Simple, self-confessional acts in the classroom, test pit, and elsewhere provide myriad opportunities to deconstruct hierarchies of power that perpetuate harmful stereotypes in the past, present, and future.

Visioning Futures. An anarchist archaeology perceives that vanguardism (i.e., a traditional Marxist revolutionary strategy that attempts to design cultural change with the hope of a pre-determined outcome) often represents an extension of present power structures, either intentionally or otherwise, and rarely succeeds in the long term. Instead, anarchist archaeologists examine material culture across time using prefigurative practices as decolonized visioning. This means that they examine the material record and their discipline with the recognition that people who act within the present in ways that create change towards a desired future, are more likely to implement broadly beneficial change (anarchists call this “making a new society in the shell of the old one”). This practice of visioning the future in the present moment aligns an anarchist archaeology with the commitments of a contemporary archaeology, even if the material under investigation is one of the deep past. An anarchist archaeology recognizes that the past can only be investigated within a deep present rife with conflicts, conversations, and politics. This does not repudiate perspectives of archaeology as a science. Instead, it recognizes how culture interacts with and informs scientific analysis. The shedding of hierarchy from scientific practice opens its predictive potential beyond the traditional realm of archaeology (i.e., the past) towards future places.

Seeking Non-Authoritarian Forms of Organization. An anarchist archaeology attempts to reimagine, redistribute, and decolonize processes and positions of authority within communities, the academy and discipline, and its many publics, while doing research, facilitating student learning, and engaging in heritage management. These reconfigurations, though, can only happen in an inclusive environment, and one imbued with recognition of the perils of layering present perspectives uncritically upon the past. This means that an anarchist archaeology is also an archaeology that is committed to community, encompassing multiple voices, and a deep critical engagement with research. Anarchist archaeologists seek alternatives to the traditional hierarchical modes of knowledge production and management of past places and time, in favor of egalitarian ways of bringing people together to learn, to protect places, and to understand the relevance of the past for the present.

Recognizing the Heterogeneity of Identities. Anarchist archaeologists understand that people live in many different social spaces. More importantly, they encourage people, including archaeologists, to live in and explore many different positions, worlds, and identities. An anarchist archaeology is necessarily intersectional. It understands that people are not products of one simple form of identity (i.e., not essentialist), nor even one very complex form of identity, but they are created, and continually recreated, by the constant intersection, erasure, and addition of these many different aspects of themselves. In fact, it is this very act of recognizing each other’s multivalent identities/positions/standpoints that offers a powerful method for building equity between individuals, groups, cultures, and other cultural constructs.

Exposing Multiple Scales from the Bottom Up. An anarchist archaeology works at many different scales. This means that it works at global, regional, community, and personal levels. Most importantly, an anarchist archaeology recognizes both the roles of assemblages as encompassing individual people, places, materials, and animals, as well as larger collections of those social influences. It is cognizant of the agency of social participants to author how and where they are situated within the scales of the social environment. This contextual, feminist, decolonized, and non-human/humanism integrates with anarchist archaeologies, anchoring it to place. This means that research, interpretation, and advocacy often focus on individuals or localities, and then expand to encompass a more global scale. The grassroots scale of people and lived places provide the critical building blocks for a re-imagining of higher systemic-level changes. This is the space where the scales of archaeological analysis—from the sherd, to the place where it was found, to the regional context—help us to build connections between many scales of order that allow us give voice to the past and present.

Recognizing Agency in Change and Stability. An anarchist archaeology is agentive. Anarchist archaeologists understand that if placed in equitable systems, all humans/nonhumans have the ability and capacity to enact change. Most archaeologists recognize that the power of our discipline derives from its understanding of human capacity for shaping the environment, the material world, and spiritual realms through action. Combined, these agents allow archaeologists to add people, instead of only objects, back into the past (and the present). Recognizing that all people are important means that an anarchist archaeology is an archaeology of social relations that uses how people interact to understand the archaeological record. An anarchist archaeology focuses especially on those people who are least likely to have contributed to dominant narratives from the past.

Valuing the Heritage of State and Non-State Societies. An anarchist archaeology contests conservation and preservation of heritage by questioning why and how some sites and regions are chosen to be protected while others are not. Anarchist archaeologists understand that preserving sites and communities that only represent states, or what are usually perceived as the precursors for states (i.e. vertical hierarchies with elites) means that we create a past that sees state and state-like societies as models of success. Societies that are not states, often intentionally preventing the emergence of hierarchy as they evolve, become implicit examples of failure. An anarchist archaeology is asking that we start to change our understanding of what success looks like, and that this theoretical shift is accompanied by action in how we understand whose heritage is deemed significant. This is where an anarchist archaeology can powerfully parallel and support an indigenous archaeology. These biased decisions on what heritage is valued also decrease our historical imagination. Removing or limiting the archaeological, historical, and cultural presence of horizontally organized societies through preservation decisions can have dramatic impacts on the ability of future societies to envisage and enact alternatives to present hierarchies.

No Paradigms––A Multitude of Views and Voices. Anarchist archaeology acknowledges that a multiplicity of viewpoints exist, and rejects the false dichotomy that all who promote these ideas must self-identify as an anarchist or archaeologist. Labels limit people’s ability to find utility in anarchist theory. For instance, people do not need to call themselves anarchists to promote anarchist ideas and ideals in the same way that people do not need to call themselves archaeologists to promote the use of material culture as a social science and a historical method. This standpoint allows us to be theoretically promiscuous and claim that it is scientifically fruitful to consider alternate theories and methods from the normal paradigm, thus engaging in epistemological anarchism.

A Heterarchy of Authorities. As anarchist archaeologists, we do not recognize ourselves as one community. Instead, we recognize ourselves belonging to, and claiming, many connected communities. We support the idea that decentralizing our knowledge and authority does not deny any expertise we may have. We recognize that while we have the skills of our craft and expertise concerning material culture and knowledge about the past, it is an expertise that derives from a certain perspective that is without sole authority. Our knowledge should be open and our expertise should be available so that we do not create a situation in which archaeologists (or historians) alone obtain authority over the past, especially as concerns the heritage of descendant peoples. Further, we recognize that many kinds of expertise exist outside of our discipline, and indeed outside of the realm of ‘academic’ knowledge. An anarchist archaeology is about respecting the many kinds of experts that can speak to the past and the present.

Decentering the Human––Recognizing Relationships with Non-Human Entities. An anarchist archaeology understands and encourages us to examine how non-human agents may create social change. Thus, place, space, the environment, material objects, and the supernatural can all be agents of change. Moreover, the patterns of human behavior may be structured by their relationships with non-human entities, as geontologies, whether it is perceived agents within the landscape, climate, plants, animals, or spirits. We acknowledge that since people in past cultures often saw themselves as equal to or lesser than non-human entities, decentering the human may help us understand how past peoples arranged themselves. Such a stance also helps us to reimagine our own subject positions in relation to the environment, to places, to plants, animals, and spirits.

An Archaeology of Action. Anarchist archaeologists recognize that even though our research can often tackle incredibly difficult and sensitive topics, that archaeological research should be pleasant and joyful. Simultaneously, archaeology should be conducted and reported with respect. While our subject matter can be fraught with violence, we look at finding ways to study these topics that are not themselves violent. Following the many successful acts of resistance that use humor to contest violence, such as marchers protesting injustice armed with puppets, we also think that presentations of difficult topics can be broken up with artistic, poetic, or revolutionary interventions. But most of all, we see an anarchist archaeology as a call to action, and we invite those who are interested to join us. Do research. Write an essay. Compose an epic poem. Contribute song lyrics. Offer a painting or photograph. Do something big, or do something small. Do something different. Write a classic. Do what feels right. Do it for archaeology’s potential to help us build a better world. Make it grand. Make it humble. Make it brilliant.

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Simply, we offer an anarchist archaeology as an alternate way to think about the past and to consider our methods and practices in the present. An anarchist approach reminds us to consider relations of power and to question whether those relationships are authoritarian or coercive, whether in past societies we study, among archaeologists as teams in practice, among archaeologists and descendant communities concerning heritage, or in the relationships between archaeology and contemporary nation-states. The vast bulk of societies in the past were anarchic societies, organizing their lives without centralized authorities. This is one primary reason that an anarchist archaeology can be of use for understanding the principles and dynamics of societies without government. Moreover, sustained critique of power can help us better recognize the forms of resistance within centralized societies. Finally, anarchist principles can help us better attain more egalitarian and democratic practices among archaeologists and others with interests in the past. This approach can also engage archaeology to invigorate the historical imagination and present alternatives to contemporary top-down oriented political and economic structures of authority. In short, an anarchist archaeology can help us to expand the realm of the possible, both in relation to our interpretations of the traces of past lives, and in terms of our understandings of what is possible in the future.

The Black Trowel Collective: We come to anarchism and archaeology from many backgrounds, and for varied reasons. Most of this document comes from a conversation started at the Amerind Foundation in April 2016 (made possible by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation), where we began to put the ‘sherds’ of an anarchist archaeology into a coherent framework. Since then, many of us have continued to work together on this and other projects relating to anarchist archaeology, and our circle has widened as the project evolves. We invite you to join us, or to keep up with the work we are doing at http://www.anarchaeology.org/site-forum/.

I was born on a land declared an ‘Excluded Area’: a previously colonized region. A geographic landmass formerly carved out of Assam: lodged between Myanmar to its east, Manipur to its south, bounded by the plains of Assam to the west and snow clad mountains of the sub-Himalayan region of Arunachal Pradesh to the north. Now tagged for tourism purposes as ‘The Land of Festivals,’ it is the very same homeland where Naga ancestors were once branded ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ ‘uncivilized’ ‘barbaric’ and ‘head hunters’ by the colonial powers. This colonial stereotype of the Nagas continues and is reiterated in the neighboring states and Mainland India. A case in point is Manpreet Singh’s article The Soul Hunters of Central Asia (2006) published in Christianity Today that describes the Naga homeland as “once notorious worldwide for its savagery”,  now “the most Baptist state in the world.”

Abraham Lotha (2007), a noted Naga anthropologist, maintains that British colonialism in the Naga Hills is a story of double domination: political and scientific. This is evident in the production of mass ethnographic  materials,  topographical survey reports  and  monographs  that aided  colonial administration  in  their  attempt  to  control  the colonized. The museum collections that began in the early 19^th century conveyed a certain awareness of the Nagas to the rest of India and the West by putting them in ethnographic  museums, on geographical/ethnographic maps, and in weighty books (Schäffler 2006b: 292, cited in Stockhausen 2008: 64). For a visiting European, the Naga Hills were a ‘museum-piece’ and the objects (both archaeological and ethnographic) were collected from the colonies and displayed  in  the  West as a way to authenticate the primitive stages  of human development. The region was perceived as a cultural backwater. This part of India, that was once a portion of the Hill District of Assam, later came to be recognized, after much political unrest, as the 16^th State of India called ‘Nagaland’ on 1^st of December, 1963.

Although I was born in a small suburban town in eastern Nagaland, I grew up experiencing a typical Naga life. As a teen, I learnt how to swing a dao (a local iron machete), how to sharpen the blade most effectively, and how to shoot a target with a gun. I slashed and burnt thick forest for cultivation, learnt the traditional skill of fire-making, carried loads of paddy on my shoulder after a bumper harvest, built traditional houses with my peers, laid fishing traps and other traditional means of fishing, read animal tracks and hunted, roamed the deep forests foraging and gathering for wild berries, fruits, and edible vegetables. Not only were these moments a part of my leisure time but I took great pride in what I learned for it was a part of my heritage. Inculcating such traditional values was not only key to one’s survival but was also considered gender assigned roles for a Naga man. Little did I realize that it was these early experiences that drew me close to anthropology, a discipline that would allow me to study about myself and our Naga culture.

My fascination for archaeology developed while I was a graduate student of Anthropology in Kohima Science College. On one occasion, one of my professors, now a senior anthropologist, shared his experience as a member of the excavation team (1992) to Chungliyimti. At that time, we were told that Chungliyimti was a ‘Neolithic’ site, with great potential for understanding the beginnings of agriculture in the region. My involvement in archaeology developed, coupled with a strong yearning to visit this ancestral village that held historical ties with the clan with which I identified. I realized then that archaeology could contribute to the rich cultural heritage of our Naga pre-colonial past; a subject that was different from what I studied in the Political and Economic History classes in my high school. Archaeology provided me not only a career, but also an understanding of a deeper sense of identity as a Naga.

According to legend, our great ancestor Yimsenpirong of the Jamir clan was known to have spotted the first fresh water during early Chungliyimti times.  Oral tradition recounts Chungliyimti as the once ancestral village of the Aos, few sections of the Changs, Phoms and Sangtams. These were communities that were labeled as ‘tribes’ in colonial accounts. An Ao origin myth also informs of the emergence of progenitors of the Aos from six stones or Longtrok (Long-stone; trok-six) after which they founded Chungliyimti.   The site remained deserted for few centuries until it was re-occupied by some members from Chare and Tonger village (Northern Sangtam Naga) and Longsa village (Ao Naga). Today, the residents of Chungliyimti who partly occupy the ancient site are the descent communities of these later occupants (Figures 1 & 2) and continue to trace their historical link to this ancestral site.

Figure 1: Location map of Chungliyimti

Figure 2: A partial view of Chungliyimti presently occupied

Because of the special provision laid out in Article 371 (A) of the Indian Constitution, traditional land rights and ownership are still closely linked to the local communities. Hence, no Act of Parliament may apply directly to the State of Nagaland unless such Acts are passed in the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland. It is here that the host of legislation of the ASI remains to come into effect in Nagaland. Realizing this situation, my first visit to the site on October 2006 was mainly to acquire permission from the village authorities. Besides academic concerns, to me, this initial journey to Chungliyimti and Longtrok was considered a pilgrimage to the land of my ancestors.

This visit helped me reformulate methodologies that would best work for this research. Guided by previous works of Vikuosa Nienu (1974) and T.C.Sharma, I embarked on investigating this site further, fundamentally for few reasons: i) the lack of stratigraphic and historical context of the site and other site details ii) adopt alternative methodologies involving local community participation in archaeological research programs, iii) the historical ties that my clan shares with this particular site.

Preliminary excavations began in January 2007 with a research grant from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. Further excavation continued in subsequent years with the involvement of the Anthropological Society of Nagaland and the Directorate of Art & Culture, Government of Nagaland. Pottery bearing carved paddle and cord-mark designs, wheel made kaolin potteries, a few ground stone tools, iron tools, carnelian and glass beads, spindle whorls etc. were the main materials retrieved. Charred remains of both wild (Oryza sp (cf. nivara); Oryza sp. (cf. rufipogon) and cultivated rice (Oryza sativa), and millet (Setaria sp.) native to the region were reported together with introduced cereals such as wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Eight radiometric dates obtained assigned the site within cal. AD 980-1647 AD (see Pokharia et al. 2013; Jamir et al. 2014).

Community engagement and archaeology practice
My effort to undertake a community-based archaeology at Chungliyimti stemmed from our past experiences with local communities at few Naga ancestral sites. With the aim of incorporating a more community-inclusive research and ascertain the level of mutual trust, several meetings were called with members of the village council to discuss ideas of the research program. With previous years of the site excavation, the community by now had removed all doubts that we were simply antique collectors, a remnant of the colonial past known in the region. Transparency of process increased the levels of trust among us, as did a collective social memory we shared with this ancestral site. The significance of the research and how the work aims to contribute to understanding the pre-colonial history of the region, corroborating both the ethno-historical accounts of the site and archaeology, the adaptive behavioral pattern within a sub-tropical monsoon environment were some of the key issues highlighted by the team. Community concerns such as measures to protect the excavated area and develop the site for tourism were other active engagements of the meeting. The mutual trust and respect further aided conversations on the myths of origin underlying Longtrok or ‘six-stones’ found standing at Chungliyimti. In trying to encourage multivocality and plurality, we were able to gain multiple perspectives of the past. To a large extent, the origin myth of Longtrok has been a subject of much debate to local scholars, centering on the politics of ‘who owns the past’? While the Ao Chongli ascribes the six stones to the three male patriarch of the Pongen, Longkumer and Jamir clan and their three sisters, the Ao Mongsen identifies the standing stones to six male ancestors (see Aier and Jamir 2009). Historical narratives linking the origin of the clan is also shared by the resident of Chungliyimti who too ascribes the monuments in commemoration of six major clans. What is interesting in the Northern Sangtam oral narrative is the description of the six clans which appears to revolve around the story of a ‘stone’. Few other important sites within 2-3 km radius of Chungliyimti were identified with the help of the community (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Identifying the locality where Yimsenpirong of the Jamir clan, led by a bulbul bird first spotted fresh water

Residents were also forthcoming to share details on their knowledge of edible wild plants, medicinal plants and their frequent hunting grounds which contributed significantly whilst mapping site catchment resources. Because the community had a better understanding of the site’s landscape gained from their seasonal cultivation around the site, their accounts aided in identifying artifact-rich clusters, and the extent of site disturbances in cultivated plots (Figure 4).

Figure 4: An ArcGIS generated Digital Elevation Model of Chungliyimti showing the prominent localities identified as a result of community engagement

Given the time constraints at our disposal, these important details of the site enabled us to effectively plan our digs. Another important initiative is the community’s engagement in experimental archaeology. A traditional hut was set up in one of the trenches following a good understanding of the house plans exposed during excavation (Figure 5) (see Jamir 2014).

Figure 5: View of a traditional hut within one of the excavated trenches, built with the effort of the community following the plan of one of the excavated residential site.

Often after a conference paper or publication, my Mainland colleagues ask how I dub the site. Perhaps to them, the site must conform to mainstream archaeological trajectories–Neolithic, a Bronze Age, Chalcolithic or an Iron Age site or it is utterly nonsense archaeology! In spite of K. Paddayya’s call for Multiple Approaches to the Study of India’s Early Past (2014), it seems that we continue to be obsessed with Universal tags and labels. Besides the problematic of such categories, I am doubtful whether coining Anglophone terms like ‘Neolithic’, ‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’ is even applicable to the Naga Hills and its pre-colonial history. I have come to realize that mainstream archaeology is ethnocentric, particular and colonizing in a manner that prevents connecting with an Indigenous present. By creating period boundaries and assuming that Indigenous pasts look like normative presents (see Wobst 2005: 17-24). Rather, I would recommend overriding the technological trajectory cocoon and instead, identify these sites as ‘ancestral sites’ where our clan histories and stories of migrations are still relevant in the lives of descent communities today. Such a label deems fit considering the present descent groups (including my clan history) who relate our own ancestral past to this site, a site where Indigenous views such as the oral tradition, the meanings assigned to particular features of the landscape (toponym), and folk songs have played significant role in the interpretation of Chungliyimti.  Like any other research, the present one is not without its problems. However, as pointed out by Shoocongdej (2009; also see Rizvi 2006, 2008; Selvakumar 2006), there is no single way of practicing community archaeology and is bound to inherently differ depending on the historical and cultural context of the community under study. It is, therefore, the collaborative practice of involving indigenous and other worldviews into archaeology that signals a positive process of decolonization of the discipline (Atalay 2007).

References
Aier, A. and T. Jamir. 2009. Re-interpreting the Myth of Longterok, Indian Folklife 33 (July): 5-9.

Atalay, S.  2007.  Global  Application  of  Indigenous  Archaeology:  Community  Based  Participatory Research  in  Turkey,  Archaeologies:  Journal  of  World  Archaeological  Congress  3  (3):  249-270.  DOI: 10.1007/s11759-007-9026-8.

Jamir, T. 2014. Ancestral Sites, Local Communities and Archaeology in Nagaland: A Community Archaeology Approach at Chungliyimti, in 50 Years After Daojali-Hading: Emerging perspectives in the Archaeology of Northeast India (Essays in Honour of T. C. Sharma) (Tiatoshi Jamir and Manjil Hazarika Eds.), pp. 473-487. New Delhi: Research India Press.

Jamir,  T. et al. 2014.  Archaeology  of  Naga  Ancestral Sites: Recent  Archaeological  Investigations  at  Chungliyimti  and  Adjoining  sites  (Vol-1).  Department  of  Art  and  Culture,  Government  of  Nagaland.  Dimapur:  Heritage  Publishing House.

Lotha, A. 2007. History of Naga Anthropology (1832-1947). Dimapur: Chumpo Museum.

Nienu, V.1974. Recent Prehistoric Discoveries in Nagaland-a survey, Highlanders II (1): 5-7.

Paddayya, K. 2014. Multiple Approaches to the Study of India’s Early Past. New Delhi: Aryan Books International.

Pokharia, A. et al. 2013. Late First millennium BC to Second Millennium A.D. Agriculture in Nagaland: A Reconstruction based on Archaeobotanical Evidence, Current Science 104 (10), 25 May:1341-1353.

Rizvi,U.Z. 2006. Accounting for Multiple Desires: Decolonizing Methodologies, Archaeology and the Public Interest, India Review 5(3-4):394-416.  DOI: 10.1080/ 1473 64 80600939223.

Rizvi, U.Z.2008. Decolonizing Methodologies as Strategies of Practice: Operationalizing the Postcolonial Critique in the Archaeology of Rajasthan, in Archaeology and the postcolonial critique (Mathew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi Eds.), pp.109-127.UK: Altamira Press.

Selvakumar, V. 2006. Public Archaeology in India: Perspectives from Kerala, India Review 5 (3-4): 417-446. DOI: 10.1080/14736480600939256.

Shoocongdej, R. 2009. Public archaeology in Thailand, New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology (K.Okamura and A.Matsuda Eds.),pp.95-111.New York: Springer.DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-0341-8_8.

Singh, M. 2006. The soul hunters of Central Asia, Christianity Today [Online] available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/february/38.51.html.

Stockhausen, A. 2008. Creating Naga: Identity between Colonial Construction, Political Calculation, and Religious Instrumentalisation, in Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the North East of India (Michael Oppitz et al. Eds.), pp. 57-79. Ethnographic Museum of Zürich University: Snoeck Publishers.

Wobst, M.H. 2005. Power to the (indigenous) past and present! Or: The theory and method behind archaeological theory and method, in Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice (Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst Eds.), pp. 17-32. London and New York: Routledge.

Biography
Tiatoshi Jamir is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology, Nagaland University, Kohima Campus, Nagaland, India, where he teaches prehistory and ethnoarchaeology. His broad professional interest also extends to the field of ethnomusicology and is front man of the folk-jazz band Blue Print. He is lead editor and author of the books 50 Years After Daojali-Hading: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Northeast India and Archaeology of Naga Ancestral Sites (Vol-1 & 2). He currently directs a research program on the Archaeology of Mimi Caves on the Naga Ophiolite belt adjoining Myanmar in collaboration with the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Nagaland. He is Vice-Chairman of the Anthropological Society of Nagaland, and is a member of the Indian Society for Prehistoric and Quaternary Studies, Indian Archaeological Society, and Society of South Asian Archaeology. Follow Tiatoshi on facebook and academia.edu.

At this year’s Taiwan’s annual anthropology conference, the Taiwan group anthropology blog Guava Anthropology hosted a public event where blog members were invited to give five minute “lightning talks” on the topic of cultural policy. In May, Taiwan’s new Minister of Culture Cheng Li-chun 鄭麗君 announced plans to hold a national conference with the aim of establishing a “Basic Cultural Law” for Taiwan.¹ These talks were to reflect on both the role of the government in shaping cultural policy and the role of anthropologists in shaping government policy. Below is the English version of the talk I gave in Chinese.²

The State must “see” culture

The central problem facing state cultural policies is the need to make culture visible to the state. After all, if the state can’t “see” culture, how can it regulate it? Post-war Taiwan saw tremendous changes in cultural policy: from promoting China-centric cultural nationalism to embracing multiculturalism. But whether it is mono-culturalism or multiculturalism, whether the state wants to suppress or encourage the development of local cultures, it must first be able to “see” them.

Seeing Culture Changes It

But here’s the thing, the act of making culture visible changes it. How does culture become visible? At the most basic level it gets written down, recorded, and photographed. This act of recording can permanently fix cultural traits that had previously been fluid. When the British did the first census of India they recorded everyone’s caste, in doing so they turned a system which had been much more flexible and fluid into something rigid and fixed. Even the process of recording caste was fraught with conflict as groups petitioned the government to change their caste listing.

How do governments “see” culture when it doesn’t want to be seen?

But sometimes it is difficult for the state to see culture. When Taiwan’s government wanted to suppress the use of local languages in favor of Mandarin it found a way to make students spy on each other. If a student was caught speaking a local language they had to wear a sign saying that they had wear a sign saying “I won’t speak the local language”. The only way to get rid of this sign was to catch another student speaking the local language and make them wear the sign instead.

How does the state see culture that wants to be seen?

Today the policy is reversed, the state wants to encourage the preservation of local languages. There are even funds to support families that use endangered languages in the home. But how to know if the recipients of these funds are actually using the target languages? Early on they would do this by giving written tests, requiring the family to prove that they had learned 300 new vocabulary words each month. But this caused problems because people focused on learning to write and spell new words rather than actually speaking the language in their homes. So they switched to having inspectors make video recordings of the family speaking in their mother tongue. But this hasn’t worked either. Families have taken to memorizing dialogs — little plays they perform for the video cameras.

Visible to whom?

Making culture visible to the state is an act of violence. Whether the government is trying to suppress culture or promote it, it must see it first. So what is the answer? One answer might be to leave the government out of it altogether. But I don’t think that is right. Government is involved whether or not it wants to be. The choices individuals make about their own cultural practices aren’t made in a vacuum, but are shaped by the wider cultural environment and the state has a big say in shaping that environment.

But there are ways of seeing culture that don’t do as much violence to the cultures under observation. It is a lot easier for members of a culture to see their own culture than it is for an outsider. Giving communities greater autonomy over their own cultural policies doesn’t require ripping that culture out of its context in order to be seen. It isn’t enough to simply switch from suppressing a culture to promoting it. The very nature of the relationship between the state and cultural practitioners has to change as well.

In mid-December 2015, indigenous social activists protested across Taiwan with urban demonstrations and lighting of solidarity bonfires in rural communities. They were angry about the case of Tama Talum (Wang Guang-lu), a 56-year-old Bunun man slated to begin a 3.5 year prison sentence on December 15. In July 2013, at the request of his 92-year-old mother who wanted to eat traditional country food, he had hunted one Reeve’s muntjac (a small deer) and Formosan serow (a mountain goat).¹ He was arrested and convicted in a Taitung court for illegal weapons possession and poaching. On October 29, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled against his appeal. Tama Talum’s case merits international attention for humanitarian reasons, but also because it reveals deeper human rights issues.

Taiwan’s indigenous peoples (known as Austronesians to anthropologists) have traditionally lived from horticulture and hunting. There are now 546,218 indigenous people in 16 officially recognized tribes. They have an active social movement, a quota of 6 indigenous legislators, a cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples, and their collective rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Systematic violation of their right to hunt, however, remains a concern.

Indigenous Hunting as a Human Right

Indigenous hunting rights are recognized in international customary law, including International Labour Organization Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8j of which recognizes the value of indigenous practices and knowledge to wildlife conservation.

Taiwan’s 2005 Basic Law on Indigenous Peoples states clearly in Article 19 that:

Indigenous persons may undertake the following non-profit seeking activities in indigenous peoples’ regions: 1) Hunting wild animals; 2) Collecting wild plants and fungus; 3) Collecting minerals, rocks and soils; 4) Utilizing water resources. The above activities can only be conducted for traditional culture, ritual or self-consumption.

The sticking point is that this law is a Basic Law. In order to be implemented, all relevant laws must be revised. Currently, all hunting in National Parks (nearly 9% of Taiwan) remains illegal. The 1989 Wildlife Conservation Act bans trapping (the most common practice) entirely. Revisions permit hunting only for collective ceremonies upon application of a permit. The Statute for Controlling Firearms, Ammunition and Weapons has been revised to permit indigenous people to possess home-made rifles. Tama Talum was convicted because he did not use a “handmade” rifle and his hunt was not part of collective ritual. This ignores the provision for self-consumption in the Basic Law.

Indigenous Hunting as Life Practice

For indigenous people, hunting is not about killing animals, but rather about sociality and identity. For many young men, hunting is an important coming-of-age ritual and an opportunity for intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Hunting involves dangerous ordeals in ancestral forests, as well as sharing of meat with family and friends. It is spiritual form of communication with ancestors and mountain spirits. Some parents expect prospective sons-in-law to demonstrate their abilities by providing game. Each tribe in Taiwan has traditional legal institutions to regulate hunting. Hunters claim that their institutions successfully conserve wildlife, pointing to the continuing existence of animals as living evidence. Hunting and trapping are part of a larger embodied knowledge of forest animals and plants that would be lost forever if these practices ceased. The forests do not exist outside of human activity. They have been shaped by generations of hunters in ways conducive to animal well-being.

Taiwan’s current legal framework does not take indigenous hunting rights seriously. It condemns indigenous hunters to use “homemade” rifles that can be dangerous to the hunters and their companions. It forbids trapping entirely, even though this is the most common hunting practice. Current definitions of “culture” include only public rituals and ceremonies approved by local governments, without consideration of daily culture or subsistence needs. It does not provide provisions for the implementation and enforcement of indigenous-led hunting management.

This legal framework is also insufficient for conservation. Because indigenous people must hunt clandestinely, it is impossible for them to create effective management regimes. There are few incentives to evict other intruders (including non-indigenous poachers) from traditional territories now under exclusive state jurisdiction. Without sustainable hunting, knowledge and practices important to conservation will be lost; and fewer people will maintain a vested interest in nurturing wildlife habitat. This is a lose-lose situation for hunters and animals alike.

For now, Tama Talum’s sentence should be suspended or pardoned. Taiwan must immediately revise all relevant laws in accordance with the Basic Law. Only then can hunters reaffirm their role as stewards of the forests and establish institutions for effective management of hunting. These are important steps in indigenous rights. Since biodiversity loss is a worldwide crisis, this would also be a gift to the entire planet.

Take Action

Please help us show international support for Talum’s case by signing this petition.

Thank you!

For more information, see:

• Simon, Scott and Awi Mona. 2015. “Indigenous Rights and Wildlife Conservation: The Vernacularization of International Law on Taiwan.” Taiwan Human Rights Journal 3(1): 3-31. (Open Access)
• Simon, Scott. 2013. “Of Boars and Men: Indigenous Knowledge and Co-Management in Taiwan.” Human Organization 72 (3): 220-229.
• Simon, Scott. 2015. “Real People, Real Dogs and Pigs for the Ancestors: The Moral Universe of ‘Domestication’ in Indigenous Taiwan.” American Anthropologist 117(4): early view.

The greatest challenge of being an anthropologist is being me. From one decade to the next I have been a cross-cultural island of self-consciousness, framed by the cross generational memories of wider kin. Wisdom comes in many forms, but as I tell my students, at least those who turn up to class, it cannot be found on the Internet. Somewhere between my father’s Maori generation of desperately trying to be English and my children’s reality of being overtly Maori you find… me.

Raised in the tribally alienated rural heartlands of Waikato naivety (built on 19^th century confiscations at gunpoint), my view of the world was one of barefoot summers by the ocean, while the rest of the year was underpinned by frosts, fog, rugby and ducking for cover in a rurally serviced school surrounded by affluent dairy farms and horse studs. Right from the start teachers placed me neither at the front or the back of the classroom. Kids in the front were mostly fourth generation descendants of English settlers, while at the back were the ever sniffling Maori who had no shoes and walked five miles to school across farmlands, one steaming cow pat to the next. And there I was, from age five, placed right in the middle, on the boundary between a white-is-right future and an uncivilised dark skinned past.

Weekends provided respite, often spent with my grandmother while dad mowed an acre of lawn on our tribal property back in Rotorua. She used taonga (ancestral treasures) to instil in me a deeper understanding of the proud history to which Maori belonged, decades before these stories found their way into mainstream classrooms. Taonga either at her museum or off the mantelpiece made history all the more real to me, especially when performed during death rituals on my ancestral marae (community villages) of Maketu and Ohinemutu.

Life in the 1960s-70s seemed so simple, so straightforward. You were either Maori (dark like dad) or English (lily white like mum). If you were Maori, society deemed you dirty, lazy and only good for fixing roads or driving buses. Whereas if you chose to be English, no matter your skin colour, you could participate in a national ideology of being “one people”, but only so long as you played by the rules. I did not play by the rules. My very left wing Irish grandmother filled my head with a whole different way of seeing the world. For her, colonial New Zealand was extremely unjust and Maori had been royally screwed by the English. She kept the home fires alight, becoming the most feared” Maori” in our village. In 1915 her husband and twenty-five other kinsmen had fought for God and Empire on foreign soil, killing indigenous people of another land in the name of an English King, but for what? To return home as second rate citizens, shot to pieces, and dig ditches on lands now owned by wealthy farmers? No, her world was now here.

Given this background my gravitation toward anthropology and later specialisation in museum ethnography (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University) was always going to happen. I grew up as a member of a tribe famous for producing, protecting and prestating taonga across tens of generations, many of which are now found in museums throughout the world. My earliest formal memories were genealogically layered narratives (whakapapa) from elders who animated surrounding landscapes with great deeds of my ancestors. I was raised to be proud of my whakapapa. But when my grandmother died my world was tipped upside down. My parents shifted us away from perceived negative influences of tribalism to let the cities shape their children into more urbane citizens of modern integrated New Zealand. By the age of eighteen, I had dropped out of education and fled to Australia on a one-way ticket. Like so many other Maori, I wanted to be anywhere but here, anywhere but living in 1970s white conservative, backwater colonial New Zealand.

Over the next decade I found solace through professional sport and writing, providing me a useful vehicle by which to travel the world and experience a multitude of cultures as an outsider looking in. The more I engaged with others, the more I began to reflect on my own cultural self and childhood experiences of being Maori in a still racially divided nation. And then overnight England joined the EU (then known as EEC) and New Zealand was forced to radically reinvent itself to survive economically. Leveraging Maori identity became a horizon of new opportunity – a point of difference on which the government sought to market national uniqueness. Its flagship was an international touring exhibition of taonga, named Te Maori (1984-87), representing a new Aotearoa New Zealand: an island nation which dared to imagine a bicultural future built on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. In the wake of Te Maori was born the Museum of New Zealand Project better known today as Te Papa: two cultures, one nation.

Beneath today’s flagging bicultural ideology still exists the unaddressed premise of being Maori: kin-accountability to source marae communities. It represents tribally ordered rights and responsibilities according to ancestral context. But where does such a philosophy of knowledge fit in a bicultural nation based on urban Maori ethnic identity beyond the horizon of New Zealand’s 766 tribal marae? The Treaty promised protection of such communities, but it now stands for the delivery of globalised tribal (Iwi) organisations based on laws of exclusive ownership at the expense of kin-belonging and inclusion. It was the genesis of these fascinating bicultural tensions that drew me back to university and into anthropology.

While my academic training was initially underpinned by post structuralism with a healthy injection of ethnicity, it was when I stepped outside the western paradigm of grid-ordered Cartesian epistemology that my engagement with the “field at home” became real. Some might refer to my approach as reflexive ethnography, bordering on neo-traditionalism. But closer inspection of my writings might also reveal a reorientation of knowledge according to a genealogical accountability to source, beyond any currently practiced Indigenous Methodology. Lets call it being “pre-indigenous”: a counterpoint to current globalised Maori organisations or “iwification”… I remain my late grandmother’s work in progress, continuing to challenge the status quo as I explore cross-generational consciousness through museums and taonga.

My ongoing challenge is to find effective ways to communicate to the field what it really means to be the Other when described from the position of my Anthropological Self. Two decades on and boundaries of misunderstanding in wider New Zealand are growing even wider. Who is doing useful anthropology of our cultural crisis when needed most? Maori urban dysfunctionality and tribal depopulation dominate our headlines. I threw myself into this fray a decade ago and today it has evolved into Maori Maps, a digitally born cross-generational reconnection gateway…

So with last thoughts of elders, grandmother and mentors, Sir Hugh Kawharu and Greg Dening: here I am again, at the boundary of difference negotiating being me with the rest of the universe.

It’s not a joke – the Arctic seems to be everywhere at the moment, and it’s mainly because it is getting warmer. None of us really agree what the Arctic is or where – or whether – it has limits, few of us go there, and only a small number of states border the Arctic seas. That doesn’t seem to stop commentators using images of the Arctic to serve their particular interests, often with little regard or even acknowledgement of those who actually live in the Arctic regions. Nor does it dissuade states around the world from developing Arctic policies or seeing the Arctic as a potential resource for their own development goals. These are the themes that inform a recently-established international European project on Arctic Encounters that sets out to confront the idea of a post-colonial Arctic, through the comparison between Arctic imageries and lives in the region. 

Fresh from three days of workshops and discussions about what it might mean to talk about a ‘postcolonial Arctic’ (#postarctic), I want to draw out some of the themes and memes that characterise debate about Arctic regions, and the European High North in particular. I do this from a couple of perspectives that feed in from my own particular interests and find fruition in the Arctic question: tourism and energy. Those provide a fortuitous combination, since the two main sources of Arctic anxieties revolve around tourism imaginaries and what are sometimes called oil imaginaries but actually extend into a range of extractive industries (e.g. oilscapes ).

Global environmental activists have been increasingly effective in protesting against fossil and nuclear fuel extraction, and current action, such as Greenpeace’s campaign to defend Bear Island, have been effective in drawing global media attention to the issues. The alternatives to fossil and nuclear fuels include renewable resources such as wind, wave, solar and hydro, of which hydro is currently the established technology that is most easily scaled for mass provision. So bearing in mind that hydro-electric power is the cleanest, most responsive and by far the most renewable source of electricity generation available to us, and considering the urgency of reducing carbon emissions, it would seem perverse to find people protesting against hydro-electric power production, as much as against wind farms, another renewable source that provokes vociferous protest at various sites (particularly in the UK).

In the Arctic context, it’s worth remembering that the most important Sami uprising in the Norwegian North was prompted by the construction of a mammoth hydro-electric dam that flooded hundreds of kilometres of crucially important herding grounds, land that embodied shared histories, kinships and ancient sacred sites. The Alta uprising is echoed in protests around the world that are ongoing today. Current crises include a proposal to dam the Omo river in Ethiopia that will rob the Mursi of their lands, a disputed mega-dam in Myanmar  (see BBC reports), indigenous protests against a dam in the Amazon basin, and protests against a hydro project in British Columbia.

Of course the apparent conflict between carbon reduction and indigenous rights is merely the visible evidence of a much more fundamental global problem that can be crudely characterised (or perhaps caricatured) as a conflict between the technological-focus and capital-driven engines of modernity and the desire to live at the human scale in tune with nature. But rather than each position being the problem here, it is the idea of opposition that is so entrenched at governmental and corporate levels that can make the problem seem intractable. We are faced with a classic set of cognitive dissonances (or ‘denials’) that we are struggling to escape: we all know that carbon emissions must drop dramatically if we are to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, yet most people still want to drive their cars or fly around to international conferences (guilty as charged!). We know that only a fraction of the carbon that is currently traded on global markets can be used, yet trillions of dollars of share capital is invested in the potential of these resources – and many of us have pensions invested in these very funds. Current action on ‘divestment‘ is starting to respond to this particular issue, with notable initiatives from universities including Stanford and Oxford.

How is this all connected to the Arctic? Firstly, as sea ice melts and navigable shipping routes begin to open up, new fields of oil and gas are being explored for extraction and states and corporations are manoeuvring to claim ownership and rights to extract resources in what has been called (and disputed) a ‘scramble for the Arctic’ (Sale and Potapov 2010). But secondly, tensions are heightened because the Arctic has provided imagery that sustains the idea of a ‘pristine wilderness’, borrowing and reinforcing imagery from now mythologised Antarctic expeditions and scientific hyperbole about polar nature. In this, the colonial tropes of unconquered land figure deeply, and serve to reproduce the notion of an Arctic region ‘untouched by man’. For indigenous inhabitants, this is not only annoying; it has deeply disturbing consequences, which are being increasingly vociferously documented.

For anthropologists, the ‘indigenous question’ is not the only one we should write about. It should, however, be always in our minds in our research on the workings of extractive industries, the means that states use to create the space for policies and legislation about rights or ownership, the imagery and discourses that tourism companies use to attract clients and customers, or the question of how tourism activities are or should be regulated and by whom.

Subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks will draw out some of these themes, and I hope you’ll enjoy the journey and contribute with comments and responses along the way.