Conferencing, Science-Inspired Landmarks, and Why Christmas Is Just a Train Ride Away

In 2022, Canadian parliament recognized the country’s residential school system as genocide. More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to residential schools to assimilate them between 1880s and the 1990s. The school system, administered by Christian churches, removed Indigenous children from their families, deprived them of their ancestral languages, and exposed them to physical and sexual abuse. Many of these schools had associated gravesites where children who died from Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malnutrition, as well as physical and sexual abuse, were buried.

These facts were highlighted in the keynote speech at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, by Kisha Supernant. Considering her great-grandparents survived a residential school, Supernant is a survivor and an Indigenous anthropological archaeologist at the University of Alberta. In her keynote, she called for more archaeology that focuses on restorative justice, in which the center stands for care, emotion, relation, and rigor, as highlighted in Archaeologies of the Heart.

Supernant also called for more community-based research projects. In such approaches, Indigenous peoples or survivors who know about the disappearances may work together with archaeologists, who can help identify the graves. In such endeavors, archaeologists can crucially assist in transitioning into new futures in two ways. First, by assisting the Indigenous peoples to regain the access to knowledge stolen from them. Second, by helping to change the discipline.

Supernant’s call for community-based research closely resonated with the Patty Jo Watson Distinguished lecture delivered by Sonya Atalay at the Archeology Division Business Meeting. Atalay, a Provost Professor at the University of Massachusetts is also a director of the UMass Engaged Anthropology Lab. There, she hosts monthly brown bag lectures in which issues related to Engaged Anthropology are discussed among students, faculty, and community members. Such a “science lab” serves both, as an incubator for new community-based research project ideas as well as community space on the campus.

Atalay highlighted the NAGPRA Comics as an important community-based initiative in which the Indigenous peoples can determine how they and the Indigenous objects are being portrayed. For example, Atalay in her lecture showed us a figure of a carved archer, with a remark that the depiction is different from the original as the community refuses to share the original depiction with a broader public. Supernant’s keynote and Atalay’s distinguished lectures highlighted important Indigenous community-based initiatives based on restorative justice both in the US and Canada.

Apart from the two keynotes, I was fortunate to chair and organize a session titled “Reconstructing Kinship Practices in Archaeology: Materiality, Socio-cultural Anthropology, and Archaeogenetics”. Among the brilliant speakers were Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Maanasa Raghavan from the University of Chicago, Catherine Frieman from the Australian National University, Alexander R. Bentley from the University of Tennessee, and Peter Whiteley from the American Museum of Natural History. Finally, Sandra Bamford from the University of Toronto took up the discussant role and identified crosscutting themes and the potential of advancing our knowledge of prehistoric kinship.

The session was unique in many ways. First, it was inherently interdisciplinary, crosscutting the three subfields of anthropology, namely cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Second, it brought together scholars who are willing to engage in an interdisciplinary discourse, share their insights, and discuss them through a different lens. Third, our session was supported by the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association, for which I received a Symposium Development Award.

I concluded my AAA Annual Meeting by visiting my landlady and dear friend from New Delhi, where I conducted fieldwork for my MA thesis for six months in 2013/14. She now lives in Toronto with her son and her daughter-in-law. I also visited the “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” exhibition at ROM – Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The exhibition is a great reminder of the universal, continuous, and cyclical process of life and death. My favorite message that links with the AAA keynote is: “When someone is forcibly removed from their place of origin, community members often don’t know what happened to them. This can be considered a form of social death.”

Before leaving for Toronto, I was privileged to participate in the workshop on the population history of Central Anatolia organized at the University of Chicago in collaboration with the Comparative and Evolutionary Biology Lab at METU. Apart from two days of listening to engaging presentations, I also joined a campus tour generously offered by Hannah Moots. Among other science-inspired landmarks, we passed by a large abstract metal statue, sculpted by Virginio Ferrari in 1971. Apparently, at noon on May 1st of every year, the statue called Dialogo, forms a shadow resembling the hammer and sickle, a symbol of communism and workers’ revolution.

We also visited the site where the discovery of radiocarbon dating took place. In 1946, Williard Libby (1908–1980) developed a method for dating organic materials by measuring their content of carbon-14m, a radioactive isotope of carbon. Today, radiocarbon dating is extremely important in archaeology, geology, and other sciences. For this discovery, Libby received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.

In the year of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, we also passed by the site of the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear chain reaction that happened on December 2nd, 1942. The success of physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues ended tragically for 129,000 and 226,000 people were killed by two denotated atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945.

Being back in Chicago from Toronto, I am still recovering from the Friendsgiving meal we had after attending the Chicago Thanksgiving Parade on State Street. Aside from the giant helium balloons and different Chicago clubs participating with their tricks, the parade auspiciously started with a large turkey and ended with Santa and his reindeer crew.

Not only the parade but also the Chicago transport authority and Metra remind us that Christmas is just a train ride away...