Mandated by the Board of the Merced del Pueblo de Abiquiú, our team had multiple field seasons, focused on work prioritized by the community to protect land and water rights, to recover information before the restoration of the cultural center's west wing, and to incorporate community youth into every aspect of the project to meet community goals of intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Led by the Robinson Rancheria Tribal Fisheries Biologist and an Adivsory Group of Elders from the 7 Tribes surrounding Clear Lake, this partnership with Northeastern University at Mills College focuses on providing the training and resources for Tribal Youth to listen to stories gifted by their Elders, record them in culturally appropriate and Tribally-controlled ways, and to produce a story map about the endangered Clear Lake Hitch as part of a suite of deliverables that focuses on intergenerational knowledge transfer.
https://www.shinglespringsrancheria.com/
Our partnership revolves around supporting the Flicker Intertribal Ecological Restoration Crew in their efforts to restore a complex suite of Guardianship practices to Ancestral places. This includes planning, using, and teaching non-invasive, low-impact archaeological methods and instruments that supplement their work and which lead to increased visibility of Ancestral practices when used in conjunction with Guardianship practices such as good fire.
The Indigenous Futures Society's mission is to elevate Indigenous place-based wisdom, leadership, and guardianship to achieve reparative justice and resilient Sierra Nevada cultural ecologies and communities for future generations under Indigenous Leadership. We are honored to be invited to serve on the advisory board and work with the InterTribal Fire crew to co-create new connections between archaeological non-invasive and low-impact technologies to time-tested Guardianship principles and practices in our partnered work in Ancestral Places.
Our team is partnered with members of recovery teams working for the Defense Personnel Accounting Agency (DPAA) to develop field-deployable 3D models of artifacts that might be encountered during the search for service members who made the ultimate sacrifice. The goal is to maximize the potential of recovery and correctly categorizing non-human materials that would help identify crew positions at time of impact. The project is oriented for citizen scientists from all walks of life to contribute to the mission. https://tinyurl.com/berkeley-missing-airmen
For over a decade of partnership, we have been working under the leadership of the Kootzaduka'a Tribal Council to amass the records and details necessary to overturn the wrongful termination of their federal recognition.
Our team of archaeologists is working with our Community Mentors to understand the history and landscape surrounding the Old Leupp Indian Boarding School and Citizen Isolation Center. Starting with a community accountable approach, we are working to utilize our diverse toolkits of methodological training in service to the unique priorities of the Diné (Navajo) and Nikkei communities. Due to the history of the site as both an Indian Boarding School for Diné youth and a Citizen Isolation Center for Japanese Americans, we approach this project slowly and with care, working to gather community-generated mandates for research design and deliverables. For example, our team of students artists, working from the mandate of intergenerational knowledge transfer and gifted with stories from members of our Nikkei and Diné Community Advisory Group, have built storybooks and interactive story elements based upon those memories. (https://bearboneslab.org/old-leupp-interactive-art-and-storytelling)
For more information, see the following links:
National Japanese American Historical Society
Research mandated by Tribal Leadership includes work focused on the return of the village of Bak-Kum'Tā-Te to the community. Co-authored work on our partnership is forthcoming.
Working closely with the research team and osteological curations manager at Safari West, the Bear Bones Lab team is learning how to calibrate and compare the data from various geophysical instruments (ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, magnetic gradiometry, and multispectral imaging) used in non-invasive and low-impact archaeological survey to study known deposits.
Our team has digitized, OCR text-recognized, and created finding aids for the oldest continuously operating newspaper west of the Mississippi, whose contributors included Brett Harte and Mark Twain. Community members and agency researchers have started accessing these resources since the pandemic and continue to use them for historical and family research. Historical broadsheet scans located here.
Partnered with Ron Rael (architecture), Stephanie Syjuco (art practice) , Albert Gonazlez (CSUEB), community partners, and students from across disciplines on campus, we continue to innovate new modes and forms of construction of this simple but effective culinary technology. Multiple iterations of the humble horno have been built, tested, and destroyed to accomplish a myriad of research, teaching, and service goals. New communities have been built around the hands-on approach we take to working together with mud and straw in our popular freshman and sophmore seminars.
Our team has visited countless classrooms in the East Bay, bringing basic archaeological concepts, storytelling, and hands-on activities to meet the state mandated curriuculm needs of hard-working public school educators. In some cases, school groups (including elementary, high school, and community college cohorts) have come to our lab to experience materials and equipment and meet the different kinds of students who are modeling new pathways through college.