In January 2020, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition announced the commencement of a 10-year strategic initiative to raise collective awareness around the forced removal and education of Indigenous children throughout the United States. Central pillars in this new plan are education, global advocacy, and developing healing values and practices. The collaborative archaeological project undertaken by Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman, and Christopher C. LeBlanc at the Stewart Indian School offers a compelling example of how archaeologists can contribute to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition's mission to address the harmful legacy of the boarding school system in ways that strengthen Tribal Nations.

Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School documents the efforts of a 2013 archaeological field school that took place at the boarding school, located near Carson City, Nevada. Centered on the Stewart school, which opened its doors to Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone students in 1890, this volume presents itself as a model of heritage management for archaeological resources located on ancestral Indigenous lands now under public legal control. The primary scholarly contribution of this coauthored volume is as a methodological case study in collaboration for researchers, Tribal Nations, and heritage practitioners. While offering an interesting archaeological case study, what is perhaps most compelling about this book is its multivocal approach to authorship. A different participant or combination of participants who come from a variety of backgrounds, including official tribal representatives, Native and non-Native fieldworkers, graduate students, and academic project directors, author each chapter.

The eight chapters of the book are loosely organized into three broad sections. The first three chapters are spent framing the Stewart Indian School archaeology project and provide an overview of its theoretical and methodological underpinnings. Chapter 2 situates the project within the subfields of Indigenous archaeology and heritage studies and introduces the concepts of governmentality and social capital, which act as narrative threads uniting each subsequent chapter. The authors contend that governmentality—a disciplinary power accomplished through government policies, laws, and economic apparatuses—provides a means of understanding the power imbalances that exist between the federal government, heritage managers, and Indigenous communities. While governmentality is presented as an explanatory framework, social capital is framed as a decolonizing mechanism. As Cowie, Teeman, and LeBlanc argue, cultivating meaningful relationships between Native American communities and archaeologists offers a means of deconstructing the codified power imbalances between these groups. Chapter 3 offers another theoretical and methodological overview, this time focusing on the anthropology of education, institutions, and childhood as well as outlining the key questions driving this line of research at the Stewart Indian School.

The second group of chapters—chapters 4, 5, and 6—are focused on the history and lived experiences of Indigenous students within the Indian education system. Drawing on archival documents and oral histories from Paiute and Western Shoshone tribal members, Chapter 4 provides a general overview of the evolution of government-sponsored education for Native youth in the state of Nevada. Building on this broader context, Chapter 5 presents a detailed account of daily life at Stewart. While highlighting the trauma and violence of this experience, the authors are also careful to demonstrate the many positive experiences relayed by former students related to sports and leisure activities. Chapter 6 complements the preceding chapters that were focused largely on documentary sources through a detailed discussion of the archaeological excavations undertaken within the original school buildings and the more than 12,000 artifacts collected. These chapters provide new insights into daily life at Stewart and leave the reader eagerly anticipating the publication of a more narrative interpretation of the materials unearthed by the field school.

The final two chapters present the authors’ reflections on the merits and methods of this project in collaborative archaeology. Chapter 7 offers an innovative blueprint for how to write collaborative monographs. In this chapter, we read the short essays of 15 participants in the field school who were asked to reflect on what they found interesting and important about their experiences. Most of these narratives emphasize the need for a “slow” approach to archaeology that affords both Native and non-Native participants the time and space to critically think through methodology and to develop new approaches in consensus. In the concluding chapter, the authors make a compelling case for the essential role that heritage management can play in redressing the myriad forms of cultural loss and political disenfranchisement that Indigenous communities have suffered under federally enforced assimilation and subsequent legislative polices around cultural heritage. When finished with this book, one is left feeling that the Stewart Indian School collaborative archaeology project has set an important precedent for ethical community-driven research that will increasingly come to characterize archaeological praxis in North America.