The joy of reading about successful collaborative ventures between nondescendant researchers and community stewards can sometimes be tempered by the understanding that such accounts necessarily leave out much of the hard work and heartbreak involved. In Footprints of Hopi History, the collection of conference papers–turned-chapters weave together relationships that were hard fought and won despite the extractive history of non-Hopi research and associated erosions of sovereignty attempted by settler colonial-based government agencies and the academy. It is evident in how most contributing authors frame their contributions that decades of trust building and community-accountable research priorities were incubated slowly and with great vulnerability on both sides. The volume contributors stress again and again how much hard work it took to build those relationships and to nurture them in the kinds of long-term commitments to partnership represented within this book. Much like their approach to seeing and knowing the Hopi kukveni that the book's title references, that humility and recognition of building meaningful work together pays off in framing the excellent examples that these authors present as the fruits of their collaborations.
As a main fiber running through the work, Leigh Kuwanwisiwma's role as director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office (HCPO) binds much of the partnerships together. His first chapter in the book details his disappointments with development-centric legal frameworks. Yet, he concludes his opening with the reasons for starting a research protocol portal for parties interested in collaboration and the way it creates energetic potential for new forms of reinvestment in Hopi priorities. The rest of the volume illustrates how such promise can be fulfilling in multiple dimensions for both different sectors of Hopi society and academic productivity. This is particularly demonstrated in how Chip Colwell and Stewart Koyiyumptewa frame the work of the HCPO to set the bar high by requiring noncompeting goals for academic and applied knowledge generation. The basis of a locally accountable process, convincing the Hopi community of a given research proposal's merits is only the first step to truly informed consent.
The discussion of intellectual property outlined in the chapter by Mark Varien and coauthors is particularly generative of aspirational frameworks for building trust and accountability. Given that few in the collaboration were well versed in how to safeguard the multigenerational knowledge encoded genetically in Hopi corn, the HCPO, the Hopi Cultural Resources Advisory Task Team, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center wrestled with the legal and ethical ramifications of working with such data and methods. The ambitions of the collaborative research were to not only realize the responsibility for safeguarding the intellectual property but also act on community mandates regarding ancestors and descendants, helping Hopi to achieve their larger goals.
For the patchwork of non-Hopi agencies that attempt to regulate Hopi cultural landscapes, critical linkages remain elusive for building capacity through collaboration and meeting larger community priorities. Wesley Bernardini deftly demonstrates one such misalignment by highlighting the practices of placemaking as non-Cartesian and as outcomes of processes of movement. Experiential anchors in shifting perspective are difficult attributes to assign to the kinds of resource inventory systems in broad use across institutions. Mark Yeatt's chapter returns to Kuwanwisiwma's critique of development frameworks by highlighting the poor fit between provisions of Section 106 of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and managing traditional cultural properties. As an example of how local stewardship principles may be cut out of legal (and commensurate research) frameworks, the attributes of Hopi cultural resources in the Grand Canyon are not well accommodated by predominant historic preservation guidelines. Much like the cartographic gaze of GIS, boundaries that inscribe belonging and patrimony in regulatory frameworks can be a disservice and do potential damage to the kinds of sovereignty intrinsic to community stewardship of Hopitutskwa, as described in the chapter by the late Saul Hedquist and others. Community stewardship and interpretation of cultural landscape meanings are consequently foundational to understanding the relational linkages between the Hopi footprints illustrated in the volume and realizing the potential work that those linkages do for Hopi community priorities. The aspirational values of becoming described by Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Dennis Gilpin in their coauthored chapter is a principle that applies to realizing the potential of community-accountable work.
As someone who uses this book to teach graduate students about community-accountable archaeology, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of how well it confronts the “separate but equal” ideologies about Indigenous and scientific perspectives on the materiality of the past. Contributors such as Peter Whiteley and Gregson Schachner zero in on the importance of reconciliations between epistemological differences. They frame them as critical interventions in community-accountable archaeology, combating false compartmentalization and notions of equality. Moreover, the disruption of “traditional” intellectual genealogies created through tiered mentorship by the principal stewards of the archaeological record—the descendant communities themselves—is foundational to cultures of learning and teaching that will guide generations of local and nonlocal archaeologists toward meaningful work.
The book was first published in hardcover in 2018, and it was released in paperback in 2019, and in keeping with its commitment to bridging interests of anthropologists and of the Hopi community, the open-access e-book version is accessible online at the publisher's website.
