Trigger warning: This piece contains continuous swearing, discussions of colonialism, racism and academic gatekeeping, and mentions the transatlantic slave trade.

 

(Lights up. After listening to First Knowledges: Innovation, Jocelyn undergoes a painful and grotesque process and splits into two beings. Ear shattering screams are heard. Finally, it ends. Jocelyn is no more.)^[1]

(The new creatures, Annabella and Wladyslawa, enter stage right and sit on a damp bench in the middle of the sidewalk. The sky swirls, as if it could rain but something is holding it back.)

(A moment of silence passes between the two. The quiet hangs heavy in the air.)

Wladyslawa: Well that was a garbage fire.

Annabella: Wlady!

Wladyslawa: What? It was! I mean half of that was just about their personal life.

Annabella: It was kinda cute how they met.

Wladyslawa: Respectfully, if I wanted to know their life stories I would’ve attended The Love Story of Ian McNiven and Lynette Russell, not a panel about Indigenous Archaeology.

Annabella: That is one hundred percent not a panel.

Wladyslawa: I literally don’t care.

Annabella: People tell their life stories so watchers can see how you can achieve that profession and possible pathways.

Wladyslawa: I get the feeling the job market has changed a bit from 30 years ago.

Annabella: Meeting people, networking, it’s still the same principle.

Wladyslawa: Anna, the host (Larissa Behrendt) had to prompt Ian multiple times to get Ian to actually talk about his archaeological projects. And his “talk” was just cursory statements!

Annabella: Maybe he didn’t wanna get too technical.

Wladyslawa: The panel was literally about their archaeological projects.

Annabella: Yeah but we’re archaeology students, naturally we’re gonna expect more information than a member of the public.

Wladyslawa: That! That is what frustrates me about this panel. Why should you assume that the public is any less intelligent and capable than a university student? Why would you assume they only want the love story and sweeping statements? How is it public education when you assume the public can’t be educated to the same standard as you? What in the academic gatekeeping bullshit-

Annabella: You sound just like Foucault in his one lecture on-^[2]

Wladyslawa: You’re all “give them a break” until I sound like world renowned sociologist Michel Foucault. You can’t agree with an opinion until a well-known academic has said it, huh?

Annabella: For your information, I still don’t agree with you, I think you’re being way too harsh. I-

Wladyslawa: (cough cough) Foucault simp (cough cough).

(Annabella gives Wladyslawa a firm stare until she grows quiet.)

Annabella: What I was saying is that I think it’s unfair to be angry at this panel in particular for an issue shared by the broader academic sector. Gatekeeping is a norm. A questionable norm, but a norm that is usually followed. We can’t be mad at a panel for not being revolutionary.

Wladyslawa: Oh yeah? So as long as something is a norm it’s okay?

Annabella: No, but-

Wladyslawa: No no, I understand what you’re saying, the transatlantic slave trade was okay, because everyone owned slaves. It was the norm so its fine.

Annabella: I feel like a panel not staying on topic is not slavery-level bad. You’re pulling a bit of a straw man here.^[3]

Wladyslawa: It’s the principal Anna! The principal!

Annabella: Do you mean “the principle”?

Wladyslawa: Shut up! Look, it's like how everyone excuses 70s movies for being sexist because “that was just the time,” but it wasn’t! The 70s was the height of the second wave feminist movement. There were other beliefs, those filmmakers just chose to be assholes.^[4]

Annabella: Yes, but progressive beliefs are often isolated within communities. It's why our isolated country town still believes that being gay is bad and that “the migrants” are stealing their jobs. It takes a while for new ideas to develop and spread.

Wladyslawa: We’re living in the world of unlimited access to information - do a goddamn google search. Hell! In this case, there was literally a non-gatekeeping, fantastically on topic panel just before First Knowledges, fucking take notes.

Annabella: Who Gets to be Human was a difficult panel to follow. But it's a very differently framed discussion. First Knowledges: Innovation was two non-Community members talking about Indigenous Archaeology, whereas Who Gets to be Human was peers discussing the issue.^[5]

Wladyslawa: Well maybe archaeologists should start following how Community talks about their history, instead of “learning from their wisdom” but not actually changing the way they do things.

Annabella: Okay okay, that was a lot of shots fired. Everyone, she did not mean that as harshly it came across.

Wladyslawa: Yes I fucking did!

Annabella: Okay, look Wlady, we can’t just expect an entire discourse to change. Of course Indigenous Studies is ahead of archaeology, they weren’t built on a bed of colonial misuse. Archaeology was. And change is slow. Ian and Lynette, while admittedly a bit off topic, were also taking pains to explain that Indigenous communities were smart and innovative. That is the key point of a lot of Indigenous Archaeology, combatting the beliefs that Indigenous culture was “lesser” than White culture.

Wladyslawa: But by doing that, they were unendingly patronising.

Annabella: That’s a bit harsh.

Wladyslawa: Come on, you don’t think constantly disclaiming “And that’s why Indigenous Australians weren’t savages!” is a little irritating? Or, more dangerously, reinforces that belief as something that “normal” people think?

Annabella: It is a popular belief.

Wladyslawa: If the point of Indigenous Archaeology is to change the “normal” view of Indigenous history, is it not directly harmful to this goal for archaeologists to repeatedly state “Indigenous people are savages” as the normal view? Should they not just be focused on “truth-telling”, and making that truth the norm?^[6]

Annabella: You gotta keep in mind here, Wlady, that these archaeologists have been working against these normal views for decades. They’d naturally be a little defensive around them.

Wladyslawa: Oh yes what martyrs. You know, that’s what bothered me about all this as well. The sense of self-congratulation of it all: look at us, we involve Community in our research and believe Indigenous people were innovative, unlike the bad racist academics. Dude, you believe the truth. You are literally just doing your job as a historian. Listening to Community directly helps your research, it’s not philanthropy.

Annabella: Ian said that his Community connections helped his research.

Wladyslawa: Yes but did he believe it?

Annabella: Given neither of us are Ian I don’t think we can really say we know his internal beliefs. Admittedly, the lens both Larissa and him spoke from was quite flawed. It came from an assumption that everyone in the room looked down on Aboriginal people, which made the education seem like an act of patronage, from two academics that “knew better” than everyone else.

Wladyslawa: Aha! You admit it!

Annabella: Something is wrong with your desire to be right. But yes, I admit that their lens was flawed. However, their view is not unique. It’s very reconciliation-based, and has been critiqued, but only recently. Given they’re both archaeologists that have contributed to the movement for decades, it’s understandable that they would be a little out-dated. Archaeology as a discipline has always struggled to update with the times-hell, they’ve barely even started post-modernism and that’s been going on since the 90s.

Wladyslawa: We should just burn it all down.

Annabella: Oh my god you’re exhausting.

(Fortunately, Jocelyn did return in one piece after a few days, to document this discussion for you. If she had written this review, Jocelyn wouldn’t have used all the inaccessible metalanguage Wladyslawa and Annabella used, so she added some handy footnotes explaining them.)