ASU archaeology field school expands institutional capacity on Indigenous lands while descendant communities still fight for sovereignty over ancestral heritage
Original framing: “ASU field school trains the next generation of archaeologists — right in their own backyard” — bing news
Indigenous archaeologies center the principle that ancestral sites are not 'resources' for training but living landscapes with ongoing spiritual and political significance to descendant nations. The O'odham, Piipaash, and Yavapai nations have maintained continuous relationships with these lands since time immemorial, yet their epistemologies — which prioritize protection over excavation, collective stewardship over individual publication — are absent from standard field school curricula. A decolonized field school would require tribal co-direction, data sovereignty agreements, and curriculum shaped by Indigenous knowledge keepers rather than university administrators.
ASU's field school press release exemplifies how settler institutions reframe colonial continuity as educational innovation — 'training the next generation' on Indigenous lands without Indigenous governance reproduces the extractive logic that made archaeology a tool of dispossession.
The eight dimensions converge on a single structural reality: until tribal nations hold veto power over research on their ancestral territories, field schools will produce archaeologists skilled in extraction rather than accountability. The solutions exist — in tribal co-governance models, in redirected funding to THPOs, in mandatory decolonial training — but they require universities to cede authority, not expand it. The trickster's irony is that the 'backyard' was never the university's to teach in; the real field school is the one Indigenous nations have been running for millennia, protecting ancestors while institutions catch up.