Who Owns the Past? What the heck does that mean?

I recently received an email from reader Mark M., who asked "Who owns the past? What is the Indigenous perspective? What is the archaeologists' perspective?" I started to give my usual answer. "Well, there is no one 'indigenous' or 'archaeological' perspective; in fact, there's a huge continuum between..." and there I stopped dead, because I realized---I didn't know what Mark was asking about. Who owns the past? What do you mean 'Who owns the past?' What 'past'? What do you mean 'own'? While I could have simply said to Mark, "Define your terms, please," it strikes me that I have propounded on occasion about who 'owns the past' without being particularly specific; and if I have the nerve to call myself a 'cultural resource manager' I ought to be able to figure out what we're talking about. So, maybe it's time to think about what we mean when we ask 'Who Owns the Past?'

What is 'The Past'?

Before we get to the 'who', and the 'owns', we have to define 'the past'. It seems to me that the past is a combination of stuff (material remains, buildings, artifacts, human remains, documents, etc.) and ideas (interpretations, significance, and value). The control of those two kinds of things are what is at stake in these debates. What do we do with the stuff is at heart a legal battle, and complicated but not so complicated that it can't be resolved by careful legislation. Who shapes and gets access to the ideas about the past is less definable but no less contentious. Sure, anybody can have any idea about the past they want---look at the people who deny the Holocaust happened or the people who believe the Nazca lines were built for alien spaceships. But the privileged ideas---the ideas that go into the professional publications and into textbooks---who gets to shape those ideas? Who says when those ideas should be given to the public at large or kept private?

In addition to those sorts of questions, there are questions about what of the past deserves study, or is acceptable to study. Is a 1950s race track worthy of archaeological excavation? Should a burial mound be excavated? Should a highway be redesigned around a 1920s gymnasium or a wild rice patch sacred to a living cultural group? Who makes those decisions?

Five Questions

So, when we ask 'Who owns the past?', then, I think we're really asking five questions:

• Who decides what parts of the past should be studied/valued/protected?
• Who does the research?
• Who tells the story?
• Who gets to hear the story?
• Who gets the stuff when we're done?

That I need to mull over. Please feel free to add to this discussion in the comment box, post on the discussion board or email me at archaeology.guide@about.com.