January 20, 2018 - Lecture at Schlitz Audubon Nature Center - Official Flier, Online Component, and Registration Instructions

The lecture for January 20th is set. Many thanks to Schlitz Audubon Nature Center and the School of Continuing and Online Learning at Cardinal Stritch University. Below you'll find an image of the flier as well as a downloadable PDF. For teachers, I've included here the PDF of the handout we'll use at the lecture. The flier and handout have instructions for accessing the online enrichment materials. We very much hope you'll participate online and in person! A video detailing registration for the free and optional online component is also posted below.

Thanks and come on out to participate in archaeological science

Click here for flier PDF to print and post.

Teachers: Click here for the handout.

 

Public Lecture and Interactive Online Seminar scheduled for January 20, 2018 at Schlitz Audubon Nature Center

Join Schlitz Audubon director of conservation and me at Schlitz Audubon Nature Center in Bayside, WI on January 20th for a discussion of preliminary findings from archaeological investigations of their lakeside property on Lake Michigan. This in-person lecture and discussion is part of a collaboration between the School of Continuing and Online Learning at Cardinal Stritch University and Schlitz Audubon Nature Center.

The in-person lecture will be supported by interactive online materials that will go live on January 6, 2018. Online participation is optional, and you do not need to participate online to attend the in person lecture. To register online, visit online.stritch.edu/academics/courses and select the red 'community partners' tab. The discussion will continue online until February 20th, 2018.

The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center is located at 1111 Brown Deer Road, Bayside (Milwaukee County), Wisconsin, 53217. The lecture is free for students showing valid IDs, adults paying admission to or members of Schlitz Audubon Nature Center.

Come out, learn, and join the conversation about local history and ecology!

Site Found! Schlitz Audubon Nature Center / Fox Point (Milwaukee), Wisconsin

Over the summer and into the autumn, Dr. Pacifico, the School of Continuing and Online Learning (SCOL), and the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center (SANC) explored the potential for a partnership.

As of October 27th we're going to move forward exploring the possibility of future and sustained archaeological research on their property as a partnership between SANC, SCOL, and MCAP.

The SANC lakeside property in Fox Point is known as the former pastureland for the Schlitz Brewing Company draft horses. However, previous to the property's acquisition by Schlitz at the end of the 19th century, the property was the site of several farmsteads settled by European immigrants from areas now part of Germany and the Netherlands. Documentary and archaeological excavation will tell us much about life for the early settlers of this area and the founding of Milwaukee.

Of course, this area was previously settled by American Indian people. The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center site is reported to have been the location of scattered campsites, villages, and workshops and so archaeological investigation on the property could extend our knowledge of local history and original residents even further into the past.

American Indian Representations of Totemism Today at Indian Summer Festival 2016

Indian Summer Festival, reportedly the largest such festival for Indian People, took place from September 9th to 11th at the Henry W. Maier Festival Park on Milwaukee's downtown lakefront. Indian Summer Festival presents a somewhat different view of American Indian life and culture compared to what I saw at the Shalom Wildlife Zoo. I was particularly gratified to see an explanation of Great Lakes Indian tribal organization that presented the structure, meaning, and history of Great Lakes Indian totemism. As an anthropologist, totemism is an important symbolic cultural system that is foundational to our field. It continually re-emerges as a pillar of anthropological insight because it links the domains of symbolic, social,animal, and material worlds. Indeed, it would seem that under American Indian clan organization, there is limited separation between the animal, material, and human worlds. They are interrelated in a symbolic social system. They were represented in a grassy knoll with installations by 'living cultures of the Great Lakes.'

At the Shalom Wildlife Zoo totemism was represented as a personal avatar. A sign near the beginning of the zoo trail explained that Indians chose a totem animal that they felt close to; then it explained that if visitors had an animal that they felt close to as a child, then that is the visitor's "true totem." The placard finishes by referencing the phenomenon in which dogs and their owners tend to look alike.

There is some reasonable truth in some of this explanation. Emile Durkheim established social anthropology with his study of totemism in the late 19th century. He explained that people do indeed have individual totems that may be animals.

But totemism as presented at Indian Summer Festival 2016 emphasizes the social and collective levels of totemism, which is also the focus of anthropological studies of totemism.

At Indian Summer Festival totemism is presented as a structure for organizing tribal society. The totemic animals symbolize the divisions within this system. More than one's name - let alone a personal totem - the presentation at Indian Summer Festival shows that the most important aspect of one's identity was once one's clan within the totemic system. "What clan are you from" one would ask, not 'what's your name?'

This explanation of the clan/totemic system explains that the totemic system and its clans define both the meaning and location of 'community' for Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and other Great Lakes Indians groups, but also the overarching structure into which these community elements fit. Totemism, then, provides a multi-level social order as well as a symbolic map for keeping that system straight in one's mind. Moreover, according to the display at Indian Summer Festival, social functions and values are connected with different clan totems.

 

This explanation of Great Lakes totemism and clan organization also accords with Carol Mason's account of Ho-Chunk (aka Winnebago) totemism. But what seems most illuminating here is the presentation of a historical representation of Great Lakes clan organization. In this image (below) we see multiple clans represented by their totem with lines connecting them through their eyes and hearts. Notice that all lines go into the crane and leave through the crane's eye as a single strand. The Cran Clan was tasked with leadership and external communication (see above). This image, then, is a pictorial representation of Chippewa (Ojibwe) tribal structure and authority. Here we might interpret this image to say that the leader of the Cran Clan - probably Oshcabawis of "Monomoneau, WI" - is the legitimate spokesperson of the Chippewa clans. We might also interpret the twin badger-like creatures as depictions of the moity system Mason attributes to Great Lakes tribes. The small badger-like creature may be an additional division - an anomaly to a perfect moiety system.

At the Indian Summer Festival Milwaukee's Indian Peoples both presented and explored the past and present of Great Lakes area tribes. Indeed, as I suggested in my Shalom Wildlife Zoo post, Indian People are plenty able to speak for themselves; and they do, for our collective benefit.

Representing Wisconsin's Past at the Shalom Wildlife Zoo

Since moving to Wisconsin I have been eagerly exploring its history through visits to historical and prehistorical sites and by reading up on Wisconsin's Indian History. Some particularly excellent resources include Robert Birmingham's Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, Lurie's Wisconsin Indians, and Carol Mason's Introduction to Wisconsin Indians: Prehistory to Statehood. Unlike Illinois and the northeastern states where I grew up, Indian sites are fairly easy to find and experience in Wisconsin. There are mounds in the State Fairgrounds near Milwaukee, as well as in Milwaukee's Lake Park. Lizard Mount County Park in Washington County also has a lovely set of trails that wind through late Woodland Period effigy mounds as well as conical mounds that may be somewhat older.

Recently my family and I visited the Shalom Wildlife Zoo not far from the Lizard Mound County Park. Shalom Wildlife Zoo's (SWZ) website explained that it features a number of learning centers and an Indian artifact museum. My plan was to go, view the animals, experience nature, and enjoy whatever exhibits they had. I was fairly sure the exhibits would be more indicative of popular conceptions of American Indians and their culture, rather than a deeply-informed presentation of Indian culture and beliefs. Indeed, the presentation of the Indian past, natural present, and popular dispositions towards learning about the past and present were clearly on display at SWZ. I found that the zoo's presentations suggest an unresolved tension between genuine interest in learning and a hostility to information. This unresolved tension indicates to me that there is public interest in knowledge of Wisconsin's natural and social history, but that expert resources are either off-putting or inaccessible. Before examining some of the features of the zoo, I also want to emphasize that I share the zoo's message that experience of the outdoors is a powerful, necessary, and a disappearing learning opportunity.

The Shalom Wildlife Zoo began in 1979 when David and Lana Fechter purchased 30 acres to preserve from development. They started a deer farm there which became popular with locals and by 2010 they registered the farm as a federally-recognized zoo that today houses over 300 animals [1][2].

The animals include rare forms of white-tailed deer, such as piebald and albino varieties, as well as elk, wolves, brown bears, and American bison. Pebbly trails wind between the animal habitats, "learning centers," physical challenges, and other features, such as the Artifact Museum. Walking the trails - or riding in a rented golf cart - is legitimately fun and enlightening.

The signage, however, present the unresolved tension between 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' as the zoo puts it. Consider the experience of visiting the artifact museum. The museum is a small cabin flanked by a half-moon-doored outhouse. The museum is labeled with a laminated sheet that announces its purpose and also advises the visitor to seek wisdom - which is of the future - and not knowledge - which is of the past. However, the museum itself presents a historical review of artifact types in laminated posters above display cases of stone, ceramic, bone, and other unprovenenced artifacts.

 

Further down the trail, an artistic architectural installation built by a college intern reinforces this hostility towards knowledge by juxtaposing "knowledge" flanked by references to books, schools, libraries, news outlets, universities, science, culture, etc., to "wisdom," which is represented only by a framed (and admittedly beautiful) vista of the farms cultivated, semi-natural landscape. The SWZ website invites school groups to make field trips here, and one wonders what message students will take away from a didactic field trip that is anti-didactic.

At left: "Window to Wisdom." At right: "Window to Knowledge"
Note 'education,' 'university,' and 'learning' located in the right hand window.

The trails between these installations explain little bits of unattributed Indian lore to visitors, some of which explains that humans are unimportant and asks 'how does it feel to be unimportant?' Other bits of lore explain the uses of local trees and additional installments present Indian dwellings and burials as reconstructed by the zoo. Despite Wisconsin's great diversity of Indian People and cultures - not to mention the vast diversity in the current borders of the US - the SWZ tends to pick 3000 BC as the prime time for the Indian artifacts it presents.

 

There are other unusual attractions at the zoo: an above ground Indian burial, a 'bison pole,' a sadder version of a supposed Indian lean-to. And it appears that there have been complaints from concerned citizens about authenticity and animal welfare here. A change.org petition called for the removal of ferrets from an outdoor ferret enclosure because the ferrets were in fact domestic ferrets meant for indoor life as pets, not the wild ferrets they were presented as. The zoo apparently rectified the situation, as noted by the petition's administrators [3].

Critiquing the zoo or debunking its presentation of Indian Peoples cannot be my purpose here because I am not a specialist in zoo ethics or North American Indians (though I am a specialist in precolonial material culture in the Western Hemisphere). Moreover, I don't intend to pick apart and research every claim. Finally, it's not for me here to defend the history of Indian Peoples, as there are plenty of Indian People who can handle that themselves.

As an expert on researching and teaching the past I am most interested in the unresolved and problematic tension between information about the past and the attitudes by which it is presented. At the SWZ the past is clearly valuable and important. However, legitimate means for learning about the past are presented as unimportant and regarded with hostility. This apparent contradiction seems to me to be symptomatic of American ambivalence to legitimate intellectual pursuits and also the failure of education specialists at all levels to foster a positive engagement with our collective pasts. 

As a public-oriented anthropologist and archaeologist the solution to me seems to call for increased public outreach by specialists as well as public support for those specialists (e.g., teachers, professors, researchers, publishers, etc.).

I share the SWZ's firm belief that the field is an invaluable teaching resource. Moreover, the experience of the field is as important to me as the systematic absorption of information about the field through note-taking, book reading, lecture hearing, and etc. But the value of field experience does not devalue systematic attempts to record, analyze, and communicate knowledge about the field and its residents - as the Shalom Wildlife Zoo might have us believe.

[1] Shalom Wildlife Zoo. "About Us" webpage. Accessed 12 September 2016.
[2] The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. "Why it's called the Shalom Zoo on Shalom Drive." Published 13 April 2016. Accessed 12 September 2016.
[3] Change.org petition."Take measures to provide a proper habitat for four domestic ferrets..." Accessed 12 September 2016.