S3E13: Why Protecting Cultural Sites is Important

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris ): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. Donate or text the word needles to 53555.

0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:43 - (Chris ): Nine out of ten of all major archaeological sites in the southwestern us have been looted or vandalized. About 80% of such incidents go unreported. More than 70% of US antiquities sold in overseas auctions were affiliated with southwestern tribes. Those sales are largely illegal. This is all according to savehiory.org dot, a very useful website, which is a project of the group Archaeology southwest loading of archaeological sites is especially problematic in the desert southwest, in part because the landscape has been less disturbed over the course of the last couple centuries of settler culture. Places such as coastal California or most of the United States east of the Mississippi river have been plowed over and paved and built on.

0:01:34 - (Chris ): But in the desert you still have relatively intact cultural sites, despite the fact that a majority of them have been looted or vandalized. For the last few decades, removal of artifacts or rock art or human remains or similar items from native cultural sites has been forbidden by federal laws in the US. Two laws in particular are most prominent. The Archaeological Resources Protection act, or ARPA federal law, passed in October 1979, was followed a decade later by the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation act, or NAGPRA, in 1990.

0:02:16 - (Chris ): These laws protect cultural items, artifacts, and human remains of Native Americans and Native Hawaiians from looting or vandalism. Making removal or theft of those items or those human remains a federal crime. Legality is one issue. Ethics and morality are a different issue, and the ##ems were talking about whether they're human remains or pieces of property that were once used by ancestral native people are the cultural property of the tribes that are affiliated with them, best left to their original caretakers. Privatizing them by stealing them from the tribes that are the rightful owners and putting them into private collections or sending them overseas for auction is a theft of knowledge.

0:02:56 - (Chris ): It's a violation of sovereignty, and it's just tacky. It's bad form. In this episode of 90 miles from needles, we talk about looting of archaeological resources and theft and vandalism of cultural sites. With two representatives of the group Archaeology Southwest. We had the good fortune to speak with Shannon Cowell, who works with Ark Southwest as Bureau of Indian affairs collaboration director and preservation archaeologist, and Dustin Whiting, aka Dusty, law enforcement liaison contractor with Archaeology Southwest, who, in addition to working with law enforcement groups, also monitors vandalism and looting of cultural sites.

0:03:36 - (Chris ): I think you're go goingna enjoy this episode. We talk about some very interesting things. But first, if you've been enjoying this podcast, you should know that it is made possible by listeners just like you. At the moment, we get no grants, no advertising revenue, no foundation funding, not that we'd turn any of those down. But right now this is all relatively small donations from listeners like you.

0:04:01 - (Chris ): If you wanna join the group of people that's been making these episodes of 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast possible, you can go to nine 0 mile from needles.com donate to find a couple easy ways to toss us a little cash, cover some of our expenses. We would really appreciate it, as would your fellow listeners. Now let's get to the interview with Shannon Cowell and Dustin Whiting.

0:04:26 - (Chris ): Shannon and Dustin, welcome to 90 miles from Needles. Can you introduce yourselves to our listeners?

0:04:32 - (Shannon Cowell): My name is Shannon Cowell. I am an archaeologist at Archaeology Southwest, and I work on our ARPA assistance program with Dusty. I moved around a lot throughout my early life, and I came of age and went to school and started my archaeological career in Wisconsin. Then after that, I was a nomadic shovel bun. So I traveled all over the west, worked on a ton of different projects in contract archaeology.

0:05:02 - (Shannon Cowell): So I've seen a ton of looting on the ground, and it's something they don't really teach you much about, especially in undergraduate archaeology programs. You'll get a passing reference to the Archaeological Resources Protection act, but it's not something that you have multiple days in a course teaching you about. And a lot of times we would just record looting in vandalism and passing as we record sites.

0:05:29 - (Shannon Cowell): So it was not up to any kind of standard. So I've seen this all over the west. It's really widespread. And when I saw this job opportunity at Archaeology Southwest, I leapt for it because it seemed like a chance to do something good, to preserve archaeological sites and police and protect cultural resources.

0:05:49 - (Dusty Whiting): My name is Dustin Whiting. Everybody calls me Dusty. I'm an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota. I had a pretty adventurous law enforcement career in South Dakota and Montana before I moved to the great Southwest. In 1998, I came to Arizona as a federal agent for the Bureau of Indian affairs, and my job at that time was focused on violent crime. I didn't have a lot of knowledge about the looting of archaeological sites and vandalism to petroglyph that type of stuff was new to me.

0:06:27 - (Dusty Whiting): However, I did have an opportunity and attended the federal law enforcement training centers class, if you will, regarding those issues. Have a little bit of training, a little bit of background. But it wasn't until some years later, really in 2008, while I was working on a reservation here in Arizona, that I got exposed to my first legitimate looting cases, those being violations of the Archaeological Resources Protection act under the federal law, and my responsibilityilities involving indian country and in later years here, other federal properties like the Forest Service, BLM and so forth.

0:07:13 - (Dusty Whiting): So through the ARPA work, as we would call it, I really encountered a new group of friends, federal agents, that were dedicated to investigation and enforcement of what we call resource crimes, whether ARTPA violations or woodcutting or stealing petroglyphs, things like this. What a wonderful bunch of people. They operated on a much slower, thoughtful speed than a lot of my law enforcement counterparts, and I appreciated that.

0:07:48 - (Dusty Whiting): And another important part of that new community were the archaeologists. I probably had a layman's perception of archaeology, but I certainly didn't know anything about southwest archaeology and all that was involved. So in my early years of exposure, lots and lots of reading, I spent many a long hour in my den here, just reading and catching up and beginning to understand the history and the science of Southwest archaeology, another group that we sometimes forget about. Even in a recent training and literature, I see that we neglect to acknowledge and fully involve the tribal historic preservation officers.

0:08:34 - (Dusty Whiting): For some tribes, they are referred to as cultural preservation officers, and I like that title. They get the tribal historic preservation officer title through their federal funding. That's just the way it's hed. But I'm here to tell you, every tippo, as we pronounce the acronym, is an absolutely fascinating, dedicated person who all strive continually to make me a better person in the nicest way. So I really appreciate that. I really have good friendships with those people in our area.

0:09:10 - (Dusty Whiting): And of course, we know that there has to be a very close relationship between law enforcement, the archeologists and the prosecutors, as well as the tippo folks and whatever tribal environment we're working in. So it can be an environment with different objectives and different expectations. So there has to be a lot of communication between the players and open communication and a respectfulness. And of course, like all relationships, the longer and better the relationship is, the better it becomes. It feeds on itself, it strengthens itself.

0:09:52 - (Dusty Whiting): I retired in 2012 from the federal government or from the law enforcement part, not knowing I was going to go back to work for the federal government. For a while, but that's another story for another podcast. So I started out that post retirement period with a couple of years of a study for a particular reservation here in Arizona. And we saw that the looting activity was much more widespread and much deeper into their resources than we ever imagined.

0:10:25 - (Dusty Whiting): And I had no idea that report would go to the highest echel launch of the Bureau of Indian affairs at Washington, DC, and result in some funding directed toward our investigative and damage assessment resources. Remember, the damage assessment is where we really put a dollar figure on the damage to a looted site or a vandalized site. And I was thinking this morning, unfortunately, in our modern culture, we have to put things in a dollar figure so that our criminal justice system can deal with it.

0:11:07 - (Dusty Whiting): We don't have any other way to do it. I guess she's a nice way to say it. So that partnership between the archeologists determining those figures, the law enforcement officers doing their criminal investigation, and both of them working hand in hand with the tribal officials, we have to put that package together and then present it to the prosecutors. And for better or worse, because I was pretty fluent in law enforcement and had only a limited understanding of archaeology, I pretty quickly got put in the role of being a cat herder, or as my brother calls it, the flying monkey manager trying to get to law enforcement and the archaeologists to work side by side and haveocate open communication.

0:12:02 - (Dusty Whiting): So we did that for a number of years on short term contracts, which gave me additional experience, enlarged my circle of friends in that area. But that was all part time, simple project, so to speak. And there came a time in between projects. I made a late payment on my house. This by accident. It was probably out of town or something. And holy man, did I get the longest, nastiest letter from the mortgage company than I, I've ever seen in my life. If that thing wouldn't frighten the man to death, I don't know what would.

0:12:35 - (Dusty Whiting): So I was thinking, you know, I probably maybe should get another full time job so I don't put myself in this situation again. So I looked around, and just by luck, there was an opening in one of our tribal game and fish departments, and I applied. I was fortunate to be hired and did two years full time work as a. A tribal ranger, which further endeared me to their backcoun country landscape. Over time, the ARPA assistance role started to feed on itself, and we had some good interest from good people.

0:13:11 - (Dusty Whiting): I was able to attend couple of conferences to expose me to the international aspects of their looting and sales and that type of stuff. And really, I came to understand that our looting issues and vandalism issues are not unique at all to America or North America. It's a worldwide issue. It's a worldwide problem. So the funding for some of its assistance to the Bureau of Indian affairs and the federal government in general became a little bit solidified to the point where I had to take on this role as law enforcement liaison for Archaeology Southwest. So that's been for six years now.

0:13:53 - (Dusty Whiting): I couldn't imagine a better role for myself and a better group of people to work with. In 2021, we had a terrible incident happened here in Arizona, a terrible looting case. And from that came an additional awareness, additional motivation, additional communication with folks from the Indian Police Academy at Artesia, New Mexico. And really then a good partnership between the Indian Police academy and Archeology Southwest.

0:14:27 - (Dusty Whiting): And among the things that we've been doing is to put out short term training tailored to a particular reservation or tribal group or whoever wants to listen to us, we'll put some together for them. Arizona site stewards, just another partnership we have. But we also developed a 40 hours class, 40 hours ARPA training for our tribal partners, specifically oriented toward tribal rangers, tribal law enforcement, tribal archaeologists, tribal tippos, that broad audience, and we've had that up and running now for a couple of years, been very well received.

0:15:13 - (Dusty Whiting): We may be the victims of our own success as time goes on, because it's become a very time consuming project that's involved a whole wave of new people taking that class to California, New Mexico, here in Arizona, of course. And recently as victims of our success, we've been out to Oklahoma a couple times and we're headed out there in the near future, but also not neglecting our northern responsibilities, be taking that class toings, Montana.

0:15:48 - (Dusty Whiting): And we've had the opportunity to have a lot of liaiseison with the folks in Alaska. We have some things on the drawing board with them, so very rewardning. Now, listening to some of the other podcasts, I wanted to talk about a couple things that are a little more on the emotional side. In 2009, my youngest boy was born, and a great blessing to me at 51 years of age at the time. And I highly recommend that for all my friends to father a child late in life, and there's a lot of wonder that comes out of that.

0:16:29 - (Dusty Whiting): Lots of people shake their head and they can goofy, but that's okay. So about a year little his game is Dakota. So little Dakota was about a year old picture in that infant stage, and we were doing a damage assessment on the site. They had been looted. And part of that process is to examine the back dirt or the back shell, literally shifting it through a screen and looking for evidence or artifacts, that type of stuff.

0:17:00 - (Dusty Whiting): And my partner and I were shaking or moving the screen back and forth and out of that backfill boiled up to skeleton of an infant child. And while I was just like a punch to the gut, I could picture my little boy being that size. I thought of that child being someone's beloved child. And I thought of them being buried with great reverence and sadness and probably some small artifacts and tokens and things that might have been buried with this child.

0:17:41 - (Dusty Whiting): And that was what the looters were after, where the artifacts there were buried with this beloved child. And I was so mad. And it doesn't take much for me to talk about that and get mad about that again many years later. That's just a horrific thing. I had joke, in a way, with my friends here around the showo community where I reside. If I went down the street here to the revered cholo cemetery and dug up somebody's relative to take an artifact, I'd be hung from the highest tree.

0:18:18 - (Dusty Whiting): But it goes on in indian country all the time, and nobody or very few of us really getting emotionally involved in that. So it's kind of a hard thing to understand. And then I wanted to say something about sovereignty. Indian sovereignty. Native american sovereignty. I have a concept of that, of course. But the way I try to relate it to my non native friends can be around the trespassing issues. Sholo is a nice community, and there's some moderately wealthy neighborhoods or housing developments here.

0:19:00 - (Dusty Whiting): And a lot of them border the reservation. They like having that forest in their backyard. And who wouldn't? That's absolutely wonderful. And all their properties are plastered, if you will, which obnoxious, no trespassing, keep out sign and all that kind of stuff. Literally on the other side of that sameame gravel road or smaller, somewhat subdued Fort Apache indian reservation boundary signs. No trespassing can keep out. Right.

0:19:32 - (Dusty Whiting): Those people in the. Those wealthy enclaves defend their territory to the death, literally, I'm sure, for any trespassing issue, they would quickly call the police department or the sheriff's office. But those same people walk across that road and trespass an indian country and think nothing of it. They just don't get it. There's such a dichotomy between my property and the indian property. Or people who come on to the reservation with the specific intent of looting our sites.

0:20:12 - (Dusty Whiting): It just blows me away. I don't know how to explain that. One of those things I just. I think about and I try to resolve it or let it resolve itself in my mind and every now and that I'm in a position where I can have a gentle discussion with somebody about that and I can see the wheels spinning in their head that they never thought of it like that. It just. It never occurred to him. So if I can spread that word gently, I try to do that.

0:20:42 - (Chris ): I was looking through some of the material that you provided, Shannon, and I fancy myself someone that pays attention to this kind of thing. I've had the privilege of visiting a bunch of different cultural sites, including rock art sites and similar places like that, and have read news stories about, for instance, SC Grapevine Canyon along the Colorado river. We had about a dozen years ago, a couple guys go in there with a paintball equip and desecrated some of the sites there.

0:21:11 - (Chris ): But I wasn't aware that this was as wides spread a problem as it seems to be. I heard about county commissioners in southern Utah getting busted with a bunch of pots in their living rooms and things like that. But what really is the scope of this issue? How big a problem is the theft and vandalism of archaeological resources? Question for either one of you or both of you.

0:21:36 - (Shannon Cowell): That's a great question. I'll take the first stab at it. There's no central repository or recording system for these kind of incidents. And only a small fraction of what happens gets reported. An even smaller fraction gets investigated, and then an even smaller fraction actually goes to prosecution. We have a lack of information. Everything is pretty much anecdotal. What archaeologists and what the public and what tribal members are seeing on the ground.

0:22:08 - (Shannon Cowell): I think social media has had a really negative impact. Some places are just getting loved to death. Really serious looters will share information on social media or brag about their exploits. So I think it's getting worse. We work with the Arizona site Stewart'program, which Dusty mentioned. They have people on the ground monitoring hundreds of sites all over Arizona. And there are similar programs in Utah and other states, and they only monitor a fraction of the sites. But over a 13 year period, they reported over 2000 incidents of looting and vandalism and negligent damage to sites. And in that same time period, only three felonies were prosecuted.

0:22:52 - (Shannon Cowell): Arizona. So we've got a huge disparity between how much it's happening and how much people actually see consequences'part. Of the problem and land managers and the public need to know more about how much it's happening so that we can advocate for these places so some kind of more studies are required to really understand what's going on.

0:23:16 - (Dusty Whiting): That was the perfect question for Shannon. She's really done a lot of factual statistical research that was quite surprising to a lot of us. I would add that one of the issues is always resources, always priorities. We think of violent crime, homicide, sexual assault, drug dealing, human trafficking. It's serious things, and certainly they are. But that hierarchy leaves resource crimes at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak.

0:23:49 - (Dusty Whiting): And that's just a reality. Or good law enforcement partners are been running gun mode all the time, jumping from crisis to crisis. And resource crimes require little different kind of investigation. You might gather pieces of the puzzle literally years apart. You might have people involved that you are not able to identify for years. And then that lends itself toward some cases slipping past the statute of limitations, unfortunately fairly common for us. We've got some larger time consuming investigations in cases that have exceeded that five year limit.

0:24:37 - (Dusty Whiting): And unless something pretty unique happens, all that work was for naught. And maybe we developed suspect or maybe we didn't. So we get to factor all that stuff into. And unfortunately, I think society views looting and vandalism as property crime. And so that automatically puts you lower on the totem pole. It's not a personal injury, personal violence kind of a crime. We don't have the optics, as they say nowadays, of drug dealers and large numbers of overdosers and all that kind of stuff. It's a different kind of a ball game.

0:25:17 - (Dusty Whiting): So in that way, I think law enforcement'response is a very measured response because they have other priorities. That's just the way it is.

0:25:27 - (Chris ): Leads to another question, given that seems like law enforcement folks have a tendency to take these kinds of crimes less seriously than they do murder, mayhem, the usual headline generating crimes. What precisely is the damage to native people or their tribes, their governments, cultures, etcetera? If someone steals a pot from some BLM land, why is that a big issue?

0:25:54 - (Dusty Whiting): I'm going to pass, as I say, on that question, not because it's not an issue, but because I really can't articulate that as well as some of our other tribal members have. If you get a chance to look at our savehistory.org website, there are some beautiful, well done, articulated short stories, if you will, from tribal members. I know tribal members in this area, and they just do a much better job of addressing and articulating that issue than I ever could fair enough.

0:26:32 - (Chris ): A quick interjection here. After I spoke with Shannon and Dusty, I took Dusty's advice, went to savehistory.org, and I checked out their YouTube channel, where I found a compelling statement by Ramon Reiley, the cultural resource director of the White Mountain Apache tribe. Talking about this very issue, here's Mister Riley.

0:26:51 - (Ramon Riley): Part of history is gone. Part of our teaching of the sacred site, what it means that's been taken away, destroyed, it'never be recovered again most of the time. And all those things that were taken were made with a prayer ceremonies. Sacred. White people call it sacred. We call it holy. All the things that were done on the site, artifacts, everything, even human remains and that were buried there. That's for a. The reason, you know, and if anything'taken it destroys our way are laws.

0:27:45 - (Ramon Riley): The old Apache thinking is that you leave it as it is. Leave it alone. Just hands off.

0:27:54 - (Chris ): Back to the interview.

0:27:55 - (Shannon Cowell): I'll second what Dusty said, but I've heard it compared to looting Arlington Cemetery, like he said, looting the showom cemetery, it can be like breaking and entering a home. So a lot of what I've heard indigenous people say is that it is a violent crime. There are victims. It's really harmful to people's cultural identity.

0:28:18 - (Dusty Whiting): Arlington is a good analogy, Shannon. I like that. Think of that as an attack on the american psyche. Who would put up with that? It would be outrage and uproar from our veterans and other Americans, our listeners.

0:28:34 - (Chris ): Our listeners are the kind of people that tend to spend a lot of time out in the backcount country, exploring BLM lands, picking up rocks, crawling on their stomachs to get good looks at tiny little wildflowers, things like that. And I expect that people are going to be wondering, what precisely is the boundary of resource theft type crimes? About 30 years ago, I was up in your part of the world, dusty, just on the other side of the state line, visiting a friend in Catron County, New Mexico, and she has some land there.

0:29:06 - (Chris ): And she, as I was saying goodbye, handed me a little pot sherd that she had found on her land and said, here, take this, and I still have it somewhere. Did she or I do something wrong there? Is that part of the issue, or are we looking at things that are more restricted to tribal and federal lands?

0:29:30 - (Dusty Whiting): Very good question. Very good scenario comes back to who owned the land where that potsher was taken from. America honors private land ownership to a great degree. When other countries, the government retains control of all those cultural items, regardless of whose land they are on. In Mexico, for example, all those resources belong to the federal government. But in America that's not the case. It's always a convenient thing for our looters.

0:30:03 - (Dusty Whiting): The claim that the artifacts came from private land. What did they. We don't know. And that's a hard question to ask. If you did anything wrong or she did anything wrong, it depends. There's a lot of variables.

0:30:18 - (Chris ): I guess there's the legal aspect and then there's the ethical, moral aspect.

0:30:24 - (Dusty Whiting): True. And one thing that we see and deal with in the past few years, I'm sure it's been an issue for a while or the next generation ahead of us passing away and other family members finding troves of artifacts, including human remains. They probably honestly don't know where they came from. So that's an issue out there too.

0:30:49 - (Shannon Cowell): Nowadays, again, I'll echo Dusty's sentiment that the ethical thing to do is to preserve things in place. And also I could say more about people inheriting artifacts. I keep seeing news articles about human remains showing up in pawnshops and goodwill. It's really sad. It's widespread too, like I'm a descendant of rural white communities in the south. And looting was like a cultural practice that a lot of people did, especially in the mid tw th century.

0:31:23 - (Shannon Cowell): So part of it, something to celebrate, is how far we've come. I think that cultural ideas around preserving things in place and respect for culture resources has changed in the last few decades. It's much less normal to go out and loot sites than it was a hundred years ago. So we've made really great progress, and I think we need to keep working on our relatives and our communities to respect things as they are and preserve them for future generations.

0:31:54 - (Chris ): It sounds like I'm going to have to sneak onto my friend's land and drop that potsherd back off. Good excuse to go visit. I was intrigued by something you said earlier, Dustin, about this is a worldwide problem. And as I was doing a little bit of reading of this material Shannon sent along, I couldn't help thinking of places like the British Museum and the Elgin marbles. And you have this colonialist culture mentality where the wealth of these other nations is there for your picking its part and parcel of the mindset that this land was there for the taking, even though there were people living here since time immemorial.

0:32:37 - (Chris ): Seems like just another part of that whole process of eradicating the history once you did your best to eradicate the people. Kind of thinking out loud here and having trouble forming an actual question, but maybe just leave it open for reaction to that.

0:32:56 - (Dusty Whiting): My general response would be that we can only hope for a better world by educating people. I add this a little bit from my law enforcement career where people get off track and do things that are not right. It starts at home. It starts with their families, or maybe their parents have alcohol abuse or drug addiction problem. And those young children are not living in a safe environment with adequate food and rest and nurturing, so to speak.

0:33:29 - (Dusty Whiting): And by the time they get into middle school and high school, they're starting to falter and they're academic performance, and they start hanging around with goofballs and knuckleheads who have their own issues. And pretty soon it's easy to get drunk or get high and make some more mistakes in school and maybe get a little bit of a criminal record, minor misdemeanor record. But pretty soon you're failing in school and you can't get a job and you'head down the track of alcohol and drugubishe. So you're struggling with those very basic human needs, and how are you going to make good decisions? How are you going to foster a good family down the road to ever become even considerate of or enlightened enough to think about your effect on the rest of humanity?

0:34:26 - (Dusty Whiting): You're very much focused on what's going on in your world. You know, in life's quite a. Quite an adventure. And from my perspective, at 66 years old, it's entirely different than what it was at 46 or even 56 or shouldooting me 36 and 46. Those are all totally different environments. But I enjoy working with the people now that are in their seventies and into their eighties. I spent a good part of the month last month with an 88 year old gentleman, and that guy was just as sharp as attack.

0:35:04 - (Dusty Whiting): And we have people on our team in archeology southwest in their seventies. Boy, you better not get in their way. They are energetic, smart, highly experienced, highly intelligent individuals. To me, those are the hope for humanity. If we had a world full of people like that, what a different world it would be. At the same time, I see all the media issues about crime and craziness in the country and yeah, it's just disappointing.

0:35:39 - (Dusty Whiting): So that's a difficult question that you pose. How can we influence that? I think we try to influence that by being good individuals, personally thinking about our faults and trying to correct them. And then I think the best influence any of us can have is to be a good parent, to give our kids the opportunity to have a fair start in life. I accredited. Anything I ever achieved to my parents. I had good parents and we didn't have issues at home. We had an overdose of discipline and responsibility and, you know, but that's not a magic formula either. We all know people who had a good environment and still ran off the tracks. And I've enjoyed some good long talks with friends of mine who never had a family. They were bouncedd from social services, environment foster home to foster home.

0:36:31 - (Dusty Whiting): Never knew their parents, never grew up in the same family. And they're still outstanding, educated, intelligent, caring people, which is fascinating how that worked for them. So you're asking a philosophical question. Probably don't have the answer to, but.

0:36:46 - (Chris ): Well, it was a really vague question too.

0:36:48 - (Dusty Whiting): Yeah. The answer is compassion and awareness. I might go back to my lakota virtues, the four fundamental virtues of that, of wisdom, bravery, generosity, fortitude. We think about those. That wisdom is the first to learn what's going on around you and to be courageous, have fortitude, and to be generous. All those things are together will make the world better.

0:37:19 - (Chris ): I suspect that also playing a role here is that there are people that really want to do the right thing, really appreciate native cultures, even if they're not part of one, are curious to learn more, but just don't know what's right and what's wrong in this particular area. I'm wondering, for instance, how do people who are in an antiquity shop or anything from a museum shop to a thrift store and they see a pot or a basket or something like that, how can people make sure that those were obtained ethically?

0:37:59 - (Chris ): Is, is there a way for people to do that?

0:38:02 - (Dusty Whiting): Boy, that's a hard one. Oh, you touched a little bit on the provenance of your, quite sure that your friend gave you had so hard to pin down sometimes. And of course, all those people involved in an industry out there of not wanting to know where those things came from? Pretty difficult. But by the same token, education and responsibility is a good thing out there. We have many success stories of stopping sales at auction houses and returning artifacts to try and share that type of stuff.

0:38:38 - (Dusty Whiting): A lot of that work is done very much behind the scenes by our law enforcement partners, and maybe the day will come that we can publish a little more that or summarize a little more of those success stories. But that's a new thing that's only been going on certainly within the past ten years, maybe not much more. That's a good thing going on in the background.

0:39:00 - (Chris ): The other aspect of that question is in the scenario that you mentioned earlier about people inheriting material from a departed loved one. If people find themselves in possession of a bunch of questionable objects, what's the first step that you would advise them to take?

0:39:17 - (Dusty Whiting): Try to determine where they came from. We do have situations where people have an idea where the objects were taken from. In other situations, they probably honestly have no idea. I don't know what the guidance would be on that. We'd have to find some of those smart people I know and see what they think be side story. But along that line, one of the things we did a couple of years ago now, we established that end loot toll free tip line on their save history site. And I remember when we set that up, that number is routed directly to myself and the supervisor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Cultural Resource unit. And it didn't take us a month to switch that to voicemail set up because you could not believe all the crazies and goofballs and weirdos and intoxicated and 24/7 phone calls that l solic so you pretty quickly can't deal with that realistically. So you have to hope and pray a little bit that the good people are gonna take a minute to listen to that message and then leave some rec contact or feedback inst informationation.

0:40:33 - (Dusty Whiting): And so for all the crazies out there, probably maybe even 90%, every now and then we get a good, sober, logical person who would tell us a very interesting story. And we've had. I couldn't tell you offhand, I know Shannon track us pretty closely, but we've had a lot of good law enforcement referrals that we made. And I tell that little story because you were talking about the people with artifacts.

0:41:03 - (Dusty Whiting): Just recently we had a person that contacted us and told a long story and had a pretty good idea where the items were stolen from. And so that was a good legitimate referral to law enforcement. So the agency that has jurisdiction over that area can do whatever follow up they demons is appropriate. So it does happen. There are success stories.

0:41:27 - (Chris ): How about if someone themselves is responsible for this theft, but they have a change of heart over the course of a few years? Has that kind of thing happened?

0:41:37 - (Dusty Whiting): Tell them to call me. I'll be happy to go anywhere, anytime, sit down and have coffee with them. They'I tea or whatever their preference is, and I will present them when Suc come to Jesus talk and we will get to get them introduced to the right people and hopefully they'll be off and running. Effort will be not so much for their personal salvation, but to help us dismantle these networks out there.

0:42:04 - (Dusty Whiting): We know a lot. We know about the networks. We know who the dealers are. We know who the thinkers are. We need help infiltrating those organizations.

0:42:15 - (Chris ): Interesting. Sounds like a spec script for a tv show.

0:42:19 - (Shannon Cowell): I want to see a dark winds episode on archeological resource crime.

0:42:24 - (Chris ): Is there a season three coming up? Have either of you heard?

0:42:27 - (Shannon Cowell): I hope so.

0:42:28 - (Chris ): Well, Shannon, it's been dusty and me batting back and forth and I wanna make sure that you have an opportunity to say everything you want to bring here.

0:42:37 - (Shannon Cowell): Now, I've had some time to think and I wanted to talk about your vague question, and I'll be strident because that's how I am. Looting and vandalism have been intertwined with colonialism since the beginning. Pilgrims rolled off the boat and looted graves to find food. The military looted graves and brought back human remains. So there's a long history of looting and vandalism as part of genocide and land theft.

0:43:07 - (Shannon Cowell): And I think it's also intertwined with this finder keepers mentality. And that's something that we also need to work on as a community. In addition to what Dusty said, if you appreciate indigenous culture and history, there are a lot of sanctioned ways to learn more. A lot of tribes have museums and cultural centers. You can go to pow wows. You can go to other events to learn more. You don't need to go out and desecrate village sites and resting places. And there's plenty of non damaging, nonviolent ways.

0:43:43 - (Shannon Cowell): Trying to think of your other questions now, too. One thing I wanted to talk about was we put together a children's activity book. It's got coloring pages and activities. We worked with indigenous artists from all over the southwest to create this. You can download it for free@safistory.org. Safehistory.org also provides a place to report these issues. If you inherit something and you don't know what to do with it, you witness a crime, you witness vandalism, you can go to our website and we can help you direct you into the right place.

0:44:23 - (Shannon Cowell): That hotline Dusty mentioned is 1833 and loot. And we've got other resources on the website as well where you can learn more.

0:44:33 - (Chris ): That's great. And we will have all the links and resources that have been mentioned in our show notes. This has been a really fascinating conversation. Shannon Dusty, thank you so much for joining us on 90 miles from needles.

0:44:47 - (Shannon Cowell): Thank you.

0:44:48 - (Dusty Whiting): Thank you for having us.

0:44:50 - (Chris ): Well, that wraps up another episode of 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. We have a lot of new donors to thank. Starting in chronological order since the last episode, we would like to thank Min Choi, Josh Patterson, Joshua Kirstadt, Gloria Beatle, Yvonne Lereice, William Walker, Nora Lee, Allison Bauhfner, Karen Cowen, Barrett Baumgart, Hilary Sloane, Andrew Alden, and Thomas Fjallstam.

0:45:23 - (Chris ): And to everyone who shared our appeal on social media, helped us spread the word. We appreciate you. In addition, I want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover announcer. Look for more of him in episodes to come. We have to work out that contract, but im optimistic. Thanks as well to Martin Mancha, our podcast art creator. Our theme song Moody western is by Brightside Studio. Thanks to archeology southwest for the use of their material in preparing this episode.

0:45:52 - (Chris ): And special thanks to our friend Skyler Beigt, who helped us set this whole thing up and had the idea for the episode in the first place. Arranged the meeting between archaeology southwest and us at 90 miles from needles. Thank you, Skyar, and thanks to you for listening. We will be back next week. In the meantime, please take care of yourself. The desert needs you, and we will see you at the next watering hole.

0:46:19 - (Chris ): Bye now.

0:48:28 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert advocacy meeting Network.