Epistemic Colonialism at the West Berkeley Shellmound

Abstract

This chapter illustrates epistemic colonialism in operation through a detailed examination of the legal proceedings surrounding a development proposal that threatened the West Berkeley Shellmound, a sacred and ancestral place of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation in the territory of Huchiun, on the eastern shore of what is now known as San Francisco Bay. Although the city of Berkeley supported Lisjan Nation in court, and despite the well-documented alignment between Indigenous oral scholarship and archaeological scholarship regarding the Shellmound, the US legal system still failed to protect the oldest known sacred place in the East Bay. The author argues that this failure is the result of mutually reinforcing misconceptions of Indigenous heritage in both archaeology and law, which facilitate the destruction of Indigenous heritage through development and evidently persist in practice despite recent developments in state and federal law that are intended in theory to recognize Indigenous testimony. The author focuses particularly on the problematic concept of “archaeological integrity” and its centrality within cultural heritage law. This case study offers an instructive example of how archaeological scholarship can effectively silence Indigenous oral scholarship, despite its irrelevance to Tribal understandings of heritage.