Latest / California Frontier / 060: Reservation Archaeology with Richard Carrico (Part 1)

Transcript

060: Reservation Archaeology with Richard Carrico (Part 1) · California Frontier

• 0:00
  Richard Carrico: You save some sites, but you have not mitigated the impacts to our culture.
• 0:05
  Richard Carrico: There's not a lot about our culture in that document.
• 0:07
  Richard Carrico: It's about arrow point types.
• 0:10
  Richard Carrico: It's about T zone brownware.
• 0:12
  Richard Carrico: It's about chipping.
• 0:13
  Richard Carrico: Where's our cosmology?
• 0:14
  Richard Carrico: Where's our death beliefs?
• 0:17
  Richard Carrico: Where's our songs?
• 0:28
  Damian Bacich: I'm here with Richard Carrico, who is, to my mind, one of the go to people we're talking about, Native peoples of California, especially Southern California, the San Diego area.
• 0:45
  Damian Bacich: I, uh, I've really wanted to talk to him for a long time and to, to hear about his expertise.
• 0:51
  Damian Bacich: So, so Richard, welcome to the California Frontier podcast, and I appreciate your taking the time to do this.
• 1:00
  Richard Carrico: Thank you for the invitation.
• 1:02
  Damian Bacich: You're quite welcome.
• 1:04
  Damian Bacich: So we mentioned before we hit record, maybe if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about your background and, uh, and then we can, we can talk about some really interesting topics.
• 1:17
  Richard Carrico: sure.
• 1:18
  Richard Carrico: Um, almost a Southern California grown boy.
• 1:22
  Richard Carrico: My family moved out here, had the good sense to move out here, when I was nine years old from Indiana.
• 1:28
  Richard Carrico: So I went through all the grade schools and middle schools and high school out here.
• 1:32
  Richard Carrico: And, If you go back to the late sixties with the Vietnam war going on and such, um, they were doing a lot of drafting of people into the army.
• 1:41
  Richard Carrico: And because I had dropped a couple of classes at a community college, I lost my educational deferment, drafted into the U S army, and I ended up serving in South Korea and made sergeant.
• 1:55
  Richard Carrico: And while I was over there, took some classes through the university of Maryland in South Korea and came home.
• 2:02
  Richard Carrico: And I was going to be a medieval Renaissance historian, uh, thinking I might go into teaching, uh, with that.
• 2:08
  Richard Carrico: That was my, my focal point.
• 2:11
  Richard Carrico: And, you know, life has lots of twists and turns in it.
• 2:13
  Richard Carrico: And the twist and turn that got me into archaeology was I got a transcript.
• 2:18
  Richard Carrico: Of course, back then they were paper.
• 2:20
  Richard Carrico: It wasn't on computer.
• 2:22
  Richard Carrico: And it came in the mail and it said, yeah, you thought you were going to graduate, but you're not.
• 2:26
  Richard Carrico: You need three more units, uh, besides the six that you were going to take.
• 2:30
  Richard Carrico: And the only class that was open was a Saturday class in archaeology.
• 2:35
  Richard Carrico: I'm not sure I could spell it, but it was open and I took it and it was with a professor that became my mentor, Dr.
• 2:45
  Richard Carrico: Paul Wiesel from San Diego State, who was mainly known for historic archaeology and his work in the southwest in Arizona.
• 2:53
  Richard Carrico: And it was a prehistoric contact site out in Spring Valley, east of San Diego State.
• 3:00
  Richard Carrico: And it was a village, Kumeyaay village called Nete, or Mete.
• 3:04
  Richard Carrico: And that was my beginning.
• 3:05
  Richard Carrico: And the first four or five weeks, I really got into it because I had some mapping skills and I was pretty meticulous and took good notes and really got along with the professor.
• 3:17
  Richard Carrico: He kind of liked me cause I was a couple of years older than most of the students at the time.
• 3:22
  Richard Carrico: He did not like my ponytail.
• 3:24
  Richard Carrico: He was a very conservative Republican.
• 3:26
  Richard Carrico: And that's, that's, that just wasn't.
• 3:29
  Richard Carrico: Didn't fit his, uh, his, his pattern of life, if you will.
• 3:33
  Richard Carrico: But by about the sixth week, uh, I was digging and I was about a meter, meter and a half down.
• 3:38
  Richard Carrico: And I found a very large sherd of a Kumeyaay Orya, so the side of a pot, basically a Tizon brown ware pot.
• 3:46
  Richard Carrico: And he came by and asked me about it and said, you know, did you measure it and weigh it and look for temper and do all these things?
• 3:54
  Richard Carrico: And I said, yep.
• 3:55
  Richard Carrico: And then.
• 3:57
  Richard Carrico: He kind of shocked me.
• 3:58
  Richard Carrico: He said, well, did you close your eyes and rub the inside of it?
• 4:03
  Richard Carrico: And I thought that's kind of fuzzy, was he?
• 4:05
  Richard Carrico: But okay.
• 4:06
  Richard Carrico: I said, no, no, I didn't.
• 4:08
  Richard Carrico: He said, we need to do that.
• 4:09
  Richard Carrico: So I did.
• 4:10
  Richard Carrico: And he said, what do you feel?
• 4:12
  Richard Carrico: And I feel, I said, well, I'm feeling some really nice little indentations.
• 4:16
  Richard Carrico: And he says, well, Richard, those indentations were made by the woman that made that pot 900 years ago or so.
• 4:23
  Richard Carrico: She used it.
• 4:24
  Richard Carrico: It broke, and you're the next person who talked, who touched it.
• 4:28
  Richard Carrico: So, Monday I went back and changed my major.
• 4:32
  Richard Carrico: I finished up my Renaissance degree in History, and then took my degree in Anthropology.
• 4:38
  Richard Carrico: So, the lack of a class, and then finding that shirt, and then Dr.
• 4:43
  Richard Carrico: Rizzo encouraging me, changed my life.
• 4:48
  Richard Carrico: Here I am.
• 4:49
  Damian Bacich: Well, and so that started a, a long career in archaeology.
• 4:54
  Damian Bacich: What, what happened after that?
• 4:56
  Damian Bacich: How did you become a professional archaeologist?
• 5:01
  Richard Carrico: Well, timing sometimes is everything also, and I was, I was staying at the Bancroft ranch house and finished my BA in anthropology after my BA in history, and I ultimately was the director at the, at the Bancroft ranch house, um, contact site.
• 5:19
  Richard Carrico: And at some point, Paul came to me and said.
• 5:22
  Richard Carrico: As you go on to the graduate program, you cannot stay here at the site.
• 5:27
  Richard Carrico: You have to go change sites.
• 5:29
  Richard Carrico: So Paul was also running at the same time, which I can't imagine now having run field schools, two field schools at the same time, the Bancroft Ranch House, and then the Presidio of San Diego above Old Town.
• 5:42
  Richard Carrico: So he forced me to go to the Presidio of San Diego and excavate there.
• 5:50
  Richard Carrico: And again, sort of the serendipity side of it, I really got into that because we were excavating the chapel, which was actually the first mission and out to California.
• 6:02
  Richard Carrico: Here in San Diego, if you take a tour, they take you to Mission Valley to where the mission is today.
• 6:07
  Richard Carrico: And it's very photogenic and postcard like and all that.
• 6:11
  Richard Carrico: And they'll tell you that's the first mission.
• 6:14
  Richard Carrico: And there's a half truth there.
• 6:16
  Richard Carrico: The first mission was on Presidio Hill.
• 6:19
  Richard Carrico: So again, under his guidance, I really got into historic archaeology and got Mayolica because of Ron May and doing research and the pottery of the Spanish period.
• 6:33
  Richard Carrico: We excavated a lot of burials, a lot being about 120 out of the 220 people buried there, and I started doing research, and this was before everything was digitized.
• 6:46
  Richard Carrico: I started doing research on the mission records for the deaths and the baptisms at the Presidio.
• 6:52
  Richard Carrico: Specific to the Presidio.
• 6:55
  Richard Carrico: So, as you kind of mentioned, I got into this field and it grew and grew.
• 6:59
  Richard Carrico: And 30, 40 years later, I'm able now to reconstruct the men and the women and the children who lived at the Presidio.
• 7:06
  Richard Carrico: Lived there, died there.
• 7:08
  Richard Carrico: You had soldiers, you had merchants, you had Native Americans, women who moved in and married soldiers.
• 7:15
  Richard Carrico: So I spent the next three years there and became ultimately the director of the Presidio right before we closed it in 1976.
• 7:25
  Richard Carrico: Just about that time, 1976, the California Environmental Quality Act had been passed a few years before, and an environmental consulting firm, a private commercial firm, called up the school.
• 7:40
  Richard Carrico: and said we'd like to hire an archaeologist or interview some archaeologists to come into the commercial side rather than the purely academic side.
• 7:47
  Richard Carrico: I interviewed and got the job and we took a company from nine people to about 80 people, built it up and ultimately sold it off.
• 7:59
  Richard Carrico: So for the next 14, 15, 18 years most of my work except for writing some articles was in the commercial side, the cultural resource management side.
• 8:11
  Richard Carrico: rather than the academic side, except I did keep researching and writing articles.
• 8:16
  Richard Carrico: And in about 1990, 1989, San Diego State contacted me where I'd taken my, uh, my two BAs and said, would you come and teach in the Department of American Indian Studies?
• 8:30
  Richard Carrico: Because we think you have that, that ability to both do Native Americans and, and also, um, historic archaeology and tie all that in.
• 8:39
  Richard Carrico: So, from 1991 until about 2010, 2015, I taught part time and kept running environmental consulting firms and kept building them up and they would be sold and then, On and on and on.
• 8:55
  Richard Carrico: So I had that great opportunity to archaeologically excavate literally hundreds of sites in San Diego County and deal with some really interesting people.
• 9:05
  Richard Carrico: And part of my bent was on prehistoric, pre contact site, was to contact the Native Americans before it was legally required.
• 9:14
  Richard Carrico: And I'm not tooting my own horn, other people were doing this as well.
• 9:18
  Richard Carrico: And then in about 2015.
• 9:22
  Richard Carrico: Uh, I sold the last business along with my business partner, Brian Mooney and retired from doing cultural resource management on a big scale.
• 9:30
  Richard Carrico: San Diego State brought me on full time and I just retired last December.
• 9:35
  Richard Carrico: So that's, that's a condensed version of Richard with a foot in the CRM world, which some people kind of think of as prostitution.
• 9:45
  Richard Carrico: You're out there being paid instead of doing academic research and blah blah blah.
• 9:49
  Richard Carrico: And another foot in the academic world teaching through the Department of American Indian History.
• 9:54
  Richard Carrico: And it's been a good ride.
• 9:56
  Richard Carrico: Been a great ride.
• 9:56
  Richard Carrico: And then Over the years, my focus switched away from pre contact or prehistoric archaeology, in part because there were a lot of good people doing very good work, but I thought it was too materialistic, meaning they were studying material culture a lot and getting into ceramic wares and arrowpoint types, but they weren't seeing the people.
• 10:21
  Richard Carrico: They didn't understand that, to my view, this man made this point, this woman made this Orya, or to tell you about them.
• 10:29
  Richard Carrico: Historic archaeology and mission archaeology, presidio archaeology, allowed me more of a chance to do that because I have written records that went with it and my ability to read 18th century Spanish was reasonably good.
• 10:43
  Richard Carrico: So my career academically went that way and that's, that's my focus right now.
• 10:47
  Richard Carrico: And I've got a contract to write a book for the pop, a popular book for the lay public on the history of the presidio and its focus is who was there.
• 10:57
  Richard Carrico: And what were they doing?
• 10:58
  Damian Bacich: Oh, that'll be really great.
• 11:00
  Damian Bacich: I'll look forward to that and I'm sure a lot of people will.
• 11:03
  Damian Bacich: You know that it caught my attention that you mentioned that these CRM companies you work for, you built them up and sold them as businesses.
• 11:15
  Damian Bacich: I don't, I don't know if, if I've heard that a lot from other people, but that's really interesting.
• 11:21
  Damian Bacich: Was that something that you you kind of fell into or did you have that in your mind?
• 11:28
  Damian Bacich: And you know, there's a little bit of a detour, but did you have that idea that, okay, this is going to be a business that later, uh, becomes an asset that I can sell and start another
• 11:39
  Richard Carrico: No, not at all.
• 11:40
  Richard Carrico: Um, my, my colleagues would tell you that I've always had sort of a business side to me, if you will.
• 11:47
  Richard Carrico: And so when, when CRM was first starting, San Diego State, like, like some other universities actually did cultural resource work, like Sonoma State's pretty famous for that, actually.
• 11:59
  Richard Carrico: And San Diego State started doing that through Pauly Zell as a.
• 12:03
  Richard Carrico: As a sidelight of anthropology and most anthropologists archaeologists doing that for the school wanted to go excavate, they wanted to go survey, maybe write a report.
• 12:15
  Richard Carrico: I love writing, and I love giving presentations.
• 12:19
  Richard Carrico: And so that that drug me into making presentations to city councils and to boards of supervisors and at the state level, trying to represent archaeology is something that needed to be studied and saved.
• 12:30
  Richard Carrico: Thank you very much.
• 12:31
  Richard Carrico: So the people I worked with that were above me in the company said, you have a business side to you.
• 12:37
  Richard Carrico: You know, you have that ability to go out there and to the lay public and talk to them about why these things should be saved and developers need to pay for it and all that.
• 12:46
  Richard Carrico: And as a result of that, I think.
• 12:49
  Richard Carrico: I got promoted a lot at the first company and became essentially a vice president, although I never had a card that said that.
• 12:56
  Richard Carrico: It said director of cultural resources.
• 12:58
  Richard Carrico: I didn't want to be a vice president because you had to wear a suit and a yellow tie, right?
• 13:04
  Richard Carrico: Um, so I think a whole, whole series of things led to me.
• 13:09
  Richard Carrico: helping develop the companies and seeing a bigger view and kind of going out in the public and and recruiting people to join the firm.
• 13:18
  Richard Carrico: So I certainly didn't sit down and say, I think I'm going to grow this to X numbers and then be part of selling the company.
• 13:24
  Richard Carrico: I, it never dawned on me until many years later about selling a company.
• 13:30
  Richard Carrico: I was just going to do my job and hire a good archaeologist and do good archaeology.
• 13:34
  Richard Carrico: And then when one of my bosses came to me and said, Hey, we're about to sell the company.
• 13:41
  Richard Carrico: What do you think about that?
• 13:43
  Richard Carrico: And I said, well, I've got stock in the company that should be good for me, but it is a, is it a company that's going to do good environmental work?
• 13:50
  Richard Carrico: Or is this going to be some equity company that's just going to gobble us up?
• 13:54
  Richard Carrico: Turned out it was a very good company.
• 13:56
  Richard Carrico: We got along, they promoted me and it just kept going on like that.
• 14:00
  Richard Carrico: So for years, I never left my office.
• 14:04
  Richard Carrico: It's just the name on the door outside kept changing in terms of who owned us and all of that.
• 14:11
  Richard Carrico: So I.
• 14:13
  Richard Carrico: You know, I have invested in the stock market over the years and I do follow business.
• 14:17
  Richard Carrico: So maybe that was part of it too.
• 14:19
  Richard Carrico: I wasn't just a, you know, a dig bum or a person who was just focused on a very narrow channel.
• 14:25
  Richard Carrico: And I think it paid off over the years.
• 14:27
  Richard Carrico: Yeah.
• 14:28
  Richard Carrico: Yeah.
• 14:28
  Damian Bacich: Well, that's sort of a tangent that I get off on.
• 14:31
  Damian Bacich: Um, I was, I was in between college and graduate school.
• 14:39
  Damian Bacich: You know, I worked for several years in a company, uh, doing marketing and import export, et cetera.
• 14:45
  Damian Bacich: And then when I went back to graduate school, I, I had, uh, this mentality, I think that that also helped me in dealing with my professors, for example, that I saw them from a certain standpoint as clients that I didn't tend to get too drawn into the personalities or the personality conflicts of conflicts, etc.
• 15:10
  Damian Bacich: It was more sort of, okay, this person.
• 15:12
  Damian Bacich: wants this from me.
• 15:14
  Damian Bacich: I've got to deliver it on time.
• 15:17
  Damian Bacich: And in the end, they will give me what I'm looking for.
• 15:21
  Damian Bacich: So, uh, I, I think that, that idea of also going back to, you know, your studies after having been out in the world a little while also, also helps give you a different, a different perspective on things, maybe a broader perspective.
• 15:36
  Damian Bacich: So that's very interesting.
• 15:38
  Richard Carrico: Yeah, I think it does.
• 15:40
  Richard Carrico: And I felt for years until about 15 years ago, maybe 10, I felt, and some of my colleagues felt that I wasn't, I wasn't writing enough academic articles.
• 15:52
  Richard Carrico: I was giving papers all over the place because I like to do that.
• 15:55
  Richard Carrico: And, you know, you may have noticed, I rarely write a paper like the old school and then read the paper.
• 16:04
  Richard Carrico: In fact, I don't like to read papers and I generally don't like people who do read papers because I don't think they bring it to life, but if that's their That's fine.
• 16:14
  Richard Carrico: So for years, you know, I kept writing papers and putting them aside and publishing occasionally, but it was more about going to the AAAs or the SCAs or Historic Archaeology Conferences and giving the paper.
• 16:28
  Richard Carrico: And so when it came time to actually now start publishing more of them, I already had the paper somewhere or pieces of the paper, right?
• 16:36
  Richard Carrico: And so that's more what i've devoted my attention to so I have probably published more In the last 10 years than I did in the previous 20 Because I wasn't writing crm reports and managing 80 people and and the last company We had six companies all over America, including in Hawaii.
• 16:56
  Richard Carrico: And so I was all over the place, which I enjoyed.
• 16:59
  Richard Carrico: And I really liked working for instance, with Hawaiian people or Chamorro people or Zuni or whoever.
• 17:05
  Richard Carrico: Cause again, it brought a bigger scope to, to my view.
• 17:09
  Richard Carrico: And there's a tendency to be provincial.
• 17:12
  Richard Carrico: I some, I think sometimes for all of us, we kind of get locked into what we're comfortable with and that's what you see.
• 17:18
  Richard Carrico: But if you go see another culture or a different mission in Arizona, that brings a different, when you come back to San Diego and look at what you're doing here, you go, Oh, well, San Javier de Bach was like this, or this culture did this.
• 17:33
  Richard Carrico: So that's, that's, I'm kind of a sponge that way.
• 17:36
  Richard Carrico: And then I think it's helped me in my research.
• 17:38
  Richard Carrico: Yeah.
• 17:39
  Damian Bacich: I feel the same way.
• 17:41
  Damian Bacich: I'm glad.
• 17:41
  Damian Bacich: It gives me hope.
• 17:42
  Damian Bacich: I have a ton of, um, conference papers, uh, piled up that, um, that now that I'm no longer department chair, I'm hoping I'll have more time to, to, you know, shape into publishable, uh, articles and, and get them out there.
• 17:59
  Damian Bacich: But I was wondering, so you, you know, transitioning into the topic we were going to discuss, you really have, at least I, I know you from your work with the Kumeyaay people in, in San Diego.
• 18:12
  Damian Bacich: Um, can you talk a little bit about how that, uh, developed?
• 18:15
  Damian Bacich: I mean, you, you mentioned working on the Presidio and, um, and the different people there.
• 18:24
  Damian Bacich: So how did that evolve?
• 18:28
  Richard Carrico: With working with the native people.
• 18:31
  Richard Carrico: Yeah.
• 18:32
  Richard Carrico: Um, it's a little embarrassing, not for me, but when I was starting my master's thesis, which turned into my book, Strangers in a Stolen Land, um, there were some artifacts from the Bancroft Ranch House site that were very unusual.
• 18:52
  Richard Carrico: Very unusual.
• 18:53
  Richard Carrico: It turned out they were effigies.
• 18:56
  Damian Bacich: to interrupt, can you just give a little background on the Bancroft Ranch House, what it is, um, and what that site is?
• 19:03
  Richard Carrico: Sure.
• 19:05
  Richard Carrico: Sure.
• 19:05
  Richard Carrico: It's, it's, it was a village, uh, occupied by the Kumeyaay people, the local people.
• 19:12
  Richard Carrico: So the people here in San Diego County, south of Carlsbad, south of Escondido, are the Kumeyaay, all the way down into Baja California to Santo Tomas and arguably to the Colorado River.
• 19:24
  Richard Carrico: And this village was occupied for at least 4, 500 years.
• 19:28
  Richard Carrico: That's the earliest date we got out of it.
• 19:31
  Richard Carrico: It may not have been a village 4, 500 years ago, but it was a major settlement.
• 19:35
  Richard Carrico: Had a big spring, which was still flowing, still flows.
• 19:39
  Richard Carrico: And by 2, 000 years ago, 1, 000 years ago, probably had 300 or 400 people living there in a sheltered valley.
• 19:47
  Richard Carrico: And a person built a house on it.
• 19:51
  Richard Carrico: Um, a guy named Porter, back in the 1850s, an adobe house, and used a lot of native workers to build his house, but also to farm his extensive farmland.
• 20:02
  Richard Carrico: He had 160 acres, a quarter of a square mile.
• 20:06
  Richard Carrico: And the beauty of Mr.
• 20:07
  Richard Carrico: Porter was that he kept diaries and wrote things in the San Diego newspaper in the 1850s and 60s about his Kumeyaay workers.
• 20:16
  Richard Carrico: They were called Digenio at the time, but his Dieguiño workers.
• 20:19
  Richard Carrico: So it's sort of a one off ethnographic study in that sense.
• 20:24
  Richard Carrico: He's talking about the people around him.
• 20:26
  Richard Carrico: And then later in time, H.
• 20:30
  Richard Carrico: H.
• 20:30
  Richard Carrico: Bancroft of the Bancroft Library and the Bancroft Histories of California,
• 20:35
  Damian Bacich: Bancroft, okay.
• 20:38
  Richard Carrico: That's why it's called the Bancroft Ranch House and the Bancroft Homestead, and he didn't live there permanently.
• 20:44
  Richard Carrico: He had very nice houses in San Francisco and Berkeley, but he did come down there and write.
• 20:50
  Richard Carrico: So actually some of the series that we're all familiar with, those multi volumes of the Bancroft Histories of California were actually written in Spring Valley at the Bancroft Ranch House.
• 21:01
  Richard Carrico: So, ultimately, things got developed around it, Bancroft moved on, but it got preserved, the house, and some of the acreage, about 20 acres, because the Historical Society took it over.
• 21:17
  Richard Carrico: It got registered on the National Register of Historic Places, for both prehistoric and historic, because of the house, because of Mr.
• 21:23
  Richard Carrico: Bancroft, and In about 1968, I believe it was, 1970, San Diego State College, at the time San Diego State College, started a field school there and it ran all the way into the 70s and 80s.
• 21:39
  Richard Carrico: So, a lot of excavation was done there and, and my involvement started in probably 74.
• 21:48
  Richard Carrico: Uh, when I needed those units to graduate.
• 21:51
  Richard Carrico: And at one point, I found a clay, some clay pieces that were neither a pot, a vessel, nor a smoking pipe, because the Kumeyaay made what we call bow, human bow pipes out of clay, it wasn't shaped right for any of those things.
• 22:07
  Richard Carrico: And.
• 22:08
  Richard Carrico: I went to a professor, Paul, Paul Ezell was on sabbatical, I think.
• 22:13
  Richard Carrico: So I went to another professor in the anthropology department at San Diego state, and this was not his specialty, this area, but he was a good archeologist.
• 22:22
  Richard Carrico: And I said, maybe I should, you know, go up to the reservation and talk to some of the native people about this.
• 22:30
  Richard Carrico: And his answer was, well, Richard, I don't think that's of any value because the Indians on the reservation are just Mexicans with feathers.
• 22:38
  Richard Carrico: Exactly.
• 22:42
  Richard Carrico: So I said, yeah, thanks for that.
• 22:45
  Richard Carrico: So I got in my Jeep and I actually went up to one of the reservations and I, I generally knew somebody up there through someone else, through a Mexican gardener that I knew, not my gardener, but a gardener.
• 22:58
  Richard Carrico: And he was related to the Kumeyaay.
• 23:00
  Richard Carrico: So he did introduce me to one person.
• 23:02
  Richard Carrico: So I don't want you to think I just walked into a reservation and knocked on a door and said, Hey, what's, what's these pieces?
• 23:08
  Richard Carrico: But he did fix me up with an elder, um, a guy named Clarence Brown, who's kind of ornery sometimes, and we got along.
• 23:18
  Richard Carrico: And, uh, the first day I went up, I didn't take the pieces of pottery with me.
• 23:25
  Richard Carrico: I simply said, I'm an archaeologist.
• 23:26
  Richard Carrico: We're digging down in Spring Valley.
• 23:29
  Richard Carrico: I'd like to talk to you.
• 23:30
  Richard Carrico: And he says, Oh, you're one of those anthropologists and you want to come and interview me and then you're going to write some stuff up and we'll, I'll never hear back from you.
• 23:39
  Richard Carrico: And I go, no, I guarantee you, you will hear back from me.
• 23:43
  Richard Carrico: And yes, I would like to write some stuff up.
• 23:45
  Richard Carrico: So the next time I brought the little pieces with me.
• 23:49
  Richard Carrico: And he said, well, those are death effigies.
• 23:52
  Richard Carrico: Those are clay death effigies, and you shouldn't be having those.
• 23:55
  Richard Carrico: You shouldn't be touching those.
• 23:57
  Richard Carrico: I want to stress, this is back in 1974, 75, when people did not consult a lot with Native Americans in our field, my field, and And the whole thing about spiritualism or sacredness of objects was somewhat new to some anthropologists in California.
• 24:16
  Richard Carrico: So he said, you need to rebury those.
• 24:19
  Richard Carrico: And I said, well, I, I can't rebury them because it's part of San Diego State and all that.
• 24:24
  Richard Carrico: So they ultimately, by the way, did get reburied, but that was the beginning.
• 24:29
  Richard Carrico: And I got along with him.
• 24:31
  Richard Carrico: I was told, this all sounds like J.
• 24:34
  Richard Carrico: P.
• 24:34
  Richard Carrico: Harrington or, or Margaret Mead or something.
• 24:37
  Richard Carrico: I was told next time you go up, by not Clarence, but by his daughter, you should bring some cigarettes.
• 24:44
  Richard Carrico: You should bring a carton of Marlboro Reds.
• 24:47
  Richard Carrico: That's what Clarence would like.
• 24:49
  Richard Carrico: And then you'll get along better.
• 24:52
  Richard Carrico: So I did.
• 24:53
  Richard Carrico: So it was this whole exchange of gift giving.
• 24:56
  Richard Carrico: And then over the years, he would give me gifts and all that.
• 24:58
  Richard Carrico: So that was the beginning of it.
• 25:00
  Richard Carrico: And anthropologically, I learned that I could talk to Clarence Brown, I could talk to his family, I could talk to his friends and his cohorts, and they would share a lot of information.
• 25:13
  Richard Carrico: And then in return, I shared information with them, some articles that people had written.
• 25:18
  Richard Carrico: based on studies on their reservation that they'd never seen.
• 25:22
  Richard Carrico: But what I also learned was, if you were a friend of Clarence Brown, then you were not a friend of another family, because they didn't like the Clarence Brown family on the reservation.
• 25:32
  Richard Carrico: So that kind of brought the anthropology home to me, that you had clans, and you had families, and you had lineages, and just because Clarence Brown likes you and talks to you, The next time you're at a meeting and you try to talk to somebody else, they're likely to say, well, you've been hanging out with Clarence.
• 25:51
  Richard Carrico: I don't want to talk to you.
• 25:53
  Richard Carrico: Or just the opposite.
• 25:55
  Richard Carrico: Oh, Clarence Brown's been filling your head full of shit.
• 25:57
  Richard Carrico: So talk to me and I'll tell you the truth about our people.
• 26:01
  Richard Carrico: That's how I got into it.
• 26:03
  Damian Bacich: So did you, did you have to learn, kind of diplomatic skills in order to, uh, be able to, to continue your work?
• 26:14
  Damian Bacich: Hmm.
• 26:16
  Richard Carrico: I think I did.
• 26:16
  Richard Carrico: I think, I think I already had a set of skills having, I think being a sergeant in the army helped me.
• 26:22
  Richard Carrico: I hated the draft, right?
• 26:24
  Richard Carrico: I was not a, um, I was not one way or the other about the Vietnam War at that part, at that time.
• 26:31
  Richard Carrico: So I think that was part of it.
• 26:32
  Richard Carrico: And then being an archaeologist who was hiring and using people in the field and trying to train them at the same time more than they, Got in a field school.
• 26:43
  Richard Carrico: You have to be diplomatic about that.
• 26:45
  Richard Carrico: And even in the 70s, the role of gender and, and all of that.
• 26:50
  Richard Carrico: So I think I was kind of prepared for that.
• 26:52
  Richard Carrico: And, and, you know, having, having dealt with a lot of different people in a lot of different situations, but it was different because I didn't understand those differences quite As well as I should have.
• 27:07
  Richard Carrico: So in the business world, I knew that, you know, someone from the Bureau of Land Management might not like somebody from the Forest Service.
• 27:14
  Richard Carrico: And I could be a mediator, but that was more about policy and, and ego and all that were, is what the tribal members, some of these animosities were deep seated.
• 27:25
  Richard Carrico: They went back hundreds of years.
• 27:29
  Richard Carrico: And so it was a different approach that I had to make, and I had to back off.
• 27:34
  Richard Carrico: And not talk so much and just listen.
• 27:37
  Richard Carrico: I think a lot of anthropologists have learned that over the years.
• 27:40
  Richard Carrico: We're supposed to be listeners.
• 27:42
  Richard Carrico: And then if we can gain something from it, interpret something and give something back to the people.
• 27:47
  Richard Carrico: But our tendency is always wanting to talk, you know, and sometimes unfortunately talk over the people.
• 27:54
  Richard Carrico: So it was, it was a great learning experience for me.
• 27:56
  Richard Carrico: And over the years now, I've worked a lot with the Kumeyaay people.
• 28:01
  Richard Carrico: Um, I just finished a, uh, 350 page ethnography of the Kumeyaay Indians.
• 28:07
  Richard Carrico: So it's a standalone document and I was paid for it.
• 28:13
  Richard Carrico: Because of a wind turbine project, but it was, it was sponsored by the Native Americans.
• 28:19
  Richard Carrico: When asked, what do you want to do for mitigation for these wind turbines?
• 28:24
  Richard Carrico: All this archaeology was done, and again, I'm not knocking archaeology, all this archaeology was done.
• 28:30
  Richard Carrico: A lot of sites were recorded out in the California desert where these wind turbines went.
• 28:34
  Richard Carrico: They were largely preserved, but at a meeting to kind of close the documentation for Section 106 and the federal compliance, I went to, I was invited to go there, two of the Native American bands said, hey, good archaeology, you spent 1.
• 28:50
  Richard Carrico: 1 million dollars, this is 15 years ago, 1.
• 28:53
  Richard Carrico: 1 million dollars.
• 28:55
  Richard Carrico: You save some sites, but you have not mitigated the impacts to our culture.
• 29:01
  Richard Carrico: There's not a lot about our culture in that document.
• 29:03
  Richard Carrico: It's about arrow point types.
• 29:05
  Richard Carrico: It's about T zone brownware.
• 29:07
  Richard Carrico: It's about chipping.
• 29:08
  Richard Carrico: Where's our cosmology?
• 29:10
  Richard Carrico: Where's our death beliefs?
• 29:13
  Richard Carrico: Where's our songs?
• 29:14
  Richard Carrico: Right?
• 29:15
  Richard Carrico: And so they forced the BLM, Bureau of Land Management, to fund, through Pattern Energy, an ethnographic study.
• 29:23
  Richard Carrico: And it was supposed to be a three year project, took me seven, and that document was neat for me because I got to go and deal with all of the nine Kumeyaay reservations and go to tribal meetings and do some sweats.
• 29:39
  Richard Carrico: I had to go do some sweats, go to the sweat lodge with them.
• 29:42
  Richard Carrico: I called it, let's kill the archaeologist, you know, let's steam the archaeologist to death.
• 29:49
  Richard Carrico: But I learned a lot from that.
• 29:50
  Richard Carrico: It's one thing to read about a sweat and it's another to go to one, especially when it's not a commercial sweat.
• 29:56
  Richard Carrico: It's not some new age person burning white sage or something.
• 30:00
  Richard Carrico: So I point out the ethnographic study, even though my colleague, uh, Jerome Levy would say, well, it's not really an ethnography because you didn't, it's not based just on interviews.
• 30:13
  Richard Carrico: You also took a lot of the old ethnographies from Harrington and Du Bois and people and pulled that together.
• 30:19
  Richard Carrico: So maybe you want to call it an ethnographic overview or an ethnographic something, but not an ethnography.
• 30:25
  Richard Carrico: And I agree with him.
• 30:27
  Richard Carrico: But I point, I point that study out because I think if I hadn't been getting along with, with the native people for 30 years, certain doors wouldn't have opened up and people wouldn't have let me do video with them, but I also.
• 30:41
  Richard Carrico: Want you and your, and your viewers to know.
• 30:43
  Richard Carrico: That doesn't mean every Native American on, on every reservation in San Diego County likes me or respects me or trust me because, you know, we all make mistakes.
• 30:52
  Richard Carrico: You talk to the wrong family.
• 30:54
  Richard Carrico: Back in 1989 when I excavated part of Mission San Diego De Aala, uh, for a project and found 60 burials, almost all of whom were kumai or Native American.
• 31:06
  Richard Carrico: I was persona non grata on some of the reservations.
• 31:10
  Richard Carrico: I was desecrating graves and people still hold that against me.
• 31:14
  Richard Carrico: So it's not like I'm some white Messiah that all the Native Americans talk to.
• 31:19
  Richard Carrico: And it's not, that's not possible.
• 31:31
  I hope you enjoyed this episode of the California Frontier Show.
• 31:35
  If you'd like to support the show, the best thing to do is to let other people know about it.
• 31:41
  If you'd like to support it monetarily, there are a couple ways of doing that.
• 31:45
  One is by scrolling down in your podcast app to where it says support the show.
• 31:50
  There you can become a subscriber for as little as three dollars a month.
• 31:54
  And if you want to give a one time donation, just below you'll see where it says give a one time donation.
• 32:02
  Finally, the show is supported by California History Teachers, which is a full year of lessons for 4th grade California History and Social Studies.
• 32:10
  You can find out more at www.
• 32:14
  californiahistoryteachers.
• 32:15
  com.
• 32:17
  And if you input the coupon code PODCAST, you'll receive 25 percent off your monthly or annual subscription.
• 32:25
  So check it out!