Franz Boas Refracted Through His Local Collaborators: A Legacy with Implications for Collaborative Archaeologies

Collaborative ethnographies and community-based archaeologies have become more commonplace throughout an-thropology in recent decades. Well over a century ago, Franz Boas initiated collaborations with Indigenous community members. Some of his Indigenous collaborators became recognized scholars themselves, such as George Hunt (Tlingit/ Kwakwaka’wakw) and William Beynon (Tsimshian). He also involved James Teit, a settler from the Shetlands who married a Nlaka’pamux woman and became an exemplary anthropologist and advocate for Indigenous rights. Here, I will discuss how these close collaborations transformed Boas’s thinking, with ramifications throughout the discipline. In these examples, we find a dialectical interplay whereby Indigenous groups actively sought to use the anthropological medium to their needs; in turn, anthropologists like Boas and Teit recognized the scholarly need for activism to aid Indigenous groups under the constraints of colonial rule. In important ways, however, Boas did not meet the standards that his own ideas set forth. These partnerships from over a century ago still have implications for contemporary collaborations as instructive histories of successes and failures, for both theory in the expansion of interpretative potential and range and for anthropological praxis in the context of settler-colonial relationships.


Introduction
In the last few decades, collaborative ethnographies and community-based archaeologies have become more commonplace throughout anthropology. Yet, this type of fieldwork is not recent, but is instead an ongoing praxis in anthropology that extends back to Franz Boas himself and his founding of cultural anthropology. In these early collaborations, there was a dialogical interaction whereby Indigenous groups actively sought to use the anthropological medium for their needs; in turn, anthropologists like Boas recognized the need for activism to aid Indigenous groups under the constraints of colonial rule. The backand-forth reciprocity involved in these collaborations served well for each side. While Boas is an early exemplar of collaboration, as I will emphasize in the following, he did not always meet the ethical standards that he set out EAZ 57, 2023 Franz Boas Refracted Through His Local Collaborators: A Legacy with Implications for Collaborative Archaeologies These partnerships from over a century ago still have implications for contemporary collaborations as instructive histories for both theory in the expansion of interpretative potential and range and for anthropological praxis in the context of settler-colonial relationships. In the following, I will discuss Boas's intensive engagements, focusing on those interactions with Indigenous peoples whereby Boas's thinking was transformed. I will begin early in his career, during his time among the Inuit, which led to his interest in anthropology as a discipline. Then, the focus will be on his relationship with George Hunt and the Kwakwaka'wakw. Finally, I will turn to his involvement with James Teit, and consider his collaborative methods in contrast to Boas's. In so doing, this series of engagements shows the evolving thought and practice of Boas, as well as some of his limitations. Lastly, I will turn to how these examples of collaboration have set the foundation for contemporary archaeological collaborations.
Just as Boas, for his dissertation, had studied how light is refracted through water, here I will assess how in his later studies, his thought is refracted through his local collaborators.

Collaborations in anthropology
In 2005, Luke Eric Lassiter proclaimed the establishing of a 'collaborative anthropology'. He outlined protocols and procedures that indicated that Indigenous peoples, for instance, were no longer simply objects of study,  Beynon (Tsimshian). Indeed, Lassiter (2005, 85) recognizes Boas's and Hunt's collaboration first in his discussion of the 'precedents for a collaborative ethnography'. He also highlights the earlier work of Lewis Henry Morgan (1904) with Hä-sa-noan'da (Ely Parker), of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). 1 A few years after his article, Lassiter inaugurated the journal Collaborative Anthropologies to account for the increasing amount of research that aims to be collaborative with Indigenous or descendant peoples. This mainly has focused on ethnographic studies, but the journal has also included archaeological research (e.g., Murray et al. 2009 certainly not a term for a collaborator (King 2019, 25).
Yet, during his year-long expedition living among them, Boas became quite impressed by the Inuit, especially regarding how they managed to thrive in a difficult environment that most peoples of the world avoided. Boas came to recognize that the Inuit should not be treated generically as just the focus of a study, that they were not simply cultural manifestations that were determined by the natural arctic landscape. Rather than considering them only as a collective, he realized that each group was complex, that they did not share the same common experiences, but were individuals with particular biographical histories. For instance, he learned that Signa was from another group originally, Davis Strait, a people that hunted deer among interior lakes. Signa knew several languages from his travels and interactions with other peoples. It seemed, the Inuit were not as simple as Boas originally conceived, either in their historical experiences or with how they lived in the arctic environment. His conceptions of Indigenous peoples, and of humanity in general, began to expand. As Gladys Reichard (1938;quoted in Harris 1968, 266) (Boas 1998, in Müller-Wille 1998.
This appears to be his first mention of 'relativity' regarding ethnographic fieldwork. He later first published about relativity in 1887: 'It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes' (Boas 1989, 66, quoted in Greenhouse 2017, 1061. The comparison Davis makes is worth considering.
Each of these were momentous as revolutions, but also as decentrings. Nicolaus Copernicus shifted our view of ourselves in the solar system, that the sun does not revolve around the earth, rather the earth revolves around the sun.
Charles Darwin upended the notion that we as humans are the most important biological species, whereby instead we are an outcome of natural selection that does not teleologically favour humans at the top of an earthly chain of being. As well, Sigmund Freud toppled over our view of ourselves as individuals that were in command of our own minds; his notion of the unconscious and the death drive fundamentally altered how we see humans as subjects in the world. Here, we can add Boas (chronologically before Einstein and Freud) to a list of those that have subverted our thinking in paradigmatic ways. He decentred Western European colonial culture as not being at the apex of human societies, as the 'civilized' presiding over 'barbarians' and 'savages'; indeed, it is this notion in Morgan (1964) that he challenged the most.
Often not much is made of this coincidence of interest in the relativity of our perceptions. Some, like Patrick Wolfe (1999, 58)  In 2020, a conference session was held precisely to discuss this link between Einstein and Boas. Called 'Com-This interest in relativity actually precedes Albert Einstein's (e.g., 1905; work on relativity in the physical sciences. Einstein emphasized that our conceptions and measurements of external reality were relative to our spatiotemporal position. While the speed of light was a constant, space and time were linked and could be warped in perspective, especially in relation to the gravitational pull of massive objects. For physicists and others in the natural sciences, this was a conceptual earthquake.
It shook the discipline and even the imaginations of the public. For Boas's insight, however, it appears that the social sciences have taken longer to absorb the implications.
Yet, his relativism was no less Copernican (Fig. 2)

Collaborating with George Hunt among the Kwakwaka'wakw
George Hunt was born with the heritage of two cultures.
Initially raised in the fur trade outpost of his father, he later lived among the Tlingit communities of his mother ( Fig. 3). He even did the long training required to become a shaman. Eventually, he married into a noble Kwakwaka'wakw 4 family (Berman 1994, 484-485 (Boas 1902;1916;Maud 2000; see also 1989). Beynon had worked with Marius Barbeau earlier in collecting myths and legends, resulting in Tsimshian Narratives, volumes 1 and 2 (Barbeau/Beynon 1987a;1987b). Beynon began working with Boas in 1932 to edit and improve upon the Tate materials, and he ultimately provided Boas with over 250 narratives from his ethnographic fieldwork (Halpin 1978;Winter 1984). So, in listening to critiques from Beynon, Boas broadened his understandings of Tsimshian oral narratives. These collaborations established Beynon as one of the major Indigenous scholars among the Tsimshian (e.g., Beynon 1941;2000).

James Teit, ethnographer of Interior Plateau cultures
Another important figure that Boas worked with was James Teit (Fig. 5)   10 Boas had also wanted to remove skulls from the graves he encountered while with the Inuit in Pangnirtung Fiord, but they prevented him. He wrote in a letter that 'Unfortunately I cannot take away the skulls that were in the two graves, because of my Eskimos' (Zumwalt 2019, 118  Fourth, archaeological collaborations are important even long after the investigations have completed. This is especially the case for archaeological work that was done years ago without collaboration as part of the original set-up. The repatriation of such remains is essential to do for any artefacts of cultural value to descendant groups, but it is especially the case concerning the remains of individuals and any grave items that had been buried with them. Boas himself was responsible for the extraction of many hundreds of burials that had overseen the excavation or purchase; accordingly, he had collected the remains of 200 individuals by 1890, yet it continued thereafter (Cole 1995, 120-121;Pöhl 2008, 42). In our collaborative practices, we should not think that such relations are always going to be straight-forward.

Implications for archaeological interpretations
It is also significant to consider that there are other  Thomas Kuhn (1962).
In developing Indigenous frameworks of interpreta-

Conclusions: Theories, methods and relationships
The legacy of Boas is complicated. To be sure, he expanded anthropological thought, especially with the concept of cultural relativity, the importance of which is clear by how thoroughly it has become just a core part of the anthropological perspective since. Wilner (2018) argued even further that Boas's example takes anthropological thought towards a diverse yet universalist approach to human cultures. Indeed, his record of antiracist activism indicates such a thrust, so much so that Thomas Gossett (1963, 418) in Race: The History of an Idea has stated that 'It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.' This notion is both values. Yet, we can learn from these mistakes as well. His colleague, James Teit, provides an example of an anthro-pology that carries out much more fully the message of a universal humanity. Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) 13 referred to such ideas as 'cosmopolitanism', from the Greek for 'citizens of the world,' wherein concerns for people should not be restricted to our culture, class or country. This concept has been embraced by anthropologists (Werb ner 2020) and archaeologists (Meskell 2009).
These are the kinds of ethics that should underpin our relations as archaeologists with descendant peoples. One