GDAH Ep57 - Archaeology in Oregon & Government Shutdown w/ Tia Cody and Katie Tipton

Introducing Our Guests
Tia Cody recently graduated from the Anthropology Masters program at Portland State University. Her thesis, titled LIDAR Predictive Modeling of Kalapuya Mound Sites in the Callapooia Watershed, Oregon, uses geospatial approaches to analyze settlement patterns in a culturally significant region south of Salem, Oregon near Brownsville.

Katie Tipton is a grad student at Portland State University who’s working to build a database to connect archaeological resources in Oregon with public knowledge and collections.

“Archaeological material and cultural resources are finite resources, which means we all have the responsibility to ensure that these resources are protected. Besides the trowel, archaeologists and many others utilize many ways of engaging with the past in order to preserve these finite resources. The database established through this project is one way to minimize the impact of archaeological investigations on cultural resources.”

The Government Shutdown
So, the shutdown is just horrendous no matter how you slice it. We all know archaeologists who are losing paychecks. I reached out to a couple folks to see if they’d speak, but that pesky Taft-Hartley Bill keeps government employees from organizing labor or speaking out in anything that could be interpreted as protest, so they need our help speaking up for them.

Some excerpts from a recent letter from the DSA Labor Commission:

“Trump is trying to divide the working class as part of his racist agenda, but DSA members who are federal workers are speaking out and building solidarity.”

“ call your congressional representative and both senators and demand they end the shutdown immediately and backpay all furloughed government workers as well as contractors. Ask that they work with Rep. Pressley to ensure that contractors as well as federal employees are backpaid for all time lost to the shutdown.”

It’s Not About the Wall
Naomi Klein writes about “disaster capitalism” in her books, The Shock Doctrine and No Is Not Enough. There, she spells out cases where crises were exploited or flatly engineered to erode public services, strain the working class financially, and install privatized services that profit off suffering. In post-Katrina Louisiana, post-Sandy New York and New Jersey, and in post-Maria Puerto Rico, we saw natural disasters take human lives and wreak havoc on communities. In the aftermath, Bain Capital and other nebulous firms stepped in to undermine local public services and replace them with privatized contracts. Mike Pence was instrumental in all of these cases, as he was when he engineered the worst HIV and AIDS epidemic the country has seen in since the 1980s through smash and grab public health policy when he was governor of Indiana. Now we have a senile, openly white supremacist president who’s a failed real estate tycoon that owes foreign investors billions of dollars and the only way to repay his debts is to engineer a crisis that will let him concentrate an obscene amount of wealth in the ruling class.

If you want to hear more about the shutdown and how it is affecting archaeology and the country as a whole, check out the newest WIA episode on iTunes or your favorite Android app, as well as on our website, www.womeninarchaeology.com.
Where can we find you online?
Kirsten Lopez
Twitter @archyfem www.twitter.com/archyfem
Instagram @bluejaderose www.instagram.com/bluejaderose
Check out Women in Archaeology www.womeninarchaeology.com

Tia Cody

Katie Tipton
Arch Database PDX https://archdatabasepdx.wordpress.com/
Links
Support Go Dig a Hole on Patreon www.patreon.com/godigahole

Urgent Solidarity Needed with Federal Workers https://www.dsausa.org/news/urgent-solidarity-needed-with-federal-workers/

Call your senators and representatives to demand an end to the shutdown https://callyourrep.co/