Braided science field schools: cultivating professional fluency in Indigenous-centered archaeology

This paper presents a replicable model for transforming archaeological field schools into Braided Science programs that center Indigenous self-determination, robust Tribal collaboration, and integrated Cultural Resource Management (CRM) training. Grounded in the Indigenous-led pedagogy of Two-Eyed Seeing, this curriculum intentionally weaves Western scientific methods with oral histories, land-based protocols, and reciprocal stewardship. At its core is epistemological fluency—the capacity to recognize, switch between, and integrate diverse ways of knowing. Building on this concept, we define heritage professional fluency as a framework that emerges from braided science and equips students to generate actionable knowledge through collaborative, decolonized research. While no single field school can impart every technical and community-engagement skill, we argue that building professional fluency provides an essential foundation upon which graduates can continue to develop. Traditional field schools that emphasize academic research leave graduates underprepared for careers dominated by the CRM sector and the imperative for collaborative, ethically informed practice, perpetuating colonial dynamics. Through the Washington State University (WSU) Field School in Indigenous Collaboration, First Foods, and Cultural Resource Management at Indian Creek—a collaborative field school held in 2023 on Kalispel Tribal lands—we demonstrate how we navigated three entrenched barriers: (1) conflicting institutional goals and data-ownership conventions; (2) financial and accessibility constraints that limit participation; and (3) disciplinary fragmentation separating academic, CRM, and Indigenous archaeology. By aligning research with Kalispel priorities—traditional foodways and landscape stewardship—our Tribal-academic-CRM partnership shows that meaningful collaboration is achievable but requires significant individual commitment and structural reform. We call for comprehensive change—addressing dwindling tenure-track positions, rising tuition and field-school fees, and persisting access inequities—to align archaeological training with the evolving realities of academia and public archaeology. This case study offers a practical framework built with braided knowledges for reimagining field schools as dynamic laboratories of ethical practice, rigorous skill-building, and community-driven research.

1 Introduction

Archaeological field schools serve as a critical gateway for students entering the profession, intended to connect theoretical knowledge with practical, hands-on training (Mytum, 2012; Warner et al., 2024). They have long functioned as a foundational “rite of passage” and prerequisite for employment or graduate studies, providing vital training in core methods, confirming career commitments, and building professional networks. With an approximately 100-year history in Americanist archaeology, field schools—historically embedded within universities—remain rooted in a model that privileges academic research questions and publication-driven outcomes (Baxter, 2009).

Despite 90 percent of archaeologists employed in Cultural Resource Management (CRM), and every career requiring culturally responsive engagement, graduates often find themselves underprepared for the regulatory, methodological, and community-engagement demands of contemporary practice (Altschul and Klein, 2022; Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2021; Pipp, 2024; Sebastian, 2009). Indigenous archaeology scholars likewise note that Tribal partners are too often treated as passive subjects rather than sovereign collaborators with their own knowledge systems and research priorities (Atalay, 2006, 2008; Lightfoot, 2008; Nicholas, 2008; Smith and Wobst, 2005).

In response to calls for genuine collaboration, this paper presents a field school co-designed with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians—focused on community-centered archaeology rather than extractive research. Building on long-running collaborative field schools that successfully integrate Indigenous perspectives (e.g., Atalay, 2012; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2008; Nicholas, 2008), we advance a Braided Science pedagogy that cultivates heritage professional fluency: the integrated capacity to apply core technical skills, navigate different knowledge systems, and confront institutional hurdles, while building reciprocal and respectful partnerships with Indigenous communities. In this holistic model, field schools become true microcosms of professional life—equipping students to engage in public archaeology and uphold rigorous ethical standards and collaborative approaches.

The pedagogical foundation of this model is epistemic fluency—the capacity to recognize, switch between, and integrate diverse ways of knowing (Markauskaite and Goodyear, 2017). Informed by Indigenous-led concepts like Two-Eyed Seeing and Braided Knowledges (Atalay, 2012; Bartlett et al., 2012; Carney, 2024), this approach shifts the educational goal from simply teaching “how to dig” toward cultivating the ability “to think, collaborate, and generate actionable knowledge” across different systems.

Braided Science Field Schools deliberately weave empirical methods (stratigraphic excavation, geospatial mapping, statistical analysis, regulatory reporting) with Indigenous oral histories, land-based protocols, and stewardship ethics. Although no single field school can teach every technical method or community-engagement skill, we argue that providing a solid foundation in epistemological fluency is critical: it equips students to recognize, switch between, and integrate diverse knowledge systems, to use models and frameworks flexibly, and to reconfigure their perspective in the face of novel challenges. In archaeological training, professional fluency produces practitioners who not only master technical skills but also engage ethically with Indigenous communities, synthesize multiple evidence streams, and generate actionable knowledge through genuinely collaborative, decolonized research.

To illustrate this model in practice, we present a case study: the Washington State University (WSU) Field School in Indigenous Collaboration, First Foods, and Cultural Resource Management at Indian Creek (Field School), developed in partnership with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians (Kalispel Tribe) and Far Western Anthropological Research Group (Far Western; Box 1). The Field School emerged from a large-scale cultural resource mitigation project on Kalispel Tribal Lands, which presented a unique opportunity to design a curriculum that directly confronts the systemic barriers—conflicting institutional goals, financial inequities, and deep-seated disciplinary divides—that often hinder such integrated work.

Box 1. Braided perspectives, roles, co-creation, and authorship.

The field-school partnership wove together institutional, Tribal, and CRM expertise: The Kalispel Tribe of Indians was the tribal lead—initiating the Indian Creek Housing Project and preliminary fieldwork at site 45PO358—and spearheaded the field school under a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) and within a regulatory mitigation framework. Hosted on Tribal lands, the Tribe provided infrastructure (camping, laboratories, heavy equipment, classrooms, wellness-center access), defined and enforced ethical and legal protocols (data ownership, Section 106 compliance), and financially underwrote the project through WSU's Office of Research. Serving as cultural authorities and knowledge holders, Tribal elders, staff, and specialists provided advice, instruction, and guidance; directed core Tribal review; defined community-driven research priorities and protocols; and facilitated discussions that greatly enriched student learning. Washington State University, the project's academic lead, provided academic infrastructure, institutional support, robust research, teaching, and methodological expertise. WSU's instructional team and field crew comprised faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates. While most participants were enrolled at WSU, the program also welcomed undergraduate and graduate students from other universities. Offered as a tuition-based, accredited field school through WSU's Summer Session Office, the program drew on the Department of Anthropology's 50-year archaeological field-school legacy and its long-standing partnership with the Kalispel Tribe to establish this collaboration. Far Western Anthropological Research Group, a CRM firm with an extensive record of educational and research collaborations, was subcontracted by WSU for its essential CRM capabilities in executing large-scale, complex excavations. They provided expertise in geoarchaeology, mechanical trenching, GIS mapping, report production, and industry-standard workflows and safety protocols. Co-Creation, Core Leadership Team, and Authorship: The three partners—academic, Tribal, and CRM—brought complementary expertise to co-develop the curriculum and implement the Braided Science pedagogy within the heritage professional fluency framework (Two-Eyed Seeing). All contributed to and were embedded at every stage—from pre-field planning and student training to data analysis, compliance reporting, and peer-reviewed publication—ensuring the field school met mitigation mandates, upheld legal data standards, and advanced a decolonized, community-centered pedagogy. The authors of this paper are non-Indigenous scientists with training from colonial institutions. The research herein emerge from, and are part of, our work alongside co-researchers from the Interior Salish speaking Kalispel Tribe. Cohesion among partners was anchored by a core leadership team—Shannon Tushingham (WSU/California Academy of Sciences), Naomi Scher (Far Western), Molly Carney (WSU/OSU), and Kevin Lyons (Kalispel Tribe of Indians). Mr. Lyons was instrumental in co-creating every phase of this project and reviewed all materials, including this manuscript. In keeping with Kalispel values and to honor distinct Indigenous epistemologies, he chose a formal acknowledgment rather than co-authorship.

The paper first reviews the limitations of traditional field schools and analyzes systemic obstacles to Indigenous collaboration and CRM integration, then presents our case study and strategies we employed. Finally, it distills key lessons, and concludes with a call for institutional transformation to embed Indigenous authority and equitable access at the core of archaeological education. While this Field School was born from a fortuitous partnership, it served as a pilot for an innovative model that offers a replicable framework for transforming archaeological field school pedagogy.

Rather than a catch-all for every foundational skill, our field school functioned as a capstone, cementing a braided science curriculum through precision-driven excavation, advanced CRM methodologies, and negotiated ethical protocols with the Kalispel Tribe. This living laboratory cemented professional fluency—the fusion of technical rigor, regulatory know-how, accountability, and culturally grounded collaboration—and produced graduates prepared to lead in public and compliance archaeology.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Indigenous authority and partnership must sit at the heart of field-school pedagogy. When the Tribe is treated as an equal project partner, every excavation begins with a permit in hand and protocols jointly agreed upon. That partnership becomes more than symbolism: it transforms a land-grant institution into a genuine peer to descendant communities, far beyond performative land acknowledgments. It also creates direct recruitment pathways—this cohort led to two Tribal hires on site and two more in related roles—and connected students into the Kalispel Tribe's regional and national networks. Such synchrony makes research more efficient, sustainable, and locally accountable.

We demonstrate that meaningful collaboration is achievable but demands considerable individual commitment and, critically, comprehensive structural reform—addressing dwindling tenure-track positions, escalating tuition and field school fees, and enduring access inequities—to realign archaeological training with the evolving realities of academic and public archaeology (Banks et al., 2025; Brown et al., 2025; Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2019; Speakman et al., 2018; Tushingham et al., 2017).

2 Background and context

This paper examines how divergent “academic,” “CRM,” and “Tribal” archaeologies can erect systemic barriers to collaboration. As summarized in Table 1, each domain shapes distinct professional ecosystems with disparate incentives (e.g., publish or perish vs. deadline-driven compliance), vocabularies, and ethical guidelines (Tushingham et al., 2020). Yet, these “silos” are heuristic: faculty conduct CRM, firms hire Tribal experts, and Tribal archaeologists publish in scholarly journals (Atalay, 2012; Two-Bears, 2006). The Kalispel Tribe's Natural Resource Department embodies a hybrid model, running a Cultural Resources program that both fulfills regulatory mandates (a CRM function) and sets research priorities grounded in Tribal values (a sovereign, community-based function). Their in-house team integrates cultural practitioners with Tribal and non-Tribal scientists, fostering a collaborative environment that transcends traditional divides and sustains enduring academic partnerships. This integrated capacity fundamentally shaped our collaborative dynamic. We thus use these categories not as rigid taxonomy but as flexible lenses to diagnose structural mismatches in funding, timelines, and data ownership that impede true collaboration.

Table 1

Table 1. Heuristic categories of archaeological practice: core focuses and overlapping contexts.

2.1 The historical divide: field schools and the rise of CRM

Historically, archaeological field schools have been critical for training students for various career pathways, supplying data for faculty research, and immersing trainees in the rigors of fieldwork (Boytner, 2012; Gifford and Morris, 1985; Mills, 2011; Silliman, 2008). Lewis Henry Morgan's 1878 mapping and excavation excursions in the American Southwest is an early example of early field instruction (Gifford and Morris, 1985). By the early 20th century, structured summer programs blended hands-on excavation with geology, botany, surveying, ethnology, linguistics, art and photography. The introduction of university-credited summer courses circa 1919 and mid-century formalization of field school for credit laid the foundation for the modern archaeological field school (Gifford and Morris, 1985; Mills, 2011).

Although academic archaeology and CRM now diverge, universities were instrumental in CRM's origins (Davis, 2009). Anthropology departments long ran hands-on, university-run projects. Large-scale salvage projects of the Works Progress Administration/New Deal era (1930s−40s), built a corps of skilled practitioners that established the project-driven methodologies now standard in infrastructure archaeology (e.g., highways, water reclamation). Formal field schools, expanded anthropology departments, New Archaeology's hypothesis-driven paradigm, and conservation archaeology converged in the 1960s to reshape student training and fuel the growth of Americanist archaeology. New legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 and implementing regulations, created a surge in public (compliance) archaeology encompassing federal and state agencies and later expansion of a private CRM sector (Davis, 2009; McManamon, 2016, 2018). Academics initially led this surge, which also led to a dramatic increase in employment and research opportunities beyond academic settings (Altschul and Klein, 2022).

In the 1980s−90s, CRM rapidly privatized as in-house university CRM operations closed. King (2020) identifies three drivers of this change: (1) project volume and regulatory complexity outstripping university capacity, (2) CRM's interdisciplinary demands clashing with siloed anthropology departments, and (3) academia's dismissal of CRM as “too grubby, too compromising, and, in the eyes of many academics, too intellectually undemanding” (King, 2020, p. 5–6). This retreat shrank CRM training, reinforced a stigma that belies CRM's rigor, and narrowed pathways for serious scholarship (King, 2020, p. 6, 15). Simultaneously, rising tuition fees made field schools—already detached from the sector that now employs most archaeologists—prohibitively expensive (Heath-Stout and Hannigan, 2020). As a result, programs remain costly, inaccessible, and skewed toward academic research over CRM practice. While most entry-level positions still require field-school credentials (Baxter, 2009; Warner et al., 2024), two-thirds of western US CRM firms report that graduates lack essential field and cultural competencies, leaving many ill-prepared for the workforce (Barclow and Anderson, 2026; Brown et al., 2025).

2.2 Foundations of collaborative field schools and indigenous scholarship

Archaeology's colonial foundations—embodied in field schools that treated Indigenous lands as research sites, ignored traditional knowledge, failed to share findings, and positioned Indigenous peoples as passive subjects—trained generations of archaeologists within power structures privileging Western authority over community stewardship (Nicholas, 2008; Atalay, 2012; Silliman, 2008; Steeves, 2015). Worse still, students rarely were exposed to confronting the real-world complexities of landowner negotiations or Tribal concerns, prioritizing academic expertise and treating Indigenous communities as if they were unable to care for their own heritage without the intervention of Western science (Cipolla and Quinn, 2016; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2008; May et al., 2017). This academic entitlement—captured in the lyrics by Dakota folk singer Floyd (Red Crow) Westerman, “And the Anthros keep on diggin' in our sacred ceremonial sites…as if their education gives them the right”—underscored the perception of field schools as being the nexus for violators of sacred places under the guise of training (Whittaker, 1997, p. 101).

That extractive paradigm began to fracture in the 1970s, when Indigenous communities established Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and asserted authority over their own heritage (Stapp and Burney, 2002; Steeves, 2015). The Navajo Nation's 1977 CRM program—later the Navajo Nation Archaeology and Historic Preservation Departments—set a powerful, Tribal-led oversight model (Two-Bears, 2006). Closer on the Interior Plateau, the Colville Tribes pioneered a Tribal repository (1974), a sovereign Archaeology Department (1976), one of the region's first THPO accreditations (1996), and today's integrated Natural & Cultural Resources Department (Stapp and Burney, 2002), while the Umatilla Tribes' Natural Resources Department centers its work on a visionary First Foods program (Endress et al., 2019).

The 1990s marked a significant turning point, as this push for change gained broader momentum. The movement was catalyzed by influential critiques from Indigenous scholars and allies (e.g., Atalay, 2006, 2008; Echo-Hawk, 2000; Lightfoot, 2008; Nicholas, 2008; Nicholas and Andrews, 2007; Smith and Wobst, 2005; Watkins, 1997) and the formalization of community-based archaeological methods. This intellectual shift was reinforced by key policy changes. The National Park Service's Tribal Historic Preservation Program, established in 1990 and formally launched in 1996, recognized Tribal authority in heritage management and provided crucial funding to support it. Today, the program has grown to include over 200 Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs). The pass of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, and numerous other federal and state laws and policies have since enshrined legal and ethical frameworks for repatriation and collaborative engagement with Indigenous communities.

Collaborative field schools trace back to Tribal-academic partnerships such as WSU's multi-year excavations at Ozette Village and Hoko River during the 1970s, conducted as “50/50” partnerships with the Makah Tribe, produced major scientific advances and launched the careers of students who became leaders in CRM and academic archaeology, some later founding their own collaborative field schools (Croes, 2010). This legacy highlights how early, immersive fieldwork—grounded in community collaboration—builds both the technical expertise and professional identity of emerging archaeologists (Gonzalez and Edwards, 2020; Mills, 2011).

Over the past 30 years, this Indigenous-centered approach has reshaped archaeology: collaborative field schools now train students in cultural competency, negotiation, and hands-on CRM methods—preparing heritage stewards to partner, rather than extract (e.g., Bendremer and Thomas, 2008; Cipolla and Quinn, 2016; Gonzalez and Edwards, 2020; Newsom et al., 2023; Sanchez et al., 2024; Silliman, 2008).

2.3 Barriers to Indigenous collaboration & integrated CRM training in archaeological field schools

Before introducing our field school, we outline three persistent obstacles—conflicting institutional goals, financial barriers, and methodological fragmentation—that we will revisit in Section 4 to show how we encountered and navigated them.

2.3.1 Conflicting institutional goals and priorities

A basic barrier to integrated collaboration is that academic, CRM, and Indigenous partners operate within institutional systems that produce distinct deliverables and measure success by divergent criteria, creating structural tensions. Academics set their research agendas, whereas community-driven models provide authority to Indigenous partners, who frame questions and agendas, guide interpretations, and control data use (Atalay, 2012; Bendremer and Thomas, 2008; Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2021; Gonzalez, 2016; Jameson and Musteaţă, 2019; Silliman, 2008; Supernant and Warrick, 2014).

R1 universities in particular reward rapid, frequent peer-reviewed publications for tenure—fostering a “publish or perish” culture that rarely values the time-intensive, trust-based labor of community relationship-building, technical reporting, or ethical deliberation. Academic careers, especially for junior faculty and graduate students, are governed by strict timelines for research, publication, and tenure review, often clashing with the slower pace required for building authentic trust with Indigenous communities, which involves extensive dialogue, patience, and adapting to community schedules that prioritize ceremonial practices, seasonal harvests, and other responsibilities (Atalay, 2012; Douglass et al., 2023; Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2019, 2021; Wright, 2022). These incongruities create an inherent tension, where the pressure for conventional academic outputs can undermine non-extractive collaborative research.

CRM practice—whether in public agencies or private firms—is governed by legal compliance and cost-efficiency. Agency archaeologists oversee resource identification, protection, and interpretation under tight budgets and staff limits, focusing on regulatory “management” goals that vary by mission. Formal government-to-government Tribal consultation, with its legal duties of trust and sovereignty, is reserved for federal, state, and Tribal agencies. Private-sector CRM archaeologists operate in an intermediate role, conducting fieldwork and making recommendations but hold no legal authority for formal Tribal consultation or project outcomes. Bound by client-driven mandates and regulatory protocols, they can advise on when and how to incorporate indigenous input—but cannot enforce its adoption. These distinct roles can be unsettling for CRM and agency professionals who aspire to genuine collaboration but must prioritize compliance and sponsored interests—realities that are often a surprise to early-career professionals. Still, many firms build enduring Tribal relationships, fostering sustained, mutually beneficial engagement beyond one-off consultations. Training must therefore equip emerging archaeologists to navigate these bureaucratic realities, advocate effectively for Tribal priorities, and build respectful, resilient collaborations under constraint.

Success in CRM is defined differently by its key actors. For a project, success means meeting legal mandates like the NHPA within strict timelines and budgets. For public agencies, it means aligning projects with their core missions, while for private CRM firms, it requires sustaining business operations and maintaining client satisfaction. This efficiency-driven model prioritizes standardized methods, a practice that often clashes with the slower, relational pace required for genuine community collaboration. Consequently, CRM has traditionally privileged archaeological “data potential,” often overlooking multivocal perspectives and other vital aspects of cultural heritage (Atalay, 2008). Academic publication is rarely a metric for success in CRM; while high-quality research can be produced, findings typically reside in unpublished “gray literature” reports (Seymour, 2010; Tushingham et al., 2017).

Academic and CRM structures often collide with Indigenous sovereignty. For Tribal nations, archaeology often underpins cultural revitalization, resource stewardship, heritage program capacity building, and control over ancestral data and narratives (Laluk et al., 2022). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) embody these priorities, but often clash with academia's push for open-access data and CRM's narrow, project-driven scopes (Carroll et al., 2020). Navigating this tension is essential; heritage professionals must co-create ethical data-governance protocols with partner communities, not merely comply.

2.3.2 Financial barriers and inequities in access

Both academic and CRM archaeology have long depended on unpaid Indigenous labor and knowledge, reinforcing colonial power dynamics. Communities routinely share time, expertise, and land access without compensation, while academic faculty receive salaries and institutions gain tuition revenue. Funding bodies rarely support Indigenous-led research or equitable labor arrangements (Marek-Martinez and Gonzalez, 2024), and Tribal participation in CRM remains underfunded and inconsistent. Genuine collaboration requires budgets that recognize Indigenous expertise as professional labor—a requirement most traditional field-school models cannot meet.

Meanwhile, dependence on student tuition imposes steep financial barriers. The costs of tuition, fees, travel, and lost wages disproportionately exclude low-income, underrepresented, and non-traditional students. In an Archaeology Centers Coalition survey, cost was students' top deterrent, and 83 percent were unaware of any institutional support [Archaeological Centers Coalition (ACC), 2023]. This economic barrier favors financial privilege over academic promise, perpetuating archaeology's diversity gap (Heath-Stout and Hannigan, 2020; Voss and Casella, 2021; Warner et al., 2024). While helpful, scholarships and waivers are often insufficient or inaccessible, and ultimately fail to dismantle these structural inequities.

Relying on tuition to underwrite academic research can create perverse incentives, prioritizing revenue generation over educational quality or ethical collaboration. As universities face budget shortfalls, field-school fees are increasingly diverted to overhead, leaving programs under-resourced and operationally fragile. This dynamic is especially troubling on Indigenous lands: institutions reap financial gains, cultural data, and professional prestige yet seldom reinvest those resources into the field school or its Tribal partners (Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2021). Scholars question whether tuition and fees genuinely support field-school training or simply subsidize unrelated institutional expenses (Heath-Stout and Hannigan, 2020). Drawing on over 25 years of teaching and extensive peer dialogue, we find this imbalance persists and demands urgent correction.

Moreover, funding often fails to account for the full project lifecycle: pre-field planning, post-field analysis, report writing, and curation are routinely underbudgeted, perpetuating the discipline's curation crisis and leaving final reports unwritten (Warner et al., 2024). Treating archaeology as a privilege and relying on faculty and students' unpaid “passion” to finish curation and reporting is untenable; institutions must establish enduring faculty lines to carry projects through leadership changes and uphold their ethical obligations to descendant communities. Genuine collaborative projects require additional true time and resources that are consistently underestimated and underbudgeted.

2.3.3 Disciplinary and methodological fragmentation and siloed knowledge systems

Finally, deep divisions among academic archaeology, CRM practice, and Indigenous archaeology—that have emerged from their institutional backgrounds and conflicting goals and priorities—have created silos that traditional field schools often fail to bridge (Table 1). Field schools operating within academia can excel at teaching many fundamental skills, but too often neglect both standard CRM procedures and the culturally responsive approaches increasingly demanded by today's practice. Bridging these methodological and epistemological divides is essential to prepare archaeologists who can work across sectors and honor diverse forms of cultural heritage from project conception through dissemination.

Academic and CRM archaeology utilize different methodologies and speak different professional “languages.” Academic archaeologists are frequently regarded as working in the realm of abstract theory, while CRM professionals are known for their practical, compliance-focused projects. Professional output is emblematic of this divide; CRM practitioners produce extensive gray literature—mandated technical and compliance reports—while academics focus on peer-reviewed articles, creating parallel literatures with distinct incentives, audiences, and terminologies, reinforcing separate career paths (Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2019; Seymour, 2010; Tushingham et al., 2017). Academic and CRM archaeology also employ different field methods, for example, conventional field schools focused on research objectives often visit the same sites repeatedly over a number of years, while the project-driven focus of CRM work requires relatively rapid excavation techniques (e.g., shovels vs. trowels) across a single season.

Even more profound is the epistemological divide between Western science and Indigenous knowledge systems. Historically, Western frameworks have marginalized Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), oral traditions, and Indigenous spiritual values—dismissing them as “unscientific” or mining them as raw data for Western interpretation (Echo-Hawk, 2000). Field schools typically focus on discrete sites rather than the travel corridors, gathering areas, and sacred places that many descendant communities prioritize and students seldom encounter non-invasive survey methods, ethnobotanical or zooarchaeological analyses, or the incorporation of TEK and Indigenous landscape concepts. Equally, training in community engagement—conducting oral-history interviews, facilitating Tribal consultations, recording natural and cultural properties and resources, co-designing research questions with Indigenous partners, and navigating complex permitting and compliance frameworks—is virtually absent. Though no field school can prepare students in all methods, teaching openness to multiple approaches is of great value. Similarly, the ethic of incorporating Indigenous knowledge as an equally valid system of inquiry—with its own methods and standards of evidence—is essential. The braided science framework provides a model for this integration, emphasizing that both traditions need not be merged but can be woven together in ways that respect their distinct origins and strengths. Without models that integrate academic, CRM, and Indigenous perspectives, field schools will continue to produce practitioners unprepared for the respectful, multi-vocal collaboration contemporary archaeology demands.

Braided Science field schools provide a unified framework that intentionally weaves Western empirical methodologies and Indigenous knowledge systems into a coherent curriculum. Applied to archaeological training, this model cultivates heritage professional fluency—the integrated capacity to apply technical skills (stratigraphic excavation, geospatial mapping, statistical analysis, compliance reporting) while forging ethically grounded, reciprocal partnerships with Indigenous communities. Professional fluency also embraces multicultural literacy, collaborative decision-making, open dialogue, and stewardship practices that honor land-based observations and community priorities.

Indigenous people remain severely underrepresented in archaeology and field schools not only because of economic and time barriers, but also due to deeper structural and cultural factors. Mills (2011), Silliman (2008), (Atalay 2008, 2012) and others point to a pervasive distrust of archaeology among many Indigenous communities, driven by perceptions that the field is irrelevant, operates through a Eurocentric curriculum and pedagogy, and fails to honor Indigenous histories, worldviews, or the cultural protocols of excavation. Reflecting this divide, (Marek-Martinez and Gonzalez 2023, p. 51) identified only 24 Indigenous archaeologists in U.S. academia—just 13 of whom hold tenure—and a 2015 SAA survey found that a mere 0.8 percent of members self-identify as Native or Indigenous, most of them students or retirees. These stark figures underscore the urgent need for culturally responsive curricula, community-driven methodologies, and institutional reforms that build trust and meaningfully engage Indigenous voices in archaeological practice.

3 The Kalispel first foods at Indian creek project: a case study in collaborative field schools

The 2023 WSU Field School in Indigenous Collaboration, First Foods, and Cultural Resource Management at Indian Creek serves as a practical case study in Indigenous-centered archaeological pedagogy. The Field School took place at the Indian Creek site (45PO358; Figure 1), which is situated on the ancestral lands of the Kalispel, an Interior Salish-speaking people of the eastern Columbia-Fraser Plateau. Their homelands historically encompassed the Pend Oreille River Valley across British Columbia, Washington, and Idaho east to the Clark Fork in Montana. During warmer seasons, Kalispel people practiced a seasonal subsistence cycle moving to specific locations to gather foods like camas, berries, and wapato, and hunting ungulates and fishing trout (Smith, 1936–1938, 1961, 2000). People maintained semi-permanent winter villages with extensive storage practices to ensure a stable food supply (Lyons, 2009; Smith, 2000, pp. 7.22–7.62).

Figure 1

Figure 1. Field school at Indian Creek (45-PO-358). The field school took place at the Indian Creek site (45-PO-358) in the homelands of the Kalispel Tribe of Indians.

Today, the Kalispel Tribe—a federally recognized sovereign nation—actively manages its resources with a strong commitment to revitalizing traditional foodways, thereby promoting both community health and cultural continuity. Central to this effort is the concept of “First Foods”—a term used by many Plateau Tribal communities to describe traditional foods as sacred, foundational elements of identity—and ensuring their accessibility, stewardship, and ongoing maintenance. Early conversations among project leaders crystallized this shared vision, providing a powerful framework that aligns with academic research on subsistence patterns, historical ecology, and long-term human—environment dynamics. By working together, all partners have been able to investigate the past in ways that meaningfully address the present-day needs of the Kalispel community.

The project's research design wove Kalispel Tribal priorities into both CRM regulatory compliance and university field-school requirements by adopting a First Foods framework—a holistic model that links ancestral foods, ecological health, cultural identity, and community wellbeing. For students, our intent was to develop the Field School as an immersive experience designed to cultivate professional expectations, ethical standards, and collaborative practices within the next cohort of practicing archaeologists. It was our goal to establish a standard of culturally competent practices and understanding of Indigenous cultures, worldviews and realities for students to internalize and carry forward with throughout their careers (Amundsen-Meyer et al., 2023).

3.1 The collaborative first-foods framework

The Field School itself was just one arm of a larger, multi-year “First-Foods” project framework developed between the Tribe and the authors where we collectively sought to integrate TEK with archaeological investigations and contemporary subsistence autonomy initiatives. “First Foods” encompasses the diverse plants, animals, and fish that have sustained the Kalispel for generations, embedding traditional knowledge, land-stewardship practices, intergenerational teaching, and spiritual ties to the ancestral landscape. Project activities center on documenting, revitalizing, and protecting these foodways to bolster food security, community health, and cultural continuity, with a goal of dissolving disciplinary boundaries and silos (see Table 1).

This unifying framework subverts traditional field school models by integrating three core principles: (1) Sovereign partnership ensured the Tribe directed all research goals, questions, and methods to revitalize and steward their traditional foods. (2) Integrated ethical protocols—formalized through pre-field agreements—guaranteed Tribal ownership and control of all data, archives, and publications, regular community review of deliverables, and strict adherence to Tribal research protocols. (3) Holistic research design aligned every archaeological method with the Tribe's land-management and cultural priorities, blending data recovery with educational and public-communication outcomes, and drawing from “archaeology beyond sites,” incorporating mixed methods and data including Indigenous knowledge, oral histories, and experimental harvesting.

The Field School was foregrounded by initial First Foods TEK and experimental ethnoarcheological studies (Figure 2). In this work, Kalispel experts, WSU staff, and prior students collaborated on traditional harvesting and camas-processing trials—preparing Camassia quamash (common camas, an edible bulb) in replicated earth ovens to document nutritional values and cooking dynamics. Students helped harvest bulbs and cooked food in ovens alongside Tribal knowledge holders. These experiments informed later excavation strategies and interpretation of Indian Creek (see Section 4.3), creating a dynamic link between living practice and archaeological interpretation—and demonstrating to students that archaeology reaches far beyond digging sites to encompass cultural, ecological, and community-centered inquiry.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Field school flier. This flier was designed to recruit students seeking experience in CRM field techniques and Indigenous community-based archaeology. The featured photograph shows a 2022 First Foods Traditional Ecological Knowledge study team harvesting camas on Kalispel homelands, guided by Jessie Isadore and Kevin Lyons. While at first glance the tools resemble archaeological shovels or augers, they are in fact steel digging sticks supplied by the Tribe—essential implements in traditional camas-harvesting practice.

3.2 Origins: a partnership forged by community, compliance, and shared goals

The Kalispel Tribe initiated the Indian Creek Housing Project to build seven new homes for Tribal members. During geotechnical trenching, an earth oven was inadvertently discovered, revealing food processing site 45PO358. Guided by the Tribe's philosophy of collaborative sufficiency—the idea that many small actors contribute to a greater whole—the Tribe recognized the significance of this material piece of its history (Lyons, 2025). As cultural resource program manager Kevin Lyons (2025 personal communication) reflected “At the end of the day, 45PO358 was a piece of the Tribe's tangible history. It fed ancestral Kalispel when it was used, and we seek to have it feed us again with insights. Be it peer-reviewed or gray literature, the conventional products that archaeologists provide as recompense to the public's loss of data are alienating.”

The location and purpose of the data recovery at Indian Creek (45PO358) created a unique opportunity for public engagement beyond typical CRM mitigations. This regulatory requirement became a catalyst for expanding the First Foods initiative and became the foundation for the 2023 collaborative field school in partnership between the Kalispel Tribe, WSU, and Far Western. Formalized through a service agreement, the partnership allowed us to address community and compliance goals while contributing to broader research and educational goals.

The Kalispel Tribe has a long-standing CRM program and brought invaluable expertise to the housing project. Yet, as Kevin Lyons explained, “This is one of those rare occasions where the Tribe, with its own expertise, could do this on its own, but we would wind up doing it to the exclusion of everything else, and we already have other standing obligations. We are partnering with WSU archeologists on this project because we have a long tradition of working with them and know that they will do justice to the Tribe's history and its tangible footprint” (Ferguson, 2023). Prior to the Field School, the Tribe conducted initial testing and National Register of Historic Places evaluation of an earth-oven feature and led its trenching/stratigraphic discernment, followed by horizontal site survey via magnetometry and bucket auger sampling to pinpoint areas of interest. These preliminary investigations allowed our team to focus squarely on the pre-contact food-processing features at the heart of our First Foods project goals.

Prior to the field school, formal agreements enshrined Tribal authority over data, publications, and research protocols, and established regular consultation checkpoints. This foundation allowed us to weave Western archaeological methods with Kalispel TEK in a First Foods framework that goes beyond Section 106 data recovery to support a field school as a mitigation project, bolstering food security, eco-cultural restoration, and cultural continuity. Together, we designed a comprehensive project—spanning data-recovery excavation, laboratory analysis, a technical report, and interpretive products—to meet management, research, and educational objectives while effectively mitigating site impacts.

3.3 Field school setting, infrastructure, & daily practice

Rooted in Indigenous pedagogies that view landscapes as co-teachers (Cajete, 2000; Johnson, 2010), our place-based model was designed to deepen students' cultural competencies. The immersive experience of living on Kalispel-owned lands for 4 weeks put this model into practice, framing the landscape itself as our primary instructor. We camped at the Tribe's Indian Creek facilities (Figures 3, 4), an educational and recreational hub central to their ecological restoration efforts. The Tribe provided access to converted buildings for labs and meeting spaces, a firepit area for group gatherings, and month-long memberships to the Camas Center—their wellness facility—for showers and recreation. This created a fully integrated learning environment that combined outdoor fieldwork with indoor instruction and analysis.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Indian Creek community forest and facilities: (a) the crew camped on the Tribe's Indian Creek Community forest property; (b) the Tribe's barn housed the camp kitchen, laboratory, and classroom; (c) contemplating the day in the beautiful Pend Oreille Valley; (d) a casual morning stretch guided by Daisy Chisholm; (e) students sharing an evening meal; (f) classroom lecture held in the Tribe's barn.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Indian Creek community forest fire pit gathering. Students regularly gathered in the evenings around a firepit at the Indian Creek Community Forest. Weekly campfire summaries were also held at this location.

Prior to excavations, elder Francis Cuyoollah welcomed staff and students to the archaeological site with a ceremonial blessing and sharing of medicinal herbs, which the team was invited to rub on their hands. This aromatic moment connected us with each other and with the regions' flora, but was also an act of care meant to protect us as visitors and archaeologists. For many students, this was their first field experience and the blessing framed cultural sensitivity as an essential and expected part of archaeological practice. This ceremonial beginning set the tone for a braided science field school experience on Tribal lands, where our field site and camp were not just locations on a map but living enmeshed communities of people, places, and plants.

Daily operations mirrored a professional CRM workflow, with rotating field, lab, and camp responsibilities. To instill professional standards, each day began with a safety briefing aligned with OSHA protocols, reviewing site hazards, risks, and emergency procedures. For many students, the pace of work and physical labor was a new experience that pushed them out of their comfort zones, fostering new relationships and a deeper understanding of professional realities (Amundsen-Meyer et al., 2023).

This professional training was enriched by evening lectures, field trips, and activities like storytelling and flintknapping that fostered communal knowledge sharing and deepened relationships (Figure 5). Major highlights include a weekend potluck with Kalispel staff and Tribal members and their families and evening excursions with Kalispel fisheries department staff. Also important were the field trips to experientially learn about culturally significant places and traditional harvesting practices, guided by Kalispel Cultural Resource Program Manager Kevin Lyons (Figures 6, 7). Students also learned about the Tribe's contemporary conservation and food-related initiatives, including environmental stewardship projects led by the Natural Resource Department, which helped contextualize archaeological work within ongoing Tribal priorities.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Guest lectures, discussions, and hands-on learning activities: (a) a discussion around the Tribe's firepit about the day's findings; (b) an evening lecture in the Tribe's boat barn; (c) Flintknapping workshop led by guests BLM archaeologist Anna Coon (BLM) Garrett Toombs (USFS); (d) hands-on learning extended to an atlatl/spearthrowing workshop; (e) Shannon Tushingham with CRM guest Instructor and speaker William Hildebrant (Far Western).

Figure 6

Figure 6. Student experiences with Kalispel tribal members and staff: (a) students on a field trip to visit other Pend Oreille archaeological sites in the first week of the field school; (b) Field school student Danny Fuentes and Daulton Cochran participating in an evening Tribal bull trout survey on the Pend Oreille River with Raymond Ostlie (KTI fisheries department); (c) Raymond Ostlie leading Tribal bull trout survey; (d) Daulton Cochran piloting a Kalispel Fisheries watercraft; (e) Kalispel Tribal citizen and staff member Genie Kennedy (operating backhoe) worked with students and staff extensively in the field.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Kalispel cultural resource program manager Kevin Lyons guided students on field trips throughout the valley to experientially learn about culturally significant places and traditional harvesting practices.

Integrating the field school within the Tribe's daily operations demonstrated key principles of collaborative education. First, it positioned students as guests and participants in Tribal spaces, rather than as external researchers, which fundamentally altered traditional field school power dynamics. Second, it provided direct exposure to contemporary Tribal life and environmental stewardship, connecting the archaeology to ongoing cultural programs and allowing students to witness active Indigenous sovereignty in real time. Third, it required significant coordination and resource commitment from both partners, establishing the relationship as reciprocal rather than extractive.

3.4 Field & laboratory methods

In coordination with the Tribe, we developed field and laboratory methods that met research objectives, regulatory mitigation requirements, and fostered cultural competency among students. Logistics supported mitigation goals beyond data recovery through co-organized public outreach events and a curriculum hands-on training in CRM and Tribal collaboration. Trainees were exposed to core “dirt skills”—geoarchaeological trenching, mechanical stripping, control-unit excavation, feature exposure, and stratigraphic profiling (Figures 8–10)—were supplemented by stratigraphic profiling, auger testing, shovel-test units to delineate site boundaries, and limited pedestrian survey (pacing, compass navigation, and site mapping).

Figure 8

Figure 8. Diverse field skills training: (a) Geoarchaeological trenching and mechanical stripping-Genie Kennedy (in backhoe) and Naomi Scher (in foreground) directing students on safe and efficient practices; (b) Naomi Scher instructing students on site stratigraphy and geoarchaeological findings at the site.

Figure 9

Figure 9. Excavation skills training: (a) control unit excavation in Block B; (b) screening soil; (c) graduate student Linda McNulty refining her excavation technique refining her excavation technique; (d) students defining earth oven features.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Mapping and recording skills training: clockwise from top left: (a) mapping the site; (b) discussing complex site stratigraphy in the final week of the field school; (c) students recording stratigraphic profile in an excavation trench; (d) delineating an earth oven in profile; (e) recording a shovel test unit; (f) recording excavation data.

These activities equipped students with practical skills and standard CRM field protocols.

In the laboratory, students practiced cataloging and curation to prepare all cultural materials for storage within the Tribe's on-site curational facility. Students processed soil samples through flotation and analyzed fire-cracked rock specifically to link our First Foods research questions with Indigenous culinary traditions and Tribal research priorities (Figure 11).

Figure 11

Figure 11. Laboratory and curation skills: clockwise from top left: (a) processing soil samples via bucket flotation methods; (b) a days worth of floated soils drying on racks; (c) Molly Carney (left) instructing students on soil sample cataloging; (d) students processing artifacts; (e) students cataloging artifacts following the Tribes' curation guidelines; (f) laboratory supervisor Cassady Fairlaine overseeing the cataloging process for later storage at the Tribe's curation facility.

3.5 Outcomes & deliverables

Cohesion of the field school partnership rested on complimentary expertise and collaboration among a core team of academic, Tribal, and CRM leads (see Box 1), yielding deliverables across several key domains. In the regulatory realm, they produced a Section 106 compliance report that mitigated site impacts and enabled the Kalispel Housing Project to proceed (Neubauer, 2024). Scientifically, they excavated, mapped, and analyzed ten earth-oven features, dozens of ancillary cultural features, and extensive paleoethnobotanical assemblages (Neubauer, 2024). For outreach, partners secured widespread media coverage, participated in podcast, and presented results in classrooms, to the public, and at varied professional conferences (Supplementary Text S1, Supplementary Table S1, Supplementary Text S2). Through open-house days and media events (Figure 12), the Field School showcased its methods and findings—highlighting collaborative archaeology and traditional foodways—and provided hands-on training in CRM protocols, ethical engagement with Tribal partners, and Indigenous-centered methodologies. These combined efforts demonstrate that centering First Foods and sovereign partnership produces legally sound, scientifically robust, community-relevant, and professionally transformative outcomes, offering a blueprint for future community-driven and enduring collaborations. Ongoing analyses will fuel forthcoming publications.

Figure 12

Figure 12. Public communication and community engagement-the field school was widely covered in the print, radio, television, and online media. (a) Media day arranged by KTI. clockwise from top left: on June 5, 2023. KTI Tribal Council Vice Chairman Curt Holmes directly addressed the media and led a discussion; (b) field school student Jackson Hammill (center) and crew member Shae Orega (right) being interviewed by Will Ferguson (left), WSU communications team; (c) media coverage was extensive, including front page stories in the Newport Miner and the Spokesman Review. In many cases, the story was picked up by news sources with broad international reach (see Supplementary Text); (d) Kalispel Cultural panel.

4 Discussion: confronting systemic barriers through collaborative practice

The Kalispel First Foods Field School, summarized in Section 3, was designed to directly confront the systemic barriers outlined in Section 2. This section discusses the strategies and project structures that were implemented to navigate these challenges, offering concrete examples of how the partnership translated principles into practice. In our experience systemic barriers to Indigenous collaboration in archaeological field schools—while substantial—are not insurmountable. However, the case study reveals that transcending these barriers requires ongoing negotiation and a willingness to confront the distinct institutional logics that govern archaeological practice. Most critically, the success of such models depends on institutional recognition of the substantial additional labor and professional risks assumed by faculty and community partners who prioritize this work.

4.1 How the partnership navigated institutional conflicts

Navigating success metric conflicts described in Section 2.1, required honest and extensive communication and discussion by the academic, Tribal, and CRM partners. Well in advance of the project we initiated extensive discussions to identify and delineate overlapping research priorities, ensuring that our project goals were simultaneously driven by Kalispel community needs and robust scholarly inquiry. The “first foods” framework provided this essential convergence, allowing us to align academic objectives with community capacity-building, student training, and culturally significant outcomes.

Our co-created research design was operationalized through a formal service agreement that gave the Kalispel Tribe ultimate authority over research questions, data, and deliverables. While regulatory agencies and reviewing bodies may need convincing that a field school serving educational objectives could fulfill mitigation requirements, in our case the co-developed partnership made this aspect run smoothly.

4.1.1 Academic publishing pressures and career advancement conflicts

For academic instructor leads, the imperative to produce peer-reviewed research while meeting community-centered timelines and CRM deliverables presented a significant professional conflict. Front-loading the CRM mitigation report—essential for regulatory compliance and ethical partnership—required exceptional personal commitment yet exposed faculty to significant career risk. Only after fulfilling this primary obligation would we pursue traditional academic publications as a secondary outcome, contingent on Tribal approval and co-authorship.

This strategic sequencing protected regulatory and community needs but introduced (self-imposed, but very real) professional precarity and the need for self-advocacy as well as support for each other. The time-intensive nature of relationship-building and collaborative work made delays in journal articles inevitable—indeed, this is our first publication appearing 2 years after our 2023 fieldwork and we are still processing data for future publications. Furthermore, the resulting CRM report (Neubauer, 2024), while substantial and vital to the project's integrity, was largely inconsequential in tenure and promotion evaluations for its academic co-authors.

For the lead PI (Tushingham), these delays were a manageable burden—until she began a new position immediately after the Field School—an outcome not anticipated in our planning—and had to justify her “clogged publication pipeline” in initial performance reviews, all while striving to fulfill project commitments. Carney was in a more precarious position as an early-career untenured Assistant Professor, as were other Field School instructors, who were seeking tenure track and postdoctoral positions.

These realities highlight the professional risks-especially for early-career and untenured scholars-who wish to pursue this work. This underscores a broader structural problem: current promotion and tenure criteria fail to recognize collaborative, community-driven scholarship. Institutions increasingly claim to support reconciliation and rebuilding relationships with Indigenous communities after decades of extractive and harmful archaeological practices. Yet, faculty are expected to publish multiple articles annually, secure grants, teach full loads, and serve on committees—leaving scant time for the slow, relational work and true collaboration demands.

Lacking explicit institutional validation—and support from administrators for expanded formal criteria for tenure and promotion—early-career scholars are forced to risk their professional futures when they prioritize community engagement over conventional research productivity. Until academic institutions reform their evaluation structures to formally recognize the intellectual labor of collaborative activities and relationship-building and CRM reports, and other community deliverables, as legitimate and valuable research products, the tension will remain. As Douglass et al. (2023) argue, universities must expand evaluation criteria to include a wide range of engaged and activist scholarship if they truly support reconciliation and responsible scholarship.

4.1.2 Intellectual property and data sovereignty conflicts

By embedding the CARE framework into the project's formal structure (Gupta et al., 2023), we committed to shared stewardship and Tribal benefit. Yet even negotiating a basic MOU between WSU and the Tribe exposed deep institutional barriers. Convincing WSU's Office of Research to adopt open, flexible IP agreements was particularly challenging: the university's standard clauses and open-data mandates directly conflicted with Indigenous data-sovereignty principles requiring community control over sensitive information. Resolving these conflicts proved time-consuming and complex—multiple contract revisions, extensive negotiation, and administrator education on collaborative research ethics were all required.

This process revealed how deeply embedded academic assumptions about knowledge ownership clash with Indigenous protocols and how routine administrative approaches obscure fundamental ethical considerations. Ultimately, individual faculty advocacy alone was insufficient; systemic reform of university research agreements is essential to honor Indigenous protocols and safeguard meaningful data sovereignty.

4.1.3 CRM benchmarks and timeline challenges

Balancing the Tribe's regulatory-mitigation and research objectives with meaningful student training was a main tension. Partnering directly with the Tribe—who served as landowner, project proponent, and SHPO negotiator—streamlined every phase. They assumed regulatory compliance, approvals, and CRM guidance, while providing access to facilities, equipment, and data that simplified planning, field logistics, and analysis. Daily engagement with Tribal staff fostered flexibility in the field and in mitigation strategies, and integrating Far Western's CRM professionals into the core team made it possible to absorb the added workload of data-recovery excavations during the Field School. Despite these efficiencies, we still encountered challenges in locking down our post-fieldwork timelines, as discussed below.

The Tribe's extensive experience and capacity in CRM, including responsibility for SHPO negotiations, allowed for a smooth process from project inception to completion. Access to Tribal facilities, equipment, and data made planning, fieldwork logistics, and research and writing tasks much easier. Proximity and daily engagement with Tribal staff enabled a flexible approach in the field and strategy for completing mitigation. Including CRM professionals from Far Western in the partnership and core team was also key to addressing the added workload of completing data recovery excavation as part of the Field School.

Achieving our ambitious 4-week field school—completing all CRM obligations, generating publishable research data, delivering high-quality instruction to 14 students, and managing a 25-member crew plus frequent guests and public outreach—required meticulous, front-loaded planning and a tightly coordinated team (Figures 13a, b). Beginning the previous fall, we convened regular planning sessions, developed and designed the project's mitigation strategy and field school curriculum, and built comprehensive contingency protocols (Inadvertent Discovery, soil sampling and flotation for anticipated earth-oven features, artifact curation and cataloging, plus custom forms and databases), incorporating input from our Far Western partners. We also designed our advertising to highlight the school's collaborative, technical focus, which drew students eager to build CRM and Indigenous archaeology skills (Figure 2).

Figure 13

Figure 13. (a) Field school students and instructors; back row, left to right: Steven Wohlgemuth, Chris Arriola, Mario Zimmermann, Keneisha Benton, Linda McNulty, Libby Musolino, Daisy Chisholm, Morgan Chenoweth, Jackson Hammill, Fletcher Stoddard, Daulton Cochran; Front row: Naomi Scher, Molly Carney, Shannon Tushingham, Danielle Hebert, Ashley Underwood, Alianne Kimura; Front Center: Danny Fuentes. (b) Field school instructors and crew left to right: Molly Carney, Naomi Scher, Shannon Tushingham, Fernanda Neubauer, Shae McCarron, Cassady Fairlane, Mario Zimmermann, Jorgen Gang (not pictured: Kevin Lyons, Bill Hildebrandt, Brian McCarron, Harrison Lantier).

In the field, a low student-to-instructor and support staff ratio and clearly divided excavation, laboratory, and camp-management duties were crucial for ensuring that both CRM and student needs were met (Figure 13b). The inclusion of both educators and CRM professionals on project staff allowed for a dual focus on both aspects of the Field School excavation (mitigation and education). While the curriculum was designed to prepare students for the realities of CRM work—including discussions of industry standards for wages and working conditions—we balanced fieldwork and hands-on instructional time with lectures and other educational activities. This ensured that student contributions were valued for their learning outcomes rather than being exploited as simple project labor. Even with these pedagogical successes, no field school can cover every essential CRM competency, a point we return to below. In our case, the nature of the site and its excavation context naturally constrained students' experiences: while participants gained intensive excavation and feature-recording expertise, their exposure to survey and site recording was limited.

Despite close partnership with the Tribe and the integration of CRM professionals into our core team, we still faced significant post-fieldwork challenges—particularly with timelines, as students and instructors quickly moved on to other responsibilities. These issues highlighted persistent mismatches between academic, Tribal, and CRM schedules. Beyond such logistical tensions, collaborative, community-centered archaeology continues to face deeper financial and access barriers rooted in institutional norms and disciplinary expectations.

4.2 Strategies for overcoming financial and access barriers

In the following sections, we outline practical approaches to navigate these financial challenges and advance more inclusive, sustainable field school models. Specifically, we discuss: (1) the role of hidden labor and in-kind Tribal support; (2) systemic barriers to participation; and (3) key budgetary and administrative lessons learned.

Given the high cost of field schools, it may be surprising or difficult to understand why so many complain of small budgets. The cost of the six-credit Field School was $3,380 for undergrads, $3,877 for graduate students, plus $563 in fees—consistent with industry averages [Archaeological Centers Coalition (ACC), 2023; Heath-Stout and Hannigan, 2020]—but only a fraction of that returned to field operations. Tuition largely covered university overhead with a portion offsetting labor costs (TAs, camp staff, and instructors), and student fees—intended to cover food and lodging—fell far short of these basic expenses. Tribal funding, plus in-kind contributions of laboratory space, camping/shower facilities, and equipment, substantially offset our core operating costs.

The Field School's blended financial model, including student tuition and funding through the service agreement with the Tribe for completing mitigation for regulatory compliance, enabled a stable base for achieving CRM objectives, but it did not resolve all financial challenges and required considerable commitment from every partner. Despite this innovation, major challenges remained.

4.2.1 Confronting hidden labor costs

The Field School's success rested on substantial uncompensated labor—from hundreds of hours of pre-field planning and administrative negotiations to post-field analyses, curation, and production of reports for community, regulatory, and academic audiences. Volunteering remains vital for ethical collaboration and, as Atalay (2012) argues, a baseline for rebuilding trust with Indigenous partners. However, relying on early-career scholars, students, and Tribal members or staff to absorb these costs exposes the depth of this issue in most field schools.

Equally significant were the massive in-kind contributions of the Kalispel Tribe—staff and elder expertise; land access; laboratory, camping, and shower facilities; heavy equipment; and pre-field survey, research and technical advising, student instruction. Going forward, institutions must establish sustainable funding mechanisms—including dedicated honoraria, gifts, or other forms of compensation where appropriate—to formally recognize Indigenous knowledge, labor, and resources as professional contributions rather than assuming acts of goodwill. This process revealed the true, comprehensive costs of collaboration and underscored the challenge of a tuition-based funding model.

4.2.2 Confronting systemic access and equity barriers

While the project implemented innovative solutions, some institutional constraints remained insurmountable. For the university, tuition and fee reductions were a non-starter, and attempts to secure waivers for Native students through administrative channels failed. If the field school continued into future seasons, this perhaps could have been negotiated with dedicated work or through the solicitation of donations or grant support, but following the traditional field school model (for credit/tuition-based, taking place over several weeks over the summer) excludes anyone unable to forgo a month's income or step away from caregiving duties.

Requiring full, substantial tuition and fees thus entrenches barriers for non-traditional and low-income participants. These waiver failures underscore systemic obstacles that individual programs cannot overcome. Until universities adopt flexible schedules, targeted financial aid, and more accessible pathways, even the most equity-focused field schools will remain out of reach for many.

4.2.3 Budget flexibility & administrative realities

Financial constraints demanded vigilant budget management and adaptable project scope. Guidance from co-author and CRM professional Naomi Scher was essential to establishing (and keeping to) a realistic budget. However, it is important to note, that even with careful planning, we recognized from the outset that the project would require more time and funding than originally allotted, prompting us to secure additional resources, ingenuity, and substantial personal commitment on the part of the principal instructors.

Our Tribal, academic, and CRM partnership enabled real-time adjustments to excavation scope. That flexibility was vital given the extensive fieldwork—and the substantial pre- and post-field analysis and write-up costs often not budgeted for. Our relatively small artifact assemblage kept laboratory costs manageable, but a larger recovery would have strained resources through increased analysis, cataloging, and curation expenses. Access to Far Western's production and GIS teams further streamlined completion and delivery of a comprehensive technical report. These experiences underscore the need for flexible budgets that accommodate varying assemblage sizes and analytical demands.

The project exposed the heavy administrative burden faculty often shoulder when leading field schools. Navigating university bureaucracy for purchases and reimbursements—even initially fronting thousands of dollars for food and supplies—created an unsustainable hidden workload. Securing a university credit card later eased this strain, but the experience underscores the urgent need for institutions to provide streamlined administrative support tailored to the unique logistical demands of field-based research.

Ensuring healthy, nourishing meals 7 days a week—while accommodating multiple dietary restrictions on a tight budget—proved a formidable logistical challenge. Although our field kitchen was well-equipped for a field school, with a single fridge and camp stoves, we still relied on ice-filled coolers and sealed containers to keep bulk perishables fresh and rodent-free. To lighten the load, we hired a camp manager and organized students into rotating teams for cooking and camp chores.

Our food and supply budget exceeded $9,000. We meticulously logged every receipt in a weekly spreadsheet—fully aware that any missing document would mean faculty personally absorbing the cost. Yet, even this diligence didn't prevent an absurd bureaucratic hurdle. An administrator challenged a $53.25 purchase of tampons and pads—intended for menstruating students and stocked in the Tribe-supplied porta-lets—labeling it a “personal expense” and demanding immediate reimbursement from the PI. After we cited Washington state law mandating free feminine products in restrooms, the university relented—but then insisted any unused supplies be returned once Field School was complete (university property). This episode perfectly illustrates how rigid administrative procedures can be ill-suited to the practical needs of field-based research.

We shared this anecdote with our students because it highlights not only the often staggering absurdity of university bureaucracy, but also the essential leadership responsibility to provide for basic needs—like feminine hygiene products—in the field. Advocating for your team's health and dignity is a lesson we hope every future field director—men and women alike—carries into their careers. It was particularly disheartening to have a modest $53 purchase questioned when we'd already documented thousands of dollars in expenses, underscoring the urgent need for more empathetic, flexible administrative support.

4.3 Braided science for bridging methodological divides

We argue that meaningful reform in archaeological education hinges on ethically grounded partnerships. By integrating rigorous empirical protocols with Indigenous frameworks of stewardship and communal accountability, a braided science pedagogy creates space for students to navigate and blend Western and Indigenous epistemologies. This foundation in “heritage professional fluency” equips graduates for modern public-archaeology careers—enabling them to generate actionable knowledge, foster genuinely collaborative research, and advance decolonized, community-centered heritage stewardship.

This braided approach was not an afterthought but the project's foundational architecture. The entire process began with co-developing research questions and a governing MOU with the Kalispel Tribe to align with their sovereign cultural and resource management goals. Archaeobotanical analyses were informed by the expertise of Tribal members of traditional foodways. The interpretation of archaeological materials and features like earth ovens were contextualized by Kalispel oral histories affirming their deep and continuous presence on the land. It also culminated in how we disseminated findings: producing not only standard technical reports but also co-designed public outreach materials to ensure the results were accessible and beneficial to the Kalispel community.

Central to this operational framework was an explicit ethical compass: the “Four R's” of Indigenous research—respect, reciprocity, relationship, and relevance (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991). These were not abstract ideals but were woven into the field school's daily structure, curriculum, and assessments. Respect was initiated with a ceremonial blessing by Kalispel elder Francis Cuyoollah and modeled through daily protocols. Relationship was cultivated through the immersive experience of living on Tribal lands and sharing meals with community members. Relevance was constantly reinforced by connecting our work to the Tribe's First Foods initiative. This ethical structure directly shaped our pedagogy, especially our emphasis on Reciprocity. This commitment to reciprocity fundamentally changed how we assessed learning. Instead of traditional essays, the final project challenged students to design a public-facing deliverable for the Tribe. These projects—ranging from interpretive displays and lesson plans to coloring books—were created based on student interests and, in many cases, direct feedback from Tribal staff. The grading rubric itself was braided, assessing not only scientific interpretation but also cultural sensitivity, respect, and relevance to the Kalispel community. The completed projects were then shared with the Tribe, transforming an academic requirement into a genuine act of reciprocity.

A core component of the curriculum was the deep integration of Tribal values and TEK. For instance, our excavation strategy and interpretive framework were directly informed by research from earlier collaborative harvesting and earth oven experiments, where students had worked alongside Kalispel cultural experts (Figure 2). This approach exemplifies how braided science informed our present-day excavation strategy and interpretive framework. Learning from our Kalispel partners about traditional earth oven cooking provided key insights into the labor and cultural importance of First Foods. Simultaneously, it generated baseline nutritional and return-rate data and helped us recognize the archaeological signatures of camas cooking, such as specific Fire-Cracked Rock (FCR) and archaeobotanical patterns.

This braided methodology was applied directly at Site 45PO358. Although we excavated ten earth ovens, the site was unusually “clean” of artifacts, prompting us to collectively think through the cultural traditions that created such a place. In our makeshift lab, we emphasized analyses important to the Tribe's interest in their own history of subsistence autonomy. Students processed soil samples through flotation and analyzed charred remains, and we emphasized FCR analysis, which revealed that these oft-overlooked materials contained many expedient tools offering insights into past culinary practices (Neubauer, 2024, Appendix E in Tushingham et al., 2024). This interpretive process promoted students to co-producers of knowledge by actively considering and creating meaning through direct connections between past and present (Cobb and Croucher, 2014).

Beyond technical skills, this physical and social immersion created profound learning opportunities. Embedding students on Tribal lands reshaped power dynamics, as they witnessed how archaeological research could serve broader community and environmental goals. For students, working alongside Tribal members across departments while residing on Kalispel lands defined collaborative models as the norm, codifying research practices that emphasize Indigenous values of respect, reciprocity, responsibility, and relationality.

This experience was reinforced through public outreach, which was a pillar of the project from its inception, designed to support the Tribe's mission of reshaping their own heritage narratives. The Tribe maintained full control of all messaging, in collaboration with the WSU communications team, and these science communication skills were put directly into practice on-site. As the Field School took place along a busy county highway, the Tribe opted to open the excavations to the public. Several times throughout fieldwork, we hosted public visitors, Kalispel summer camps, and a media day for journalists. On one memorable day, a dozen third-grade Salish language school students came to visit, asking questions and connecting with their heritage. In these moments, the field school students became the archaeologists, cheerfully engaging in colloquial dialogue with Tribal youth. These public-facing efforts demonstrated the field school's role as a platform for sovereign visibility and reinforced for our students that their work had immediate community relevance.

While the program had many successes, with several students now working in CRM and for Tribal governments, it is important to acknowledge the constraints we faced. Time and resources limited some of our more ambitious plans, resulting in fewer evening talks and campfire check-ins than originally envisioned (Figure 5a). However, the foundational goal of transforming archaeology from an extractive practice into a collaborative one was largely achieved. By positioning student training itself as a form of cultural resource stewardship, we confronted the deep divides between academic, CRM, and Indigenous approaches not by merging them, but by creating a pedagogical framework where students learned to operate respectfully within multiple, parallel knowledge systems. This better prepares them for careers that genuinely serve Indigenous communities, transforming archaeology one student at a time.

4.4 Lessons learned and remaining challenges

Reconciling competing frameworks required honoring all partners' objectives without privileging any single institutional perspective. The project demonstrated that collaboration demands early planning, open and ongoing conversations, and frank discussion about how to best complete the work while ensuring academic rigor, regulatory compliance, and Indigenous research priorities within a coherent framework.

Success is often challenged by lack of institutional policies and tangible on the ground tools that reflect institutional commitment. Meaningful collaboration required more time and budget than we had, despite intensive planning. The experience revealed that truly collaborative archaeological practice requires fundamental shifts in how institutions define and measure success, moving beyond individual achievement metrics toward frameworks that recognize community partnership and capacity building as legitimate research outcomes.

Systemic barriers still block truly collaborative field schools and CRM projects: partnerships today depend almost entirely on individual commitment rather than on supportive structures within academia, CRM firms, or Tribal programs. This challenge transcends university walls—many private-sector practitioners face similar constraints—and leaves collaboration vulnerable whenever that personal dedication falters. Yet, driven by a genuine desire to give back, professionals continue to volunteer time and expertise. To move beyond this fragility, we must embed collaboration into institutional policies, funding models, and evaluation metrics so that working—and learning—together becomes a sustainable norm.

The project provided an opportunity to explore how a field school can be structured to braid together CRM, academic, and Indigenous research priorities. The core lesson—that field schools must be built on a foundation of genuine partnership and respect for Tribal sovereignty—is a principle that is both scalable and transferable to a wide range of collaborative contexts. We recognize that the specific circumstances of the Kalispel Field School cannot be replicated everywhere. However, the project's true value lies not in its exact duplication, but in the collaborative model it offers.

Beyond the specific solutions implemented for the Field School, several broader lessons emerge, alongside challenges that highlight the difficulty of scaling this model. One of the most critical lessons is that meaningful collaboration requires sustained commitment across multiple institutional levels. The dedication of individual faculty and community partners is a necessary prerequisite, but it is insufficient on its own. Success also depends on the willingness of academic programs to provide flexibility in teaching and service expectations, and of university administrations to better develop culturally appropriate MOUs and recognize the legitimacy of community-centered deliverables. Without multi-scalar support, the burden falls entirely on individuals, making the work unsustainable.

Furthermore, this case study reveals that collaborative work is, fundamentally, more work. It involves significant, often invisible, administrative and emotional labor to build relationships, navigate institutional differences, and manage the complex logistics of multi-partner projects. This additional labor, which is essential for ethical and effective practice, is rarely acknowledged or rewarded within traditional academic or CRM structures.

Finally, even in a successful partnership, systemic power imbalances do not disappear; they must be actively and continually managed (Montgomery and Fryer, 2023). Regular communication and assessments can help to ensure that community priorities were not subsumed by academic timelines or regulatory pressures. This underscores that collaboration is not a static state to be achieved, but an ongoing process of negotiation, communication, and relationship maintenance.

A key remaining challenge is the replicability of this model. Success was contingent on a specific set of circumstances: a sovereign Tribal nation with a robust cultural resources program, a pre-existing foundation of trust between partners, and a clear regulatory driver. Adapting this model to contexts lacking these elements—such as with non-federally recognized Tribes or in regions without strong heritage laws—presents a significant hurdle. The long-term financial sustainability of such intensive, multi-partner projects beyond initial grant cycles also remains a critical, unresolved issue for the discipline.

4.4.1 Cultivating “tribally-minded archaeological practitioners” through localized practice

While key goals of collaborative field schools are to center Indigenous communities and facilitate the growth of “Tribally-minded archaeological practitioners,” Any such model must be locally adapted (Pipp, 2024). Developing Tribally-minded practitioners involves fostering a community of individuals who “practice archaeology and archaeological teaching in relationship with descendent communities in ways that reflect their political nationhood and sovereign decision making, their cultural protocols for engaging with belongings and ancestors, and their expectations of ethical engagement and relationship-development” (Pipp, 2024, p. 92).

However, there is no single way of doing this. A localized approach developed specifically for the community is essential and should always be “grounded in relationality to specific community partners” (Pipp, 2024, p. 93). In their ethnography of an archaeological field school conducted in partnership with the Stillaguamish Tribe, (Pipp 2024, p. 93) further notes that:

“For many Indigenous communities, knowledge is contextual—there is no copy and paste to life or research. When the Stillaguamish community teaches students their protocols to archaeology, participants learn contextual approaches that reflect Stillaguamish cultural, political, epistemological, and ontological specificity. How archaeology is perceived, what is wanted, and what is gained from this work for the Stillaguamish Tribe cannot be generalized or universalized, but the overall ethos of being tribally-minded can equip students to prioritize finding out what it means to be tribally-minded in other communities where they may work in the future. The cultural context is specific, and the lesson is generalizable.” (Pipp, 2024, p. 93)

Transcending barriers to collaboration is achievable but requires a multi-pronged approach: a commitment to navigating conflicting institutional goals through open negotiation, the development of sustainable financial models that ensure equitable access and compensate partners, and the creation of integrated methodologies that respect diverse ways of knowing. Ultimately, reforming archaeological education requires a fundamental shift from extractive models to reciprocal partnerships built on a foundation of shared authority and respect.

5 Conclusion: a call to systemic change in archaeological education

The Field School exposed that systemic barriers hindering Indigenous collaboration in archaeological education—conflicting institutional goals, financial inequities, and disciplinary fragmentation—while not insurmountable remain significant. By centering the priorities, sovereignty, and knowledge of the Kalispel Tribe, this collaboration moved beyond extractive disciplinary legacies. It offers a powerful, localized model for training a new generation of “Tribally-minded” practitioners who learn that ethical archaeology is not a universal template but a practice grounded in specific community relationships and protocols.

The key lesson is not that this exact project should be duplicated, but that its guiding principles are broadly applicable and transferable. This work demonstrates a successful braided science model for centering archaeological training on the ethical imperatives of deep collaboration and Tribal sovereignty—a lesson that is essential for the entire discipline. As many collaborative archaeological practitioners note, every collaboration and project will follow it's own path.

For archaeology to be relevant and just, Indigenous collaboration must be non-negotiable, starting with field schools. The discipline must move beyond isolated case studies and embrace systemic reform that prioritizes Tribal sovereignty, ethical partnerships, and community-driven goals. Because no single field school can meet every training objective, instructors and the broader discipline must identify and prioritize the most critical skills. We therefore advocate a “braided science” approach that treats professional fluency as its foundational pillar and collaboration and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) skills as core competencies. Declared commitments to decolonization and professional relevance will ring hollow until institutions and the discipline dismantle structural barriers that reproduce extractive, colonial practices.

Moving from this successful case study to broader disciplinary change requires concrete institutional commitment. For decades, universities have benefited from field schools that often excluded or marginalized the very communities whose heritage was the object of study. As La Salle (2010) cautions, “collaboration” has become a buzzword in archaeology, often invoked without meaningful accountability. Many projects framed as collaborative fail to challenge extractive legacies or shift power dynamics. La Salle's critique underscores the need for more than good intentions or rhetorical commitments; it demands that we confront and change the ways in which institutional structures, publishing norms, and professional incentives continue to reward individual achievement over collective responsibility and relationships with descendent communities. To build a more just future, land-grant institutions in particular have an obligation to invest in decolonizing approaches (Fulkerson and Tushingham, 2021).

Further, professional organizations, regulatory agencies, and private CRM practitioners must work in concert with academic institutions to dismantle persistent barriers that privilege extractive research and allow “check-the-box” archaeology. In line with calls for “sharing responsibility in shaping the future of archaeology” (Brown et al., 2025), we recommend expanding formalized partnerships with CRM agencies and private firms in archaeological education by co-designing curriculum, training modules, guest lectures, and developing opportunities for internships and on-the-job placements that not only immerse students in real-world professional contexts but also cultivate “professional fluency,”—equipping them with both rigorous technical competencies and the ethical, reciprocal engagement skills essential for modern public-archaeology careers. Guided by the four Rs—Respect, Relationship, Reciprocity, and Responsibility (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991)—these partnerships should redistribute authority and reform structural barriers. Only through this fundamental commitment can collaborative, multi-vocal archaeology become the norm rather than the exception. Thus, we call on institutions to take the following specific actions, organized around the three primary barriers to collaboration in field schools:

1. Overcoming Institutional and Structural Barriers. Success requires commitment that extends beyond individual faculty enthusiasm to fundamental changes in how universities operate and honor sovereign relationships.

• Formalize Government-to-Government Tribal Partnerships: University leadership must spearhead, negotiate and honor formal agreements with Tribal governments—encompassing government-to-government accords, intellectual-property and data-sharing protocols—that explicitly affirm and protect Tribal sovereignty. To ensure consistent, respectful communication, establish formal engagement protocols requiring senior administrators—not just faculty—to meet directly and regularly with Tribal leaders, fostering ongoing dialogue and shared decision-making. Pursue a comprehensive audit of existing policies and procedures to identify and remove barriers to collaboration, streamlining processes and promoting transparency in all joint initiatives. Actively support faculty and colleagues who are engaging in collaborative partnerships, assess current policies and procedures and reform accordingly. Allocate dedicated funding, staff and training to support faculty and departmental efforts, enabling sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships with Tribal communities.

• Align Communications and Narrative: Direct university communications teams to work with Tribal partners to ensure a co-created and respectful narrative that accurately reflects the partnership's value for public relations and student recruitment.

• Reform Faculty Support and Evaluation: Tenure and promotion criteria must be reformed to explicitly recognize and reward community-engaged research and collaborative deliverables. Formally recognize the intensive labor of collaborative projects in tenure and promotion reviews. Provide tangible support, such as course releases during the academic year, to reduce faculty's unpaid labor load required for multi-year, relationship-based projects. Recognize significant post-field analysis and writing time required for field schools, and allow faculty to teach supplemental courses during the academic year (e.g., analysis classes and internships) that help get research done and provide students with more hands-on opportunities. Consider CRM reports and diverse outputs as professional contributions; ensure faculty have time and are given credit for pursuing relationships.

• Acknowledge and Address Historic Inequities: Publicly acknowledge the historical and ongoing benefits universities have gained from research on Indigenous lands and commit to tangible, reciprocal actions that support Native communities.

• Reframe Archaeological Practice and “Service”: Encourage departments and professional organizations to adopt a service-oriented framework for archaeology (Herr et al., 2023). Embed community engagement, policy advising, stewardship, and co-creation with Indigenous and local partners into core missions. Reframe “service” in academia—including outreach, consultation, and collaborative project management—as a pillar equal to research and teaching in tenure and promotion reviews, rather than relegating it to the lowest-priority category.

• Partner with Private Firms and Agencies: CRM companies and state and federal agencies hire the majority of archaeological field school graduates and share responsibility for workforce development. Many CRM Professionals already contribute to field-school pedagogy in several informal ways—volunteering on-site, guest lecturing, and mentoring in panels—and many agencies and firms offer internships as well as on-the-job training for entry-level technicians (sometimes hiring and paying community members with no prior experience). To strengthen and clarify these pathways we recommend: (1) Establish clear standards for professional volunteer roles and internship placements, ensuring consistent training outcomes. (2) Improve outreach so students and community members know about available internships, volunteer opportunities, and on-the-job fieldwork positions. (3) Encourage universities to seek CRM project partnerships that embed field-school training in real-world contracts—both enriching student experience and opening funding streams. (4) Promote “creative cobbling” of support—combining grants, agency contributions, institutional cost-shares, and in-kind services—to secure more reliable financial backing. (5) Acknowledge and expand the diverse forms of CRM-provided training (mentorship, workshops, site visits), and advocate for their formal recognition alongside traditional field schools. (See also financial partnerships and alternative mitigations, below).

2. Dismantling Financial Barriers: Existing field school scholarships such as those offered by the Society for American Archaeology provide significant positive impacts for individuals and free field schools (e.g., Kansa et al., 2024) offer important avenues for expanded access, but these are only a bandaid; Systemic change is required for disciplinary transformation. Sustainable partnerships require financial models that prioritize equity, accessibility, and just compensation.

• Prioritize Financial Accessibility: Implement tuition waivers/free enrollment for Native and other historically excluded field schools participants. Reform tuition recovery models, reduce institutional “overhead” to ensure that student tuition and fees directly support the on-the-ground costs of the field school itself (increase proportion of tuition and fees paid by students to directly support field schools). Offer field courses during the academic year where students can qualify for financial aid and/or maintain work schedules.

• Prioritize Non-exploitative Structures and Equitable Compensation: Provide funding for faculty and students to engage with Tribes-not just during field school (travel funding, honoraria). Establish clear university policies to properly honor and compensate Tribal instructors, Elders, and community experts for their essential pedagogical and intellectual contributions in culturally appropriate ways.

• Secure Sustainable Funding: Task university development offices with actively seeking dedicated, ongoing funding for collaborative projects. This includes securing support for essential pre- and post-fieldwork activities, such as community consultations, travel, and analysis, which are critical for project success. The significant public relations value and student recruitment opportunities from these partnerships can be leveraged for this purpose.

• Secure Endowment: A dedicated collaborative research endowment could tap existing institutional policies, funding mechanisms, and legal authorities. Jointly managed by Tribal representatives and state-level Indigenous affairs offices, the fund would draw initial capital from land-grant university revenues and be supplemented by modest levies on resource extraction activities. After a 5-year accumulation period, the endowment would award competitive grants for culturally responsive research and education. Eligibility would require formal Tribal partnerships (MOU/MOA) and incorporate metrics like Indigenous-scholar participation and honoraria distribution.

• Financial Partnerships: CRM and agencies can unlock funding and support pathways for field schools. Direct financial contributions—in the form of memorandums of agreement, grants, tuition assistance, or work-study programs—help defray student costs, while in-kind donations of equipment, facilities, data, and professional volunteer time reduce operational expenses. Embedding paid internships within workforce-development pipelines not only subsidizes student participation but also addresses industry staffing needs and creates entry points for community members without prior experience.

• Consider Alternative Mitigations: For CRM archaeologists in agencies and private companies-if appropriate, consider proposing student education and peer reviewed publication as mitigation strategies, or other creative regulatory compliance, including funding commitments. Beyond Section 106—driven reviews and mitigations of specific federal undertakings, other federal, state, and Tribal legislative frameworks also create valuable training opportunities. For instance, Section 110 of the NHPA, which requires agencies to identify, evaluate, and manage historic properties on their lands through survey, inventory, National Register nominations, and preservation planning.

• Consider Alternative Field school Models: 4–6-week field schools offer immersive, hands-on experience, their cost and duration can be prohibitive. Shorter, locally offered modular training reduces both time commitments and travel expenses, making them more accessible to a wider range of students. Likewise, non-tuition-based pathways—such as paid internships or apprenticeships with CRM firms and agencies—provide practical field experience without the burden of high fees.

3. Integrating Methodological and Pedagogical Divides: Field schools must become spaces where different knowledge systems are integrated with respect, requiring flexibility in academic structures. Creating regulatory and academic frameworks that encourage—rather than hinder—the methodological integration of western and Indigenous science.

• Facilitate Flexible and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogies: Empower faculty to co-develop curriculum, course structures, and learning outcomes with Tribal partners. University course catalogs and credit-hour requirements must be adapted to accommodate holistic, land-based, and culturally-responsive teaching methods.

• Credit Collaborative Learning: Include field schools in teaching loads. Allow for faculty to teach and students to receive academic credit for supplemental courses during the academic year that support the collaborative project, moving beyond restrictive “internship” models that often don't count toward a student's degree.

• Center Tribal Authority in Research Design and Decision-Making: Shift control over research questions, methods, and data interpretation to Tribal partners. Archaeological education should train students to see Tribal governments, cultural departments, and Elders as lead decision-makers and collaborators. This includes teaching students to apply for Tribal research permits, Tribal institutional review boards, and cultural committees before initiating any fieldwork or publications.

• Support Community-Directed Methodologies: Encourage field schools and research projects to adopt oral histories and methods based on Tribal preferences and cultural protocols. If appropriate incorporate low-impact archaeological methods and non-invasive survey techniques, augering, and test units. Methodological decisions should be co-developed or driven by Tribal partners, prioritizing cultural sensitivity, ecological stewardship, and long-term community goals.

• Recruit and Retain Diverse faculty and students: For genuine academic transformation, institutions must create formal, compensated roles for Indigenous Knowledge Holders, not just diversify recruitment. This validates Indigenous knowledge as a core intellectual contribution and ensures that decolonization is authentically community-led in a braided, reciprocal framework.

Implementing these changes is a critical step in transforming archaeological pedagogy from a system that has historically served a largely non-native academic community into one that actively fosters equity and respects Indigenous sovereignty. As this case study demonstrates, transcending these barriers is achievable and essential for building a foundation for truly collaborative and ethical stewardship of the past.

The true measure of a braided science pedagogy's impact lies not in scholarly articles, but in its practical adoption and adaptation in classrooms, field schools, and boardrooms. While this article provides a theoretical framework and a detailed case study, its true impact will be determined by its adoption and adaptation in classrooms, field schools, and boardrooms. We recognize that by publishing in a traditional academic journal, we risk that our recommendations will not reach the very people—institutional administrators, community leaders, and CRM professionals—who are most critical to enacting change. Therefore, we explicitly call on our readers, particularly faculty and other advocates, to use these findings as a resource to spark dialogue with university administrators, CRM managers, and community partners. To further this effort, we advocate for a broader dissemination roadmap. Future work should focus on distilling these findings into targeted articles for professional CRM and administrative outlets, in addition to creating accessible summaries for distribution through blogs and social media aimed at students, early-career professionals, university decision-makers, and Tribal community members. We also strongly encourage others to join this effort by disseminating these and other collaborative study findings and adding their own experiences to the conversation. Inspiring systemic change is a long-term project that requires not just new ideas, but a sustained, multi-vocal conversation across the very siloes we seek to dismantle.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics statement

Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any identifiable images or data included in this article.

Author contributions

ST: Supervision, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing, Investigation, Data curation, Project administration, Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Resources. MC: Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Resources, Conceptualization. NS: Investigation, Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Resources, Writing – review & editing, Project administration.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. The field school described in this report was conducted under a one-year Service Center Agreement (May 2023-June 2024) between the Housing, Planning, and Public Works Department of the Kalispel Tribe of Indians and WSU. Supplemental funding for instructors, student food, and supplies was provided by WSU and student fees. Publishing this article open access was made possible by the University of California Libraries under an open access agreement with the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We dedicate this article to Francis Cullooyah, Culture Director of the Kalispel Tribe. Our deepest thanks go to the Kalispel Tribe for generously hosting the 2023 Field School on their ancestral homelands. In particular, we are grateful to Rebekah Sutch, Francis Cullooyah, Jessie Isadore, Genie Kennedy, Kevin Lyons, Kendra Maroney, Raymond Ostlie, and the many Tribal staff and community members whose hospitality and support made the summer of 2023 truly unforgettable. We thank Kevin Lyons (Kalispel Tribe) for co-creating this work and for his review and guidance. In keeping with his preference, he is acknowledged rather than listed as a co-author. We are deeply grateful for his exceptional contributions, meticulous insights, and comprehensive review of this manuscript. We also extend our appreciation to all Field School students, staff, and guests for their enthusiasm and contributions. Image credits: Daulton Cochran (Figures 6b–d); Walt Hughes (Figures 9a, 10b, c); WSU Photo Services (Figures 9b, c, 10a, 11a, b).

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fearc.2025.1722734/full#supplementary-material

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