My name is Mary Motah Weahkee, and I am a tribal member of the Comanche Nation and Santa Clara Pueblo. I was born in New Mexico and resided with my mother in Santa Clara Pueblo while my father, an airman, was overseas in Germany. The family moved around the country from Florida to Oklahoma to finally California and then back to my homeland of northern New Mexico. I played volleyball in high school and was California Interscholastic Federation Most Valuable Player two years in a row. I attended Cal State University Fullerton on a full athletic scholarship and was an all-American my freshman and sophomore years. Our team toured other countries, including exhibition matches and teaching in Indigenous communities in Mexico. This experience allowed me to coach volleyball and other sports in California and when I returned to New Mexico, and my Native player graduates are scattered throughout the Southwest.
I starting working as an entry-level archaeologist in 2006, retiring as a crew chief in 2023. I was able to find connections between the oral histories of my grandparents and the places and sites I had the pleasure of working in. I shared my community’s stories with my scientist colleagues, and the advantage of being Native American helped with the interpretation of some sites. The negative side of archaeology for me was watching some of the sites our team uncovered and recorded bulldozed, never to be seen again. I don’t think I ever got over the devastation each time this occurred, watching the heritage of my ancestors destroyed by highway or building construction. I did give my offerings of cornmeal and prayers for the old ones at these times.
I was drawn to experimental archaeology as an opportunity to learn ancient technologies and skills that weren’t part of my modern life. I saw “how and why questions” being answered by hands-on experiments and experiences. Few experiences can compare with the luxuriant warmth of a turkey feather blanket. The advantage of hands-on teaching has also been that I have been able to reach a broad audience. Pre-K thru high school children tend to be visual and touch learners, and I enjoy demonstrating that even an object that looks difficult may not be that difficult to make after all. The use of objects produced from plants right at your feet amazed children who often went home and mangled their parent’s landscaping to show what they had learned. With adults, I noticed the excitement of their inner child while getting yucca goop on their hands and grinding a shell for a simple bracelet. Their eyes focused and the wrinkles on their foreheads tightened, ending with the happiness and satisfaction of accomplishment when they were finished. A UNM professor put on a pair of sandals and said “my god I never knew how these went on the foot,” expressing how elegant they looked on her own feet.
Native Americans are visual learners, and being able to demonstrate ancient knowledge and skills helped open opportunities to support education programs in Native schools. Students don’t get much from seeing ancestors’ artifacts of daily life behind glass, and being able to explain how objects were made and used as the students handle replicas or learn the skills to make the objects themselves result in a far more meaningful connection. They can learn how ancient weapons were used, how clever and sophisticated the technologies were, and how learning the techniques of making and using tools for survival is within their ability. FUN is the key.
Native American communities in New Mexico are very different in cultural practices and language. As a Native person I knew this from my pre-archaeology life, and my understanding became deeper as I delivered education programs throughout the State. This is taken into great consideration when teaching at the range of schools that I have worked with in the communities we visit, even to the point of getting approvals from elders and leaders before teaching.
Many of the survival skills that I have learned and teach are very important, so important that I have often found that the skills and objects inspire the telling of history and stories of the past. During some of my programs, elders have come in (planned or unplanned) to teach the names of archaeological replica items in the language of the specific village or tribe. Bilingual programs have the opportunity to create a curriculum around a particular subject pertaining to ancient lifeways knowledge and skills. We have worked with schools to develop stem programs based on ancient lifeways, the strength of yucca, the flight of the weapons, and the processing of certain wild foods. I have created programs that specifically bring back lost knowledge such as bison butchering for the women and processing of meat and use of hide and bones for tools. Experimental archaeology has allowed me to reintroduce to whole communities some of the ways that our ancestors had followed for hundreds and thousands of years.
As an individual I plan to continue the teaching of ancient lifeways to whom ever may want to learn. I am still visiting and working on sites in Utah, Colorado, and Texas. And thanks to collaborations with archaeologists such as Dr. Laurie Webster, I am still looking at collections in various museums in the United States and am learning more about ancient technologies and lifeways. As long as I have grandchildren I will always be both a student and a teacher.