The Oakland Museum of California’s “Power to the People'' exhibit celebrates the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its influence on contemporary social movements, such as Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp (KYRC) and Autopsy Initiative, which pays for autopsies in suspected cases of police brutality. This form of mass murder of African Americans has spurred a reevaluation of how museums and agencies (such as the National Park Service) collect and present the stories they tell. Collecting and curating the objects of protest and promoting the stories of activism helps Americans realize that protests and social movements are not isolated events. Each is part of a long history of struggle. The “Power to the People'' exhibit is an example of how stewards of history (archaeologists, historians, and museum specialists) can respond to activism. The exhibit, like the KYRC, offers those who are disproportionately affected by police brutality resources they can use.

In this paper I will discuss the artifacts, digital data, and community relationships accumulated over three years of documenting police violence against protestors in my local community. Over the course of this project I have become expert at identifying chemical weapons parts, have learned to safely store explosive objects outside of traditional institutional settings, and have been called upon to provide material to support legal action brought by people harmed by use of "less than lethal" weapons throughout my region. Cataloguing these contemporary historically significant artifacts was eye-opening in itself, but equally so has been the way this role has helped me establish parasocial relationships with people as I help them to understand their own traumatic experiences through community-based archaeological practice.

This paper focuses on the ways that archaeological praxis shifts when we embrace the political nature of all archaeology. Participatory Action Research (PAR) provides a method for archaeologists to work as both archaeologists and activists with communities, connecting the past to current injustices. This better allows their work to be translational by incorporating communities’ needs and desires into their research thereby providing useful interventions for affected communities to use for activist purposes. With more engaged methodologies like PAR, archaeologists can also challenge scholarly authority on what constitutes archaeological practice and method. Archaeologists can utilize non-traditional strategies and use traditional archaeological methods in untraditional ways. This can even include archaeological research that does not involve excavation. This paper will highlight several projects from Brooklyn, New York that are redefining archaeology as a way to explore the who, what, and how of activist archaeology.

Research that purposefully redistributes authority can have more ethical and innovative results than standard hierarchical research models. This paper summarizes the results of projects “with, by, and for” (sensu Atalay 2012) Native American communities who had more authority in decision making than standard projects typically do. First, the Stewart Indian School project studied the forced assimilation of Native American children into mainstream society in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The project distributed authority among settler academics and tribal members in heritage negotiations. Some of the same participants later initiated the “Our Ancestors’ Walk of Sorrow” project to study the forced removal of Indigenous POWs from their homelands in the 19^th century. The later project represents a shift from shared authority to primarily tribal authorities. This paper explores the author’s increasing efforts to relinquish control from the academic Ivory Tower, including challenges, consequences, and benefits for different groups.

Enbridge crude oil pipelines have been operational on Anishinaabe treaty lands in northern Minnesota for over 70 years, carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Superior Terminal, Wisconsin. It was not until the replacement of Line 3 with the Line 93 pipeline in 2015 that large-scale social unrest was sparked. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Water Protectors joined together in civil disobedience to halt construction of Line 93 due to its violations of Indigenous sovereignty and its potential for environmental impacts. On October 1st, 2021, the replacement construction was finished; Line 3 was deactivated; the replacement Line 93 began transporting oil; and the resistance mostly subsided. In this paper, I explore the role of archaeology within this conflict as both a methodology for engaging with the materiality of oil infrastructure and as a stakeholder and ally of decolonial social movements through collected archaeological and ethnographic data along the pipeline route.

Gender equality is an objective that has yet to be achieved on a larger scale. Women have always been and are still part of the industrial workforce, nonetheless, they often keep being ignored and marginalized by archaeological research as part of a productive system that enhanced their social subalternization. In general, industrial archaeology continues to promote the idea that women are the “weaker sex”, and heteronormative myths related to their working situation keep “occupying” the minds of so many people. As a public science, archaeology must contribute to the activist debate on social inequality and contemporary political debates by providing data about social practices, both in the past and in the present. Based on the example of the Portuguese situation of women working in industrial spaces, and defending that archaeology should be public, political, and activist, this paper intends to deconstruct those narratives and give a voice to these women.