Creators, Makers, & Doers: William A. White III
Posted on 6/26/24 by Brooke Burton
Interview by Brooke Burton © Boise City Department of Arts & History, Edited by HJ Moon & Brooke Burton
Photography by Brooke Burton & William A. White III (River Street Archaeological Dig documentation images)
William A. White III, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, returned to Boise, his hometown, to lead a volunteer powered archaeological dig in the River Street Neighborhood in 2015. The findings are the center of his newly published book: Segregation Made Them Neighbors; An Archaeology of Radicalization in Boise, Idaho. We met with Bill to dig (see what we did there?) into the surprising thing that archaeologists get wrong, hidden truths found in historical laws for fashion, and his intriguing take on the afterlife. What we really love: the frank discussion on the creation of whiteness. What is it? Addressed through artifacts, you don’t have to dig deep to discover that archaeology isn’t “the nice, neat, tidy package” you expected. It’s an exposure to recent histories that can be uncomfortable, painful even. And it’s worth it. Awareness can lead to healing; “What you do with that awareness is up to you.”
How did you come to get a doctorate in Archaeology?
I was born in Boise, then my dad got a job in New York, so I started elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York. When you’re a kindergartner there, the field trips are to the Ringling Brothers Circus and the Museum of Natural History. I was this nerdy kid—I learned how to read when I was three and a half or four—so the library was my home. When I went to the museums, I had all these questions: where did they get these fossils, how did they get them, what does it mean to have that stuff? Where did they get these meteorites? In the ’80s, the movies Star Wars, Indiana Jones—I was just a kid—
I was wondering if Indiana Jones was going to come up today! [laughter.]
There was a traveling exhibit that brought the Ramses sarcophagus to Boise; I got to see that. Those were all huge influences.
What is contemporary archaeology?
It’s using the archaeology method and theory on things that aren’t old. It’s looking at places where people tailgate, or watch sporting events, or, [looking at] unhoused encampments. It’s looking in neighborhoods, doing household evaluations.
Archaeologists never find 100 percent of an archaeological site. There’s no way to do that. You’re always using crumbs to get at much bigger things. You never get everything at a Native American camp, you only get a few flake stones, or charcoal, or changes in the soil. So, you try to figure out what [life] was like; where [and why] they were burning different kinds of wood, eating different foods, telling stories, and just being human. In the case of contemporary [archaeology], you can look at the stuff left over, things people throw away, litter.
Looking around the room, I wonder how many of my belongings would be interpreted incorrectly by an archaeologist in the future?
Everything [chuckling]. Even what we’re doing in this room will just evaporate away. Even if they had every single thing in here, they wouldn’t know what we do in this room. They can’t imagine what would happen—they can only see what was there. From that, we have to extrapolate. That’s how you get into danger; a thousand years have gone by, you can only see the echoes of things like dinner, sleeping, eating—
What’s the danger?
That you would apply your own understanding from the present to something in the past. And strongly go with it.
Go with it and then make interpretations based on what’s true for you?
If you don’t change your approach and listen to new data, you can get locked into a misunderstanding of what you’re seeing. That happens sometimes.
What’s an example?
In the case of African American archaeology in the 1960s and ‘70s, [excavating] plantations, they knew the cabins were where enslaved people of African descent lived. And they would know that the house was where people of European descent lived. And the [plantation] overseers, or managers, lived in other houses. Most of the time these larger plantations were owned by more prosperous white people but managed by working-class whites or European immigrants. So, archaeologists were trying to figure out if enslaved folks and working-class white people were buying the same things.
The question was, how did the material life of enslaved Africans differ from the life of the plantation manager, the overseer, or the people who were living in the big house? They had this idea that people of African descent were fully enchained and had zero agency, who just kind of woke up, worked, then went and laid in their room.
Archaeologists envisioned that enslaved people waited around on the property?
Archaeologists could probably intuitively understand the range of culture happening, but they thought that enslaved Africans didn’t have materials or that the enslaved were making everything themselves. But what the archaeologists learned was that the enslaved Africans sometimes had slightly better things, things that cost more to obtain, than the overseer. The ceramics of enslaved folks, in some instances, were actually the same quality as the ceramics of the people who owned the plantation.
What was the false belief based on those findings?
The false belief was that the plantation owner was giving those ceramics to the people of African descent. While this may have happened, Black folks were making money on their own and buying things that mattered to them. Sometimes this meant high quality ceramics. Enslaved Africans might have been getting hand-me-downs from the plantation owner but they also had agency, were entrepreneurial, and were buying and selling in the local marketplace. The overseer was also shopping in town, but their primary source of income was watching the enslaved.
Archaeologists made the assumption that the more expensive items were gifts given to enslaved people? While the overseer had to purchase their own, but had less money to spend, but that’s not exactly the case?
[They assumed] that was the reason the overseer had less quality ceramics, right? But what they’re forgetting is that enslaved African folks had agency and were entrepreneurial, and they didn’t have to pay for lodging, so all their earnings could go into expensive ceramics, if they wanted. They could raise vegetables and sell them to other slaves, making extra money; whereas the overseer had only one pathway of revenue. The overseers were paid to keep Africans enslaved, which was a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job. The overseer was paid by the plantation owner to constantly watch the enslaved individuals, whereas enslaved individuals could leave and go to town on Sundays, make crafts, make different kinds of foods to sell. And archaeologists could see this in the value of the ceramics the overseers were using in their homes; they weren’t as expensive as what some of the enslaved people were using.
You can imagine, just like today, there were people living hand to mouth— both white and black—who, maybe, worked on the docks, only earned a few cents each day, and didn’t have a place to cook food—so enslaved folks made stews all day then sold it by the bowl. They may not have been granted emancipation, but, if they wanted to have nice clothes, they could. If they wanted to have expensive ceramics, they could.
How can a narrative like that be corrected?
By reading historical documents. There are laws and rules on what Black people could wear, like a prohibition on Black women buying fine linens in town because they were dressing too nicely. Well, why would you have to make a law in South Carolina or Louisiana against Black women dressing too nicely, if people weren’t doing it? Or, sumptuary laws in Texas that Black people couldn’t wear certain kinds of fabrics. They’d have to have the ability to get those fabrics in the first place. The reason people made rules against Black people’s clothing was because Black people had money to buy expensive things because they were making money from the products they had to sell.
Archaeologists didn’t factor in agency and commerce outside the white majority. Is archaeology just digging and digging? I have this romantic idea of a lone archaeologist out in the dirt, sweating in the sun. How wrong am I?
Very wrong. [Laughter.] No archaeologist does it alone. If you’re doing it alone, you’re doing it wrong.
Besides labor, what’s the advantages of working with a team?
The group mind of experienced folks, having different perspectives. Nobody is the same. Everybody looks at an artifact, but each of us has a different relationship to it, and notices different things about it.
You’re covering a lot of ground? I looked at the plot points for the Erma Hayman House, and it’s covered in dots.
It can take a long, long time. If I hadn’t had the folks in Boise, and my other colleagues, it couldn’t have gotten done in a month. It could have gotten done in years, but not in six weeks.
Who were the volunteers helping out?
We had a lot of Boise residents participate. We’re super fortunate to have a city‑level government department that cares about archaeology, arts and history. Most communities don’t have that. It’s a real net gain to have that. Archaeology collects information about the past in a way you don’t get from books or from interviews. Archaeology sites are precious resources. Anything can come by and just wipe an archaeological site away.
You said sites like this are becoming rare and contested?
There are a lot of neighborhoods like River Street that have been slated for development. If we look across the United States, it wasn’t just Black neighborhoods—man, they just ripped through our urban spaces in the mid-20th Century, and they’re still rolling through. They don’t come with tanks, they come with banks. The property is really valuable now. But, people are starting to realize, like, “Holy cow, this entire immigrant neighborhood is gone.” No one has commemorated their existence in these landscapes, and now it’s gone. It becomes contested because you want new condos or need affordable housing.
Taking action on the land without foresight, or perhaps care, for the historical or archaeological record?
Every time something is constructed, it has the potential to destroy an archaeological site. You’ll never have a chance to know the information that site contained, because if it gets destroyed, it’s lost for 50 to 100 years, until a new archaeological record is built up. There are laws that could help prevent site destruction, but it is really up to how much a community values knowing about the past that will determine how much effort is placed on site preservation. Some cultures believe it’s a bad idea to engage with this kind of work.
Really?
[Some cultures] believe artifacts were deposited in the past for a certain reason, and that you’re not supposed to meddle. Some people are ethically and culturally prohibited from engaging in archaeological work. Archaeologists occupy this liminal space, where items that have been created by folks in the past— ancestors— through fate, or whatever pathways, have gone out of circulation with humans. This goes beyond buried human remains to include spiritual items, ceremonial items, or even just remains of everyday life.
The items have died too, so to speak?
And they’re forever connected with those past people. So, to engage in archaeology is to bring—to resurrect the dead and connect to those dead energies, right?
Spooky.
If you’re an individual who believes those energies and spirits of ancestors engage with the living, and that they can engage with our spirits here in the present—maybe cause problems for folks trying to successfully transition over to the ancestral realm—then to dig into archaeology is to reach out and touch those things, to bring those spirits who have not passed into the ancestral realm—
Inviting ghosts. . . ?
Yeah. So, it could be a bad thing, culturally, to engage in archaeology. Some folks believe that because archaeologists have meddled with so many different spirits, that our spirits and souls are out of alignment or tainted and that we shouldn’t be around certain people because we have spirits all around us.
You’ve got an entourage of spirits floating around you? I’m glad this is a virtual meeting.
What? So you’re safe? Those spirits don’t know any boundaries or dimensions. Better watch yourself. [Laughter.]
Do you believe in an afterlife?
Well, I mean it makes a lot of sense; all the things we’re doing right now are going to impact future generations. Every inch I drive, every dollar I put into retirement, every Amazon purchase—it’s all going to echo for a long, long time. It’s going to live on for thousands of years. Whether your spirit lives on, or your bones live on, we know that the impact of previous generations on planet Earth keeps going. So, if you think about the afterlife in that way, yeah, it’s fully real. We’re living with the legacy of what 50,000 years of human [life] has done to this planet.
Personally speaking, is there a legacy you’d like to leave?
I’ve got a family, so I want to make sure my kids are financially better off than I am. I want to try to figure out more about the past so it’s not forgotten, try to provide spaces for descendants to metabolize some of the stuff that’s happened to us, stuff we don’t talk about.
Emotional work?
Some of the growth and healing that the world needs, emotionally and mentally, is to work through the traumas and struggles that came from our parents, grandparents, and great‑grandparents. I hope people recognize that life is short and precious. At the snap of your fingers, everything can change, even for the whole world. Maybe spending time collecting artifacts is not the goal. The goal should lie in trying to help people work through the complications and difficulties in their lives and find a way to live in this world that’s changing so much.
In that context is archaeology a form of therapy? For a whole culture?
I’m not a therapist so—
Well, we used the world heal—
Boise is not the only place trying to find a way in this rapidly changing world, and we can learn about the past from [archaeology] sites. Communities are pushing for archaeology and oral history projects. Disenfranchised people like African Americans, Native American tribes, and immigrant groups want to document the knowledge their elders have and to record the history of their people in their own unique way. These communities can get at some of this by recording oral history interviews with their elders and digging sites where their people used to live. Some people don’t want certain histories told.
Why do you think that is?
It causes them discomfort and pain.
Is that related to the River Street neighborhood?
Folks who lived here were racialized, segregated from the rest of the town. In order for there to be a Boise that was the upstanding Protestant white town, people who were, like, Catholic, Basque, Japanese, Eastern European immigrants, or people who were Eastern Orthodox, or [spoke] a different language, and, definitely African Americans, were put in this neighborhood—along with anyone else who was white, but that didn’t have the economic capacity to portray their whiteness, to project it.
We talked earlier about the creation of whiteness. I’m white, and I think in terms of the other, I don’t think about being white. What is the creation of whiteness?
A process whereby people who were, or are immigrants, from European nations that have this, kind of, white phenotype expression, and who can surrender aspects of their original ethnicity, to take on a constantly transmogrifying American identity. It changes throughout time. That’s why it makes it really hard for [us] to consider who’s white and who’s not. 
It is a presentation of an imagined American identity? The invention of a majority?
It’s not always skin complexion. It’s not always English language capability. It depends on where [you live]. The United States is a big place. It’s situational. One of the ways it happens, is to normalize the idea that the things it means to be an American are things associated with non‑European ethnic white context. And by normalizing that, anyone who doesn’t have it, or can never get it, ends up something else.
The other. A minority.
It also creates a comfortable space for people who are white to operate without having the stress and strain of being ethnic. You end up in this situation where folks start making laws, social norms—making it hard for someone from Europe to fit in, unless they speak English, and not just English, but English without any kind of accent.
Language. What else?
To wear clothes that are some rendition of what the time period thinks is adequate clothing for a person of European descent. These are tiny cultural clues; how you wear your pants, how you wear your hat, how you wear your hair, your makeup. You can also make movies and music that shows your cultural uniqueness but those same media can be used to show certain groups as upstanding citizens when compared to other groups. You can use all of this to build a profile of who is considered an upstanding American citizen.
To publish and circulate the idea of what it means to be American.
And controlling the message. It’s taken hundreds of years to manufacture that.
I am beginning to understand.
The discomfort happens when we start to dig into these histories [and see that] people made laws preventing people of European descent from being considered white, until they shed their culture. The thing that makes it uncomfortable is when you start to think, “Oh, yeah, actually, it was my parents, or my grandparents, who benefited directly from [those laws].”
That’s how it comes out in places like River Street, where the minute those People of Color leave that neighborhood, they know they’re on somebody else’s turf. They’re in the spaces reserved for white people. And to be in that space means you are out of your space. Carving up the landscape—
The city was divided according to whiteness and non-whiteness. I’m learning a lot here. What is the idea of exposure therapy?
If everything’s normalized [for you,] and you never spend any time thinking about your own race, you’re in a place of whiteness. Remember what I was saying about the artifacts, that they’re all buying the things from the same factory—they may not be paying the same price—and by having these artifacts, these buttons and clothes, that you are projecting American‑ness, projecting that you are upstanding, hard‑working, clean, all these different aspects.
So the only thing that was different about River Street, is that people of African descent, immigrants, people of a lower socioeconomic status, lived in this neighborhood, and [today] people don’t really think about how that echoes through history. Developers aren’t taking bulldozers and building condos in the North End? 
No.
They aim right for River Street; it’s been targeted. They’re going through Garden City, too, which is where they drove Chinese folks out of the city of Boise. They’re rolling through with townhouses, getting rid of trailer parks and other kinds of housing that low‑income folks need. They’re not aiming that kind of development and density at other older districts in the city of Boise.
I see the complexity. Areas with low property value are more attractive to developers and therefore more likely to have the history of those places and the people who lived in them, erased. So, then the available archaeological record in a city will not be a true representation of all the people who lived there. And when the sites are gone, they are gone. I hadn’t thought about that.
People don’t think about it. But then they end up in a [situation] where there’s no way to avoid it, you have to talk about it. When I was at the Hayman house, folks were doing cartwheels in their minds, thinking about “Well, I’m an immigrant—”
They’re thinking about their own family history while they are digging?
Yeah, while doing archaeology. After a couple weeks, they’d be like, “You know what I was thinking about? My grandmother told me these stories about what it was like to immigrate from Europe.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. 
Folks are exposed to the fact that there was a segregated landscape, that not everyone was free to be who they wanted to be and live where they wanted to live. People would say, “Well, I’m fourth generation Boise.” Yeah, that means three of those generations made this place exist. Then “Oh, really? Well, I didn’t do anything wrong.” I’m not saying they did anything wrong. It is wrong— what happened—but that’s all part of our history. It’s not just thinking about Black people having race; it’s also thinking about the fact that white people are the other side of the coin, and who were, a lot of times, complicit.
And who probably benefited.
All of that has come into who we are as people. In a place like the Hayman House, in a place like Boise that’s overwhelmingly white, most people working on [the dig] were white. I was the only African American out there. There were some Native students, some Asian American students, but it was mostly white people and volunteers.
They end up having to think about how they have come to have whiteness. “Why do you think you’re white?” “Well, I don’t know, I never thought about it.” Well, think about it. Because there’s other people, and how do you think they came to be others?
Volunteers came to dig for the summer, and are exposed, in a non-confrontational way, to uncomfortable histories in our community.
Boise is super lucky to have a really well‑organized volunteer archaeology cohort. They love it, they volunteer on a lot of sites, and they show up when it’s time. But, there can be a backlash. Someone feels really uncomfortable, then gets mad that the city is sponsoring the work. So, the kinds of things brought up by archaeology—it’s not the nice, neat, tidy package that they thought. And maybe their grandparents weren’t really telling the truth.
It used to be laughed off, like, “Well, that’s just how people were in the past.” People today are like, “Well, it’s time for reparations. It’s time for you to start thinking about the harm you’ve caused and what it’s done to you, too, as a person. You have been impacted, even though it was generations ago, so think about it. Because we have been thinking about it.”
We live with the legacy of people who did own people.
Reparations as calling for action from people living today?
Here’s the deal. Folks today like to say, “I didn’t do it.” Well, you’re exactly right, like, I didn’t cut down all the forest in the Amazon; nevertheless, they’re getting torched and cut down. I didn’t start the fires in the Boise National Forest in the ’80s, but when I drive through now, they’re gone. It burned down when I was a boy. I’m not the one who specifically caused those things, but I still have to live with the legacy.
I’m not the one who directly caused the harm, but acknowledging it is the first step. That enables you, based on how you feel, on who you are as a person, and where you’re at in your life, to take other steps. The first step is awareness. What you do with that awareness is up to you. 
River Street Neighborhood
June 26, 2024
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Creators, Makers, & Doers highlights the lives and work of Boise artists and creative individuals. Selected profiles focus on individuals whose work has been supported by the Boise City Dept. of Arts & History. The views expressed in this publication are those of the individuals