For as long as she can remember, Sonya Atalay has been fascinated by archaeological research that uncovers clues about the past. She credits her sixth-grade teacher, Barbara Eisenman, who introduced her to the field by giving her an archaeology book on ancient Greece and Rome to occupy her when young Atalay, always thirsty for knowledge, had completed her assignments ahead of the class. 

Growing up outside Detroit, Michigan, a region dominated by auto manufacturing, Atalay was the first in her extended family—and one of only a few from her high school—to attend college. She was accepted to the nearby University of Michigan, where she dove into studying archaeology from day one. Yet as she progressed in her studies, Atalay became increasingly uncomfortable with the methods used in the discipline. As a Native person, she frequently heard from Elders about archaeologists’ disrespectful practices when it came to studying their communities—particularly researchers’ shameful record of digging up Native people’s graves.

“I just kept thinking that this wasn’t a problem with the field—the science—itself, but rather with how the research was being done,” recalls Atalay, today the provost professor of anthropology at UMass Amherst, who has a joint appointment at MIT. “If scientists could learn how to work appropriately with the communities to partner with them, they could explore questions that were meaningful to these communities.”

Atalay continued to grapple with these concerns through her PhD work at the University of California, Berkeley, and later during two postdocs at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. While working at a Turkish archaeological site called Çatalhöyük—one of the world’s earliest cities and today a World Heritage Site—Atalay was struck by the disconnect between the work underway and the experience of local residents, many of whom were hired to carry out manual labor for the scientists but were never consulted on the research being done. With the support of the Stanford faculty member heading the excavation, Atalay went into the villages and talked with the local community members. She learned what was of interest to them—which was very different from her own research questions—and how they preferred to receive information. For this community with limited education and a low literacy rate, they liked formats such as comics and community theater.

Today, Atalay is a global leader in developing ethical, community-based methodologies for research in anthropology and other disciplines. She is the author of Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (University of California Press, 2012), one of the first books to describe a vision for operationalizing the ethics and practices of community-based archaeology research. One of the country’s foremost experts on Indigenous archaeology, Atalay was nominated by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations to serve on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Federal Advisory Review Committee.

In 2012, Atalay joined the UMass Amherst faculty, attracted by the university’s strong commitment to community-based research—not only in anthropology but in disciplines across the university, she says, pointing to UMass’s Carnegie Foundation classification as a community-engaged university. Today, Atalay teaches courses at UMass on community-based research and Indigenous research methods, as well as a course called Comics, Cartoons, and Communicating Research, centered on Indigenous knowledge about storytelling and science communication. 

Over the course of her career, Atalay has seen growing recognition of the value of Indigenous knowledge, both within and beyond the academy. While this is a largely positive development, Atalay and other Native scholars are concerned that Indigenous communities are treated ethically in the process.

As she puts it, “How do you listen to Indigenous knowledge in a way that’s ethical and not extractive? Because of NAGPRA law and long-standing contentious relationships with Native people, archaeologists have been grappling with these questions for decades and can now lead the way as other disciplines begin to contend with similar issues.” 

In 2023, Atalay led the establishment of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (NSF CBIKS), an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) headquartered at UMass Amherst with hubs around the globe. The first social science STC and the first to focus on Indigenous science, NSF CBIKS brings together over 50 scholars, a majority of whom are Indigenous, from across the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Atalay’s focus on relationship building enabled her to form this network for scholars across diverse disciplines and geographies, which is now tackling crucial challenges that are interconnected in the real world—including climate change, protection and care of cultural places, and food sovereignty—in a more organic way, rather than dividing them up into traditional Western academic silos.

“Our scholars meet regularly and work with community partners to develop research questions and designs that reflect communities’ priorities. It’s totally flipping the way research is done,” says Atalay. “In addition, all our partner institutions have signed intellectual property (IP) agreements that say the rights to whatever knowledge comes from Indigenous communities remain with Indigenous communities.”

Ultimately, says Atalay, “We’re building capacity within universities to learn how to work productively and ethically, not only with tribes but with all communities. Community-based research offers a partnership approach to solve critical challenges in the real world.” 

NSF CBIKS also offers the next generation of scholars exposure to methods of braiding Indigenous and Western knowledges in research. Thinking back to the ripple effect her own sixth-grade teacher’s influence had on her, Atalay says, “I’m really proud that we’re training students to think in this mindset and to do ethical work with communities.”

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