Arizona State University: Updates on Research of the Leupp Isolation Center Community Accountable Archaeological Project

In this presentation, Davina Two Bears will give an update on the Leupp Isolation Center Community Accountable Archaeological Project. Old Leupp is a site of entwined histories of both the Navajo people and Japanese Americans. Our community accountable archaeological project seeks to understand and share these histories of assimilation in federal Indian boarding schools and Japanese American incarceration on Indigenous lands by the US government in the early 20th century. Davina Two Bears is Navajo from the community of Birdsprings, Arizona, located on the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona. Davina is also currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU. Her research focuses on the Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS), a Navajo historic archaeological site near the community of Leupp, Arizona. She has researched the Navajo experience at this Federal Indian Boarding School, which operated from 1909 to 1942. Although the OLBS was one of the only schools functioning on the western half of the Navajo Reservation in the early 20th century, it had never been fully documented in the literature until now. She is also researching its later use as a Japanese Isolation Center—the Leupp Isolation Center—in 1943 during World War II.