by Chris Oke -- By joining hands with Yukon First Nations, gonzo archeologist Norm Easton has broken remarkable new ground.
What with diving for wrecks in the frigid currents of the Yukon River and unearthing some of this continent’s most ancient First Nations artifacts, Norm Easton might seem the classic archeologist-hero – a swashbuckling Indiana Jones-type, equally at ease in the halls of academe and in the throes of a derring-do adventure.
But the comparison doesn’t quite hold. A lecturer in anthropology and Northern studies at Yukon College in Whitehorse, Easton is no grave-robbing buccaneer. The 51-year-old, iconoclastic scientist would never grab a golden idol and run. During 20 years in the North he’s built a lauded career – and made remarkable discoveries – in precisely the opposite way: By forging bonds with Yukon and Alaska First Nations so tight that, according to aboriginal leaders, when he dies he’s welcome to be buried as one of them, on native land. Almost certainly, Easton would like it that way.
When I go to visit Easton at his ramshackle home near Whitehorse’s clay cliffs, my knock creaks his door open to reveal a chaotic universe. Trays of stones and bones clutter the living-room floor in a seemingly haphazard manner, alongside stacks of books and papers in a similar state of disorder. In keeping with the theme, a Jackson Pollock-style splatter-painting covers an entire wall (Easton did it himself). Additional art includes a shelf full of disfigured Barbie dolls – a symbol, he tells me later, of his battles against plastic consumer culture. Posters, photos, quotes and slogans – relics of Easton’s years as a self-styled political firebrand, when he fought fruitlessly against the coming of Wal-Mart – paper every surface, and you get the sense of a man who lives in a whirlwind.
I shout a hello into the entropy, and a gruff bark, like that of an old friendly dog, answers from the room above. Easton stomps down the stairs. He’s wearing a battered Beaver Creek ball cap and heavy earrings that droop from his lobes. There are traces of white peppered throughout his stubble, and his eyebrows creep like orange caterpillars toward his shaved head. His ruddy face seems to have gotten a little too much sun the day before.
Easton takes out a large decanter of whiskey and pours himself a shot. He slugs it down and sighs. “Ah, that’s better.”
We head to a local bar for a less cluttered place to talk. I follow him to his “roost” in the corner of the outdoor deck and the waitress serves up a Miller Genuine Draft without having to ask. He sparks up a cigarette, noting that they’re “politically incorrect” but asking for neither permission nor forgiveness. As we drink, he burns his way through several more.
Easton explains he didn’t choose his profession to fulfill fantasies of gun-slinging adventure. Sure, he sometimes packs a rifle into the bush, but only for bears. No, he says, after a childhood growing up in Vancouver he wound up as an archeologist because, as an undergrad at Simon Fraser University, he failed biochemistry. Adrift and losing interest in school, he took a friend’s advice to attend an anthropology course. He liked it enough to go on a 12-week field course the following summer in Crescent Beach, B.C. By the time he returned to school that fall, he was hooked.
Easton first came to the Yukon in January 1986, following his then-wife, who had a job in the territory. On his second day in town he was sitting in the hotel bar, drinking and smoking and watching ads on the community TV station. He noticed an announcement for a meeting of the Yukon Underwater Diving
Association. It was happening at that very moment, in the bar’s adjacent hotel. With nothing better to do, he wandered over, hunkered down in back, and listened to a representative from the Yukon government’s heritage branch talk about a proposal for a territorial underwater-archeology program. Easton couldn’t believe his luck. He’d done underwater archeology during his graduate studies, making him one of just 10 professional archeologists in Canada that dove.
From that moment, like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones, Easton’s career started rolling. He speaks excitedly about his four years setting up a research inventory of the Yukon’s historic freshwater shipwrecks, and about the dangers of diving in the North’s frigid, fast-moving waters. His academic tones often give way to flourishes of profanity, thrown in for emphasis. Yukon diving, he says, fiddling with his earring, “can be really dangerous, especially with all the crap that’s in there. You don’t want to get a piece of rebar up your ass.”
There were other entanglements, of the non-aquatic variety. After “running afoul of some interests here” – involving a court case Easton won’t elaborate on – Easton went back south to B.C. to do diving research off Galiano Island. But by 1991 he was back in the North for a doctoral thesis on the Dene of the Yukon-Alaska borderlands – people who live in two different nations yet share a common culture. He conducted a great deal of archeological digging in the area, living in the bush for a year and studying with native elders – “teachers,” as he lovingly refers to them.
Many of Easton’s colleagues couldn’t understand why he was wasting time in the villages, dancing at potlatches and the like. According to Chief David Johnny of the Yukon’s White River First Nation, “A lot of people just come here to get their information, do what they have to do, and then they’re gone. But Norm is totally different. He learns the language, he learns the culture, he learns how the elders think and what’s taboo and all that stuff. Even though he’s a non-native person his thinking is totally native. We’ve just got to paint him brown and put a feather in him.”
Easton laughs, describing it as perplexing yet beautiful that First Nations would embrace him, considering the sordid history between Northern natives and whites. “The last thing you’d think they’d want is another probable bastard hanging out and causing trouble,” he says. “But they say, ‘I haven’t met you before, so come on in, have some tea and we’ll see what we can work out.’”
Easton’s appreciation of First Nations’ generosity is, clearly, reciprocated. According to Chief Johnny, “I think we’ll have to bury him here if he dies. We’ll plant him anywhere he wants.”
Easton’s respect for the White River band has paid dividends before the grave, too. In 2002, because of his special relationship with the First Nation, Easton made his most important discovery. Joseph Tommy Johnny, an elder with whom Easton had spent countless hours doing cultural and linguistic work, took him and his crew to a hunting camp just outside the Yukon town of Beaver Creek. While there, Johnny suggested the crew dig around. Easton didn’t expect to find anything – after all, they were close to the well-trodden Alaska Highway, and four major surveys had already been completed in the area.
Still, his team went to work with their trowels and brushes. Shockingly, they found material in every test-pit. Easton returned to the site with more Yukon College students, plus youth from the First Nation, and let them have a go at it. No more than a couple feet down a teardrop-shaped tool was unearthed – an artifact that fell into disuse some 10,000 years ago. Further exploration in 2007 yielded another area of the site that was much deeper. There, bone was found from a species of extinct bison that had been butchered by prehistoric humans. Radiocarbon testing showed it to be between 13,720 and 14,050 years old.
It is some of the oldest evidence of human occupation in the New World.
The find, Easton tells me as he sucks at his beer, was announced at the Society for American Archeology meeting last March. It had the archeological community drooling. Sure, it’s not the Lost Ark of the Covenant, nor the Temple of Doom. But for swashbuckling scholar Norm Easton, it’s pretty darn close.
