New Perspectives on Inequity: European and Indigenous Voices in the North American Landscape

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

The complex and often troubled relations between European arrivals andIndigenous people have undergone reinterpretations, as scholars have revisitedthe documentary and archaeological evidence to provide a more nuancedinterpretation of these entanglements. North American researchers have largelyespoused a postcolonial approach that reorders the evidence in order tohighlight Indigenous presence and agency, and accounts for local historical andcultural contingencies. Indigenous context, settings and networks are importantcorrectives to those represented in the documents. However, this is oftenapplied at the expense of a more thorough understanding of the parallel socialuniverse of European settlers which must also be re-assessed in a similarfashion. This session discusses the uncertainties of power and control in theprocess of colonisation, and how the dynamic Indigenous-European landscapes ofthe 17th-19th centuries were being continually reassessed by all parties.

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  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Dealing in Metaphors: Exploring the Materiality of Trade on the Seventeenth-Century Eastern Siouan Frontier (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Gunter.

    Seventeenth-century native communities along the modern-day Virginia/North Carolina border occupied a pivotal place on the Southeastern U.S. geopolitical landscape. On the periphery of Occaneechi-controlled fur trading networks, Siouan groups like the Sara maintained ties with the eastern Occaneechi through a complex web of social connections and trade networks. Despite their prominent place on the landscape, these groups are poorly understood ethnographically and largely ignored in historical...

  • English Dwellings in North America (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Green.

    This paper explores the evidence for the form of houses built by seventeenth-century English settlers in North America, and examines how closely they followed and in what ways they differed from contemporary English housing. Did houses adapt to differences in climate? Did they incorporate indigenous techniques? Were they built with a view to withstanding attack? How far can we see English houses as embodying a sense of ethnic culture or national identity? And to what extent was the evident...

  • Euro-Native Interaction in 17th Century Montreal: Contributions from a pluralistic approach (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Bourguignon-Tétreault.

    Historical archaeology in Québec tends to focus on European colonial life ways and adaptation to a new landscape, while aspects relating to Native traditions are relegated to prehistory. However, an Indigenous presence was critical to the establishment of the first Montreal colony; at its inception, the project even depended on that presence. The motivations for attracting Native peoples to the small French fort shifted throughout the 17th century from religious to commercial, but the pivotal...

  • European Cultural Landscapes in Manitoba - an Interethnic Perspective (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeff Oliver. Agusta Edwald.

    Within the discourse of settler experiences in North America the ‘European Colonizer’ is all too often viewed in monolithic terms. Moving forward ideas of agency and hybridity, which can transgress the over-embellished ‘contact line’ between Europeans and Indigenous peoples as well as the boundaries that serve to differentiate groups within these categories, requires sensitivity to the scales of social life as well as the situated historical moments that saw people coming together for a variety...

  • Incumbents and Others: de-centering mobility and kinship in Native northeastern landscapes (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Giovanna Vitelli.

    From the late 17th century until relatively recent times, the Native settlements of the Abenaki corridor of northern New England and Québec were host to flows of Indians displaced from increasingly repopulated coastal regions. These small groups cycled through Native settlements, territories, and missions, making connections through kin and links to homelands. The documentary record for these movements is variable, and is particularly affected by contemporary colonial perceptions of marginality:...

  • The Social Identity of the Crew Aboard an 18th Century Spanish Frigate (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Rankin.

    Qualitative and quantitative data comparison of the personal possession and ceramic assemblages of the shipwreck Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Santiago Ap’stol (Rosario) to the shipwreck El Nuevo Constante and Presidio Santa María de Galve provides information regarding the social identities of the sailors on the Rosario. Historical document research and comparative analysis of personal possessions from the Rosario demonstrate the performance of identities such as gender, ethnicity, occupation,...

  • Strange Cousins from the West: Colonial Legacies within Historical Archaeology (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Beaudoin.

    Historical archaeology in North America can be broadly bifurcated between the archaeology of the colonizer (European peoples) and the archaeology of the colonized (Indigenous peoples). This bifurcation is continuously reified in the archaeological discipline, such as by the research questions asked, data privileged, and/or narratives chosen; however, all serve to re-affirm the divide as significant and ultimately conceptualize the colonizers and colonized as essentially different without...

  • We Know You’re Up There: French Perspectives on Inter-Cultural Engagement in Southern Labrador (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Crompton. Lisa Rankin.

    From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century, the French were increasingly drawn to southern Labrador to extract marine resources. Through accidental, incidental, and purposeful encounters, French and Inuit became linked together in an increasingly dense set of connections. The French colonization of southern Labrador was not a steady process of the imposition of domination. Rather, this colonization should best be conceived of as an untidy process, dictated by individual desires and...

  • We Know You’’re Down There: Inuit Perspectives on Inter-Cultural Engagement in Southern Labrador (2014)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Rankin. Amanda Crompton.

    Inuit peoples colonized southern Labrador by the sixteenth century, drawn at least in part by the desire to obtain European materials from seasonally and later permanently resident French colonists. Traditionally, archaeologists have framed the Labrador Inuit story with reference to the ethnographic and archaeological record. Although documentary evidence exists, it is generally considered biased and used sparingly. A re-evaluation of this evidence using social history should enable a much more...