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

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.