Reservation Archaeology: Culture Change, Historical Trauma, and Community Resilience in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Native North America

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Herbster. Jane Miller.

The nineteenth century history of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah is a snapshot of continuous Native American presence on Martha’s Vineyard over thousands of years. Residents were placed under state guardians in 1781. Between 1863 and 1878, communal lands were subdivided and distributed among tribal families, and a census of tribal members and professional survey of existing homesteads was completed. Aquinnah ceased to be an Indian reservation with town incorporation in 1870,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara L Gonzalez.

Native nations in the 19th and early 20th century were subjected to increasing pressure from American settlers and the U.S. government, which resulted in their forced removal, resettlement, and the creation of policies that were directed at terminating tribal identities and reservations. Despite this history of colonial oppression and dispossession tribes such as the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (CTGR) did not just survive settler colonialism, but created anew their social worlds and sense of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Pickering.

The Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana was established in 1855 and contains six river basins. Beginning in the early 1900s, plans for Blackfeet Irrigation Projects were developed. It was estimated that 111,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres reservation would be irrigable. From 1908 to 1920, the Bureau of Reclamation constructed a network of water works; including canals, laterals, reservoirs, and dams across six irrigation districts. Through the lens of materiality as manifested in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Laluk.

In 2004 the White Mountain Apache Tribe approved the Cultural Heritage Resources Best Management Practices (Welch et al.). However, since the tribe’s adoption of the practices little has been done in reference to the application of such tenets/concepts found within the guidelines. Tribal programs, contractors, and researcher’s might adhere to the guidelines during project activities but only as "guidelines," when there is much more embedded in such tenets as respect and avoidance that can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Turney.

     There is a contentious history between Navajo families living in the Wupatki Basin, ranchers, and the National Park Service. The creation of the monument in 1924 gradually displaced indigenous residents from ancestral homelands, leading to loss of territory and connection to family. Here I focus on change in Euroamerican demands for land and federal management policies, as well as Navajo kinship, family dynamics, and oral history as told by descendants of the first Navajo settlers in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric T. Oosahwee-Voss.

What happens to the identity of indigenous people when they are raised in a tribal community but not within the boundaries of a reservation? The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma (UKB) are one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes and are also known as the "Old Settlers" or "Western Cherokee." The UKB established a reservation in Indian Territory via treaty in 1828. Although the tribe never relinquished this treaty claim, today the United States government does not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Sturdevant. William Clayton.

As co-signatories on the 1854 Treaty of LaPointe, the Grand Portage Band was placed on a reservation within their traditional homeland where they continued to maintain a tribal identify directly tied to Grand Portage Bay on Lake Superior. During the reservation era, the Grand Portage Band lived within a changing cultural landscape created out of the multi-cultural milieu that had existed since the arrival of the French in the 1660s. This paper explores cultural landscape aspects of mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacy Hollenback. Wendi Field Murray. Jay Sturdevant.

The Reservation Era (AD 1778 to present) is a time of culture change and fight for cultural sovereignty. There are approximately 326 American Indian Reservations covering 56.2 million acres in the United States, numbers that fail to capture the realities of non-federally recognized groups, those with no land base, or indigenous peoples in Canada or Mexico. All of these communities experienced profound transformations in economies, cultural institutions, and socio-political structures during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandi Bethke.

Programs of forced settlement and assimilation were responsible for the loss of many aspects of traditional Blackfoot lifeways. At the same time, however, they also strengthened the identity of the Blackfoot people as they resisted absorption into Euroamerican culture. This resistance through adaptation is seen in the Blackfoot people’s continued use of and adoration for horses. While many elements of nomadic Blackfoot culture were abandoned in the late nineteenth century with the near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle L. Kiesow.

The Grand Portage Reservation in the northeastern tip of Minnesota is home to the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe). Until recently, no research at Grand Portage has analyzed the extent to which the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) exerted psychological and physical control over Ojibwe residents. Historic documentation, artifact assemblages, and paleobotanical data in the form of phytoliths constitute the three main lines of evidence used to interpret land use and plant use at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kretzler.

The General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 was passed amid mounting criticism that the federal reservation system was failing to assimilate Native Americans into Euro-American society. On reservations, Native communities grappled with the traumas of dispossession, violence, and food shortages, but they also possessed a degree of freedom to maintain cultural practices and identities. The Dawes Act was designed to terminate these lifeways by tethering Native families to privately owned plots,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell G. Townsend.

Landscapes of tribal reservations vary across the regions of the United States, yet change to these landscapes remains a constant. On the constrained reservations of the east any change to the landscape can be of great significance.  The Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina is one such reservation.  Home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, this 57,000 acre section of trust land has changed significantly over the past century, but with the economic boon brought about by the casino, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendi Field Murray. Brad Kroupa.

     By the eighteenth century, Arikara villages along the Missouri River in the Dakotas were already in flux, as residents confronted Old World epidemic diseases and powerful enemies. Nineteenth- century allotment policies further transformed the spatial organization of their communities, though they did not undermine the central tenets of Arikara identity; the persistence of corn agriculture, a tradition of resource-sharing, and spiritual communion with the Missouri River.      This research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric C. Drake.

Recent historical analyses of American Indians and wage labor have sought to challenge the "traditional" versus "modernist" dichotomy that has long shaped narratives of Anishinaabe labor history in the Upper Great Lakes.  This paper discusses how collaborative research, involving the archaeological investigation of logging camps and mill sites in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, has aided in challenging the assumptions underlying this narrative form.  More specifically, this paper explores the...