Locating Stories of Survivance within the Colonial Archive: Crafting New Accounts of Grand Ronde History

Summary

Archival material plays an important role in historical archaeological research. This is particularly true in studies of Native American communities of the recent past since the colonial archive comprises a sizable portion of available historical sources. Yet the archive must not be treated as a storehouse of information alone, as it constitutes both state perceptions of Native lifeways and modes of knowledge production through which colonial projects were realized. When approached as sites of critical inquiry the archive’s inconsistencies, omissions, and contingencies may be used to better understand the ways Native communities subverted, accommodated, and lived through European and American colonialisms. This paper explores how community-based historical and archaeological research with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Tribal Historic Preservation Office lends new insight into the history of the Grand Ronde Reservation from its establishment in the mid-1850s through the early twentieth century. Reading government reports, maps, and correspondences against ethnographic information, community knowledge, and archaeological data displaces assimilationist narratives within dominant accounts of tribal history, replacing them with stories that foreground community survivance. This work refashions the colonial tools that created and maintained the Grand Ronde Reservation into sources of capacity building and decolonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15087