Delineating Ancestral Tribal Territories in Western Washington Based on Flawed Interpretations of Historic Records and Archaeology: A Review of Contemporary Practices and Consequences

Summary

Historians and anthropologists have reviewed the history of problems associated with delineating tribes and tribal territories in Western Washington, noting often uncritical acceptance of historic records at face value, such as failure to consider the context, goals, and cultural viewpoints of those generating records.  Such problems, unfortunately, persist in contemporary contexts where tribes create fictional histories to accommodate modern political and economic goals.  Here I review flawed interpretations of historic records and archaeology for Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound that derive from legal cases associated with treaty-reserved rights to fish, hunt, and harvest shellfish and crab.  Consequences of flawed scholarship extend beyond treaty-reserved access to resources that have economic effects, to projection of cultural hegemony by some tribes to rewrite histories and to force public agencies to ignore legitimate histories and claims of other tribes, including access to traditional cultural historic landscapes and claims to ancestral archaeological resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Culture Change and Persistence among North American Indigenous Peoples in the Contact Zone   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 492