Incumbents and Others: de-centering mobility and kinship in Native northeastern landscapes

Summary

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: settlers’ perspectives meshed home-grown concerns about transiency and poverty with more proximate threats of deviant behaviour, influenced by exclusionary strategies towards the poor and homeless in England. Thus a conventional reading of the documentary sources leaves us with a shadowy and diasporic geography of Native displacement. Referencing new research on localised identity-formation and kinship, this paper expands on the idea of bringing de-centred sources and ‘minor’ spaces into dialogue with colonial materials to examine the potential for an investigation of the interrelationship of mobility and connectedness in the historical northeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Perspectives on Inequity: European and Indigenous Voices in the North American Landscape   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-27,01