At the Crossroads: Intersections of Colonization

Summary

Intersectionality arose as a strategy for understanding the ways oppression operates simultaneously on multiple aspects of a person’s identity.  As such, it provides a key framework for understanding how gender, race, and religion affected interactions between Europeans and indigenous communities from contact through today.  The missionaries of New Spain, as well as later explorers of the Louisiana Territory, proscribed gendered expectations on indigenous peoples that fundamentally altered their societies.  Applying an intersectional framework, this paper argues for possible alternative interpretations of cultural materials from the southern Great Plains and central South region, particular those related to Caddo and Wichita peoples.  Examining the gendered normalization of indigenous peoples by Europeans through an intersectional lens of racialized, religious discourse provides space to question persistent underlying assumptions about past communities’ lifeways that rely on these colonial legacies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Age, Religion, the Military, etc.

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 836