Engaging Archaeology and Native American and Indigenous Studies

Summary

Using concepts proposed and developed in Native American and Indigenous Studies would provide a useful way for archaeologists, especially those dealing with the relatively recent past, to address the challenge posed by indigenous scholars to decolonize archaeology. A few concepts have already been employed by archaeologists in North America, notably Gerald Vizenor's idea of "survivance". But as Maarten Jansen and Mixtec scholar Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez have shown in their work decolonizing Mesoamerican archaeology, there are even more ways to push forward. In this paper, I present a discussion of a series of concepts from Native American and Indigenous Studies that are being used by archaeologists working in the Americas, ranging from survivance to articulation to refusal to the indigenous archive, showing how the use of concepts developed under a decolonizing framework markedly shift the goals and interpretations of archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20574