The Invisible Whiteness at New England’s Native Heritage Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While many of New England’s memorials contribute to the false narrative of Native American disappearance, a growing number of heritage sites create and promote public memories that counter these myths. In some instances, Native American communities and heritage professionals work collaboratively to use objects and landscapes to challenge erasures and re-shape popular memory. In this paper I discuss the results of a study of four Native New England heritage-scapes (Deerfield, Aquinnah, and Plimoth, Massachusetts, and Mashantucket, Connecticut) that attempt to replace disappearance narratives with stories of survivance. In these places objects, landscapes, and bodies are used to challenge and create alternatives to existing narratives of social extinction that deny modern Indianness. Offered in public settings and aimed at largely (but not exclusively) non-Native audiences, they serve as interventions in popular recountings of Native histories, identities, and modernities, and interruptions in non-Native ideas about cultural distinctiveness, land and property rights, and race. I conclude that the memory work engaged in these places demands much from Indigenous curators, interpreters and collaborators, but little from non-Native visitors except "an open mind." This common trope reinforces white privilege and obfuscates the normalization of whiteness that persists as a legacy of colonialism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23802