The Forest through the Trees: Using Vivifacts to Analyze How Native American Landscapes Shaped Colonial Encounter

Summary

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

In 1836, after centuries of occupation, Native Americans signed over 13 million acres of Northern Michigan land to the U.S. in an attempt to curtail complete removal from their ancestral homeland. This research project examines the transitional period of land loss in the mid-19th century to analyze to what extent Native Americans utilized the landscape before, during, and after reservation allotment and how Native American landscape use shaped colonization. Using a landscape approach, this research evaluates primary source accounts of missionary cartographers as they mapped the region and identified land for reservations. These reservations intended to limit Native Americans to smaller defined territories and challenged mobility outside of those allotted spaces. In contrast to the emerging colonial landscape, this research examines to what extent Native Americans maintained mobility within the broader landscape and whether this mobility played a central role in maintaining a distinct cultural identity. Using mapping of culturally modified trees and excavation, this research reconstructs the Native landscape at a key point in the colonization process and contributes to current debates in anthropology surrounding indigenous landscapes, how colonial power is actively negotiated, and the relationship between exploration and colonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26196