"I Can Tell It Always": Confronting Colonialist Presumptions and Disciplinary Blind Spots through Community-Based Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century history of western Oregon is rife with Euro-American presumptions about the trajectory, pace, and nature of Native cultural change. Federal architects of the state’s reservation system and, later, reservation agents wrote extensively about Native peoples’ ability to throw off traditional lifeways in favor of "civilized" behaviors. Since 2014, two community-based research projects conducted alongside the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Historic Preservation Office have exposed these observations as fragmentary and culturally and politically situated. Analysis of historic maps and recovery of household belongings have revealed the strategies employed by Native families to balance participation in Euro-American economies and continuation of pre-reservation practices and relationships. Furthermore, these projects have highlighted the inadequacy of conventional classification schemes predicted on cultural and temporal homogeneity. The complexity of the reservation material record challenges archaeologists to develop interpretive approaches grounded in Native knowledge systems and community experiences. This paper discusses the issues inherent to recognizing Native presence—in the colonial archive and in the field—and the value of community-based research in crafting nuanced accounts of Native history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24806