Engaging Communities through Conflict: A Case Study in the Development of Truly Engaged Scholarship in Two Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Initiation of community engaged scholarship is not an event. It is often a long-term developmental process, requires recursive planning and assessment, and often engages multiple communities. We present a case study of a research project that grew into a community and collaborative archaeological endeavor that balances engagement between two descendant communities of opposing sides of St. Clair’s Defeat and the Northwest Indian War. Bridging the cultural gap between these two communities while maintaining commitment to accurate retelling of historical narrative presents many challenges. However, these challenges present direct opportunities to use anthropology in the public sphere to foster empathy and understanding through historical archaeological context. We engage with the popular, but uncritically one-sided, narrative represented in historical public interpretation and even school curricula. We confront this narrative with the full context of the historical and archaeological record. This confrontation facilitates frank, educational discussions about the innate humanity of the other side, leading to reflections about assumptions and a critical assessment of identity and self-history. These reflections enable engagement of both communities with the history and consequences of colonization for American Indians formerly of the Northwest Territory and beyond.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32504