GINI and the Indigenous Critique: Dynamics of Equality and Inequality in Eastern North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper we utilize the systemic, empirically driven methodology developed by the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) project in order to evaluate and compare differences in wealth accumulation for Indigenous eastern North American societies. These societies were predominantly organized around multiple, overlapping, and intersecting institutions. Arguably, the most important of these were the clans and councils that served to distribute power and authority among multiple segments of society. The central tendencies of these diffuse institutional arrangements were to tamp down inequality. We hypothesize (a) that variability in GINI coefficients will be less pronounced in eastern North America than most other world regions and (b) that increases in GINI coefficients will occur in times and places where external or internal factors or events led to shifts in power, increases in violence, and other factors that disrupted the collectively oriented institutional basis of governance and equality in eastern North American societies. Drawing from Indigenous eastern North American philosophies, we suggest that comparing house size in communities may miss elements of social differentiation that are more obvious in other societies and may not always be visible through settler-colonial frameworks. Additional co-authors include Sarah Love, Tillman Norsworthy, Victoria Nuccio, and Mckenna Waite.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35913.0