Binaries, Landforms, and Clam Gardens on the Northwest Coast of North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The imposition of colonial authority throughout the Indigenous Northwest Coast of North America brought with it two long-standing western binaries—agricultural/not and natural/anthropogenic. Within these, Northwest Coast peoples were viewed as not agricultural (useful for alienating them from land) and in a state of nature, by extension incapable or unwilling to transform the natural world in any meaningful way. Both binaries were used (inappropriately) to pigeonhole the complex relationships between Northwest Coast peoples and the geophysical world. Importantly, this frame was mobilized by anthropologists in their ethnology and archaeologists in their methodologies for describing and interpreting the archaeological record. In this paper I discuss how Indigenous relational ontologies and archaeological data are pushing back against this. Landscape data from coastal spit sites in southwestern British Columbia illuminate complex human-earth engagements that blur tidy categorizations of archaeological deposits as either natural or anthropogenic. Stone-walled clam gardens expose how human and non-human persons were seamlessly interdigitated with coastal geologies. Such observations confront long-standing binaries conceptually but also politically, as they underscore how modern renegotiations of aboriginal treaty rights and title must jettison anachronistic binaries to engage in meaningful conversation toward reconciliation and restorative justice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36297.0