Peering In and Locking Out: Windows and Doors at William Warren’s Cabin on the Minnesota Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

William Whipple Warren was the son of an American fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother. As a person of mixed ancestry, Warren was a cultural broker, who wrote the first history of the Ojibwe from an Indigenous perspective. He built a cabin on the Mississippi River in ca. 1850 lived here until his death in 1853. The window glass and keyhole escutcheon recovered at the site offer an opportunity to examine how seemingly mundane objects such as glass windows and door locks are material hallmarks of settler colonialism. A common trope in many settler narratives are accounts of Indigenous people coming to peer in the windows of settler’s cabins. We scrutinize how the meanings of windows and doors vary when we examine them from a cross-cultural perspective. In this paper, we examine issues such as privacy, hospitality, domesticity, private property, generosity, and reciprocity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow