“An Acre of Land to Plant or A Stick of Wood to Make a Fence or Fire”: A Heritage of Mohegan Allotment

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Allotment was a world-changing institution that forever altered the course of North American history; through this process, Indigenous lands were broken up into lots, “owned” by individuals and families rather than collectively held. Allotment placed an unprecedented amount of stress on Indigenous traditions of subsistence, social relations, political organization, and more. A strikingly limited amount of archaeological attention has been placed on studying histories of allotment and their aftermaths, nor are these subjects traditionally discussed in terms of heritage. In this paper we take a pragmatic view, thinking through the differences that a “heritage of allotment” makes in the wider world. We consider allotment of Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA). An archaeology of Mohegan allotment speaks to an enduring and long-term Indigenous presence, to the challenges faced and overcome by Mohegan peoples living through, and with, settler colonialism, and to the nuances of Indigenous-colonial archaeological records. The paper emphasizes the importance of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies for shedding new light on these challenging but important archaeological traces, while also exploring how a heritage of allotment pushes back against the Eurocentric and colonial vantages through which Indigenous history is often framed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40036.0