Heart-centered Archaeology in an Indigenous Landscape of Eviction and Erasure

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1952–1954, Cold Lake First Nations (CLFN) was forcibly removed from their territory by the Canadian military to establish a 20’000 km2 munitions testing area (“bombing range”) in northern Canada. Many homes and belongings have since been destroyed, or otherwise barred access to, and the separation from their territory continues to cause impacts to the evicted. This region also remains one of the more remote, at risk, and least archaeologically studied areas of the Canadian Prairies. Originally, this research was framed around finding/protecting the remaining historical cabins, but travelling this traumatic landscape changed our research design from method to theory. This paper describes our methodology for community-driven archaeology in a landscape of erasure, as well as applies contemporary Indigenous archaeological theory such as former places of refuge, sustained colonialism, and sites of future re-occupation within the context of the past, present, and future of CLFN and their territory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow