It’s Personal: Artifacts as Belongings, Connecting with Indigenous Communities, and Volunteer Work at Stewart Indian School

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.

Initially, this paper shares the results of an archaeological monitoring project at the Stewart Indian School site that yielded a fascinating, touching snapshot of student life in the recent past. It is a poignant reminder that artifacts are personal belongings that should be treated with care. I then provide a partial response to years of non-Native students wrestling with newfound knowledge about legacies of settler colonialism. They often ask me – as a settler archaeologist myself – how they could help humanize relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous communities to reduce the harm that archaeology often causes. They seek to learn about Native Nations’ heritage goals outside of the impersonal and often fraught structure of federally mandated consultations. As such, I encourage settler archaeologists who would build their careers on Indigenous peoples’ heritages to support communities with volunteer work under the direction and authority of Indigenous governments and organizations.

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