Challenging The Use Of "Transition" In The Interpretation Of The Second Crow Agency Site (1875-1884)

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

During the early reservation period, the US government established successive reservation headquarters for the Crow Tribe (Apsáalooke) of present-day Montana, in part to attempt to “assimilate” Crow people into European American culture. The Second Crow Agency headquarter (1875-1884) has been interpreted archaeologically as an example of Crow people transitioning from “traditional” to European American culture and lifestyle. The presence of artifacts like glass scrapers and Crow items usually found in Medicine Bundles located in the dump area contribute to the evidence many archaeologists and local scholars use to characterize the site as “transitional”. The Crow perspective, however, collected through collaborative ethnographic research, demonstrates how damaging the use of transition is for understanding Crow history and their contemporary culture and values. This paper focuses on these oral histories to challenge the framework of transition, to more accurately present the history of this site, and recenter the agency of the Crow people.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow