Counter-mapping the Blackfoot landscape - in Alice's footsteps

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With the constant encouragement of Alice Kehoe for the past quarter of a century, my wife Joy, the historian in this project, and I have adopted counter-mapping as an alternative approach to interpret the archaeological record of the Northwestern Plains as an imprint of Blackfoot oral traditions. This approach has involved the collection of Blackfoot toponyms, the re-interpretation of Blackfoot maps, and the establishment of connections between oral traditions, maps, toponyms, historical documents, and archaeological sites. An outcome of this research has been the realization that even the landscape of the nomadic bison hunters was a managed landscape, not a pristine grassland as maintained by ecologists. Furthermore, this landscape served as an archive for the storage of Blackfoot oral traditions. However, when the movements of the Blackfoot were restricted to reservations, they could no longer visit the places, remember the names, tell the stories, sing the songs, perform the ceremonies, and transmit this information to subsequent generations. As such, colonization was so much more than the simple extermination of bison and the appropriation of the Blackfoot homeland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50293