"For Not Limiting Material Culture: Becoming Worthy to the Effects of Climate Change through the Life of Ino:de Heshoda:we."

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Science and Service: How Archaeologists Address Climate Change" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The effects of climate change disproportionately impact indigenous peoples and their deep time and deep space adaptive capacities. Diminishments in such capacities are overwhelmingly the product of the converging courses of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism. This presentation examines how colonial- and industrial-induced climate change is expected to impact the Pueblo of Zuni community; included are the impacts to their broader cultural landscape(s) inclusive of water, plants, animals, and Ino:de Heshoda:we, or ancestral places and materials commonly reductively termed “archaeological.” Drawing from collaborative work with Zuni in developing a climate change response and resiliency document based on lessons of the ancestors, we navigate Zuni traditional praxes as productive responses to these harmful effects. We also identify the consistent failure of federal agencies to meaningfully address climate change in their permitting and licensing processes and under compliance procedures of Section 106 of the NHPA and NEPA. We then highlight how agency failures to incorporate informed understandings of colonial- and industrial-induced direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts associated with climate change can be productively and constructively addressed through Zuni Indigenous Knowledge (IK) under the charges of multiple Executive Orders and a White House memorandum on IK.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bridging Science and Service: How Archaeologists Address Climate Change   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50821