Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas
Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas
Material and Documentary Perspectives on Entanglement
This scholarly collection explores the method and theory of the archaeological study of indigenous persistence and long-term colonial entanglement. Each contributor offers an examination of the complex ways that indigenous communities in the Americas have navigated the circumstances of colonial and postcolonial life, which in turn provides a clearer understanding of anthropological concepts of ethnogenesis and hybridity, survivance, persistence, and refusal.
Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas highlights the unique ability of historical anthropology to bring together various kinds of materials--including excavated objects, documents in archives, and print and oral histories--to provide more textured histories illuminated by the archaeological record. The work also extends the study of historical archaeology by tracing indigenous societies long after their initial entanglement with European settlers and colonial regimes. The contributors engage a geographic scope that spans Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other models of colonization.
The book's editors . . . offer the advantage of reframing perseverance or cultural persistence in ways that consciously eschew questions about authenticity and legitimacy, given that these ideas were colloquially used to disenfranchise, erase, delegitimize, or otherwise deny Indigenous descendant communities their cultural identities. With consideration of a set of concepts (e.g., residence, sovereignty) that contribute to Native self-determination, the contributors' approaches actively contribute to the larger project of decolonizing the discipline.'--Christine D. Beaule, American Antiquity
Heather Law Pezzarossi is a visiting scholar at Syracuse University. She is a contributor to Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice. Russell N. Sheptak is a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a contributor to several books including The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects and The Death of Prehistory.
List of Illustrations
Chapter One. Introduction
Heather Law Pezzarossi and Russell N. Sheptak
Chapter Two. Moving Masca: Persistent Indigenous Communities in Spanish Colonial Honduras
Russell N. Sheptak
Chapter Three. Neither Contact nor Colonial: Seneca Iroquois Local Political Economies, 1670-1754
Kurt A. Jordan and Peregrine A. Gerard-Little
Chapter Four. From Cacao to Sugar: Long-Term Maya Economic Entanglement in Colonial Guatemala
Guido Pezzarossi
Chapter Five. Brewed Time: Considering Anachronisms in the Study of Indigenous Persistence in New England
Heather Law Pezzarossi
Chapter Six. Comanche Imperialism: The Materiality of Empire
Lindsay M. Montgomery
Chapter Seven. "Mission Indians" and Settler Colonialism: Rethinking Indigenous Persistence in Nineteenth-Century Central California
Lee M. Panich
Chapter Eight. The Sword and the Stone: History, Identity, and Territoriality among the Mapoyo People of the Venezuelan Orinoco Region
Kay Scaramelli and Franz Scaramelli
Chapter Nine. Indigenous Refusal of Settler Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Central California: A Case from the Tolay Valley, Sonoma County
Peter A. Nelson
Chapter Ten. Materialities and Practices of Persistence: Indigenous Survivance in the Face of Settler Societies
Rosemary A. Joyce
References
Index
