In Canada, cultural heritage efforts have largely focused on the recovery, collection, and protection of European material cultural and landscapes. This has resulted in the overrepresentation of white settler history and the mis/underrepresentation of the history and stories of the Black experience within the nation. This erasure has significantly impacted how Black heritage is represented, remembered, protected, and cared for. In this paper, I critically examine these representational politics through the analysis of Ontario Heritage Trust’s 2021 Provincial Plaque Program – an inventory listing of registered provincial plaques commemorating the significant historical and cultural events as well as people and places throughout Ontario. Drawing on the heart-centered principles of care, accountability, and relationality, I argue for the need to integrate community relations with Black descendants into Ontario’s cultural heritage policies, practices, and representational frameworks as one of many steps into transforming current practices and co-constructing new heritage worlds in Ontario.

Ledger art is an Indigenous artistic practice from the North American Plains that developed from rock art and hide painting. More than artistic expression, ledger art depicts cultural practices, daily life, and historical events such as the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and imprisonment of Cheyenne and Kiowa leaders at Fort Marion, Florida. Despite this, ledger art has not been traditionally accepted as historical documentation in American archaeology. Informed by scholarly critiques from Patricia Galloway and Phillip Deloria of traditionally cited ethnographies, this paper takes a heart-centered approach to acknowledge the emotional labor of Indigenous ledger artists as tribal historians. Drawing from the work and knowledge of Indigenous artists such as Howling Wolf, Zotom, Halycon Levi and Linda Haukaas, the proposed paper emphasizes how we can recognize the relationality of traditional historical recordation and identity in Indigenous North American Plains ledger art and better acknowledge Indigenous history.

This paper evidences the emotional struggles of women in convents in Portugal during the 17th and 18th century. Triggered by a novice unsent letter, found during a 1988 archaeological excavation at the Jesus convent in Setubal, Portugal, that reveals her turmoil and longing for her lover, this letter together with other strategies, shows how nuns coped with isolation and forbidden desires.

A significant number of girls and women were most probably forced into religious life by several reasons, from family pressure to personal refuge. This study examines the way these girls would most probably feel displaced and lonely. Strict vows of obedience, chastity, silence, enclosure, and poverty were not enough to break them. Despite the austerity, archaeological findings like luxury items and pets reveal nuns' efforts to combat their loneliness. The study emphasizes the complex emotional lives of nuns, who often, despite their vows, maintained ties to the outside world.

Heritage Trees also named spirit, righteous, survivor, or sacred trees, have overcome impossible odds to bear witness to historical events, serving as guardians of culture that exist outside of the boundaries of human life. While heritage trees exist around the world using their bark, their roots, and their placement in the landscape to tell stories, the trees that have stood in witness to collective Black freedom events and instances of Anti-Black violence hold a constellation of Black history in their roots. The Black Heritage Tree Project (BHT) is a land-based storytelling initiative using narratives of Black freedom and survivance connected to heritage trees that have witnessed countless events in Black history but rarely get the chance to tell their stories. Exploring these trees and the stories told around them provide a powerful tool to combat and heal historical trauma in the past while developing landscapes of care in the present.

Traditionally, cultural belongings have been housed in large institutions, often leading to a disconnect between them and their communities. Faced with calls for reconciliation, however, many institutions are at a loss for what to do with these belongings, often prioritizing institutional “ownership” over Indigenous rights. Community-based archives/museum spaces offer a solution by placing control back into the hands of the community itself and supporting the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In partnership with the Tłı̨chǫ Government (Dene, Treaty 11, NWT Canada), this paper presents the results of an ethnographic exploration into Tłı̨chǫ traditions for care and knowledge organization to articulate Tłı̨chǫ principles of curation (e.g., ownership, preservation, categorization, repatriation, etc.). Centering our conversations around care allowed for us to embrace the relationships surrounding the belonging (whether tangible or intangible) and start to re-imagine the structures underlying curation into a cultural heritage management system based on Tłı̨chǫ traditional values.

In 2022, I defended my dissertation on placemaking in two Alsatian colonies in 19th century Texas. Two months later, I had my daughter and learned how childbirth unmakes and remakes worlds, bodies, and relationships. Somewhere in (what felt like) the impossible gap between research and motherhood were the stories of mothers from my project, encountered amid fragments of data (Wilkie 2003). In this paper, I return to their stories to consider how placemaking itself is a form of “intimate labor” (Boris and Parreñas 2010), with mothering not at the margins but at the center. Drawing on archives, oral histories, and ruins, how might we remake space for/through mothers’ experiences – the relationships, movements, perils, joys, demands, corporeal realities of care? Following Searcy and Casteñeda (2020), I explore how making place and mothering are both collaborative projects of “intimate labor,” and how this shapes my collaborative work as an archaeologist.

Within missionization, practices of care are coded as feminine, assigned to women and often overlooked as labor. Tending to the sick, laundry, cooking, and feeding are often rendered invisible in the domestic sphere and undervalued in missionization compared to practices commonly coded as vocational (and masculine), such as recruiting converts, teaching the catechism, giving sacraments, saying Mass, and translating religious texts into local languages. Since 1863, the convent at the Mission of St. Joseph (Ngasobil, Senegal) has been home to the first order of autochthonous West African religious sisters cultivating a uniquely Senegalese Catholic community. Their everyday practices of care created community not simply by providing material support, but forging kinship between themselves, refugees, and formerly enslaved individuals who gathered at Ngasobil from afar. Archaeological, archival, and oral historical investigation point towards a community intentionally built through African women’s care for each other and their labor of cultivating community.

Heart-centered practices are rare to see in historical archaeology due to the lack of documentation by the enslaved communities with experiential memories. Likewise, artifacts collected from the excavation at Smithfield are often interpreted without considering their implication for heart-centered practices. This study incorporates Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), which involves collaboration with descendants of the enslaved community to re-examine the intersection between material cultures, landscape memories, and emotional practices at Smithfield in shaping plantation narratives. The research results illustrate how descendants’ cultures and landscape memories, such as the merry tree stories, contemporary libation traditions, cooking rituals, and veneration of deceased loved ones, provide insight into the past heart-centered practices by the past enslaved community. Through CBPR, engaging with descendants of historical figures at Smithfield offers a broader understanding of plantation life and shapes disciplinary narratives for historical research.

In 1952–1954, Cold Lake First Nations (CLFN) was forcibly removed from their territory by the Canadian military to establish a 20’000 km² munitions testing area (“bombing range”) in northern Canada. Many homes and belongings have since been destroyed, or otherwise barred access to, and the separation from their territory continues to cause impacts to the evicted. This region also remains one of the more remote, at risk, and least archaeologically studied areas of the Canadian Prairies. Originally, this research was framed around finding/protecting the remaining historical cabins, but travelling this traumatic landscape changed our research design from method to theory. This paper describes our methodology for community-driven archaeology in a landscape of erasure, as well as applies contemporary Indigenous archaeological theory such as former places of refuge, sustained colonialism, and sites of future re-occupation within the context of the past, present, and future of CLFN and their territory.

I draw from heart-centered practices to explore the relation between foodways and identity among the Métis, a post-contact Indigenous nation from northwestern North America. Moving away from hybridity-centered understandings of identity that have guided archaeological research on the Métis until recently, I present a new approach that situates foodways as a tool used to shed light on the processes involved in the construction and expression of Métis ethnic identity. Centering materials recovered from and the practices associated with late 19^th-century Métis overwintering sites, this framework highlights the intimate connections between the land, kinship, and food as core components of that identity. It also places Métis women at the center of a broad system of care that articulates Métis ethnic identity on a day-to-day basis. These ideas have important implications for the interpretation of a range of artifacts and ecofacts recovered at overwintering sites, and for Métis archaeology more broadly.