Conference Agenda

Initially, this paper shares the results of an archaeological monitoring project at the Stewart Indian School site that yielded a fascinating, touching snapshot of student life in the recent past. It is a poignant reminder that artifacts are personal belongings that should be treated with care. I then provide a partial response to years of non-Native students wrestling with newfound knowledge about legacies of settler colonialism. They often ask me – as a settler archaeologist myself – how they could help humanize relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous communities to reduce the harm that archaeology often causes. They seek to learn about Native Nations’ heritage goals outside of the impersonal and often fraught structure of federally mandated consultations. As such, I encourage settler archaeologists who would build their careers on Indigenous peoples’ heritages to support communities with volunteer work under the direction and authority of Indigenous governments and organizations.

Archaeologists have long since acknowledged the complexities of historic landscapes but explorations into the ways relationality shaped and continues to shape these landscapes are still relatively rare. We can study the landscape with various technologies and methods but never really be able to understand the way past peoples interacted with it if we don’t consider the relationships people had with each other and the landscape itself. For the Métis, the practice of visiting is intrinsically linked with relationality. Visiting allows for the sharing of knowledge and the strengthening of relationships within communities and with the land. This paper discusses the ways the Métis practice of visiting may have influenced the landscapes of different Métis sites during the 19th and 20th centuries. I look at two types of Métis sites in the Canadian Prairies – overwintering sites and river lots – and question the ways visiting may have influenced site layouts.

Slag, the byproduct of iron smelting, is found in abundance around the ruins of Longdale Furnace, one of many nineteenth-century iron companies active in western Virginia’s Alleghany Highlands. Also found in abundance are material remnants of workers’ everyday lives. While many of these ‘small finds’ are indicative of hard living and modest means, they also imply remarkable consumer agency – goods were purchased from the company store, the Sears catalogue, local vendors, and one another. What was left behind suggests an attempt to ‘polish slag:’ slag, when polished, can resemble beautifully-colored glass. From medicine bottles to mustache cups, from bud vases to baby-dolls, we find not merely ‘byproducts’ of life, but artifacts of life-affirming wellbeing practices. By bringing them home, Longdale residents worked to ‘polish’ the oftentimes harsh realities of industrial labor; by analyzing them, we recognize their ontological importance as mediums of care, comfort, joy, and leisure.

In this paper, I reflect on my experience employing the Collaborative Inquiry (CI) approach in the study of 17th-century Ontario Attawandaron (Neutral) shell-tempered pottery with Wyandotte Elder and Knowledge Keeper Richard Zane Smith. This hands-on collaboration, which included the practice of shell-tempered pottery-making and firing experiments, was initially aimed at discerning ancient potters’ technological choices. This engagement evolved into a transformative learning process, influencing my understanding of ancestral knowledge, materials, and the landscapes of the past as a non-Indigenous archaeological scientist. Through this case study, I critically reflect on the process of employing CI in archaeological research and emphasize its potential to create a space for archaeologists to align themselves with the core components of heart-centered archaeology: rigor, care, relationality, and emotion. Central to this discussion is the negotiation of ethical, institutional, communal, and personal expectations in archaeological research practices, particularly within collaborative frameworks with Indigenous communities.

In this paper we argue that refusing a settler sense of time in favor of locally grounded ones (what we call “undisciplining”) is a form of heart-centered practice. Historical archaeology lends itself to epistemic undisciplining, and continues to grapple with time and what is meant by history. But what does it mean to understand time and chronology building as socially and politically shaped? How do we use time? How are settler time and memory used as tools of dispossession? How do political and cultural collectives counter settler time with their own temporalities, as through embodied and affective time? And how does a consideration of the fullness of time (i.e., many intersecting senses of time) require heartwork, work that is anchored in care, rigorous self-reflexivity, and responsibility? We provide examples from our own work both advocating for community-based temporalities and challenging the legacies of settler institutional and disciplinary timekeeping.

The homeland of the Métis Nation of Canada is a vast landscape, making it challenging to trace our material history across many colonially imposed borders. Métis ancestors moved across this landscape along trails and river systems, creating a web of interconnected places tied together through kin relations with human and other-than-human relatives. These veins of connection were key to our emergence as a distinct people and Nation. In this paper, I explore the vascular kinscapes of the first and second generation of Métis ancestors in western Canada by mapping family connections to place throughout the homeland. I argue that Métis mobility is akin to a heartbeat, where families would ebb and flow to certain places at certain times, leaving behind material traces that help map our history and challenge traditional understanding of mobility in archaeology.

As I began my dissertation research on the African diaspora in Florida, I was also becoming deeply involved in the world of immigration activism in Florida. This work provided years of experience in listening to and working alongside a community, which began to directly inform my research agenda. I often drew comparisons between the position of undocumented immigrants in the United States today and African diasporic peoples in the colonial world. The juxtaposition challenged me to think about how I understand violence, precarity, self-liberation, self-preservation, migration and movement, and equality under the law. Most significantly, this work led me to actively explore how it feels to be a part of a community and to consider how my responsibilities as the daughter of an immigrant intersect with my responsibilities as an archaeologist. This paper will explore the ways those roles and responsibilities have continued to blend over the subsequent years.

Early 20th-century anti-Black race massacres and violence left an indelible impact on the physical landscape and collective expressions of Black ontology and memory. This legacy conjures ethical and political questions from descendants, the larger community, and the state regarding the possibilities of reparative justice for enhancing Black self-determination in the face of ongoing dislocation and erasure. Presently, the destruction of historic anti-Black violence evokes strong emotional responses from those intimately connected with these histories. Using Tulsa, OK, as a case study, I consider the possibilities of a heart-centered approach to the archaeology of anti-Black race massacres, due to its potential to incorporate practices of care, emotion, relationality, and rigor into our work. Also, given its self-reflective nature, I argue that a heart-centered praxis, especially when considering ongoing historic violence; moves away from nihilism, difference, and disconnection while embracing healing that is grounded in love and liberation.

Emotional engagement in archaeology poses significant challenges. The emotions of women working in industrial sites, often overlooked and disregarded, exemplify this complexity. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the emotional experiences of women within industrial settings. Employing a unique approach, it utilizes photographs as archaeological artefacts to gather insights into the emotions these women may have experienced. Furthermore, it engages in a critical discussion regarding the responsibility of archaeologists in shaping new narratives surrounding emotional actors. By exploring these emotional dimensions, this study seeks to contribute to a more sensitive understanding of past societies and the individuals who inhabited them, shedding light on often marginalized perspectives and experiences.

Increasingly, Indigenous, Black, and other colonized people have turned to archaeological knowledge as a potential tool allowing us to reclaim ancestral worlds, and expose the ongoing structures of violence that keep affecting our communities. Yet, such undertaking does not necessarily attend to our needs, while also being at the root of deeper frustrations and pain as we face the inevitable contradictions present in occupying colonial epistemological spaces. The constant reiteration of structures of epistemic violence affects colonized communities and their archaeologists, making the transformation of archaeological knowledge into a tool for care or healing seem like an impossible goal. This paper seeks to offer reflections on the need to both acknowledge the trauma present in our participation in archaeological knowledge and remember/imagine otherwise ways of doing research for our communities. Much more expansive than a method, the connection with the Ancestors appears as a guiding force for such “impossible goal”.