Other Argonauts: Native Hawaiian Miners in the California ...



American Society For Ethnohistory Conference Abstracts 2017*Disclaimer: All abstracts were copied and pasted from submissions with minimal edits for consistency in overall format. 1. Indigenous Engagements with the Wage Economy in North America,1874 to the Present (General Session)Treaty Cash, Competition and Indigenous Spending in Territorial Western Canada, 1874 – 1900George Colpitts, University of CalgaryThis study examines annuity cash spent by Indigenous people from the mid-1870s through 1900 in Western Canada. During this period annuity payments were critical to cash-starved territorial economies and treaty Indians as groups of consumers commanded considerable purchasing power. With “treaty trade” attracting independent town merchants as well as Hudson’s Bay Company traders, Indigenous people freed from the strictures of barter in the fur trade exploited opportunities presented with cash. At Blackfoot Crossing in the 1870s, for instance, Crowfoot reportedly slowed down annuity payments because he “wished to see the goods brought in by the merchants and price them and advise his young men where to trade, after having found what he considered the cheapest place.” Plains Cree near Battleford encouraged competition between merchants at their own payment to purchase guns, blankets, and other wares at prices 25% to 50% lower than in town. In the 1880s and 90s, Indigenous people collectively occupied an important mercantile space in towns. The Tsuu T’ina in 1883, for instance, arrived to Calgary with their entire annuity cash; contingents of males danced before each shop front to judge from the size of gifts where to buy goods. Continuing to make purchases over a number of days, their “Treaty Days” included dancing, horse racing, pipe smoking and other traditional ceremonies. While confirming traditional ceremonialism, these cash purchasing events in Calgary, Edmonton, Fort Macleod and other small communities also informed Indigenous consumerism in a modernist age. This paper is based on a larger SSHRC-sponsored project on annuities, merchant treaty trade and books, and Indigenous consumerism in late 19th century western Canada. From Family Allowances to Nutrition North: An Ethnohistorical Approach to Canada’s Arctic Food PolicyEleanor Stephenson, McGill UniversityTaking an ethnohistorical approach, this paper draws on textual records, images, and ethnographic field notes to examine the trajectory of Canada’s approach to Inuit food security in the Eastern Arctic. Large-scale government intervention in the Inuit food system in the Eastern Arctic dates to the late 1940s, when the Government of Canada adopted a larger role in northern food relief with the Family Allowance program. In Inuit communities, Family Allowances were initially issued in-kind, comprising powdered milk, Pablum, and other imported “nutritious” foods. Here, I explore the rationale and beliefs that underpinned the Family Allowance program. In particular, I examine how policymakers’ beliefs about the nutritional value of traditional (country) foods, Inuit mothers’ care, and child malnutrition helped inspire an assimilationist food relief program that sought to reshape the Inuit food system towards a southern diet. Against this historical backdrop, the paper reflects on current policy debates over Canada’s approach to Inuit food security. In particular, I highlight the recent review of the Nutrition North Canada program, which provides a retail subsidy on “nutritious” perishable foods such as fruits and vegetables in remote northern communities. In 2016, community consultations on Nutrition North elicited calls for a more culturally appropriate solution to high rates of food insecurity in Arctic Canada, including greater support for traditional foods and harvesting. Drawing parallels between past and present, I explore how current policy debates on food security in Arctic Canada are bound within longstanding narratives of “nutritious” food that have helped inspire and legitimize federal policy.2. Contested Geographies (Part 1): Indigenous and African Challengesto European Conquest and Colonialism, 16th–18th Centuries (Symposium) “From Reducciones to Cimarrones: Indigenous Exploitation in Tierra Firme and the rise of African Maroon Communities”Robert C. Schwaller, University of KansasFrom the outset of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African slaves fled their European masters. Throughout the Americas, many of these runaways (maroons-cimarrones) banded together to form maroon communities. Often this process has been explored as an outgrowth of economic and social structures associated with colonialism. However, the formation of maroon communities on the landscape cannot be divorced from patterns and processes of Spanish conquest. In many areas of early maroon activity, Spanish patterns of exploitation of the indigenous population altered the human geography of the regions. The exploitation, enslavement, and often relocation of native groups, created new spaces on the landscape that could be occupied by maroons. Moreover, in some cases, these processes drastically altered the local ecology by curtailing indigenous patterns of land use and cultivation. This in turn led to changes in the physical landscape which further isolated maroon communities from Spanish authorities. This paper will explore these patterns in early Tierra Firme (Panama). Using an interdisciplinary approach, the paper argues that Spanish enslavement and exploitation of the indigenous inhabitants of this region vacated large swaths of territory and facilitated the transition from a human-managed landscape to an increasingly wild one. Both shifts created conditions that could be exploited by African maroons. Importantly, Spanish conquest of native peoples in the region was incomplete. Some native groups remained and became allies of maroons and antagonists to Spanish authorities. Finally, this paper presents several new maps that attempt to more accurately convey these conflicts and the territory inhabited by Spaniards, native peoples, and Africans in Tierra Firme. The Eighty-Year’s War of Indigenous AttritionDana Velasco Murillo, University of California, San DiegoFrom the 1550s to the 1590s northern New Spain’s mining district witnessed a violent frontier war between Spanish soldiers and settlers and the autochthonous native peoples of the region. For indigenous peoples, it was a war to defend their lifeways and patterns of subsistence. For the crown, it was an offensive war to bring native peoples they considered rebellious and barbaric under submission. By the 1590s, a variety of political, economic, and environmental factors led native peoples to engage in peacemaking with the crown. As part of the peacekeeping terms native peoples were congregated into newly formed communities (or reducciónes) near Spanish population centers. This war and these reducciónes have not been contextualized within the broader conquest narrative of the Americas. This paper considers how Spanish campaigns to conquer stateless peoples in the period from 1550 to 1630 were part of a war I am naming, “The Eighty-Year’s War of Indigenous Attrition.”Ah Otochnalob yetel Ah Chun Kaxob: Indios de Campana, Indios Idolatras, and the Role of the “Pagan Frontier” in the Re-Construction of Colonial Maya Identity, 1565-1700John Chuchiack IV, Missouri State UniversityBy the early 17th century definitions of Maya identity began to change in Yucatán. Both Maya and Spaniards began to re-formulate and re-construct their notions of what it was to be Maya. Colonial accommodations, Christianization, and social reorganization meant that those Maya “debajo de campana,” or settled in Christian communities, viewed themselves as “hahil Maya uinicob” or “True Maya people.” At the same time, they and their colonial overlords viewed those Maya who lived in the forests beyond colonial control as a fearful “other” ethnic group, the Ah Chun Kaxob, or forest dwellers, a loosely-knit group of “barbarians, infidels, idolaters and apostates…” This changing view of Maya identity focused on the role of the so-called “pagan frontier” and the acceptance or rejection of the European colonial order. Those Maya who fled into the jungles, rejecting both Christianity and all things Spanish, were not seen as Maya, but as a separate ethnicity, a strange aberration of what both Christian Maya and Spaniards considered the true Maya identity. In this vein, many Maya from northern Yucatán willingly joined expeditions against the Maya of the interior who they considered inferior “others.” By examining primary source documentation in both Maya and Spanish, the paper illustrates the historical, social, cultural, and religious factors influencing this colonial reconstruction of Maya identity and the role that the frontier played in this process.3. Outsider Gaze/Insider Gaze in North America (General Session)Will the Real Expert Please Stand Up: Perceptions of Anthropological Expert Witness Testimony in First Nations CommunitiesDaniel L. Boxberger, Western Washington UniversityLitigation requires the presentation of traditional knowledge that results in benefits gained through clarification of aboriginal rights to land and resources, however, the exigencies of the assertion of rights often requires the transference of privileged knowledge into the public domain. Communities cannot afford to restrict certain forms of privileged knowledge yet at the same time they regret having to do so. Some of these costs are now being assessed by Native communities, as is the question, who is best suited to present this knowledge?Many forms of knowledge, e.g., spirit songs, genealogies, origin traditions, family histories and spiritual knowledge, remain in the private domain although elements of these filter into the public realm. In the past knowledge that was not meant for outside consumption was often shared, despite the understanding of the privileged nature of this knowledge in the community.This paper examines the control of knowledge as process. How do you disseminate knowledge within a system of knowing whereby the living aspects of the community become separated, peripheral and lost within the “objective” nature of Western legal positivist analysis? Many studies have analyzed the role played by the legal system in effecting transfers of land and resources by colonizing governments and settlers; in legitimizing the political sovereignty of colonial nations while limiting the political sovereignty of First Nations; in the extraction of natural resources; and in marginalizing Indigenous peoples. A fundamental question that we must ask is, do we, as “expert witnesses,” participate in this hegemonic process by adding intellectual resources to the list of effective transfers? Neoidigenous Ethnohistory: Urban Education Research in Space and TimeEldrin L. Deas, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillFrom its early development in the United States, the practice of ethnohistory has focused primarily on indigenous populations. Described more as an approach as opposed to a discipline (Fenton, 1962; Martin, 1978), ethnohistorical methods have been traced as far back as Herodotus (Sturtevant, 1966) but developed more formally as a response to the work of the Indian Claims Commission—established “to hear the accumulated treaty claims of Indian tribes against the federal government” (Tanner, 1991, p. 65)—and the general study of American Indians. Although historians and anthropologists may vary in the ways that they approach ethnohistory, they share, according to Cohn (1998), a common subject matter—otherness—wherein “one field constructs and studies ‘otherness’ in space, the other in time” (p. 198). Cohn adds that both fields focus on text and context and aim to explicate “the meaning of actions of people rooted in one time and place, to persons in another” where practitioners work to develop translational accounts that provide “understanding and explanation, rather than the construction of social laws and prediction” (p. 198), as in other social science fields. In the field of education research, this sense of otherness is also often ascribed to urban youth of color, described by Emdin (2016) as neoindigenous. As Emdin explains, “Like the indigenous, the neoindigenous are a group that will not fade into oblivion despite attempts to rename or relocate them. The term neoindigenous carries the rich histories of indigenous groups, acknowledges the powerful connections among populations that have dealt with being silenced, and signals the need to examine the ways that institutions replicate colonial processes” (p. 9). This project highlights the ways in which ethnohistory can be used to make connections beyond the borders of space and time and to rethink how education research is conducted in urban settings.The Manners-and-Customs Racket and Paul Kane’s Record of the Peoples of the Oregon Territory and Vancouver Island, 1847I.S. MacLaren, University of AlbertaWhether one approaches illustrated books of travel from the point of view of an ethnohistorian, book historian, art historian, or fur-trade historian, the inclination, as Mary Louise Pratt’s widely hailed Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) adopted it, is to equate the travelling artist/author with a subsequently published book’s painter of the engravings and first-person narrator. The examination of aspects of the manners-and-customs chapter of Paul Kane’s Wanderings of an Artist (1859) shows the folly of adopting this praxis. The paper will speak to the Manners and Customs sub-genre, generally, then focus on Borderlands traveller Paul Kane, now a famous Canadian, who in fact completed a majority of his sketches in USAmerican lands during his travels through “Hudson’s Bay Company Territory” (sub-title) 1845–1848. A series of verbal and pictorial examples of the disjunction between work done in the field and work reproduced and narrated in Wanderings of an Artist (1859) will highlight the ongoing need to suspend disbelief and question the authority of published sources in ethnohistorical studies. These example will be drawn from his pictorial and verbal records of Sinaikst/Sinixt, Whe-el-po/Ilthkoyape/Chualpay/sxweyí7lhp, Cayuse, Wishkum/Wishram, Klackamas, Chinook, Cowlitz, S’Klallam, Songhees, Kwakwaka’wakw/Kwagyulth, and Babine/ Carrier/Dakelh/Nadot’en-Wets’uwet’en. It is accurate to state that the polarization of field studies and published representations is not at all straightforward; the praxis involves almost as many cautionary tales as it does clear contradictions of the accuracy of published sources. Overall, however, it is perilous for scholars to overlook the roles played behind the scenes by non-eyewitnesses carrying out their roles, official or unofficial, as publishers, engravers, and editors/“readers.” 4. Peace and Violence in Contested Spaces: Diplomacy, Kinship, andWarfare in America’s Old and New Northwest (Symposium)The Prophet or the Father: Native Diplomacy on the Eve of the War of 1812Adam Franti, Eastern Michigan UniversityThe outbreak of the War of 1812 is often characterized in modern historiography as an event that helped to galvanize and unite Native American resistance to Euro-American expansion into the West. While true in some cases, that narrative leaves the decisions of individual Natives and Native communities unexplored and seemingly unimportant. The Native communities in and around Detroit in the first decades of the nineteenth century were situated in a difficult position. Sought as political and military checks by one Euro-American power against the other, many were reticent to involve themselves in yet another imperial struggle, and instead chose to remain neutral.? But what happened when the war was brought to their doorstep? Shawnee leader Blue Jacket and Miami leader Little Turtle characterized the pro and anti-war stances of the Native community at the outbreak of the war. Both were active leaders during earlier attempts at forming Indian confederacies, and both were motivated by the memories of failed British support against encroaching Americans in recent conflicts. While, as the traditional historiography argues, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for Tenskwatawa’s preaching, there was an strong degree of pragmatic belief that neutrality and cooperation was a longer-term strategy for the survival of their communities. Examining the relationship between American and British agents from the breakup of the Northwest Confederacy in 1794 up to the first months of the War of 1812, this paper analyzes the choices made by individual Native leaders and the political consequences of the opening of hostilities. American at All Hazards?: Susan Davenport and the Evolution of Ethnic Identity on Mackinac Island Michael J. Albani, Michigan State UniversityAfter the Treaty of Ghent brought an end to the War of 1812, Mackinac Island slowly transitioned from a contested space straddling the borders of the United States and Canada to a territory solidly under American political control. Nevertheless, invisible borders still existed dividing the island's diverse inhabitants of both Euro-American and Native American descent. It was in this context that an Ojibwe woman named Susan Des?Carreaux arrived on Mackinac Island. She arrived as the wife of Ambrose R. Davenport, Jr., the son of a War of 1812 veteran who won local acclaim for declaring to the British, "I was born in America and am determined, at all hazards, to live and die an American citizen." In the years following the War of 1812, though, Susan and Ambrose, Jr. constructed a multiethnic family together whose character continually shifted between being more American and more Indigenous. By the 1870s, American census takers even began to consider Ambrose, Jr. (whose parents were both white Virginians) an Indian. This paper uses the Davenport Family of Mackinac Island as a case study to explore the nebulous nature of ethnic identity in the Great Lakes region after the War of 1812. It argues that national and ethnic identities were contingent upon categories of both kith and kin. In other words, individuals could characterize themselves (or be characterized as) American or Indigenous based on their connectedness to acquaintances or relatives from either group. Ambrose, Sr. overwhelmingly associated with fellow American citizens who could corroborate his affinity for citizenship before American institutions such as Michigan's territorial government and Mackinac Island's Presbyterian church. Meanwhile, Susan and Ambrose, Jr. were bound by kinship, allowing them to capitalize on multiple identities to pursue survival (in the case of the former) and material gain (in the case of the latter). The Illusion of Union: American Reconstruction as Settler Colonialism in Montana Territory, 1864-1883Jennifer M. Andrella, Michigan State UniversityAs a case study of settler-colonialism, this paper uses Montana’s territorial period (1863-1889) to emphasize the necessity of violence against Indigenous peoples to develop territories in the American West while also incorporating this history into the larger political framework of the Reconstruction Era. Furthermore, this study traces the administrations of federally-appointed Republican territorial governors of Montana and their relationship with predominantly Democratic settlers, Native tribes, and the federal government. Ultimately, the governors' use of military suppression to respond to Montana's "Indian problem" was an expedient solution designed to appease irritated settlers while simultaneously fulfilling plans to develop the West economically, politically, and socially. From1864 to 1883, Montana Territory experienced fifteen major engagements between Native American tribes and the United States Army, with nine of these conflicts happening in two years alone under the governorship of Benjamin F. Potts (1870-1883). The ironic proliferation of violence following President Ulysses S. Grant's 1870 "Peace Policy" demonstrates both the brutal reality of perceived humanitarian policies and the realization of the Plains Indian Wars as a political tool to strengthen the position of Republican leaders. This occurred amid routine criticism from Democrats and a growing division between Republican moderates and radicals. Therefore, by examining the conflicted relationships between the federal government, Montana's territorial governors, Native Americans, and settlers, Montana's battles and massacres figure prominently in the Plains Indian Wars and reveal overlooked connections between the politics that dictated Reconstruction of the South and the development of the West.5. Gender and Sexuality (General Session)Gender and Sexuality as Settler Borders at the Point Barrow, Alaska Expedition of the First International Polar Year, 1882-1883.Rachel Hurst, St. Francis Xavier UniversityIn 1881, the United States Army established a station at Point Barrow, Alaska (Utqiagvik) to collect data related to meteorology, geomagnetism, and auroral activity for the First International Polar Year (IPY). The First IPY (1882-1883) was a significant moment in colonial scientific exploration and research, because it shifted polar exploration from a contest between nations toward a coordinated international effort. This presentation looks at the relationship between the I?upiat and American people, and specifically at the circulation of settler fantasies of race, gender and sexuality as borders of control. I argue that colonial/modern gender (Lugones 2007, 2010) is a crucial lens through which to examine the Point Barrow station of the First IPY. Through an examination of gender as ‘settler common sense’ (Rifkin, 2014) in the published and unpublished sources generated from this expedition (which include final reports to the U. S. government and the Smithsonian Institute, photographs, and diaries), this presentation establishes a new understanding of the expedition as a site where settler colonial ideals of masculinity emerge in response to I?upiat expressions of gender and sexuality that challenged members of the expedition. Specifically, the high social standing and sexual autonomy of I?upiat women created anxiety for the Americans, who interpreted I?upiat women’s equality as a sign of I?upiat men’s weakness according to a settler colonial heteropatriarchal framework. These gender anxieties were framed by a familiar mise-en-scène of the Arctic as secretive, unknown, and ethereal, yet knowable by techniques of colonial scientific exploration. Understanding and categorising members of I?upiat society through a rigidly binaristic gender system was a strategy for members of the Point Barrow expedition to accomplish a difficult task, that of disavowing their dependency on the I?upiat people for basic survival while recasting themselves as at the top of the hierarchy of masculinity.Indigenous Two-Spirit LGBTQ Resurgence in the Age of Political Heteronormativity Albert McLeod, Independent ScholarThis session will explore the efforts of Indigenous Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (2SLGBTQ) people to reclaim safe and productive spaces within their families, communities and nations. The imposition of government-run Indian Residential Schools and Native American Boarding Schools erased the historical role/legacy of 2SLGBTQ people to the extent that many of today’s political leaders and elders deny or avoid acknowledgment of this history. In terms of resurgence, the first local movements began in large urban centres where 2SLGBTQ people were concentrated within the broader LGBTQ community. The Gay American Indians (GAI) organization was founded in San Francisco in 1975 by Randy Burns and Barbara Cameron. In Canada, the Greater Vancouver Native Cultural Society (GVNCS) was organized in in 1977. Many of the early leaders/activists were queer people who had left their families and home communities to avoid homophobia and transphobia, and to find a quality of life that better reflected their realities. The introduction of the neologism, Two-Spirit, in 1990 began a new era of engagement that initiated a process of “coming in” (Wilson) to traditional homelands in addition to coming out in mainstream society. The efforts of 2SLGBTQ people to be included Indigenous-led advocacy has been referenced in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP, 1996) and the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2008-2015. The presentation will include research focusing on 2SLGBTQ people, the work of 2S artists and activists, and the advocacy with First Nation, Inuit, and Metis leaders. Native American HIV/AIDS Activism in the U.S. and Canada and the Roots of the Two-Spirit Movement, 1985–1995Daniel Rivers, Ohio State UniversityThis paper will explore the specific histories of Native HIV/AIDS activism in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toronto, and New York within a nationwide context. It will argue that the early years of the epidemic were devastating for Native communities and formative for what would emerge as a new articulation of Two Spirit consciousness by the end of the 1980s. Archival sources from collections in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and New York show that in the face of dysfunctional, racist, and homophobic Native health programs and federal negligence, the trauma of these years put Native LGBT activists in conversation with heterosexually-identified Native people, beginning a crucial process of defining Native wellness and survival, challenging homophobia, and forging support networks. At the same time, these experiences helped define the political activism and consciousness of the nascent Two-Spirit movement.6. Telling Indigenous Stories (Symposium)Anishinaabek Islands in Georgian Bay and Lake HuronRhonda Telford, Historical Research ConsultingThere are about 30,000 islands situated in Georgian Bay and hundreds more in the north channel and around the Great Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. These islands are the ancient property of the Anishinaabek and Odahwa. The government expressly recognized Anishinaabek and Odahwa ownership of the islands surrounding the Great Manitoulin Island in 1836 when it made a Treaty with them. In 1850, the government and the Anishinaabek on the north shore of Lake Huron signed a Treaty; in 1862, the government and the Anishinaabek and Odahwa west of the Wikwemikong Peninsula on Manitoulin Island signed a Treaty. In both cases, the Chiefs and Principal Men never intended to relinquish their islands and, based on subsequent petitions were not aware they had been included in the written text of the Treaties. The islands were valuable to the Anishinaabek and Odahwa, and also to the government which wanted to lease or sell them as fishing stations, timber berths, and summer resort locations. This brought the government into direct conflict with the Anishinaabek and Odahwa. To complicate matters further, after the Confederation of Canada in 1867 there were disputes within the federal government and between Canada and Ontario over the disposition of the islands. A deal was reached between the government around 1914, but the Anishinaabek and Odahwa have never relinquished their claims to the islands. This presentation will examine what the government did; what the Anishinaabek and Odahwa did; and where things stand today.Canadian Treaties and the Usurpation of the Islands in Lake Winnipeg.Victor Lytwyn, Historical and Geographical ConsultingIn 1875 and 1876 the Canadian government obtained treaties with most of the Chiefs and Principal Men who lived in the Lake Winnipeg region. Before the treaties were signed, the government sent surveyors to appraise the value of timber, minerals and other resources in the Lake Winnipeg region. They reported the islands in Lake Winnipeg contained valuable timber and mineral resources. One island stood out; known then as Big Island, and now called Black Island. It contained valuable iron deposits – a fact that had been known since the early French explorations of Lake Winnipeg in the early 18th century. The government surveyors met with Indigenous people who lived on the islands, and they were informed that they owned the islands and would not sell them to the government. At one of the treaty signing meetings Chief Ka-ta-kee-pe-ness refused to sign unless he could keep Big Island. The government representatives refused, and the Chief was blocked from the treaty proceedings. Although no reasons were given at the time, Big Island had already been given away by the government. Icelandic settlers had been promised Big Island (now known as Hecla Island), and the government was interested in granting mining and timber leases to Black Island (then known as Big Island). Chief Ka-ta-kee-pe-ness maintained his steadfast refusal to give his island to the Queen. He never accepted the small annual payments that were given to his Band members who were forced to sign the treaty and give up their island. This paper examines the historical and geographical factors that led to the usurpation of “Big Island” and the other islands in Lake Winnipeg.Fort La Cloche and the Sagamok Anishnawbek: Taking Back HistoryPeter DiGangi, Sicani Research and Advisory ServicesThe Sagamok Anishnawbek have lived on the North Shore of Lake Huron since time immemorial. Fur traders established a post at LaCloche on a pre-existing indigenous trading location in the late 1700’s. This site was an important economic, cultural and spiritual centre. When the Robinson Huron treaty was concluded in 1850, the Hudson’s Bay Company succeeded in having the post excluded from the lands which were reserved for the Sagamok Anishnawbek.Today, efforts to obtain resolution of this long outstanding issue offer a case study in applied multi-disciplinary research. Archaeology, Hudson’s Bay Company post journals and maps from two centuries ago, along with oral history, an anthropologist’s field notes, current use & occupancy mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have combined to assist the Sagamok Anishnawbek in reconciling their interests in the LaCloche site.Ethical and political considerations for filmmaking, journalism and research in Indigenous communitiesJames Cullingham, documentary filmmaker, Professor of Journalism and History at Seneca CollegeI have three decades of experience working as an independent documentary filmmaker, historian, journalist and public affairs broadcast producer in First Nation and Inuit communities from Yukon to Labrador. I intend to address ethical, human rights and political concerns and approaches for non-Native researchers and storytellers. My reflections will be framed in consideration of the meaning and potential realization of National Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada.I will focus on specific production and research experiences that have challenged, informed and nurtured me throughout my career. My work cuts across academic, filmmaking and journalistic boundaries. I have observed that such boundaries are often reified and preserved for the shared professional benefit of self-perpetuating elites. In journalism, a fetish for false objectivity has distorted coverage of Indigenous peoples. In academe, a widely shared culture of detachment inhibits engagement. I will make a case for approaches that enhance collaboration, democracy, human rights and political change.7. Contested Geographies (Part 2): Indigenous and African Challenges to European Conquest and Colonialism, 16th–18th Centuries (Symposium)The Shifting Meaning of Geography: European and Indigenous Contests for Cura?aoNicholas Cunigan, Calvin CollegeThis paper explores how the physical, political, and human geographies of Cura?ao influenced the relationship between the Dutch, the Spanish, and the island’s indigenous Caquetios between 1636 and 1645. Beginning in 1499, Spanish activities on Cura?ao resulted in the introduction of feral cattle, sheep, lamb, horses, pigs, and goats; the exploitation of the island’s dyewood trees; and the enslavement of nearly 2,000 Caquetios. When the Dutch West India Company seized the island in 1634, the island’s landscape had been denuded and its Native population reduced to roughly 400 individuals. The Dutch West India Company prized Cura?ao for its abundant salt flats, defensible geography, and prime location as a naval base. However, Company employees lacked the ecological knowledge to produce subsistence crops and the Company experienced repeated famine crises. The Company relied upon the Caquetios’ skills as livestock wranglers and subsistence farmers to maintain their hold on the island. The Caquetios parlayed their knowledge of the island’s physical geography and the island’s proximity to the Spanish Main to challenge Dutch control of Cura?ao. The Caquetios utilized the play-off system, threatened to aid Spanish attempts to re-take the island, and deployed non-violent means of resistance including foot-dragging, desertion, and non-compliance. The Company responded through informal negotiations to ensure the Caquetios’ assistance and loyalty. However, the Company also responded to the island’s shifting political and human geography by increasingly using the island as a port for its burgeoning position in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This paper examines how Europeans and indigenous peoples responded to the shifting meaning and significance of Cura?ao’s physical, political, and human geographies during the early modern period. It explores the reciprocal relationship between these geographies and highlights indigenous peoples’ ability to utilize these shifting meanings to resist European colonialism. “… Usted manda en la Plaza de Cartagena…el manda en el Palenque hasta la puerta de la Media Luna….” Geographies of Freedom and the Governance of Space in Colonial Colombia.Renée Soulodre-La France, King’s University College at Western UniversityRunaway slave communities (palenques) in Nueva Granada have been a focus of study by scholars of Africans and their descendants for several decades. Unsurprisingly, they were also the focus of much discussion, concern and often, military action by colonial officials as well. While the historiography of runaway communities continues to develop, there is still much to understand regarding the ways in which these communities presented opportunities to formerly enslaved Africans and the challenges they represented to the ideal forms of governance invoked by both church and state in Hispanic America. There is also much to be learned regarding the ways in which free Black towns became legitimized and institutionalized within colonial society and the nature of the hard-fought freedoms won by townspeople of African descent. Based on documents drawn from the AGN Colombia, and interpreting maps from the AGI that detail the geographic location of free black communities in Panama and Cartagena province, this paper will explore the fraught relations that existed between palenqueros and their priests, as well as the difficulties civil and military officials confronted when trying to bring free black towns into alignment with Iberian ideals of civility and religiosity. The work will test the extent and limitations of freedoms in a Black Atlantic context situated within the confines of Hispanic colonial landscapes, institutions, and mores. Remapping the Conquests of Central America: A Comparison of Spanish and Mosquito Territorial PracticesDaniel Mendiola, University of HoustonThe Purpose of this paper is to compare the strategies of conquest of two competing imperial projects in eighteenth-century Central America: Spain’s overseas empire, and the indigenous Mosquito Kingdom. While the early Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century succeeded in establishing several nodes of colonial rule along Central America’s pacific highlands, the Caribbean side of the isthmus remained largely insulated from Spanish influence. The Mosquito Kingdom, then, emerged on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua during the seventeenth century. Formed through a series of alliances among indigenous peoples and escaped African slaves, the Mosquito Kingdom began its own conquest at the start of the eighteenth century, expanding up and down the Central American coast. This paper examines Spanish and Mosquito territorialism by exploring how different practices of expansion intersected with local conditions to produce specific territorial regimes. I argue that while both the Spanish and the Mosquito were expansionist, they mobilized collective power in very different ways – processes which are reflected in territorial arrangements. On the one hand, the Mosquito territorial practices emphasized mobility and intensive power by concentrating activities along narrow corridors of efficient transportation. On the other hand, Spanish territorial practices emphasized colonization and extensive power by constructing a land-based realm which spread out in many directions. Ultimately, this paper provides an overview of the historical processes that contributed to these patterns, and then contributes suggestions for new cartographic methods which highlight these processes more effectively than do conventional maps.8. Beyond Red River: Nineteenth-Century Metis Across Borders (Symposium)Mobility, Memory and ‘Finding’ Nineteenth Century Hudson’s Bay Company Families Beyond Red RiverKrista Barclay, University of ManitobaSecrets, shadows, fragments, and silences. Historians and descendants of Hudson’s Bay Company employees and their Indigenous wives have often described the process of uncovering these families’ stories in these terms. Over the last four decades, a flurry of scholarship has worked to uncover the experiences of mixed heritage fur trade families who remained at fur trade posts or who settled what became the American and Canadian Wests, but there has been little research on those families who left Rupert’s Land in the middle decades of the 19th century and settled in clusters across Britain and colonial Canada. By reading ‘against the grain’ and working with Indigenous family heirlooms and other alternative sources, this paper highlights divisions and connections among Métis families beyond Red River. Members of the Cumming, Cameron and Finlayson families lived their lives at the intersection of seemingly divergent life ways and socio-political units: the fur trade, settler colonialism, Indigenous homelands, the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire, and the United States. Their navigation of these intersections show just how far and wide their social and economic worlds extended and ultimately came to rest, however uneasily or contradictorily, within the structures of settler or imperial states in which they and their descendants faced changing conceptions of gender, race and citizenship. This paper focuses on how these changes created the conditions within which the histories of the Cumming, Cameron and Finlayson families were truncated and obscured, bringing the territorial, cultural and historiographical borders between siblings and their descendants into sharp relief. Genealogy and Metis Identity: An Examination of Charles Denney’s Family HistoriesErin Dolmage, Seneca CollegeWhat makes an individual Indigenous is an ongoing political, legislative, and personal issue in Canada. For many of Canada’s Métis, descendants of distinct communities that grew from the families of the Aboriginal and European traders, Indigenous heritage was buried by years of racism and denial. Proof of their Indigeneity was found in the research of genealogists. However, the work of these genealogists is complicated by their own construction of families and ideas regarding ethnic identity. Although the work of genealogists has been crucial to defining membership in Métis communities, very few scholars have critically examined the meanings, limitations and biases of the genealogies themselves. This paper looks at the collection of amateur genealogist Charles Denny (1901-2002), which is currently housed in the Glenbow Archives in Calgary, Alberta. Denney was an avid amateur historian whose archival collection includes over 2600 family files who are related to the historic Métis communities who settled in the Northwest during the fur trade. This paper looks at a selection of the genealogies compiled by Denney and how his collection intersects genealogy and history. This paper looks at the parameters instituted by Denney to include a family in his collection, how Denney defines “metisness,” and the limits he imposes, whether they are familial, geographical, or historical. This research asks the question how did Denny elicit and write the histories of the people he researched and how do his conclusions of what made a family Métis compare with and shape our contemporary view of the Métis Nation?Crossing Borders, Challenging Boundaries: The Transnational Life Histories of Two Metis EducatorsErin Millions, University of ManitobaMetis children of Indigenous, English, Scottish and Orcadian descent attended schools both in the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) territories and abroad in the Canadian colonies, Britain and the United States. British constructs of race, gender and class in the HBC territories and in the wider Empire influenced fur trade parents’ decisions about their Métis children’s education, and the form and content of that education. The movement of these children as they accessed this education highlights the ways in which mobile Metis men, women and children engaged with empire, and in doing so challenged imperial constructs of race, gender, class and place. Moreover, the mobility of Métis students demonstrates the extensive Metis and fur trade kin and social networks that spanned the HBC territories, the Canadian colonies and Britain and connected the remote HBC fur trade territories to London and Edinburgh. This paper will explore these themes by examining the life histories of Matilda Davis and Alexander Kennedy Isbister. Both Davis and Isbister were born into fur trade families. Both were sent to Britain at a young age to be educated. Both lived part of their adult lives in Britain, and both were involved in different ways as educators in Britain and Red River. Their life histories demonstrate the ways in which the mobility of Indigenous men and women from the HBC territories challenged ideas about the relationship between the metropole and the colony, and the place of indigenous peoples in the empire. Their roles as educators highlight the ways in which imperial ideals of race, gender, class and respectability were transmitted and translated in the HBC territories to fit and reflect local conditions. 9. Dispossession, Land, and Leadership in the 19th Century:Examples from Red River, Wisconsin, and Manitoba (General Session)Displacement of Indigenous People from the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine RiversLawrence J. Barkwell, Louis Riel InstituteFor many years in the mid-nineteenth century there were mixed Saulteaux-Metis Bands living on the camping grounds at Upper Fort Garry on a semi-permanent basis. The men of this group were sometimes employed as trip-men and casual labourers by the Hudson’s Bay Company officers at the fort. They became known as the Fort Garry Band and in 1870 when Manitoba entered confederation they were led by Chief Na-sha-ke-penais, who signed Treaty No. 1 in 1871 on their behalf.During the negotiations of Treaty 1 in 1871 officials made a concerted effort to remove the First Nations and Metis Bands from the Upper Fort Garry area. According to Diane Payment, Parks Canada historian, the Kakekapenais (Bird Forever) and Na-sha-ke-penais (Flying Down Bird) bands, of which a good number were Metis or Half-breeds, were told to take up reserves around Fort Alexander and Brokenhead respectively.The names of their two chiefs should be returned to a place of honour in local history. Grandes Oreilles signed the treaty of 1817 between the Saulteaux and Lord Selkirk. And his son, Chief Na-Sha-Ke-Penais (sometimes Na-Sa-Kee-By-ness and other spellings, Flying Down Bird, or Grandes Oreilles as he was known to the local Métis and Europeans), signed Treaty One. Today, the only recorded use of the name in public circulation is a small reserve, vacant, just outside Winnipeg in East St. Paul, the Na-sha-Ke-Penais Indian Reserve. Though 60 kilometres from the main reserve, at Brokenhead, the Baaskaandibewiziibiing (Brokenhead Ojibway Nation), this fragment of land preserves the memory of two prominent 19th century First Nation leaders.The St. Croix Chippewa: A Lost Tribe?Theresa Schenck, University of Wisconsin, emeritusAbstract: For more than a century many of the Ojibwe of the St. Croix River Valley in Wisconsin believed that they had been left out of the apportionment of reservation land in the treaty of 1854. As a result they were known as "the lost tribe" for many years. Although they achieved federal recognition in 1934 and received back some of their original land, the epithet of "lost tribe" has continued into the 21st century. In this paper I will discuss what really happened before and after the treaty, and why they no longer consider themselves a lost tribe.The Nor’-Wester and the Subject of ‘Indian Title’Kenton Storey, Independent ScholarClaims to British sovereignty over the Red River Settlement in Rupert’s Land were understood to be under threat in the 1860s. The Nor’-Wester, a local Red River newspaper, warned its readers that hostile annexation by the United States was a danger, but also problematic was the fact that the local property rights were not secure because the underlying Indian title had not been dealt with. This presentation, then, will explore the subject of Indian title within the Red River Settlement’s only newspaper of record across the 1860s. Two subjects are of particular interest: the significance of previous historical precedents for recognising Indian title and how the threat of First Nations violence informed editors’ support for the recognition of Indian title. The Nor’-Wester was founded in December 1859 by William Coldwell and William Buckingham, both recent immigrants from Great Britain with several years of experience as journalists in Toronto. Shortly after initiating the paper, Coldwell and Buckingham took on James Ross as a joint editor and co-owner. Ross was a local, the son of former HBC chief trader Alexander Ross. The Nor’-Wester’s early editorial manifesto was focused on community development, but the paper very quickly became critical of local government. As we will see, the Nor’-Wester’s attention to the subject of Indian title was one element of its campaign to lobby the Colonial Office to establish responsible government in the colony. By examining the Nor’-Wester, this presentation responds to Bain Attwood’s recent injunction that “Historians must seek to recover the realpolitik of the frontier, what actually happened in colonial settings and how aboriginal title was shaped by relationships between colonizers, colonized and the imperial and colonial state.”10. Native American Routes of Migration and Exchange (Symposium)Other Argonauts: Native Hawaiian Miners in the California Gold RushBenjamin Madley, University of California, Los AngelesOver the last eighty years, scholars have increasingly explored the international, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and gendered dimensions of California’s gold rush. Still, scholars have largely neglected one important group. Hundreds of Kānaka Maoli, also known as Native Hawaiians, mined in California’s gold rush, shaping both the place they called Kaliponia and the Kingdom of Hawai’i.This article will present the first history of the rise and fall of Kānaka Maoli miners in the California gold rush while also exploring the impact of the gold rush on Hawai’i. Beginning with an analysis of how and why Kānaka Maoli were among the first miners of 1848, this presentation will then explore how and where perhaps a thousand or more Kānaka Maoli mined by 1849. The third section will describe the zenith of Kānaka Maoli gold mining—as well as rising violence against Native Americans in the gold rush—between 1849 and 1850. The paper will next explore how hydraulic and hard rock mining, increased immigration, and systematic violence drove most Kānaka Maoli from the mines by 1853. Finally, the conclusion will explore the economic, demographic, and political impact of the gold rush on the Kingdom of Hawai’i.Lipan Apache Trade Networks and the Pastoral-Plantation Borderland, 1770-1830Max Flomen, University of California, Los AngelesIn 1753 the governor of Louisiana expressed his desire to detach Apache bands from their Spanish partners and help place the French at the head of a new Native alliance. In his memorial, Governor Louis Billouart de Kerlérec schemed to lead an indigenous-French strike force into New Spain and either open up free trade with the Spanish or bring “war and desolation into Mexico itself.” French-equipped Apache raiders would crack restrictive Spanish trade policies and insure an open trade in livestock, providing animals desperately needed for the labour, energy, and food they contributed to the plantation economy while excess mules and horses could be shipped to St Domingue for exorbitant profits.Although unrealized, Governor Kerlérec’s proposed scheme is illustrative of the ways that indigenous and colonial peoples clashed over the pursuit of wealth and security in a contested borderland. Between the 1770s and 1830s Lipan Apache bands constructed extensive trade networks with Spaniards, Frenchmen, and the indigenous people of the Gulf Coast. Moving horses and captives towards Louisiana, Lipans obtained the guns and ammunition crucial to surviving Comanches’ southward expansion. In doing so, eastern Apaches helped create a pastoral-plantation borderland.From Taken “without consent’ to ‘running away from disease’: Migration to and from American Indian Off-Reservation Boarding Schools, 1879-1934”Preston McBride, University of California Los AngelesWell-known examples such as the slave trade in Indigenous bodies, American Indian Removal, and American Indian Relocation policies constitute the bulk of literature on the Indian forced migration. This paper addresses an overlooked aspect of the topic despite being several times the size of the “Trail or Tears.” The forcible transfer of children to American Indian boarding schools is one of the largest known migrations of Indian peoples. Beginning in 1879, United States officials took hundreds of thousands of American Indian children from their families and tribal nations to boarding schools. American Indian boarding school officials—carrying out an assimilationist federal mandate established in 1879—frequently cajoled, threatened, bribed, committed fraud, persuaded, and forced students into attending boarding schools. The federal government also passed compulsory education laws and threatened to withhold food, rations, and other annuities if parents refused to comply. Even when the federal government passed laws mandating parental consent to limit illegal behavior, officials violated it with impunity. Movement and migration did not cease once students went to boarding schools. Despite being incarcerated for a minimum of three years, many students sought to escape the confines of the school before their enrollment expired. Students left the schools by completing their terms of enrollment, graduating, running away, failing to return from leave, and being sent home sick. Despite being largely absent from the historiography of forced migrations, American Indian boarding schools fundamentally transformed the landscape of Native North America, restricting Indigenous economies, migration patterns, and exchanges. They deserve a more thorough investigation under this rubric and this paper begins that process.11. Creek Indian Responses to American Expansion (Symposium)“The Nation Now Present, Old and Young”: Forging Creek National Consensus, 1790-1796Joshua Haynes, University of Southern MississippiIn 1790, Alexander McGillivray claimed authority as executive leader of the Creek Nation when he negotiated the Treaty of New York with the United States. The land cession was a devil’s bargain to which many Creeks were never party. Many of the Creek signers later repudiated the treaty claiming McGillivray had misrepresented its terms. A lack of consensus combined with Georgia’s aggressive expansionism soured Creek-U.S. relations. In the early 1790s, Georgia militias and citizens unleashed frenzied extralegal violence against Creeks. Young Creeks responded with a series of raids best described as border patrols. Georgians’ lawlessness angered federal agents who renewed their efforts to control the Creek-Georgia border. Under constant threat of random violence, Creek leaders forged an unprecedented national consensus to accept the Oconee River as a permanent boundary.Creek national consensus depended on incorporating young men into the political process and reconciling town, or talwa, autonomy with national authority, rather than relying on a skilled executive such as McGillivray. In negotiating the 1796 Treaty of Colerain, talwa leaders and young men presented themselves as a unified Creek Nation with a single foreign policy. Over 120 leaders from twenty-four towns signed the treaty. They represented roughly half of Creek talwas, double the number represented at earlier treaties. Creeks recognized the value of presenting themselves as a nation, yet, in doing so, they embraced the long-standing system of autonomous talwas. Creeks had achieved peace and nation-to-nation relations with the United States. They could call on federal troops to restrain hostile Georgians, their most vexing enemies, yet they had made another devil’s bargain: after 1796, Creek security would depend on American soldiers rather than Creek border patrols. “The Four Mothers”: Creek Efforts to Forge a Southern Indian Confederation in 1803Steven J. Peach, Indiana University SoutheastThis paper examines early-nineteenth-century Creek efforts to charter a confederation among Southern Indians to resist American demands for land and debts. Studies of confederation in the Native South tend to focus on Alexander McGillivray, who engineered a militant coalition against Georgia in the 1780s and early 1790s. After McGillivray’s untimely death in 1793, however, many Creek headmen relied on diplomacy to help preserve Creek lands. Increasingly, they partnered with other Southern Indian leaders to cultivate a shared, pan-Indian identity based on political, kinship, and cultural ties. In at least one case, Creeks referred to the union as “the four mothers,” a moniker that promoted matrilineal kinship reckoning and a shared sense of Indian-ness.The pinnacle of the Southern Indian confederation came in 1803. At that time, the Four Mothers met in the Upper Creek town of Hickory Ground and framed a resolution that encouraged participating members to consult one another before ceding land and making other important decisions. Although the Four Mothers failed to stop the train of land cessions, the Hickory Ground meeting provides a glimpse into the possibilities and limits of pan-Indian coalitions on the eve of the Redstick War. In terms of evidence, this paper interrogates Spanish and American records and, specifically, the documents of the Panton, Leslie, and Company, a British-run trading firm that operated out of Spanish West Florida from 1783 to 1805. The paper corroborates Spanish observations of indigenous culture with American correspondence drawn from the American State Papers.Mapping Dispossession: Battle Maps as a Key to Understanding the Creek Response to American Invasion during the Red Stick War, 1813-1814Kathryn H. Braund, Auburn UniversityThe morning after the great battle at Tohopeka (Horseshoe Bend), fought March 27, 1814, Third Lieutenant R. H. McEwen, the regimental quartermaster of Col. John Brown’s East Tennessee volunteers, sat down to draw a “description of the Battle Ground” and to record his “Memorandums” regarding Andrew Jackson's victory against the Creek Indians. McEwen’s “description” was actually a pen and ink manuscript map. McEwen’s map, like the other six known manuscript maps of the battle, was a small sketch, mainly done “by eye.”While it is a boon to scholarship to have so many maps from this famous battle, the large number produced does raise the question of why so many American soldiers took the time to produce maps of the battle and depict it the way they did when other Creek War battles and indeed other War of 1812 battles were not similarly memorialized. Obviously the compelling nature setting—a horseshoe bend in the Tallapoosa River—as well as the extraordinary nature of the Creek fortification across the neck of the bend inspired the mapmakers. These maps provide keys understanding not only Jackson's military tactics, but Creek Indian defensive strategy during the war. This paper will explore conquest and territorial appropriation through the use of contemporary battle maps and explore how cartography contributes to our understanding of the Creek response to the American invasion during the brief but brutal war that ultimately dispossessed the Creek Nation of over 21,000,000 acres.12. Material heritage as permeable boundary between past and present (Symposium)All the things we do not know: thoughts on material culture and ethnohistoryLaura Peers, University of OxfordMaterial culture is both a compelling and an elusive source for ethnohistory, often with frustrating gaps in documentation which make it difficult to use as historical sources. Focusing on a cradleboard and watercolour produced within 5 years of each other in the Red River Settlement in the 1820s, this paper explores what those gaps reveal about the historical contexts in which items were made and collected, and how the challenge and augment current theoretical (and political) analyses of those contexts: how they act as links between the past and the present.Talk to me, Gaganoonishin: Indigenous and Ethnohistorical Conversations at the Manitoba MuseumMaureen Matthews, Manitoba Museum and Roger Roulette, Community MemberIn the Past few years in recognition of the importance of Treaties as foundational documents and as part of a reconciliation process with Indigenous communities, museums have been called upon to create exhibits which emphasize Indigenous perspectives, open collections to Indigenous research and engage in programs and projects which serve Indenous communities. Working with Indigenous artefacts to accomplish these objectives requires a heartfelt acknowledgement of the lives and relationships of indigenous artefacts; their ceremonial and community engagements become obligagions of contemporary collaborative development of a new permanent Treaty exhibit at the Manitoba Museum.Objects, Ancestors, Stories: the McTavish CollectionAngela Fey, Independent ScholarObjects have the power to create a concrete connection to our past – a connection we can hold in our hands. Each object in a family collection is connected to an ancestor and their story. It is these stories that ground us in who we are and where we come from; these stories that create our heritage and identity. The McTavish Collection is made up 159 objects and is housed at the Manitoba Museum. The collection belonged to a prominent fur trade family and has been passed down through five generations of women of mixed Indigenous/European decent. Eighty objects were pulled from the vaults and reunited as a single collection for closer study. An object biography was created using a combination of research techniques and perspectives to piece together a deeper understanding of the life of women of the fur trade era. Through these objects, a story emerged and shone a light on the women who made, collected and used these objects. This is a study of that process and those stories.Visiting Nahovey’s Granddaughters: Object Portals and Stories in Museum CollectionsSherry Farrell Racette, University of ReginaThree collections in public institutions in Winnipeg came directly from the descendants of Nahovay Sinclair, the Cree wife of William Sinclair. Another related small collection, the possessions of Nahoway’s daughter-in-law, also found its way into a collection through family donation. Unlike many objects that drift orphan-like into collections bereft of provenance, or items acquired by collectors with institutional or academic agendas, these objects reflect the needs, interests and movement of each family over time.In his discussion of the “presence” of history, Eelco Runia posits that objects can act as holes, punctures or leaks, through which “the past discharges into the present”. This can be expanded into the notion of objects-as-portal, both triggering and holding memory, inviting us to step through and engage in the speculative creation of meaning. When aligned with Indigenous notions of objects-as-persons, a pair of moccasins becomes a potent storyteller who guides us on that tentative step into the porta. A large collection becomes a chorus, albeit a somewhat discordant one, evoking multiple openings into a complex colonial past.13. Of Haunted Margins: Ghost Stories and Tales of Monstrous Encounters as Oral Histories (Symposium)Land, Power, and Poltergeist in Upper CanadaRick Fehr, Nipissing University“At times every inanimate thing about the place seemed to be endowed with life…” This eyewitness account of the events surrounding the Baldoon Mystery speaks to a spiritual transgression which invades every aspect of the social and personal sphere of early 19th century settler life in Upper Canada. The events that surround the Baldoon Mystery speak to a type of social upheaval centreing on stolen Indigenous land, environmental instability, and the Crown’s land petition process. The story centres on a land dispute involving disaffected settlers from Lord Selkirk’s failed Baldoon settlement, a social experiment involving landless Scottish crofters in Upper Canada who settled as indentured servants required them to buy freedom through labour. Following the community collapse, several residents sought to carve out a life on neighbouring land that has been described as “the unpeopled waste.” The land in question was actually promised to the Anishinaabeg of the Chenail Ecarte River tract and Bkejwanong Territory in the Chenail Ecarte Treaty of 1796. The eyewitness accounts of the environmental conditions, the settler encroachment, and the responding Indigenous action portrays both the land and the Indigenous agents as antagonists to the Judeo-Christian project that was sanctioned by the Crown. This paper will explore the archival trail that raises new questions about precisely what land was being fought over and the artistic license that has been used to whitewash the story from its shared settler and Indigenous contexts. The Northern Paiute tale of the People-Masher; A Case of Materiality PoeticsThierry Veyrié Indiana University, BloomingtonThe People-Masher is a recurrent character in Western Great Basin folklore. Sometimes described as a giant cannibal, he goes along with a grinding stone on his back, mashing people down with it. These tales are often told to children to keep them out of trouble. Grinding is a pervasive process in Great Basin historic subsistence economies, and I argue the psychological effect of terror appears to be produced by a mise en abyme of people being cooked, rather than doing the cooking. In this paper I will investigate whether power in these tales is represented through a poetics of materiality, through culturally specific sensitive qualities perceived in subsistence practices, or through material states such as consistency and decay. The forms that the People-Masher and other personifications of disaster take, in particular in a Northern Paiute tale recorded by the Swedish folklorist and linguist Sven Liljeblad, are either ultra-material or non-material, and connected to landscape features. These ancestral dwellers of places may also be the expression of historical events that have affected the Paiute during the 19th century, such as disease and hunger. Furthermore, the pervasive aesthetics of grinding in Great Basin culture invites a cross-cultural study of Uto-Aztecan mythology.“With All The Ghosts that Haunt the Park...”:Haunted Recreation in Brent, OntarioIan Puppe, University of Western OntarioWhen I first visited Brent, the defunct logging village, now campgrounds in the northern reaches of Algonquin Provincial Park I went searching for ghost stories. Often described as a “ghost town,” Brent has been occupied since the earliest days of logging in the Ottawa River/Kiji Sibi Valley and holds an important place in the oral history of the Park. The village was a place where many died after violent accidents during the timber rush of the eighteen-hundreds, and where Algonquin/Anishinaabe Peoples held a village of their own prior to colonization. Brent was once a bustling community, the former site of the Kish-Kaduk Lodge and an important railway stopover during the First World War. Further, Brent was home to the last year round resident of the Park. Mr. Adam Pitts, known to many local cottagers as the “Mayor” passed away in his home in 1998 one year after the railroad tracks were removed by the Canadian National Railway Company and the electricity was shut off. Now his cottage is a ruin some claim to be haunted by the Mayor’s restless ghost. And there are other ghost stories I heard in Brent that haunt the edges of the colonial imagination, stalking unwary travellers as they meander through what they sometimes assume to be “pristine wilderness.” Common patterns of self-apprehension and identity formation associated with tourism and heritage management in Algonquin Park are imbued with nationalist value through a prismatic complex of cultural appropriation, the denial of complicity in colonial violence, and the contingent obfuscation of Indigenous presence and persistence in the area, a process I call haunted recreation. Countering this complex is critical for working past the historical and intergenerational trauma associated with Canadian settler-colonialism and the contemporary inequities of Canadian society. 14. Foodways, Empire, and Colonization in North America from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Symposium)Autonomy and Adaptation of Indigenous Foodways in New France and New England:Sillery and Natick ComparedMairi Cowan, University of TorontoThe communities of Sillery and Natick pair well as sites for examining Indigenous autonomy near centres of colonial control. Sillery, founded in 1637, was located about 7 km south-west from the town of Québec. Natick, founded in 1651, was located about 32 km south-west from Boston. Their populations, formed from members of mostly Algonquian groups, soon rose to somewhere between 150 and 200. In both cases, colonial governments intended them to be places for nomadic and semi-nomadic Indigenous people to settle and live as sedentary Christians, and in both cases, they were the colony’s first such attempt. These similarities provide a good basis for comparison, while points of contrast between Sillery and Natick, including the colonial powers with which they were associated, the dissimilar migration patterns of Europeans in their regions, and the distinct forms of Christianity to which the Indigenous people were expected to covert, offer interesting terrain for tracing the consequences of different colonial policies and Indigenous responses. This presentation focuses on the production and consumption of food in the two communities. In particular, it compares how the residents of Sillery and Natick maintained their traditional foodways in some respects, and adopted colonial practices in others. Drawing upon written sources and the archaeological record, it argues that both communities exercised considerable control over their foodways, but that Sillery was more autonomous than Natick. It proposes three reasons to explain this difference: the extent to which traditional practices of the Indigenous inhabitants were compatible with European ideals of sedentarization, the ways in which French and English governments tried to deal with Indigenous peoples on lands they wished to claim, and the expectations of missionaries for how religious conversion to Christianity was supposed to involve broader acculturation to European norms.Meaning and Moose Muffles: Intersections of Colonialism and Indigeneity in a Uniquely North American FoodStacy Nation-Knapper, McMaster UniversityIn the seventeenth century, European settlers in colonized New France traded frequently with Indigenous peoples for furs, labour, processed goods including shoes and clothing, and food. Evidence of trades for meat appear often in the colonial archives, and though they may mention the animal from which the meat came, they infrequently mention the specific part of the animal being traded. One tantalizing exception is the moose muffle. When settlers traded with Indigenous peoples for moose muffle, the nose of the animal, they occasionally noted as much in the documents they created. Such references emerge in settler documents across four centuries, revealing the value of the muffle to settlers and Indigenous trade partners alike, in part by illuminating the items for which muffles were traded, but also with the mere mention of muffles in the documents. Settlers slowly erased the Indigenous origins of the muffle as an ingredient in recipes, as well as the diverse cultural contexts in which the muffle has long been enmeshed in North American Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples continue to create moose muffle dishes, some incorporating settler variations on Indigenous preparation methods and others using long-held community preparation traditions. Over more than four hundred years and among multiple iterations of European colonization of North America, the moose muffle has crossed boundaries of culture and empire, bringing Indigenous people and settlers together in acts of trade and nourishment, and being made meaningful in drastically different ways for very different purposes. This presentation will explore the complexities of meaning that humans in North America have created for the delicacy that is the moose muffle.The Lab Rat Experiments of Percy Moore, 1956-1962Travis Hay, York University The purpose of this paper is to historicize a series of nutrition experiments organized by the Director of Indian and Northern Health Services Percy Moore in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Constructing a narrative from archival sources, I review the way in which Percy Moore had students in residential schools conduct starvation experiments on rats as a means of disciplining Indigenous children to the scientifically engineered diets offered in the schools (which were served in the place of healthy, natural foods). After reviewing the logistics of the experiments, I situate them within a broader departmental history of Indian Affairs and its tendency to produce Indigenous bodies as objects of scientific analysis by and through systematic malnourishment, subsequent scientific observation, and eventual medical intervention. What is more, my paper argues that the lab rat experiments represent a moment in the history of Canadian federal Indian policy wherein scientific knowledge and practices acted as the vehicles of discipline and techniques of assimilation within a genocidal framework. Bringing together these two central aspects of the experiments, my paper concludes with a discussion of the centrality of nutrition experimentation to Canadian federal Indian policy in the post-war period, as well as a critique of statist accounts of departmental modernization wherein scientific and secular modes of state thinking replaced archaic and more violent loci of church control. As the example of rat experiments will demonstrate, scientific practices and knowledges related to nutrition experimentation emerged as key instruments of colonial statecraft in the post-war period and served the same function as their less secular predecessors. 15. Deviant Sexuality, Ritual Symbolism, and Social Justice: Exploring Indigenous Societies from the Colonial Era to the Present (Symposium)Toquiztli huan Tocaliztli: A Comparative Analysis of Agriculture and Sexuality in Nahua Ritual in Huasteca, VeracruzAbelardo de la Cruz, SUNY AlbanyThe agrarian Nahua communities of Huasteca, situated in the northern part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico, cultivate corn (hereafter maize) as their primary source of sustenance. In Nahua religion, maize is sacred and treated as if it were a child, known as Chicomexochitl in Náhuatl. Rural indigenous denizens practice such agricultural ceremonies both before and after the yearly harvest. Just as men and women reproduce through tocaliztli (sexual contact), the sowing of maize is considered to be toquiztli (the sexual act itself) as a result of the sower and the earth. In order to increase the efficacy of such rituals, participants employ the cuatlatoctli (sowing stick) and the xinachtli (seed)—analogous to a man’s phallus and sperm. These ceremonies help to bring about the birth of a child or the birth of maize. In this essay, I intend to comparatively analyze maize’s sexual origins in juxtaposition to Nahua men’s reproductive capacities within the Chicontepec Municipality. I will also examine the verb toca, which can signify to “sow something in the earth” as well as “copulation between men and women.” Both examples reveal the semantic and cultural division between man (i.e. humans) and maize in contemporary Nahua cosmology. This study will be presented by an indigenous doctorate student and native Nahuatl speaker from Huasteca in the state of Veracruz. Sexual Geography: Transforming Indigenous Spaces into Dens of Iniquity in Eighteenth-Century New SpainAnderson Hagler, Duke UniversityThis study considers two eighteenth-century sodomy cases in which Spanish colonizers accused the indigenous Pueblo peoples in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I emphasize the discursive labels that Spanish colonizers employed to describe indigenous peoples and landscapes, thereby reifying the socially imposed boundaries between propriety and misconduct. Rather than consider cross-cultural sexualities in isolation, this essay includes the environment and how ethnocentric outlooks shaped the ways in which Spanish colonizers associated sinfulness with certain physical spaces. Accordingly, this study coins the phrase sexual geography to describe the process by which colonial authorities labeled certain spaces as wicked and sinful, thus combining the thematic fields of gender, sexuality, and the environment.I argue that when Spanish colonizers recognized the physical limit of their control, they imposed labels upon peoples and landscapes out of their reach as a means of discursive conquest. By integrating gender and sexuality with environmental history, this essay problematizes descriptions of seemingly natural landscapes and elucidates the cultural construction of pejorative tropes that Spanish colonizers employed to report and chronicle events in the colonial era. The first sodomy case (1731) highlights the tensions between Spanish spaces regarded as civilized and other areas removed from the purview of the Spanish state that colonizers viewed as infested with wild Indians. The second sodomy case (1775) reveals that colonial authorities attempted to normalize local denizens’ sexual comportment in spaces deemed asexual. When indigenous peoples challenged the colonial project, Spanish colonizers exerted much effort to desexualize such spaces and reestablish behavioral norms. Thus, this paper explicates the nature of discursive conquest, by elucidating how colonists utilized the Catholic Church’s concept of sin to subjugate indigenous peoples—both physically and mentally—so as to appropriate land.Violence and Justice in Chiapas: Campesinos, Caciques, and the Catholic ChurchAlyssa Skarbek, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillThe post-revolutionary reforms enacted during the administration of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) would shape the methods by which communities in Chiapas engaged with the state throughout the twentieth century. By the 1970s, in municipalities such as Venustiano Carranza and Amatenango del Valle, communities increasingly became embroiled in violent encounters with caciques, municipal presidents, and each other when legal methods failed to solve local land conflicts. In response to armed state intervention and increased violence in the form of political assassinations, murder, gendered violence, and arrests, many agrarian committees turned to the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and specifically Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, to support their desire for social justice. The rise of independent indigenous peasant organizations as well as the training of indigenous catechists in the region during the 1970s and 1980s has been linked to the development of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) and the Zapatista Uprising of 1994. Yet, this paper will expand our understanding of the role of the Catholic Church and local agrarian committees in supporting or mobilizing indigenous activism from the post-revolutionary period up until the late twentieth century. Furthermore, this paper will demonstrate that local forms of organization, which was influenced by both legal and violent measures, would affect the development of the EZLN in the region. 16. Histories of Space and Hierarchy: Indigenous Socio-Political Boundaries in Colonial Highland Guatemala (Symposium)“This then was the Root of their Division:” Ritual Feasting and Inter-lineage Marriage among the Highland MayaAllen Christenson, Brigham Young UniversityPrior to the Spanish Conquest, ritual feasting was a major part of the ceremonial life of the highland Maya. The Popol Vuh notes that feasting and drinking were a major, if not the major, function of the Great Houses that each of the major K’iche’ lineages constructed in their capital, particularly in conjunction with inter-lineage marriage. At the first major capital at Chi Ismachi’, no other gift exchange than food and drink was considered necessary or even desirable in this regard:And yet again they began to feast and to drink to their daughters. They were called the Three Great Houses gathered together to celebrate (Christenson 2007, 265).Later, when the ruling lineages fell into dissension and broke apart, it was the demand for more than food and drink during bride negotiations that was blamed for the split from three into nine great lineages. It is also significant that the outward expression of this dissent was the desecration of the ancestral dead—the most violent means possible of breaking familial ties:They began to envy each other regarding the bride price for their sisters and their daughters. For it was no longer merely food and drink that they demanded. This, then, was the root of their division. They turned on each other, desecrating the bones and the skulls of the dead (Christenson 2007, 267).Following the Spanish Conquest and the concomitant disruption of centralized indigenous institutions of power, lineages proved to be an enduring foundation for community organization. Ritual feasting continued to be a major element of inter-lineage relationships, often solidified in conjunction with bride negotiations. Having eaten maize together, the two families would become literally of one flesh. The Case for Municipal K’iche’ Scribal Schools: Orthography, Formulaic Expression, and Stylistic Convention in Native Language Documents in the Guatemalan HighlandsOwen Jones, Southeast Missouri State UniversityIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, K’iche’ Maya scribes produced native language documents that were specific to the administrative needs of their municipalities. Each pueblo had its own parish church and archival evidence has revealed a scribal school that the fiscal of the church operated. Every one of the scribal schools had its own stylistic conventions that included in some cases a unique orthography that borrowed elements from Fray Francisco de la Parra’s original sixteenth century exemplar. These schools also cultivated their own formulaic expressions in their documents. The fiscal of the church not only taught scribes how to write in K’iche’ but also taught them Spanish literacy both in reading and writing. This paper argues the use of native language stylistic scribal conventions and the unique differences that they had from one another in the municipalities of Rabinal, Xelaju, Momostenango, Santa Cruz del Quiche, Santa Maria Chiquimula, San Miguel and San Cristobal Totonicapán. It also follows the shift into code-switching that scribes employed in their relationship with Spanish colonial visitors both civil and ecclesiastical. Indigenous scribes served as the quintessential mediators between the K’iche’ and Spanish colonial worlds. Dividing Land and Defining Territory in Colonial K’iche’an NarrativesMallory Matsumoto, Brown UniversityLand is a prevalent feature in colonial-period K’iche’an documents, although it is most explicitly forefronted in accounts of territorial possessions. Many of these texts necessarily reference the borders of the area at stake to directly or indirectly position their claim with respect to others. But not all borders were created equal. In this paper, I highlight differences in both the nature and history of boundaries that are articulated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century K’iche’an historical and legal documents. Some borders are explicitly tied to natural features, such as mountains or rivers. Others, however, are markers constructed on the landscape, where they are not subject to the constraints of local geography. This distinction often manifests itself in portrayals not only of borders themselves, but also of claimants’ relationship to the land that they demarcate.In K’iche’an sources, man-made boundary markers tend to be planted on the landscape in direct correlation with military confrontation. Establishing new territorial limits was not simply an end goal of conquest; it was frequently the mechanism, literally and metaphorically, through which conquest occurred. Borders delineated by geographic features, in contrast, emphasize the naturalness of the social and political relations that they symbolize, rather than specific historical events underlying them. These distinct approaches to presenting the association between people and the landscape were developed by K’iche’an communities to assert their territorial privileges before the colonial government. In the first, demarcations are presented as the result of agency by an individual or group on behalf of a larger community; in the second, boundaries’ fundamental place on the terrain itself highlights personal and collective relationships to it. Nonetheless, both strategies ultimately invoke the historicity of the claimant’s ties to the land, thus drawing on a pre-Columbian past to justify contemporary land claims in the Spanish legal framework. The Seat of Authority: Continuities of Power and Hierarchy in Colonial Highland GuatemalaFrauke Sachse, University of BonnOur primary resources for the reconstruction of socio-political organization in pre-conquest and early colonial Highland Guatemala are sixteenth-century native historiographies, including the Popol Vuh, the Memorial de Sololá and a number of so-called títulos. Adopting the European genre of the land title, títulos were produced by a number of different indigenous communities in the k'iche'-speaking Highlands to state and emphasize the legitimacy of local indigenous lords, and thereby their legal access to land and resources. The texts follow the same format, describing the origin of a local ruling line and then the lands that were settled or acquired through conquest in the course of history. While the histories and genealogies in the various títulos differ from community to community, the ruling line shows some form of connection to the Kaweq' K'iche' of Q'umarkaj (Utatlán). In his Apologética Historia Bartolome de Las Casas describes a system of political organization and inter-polity hierarchies which identified the lords of Q'umarkaj as the utmost authority in the Highlands that was recognized by all surrounding polities (reinos) including the non-K'iche'-speaking groups. This paper will provide documentary evidence which shows that the conquest did not fundamentally change these hierarchies and that the Kaweq' K'iche' of Q'umarkaj, now residing in Santa Cruz del Quiché, continued to install local lords in regional centers into their office. As a consequence, I argue that the authorities in Santa Cruz del Quiché were the prime addressees of the títulos that were written in the aftermath of the conquest, when K'iche' society began to reorganize itself and reestablish the old hierarchies within the framework of the new colonial social order. Maya Mapping Missionaries: Geo-theological Scope through K'iche'an Land DeedsGarry Sparks, George Mason UniversityWithin the recent decades, ethnohistorians have noted the appropriation of Iberian notarial genres by Mesoamerican elites for not only the early defense of native property rights but also as the armature in which pre-Hispanic genres--such as from lienzos--descriptive of indigenous notions of geographic, social, and mytho-historical space continued. However, the native use of religious or theological features in these presumably legal texts is often overlooked or dismissed. Perhaps ironically, as some of the earliest post-contact autochthonous literature, Highland Maya land deeds or títulos also note, and thus help map, the arrival and impact of the advent of Hispano-Catholicism decades earlier than accounts by missionary chroniclers like Fray Antonio de Remesal or even Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. Through intertextual analysis of early K'iche'an land deeds, as well as mendicant chronicles where correspondence can be established (attentive to particular uses of Christian discourse, tropes, and names by Maya authors) the regional scope of the competing religious orders, namely the Dominicans, can be more accurately mapped out, at least from the Maya, but also an earlier, perspective.17. “The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women” After 40 Years(Round Table)A roundtable discussion of "The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women" as a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the original 1977 conference that engendered its creation. The roundtable will critically analyze the impact of “The Hidden Half,” which was primarily written by non-Indigenous scholars, and their own work as Indigenous scholars of psychology, history and Indigenous studies. As a roundtable, discussants will comment briefly on their own projects on historic trauma, health and colonization of Plains peoples, and Indigenous women activism. With audience participation the roundtable will end by discussing to what extent research on Indigenous women remains “The Hidden Half?”18. Native Organizations, Media, and Challenges to Power and Memory(General Session) Settler Colonial Sin-Eaters: The Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast and Their Battle with HistoryMarc James Carpenter, University of OregonuFrom their inception in 1885 through the official end of their organization in 1941, the Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast waged a two-pronged war to shape their own history. Comprised of volunteers who had fought in the Cayuse, Rogue River, and Yakima Indian Wars, the veterans campaigned for recognition and pensions from the federal government. But they also fought against many early historians of the Pacific Northwest, who (accurately) portrayed them as genocidal murderers. Early historians, taking their cue from the official records, generally blamed local white militias for unwarranted violence against Native Americans. By contrasting the “barbarous conduct of the volunteers” with the “great indignation of the better class of white men,” historians like Hubert Howe Bancroft attempted to isolate the blame for white atrocities to a handful of early settlers and malcontents, implicitly exculpating the rest of the country.The Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast tended to respond with counterattacks rather than outright denial. Their attempts to sanctify their service rested on the creation of a legion of enemies. They painted the national government as inept and out of touch, the regular troops as high-handed and wrong-footed, and historians who relied on the records of either rather than the reminiscences of pioneers as arrogant and unscholarly. Above all, the IWV-NPC created an image of Native Americans as “dreaded red men” who were more “demons of another world” than human beings. The organization’s claim to a better sense of the “true history” of the Northwest than others was predicated in part on the pioneer volunteers’ knowledge of Native culture, customs, and language compared to later white settlers, to the extent that meetings sometimes conducted in Chinook Jargon as well as English.Drawing on previously untapped archival materials, this paper examines how conflicts over history and memory shaped how settler violence was used, excused, and forgotten. Initially remembered for their violent excess, the volunteer veterans were able to use their presumed authenticity to justify and erase their genocidal acts, even as they commemorated them.New Breed Magazine and Cross-Border Media Activism in 1970s Western Canadian Indigenous PressHannah Cooly, University of Ottawa In April 1973, New Breed magazine, a periodical produced by the Association of Métis and Non-Status Indians of Saskatchewan (AMNSIS), published an issue which featured coverage of the ongoing conflict at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The creators of New Breed pledged their full support for the American Indian Movement and the Oglala Lakota in the dispute. Although AMNSIS officially supported the Lakota actions south of the border, opinions provided by readers show that support was far from unanimous. Discussions of the Wounded Knee conflict in 1973, and other Native American activist initiatives, both contemporary and historical, show that Métis government and membership were highly engaged with events taking place to the South, though they demonstrated diverse opinions about these events. Throughout the 1970s, New Breed included significant coverage of not only Wounded Knee, but also the 1977 Leonard Peltier trial, the 1978 Longest Walk march to Washington, D.C., and other events. These components of New Breed suggest that print media was one of the ways that political ideas and activist ideals crossed the 49th parallel, creating overlapping and integrated Indigenous activist communities. By sharing ideas across the border in Indigenous-produced media bodies, creators of New Breed and other Indigenous newspapers fostered a trans-national activist press, promoting common ideals of anti-colonial struggle. While the border created different conditions of oppression for Indigenous people in American and Canadian nation-states, it did not necessarily create distinct and separate activist movements. Rather, cross-border activism created complex conditions of similarity and difference between diverse Indigenous people and communities across North America. The movement of ideas and media products throughout these diverse communities promoted significant public discussions of these similarities and differences, and contributed to growing activist movements in Canada and the United States. Brandon Indian Residential School Mobile Learning CentreRev. Craig S. Miller, Knox United ChurchThe Brandon Indian Residential School Mobile Learning Centre (BIRSLC) is the Assiniboine Presbytery’s (United Church of Canada) response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and Call to Action Number 59 which calls on Church Parties to the Settlement Agreement to educate communities about the effects of colonization and the history and legacy of residential schools. The BIRSLC is composed of 27 large format photos that span the history of the school from 1895-1972. Each photo is displayed on a portable easel and the exhibit requires a large conference room for viewing. A colour booklet outlines the history of the school and each photo includes a description board. Additional resources accompany the BIRSLC that empower communities to plan events where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people meet together, learn together, talk together, and become known to each other by name. The planning team is composed of members from the UCC, Brandon University, Sioux Valley First Nation, and the community of Brandon. Our goal is to promote awareness (truth) and to create opportunities for new relationships to grow between Indigenous and non-Indigenous neighbours (reconciliation). The school building was demolished in 2000. There are few references to the school and its history in our local museums and institutions. Many long time residents have told us they did not know a residential school existed in Brandon. Upon making initial inquiries with leaders and institutions in the City of Brandon we received little interest in partnering to create a permanent learning centre, thus we created a mobile centre. 19. Decentering the 150th Anniversary Celebrations: Alternative Histories in the Western Subarctic, A Panel in Honor of Jennifer Brown (Symposium)“Women making shoes & etc. & etc.”: Identifying the Presence and Role of Women in the Remote Subarctic Fur Trade Post of Fort Selkirk, YukonVictoria Elena Castillo, School of Liberal Arts, Yukon CollegeFort Selkirk operated as a small fur trade post for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in central Yukon, at the confluence of the Yukon and Pelly rivers, from 1848-1852. The company’s priority was the trade of European merchandise in exchange for a wide variety of furs trapped and hunted by Northern Tutchone, Kaska and other Indigenous groups in the region. An examination of Fort Selkirk journal records indicates the fort employed and housed a pluralistic population, which included English, Scottish, Indigenous and Métis men who worked as clerks, labourers and meat hunters. Largely missing from Fort Selkirk’s written record is the presence and role of women living at the fort. Women visiting the fort during Indigenous trade expeditions are also absent from the written record except in the most cursory instances. In just a few rare examples does Fort Selkirk Clerk, Robert Campbell, describe in detail women who have made an impression on him.Clearly women had a critical role to play. Indigenous women had extensive knowledge of the local landscape and lifeways, which would have been seen as valued qualities by the fort complement, particularly in a circumpolar context. Archaeological excavations conducted over two years at Fort Selkirk I recovered a variety of European and Indigenous made objects including those made from bone and antler, which fit into generalized gendered artifact categories. The recovered artifacts, their spatial distribution, as well as HBC journals are analyzed to ascertain the presence, identification, and important socio-economic roles of Indigenous and nonindigenous women within the fort.Trade, Treaty, Chiefs, and “Famous Sorcerers”: Leadership, Ethnostatus, and Religious Pluralism During a Transitional Period in the Western SubarcticClint Westman, University of SaskatchewanThis paper examines a pivotal period in the history of an “isolated” region of northern Alberta through analysis of archival and oral historical data, principally concerning the lives of a small number of known and named (male) Cree and Métis leaders during the period between the 1880s and 1940s. Based on fieldwork in Trout Lake and Peerless Lake and archival research in Edmonton and northern Alberta (as well as on records of the Hudson’s Bay Company held in Winnipeg but accessed remotely), the paper provides information on political negotiations, reception (and rejection) of Roman Catholic and Anglican Christianity, and trading strategies of these leaders and their followers.Trout Lake was the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company post by 1870 and was first visited by a missionary in 1891 (but perhaps as early as the 1870s). Nevertheless, the period around 1900 saw Trout Lake people and nearby groups increasingly designated as “isolated.” The Treaty 8 commission and the Métis scrip commission of 1899 traveled mainly by major rivers and thus knowingly missed several hundred individuals living in the vast interior region (including those around Trout Lake). This set the stage for more than a century of arbitrary treatment by the federal and (later) provincial governments. During this period, individuals like Everlasting Voice, Elder Brother, Cutwing, Perfumed Bow, Okemow, and Edward Letendre engaged in debates and negotiations with church and state representatives, working strategically to accommodate and respond to outside pressures while remaining embedded in a relational ecology of human and non-human persons. The ethnohistory of displacement and the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan: creating a new northern commons at the expense of Indigenous peoplePatricia A. McCormack, University of AlbertaWhen Indigenous people controlled northern Alberta, these lands constituted a series of partially-overlapping commons, with the borders between these regions, and access to land and resources, governed by ethic affiliation, cultural identity, and especially kinship ties. They entered into Treaty No. 8 in 1899 because the Treaty Commissioners promised that they would be able to continue their way of life on those lands in the future and be given priority in resource use over outsiders. However, 20th century governments ignored those promises and put an end to that world, especially from the 1920s, when the north was invaded by White trappers, and accelerating in the 1940s, when a system of registered trap lines was introduced. Today, the Government of Alberta is seeking to turn northern Alberta into a new type of commons, one that will be available for recreational uses by all citizens and even foreigners. This goal is embedded in the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan. The new commons will further marginalize Indigenous occupants, whose resource use is already being swamped by a new invasion of outsiders at the same time that they are being displaced from much of their former land base by an expanding industrial footprint.Reclaiming our Storyscapes: the Kwanlin Dün Waterfront History Project Rae Mombourquette and Linda JohnsonFor more than 150 years the Kwanlin Dün (people) experienced increasing encroachments on their lands, families, cultures, and lifeways. In 1883 this included the renaming of their namesake landmark – Kwanlin, which means, “water rushing through a narrow place” in their language – after American Army General Miles who never even visited the area. The decades following through to the 1970s brought many more difficult episodes when the Klondike Gold Rush, Alaska Highway construction, residential schools, settler expansion and government programs overtook almost all aspects of Kwanlin Dün lives. In 1973 Yukon First Nations people presented their land claims manifesto entitled Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow to Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in Ottawa. After decades of negotiations, an Umbrella Final Agreement established the framework for self-government and final agreements in 1993, signed by 11 of 14 Yukon First Nations. Kwanlin Dün First Nation signed its agreements in 2005, regaining control over selected lands, citizenship, justice, cultural resources and co-management processes for other governance issues. A key element of the 2005 agreements was the return of Kwanlin Dün to the Whitehorse waterfront, with lands and money to build a magnificent cultural centre, along with funding for a comprehensive waterfront heritage project to research, document, and retell the stories of Kwanlin people on the riverfront in a book, displays and interpretive programs. The book, to be published in 2018, will be based on community oral histories and perspectives - looking at traditional stories about the landscape, life before contact, experiences with non-indigenous travellers and settlers, residential schools, colonial government policies and the return to self determination through the land claims treaty. With this project, Kwanlin Dün are re-establishing their storyscapes, rebalancing the “history” of their lands and waters, reclaiming their places and their voices, and offering a "new look" at Whitehorse and the Yukon for the next 150 years!20. Comparative Perspectives on Transnational Indigenous Experiences(General Session)Governing the Global Periphery: Frontier Governmentality amongst the Apache and AfghansBenjamin D. Hopkins, Ph.D. (Cantab), George Washington UniversityThis paper examines the experience of the Apache inhabitants of the San Carlos Reservation in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border during the late 19th century. It places that experience in a global context which witnessed similar forms of frontier rule developed and deployed along the peripheries of expanding nation states and colonial empires far removed from the American southwest. Focusing on the practices employed by John Philip Clum, agent for the reservation during the mid-1870s, the paper argues that the Apache were subject to a form of frontier governmentality which was becoming globally ubiquitous at this time. Clum ruled the Indians through their own ‘customs’ and ‘traditions’ – as he understood them. He established a tribal police and tribal court, recruiting and paying Indians to police themselves. His administration served as model of reservation governance, and within a decade Congress had codified his practices in law. Yet despite claims of the uniqueness of his method of administration, Clum’s rule was identical to a system of frontier administration constructed at the very same moment on the other side of the world, along the Afghan frontier of British India. Captain Robert Groves Sandeman’s system of frontier administration ruled the local Baluch tribesmen through their own ‘customs’ and ‘traditions.’ Like Clum, Sandeman recruited the tribesmen into a tribal police and court, monetizing as he monitored them. Sandeman’s system became a model for frontier rule throughout the British Empire and was widely copied in other European colonial empires. Clum and Sandeman represent more than simply an interesting coincidence or juxtaposition. Rather, they authored and embodied a nearly universal system of frontier rule born of the political and administrative logic of the late 19th century world which had devastating consequences for the inhabitants of these spaces. The Sons of Chief Bob: Cherokee and Nahua People’s Fight for Education as an Example of Indigenous Mutual Collaboration in 1828.Argella Segovia-Liga, Leiden UniversityHistorical documentation demonstrates that after the 16th century, despite the negative consequences that the European colonization brought to the Americas, indigenous communities in both Mesoamerica and North America remained highly interested in educating their youths according to their own indigenous traditions, and yet they also sought educational spaces in order to advance their contemporary needs. Despite the tragic events that Indigenous Peoples endured both in North American and the Mexican territories, available documentation demonstrates that during the first decades of the nineteenth century several indigenous societies continued their fight to provide their peoples with access to educational institutions. Several historical examples demonstrate the existence of a shared interest for education among indigenous communities throughout both Mexico and the United States. This particular appeal of education contributed to the consolidation of an indigenous identity that Indigenous Peoples both in Mexico and the United States shared during the 19th century. During the decades that came after 1821, when Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the Nahua people who inhabited Mexico City faced a series of changes that threatened their social cohesion. Meanwhile, the members of the Cherokee Nation in the United States also faced their own struggles. Regardless of all of these problems, both groups remained active and mutually cooperated in order to keep education accessible for their people.Through the analysis of a specific historical case study, this paper will explore the mutual cooperation that both Cherokee and Nahua leaders established during the second decade of the 19th century in order to defend their right to provide higher education to their children. Through a general overview of selected historical documentation, this paper aims to present an example of mutual collaboration that prevailed among diverse indigenous groups divided by artificial frontiers that the U. S. and Mexican independent governments reinforced during the nineteenth century. Indigenous School and the current Colonization Process of KnowledgeEduardo Vergolino, University of ManitobaIndigenous schools in Canada and Brazil have one specific and crucial point in common, in both countries education inside the classroom are based on a structured curriculum which privileges the fragmented content and not the way of thinking or knowing. Participation and self-governance still an issue and the Government has the power to decide what, how and when the children are going to learn. Curriculum based on content does not recognize the subject individuality and much less the cultural aspects of the community which the school is supposed to work for. The way of thinking and recognize knowledge in Western-based schools seems different from indigenous's way. The holistic perspective of human beings as a part of the total and the Western-based way of being and think as an individual a-part from everything and everyone is a crucial point of discussion in the indigenous schools. How can be the Indigenous Schools structured in a different way to recognize the indigenous way of thinking? It is necessary to discuss the structure of the current curriculum inside Indigenous Schools. Not only which content will be necessary to fill the "gaps" of knowledge, but also, the pedagogy which the school is going to undertake as a fundamental power of change in the relation teach-learn. It is important to discern the ways of building the knowledge in a western-based and in a indigenous school. The school should be the centre of recognition of differences, and not a Government instrument of unification and universalization of subject's individualities. 21. Native Knowledgeful Places: Confined and Confounded Colonial Education under American Empires, 1524 to 1840 (Symposium)Spirited Training Grounds and Contested Convents: Nahua-Otomí Religious and Worker Educational Spaces under New Spain (1524-1650)Joshua Fitzgerald, University of OregonIn the sixteenth century, Christo-European migrants, both civilian peninsulars and priests, entered the Mesoamerican countryside and began devising ways to shape indigenous knowledge to better fit their own. They packaged colonial education using two basic media: inked into paper texts and carved into church stones. They were often aided by converted Native elites and the famous “collegians,” the first set of indigenous students in the Americas. Early on, religious scholars argued that foreigners dominated these settings and the social and spiritual arrangements under Spain (Ricard, 1933), but decades of ethnohistories have complicated the top-down view of conversion and ecclesiasticism (Gibson, 1954; Burkhart, 1992, 1996; Tavárez, 2011). Still, surprisingly few have sought a combined study of textual and spatial indigenous perspectives (Edgerton, 2001; Haskett, 2005; Lara, 2004, 2008). Fewer have studied specific local learning environments (Wake, 2010) and education related to worker training is often neglected (Morril, 2014). In this paper, Joshua Fitzgerald proposes an approach to this task. He adopts the thrust of Cohen and Glover’s “colonial mediascape (2013),” the spectrum of indigenous modes of knowledge transference which persisted throughout the Americas. And, based on Nahuatl and Otomí sources, Christian didactic material culture, and descriptions of daily-life instruction and vocationalism, Fitzgerald will argue that local students contended for and articulated what he terms the “indigenous learningscape.” His paper highlights sixteenth-century educational spaces built in provincial towns in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley and Querétaro, places scholars have famously associated with Franciscan predicators and architects, but, he argues, were actually under the auspices of local learners. Developing a cultural context for texts used in courtyards and worker-training, specifically in Spanish-owned textile mills, he argues that Nahua learners not only shaped their own education but also imposed a Nahua pedagogy upon their Otomí neighbors.“Raise your Saber, and then I will eat you”: Missionization and Native Manhood in Upper California Emily Dylla, University of Texas-AustinIn this paper, Emily Dylla examines Native manhood within the context of the ethnically pluralistic Alta California missions. The last of the northern Spanish-American borderlands to be colonized, Franciscan missionaries in Alta California drew heavily on previous missionization efforts in other frontier regions to shape their practices and policies. What resulted was an effort to exert an unprecedented amount of control over baptized Native peoples (neophytes) using corporeal and psychological tactics. By reordering the conceptual universe of the neophytes, missionaries hoped to transform them from ‘gentiles’ and ‘savages’ into gente de razón, devout Christians and loyal, productive subjects of the Crown. Missionaries identified children as more malleable subjects and so intensified efforts to acculturate them into a Christo-European worldview. Neophyte boys, by virtue of their sex, also received the lion’s share of formal education. Children as young as seven years were separated from their families and required to live in sex-segregated dormitories (for boys, jayuntes; for girls, monjeríos). In doing so, missionaries not only attempted to disintegrate Native families but to replace intergenerational transmission of knowledge with a Christo-European pedagogy and replace Native gender and kinship structure with Spanish patriarchy. Dylla will argue that despite these measures, neophyte boys did not adopt the worldview missionaries were attempting to instill, suggesting instead Native manhood was a site of cultural negotiation, transformation, and persistence. This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach, examining material culture recovered from the jayunte at Mission San Antonio de Padua and the writing of the neophyte Pablo Tac. Reflecting a broader pattern across neophyte populations, both material and documentary evidence suggest boys selectively adopted certain aspects of Spanish worldview while nonetheless persisting in Native behaviors and practices. “Even in a Wilderness”: Conceptualizations of Space by Christian Indian Communities in Mexico and the United States, 1744-1840Jessica Lauren Criales, Rutgers UniversityJessica Criales examines rhetorics of space and place deployed by self-identified “Christian Indians” in both colonial Mexico and colonial New England. Specifically, she analyzes the campaigns for indigenous convents in Mexico City, Valladolid, Oaxaca, Puebla, in comparison with efforts to create a Christian Indian village, called Brothertown, by coastal New England tribes. In order to successfully establish these locations, which excluded non-indigenous people from entering and residing, both native groups drew on European colonial discourse, but modified these concepts in order to advance their own goals. This paper particularly focuses on the idea of the “wilderness,” a place commonly understood by Europeans as the opposite of civilization, sometimes a seen as a site of purity, but more frequently of transgression, idolatry, and danger. In their efforts to establish Christian Indian spaces, native people incorporated this concept of wilderness into their arguments, subtly modifying the definition to create a logic that was both palatable and persuasive to European colonizers. In doing so, they created a stronger foundation for the community borders than they themselves wanted to erect. Drawing primarily on letters and petitions written by indigenous peoples to missionary societies, government and church officials, and other indigenous peoples, this paper demonstrates the ways in which indigenous peoples creatively adapted missionary and colonizer rhetoric for their own purposes. It forms part of a larger project which seeks to understand how and why indigenous peoples were able to establish these Christian Indian spaces during the late colonial and early Republic periods in Mexico and the United States.22. Identity and Borders as Terms of Negotiation in North American Intercultural Diplomacy (Symposium)Native American Influence on the Creation of an American Identity in Early KentuckyJay Donis, Lehigh UniversityIn studying the last third of the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley, historians often focus on the contest between Native Americans and Euro-Americans over land. A vital, but understudied component of those sometimes diplomatic and sometimes deadly encounters includes “identity politics.” By identity politics, I mean the creation and reshaping of identities due to encounters between different cultural groups on intra-societal and inter-societal levels. This paper evaluates the evolution of white identity in Kentucky in relation to both peaceful and violent contacts with various Native American groups. Scholars often recognize social creation through the exclusion of “others.” Coupled with the rise of racialized thinking in the mid to late eighteenth century, it may seem obvious that fighting over Kentucky drew a harder line around racial boundaries. Yet, numerous events from the Revolutionary era point to a still fluid process of racial identity construction by Euro-Americans of themselves and their Indian enemies.??????????? Perhaps more important for white Kentuckians, identity could either reinforce or undermine legitimacy and authority. Although a permanent Euro-American population in Kentucky existed simultaneously with the opening battles of the American Revolution, forging an identity in Kentucky involved pre-revolutionary patterns and cultural transmission. At the same time, the American Revolution represented an opportunity to reorient the political allegiances of white Kentuckians. As Euro-American migrants struggled to recreate their lives in Kentucky the dual processes of migration and living in a new area forced settlers to revisit social bonds. This paper focuses on the significant influence of Native Americans to affect both the pre-revolutionary patterns and revolutionary rhetoric that Kentuckians considered while constructing broad local and national identities.Murky Boundaries Clear Waters: Power, Water, and Treaties in the Anishinaabeg Great LakesJacob C. Jurss, University of Minnesota, MorrisA defining characteristic of the Great Lakes for its abundance, the waters of shallow ponds, navigable rivers, and expansive lakes provided the environment necessary for, wild rice harvests, bountiful fisheries, and transportation highways. Rivers could connect communities across vast distances, but also served as boundaries between peoples. The fluid nature of water complicated attempts to create borders through lakes while all humans’ dependence on water made controlling access to water a vital step in securing claims to territory. “Murky Boundaries Clear Waters” represents the early stages of my research into how the Anishinaabeg used and protected their access to water and the resources harvested from lakes in treaty negotiations with the United States. Anishinaabeg leaders’ power and authority partially stemmed from their ability to maintain access to environmental resources. By asking how tribal leaders worked to achieve these goals in treaty negotiations with the United States this research helps highlight the importance of historical treaties to contemporary debates over hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. Issues regarding identity permeate this discussion over who was and is allowed to access these rights.Cecil Gannendaris – Daughter of?AataentsicDr. Kathryn Labelle, University of SaskatchewanThis presentation explores the life story of?the seventeenth-century Wendat woman Cecil Gannendaris and her role as a leader within the first few decades of the dispersal of her community. With her relocation to Quebec city from present-day Southern Ontario, Cecil becomes one of the first Wendats to endorse the French seminary and Catholic church.?It is my hope that this life story will help investigate the complex relationship between the Wendat people (the descendants of?Aataentsic?or Sky Woman), feminism, and the colonial regimes of North America. Questions concerning the legacy of matricentrism and the effects of Eurocentric systems of patriarchy guide this research, tracing the themes of identity, power, leadership and gender throughout the Wendat diaspora experience. This presentation will also clarify the various strategies used by Wendat women to combat colonialism and preserve pre-contact notions of female authority within the community.23. Rupert’s Land: Nituskeenan Anishinaabewaki—Critically Researching Histories, A Panel in Honor of Jennifer S. H. Brown, Session 1: Early Fur Trade (Symposium)Wintering with the Piikani Barbara Belyea, University of CalgaryFrom November 1792 to March 1793 Peter Fidler, a young surveyor with the Hudson’sBay Company, was a guest of Piikani on their annual circuit to hunt buffalo in the RockyMountain foothills. By his own request Fidler had spent the two previous winters withDene families north of Lake Athabasca; his trip with the Piikani took him to the frontierof European trade and allowed him to study a Plains nation’s way of life far from theSaskatchewan River outposts. Fidler was hardy, adaptable, intelligent, observant andarticulate. His journal of seven months with the Dene, published by J. B. Tyrrell in 1934,has long been recognized as a valuable source for ethnographic studies. His journal of fivemonths with the Piikani promises to be no less valuable.To be useful ethnographically, three textual aspects of the Piikani journal need to be takeninto account. First, as for earlier fur-trade winterers, Fidler’s objectives in writing a journalwere to record his route and report on opportunities for trade. The exactitude of his routesurvey makes it possible to locate precisely where Fidler met parties of Shoshoni andKtunaxa as well as where the Piikani hunted, joining this evidence with archaeologicalresearch of specific sites. Second, the journal format (day-by-day segments of narration anddescription) indicates the rhythm of travel and longer periods of camping, together withthe rhythm of social aggregation and dispersal. And third, evidence of the Plains nationsthat the journal provides is conditioned by the writer’s point of view. Fidler’s descriptionshint at considerable appreciation and understanding, but his perception of the Piikani andtheir neighbours was across a cultural distance he made no effort to close.None of these textual aspects can be ignored or removed from the evidence that thejournal presents. No information can be subtracted from the text. Fidler’s journal survivesas one side of a cultural dialogue that has since been disrupted and transformed. “Nevertheless true”: Hearing Voices in the “Reminiscences of One of the last descendants of a Bourgeois of the North West CompanyAnne Lindsay, Documentary Heritage Communities Program Ambassador, Library and Archives CanadaLocated in the Robert Bell fonds at Library and Archives Canada, the typescript manuscript “Reminiscences of One of the last descendants of a Bourgeois of the North West Company” seems at first glance to pose more problems than it solves. Although the author is not identified in the typescript, the work is clearly attributable to Henry Connolly, son of fur trader William and his Cree wife Suzanne Bellefeuille (Miyo Nipy) Connolly, yet the manuscript begins in a period that predates Henry Connolly’s birth, and often appears to recount events quite differently from what was the established “truth” and even style of the period when the manuscript was assembled. Yet the author himself assures the unidentified person for whom the manuscript was created that “Although many statements may appear incredible to some, they are nevertheless true, and shall I hope prove interesting to you and to the future students of our Great North West.” In light of the work of scholars such as anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, and ethnohistorian Jennifer S.H. Brown, this paper will examine the manuscript in the context of its probable oral origins to consider in what ways it is, in fact, “nevertheless true,” and what lessons and information historians can gain from a careful and respectful reading of the document, arguing that it is, indeed, as the author had hoped, “interesting … to the future students of our Great North West.”Shawnees and Napoleon on the Saskatchewan: Deconstructing the Rupert’s Land of Paul Kane, Author of “a Canadian Travel-Literature Classic” and “Founding Father of Canadian Art” I.S. McLaren, University of AlbertaMore than any other section of Paul’s Kane’s travels 1845–1848, the Saskatchewan River receives particular emphasis in his studio works. A worrying number of these are mere concoctions; that is, lacking preparatory sketches drawn during his travels, Kane could have painted them in Toronto without ever venturing west. Yet, the studio renderings are repeatedly exhibited, particularly by the Royal Ontario Museum and National Gallery of Canada, which hold most of them, and at historic sites, thereby burnishing Kane’s image as the “founding father of Canadian art,” as the Land Study, Study View exhibition at the ROM called him in 2000, and author of “a Canadian travel-literature classic,” as the ROM dubbed him in 2016 when publishing a lavishly produced facsimile edition of Wanderings of an Artist ahead of “Canada 150.” The Saskatchewan studio canvases are also routinely reproduced. Their rich colours reproduce well but also, by the mid-1840s, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, and Alfred Jacob Miller had established the horse-riding, buffalo-hunting, tipi-dwelling Plains/Prairies warrior as the preeminent North American native in the minds of eastern Euro-North Americans and Europeans. Meanwhile, ethnographer Ted Brasser’s 2005 admonition – “the documentary value of these paintings is limited to the precise rendition of artifacts in Kane’s collection; these paintings should never be used to illustrate ethnohistorical publications” – appear to go unheeded. Meanwhile too, Kane made remarkable drawings, some of them coloured. They draw attention to peoples in much more representational, culturally contextual ways than the Noble Savage studio productions à la McKenney and Hall’s monumental History of the Indian Tribes (1836–1844) and other artistic predecessors. One, a full-length oil-on-paper portrait of a turban-wearing Cree named Uskooskishish/Young Grass/Fresh Sweet Grass (from oskaskosiy), sketched at Fort Pitt in 1846 or 1848, represents many that deserve scholarly attention, as much by ethno- as by art historians. French-Canadian Persistence, Continuity, and Métissage in Rupert's Land, 1759-1782Scott Berthelette, University of SaskatchewanThroughout the 1730s and 1740s, New France established a series of forts northwest of Lake Superior, known as les postes de l'Ouest. At les postes de l'Ouest, Crees, Assiniboines, Monsonis, Anishinaabeg, Dakotas, and many other Indigenous peoples, rejected French diplomatic overtures because they had little desire or need of French mediation in their territories. Unable to wrest control of the fur trade away from the Hudson’s Bay Company, or to “discover” the fabled Mer de l'Ouest, Troupes de la Marine officers withdrew ignominiously to defend Canada in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763). Nevertheless, former voyageurs, soldiers, and coureurs de bois remained in Rupert's Land amongst their Indigenous fur trade families. Resultantly, when the first Montreal pedlars arrived in the Northwest in 1767, they encountered already established, cohesive, and dynamic French-Indigenous communities. Thus, the Hudson Bay watershed, or Rupert's Land, remained a French-Indigenous social space even after the Troupes de la Marine officers withdrew to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War in the East. Through Indigenous kinship networks, a diverse cast of French non-elites, had gained unprecedented knowledge of the North American geographic, political, and cultural landscape, which allowed them to carve out a salient socio-cultural space, even once the hierarchy of the Ancien Régime had collapsed at les postes de l'Ouest. Such an argument challenges previous scholarly interpretations that the French presence in the Hudson Bay watershed vanished during the Seven Years’ War. 24. Alliance and Gender in 18th Century Eastern North America (General Session)Gendered Neutrality: Rethinking Social Relations and Cross-Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth-Century Creek Confederacy. Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, Texas Christian UniversityThroughout the eighteenth century, the Creek Indians of the North American Southeast were regarded as the region’s most powerful Native group, largely due to their ability to remain neutral in their dealings with the English, French, and Spanish without committing to a strict alliance with any. This paper explores the development of this policy of neutrality, formalized after the Yamasee War in 1718, through the lenses of trade and gender. This research posits that Creek concerns over ensuring a steady supply of gunpowder and firearms, more so than other European commodities, influenced the development of neutrality as a diplomatic strategy. As such, I view neutrality as a highly gendered political tool, one that existed largely to obtain goods associated with masculine activities, such as hunting and warfare, in an era where the maintenance of Creek power and ways of life depended heavily on their roles as producers and consumers. Consequently, political decision-making and Creek diplomacy came to embrace a more European-aligned ideology that equated political power and societal welfare with military success. Subsequently, this paper argues that Native females actually preferred a strict alliance with the British over neutrality because they knew the traders at Charleston and Savannah had the best supplies of cloth, scissors, needles, and other tools necessary for the tasks associated with their gender in Indigenous society. This is not to say, however, that women lost power in Native society after the arrival of European settlers; eighteenth-century Creek life continued to function along separate, yet balanced, gender lines, as the demands of cross-cultural trade stressed the necessity of traditional female activities such as agricultural work and the dressing of deerskins. Rather, this paper suggests that connecting the importance of gunpowder and firearms to the development of Creek neutrality complicates our understanding of post-contact Indigenous diplomacy and its implications on gender relations both within Creek society and across cultural lines. An Alliance of Men: Masculinity, Chickamaugas, and Pan-Indian AlliancesJamie Myers Mize, University of North Carolina, GreensboroThis paper analyzes how masculine ideals motivated and shaped the participation of Chickamauga Cherokees in Pan-Indian alliances at the end of the eighteenth century. Residents of the Chickamauga or Lower Towns are often considered militant Cherokees. But even as they warred with Americans, Chickamauga leaders engaged in intense diplomatic efforts with other Native groups in the hopes that a Pan-Indian alliance would be decisive in checking American colonialism. A Pan-Indian alliance was crucial for Dragging Canoe and others from the Chickamauga towns as they attempted to persuade Cherokees throughout the nation to embrace their vision for Cherokee society and identity. As a result of Cherokee geopolitics, a successful alliance among Native peoples became a central feature of an evolving Cherokee masculine ideal. Diplomacy was a historic expression of Cherokee manhood throughout the eighteenth century. The Chickamauga or Lower towns marked a turning point in Cherokee history as war leaders also took on the diplomatic roles historically reserved for older men. Men like Dragging Canoe, John Watts, and Bloody Fellow worked tirelessly toward a Pan-Indian alliance, and when not engaged in Native-to-Native diplomacy, these men led groups of warriors to attack American settlements. Few works discuss Chickamauga Pan-Indian efforts. This paper will expand on the scholarship of Gregory Evans Down and Robert Owens to more fully examine Chickamauga participation in Pan-Indian alliances and the gendered motivations for such involvement. By examining the diplomatic efforts of Chickamauga leaders, this research seeks to illuminate additional expressions of Chickamauga masculinity, apart from warfare.“Amended Instructions from the Master of Life: The Malleable Politics of Pan-Indian Revitalization, 1765”Andrew Dyrli Hermeling, Lehigh UniversityWhen the Lenni Lenape prophet Neolin received his vision from the Master of Life, he initiated a pan-Indian revitalization movement that drew adherents throughout eighteenth-century Indian Country, the most famous of which was the Odawa military leader, Pontiac. However, as the armed resistance that now bears Pontiac’s name drew to a close, the instructions from the Master of Life—which had previously delineated between Indians and Europeans—had become more nuanced in the face of geopolitical challenges facing the Lenni Lenape. What once was a tool for bringing Indian peoples together was being leveraged to give the Lenni Lenape a diplomatic advantage over both European empires and Indian neighbors alike.This paper will examine this shift during negotiations orchestrated by British Indian diplomat George Croghan at Fort Pitt in 1765. Although Lenni Lenape attempts to strengthen their position at the treaty council ultimately failed, the attempt itself illustrates the political malleability of this prophetic vision. Through a wider scope, examinations of revitalization movements and nativism by the likes of Anthony F. C. Wallace and Gregory Evans Dowd have done well to demonstrate the power and influence of Neolin’s vision within both the spiritual and political landscape of the Eastern half of North America. However, by narrowing the lens, one is forced to wrestle with a more complicated and perhaps cynical interpretation of the politics of the instructions from the Master of Life. 25. Ways of Knowing and Communicating in Pre-Contact and Early Contact North America (General Session)?li Luweyok Kìkayunkahke - So Said the Departed EldersRolf Cachat-Schilling, Oso:ah FoundationLand use and land classification traditions of Northeastern Algonquians are poorly understood. Even less clear are traditions governing sacred lands: cemeteries and ceremonial sites, as well as hunting and gathering lands. Epistemic genocide, religious intolerance, political policy, and oppressed Native narrative obstruct understanding. How did Northeastern Algonquians view land and land use? How did economy and religion intersect on the landscape in Northeast North America before Colonialism? Through archaeology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, we see how Northeastern Algonquians classified and managed lands, especially sacred lands. Only through the lens of Native worldview can we comprehend Algonquian land use, which knowledge we can apply to improve sacred site preservation and plan for intelligent land management. In land "deeds" between Colonists and Nipmuc or Pocumtuck are clues to land types recognized, land tenure tradition and land use prohibitions. In Native-spoken traditions and pertinent terminology lie definitions, insights and underlying causes of Northeastern Algonquian land policy. In fragments of early contact language and culture reports are more keys into the least understood aspect of Northeastern Algonquians: ritual life and religion.These considerations do not equate to any ready formula that can be perceived through European criteria. Each of these Native burial choices associates with ceremonial stone landscapes and the natural landscape in a complex spiritual and ritual conversation between our world of land, the heavenly world, and the underworld sources of water in a prayer dynamic that binds these worlds into one experience. As a pauwau enters stones through prayer to access other worlds and to see what is unseen, so we must enter the subject of ritual landscapes and land economy of Northeastern Algonquians through the lens of culture. Practicing that understanding means consulting earnestly with tribal heritage offices in land management plans. Roland Bohr, “Pisim Finds Her Miskanow” – Reclaiming and Promoting Rocky Cree History and Culture Roland Bohr, Director, Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, University of Winnipeg When the 350-year-old remains of a young Cree woman eroded out of the shores of Nagami Bay, Manitoba, in 1993, elders from the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (OPCN) and researchers from the Manitoba Museum collaborated in studying this important archaeological find. Twelve years later, Cree educator William Dumas, working together with researchers from the museum and The University of Winnipeg, developed a fictionalized account, set in the mid-1600s, of a week in the life of the young woman, reimagined as a 13-year-old girl named Pīsim. This literary and historical text, published in 2013 as Pīsim Finds Her Miskanow, combines the story of Pīsim with information about Cree culture, language, and life, based on a wide range of sources, including Rocky Cree oral traditions, linguistic and archaeological evidence and fur trade records. In 2014, the book was honoured by the Canadian Archaeological Association as an outstanding example of the public communication of archaeology and has been used with great success by parents, educators and schools in First Nations communities, as well as in urban settings. The team is now working on expanding the series to a total of six books, one for each season of the Rocky Cree year. Interactive digital media accompanying these books will make the narrative and information more accessible to all audiences: young people, adults, families, teachers, educational institutions, and the general public. The project’s overall goal is to continue the work of reclaiming Rocky Cree languages, histories, and knowledge. Through the telling of stories about Pīsim and her kinship group, Dumas, the scholarly research team, and partnering communities and agencies aim to deepen our collective understanding of Canadian society and to inform the search for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. The paper will use this project as a case study to consider the challenges and promises of university-community partnerships in ethnohistorical research. Borderlands of stone: rock art’s multiple boundariesDouglas Hunter, University of WaterlooIn “Eastern Woodlands” cultures of Northeastern North America, rock art has marked multiple cosmological boundaries: between Sky World and Beneath World, between living and Other Than Living entities, and between people alive today and their ancestors, who can be Other Than Living entities. In interpretations arising from scholarship, public history, and fringe theorists, rock art sites are often places of contestation that produce boundaries, delineations, and exclusions. Sites become boundary markers of identity and possession, which may include specific Indigenous cultural assignments that exclude other possible Indigenous cultures. Contestation can be historical, involving different Indigenous cultures and cosmologies, as in the cases of Dakota and Chippewa glyphs at Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. They can also suggest changing cosmologies within populations, as evidenced by the apparent Southeastern Ceremonial Complex imagery among the Eastern Woodlands/Anishinabe glyphs at Peterborough Petroglyphs. Contestations extend to settler over-writing: graffiti and defacement, including the enormous Walt Whitman quote carved into the rock face at a major pictograph site, Mazinaw Lake in south-central Ontario. Settler “over-writing” can include the act of interpretation (or misinterpretation), creating a palimpsest of assigned meanings. Major sites like the Peterborough Petroglyphs in Ontario and Dighton Rock in Massachusetts have generated endless speculation about who created them, with persistent theories of non-Indigenous (European) origin that displace or deny Indigenous affiliation. Boundaries then in the realm of rock art can be spatially horizontal in the sense of delineating cultural affiliation (and, by implication, territory). Boundaries can also be vertically layered, in presumed cosmologies, cultural affiliation, physical overwriting, interpretation, and misinterpretation. 26. Discovery, Erasure, and Remembrance: European and Anishinaabeg Ways of Understanding their Entangled Histories (Symposium)“Modes of Discovery and Methods of Possession: Contrasting Patterns in the Western Great Lakes,” Bruce White, Turnstone Historical ResearchRather than a process uncovering a place never before seen, as it may have been viewed in the past, discovery must be seen not just in terms of the legal "Doctrine of Discovery," but as a cultural process of recording, claiming, announcing, and making known "other" places and "other" peoples in the discoverer's own place of origin. As Patricia Seed has described in Ceremonies of Possession, representatives of European powers followed a variety of patterns in "discovering" and "taking possession" of regions inhabited by Native peoples. In the Western Great Lakes French "discoverers"--as they did elsewhere--used a formulaic process of "taking possession" and recording the regions found and inhabitants of those regions in a written document called a procès verbal. This document had an apparent legal power in a European context but is also a cultural, historical, even literary document. In this paper I will examine the patterns shared by such documents in the Western Great Lakes and also place them in the cultural, historical, and literary context of the "discovered," who had their own modes and methods of discovery and possession, which provide a fruitful basis of comparison in decoding European modes and methods. “‘Much More Pleasant Than We Expected’: Anglo-American Missionary Encounters with History, Remembrance and Forgetting in the Western Great Lakes, 1818-1838.” Rebecca Kugel, History Department, University of California-Riverside In the early 1830s, Anglo-American missionaries commenced missions to Anishinaabeg (largely Ojibwes) in the western Great Lakes. To a person they were from New England, and they thus brought a particular parochial view to their endeavors. Despite the 200 year French colonial presence in the Great Lakes region and the decades of British occupation that followed, these New Englanders conceptualized the land as John Adams’ famous “howling wilderness.” They self-consciously noted their many presumed “firsts” –the first sermon ever preached, the first white woman to set foot in the territory, and so on. They also experienced profound challenges to their constructions of the wilderness when they reached fur trade towns that predated the New England villages they came from which they thought of as among North America’s “oldest settlements.” Although they engaged in a very different form of discovery and possession than the French procès verbal, they nonetheless set about erasing and renaming multiple prior presences on the landscape, both Indigenous and European, in order for the land to reflect their own constellation of nationalistic and colonialist ambitions.“Mikwendamang Adaawaaganan gii Meshkwadoonang: Remembering the Fur Trade.” Margaret Ann Noodin, English Dept., University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeThis presentation will invite the audience to consider the facts of the Great Lakes fur trade history through contemporary Anishinaabe poetry in multiple languages. Various human and non-human perspectives will be considered to arrive at an alternate reading of the time and landscape. Through blended and multi-modal creative writing, the memories of this cosmopolitan era are preserved and carried into the current diaspora of trade and economic instability in Anishinaabewakiing.27. Native Medical and Environmental Knowledge in Colonial Latin America (General Session)Medical Intermediators: Spanish Naturalists, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Development of a Sixteenth Century Transatlantic Medical CultureScott Doebler, Pennsylvania State UniversityThis paper explores interactions between indigenous peoples of New Spain and sixteenth century Spanish naturalists. Although Greek and Latin texts did not contain information on New World organisms, European scholars and theologians continued to draw from these ancient texts after contact to understand the New World. They reconciled differences with relative ease to construct invisible borders between Europeans and indigenous peoples of New Spain. This paper argues that early Spanish naturalists like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Nicolás Monardes, and Francisco Hernández, as collectors of New World materia medica, learned physicians, and authors, were medical intermediaries who facilitated a transatlantic exchange of practical knowledge across cultural and material borders. Using early published natural history texts and archival materials from the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, the paper delves into the classical and humanist training that many early Spanish naturalists received as well as the personal experience and empirical testing of New World plants, animals, seeds, and other organisms that they used as medical professionals. Yet obscured by these European epistemologies, indigenous peoples in medical contact zones chose how and when to share their knowledge. Spanish naturalists frequently came away from interactions in these botanical borderlands empty handed, frustrated, and scorned. In many cases, they could do nothing more than imitate indigenous medical ways. But in their publications, they incorporated as much indigenous knowledge, gathering processes, and production techniques as they could to add layers of exoticism, authority, and reliability to appeal to European audiences. Thus, Spanish medical intermediaries crossed invisible borders and entered into complex negotiations with indigenous peoples that resulted in a transatlantic medical culture that preserved their knowledge of medicine well beyond the sixteenth century. Frontier Bodies: Humans, Animals, and Place in the Shaping of Spanish Colonial ChileKate Godfrey, The Pennsylvania State UniversityIn Jesuit missionary Alonso de Ovalle’s 1646 publication, Historica relación del reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que exercita en la compa?ia de Jesus, the first term that appears underneath the “A” section of the index is animales. While at first this may seem unsurprising, out of the first ten index entries, animal species and animal-related activities comprise half of the list. In addition to the relación, a woodcut map of Chile was rendered to support Ovalle’s publication. Titled Tabvla geographica regni chile, the map depicts towns, rivers, and ports alongside a series of real and mythological animals. Since Jesuit priests occupied Chile’s frontier region, and primarily worked among the Mapuche people, the strong presence of animals within the relación and map suggests the considerable extent to which Mapuche knowledge was infused throughout Ovalle’s project. Spanish Colonial Chile has received a significant amount of popular and scholarly attention over the last several hundred years. Shaping these studies, whether historical, anthropological, literary, or linguistic in nature, is often, if not solely, the frequent conflicts between Spaniards and the Mapuche people, referred to as the “Guerra de Arauco,” or Arauco War. As this paper will highlight, the European and indigenous fauna mingling between two contesting, cultural spheres are overwhelmingly silent in studies of the colony’s early existence. Since he worked among the Mapuche, I argue that historical treatment of Alonso de Ovalle’s map and relación is crucial if we wish better understand human and nonhuman species’ capacity to act as cultural brokers in times of peace and hostility in this region of South America.Opposing the Boundaries of a Royal Grant: San Juan Cuiluco (Valley of Atlixco, Mexico), 1605Avis Mysyk, Cape Breton UniversityDuring a routine vista de ojos (boundary inspection) of a real merced (royal land grant) requested by a Spanish farmer in 1605, the indigenous inhabitants of San Juan Cuiluco (Valley of Atlixco, Mexico) suddenly presented a forceful and convincing petition to oppose the request. They were immediately accused of having been influenced by another Spanish farmer and, soon afterward, their petition was dismissed. This paper briefly summarizes the case-accompanied by a pintura (map) – by placing it within the wider context of early colonial-period epidemics, indigenous population decline, congregation of indigenous towns, and opposition to Spanish encroachment on their boundaries.Humans, Insects, and Forests in Mid-Colonial YucatánGeoffrey Wallace, McGill UniversityThis paper stems from my upcoming dissertation on the environmental history of colonial Yucatán. It explores how the relationships between humans (Maya and Spaniard alike) and insects changed over the course of the early- and mid-colonial period (from 1542 to 1700), focusing on the latter. I examine two species of importance to humans: honeybees, which were of utility, and locusts, which were a nuisance. My intent is to briefly tell the two very different environmental histories of bees and locusts and then to link them within the broader history of human-forest interactions in colonial Yucatán, highlighting the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which humans, insects, and forests affected one another in changing colonial Yucatec landscapes. Forests serve as the ecological fulcra between humans and both insect families. On the one hand, wax’s economic importance to the Yucatec economy was second only to cotton by the end of the eighteenth century and brought large numbers of Maya men into forested (and unpacified) areas for extended periods of time, either to gather or trade for the commodity. At the same time, the expansion of cattle estancias in northern Yucatán, indigo plantations in neighbouring regions, and a slow but significant increase in population encroached on forests and most likely precipitated several catastrophic locust outbreaks that plunged the colony into catastrophic famine in the mid-seventeenth century. These contradictory relationships between humans and forests grew out of a colonial dual economy that catered to demand in the wider circum-Caribbean economy, and they are therefore usefully considered in tandem.The sources I employ are mostly archival records on locust outbreaks and famines, repartimiento wax collection records, and colonial chronicles detailing both in anecdotal fashion. Where possible, these data are mapped onto GIS-derived maps of Yucatán’s ecological and demographic geography. 28. Rupert’s Land: Nituskeenan Anishinaabewaki—Critically ResearchingHistories: Session 2, Kin Relations—Native Women and Métis, A Panelin Honor of Jennifer S. H. Brown (Symposium)Rocking the Cradle of the Plains: A Second Look at Metis EthnogenesisJacqueline Peterson, Washington State University“Rocking the Cradle of the Plains” traces the sudden emergence of the Metis as a new indigenous people and nation on the northeastern plains between 1770-1830. Viewing the Metis as part of a broader Plains Indian adaptation by successive waves of migrating Central Algonkian hunters from the Great Lakes region during this transitional period, the paper suggests that Metis identity and nationhood did not derive solely from long established patterns of intermarriage within the fur trade. At least as important may have been the opportunities presented by a particular set of economic, political, social, ecological and demographic conditions on the plains surrounding what would become in 1823 the international boundary between British North America and the United States.The Women Who Hold It Together: Applying Jennifer Brown’s “Woman as Centre and Symbol” as Research Methodology and Critical TheorySherry Farrell Racette, University of Regina Originally written in 1983 as a gentle nudge to historians working on the emergence of the Métis, a number of contemporary scholars are employing Brown’s concept of “woman as center and symbol” as both methodology and theoretical framework.? Seeking key women as a means to better understand the interrelated kin networks that knit scattered communities together reveals female-centered root systems that, like the willow trees that hold down prairie soil, worked under the surface, tethering families to the land and each other, and mobilizing action. Reclaiming and identifying these networks is an effective tool for disrupting deeply gendered archival documents and civil documentation systems such as census records and scrip applications.The first woman in the river: boundaries and death in the Red River Settlement, 1844Laura Peers: Oxford UniversityThis paper uses evidence presented during the trial following the death of an Ojibwa woman as a lens to explore the processes of the construction of social boundaries in the Red River Settlement and the beginnings of a pattern of racialized violence which has resulted in the deaths of far too many Aboriginal women in the Red River since then.Treaty Language as Legislated Disinheritance from Indigenous Kinship and Land RelationshipsNimachia Howe, Museum of the Plains Indian, Browning, MontanaCanadian and United States treaties traditionally employed family terms to disinherit and dislodge Indigenous women’s central roles––religiously, socially, politically, economically, and geographically. Canadian treaties named the Queen as benefactor, provider, protector, and disciplinarian of her "Indian children". United States treaty references to the "Great Father" (the president in Washington) are presented similarly, mirroring the Canadian "Great Mother" (the queen of England). Treaty language replaced Indigenous kinship references that placed Peoples in the lands given them by their respective Creators, substituting political relationships. They established white male authority explicitly as official agents, translators, and interpreters for the respective tribes, often using those men who had positions within native communities through Indigenous wives. Abolishing “paganism,” polygamy, and other traditional roles entered into this fight over occupation and ownership of the land. Polygamy complicated land allotments and food distribution because it created and maintained alliances, and kept bands intact. This was antithetical to the Anglo goal of divesting entire Peoples of their collective rights to lands and resources. Individuating and restructuring long-standing and complicated practices around kinship into separated, isolated nuclear families broke apart communities. Women were divested of their historical significance in the life of their people when men were decreed heads of households and women excluded from or subordinated in ritual roles. Foreigners' rules and teachings forcibly negated Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge of the land's creation and the traditions of belonging within it, including recognition of other-than-human beings as sentient and due respect. “Great Father” and “Great Mother” echoed Anglo terms for God and Mother of Christ, apex of the hierarchy of uncontestable power, and treaty terms of selling land rendered the land an inert commodity to be alienated from its people.29. Indigenous Mobility across Borderlands (Symposium)Paper: Indigenous mobility across borderlandsMaría Cristina Manzano-Munguía, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de PueblaThis panel strives to incorporate Indigenous thoughts and experiences?on mobility from the bottom up: direct academia on Indigenous (de)constructions on mobility across and beyond borders. For the past three decades global fragmentation and uncertainty has overtly encouraged scholarly studies on mobility, diasporas, migrants, nomads, transnationalism, and deterritorialization. Indeed, mobility studies contravened “sedentarist metaphysics” (Malkki, 1992?: 31) which focused on territorialized and place making of cultures around the globe. Appadurai (1990?: 296) noted the increasing trend on global flow of culture and economy in terms of push and pull or center-periphery models of migration, rather he proposed to examine the “complex, overlapping [and] disjunctive order” of migration trends. Regretfully, scholars embedded on studying Indigenous mobility overused the push and pull models in order to explain migration patterns across Canada. Therefore, the complexity of Indigenous mobility must not be framed on models that miss precisely the fragmentation and the (dis)order of moving back and forth from First Nations communities to urban centres or intra-community (within the cities). Nevertheless, research on place and place making from disciplines like Native studies, anthropology, geography, communications, and others (de)constructed the “dynamics of culture, power, and economy”. For instance, studies on First Nations mobility to urban centres and abroad aided in the deconstruction of the settled Indian. As Watson (2010?: accurately noted, “Indigenous migration to, and residence in, urban areas, does not signify the disappearance of Indigenous life but, rather, characterizes its social, geographical, and political ‘extension’”.My paper draw material from my ethnographic research among Aboriginal people in Canada and some examples of Indigenous people in Mexico to (de)construct indigenous mobility across borderlands and emphasize epistemologies from below. The pow wow movement among the Innu peoples in Quebec : Cultural borders issues and contemporary Algonquian nomadism Véronique Audet, Université du Québec à ChicoutimiWith the loss, ruptures and traumas engendered by colonization in Quebec, Canada, Indigenous peoples are searching to recover their culture, spirituality and pride. The pow wow movement offers and is driven by that possibility. That cultural and spiritual movement is originating from the West Plains and since about one century, is spreading across North America. In the province of Quebec, this movement is relatively new and spreads from the south-west to the north-east since the 1990’s, and gains more and more First Nations peoples and communities each year. The Innu people, having their ancestral lands in the north-east of Quebec and Labrador, organized their first annual pow wow in a community in 2007. There is now a second annual pow wow since 2014 and people from every Innu communities are embracing those intertribal celebrations as either spectators, dancers, singers, drummers, and spiritual ceremonies’ participants. However, some Innu fear the loss of their local Innu culture inherited from their ancestors, one of Algonquian nomads hunters-gatherers, to the hand of that new pan-indigenous culture. There are interesting debates among them about what is Innu culture and what is not, and if pow wow culture is ‘ours’ or not. They say that it is Indigenous from North America, sharing a lot of similar elements, rather than from Europe from where they inherited a lot through encounters and colonization. But, informed by ancestral prophecies through oral history, some says that those ceremonies came from the East (of North America) and, some centuries before the coming of European Peoples, was sent to the West to protect it from colonial destruction. And today, Indigenous from the West are returning it to the East. Those are fascinating issues about cultural borders and exchanges among different Indigenous peoples meeting together and recovering from the shared experience of colonization. Also, travelling the pow wow trail enables the practice of ancestral Algonquian nomadism, deeply grounded in the Innu identity and way of being until today, but in a new way.Cultural Continuity Across BorderlandsNatalie Owl, University of ReginaIn 1867 Canada became a country that eventually apportioned Nishnaabe-kiing— Indigenous land— for Canadian settlement and resource extraction. In this process, treaties were signed with Indigenous nations and soon, after self-designating itself via s. 91(24) of the British North America Act to be the legislative authority for “Indians, and lands reserved for Indians,” Indian Act dominated and diminished territories became the mere parcels of land wherein “Indians” were expected to exist. Foreign names were applied to the Canadian map, often replacing the language and history of Indigenous nations. Canadian ethnocentric indoctrination of Indigenous children via the Indian Residential School system, Western religious thought, and the Western education system, many Indigenous people forgot their territory—ndakiimnaan—and the names used for Shkak-mikwe (Mother Earth). In this way, the spiritual relationship with each other and with Shkak-mikwe is forgotten.Today, there are obvious borders; Canadian provincial borders, Canadian and American borders, and even Treaty borders that continue to define the extent of Indigenous identity and jurisdiction. What is less remembered or discussed, in and outside of academia, are Indigenous Nation borders and the language and history that accompany them. In the author’s circumstance of not physically living in her community of Sagamok Anishnawbek, she, as a Nishnaabe-kwe, in the territory of Indigenous Nations that encompasses the Canadian provincial and Canadian American borders, maintained cultural continuity through Nishnaabemwin (Ojibwe language) revitalization and through her spiritual growth that includes maintaining the interconnectedness of not only her own people but also that of other peoples as well as living and spiritual entities. Cultural continuity guides her research as an Indigenous scholar which exceeds the Canadian and American parameters and will ultimately strengthen the Indigenous nationhood of her people.Motivations of Mexican Rural Workers to Participate in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers ProgramLidia Carvajal, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico Judith I. Stallmann, University of Missouri-ColumbiaBased on in-depth interviews, this study finds three main motivations for Mexican rural workers to participate in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP): increasing household welfare, investing in farming skills and assets and improving children’s education and family housing. Mexican rural workers do not participate in CSAWP not because they would like to stay in Canada but because they would like to give a better quality of life to his/her family back in rural México. Then we also identify which demographic characteristics of the migrants and their families are associated with each of the three motivations. Differing characteristics are associated with each factor. Surprisingly, the number of children generally is not associated with the motivations. Being and agricultural day laborer in Mexico also is not associated with any of the motivations. (Re)Thinking borders, limits and sociocultural frontiers from Indigenous migrationElizabeth Martínez Buenabad, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de PueblaWe have to analyze our sense of belonging to a territory in any social study. First, many states have divided the earth into territories in an arbitrary manner, forgetting about the ancestral lands where no frontiers were established and these limitations respond to geopolitical-administrations. Therefore, if we think interculturally, we have to cite the Convenio 169 de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo that in the first article states: The governments should respect original people’s cultural and spiritual beliefs who possess a special relationship with their lands and territories, or with both, accordingly to their needs or the use they made including their collective relations (OIT, 1989:10). It is necessary to consider those frontiers that are not relevant to the millenial practice for original peoples across the world. My proposition thus emphasizes the educational aspect of those frontiers by stating that these should be flexible enough to respond to their cutlural fragmentation due to geopolitical administration. We have to think about the challenges in education specifically in the state of Puebla, both in basic education and higher. The vast majority of the students in the public system are admitted and follow the curricula of the national system. Their worldviews are often set aside and their cultural baggage as well. Consequently, my interest in this paper is to analyze the intercultural education beyond borders for Indigenous children in the city of Puebla and to look at the enthnoliguistic profile of these children. The persistence of rurality within the urban setting is an example of the need to rethink the borders across and beyond the rural/urban dichotomy.30. Sovereignty in Practice: Local Defenses of Native Land (Symposium)Building Roads, Getting Arrested, and Not Paying Taxes: Yamasee Practices of Sovereignty in FloridaDenise I. Bossy, University of North FloridaSince the 1730s first the British, then the Americans – including many reputable scholars – have long claimed that the Yamasee Indians were (and still are) extinct. But despite concerted campaigns, both rhetorical and very real, to wipe out the Yamasees, several communities have survived pirates, slave raids, the world market system, the Yamasee War, decades of attacks by Creek Indians, invasions by the British, the Seminole Wars, Removal, Jim Crow violence, and recent incursions of their homelands by state police and even the F.B.I. This paper considers how one Yamasee community – the Oklevueha Band of Yamassee Seminoles (Florida) – has done so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While their major survival strategy from 1653 to 1970 was intraregional migration, in the 1970s the Oklevuehas returned to an important eighteenth-century homeland where they intend to stay. Purchasing thirty acres of land, they began to explore strategies for asserting their identity as Yamassee Seminole and for delineating their sovereignty. Though interested in federal recognition, the Oklevuehas have put more energy into local practices. Building and maintain their own roads, paying their electricity but not their land tax bills, and proclaiming their identity to local and state officials through arrest records, the Oklevuehas have carved out a distinct space for themselves beyond the bounds of local, state, and federal law. Land-Eaters and Legitimate Indians: Indigenous Struggles over Land, Sovereignty, and Identity in Late Colonial CubaJason M. Yaremko, University of WinnipegThis paper explores the struggle for sovereignty waged by Indigenous peoples in Cuba during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the case studies like the poblado Indio or "Indian town" of Jiguaní in eastern Cuba, a municipality founded through Indigenous initiative, sanctioned by the Spanish crown, and almost immediately besieged by geofagos, land-hungry Spanish and criollo estate owners, and their allies in the colonial government. Jiguaní's establishment and struggle for autonomy are representative of early colonial, crown-sanctioned Indigenous settlements common throughout Spain's American empire. In the continental Americas, this historical struggle is a well-known story, exhaustively studied, and with a well- established historiography. It is considerably less well-known and severely understudied in the case of the Caribbean, a region whose original inhabitants, until recently, had been declared extinct by the end of the first century of Spanish conquest and colonization. This study addresses this gap in our knowledge by examining enduring Indigenous attempts in late colonial (and contemporary) Cuba to secure and maintain political autonomy through the land base and jurisdiction they established, against the efforts of landowners and colluding officials to wrest both land and autonomy from them. The "Indios naturales" of Jiguaní appealed to existing Spanish colonial laws and institutions, invoking rights based in autochthonous land and resource use "since time immemorial." Their opponents used (and abused) the same entities to challenge not only their claims to land but to their Indigeneity, a dynamic, furthermore, with implications for historical understandings of mestizaje and the social construction of race. Local Legibility and Land Claims: “Indian Title” in Louisiana and CaliforniaJulia Lewandoski, University of California, Berkeley The two major territorial treaties of the nineteenth century—the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—both initiated lengthy and complicated land claims processes, as inhabitants sought approval from the U.S. for their French, Spanish and Mexican landholdings. While many settlers sought confirmation for properties originally based in land grants from French, Spanish, and Mexican authorities, a significant number also claimed land on the basis of originating “Indian titles,” that is, purchases made from Native Americans under French, Spanish and Mexican jurisdictions, now illegal under U.S. law. Alongside these settler claims, Native nations and individuals also mobilized the concept of “Indian title” to seek U.S. approval for their territorial claims, basing them on Spanish and French grants, Mexican mission secularization, and, most importantly, their ancestral possession and continued occupation of long held tribal lands. This paper compares these key transitional periods in the western Lower Mississippi Valley and in coastal California, exploring how both settlers and Native Americans—including Chitimachas, Tunicas, and Attakapas in Louisiana, and Tongvas, Coast Miwoks, and Pomos in California—utilized the concept of “Indian title” to gain U.S. approval for their land. For Native claimants, establishing a legitimate “Indian title” relied on the testimony of settler neighbors who could attest to sustained tribal possession, culturally “Indian” practices, and recognizable political organization. Tribes who had sold tracts of land to settlers found their authority as proprietors bolstered, but their territories diminished, by settlers who asserted the validity of originating Indian titles now firmly in settler hands. Ultimately, local recognition of “Indian” identities and landholdings undergirded successful settler and Native claims to land. Oneida Nation v. Village of Hobart: Jurisdictional Disputes on an Allotted ReservationDoug Kiel, Northwestern UniversityThe growth of Native American casino gaming in the 1990s dramatically transformed the relationship between Native American tribes and the United States. In the wake of tremendous amounts of new revenue flowing into Indian Country, tribal communities around the United States suddenly had a greater opportunity to buy back former reservation lands that had been lost through the policy of allotment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Allotment was catastrophically effective at dispossessing Indigenous people of title to millions of acres of homelands, and when the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) formally halted allotment, it empowered the Secretary of the Interior to facilitate the placing of former reservation lands back into tax-free federal trust once again. For decades, the acreage that tribes bought back amounted to a trickle, but casino revenues opened the door to much more rapid land reacquisition. The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin aggressively pursued land recovery on their reservation and it indeed transformed their relationship with their non-Indian neighbors who had become the majority of the reservation’s residents in the decades that followed allotment. The residents of Hobart—a predominantly white village located within the Oneida Reservation—saw themselves as defending a shrinking plot of land, literally losing ground as Oneidas took what Hobart residents felt was rightfully their own. By 2008, tensions between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart had erupted into a heated legal battle about who had sovereign authority over their shared territory. This paper highlights the litigation between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart, which primarily centered on the village’s attempts to tax a sovereign nation.31. Borders I: Creating Canadian, Mexican, and American Borders (General Session)Slavery, Migration, and the Making of Texas BorderlandsPaul Barba, Bucknell University “Slavery, Migration, and the Making of Texas Borderlands” investigates the role of slaving migrants in the creation of borderlands, specifically during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century in the geographic region that eventually would be known as Texas. In this paper, I agree with borderlands scholars who highlight the inherent instability and historical nature of boundaries but argue that violence – especially the violence of slavery – is deserving of special recognition for its capacity to make and remake borders over time. By surveying slavery’s long and variegated history in Texas from the 1600s through the 1800s, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Texas’s geographic, political, economic, and cultural landscapes shifted and morphed often as a direct result of the slaving practices of Hispanic, Comanche, and Anglo-American migrants. In Texas, the violence of slavery was omnipresent and manifested variously: slaving displaced Native communities; slave raiding, slave trading, and slave labor enhanced the economic influence of communities; cross-cultural slaving sparked diplomatic crises; slavery-based identities redrew social boundaries; and slaver violence even had the potential to undermine emerging national borders. Thus, it is the intention of this paper to demonstrate that from the 1600s through the 1800s Texas was simultaneously many places at once and that slavery – as a mechanism of cross-community dominion, personal control, and economic exploitation – frequently accounted for the numerous lines that were drawn between and within the diverse populations of the region. Moreover, my paper offers scholars a less conventional way to interpret immigration in the context of North America. In this history, migration was so much more complicated than the benign moving and relocating of people; instead, migration involved colonialism, cross-community and inter-personal violence, community displacement, and widespread economic integration. “The Art of Blending In”: Modernity and Contra-Modernity in the Culture of Seasonal Mexican Agricultural Migrants in CanadaNaomi Calnitsky, Carleton UniversityDrawing on research in British Columbia and Manitoba, my PhD dissertation at Carleton University, “Harvest Histories: A Social History of Mexican Farmworkers in Canada since 1974” included a set of oral history interviews with seasonal agricultural workers drawn from a wide variety of locations in Mexico, including Chiapas, Veracruz, Michoacán, the Federal District and San Luis Potosi. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I deal with the problem of culture, and explore the extent to which Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) migrants from Mexico have experienced change or transformation on cultural grounds as a result of their persistent return migrations to Canada. In this paper, I seek to ask and locate answers for a set of interrelated questions, including the following: to what extent have Mexican SAWP workers forged unique connections with Canadian farmers and communities and to what extent have they remained isolated or experienced social isolation, loneliness or homesickness on Canadian farms? To what extent has Mexican culture retained its resilience in the face of migration to Canada, in terms of language, culinary habits and other cultural formations, including recreational habits and other modes of consumption? To what extent are SAWP workers a part of Canadian modernity as wage earners, and to what extent have they suffered exclusions from modern labour rights standards normative to Canadian society at large? Finally the paper will seek to address the ways in which the opinions of migrants diverge from or coincide with current trends in Canadian migrant advocacy work, and why do these divergences matter? On and Off the Rez: Race and Boundaries in Oregon Settler SocietyPatience Collier, University of OregonThis paper examines the construction and enforcement of geographical and racial boundaries in the Klamath territory of Oregon in the 1860s-70s. I argue that the reservation boundaries were attempts to inscribe racial hierarchies through selective privilege, and that despite the intentions of the officials who established them, Klamath, Modoc, and Paiute bands disregarded the reservation boundaries throughout their existence for personal and political reasons. Further, some white settlers and immigrant miners ignored the boundaries for personal and economic reasons. Elite whites in Oregon, however, considered any interracial mixing a danger to society and the public health.Throughout the early reservation period, Modoc, Klamath, and Paiute bands left the Klamath Reservation at will, individually and in groups. Between conditions on the reservation and personal connections to places and people around California and Oregon, tribes considered the boundaries fluid at best. The Modoc War may have been the best-known such incident, but large groups of Natives periodically left the reservation to take up residence elsewhere from the moment the reservation was established. Within the first few years of reservation life, band headmen applied for permits to leave the reservation in order to perform burials for their people who lived in nearby Jacksonville. Despite later treaties, which insisted that all individuals remain on the reservation indefinitely, Natives continued to create their own communities across the borders. In 1868, the smallpox epidemic at Jacksonville revealed sixty Native and mixed women and children living at “Kanaka Flat,” a small mining town, including twenty-eight Klamaths and Modocs. The more freely Indian, Hawaiian, and white communities crossed racial boundaries, the more anxious authorities were to strengthen those boundaries.“Peter the American” and 19th Century Wabanaki Histories of Borders and BoundariesChristopher Roy, Temple UniversityPierre Jacques Neptune, aka “Peter the American,” an Abenaki man with roots at both W?linak and Penobscot, is emblematic of the growing salience of the border between the U.S. and Canada and the boundaries between individual First Nations in the lives of Wabanaki people during the 19th century. As is evident during Pierre Jacques’ 1874 dispute with Chief Joseph Metsalabanlet and his supporter, Father L. S. Malo, borders and belonging, as well as sobriety and respectability, served as tools of political contestation for Wabanaki community members and the settlers in their midst, naturalizing categories such as American, Canadian, Abenaki, and Maliseet.This paper considers the controversy surrounding Pierre Jacques Neptune, as well as a number of other instances in Wabanaki history, such as an 1830 petition for relief on behalf of a Maliseet/Abenaki woman at Lévy, an 1809 petition from “Penobscot Indians” for a reserve at Sartigan, and an estate dispute at W?linak in 1901-03, in order to better understand the conditions by which borders and boundaries have become powerful (if sometimes contested) components of the Wabanaki experience, in part by the ways in which they have been linked to colonial authority, on-reserve conflict, and settler appropriation of traditional resources. 32. Film Screening: Elder in the Making, Chris Hsiung, DirectorHidden Story Productions Ltd. Mount Royal UniversityElder in the Making follows two young urban dwellers, one Blackfoot and the other Chinese-Canadian, as they embark on a roadtrip across traditional Blackfoot territory. Across cinematic prairie landscapes guided by the wisdom of modern day elders, two unlikely travel companions rediscover their shared history and in one tragic moment come to understand their responsibility as stewards of the land and of the generations yet to come.Winner of the 2016 Best Feature Documentary and Best Original Score at the Alberta TV and Film Awards, Elder in the Making is a documentary that brings together history, music, art and storytelling to find a road of reconciliation between two cultures. This film has won wide acclaim as a story that takes audiences on a journey through laughter, tears, insight and ultimately inspiration about what it means to be human. To view the trailer, please visit . Chris Hsiung is the Producer and Director of Elder in the Making. He runs Hidden Story Productions, an organization dedicated to using documentary storytelling to nurture a more compassionate, just, and intelligent society. From Kathmandu where Nepalese youth fight for better water sanitation to local Alberta Indigenous communities, Chris finds stories that both express the struggles and triumphs of the human spirit. Currently he is the Executive Producer for a series of short films that will be exhibited at new Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. 33. Re-Building and Re-Theorizing Nations in the Early Twentieth Century(General Session)“They smashed [them] right through our reserve”: Right-of-Ways through Chawathil IR 4Gordon Lyall, University of VictoriaNative reserves in British Columbia represent one of the most conflicting and contradictory elements of governmental First Nations policy. While reserves were designed to protect First Nations from Settler encroachment, this protection has only been honored as long as it doesn’t impede upon Settler modernisation of the province. A clear example of this can be seen in the development of right-of-ways on First Nations territory. While historical geographer Cole Harris has provided a thorough history of the BC reserve system and a few scholars have written on railways through reserves, less scholarship has looked diachronically at the cumulative effect of multiple right-of-ways on First Nations communities. An ethnohistory of Stó:lō (Coast Salish) perspectives on Settler infrastructure in Chawathil IR4 (near Hope, BC) offers insight into the relationship between First Nations and Settlers while illuminating some the ways in which state-sanctioned land development on First Nations reserves has affected indigenous communities. This study investigates the impacts of three major right-of-ways that currently occupy space on the reserve. Oral histories from community members reveal how a railroad, a pipeline and a highway have changed their lives. Based on their perspectives, I evaluate how the right-of-ways have affected (a) lifestyle, (b) health, and (c) spirituality/culture. As part of the Stó:lō Ethnohistory Field School, this project also features a community-inspired project; a digital map of the right-of-ways, with relevant primary material and quotes from elders, is provided to the community for the benefit of future generations. Part of my presentation will also discuss the field school and the type of community-engaged research developed within the paradigm of “new ethnohistory.”Sovereigntist Counterdiscourse at the 1914 Meeting of the Society of American Indians Larry Nesper, University of WisconsinThe Society of American Indians is described as the first, secular, progressive, pan-Indian Indian-led, Indian rights organization in the United States. It held annual meetings from 1911 until 1923, mostly at academic institutions as it saw education as the key to the transformation of both Indian people and the image of Indian people in the eyes of the dominant society. The leadership of the Society were mostly educated professionals. The SAI sought citizenship for Indian people and the opening of the Court of Claims. For the most part, the leadership thought in terms of race. In 1914, the Society met at the University of Wisconsin-Madison having met at Ohio State twice and at the University of Denver the year before. It was the first time that the meeting was held in a state with a relatively large Indian population with 12 different tribes and several reservations. Half the attendees were from Wisconsin. The record of the meeting is the most complete of all of the Society’s 12 meetings as a one-hundred and twenty-one page transcript of the proceedings was produced. A close reading of this transcript reveals a tribalist and sovereigntist subtext largely due to the presence of so many local Indian people who both provided evidence for the Society’s broader goals and catalyzed a concern for treaties and tribes that had been de-emphasized previously.From Majority to “Foreign”: The Franco-Manitoban Experience of World War IMel Prewitt, Scott Community CollegeThe Great War was only one of several simultaneous events complicating the social and political life of Manitoba during the decade of 1910 to 1920. Old style politics were not in keeping with modern demands, suffrage and prohibition were leading political debate topics, the wheat boom had ended, and the Province of Manitoba had good reason to question its own future. All of these events and conditions became part of the stimulus for legislation to remove all languages except English from public education. Manitoba, which became a province in 1870, followed the latest trends of England, Canada, and the United States in establishing a public education system. Because the Francophone population was at least equal to that of the Anglophones, the initial system was bilingual. After Anglophones became a clear majority, legislation attempted to end the use of French language in education in 1890. That legislation ended with a compromise in 1896 which allowed limited use of “foreign” languages. With the arrival of the Great War, nativist sentiment allowed old prejudices to prevail to once again to outlaw the use of any language other than English in provincially funded education in the province. The experience of the French during that decade demonstrates the fragility of constitutional protection and the danger of tyranny of the majority. In spite of official opposition, the Francophone population in close association with the Catholic Church managed to maintain an island of minority French language and culture on the western prairie. Language rights would ultimately be reaffirmed during the civil rights era. Thunderwater and Nation-ReBuilding among the Haudenosaunee in Canada in the Early Twentieth CenturyGerald F. Reid, Sacred Heart UniversityIndigenous contestation of nation-building takes a variety of forms, including opposition, resistance, cooperation, cooptation, adaptation, and assimilation. Indigenous nation-rebuilding in the form of efforts to revitalize culture, collective identity, self-governance and self-determination is another. The Thunderwater movement among the Haudenosaunee in Canada in the early twentieth century exemplified this process of political revitalization and attempted nation-rebuilding, which, though not successful in the short term, helped lay the groundwork for further development of this process during the 1920s and beyond. Based mainly on primary source material, this paper explores the roots of Haudenosaunee nation-rebuilding in Canada during the late nineteenth century in response to the Indian Act system, its re-emergence in the form of the Thunderwater movement around 1915, and the efforts by the Department of Indian Affairs to suppress the movement, in particular, by undermining the credibility of its central figure, “Chief Thunderwater.” This paper also explores the enigmatic figure of Thunderwater himself. As the son of a Sauk mother and Seneca father whose formative and young adult years were spent in traveling Indian exhibitions and wildwest shows, a highly literate but formally unschooled entrepreneur who eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio, and a political activist who operated a hospitality house for travelling and needy Indians, Thunderwater operated in and between both indigenous and Euro-American societies. To paraphrase Philip Deloria, Jr., as the central figure in a reserve-based political movement, he was a most unexpected Indian in the most unexpected of places. His very liminality was exploited by the Indian Department to thwart the process of Haudenosaunee political revitalization as it was manifested in and facilitated by the Thunderwater movement. The success of the Indian Department in discrediting Thunderwater and undermining the Thunderwater movement has contributed to a misunderstanding and a lack of recognition of both.34. Ethnohistory in the Post-War Kivalliq Region (Symposium)The Rankin File: Inuit health and the Canadian liberal welfare stateFrank Tester, University of ManitobaNorth of Winnipeg in Nunavut Territory, the community of Rankin Inlet now serves as a regional centre for the Kivalliq region. The community was first created in the mid-1950s as a frontier mining camp, subsequently seen by the Northern Administration of the Canadian federal government as an opportunity to solve serious social and economic problems created following World War II by the collapse of the fox fur trade and incidents of starvation at Padlei, Henik Lake and Garry Lake. Inuit who survived these events were relocated to fledgling settlements on the coast of Hudson Bay, with further consideration given to relocating families to a former Department of Indian and Northern Affairs mental hospital at Selkirk Manitoba, there to be ‘trained’ for integration into southern Canadian culture. The North Rankin Nickel Mine offered a partial and alternative solution to the problems of the region. Inuit were to be trained as miners and brought into a modern industrial economy. The paper examines the considerable health problems and needs generated by this experiment in industrial employment, prior to the 1966 introduction of Medicare and the public provision of health care; notable among them, a rate of infant mortality in the community in excess of 300/1000. The role of Inuit in this frontier experiment – capital accumulation by expropriation - is revealing of terrible living conditions, substandard wages, the proletarianization of Inuit labour and the compromised position of a State reluctant to assume its constitutional responsibility for the welfare of Inuit and the social costs of a mode of production to which it was committed. Dr. Percy Moore, Director of the Indian and Northern Health Services Program and the proponent of the original idea of relocating Inuit to the South, faced with addressing the serious health and social problems incurred when the mine closed in 1962, once again introduced the idea of relocation to the South as a solution. A case study of the complexities and contradictions inherent in attempts to address the social and health costs associated with the North Rankin Nickel Mine (1957-1962) is revealing of the visible and invisible borders of modern colonial logic. These allow us to better understand the rhetoric and practice of what is currently advanced as ‘the economic future of Nunavut’. A Dialectic of Resistance and De-Politicization: Kivalliq Inuit and Energy Extraction, 1970-1993?Warren Bernauer, York University?After the second world war, the search for energy resources (oil, natural gas, and uranium) expanded into the Inuit Nunangat – the Inuit homeland in the Arctic. By the end of the 1960s, exploration activities were having a detrimental effect on the wildlife Inuit hunt, and Inuit began a coordinated campaign to oppose energy extraction. What followed was, I argue, a dialectic of resistance and de-politicization: Inuit protest against energy extraction was met with de-politicizing processes by the state, which Inuit then struggled to re-politicize. Through letters, petitions, and litigation, expressed serious discontent with plans for a regional economy based on energy extraction. They suggested that alternative economic development, with wildlife harvesting as the primary foundation, would be favourable to the ‘boom-bust’ framework of resource extraction. The state responded by introducing a series of bureaucratic processes, including environmental assessment and land use planning. These assessment and planning processes were structured to depoliticize conflicts between Inuit and extraction, and to ultimately obtain Inuit consent to an economy based on mineral and energy extraction. After initially boycotting these processes, Inuit developed a strategy to carefully engage with them as part of a larger political campaign against energy extraction. To demonstrate this dialectic between de-politicization and resistance, this paper examines conflicts over uranium and natural gas extraction in the Kivalliq region, from 1970-1990.?Affect Theory in Inuit Ethnohistory: The Story of a Missing ArnaqPeter Kulchyski, University of ManitobaThrough the late 1950s inland of Arviat (then Eskimo Point) a drama, available to history only through a single RCMP file, involving relations between a Qallunaat (non-Inuit) man and an Inuit Arnaq (woman) unfolded. The ‘drama’ was in fact a horror story, involving a brutal relationship, the suspicion of murder, and a disappeared indigenous woman. In retelling this story, this essay attempts to unfold several interlinked themes which include affective relations across a colonial divide, the question of indigenous women’s agency, and the historical roots of the contemporary social trauma of murdered and missing indigenous women. In keeping with indigenous knowledge, in the Inuit case Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, narrative plays a key role in the expression, formulation and dissemination of knowledge. Sometimes one story can offer volumes of insight. This paper involves a close or intensive reading of a particular historical case file, in conjunction with a broader context or understanding of regional and global historical forces, to illustrate affective relations across a colonial boundry in the Kivalliq region of the Canadian arctic.35. Borders II: Bounded Communities and Porous Borders (General Session)“Fight For the Line”: Indigenous challenges to the US/Canada border from the IDLA to Idle No More.Paul McKenzie-Jones, Ph.D, Montana State University – NorthernThis paper will discuss the historical significance and motivations of Indigenous activists using border closures as a method of asserting sovereignty and challenging settler-colonial policies that sought to undermine and eradicate that sovereignty. Focusing on five specific moments of border crossing or closure: the 1926 IDLA crossings; the 1969 Akwesasne Mohawk Closure on Cornwall Island; the 1990 Mercier Bridge closure in support of the Mohawk under siege at Kanesatake; the 1995 Blackfeet riders travelling south to seek the reunion of the Blackfoot Confederacy; and the 2013 Idle No More shutdown of the International Bridge: I will explore the ways in which these actions force us to reconsider the role of the border and conversations about nation-state security and protection.Such Indigenous engagements with the border of settler-colonial states ask us to explore transnationalism on multiple levels - the macro level of neighboring settler colonial states, and the micro level of multiple Indigenous nations framing their own boundaries and borders within and without those settler states. By closing, or crossing this border as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty the activists are reasserting and protecting their own cultural, political, and territorial sovereignties and treaty rights over a line that seeks to subvert such sovereignties and rights by its very existence. As such, I will argue that these episodes of border refusal each restrict and impede the processes of absolute settler-nationhood that the border and its enforcement represent.Formal and Informal Geographical Boudaries Surrounding Indigenous Comunities: Is the International Border the Only Source of Problems?Yuka Mizutani, Sophia UniversityA geographical boundary may cause division within an indigenous community and its society. It may also cause indigenous people to be disconnected from their culturally important sites. Lately in North America, challenges caused by international borders that cut through indigenous people’s traditional and contemporary geographic territories have been highlighted. Meanwhile, there are various types of formal and informal geographical boundaries besides international borders, and these boundaries pose many challenges for indigenous people. This paper presents a case study of the Kumeyaay people on the U.S.-Mexico border in California. Currently, the Kumeyaay people are divided into 12 tribes in the U.S. and 5 communities in Mexico. Although they are divided even in the U.S., a tribal college and nonprofit organizations related to some of their tribal governments seem to be functioning as hubs for transboundary activities within the U.S. and beyond. On the other hand, the Kumeyaay people’s history of forced relocation has disconnected them from the coast. Non-indigenous settlement and urban development along the Pacific Coast in southern California has created an informal geographical boundary that prevents the Kumeyaay from accessing the coast and the ocean. This situation is affecting their process of cultural revitalization. In discussions regarding indigenous people on the borderland, issues related to international borders may draw the most attention. Moreover, it tends to be emphasized how the national government is making a great effort to help indigenous people in the borderlands by providing them with special rights to cross the international border. Certainly, such rights are helping the indigenous people in the borderlands. Still, it may not be sufficient for them, as other types of boundaries that bring them challenges continue to be problematic. The international border is not the only problem for indigenous people in the borderlands.American Indian Visible and Invisible Borders between the US and CanadaRoger Nichols, University of ArizonaThroughout American history international borders have been significant for Indians. In the east the clearly visible northern boundary between the US and Canada ran along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes chain west to Manitoba. The so-called “Medicine Line,” the invisible half of the northern border, ran west from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific. To the south an invisible border created by the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the later Treaty of San Lorenzo, separated US territory from that of Spain. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the later Gadsden Purchase created an invisible line in the southwest, while the Rio Grande River separating Texas from Mexico was clearly visible. Although Native groups crossed all these borders in both directions, this paper will analyze briefly the three reasons Indians crossed over both the visible and invisible borders from the US north into Canada. First, for the Mohawk and Pottawatomie, Canada offered a chance for peaceful migration and settlement. Second the Shawnee, Miami, and Sauk and Mesquakie, among others, moved across the visible border into Canada for diplomatic advice, trade, and potential military support. Third, the Dakota and Lakota crossed the invisible, but clearly understood Medicine Line, as a refuge from military pursuit. From these actions from the 1780s to the 1870s, I conclude that Native leaders recognized and used both types of border as offering opportunity or safety for their people. SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Perspectives on Indian Removal from the “Zone of Removal”Jeffrey Ostler, University of OregonThis paper provides new perspectives on the U.S. policy of Indian removal by looking at the policy from the vantage point of what I term the “zone of removal”—the ever-shrinking area west of the Mississippi that policy makers planned to be the location for the removal of Indians living east of the Mississippi. Standing in the zone of removal first highlights the fact that policymakers began preparing for removal very soon after the Louisiana Purchase and thus allows us to put to rest the view that the policy of removal was developed incrementally and as an alternative to a policy of “civilization.” Second, this perspective reveals a basic contradiction at the heart of Indian removal, since the zone of removal quickly became a zone for settlement and so steadily shrank. This meant that even as removal was being planned, it was apparent that the lands being promised Indians in the west could never be permanent. Third, this perspective broadens our sense of the impact of removal by taking into account the policy’s impact on the tribes indigenous to the zone of removal. Removing eastern Indians west reduced the lands of people already west of the Mississippi and in many cases required them to be removed (sometimes more than once). Finally, this perspective requires us to extend our assessment of the impact of removal on eastern nations to encompass what happened to them after the trails of tears when they tried to reconstitute themselves in the zone of removal.36. Postscript to Removal: Institutions and Families in the 19th-Century Cherokee Nation (Symposium)School Choice in the Post-Removal Cherokee NationJulie L. Reed, University of TennesseeFor the most part, historians no longer refer to the Cherokee Nation as one of the Five Civilized Tribes, yet we still celebrate some of the trappings associated with the term. The invention of the Cherokee written language by Sequoyah, an illiterate and monolingual Cherokee speaker is the best example of this celebration. This paper will focus on the educational choices, enriched by Sequoyah’s contribution, available to Cherokee people in the post-removal era. These choices included public schools, mission schools, study abroad, and avoiding institutional education altogether in favor of older educational philosophies. Particularly for those committed to Cherokee language use and literacy, and older legal and cultural practices these choices had associated costs. I intend to highlight the educational choices different Cherokee people made and what they lost and/or gained by making those choices. Resilience in the Post-Removal Cherokee NationRose Stremlau, Davidson CollegeHistorical narratives about the removal of the majority of Cherokees from their eastern homelands emphasize loss, suffering, and trauma, but perhaps to assuage the guilt of non-Indian audiences, they typically end in reassuring assertions of the Cherokee Nation’s reestablishment in Indian Territory. Historians have explained this silver lining of an epilogue to removal by assuming the successful reestablishment of pre-removal social and economic systems in Indian Territory. I interrogate these assumptions, and in this paper, I focus on Cherokee peoples’ experiences of kinship and familial relationships and economic recovery to provide insight into the ways that Cherokees adapted and endured throughout this transitional period. I engage the literature on historical trauma response (HTR) as a framework to glean additional insight from the post-removal era documentary record, and I center the concept of resiliency as developed by psychologists and social scientists to describe the internal factors enabling – and I am quoting Onondaga scholar Stephanie J. Waterman and Lorinda S. Lindley here -- the “ability to ‘overcome’ stressful situations, to achieve successful outcomes, maintain ‘competence,’ and recover from stress.” Researchers working in present day indigenous communities have identified a wide range of factors that promote resiliency, and they have one thing in common – they come from relationships. In reconceptualizing the post-removal era in the Cherokee Nation as an expression of resiliency, I seek to center the story of rebuilding in the relationships that shaped familiar and economic life in the 1840s.Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and Crime in the Post-Civil War Cherokee NationTroy D. Smith, Tennessee Technological UniversityIn the 1866 treaty ending the Civil War in Indian Territory (I.T.), in which the leadership of the “Five Civilized Nations” had allied with the Confederacy, one of the stipulations laid upon the Cherokees was that “the United States district court, the nearest to the Cherokee Nation, shall have exclusive original jurisdiction” in cases where the suspect was a non-Indian, or that took place outside the Cherokee Nation and in the district of said court. Beginning in 1871, that district court was just across the border in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The resultant complicated jurisdictional situation would often lead to friction between the U.S. and the Cherokee Nation, and to Indian Territory becoming a mecca for non-Indian outlaws who could neither be touched by the Indian light horse nor pursued into the area by state or local authorities, with only federal marshals attached to the Fort Smith court empowered to arrest them. This, in turn, led to a perception of I.T. as a “lawless” place, with a common saying of the day stating that “there is no God west of Fort Smith” and Mark Twain concluding his famous 1884 novel by having Huck Finn decide the only way he could escape civilization was to “light out for the Territory.” In this paper, besides examining some particular cases, I will argue that the consequence of the jurisdictional limits placed on the Cherokees and others was to enable those coveting their resources to accuse them of “savagery” and “lawlessness,” leading to the Curtis Act of 1898 adding the Five Nations to the list of tribes fated for allotment. 37. Who Speaks for Us? Questions of Agency, Voice, and Colonization along the Berens River System (Symposium)“We Speak for Ourselves: stories from the Anishinaabe community of PauingassiPatricia Harms, Brandon UniversityFor most of the twentieth century when many aboriginal communities in Canada were experiencing a variety of cultural, economic and spiritual crises, the people living around the ‘grassy narrows’ known as Pauingassi maintained a vibrant communal life, largely removed from outside influences. Community leaders created and practiced new spiritual ceremonies while traditional hunting and trapping practices maintained a healthy economic foundation. When opportunities for change offered an improvement in their lives, the community actively embraced them. Simultaneously when cultural or spiritual practices were phased out or openly rejected, they did so with clear conviction. Throughout this period, this small group of about 150 Anishinaabe (Saulteaux Ojibwe) people actively participated in their relationship with outsiders while remaining grounded within the geographic world in which they lived (Pauingassi is located near Little Grand Rapids on the eastern edge of Manitoba). In doing so, their language and stories have not been lost and in fact represent a history with colonization that deviates from the dominant First Nations narratives. Their cultural and spiritual resiliency challenge stereotypes of both the static unchanging and romantic image of the traditional Indian and the colonized and helpless victim. Rather, the Pauingassi community has demonstrated an active engagement with the forces of change, embracing and rejecting elements of new cultural and religious practices as they suited them.This paper will explore the various voices that are currently telling the stories of Pauingassi (which includes my own work on the community) and raise questions about the role of these storytellers within the broader processes of the Truth and Reconciliation recommendations.“Like a Chief: Conceptions of Anishinaabe Leadership”Myra Tait, JD, LLM University of ManitobaBerens River First Nation is a remote, fly-in Anishinaabe community, located in NorthernManitoba, at the mouth of the Berens River. Today, with a registered population of over3300 members, the Indian Act continues to determine the governance structure, andelections protocol for Chief and Counsellors. The community entered Treaty Number 5 in1875, but shortly thereafter was placed under the legislative regime of the Indian Act(1876). The contributions of A Irving Hallowell and Treaty Commissioner AlexanderMorris, along with contemporary scholarship considering Anishinaabe political, legal,and cultural practices, provide a wealth of ethnohistory resources.At the time of treaty negotiations between the representatives of Her Majesty the Queen(Victoria) and the Saulteaux (Anishinaabe) and Swampy Cree of this territory, thepolitical office of “Chief” was in flux. This paper examines the Anishinaabe concepts of“ogimaa” (meaning: “chief”) and the term “ogimaakaaniwind” (meaning: “like a chief”),which was the term used by William Berens to describe his recollection of his father,Jacob Berens, when the latter was elected and signed Treaty 5. Inherent in this differenceis the suggestion of a tension between Anishinaabe conceptions of leadership, and theimpositions of a foreign and colonizing legislated leadership structure. A betterunderstanding of this tension has potential to contribute to community and culturalresurgence for not only Berens River First Nation and other Treaty 5 communities, butalso to further discussions of political and legal structures of the Anishinaabe in general.Questions of Ownership and Access Surrounding Aboriginal RecordsCarmen Miedema, University of ManitobaMany scholars, missionaries and fur traders have recorded the knowledge they gained from Aboriginal Peoples and used it build their careers, gain authority from their superiors during their stationing in a community, and some have even used such knowledge to advance another nation’s scientific goals (Alfred Irving Hallowell, Culture and Experience (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955); Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, “George Burnham Boucher fonds” Archives of Manitoba). While academics, missionaries and fur traders have perceived the production of knowledge to be part of their job, what about the archival community? What happens when such records get to an archival institution? Who owns these records? Who should decide who has access to the knowledge contained in them? Who should decide if they are made public? These are questions archivists should be able to answer, and yet such questions are rarely asked in a meaningful way. This paper asks the hard questions above utilizing a particular set of records written over a thirty-year period by a Mennonite missionary working in communities along the Berens River system. It also attempts to understand why the records were written, whether the communities were aware of the minister’s intentions, did the missionary consider the communities wishes, and why the institution upon acquisition of these records did not follow proper archival procedures? These are obviously not the easiest questions to answer, and that is why this paper is a part of a much larger project, but for the purpose of this conference this essay will explore these challenging questions in order to create dialogue on how academics view archival records and how archivists should be reconsidering their Eurocentric education.38. “Worth a Thousand Words”: Reading Law, Identity, and Native History in Photographs (Symposium)The Root-Digging Stick as an Instrument of LawBeth Piatote, University of California, BerkeleyIn a photograph dated to the mid-1950s, two young Yakama women, one holding a baby in a cradleboard, stand beside a wooden sign, each holding aloft their kápin, or root-digging sticks. In the foreground, a younger companion faces the camera directly and points to the sign:WARNINGINDIAN LANDDO NOT ENTERThe women and the sign form a single boundary line. The written sign enumerates forbidden activities, and draws its authority to punish violators from the State; the women, alternatively, signal what is allowed on this restricted ground: customary subsistence activities by Yakama people who maintain the cultural and property rights to do so, and have such rights secured through the Treaty of 1855. Their authority extends from a system of indigenous law in which property rights to traditional foods (predominantly fish, game, roots, and berries) are held by particular families and involve practices that express relationships of reciprocity. In this legal system, the kápin is a sign of authority, an instrument of law.The Indian reservation is a place where multiple forms of law—federal, tribal, and state—create both gaps and overlaps of rules and jurisdictions, at times in accord and at times in contest. In asserting tribal and treaty rights, Native communities have often sought to make visible this complex legal terrain, particularly indigenous forms of law and understandings of treaty provisions. A casual observer may look at this photograph and see one sign of law: the WARNING sign, standing on its wooden legs. But this is far from the only sign of law; the Yakama women and children bear signs of law in their kápin, their dress, their posture—if one can read these signs and the legal systems that are co-produced by them. I draw upon this photograph to read and tease apart the multiple discourses of law evident in this mid-century moment.John Clark’s Leggings: Painting Ojibwe Life and HistoryBrenda Child, University of MinnesotaSteven Primo, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe ArtistOur paper was inspired by a photograph and painting of John Clark or Niigaanigiizhik (Leading Sky) a Mille Lacs Ojibwe man born in1883, who died in 1972. In1920, a census taker described Clark as not speaking, reading or writing in English. In a photograph taken a few years prior to the 1920 census, Niigaanigiizhik and a companion are pictured wearing unusual leggings, perhaps traceable to a Scandinavian settler influence on Ojibwe clothing and design. His son, Jim Clark or Naawigiizis (Center of the Moon), decades later described the attire of people in their community including the Clark’s white neighbors, in addition to his father’s everyday clothing. Naawigiizis summoned up a strong childhood “memory of those walks with my dad” when “my eyes were about level with the hind pockets of the loose fitting bibbed overalls he always wore. So as he walked, I used to watch the creases his moving legs created.” Steven Premo, a Mille Lacs Ojibwe artist and the grandson of Niigaanigiizhik, will reflect on his recent painting of his grandfather when he was in his early thirties, in the dressed up attire and leggings in which he appeared in the photograph. George Bonga’s Moccasins: Fashioning the Ojibwe Mixed-Blood Identity in Early MinnesotaMattie Harper, Minnesota Historical SocietyA single photograph of George Bonga is stored in the Minnesota Historical Society archives. He was a legendary fur trader in the early nineteenth century whose father and grandparents were enslaved in Quebec and whose mother was Ojibwe. Bonga was born in Ojibwe country, educated in Montreal and married an Ojibwe woman when he returned home. No other photograph of this remarkable man survives. It is a formal studio portrait in an urban location dated as circa 1870. Bonga’s African American heritage is clearly visible in the photograph and his status as a “civilized man” is rendered legible through his clothing. However, one detail that stands out is his footwear. George Bonga is wearing Ojibwe moccasins. In this paper, I use this detail as an opening to raise questions about George Bonga’s identity, early settler colonial technologies, and strategies of survival by Indians and blacks at this early period of statehood.This paper combines a study of letters written by George Bonga and a comparative analysis of photographs to probe into the locally constructed “mixed-blood” identity and the role race played in Minnesota statehood. Referencing photographs of both George Bonga and his brother Stephen Bonga, I analyze what their visual presentations say about their relationships to the African Diaspora. The Bongas are often heralded as some of the earliest African Americans in the region, but can they be framed as part of the African Diaspora? Also, what kind of relationship does their visual presentation and embrace of a mixed blood identity create with settler colonial agents? Does their African ancestry differentiate their mixed-blood identity from other mixed-bloods of European and Native ancestry? 39. Native Environmental Responsibilities: Caring for Land and Water (General Session)Where Cowboys and Indians Meet: Relationships and Environment in a Cattle Borderland, 1877-1887John Truden, University of OklahomaDuring a hot, windy July day in 1884, Texan cowboys driving 300 horses to Kansas approached the dangerously flooded North Canadian River in west-central Indian Territory. At the river, they met Southern Cheyenne leader White Horse, who told them quicksand and flooding meant the cowboys needed to look for another crossing. As a result of White Horse’s direction, the Texans moved well off the established trail, crossed and then met another Southern Cheyenne named Running Buffalo. Running Buffalo told them they were not on the agreed trail and needed to give him two ponies as compensation. The cowboys, having already given away several, refused. Running Buffalo promptly rode to the front of the herd, took out a rifle and shot into the air, stampeding and killing some of the horses. For the most part, scholars have argued that Southern Plains Indians lost political power, and by extension influence over their environment, after the 1875 Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. However, E.P. Thompson’s 1971 concept of the “moral economy” and common examples like Running Buffalo’s between 1875 and 1895 form a framework allowing Southern Plains Indians to be seen as powerful regulators of the environment they continued to live in. This combination redefines their relationships with both passing cowboys and semi-permanent cattlemen as extensions of cultural concepts and rules obvious to Southern Plains Indians. It can be labeled the Southern Plains moral economy and encompassed Indigenous ownership of a supposedly conquered landscape, Indigenous legislation controlling and dividing that land and standardized payment enforcing that legislation. Even though cowboys and cattlemen did not understand this system in the same way, they cooperated because they had no other choice. The consequences of failing to reciprocate were so dire that resistance was simply not worth the risk. “We are carrying out our responsibility to the Lake”: Tracing the Ethnohistory and Traditional Roots of Native Environmental Stewardship from the Haudenosaunee Frontier to Standing RockChristopher Lindsay Turner, Smithsonian InstitutionMaybe more so than in any previous year in history, the world has learned that Native people hold a very different view of the status of borders between lands owned and occupied, reserved lands and lands ceded to settler states, and the environmental issues that are shared among the occupiers of those lands. The Standing Rock Sioux brought a vision to a global audience, a perspective on stewardship and management of resources that is by no means new, there, or elsewhere in Indian Country. The Haudenosaunee of New York, certainly, have a long history of resistance to settler encroachment and land loss, but also to threats to their lands within and beyond the borders of their reserves, when they have seen issues as destructive to their environment and hence, their way of life for future generations. They have expressed these positions, as this paper will show, historically- by connecting the issues with their core texts and traditions, such as the Great Law of Peace, and the Gon:yon:yoh, or ‘Thanksgiving Address’. Beginning with the stance of 19th century leaders such as Governor Blacksnake and Red Jacket of the Seneca to resist waterway manipulation, we will read the ethnohistorical record for evidence of these efforts, as well as those of the Onondaga and Cayuga Nations to move in a progressive fashion towards more sustainable management of their lands in the historic period before they were dispossessed. In this way, the discussion will provide a new context for understanding contemporary struggles- and also collaborations- with their settler neighbors, such as the Onondaga Land Rights action of 2005, and the Cayuga effort in the last 15 years to return to lands lost during the Revolution and reintroduce traditional crops and medicinals.“The Many-Headed Hydra”: Conflicting Memories of the 1977 Northern Flood Agreement of Northern Manitoba, from 1990-2000Erin Yaremko, University of Winnipeg and University of ManitobaManitobans and Canadians have viewed hydroelectric power as a viable sustainable energy source for decades. What many Manitobans and Canadians are unaware of is the destruction hydroelectric dam creation has on Northern indigenous communities. Prior to 1970, Manitoba Hydro gained access to treaty land with assistance of the Government of Canada and moved forth in the creation of hydroelectric generating stations along the Kelsey and Nelson River systems of Northern Manitoba. Traditional hunting land and community space became ruined by flood waters, and water slowly became polluted due to creation and use of hydroelectric generating stations. By 1970 Northern Flood Committee was formed from council members from the affected communities. The Northern Flood Committee produced the Northern Flood Agreement (NFA) that stated the demands of the affected communities. In 1977 Manitoba Hydro and the governments of Manitoba and Canada signed the NFA.By 1990 however the NFA remained unfulfilled and unimplemented. Members from affected communities voiced frustration through articles in the Winnipeg Free Press and at a conference held at the University of Winnipeg surrounding the NFA. Manitoba Hydro and the provincial government responded to these articles, and voiced their opinion. I argue that two distinct narrative groups existed from 1990-2000 surrounding the creation and implementation of the NFA. From 1990-2000 the founding communities of the Northern Flood Committee of Manitoba remember the creation and implementation of the NFA as overlooked and undercut by Manitoba Hydro and the provincial government of Manitoba. In signing the NFA, the Northern Flood Committee communities believe the Government of Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro became legally bound to the agreement and its later implementation.My research analyses competing memories of the NFA through analysis of articles from the Winnipeg Free Press in the 1990s by affected indigenous community members, Manitoba Hydro and government personnel. As well as conference material from the 1998 University of Winnipeg NFA conference. 40. Spanish-Indigenous Relations Part I: The Colonial Andean Borderlands (General Session)The Return of don Juan Choque Mamani: Rebuilding a Community in Late Eighteenth Century Omasuyos, Alto Peru. Paul Charney, Frostburg State UniversityIn late seventeenth century Omasuyos, a province of Alto Peru (Bolivia), the community of Laja became the scene of a litigation case involving the cacique, don Martin Fernandez Chuy, who was accused of various transgressions by don Juan Choque Mamani. One allegation was that Chuy underreported tribute amounts and pocketed the difference. To prove otherwise don Martin provided a robust list of tribute payers and renters (mostly outsiders) and what they actually paid, which contradicted Choque Mamani’s claims. Such evidence was revealing of not only the community’s income and financial viability, but also the names of Indians whom don Martin repatriated, Indians who had left Laja to evade tribute obligations. Repatriation was used as a way to replenish much depleted ayllus (families linked to an ancestor deity) and bolster tribute levels--but it did not sit well with everyone. Don Martin’s efforts consequently encountered resistance and created enemies, one of whom was Choque Mamani. Some Indians who emigrated nonetheless continued to pay tribute in order to retain ties to their homeland. This litigation thus serves as a window on Andean efforts to rebuild communities devastated by disease and out-migration.The Transformation of an Indigenous Nobility: Religious Materialism and the Nahua People in the Sixteenth CenturyMarley-Vincent Lindsey, Brown UniversityThe Libros de Tributos are deeply important documents to several historiographies; as census documents from the 1530s, they are the earliest extant records we have for numbers of people and and types of tributes given on encomienda grants in Mexico. As records that reveal the baptismal status of tributaries within the town, they are important contributions to both the history of Christian expansion in Mexico, and to linguistic analyses of the language itself. As records that describe the amount of tribute given, they are important to histories about the Hispanic economy, and the nature of labor within sixteenth-century New Spain. Combining aspects of these historiographies is uncommon; while economic historians typically skate over the requirement that those who held encomiendas baptize their charges, religious historians emphasize the nature of conversion at the cost of all material aspects. This has led the historical conversation surrounding the encomienda to diminish its significance, as both religious chroniclers like Geronimo de Mendieta and Toribio de Benavente—Motolinía—and the Crown itself insisted that the class of encomenderos themselves were hindrances to the broader religious and economic goals of both groups.Whether or not the displacement of the encomienda as a system of labor was inevitable, it retained significance for nearly a century of Mexico’s history, and held significant cultural and social influence for the duration of its existence. Using all three of the Libros de Tributos, the religious chronicles, and Latin records of the Nahua nobility, I argue that part of the transition to capitalism required a deep sense of Christian universalism, and that this universalism was only made possible by the interactions within the encomienda. Simultaneously, it was the materialist exchange found within these census records that powered the ability of friars to convert Indigenous people into Christians. Yanaconas and the Chiriguano War: The Role of the Indigenous Populations in Colonizing the Early Colonial Peruvian FrontierChad McCutchen, Minnesota State University, MankatoThe emergence of Potosí as the fundamental economic venture in sixteenth-century Peru gave the settlement of the eastern frontier newfound significance. Spanish officials soon found the colonization of the lands east of the Andean foothills a more difficult endeavor than they had imagined. From the onset of the establishment of the frontier settlement of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the Spanish and indigenous populations began to interact with various results. The violent conflict with a local indigenous population, known to the Spanish as the Chiriguanos, created a bellicose atmosphere in which various native groups allied with the Spanish. In subsequent years, a diverse, multiethnic population emerged, with divergent interests from those in Lima. This paper analyzes the ways in which the Spanish attempted to manipulate various indigenous populations to serve their designs, with a particular focus on the role of yanaconas (natives outside of traditional kinship groups who conventionally provided individual service). Cultural exchange often created paradoxes in which the lines between the numerous populations were frequently blurred. A frontier culture arose from a combination of factors, including lessons from the Reconquista, local indigenous traditions, and new practices acquired from experience in the Americas. In an environment of almost constant warfare, the Spanish, mestizo, and indigenous groups continually interrelated. Spanish officials related multiple accounts of Chiriguano atrocities comprising of cannibalism and the existence of human meat markets, which in turn influenced indigenous behavior. Spanish and mestizo traders hoped to benefit from these accounts to justify their participation in the indigenous slave trade. Some mestizos lived peacefully among the natives and adopted their style of dress (en traje de indio), while others instructed them in Hispanic styles of warfare. In an attempt at pacification, the Spanish Crown encouraged the settlement of yanaconas in the region to establish a buffer zone between the populations. This research indicates that, while local transculturation threatened to undermine their endeavors, yanaconas played a significant role in Spanish designs along the frontier. 41. Rupert’s Land: Nituskeenan Anishinaabewaki—Critically Researching Histories: Session 3, Material Aspects of Rupert’s Land Cultures, A Panel in Honor of Jennifer S.H. Brown (Symposium)Mapping the Bear: A I. Hallowell’s Anthropological Legacy on the Berens River. Maureen Matthews, Manitoba MuseumRoger Roulette, University of ManitobaIn 1932 on one of his extensive visits up the Berens River, A. Irving Hallowell met a man named Ojijaak (Crane) who impressed him greatly and became one of his most important acquaintances on the river. It was Ojijaak who provided Hallowell with much of the information which he later published in his article on the Midewiwin. Hallowell said in 1936 that although Ojijaak apparently never led the Midewiwin himself, “he is the only man on the river who, at present, would be capable of doing so” (2010:397). They seem to have developed an excellent relationship and one of the products of that relationship is a map, a birch bark scroll, and an accompanying text explaining the drawing. It is an 80 year old artefact of Hallowell’s thoughtful and collaborative anthropological practice which has become a key piece of evidence for contemporary Anishinaabe people. Those who live on the river now are arguing for the right to manage their lives and lands in a bid to have their traditional territories declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site Cultural Landscape. The map underlines their awareness of their place in the world and illustrates a sophisticated understanding of Anishinaabe land claims concepts. This paper looks at Hallowell’s contribution to the descendants of the people he knew and wrote about.Ethnographic Accounts and Experimental Research on Indigenous Material Culture in the Hudson Bay WatershedRoland Bohr, University of WinnipegEarly scholarship on the history of the fur trade primarily perceived it as a function of European expansion and domination. Within this perspective, its impact on indigenous societies was assessed by ethnocentric perspectives postulating superiority to European technologies, tools and weapons, supposedly causing an almost instantaneous dependency of indigenous peoples on such European goods, as well as the rapid disappearance of indigenous tools and weapons traditions. With the emergence of ethnohistorical and postcolonial scholarship, a new generation of researchers challenged these notions, pointing out the sophistication and ingenuity of indigenous weapons technologies, while emphasizing the flaws and shortcoming of European weapons systems, such as muzzle-loading firearms. Purveyors of either position have often used sources very selectively, taking them out of context and ignoring evidence contradicting their views.Ethnographic observations by various non-indigenous sojourners in “Rupert’s Land” contain seemingly contradictory, yet meticulously detailed information on indigenous material culture and technologies, and on how indigenous people adapted their traditional technology to newly acquired tools and weapons from Europe, using them side by side, rather than discarding indigenous technologies. For example, the writings of late eighteenth and early nineteenth traders and surveyors such as Andrew Graham, Peter Fidler, David Thompson and Alexander Henry the Younger can be juxtaposed with indigenous accounts and surviving indigenous artifacts from their time. Experimental reproduction and testing of traditional indigenous distance weapons, such as regionally specific archery equipment, but also indigenous types of armour, then leads to a practical understanding of the capabilities of such devices, showing adaptability and ingenuity in indigenous peoples’ use of traditional and European technologies, offering new insights into and a more balanced understanding of the nature of contact and relations between indigenous peoples and European newcomers in the Hudson Bay watershed. Algonquian Land Debate: A Cumberland Cree PerspectiveKeith Goulet, University of SaskatchewanAcademic scholars have been debating the Algonquian concept of land in the past century. The debate was centred on the ideas of the family hunting territory and communal land tenure. A brief summary of the debate will be presented followed by a critique based on a re-examination of new and existing sources as well as oral evidence from Nehinuw (Cree) language and ethnohistorical sources. An overview of Cumberland Cree territoriality including use, kupesihina (camps), weeginanuskeeya (homelands), eehitahina (places of existence) and ootenawa or oochenasa (gathering centers) will be presented. The sovereign national territory of the Cree as nituskeenan and kituskeenuw will also be introduced as well as uskeeganis as private property.42. Reform and Restitution in the 20th Century U.S.: ICC, Termination, and the International American Indian Tribunal (General Session)“Bribed with our own money:” Tribal Moneys and Termination in the 1950sDavid. R. Beck, University of MontanaThe United States federal government has a long history of both misusing tribal moneys and attempting to “get out of the Indian business.” The former dates to treaty funds and later to income emanating from tribal resources. The latter dates to the earliest federal policies. The 1950s saw a startling coalescence of these two initiatives as federal officials tried to convince tribal communities to voluntarily withdraw from the trust relationship in exchange for payment of moneys already due to the tribes. Tribes with a strong or potentially strong economic foundation were among the first targeted for termination, a policy that had begun to germinate under John Collier and remains a subtext of federal-Indian relations. Both BIA officials and the U.S. Congress viewed tribes receiving judgment funds or other infusions of cash as ripe for what Senator Arthur Watkins (Utah) referred to as a “freedom plan” from federal supervision. When the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin was tricked into supporting termination in exchange for release of funds it was awarded for federal mismanagement of their forest resource, tribal member William Grignon exclaimed, “We were bribed with our own money!” The Menominee were not the only tribe that found themselves in this situation. For the most part, tribes wanted diminished federal control but strengthening of the trust relationship, not elimination of it. This paper begins to explore the intersections of these two features of the federal-tribal relationship in the United States: federal misuse of tribal funds and federal efforts to terminate the legal and political relationship of tribes to the U.S. Both reflect a lapse in federal fiduciary responsibility toward tribes.“First we get rid of him, then we thank him:” The American Indian International Tribunal’s Response to Ronald ReaganJared Eberle, Oklahoma State UniversityIn the years immediately following Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 Native Americans across the United States became increasingly concerned with the rise of Reagan's "New Federalism" policy that threatened drastic cuts across the federal government. In the face of serious funding cuts to educational and healthcare programs, Native activists in California organized the American Indian International Tribunal at D-Q University to try Reagan and the United States for crimes against native peoples. While originally formulated in response to Reagan's domestic policies, the tribunal's name signifies that organizers quickly expanded the event to include testimony from indigenous peoples from around the world, acknowledging that Reagan’s policies were only a small part of the United States’ long-term oppression of indigenous rights. While participants universally opposed Reagan, many also argued natives would owe thanks to Reagan for uniting indigenous peoples regardless of national borders.The American Indian International Tribunal is far less well known than other protests of the era, but it fills an understudied gap in the historiography of twentieth century Native American activism. More significantly, the conflict over its scope highlights the growing divide amongst Native American activists in the decades that followed the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 in regards to whether US activists should move towards internationally focused activism. Furthermore, the Tribunal signified one of the first concerted attempts to fully define the ideological underpinnings of the transnational indigenous movement that had grown during the 1970s, in particular how indigenous peoples relate to western political structures and the capitalist/communism Cold War divide. While the tribunal never removed Reagan from office, the groundwork it laid influenced American Indian activism for the next decade.Indigenous Land Sovereignty and Restorative Justice in the American WestBaligh Ben Taleb, University of Nebraska-LincolnAbstract: Reckoning with the legacy of colonialism in the context of settler states is a painstaking and mighty task. Understanding and investigating this task has become, nevertheless, one of the most vibrant and innovative areas of historical enquiry and academic scrutiny. As one reads through the wide-ranging discussions on transitional justice, retribution, restitution, and the burgeoning scholarship on truth and reconciliation, it is striking to witness the relative absence of scholarship and the little work on efforts of restorative justice in American western history. To fill this gap, this paper seeks to uncover early instances of restorative justice, retribution or reconciliation efforts in the American West in respect to Indigenous land sovereignty. Although Native Americans suffered from land dispossession, forced removal, broken treaties, and coercive assimilation programs, the U.S. has neither issued a public apology nor organized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC hereafter) to address the hurt, pain, and historical perfidy in the nation’s conquest of Indians. On the other hand, there have been a number of occasions in the past when the U.S. engaged in processes similar to restorative justice. My research looks at one of these: the Indian Claims Commission (ICC henceforth) that operated between August 1946 and September 1978 and its relationship with three different Indian tribes—the Winnebago, the Hopi, and Western Shoshone tribes. Furthermore, this work places these three different cases within the recent historiography of truth and reconciliation commissions in settler colonial societies, and ask to what extent these awards, if any, have settled old grievances of settler colonialism and advanced the rights of Native Americans. It also calls for more discussion and scholarship on historical injustice in the U.S., by offering a set of examples through which historians and social scientists can examine the past through a reconciliatory lens. Crudely put, this paper serves as a springboard for exploring questions of restitution and reconciliation in American western history. This is not, however, a theoretical examination of the past—imposing a hypothetical framework and selective views in determining what and how certain events happened in the past. Rather I offer a critical understanding of early instances of restorative justice, if any. In different ways, I seek to rethink efforts of seeking truth and reckoning with past injustices in western history through new comparative approaches and methods that seek to draw interconnections among various forms and sites of settler colonialism and truth and reconciliation commissions. Much of the discussion and analysis of these cases will be based on extensive archival research, oral history (interviews), and secondary sources drawn from the recent scholarship on truth and reconciliation. The central arguments of this paper are framed by recent theory and historical scholarship of settler colonialism and truth and reconciliation, a relatively recent yet cutting-edge field of historical inquiry.43. On-Going Native Engagements with Christianity (General Session)“Un mundo sacrilizado”: The Theology of Maíz and Father Tomás García’s Re-Enchantment of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, 1974Creighton Chandler, Texas A&MThis paper chronicles the previously uncharted liberationist vision of an autochthonous Catholic Church pioneered in the early 1970s by Father Santos Tomás García, a K’iche’ Mayan who the previous decade had been ordained as only the third indigenous Catholic priest in Guatemalan history.In part, my research situates what Padre Tomás outlined as the “theology of maíz” at a three-week training course for religious and lay leaders within the wider revitalization of the church’s relationship with indigenous peoples in the wake of Vatican II and Medellín. Indeed, this course was part of an ongoing, formal series of “encounters” through which the Guatemalan church—in conjunction with the Mexican Catholic Church—forged a contextualized theo-anthropological approach to pastoral theology that placed Guatemalan Catholics at the fore of a trans-American movement to reframe the Christian-indigenous historical imaginary.At the same time, the theology of maíz’s emphasis on the local and the particular, which Padre Tomás viewed in terms of decolonization, challenged the church’s dualist assumptions about the relationship between Judeo-Christian and K’iche’ Mayan traditions. For Padre Tomás, Jesus and Quetzalcoatl embodied a parallel vocation of liberation where the transcendent was constituted in the world and by the work of humans. It was, in other words, the Hero Twins of the sacred book of the Maya-K’iche’s, the Pop-Wuj, who could save the church. In this way, as this paper explains, Padre Tomás’s unique theological framework offers more than a profound wrestling with his own identity as an indigenous Catholic priest. It is also at once a work of holy reconciliation as well as a postcolonial challenge to the church’s authority over the source, constitution, and practice of “theology” whose self-conviction called on the church to cultivate maíz as a divine—indeed, even mystical—locus of liberation.Building Christian dogma over Cree beliefs: the excoriating evangelism of Emile Saindon, OMIJames Fulford, University of WinnipegThis paper critically examines the unpublished letters, sermons, and writings of Emile Saindon, OMI. These materials are housed in the Desch?telets Archives (Ottawa). Father Saindon was born in Sainte-Hilaire, New Brunswick in 1891, attended Sainte-Anne-de-la Pocatière College and was ordained in 1920 at the Scholaticat St. Joseph in Ottawa. He died in Cochrane Ontario in 1934. For the last 12 years of his life Father Saindon was an Oblate missionary at Fort Albany, Attawapiskat and Moosonee (Ontario). He succinctly stated in a letter written in 1930 that his approach to evangelizing Crees was “to destroy [their] pagan beliefs and over their ruins preach [Christian] morality and build dogma.” In this presentation Father Saindon’s conversion techniques are situated and discussed within the context of his own writings about Christianity and social science. Saindon’s statements are examined in the light of the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as recent revelations about the operation of Ste. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany."Louis Nicolas and the Sovereign Animals of Native American Natural History" Gordon M. Sayre, University of OregonAbstract:My previous work on the Natchez revolt of 1729 and its two most important chroniclers, Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny, shows how French colonists in Louisiana saw the Natchez Indians as distinct from other polities of the region due to its hierarchical caste system and the despotic power of its exogamous lineage of monarchs (both male and female), called Soleils. The comparison to the French "Sun King" Louis XIV, was overt in the French ethnographers' writings. They saw symbols of sovereign power, such as the sun, to be universal or transcultural.For this presentation I turn to another French colonial ethnographer during the reign of Sun King. Louis Nicolas was the creator of the Codex Canadensis, an extraordinary manuscript portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings, and author of an accompanying Histoire naturelle des Indes occidentales. The two works are conserved in Tulsa and Paris, respectively, but their common source was not ascertained until the 1970s and the two manuscripts were published together for the first time in 2011. A Jesuit missionary who evangelized among the Iroquois and at the Ojibwa village of Chequamegon on the south shore of Lake Superior from 1667-1671, Nicolas was fluent enough in Algonquian to write a grammar of that language, a third manuscript first published in 1994.Most native peoples of the Canadian Shield and Gulf of Saint Lawrence (quite unlike the Natchez) practiced seasonal round hunter-gatherer subsistence and lived in small autonomous groups. They did not conform to European preconceptions of sovereign rulers over large territories of settled peasants. However, Nicolas in the Codex Canadensis used the iconography of royal sovereignty, notably the symbolism of powerful animals, to suggest resemblances between European political imaginaries, and the spiritual power of animal manitous (what anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell called "other-than-human persons") among the Algonquians. His Codex begins with drawings of the "Massue royale" "Couronne royale" and "Ecusson de France" celebrating his King who had recently "renversé presque toute la Hollande Represantée par ce Lion renversé" and won a victory over "les aigles d'Allemagne." Nicolas drew the upside down lion, and two eagles, and the larger purpose of his work lay in his dozens of drawings of species of quadrupeds, birds, and fish of Canada. Among them were several Anishnaabe (aka Ojibwa) mythical creatures: Michabous (the Great Hare), Michinik (the Great Turtle), and Michipichik (the Great Lynx). These polymorphic beings appear in myths as persons and as outsized animals who exert sovereign control over common animals, a power that Anishnaabe seek to influence in order to ensure successful hunting.The role of the outsized manitous or ogimaa of animal species may relate to the fossils of Pleistocene megafauna that Native peoples unearthed and compared to the bones of their game. For European natural history, these ancient giants supported theories of the degeneration of American nature and culture. For Native people, however, they supported a distinct theory of sovereignty that was more-than-human, that imagined a politics of many species all transforming and interacting in a spiritually powerful world. Scholarship on indigenous sovereignties needs to take account of the role of animals and other-than-human persons in cross-cultural perspective.44. Forging Identity and Community in the Age of the Imperial Nation-State (Symposium)A Fractured Rebellion: African Cultural Practices and Differing Visions of Resistance in the Early Haitian Revolution Sean Anderson, Lehigh UniversityScholars have often noted that a carefully selected creole-slave elite was situated between a large workforce of newly arrived African slaves and an increasingly multi-racial class of planters in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. Curiously, those scholars have also portrayed the early rebellion as that of slaves versus planters, without questioning the social differences that existed among the insurgents. Yet accounts by eighteenth-century contemporaries such as Moreau de Saint-Méry mention that slaves born in Saint-Domingue often socialized apart from and held cultural values different from African born slaves. When the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, insurgent leaders, as coachmen and plantation drivers, belonged to the creole slave elite. In contrast, African-born slaves made up a large portion of the insurgency. Social and cultural differences between these groups has led me to question if the creole leadership viewed the goals of the rebellion in a similar fashion to the many African born insurgents who took part. In order to answer this question, this paper will take a socio-cultural look at a variety of early accounts of the insurgency including the travel account of Jean Paul Pillet, correspondence between the insurgent leader Jean-Fran?ois and French officials, and an account of the insurgent camps written by a man known as Monsieur Gros. I will draw upon insights from a variety of recent social-theorists in order to show how the cultural practice of dance and the various religious proclivities of insurgents uncover deep socio-cultural differentiation within the insurgent community. These insights about social differentiation help us to understand why the official letters Jean-Fran?ois and Georges Biassou sent to French officials never asked for freedom for insurgents in general. This paper will argue that the creole leadership's vision of a successful rebellion was socially constructed to exclude the African slaves that they drew on for military strength. Yet since African men and women made up the bulk of the resistance force, the early leaders Jean-Francois and Biassou were unable to exclude African-born slaves from demanding inclusion in the Haitian Revolution. Mythologizing the Whiteman’s Friends: Misrepresentation of Indian Leaders in the Writing of Chicago’s Origin StoryAaron Luedtke, Michigan State UniversityIn 1877, the Chicago Historical Society commemorated the acquisition of a celebrated document and asked William Hickling to present a sketch of noted Potawatomi leaders, Billy Caldwell and Shabbona. The document, a letter penned by Caldwell in 1816, certified the worthy nature of Shabbona because of his service to Tecumseh and the British during the War of 1812. Hickling praised Caldwell and Shabbona, despite their hostility toward the U.S. during the war. Hickling neither ignored or rejected the early lives of both men but his sketch focused on their later lives, when they opposed those Indigenous leaders like Black Hawk, who remained hostile to white encroachment. He praised Caldwell and Shabbona for their contributions to treaty negotiations and Indian removal. Like so many nineteenth-century chroniclers of Chicago’s early history, Hickling framed his narrative around the widely accepted Myth of the Good and Bad Indian.This research maintains that nineteenth-century llinois policy makers and settlers perpetrated acts of violence against Illinois’ Indigenous people through physical removal. Unlike surrounding states, Illinois failed to establish reservations. Instead, in a series of treaties, concluding with the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, Indians were forced to cede all of their lands to the United States. By placing commemorations of Caldwell and Shabbona within the context of Chicago’s origin myth, white pioneers and civilizers positioned themselves as legitimate inheritors of the landscape the vanquished Indians had left behind. Chicagoans perpetuated the myth of the good and bad Indian by asserting power over the memory of the region’s Indigenous survivors by relegating them strictly to the past. White Americans who monopolized the state’s historical narrative diminished the public memory of such violence, disregarding memories of the bad Indian and displacing them with the myth of a good Indian who cooperated with white men. Finding Home at Pala: Indigenous Communities and Colonial Legacies in Southern CaliforniaNaomi Sussman, Yale UniversityOn May 12, 1903, Indian Agent James Jenkins and forty teamsters forcibly removed the Warner’s Ranch Band of Cupe?o Indians from their homeland. Over the course of the next several weeks, carrying their possessions in carts, some two hundred Cupe?os walked the forty miles to Pala Reservation to settle among the reservation’s established Luise?o inhabitants. Over the last 114 years, the Cupe?o and Luise?o peoples have built a joint community: today, their website proclaims, they “consider themselves to be one proud people—Pala.” In light of their often-fractious history, this creation of a shared community was surprising. Long before the 1769 Spanish colonization of Alta California, the Cupe?o territory abutted Luise?o lands; the Luise?o retained a reputation for being actively expansionist, seeding enmity and political tensions with their Cupe?o and Cahuilla neighbors. Between 1769 and 1903, however, successive colonial incursions reoriented Indigenous political and social affiliations in Southern California. Over this period, three colonial regimes reigned over California: the Spanish Empire (1769-1821), Mexico (1821-1848), and the United States (1848-present). As they struggled to incorporate California, Mexico and the U.S. grappled with the legal, diplomatic, political, and physical legacies of their predecessors. These living “remains,” which included land titles, forced labor regimes, treaties, and mission buildings, continued to shape relations between the colonial state and the Cupe?o and Luise?o peoples. By situating the 1903 formation of a combined Luise?o-Cupe?o community within California’s longer colonial history, then, this paper foregrounds Native people’s radical self-creation in the face of sustained colonial assault. Although the conditions that produced the Pala community were violent and coercive, the two peoples crafted new terms of belonging. Their communal rebirths emerged alongside colonial loss and destruction. By reconfiguring Pala to encompass the Warner’s Ranch Cupe?o refugees, this paper argues, the Luise?o and Cupe?o peoples forged their own historical continuities and futures. 45. Spanish-Indigenous Relations Part II:Caribbean, Mesoamerican and Central American Borderlands (General Session)Diplomacy or Destruction?: Miskitu-Spanish Relations on the Borderlands of Central AmericaSamantha Billing, Pennsylvania State UniversityIn 1711, the Bishop of Nicaragua wrote to the King of Spain requesting permission and funding to launch a military attack against the Miskitu peoples of Nicaragua and Honduras. This letter sparked a forty-year debate among Spanish officials over how best to go about exterminating this troublesome indigenous population. At the same time, however, Spanish officials were taking a different approach towards this group farther south. Also in 1711, the same Bishop began meeting with Miskitu officials in Costa Rica in order to negotiate an alliance. These examples demonstrate that during the colonial period, local action in the Spanish Empire was often dictated by regional contexts. Likewise, the Miskitu confederacy often reacted to situations in decidedly localized ways. This paper explores the importance of regional circumstances and politics for both the Spanish and Miskitu in determining how these two groups would interact with one other.Scholarship on the Miskitu has generally focused on two major themes: Miskitu friendship with the English and animosity towards the Spanish. This paper demonstrates that Miskitu interactions with colonial European empires was much more complex than this traditional dichotomy suggests. In the early eighteenth century, the Miskitu conducted continuous raids against Spanish and indigenous populations in the northern regions of Spain’s Central American territories. They stole goods, raided mines, captured individuals to sell as slaves, and desecrated religious buildings. Spanish officials in these regions, therefore, reacted by proposing that this indigenous group needed to be exterminated. In Costa Rica, however, both Miskitu and Spanish officials saw alliance and peace as a more desirable outcome. I argue, then, that regional politics necessitated diverse and often contradictory interactions between the Miskitu and the Spanish within the complex landscape of the Central American borderlands. A Pedagogical borderland: Translation and education in Tlatelolco, 1536-1620Aysha Pollnitz, Rice UniversityA number of colegios and escuelas of Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were cultural borderlands and sites of linguistic exchange. There, missionaries and indigenous students translated between Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, Otomi, and Purépecha, among other tongues. While the terms of exchange and negotiation were hardly equal, missionaries were students of indigenous tongues as well as teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and their pupils were linguistic authorities as well as gramaticos. This paper will use Newberry Library Ayer manuscripts, printed works including Maturino Gilberti’s grammar and the Huehuetlahtolli, ed. Juan Bautista [1601], and the hitherto neglected pedagogical annotations on library books from the Colegio de la Santa Cruz at the Convent of Santiago, Tlatelolco, now held in the Sutro Library, San Francisco State University, to trace a series of pedagogical exchanges. By studying the methods of liberal education used at Tlatelolco, we may see how residency in this cultural borderland transformed the identities of indigenous students and missionaries in New Spain. Since Robert Ricard’s La "conque?te spirituelle" du Mexique (1933), scholars have debated whether the purpose of this colegio was to create a native clergy or a friendly class of local administrators. This paper proposes, however, that the exchanges between pedagogues and indigenous students show how the methods of and justifications for good letters (bonae litterae) were translated in the Americas.Paper title: ‘Going beyond ‘the beach’: in-between spaces of first encounter in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, 1492-c.1530’Claudia Rogers, University of LeedsOccupied by strangers, the spaces in which the first encounters between Indigenous and European groups in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica took place are particularly liminal, ambiguous, and in-between. This paper aims to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of these shared spaces of encounter firstly through the exploration of different spatial concepts, principally Greg Dening’s ‘islands and beaches’ metaphor. Dening’s conception of the metaphorical beach as borderless, unbounded and fluid reflects the dynamic nature of the early cultural meetings in question, and – as this paper will argue – aids our understanding of how the in-between space of the contact situation came, in turn, to produce and nurture ‘in-between’ identities. The second part of this paper, then, will highlight certain individuals who ‘crossed the beach’ (to use Dening’s terms), who shared and adopted one another’s cultural symbols, from personal possessions to physical features. Whilst scholarship considering such ambiguous figures is largely focused on Indigenous individuals adopting European cultural symbols – most famously Malintzin – this paper will equally consider instances of Europeans adopting Indigenous symbols in Indigenous and European representations and accounts of the first encounters. In doing so, the two-way, mutual sharing of cultural symbols is exposed, in both the Caribbean and Mesoamerican contexts, and the ambiguity of the space is reflected once more. Significantly, mid sixteenth-century Mesoamerican pictorial representations of in-between Europeans reflect a critical use of the breaking of cultural barriers by the Indigenous painter-scribes, who – in visually representing Hernán Cortés and other Europeans’ adoption of Indigenous clothing, weaponry, and other items in the first meetings – effectively highlighted their own power. In an effort to address the importance of wider accessibility, the pictorial sources selected are openly available online, thanks to numerous initiatives in the digital humanities. Handouts will be provided with details. 46. Scholar, Mentor, Advocate, Friend: A Celebration of Theda Perdue(Roundtable)For four decades, Theda Perdue has been a leading ethnohistorian and groundbreaking scholar advancing the study of the Native South, Native women, gender roles, and constructions of race among Indigenous peoples. We seek this opportunity to address the specific ways she has shaped our field and continues to do so. In our comments, we will address the following topics: Perdue’s influence on the literature; her important role in ASE and other professional organizations; her example of ensuring Native peoples’ access to academic spaces, including conferences; her mentorship of rising ethnohistorians, especially regarding publishing and navigating university life; and her training of graduate students.47. Negotiating Political and Economic Changes in Eastern NorthAmerica (General Session)“‘The Custom of the Country’: Colonial Property and Native Land Rights on the Northern New England Frontier”Ian Saxine, St. Mary’s College of Maryland This paper argues that Boston-based land speculators developed a vested interest in defending Native rights to unsold lands on the Northern New England frontier, turning them into supporters of an Anglo-Wabanaki relationship for much of the eighteenth-century. By 1713, companies like the Pejepscot Proprietors had acquired title to vast tracts of Maine real estate, most of it originating in purchases from the original Indian owners. Enduring Native power required the speculators to secure genuine consent from the Indians before occupying the land. As a result, the land companies came to view Indian land deeds as a superior source of title to royal patents—which would leave the colony vulnerable to outside meddling—and title by “improvement,” which would allow squatters to overwhelm company lands. As a result, during the 1720s, the elite land speculators who dominated the Massachusetts legislature threw their influence behind a Bay Colony policy of defending Indian rights to unsold land, and using Indian land deeds as the basis of title on the frontier. Even though the King-in-Council had insisted the letter of Massachusetts law acknowledge royal supremacy over the land in question, in practice, Bay Colonists followed what one speculator called “the custom of the country,” and treated Indian deeds as the foundation of landed property. This custom proved fertile grounds for a working Anglo-Wabanaki relationship on the frontier, until a new, powerful land company arrived to claim rights to much of Maine based on an obscure royal patent. Who Knew What, and When: Tracking Information Flows through and the Borders of the American South at the Time of the Soto EntradaRobbie Ethridge, University of MississippiThe flow of information is one of the ties that bind multiple, disparate polities and people into a single world system and that defines its borders. Although we now understand the polities of the Mississippian Period to have constituted such a world, for pre-colonial and pre-literate eras, the flow of information is difficult to reconstruct from the archaeological record and without written evidence. It is safe to assume that pre-colonial information flows followed trade and transportation routes; this paper takes this question further by using the Soto chronicles and the rich archaeological record of the sixteenth-century Southeast to track how information moved through the Mississippian world at the time of the Soto entrada. Mahene’s Debt: A Case Study of Border Crossing in Seventeenth Century Long Island, New York.John A. Strong, Long Island UniversityMahene, a young Unkechaug man whose people lived along the tidal streams flowing into the Atlantic Ocean on Long Island’s southern shore, crossed over into an alien political and economic system as a young man. He first appears in the colonial records in 1682 when he was arrested for debt accrued while participating in the English shore whaling operations. These operations which had developed on Long Island in the 1660s were a primary cause of Native American debt during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Mahene’s debt forced the Unkechaug leaders to turn over a tract valuable meadowland to the English authorities. Soon after the English arrived on Long Island in 1640, about the time Mehene was born, the English began launching shore whaling operations to attack the North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) as they swam along close to the shores of Long Island from November to March each year. Lacking the hunting skills and experience in navigating small boats on the open ocean waters, the English turned to the Indians such as Mahene for help. “Ye whale Design,” as it was called brought the two alien cultures into a new and more direct relationship than had been the case in the past when the leaders only met to negotiate the dispossession of Indian land. This study focuses on the experiences of both Mehene and the English as they interacted across cultural boundaries. This paper examines the political, economic, and cultural impact of this labor exchange on native lifeways. The data base for this study includes whaling contracts negotiated between Native American whalers and English company owners, and colonial estate inventories. These data were examined to help understand the nature and significance of cultural border crossing during the first decades interaction following English settlement. Neolin’s and Pontiac’s Wars: Indigenous Politics and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763Andrew Sturtevant, University of WisconsinIn a speech recruiting warriors for his anti-British campaign in the spring of 1763, the Odaawa leader, Pontiac, invoked the Lenape mystic Neolin, one of the many advocates of an emerging anti-colonial religious movement then spreading throughout North America. Yet the Odaawa leader subtly altered Neolin’s message. While Neolin and other thinkers advocated the removal of all Europeans and European material culture, Pontiac’s message was more specific; he wished to remove the “dogs clothed in red”—the British who had recently defeated his erstwhile French allies. In fact, Pontiac vowed that he “was French, and would die French.” Unlike Neolin, then, Pontiac did not wish to remove all Europeans from North America, just the British ones.This paper seeks to explain the discrepancy between Neolin’s War and Pontiac’s. It argues that, although Pontiac found common cause with anti-colonial activists in the south and drew inspiration from their religious visions, he opposed the British presence in the Great Lakes for reasons quite different than his southern allies and specific to his people and situation. While the Shawnees, Lenapes, and others in the Ohio Valley, who had faced continuous dislocation and death at the hands of British settler colonialism, sought to remove Europeans from the continent altogether, Pontiac and his Anishinaabe kin, who had enjoyed a privileged place in the French alliance network, sought only to resume the status quo enjoyed before the fall of New France three years earlier. In particular, Pontiac hoped to reassert Odaawa influence in the regional alliance, which had been eroded by the ascendance of the Wyandots, their longtime rivals. Rather than conflating the motivations of different indigenous groups which had very different experiences with settler colonialism, this paper attends to the complexity of indigenous political experience and thought in the Anglo-Indian War of 1763.48. Digital Knowledge Sharing: Stories from the American PhilosophicalSociety Library (Symposium)The Archivist in the Field: Re-envisioning the Activity of Ethnographic CollectionsBrian Carpenter, American Philosophical SocietySince 2008, the American Philosophical Society Library has sent digital copies of materials from its collections to over 170 indigenous communities throughout North and Central America. Over the course of these years, it has worked to develop a capacity to not just respond to requests that come in from indigenous community organizations, governments, and individuals, but to develop ongoing collaborations. As the primary reference and outreach archivist for these collections over the last decade, I will first provide an overview of the variety of projects (in terms of quantity, geographic and historical range, content type, team composition, etc.) in which the APS has participated over the last several years. In this context, the APS Library’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) operates under a mission to not only respond to and assist uses of these materials by scholars and indigenous communities alike, but also very often to initiate and coordinate such projects. This proactive approach allows the Library to improve its understanding and representation of these materials, but also to forge direct, long-term relationships with the indigenous communities concerned. This presentation will profile a few representative examples of different kinds of projects surrounding legacy archival materials that were developed through proactive engagement between APS archivists and indigenous communities directly, sometimes in parallel with projects involving academic scholars, and sometimes entirely (and necessarily) independent from traditional contexts. In light of these opportunities, which have emerged to a great degree from the desire of indigenous communities to establish archive-to-Nation partnerships, I will offer some thoughts on the unique role that archivists can play in the mobilization of ethnographic collections. Making the Invisible Visible:? Embracing Responsibility, Respect and?ReciprocityAngie Bain, Lower Nicola Indian Band (LNIB)In 1900, ethnologist James Alexander Teit’s memoir?The Thompson Indians?was released.? This publication went on to be one of the most important works detailing the culture and lifestyle of the Thompson River Indians at a critical time in history.? While?The Thompson Indians?shared the Nlaka’pamux culture with the world, much of the rich detail collected by James Teit, including place names, personal names, maps and sketches remained unpublished.? Not being readily available, community access to this material has been a challenge.? Thus, this material, stored in archival repositories like the American Philosophical Society (APS), has remained largely invisible to First Nations communities for decades.? The Lower Nicola Indian Band of Merritt, British Columbia, has been working with the APS to make these rich materials visible and accessible once again.?? Using the example of community place name research, this paper will illustrate how the relationship between the APS and the LNIB has worked to make what was once invisible, visible once again by mutually embracing the values of responsibility, respect and reciprocity.From the Archive to Hupacasath Traditional Territory and Back Again: Material Culture, Reciprocal Knowledge-Sharing, and Understandings of PlaceDenise N. Green, Cornell University?Hupacasath First Nations map territories and describe rights to particular natural resources through a number of expressive forms, including stories, textiles, crests, dances, ceremonies and song (Boas 1891; Sapir 1913; Golla 1987). Since the 1860s anthropologists and amateur anthropologists alike have conducted fieldwork, documented stories, written notes, recorded songs, and collected artifacts from the Hupacasath, leaving rich archival and material records in various institutions across North America and Europe. This project began as an archival ethnography of sorts—since 2013 I have worked with Hupacasath collections held by the American Philosophical Society (APS), bringing them into conversation with related archival collections at other institutions, and more importantly, into the lives of Hupacasath families through reciprocal knowledge-sharing. In particular, this presentation will explore the material culture and oral records used to map places and natural resources in Hupacasath haahuulthii (chiefly territories) in the 19th?– 21st?centuries; furthermore, I will draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016, as well as visits from Hupacasath people to the APS for brief periods in 2014 and 2016, to consider the impact of reciprocal knowledge-sharing on the production of new material culture and understandings of place.??Ngodwezhaanan Mazinaatenjiganag, Virtual Families: Digital Imagery and the Creation of Multidimensional FamiliesMaureen Matthews, The Manitoba MuseumRoger Roulette, Indigenous Languages of Manitoba Inc.Ngodwezhaanan mazinaatenjiganag means families created by imagery. The family is that of an Ojibwe medicine man, Naamiwan, one of the principal informants of A. Irving Hallowell, former president of the AAA. Hallowell's archives, including 900 photographs, reside at the American Philosophical Society (APS) Library and have become the focus of collaborative research with Naamiwan’s home community of Pauingassi. Over the past three years, the collection has been augmented by contemporary photographs of people who were young in the historic photographs and are now elders in the community as well as audio recordings of those elders explaining in Ojibwe the meaning of Naamiwan’s practice and the ceremonies pictured in the old photos. The historic and contemporary photos and audio have been digitized in the last three years. It is now possible to search a web-based database of the Hallowell photographs by both the Ojibwe and English names of individuals and find links to their audio recordings and English/Ojibwe transcripts as well. The APS has encouraged this digital tagging project and welcomed the way in which community data has reshaped its database and restructured relations between the library and the Anishinaabe community. The expanding web of relations between the newly digitized photos, augmented digital search tools, and Ojibwe speakers has created a ‘digital extended family, ngodwezhaanan mazinaatenjiganag,’ including the library, the community, the past, and the present. This paper looks at the implications that flow from expanding familial relationships in a digitized research environment.When the Stories Come to Life: Digital Repatriation and Cultural Revitalization in Partnership with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee IndiansTim Powell, University of PennsylvaniaIn 2008, the American Philosophical Society (APS) formed a Digital Knowledge Sharing partnership with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) that resulted in old photographs, audio recordings in the Cherokee language, and hundreds of pages of manuscript materials being returned to the Nation. In the past ten years, these materials have been incorporated into the curriculum of the Kituwah Preservation and Education Program’s (KPEP) total immersion school and have generated new recordings of elders discussing old photographs and audio recordings.“When the Stories Come to Life” will provide an ethnographic study of digital repatriation in the EBCI community over the past decade, focusing on digitized materials from the APS and the National Anthropological Archives (NAA). The study will highlight both the successes (language preservation) and the failures (placing sacred materials on-line) of the relationship between the EBCI, APS, and NAA. Tim Powell is the former director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (2008-2016) and is currently the director of EPIC (Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities) at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently working with T.J. Holland, curator of the Junaluska Museum and Cultural Resources Manager of KPEP, on one of the first in depth studies of the impact of digital repatriation and cultural revitalization. The outcome of this study will be a virtual museum that integrates ancestral and contemporary voices of EBCI elders interpreting anthropological materials collected by Frank Speck, Raymond Fogelson, and James Mooney.49. Racial Categories, Indigenous Subjects, and State Institutions (Symposium)“her father…a full blood Canadian Indian and her mother… a full blood American Indian”: Indigeneity, Race, and Indian Policy along the US-Canadian Border Patrick Lozar, University of Washington In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous peoples of the Columbia Plateau, in the interior Pacific Northwest, confronted the political and racial hardening of the US-Canadian border that ran through their homelands. Native communities, including the Okanagan, Sinixt, and Ktunaxa, negotiated the US and Canadian federal governments’ increasingly persistent enforcement of the international boundary’s separation of national jurisdiction and Indian policy. Through the 1890s and 1910s in particular, indigenous bands and families along the line were subject to either nation-states’ racialized systems of control, wardship, and assimilation policies. According to federal policies - Canada’s Indian Act and British Columbia’s mercurial reserve system, and allotment and enrollment councils in the United States - North American nation-states sought to fit “their” Indians into rigid racial categories and assign them, or not, to a shrinking land base. These tribal communities, partitioned on paper but who continued to move about their aboriginal territories to relocate and reconnect with kin beyond the international boundary line, complicated nation-state policies bound to one or the other side of the border. My paper investigates the ways in which indigenous movements, communications, and relocations across the line served to both obfuscate these settler-racial projects and undermine the presumed legitimacy of nation-state borders. These cases involve “Canadian” Okanagans and Sinixt seeking enrollment at the Colville Indian Reservation in the US, “American” Okanagans confounding Canadian enumerations of Okanagan Indians in British Columbia, and Ktunaxa in Canada leveraging their knowledge of Indian policy in the US in negotiations with Canadian officials. Indian policy, a prerogative of federal governments inside national borders, took on a transnational dimension with native Plateau peoples’ cross-border migrations and relationships. Such movements demonstrated enduring indigenous conceptions of community while thwarting any consistent implementation of federal Indian policy in the United States or Canada on the Columbia Plateau. Rethinking Race through the Alaska Example: Pseudo-speciation, Dehumanization, and ErasureJordan Craddick, University of WashingtonWhen Europeans first arrived in Alaska in the 1700s they classified the indigenous peoples they encountered in crude terms generally consistent with barbarity. While there has since been academic interest as to whether such classifications constituted racism or ethnocentrism the function of said classifications has consistently been overlooked. In this paper I will contend that regardless of terminology around race or ethnocentrism, the classifications assigned to Alaska Natives were meant to dehumanize them and set them apart as a pseudo-species. As part of this dehumanizing process, Europeans implemented biologically deterministic rules based on paternal lineage in order to break-down and ultimately erase indigeneity. Historically, this will be demonstrated through the creolization that followed Russia’s invasion into Alaska post 1732 with their legacy continuing through the 1867 U.S. takeover and the onset of blood quantum guidelines.Fingerprints, Surveillance, and Native CriminalizationSherri Sheu, University of Colorado, BoulderThis paper traces the development of using biometric data to identify and control Native American populations. It argues that the US state first tested, deployed, and systematized surveillance technology, especially fingerprints, to control Native Americans. Fingerprinting technologies evolved from attempts to subjugate and control of populations whose individual bodies were illegible to the state. Two of the first federal efforts to use fingerprints to identify and track individuals came from the U.S. Customs Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The U.S. Customs Service began showing interest in using fingerprints to track a racialized population in the 1880s, when customs officials advocated using thumbprints to track Chinese immigrants. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act made tracking individual Chinese immigrants moot.?In contrast, the Bureau of Indian Affairs continued a long historical tradition of using thumbprints and fingerprints for identification on censuses, deeds, petitions, and other documents. In doing so, the use of fingerprints to control Natives through Euro-American legal systems converged with modern tracking and surveillance. By World War I, the BIA issued identity cards based primarily on thumb marks to Native Americans. However, state agencies publically advocated for the use of fingerprints primarily to identify criminals despite the widespread use of fingerprints on Natives. The early use of fingerprinting in the United States suggests that the deployment of this new technology arose not from attempts to identify criminals, as usually thought, but the criminalization of indigenous bodies.“First-Class Citizenship” for “Competent” Indians: Race and Gender in Indian Emancipation Bills, 1944-1954Mary Klann, University of California, San DiegoAccording to the legislators and policymakers who supported them, the termination policies of the mid-twentieth-century United States were geared towards helping Native people achieve “first-class” citizenship and full equality with non-Native Americans. However, underneath lofty rhetoric of “emancipation” and “freedom” for Indian citizens lay racialized assumptions about Native peoples’ status as “wards” of the federal government. “Ward Indians” were assumed to be incompetent, dependent, and ultimately, incapable of becoming self-sufficient citizens. These racialized assumptions undergirded a series of eleven bills proposed in the House and Senate by Congressmen Francis Case (R-South Dakota), Hugh Butler (R-Nebraska), and Wesley D’Ewart (R-Montana) between 1944 and 1954. If they had passed, these bills—alternatively termed “competency bills” or “emancipation bills”—would have implemented a bureaucratic process for individual Indians to apply directly to either the Secretary of the Interior or a judge in a naturalization court for a “certificate of competency.” Once declared “competent,” a Native applicant—and his or her spouse and minor children—would cease to be wards of the federal government and be able to sell their property if they so desired. Under the guise of bestowing upon “competent” Native people “full” American citizenship, competency legislation ultimately sought to disrupt Native families and tribal communities, remove trust restrictions on Indian land, and “set a date and time when wardship will eventually end,” terminating the relationship between Native tribes and the federal government. This paper explores the ways in which state agents utilized proposed competency bills as a method for defining and judging “Indianness” as a racialized and gendered identity. The paper examines the racialized and gendered criteria instituted in the legislation for determining “competency” of individual applicants and their suitability for “full” citizenship. I also explore the vociferous critiques of Native organizations and tribal groups who opposed competency legislation on the basis that it undermined tribal sovereignty and threatened Indian land. Though none of these proposed bills ever became laws, they reveal the complex conflicts over how, in the post-World War II period of multiculturalism and civil rights rhetoric, “Indian” as a racial and gendered identity should be defined. 50. Teaching Indigenous History in/as an Indigenous Required Course(ICR) (Symposium)Dancing Around the Topic: Attempts to Avoid Indigenous History While Taking an ICR CourseRyan Eyford, University of Winnipeg In this paper, Ryan Eyford will talk about a common trend in student essay assignments in two courses, HIST-2510 (Indigenous Peoples of Canada to 1815) and HIST-2511 (Indigenous Peoples in Canada Since 1815). In particular, he shows how many students tended to avoid using sources by or about Indigenous people, and instead privileged sources about Europeans or Euro-Canadians (i.e. sources about George Vancouver instead of the First Nations people that he encountered).??History Faculty and History Indigenous Course Requirement CoursesMary Jane Logan McCallum, University of WinnipegDiscussions of mandatory Indigenous content courses currently exist in media, at some scholarly conferences and in some online publications such as Active History. None of these discussions has centred faculty perspectives and none has dealt exclusively with history faculty roles in teaching courses. In this paper, Mary Jane Logan McCallum presents preliminary findings of a research project on six History faculty ICR instructors who taught one or more ICR during the 2016-2017 year. This project seeks to document and analyze History faculty approaches, methods and experiences in undertaking ICR courses. That?Paper: Denial in the Context of Mandatory LearningKaren Froman, University of Winnipeg In the 2016-2017 year, I taught three ICR courses: HIST 3523 (Indigenous Women’s History), HIST 2516 (History of Indigenous Education: Residential Schools and Beyond) and HIST 2509 (History of Indigenous Peoples). One eye-opening experience for me this year was in addressing how non-Native students deal with (or not) the uncomfortable truth. ?In this paper, I will discuss how I teach about violence in Indigenous history especially in the context of Indian Residential Schools. ?I will describe the assignments I give to students in those courses. ?I will also describe my own?response to student papers which fail to engage with evidence and which instead rely on popular misconceptions of Indigenous history. ? 51. Memorial Panel for Nancy Oestreich Lurie (Symposium)Panel abstract: Nancy Oestreich Lurie (1922-2017) was a central figure in the origins of the discipline of Ethnohistory and the methodological and theoretical debates that shaped its first decades. Along with Sol Tax, with whom she worked on the pivotal American Indian Chicago Conference (1961), she was one of the leading advocates of an action anthropology devoted to combining anthropological research with service to Indigenous communities engaged in their struggles for sovereignty and survival. The foremost anthropological authority on the Indigenous peoples of Wisconsin, particularly the Ho-Chunk Nation, with whom she had worked since 1944, Lurie was also a leading museum anthropologist, curator emerita of Anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Our panel pays tribute to Nancy Oestreich Lurie’s contributions to ethnohistory and anthropology throughout her extraordinary seven-decade career.Nancy Lurie and the Wisconsin IdeaLarry Nesper, University of WisconsinNancy Lurie was the pre-eminent ethnographer of Indian Wisconsin for the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. She was also actively involved with two of Wisconsin’s tribes—the Menominee and the Ho-Chunk—in their political, economic and social aspirations. She began her career as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent most of her career as Curator of Anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum. This paper reviews her accomplishments in view of the Wisconsin Idea, the University’s commitment to benefitting all of the citizens of the state, for which she received an honorary doctorate from UW-Madison in 2004.Unmasking “The fallacy of misplaced concreteness:” Nancy Lurie, Jean Nicolet, and the Proto-History of the Ho-Chunk.Patrick J. Jung, Milwaukee School of EngineeringAnthropologist Nancy Lurie dedicated her career to the study of the culture and history of the Ho-Chunk Indians. Her 1960 essay on the proto-history of the Ho-Chunk remains the starting point for any investigation into this subject. Lurie later revised several of her conclusions, the most important of which concerned the 1634 mission of Jean Nicolet, the first European to make contact with the Ho-Chunk. The early research on Nicolet in the latter half of the nineteenth century produced many significant factual errors that, over the course of a century and a half, scholars had uncritically repeated until they had become dogmas. When Lurie realized after much research that she had repeated several of these spurious conclusions in her 1960 essay, she published a “corrigenda,” or a list of errors relating to Nicolet that included well-argued corrections. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, Lurie labeled such errors, “The fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In her corrigenda, she definitively established that, contrary to what earlier historians had written, Nicolet did not seek the Northwest Passage on his 1634 journey; he also did not wear a Chinese robe. She determined his mission was purely diplomatic. This revelation produced a clearer understanding of the French motives behind Nicolet’s mission. This in turn produced a new understanding of the proto-historic Ho-Chunk, who established a powerful chiefdom in the Green Bay region. While her theory that the Ho-Chunk were of Middle Mississippian ancestry is generally not accepted by archaeologists or anthropologists, ethnohistorians owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for solving the riddle of Nicolet’s 1634 journey. ‘A Dangerous Spot’: Nancy Lurie and the Violent Facts of EthnohistoryJoshua J. Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillUpon reflecting on Lurie’s monumental career and contributions, this paper highlights her contributions to both action anthropology and the emergence of what is now the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE). Lurie served as co-Coordinator for the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference. In addition to her ongoing research with Indigenous Peoples, she was also an expert witness on many cases for many Tribes including the Menominee in the federal courts. She carried the action anthropology tradition forward in her tireless work with the Menominee helping them fight termination, while working on many action projects with them as well as the Wisconsin Winnebago and the United Indians of Milwaukee. This paper draws out Lurie’s political location vis-à-vis Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Anthropological Methods by utilising Lurie’s correspondence with Sol Tax together with her essays on methods, especially her cogent critique of what in her time was the newly exploding field of applied anthropology; and, the scientistic paradigm that underscored it. In June of 1955, Julian Steward declared,?“There is evidently developing a rather dangerous group including Nancy Lurie…? which is doing considerable violence to facts and interpretations which is putting anthropology in a very dangerous spot.”? The ASE as a community and an organization is very much an outcome of the very position Nancy, along with others, took against the cultural evolutionists such as Steward who took notice of Lurie’s courageous stance against his and others’ so-called ‘facts’.?? “Pow-Wow-How-Taxed-We-Are:” Nancy O. Lurie and Sol TaxJudy Daubenmier, Independent ScholarThe relationship between Nancy O. Lurie and Sol Tax nearly ended before it started. Tax, a University of Chicago anthropology professor, helped bring about a premature close to Lurie’s career as a graduate student at the university. After her departure from the University of Chicago, Lurie earned her doctorate at Northwestern and would miss out on the formative years of action anthropology. But Tax’s former student, who became head of anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum, went on to embrace the concept and practice of action anthropology, describing herself a few years later as “joyously wallowing” in action anthropology. Lurie’s former mentor, in turn, came to rely on Lurie to help organize the American Indian Chicago Conference, selecting her as his assistant coordinator for the large gathering of Indian peoples from around the nation. Tax’s demanding management style pushed Lurie so hard that she penned the lyrics of a song teasing Tax for overworking her and others on the conference organizing staff. Yet she looked back on the conference as crucial to bringing about a renewed interest in “tribal sovereignty” about indigenous people and sparked her special collaboration with Helen Miner Miller and the HoChunk.This paper looks at how Lurie and Tax managed to create a fruitful, working relationship despite the rocky beginning. It discusses how two extremely talented individuals had the character to put aside personal matters of the past because of their mutual dedication to collaborating with American Indians at a time of great ferment in federal Indian policy and the stirrings of change within anthropology itself. Each of them had a talent for action anthropology. And they also had a talent for recognizing merit in other’s work.734-612-7137Action Anthropology and Anthropological Engagements with Indigeneity: Nancy Oestreich Lurie, Ho-Chunk Reorganization, and the concept of the “Articulatory Movement”Grant P. Arndt, Iowa State UniversityAction anthropology was a distinctive conceptualization of the relationship between Indigeneity and anthropological practice in mid-twentieth century Americanist anthropology. Working during a moment of crisis and mobilization across Native North America spurred by Federal termination legislation and other threats to sovereignty and survival, action anthropologists attempted to render practical aid to communities seeking to solve their own problems while contributing to the development of anthropological theory. Both the practical and theoretical dimensions of action anthropology have been somewhat obscured for later generations by a lack of accessible accounts of the majority of its projects and by the difficulties of translating methodological and theoretical statements written in different conceptual vocabularies from those most prominent in subsequent decades. My paper focuses on Nancy Oestreich Lurie’s first major project of action anthropology: her involvement between 1962 and 1965 in the Ho-Chunk Nation’s efforts to organize a federally-recognized tribal government under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Recruited by Ho-Chunk activist Helen Miner Miller, Lurie worked with Miller and other Ho-Chunk activists in carrying out an innovative “self-study” of Ho-Chunk communities in Wisconsin that sought to identify goals for self-governance and build general tribal support for reorganization. She also assisted Miller and others as they formed the Wisconsin Winnebago Business Committee to oversee the drafting of a constitution and organization of support for tribal organization. I connect Lurie’s experience with Ho-Chunk reorganization to her efforts to conceptualize the ongoing efforts of American Indian peoples to simultaneously maintain cultures and identities, reclaim sovereignty, and rebuild the institutional foundations of collective life as an “articulatory movement.”Nancy Lurie, Action AnthropologistAlice Kehoe, University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeNancy Lurie’s position assisting Sol Tax in organizing and running the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference can be said to have defined her professional life, although she herself always thought of herself as primarily a museum person. Tax, like Nancy, was a Milwaukee native, so like her, grew up in a distinctly American Socialist city where the mayors were far more concerned with providing good water and sewers than with Socialist theory, hence were tagged “sewer Socialists”. Tax’s Mesquakie fieldschool, 1948-1962, taught that the privileged University of Chicago students should listen to the Mesquakie people and endeavor to use White privilege to aid the oppressed according to their own wishes. In line with this Action Anthropology, Tax determined to host, in Chicago, an open conference of American Indians representing all tribes and also federally-unrecognized nations. Tax and his assistant, Lurie, would facilitate the logistics but not run the conference: that would be the Indians themselves. In this, the Conference would be the mirror opposite of the 1930s conferences run by John Collier for the Office of Indian Affairs. The Chicago Conference may be considered a landmark in postcolonialism. Nancy’s work in DRUMS with Ada Deer was certainly Action Anthropology; in a quieter way, so was her convening an advisory council of Indian representatives to consult on Milwaukee Public Museum exhibits and collections. Her 1993 Tribute to Survival at the Museum, a Grand Entry of lifesize mannequins of actual Milwaukee Indian residents in powwow regalia, powerfully and beautifully announces the Museum is showcasing living societies. It is now, for us, a memorial of Nancy, too.A Personal Perspective on Nancy Lurie’s Impact on Indian People in WisconsinAda Deer, University of Wisconsin, MilwaukeeNancy Lurie worked directly with the Menominee Restoration effort the resulted in the tribe being restored to federally recognized status. She also worked with the Ho-Chunk in their effort to organize and was a life-long advocate for the tribe. Ada will provide personal comments on her own involvement with Nancy and the impact that she has had on Indian people in Wisconsin. 52. New Ethnohistorical Research on Nahua Language and Culture (General Session)Humor, laughter, and pleasurable life as an area of encounter between Nahua and Spanish worldsAgnieszka Brylak, University of WarsawThe phenomenon of humor, ephemeral and dynamic as it is, allows to penetrate deeply into the cultural uniqueness and to inquire into the socio-cultural peculiarities. Nevertheless, due to its strong cultural conditioning, enhanced by individual preferences, it is difficult to grasp and understand its mechanism. It is particularly true in the context of cultural encounter as the one that occurred in the sixteenth-century Mexico between the Nahuas and the Spaniards. The present paper aims at presenting this aspect of cultural expression as a sphere of confluence and misunderstandings of the indigenous and European world views in early colonial New Spain.The focal point of the proposed talk is the divergent way in which Spanish (and mostly religious) authors referred to the phenomena of humor and laughter (often, though not always, associated with each other) in their writings. On the one hand, doctrinal texts in Nahuatl and Spanish (confessional manuals, sermons, religious treatises) condemn laughter and pleasurable life (ahuilnemiliztli). On the other hand, in their descriptions of pre-Hispanic Nahua performances Spanish friars seem to have treated some rituals as innocuous forms of expression and entertainment equated with European farces and interludes. Also, it is not uncommon to find humorous passages in religious plays in Nahuatl and references to comical spectacles from the colonial period in annals. The analysis of such an inconsistent approach to humor and laughter gives insight into a hitherto unexplored data that contribute in a new way to the ongoing discussion on the process of cultural transfer and formation of Nahua-Spanish dialogue.Quemman huetzca, pehua pepetlaca inenepil: Rediscovering Cipactli’s Tongue in Huastecan Oral Tradition and the Central Mexican CodicesJeffrey Pynes, University of UtahAllison Caplan, Tulane UniversityAn aetiological story from the Huasteca collected by native speaker and language activist Eduardo de la Cruz narrates lightning’s origin as the severed, sparkling tongue of the ahquetzpalin. As understood within the community, this story also serves to explain the anatomical lack of a tongue characteristic of true crocodilians. Drawing on two recent publications of this contemporary Huastecan Nahuatl story (de la Cruz 2015, Peregrina Llanes 2015 [Sandstrom 1990]), comparison with neighboring oral traditions, and conversations with de la Cruz about the story’s meaning, we propose that elements of this narrative offer insight into an unusual and previously unnoticed element of pre-colonial central Mexican iconography. A significant section of the corpus of painted representations of cipactli show the aquatic animal with a forked, bicolored red-and-blue tongue (fig. 1). This color patterning has restricted use in central Mexican codices and is typically reserved for representations of materials conceived of as fiery, such as flames, butterflies, and scarlet macaw upper-tail covert feathers. Extant historical sources do not supply an explanation for this element of cipactli’s iconography. Based on the aetiology of the modern Huastecan story, we hypothesize that cipactli’s tongue is portrayed as bicolored and forked because it was once identified with lightning. This interpretation is further supported by the well-documented view of cipactli’s body as the origin of the world and by the lack of any empirical basis for a forked bicolored tongue in crocodilian anatomy. Through the example of this reconstructed narrative, we underscore the importance of incorporating modern Nahuatl speakers’ understandings of their own narrative traditions into academic approaches to indigenous culture and history.Tlahtzomaliztli: Artistic Expression in a Contemporary Nahua CommunityAlberta Martínez Cruz, IDIEZ/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León In recent times, contemporary Nahua communities have faced a variety of changes affecting everything from their clothing, diet, lifestyle, political system, and even embroidery (López Austin 2008: 11). The history of Nahua embroidery has ancient origins. In the XVI century, according to the Florentine Codex, textile art was an important activity among women. Women who could make cotton string and create embroidered designs making use of a variety of colors and techniques were considered artisans. Embroidered cloth was used for decorative tablecloths, and delicate embroidered cloth was even used as clothing; thus the broad ancestral embroidery repertoire was transformed in an effort to immortalize the techniques and symbols of our ancestors through the creation of art. (Sabau García 1994: 40-43). Today in the communities of Chicontepec, Veracruz, this activity continues to be preserved although it is also being subjected to many changes in technique, design, material, and meaning. In this paper, I will compare the changes that have affected embroidery practices over the years, the techniques used today, the materials now chosen for embroidery, and the embroidered designs chosen for different purposes. The primary use of embroidery today is as tablecloths, but it is also used for the “quechquemitl”, the blouse worn by women. Regarding the latter, a great change has been visible in the indigenous communities of the Sierra de Chicontepec due to the influence of migration and the new tendencies which are common in the globalized world. For this reason, women in the current generations choose to stop using the quechquemitl in favor of more modern clothing and, consequently, they lose the practice of embroidery. As a response, groups of older women in Nahua communities such as Ayacaxtle and El Tecomate have come together to preserve this activity, creating new designs, displaying embroidery at cultural events, and, above all, recovering their own artistic expression in order to recover the significance and historical importance their embroidery practice.53. Dogs in Northern Ethnohistory (Symposium)Dogs of the Southeastern United States Meagan Dennison, M.A., University of Tennessee, Knoxville Domestic dogs have been present in the Southeastern United States for more than 10,000 years, fulfilling various ecological and cultural niches throughout time. Drawing from both archaeological and ethnohistoric data, this paper explores the relationship between dogs and native communities in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries from the Southern Appalachians, and Southeast more generally. Particular attention will be given to the roles dogs played in pack-carrying, hunting/tracking, protecting and serving as spiritual guides to the afterlife. Addressing how indigenous dogs’ roles, genetics and behaviors changed with European breed influx will also be considered. An Ethnohistory of Dogs in the Western SubarcticPatricia A. McCormack, Ph.D, University of AlbertaThis paper provides an overview ethnohistory of dogs in the western Subarctic, especially the Mackenzie Basin. Dogs and humans entered the Subarctic together and have lived in association since the Pleistocene. Although dogs were one of the categories of non-human persons of the Aboriginal world and were engaged with humans directly in daily life, surprisingly little research has been undertaken on this subject. Instead, northern dogs have been viewed mainly in their recent role as sled dogs, an economic role instigated by the fur trade, that evolved several forms over time, with material culture that was a synthesis of western Subarctic sleds and eastern Aboriginal sleds and decorative elements.Sled Dogs through the Lens of Personal Narratives: Journeying across Spatial, Cultural and Generational Divides/BordersIngrid Urberg, University of AlbertaSled dogs are frequently described as the cause of and means for cross-cultural meetings, exchanges and clashes in myriad North American historic arctic and subarctic texts including exploration narratives and first-hand accounts of the fur trade, as well as more recent narratives of adventure and self-discovery. They are depicted as carrying inhabitants of and visitors to the North across spatial and cultural boundaries, and their presence and at times appearance and/or disappearance highlight issues surrounding colonization and often serve as a marker of otherness. After providing a brief survey of these themes, I will focus on the strong relationality (to use literary critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s term) of sled dogs in several more recent northern personal narratives for both adults and children—including Bren Kolson’s Myths of the Barrens: One Aboriginal Woman’s Journey Through the Barren Lands of Canada (2009) and Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s a stranger at home: A True Story (2011). I will argue that their position in these texts mirrors another type of ethnohistoric divide/border which sled dogs have assisted people—indigenous and non-indigenous— in navigating, namely generational divides and trauma linked to colonization and removal from the land and community. ................
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