Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America (January 2013) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Lee Panich Published: January 2013 # of Pages: 19 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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Panich] yet dynamic cultural values to negotiate the colonial period. These approaches, I contend, have the potential to advance the goal of an integrated archaeological approach to native histories (Lightfoot 1995) and may provide further stimulus for the collaboration between archaeologists and indigenous groups. Archaeologies of Persistence Persistence, in common usage, refers to a continuation of existence in the face of opposition. As a general observation, this definition works well for describing those indigenous groups that intentionally maintained identities distinct from Euro-American colonists and settlers. But persistence should not imply stasis or passivity, as in many cases indigenous identities were reinterpreted and transformed even as they were perpetuated. Any concept of persistence must therefore also deal with change and adjustment, leaving room for the active negotiation of the various forms of opposition—warfare, disease, dislocation, and policies of assimilation, to name but a few—native peoples have encountered in the past five centuries. Persistence, then, acknowledges the physical and symbolic violence of colonialism but also allows for a continuum of processes that encapsulates various forms of perseverance, ranging from intentional resistance or ethnogenesis to more subtle shifts in political organization and group identity that draw on and are structured by dynamic cultural values and practices. The key to understanding this definition as applied to the archaeology of native North America is the recognition that persistence can accommodate change—indeed, it may often require it. In the following section, I address three crucial theoretical developments, drawn from contemporary debate, that I argue are useful for the articulation of diverse archaeologies of persistence: 1. Identity. Recent research on identity suggests that it is not tied to essentialist traits but, rather, is constructed socially. In this sense, identities can be transmitted across generations despite far-reaching changes in other aspects of life. 2. Practice. The application of practice theory in archaeology allows us to examine how the social world is constructed. When we apply it to the archaeology of colonialism, we can use it to see ARCHAEOLOGIES OF PERSISTENCE 107 how change is internally structured at the scale of daily practice. 3. Context. Through our ability to access broad time scales, archaeologists are uniquely positioned to demonstrate the dynamic nature of culture and identity and to thus contextualize the disjunctures of colonialism within the long-term history of indigenous groups and to understand their significance for native communities today. Identity Identity is at the core of many recent studies of indigenous persistence in North America. Archaeologists have largely rejected acculturation models that rely on a unilinear evolution from “Indian” to “European” and instead have expanded their investigations to include questions about hybridity, ethnogenesis, and the fluidity of identity in colonial settings. Recent work that examines indigenous peoples’ negotiations of the colonial period often draws from notions of identity that treat it as socially constructed through both self-definition and external categorization (Barth 1969; Jenkins 1996). Linking this definition of identity to practice through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Jones (1997) suggests that we can see the cohesion of collective identity as stemming from the recognition of shared cultural dispositions, which themselves are shaped by daily practice. These constructivist approaches offer a way around the restrictive analytical categories inherent in essentialist frameworks that equate indigenous identity with the retention of particular cultural elements. Identity then can be seen as strategic and relatively fluid, but it is also rooted in history through practice. Constructivism thus works well for understanding how identity was negotiated in colonial contexts in which “Indian” identity was reified even as it was open to reinterpretation. Before the onset of colonialism and the application of terms such as Indian or Indio to indigenous peoples, native individuals and families likely experienced their collective identities very differently, perhaps through their connections to a particular place or membership in a certain social or kin group. The term /ndian, in contrast, can be seen as a word used to denote otherness, an artifact of colonialism that has been used to essentialize indigenous peoples as static and primitive (Deloria