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] simply as one of European domination. In placing individual or collective action at the center of this concept of persistence, however, we must also recognize the potential for divergent motives and understandings within a particular group or society (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Sahlins 1985). A focus on practice is necessarily contextual and in this way can also help us to interpret longterm trends on a more human scale. Silliman (2009), for example, notes that in understanding dynamic cultural practices, we cannot simply use the late precontact period as a baseline for change. From a practice perspective, we might view native peoples in the early colonial period as carrying with them cultural dispositions attuned to precontact lifeways, as well as simultaneously negotiating new cultural structures (and power relations) in the form of European colonialism. Yet we must also recognize that such cultural dispositions are historically situated and constantly in flux. We should therefore accept that indigenous sites dating to decades or centuries after initial contact or prolonged periods of colonialism might have few direct material referents to precontact technologies and traditions (Martindale 2009; Silliman 2009). Archaeologists may need to investigate more points or “windows” on the continuum between ancient and recent times in order to fully contextualize apparent changes in cultural practices reflected in the archaeological record (Lightfoot et al. 1998:202). Ferris’s (2009) concept of “changing continuities” eloquently captures the notion that persistence itself is a dynamic process that takes social work and that we need to work across both longand short-term time scales to understand how indigenous societies have transformed and perpetuated themselves (Mitchell and Scheiber 2010:17). Through a focus on practice, the idea of persistence is rooted in human agency. This is not to suggest that all examples of persistence were necessarily intentional acts (although many were) but, rather, that the accumulated effects of individual and group choices, each structured by the past but looking to the future, also served to slowly facilitate the persistence of native communities. This process, while agental, is also diachronic, as it spans generations. Thus indigenous practices, like the social identities they are bound up with, are always in the process of becoming. ARCHAEOLOGIES OF PERSISTENCE 109 These “changing continuities” challenge us to develop method and theory that get beyond the simplistic uses of the ethnographic and prehistoric records for understanding changes and continuities in native societies (Lightfoot 1995; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2009; Wilcox 2009). As Mitchell and Scheiber (2010:18) assert, change was not the simple result of contact with others; rather, it came from within native societies that drew on existing beliefs and practices to actively negotiate the colonial period. Through a focus on daily practice, we can give texture and meaning to the lives of people who grappled— sometimes successfully, sometimes not—with unimaginable upheaval. Context One way to overcome terminal narratives and the shortcomings of essentialist approaches is to frame our discussions of indigenous negotiations of colonialism within the context of long-term historical trajectories. As suggested by Ferris (2009:xiv), we need to develop ways to link ancient histories to recent histories. Native cultures were not static prior to the arrival of European colonists, nor did the moment of contact freeze native societies in an ahistorical ethnographic present in which culture change of whatever form necessarily amounts to a loss of authenticity (Silliman 2009). Through a careful examination of the context of changes in indigenous societies, we can help counter the tropes of dependency, assimilation, and cultural extinction that so often frame discussion of indigenous peoples and their entanglements with Euro-American colonial enterprises (Ferris 2009; Martindale 2009; Mitchell and Scheiber 2010). This idea of contextualizing indigenous colonial experiences is present in Hull’s (2009) research on the relationship between culture change and infectious disease in California’s Sierra Nevada region. As she (2009) points out, the ways in which native peoples dealt with early epidemics, as well as later colonial impositions, were conditioned by earlier demographic shifts and cultural “contacts” that took place decades, centuries, and millennia prior to the arrival of Euro-Americans. In the Great Lakes region, Ferris similarly focuses on indigenous colonial experiences within a broadly diachronic perspective,