Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900

354 Pages·2010·4.36 MB·English

by  Laura L. Scheiber, Mark D. Mitchell

Across a Great Divide
Amerind Studies in Archaeology
Series Editor John Ware
Volume 1
Trincheras Sites in Time, Space, and Society
Edited by Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish, and M. Elisa Villalpando
Volume 2
Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning
in Indigenous Archaeology
Edited by Stephen W. Silliman
Volume 3
Warfare in Cultural Context: Practice, Agency, and the
Archaeology of Violence
Edited by Axel E. Nielsen and William H. Walker
Volume 4
Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native
North American Societies, 1400–1900
Edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell
Across A Great Divide
Continuity and Change in Native
North American Societies,
1400–1900
Edited by Laura L. Scheiber
and Mark D. Mitchell
The University of Arizona Press
Tucson
We dedicate this book to
Kent G. Lightfoot
for inspiring us to cross many divides
The University of Arizona Press
© 2010 The Arizona Board of Regents
All rights reserved
www.uapress.arizona.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Across a great divide : continuity and change in native North
American societies, 1400–1900 / edited by Laura L. Scheiber
and Mark D. Mitchell.
p. cm. — (Amerind studies in archaeology ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8165-2871-4
1. Indians of North America—Social conditions. 2. Indi-
ans of North America—Colonization—Social aspects. 3.
Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation. 4. North
America—Colonization—Social aspects. 5. Social archaeol-
ogy—North America. 6. Social change—North America.
I. Scheiber, Laura L. II. Mitchell, Mark D.
E98.S67A26 2010
305.897—dc22
2009034326
Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality
paper containing a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer waste and processed
chlorine free.
15 14 13 12 11 10 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword by John Ware vii
1 Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term
History 1
Mark D. Mitchell and Laura L. Scheiber
2 Agency and Practice in Apalachee Province 23
John F. Scarry
3 Long-Term History, Positionality, Contingency,
Hybridity: Does Rethinking Indigenous History
Reframe the Jamestown Colony? 42
Jeffrey L. Hantman
4 When Moral Economies and Capitalism Meet: Creek
Factionalism and the Colonial Southeastern Frontier 61
Cameron B. Wesson
5 Not Just “One Site Against the World”: Seneca
Iroquois Intercommunity Connections and
Autonomy, 1550–1779 79
Kurt A. Jordan
6 A Prophet Has Arisen: The Archaeology of Nativism
among the Nineteenth-Century Algonquin Peoples
of Illinois 107
Mark J. Wagner
7 Mountain Shoshone Technological Transitions across
the Great Divide 128
Laura L. Scheiber and Judson Byrd Finley
8 The Plains Hide Trade: French Impact on Wichita
Technology and Society 149
Susan C. Vehik, Lauren M. Cleeland, Richard R. Drass, Stephen
M. Perkins, and Liz Leith
vi Contents
9 “Like Butterflies on a Mounting Board”: Pueblo
Mobility and Demography before 1825 174
Jeremy Kulisheck
10 The Diné at the Edge of History: Navajo Ethnogenesis
in the Northern Southwest, 1500–1750 192
Richard H. Wilshusen
11 A Cross-Cultural Study of Colonialism and Indigenous Foodways
in Western North America 212
Anthony P. Graesch, Julienne Bernard, and Anna C. Noah
12 Identity Collectives and Religious Colonialism
in Coastal Western Alaska 239
Liam Frink
13 Crossing, Bridging, and Transgressing Divides
in the Study of Native North America 258
Stephen W. Silliman
References Cited 277
About the Contributors 329
Index 337
Foreword
This book addresses colonial interactions in North America from
the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century. The emphasis
throughout the book is on interactions as opposed to one-way colonial
effects. Historians and archaeologists often emphasize the impacts that
colonizers have on the indigenous societies with which they collide.
The actions, agencies, and institutions of indigenous people are often
overlooked, or their influence on the outcome of colonial processes is
dismissed as trivial. In North America, European technologies, disease
processes, and social-political institutions are typically seen as overwhelm-
ing the less sophisticated and less populous Native American cultures
of the continent.
The chapters in this volume, which are based on the presentations at a
prize-winning symposium at the Amerind Foundation in October 2007,
adopt a more nuanced view of European–Native American interactions.
The chapter authors argue persuasively that colonial processes in North
America consisted of more than just what the colonizers brought to the
table. Native Americans were never passive participants in the process;
rather, they were active agents who made choices, exercised judgments,
accepted some things and rejected others, in many cases contributed as
much or more than they received, and reinterpreted and reorganized
everything that came their way.
This more complex view of colonial interactions resonates with my
own research among the Pueblo people of the American Southwest. The
canonical explanation of East-West Pueblo differences (Eggan 1950)
assumes that European diseases and Spanish assimilation programs had
viii John Ware
a more profound impact on the densely populated Pueblo communities
of the Rio Grande Valley — who, after all, lived cheek by jowl with the
Spanish for three centuries — than they did on the more dispersed settle-
ments of the western Pueblos. As a result, archaeologists attempting to
reconstruct ancestral Pueblo organizations pay scant attention to Rio
Grande Pueblo social-political-ceremonial institutions, organizations
assumed to have been tainted by Spanish political institutions and mar-
riage practices and distorted by catastrophic demographic shifts.
In fact, the situation was much more complicated than this. Unlike the
kin-based organizations of the western Pueblos, which are easily eroded
when population crashes and descent groups die out, the sodality-based
organizations of the Rio Grande Pueblos are comparatively resilient
to demographic insults. The theocratic organizations of the eastern
Pueblos, whose activities are typically hidden behind multiple layers of
secrecy (which caused many Spanish and American administrators to
consistently underestimate their influence), are nearly always pan-tribal
and intertribal in scope, rendering them extremely resilient in the face
of external pressures to change. If a chapter of a sodality should die out
in a Rio Grande Pueblo community because of population decline or
other colonial disruption, the organization can be reconstituted from
a neighboring pueblo where the sodality is intact. The Tewas call this
process “reinvigorating the vine” (Ortiz 1994:304–305). The sodalities
cannot exist without the pueblos, but they can persist despite the loss
of individual villages or most of the population of a village — just as
a vine can survive the loss of individual leaves, stems, and branches.
Unfortunately, the deep resilience of eastern Pueblo institutions has been
profoundly underappreciated by historical scholars because the reigning
postcolonial paradigm has focused scholarly attention on Columbian
consequences rather than interactions. This book takes a very large step
toward correcting that bias.
There are many people to thank for the successful completion of this
groundbreaking volume. First and foremost are the book’s editors, Laura
Scheiber and Mark Mitchell, who conceived of the idea for a Society of
American Archaeology (SAA) symposium, brought together a splendid
cast of scholars to participate in the symposium in Austin — and, six
months later, the seminar in Dragoon — and who went on to shepherd
the volume of contributed papers through its many edits and iterations.
Foreword ix
Thanks also to the book’s contributors for the original research that com-
prises the book’s chapters, as well as to Steve Silliman for his insightful
comments during and after the SAA and Amerind symposia. Finally,
my thanks to Allyson Carter and the staff of the University of Arizona
Press for bringing the manuscript to press, to the SAA for cosponsoring
Amerind’s annual SAA Symposium Prize, and to the staff and board of
the Amerind Foundation for their hard work in support of Amerind’s
advanced seminar program.
John Ware