Colonialism
may have significantly changed the history of North America, but its
impact on Native Americans has been greatly misunderstood.
In this book, Neal Ferris offers alternative explanations of colonial
encounters that emphasize continuity as well as change affecting Native
behaviors. He examines how communities from three aboriginal nations in
what is now southwestern Ontario negotiated the changes that
accompanied the arrival of Europeans and maintained a cultural
continuity with their pasts that has been too often overlooked in
conventional “master narrative” histories of contact.
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In
reconsidering Native adaptation and resistance to colonial British
rule, Ferris reviews five centuries of interaction that are usually
read as a single event viewed through the lens of historical bias. |
He first examines patterns of traditional lifeway continuity among the
Ojibwa, demonstrating their ability to maintain seasonal mobility up to
the mid-nineteenth century and their adaptive response to its loss. He
then looks at the experience of refugee Delawares, who settled among
the Ojibwa as a missionary-sponsored community yet managed to maintain
an identity distinct from missionary influences. And he shows how the
archaeological history of the Six Nations Iroquois reflected patterns
of negotiating emergent colonialism when they returned to the region in
the 1780s, exploring how families managed tradition and the
contemporary colonial world to develop innovative ways of revising and
maintaining identity.
The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism
convincingly utilizes historical archaeology to link the Native
experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the deeper
history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interactions and with
pre-European times. It shows how these Native communities succeeded in
retaining cohesiveness through centuries of foreign influence and
material innovations by maintaining ancient, adaptive social processes
that both incorporated European ideas and reinforced historically
understood notions of self and community.
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The Archaeology of
Native-Lived Colonialism
Challenging History in the Great Lakes
by Neal Ferris
University of Arizona Press,
2009
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a copy
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