Pequot Warriors Combating Paper Genocide: How the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation Uses Education to Resist Cultural Erasure

This paper analyzes the southeastern Connecticut Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation’s battle with cultural erasure and resistance through education. Indigenous education programs are gradual yet the most effective method of resisting Western cultural erasure from the United States government, because they peacefully invite both Natives and non-Natives to learn about Native American history outside of European colonizer textbooks. The Tribe battles the erasure that can result from external parties’ ability to grant state or federal titles recognizing tribal authority (known as recognition titles) to determine who receives the powerful stamp of Indigeneity and the right to self- govern. My case study focuses on the Eastern Pequots Archaeology Field School project in collaboration with University of Massachusetts, Boston. I evaluate how the Eastern Pequots use a collaborative archaeology education program with their Tribal members and non-Native individuals to resist erasure by decolonizing Western pedagogy. The Field School has gathered over 99,000 artifacts over 15 seasons that dismantle common misconceptions of how Native Americans lived during the beginning of the United States’ history and redefine modern beliefs about how Natives survived European colonization. The Field School contributes to expanding brief descriptions of Native history into a more complicated and dynamic story that elaborates on Native struggle, survival and resistance.

Shellfish Collection and Community Connections in Eighteenth-Century Native New England

In recent years, the archaeology of Native American sites in colonial contexts has increased our understanding of how indigenous communities persisted in challenging times. Greater attention to practices helps to create a more enriched picture, especially when set in the context of food and consumption. This article considers shellfish remains excavated from three households on the Eastern Pequot reservation, located several kilometers Inland from the Connecticut coast in southern New England, to explore the role that shellfish gathering played in eighteenth-century subsistence and social practices in Native New England. Household variability in the specific species and quantity consumed, as well as disposal methods, provide insight into internal community decision making. Moreover, eighteenth-century reservation demographics strongly accentuate the role of women in the provision of these foodstuffs and in maintaining cultural connections to the coast and other off-reservation communities. Practices of gathering and consuming shellfish thus provide vectors of change and continuity in Native American communities of colonial New England, showing how these practices represent not only connections to a deeper past, but also ongoing and even resurging practices to engage with a colonial present.

Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: A Response to Stephen Silliman

Stephen Silliman's article in American Antiquity (74:211-230) addresses a key issue that has been in quiet circulation for some time, examining the connections between archaeological data, traditional persistence, and postcolonial ways of understanding diachronic variability. This is a fundamental problem not only for archaeology but for American social scientists researching colonialism and traditional cultures (Alfred 1995; Harrod 1995; Stover 2001). Silliman orients his understanding of historic Eastern Pequot settlement through the lens of a theoretical approach to memory and practice as has been taken up in archaeological circles by a number of practitioners (cf. Silliman 2009:213). He acknowledges the existence of other perspectives, not least that of past Native people themselves, but the article focuses primarily on the application of current thinking on these topics of identity.

Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the "precontact baseline," they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

Signs of identity, signs of memory

This essay explores everyday practices as sites of memory-making, arguing that such practices have the potential to serve as markers and makers of cultural identity. I use frameworks of social memory to interpret 19th-century butchery practices on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. Colonialism meant change for Pequot peoples, including shifts in family structures and the adoption of mass produced material culture. I argue that, within these abrupt changes, social memory and memory-making practices played a central role in maintaining and congealing indigenous identity. I examine evidence of changing butchery practices on the reservation as they related to the adoption of metal tools. Archaeological investigations demonstrate that even though the Eastern Pequot increasingly used metal tools for butchery, they also continued to use chipped tools made of either stone or glass. I suggest that this pattern is significant because of the ‘mnemonic’ qualities that chipped-tool usage might have carried on reservation grounds. These mnemonic practices served as binding ties for the reservation community.