Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 and the explicit acknowledgment that Native peoples also have an interest in the past (for various reasons), archaeologists have slowly begun to see the benefits of collaborations with Indigenous groups. Because the archaeological record is underdetermined, significant bias can creep in when members of the dominant culture are left to investigate, interrogate, and interpret the material remains associated with marginalized groups. As we archaeologists come to understand how positionality can hinder our vision, it behooves us to participate in archaeology with, for, and by Indigenous peoples and create a progressive narrative that is not antithetical to Native needs and desires.
New England has a long history of white settlement that attracted early work in historical archaeology by James Deetz and his entourage (e.g., Plimoth Plantation). It is also where the “myth of the vanishing Indian” took hold, denying Native peoples any meaningful contribution to American history and effectively silencing their collective voices. Yet a closer historical examination reveals the persistence of Indigenous culture despite the prevalence of disease, warfare, enslavement, genocide, proselytization, land dispossession, miscegenation, and racism. Native survivance is evidenced by the stories, familial gatherings, curated artifacts, historical markers, place names, landownership, political action, and federal recognition in the United States granted to a select few groups in southeastern New England: the Mashantucket Pequots (1983), Narragansetts (1983), Mohegans (1994), Nipmucs (2001), and Mashpee Wampanoags (2007). The Nipmuc determination, however, was overturned in 2004.
In Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration, D. Rae Gould and her coauthors present a thinly veiled argument to challenge the flaws of this reversal of federal recognition. But the book is more than a defense of sovereignty. Using multidisciplinary approaches to documents, oral accounts, material remains, and cultural landscapes—the hallmark of historical archaeology—from a Native perspective, the authors braid together a cohesive understanding of a Nipmuc presence in their traditional homelands from before the establishment of John Eliot's “praying towns” to King Philip's War and its aftermath, up to the present.
The book is the outcome of cooperation among various institutions and organizations (e.g., the Nipmuc Nation; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; the Town of Grafton, Massachusetts; and the Public Archaeology Laboratory, a CRM firm based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) united in the interests of centering a Native agenda and demonstrating how cultural practices persisted throughout a very tumultuous four centuries. The result is a history that does more than reveal the past: it paves the way for the future. Even as the Nipmuc tribal leader, Cheryll Toney Holley, “waited for the researchers to mess up” (p. xi), archaeology proved to be a useful tool, revealing aspects of Nipmuc lifeways that went unrecorded or had been effectively erased by the dominant narrative that had marginalized Native peoples and undermined their cultural legitimacy. All of the authors have worked on one or more eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc sites to produce a revisionist history that includes “past and present loss and survival, renewal and revival, colonialism and racism, and political and legal struggles” (p. 22).
The authors craft a study that underscores the connections between past, present, and future. They develop a plausible model that shows how studies of Indigenous peoples and their spaces should be decolonized. They demonstrate the central role of women in preserving and maintaining tribal land and culture and how they differed from their white neighbors; that both female and male agents were politically savvy in their use of the legal system; and how the shifting spaces that Nipmuc peoples occupied, their reservation, and their connections to land and place are central to Native narratives about belonging.
Gould and her coauthors are part of a larger scholarly contingent whose work is “actively and consciously refashioning, reshaping, and redefining how the past is interpreted” (p. 186) as they preserve and integrate knowledge about these cultural landscapes through collaboration. They stand on the shoulders of others who pioneered this path, including Sonya Atalay, Elise Brenner, John Brown, Cathy Carlson, Paul Robinson, and Patricia Rubertone. Although some of the interpretations may be tenuous (e.g., the significance of Archaic age soapstone sherds to eighteenth-century descendants), the argument as a whole is sound. We are left wondering about the (legal) status of Nipmucs and who is (and is not) Nipmuc. Finally, throughout the volume the authors emphasize the creation of “histories that have futures” (p. 22). Histories can have futures, but only when they pierce the silence created by the dominant culture, lead to practical changes that accord sovereignty to marginalized groups, and advance efforts to transform conditions of economic, political, and cultural oppression. Therein will lie the main contribution of this study, though only time will tell.
