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This chapter explores “haunting” as a way to conceptualize and engage with the traumatic events of the United States Federal Indian Boarding School era. The goal is to create an intersectional and intersubjective approach that does not seek singular explanations, but leaves room for diversity of memory—a core principle in feminist indigenous theory. Bringing together archaeological, archival, and oral data, we tell three stories of perseverance that have come to light from community‐based heritage work. In this manner, archaeology has the power to facilitate community healing and decolonize women's experiences at the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School.

Editing this volume has been both a political and personal project for me. As a longtime sufferer of a chronic illness, I have been interested in how disparities in healthcare, be it the care an individual receives or the care an individual can afford, shape an individual's life course. Healthcare is not apolitical; a person's class, gender, citizenship, and racial status can determine the quality and amount of care they receive. As we see here in the United States, the first people who were tested for COVID-19 were not those who were vulnerable, on the frontlines of fighting the virus, and in need, but rather wealthy politicians and athletes who had the capital and power to access tests. In the middle of this pandemic, the structural factors influencing people's care seem insurmountable. How do we fix this system given the politicalization of masks, the material culture essential to preventing the spread of COVID-19?

This thematic volume explores how health, well-being, and ability are constructed in the past and in the present. The volume’s authors undo and question deeply ingrained assumptions about what constitutes a “normative” body. They do so by not only looking at how bodies have been medicalized and envisioned in the past, but also how our own profession and discipline discriminates against certain types of bodies in the present.

The physical structure and configuration of the landscape play profound roles in how a culture settles and utilizes a region. The following case study in the former Kankakee marsh region of northwestern Indiana exemplifies how subtle topographic variation can have a significant impact on intra-wetland landscape utilization. In the Kankakee marsh landscape, so-called dune islands provided areas of preferential settlement that were reused throughout the prehistory and early history of the region. In particular, these islands were important locales for resource extraction during the Late Archaic period and resource processing and storage during the Middle and Late Woodland and Upper Mississippian periods.