The Creation and Endurance of Memory and Place Among First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Examinations of rock art typically focus on acts of creation and compositional meaning, with little attention paid to the position of these created places in the palimpsest of history. As these sites endure, their recognition and importance within subsequent social developments, including memory and oral tradition, are both invented and reinvented as descendant populations become established or as new populations move in displacing or replacing the makers. This paper examines the ways in which oral histories of historic and contemporary First Nations populations in northwestern Ontario, Canada, challenge standard understandings of rock-art in the region, taking these sites out of the maker/meaning context and placing them within a framework of user/caretaker. The results of this contextual shift contest notions of applied cultural affiliation and traditional ownership, resulting in a perspective that reveals a transgenerational and transcultural endurance of these places in the contemporary social memory of these Indigenous communities.

Excavating and interpreting ancestral action: Stories from the subsurface of Orokolo Bay, Papua New Guinea

“…Among many ways of knowing the past, Indigenous community members ‘read’ ancestral places and landscapes for meaning and historicity (Boogaart, 2001; Cruikshank, 2005; Morphy, 1995). These readings take place in relation to artefacts (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2006; Mosley, 2010: 68), flora and fauna (Bradley, 2008; Rose, 1996), rock art (Brady et al., 2016; papers in Brady and Taçon, 2016; Norder, 2012), water and watercourses (Langton, 2008: 144–148), fossils (Smith, 2019: 62) and other physical features of the landscape (Alcock, 2002; Basso, 1996; Bradley, 2000; Cruikshank, 2005). Indigenous interpretations of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features have received far less attention: these engagements are seldom reported and are under-theorised (but see Ballard, in press, 1998; David et al., 2012; Pauketat, 2008; see Jones, 2012; Moshenska, 2007, 2009 for non-Indigenous public interpretations of the subsurface).…”