The indivisibility of land and mind: Indigenous knowledge and collaborative archaeology within Apache contexts

Abstract

Contemporary understandings of Apache history and culture have largely resulted from anthropological work by non-Apache researchers. Most of this work has exhibited a limited appreciation of Apache ontologies that provide better understandings of Apache past and present. The goal of this article is to utilize the Apache concept of Ni and Apache interpretations of the Chiricahua mountainscape to demonstrate how Apache communities retain significant and powerful links to the Chiricahua Mountains. It also provides a discussion of the dilemma of utilizing Western theory in collaborative projects with Apache communities and the need to focus more on tribally derived knowledge. Such knowledge can provide unique glimpses into the Apache past and associations to their former homelands that are crucial for contemporary collaborative archaeological–anthropological research projects involving Apache cultural experts and their ancestral homelands.

Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South

“…As these methods gain widespread acceptance, practitioners increasingly ask how they might advance a theoretical agenda (McNiven 2016; Cipolla, Quinn, and Levy 2019). I address this question by adopting an ethnographic approach (Dowdall and Parrish 2003; Ferguson and Colwell‐Chanthaphonh 2006; Laluk 2017) that attends to alternative archaeologies (or ways of knowing the deep past and renewing relationships with ancestral presences) already practiced within descendant communities, which may differ from how archaeology is usually imagined at this particular moment in time. I draw on ethnography as a methodology adapted for identifying contradictions between dominant discourses and local knowledges, or “life on the ground.” At the same time, many community members have taken archaeology classes in college.…”

“…Pvlvcekolv people see mounds as living and sentient landscapes (see also Mojica 2012; Howe 2014; Allen 2015a, 2015b; Miller 2015; and more generally Cruikshank 2005; Watts 2013; Laluk 2017; Larsen and Johnson 2017). They draw descendants into deep histories that might lead in other directions, deflating teleologies that cast mounds as sites of finished pasts subsumed by colonial orders as the apex of human progress.…”

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

“…Joining a chorus of voices regarding North American Indigenous archaeology (e.g., Atalay, , ; Cipolla ; Colwell‐Chanthaphonh et al. ; Laluk ), some researchers insist we see non‐Western practices of knowing and knowledge production in terms that are radically different from the taxonomies of modern science. In particular, Porr () and Bloch () advocate a renewed attention to the importance of the places that constitute aboriginal Australian or Indigenous American landscapes, and how native people know their past through experiences and stories of a panoply of places in the present, rather than in historicist tales that imply linear causal connections among events, actions, and dates (see also Nelson and Shilling ).…”

Finding Archaeology in 2017: What Is Archaeology and Why Are We Doing It? Why Should We Be Doing It?

“…The archaeological sites in the Boreda landscape are not a silent, severed past but continue to play an active role in determining contemporary social roles. In a similar but somewhat inverted case in the United States, Laluk () employs Apache cultural concepts to demonstrate continued profound links to their former homelands. Laluk also critiques the use of Western theories in Indigenous contexts and argues for acknowledging the critical role of tribal knowledge.…”