Craig N. Cipolla

Native American Historical Archaeology and the Trope of Authenticity

This essay argues that historical archaeology has the potential to complicate and challenge colonial narratives of authenticity, not only in the rich data that it collects and studies, but also in the ways in which it goes about collecting these data. Case studies from colonial New England exemplify the nuanced perspectives on native spirituality and community cohesion offered via historical archaeology. These complex and variegated archaeological histories have the potential to break the dichotomous tropes inherent in public understandings of colonialism. Recent historical archaeological research with the Brothertown Indian Nation also serves to demonstrate the ways in which critical, collaborative, and pragmatic approaches can challenge colonial narratives on a local scale.

Commemoration, Community, and Colonial Politics At Brothertown

Abstract The Brothertown Indian community formed in the late eighteenth century when Christian factions of several Algonquian tribes from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and coastal New York moved west together in hopes of escaping the land politics and corrupting influences of colonial culture on the East Coast. The community settled in central New York State for a time, but relocated once again to current-day Brothertown, Wisconsin in the 1830s. Established in 2006, the Brothertown Archaeology Project explores Brothertown history from the perspective of collaborative historical archaeology. Data collected from Brothertown cemeteries during the first few seasons of the project offer valuable perspectives on Brothertown commemoration practices and the changes they underwent between 1780 and 1910. When compared with larger trends in Native American and Euroamerican commemoration, these data yield new insights into history, memory, and materiality at Brothertown and speak to the politics of post-Columbian North America, both past and present.

Textual Artifacts, Artifactual Texts: An Historical Archaeology of Brothertown Writing

Systematic analyses of 18th- and 19th-century texts written by, to, and about the Brothertown Indians demonstrate the merits of experimenting with new approaches to the written word in historical archaeology. Formed from Christian factions of several tribal groups living in coastal northeastern North America, the Brothertown Indian community readily embraced the English language beginning in the second half of the 18th century. As seen in gravemarker inscriptions and historical documents, Brothertown writing practices contain important clues into issues of colonial entanglement, ethnogenesis, and subaltern agency. In uncovering new and insightful perspectives on these processes, methods of textual analysis developed in the context of the Brothertown Archaeology Project demonstrate the merits of deeper engagements with the language of historical texts.

Resituating Homeland: Motion, Movement, and Ethnogenesis at Brothertown

Colonial tensions of eighteenth-century New England led to the formation of a multi-tribal Christian community of Algonquian peoples known as the Brothertown Indians. This new group took shape as its members relocated from their home reservations of New England to central New York State. In the mid-nineteenth century, the community moved once again, this time to current-day Wisconsin, where it remains situated today. This chapter draws upon written discourse, settlement patterns, and cemetery spaces to explore the types of placemaking coincided with the ethnogenesis of the Brothertown community. The discursive, experiential, and mnemonic implications of the Brothertown Indian Movement analyzed in this chapter speak to the place of movement in community formation, cultural entanglement, and social navigation. Since Brothertown history involved mobility and migration, this chapter also highlights the differences that continually starting anew in foreign landscapes made for different generations of Brothertown Indians