Decolonizing Archaeological Theory at Fort St. Joseph, An Eighteenth-Century Multi-Ethnic Community in the Western Great Lakes Region

Abstract

Recent archaeologies of colonialism have challenged and significantly revised contemporary imaginings of Indigenous peoples' engagement with Europeans and the impacts of these entanglements on material and social realities. Changes in socio-political climate beginning in the 1970s instigated reconceptualizations that accompanied increas- ingly audible sounds of Native voices and concerns. Political action outside the discipline has heightened archaeologists' self-reflexivity and engendered new theoretical frameworks such as the shift from acculturation to agency models and the trend away from essential- ized categories towards hybridized forms. In this paper, I suggest first that the growing adoption of decolonized archaeological theory is grounded in socio-political experiences and contestation. Second, I challenge a recent reactionary critique of aboriginalism in an effort to enter the ongoing debate on the side of Indigenous archaeology to highlight some of the relationships between materiality, colonialism/ decolonialism, and archaeological theory. Finally, I show how post- colonial theoretical perspectives have influenced the archaeological interpretations of an eighteenth-century, multi-ethnic community in southwest Michigan. New ways of envisioning the past are developed through changing the relationships archaeologists establish with a broader community of stakeholders that influence the interpretations of the data that they recover.