Exploring Relationality: Perspectives on the Research Narratives of the Rock Art of the Algonquian-Speaking Peoples of Central and Eastern Canada

Abstract

Over the past six decades, researchers investigating the rock art of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Central and Eastern Canada have produced interpretations that recognize and draw on Algonquian peoples’ oral traditions, worldviews, and realities. Mainly characterized by the use of ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence and analogy, this has resulted in a number of important developments and trends in Algonquian rock art research. In particular, this research has identified some of the motives, practices, and performances that underpin the making of rock art, and focused attention on the ways in which humans and other-than-humans are implicated. It has also revealed the paradigms within which researchers have operated. In recent years, the interest in ‘new animism’ has resulted in a shift from epistemological concerns to new ontologically related approaches, which engage Algonquian ontologies as sources of theory and heuristic tools with which to examine the relationality and agency of rock art. The trajectory of current research indicates that the recognition and acceptance of ontological multiplicity and the multivocality of the past are crucial not only to the interpretation of rock art but also to the ‘worlding practices’ that characterize Algonquian rock art research.