Abstract
This chapter examines the manner in which time is conceptualised within the contexts of prehistory and deeper history. By privileging historical records, it shows how the federal recognition process also subordinates oral tradition or archaeological evidence, creating circumstances where dynamic, contingent histories are replaced by strategic essentialism with embedded notions of static and timeless cultures. The chapter looks at quartz crystals placed in the corners of the Magunkaquog building foundation in Ashland, Massachusetts to call attention to parallel processes, a variety of liminality between the ancient past and present (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) — neither past nor present — when ancient beliefs with cultural plasticity were woven into Christian structures. This archaeological example illustrates the presencing of the past and suggests that we cannot understand processes of hybridisation unless we stop dignifying the prehistory-history divide.
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