What Is There to Do If You Find an Old Indian Canoe? Anti-Colonialism in Maritime Archaeology

Abstract

Following Max Liboiron’s claim that pollution is colonialism, the anti-colonial maritime archaeologist’s role in the Anthropocene might be to reframe research questions, so that focus is directed toward interactions between marine and maritime, and that the colonial ‘resurrectionist’ approach that has dominated nautical archaeology ought to be reconsidered altogether. This normative statement is put to the test with a 4000-year-old waterlogged dugout canoe that was illegally excavated from the Cooper River in South Carolina, USA. Upon retrieval, the affected tribal entities were brought into consultation with archaeologists and conservators to help decide how to proceed with the canoe’s remains. Tribal representatives reached a consensus to preserve the canoe with PEG and display it in a public museum. This procedure follows the resurrectionist model typical of maritime archaeology in the West, now the dominant protocol globally, where the scholar acts as savior by lifting entire wrecks from watery graves and promising to grant them immortality in utopian museum spaces. However, this immortalizing procedure is at odds with some Indigenous values, voiced by tribal representatives, which embrace life cycles and distributed agency. In the end, the desire to preserve the canoe as a perpetual symbol of intertribal unity dominated concerns surrounding the canoe’s own life, spirit, and autonomy, and that plasticizing it would permanently alter its substance and essence. We argue that the object of the canoe has become subservient to its postcolonial symbolism of Indigenous unity, resilience, and resistance. Further, by subscribing to the resurrectionist model of maritime archaeology, the immortalized canoe now bears the irony of colonial metaphor, as an unintended consequence of its preservation. We echo Audre Lorde’s famous sentiment by wondering if an anticolonial maritime archaeology can ever hope to dismantle the master’s boat using the master’s tools. The conclusions reached here have implications for other maritime and museum contexts too, including the highly publicized case of the wrecked 1859–1860 slave ship, Clotilda.