(Re)lating Archaeological Belongings, Colonialist Histories, and Incorporated Peoples among the Onöndowa'ga:' Hodinöhsö:ni'

Settler narratives of Indigenous history tend to produce imaginary geographies across contested landscapes—employing moments of violence, movement, and change to characterize Indigenous communities as annihilated or moving towards erasure. The dispersal and incorporation of the Wendat and other peoples from Southern Ontario by the Hodinöhsö:ni' in 1649 CE provides one such narrative, with incorporees often portrayed as enslaved and their host communities on a violent trajectory of decline. Paralleling the maintenance of these scholarly interpretations, archaeological material culture from Hodinöhsö:ni' sites following this moment of rupture and incorporation have been subject to extensive avocational collecting and remain isolated from their living communities and histories in institutional collections. Bridging a critique of the construction of history and the practice of archaeology, I present a reassessment of the enslavement narrative of the Wendat and other Indigenous peoples among the Onöndowa'ga:' Hodinöhsö:ni' in the 17th century in what is now known as Upstate New York, employing legacy archaeological collections to untangle Indigenous processes from settler colonial narratives of decline and erasure.

Dusti C. Bridges is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell. Her work combines archaeology, geography, and Indigenous studies to study Indigenous and settler colonial histories in the United States and Canada.