American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Introduction to the author, the term pyroepistomology, and this special issue

The oral traditions of the Anishinaabeg accurately describe the processes that formed the Great Lakes, the mass extinctions that followed, and adaptations made by animals and people from the Younger Dryas (12,600–11,700 YBP) to the Early Holocene (c. 11,700–8,000 YBP) periods. By exploring the geophilosophical tracks of indigenous oral tradition alongside modern academic methodologies, this article highlights the important cultural shift of the Anishinaabeg’s reliance on the ma’iingan (wolf or canis lupus) to the animosh (dog or canis lupus familiaris). The human-wolf relationship was so intrinsic to their survival during this period that it has been preserved within accounts of the Original Man (often depicted as Nanabush). Such accounts describe this mutually beneficial relationship of humans and wolves hunting together, which made hunting more efficient for both humans and wolves. This is an early example of mino bimaadiziwin (living a good life). The contrast between two Anishinaabe stories (the “Original Man and Wolf” and the “Story of Dogs”) in the context of a new world (after a Great Flood) speaks to important shifts. One is the selective breeding of animosh (dog), which distinguishes this species from its cousin the ma’iingan (wolf), recorded in oral traditions that emphasizes the importance of the Anishinaabeg’s connection to their environment and to the animal world. The use of animal patterns, ecological models, and oral traditions therefore helps to demonstrate that the distinct Anishinaabeg-woodland identity began to be formed among the populations on the St. Mary’s River several millennia earlier than generally believed.

This article critically reevaluates the mound-builders theory and the Hopewell tradition (200 BCE–500 CE) along the northern shores of Lake Ontario by incorporating Anishinaabeg perspectives on burial mounds and death practices. Through case studies of the Serpent Mounds (300 BCE–1400 CE, Hiawatha First Nation, Ontario) and the Hasting Mounds site (500 CE, Norwood, Ontario), this paper employs the concept of pyroepistemology, as introduced by Paulette Steeves (2021), to challenge and decolonize established archaeological narratives. Pyroepistemology, which seeks to eradicate colonial ideologies to reveal Indigenous knowledge, is crucial for reinterpreting the Hopewell tradition, traditionally viewed through a eurocentric lens. This study integrates Anishinaabeg oral histories and cultural practices to provide a more holistic understanding of these sites, advocating for an inclusive and respectful archaeological approach that acknowledges Anishinaabeg cultural heritage and calls for educational reforms in Ontario.

The global decline of anguillid eels is well-documented across all continents where nineteen related species migrate. In North America, the population decline (and in some cases, extirpation) is related to numerous factors including industrial development. Eels experience violent mortality and migration barriers which have been linked to extractive infrastructure affiliated with settler colonial land occupation. The intricate migration pattern of Anguilla rostrata (American eels) is one of those species, an ecologically significant fish that has ancestral and persistent relevance to First Nations and tribal nations in Canada and the US, respectively. This paper draws from Anishinabe ontological grounding including intergenerational dodem gikendaasowin (clan or kinship knowledge) to suggest that humans are living in a world that includes an aquatic governance mediated by eels. A primary contribution is the suggestion that attention to such framing has applied relevance to intergenerational land-based healing, for extension of ongoing pursuits including Indigenous environmental justice, water governance strategies, and renewed interspecies relations. The application of these nascent concepts affects possibilities for current and future generations to exert reflective capacity and advocate for greater decision-making in matters of water governance. This paper suggests these opportunities be afforded to inheritors of ancestral Anishinabeg legacy dispersed throughout areas in Anishinabe-aki, where eels have resided and migrated and may do so again; to survive, eels benefit from informed policy and governance practices that facilitate physical assistance. New regimes may be built from human reflexivity and the desire to give back to life, an inherent principle of Anishinabe water governance and the application of Nibi Inaakonigewin (water laws).  

While it is now common knowledge that Pacific salmon die after spawning, in 1881 American fish culturalists fiercely debated the matter. In a magazine article, US Fish Commission official Livingston Stone surveyed Winnemem Wintu workers at his hatchery on the McCloud River in Northern California. Acknowledging their unique expertise from “having spent their entire lives on the river since time immemorial,” Stone noted, “they were unanimous in saying that all the salmon died. There was not one dissenting opinion.”

After establishing the salmon hatchery on the McCloud in 1871, Stone would succeed in exporting millions of artificially inseminated salmon eggs around the world. While Stone is still memorialized as a forefather of modern fisheries science, scholars have elided the Winnemem Wintu ecological knowledge he relied upon from their histories. The few that do reference the Winnemem Wintu workers characterize them as helpful but naive servants and laud their partnership with Stone as an exemplar of multicultural cooperation. However, this paper recasts the narrative by foregrounding the oral history of the Winnemem Wintu, who contend Stone learned from them about salmon biology but ignored their most important lessons: that salmon are sentient bearers of ecological wisdom who must be followed rather than controlled and that hatcheries cannot replace the protection of riverine habitat. Their oral history and newly excavated archival documents also reveal how the hatchery facilitated the extra-legal seizure of Indigenous lands and suppression of Winnemem Wintu ceremonies. Written and researched in close collaboration with Winnemem Wintu leadership, this paper connects Stone’s scientific legacy to colonial impulses that continue to influence modern fisheries biology. The tribe argues that rewriting the history of Stone’s operation is an essential intervention to unravel the hatchery-centric culture of wildlife agencies that hampers the tribe’s restoration of wild salmon in their ancestral watershed.

This article seeks to trace historical developments in the American Southwest alongside the professionalization of archeological pursuits between the 1870s and the 1890s, while paying attention to uses of Old World antiquity as models. The bulk of this article will center the movement of the Stevenson collection introduced to the US National Museum (the Smithsonian) in its transition from specimen to cross-cultural currency between institutions and governments. My methodology is primarily decolonial in revisiting the documentation methods, especially cataloging, involved in the collection of Indigenous material culture in the Southwest. The framing of Native materials as imitative served as a key form of Indigenous dispossession that administratively categorized peoples on behalf of colonial governments. The discursive connections drawn between Native American materials and classical antiquity are also worth exploring further, inasmuch as these materials served not just as parts of a hierarchical comparative model but also moved through institutional and international exchanges in the formation of national archaeologies that furthered imperial conceptions of time and history. Unpacking the centrality of nationalism in the pursuit of collecting should serve as a starting point in reconsidering the ethics of material extraction from source communities. Understanding the relationship between salvage ethnography and the cultural exchange of archeological specimens, including through extraction, points to the continued relevance of how institutions continue to view and handle these materials today.

As a descendant member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, I was culturally and geographically displaced from my tribe while growing up. In this article, I explore the marginal space that I inhabit now as an adult and as a linguistic anthropologist. In this article, I describe my ambivalence at being indebted to the cruel and bloody history of anthropological and linguistic research perpetrated upon Indigenous nations throughout the last 300 years. I analyze the moral and ethical implications of past social scientists’ works, as well as how I navigate my journey through an academic system built on the oppression and subjugation of my people. 

As an indigenous researcher, I have many questions about what has happened to the Willamette Valley, the traditional landscape where my people have lived for more than 16,000 years. The valley is now completely recreated in a settler vision for agriculture leaving little land, about 1 percent of the valley as still a traditional landscape. Generations of settlers have changed their land, drained off the water, and engineered the environment to be an arid landscape.

Using ethnographic reports, ethnological fieldwork, oral histories, settler accounts, and tribal intellectual knowledge I reconstruct the original environment of the valley to reveal the character of the land in which the Kalapuyan peoples used to live. Research shows that they lived in a vast landscape of wetlands, the prairies expanding into shallow swales during any season. The majority wetlands of the valley give many clues as to what the original Kalapuyan culture was like, because they had to collect food, hunt, fish, dig roots, and set fall prairie fires, despite the great amount of seasonal moisture. 

The Kalapuyans were colonized very early in the history of the West, 1830–1856. Because of this, little information was collected about their traditional lifeways, their villages, or even their houses. Historically, there was rare information preserved about how the valley was changed by settlers to become an arid landscape. The fact that wetlands dominated the valley will change many assumptions made by scholars about tribal cultures, and that water will need to be restored to have successful restoration and decolonization projects.

This paper seeks to present the experience of the Quechua Indigenous Community of Quipisca (CIQQ) regarding the socioenvironmental conflicts of its territory, which has been stressed by the presence of large-scale mining activity. In this sense, we explain how the CIQQ has formed a collaborative and community work plan in which the concept of indigenous cultural heritage has taken a relevant role in the defense of the territory and the ritual landscape of Quipisca, while it has also served to strengthen the identity and recovery of cultural practices. In this way, the presence of different ceremonial apus (sacred hills), different geoglyphs, and caravan routes in the ancestral territory are made visible in the face of Chilean environmental legislation and traditional scientific knowledge that makes invisible the knowledge and feelings of the community regarding these spaces. In this context, we exemplify the territorial tension of the mining advance in the cultural and ritual landscape of Quipisca as a dichotomy around the representations of the world, where, for CIQQ, the hills and ceremonial sites have a relational life between nonhumans and humans, while, for the mining company, they only represent spaces of mineral extraction.