The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere by Paulette F.C. Steeves

Author:Paulette F.C. Steeves [Steeves, Paulette F.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496202178
Amazon: 1496202171
Barnesnoble: 1496202171
Goodreads: 55761703
Published: 2021-05-03T14:59:22+00:00

Memories

Our ancestors are in our hearts, minds, and souls

they remain with us always

and their memories

of places on the lands

of ceremonies

of pimatisiwin

live within us

course through our veins

as we work to reclaim, revive, and relink our descendants to their lands the places of their ancestral birth

the places where blood and memories run free

Chapter 8

Reawakening, Resisting, Rewriting

Confronting Soulwounds along Paths to Healing

The problem is that constant efforts by governments, states, societies, and institutions to deny the historical formations of such conditions have simultaneously denied our claims to humanity, to having a history, and to all sense of hope. To acquiesce is to lose ourselves entirely and implicitly agree with all that has been said about us.

To resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves.

— Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies

Archaeologists are acutely aware of the possible implications of the earlier peopling of the Americas, which reflects on contemporary issues of identity, ancestry, and ownership of the past and present.

— David Meltzer, First Peoples in a New World

Discussions on the unsubstantiated claims of the Clovis First hypothesis of initial human migrations to the Western Hemisphere have arisen in academic literature and the general media.1 Critical discussions regarding the Western view of the histories of first peoples are a crucial area of study, for what remains undiscussed remains unchallenged and hidden. Critical scholarship and discussions refuse to allow colonial violence to continue unabated and to allow false doctrines of Indigenous people’s histories to go unchallenged. Contemporary colonial violence against Indigenous people is normalized in literature and remains embedded in many forms throughout education, institutions, and the general media: “The Western worldview permeated throughout academic institutions serves to minimize, marginalize, undermine, and smother the worldviews of Indigenous peoples in a toxic cloud of racism, sexism and, capitalism. When Indigenous and 169

Western worldviews meet under these conditions of conflict, resistance emerges on both sides. The Western worldview systematically prevails because their values are backed up by the Government, enforced by their laws and perpetuated by the dominant society.”2

To stay silent is to allow violence and colonialization to continue. It is essential to rewrite Indigenous histories that continue to erase diversity and humanity, such as the Clovis First hypothesis of initial migrations into the Western Hemisphere.3 Archaeologists discuss sites in the Western Hemisphere where Clovis fluted tools and associated artifacts have been discovered as sites that were inhabited or used by the “Clovis People.”

Anthropologists and archaeologists are aware of the fact that one tool type does not define a culture, specifically, not a panhemispheric culture. Contemporary archaeologists continue to discuss the “Clovis People,” and, as I said earlier, no such cultural human group ever existed beyond the wildest imagination of the archaeological mind. Indigenous histories framed by Western academics are often accepted as fact by the general population; they are not exposed for what Vine Deloria Jr. called the absurdity of their claims.

Disagreements between archaeologists over the peopling of the Americas have been so fierce that the field has been described as a battleground and an archaeological badlands.

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