Traces of Residence: Indigenous Mobility and Materiality in 19th century New England

This dissertation combines archaeological evidence collected from a late 18th and early 19th century Native Farmstead in Grafton, Massachusetts with a literature critique and a museum collections study to build an inter-disciplinary history of the Nipmuc community in Central Massachusetts. The study critiques long-held criteria of static continuity and socio-spatial isolation associated with Indigenous cultural authenticity by revealing the dynamic nature of the Nipmuc community's spatial strategies, social networks, material surroundings and even their histories in the context of long-term colonial encroachment. It begins by detailing mobile strategies employed by the Nipmuc and other local Native groups from before colonial encroachment through the early 19th century, as evidenced in archaeological work and archival documentation, and contrasts those with the sedentary ideals of English settlers. While many Native communities had many reasons to stay mobile, for work, for resources, or to stay in touch with family and community members, they often struggled to do so because of increasingly negative settler sentiments toward Native mobility which was seen throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as subversive, evasive, aimless and even lazy behavior. The study then incorporates a critical survey of vernacular historical texts with a complimentary archaeological survey to examine the intimacies of Indigenous and settler socio-spatial entanglement in the 18th and 19th centuries. This study argues for the utility of little-used late 19th century Regionalist histories by first exposing their biases and then employing the spatial data within to locate a diverse range of possible unidentified Native Historical sites in Central Massachusetts. These histories suggest that despite colonial tactics of dispossession and confinement, Nipmuc families used strategies of materiality and mobility to continue to inhabit their Native social landscapes, including the practice of basketmaking and peddling. This study then challenges the myth of cultural authenticity as spatial and material fixity with a study of colonial Native basketry and its associated toolkit that further highlights the co-dynamics of material innovation and spatial mobility. The iron tools found at the Burnee Boston Site in Grafton Massachusetts are evaluated for their potential to illustrate the processes of innovation that took place in the compiling of the emerging Native basketmaking industry's toolkit, and Native baskets themselves are evaluated for their potential in facilitating continued Native movement on the landscape. The study is brought into the present with an examination of the on-going process of memory and history-building in a critical examination of inscription practices associated with heirloom Native basketry and these objects' influence on the further co-production of both the New England landscape and its associated historical narratives. The work concludes by exploring the efficacy of collaborative archaeology in revealing new materialities with which to empower the contemporary Nipmuc community and continue to revise historical narratives.

Advisor: Wilkie, Laurie A