Challenging Colonial Narratives: Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology

This slim volume can be likened to an archaeological sandwich. The meat is a cross-cultural and longitudinal study of two generationally separated Mohawk settlement families and two Irish settlement families in southern Ontario in the nineteenth century. Using archaeological and historical data, Matthew A. Beaudoin spins a story for each of these four families during a period of colonial settlement and what anthropologists used to call culture contact. The bread wrapped around these stories is an argument against the traditional dichotomization by historical archaeologists into “Euro-Canadian” and “Indigenous” or “First Nations” peoples. Still more damning is his charge that historical archaeologists, rather than being the handmaidens to history, are the whores (my choice of word) to global capitalism and the reification of the rise of that capitalism as the story worth telling, to the exclusion of any other. Beaudoin intentionally oversimplifies conventional storytelling to make his point: “the homogenous white...