Storytelling and Healing in Indigenous Archaeologies

Summary

For millennia, Indigenous communities have utilized storytelling to communicate landscape and familial histories, spiritual beliefs, empirical observations, and moral teachings. Storytelling creates communities of shared understanding and responsibility and, for contemporary Indigenous people, connects them to their ancestors, languages, and homelands. As a source of historical and cultural knowledge and conduit for developing interpersonal relationships, storytelling may be productively integrated into Indigenous archaeologies. Doing so repositions archaeologists as listeners, both to their Indigenous research partners and to those in the past whose stories shaped the belongings that comprise the archaeological record. For archaeologists, listening comes with opportunities to deepen their understanding of Indigenous knowledges and with responsibilities to the people with whom they work. Incorporating storytelling into archaeological methodologies and interpretive strategies may enhance research on a variety of topics. This article explores the role of storytelling in projects that promote Indigenous healing, which is conceptualized as an ongoing process to identify and resolve the harms of settler colonialism. Case studies focus on Indigenous food sovereignty, government boarding schools, and stone carving traditions of the Lower Columbia River along the northwest coast of North America.