Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher, eds., Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2021), 288 pp.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing discourses, academies, and knowledges has gained traction in the humanities and Indigenous studies ever since Linda Tuhiwai Smith published her seminal Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). In the past decade, endeavors to recognize and study Indigenous and other non-Western knowledges and academic contributions have much intensified and diversified; i. e., in more and more disciplines such recognition and respect, co-equal dialogue and cooperation have become a major objective, at least when Indigenous subjects are involved. Decolonial tendencies in archaeology and connected subject areas have started with the subdiscipline of Indigenous archaeology, repatriation practices, consultations of Indigenous experts and knowledge holders, collaborative field work and research relationships, and with decolonial work of Indigenous academics from within the discipline. This collection of articles, based on a symposium in Schwerin in northeastern Germany, approaches the long overdue endeavor to decolonize archeology, Indigenous history, and deep time with much sensitivity, respect, knowledge, and openness towards “new” insights.

All eleven contributions and the introduction operate on important shared premises when approaching Indigenous deep time at the interface of archeology, history, anthropology, and paleontology. Scholarship in the concerned fields was dominated by Euro-centric ideas, knowledges, knowledge practices and standards in confluence with settler colonial denial of local and Indigenous epistemes, ontologies, and relationships to land, which needs to be contested and shifted towards coeval non-Western participation in dialogue and knowledge production. Such Euro-centric standard views and established theories have set the default date for historical and epistemological beginnings at so-called “contact” time, relegating Indigenous cultures, history, and knowledges to a timeless “prehistory” linked to “primitiveness” and “development lag,” which needs to be refuted. And Euro-Western scholarship has established standard theories and terms for deep time happenings and materialities, for example, the Bering Strait theory, the “Red Paint People,” the “Clovis First” theory, the “Pleistocene Overkill” hypothesis, cultural area thinking, or the term “Maya,” which are often based on hypotheses, incomplete understandings, and information gaps. These theories and terms need to be critically re-evaluated, put into perspective, or completely debunked in hindsight of Indigenous oral material and other sources, which, the authors insist, are indispensable for knowledge building in terms of historical and epistemological developments in North America.

For the symposium and collected volume, Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock, Germany) and Christen Mucher (Smith College, MA, USA) have brought together diverse experts from various disciplines connected with North America’s deep time and Indigenous knowledges—American and Indigenous studies, archeology, anthropology, history, legal and literary studies. The introduction sets the stage and outlines colonial ideologies and practices within the concerned fields, the construction of deep history in North America, and the “invention” of American “prehistory” that denies a connection between past and present Indigenous people, which are all tied to struggles over racial and ethnic identities, history, and narratives of human (Indigenous) migration, which serve relativizing settler colonialism. As well they are tied to claims to resources and sovereignty, relations to land, commodification of culture, touristic appropriation of landmarks and cultural elements, and appropriation of Indigenous knowledges. The editors launch a “critical investigation of the ‘making’ of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledge, multispecies histories, and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism,” while contributing “to the ongoing project of ‘decolonizing’ scientific knowledge about the American deep past, following new paths toward a transcultural epistemology that acknowledges the value of Indigenous knowledges—long marginalized and delegitimized within the dominant episteme” (4-5).

The late Annette Kolodny outlines politically charged (mis)interpretations of archeological finds, such as the “Kennewick Man” or the “Red Paint People,” which, despite archeological evidence and DNA testing results, create an intentional rupture in the narrative of original and continuous Indigenous habitation. Such ideological interpretations claim that European settlers were “just” migrating people as Indigenous people much earlier and thus destabilize criticism of settler colonialism. Kolodny ties these arguments to increasing right-wing nationalism, controversial DNA test kits, social Darwinism, and legal struggles of the Penobscot nation over rights to the Penobscot River. Christen Mucher’s chapter looks at the historical (and continuous) disavowal of Indigenous oral history in the creation of scientific “facts” such as genomic migration theories, which supported and now reenacts historic dispossession, denying Indigenous originality and sovereignty and continuing devaluation of Indigenous lives. Melissa Gniadek studies Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) and its parody, Mat Johnson’s Pym: A Novel (2011), as texts that reflect discourses about deep time, history, origins, identity, race, savagery, civilization (and DNA testing), and neurotic fears of an authentic originarity of “the other.” Such discourses, she argues, are connected to already discussed denials of links between ancient and present Indigenous populations that ensure settler claims of belonging.

Rick Budhwa studies archeological and geological evidence of paleoenvironmental catastrophes in the Pacific Northwest—the eruption of Mount Mazama, the Bonneville/Cascade Landslide, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone Megathrust Earthquake and Tsunami—together with their representation in local oral accounts and finds clear correspondences. He argues that such integrated research helps broadening the understanding of ancient North America, verifying long-term Indigenous occupation of certain lands and illuminating Indigenous survival strategies. Gesa Mackenthun discusses the ideological use of “Big History” that rather sweepingly explains human history and “prehistory,” rejects continuous habitation, and homogenizes developments and responsibilities, for example of colonizer and colonized, for environmental distress. She looks at the function of extinction narratives in settler colonial master narratives, while, based on Pacific Northwest oral tradition (a story that also Budhwa studied), exploring the concept of “ruination” as a “nonterminal process of destruction followed by ecological restoration” (119)—a notion that implies Indigenous resurgence and continuity. Keith Thor Carlson and Naxaxalhts’i (Sonny McHalsie) trace settler colonial pragmatics of definition and normatization of lands as “white,” with a focus on areas in present-day British Columbia, and contrast these to Indigenous histories of these lands. With Stó:lō origin transformer stories and material witnesses interlinking the past and present, such as rocks, they illustrate storied Stó:lō connections to the lands; as well they outline historical and present destruction of such rocks when they sit in the way of settler development projects. Emerging from work in British Columbia as well, Jeff Oliver provides a self-reflexive critical look at the discipline of archaeology and its (ongoing) colonial practices and argues for a fundamental shift in its operation, aiming at decolonization that would include acknowledging the material legacies of colonialism as well as the “continuing effects” of “colonial power structures” and aiming at “a deeper, more reflective and honest engagement with the different communities with which we interact” (152). According to him, Indigenous archeology allows for collaborative and coeval knowledge production that can potentially add diversified knowledge to archeological discourses, rekindle cultural revitalization tied to specific places, shift Canadian heritage discourse from producing “White” to producing pluriversal histories, support land claim negotiations, and move “toward more decentered ways of knowing” (163). Coll Thrush speaks about the Salish way of placemaking, of understanding place as ancient, present, and future place through oral knowledge and cultural practices, with the example of three microhistories of the southern Salish Sea. He links them to the ideological notions of “modern” settler history after “primitive” Indigenous “prehistory” and larger destructive colonial and ecological legacies, while also asking critical questions about “decolonization” itself.

With the example of a precontact “Maya” site and the adjacent town of Coba, Jessica Christie critiques the constructed concept of “Maya” and offers a detailed discussion of Mexican and local government heritage politics, top-down neo/colonial and bottom-up local decolonial practices to make place, and the ensuing construction of history and identity. Similarly, Mathieu Picas, based on research on the Tulum site, takes issue with the colonial narrative of the “disappeared” Maya and a missing link to the present local Indigenous people, with the dispossession of “Maya” sites to be exploited for tourism, and with manifold restrictions local people face engaging in continuing ritual practices at such sites. He integrates fieldwork, “scientific” literature, and oral narratives in order to outline shifting perceptions and sociocultural changes in the use of the Tulum remains and argues that such sites are “plurivocal spaces that allow Mayas’ representation and legitimation of the present in a specific socio-historically built territory” (213). Philip Deloria launches a well-founded critique against the continuing damage of “scientific” master narratives about Indigenous ancient history and North America’s deep past (called “Big History” by Mackenthun) that delegitimate Indigenous ties and buoy settler colonial claims to land and its narratives. He thus continues the academic work of his father Vine Deloria and other Indigenous academics such as Gregory Cajete and Wall Kimmerer in struggling against Western intellectual dominance, logics of place, and knowledge making. He calls for “new stories—equally deep and big” that decolonize “prehistory” and are produced by scientific and Indigenous knowledge in “partnerships borne out of respect” (243), with Indigenous intellectuals and historians taking the lead. In the epilogue, Kirsten Matoy Carlson ties the contributions together from a legal studies perspective, focusing on power relations, the blindness of courts to Indigenous deep histories that still exists despite a few promising legal decisions that affect land, rights to food sources, stewardship, and restitution of cultural artifacts. She attests to a judicial and legislative ambivalence about Indigenous ancient and modern histories and knowledges that result in often contradictory laws regulating Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations.

This highly recommendable volume approaches decolonizing of “prehistory” from various perspectives penned by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. It opens a much-needed conversation and reflection about established scientific practices in fields that construct master narratives about North America’s ancient past, its manifold meanings for the present, and its land-related, cultural, ontological, and epistemological understandings. A detailed index and several images help with the reading experience; the painting “Usufruct” (1995) by Coast Salish artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun on the cover, illustrating a coastal landscape and beings struggling with pollution, makes this an ­aesthetically recommendable book as well.

Kerstin Knopf (Universität Bremen)