Reversing Statistical Erasure of Indigenous Peoples

American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Peoples are diverse, but their diversity is statistically flattened in national-level survey data and, subsequently, in contemporary understandings of race and inequality in the United States. This chapter demonstrates the utility of disaggregated data for gaining, for instance, nuanced information on social outcomes such as educational attainment and income levels, and shaping resource allocation accordingly. Throughout, it explores both reasons and remedies for AIAN invisibility in large data sets. Using their personal identities as a case in point, the authors argue for more refined survey instruments, informed by Indigenous modes of identity and affiliation, not only to raise the statistical salience of AIANs but also to paint a fuller picture of a vibrant, heterogeneous First Peoples all too often dismissed as a vanishing people.

On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere

Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives—the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a result, our interpretations of those pioneering populations could often apply as readily to a colony of ants or a herd of wildebeest as they do to living, breathing, thinking, dreaming, loving, striving human ancestors. This article first explores the reasons for our failure to fully actualize First Peoples, identifying and implicating a feedback loop that includes practitioner homogeneity (we have always been and continue to be disproportionately white men of European descent); our predominantly positivist worldview; our language, training, and practice; and even the limited nature of the material record we study. This article also, however, highlights the ways that an important minority of peopling scholars have sought to access the humanity of PaleoIndigenous people. By more consistently mobilizing our own human capacity to creatively interrogate the deep past, we will produce scholarship that more consistently recognizes the capacity of the people who lived it and, just as importantly, respects those living today.

Aboriginal Worlds and Australian Capitalism

Australia has a fairly established literature that seeks to explain, on one hand, the pre-colonial Aboriginal society and economy and, on the other, the relationship that emerged between the First Peoples’ economic system and society, and the settler economy. Most of this relies on theoretical frameworks that narrate traditional worlds dissolving. At best, these narratives see First Peoples subsumed into the workforce, retaining minimal cultural residue. In this paper, I argue against these narratives, showing the ways Aboriginal people have disrupted, or implicitly questioned and challenged dominant forms of Australian capitalism. I have sought to write not within the earlier framework of what is called Aboriginal History that often concentrated on the governance of Aborigines rather than responses to governance. In doing this, I seek to bring into view a history of Aboriginal strategies within a capitalist world that sought to maintain the most treasured elements of social life - generosity, equality, relatedness, minimal possessions, and a rich and pervasive ceremonial life.

First Peoples in a New World

Over 15,000 years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers became the first people to set foot in the Americas. They soon found themselves in a world rich in plants and animals, but also a world still shivering itself out of the coldest depths of the Ice Age. The movement of those first Americans was one of the greatest journeys undertaken by ancient peoples. In this book, David Meltzer explores the world of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological, and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptation to climate and environmental change. This fully updated edition integrates the most recent scientific discoveries, including the ancient genome revolution and human evolutionary and population history. Written for a broad audience, the book can serve as the primary text in courses on North American Archaeology, Ice Age Environments, and Human evolution and prehistory.