In this chapter, the author investigates how distinctive pictograph and petroglyph traditions promote emplacement, a sense of the cultural past, and ancestral memory of seminal events and foundational epistemological and ontological understandings. In doing so, the author examines the integrated emplaced materiality of memory performances at Agawa, an Ojibway rock art site in the Canadian Shield on the northern shore of Lake Superior, through narratives, representations, objects, ritual behaviours, places, and placelings. Following Latour (2005), the author suggests that places are actants within broader actor-networks involved in creative dialogic memory-making processes. This interpretation can potentially inform broader anthropological concerns, including the dichotomous thinking underlying materialism and idealism.
Reading rock art: interpreting the Indian rock paintings of the Canadian Shield