“The artwork featured this year by Theresa Williams shows this connection to her relations.”
Updating colonial thinking on National Indigenous Peoples Day
National Indigenous Day coincides with the Summer Solstice. Not only is it the day when the sun
travels its longest path through the sky, which explains why it is the longest day, but it is the day that many Indigenous peoples celebrate their culture and heritage.
When Indigenous people speak, they often pay tribute to “all their relations”. They are saluting not only their families, but their ancestors, and the more-than-humans on this planet and our universe, like the rivers, rocks, trees, animals, planets and stars. They recognize that we are all connected.
ARCHAEOLOGY AND “CLOVIS”
Many false narratives of the histories of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island has contributed to the hurt and the dismissal of their place on this land. They have long known about their people and all their relations through millennia of oral history.
Scholars have long argued that the presence of Indigenous peoples is situated at roughly 12,000 years BCE (Before the Common Era). This line, supposedly proving the arrival of the Indigenous from Asia, is referred to as “Clovis”.
NEW FINDINGS IN INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGY
Now, Cree-Métis scholar from Whitehorse, Yukon, and Canada Research Chair on Healing and Reconciliation at Algoma University, Dr Paulette Steeves, is making the case that Indigenous peoples may have been here for 100,000 years or more. Through the use of genetics in connection with archaeological finds, Steeves argues that there are hundreds of sites on Turtle Island and Abya Yala (South America) that predate “Clovis”.
The notion that people had only been on this land for 3000 years is considered by Steeves to be the result of a hypocritical, biased and colonial attitude in archaeology which erased the diversity and history of the Indigenous people. Steeves is reconsidering the trajectory of global human migrations, and situating Indigenous peoples at the center of a reformed view of the evolution of humans and more-than-humans, the world over.
A DAY TO EXPLORE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND WAYS
As an exercise in allyship with Indigenous people, on this National Indigenous Peoples Day, CUPW encourages its members to learn more about our Indigenous relations’ histories and culture.
Resources
“A new era of archaeology”, May 19, 2023. Unreserved with Rosanna Deerchild. CBC Radio.
Steeves, Paulette F.C. (2021). The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press.
In Solidarity,
Coleen Jones
2nd National Vice-President