Waste colonialism
Waste colonialism refers to how waste and pollution are part of the domination of one group in their homeland by another group. The concept has been gaining traction…
Tag: Indigenous
The Skeletons in the Museum Closet
Museums are full of wonderful things. From the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum to the Folsom point at the Denver Museum of Nature &…
Why Are So Many Guatemalans Migrating to the U.S.?
On May 23, a bystander filmed 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez González after a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot her in the head. The young woman had recently crossed…
The Oldest True Stories in the World
Australia’s iconic Opera House is lit up with an art installation called Songlines during a festival in 2016. For Aboriginal Australians, songlines are memories of routes through landscapes—which…
The Mastodon in the Room
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Humans may have been in North America much earlier than previously thought. Here’s the evidence: chipped rocks, crushed mastodon bones, and reliable da…
How an Archaeological Experiment Revealed California’s Ancient Past
San Nicolas Island, the most remote and one of the smallest of California’s Channel Islands, is more than 60 miles from the mainland. The seas around the island…
Why Are Some Caves Full of Shoes?
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life hiking the U.S. Southwest, and I’ve kicked my share of sharp rocks and prickly cactuses as I’ve walked across hot…
The Incas’ Knotty History
Khipu in the Museo Machu Picchu, Casa Concha, Cusco. Wikimedia Commons This article was originally published at Aeon. The Inca Empire (1400–1532) is one of few ancient civilizations that …
Hearing Indigenous Voices
The 27th of May to the 3rd of June is National Reconciliation Week in Australia. Reconciliation, for anthropology, includes reckoning with the discipline’s colonial past, and confronting the…
What Clam Thermometers Tell Us About Past Climates
It’s mid-August, 2017, but the temperature in Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands that trails off of the western Alaskan coast, is a brisk 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Christine…
Archaeology’s Search for History Hidden in Ice
When Ötzi the Iceman, the most complete Neolithic mummy ever found, melted out of the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, the field of “ice patch archaeology” was born. In…
Western Science Is Finally Catching Up to Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous groups in northern Australia have observed—and even indicated in ceremony and story—kites and falcons, or “firehawks,” deliberately transporting lit sticks in order to spread fire. …
How Natural Birth Became Inaccessible to the Poor
[no-caption] Michelle Jones/SAPIENS Pilar* gave birth in a private, “humanized” hospital in Mexico City that takes a holistic approach to health and combines world-class medicine with the…
Whose land is it anyway? Open access book on decolonialism in Canada
This is a fantastic, and timely, open-access book from some of Canada’s leading thinkers on Indigenous relations to land, law, education, and much else. There’s no simple…
Transcontinental Travel—2,000 Years Ago
Two thousand years ago, a sophisticated people lived in the rolling hills of the greater Mississippi River drainage in North America. Most of their sites are concentrated in…
How Ursula Le Guin’s Writing Was Shaped by Anthropology
In creating other worlds, Ursula Le Guin showed the power inherent in constructions of culture and new realities. Marian Wood Kolisch/Flickr This article was originally published at The…
How Canadian bureaucrats make state territory in the name of ‘restoring’ Indigenous rights
I’m quite happy that some recent work of mine is now out in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.[very happy to send copies to anybody with…
How Archaeologists Uncover History With Trees
In the fall of 1282, a young carpenter went to his favorite stand of juniper trees in southwestern Colorado. That stand contained a large number of tall trees…
Unraveling an Ancient Code Written In Strings
This khipu, which was made before the Spanish conquest of the Incas, was probably used for accounting, as indicated by the knots in the cords. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images…
The Untold Story of Japan’s First People
The Ainu, the Indigenous people of Japan, have fought Japanese domination for centuries. As this century unfolds, their efforts are finally paying off. Chris Willson/Alamy Stock Photo Thi…
Were Peace Medals the Price of Loyalty?
Gift-giving is common to all human societies; it’s one of the behaviors that makes us human. We give gifts to celebrate holidays, birthdays, and weddings, not to mention…