Race and ethnicity are slippery concepts in the United States, as we can see from changes in census categories as recently as 2012, debates about whether racial disparities result from structural inequalities or “cultural” problems, and the idea that culture itself can be lost through assimilation. Native American communities with members of African descent have suffered particularly from ideologies of racial purity and cultural authenticity, which have led to political battles over tribal membership and legal recognition since the eighteenth century. My research in in historical archaeology investigates how members of one such community, centered on the whaling port of Sag Harbor, New York, navigated the shifting boundaries of belonging in everyday life. The aim of my work is to understand how people of Native American and African ancestries navigated the ambiguous categories of race and ethnicity in the social and physical spaces that opened up around the whaling industry. Drawing on insights from critical race theory and postcolonial archaeology, I approach multicultural settings in and around Sag Harbor as sites where American-born people of color simultaneously worked to create solidarity around experiences of marginalization, maintain ethnic identities within broader communities, and seek respectability in the face of negative stereotypes. To understand how they negotiated these challenges, I analyze spatial and material patterns at the regional, neighborhood, and household levels. Recognizing that identity and its expressions are complex and situational, I find that African Americans and Native Americans made similar decisions about space and material culture in most mundane settings. Interpreting these patterns through the framework of possessive individualism, I argue that they testify to how shared struggles for economic and social equality along the Black/white color line shaped everyday life for both groups. I contrast this with particular ceremonial and legal contexts in which material culture was a mode of distinction: at the turn of the twentieth century, when the politics of Native American persistence diverged from the pursuit of equality shared with African Americans, recognizably Indian elements of material culture and bureaucratic proofs of tribal status became increasingly important ethnic markers.
Button, Emily,
"Navigating Difference: The Archaeology of Identities in an American Whaling Port"
(2015).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0BZ64FK
