In recent decades, repatriation debates have forced heritage practitioners around the world to confront the problematic pasts of their disciplines. Protective heritage legislation and policy has since offered a means to return Indigenous heritage and ancestors. But without a clear path forward, these discussions have sometimes exacerbated existing tensions between Indigenous communities and researchers. Explosive cases like Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, demonstrate this. However, collaborative projects offer an opportunity to address both problematic disciplinary pasts and build productive, mutually beneficial relationships. Well known cases like Kwäd̖āy Dän Ts’ínch̖i in Canada or the On Your Knees Cave project in the US offer examples of the potential benefits for both researchers and community partners involved. Building from a recent session held at the University of Calgary’s Chacmool conference in 2017, this session will continue to explore a diverse group of projects in North America that actively collaborate and engage with Indigenous communities in the care, scientific study, and repatriation of ancestors and their belongings.

This session is devoted to sharing the results and insights gained through recent innovative research on the Lockport site (EaLf-1). The Lockport site exhibits the best evidence for maize farming by ancestral Indigenous groups prior to European settlement in Western Canada. Domesticated and local native plant species comprised local subsistence systems. E. Leigh Syms (Curator emeritus, Manitoba Museum) and Coleen Rajotte, noted Cree film producer, initiated a large-scale project to document pre-contact farming practices in southern Manitoba focusing on the Lockport site. To support the documentary, the University of Manitoba ran a field school to collect archaeological and archaeobotanical data. Students gained further experience analyzing artifacts and floral remains through coursework at the University of Manitoba. Researchers at the University of Manitoba and Lakehead University conducted cutting-edge research using biochemical, advance microscopic, and petrographic analyses documenting new and exciting facets of subsistence practices, artifact construction and decision making processes. We invite contributions by researchers and students involved in the project that focus on specific analyses and resulting information, experiences of students- from fieldwork to lab work to participating in a documentary, or research focused on pre-contact farming practices or general lifeways as expressed by materials from the Lockport site.

There has been a long interest in understanding the workings of non-human agency in anthropology, from early debates about animism and totemism to more recent archaeological theorizing about “things.” The topic remains pertinent because many cultures do not narrowly demarcate between inanimate and animate, natural and supernatural, the physical and the spiritual. This is certainly true for the native inhabitants of subarctic and arctic North America, who shared a landscape with non-human persons, spirits, and animate objects for millennia. This session offers case studies and theoretical papers that identify and examine the entangled relations between people and these non-humans in the archaeological record. Papers are welcomed that explore these relationships wherever they occur: on the landscape, in hunting and gathering, food preparation, consumption, and discard, the crafting and use of technology, settlement and household organization, caching, burial, and ritual.