- Jodi Howe, Confederacy of Mainland Mi'kmaq
- Michelle A. Lelièvre, William and Mary
- Sara Beanlands, Boreas Heritage
The proposed session builds on the experiences of Indigenous archaeologists from across Canada shared during the “Supporting Well-Being in Indigenous Archaeology: Enacting Trauma-Informed Practices,” session held at the 2023 CAA's on the Membertou First Nation. In that session, we learned of the pain and trauma that many Indigenous archaeologists experience when archaeological practices ignore or dishonour their communities' values, including cultural and spiritual practices.
For the 2024 CAA's, we propose to take the next step toward supporting well-being in Indigenous archaeology by convening a roundtable of practitioners to share the practices they have enacted to respect Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, and interpretive frameworks. We seek contributions that describe the specific ways practitioners have incorporated local Indigenous worldviews, teachings, and experiences in the planning, fieldwork, analysis, and dissemination of results. We are also seeking contributions from archaeologists who have prioritized making their field sites, labs, and classrooms safe for members of marginalized and under-represented communities in a trauma-informed way.
We aim to foster a supportive environment that facilitates cross-cultural learning and training through dialogue around best practices and lessons learned between roundtable participants and CAA attendees. We hope the roundtable will result in recommendations to archaeologists—especially project directors and principal investigators—for how to enact culturally-sensitive and trauma-informed approaches to field- and lab-work, teaching, mentoring, and community collaborations.