Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptive emplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is organised to plunge audiences inside the ‘live’ archaeological scene and an evocative heritage landscape. It does so through technologies, including motion-triggered projections, which locate and secure visitors within official national – and universal – heritage narratives. The central argument of this article is that HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre beckons subjects of heritage through proprioception, the awareness of the body’s position in and movement through space. Extending beyond the physiological sensation of one’s own body, proprioception also works alongside the two other substantiating buttresses of archaeology and heritage to provide a gravitational ground upon which the visitor is located and their subjectivity confirmed. Proprioceptive grounding emplaces a body within an expanded and ‘ancient’ narratology of nation, and in this way, also becomes the mechanism through which exogenous settlers assuage anxieties about their latecoming status.     

The chattelization of northern whites: An evolving abolitionist warning

A recurring abolitionist theme was that the failure to destroy southern black slavery would eventuate in the enslavement of northern white laborers. During the 1830s this theme was the particular province of a few evangelical, markedly antimaterialist 'left' abolitionists like William Goodell. More inclined than their cohorts to regard the northern social order as oppressive for increasing numbers of workers, these abolitionists were also more likely to accuse capitalist 'aristocrats' of aspiring to go further and chattelize their workers in emulation of their southern slavocrat allies. Such white-chattelization warnings, which assigned a virtually coequal role in the slave power to malevolent employers and other northern 'aristocrats,' were supplanted in the late antebellum period by ones that instead targeted slavery's mulattoization and the southern slavocracy's proclivity for exploiting this ongoing erosion in racial boundaries. These white-chattelization warnings, which Goodell also notably promoted, acquired greater antislavery support than had the earlier anticapitalist ones. The late-antebellum warnings substantially reflected the ascendance of northern nationalism and the additional legitimacy that it conferred on capital-labor arrangements in the free states.     

Boundary theory as a means to understanding social space in archaeological sites

Social space in archaeological sites is constructed and produced by differentiation in behavior (habitus) and is characterized by domains or activity areas separated by boundaries. Activity areas vary in their flexibility and permeability to intrusion of other activities. This is reflected in the nature of the boundaries between activity areas. A study of boundaries, archaeologically often represented by transitional space, can provide insight into human behavior, the use and construction of space, and the contemporaneity of activities represented in a site occupation. It is suggested that kill site activities such as primary butchering may have relatively inflexible and impermeable boundaries, that activities such as tool resharpening may be more flexible, and that secondary processing may be more permeable to the intrusion of other activities. A study of a selection of activity areas at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump confirms that these concepts do enhance our understanding of site activity areas and that an examination of boundaries can allow an assessment of activity area contemporaneity.     

野牛的灭绝与大平原印第安人的命运

野牛是美国西部大平原地区最重要的一种动物,曾对人类的生活产生过直接的影响,更与印第安人的生存息息相关。在内战后的西部开拓中,白人移居对野牛进行了野蛮的屠杀,致使野牛灭绝。与此同时,白人拓居在美国政府的支持下推行种族灭绝政策,导致失去生活所依的印第安人陷入了严重的生存危机。这种残暴和不义之举是无可挽回的历史失误。反思这段历史今天仍具重要意义。