Reclaiming Indigenous History: Pyroepistomology and Social Justice

Authors

Paulette Steeves, Algoma University

Files

Description

The Indigenous past of the Americas has been fabricated to fit into neoliberal time frames of imagined “New Worlds". The past remains a tool of dis-empowerment created by American archaeologists to keep Indigenous civilizations as “infantile” on a global scale. In the Americas, the deep Indigenous past prior to 12,000 years before the present has been aggressively denied for over a century. Anthropologists’ denial of the deep Indigenous past of the Americas, has cleaved Indigenous people’s links to their homeland and created them as recent immigrants to the Americas, on a global scale of human history. Yet, Indigenous oral traditions of First People of the Americas tell a much different story of the past. In many oral traditions, Indigenous peoples say that they have been here forever, since time immemorial. All people have an inalienable right to tell their history and their stories in their own voice and their own ways of knowing. Based on research and the published data of hundreds of pre-12,000 years before present archaeological sites, oral traditions, environmental evidence, and paleo-mammalian migrations, I argue that people have been in the Western Hemisphere for over 130,000 years. Pyroepistomology works to cleanse the academic and literary landscape of dehumanizing literature that erases Indigenous communities from the land and creates space for Indigenous knowledge and voices.

Publication Date

12-6-2023

Recommended Citation

Steeves, Paulette. "Reclaiming Indigenous History: Pyroepistomology and Social Justice." (2023). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/laii_events/304