Memory Spaces and Contested Pasts in the Haudenosaunee Homeland

Abstract

American Indians are continually surrounded by memory sites of colonization. These often take the form of monuments erected by descendants of colonizers who ‘remember’ their heroic events while forgetting the atrocities they performed in order to achieve their objectives (violent dispossession). Some archaeologists are now lending a critical eye towards such memory spaces or Imaginative Geographies, as Edward Said called them, as they have been manifest in Haudenosaunee (‘Iroquois’) territory. They hereby support American Indians to counter skewed projections of their colonization with their own memorials of space. Such agency reflects the power to prompt a remembrance of some silenced or otherwise ignored history and to reverse the gaze.