“We Can Fly No Farther”

Chapter 2 by Alex Flick and Julia King explores the relationship between memory, place, and the post-Contact dispossession of indigenous lands on Maryland’s western shore. Documentary, oral, and archaeological evidence reveal how the colonial dispossession of land and the accompanying displacement of Native people proceeded hand in hand with the removal and/or appropriation of the material signs of the indigenous past. Displaced people, however, resisted this erasure in the remaking of place. Those who left the region adopted new practices while retaining familiar ones including, in the case of the Maryland Indians, a persistence in hunting, wigwam, and canoe construction and in mortuary practices reminiscent of ossuary practices known in the homeland. Those who remained in the region maintained and perpetuated memories of culturally significant places through repeated acts of visitation and oral tradition.

Appropriation · Archaeology · Colonialism · Erasure · Ethnology · Geography · Homeland · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Shore · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law