Colonialism, Community, and Heritage in Native New England by Siobhan M. Hart (review)

hart’s study of cultural heritage projects across the Native Northeast/New England examines a tension in recent collaborative endeavors. On the one hand, certain museums, exhibitions, archaeological work, and other public- facing projects have been important vehicles for recognizing the importance of Indigenous participation and knowledge systems and for resisting Euro- centric representations. On the other hand, at times they have reinscribed settler-colonial mentalities, practices, and politics under the guise of seemingly multivocal, authority-sharing interventions. Delving into this tension proves productive as anthropologist Siobhan Hart assesses the past, present, and future of heritage production in a region fraught with colonial difficulties, as well as replete with decolonizing possibilities.

The concept of “heritage- scapes” is central to this concise monograph: places “in which locales, things, and bodies are used to construct narratives of familiarity and difference.” These dynamic sites “tell us not only about ‘what happened’ in the past but about politics and community relations in the present” (1). Building on scholarship such as Jean O’Brien’s critiques of New Englanders’ “vanishing Indian” discourses, Hart probes how regional heritage- scapes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries grapple with erasive rhetorics and practices. “Today,” she contends, “Native Americans are appropriating the sources, forms, and processes of historical production in their efforts to adapt to and resist the lasting effects of colonialism . . . and to affirm their own enduring cultural, social, and spiritual relations to their ancestral homelands” (5).

The study comprises four case studies. Chapter 2 takes readers to the island of Noepe and the Aquinnah Circle district, which encompasses interpretive signage and the Aquinnah Cultural Center (housed at the Edwin DeVries Vanderhoop home site). These locales, stewarded by the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), interpret aspects of Aquinnah identity and sovereignty to the many non- Native tourists who visit in summertime. They also raise into relief complexities of land trust agreements and stringent limitations upon the autonomous exercise of tribal governance. Chapter 3 interrogates Pocumtuck/Deerfield in the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River Valley, a corridor where historically Euro-colonial institutions have been in the middle of recasting colonial narratives centered on problematic misrepresentations of Indigenous violence. Innovative museum and digital undertakings, as well as Hart’s own involvement in “polycommunal” field school archaeology, have demonstrated moves toward recollecting more diverse pasts through multistakeholder labors. Chapter 4 explores the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a facility that showcases Pequot and regional Native histories and contemporary issues, including the effects of seventeenth- century genocidal violence. The museum’s ups and downs foreground challenges of maintaining casino gaming revenue and visitor presences over long spans of time. Chapter 5 tours Patuxet/Plymouth, specifically, the Wampanoag Home Site at the “bicultural” institution of Plimoth Plantation. Hart reflects on how living history interpretation and material culture present opportunities for staff members to address past and present forms of Indigenous continuity, as well as entanglements with—and resistances to—a particular brand of filiopietistic Anglo- American colonialism.

Hart’s analysis is attuned to the shaping role of federal recognition and the differential statuses that this colonial system has conferred on communities’ abilities to serve as consultants. She is mindful that collaborations “may do little to subvert settler state power and consequently can reproduce the inequities that flow from it” (18). Importantly, the book questions the benefits and outcomes of collaborations, which at times seem most influential among participants rather than exercising wider transformative impacts. Finally, Hart contends that “the projects place the burden of decolonizing squarely on Indian people, expecting little of non- Indians except open minds and a willingness to consider other points of view” (10), doing little to critically situate whiteness and Euro-colonial roles in ongoing colonialism. The book focuses on public- facing “products” of collaborations rather than conducting in- depth interviews with curators or participants, a methodological choice that may overlook nuances of the underlying relationships, goals, and in-progress work that shape these endeavors. One also wonders how...