Sarah M Proulx

SARAH PROULX, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Responsibilities to our Ancestors: Reconciling Colonial Legacies and Anishinaabe reclamation in Shebahonaning,” supervised by Dr. Bonnie McElhinny. Retitled “Responsibilities to our Ancestors: Settler colonialism, archaeology, and Anishinaabe reclamation in Zhiibaa’onaaning,” research was conducted in the grantee’s home community of Zhiibaa’onaaning, a non-federally recognized Anishinaabe community located on the north shore of Georgian Bay in Lake Huron. Research compiled archaeological, archival, genealogical, ethnohistorical, and Anishinaabe oral knowledge demonstrating the long-standing and continuous Anishinaabe occupation of Zhiibaa’onaaning. This study unveils settler colonial politics of assimilation, dispossession and Indigenous recognition employed by the colonial state to eliminate Anishinaabe from Zhiibaa’onaaning. Policy documents and archival records demonstrates how colonial law and narrative acted as mechanisms within larger colonial agendas to erase Anishinaabe from their ancestral lands. Research that compiled archaeological archives illuminate the colonial legacy of archaeology and its role in denying Anishinaabe access to their histories and ceremonial traditions through the destruction of archaeological burial and sacred sites and removal of ancestral remains and funerary objects. The reclamation of Anishinaabe knowledge through scholarly research aided in obtaining knowledge on Anishinaabe ceremonial practices, systems of governance, socio-cultural structures and histories. The juxtaposition of this knowledge with archaeological archives and literature illuminates Anishinaabe knowledge and histories as being imbedded within sacred landscapes.