American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Conference. November 1-5, 2006.
Williamsburg, Virginia.

Session Title: Images of Colonialism: Reinvented Identities in the Atlantic World
Thursday, November 2, 1:00-3:20pm

Session Chair: Kathryn Sikes
Discussant: Audrey Horning

Session Abstract:
This panel considers the challenges that colonial encounters posed to ethnic, class, and regional identities, and to their public expression. Through dispossession of land, forced emigration, or voluntary settlement, colonization of the Caribbean and North America involved the separation of people from the landscapes and communities of their birth, along with the introduction of novel combinations of material culture for which a social context had to be invented, and new meanings ascribed. In addition, the presence of unfamiliar neighbors demanded a new etiquette of diplomacy for public interaction. How were ethnic boundaries negotiated and redefined as people of diverse origins, native and newcomer, free and enslaved, witnessed expanding geographic horizons? Using a comparative approach to explore these issues, the papers of this session span the Atlantic World, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, examining the construction and performance of identity as it was enacted through material culture, language, and public acts of empowerment.

Panel Presentations:

1. Natasha Jones
Paper Title: ‘Whereas it is a custom among them’: Indian Identity and Rights on Maryland’s 17th-Century Eastern Shore

Abstract:
The human landscape of Maryland’s late seventeenth-century Eastern Shore was characterized by diversity and unique sociocultural dynamics. Many women, people of African origin, and Indian individuals had a greater level of access to power than their counterparts on the Western Shore of Maryland and Tidewater areas of Virginia. An examination of relevant sources from Somerset County, Maryland, has revealed that local Indians successfully asserted individual and collective rights through the English court system during the first decades of European settlement. The relationship between perceptions of ethnic identity and access to power during this liminal period is explored in this paper.

2. Buck Woodard
Paper Title: The Change, Struggle, and Death of the Nottoway Language

Abstract:
During the early historic period, several groups of distinct Iroquoian ethnicities lived along the coastal plain of Virginia and North Carolina. While the language of the largest of these groups, the Tuscarora, has been examined and recorded at some length, research into the linguistic attributes of the smaller language communities (Nottoway/Meherrin) has remained focused on structural developments. However, through an examination of the extant language materials and the ethnohistorical record, an evaluation of the Nottoway language may reveal embedded cultural information previously not described. This paper focuses on the historic Nottoway language change, loss, and death through an anthropological perspective.

3. Grace Turner
Paper Title: In His Own Words: Abul Kelee, a Liberated African Apprentice

Abstract:
Scholars have often wondered about the process Africans went through in being captured and taken from their familiar world across the Atlantic to a new life where racialized enslavement proved to be quite different from enslavement by other Africans. As most of the millions of African captives had no written language, their stories mainly went untold. Those like Abul Kelee who were literate in Arabic could record their own impressions of their new life as they saw it. In defiance of European concepts of race-based slavery, Abul Kelee made it known that his sense of identity was not defined by his enslavement.

4. Meghan Habas Siudzinski
Paper Title: Negotiating Identity: Resistance and Accommodation in 19th century Donegal, Ireland

Abstract:
19th-century Irish tenants of the Glenveagh Estate lived with tensions between resistance to and accommodation of global market goods, and adherence to local traditions and products. Consumer behaviors exemplify the struggle of these tenants as they negotiated their identities in a colonial context, and in the face of an increasingly global economy. The complex nature of identity formation for these individuals is evidenced by material culture remains from home sites.

5. Kathryn Sikes/Chuck Meide
Paper Title: British Imperialism on Achill Island, Ireland: A Study of Vernacular Fishing Boats and Irish Symbolic Resistance

Abstract:
Throughout the 19th century, a series of British legal and economic restrictions of Irish fishing practices were enacted with the intent to replace indigenous vernacular boats with vessels that conformed more closely to British aesthetic and logistic sensibilities. Unlike vessel types found over broad geographic regions, commercially produced to standard plans and dimensions, vernacular boats built through folk traditions are often symbolic of community identities and their histories. An examination of boatbuilding traditions against a backdrop of historic photographs, oral histories, and British archives leads to the interpretation of Irish boats on Achill Island as expressions of unity and tools of resistance in the face of colonialist legislation.