Abstract

The archaeology and history of the post-contact era and European-Native interaction in southwestern Ontario is a field rich in data and opportunities to examine issues related to social processes of change and continuity, as well as Native adaptation and resistance to the colonial British state that ultimately became Canada. Yet the almost half millennium of history this period encompasses is often read as a single action, and we continually struggle not to insert historic biases and omissions, and contemporary issues, into that history of European-Native interaction. And while we can easily access the deeper history of European peoples in the centuries prior to their arrival in North America, often the deep archaeological history that Native peoples inhabited when Europeans first arrived is unexplored when seeking to interpret Native behaviours. This study seeks to re-situate the archaeological history that so shaped Native-centric perspectives through the events of the 16^th to 19^th centuries in southwestern Ontario, and in so doing, provide an alternative set of interpretations that emphasise change and continuity as ongoing processes informing Native behaviours. From this alternative perspective, one that emphasises archaeological interpretations arising from both material and written record, I outline how Native communities succeeded in maintaining a cohesiveness through centuries of European influence and material innovations, by their direct agency and maintenance of complex, ancient, adaptive social processes that both incorporated European ideas and things, and reinforced historically understood notions of self and community. This active engagement in the formation of their own histories identities has allowed Native individuals and communities to be of the Indigenous while being in the Colonial---an engagement that today provides the historical dimension affirming distinct Aboriginal identities, and underscores the significance these archaeological histories are to the ongoing construction of our collective pasts as being(s) in and of Canada.