ABSTRACT
Alongside other Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cultural values, Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Nation) concept of survivance has become an increasingly popular interpretive perspective in Indigenous archaeology and related fields of heritage management. Survivance is a powerful Indigenous condition that enables the rejection of Indigenous victimhood. Archaeologists are positively adapting survivance to work with archaeological perspectives on materiality and social practice to challenge false representations of Indigenous peoples as racially inauthentic and/or figuratively extinct in academic and public heritage discourses. However, questions linger over the depth and breadth of archaeologists’ engagement with Vizenor’s broader project of Indigenous healing (i.e., “socio-acupuncture”) given different but persistently generalized middle-range theorizations of survivance in archaeological research. In this chapter, I provide a brief summary of Vizenor’s survivance and other interrelated concepts, applications of survivance in archaeology, and an example of archaeological survivance storytelling that emerged specifically through my research partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen, and Payómkawichum peoples of the Los Angeles Basin (LA Basin) in Southern California.
