ABSTRACT
Indigenous histories have always existed. Indigenous notions of the past that connect people to places, events, peoples, and memories help Indigenous peoples define their place in the created world and explain its shape, wonders, and human relations (like other kinds of history). Indigenous peoples have their own ways of reckoning and remembering histories, including over the past several decades incorporating historical methodologies associated with western European traditions (Nabokov 2002). Even though Indigenous peoples have always understood their place within the created world according to narratives (many rooted in oral transmission supplemented with other memory technologies, such as winter counts, wampum belts, memory piles, pictographs, and more), Indigenous voices and agency in producing historical narratives have rarely been accorded a place of legitimacy in the formal discipline of history and have instead been dismissed as “myth,” “legend,” “folklore,” or “saga” (Nabokov 2002; Basso 1996).
