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An interdisciplinary research collaborative
investigating the pasts, presents, and futures of
forager & mixed-subsistence children's lives
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This week in Washington D.C. our research group took a morning off of talks to hit D.C. museums. We were pleased to find children everywhere!

In the National Museum of the American Indian, we learned about how children are at the center of Native American culture and activism.

These totem poles by Rick Bartow stand outside NMIA. The horizontal patterns on the poles’ bases symbolize “the flow of knowledge and inheritance”.

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Inside the museum, we saw a great exhibit on children, which focused on children’s play and learning. This included making small tipis, playing with dolls, bows and arrows, and other, child-sized subsistence material culture.

We also learned of the impact of boarding school on Native communities, whose primary purpose was to assimilate Native children. In these schools, children were forbidden from speaking their native languages, with the explicit intent to separate children from their native culture and heritage.

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However, children were also at the center of activism. For example, in 1978, hundred of American Indian activists and allies walked from San Fransisco to D.C. to protest threats to tribal land. Pictured here are children playing in front of a tipi erected at the Washington Monument at the end of this five month long protest.

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This action, and many others as part of the Red Power movement paved the way for the Indian Child Welfare Act, in which tribal governments now have a central role in placing children in “foster care or in adoptive homes which reflect Indian culture.” These measures actively ensure that Native American culture and identity can be transmitted from generation to generation.

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We also visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, whose exhibit on Human Origins also heavily featured children and child development throughout human evolution. The exhibit focused on how environmental change changed humans, and on how humans are now changing the environment, included the extended juvenility so often mentioned as a key feature for modern human life history. Pictured here is a bronze statue in the Human Origins exhibit, which shows a Neanderthal toddler watching his mother poke holes in a hide with an awl. This statue clearly demonstrates one of the various ways in which children, beyond modern humans, learned to make material culture.

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We absolutely loved our time in D.C., and can’t wait to tell you all about the various ways these museums and the talks we attended at the AAA meeting inspired us. We’ve come up with many more projects we are looking forward to beginning, so stay tuned for more exciting research on the pasts, presents and futures of forager children!

We had a great time presenting at our panel, All play and no work: (Re)defining play and work among forager children. Many thanks to all the presenters for their great papers, to our thoughtful discussant, Alyssa Crittenden, and to the wonderful audience, who asked many provocative questions.

We’ll be posting the abstracts from our respective talks shortly. In the meantime, if you are here and would like to talk to us, shoot us an email! foragerchildstudies@gmail.com

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Left to right: Adam Boyette, Rachel Reckin, Kate Ellis-Davies, Renee Hagen, Noa Lavi, Sheina Lew-Levy

Check out Camilla Morelli’s paper on the role of children in social change among the Matses of Peru! The full paper is available here

Abstract: This article examines radical social, cultural, and political changes taking place in Amazonia from the perspective of indigenous children and youth: a group who, despite their demographic prevalence, have received limited attention in the regional literature. Drawing on fieldwork with Matses people in Peru, I consider how children and youth are playing a critical role in the transition from a hunter-gatherer, forest-based society towards a riverine lifestyle that is increasingly engaged in trade, the market economy, and exchanges with chotac, or non-indigenous people. I argue that by engaging with their surroundings through playing and working, Matses children are becoming affectively attached to some parts of the world rather than others. This represents a purposeful shift from the lifestyle and worldviews of older generations and highlights how children are active agents who shape possible future directions of Matses society and transform the community’s relationships with the world. Accordingly, I propose a child-centred view of social change that seeks to demonstrate the implications of children’s creativity and agency for society at large and its future development.

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