I’ve never been quite sure whether I started doing genealogy in 1967 or 1968. What I remember is that it was an article in Reader’s Digest. It was at my aunt’s house in Heber City, Utah. I spent summers with them, so it had to be summer, probably before Labor Day when I usually went…
Territorial Acknowledgment
I’ve been thinking about the territorial acknowledgments they do in Canada. They open events and assemblies, particularly in urban and institutional spaces, with an acknowledgment that the land in that area is the the traditional homeland of the ___ people, and that it was ceded under the ___ treaty (or not ceded). We could use…
Catoneras, An Indian Princess
One of my ancestors on my dad’s side was an Indian princess. Well, sort of. If you know me I know that I’m a rigorist in these matters. There are no Indian princesses because the “Indians” didn’t have royal families. And, the vast majority of these claims are hokum anyway. But Catoneras is one of…
Can People Have Names?
Yesterday’s post about names as performance got me to thinking. Somewhere on the periphery of memory I seemed to recall a paper about a medieval debate whether people can have names. And, sure enough, I found it: Rachel Anna Bauder. Naming Particulars: A Thirteenth-Century Debate on Whether Individuals Have Proper Names. PhD Dissertation, University of…
Name Performance
Are names performative? That’s a new idea for me. I came across it while reading a book by Abu El-Haj about the politics of Israeli archeology: The author “specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in…