3
Dead Kettles and Indigenous Afterworlds in Early Colonial Encounters in the Maritimes

Meghan C.L. Howey

The indigenous peoples of the Maritimes were the first in northeastern North America to encounter colonial Europeans, having sustained interactions with Basque whalers/fishers and, soon after, French traders starting at the turn of the sixteenth century (Hornborg 2008; Martin 1975; Prins 2002; Reid 1995; Whitehead 1993). During the time of earliest contact, ca. AD 1500 to 1630, the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet experienced a near-constant influx of foreigners and their goods, including copper kettles. Their interactions with Europeans and their material objects produced diverse personhoods, social relations, and communities (Miller 2005:286). In this chapter I examine some of the subjectivities arising from their interactions with foreign goods (Joyce 2014; Mullins 2011). Specifically, I examine how the Mi’kmaq actively socialized one particularly significant European-origin good, the kettle, within the context of their preexisting value systems and well-established relational ontology, wherein objects were not only allowed but expected to possess purposeful agency (Brown and Walker 2008:297). In such an ontological perspective, humans do not form the sole exemplars of personhood (Alberti and Bray 2009:338).

To the Mi’kmaq, the entire universe was filled with an animating spirit called mntu; during the early colonial encounter, kettles were readily incorporated into this relational ontology. I explore how kettles, in the context of the social alterity of colonial contact, became the other-than-human relations of the Mi’kmaq that held the unique ability and specific responsibility to create an afterworld that was at once exclusively indigenous yet also a world prepared for a potential breach by Europeans.

I offer this case study to highlight the importance of conducting archaeologies that consider seriously in their reconstructions other-than-human agency and the potential this agency has for transforming social, economic, and ideological material realities (Harrison-Buck and Hendon, this volume). The case of the Maritimes also allows us to appreciate that colonial encounters provide a particularly salient venue for this exploration, as contact draws people into spaces where they experience and confront different object and thought worlds. In encounter, people are drawn into social alterity (sensu Taussig 1993). They are faced with the undeniable rawness of alterity—the “impossible but necessary, indeed everyday affair” of having to “register both sameness and difference, of being like and of being Other” (Taussig 1993:129). In circumstances of colonial contact, communities must negotiate their interdependent reciprocal relationships with human and nonhuman agents, which now include myriad new nonhuman agents previously not experienced and unincorporated into their relational worlds (Taussig 1993; Swenson 2015). Alterity creates openings for the activation of new, potent nonhuman agents and demands the definition of the primacy of these relationships by the human communities relating to them (Brown and Walker 2008:297).

Early Colonial Encounters in the Maritimes

The Maritimes are part of Wabanaki, or the “land of the dawn,” which runs along the Atlantic seaboard from the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec to southeastern Massachusetts (Brooks and Brooks 2010:12; figure 3.1). The Maritimes occupy the northeastern extent of this landscape and formed the traditional homelands of the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet. The name Mi’kmaq derives from their greeting nikmaq, meaning “my kin friends.” The Basque, the French, and eventually the British would refer to the Mi’kmaq by various other names, including Souriquois, Tarentines, and Gaspesiens. Europeans adopted the Mi’kmaq name for the Maliseet, mali’sit, which translates to something akin to “they don’t talk like we do.” The Maliseet referred to themselves as wukastuk kewiuk in reference to the St. John River1 (for more on terminology, see Hornborg 2008; Prins 2002; Whitehead 1993).

figure-c003.f001

Figure 3.1. General location of Wabanaki and a closeup of the Maritimes, which occupy the northeastern extent of Wabanaki. The Canadian provinces, including the Pictou site and Ooteomul, Kluskap’s Kettle (Spencer’s Island), are indicated.

The position of the Maritimes brought the indigenous peoples living there into early encounter with Europeans. The Mi’kmaq were the first peoples in Wabanaki drawn into contact, meeting Europeans as they came down the Atlantic seaboard because they were moving further and further afield as their fishing practices exhausted marine resources in their own waters in the northeast Atlantic of Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Roberts 2007). In the late fifteenth century, John Cabot landed on Cape Breton and brought confirmation of the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks back to Europe (Whitehead 1993:9).

The abundant marine resources of the northwest Atlantic waters of the Maritimes attracted more early European explorers. The Basque voyaged into the Maritimes and established whaling and fishing stations there in the early 1500s (Innis 1940; Kurlansky 1997). Like the Basque, the French came to this area as voyagers in the 1500s, but their interests quickly expanded beyond fishing into the fur trade, religious conversion, and settlement; they became the dominant colonial presence in the region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Prins 2002; Salisbury 1996; Whitehead 1993). The British began developing a larger presence in the region, including competing with the French in fur trade in the later part of the seventeenth century, and ultimately came to dominate the region during the eighteenth century (Paul 2000; Reid 1995). The British ushered in an era of increased adversarial colonial relations after this time as well (Paul 2000; Reid 1995).

While marine resources drew Europeans’ initial attention to the area, the fur trade came to be a dominant conduit for cultural contact between Native Americans and Europeans there and across the Northeast (Wagner 1998:430). Informal trading for furs began as early as the 1520s in the Maritimes and on the coast of Maine (Salisbury 1996:452). After the mid-1500s, formalized trading accelerated along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Gulf and Estuary of St. Lawrence when demand for fancy furs began to increase in Europe (Fitzgerald et al. 1993).

From the outset, the Mi’kmaq were active agents in European contact, taking a particularly active role in the fur trade. The Mi’kmaq adopted the small European sailing boat, the shallop, and used it to sail the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine as far south as Massachusetts. The Mi’kmaq used their sailing abilities to establish themselves as Native middlemen who controlled the movement and introduction of European trade goods into other indigenous communities for years before Europeans themselves made significant contacts with tribal populations inland around 1610 (Bourque and Whitehead 1985). While the Mi’kmaq capitalized on a close engagement with Europeans in economic trade, this engagement also exposed them early and rapidly to European diseases against which they had no immunity. Estimates are that during the sixteenth century, the Mi’kmaq experienced a loss of at least 75 percent of their population as a result of foreign diseases; losses at this level continued well into the seventeenth century (Prins 2002:54).

Social Alterity, New World People, and Copper Kettles

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mi’kmaq and colonial Europeans were becoming something that had never existed before: “New World People” (Reid 1995:74). Exactly what this would look like and what it meant was not yet clear. It was a time, then, of identity formation; Self and Other were intertwined in a “third space” (sensu Bhabha 2004). This third space held a material grip on the bodies and minds of both indigenous and European peoples (Gosden 2004:3). This material grip was manifest in the practice of the fur trade whereby the exchange of material goods became the mode by which contact with other human beings was mediated (Reid 1995:74). The exchange of material goods was important for facilitating economic relationships, but it did not become such a critical conduit for intercultural interaction on this basis alone. Exchange became the mode for contact because it provided a tangible way of navigating the uncertainties of alterity that lay at the heart of both Mi’kmaq and European experience during early colonial encounters (Reid 1995:74; see also Fitzgerald et al. 1993; Rubertone 1989; Salisbury 1996; White 1999).

Copper/copper-colored kettles were one of the most essential items in the trade networks established between Europeans and the Mi’kmaq and, indeed, among indigenous peoples across Wabanaki (Martin 1975; Trigger 1987; Turgeon 1997; van Dongen 1996). As exchange began in the 1500s, Europeans quickly recognized a widespread demand for copper kettles among Maritime and other northeastern indigenous groups (Groce 1980:108). Initially, they responded to this demand by trading high-quality iron-banded “red copper” kettles they had access to as products used in their home countries (Fitzgerald et al. 1993). As demand accelerated over during the 1500s, high-quality copper kettles were replaced in trade repertoires with a less complex, more economical rolled-rim variety with folded-over copper alloy lugs, often made of brass. These kettles are referred to as “trade kettles” (Ehrhardt 2005:73; Fitzgerald et al. 1993; Turgeon 1997). Figure 3.2 shows an example of a French-origin standardized trade kettle. Trade kettles were standardized in form and mass-produced in Europe specifically to supply the marked demand for kettles among indigenous communities in North America (Bradley 1987; Howey 2011; van Dongen 1996).

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Figure 3.2. Image of a standardized copper trade kettle used by the French during early contact (ca. seventeenth century). This well-preserved kettle was excavated at the Place Royale in Quebec City, which Samuel de Champlain began constructing in 1608. Marc Gadreau 2005, © Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, Quebec.

The popularity of the kettle was rooted in copper’s preexisting highly charged value among the indigenous peoples of Wabanaki. Native copper had been used from the Archaic period (ca. 8000–800 BC) onward in potent symbolic ways, and copper’s color was cognitively linked to a “metaphysics of light” (Childs 1994; Ehrhardt 2005; Hamell 1983; Miller and Hamell 1986). As European copper came to Wabanaki in the form of something novel and virtually irreproducible—kettles—it came to be invested with statutory and symbolic power exceeding even the power of native copper in prehistory (Turgeon 1997:9–10).

The trade kettle’s origin with the “Other” who had entered the social, economic, and ideological spheres of Maritime and northeastern indigenous communities, combined with its material connection to a native medium that had held symbolic significance for millennia prior to colonialism, fueled kettles’ primary place in early contact trade (see also Howey 2011). Throughout early colonial contact, kettles, understood by Europeans as utilitarian cooking items, were not acquired by indigenous groups for this function. Instead, the demand for kettles was driven by their frequent and central incorporation into symbolically, ceremonially, and socially charged activities—most notably, indigenous burial practices.

Prior to contact, across the Maritimes and the Northeast, burials were furnished with very few durable grave goods (Brenner 1988; Crosby 1988; Whitehead 1993). During early contact, burial practices shifted and indigenous internments became furnished with copious amounts of grave goods, including large quantities of European-origin goods (and some native ones). These materially rich post-contact burials have come to be referred to as “copper-kettle burials” because some combination of whole or fragmentary European-made copper/brass kettles and other artifacts made from these metals permeated almost all of the burials (Petersen et al. 2004:2). Kettle burials occurred over a large portion of northeastern North America between ca. 1500 and 1680 (Brenner 1988; Gibson 1980; Loren 2013; Petersen et al. 2004; Trigger 1987). However, copper-kettle burials are best known from the Maritimes where they occurred first and featured kettles as the most elaborate of all grave goods.

Thirteen copper-kettle burial sites dating to the Protohistoric period (ca. AD 1500–1630) have been recorded in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Mi’kmaq traditional homelands (Whitehead 1993). The inclusion of kettles in Maritime indigenous graves during the Protohistoric period was so common that it formed one of the primary driving forces behind the persistent demand for kettles in trade exchanges, starting with the Basque and then with the French (Martin 1975:114). The Mi’kmaq sought kettles from European traders to replace the many that had been buried as ceremonial grave goods (Martin 1975:114).

Animism and Afterworlds: Mi’kmaq Copper-Kettle Burials

For the Mi’kmaq, the entire universe is filled with an animating spirit called mntu. Mi’kmaq foundational cosmology understands everything in the world as imbued with sentient life and everything as related, expressed in the traditional phrase msit no’kmaq, “all my relations” (Robinson 2014:673–74). During early colonial encounters, I suggest that both elements of this long-established ontology—animate spirit and encompassing relatedness—were extended to European-origin kettles. The permeation of kettles across Protohistoric burials among the Mi’kmaq reflects kettles’ embodiment as other-than-human relatives with souls and developed conditions of personhood.

Kettle Inclusion Patterns at Burial Sites

Most of the copper-kettle burial sites recorded in Mi’kmaq territory in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are known because they were unearthed in the late 1800s and early 1900s by landowners and interested locals or through accidental discovery; the unsystematic nature of these explorations has left a somewhat sketchy archaeological record of these sites (Whitehead 1993).2 The extant evidence does suggest that kettles were included in Mi’kmaq copper-kettle burials in two ways: (1) as whole or partial kettles that were damaged, sometimes extensively, and (2) as intact kettles with little to no damage (Harper 1956, 1957; Martin 1975; Smith 1886; Whitehead 1993).

The best-recorded copper-kettle burial complex in the Maritimes comes from the Hopps or Pictou site in Nova Scotia, dug and published by local teacher and avocational archaeologist J. Russell Harper (Harper 1956:appendix A, 1957 [see figure 3.1 for site location]). While this is the best recorded of the copper-kettle burials, the excavations occurred over only a few days and their expedient nature must be taken into account. Also, excavation focused only on burials and grave goods; there is no information about the nature or distribution of non-burial activities at the site. Excavations identified two burial pits. Although no age/sex data are available from the interments, both burial pits included numerous kettles and kettle-derived objects. The deposits contained both damaged and intact kettles. Table 3.1 provides a summary of kettle and kettle-derived object distribution in these two pits.

In what Harper designated as Section 1 of Burial Pit 1, three intact copper kettles were “placed with their bottoms upward” (inverted) on a painted animal skin, and beneath each kettle was a black layer of decayed organic material that contained human remains, including skull parts (Harper 1956:40–41; see table 3.1). Section 2 of Burial Pit 1 had six kettles, all of which were mutilated and inverted. Only one had a black layer under it. For the most part, these damaged kettles were not in contact with human remains (Harper 1956:42; see table 3.1).

Table 3.1. Summary of distribution of kettle/kettle-derived objects at Hopps site. Table derived from Harper 1956:appendix A, 1957. Note, Burial Pit 1 was dug in two sections in 1955 and Burial Pit 2 was dug in three strata in 1956.

Hopps (Pictou) site (ca. AD 1550–1630)
Burial Pit # Section or Stratum Whole Kettle Kettle-Derived Object Kettle/Kettle Object Description
1 1 YES NO 3 intact inverted kettles; beneath each a black humus layer with human bones, including skull parts
1 2 YES NO 4 inverted, crushed kettles; one lay over black humus layer (but with no bones)
2 Lowest Stratum YES YES 3 to 4 bodies lay on grave floor lined with kettle-derived copper sheeting 10 inverted, crushed kettles scattered throughout stratum (but not in contact with human bones)
2 Second Stratum YES NO 2 inverted copper kettles; one lay over human skull parts and several long bone fragments; the other lay over black humus layer (but with no bones)
2 Third Stratum NO NO Ash layer from fire, no goods or bodies

In Burial Pit 2, Harper identified three distinct strata (Harper 1957:13). The lowest, or first, stratum was found to be lined with deconstructed kettle sheet metal and birch bark. It contained skeletal remains of three or four people and a compact mass of grave goods (Harper 1957:14; see table 3.1). This mass of grave goods included eight copper kettles that were inverted and “crushed or completely smashed” (Harper 1957:14; see table 3.1). In the second stratum were two inverted, intact copper kettles that both covered human remains and kept the earthen fill of the grave from touching the human remains (Harper 1957:16; see table 3.1). The uppermost, or third, stratum had the remains of two fires (Harper 1957:16).

A number of discrete patterns to the inclusion of kettles are apparent from these two burial pits. First, all kettles, whether intact or damaged, were inverted. Of the five intact whole kettles recovered across the two burial pits, four were inverted over human bones and one may have been (table 3.1). Of the fourteen damaged kettles recovered across the two burial pits, thirteen were not in contact with human remains (table 3.1). It appears that damaged kettles were kept out of contact with human remains while intact kettles were placed purposefully in direct contact with the bodies, including over the skull in one case (Burial Pit 1) (table 3.1).

A review of less well-recorded copper-kettle burial sites in the Maritimes confirms that both intact and damaged kettles were included in burials and that the practice of inverting kettles was common. These other burial finds also show a similar pattern of placing intact kettles in direct contact with bodies and damaged ones away from any human remains, although poor archaeological recording renders it hard to make conclusive determinations. For instance, at one copper-kettle burial recovered in the late 1800s on the Tabusintac River in New Brunswick, multiple undamaged kettles were found and recorded as “bottom up” and placed over human remains (Smith 1886:14–15); details beyond that are not provided. Another burial locale, known only from the description of the landowner in the 1930s, was said to have washed out of the Salmon River in Nova Scotia with a copper kettle overturned on the skull of a male burial, but there is little other information (Whitehead 1993:29). At the Northport site in Nova Scotia, a burial was accidentally discovered in the 1970s eroding out of a bank on private property, and four kettles were found inverted over a flexed inhumation burial (Whitehead 1993:41). Analysis of these kettles found the largest to be undamaged and the three smaller ones to have been cut and crushed (Whitehead 1993:45). Where each kettle was located specifically in relation to the body is not provided in site records, as the burial was found already eroding out of its original location. It seems reasonable to infer that the largest kettle, which is undamaged, was over the body while the other, smaller kettles, all damaged, were associated grave goods not in contact with the human remains, but there are not enough details to confirm such patterning.

Living Kettles, Dead Kettles

Father Le Clercq, a missionary to the Mi’kmaq on the Gaspe Peninsula in the mid-seventeenth century, was told that kettles were included with a recently deceased individual to “bear him company and do him service in the Land of the Souls” (Le Clercq 1910 [1691]:302–3). Kettles could bear humans company because the Mi’kmaq had extended their foundational cosmology to include kettles during the early contact period. Kettles were living, animate beings; they possessed a life force, or “soul,” and conditions for personhood (Zedeño 2008:363).

The complex animate life (and afterlife) of kettles is illuminated further in an exchange between a group of Mi’kmaq and Jesuits recorded by Nicolas Denys (1908 [1672]), a French aristocrat who became an explorer, colonizer, politician, and chronicler in Acadia from 1632 to 1672. Denys reported that the French disliked the fact that the Mi’kmaq put so many trade goods, especially kettles, in their burials and that they very much wanted to “disabuse” the Mi’kmaq of this practice. In one effort to dissuade this practice, the Jesuits (whom the Mi’kmaq often referred to as the robes) forced a group of Mi’kmaq to open a grave so they could show them how wasteful it was to place goods, including kettles, in burials. Denys relays the following response from the Mi’kmaq when they saw the many decayed burial goods items:

There was there among other things a kettle, all perforated with verdigris. An Indian having struck against it and found that it no longer sounded, began to make a great cry, and said that some one wished to deceive them. “We see indeed,” said he “the robes and all the rest, and if they are still there it is a sign that the dead man has not had need of them in the other world where they have enough of them because of the length of time that they have been furnished them. But with respect to the kettle,” said he “they have need of it since it is among us a utensil of new introduction, and with which the other world cannot yet be furnished. Do you not indeed see,” said he, rapping again upon the kettle, “that it has no longer any sound, and that it no longer says a word, because its spirit has abandoned it to go to be of use in the other world and to the dead man to whom we have given it?” (Denys 1908 [1672]:440).

One of the things this scene helps us understand is why some kettles were mutilated before their inclusion in burials. Damaging kettles by cutting and smashing them would have ruined their ability to make sound. In this scene, we see that if a kettle no longer makes a sound, its spirit has been released; it is only through this release that the deceased can be provided with this spirit of the kettle for use in the afterlife (Martin 1975:116). Such mutilation of kettles prior to inclusion in burials reflects, then, their ceremonial slaying. This treatment of kettles among the Mi’kmaq aligns with what Pauketat (2013:33–34) has suggested was important across much of Native North America: that “the qualities of things engage the senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch in ways that lend them agentic or transformative powers” and that “such things may have been understood by indigenous people as Witnesses, imbued with power and able to connect the living to the gods.”

Another key aspect of this vignette is that the Mi’kmaq man concluded that the kettle was needed in the afterlife by the deceased more than were the other grave goods because the kettle was newly introduced in the world of the living and therefore the afterworld did not yet have it. By concluding that the afterworld was not yet furnished with European-made kettles, the man indicated clearly that the Mi’kmaq, even as they were engaged in the process of becoming “New World People” with an identity that involved Europeans, nevertheless still understood the afterworld to be an exclusively Mi’kmaq place. As kettles were slain and included in burials, these Mi’kmaq relations were freed to cross over from the living world to the exclusively Mi’kmaq afterworld, becoming present in the fundamentally Mi’kmaq next life.

While the afterworld was envisioned as free of colonial presence, the inclusion of undamaged kettles in physical contact with Mi’kmaq bodies was done to prepare the afterworld in case of future colonial encroachment. Through intimate contact with whole kettles, the irreproducibility of kettles and their origin with Europeans was transcended. What had been the foreign-derived statutory and symbolic power of kettles in this life was relayed directly through the act of physical contact to the Mi’kmaq dead for the next life. I suggest that these undamaged kettles had to remain alive (intact) to transfer their life force to the Mi’kmaq dead; the European-origin power transferred through this contact would remain with the Mi’kmaq in the afterworld even as they left Europeans themselves behind. Unlike the experience of early colonial encounters during the Protohistoric period in their earthly life, then, in this afterlife the Mi’kmaq would already have with them European-origin knowledge and power as a resource to protect them from future breaches of their indigenous space. This explains, I suggest, why we see such a protective placement of intact kettles—directly on the bodies and often covering the heads of the dead, shielding them in the transference and crossing over.

Inverted Worlds, Inverted Kettles

As noted, despite the unreliable nature of the archaeological recording of the copper-kettle burial sites, a striking commonality is that when kettles were included in burials (both damaged and undamaged) they were inverted rather than upright in their “normal” or “usable” position. For many societies, death reflects an inversion of the living world. Among the Mi’kmaq during early contact, death as an inversion may explain in part the inversion of kettles in graves. However, there were added layers of meaning to the inversion of kettles at a time when the world of the living for the Mi’kmaq was also being inverted before their eyes by Europeans—the very people who brought with them not only copper kettles but also deadly diseases. As mentioned, Mi’kmaq population losses were rapid and substantial in the Protohistoric period. The massive rate of loss certainly inverted their world, but the real thrust of the inversion, I suggest, came from the death patterns of these losses: it was Mi’kmaq leaders who interacted with colonists as well as children who experienced disproportionate rates of death from European diseases (Hornborg 2008:6). During early contact across the region, children formed roughly 70 percent of burials (Petersen et al. 2004).

With children dying at such fast rates in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Mi’kmaq world was literally being “placed bottoms upward”; the normal cycle of life, death, and generational turnover was wholly upended during early contact. Moreover, community leaders were no longer present in this “New World” to help navigate the grief as well as the practical implications of this demographic crisis.

Kettles only work as cooking pots if they are upright; inverting them eradicates the utilitarian function instilled in them by Europeans. I suggest that when the Mi’kmaq inverted the kettles they included with their dead, they were furthering the transformation of kettles from European goods into their own relations. The Mi’kmaq encountered kettles in the “New World” during the early colonial period, but they did not activate them as other-than-human relations for assistance in this context; rather, they incorporated them into msit no’kmaq to accompany, protect, and serve their leaders and, more solemnly, their children, their next generation, now in the next world.

Kluskap’s Kettle

Aspects of Mi’kmaq mythology provide added salience to kettles’ inclusion in Protohistoric burials. In particular, the departure narrative of Kluskap3 provides important evidence for understanding kettles as animate other-than-human Mi’kmaq relations emergent within the social alterity of early colonial encounters. Kluskap is a multifaceted figure in Mi’kmaq cosmology. He is an essential culture hero and archetype of virtuous human life for the Mi’kmaq (Robinson 2014:674). In the Mi’kmaq creation story Kluskap is not the creator but the fourth level of creation, after the act of creation itself, the creation of the Sun, and the creation of Mother Earth; he is the “First One Who Spoke” (Augustine 2014:27). Chief Stephen Augustine, recalling the version of Kluksap’s creation he heard from his grandmother, shares that “he is created from a bolt of lightning that hits the surface of Mother Earth. He is made of the elements of the earth: feathers and bone and skin and dirt and grass and sand and pebbles and water. An eagle comes to Kluskap with a message from the Giver of Life, Grandfather Sun and Mother Earth. The eagle tells Kluskap that he will be joined by his family, who will help him understand his place in this world” (Augustine 2014:27). His grandmother, nephew, and mother then arrive; “as each member of his family arrives, Kluskap asks his fellow beings—the animals, the fish, and the plants—to sustain the Mi’kmaq peoples” (Augustine 2014:28).

Kluskap holds an incredibly complicated position in Mi’kmaq religious belief systems, and he can even appear contradictory at times, as both hero and trickster (for more on Kluskap, see Reid 2013). There are, however, consistencies in his prominence across Mi’kmaq myths: Kluskap, as seen in the story of his creation shared by Chief Augustine, played a key role in the creation of the Mi’kmaq world and helped situate the Mi’kmaq as harvesters of that world (Reid 2013:34). Also, in various myths Kluskap prophesizes the coming of Europeans; he is the figure in Mi’kmaq cosmology who gives primordial meaning to colonial contact (Reid 2013:34). Yet it was colonial contact that drove this foundational figure to depart from the Mi’kmaq world. While there are variants to the myth of his departure, in general these myths see Kluskap grow dissatisfied with the colonists: “He was not able to cope with the white invaders who came into his domain” (Reid 2013:18). He tells the Mi’kmaq: “I am going to leave you. I am going to a place where I can never be reached by a white man” (Reid 2013:18). He then turns his kettle upside down and departs. His inverted kettle becomes an island; the Mi’kmaq continue to call this island Ooteomul, meaning Kluskap’s Kettle, which is in Nova Scotia and today is called Spencer’s Island (see figure 3.1) (Hornborg 2008:84). Figure 3.3 provides a photograph of this island, which shows its remarkable similarities with an overturned trade kettle.

What Kluskap is described as doing before leaving the Mi’kmaq is what we see occurring repeatedly in early colonial Mi’kmaq burials—he inverts a kettle and eradicates its utilitarian, European function. Inverted kettles in burials offered a re-inversion of the Mi’kmaq world in the next one—and that world would be, just as Kluskap himself was, viscerally Mi’kmaq both before and after Europeans. The fact that Kluskap inverts his kettle before being able to go to a place where he “can never be reached by a white man” reaffirms how even as the Mi’kmaq adapted to the context of contact with Europeans, they still envisioned and actively planned for an exclusively indigenous afterworld.

Kettles—ceremonially mutilated, purposefully left whole, and inverted—came to fill a role no other object could for the Mi’kmaq: the ability to create an afterworld that was both exclusively indigenous but knowledgeable about and prepared for Europeans. The multifaceted ways kettles were incorporated in burials addressed the impossible but necessary task of mimesis that often occurs in the face of the social alterity of colonialism (as described by Taussig 1993)—of being at once same and alter, being fundamentally indigenous yet actively prepared for colonial encroachment.

With Kluskap’s inverted kettle turning into the island Ooteomul, the kettle, this irreproducible European-origin object, became primordially linked to the Mi’kmaq homelands (figure 3.3). Such tethering of myth to the physical landscape is an essential practice among many non-Western indigenous societies, wherein the physical landscape is not a backdrop for life but rather it and its varied features are “continually woven into the fabric of social life” (Basso 1996:110). Kluskap’s journey, his continued presence in Mi’kmaq traditions, and his gifting of the kettle back from Europeans to the Mi’kmaq homeland all form an important part of the Mi’kmaq’s creation and maintenance of their “symbolically interactive, topographically bounded, aesthetically effective, and meaningfully holistic landscape” (Dillehay 2007:318).

The primordial kettle inversion by Kluskap and its transformation into a piece of homeland further emphasizes the complicated biography of kettles. Kettles acquired significance in part because they connected to preexisting symbolic value systems around native copper, but they gained additional significance because of their European origin, form, and sensory qualities that could not be reproduced by the Mi’kmaq. Kettles, forming newly socialized goods that were not wholly indigenous and not wholly European, were prominently incorporated into Protohistoric burial practices wherein they were transformed fully into other-than-human Mi’kmaq relations responsible for bringing the Mi’kmaq to an afterworld free from colonialism but yet prepared for it. As kettles traveled with the Mi’kmaq to the next world, Kluskap’s Kettle ensured that the Mi’kmaq remained always connected to the place where they in fact began—their Maritime homeland (figure 3.3).

Conclusion

Copper-kettle burials are a practice that emerged in the distinct context of the social alterity and liminality of early colonial encounters in the Maritimes during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this period the Mi’kmaq had to grapple with the reality of being increasingly entrenched in a colonial world, but this could not negate the notion of humanity contained in being Mi’kmaq (Reid 1995:89). We can understand this complex duality of alterity expressed in the multifaceted inclusion of kettles in their burials. The Mi’kmaq extended their long-established relational ontology, one based on a world imbued with sentient life and encompassing relatedness, to these irreproducible European-origin goods. In doing this, the Mi’kmaq transformed kettles into objects that disavowed colonial reality and replaced it with the materialization of indigenous desires (Bhabha 2004 [1994]:130).

For the Mi’kmaq, kettles became relatives who could help them achieve their desire for a next world free from but fully prepared for colonial encroachment (both same and alter). Yet the Kluskap myth suggests that the next world was, in fact, back where they began, where Kluskap inverted his original kettle, tethering the Mi’kmaq to their place of origin and tying them deeply to their homeland. Looking again at this island as shown in figure 3.3, the fusion of topography, homeland, toponym, cosmology, and, ultimately, Mi’kmaq survivance is both undeniable and compelling. As explicated by Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor (1998:15), survivance, “in the sense of native survivance, is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence.” During the Protohistoric period, kettles as msit no’kmaq were part of this active presence for the Mi’kmaq; they were other-than-human agents that helped the Mi’kmaq go forward in the return to a world of their own.

The practice of including copious amounts of grave goods, especially items supplied to the Mi’kmaq through trade, such as kettles, agitated colonial Europeans because it clashed with their market-based understanding of how to value and use material goods and conflicted with their Christian beliefs about burials and the afterlife; together, this undermined their sense of reality and order. Indeed, there were “few Indian customs which exercised the French as much as this one did” (Martin 1975:114). But since the inclusion of kettles in graves actually contributed to the demand for kettles in trade, Europeans overlooked this practice from a practical standpoint during the early colonial encounter, even though it clashed with their worldview (Martin 1975; Turgeon 1997). Nicolas Denys, whose account I referenced above, explains further that while the French often wanted to remove items from the Mi’kmaq graves that they thought were wasted, they never dared to do so, “for this would have caused hatred and everlasting war, which it was not prudent to risk since it would have ruined entirely the trade we had with them” (Denys 1908 [1672]:439).

The concept of other-than-human agency can seem beyond the material, making it feel hard to approach in archaeological frameworks. This and the other case studies presented in this volume are aimed at transcending this sense of limitation and helping us understand that nonhuman relations have significant potential to transform material realities. In the case of the Mi’kmaq, they were willing to engage the French in everlasting war if the latter disturbed the kettles included in burials; not respecting the material reality and physical presence of nonhuman relations carried significant ramifications. While the French failed to understand Mi’kmaq reasoning, they nevertheless were compelled to recognize the relational ontology of the Mi’kmaq to avoid war and maintain trade relations. Kettles as relations who assisted the dead in the afterworld formed an ontological perspective that effectively drove the emergent, materially based market economy of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Maritimes.

As suggested by this case study, other-than-human agency is not an abstract concept; it has clear material components, both in terms of the essential import of the materiality of the objects endowed with this agency and in the ways this agency can impact and even direct key cultural institutions, such as the economy. This may be especially powerful and clear in cases of colonial encounter. In these spaces, people are drawn into alterity and so confronted with the “impossible but necessary, indeed everyday affair” of having to “register both sameness and difference, of being like and of being Other” (Taussig 1993:129). Here, as communities grapple with myriad previously un-experienced human and nonhuman agents, they turn to these foreign goods and transform them into new relations capable of creating the subjectivities necessary to navigate the impossibly incongruent but unavoidable tasks of alterity. Recognizing other-than-human relations in past societies does not require us to leave the material. Rather, the material is imbued deeply in these relations, and conducting archaeologies that recognize them will ultimately provide more robust pictures of past social, economic, and ideological developments.

Notes

1. The French sometimes called the Maliseet “Étchemins,” likely a reference to their canoe skills on the St. John River. This term also encompasses the Passamaquoddy of Maine.

2. I do not include any pictures of the bodies or goods from sites to respect the fact that they have largely been repatriated.

3. Kluskap has various spellings, including Glooscap and Gluscabe.

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