Paper short abstract:

Five hundred years of colonization in the New World have eradicated many North American Native American communities and left others in extreme states of ruin. Today, the surviving Native American communities are reconfiguring colonial salvage materials into emergent cosmologies of survival.

Paper long abstract:

The first convulsion of the Sixth Extinction began on October 12, 1492. Extensive species extinctions were triggered as the Americas were reconfigured by colonial/settler cultures, economies, and beliefs. Indigenous landscapes became alien landscapes as invasive species triggered New World species extinctions, intensive resource extractions transformed landscapes, and European agricultural practices reconfigured ecosystems. These material transformations were accompanied by alien/colonial perspectives toward native lands, indigenous peoples, and their worlds. Together, these material and ideational alienations de-substantiated and dis-integrated Native American worlds resulting in language and cultural extinctions, catastrophic population collapse, and religious and spiritual dissolution. After five hundred years of devastation in the Americas, Indigenous communities are reconfiguring the material artifacts of colonial salvage projects to repatriate Native American materials and ideational cultures.

This paper traces some Native American emergent vitalities arising out of the ruins of colonization through material remains such texts, museum collections, and ethnobotanical specimens. The latent potentialities of colonial artifacts are leading to new configurations of vitality for Native American communities. These survival strategies are also restructuring both indigenous and nonindigenous knowledge systems. Examples include the recovery of heritage seeds to re-indigenize diets, using historical documents to awaken sleeping languages, dismantling dams to revitalize rivers by restoring fish migrations. Taken together, these developments reveal a New World vision of adaptation, sustainability, and imagination that can guide us all toward meeting the challenges of anthropogenic toxicities and its concomitant stealth-suicidal tendencies.