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Historical ecology has revolutionized our understanding of fisheries and cultural landscapes, demonstrating the value of historical data for evaluating the past, present, and future of Earth’s ecosystems. Despite several important studies, Indigenous fisheries generally receive less attention from scholars and managers than the 17th–20th century capitalist commercial fisheries that decimated many keystone species, including oysters. We investigate Indigenous oyster harvest through time in North America and Australia, placing these data in the context of sea level histories and historical catch records. Indigenous oyster fisheries were pervasive across space and through time, persisting for 5000–10,000 years or more. Oysters were likely managed and sometimes “farmed,” and are woven into broader cultural, ritual, and social traditions. Effective stewardship of oyster reefs and other marine fisheries around the world must center Indigenous histories and include Indigenous community members to co-develop more inclusive, just, and successful strategies for restoration, harvest, and management. ‘Commercial fisheries have decimated keystone species, including oysters in the past 200 years. Here, the authors examine how Indigenous oyster harvest in North America and Australia was managed across 10,000 years, advocating for effective future stewardship of oyster reefs by centering Indigenous peoples.’

Late spring on Nanjemoy Creek brings mayflies and a wave of swampy heat that hints at the long, humid summer to come. It also brings my extended family together every Memorial Day weekend. We gather to camp on a home base belonging to Calvert Posey, a lifelong friend of my late grandfather, Turkey Tayac. This year Cal is no longer with us in corporeal form, having passed into the spirit world over the winter. He has joined the legion of ancestors who I believe spiritually guard this land, one of many living beings intertwined over millennia at this place. I

Although research on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States is legion, its impact on state policies that identified and defined American Indians has yet to be fully addressed. The exhibit,Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities(ongoing until September 21, 2014) at the National Museum of the American Indian provides a provocative vehicle for examining how eugenics-informed public policy during the first quarter of the twentieth century served to “remove” from official records Native peoples throughout the Southeast. One century after Indian Removal of the antebellum era, Native peoples in the American Southeast provide an important but often overlooked example of how racial policies, this time rooted in eugenics, effected a documentary erasure of Native peoples and communities.

Every plant, animal, and stone has a story to tell. This concept can be understood through the more than 27,000 trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants; 40 massive boulders; and 4 Cardinal Direction Marker stones placed throughout the National Museum of the American Indian’s landscape. All were carefully selected, blessed with prayer and song, transported over thousands of miles, and thoughtfully re-oriented on the museum’s four-acre site. These living beings traveled by boat, helicopter, flatbed truck, and tractor-trailer, and when they arrived at the museum, they were tearfully and joyfully welcomed as long-absent relatives. Four hundred years ago, the Chesapeake Bay

The fact that Jamestown's appearance was not a particularly positive event for native peoples has led event planners for \"America's 400th Anniversary\" to consider it more as a commemoration than as a celebration. You can learn more about the native peoples of the Chesapeake region by visiting \"Return to a Native Place,\" the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian's newest permanent exhibition in Washington. Or download the museum's teacher guide on the subject, at http://www.nmai.si.edu/education/files/chesapeake.pdf. (Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian, is a historian in the Office of Research for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. Tayac earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard, and her area of expertise is the native peoples of the Chesapeake region.)

As a result of La Matanza, the vast majority of the indigenous population in El Salvador went underground. External markers of ethnicity, including dress and language, ceased to be used in public. According to Esteban Lopez, a Mayan ANIS member, people wearing traditional clothing or speaking their native language publicly were often shot on sight. According to MacDonald: \"Indian involvement in 1932, and the fear of them which the movement revealed, briefly exposed a strong Indian presence in El Salvador. Ironically, its long-term effect was to further mask that group's distinctiveness.\"(1) In fact, most Salvadoran Ladinos -- who are descended from the process of ethnic blending between Spaniards and Indians during the colonial era and constitute the dominant group in society -- believe that indigenous peoples no longer exist in El Salvador. Foreign visitors to El Salvador are \"invariably told that indigenous culture has been abandoned, except for a few extremely threadbare and insignificant pockets in remote rural areas.\"(2) This general belief about the \"vanished Indian\" proves to be a fallacy. In 1977, ANIS made its existence known to the world when delegates participated in a meeting of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), an organization founded by such peoples in 1975 in order to facilitate the establishment of human rights codes for themselves in the international arena. In 1982, WCIP gained consultative status as a non-governmental organization at the United Nations, along with International Indian Treaty Council and Indian Law Resource Center. That year, the South American Indian Council (CISA) spun off from WCIP and has since developed autonomously.(17) ANIS also is a member of the International Treaty Council. Since those international bodies formed, ANIS members have traveled extensively throughout North America and Europe to conferences, meetings and hearings. They have become one of the most visible elements in the international arena. A series of relationships with North American peoples ensued, exhibited by the reception that they have received in Washington, D.C. ANIS members have also participated in Native American religious ceremonies. ANIS has held international indigenous festivals annually since 1986, to which delegates from indigenous groups worldwide have attended as well as members of human rights and other solidarity organizations. Forming solidarity networks with other indigenous peoples is in fact, one of the stated goals of ANIS.(18) A series of developments took place on the Salvadoran homefront that would shape the activities of ANIS. In 1980, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) was coordinated in Cuba. The Sandinistas had gained victory in Nicaragua the year before, and thus those opposed to both Salvadoran government policies and the extreme right-wing terrorist groups formed to eliminate reform efforts saw an opportunity.(19) The United States intervened, particularly in light of its distaste of socialist regimes, and began to aid the Salvadoran military against leftist opposition with grants of two million dollars per day. ANIS pledged the votes of its 65,000 members in the 1980 presidential election to Jose Napolean Duarte, a Christian Democrat, who won. In exchange, Duarte promised agrarian reform and assured ANIS that they would benefit in land openings. However, in spite of some initial gains of national legitimacy and the ability to strengthen their craft and agricultural cooperatives, ANIS was to suffer from the consequences of the civil war sweeping the country Duarte could no longer control either the military or the extreme right-wing death squads which terrorized the country Although ANIS was explicit in its political neutrality and pacifist doctrine -- neither supporting the FMLN or the military -- the old association of Indians and communists hit hard. Miguel Angel Serren, member of the ANIS Junta Directiva, stated in 1987: \"The high authorities prevent us from regaining our fights. If we want to exercise our rights, there's no law to protect us. If we try they call us guerrillas communists.\"

\"I am afraid they will kill us all,\" stated Chief Adrian Esquino Lisco, leader of the National Association of Indigenous Salvadorans (ANIS), on the night of February 6, 1996. Truckloads of military personnel surrounded the Las Hojas farming cooperative that night and prepared to enforce an eviction ordered by the Salvadoran Supreme Court. International outcry against the eviction led to a temporary suspension of the order. Las Hojas, an ANIS project, is a Nahuat community in Sonsonate, El Salvador. ANIS represents 68,000 Nahuat, Lenca, and Maya Indians. A Las Hojas resident, Maximiliano Bran Garcia, was threatened at his home at 1:00 a.m. on January 21, 1996, by five armed men, who had their faces painted in military camouflage. The men told him that, \"There would be another bloodshed in Las Hojas like the one on February 22, 1983 and that they would kill Adrian Esquino Lisco.\"

Collective identity incorporation is the social psychological process through which individuals adhere to social movements, essential sites of ethnic renewal. The cultural synthesis argument shows that collective identity incorporation depends upon newly created inclusive cultural practices developed by self-determining actors when structural opportunities are present. The cultural synthesis argument is derived from empirical study of an indigenous group, the Piscataway, who expand their definition of themselves from a localized society to an inclusive supra-tribal participant through the cultural creation of a new collective identity. The incorporation process was not an automatic response to external amalgamations, but an indigenous innovation. Empirical study on the Piscataway over five centuries reveals that the group adds a supra-tribal American Indian collective identity when state policies (structural opportunities) form and expansive and supportive environment for indigenous individuals to develop common origin narratives, ceremonial rituals, and fictive kin relationships (cultural practices) that cut across original tribal lines. Conversely, when state policies restrict and isolate indigenous interactions, the tribe withdraws into a submerged condition in which supra-tribal American Indian collective identity sharply declines due to lack of innovative common cultural practices. Informed by illustrative comparisons to other revitalized indigenous peoples throughout the East Coast, this study's findings suggest relevance of the cultural synthesis argument to the general situation of American Indian collective identity development and incorporation, an explanation for the sharp rise in American Indian population found on the 1990 U.S. census.