Title: Archaeology on the Slipstream: Re-Storying Kiowa and Comanche Land Use in Western Colorado  

Speaker: Lindsay M. Montgomery

Abstract: The Kiowa and the Comanche are two Tribal Nations whose ethnogenesis is tied to their migration onto the southern Plains during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there has been considerable scholarly attention paid to the development of sophisticated equestrian hunting, raiding, and trading networks among the Kiowa and Comanche following their movement onto the Plains, their historical connections to the Rocky Mountain region has gone largely undocumented. This intellectual silence, in part, reflects the tendency of archaeologists to link the emergence of new ethnic identities with radical territorial and cultural ruptures. In this talk, I offer a preliminary re-reading of Kiowa and Comanche history by applying Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of slipstreaming and the post-Indian to the iconographic record of Western Colorado. In tracing out articulations between rock art imagery and oral histories of migration this talk unsettles narratives of radical change that disconnect Kiowa and Comanche people from their ancestral places and obscure Indigenous engagements with the landscape over time.