Topic: Negotiating a World in Upheaval: Resiliency of Indigenous Systems of Warfare Among Yuman Groups

Speaker: Joseph B. Curran, Ph.D., R.P.A. 

This study is a deep historic-archaeological investigation on how and why weapon systems (Indigenous, colonial and/or hybrid) are chosen, resisted, modified, used, and/or abandoned. Through archival meta-analysis, I seek to provide ethnohistoric context on how weapons were used in symbolic communication to either reproduce or resist supposed legitimacy in borderlands. I apply this framework to a case study investigating conflicts and negotiations among the Lower Colorado River Basin Indigenous Yuman groups (i.e., Quechan, Mohave, Cocopa, and Maricopa) from 1780 to 1857. Specifically, I examine why these Yuman speakers seemed to prefer fighting on foot with their Indigenous weaponry during regional battles instead of using Spanish and then Anglo-American guns and horses as cavalry. This study seeks to address questions of how Indigenous weapons were made, how were they used, and why they continued to be used until 1857. By exploring the complexities behind why and how the Yuman peoples maintained traditional weapons systems over 300 years, this study will add to the growing literature that complicates the post-contact interactions of Indigenous people with colonial materials and technologies prior to colonial settlement.

Joseph Curran received his Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research operationalizes post-colonial frameworks to early contact studies of conflict systems by exploring the multitude of ways Indigenous peoples adapted, resisted, or redefined colonial technologies and weapons in the Southwest and California.  Curran has published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory and North American Archaeologist. He is a recipient of the California State University Chancellors Doctoral Fellowship and was a 2021 Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (NCAIS) Graduate Student Fellow.