Kowsz, Erica

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PhD Student
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Kowsz
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Erica
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Anthropology
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Erica is a anthropologist and filmmaker, interested in cultural heritage & archaeological practice, the semiotics perspectives in cultural anthropology, political and legal anthropology, and comparative indigenous studies. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Anthropology Department at UMass Amherst. In addition to research and coursework, she is the editorial administrator for the journal Heritage & Society. She is also participating in the Anthropology Department’s European Field Studies program, in it’s current iteration as the NSF-funded Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS) program.
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    Rules of Recognition: Indigenous Encounters with Society and the State
    (2022-05) Kowsz, Erica
    For Indigenous peoples, being recognized has come to mean not simply being known and acknowledged by one’s own relations but also being seen in the right way by the eye of authority. For decades, to gain access to the resources, rights, and legitimacy that state recognition confers, Indigenous political actors globally have navigated bureaucratic processes, from court proceedings to paperwork petitions. While the notion of Indigenous rights emerged at a global scale, they are specified in national jurisdictions. Indigenous people confront problems of their recognizability at all scales in their everyday lives and where they engage with state processes determining who counts as Indigenous for the purpose of the state. This dissertation centers on an analysis of the relationship between these legal models of Indigeneity and the sociohistoric models of identity that guide readings of Indigenous people’s identities in everyday life. In order to begin to account for the multiplicity of Indigenous experience, I examine two quite different cases of Indigenous recognition: the stories of Sami people in Norway and Nipmuc people in the northeastern United States. Both these groups actively pursued forms of state recognition beginning in the 1960s. Distinct policies conveying recognition to Indigenous groups were introduced in both Norway and the US in 1970s and 1980s, seeming to create a parallel between the two histories. However, the two cases have diverged dramatically over the decades. Sami engagements with the Norwegian state translated into new laws, institutions, and even a constitutional amendment within a decade while Nipmucs spent forty years in pursuit of federal acknowledgment, ultimately without success. Contemporary ethnographic research in these two contexts reveals crucial differences in how non-Indigenous publics perceive Indigenous actors and their identities today. In this dissertation, I examine how the fixing of definitional criteria in law and policy co-exists with the ongoing circulation and transformation of the social models of identity that inform how Indigenous people are perceived in their broader lives, beyond their formal interactions with the state.