Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas: Alterity, Ontology, and Shifting Paradigms

In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this diverse edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways of how people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this edited collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory are pushed to challenge current preconceptions of earlier ways of life in the indigenous Americas.