Authoring and Authority in Eastern Pequot Community Heritage and Archaeology

As collaborative indigenous archaeology continues to mature in North America, more attention is needed on the role of authoring and authority by descendent community members in the heritage practices of archaeology. We discuss the role of contemporary collaborative practice and address the ways these have materialized in the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation context in south-eastern Connecticut (USA). As a way to accentuate Eastern Pequot authoring and authority, we use examples of a commemorative volume published as a community rather than an academic product, the return of all archaeological collections to Pequot homelands from their curatorial storage at a university, and the actual content of this article itself with 80% Eastern Pequot authorship.