InRelational 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 wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.

Melissa R. Baltus is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toledo.Sarah E. Baires is an assistant professor of anthropology at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Chapter 1: A Relational Geography of Humans and Animals on the Arctic Coast of Alaska byErica HillChapter 2: The government of dogs: Archaeological (zo)ontologies byPeter WhitridgeChapter 3: A Procession of Faces: Considering the Materiality of Relational Ontologies in Southern Florida byMatthew Colvin and Victor D. ThompsonChapter 4: Vessels of Change: Everyday relationality in the rise and fall of Cahokia byMelissa R. BaltusChapter 5:How Animistic Entities Make History: Maya Materialities and Spiritualities over the Longue Durée by Christina HalperinChapter 6:Getting to the Soul of Personhood: A Survey of Historic Woodland and Plains Indian Ontologies and a Critique of the Notion of a Hopewellian Religion" byChristopher Carr, Heather Smyth, and Brianna Rafidi