Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories and Engagement in Native North America

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Archaeologies of Placemaking

One World Archaeology Series Sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress Series Editors: Joan Gero, Mark Leone, and Robin Torrence One World Archaeology volumes contain carefully edited selections of the exemplary papers presented at the World Archaeology Congress (WAC), held every four years, and intercongress meetings. WAC gives place to considerations of power and politics in framing archaeological questions and results. The organization also gives place and privilege to minorities who have often been silenced or regarded as beyond capable of making mainline contributions to the field. All royalties from the series are used to help the wider work of the organization. The series is published by Left Coast Press, Inc. beginning with volume 48. 59 Archaeologies of Placemaking, Patricia E. Rubertone (ed.) 58 Managing Archaeological Resources, Francis P. McManamon, Andrew Stout, and Jodi A. Barnes (eds.) 57 Landscapes of Clearance, Angèle Smith and Amy Gazin-Schwartz (eds.) 56 Underwater and Maritime Archaeology in Latin America and the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton and Pilar Luna Erreguerena (eds.) 55 Archaeologies of Art, Inés Domingo Sanz, Dánae Fiore, and Sally K. May (eds.) 54 Archaeology and Capitalism, Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (eds.) 53 Living Under the Shadow, John Grattan and Robin Torrence (eds.) 52 Envisioning Landscapes, Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough (eds.) 51 Rethinking Agriculture, Tim Denham, José Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs (eds.) 50 A Fearsome Heritage, John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds.) 49 Archaeology to Delight and Instruct, Heather Burke and Claire Smith (eds.) 48 African Re-Genesis, Jay B. Haviser and Kevin C. MacDonald (eds.)

Previous volumes in this series, available from Routledge: 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26

Indigenous Archaeologies Archaeologies of the British Natural Disasters and Cultural Change Matériel Culture The Dead and their Possessions Illicit Antiquities Destruction and Conservation of Cultural Property Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion The Archaeology of Dry lands The Archaeology of Difference Time and Archaeology The Constructed Past Archaeology and Language IV Archaeology and Language III Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society Prehistory of Food Historical Archaeology The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape Archaeology and Language II Early Human Behaviour in the Global Context Archaeology and Language I Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Presented Past Social Construction of the Past Sacred Sites, Sacred Places Tropical Archaeobotany Archaeology and the Information Age The Archaeology of Africa Origins of Human Behaviour From the Baltic to the Black Sea The Excluded Past Signifying Animals Hunters of the Recent Past What’s New? Foraging and Farming The Politics of the Past Centre and Periphery Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions Animals into Art The Meaning of Things Who Needs the Past? State and Society Domination and Resistance The Walking Larder What is an Animal?

Archaeologies of Placemaking Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America

Edited by Patricia E. Rubertone

Walnut Creek, California

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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1. Engaging Monuments, Memories, and Archaeology Patricia E. Rubertone

13

2. Paleo Is Not Our Word: Protecting and Growing a Mi’kmaw Place Donald M. Julien, Tim Bernard, and Leah Morine Rosenmeier

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3. Always Multivocal and Multivalent: Conceptualizing Archaeological Landscapes in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, T. J. Ferguson, and Roger Anyon

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4. Placemaking on the Northern Rio Grande: A View from Kuaua Pueblo Robert W. Preucel and Frank G. Matero

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5. Multiple Places, Histories, and Memories at a Frontier Icon in Apache Country John R. Welch

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6. Claiming an “Unpossessed Country”: Monuments to Ownership and Land Loss in Death Valley Paul J. White

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7. Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country—and the Monuments upon Them Russell G. Handsman

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8. Memorializing the Narragansett: Placemaking and Memory Keeping in the Aftermath of Detribalization Patricia E. Rubertone

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9. Jamestown’s 400th Anniversary: Old Themes, New Words, New Meanings for Virginia Indians Jeffrey L. Hantman

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Index About the Authors

243 253

List of Illustrations

Figures Figure 2.1 Map of Mi’kma’ki, the Mi’kmaw homeland Figure 2.2 ATV and motocross activity disturbance of the MacDonald site, 2006 Figure 2.3 Flake in the midst of ATV and motocross disturbance, 2006 Figure 2.4 Recent fence with signage at the original Debert site, 2006 Figure 2.5 Area surrounding the Debert and Belmont sites slated for intensive industrial development Figure 3.1 Modern-day location of tribes participating in the San Pedro Ethnohistory Project Figure 3.2 Hopi research team discussing clan migration traditions at the Reeve Ruin Figure 3.3 Perry Tsadiasi and Octavius Seowtewa discussing Salado polychrome pottery with other Zuni researchers at the Arizona State Museum Figure 3.4 A model of the cultural landscape Figure 4.1 Location of Kuaua Pueblo (Coronado State Monument), New Mexico Figure 4.2 Aerial view of Coronado State Monument showing the reconstructed village and the museum Figure 4.3 Adolph Bandelier’s sketch map of Kuaua Pueblo in 1882 Figure 4.4 Design for the museum at Coronado State Monument by John Gaw Meem Figure 4.5 Restoration of Kiva 3 with a copy of one of the original mural sequences Figure 4.6 Opening of the Coronado State Monument in 1940 Figure 4.7 Wall erosion at Kuaua, 1997 Figure 5.1 Map of Western Apache and Chiricahua lands and reservations showing places mentioned in the text Figure 5.2 1872 log cabin sometimes referred to as Crook’s Quarters at the west end of officers’ row Figure 5.3 Oblique aerial view of the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School district

36 47 47 48 49 60 61 65

68 82 83 87 90 93 95 97 102 113 114

Figure 5.4 Watercolor of Camp (Fort) Apache from the south in 1873 Figure 5.5 Navajo girls in the morning shade immediately following arrival at Theodore Roosevelt School, 1923 Figure 5.6 Navajo girls in the afternoon sun at Theodore Roosevelt School, 1923 Figure 5.7 Drill practice on the former parade ground with officers’ row and the former commanding officer’s quarters in the background, ca. 1926 Figure 5.8 Leaders at the opening prayer for intercultural reconciliation at the first Ndee Łade (Gathering of the People) Fort Apache Heritage Reunion Figure 6.1 Death Valley National Monument, California, showing 1933 boundaries and places mentioned in the text Figure 6.2 Monuments at the northeastern corner of Indian Allotment 330 Figure 6.3 Present-day view looking west at Püaitungani in Johnson Canyon Figure 6.4 Hungry Bill’s allotment in Johnson Canyon Figure 6.5 Bob Thompson in front of his residence and fig orchard at Pabuna (Warm Spring), 1935 Figure 6.6 Indian Allotment 330 and mining claims constructed at Warm Spring Figure 7.1 The Pilgrim’s Progress, reenacted every day during Plymouth’s Tercentenary Celebration Figure 7.2 Samuel de Champlain’s map of Port St. Louis, the Wampanoag homeland around present-day Plymouth Figure 7.3 Map of locations and place-names in Wampanoag Country Figure 7.4 The baldachino and Plymouth Rock as seen from Cole’s Hill Figure 7.5 National Monument to the Forefathers Figure 7.6 Cole’s Hill and Plymouth Rock beneath the new portico erected for the Tercentenary Celebration Figure 7.7 Two Passamaquoddy making their way to Plymouth for the Tercentenary Celebration Figure 7.8 Statue of Massasoit in Plymouth

116 118

118 119

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140 144 148 151 152 162 165

166 179 181 185 186 187

Figure 8.1 Map of Rhode Island showing the locations of Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument Figure 8.2 Memorial Rock at Fort Ninigret Figure 8.3 Map of Narragansett Indian lands made for the detribalization hearings Figure 8.4 The Canonicus Monument at North Burial Ground Figure 8.5 The dedication of the Canonicus Monument, 1883 Figure 8.6 The Canonicus Monument, Westminster Street, 1996 Figure 9.1 Map of Jamestown Island, Virginia, showing the locations of the Jamestown Settlement and property owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities Figure 9.2 A historic place designated in 2007 by the Virginia Historical Highway Marker program recognizing the headquarters of Opechancanough, a Powhatan paramount chief Figure 9.3 Houses in the reconstructed Powhatan village at the Jamestown Settlement living history museum Figure 9.4 Two reconstructed ships at the Jamestown Settlement living history museum

197 201 204 207 208 210 220

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Tables Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 7.1 Table 9.1

How L’nuk lived in Mi’kma’ki Lévi-Strauss’s matrix of date classes History of Plymouth’s population Titles of historical highway markers approved by Virginia Council on Indians

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Acknowledgments The book had its beginnings in a session on “Monuments, Landscapes, and Cultural Memories” I organized on the theme of Indigenous Archaeologies for the 5th World Archaeological Congress in Washington, DC, in 2003. The session’s call for papers invited presenters to examine relationships between memory and landscape and to explore tensions between colonialist monuments and myths of Indigenous extinction. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, presenters were also asked to think about how they might build connections among commemorative processes, community histories, and archaeological research. I want to thank Claire Smith for urging me to organize the session and the theme conveners (Daryle Rigby, Martin Wobst, Tara Millon, and Joe Watkins) for insisting that papers engage and pave the way for topics which might be worth discussing further in the contexts of Indigenous Archaeologies, colonial histories, and in other research domains. The One World Archaeology (OWA) series editors, Joan Gero, Mark Leone, and Robin Torrence, have been unwavering in their support as the WAC-5 session evolved into an idea for a book. The book project was to include expanded versions of session papers by Taft Blackhorse, Jay Williams, and June-el Piper; Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, T. J. Ferguson, and Roger Anyon; Donald Julien, Tim Bernard, and Leah Morine Rosenmeier; Daniel Lynch; Robert Preucel and Frank Matero; Joseph H. Suina; and myself; plus additional essays solicited from other archaeologists working independently or in collaboration with Indigenous communities in North America or elsewhere. Some who participated in the session did not contribute papers to the book, though a core group stayed with the project from start to finish. I am grateful to them and also to Russell Handsman, Jeffrey Hantman, John Welch, and Paul White for accepting my invitation to join the project later. As with most edited volumes, this one took longer to complete than anticipated. Along with the research and writing, all involved have had to juggle countless other professional and personal demands. Some changed jobs and moved to new cities; others have written (or are writing) dissertations; and most have had to deal with other transforming and sometimes difficult events in their lives. Knowing the particular circumstances, I owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude for their steadfast commitment to the project and the superb quality of their research and attention to detail. I also want to express a special note of thanks to Robin Torrence, who served as my link to the other OWA series editors and provided guidance about addressing the book to a broad readership. Although half a world away, Robin was never far when I needed a question answered or 11

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encouragement. Here in the US, Mark Leone offered valuable suggestions for ushering the manuscript to completion and Mitch Allen at Left Coast Press, Inc. expertly orchestrated the book’s production. Lee Steadman’s careful copyediting merits high praise and is also deeply appreciated. At Brown University, I am grateful to David Kertzer and William Simmons, the past and present chairs of the Anthropology Department, for multiple years of support through the Vice President’s Faculty Research Funds for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. I especially want to thank Christine Reiser, my research assistant, for her constructive comments and indispensable assistance in helping with the preparation of the manuscript. Lynn Carlson, the GIS manager in Brown’s Environmental and Remote Technologies Lab, generously produced maps on short notice; and Erik Gould deserves credit for reshooting the photograph on the book’s cover. To those whose histories have been (mis)represented or are in some way entwined in the monuments discussed in this book, all the authors and I hope that we have helped your words, memories, and experiences to illuminate these shared places. We also hope that what we might have possibly misconstrued will advance new collaborations that lead to new understandings in the future. Last but certainly not least, I want to acknowledge my family and my dearest friends who are like family. I especially want to thank my Dad, Pat Rubertone, for the road trips to all the forts in New York State, to the Black Hills and Mesa Verde, and to places in between, and for teaching me to always look and think beyond written words, even those inscribed onto monuments.

CHAPTER 1

Engaging Monuments, Memories, and Archaeology Patricia E. Rubertone

INTRODUCTION It goes almost without saying that landscape plays an important role in how the past is remembered. The huge literature on place—specific portions of landscapes entwined with personal experiences and historical narratives—tells through theoretical inquiries, and richly textured and culturally and historically anchored accounts, of the power of places to provoke and evoke memories (e.g., Basso 1996; Bender 1998; Casey 1987; Clifford 1997; Jackson 1994; Lippard 1997; Lowenthal 1985; Schama 1995, to name a few). Place, then, is personal and political; indeed, placemaking, the social practices of constructing place and inscribing memories, does not necessarily require particular skills or special sensibilities. Questions about what happened here (or there), how it was formed, who was involved, and why it should matter can often be answered more or less spontaneously, alone or with others, or with varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm (Basso 1996:5; Lippard 1997:7). Although anyone can be a placemaker and places lurk everywhere, on the familiar and proverbial beaten paths as well as off them, the process is never entirely simple. What is remembered about a particular place is triggered, guided, and constrained, largely by visual “landmarks” but also by verbal accounts and other sensory stimuli (e.g., Bender 2001; Ingold 1993; Tilley 1994; Witmore 2006). These images of place are reshaped and reinterpreted, sometimes by placemakers who selectively seek to cultivate certain responses and, therefore, attempt to define for others what should be remembered and how it should be remembered. Not surprisingly, archaeological sites—ranging from “picturesque” ruins to small, barely perceptible physical traces on the landscape preserved through antiquities legislation—and built monuments of all sorts figure prominently among places that invoke memory by serving as tangible reminders of people and events in the past worth remembering 13

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and how they should be recalled. Both are “monuments” in the sense that they are reminders, places intended to prompt memory and raise historical consciousness (or at least they should) about pasts most visitors have never experienced firsthand and know little about. They “can be seen as an apology for the betrayal of forgetfulness, a half-hearted bow to the significance of histories we are too lazy to learn” (Lippard 1997:85). Archaeological sites and built monuments especially may “relieve viewers of their memory-burden” (Young 1993:5) by doing their memorywork for them and, therefore, divest onlookers of the responsibility to contemplate, let alone imagine, deeper, layered, and alternative histories and meanings entangled with place. Such charges suggest that the relationship between archaeological sites championed for preservation and monuments in a conventional sense, and the memories thought to be inspired by them may be problematic. By situating some people and events in the past, these places often deny a present and preclude a future by supplanting histories that are being lived. For many Indigenous peoples throughout the world, historic preservation, other site protection efforts, and monument building have selectively and deliberately generated and condoned remembrances which may have little or no correspondence to the memories and experiences they themselves attach to the specific locales targeted by these activities. Indigenous groups therefore may be, and indeed often are, ill-served by historic preservation and public monuments that protect, preserve, and seek to commemorate vestiges of their history (e.g., Carmichael et al. 1994; Deloria 1992; Joyce 2003; Keller and Turek 1998; Smith 2006). Choices made by preservation specialists or heritage managers, and also archaeologists, about what sites to privilege or disregard, about which time periods are valuable or more valuable than others, and about which cultural or ethnic groups are recognized or ignored have defined what is important and representative in Indigenous peoples’ pasts. Although there is a powerful global movement afoot to involve Indigenous people in the decision-making process and in the practice of archaeology (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997; Smith and Wobst 2005; Swidler et al. 1997; Watkins 2000), what is made known to outsiders has all too often excluded, suppressed, and devalued histories of place still shared by insiders. Similarly, decisions about built monuments—whether they should mourn events of tragedy and violence or celebrate colonists’ heroic victories over Indigenous peoples in bloody encounters, whether they should be representational or starkly abstract, or whether they should accurately mark the spot or simply reference another place and time (see Foote 1997; Lippard 1997; Young 1993)—have generally not been made in consultation with living descendant communities. During long and

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grueling public debates, stiff design competitions, aggressive fund-raising campaigns, and innumerable compromises, they are seldom, if ever, asked what kinds of monuments they would like to see and where specifically, or whether they want any at all. Consequently, a monument may be, and often is, built on top of memories it only relates to superstructurally and, indeed, subversively (Lippard 1997:107). Whether elaborately sculptural or deceptively bland, public monuments commemorating Indigenous people typically project images explicitly commensurate with “colonialist views of Aboriginality” as Jane Lydon has observed in Australia (Lydon 2005:114). There, public monuments generally built before 1970 commemorate “treacherous Aboriginal killers, faithful Aboriginal guides of White explorers, or the death of ‘the last of their tribe’” and hardly ever comment on the diverse experiences of Indigenous people in postcolonial contexts (Lydon 2005:114). In North America, iconic brave-on-a-horse monuments and lone nonequestrian statues reproduced in many sizes, forms, and mediums echo the logic of assimilation rather than resistance by depicting American Indians as stoic witnesses to an inevitable demise (Kammen 1991; Lippard 1997:108). Subtler and more ubiquitous monuments such as free-standing, inscribed boulders and polished stone tablets, mounted plaques and roadside markers found in locales everywhere, and frequently emplaced with far less agonizing than sculptural and architectural monuments identified as public art, also serve to “quell associative ponderings” by pushing certain interpretations and precluding others (Lippard 1997:110). Through spatial overwriting, built monuments, regardless of their scale or artistry, construct certain memories at the expense of others, ostensibly curtailing the possibility of alternative and new experiences and memories coincident with the place of memorialization. This collection of essays explores the tensions between prevailing regional and national versions of Indigenous pasts created, reified, and disseminated through monuments here broadly defined, and Indigenous peoples’ memories and experiences of place. Through detailed case studies from across North America, the contributors ask questions about processes of historic preservation and commemoration, and build connections between these processes, Indigenous peoples’ histories, and archaeology. Although the case studies cover vast ground, from California to Virginia and from the Southwest to New England and the Canadian Maritimes, the book is not intended as a comprehensive or comparative survey of popular or less well-known Native North American monuments (see, for example, Cantor 1993). Instead, the chapters, encompassing a select group of studies by archaeologists engaged in ongoing and collaborative research with Native Americans in the United States or with First

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Nations in Canada, raise critical questions about the very complicated and uncertain intersections of history and memory, place and displacement, public spectacle and private engagement, and reconciliation and reappropriation that resonate loudly all across the Indigenous world. While broadly relevant to Indigenous groups globally, these issues are not exclusive to Indigenous peoples. They also concern subordinate and minority groups throughout the world whose pasts and, indeed, living traditions have been conspicuously excluded and marginalized on the landscape by monuments of the dominant culture. The North American case studies in this book, therefore, have broad applicability, not only to archaeologists, historic preservationists, and heritage managers working in other locales, but also to individuals and communities everywhere poised to look beyond what is visibly remembered and imagine what is less visible. Without neglecting the undeniably fascinating and incredibly intricate politics of placemaking and collective memory, the authors venture into and examine the ambiguous and murky middle ground of monuments. However, the essays are not merely about compromise over contested terrain as might loosely be implied by the metaphor of a “middle ground,” a phrase used by the historian Richard White (1991) to characterize colonial relations between American Indians and Europeans around the Great Lakes region of North America. Instead, the essays are more correctly about middle grounds as actions “in the realm of cultural meaning-making, performance, and communicative practice” (Deloria 2006:16) and their material expressions. Thus, the authors look at processes that transform places, erase actors, and delight the masses and also at those which involve routine visitation, dissent and resistance, and occasionally countercelebrations. Through the lens of monuments, the book shows many Native peoples’ deep attachments to place and the efforts that some have taken in the past or are currently taking to reverse insinuations about their disappearance and other misconceptions and reclaim moral territory for the future.

SENSES OF PLACE, SENSES OF HISTORY That the past is intimately tied to place goes without saying, though not in ways that its manipulators would like us to think. Clearly attempts to freeze a place in time do not always truncate or entrap memories (Bender 1998). Nor do such efforts to keep the past separate from the present as a place to be visited when we want to escape modernity seem entirely successful (Lippard 1997). Past and present are inextricably intertwined on the contemporary landscape. The past is not distant and may not be that foreign, in spite of interpretations to the contrary. In its material

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forms, it shapes how we move through and experience the world on a day-to-day basis, perhaps even without fully knowing or appreciating the meanings of these places, distorted or otherwise. For North America’s Native peoples, the notion that the past is a separate world is especially troublesome. Standard archaeological approaches that construct linear narratives tracing the successive replacement of one archaeological culture by another identify ancestral places in ways that may not conform to community memories. While archaeology may be able to retrieve evidence of deeper pasts than can be preserved through memories of personal histories and community experiences, and arguably may add to and enrich the history of a place by making it more profound, standard archaeological approaches and terminologies may be alienating. As Donald Julien, Tim Bernard, and Leah Morine Rosenmeier suggest in Chapter 2, such categories and labels “alienate people from the landscape and places of their ancestors.” The vocabulary of culture history, which conceptualizes the past in terms of discrete archaeological phases or cultures, not only ruptures relationships temporally, but also serves to disconnect Native people from places they consider ancestral. Moreover, assumptions about “disconnection” impinge on the dominant society’s perceptions of Native peoples’ identities and, therefore, may undermine interpretations of their land rights and shape opinions about other critical issues that affect their lives. Nevertheless, ancestral relationships to place are complex and multidimensional. Clearly, they cannot be reduced to biology, gauged merely by similarities in technology, artifact styles, or language, or even fixity. The past may not be foreign—that is, separate from the present as some might assume—but an ancestral place need not be a site of continuous experience extending into deep time either. To Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia, Canada, for example, the “Paleo Indian” Debert site, radiocarbon dated to 11,000 years old, is considered ancestral because they perceive a connection that is firmly rooted to place and historical experiences, and not because they are directly descended from the ancient inhabitants who lived there (though they concede they might be). They are in some way descendant from Debert’s occupants because Debert is located in their homeland. It is part of, rather than apart from, the landscape in which generations of Mi’kmaq have dwelled and still do today. Although ancestors who resided at the Debert site might not be remembered in local genealogies, the Mi’kmaq have a relationship with them. This emotional and spiritual relationship is playing a crucial role in community-based initiatives to protect and care for sites like Debert, and paving the way for interpretive and educational programs that squarely situate them in a Mi’kmaw, rather than a foreign and anomalous, context.

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Similarly, some Native Americans may have important relationships with places on the landscape they do not consider specifically ancestral. The Reeve Ruin and Davis site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley are cases in point (Chapter 3). Archaeologists have long hypothesized that the Reeve Ruin was settled by Pueblo peoples, who migrated from the Hopi Mesas around AD 1250 and who eventually returned to their home or stayed and became part of local communities. The Hopi do not disagree with the archaeologists’ interpretation. They see the Reeve Ruin as part of their collective past, a place “that memorializes the lives of their cherished ancestors.” The Reeve Ruin and other San Pedro Valley sites are documents that identify the paths their ancestors took in their migratory routes and evoke emotional responses that far transcend concerns about the sites’ archaeological particulars. But as the authors, Chip ColwellChanthaphonh, T. J. Ferguson, and Roger Anyon, note, other Native American groups living in nearby areas also have connections to archaeological sites in the San Pedro Valley. Drawing on conversations conducted during a three-year collaborative ethnohistory and archaeology research project, they report that both the Reeve Ruin and Davis site are intensely meaningful to Western Apache and Tohono O’odham peoples, who say their ancestors did not build these sites, and the Zuni, who speculate that, like the Hopi, their ancestors might have lived at these places. For these groups, the past is neither distant nor separate from the present. In spite of archaeological chronologies that arrest sites in time and seemingly fracture spatial connections, the Hopi, Zuni, Western Apache, and Tohono O’odham have historical and cultural relationships to places in the San Pedro Valley. Rather than seeing the sites only from the fixed and distanced vantage point defined by archaeologists, they apprehend other meanings of place. The stories evoked suggest how place and landscape sustain multiple meanings. The various narratives highlight the importance of integrating Indigenous views in order to gain insights crucial to advancing more equitable understandings of the past and to reshaping relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples. Additionally, the recognition of archaeological sites as ancestral places may also be vital for individuals and communities dealing with the historical trauma of alienation and attempting to reconcile loss and hurt by reconnecting with the past as Julien, Bernard, and Morine Rosenmeier persuasively argue in Chapter 2.

PLACEMAKING AND REINVENTED PASTS If the multiple meanings of place are often muted, then their multilayered histories may be even less apparent. In part, their “invisibility” may be attributed to the passage of time and, specifically, to processes of decay,

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decomposition, and destruction by obscure human and nonhuman agents that transform sites by changing the form of buildings, features, and objects, altering their functions, and blurring their boundaries in ways that seemingly erode material traces of history and cultural memory (DeSilvey 2006). Certainly, archaeologists have developed and employ procedures that allow them to perceive layers, identify artifacts, and otherwise detect order and meaning in material remains which might at first glance seem too ephemeral, jumbled, and ambiguous. They enlist this reasoning in judging what is significant and determining, along with historic preservationists and heritage managers, what should be remembered about a place. However, the ways of perceiving and deciphering layers may be subjective and, as mentioned, may advance interpretations that emphasize the successive replacement of one archaeological phase or culture by another. Admittedly, even attempts to detect and preserve layers of lived experiences in the human past archaeologically may not always recover subtle transitions that hint at continuities and complexities. These issues aside, places with richly layered histories may also be the subject of more concerted and inventive placemaking. Using a battery of practices, including naming and selective (re)building, “preservationists” may attempt to erase certain layers of the history of a place at the expense of others. Not surprisingly, such creative and imaginative placemaking that loosely or deliberately reconstructs the past is often geared to popular audiences, and not Indigenous communities who made history at and/or continue to live in the place, nearby, or still have connections to the place. Consequently, creative placemaking and “invented traditions”—routine performances and ritualized celebrations that package history for public consumption to make the past seem more real and more suitable (e.g., Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983; Trouillot 1995)—may not only seek to inculcate national values and advocate regional prominence, but also to actively promote tourism. Reinvented places abound in North America (and elsewhere throughout the world). The layers of history—that is, the time periods (and cultural groups) favored and considered valuable and worth preserving— vary widely according to region. Whereas the Colonial period is canonized in New England and Virginia at Plymouth and Jamestown, respectively (see Chapters 7 and 9), in the Southwest, places associated with the Spanish Conquistadors, iconic figures in frontier history, and “disappeared” Anasazi Indians share the spotlight (Lippard 1997:90). There, and particularly in urban areas such as Santa Fe, archaeology and historic preservation have been enjoined in creative placemaking to build a distinctive regional identity as well as bolster American nationalism (McManamon 2003).

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For example, in Chapter 4, Robert Preucel and Frank Matero discuss these processes of placemaking at Kuaua, an archaeological site ancestral to the Pueblo peoples of the northern Rio Grande that was renamed and “restored” as the Coronado State Monument to commemorate the Spanish entrada and help craft a New Mexican identity. As part of the placemaking effort, Kuaua, an ancient Tiwa Indian village, was extensively excavated in order to establish if it was a Coronado encampment as scholars had supposed. Although archaeology did not confirm their hunches, Kuaua Pueblo was interpreted as a type-site of colonial encounter in the region. As the Coronado State Monument, Kuaua Pueblo was not merely stabilized for public consumption: its footprint was accentuated and walls, already partially standing, were given a weathered appearance to enhance their look of age and emphasize the depth of Spanish roots in the region. Additionally, placemaking involved building a small museum within the outlines of the archaeological site and a plan to raise a statue of Coronado in one of the pueblo’s plazas. Although the statue was never executed, its omission was incidental. Even its absence did not prevent or in any way deter a reenactment of a sanitized Coronado entrada from being staged at the monument’s dedication ceremony. Preucel and Matero invoke the concept of heterotopia, a term coined by Michel Foucault (1986) to describe spaces that are several places at once—that is, places where there are other real sites which may be simultaneously represented, contested, or inverted—to characterize the Coronado State Monument. In their application of the term, however, the monument is not just another space added to an existing one—at the very least Kuaua’s 1,200 rooms, six ceremonial chambers, and six kivas known from archaeological excavations. Instead, they prefer to envision heterotopias, and the Coronado State Monument specifically, as radically different modes of conceptualizing space linked to relations of knowledge and power. From this perspective, Fort Apache, an American frontier icon and the subject of John Welch’s essay (Chapter 5), may also be considered a heterotopia. Fort Apache, an epically mythologized military outpost in AngloAmerican expansion, is a constellation of places and histories largely overshadowed by its name. As Preucel and Matero suggest in Chapter 4, naming is a tactic in placemaking and a feature of heterotopias that serves to situate a place “within a knowable universe and [to] assert a form of possession.” For example, naming was used by early European explorers and later American colonists as part of their nation-building process (Thomas 2000). While hardly a neutral practice, naming also served to “lionize heroes and emphasize the most dramatic events in the exploration, settlement, and development of a new territory” (Thomas 2000:xxv). “Fort Apache,” a

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name so synonymous with hostile interactions and military pacification, then creates a false impression of the place. As Welch writes, much of the military post’s history was “a chronicle of arcane bureaucracy, hard work, and institutionalized attention to perceived duties to enforce capricious national policies” that was punctuated only by brief episodes of brutality. But what is even less known about Fort Apache—especially among individuals fascinated with its role in the conquest of the American West (and American Indians) and content not to think beyond its place-name—is its history as an Indian boarding school. The failure to call Fort Apache by this other name, then, underscores an unwillingness to acknowledge sustained contacts between the Apache and European Americans, as well as continuing displacements, alienation, and loss, that were part of an ongoing process of colonialism (e.g., Lightfoot 1995; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2005). Visitors expecting to see a palisaded fort may be sorely disappointed. What they see instead is a still-unfolding episode of placemaking that recognizes Fort Apache as a complex and multilayered place. For the Apache Tribe spearheading the rehabilitation, this has meant facing painful memories, some of them very recent. Currently called neither Fort Apache nor the Theodore Roosevelt School, but the White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center, the locale is a place of “footprints” in cultural survival, including both architectural vestiges of the fort and the school, as well as natural landscape features important in Apache culture. It is a place where personal and community healing and anticipated economic development based on tourism are not considered incompatible. Rather, increased access for visitors is seen as a means of facilitating intercultural communication and understanding. Welch’s detailed account unpacks Fort Apache as a multilayered place variously used and remembered during its long and continuing “life history.” The discussion strongly suggests that placemaking need not be limited to activities specifically undertaken to emplot ennobling events, triumphs, and sacrifices in national existence. Likewise, it would be shortsighted to think of placemaking as confined to a single, defining “monumental” moment rather than a more fluid and emergent process as recent initiatives at Fort Apache imply. Consequently, as heterotopias, monuments pose interpretive challenges to archaeologists not only in North America but elsewhere throughout the globe that far exceed their study merely as multilayered or multicomponent sites. The archaeology of heterotopias would seem, therefore, to be an especially productive global project that could help eliminate the boundaries between history and prehistory, expand notions of collaborative research, and question other persistent concepts that shape interpretations of Indigenous people regardless of their respective communities.

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COLONIAL MONUMENTS, INDIGENOUS MEMORY KEEPING That placemaking and memory keeping exist under the surface or as unpresupposing markers on the landscape, then, would seem undeniable. However, recognizing, let alone recovering, these other memory-places and the values attached to them has been and continues to be hampered by dominant physical and verbal reconstructions of place and the memories they invoke. Recently, archaeologists have begun to pay closer attention to the traces of purposeful placemaking and memory keeping lurking under the surface or lying on top of it, though perhaps not as prominently or widely recognized as landmarks from the perspective of the colonial or dominant society. Despite the often masking presence of Europeans, researchers have noted “special attention” places, ranging from marked locales to natural features, that serve as mechanisms for creating and recreating linkages between past and present and setting precedents for the future in Indigenous cultures (e.g., Carmichael et al. 1994; Morphy 1995; Simmons 1986). Such memory-keeping places may include stone cairns, deposits of offerings, or engraved or painted rock art, as well as caves, mountains, springs, swamps, rivers, rock outcrops, and a host of other landscape features that are revered and revisited. Alternatively, some have also observed that special places of memory might be intangible or not marked in any particular way. The suggestion that memorywork might not require a physically or materially marked place does not undermine the premise of the importance of a “sense of place” to cultural and social identities, experiences, and values. Rather, it implies that the place or “site,” though integral to the message, is not the full story or what alone or inherently imbues meanings (Smith 2006:44). Detecting how Indigenous identities are maintained in the postcolonial landscape, and particularly how spatial practices of memory keeping bound to specific locations are sustained or perhaps refashioned, are not simple matters. By their very nature, European colonial landscapes represented a change in land use and break with an existing Indigenous history of the land. Furthermore, colonial landscapes were spatially controlled by colonizers through numerous and finely drawn boundaries and rules constraining movement (Byrne 2003). As previously noted, some placemaking in North America took colonial assertions of possession to the next level by denying a previous and continuing Native American presence. Death Valley National Monument would seem to be such a place. Its morbid name, as Paul White discusses in Chapter 6, suggests an inhospitable landscape unfit for human habitation, but also one of foreboding and paranoia for the Timbisha Shoshone who considered what others called “hell on earth” home.

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With the establishment of the national monument, a vast testament to the American wilderness, Timbisha Shoshone in and near Death Valley, like many other Native Americans who learned they were “living in US national parks,” were faced with forced removal and relocation. Although the Timbisha Shoshone successfully resisted relocation, they were embroiled in conflicts with monument personnel and especially with miners who came to be considered part of Death Valley’s living history. Unlike remaining prospectors who were thought to add a good dose of color to the landscape, Timbisha Shoshone presence in the valley went unnoticed by most casual visitors until fairly recently. New signage corrects misconceptions about their persistence, but does not reveal much about their struggles to hold onto their land and their way of life. However, White points out that testimony to Timbisha Shoshone perseverance, and their complicated history of resistant accommodation, is visible in Death Valley in the form of other monuments, specifically survey or claim markers. These unpretentious monuments, mostly simple stone cairns often located in peripheral locations, are associated with key historical processes that promoted individual over communal ownership, exclusive rights to resources, and in other ways reified European American valuations of land. Using two cases studies, White unravels Timbisha Shoshone and European American claims and counterclaims over possession underwritten by these monuments. His analysis provides insights into how Timbisha Shoshone, who sometimes sought rights to land that was theirs through formal application, lived their lives within and against colonialism. The chapter highlights how tensions and conflicts in colonial situations occasionally led Native peoples to engage in new forms of memory keeping, ones that are manifested in landscapes in subtle but no less powerful ways than the more emblematic expressions of nationhood such as America’s national parks. While White focuses on visible places of memory keeping connected to shared and conflicted histories that offer an alternative perspective on the “monumented” spaces dedicated to mainstream ideas about the past, Russell Handsman (Chapter 7) raises questions about the deeper histories of memory keeping which may exist beneath colonialist monuments. Monuments, as he reiterates, imply “an underlying stratigraphy and thus an archaeology, and perhaps, alternative, interconnected histories.” He takes as his subject landscapes of memory in Wampanoag Indian Country of southeastern Massachusetts that lay beneath, and indeed beside, a profusion of monuments—including the iconic Plymouth Rock—raised to help shape the American public’s understanding of the Pilgrim experience. Underneath this monumental landscape to North America’s settler society are ancestral homelands attested to by archaeology and unwittingly by early settlers themselves in their written accounts. These homelands

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are filled with what Handsman, following Ingold (1993), describes as taskscapes, places where people lived, hunted and fished, collected raw materials and plants, and did other mundane tasks generation after generation. In addition, these homelands also contain places of intentional memory keeping where the Wampanoag renewed and reasserted connections among generations in ceremonies no less, and perhaps even more, meaningful than the spectacles of mass celebration conducted at Plymouth Rock. Handsman suggests that these special places of memory were not forgotten, even after the initial insults and incomprehensible disruptions of European colonization. Well into the eighteenth century, Wampanoag communities persisted throughout Plymouth Colony and remained connected to places of memory, often by placing small stones or brush on top of them to record their remembrances much in the same way as generations before them. His discussion strongly implies that special places of memory not only exist under the surface in New England Indian Country, but also endure on other colonial and “monumented” landscapes.

MONUMENTS, PUBLIC CELEBRATIONS, AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT The suggestion that not all “monuments” are the same and, especially, that there are differences between monuments as material representations of idealized history and memorials as expressions of local, more complicated histories, and between public celebrations and community or personal memories of place, in Native North America and elsewhere raises critical questions about Indigenous peoples’ interest in and possible engagement with colonialist places of memory. Handsman, for example, asks what an alternative tour of Wampanoag Country might look like a little more than a decade from now. Would it avoid altogether places suggested as stops in guidebooks printed for public commemorations? Would a countertour include these sites on the itinerary but offer interpretations of what lies beneath them? Would such a tour cover very different ground? In addition to telling about places hidden from view, as Handsman urges, could alternative tours through Wampanoag Country in the future also pause at Plymouth’s monuments to point out how they fused two landscapes and how they too sometimes became important landmarks to Native peoples? Thus, while monuments and the memories they invoked were typically intrusive and damaging, and often enough interfered with Native peoples’ spatial practices, they could sometimes have summoned staunch

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determination to hold onto routines of place or perhaps even to redirect them. Likewise, the inherent aggression perceived in an imposed monument might serve to provoke intense counterfactual memories, incite activism, and spur artistic and literal revisions. For example, as early as 1836, decades before European Americans earnestly began to raise monuments and preserve Native American antiquities, William Apess, a Pequot Indian, delivered a speech from the stage of the Odeon Theater in Boston, Massachusetts, that seriously questioned the value to Native people of celebrations commemorating Plymouth Rock and the landing of the Pilgrims. Using words which Native American activists could have comfortably interpreted as a call to arms more than a century later, he said, “Let the day be dark” and “Let every man of color wrap himself in mourning, for the 22nd of December [the day the Pilgrims landed and stepped onto Plymouth Rock] and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not joy” (O’Connell 1992:286). More recently, Native American artists have commented on, and indeed expressed their discontent over, the symbolism of public sculptures and the content of official signage with their own, often temporary, installations. Edgar Heap of Birds, for example, has appropriated “bureaucratic” signage styles to produce confrontational texts aimed at forcing passerby to “acknowledge genocidal tragedies and histories of stolen lands” (Lippard 1997:111). Similarly, other artists, often working in cooperation with tribes, have offered visual and verbal commentaries on other events affecting Native peoples’ lives in the postcolonial past (Lippard 1997:111, 113). In some instances, these criticisms or countermemorials have been instrumental in the cancellation of planned celebrations and in serving as springboards to reconciliation. However, Native peoples’ engagement with monuments might be longer and more variable than supposed by recent countermemorials and other public pronouncements thought to mark moments when they began to remember instead of being remembered (Lippard 1997:101). As important as these public displays are, they only represent a fraction of the possible ways in which Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples actively engaged with monuments. While appropriation often implies not only active, but very public, interventions, it may also involve more private, communal, and less visible, but no less significant, engagement. Therefore, rather than characterizing Native peoples’ responses only as reactionary or assuming that they had absolutely no interest in monuments that misrepresented their experiences, we might entertain more nuanced understandings. In Chapter 8, I consider some of the ways that Narragansett Indians in Rhode Island engaged with simple boulder monuments commemorating their “disappearance” in the aftermath of their detribalization. Although

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it might be expected that the Narragansett would have shunned places where European American monuments relegated them to the past, in fact they engaged with them in a variety of ways. Some places such as the site of Memorial Rock, a fortified settlement in an ancestral homeland where they had long lived and worked, continued to be meaningful to them and visited, despite the intrusive presence of the monument. Indeed, it even became a stop on a countertour. Arguably, the Narragansett may have appropriated some colonialist monuments as new sites of memory keeping and community building as they charted courses of survival and crafted identity following detribalization, sometimes, though not exclusively, in locations away from their former reservation. Although many Narragansett and other New England Indians regularly gathered at monuments and other prominent local landmarks to socialize and to share news and concerns, not all became sites of interest and engagement, as my research on the Canonicus Monument in Providence suggests. The reasons for appropriation—why some commemorative boulders were considered choice-worthy of Native peoples’ interest and not others—were complex and certainly not identical. Thus, while placemaking associated with monuments imposes narrativized and symbolic meanings of history informed by nationalistic and regional interests, these meanings of place may be contested by meanings already in place, and indeed negotiated in processes of making new memories. The intersected and complicated histories of people, monuments, and place are not, as I suggest, recoverable in archives alone, but instead demand a “hybrid practice” (Meskell 2005) that combines, at the very least, documentary, ethnographic, and archaeological approaches. In particular, archaeology, with its emphasis on deep histories, small-scale processes, and daily practices, as well as the formal aspects of “monumentality,” holds enormous promise for illuminating the afterlives of monuments and their richly textured histories (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). Consequently, archaeology may be crucial to helping challenge the very public assertions of monuments about groups they were meant to silence by revealing that acts of engagement do not only involve staged, public events or exhibitions. Like Indigenous peoples throughout North America and the world, the Narragansett made their lives against, but also at and around, colonialist monuments. Jeffrey Hantman’s essay on Jamestown’s 400th anniversary (Chapter 9) provides a fitting conclusion to the volume. He comments on deeper histories of place, colonialist placemaking, other memory sites, and pathways toward reclaiming moral ground for the future through acts of appropriation. Not insignificantly, his subject, Jamestown, is a place

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shrouded in layers of American nationalistic myths and overwrought stories that were very much in the news in 2007. If commemorations “sanitize the messy history of colonialism as lived by the actors” but also “contribute to the continuous myth-making process that gives history its more definite shapes” (Trouillot 1995:116), then the public events and programs recently enacted at Jamestown have accomplished their goal. Additionally, if numbers—that is, the number of participants and where they are from, and also the timing and cyclical nature of celebrations— count for anything in raising a site from banality or regional interest, then Jamestown is internationally renowned. Attracting large crowds, besides massive press, it has been visited by various luminaries on its anniversary celebrations and more than once by the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. Balancing the intoxication with stark reality, Hantman, like other scholars, attempts to temper popular impressions of Jamestown. Archaeological and environmental evidence have been unsettling in exposing the Jamestown experience as “the creation story from hell” (Kupperman 2007:1). Furthermore, recent historical research strongly suggests that Jamestown is not just the epitome of the shortcomings and eventual successes of English colonization abroad, but had been shaped by the harsh realities of engagement in Africa, Asia, and other locations on the world stage. Jamestown, then, was a place of tragedy and loss, both for early colonists, but certainly for Virginia Indians, and also the African Americans who arrived there in 1619. Using Kenneth Foote’s (1997) ideas on how American society treats places of violence and tragedy, Hantman reexamines Jamestown and, particularly, how its associated sites have been sanctified, obliterated, and most recently, designated on the landscape. In the language of placemaking, sanctification is the process of turning a site associated with a historic event or person into a place or monument conveying lasting and sacred meaning; on the other hand, obliteration effaces a site by covering it up or removing it altogether (Foote 1997:8, 24). For example, the Jamestown fort has been sanctified. In contrast, numerous Powhatan villages and their histories have been obliterated or largely overshadowed, despite their prominence at the time of the Jamestown colony and recent efforts to incorporate them somehow into the texture of the commemorated landscape. However, the Virginia Historical Highway Markers program has offered Virginia Indians the opportunity to appropriate “monuments of official designation” and create new ones. Through these efforts, offensive language has been replaced, new themes about Indian history introduced, specific individuals named, and references made to the larger Indian world that extended beyond Jamestown. If designation is a step toward sanctification (Foote 1997:20), then the 10 new,

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permanent markers represent a small, but significant, shift toward telling the long-term story of Jamestown and its environs as a Native American place, and only later as a place of shared histories.

CONCLUSIONS: ENDINGS AND FUTURES The tensions between monuments and their landscapes and Native North Americans’ memories and experiences of place explored in this book comprise much more than scholarly exercises. Monuments as sites preserved, created, imagined, and performed have shaped historical consciousness about Native American pasts and have impressed certain kinds of identities on Native peoples. However, placemaking, as the chapters compellingly show, is not limited to narrow and, indeed, dominant political conceptions of the past. There are other ways of contemplating what is visibly or verbally remembered by monuments and, additionally, other experiences of place, both deeply profound and recent and emerging. These arguments are not intended to imply that monuments, as broadly defined in this book, are merely inconvenient misunderstandings. Nor do the opinions expressed simply advance dualistic interpretations that pit one understanding against another, or offer new angles on older histories. The suggestion that the case studies edge into the murky and ambiguous middle ground of monuments emphasizes the creative role of misinterpretations and misunderstandings in generating new meanings and practices in cross-cultural and cross-political contexts. It also underscores the importance of connecting geographical and historical space with ideas about process, thus allowing place to inform process and vice versa (see Deloria 2006:20). And not least, the suggestion stresses the need to bind together multiple angles and arenas of analysis. Therefore, the term “middle ground” and its meanings also provide a useful concept for thinking about monuments in relation to ideas of shared versus segregated or mutually exclusive colonial histories invoked by Murray (2004), Lilley (2006), and others and for linking together what is visibly remembered or officially recorded with the very different ways in which Native peoples’ experiences are woven into the cultural landscape. In addition to offsetting “monumentalism” by helping people to imagine what is less visible, the concept of a middle ground applied to the study of monuments, including historic preservation and heritage sites, may also offer another strategy for decolonizing archaeological and other disciplinary practices. Monuments can be focal points for conversations that may help push collaborations in new directions—across the boundaries of prehistoric and historical archaeology, oral and written histories, and conventional (or “guild”) scholarship and popular culture.

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New collaborations might also fruitfully take place on a wider geographical scale that involve Indigenous communities in North America, Australia, South America, and indeed in any country with colonial histories where the dominant society’s historical narratives have taken on a material and insistent form through monuments. Ideas about middle grounds and shared histories applied to monuments, then, can broaden understandings of what archaeological studies of monuments can achieve and further contribute to expanding what is meant by archaeologies of contact and colonialism and what they might accomplish (Lightfoot 1995; Rubertone 2000; Torrence and Clarke 2000). Admittedly, archaeologists’ involvement in supplying evidence that aids in monument building and interpretation or in revealing other forms of memorialization practiced by Indigenous peoples might be perceived as problematic. Although archaeology may contribute to identifying sites of memory keeping sometimes obscured by colonial settlement or forgotten by Indigenous groups alienated from ancestral land, it might also encourage unwanted tourism or otherwise call attention to private acts and ways of fulfilling ritual obligations by making them the focus of outsiders’ scrutiny. Stopping short of indictment or exoneration, this book invites and encourages further dialogue by acknowledging that these concerns make palpable the reality that Indigenous peoples declared extinct or whose histories have been erased or marginalized by monument building, historic preservation, and other commemorative processes continue to struggle with the implications of memorialization. Although beginnings are never simple or outcomes certain, perhaps the place to start thinking about future possibilities is with the monuments discussed in this book. At Jamestown, the 400th anniversary celebration has come to an end. The stream of politicians and international dignitaries has dwindled; the number of visitors this year or next might not reach the 3.3 million mark that organizers say it did in 2007. For Virginia’s Native peoples, the end of the anniversary year was no different than the passing of other historical moments that brought colonial exploration, commerce, and imperialism to center stage. They will continue to tell their stories and pursue federal recognition. Through the Historical Highway Markers program, will they designate other places on the landscape for commemoration? Will some marked sites, long considered sacred to them, be sanctified by 2057? Compared to Jamestown, the Canonicus Monument and Memorial Rock are monuments of less renown. Among the Narragansett, interest in Memorial Rock is more assured than their interest in the Canonicus Monument. Nonetheless, they make an annual pilgrimage and personal visits to the Great Swamp Monument, which they remember as a place where their ancestors were massacred by colonists in the early days of

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King Philip’s War (1675–1676). This monument has seen its share of uninvited dirt bikers and relic hunters, but it also exhibits graffiti and scars providing visual statements of the Narragansett’s engagement, even to the extent of containing idioms which would reside comfortably in the language of Indigenous resistance. The vandalism by the bikers and relic hunters, and the graffiti and other physical evidence of resistance, may be historically linked and contradictory processes. Is there order to be detected in disorderly conduct? Could it offer further insights into the complicated and continuing intersections of, and unheard dialogues about, cultural loss and survival in Narragansett Country and perhaps even at other monuments where such behavior is usually condemned and would preferably be eradicated? At Plymouth, the Pilgrim’s Progress parade continues to be held each Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday of November, as it has been since the Tercentenary in 1920. Since 1970, this “pilgrimage” has been accompanied by a counterevent marking the United States holiday as a National Day of Mourning. For Native American activists, and some Wampanoag, it is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as public protest aimed at stirring awareness and demonstrating unity with Indigenous peoples internationally. There have been some altercations, but on the whole, the two events have coexisted more or less peacefully. No one, for example, was arrested when mourners buried Plymouth Rock under a pile of sand (Lepore 1998). The town of Plymouth has even placed a Day of Mourning commemorative plaque on a rock near a statue of Massasoit, a seventeenth-century Wampanoag leader, on behalf of the United American Indians of New England. Could future monuments be raised to the Mashpee Wampanoag, who only recently received news of federal recognition after years of having their tribal identity and ties to place questioned in a court of law and in the arena of public opinion? How would such monuments represent their rootedness, as well as their movements? How might archaeology and community memories be used to ask questions about the complexities and ambivalences of the Mashpee’s lives, which for centuries have been navigated between a local past and global future? Private development along the Rio Grande has raised concerns about the Coronado State Monument. In 2006, the monument was renovated (and rededicated) in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the New Mexico state monument system. The renovations included a new roof and windows, new stucco for the entire building, a fresh coat of paint, replacement of rotting timbers, and new electrical, heating, and air conditioning systems, but also new exterior lighting to accommodate evening events. The refurbished monument might not fit the vision of what Pueblo people would have wanted. If so, then very little has

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changed since earlier episodes of placemaking at Kuaua. However, the efforts of Southwestern archaeologists in championing Indigenous views and integrating them into verbal and material constructions of place may forecast yet another phase in placemaking at Kuaua. How would such different visions reshape the monument? Would Pueblo groups and others follow the lead of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which has opened its own cultural center at Fort Apache and which holds events aimed at reconciling ruptured and unfinished relations? Certainly, the Mi’kmaq have begun to think about how the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, which will not be completed until 2012, could facilitate journeys of healing and learning. Defying conventional museum practices and notions of monuments, they are exploring how visitors might experience a landscape and not just view or enter a building. Will diverse paths to understanding place converge? How different will Debert and its landscape look because of this traveling and the continuing dwelling of the Mi’kmaw peoples themselves? Will signage announcing the Timbisha Shoshone presence in Death Valley detract from the important stories that cairns, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, can evoke? Late in 2007, the Timbisha Shoshone dedicated a community center with prayers, songs, and drumming. As part of the ceremony, they dug a hole in the ground to plant a willow tree and place offerings of sweet sage and water. Will the willow become a new special place of memory where they can recall their enduring ties to the land that were ignored for so long and where, under its shade, they can contemplate a future? Will the Timbisha Shoshone and other Native American peoples whose relationships to monuments are discussed in this book initiate conversations with their neighbors about memories of shared landscapes, much like the Hopi, Zuni, Tohono O’odham, and Western Apache have done together with archaeologists? For these Southwestern groups, places that seemingly had little relevance to specific communities because of their reported archaeological significance have unleashed new imaginings. Bridging the middle ground of monuments therefore holds enormous promise for addressing issues that matter to Indigenous peoples and across the colonized world, and points in a direction that just might unmake borders, erase divisions between past and present, and cross new conceptual territory in the twenty-first century.

REFERENCES Ashmore, Wendy, and A. Bernard Knapp, eds. 1999. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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Bender, Barbara. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2001. Landscapes on the Move. Journal of Social Archaeology 1(1):75–89. Biolsi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds. 1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Byrne, Denis R. 2003. Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia. Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2):169–193. Cantor, George. 1993. North American Landmarks: A Traveler’s Guide. Foreword by Suzan Shown Harjo. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc. Carmichael, David L., Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhild Schanche, eds. 1994. Sacred Sites, Sacred Places. One World Archaeology Series, 23. London: Routledge. Casey, Edward S. 1987. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Deloria, Philip J. 2006. What is the Middle Ground Anyway? The William and Mary Quarterly 63(1):15–22. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1992. Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future. American Antiquity 57:595–598. DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things. Journal of Material Culture 11(3):318–338. Foote, Kenneth E. 1997. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16:22–27. Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim. 1993. The Temporality of Landscape. World Archaeology 25(2):152–174. Jackson, John B. 1994. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Joyce, Rosemary A. 2003. Archaeology and Nation Building: A View from Central America. In The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context. Susan Kane, ed. Pp. 79–100. Boston: Archaeological Institute of America. Kammen, Michael. 1991. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Keller, Robert H., and Michael F. Turek. 1998. American Indians and the National Parks. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 2007. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Lepore, Jill. 1998. Revenge of the Wampanoags. New York Times 148(51352):A25. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60(2):199–217. Lilley, Ian. 2006. Archaeology, Diaspora and Decolonization. Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1):28–47. Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lydon, Jane. 2005. Driving By: Visiting Australian Colonial Monuments. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):108–134. McManamon, Francis P. 2003. Archaeology, Nationalism, and Native America. In The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in a Global Context. Susan Kane, ed. Pp. 115–137. Boston: Archaeological Institute of America. Meskell, Lynn. 2005. Archaeological Ethnography: Conversations around Kruger National Park. Archaeologies 1(1):81–100.

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Morphy, Howard. 1995. Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, eds. Pp. 184–209. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, Tim. 2004. In the Footsteps of George Dutton: Developing Contact Archaeology of Temperate Aboriginal Australia. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Tim Murray, ed. Pp. 200–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connell, Barry, ed. 1992. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000. The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:425–446. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70(1):55–74. Simmons, William S. 1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Smith, Claire, and H. Martin Wobst, eds. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. One World Archaeology Series, 47. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Swidler, Nina, Kurt E. Dongoske, Roger Anyon, and Alan S. Downer, eds. 1997. Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Thomas, David Hurst. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. The Phenomenology of Landscape. London: Berg. Torrence, Robin, and Anne Clarke, eds. 2000. The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania. One World Archaeology Series, 38. London: Routledge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Van Dyke, Ruth M., and Susan E. Alcock, eds. 2003. Archaeologies of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Watkins, Joe. 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Witmore, Christopher L. 2006. Vision, Media, Noise, and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World. Journal of Material Culture 11(3):267–292. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Paleo Is Not Our Word Protecting and Growing a Mi’kmaw Place Donald M. Julien, Tim Bernard, and Leah Morine Rosenmeier, with review by the Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council.1

GROWING A MI’KMAW PLACE Across the Americas the relationships between present-day First Nations and the oldest sites in the hemisphere have come under increased academic, legal, and public attention in recent years. With the upheaval of long-standing scholarly interpretations of North America’s past has come a debate with many First Nations in Canada and the United States over the nature of their relationships to the earliest people of the Western Hemisphere. The public’s appetite for the debate has been unusual and enduring, fueling a broad range of media coverage for more than a decade. Before this debate began, the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq was committed to caring for and protecting the suite of Paleo Indian archaeological sites located in Debert and Belmont, Nova Scotia, Canada.2 This interest and concern has unfolded in a number of critical ways over the last two decades, from new efforts to protect the sites in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to developing a curation and interpretation facility—the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre. Gradually, the project has strengthened the formal role of the Mi’kmaw Nation in the protection and care of the sites, increased funding for research, and paved the way for public interpretation and education. This chapter reveals how these efforts have laid the basis for growing a diverse set of cultural, political, legal, and educational relationships between this ancient place and the Mi’kmaw Nation that are shifting the overall context through which the sites are perceived. It is fair to assume that these relationships were never envisioned at the time of the sites’ discoveries and excavations. Research and interpretation continue, but do so within a growing cultural context that situates the sites as part of the greater Mi’kmaw homeland, Mi’kma’ki. Elders’ guiding principles 35

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for the Mi’kmawey Debert project suggest that the growing relationships to ancestral places like Debert and Belmont are at the heart of increasing the healing and well-being of Mi’kmaw individuals and communities. More recently, through the Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn (Mi’kmaw Rights Initiative) Aboriginal and Treaty Rights process, the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs has made the Debert area a high priority to ensure sufficient land to buffer the sites from ongoing intensive industrial development as well as to secure a land base for a future cultural center.3 These diverse relationships reflect a shift from perceiving archaeological sites solely as locales of academic research to understanding them as Mi’kmaw ancestral places on the landscape—a perspective obscured in academic literature but commonly held throughout the Mi’kmaw Nation. This new context challenges academic colleagues, government partners, and the general public to rethink their categories and assumptions about ancestry and heritage throughout Mi’kma’ki. The project reflects basic Mi’kmaw assumptions about cultural descent in Mi’kma’ki, which includes Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, central and eastern New Brunswick as well as the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec and parts of Newfoundland (Figure 2.1). In doing so, the work signals an attachment to place and a notion of descent that transcends the archaeological

MI’KMA’KI LAND OF THE MI’KMAQ Quebec Kespe’k

Ktaqmkuk Newfoundland

New Brunswick Prince Edward Island

Siknikt Maine, USA

Kespukwitk

Epekwitk aqq

Nova Scotia

Piwktuk Eskikewa’kik ~ Sipekne’katik

Unama’kik

Atlantic Ocean

Figure 2.1 Map of Mi’kma’ki, the Mi’kmaw homeland. Map shows traditional Mi’kmaw districts as well as Canadian provinces. (Produced by Gerald Gloade, CMM.)

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culture history of the region. Among much else, the project challenges the notions of population isolation through time, while concurrently making use and meaning of archaeological methods and research. Asserting a Mi’kmaw role in the sites’ protection and in public interpretation confronts the presumed irrelevance and disconnection between present day First Nations and older archaeological sites that are prevalent in Paleo Indian archaeology, as well as in courts and the popular media. In doing so, the project reflects complex and deep Mi’kmaw attachments to land and place and challenges archaeologists and other academics, as well as the broader public, to rethink their assumptions about relationships and connectedness through time.

FINDING AN ANCIENT PLACE IN MI’KMA’KI Initially found in 1948 by Ernest Eaton of the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, the Debert site was excavated under the auspices of the National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization), the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology (now the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology), and the Nova Scotia Museum between 1962 and 1967, with the bulk of fieldwork completed between 1963 and 1965 (see Cotter 1962). More than 4,500 artifacts were recovered in a pioneering interdisciplinary project that identified 16 features—14 with presumed associations between hearth charcoal and artifacts (MacDonald 1968:24–27).4 The excavations also resulted in 13 radiocarbon dates ranging from 10,128 + /- 275 14C yrs BP to 11,026 + /225 14C yrs BP (MacDonald 1968:54–56). Three additional dates with erratic results were discarded. The excavations culminated in George MacDonald’s thesis, published through the National Museum of Man’s Anthropology Papers (MacDonald 1968), along with numerous other publications and international as well as interdisciplinary recognition for the significance of the site (Borns 1965, 1966; Byers 1966, 1969; Lyford, n.d.; MacDonald 1966, 1968; Stuckenrath 1964, 1966; Swift 1965). In recognition of the site’s importance, it was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1972 by the Government of Canada, and then in 1974, a Nova Scotia Special Place by the Province of Nova Scotia. In 1989, during activity related to a forest cultivation and tree-breeding center adjacent to the original Debert site, the provincial archaeologist Brian Preston and the center’s staff identified a group of new additional sites. These finds led to reconnaissance and limited site testing work by Stephen Davis of Saint Mary’s University at what became known as Belmont I, Belmont II, and the Hunter Rd. sites (Brewster et al. 1991; Davis 1991, 1993). The sites consisted largely of flake scatters with the largest assemblage from the Belmont II site, where Davis identified what

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he believed to be a “poorly defined activity floor” with an ambiguous pit feature (Davis 1991:38). Together the Debert and Belmont sites are the oldest directly dated sites in Canada,5 and represent one of the most intact and largest complexes of sites of this age in North America. The federal and provincial designations of the sites are testaments to the significance of the original excavations as well as the present condition and integrity of the sites. Although the sites have been designated a National Historic Site by the Government of Canada, they sit on Nova Scotia provincial land and the Province retains the legal responsibility for the sites’ protection and care. Commemorated through the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada as being “an excellent example of a Palaeo-Indian habitation site” that has had “a profound impact on understanding Palaeo-Indian cultures in eastern North America” (Parks Canada 2003), and less formally by the Province of Nova Scotia, it is fair to say that by what means they have, the Federal and Provincial governments claim the sites as their own. However, some combination of policy change to be more inclusive of First Nations throughout Canada and provincially in Nova Scotia, as well as growing threats of site destruction from all-terrain vehicle use, dumping, and industrial development, converged to create an opportunity for the Mi’kmaw Nation to become more actively involved with the sites. Today, the sites are both better protected and better understood than they have been since they were discovered, although there is still much work to be done. The agreement among the Nation, the Province and, to a certain extent, the Government of Canada through Parks Canada to protect the sites allows for important work to proceed; it also obscures the differing perspectives guiding the involvement and interest in the sites. For the Mi’kmaw Nation the values and priorities that guide the project are distinct from those usually employed either by government agencies or by academic researchers.

PALEO IS NOT OUR WORD The fact that no Mi’kmaw people were involved at the Debert site when it was excavated in the 1960s is a puzzle for many, reflecting the isolation of academic inquiry from Mi’kmaw values and cultural practice. While the parallel nature of academic research and life in Mi’kma’ki is not new, it remains true that Mi’kma’ki is the homeland of more than 30,000 Mi’kmaw people living in more than 33 communities (see Figure 2.1). Presently, more than 50% of First Nation people in Nova Scotia are under the age of 25; Mi’kmaw people are the fastest growing population in the Atlantic Provinces (Patten and Associates 2006:51). Recent community development work shows the highest priorities of Mi’kmaw

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communities are to understand Mi’kmaw culture and history and to bring healing to both the individual and community levels. Given these demographics and priorities, transferring cultural knowledge, language, and community histories to the next generation is critical to the health and well-being of individuals and communities. It is from these priorities that the Mi’kmawey Debert project has grown. The vision for Mi’kmawey Debert is a unique cultural center, guided by the Elders’ principles, where the sites are protected, understood, and honored by the Nation, all levels of government, academia, and the general public. The plans for the Centre redefine conventional museum practices, integrating Mi’kmaw knowledge, practice, and educational approaches to meet the needs of both Mi’kmaw and non-Mi’kmaw audiences (Lundholm Associates Architects 2007; Patten and Associates 2006). We conceive of visitor experiences as journeys—whether they are journeys of knowledge, leisure, spirit, healing, or exploration. Mi’kmawey Debert is to be a place where learning, transformation, and healing are possible and fostered. Current planning studies project up to 80,000 visitors a year in a 3,300 m2 (36,000 sq. ft.) facility—individuals and groups who will come as casual visitors, educational groups, or cultural tourists attending specially designed and prebooked programs. Visitors are invited to a landscape, not just a building. The landscape encompasses multiple interpretive trails, a viewing platform from which to understand the millennia of environmental and climatic change, and a healing lodge. The archaeological sites will be carefully protected within this landscape with appropriate visitor programs developed as opportunities arise. Early on in the development process of Mi’kmawey Debert, the Confederacy convened the Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council. The guiding principles for the project speak directly and indirectly to the Elders’ sense of past and place in Mi’kma’ki and to the distinct values of the Nation in protecting and growing Debert as a Mi’kmaw place. We use these principles for the remainder of the chapter as a way of demonstrating the character and distinction of Mi’kmaw perspectives of the sites as ancestral places in the larger landscape of Mi’kma’ki.

As Mi’kmaq, We are Descended from the People Who have Come Before Us in Mi’kma’ki Of all the messages the Elders want conveyed, this one of descent is perhaps the most important. It is also perhaps the most likely to be misunderstood in current academic and legal contexts, as well as by the general public. If there is one shared sentiment across Mi’kma’ki, it is that people share a homeland—we come from this place. This statement

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does not mean that people have been exactly the same for 11,000 years. It does not mean that there has been no linguistic, cultural, or biological change amongst the people who have lived in Mi’kma’ki since the last glaciation. It means simply that relative to other groups of people who live in North America, Mi’kmaq and First Nations people descend from this place in a way no other groups of people do. Yet, the vocabulary of Paleo Indians, Paleo Americans, and now even “Early Americans,” grows out of assumptions of populations bounded by time. The vocabulary ultimately contradicts what many Mi’kmaw people believe on a broad scale: that we come from this place in a way that other (non–First Nation or Inuit) groups of people do not. Again this is not to say that there is not change through time, but instead that the crux of being Indigenous is descending from human occupations in North America since the last glaciation, and potentially prior to the last glaciation. In part this message is important because language, terminology, and categories that alienate people from their ancestry also alienate people from the landscape and places of those ancestors. From this perspective, it is easy to understand that the Elders’ statement signals that breaking the relationships of people temporally means breaking them spatially as well: to disconnect the populations through time necessarily means disconnecting people from homelands and ancestral places. At a display about Debert and “Paleo Indians” mounted during annual celebratory events of Treaty Day in the provincial capital of Halifax several years ago, the most common question to the Mi’kmawey Debert staff was, who were these Paleo Indians? People thought of them as another tribe, like Cree or Mohawk, rather than as a very old, largely technological category of ancestors in North America. If you had asked these same people if they were related in some way to the ancestors who lived in Mi’kma’ki—shared their homeland at some point in the past—the likely answer would have been yes. However, in this case the language served to say not only that people weren’t related, but that the place itself was not connected to the people. In many ways, the Elders’ statement inverts the commonly asked question of where did people come from to ask the question, where did they go? To which the archaeological answer at some level has always been that “Paleo Indians” descended in some way and at some geographical scale—the Western Hemisphere, North America, or even Mi’kma’ki— to present-day Indigenous peoples. And this descent from the Archaic onward, as the discipline reflects, has been dynamic and complicated, but always contained within the boundaries of the continent—that is until Leif Eriksson and his Norse brethren arrived somewhere around AD 1000 and then others more permanently after the fifteenth century. The Elders’ statement asserts that the age-old disciplinary question of where

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people came from is much less significant than what has transpired since then within Mi’kma’ki. The more important question is, what has made us who we are? What are all the myriad ways that our culture, language, and knowledge have grown up in Mi’kma’ki? What is the dominant shared landscape and experience of people in the last 11,000 years? The question, where do you come from? is one that dominates and originates in countries of immigrants. More often in Mi’kma’ki, the question is not where you come from, but to whom are you related? The issue of to whom you are related is critical because it determines the extent of shared experience and establishes the personal and cultural relations among people. Certainly the Elders’ statement rejects the new term “Paleo American” to indicate that people living in North America more than 8500 14C yrs BP (~10,000 cal yrs BP) are not Indian or Native American (although the term “Indian” is not a favorite either). The basis for the recent distinction in the literature is largely biological rather than historical. Life since the last glaciation—the 11,000 years of shared historical experiences—has been the basis for defining Native American or First Nation, not presumed biological groupness, whose boundaries and transitions are fuzzy at best. This debate has come out most clearly in the legal proceedings and academic discussion about the origins and identity of the Kennewick Man and the suggestion of European origins for Native American peoples (Bradley and Stanford 2004, 2006; Bruning 2006; Chatters 2000; Fiedel 2004; Owsley and Jantz 2001; Straus 2000; Straus et al. 2005; Swedlund and Anderson 1999, 2003; Thomas 2000). Unfortunately, in popular media the academic debates were often either exaggerated or corrupted into one of Native Americans being racialized as “European” (Egan 1998; Kluger and Cray 2006; Lemonick and Cray 1996; Lemonick et al. 2006; Murr 1999, 2005; Preston 1997, 1998; Sanders 2004; Wilford 1999). The intense degree of attention the debate received from mainstream press and media, including hour-long television episodes on Nova and CBC, exposed deep cleavages between the attitudes and perspectives of Native and non-Native North Americans. Sadly, this attention speaks volumes to the differential treatment ancient histories receive from the general public when they are perceived by that public as their “own.” The point to emphasize with regard to Debert is that at the temporal and spatial scales on which these terms have meaning, the Elders’ message rejects the notion that a postulated biological group of people 11,000 years ago is more important than the 11,000 years of human experience that has transpired in North America—experience of which the Elders and the rest of the Mi’kmaw Nation are descendants. No one is arguing that biology isn’t part of groupness or that it does not change

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through time, but people are asserting that the historical experience of descending from a place over 11 millennia trumps any particular point of origin. The Elders are directly and indirectly asserting their own experience, which says we are still related even when we change biologically and technologically—something most Mi’kmaw people know and take for granted in their everyday modern lives where biological and technological change is a reality. Most importantly, by prioritizing, in particular, biology over history as “more” essential, the new vocabulary of “Paleo American” eschews the devastating losses that characterize the colonial experiences for Indigenous people throughout the Americas. It remains the case, however, that a historical basis for categorizing individuals defines most aspects of life for Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere—today people’s lives are much more historically contingent than they are biologically contingent. It would be difficult to overstate how much history has determined for people, and specifically the history of colonization. From land loss (and retention), to residential schools, policies of removal and relocation, cultural and linguistic repression, loss as well as recent renewals and applications of treaty rights, and the language and culture Mi’kmaw people share today, history has played a much greater role than biology. While most archaeologists would agree that the largely technological bases for archaeological culture histories are not biological or even cultural groups, the reality is a pervasive confusion in academia, legal proceedings, and the general public about what really defines groupness within the archaeological record—and how archaeological culture histories inevitably shift into “people.” Given that much of what archaeology tells us is about technology and materialism essentially, it is perfectly understandable that technology is what underlies categorizations through time. These categories serve the discipline well in many respects. The problem is that when archaeological culture histories transition into “people” and migrate into legal and popular contexts, First Nation people confront culture histories that disconnect present day people from the broader ideas of descent that lie at the heart of people’s understanding of who they are and what it means to be Mi’kmaq or Indigenous to this place. Take for example this excerpt from a Parks Canada press release of April 2006 describing Kejimikujik National Park, located in southwestern Nova Scotia: The park is in the midst of traditional canoe routes that Parks Canada says were first used by Maritime Archaic Indians about 4,500 years ago. Woodland Indians then lived in the area, making seasonal campsites along the rivers and lakes before their descendants, the Mi’kmaq, made Keji their home for about 2,000 years.

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This paragraph is a prime example of the way archaeological periods suddenly become “people,” even though generally academics understand and agree that cultural history periods are not meant to describe a people per se. There were no “Maritime Archaic Indians” or “Woodland Indians” (i.e., “Ceramic Indians”). There were people who lived during the Archaic and Woodland/Ceramic Periods as well as the other archaeological periods. A present-day analogy would lead us to a discussion of the “horse people” and then the “car people,” or better yet, “wood people” and now “steel people”—soon to be the “fiber optic people.” Technology doesn’t tell us about descent or ethnicity at this scale in this way. Most great grandparents in North America used horses in their lives, and people drive cars today, but they are still related— biologically as well as culturally. Roger Lewis (2006), then archaeologist at Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn (the Mi’kmaw Rights Initiative), worked with Mi’kmaw Elders across Nova Scotia to suggest new names, reflecting this perspective of relatedness and descent, for the archaeological periods (Table 2.1). While the naming of the culture histories does not change the basic technological categories through which the history is understood, the language places the ancient people in relationship to those who have come afterward, emphasizing descent. The archaeological language that blurs the distinction between technology and people has come to symbolize the breaking of the relationships of people through time. As the human relationships are broken, so are the relationships to the land where sites are located and where people assume all Mi’kmaq have lived. Many people understand that rupturing the relationship between people and the land, temporally or spatially, is what characterizes the most destructive historic events and processes, Table 2.1

How L’nuk lived in Mi’kma’ki. (From Lewis 2006.) Mi’kmakik Teloltipnik L’nuk “How the People Lived in Mi’kma’ki”

Saqiwe’k L’nuk (Ancient People)—Paleo Period 11,000–9000 BP Mu Awsami Saqiwe’k (Not So Recent People)—Archaic Period 9000–2500 BP Early/Middle 9000–5000 BP Late 5000–2500 BP Kejikawek L’nuk (Recent People)—Ceramic Period 2500–300 BP Early 2500–2400 BP Middle 2400–1700 BP Late 1700–450 BP Kiskukewe’k L’nuk (Today’s People)—450 BP–present Contact 450–350 BP Historic Period AD 1600–Present

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and therefore lies at the heart of community illness and historic trauma. If Mi’kmaw people are more related to—more descendant from—these sites than the waves of people who have arrived in the Americas in the last 500 or so years, then the experience of disconnection results in replicating traumatic historical processes and events that are much more well known and recent in community lives, even though most archaeologists do not intend to alienate present-day Indigenous people from their own understandings of the past in this manner. This brings us to the next Elders’ statement.

Our Elders Look to the Past for Healing and Spirituality, Not Only Knowledge and Information When the Elders visit the sites, they speak of spiritual connections to the sites that are centered in knowing that people—mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, children—have lived there. The presence of ancestors resides in the place, and it is this presence of the ancestors that makes the sites as important as they are. To look to the sites only for knowledge and information, such as how the fluted-point technology works or where the stone material comes from, is to miss the more important reality—that a community of people lived here and that Indigenous people share a relationship with those who lived at Debert that is distinct from others. In most academic contexts, perspectives that focus on the humanity of the people at the site might be recognized, but eventually they are dismissed as unknowable within scientific practice. This Elders’ statement does not argue with science on that front, but it does say that the human and spiritual dimension of relationships to the sites is important for them and for communities generally. Furthermore, it is a reality for many Mi’kmaq that to study and understand the past is necessarily a process of reconciling loss and destruction with a future for communities and individuals, which requires connecting spiritually with past ancestors. These journeys of learning and reconciliation involve emotional experiences where the Elders see a role for both healing and spirituality. This is predicated on the recognition of the difficult human experiences of the past—experiences that may or may not be known by material residues in the ground. In most academic investigations, concepts of healing and spirituality are either not considered or dismissed as problematic given their nonmaterial nature. Murdena Marshall, member of the Elders’ Advisory Council, gave the project a concept of healing that guides and directs our understanding of health and wellness in this context. Murdena explains the idea of health or wellness as the extent of awareness that an individual has to any given entity that has caused them illness. Healing comes when the

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individual apprehends fully their relationship to that entity, be it physical or nonphysical. “Cure” or “health” does not mean that the cause for illness necessarily goes away. Health is a state of awareness and apprehension of one’s own position and relationship to the illness. For example, take author Tim Bernard’s frustration at not speaking Mi’kmaq. His father was a fluent speaker who did not raise his children speaking Mi’kmaq. It was not until more than a decade after Tim’s father passed on that Tim found out that his father had attended residential school where speaking Mi’kmaq was forbidden—something he had not known until he was well into his 30s. Murdena’s concept of healing pushes Tim towards putting together all the pieces of the puzzle to understand his relationship (of loss in this case) to the Mi’kmaw language. For him it means reconciling not only his own relationship to his family, language, and identity, but also his children’s future as Mi’kmaq dealing with those issues. The approach is the same whether the issues are historic trauma or cancer—health is about clarity between yourself and the illness, not its disappearance or “cure.” What this concept of healing means for the Mi’kmawey Debert project is that the facility should be a place where people can reconcile and apprehend their individual and community relationships to the past. A community’s health is dependent partly upon people having the opportunities to determine and understand their relationships to the past, present, and future. Recent work in First Nation communities has illuminated the multigenerational aspects of historic trauma—the ways and means by which past traumas are revisited in subsequent generations (Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski 2004). The extent of the trauma has everything to do with the extent of alienation recreated between an individual and their family and community through historical trauma. Thus, healing and health become centered on reconnecting and rebuilding relationships that bring people out of isolation from each other and our shared past, a process that is necessarily transgressive temporally as well as spatially. Such reconciliation and understanding demand access to and responsibility for the resources of the past, be they places on the landscape such as Debert or collections that are far flung across North America and Europe, or simply growing and sharing knowledge within communities as well as drawing from academic disciplines such as archaeology and geology in new ways. Reclaiming lost resources, protecting Elders’ and community knowledge, and gathering existing resources in order to protect them become the priorities of the project. In planning the cultural center, this Elders’ statement has directed staff towards facilitating opportunities for individual healing journeys. This is a big question: what can a cultural center provide to people for their own journeys of healing and reconciliation? Such journeys might

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be seen as knowledge journeys, where individuals come to understand present-day events through the lives and histories of parents, grandparents, and a wider set of relatives. But they also include expanding both Mi’kmaw and non-Mi’kmaw perspectives of the breadth and depth of Mi’kmaw knowledge in the past and the sophistication of past generations; the extent of ecological and climatological change that ancestors experienced, understood, and accommodated; and the cultural knowledge embedded in stories that helped people read the landscapes like maps. Logistically, the statement directs the project to include semiprivate spaces at the center for community members and others to support and guide people in understanding their own relationships to the past, both as individuals and as members of communities. It also directs us towards taking care of the puzzle pieces—places, artifacts, stories, language, relationships—through efforts at site protection, repatriation, ethical research, and archiving oral histories and material records. Protecting the Debert and Belmont sites has been a key experience in building Mi’kmaw relationships to the sites, and leads directly and indirectly to growing a Mi’kmaw context for the sites for individual and community health and well-being. Clearly, from the Elders’ perspectives, these efforts are part of the healing process defined above. From the initial discovery of the Belmont sites in 1989, the Confederacy has grown into a critical player in the overall protection of the sites. When the Confederacy first became involved in working with the Province and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in protecting the sites, they worked to remove derelict cars, refrigerators, and roofing tiles from the original MacDonald site. Berms were later erected to discourage all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and motocross use, and barriers were set with signage to trespassers (Figures 2.2, 2.3). Discouraging ATV and motocross use, as well as sporadic dumping events, has required constant attention, with new fences and additional signage posted in the summer of 2006 (Figure 2.4). Along with public disturbance of the lands, in the mid-1980s the Province made the decision to establish a tree-breeding center within the area of the Special Place. The initial land area designated through the provincial legislation as a Special Place in 1974 was larger than the presumed extent of the original MacDonald site. Thus, the tree-breeding center was established without knowing about (or surveying for) any additional archaeological sites. The discovery of the Belmont sites in 1989 created a land-use conflict from our perspective, and the Belmont sites and other land areas within the Special Place have not been adequately surveyed, while ongoing planting and harvesting activities have continued to disturb soils and potentially harm unknown archaeological deposits. The Mi’kmaw role in protecting the sites was formalized in

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Figure 2.2 ATV and motocross activity disturbance of the MacDonald site, March 2006. (Photograph by Sharon Farrell, CMM.)

Figure 2.3 Flake in the midst of ATV and motocross disturbance, March 2006. (Photograph by Sharon Farrell, CMM.)

2004 with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Province to work on a management plan for the sites. In many respects, this MOU is the first governmental recognition of a formal Mi’kmaw role for the sites and their management and was an important step forward. These efforts may appear mundane and bureaucratic,

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Figure 2.4 Recent fence with signage at the original Debert site, fall 2006. (Photograph by Sharon Farrell, CMM.)

which at some level they are, but they become the building blocks to placemaking and to growing the relationships between Mi’kmaw generations and this ancient place. Both in the growing responsibility for care as well as in the growing knowledge about the sites there is the kind of healing that the Elders’ statement intends at the cultural center and for the Nation more generally. The efforts for site protection at Debert take place in a wider context of site vulnerability and destruction across the province due to development and despite the work of provincial heritage staff who are too few in number to enforce existing legislation adequately. The greatest threat to unknown sites is impending industrial development, not local surface disturbance of various types. Over the last few years the local municipality has sought to transfer roughly 4,000 acres of land immediately adjacent to the sites for an ambitious industrial complex (Figure 2.5). Spurred on by these plans for massive industrial developments in the area, the project has taken on a number of research projects in the last couple of years aimed at gaining a better idea of where the known and unknown sites in the area might be, as well as how to protect the sites.

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Figure 2.5 The area surrounding the Debert and Belmont sites is slated for intensive industrial development, May 2006. (Photograph by L. M. Rosenmeier, CMM.)

The Mi’kmaw Nation in Nova Scotia, through the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, has also set the Debert lands out as a high priority within the land claims process. These resulting research projects lead us to the last of the Elders’ statements.

As Mi’kmaq, We Respect Knowledge of the Past and are Dedicated to Learning More About Our People, L’nuk Linking the previous two statements is this one that directs the project towards learning and research. The openness of this statement is important. If the first Elders’ statement suggests that people reject an idea of isolated populations corresponding with technological traditions, they are equally committed to learning and researching about the past and the sites themselves. Growing the research agenda is a long-term process of integrating conventional archaeological and geological questions with questions arising from Mi’kmaw perspectives of the past. In the fall of 2005, the Confederacy held a workshop, Ta’n Wetapeksi’k: Understanding from Where We Come, as one step towards building an integrated future research agenda.6 This was the first time since the

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1960s the researchers from the original MacDonald site and more recent researchers, Elders, and Mi’kmaw specialists from various fields, as well as other First Nations, gathered together to discuss a future research agenda. Like some of the more bureaucratic measures taken to protect the sites, research and involvement with the interpretation of the sites are important avenues to building individual and community relationships to the sites and more broadly, to the past. Debert remains one of the most well documented and arguably most important cluster of sites that date to the Paleo period in northeastern North America, and certainly within Canada. Although the discovery of the Belmont sites resulted in several articles and an additional publication (Brewster et al. 1991; Davis 1991, 1993), core issues about the sites remain to be answered. For example, the temporal and spatial position of the sites is still contested (Bonnichsen et al. 1991; cf. Bonnichsen and Will 1999). The temporal relationships among the sites have not been clearly identified and the stratigraphy of the sites has not been correlated. There is still a great deal of artifactual analysis possible (but see Ellis 2001, 2004; Ellis et al. 1998), particularly with regard to lithic sources, and overly cited early blood residue analysis ought to be revisited with more recent techniques and understanding of organic residues (Loy 1983). Debates continue on whether people at Debert and other northeastern sites hunted caribou, megafauna, sea mammals or birds, or, of course, some more generalized adaptation to some or all (Bonnichsen et al. 1991; Davis 1991; Dincauze and Jacobson 2001; Hoyle et al. 2004; Keenleyside 1985; Miller 1997; Miller et al. 2000; Spiess et al. 1998). Perhaps the most serious of the current research questions is that there continues to be ambiguity about when the site was occupied, centering on a problem of whether it was a pre–Younger Dryas occupation or not. Drawing on both the geology and archaeology of the sites, this may be the most complex of research issues (Brewster 2006; Mott 1994; Mott et al. 1986; Newby et al. 2005; Stea and Mott 1989, 1998). Due to the plans for intensive industrial development, the Confederacy’s most recent efforts have focused on modeling the locations of nearby Paleo sites as well as defining the boundaries of the known sites. Because the extent of the sites has never been identified, we have concerns that they may indeed spill beyond the established boundary of the area protected through the Nova Scotia Special Places Protection Act, the limits of which were set down arbitrarily in 1974. While the Province has had some success with modeling precontact sites in later periods, the locations of additional Paleo sites have proven more difficult to predict. During the Belmont excavations, geologist Ralph Stea and soil scientist Gordon Brewster characterized the homogeneous Belmont Sand as either lacustrine or eolian (lake or wind deposits) in

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origin. Due to a fine “tail” of fine silt and clay-sized material (Brewster et al. 1991:85), they leaned towards lacustrine or alluvial for the origin of the deposit. At the time the Belmont sites were excavated, Stea and Brewster suggested that a “lake may have formed during deglaciation, a result of rapid melting on the south-facing Cobequid Highland Slope and persistence of ice in the Salmon River Valley.” The lacustrine sheet resembled other lake deposits from elsewhere in central Nova Scotia. Furthermore, they recognized that if the correlation with a lake shoreline was correct, then it would confirm the estimated (i.e., averaged) date for the Debert occupation (Brewster et al. 1991:86) because the lakes would only have formed at the height of Younger Dryas reglaciation between 10,800 14C yrs BP and 10,300 14C yrs BP. These results suggested an obvious project to determine whether the sites were located along the shoreline of paleolakes. We had in mind here work like that done in Ontario, where the identification of Paleo shorelines became the key to finding sites. We hoped that the identification of such shorelines would direct additional survey work, making predevelopment archaeological survey more feasible as well as successful. Throughout the summer of 2005, the project undertook a surficial geology map under the direction of geologist Ralph Stea, who has worked extensively in the area on late glacial geology (Stea 2006; Stea and Mott 1989, 1998). While paleo shorelines were not identified in the summer of 2005, the initial research tentatively identified that fluvial deposits near the sites were riverine, not lacustrine, and that further research would be required to determine a site model (Rosenmeier et al. 2006). The project has benefited greatly from the collegiality of Stea and Brewster, who continue to work on these outstanding research issues (Brewster 2006; Stea 2006). While this research does not overtly establish relationships between Mi’kmaw individuals and the sites, it has laid the basis for ongoing research at the sites, and, importantly, it derives from the Confederacy’s mandate to both protect and to understand the sites. Pursuing research such as this within a Mi’kmaw context challenges us to develop an approach that integrates conventional archaeology and geology with Mi’kmaw practice, knowledge, and perspectives. Such integration is not always quick and easy business. It is part encouraging and mentoring young Mi’kmaw people who are interested in archaeology, geology, and related sciences; part outreach to other Mi’kmaw scholars and researchers in related fields; and part allowing for the relationships to emerge over time. One of the most exciting areas of new research is the reevaluation and interpretation of meaning in the Mi’kmaw stories of Kluskap (the Mi’kmaw culture hero) (Rand 1971[1893]). The stories about Kluskap and the giant beaver, the fight with winter that Kluskap lost (when it was winter all year long, although

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Kluskap brings summer back at another time), and his transforming large mammals into small ones have garnered particular attention. Some researchers are following up on how the Kluskap stories mark lithic sources and define climatic events (either the periodic “little ice ages” or the end of the last glaciation) and changes in the landscape across Mi’kma’ki (Gloade 2007; Sable n.d.); for others they tell of the extinction of Pleistocene mammals (Paul 2007). We also look to other models for integrating Indigenous and Western sciences. One of the most promising aspects of the project to date has been the growing partnership with the Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/Integrative Science Program at Cape Breton University. The program seeks to integrate Mi’kmaw world views and perspectives with Western science approaches. The Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/Integrative Science Program is based on the idea of msi-t, meaning “all knowledges together.” The concepts relate themselves meaningfully and directly to the historical sciences of geology and archaeology. The central roles of pattern recognition, metaphorical and analogical reasoning, and inquiry-based learning stand out as primary examples of the compatibility between the Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/ Integrative Science Program and archaeology and geology in particular. The approaches being nurtured at the Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/Integrative Science Program support very much the urging of Dena Dincauze, who in 1993 (cited in Curran 1999:5) called for archaeologists to “overcome the constraints of thinking only in secular time or radiocarbon centuries; temporal units such as seasons (Curran and Grimes 1989; Spiess 1984) and generations should be employed in interpretation because they were the spans of time experienced by Palaeoindians themselves.” Using experience as a source for research questions is exactly what the Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/Integrative Science Program does. For many researchers, what distinguishes a Mi’kmaw archaeology, or even “Indigenous” archaeology, remains an intellectual question, if not a fabrication. In our experience, the integration of Mi’kmaw perspectives, language, and cultural knowledge with conventional archaeological and geological practice broadens the scope of what might be known, simply by changing the origin of the research questions people consider. Just as with allowing for healing relationships to the sites to be acknowledged and fostered, encouraging questions that are derived from traditional knowledge means new ways of thinking about the past. Finding new questions in new places will always raise the ontological questions about what is possible to know, but it does not (as is sometimes claimed) corrupt the practice of the sciences that may (or may not) shed light on these new questions. Most importantly, the project sees these new questions and new partnerships as critical to growing the Mi’kmaw context for understanding the past in Mi’kma’ki.

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GROWING A MI’KMAW PLACE Pursuing knowledge within Mi’kmaw communities and in partnership with other scientists and institutions lays the foundation for growing Debert as a Mi’kmaw place. In the introduction to this volume, Patricia Rubertone raises the question about what it would mean to study a monument detached from its landscape. In Mi’kma’ki, Debert was studied separately from the cultural landscape of Mi’kma’ki for decades. While some archaeologists may not conceive of this as problematic, from Mi’kmaw perspectives it represents a significant alienation of the story from its temporal and spatial relationships within Mi’kma’ki. The gradual and cumulative steps taken by the Mi’kmawey Debert project have established a Mi’kmaw presence in the protection and interpretation of the sites—resituating a Canadian National Historic Site into its contemporary and historical Mi’kmaw landscape. In doing so, the protection of the sites has improved dramatically because of our involvement, and the interpretation of the sites is more publicly accessible than at any time in the past. Past research is both respected and integrated, and future research is strengthened and expanded by Mi’kmaw priorities and questions about the past. Most importantly, seeing the site as part of Mi’kma’ki allows for a broader range of relationships to be built to such an important place. With the development of Mi’kmawey Debert has come a keener interest, not only in the early ancestors of Mi’kma’ki, but also in understanding how other Indigenous groups across the world understand their relationships to Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene locales. With colleagues from New Zealand and Australia, the project will explore these relationships through the Sixth World Archaeological Congress. The Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council is not likely to concede that they are not descendant in some way from the people who lived at the Debert and Belmont sites. To do so would deny what they know from their own lives: that groupness and ancestry persist through biological, linguistic, and cultural change. There has been significant change in many aspects of people’s lives since the time of European contact in Mi’kma’ki. Many people still speak the Mi’kmaw language at home in the daily lives, other don’t. Long-term places are still important, but new places have become destinations for other reasons. People drive cars and live modern lives. Language and culture transform. None of this changes the fact that people are descendant from those who have come before them. The Elders’ Advisory Council tends towards connectedness and holism, not categorization and fragmentation. They always ask, if we did not come from here, where did we come from? It seems unlikely that they will support separating the emotional and spiritual relationships to

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the past from the cognitive ones, given that delving into the past requires facing enormous personal and communal loss and disruption. To do so would prevent understanding those relationships to illness that allow for reconciliation and healing. In order for the growing number of young people to have access to the resources and knowledge of the past, the opening and building of relationships to the stories of Debert (as well as many other ancestral locales) is critical to the overall health and wellness of communities themselves.

NOTES 1. The work and perspectives of the Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council are central to this discussion. The members of the Council reviewed and edited the original paper delivered at WAC-5 in Washington, DC, as well as subsequent revisions to this published version. The Elders’ Advisory Council is chaired by Don Julien (Millbrook First Nation), and includes Elsie Charles Basque (Saulnierville, NS), Sarah Francis (Pictou Landing First Nation), Mali Ellen Googoo (Membertou First Nation), Phyllis Googoo (We’koqma’q First Nation), Judy Bernard Julian (Paq’tnkek First Nation), Theresa Isaac Julien (Millbrook First Nation), Doug Knockwood (Indian Brook First Nation), Lillian Marshall (Potlotek First Nation), Murdena Marshall (Eskasoni First Nation), Sister Dorothy Moore (Membertou First Nation), and Viola Robinson (Acadia First Nation). 2. The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq (CMM) is a nationally recognized council of six Mi’kmaw First Nations in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada. The Mi’kmawey Debert project is mandated by the Nova Scotia Assembly of Mi’kmaw Chiefs and is undertaken for all 13 Mi’kmaw First Nations in Nova Scotia by the Confederacy. 3. See www.mikmaqrights.com. 4. Although MacDonald (1968:24–27) “lists” 19 features in the original Debert volume, the list originates with field identifications, not his final interpretations. Careful attention to his comments indicates a final interpretation of 16 features, 14 of which were directly associated with charcoal. Of the 14 associations, only 9 of the features had sufficient charcoal to date. 5. In personal communication, Christopher Ellis of Western Ontario University notes that Charlie Lake Cave in British Columbia and the Debert Belmont sites are considered by most archaeologists to be the “oldest directly dated sites in Canada.” The oldest date from Charlie Lake Cave is 10,380 + /- 160 14C yrs BP and the oldest from Debert is 11,026 + /- 225 14C yrs BP. 6. A proceedings of a research conference dedicated to defining the future research agenda for the sites, Ta’n Wetapeksi’k: Understanding from Where We Come, will be published in 2008 by Eastern Woodland Publishing, Truro, Nova Scotia.

REFERENCES Bonnichsen, Robson, David Keenlyside, and Karen Turnmire. 1991. Paleoindian Patterns in Maine and the Maritimes. In Prehistoric Archaeology in the Maritimes Provinces: Past and Present Research. Michael Deal and Susan Blair, eds. Pp. 1–28. Reports in Archaeology, no. 8. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Council of Maritimes Premiers.

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Bonnichsen, Robson, and Richard F. Will. 1999. Radiocarbon Chronology of Northeastern Paleoamerican Sites: Discriminating Natural and Human Burn Features. In Ice Age Peoples of North America. Robson Bonnichsen and Karen L. Turnmire, eds. Pp. 395–415. Corvallis, OR: Center for the Study of the First Americans. Borns, Harold W., Jr. 1963. Preliminary Report on the Age and Distribution of the Late Pleistocene Ice in North Central Maine. American Journal of Science 261:738–740. ———. 1965. Late Glacial Ice-Wedge Casts in Northern Nova Scotia, Canada. Science 148(3674):1223–1226. ———. 1966. The Geography of Paleo-Indian Occupation in Nova Scotia. Quaternaria 8:49–57. Bradley, Bruce, and Dennis Stanford. 2004. The North Atlantic Ice-Edge Corridor: A Possible Palaeolithic Route to the New World. World Archaeology 36(4):459–478. ———. 2006. The Solutrean-Clovis Connection: Reply to Straus, Meltzer and Goebel. World Archaeology 38(4):704–714. Brewster, Gordon R. 2006. Soils at the Debert-Belmont Archaeological Site. Report on file at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, Truro, Nova Scotia. Brewster, Gordon R., Stephen A. Davis, Monique Frappier, Robert J. Mott, and R. Ralph Stea. 1991. Preliminary Report on the Debert/Belmont Palaeo-Indian Project. Archaeology in Nova Scotia, Curatorial Report, no. 81. S. Powell, ed. Pp. 81–88. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia Museum. Bruning, Susan B. 2006. Complex Legal Legacies: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Scientific Study, and Kennewick Man. American Antiquity 71(3):501–521. Byers, Douglas S. 1966. The Debert Archaeological Project: The Position of Debert with Respect to the Paleo-Indian Tradition. Quaternaria 8:33–47. ———. 1969. Debert and Delirium: Early Man in Nova Scotia. Eastern States Archaeological Federation Bulletin, nos. 26–27:10. Chatters, James C. 2000. The Recovery and First Analysis of an Early Holocene Human Skeleton from Kennewick, Washington. American Antiquity 65(2):291–316. Cotter, John L. 1962. Notes and News—Northeast. American Antiquity 27(3):456. Curran, Mary Lou. 1999. Exploration, Colonization and Settling In: The Bull Brook Phase, Antecedents, and Descendants. In The Archaeological Northeast. Mary Ann Levine, Kenneth E. Sassaman, and Michael S. Nassaney, eds. Pp. 3–24. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Curran, Mary Lou, and John R. Grimes. 1989. Ecological Implications for Paleoindian Lithic Procurement Economy in New England. In Eastern Paleoindian Lithic Resource Use. Christopher J. Ellis and Jonathan C. Lothrop, eds. Pp. 41–74. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Davis, Stephen A. 1991. Two Concentrations of Palaeo-Indian Occupation in the Far Northeast. Revista de Arqueología Americana 3:31–56. –——. 1993. Debert Industrial Park and Tree Breeding Centre Surveys, 1990. In Archaeology of Nova Scotia 1989, 1990, no. 77. Stephen A. Davis and Brian Preston, eds. Pp. 129–151. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia Museum. Dincauze, Dena F. 1993. Pioneering in the Pleistocene: Large Paleoindian Sites in the Northeast. In Archaeology of Eastern North America: Papers in Honor of Stephen Williams. James B. Stoltman, ed. Pp. 43–60. Archaeological Report, no. 25. Jackson, MS: Department of Archives and History. Dincauze, Dena F., and Victoria Jacobson. 2001. The Birds of Summer: Lakeside Routes into Late Pleistocene New England. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 25:121–126. Egan, Timothy. 1998. Old Skull Gets White Looks Stirring Dispute. New York Times 147(51115):A12. Ellis, Christopher J. 2001. Some Site and Artifacts I Have Known: The Debert Site, Nova Scotia. Kewa 01(6–7):2–9.

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Ellis, Christopher J. 2004. Understanding Clovis Fluted Point Variability in the Northeast: A Perspective from the Debert Site, Nova Scotia. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 28(2):205–253. Ellis, Christopher J., Albert C. Goodyear, Dan F. Morse, and Kenneth B. Tankersley. 1998. Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Eastern North America. Quaternary International 49/50:151–166. Fiedel, S. J. 2004. The Kennewick Follies: “New” Theories About the Peopling of the Americas. Journal of Anthropological Research 60(1):75–110. Gloade, Gerald. 2007. Cultural Memory Timeline Imbedded in the Mi’kmaw Legends of Kluskap. Paper presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association, St. John’s, Newfoundland, May 19. Hoyle, B. Gary, Daniel C. Fisher, Harold W. Borns Jr., Lisa L. Churchill-Dickson, Christopher C. Dorion, and Thomas K. Weddle. 2004. Late Pleistocene Mammoth Remains from Coastal Maine, USA. Quaternary Research 61:277–288. Keenlyside, David L. 1985. Late Paleo-Indian Evidence from the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Archaeology of Eastern North America 13:79–92. Kluger, Jeffrey, and Dan Cray. 2006. Who Should Own the Bones. Time 167(11):50–51. Lemonick, Michael D., and Dan Cray. 1996. Bones of Contention. Time 148(18):81. Lemonick, Michael D., Andrea Dorfman, and Dan Cray. 2006. Who Were the First Americans? Time 167(11):44–52. Lewis, Roger. 2006. Mi’kmaq Rights and Title Claim: A Review of Pre-Contact Archaeological Factor. Mi’kmaq Maliseet Nations News, June 2006:16–17. Loy, Thomas H. 1983. Prehistoric Blood Residues: Detection on Tool Surfaces and Identification of Species of Origin. Science 220(4603):1269–1271. Lundholm Associates Architects. 2007. Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre Plan for Visitor Experiences. Manuscript on file at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, Truro, Nova Scotia. Lyford, W.H. N.d. Notes on the Soil at the Debert Archaeological Site, Debert, Nova Scotia. Manuscript from the Robert S. Peabody Foundation, Andover, MA. MacDonald, George F. 1966. The Technology and Settlement Patterns of a Paleo-Indian Site at Debert, Nova Scotia. Quaternaria 8:59–80. ———. 1968. Debert: A Palaeo-Indian Site in Central Nova Scotia. Anthropology Papers, 16. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada. Miller, Randall F. 1997. New Records and AMS Radiocarbon Dates on Quaternary Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) from New Brunswick. Géographie physique et Quaternaire 51(1):107–111. Miller, Randall F., C. R. Harington, and R. Welch. 2000. A Giant Beaver (Castoroides ohioensis Foster) Fossil from New Brunswick, Canada. Atlantic Geology 36:1–5. Mott, Robert J. 1994. Wisconsinan Late-Glacial Environmental Change in Nova Scotia: A Regional Synthesis. Journal of Quaternary Science 9:155–160. Mott, Robert J., J. V. Matthews Jr., D. R. Grant, and G. J. Beke. 1986. A Late-Glacial Buried Organic Profile near Brookside, Nova Scotia. Current Research, Part B, Geological Survey of Canada Paper 86-1B:289–294. Murr, Andrew. 1999. Who Got Here First? Newsweek 134(20):71. ———. 2005. A 9,000-Year-Old Secret. Newsweek 146(4):52. Newby, Paige, James Bradley, Arthur Spiess, Brian Shuman, and Philip Leduc. 2005. A Paleoindian Response to Younger Dryas Climate Change. Quaternary Science Reviews 24:141–154. Owsley, Douglas W., and Richard L. Jantz. 2001. Archaeological Politics and Public Interest in Paleoamerican Studies: Lessons from Gordon Creek Woman and Kennewick Man. American Antiquity 66(4): 565–575. Parks Canada. 2003. Debert Palaeo Indian Site, National Historic Site of Canada, Commemorative Integrity Statement. Manuscript on file at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, Truro, Nova Scotia.

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Patten, Leslie H. and Associates. 2006. Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre Feasibility Study. Manuscript on file at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, Truro, Nova Scotia. Paul, Clifford. 2007. The Science of a Mi’kmaq Legend. Mi’kmaq-Maliseet Nations News May 2007: 24. Preston, Douglas. 1997. The Lost Man. New Yorker 73(16):70–81. ———. 1998. Skin and Bones. New Yorker 73(46):52–53. Rand, Silas T. 1971[1893]. Legends of the Micmacs. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Rosenmeier, Leah Morine, Ralph Stea, Gordon Brewster, and Gerald Gloade. 2006. Recent Work at the Debert Belmont Sites. Paper presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association, Toronto, Ontario. Sable, Trudy. In press. Legends as Maps. In Ta’n Wetapeksi’k: Understanding from Where We Come. Tim Bernard, ed. Truro, Nova Scotia: Eastern Woodland Publishing. Sanders, Eli. 2004. An 8-Year Fight Ends Over a 9,200-Year-Old Man. New York Times 153(52196):F2. Speiss, Arthur. 1984. Arctic Garbage and New England Paleo-Indians: The Single Occupation Option. Archaeology of Eastern North America 12:280–285. Spiess, Arthur, Deborah Wilson, and James Bradley. 1998. Paleoindian Occupation in the New England-Maritimes Region: Beyond Cultural Ecology. Archaeology of Eastern North America 26:201–264. Stea, R. Ralph. 2006. Geology and the Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction of the Debert/ Belmont Site. Report on file at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, Truro, Nova Scotia. Stea, R. Ralph, and Robert J. Mott. 1989. Deglaciation Environments and Evidence for Glaciers of Younger Dryas Age in Nova Scotia, Canada. Boreas 18(2):169–187. ———. 1998. Deglaciation of Nova Scotia: Stratigraphy and Chronology of Lake Sediment Cores and Buried Organic Sections. Géographie physique et Quaternaire 52(1):3–21. Straus, Lawrence G. 2000. Solutrean Settlement of North America? A Review of Reality. American Antiquity 65(2):219–226. Straus, Lawrence G., David J. Meltzer, and Ted Goebel. 2005. Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis “Connection.” World Archaeology 37(4):507–532. Stuckenrath, Robert. 1964. The Debert Site—Early Man in the Northeast. Expedition 7(1):20–29. ———. 1966. The Debert Archaeological Project, Nova Scotia: Radiocarbon Dating. Quaternaria 8:75–80. Swedlund, Alan, and Duane Anderson. 1999. Gordon Creek Woman Meets Kennewick Man: New Interpretations and Protocols Regarding the Peopling of the Americas. American Antiquity 64(4):569–576. ———. 2003. Gordon Creek Woman Meets Spirit Cave Man: A Response to Comment by Owsley and Jantz. American Antiquity 68(1):161–167. Swift, Donald J. P. 1965. A Stratified Periglacial Sand in Northern Nova Scotia, Canada. Manuscript on file at the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Andover, MA. Thomas, David H. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Wesley-Esquimaux, Cynthia C., and Magdalena Smolewski. 2004. Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Wilford, John N. 1999. New Answers to an Old Question: Who Got Here First? New York Times 149(51701):F1.

CHAPTER 3

Always Multivocal and Multivalent Conceptualizing Archaeological Landscapes in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, T. J. Ferguson, and Roger Anyon

Reeve Ruin is perched on a mesa overlooking the San Pedro River, a thin ribbon of water that wends its way northward from Mexico through southeastern Arizona (Figure 3.1). The mesa is a natural stronghold, protected by a vertical cliff and a steep escarpment, with a clear view for miles in nearly every direction. Below, the river provides a steady source of water in the desert and its regular flooding regenerates soils ideal for growing corn or beans or squash. Today the mesa is covered by sprawling creosote, but the exposed sandstone walls of the ruin, first uncovered and excavated in 1956, are visible between the plants. In the late spring of 2002, we sat on the fallen walls of Reeve Ruin along with five Hopi cultural advisors interpreting the bits of pottery, animal bones, and stone tools strewn across the village site and discussing the complex history of Pueblo peoples in Arizona (Figure 3.2). Charles Di Peso, the first archaeologist to dig Reeve Ruin, hypothesized that a group of migrants from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona, near the Hopi Mesas, settled at the site around AD 1250. Additional research through the years has confirmed Di Peso’s theory, indicating that around AD 1100 Pueblo migrants began establishing a string of communities that stretched along the length of what is now Arizona’s eastern border into the Mogollon Rim, Tonto Basin, Gila Valley, Safford Basin, San Pedro Valley, and Tucson Basin. After several centuries, the migrants vacated the initial villages they established. At this time it appears that some of the migrants moved into nearby local communities, while others likely returned northward to the Hopi Mesas. The Hopi cultural advisors listened to this story constructed from the archaeological evidence. They agreed that the suite of distinctive artifacts archaeologists key into—stacked masonry architecture, Salado polychrome ceramics, mealing bins, finger-grip manos, stone-lined rectangular hearths, hawks and eagles in the faunal assemblage, entry boxes, 59

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Figure 3.1 The modern-day location of tribes participating in the San Pedro Ethnohistory Project in relation to the project area containing Reeve Ruin and the Davis Site. (Courtesy of the Center for Desert Archaeology.)

and ceremonial kivas—tell of their Pueblo ancestors living at Reeve Ruin. As elder Harold Polingyumptewa said after walking around the site and looking at the ceramic fragments, “I’ve seen pottery like this at home.” All the Hopi advisors agreed that this place was a village of their ancestors. For the Hopi advisors, the parallels in material culture spoke of the expansive migration routes archaeologists have traced throughout the greater Southwest. Floyd Lomakuyvaya said that his clan, the Bearstrap Clan, has a history that relates to many archaeological sites in the Southwest, including those in southern Arizona. During their ancient migrations the clan members traveled so far north, to a place as cold as

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Figure 3.2 Hopi research team discussing clan migration traditions while standing at a ceremonial kiva at the Reeve Ruin. (Photograph by Chip ColwellChanthaphonh, May 1, 2000.)

Alaska, that they could not practice agriculture. So the people turned back and migrated southward to the Hopi Mesas. When they arrived at the Hopi Mesas, they were not accepted into the villages there so they migrated south to Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff, where the SnakeAntelope ceremony was created. Some people became lost during these migrations, while others returned to the Hopi Mesas after a short period, where they were accepted at Songòopavi village on Second Mesa. Hopi advisor Leroy Lewis noted that when the ancestors moved from a village, they sometimes left elderly people or pregnant women behind. Other ancestors traveled widely on trading expeditions. Elder Dalton Taylor observed that the migration routes are multiplex because the ancestors traveled from place to place in all directions, sometimes in a spiraling direction where they ultimately arrived back at the point where they started. Reeve Ruin did not neatly fit into any known clan history, but the Hopi advisors were certain that the site was linked to their collective past. “We migrated through here,” Floyd Lomakuyvaya said. “These are Hopi sites—our documents. They identify the path we walked down.” For the Hopis, Reeve Ruin is more than a site that merely represents their

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history or proves a scientific point; it comprises a monument, a corporeal symbol that memorializes the lives of their cherished ancestors. For the Hopi men we worked with, the gentle breeze atop the mesa and the gathering rain clouds that late spring day fostered an emotive experience that transcended mundane concerns about archaeological chronologies and typologies. As Harold Polingyumptewa told us, “There are all these sites and each is different and each gives you different ideas. It’s hard to explain, to tell the archaeologists. Sometimes we can tell you guys our ideas—what was in the kiva, or what those holes are for. When I go to sites I feel like they [the ancestors] are watching me all the time.” As we sat looking over the site, Leroy Lewis pointed to the floodplain down below us and said, “I could just imagine 50 or 70 people planting corn down there.” He went on to picture the importance of the nearby springs and mountains for the people who lived at Reeve Ruin. He evoked the desire of Hopis to live on top of mesas for defense, and also “to monitor the sky and to take care of the sun,” the responsibilities of the Sun, Kachina, and Water-Corn clans. At the end of our time at Reeve Ruin, Lewis finally added, “At a site like this, my heart is open—air is flowing through it and there is no burden.”

ONE VALLEY, MANY VOICES The visit of the Hopi advisors to the site of Reeve Ruin is a useful starting point to consider the ways in which archaeological sites are always multivocal and multivalent. This one place with abundant evidence of ancient occupation is simultaneously the focus of scientific research and the basis for the collective memories of the Hopi people. The values and interpretations of archaeologists and Hopis converge and diverge in significant ways. Although few anthropologists today would say that archaeological sites can only be interpreted using a scientific paradigm, with their only value being scientific objects, debate about the control of heritage sites continues (Bender 1998; Breglia 2006; Castañeda 1996; Fontein 2006). Current syntheses of traditional knowledge and archaeological findings indicate that there is still a need to more clearly frame how myriad stakeholders make sense of and value archaeological landscapes (Echo-Hawk 2000; Mason 2000; Whiteley 2002). Indeed, places such as Reeve Ruin have neither a “natural” nor single interpretation. As Bettina Arnold (1999:1) has written, “The archaeological past is perceived as passive, fixed in time and place precisely because it is ‘past.’ The archaeological past is unable to speak for itself, to contest or transform interpretations of its configurations. It is therefore susceptible to being spoken for, in the sense that resources are seen to be ‘exploitable.’” That the fragments of past material remains are open to multiple meanings in

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part explains why heritage sites occasionally become sources of conflict between different interest groups and, at the same time, why places that signify the past are valued, fundamental in every society. In this essay we explore how one archaeological landscape can be understood through multiple voices of four Indigenous communities and how members of these communities imbue the land with manifold meanings. Although we focus on one geography in North America, the implications of this work are relevant for global discussions of the “contested past.” In other studies, varying interpretations of the past are often conceptualized as political disagreements, and, indeed, a political dimension—of control, access, and authority—suffuses many of these debates (e.g., Cheung 2003; Dumont 2003; Fluehr-Lobban et al. 2003; Nelson 1995). Archaeology exposes and creates a physical and touchable product that does not just reflect power, but constructs it (Abu el-Haj 1998; Ikawa-Smith 1999:627). Here we argue that varying interpretations are not only or merely political, but in fact often are the result of perceiving time and space in different ways. We begin by suggesting that an archaeological landscape is basically a cultural landscape; archaeological sites function as one component in the geographies which human societies use to construct their experiences. The differences in cultural landscapes between communities are differences born from how people think about time and space. We therefore devise a framework, a cultural landscape matrix, that helps clarify the different ways of seeing and being in a place. In the end, building from Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of history and dialectic, we suggest that a totalized understanding of archaeological landscapes is not possible. Multiple perspectives often exist in parallel, and while they can inform one another, they cannot be combined to establish a definitive and complete truth. An alternative model that admits many interpretations of a place, however, does not necessarily need to lead to a historical schizophrenia in which there are mutually conflicting and inconsistent elements. Archaeology is only schizophrenic if the expectation is that archaeological inquiry must lead to a single truth, a single understanding of the past. We think that archaeology should not be about discovering the one “true” past of a site or a region or a people; instead, it should embrace an axiology of material pasts, the study of the relationships between humans and the material worlds of the past that people use to define the social worlds of the present. Our approach remains deeply committed to the scientific inquiry of material culture, even as it recognizes that science is not the only (or predominate) value of the places and things that inspire us to recall the past. This perspective was developed during a three-year ethnohistory project (2001–2004), conducted in collaboration with four Native American

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communities: the Hopi Tribe, Tohono O’odham Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, and the San Carlos Apache Tribe (working with the White Mountain Apache Tribe). This project focused on the cultural history of the San Pedro Valley, a region in southeastern Arizona that archaeologists have studied for more than a century (Clark 2003). Archaeological research has revealed a rich and fascinating human history in the valley, truly a persistent place, with a nearly continuous Native American presence for 13,000 years (Gregonis 1996; Haury 1956; Haury et al. 1959). Our ethnohistoric research project was designed to conjoin previous archaeological research with Native American perspectives in order to gain a better understanding of how descendant communities conceive of their ancestors, the cultural values these communities have for ancestral villages, and the historical narratives embedded in tribal traditions (Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006; Ferguson et al. 2004). Although we took into account the valley’s entire history, we focused our work on the later agricultural periods from AD 1000 to the present, a time frame that was most relevant and poignant for our Native colleagues. Research progressed through three primary methodologies: “placebased” interviews that were conducted with small groups of cultural advisors at a sample of archaeological sites in the valley, museum research with the same advisors examining collected artifacts at the Arizona State Museum and the Amerind Foundation Museum, and follow-up interviews with advisors on their respective reservations (Figure 3.3). We worked with each tribe individually, allowing its appropriate office—the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, San Carlos Apache Elders’ Council, Tohono O’odham Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Zuni Heritage and Historic Preservation Office—to determine the details of research schedules, and to review final notes and to comment on publications (see Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2004). In our research we examined a range of archaeological sites, but in order to focus our discussions in this chapter, we concentrate on tribal interpretations of Reeve Ruin and the Davis Site. These two sites have special meanings as ancestral monuments and cultural markers for contemporary Hopis and Zunis, and they are also highly valued by O’odham and Western Apache people. Archaeologists also bring their own cultural and intellectual perspectives to bear in interpreting the sites. Based on excavations in 1956 and 1957, archaeologists Charles Di Peso (1958a) and Rex Gerald (1958, 1975) argued that 800 years ago a group of Western Pueblo people (the ancestors of the modern-day Acoma, Hopi, Laguna, and Zuni peoples) traveled hundreds of miles southward from a homeland on the Colorado Plateau to take up residence at Reeve Ruin and the Davis Site. Stacked masonry architecture, Salado polychrome ceramics, ceremonial kivas, and other distinctive artifacts and

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Figure 3.3 Perry Tsadiasi and Octavius Seowtewa discuss Salado polychrome pottery from the San Pedro Valley with other Zuni researchers at the Arizona State Museum while T. J. Ferguson takes notes. (Photograph by Chip ColwellChanthaphonh, April 26, 2000.)

architectural features indicated these were distinct village communities rather than admixtures with resident local populations. The people who occupied these sites formed a cohesive population surrounded by a separate, culturally distinct people (Di Peso 1958b:12). Recent research confirms that Pueblo migrant populations first settled to the northwest of San Pedro Valley in the AD 1100s and eventually established villages such as Reeve Ruin and the Davis Site in the early AD 1200s (Clark and Lyons 2003). Occupation of these distinctive Western Pueblo settlements ceased by AD 1400, although other large farming communities in the San Pedro Valley continued to be inhabited until AD 1450. In the following centuries there is a material “gap,” a lacuna in which it is archaeologically unclear how the valley was being used and by whom. The material record does not become clear again until after the settlement of the Spanish borderlands by Euro-Americans in the late AD 1600s (Masse 1981), when the San Pedro Valley was known to be occupied by the Sobaipuri (the ancestors of the Tohono O’odham) and the Jocome, Jano, and Suma (the ancestors of the Apache). This is the story archaeologists currently tell based on the available material record.

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A MATRIX FOR CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Many archaeologists, because of their expertise and background, have traditionally looked at archaeological sites as isolated phenomena, objects divisible from the rest of the physical world. Today, however, an increasing number of archaeologists are incorporating a landscape perspective into their work (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Bender et al. 2007), and some scholars have focused on how archaeological landscapes are in essence cultural landscapes, the fusion of the land itself with cultural perceptions and values (e.g., Ferguson and Anyon 2001; Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004; Stoffle et al. 1997; Zedeño 2000). As Carl Sauer (1963:343) famously wrote, cultural landscapes are fashioned by cultural groups from a natural environment where “culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.” Conceptualizing cultural landscapes entails understanding how different people interact with and perceive a given terrain. These differences are at times dramatic. Born from the Enlightenment, the Western European tradition envisions land as an entity essentially separate from human beings, easily divisible through boundary-making practices (Smith 1999:55). In the Cartesian model of the landscape, territories are imposed on an empty space and divided through binary representations: private/public, cultural/natural, closed/open, inside/outside, ours/ theirs (Harley 1988, 1990; Piper 2002). For Euro-Americans, the past is made present primarily when it has been materially inscribed on the land and tangible remains survive to be described, measured, and represented. Euro-American cultural landscapes symbolize memory in the form of historical landmarks that encapsulate an idealized past (Jackson 1980; Lowenthal 1989). Time advances in a linear progression for EuroAmericans, which archaeologists seek to systematically reveal through precise dating techniques (Paynter 2002:86; Preucel and Meskell 2004:9). Land is part of a historical process that produces place-names and events as the people using a territory change through time (Anschuetz 2002). Time as well as space is abstract, bounded, and linear. For many Indigenous peoples, however, place and place-names are fused to arrest time itself, making “the past a referent for the present. The present is not so much produced by the past but reproduces itself in the form of the past” (Morphy 1993:239–240). American Indians often view ancestral sites that persist in the present as historical monuments that cue what passed before. Cultural landscapes thus do not represent memory, they are memory, and their apprehension provides a means to unite the past and the present in a personal experience (Küchler 1993). The meanings of these places have not expired but continue to transform

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and enlighten those living in the present (see Chapter 5). In this way, traditional histories are embedded in the land, stories made inseparable from place (Basso 1996). Visiting places is vital to apprehending and understanding the past. Bernard Siquieros, an O’odham colleague, explained to us in an interview, “All the things we hear growing up, they’re just legends, but when you go to a place first hand, then you realize it’s actually a part of history, where a historical event took place there.” Cultural landscapes tangibly link the past and present. Because the landscape has many stories that can be continuously reexperienced in new ways, the land is a palimpsest of people and places. American Indian histories of their ancestors’ lives frequently place asymmetrical emphasis on time, space, and events. The passing of time is contracted or expanded, as in O’odham origin stories where each break in time is said to be four years, a ritually significant number that is recognized to signify a much longer time. Similarly, references to places may describe real and specific locales, or be used as a narrative trope to symbolically mark movement, directionality, context, or even time itself. Many chronicles shared with us during research on the San Pedro Valley emphasize place over time in a manner similar to what Morphy (1995:188) writes about the Yolngu in Australia, where “sequences in time are represented only if they were spatially segregated and occurred at separate places in association with separate features.” Furthermore, for our American Indian colleagues, the people who lived in these places were not cognized as distinct archaeological cultures but as the ancestors who constitute the fathers and mothers of their modern world. Thus, when American Indians talk about ancestral sites, there is a complex of memories that links them to the landscapes of the past and present. Archaeologists and ethnohistorians who work with the archaeological record and American Indian oral traditions are faced with the challenge of fusing these two very different ways of knowing the past. Indeed, much debate has surrounded the issue of how, and whether, such radically divergent epistemological perspectives can be conjoined (Anyon et al. 1997; Ferguson et al. 2000; Mason 2006). Although some archaeologists have recently engaged oral tradition in important and interesting ways (e.g., Bernardini 2005; Lyons 2003; Scott 2003), we suggest that many researchers have not fully considered how narratives of the past frame time and space in different ways. Oral traditions do not always provide the kind of historical statements archaeologists seek. The interpretations and values people convey about cultural landscapes turn on their conceptions of time and space. To better understand how people’s statements in the present convey information about the past, we developed a model of cultural landscapes that helps us, as scholars, better decipher what people are really telling us in interviews and

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Material of the Past

Concepts of Space

Concepts of Time

Cultural Landscape Culturally Independent

Culturally Dependent

Absolute Space

Absolute Time

Relative Space

Relative Time

Representational Space

Representational Time

Culturally Independent

Culturally Dependent

Figure 3.4 A model of the cultural landscape. (Courtesy of the Center for Desert Archaeology.)

fieldwork. The matrix expands on the work of Barbara Morehouse (1996) by incorporating the dimension of time into her theoretical arrangement of absolute, relative, and representational space (Figure 3.4). Our cultural landscape model begins with the premise that there is a natural environment and a material culture of the past that persist in the present. People then use varying concepts of time and space to interpret objects and imbue them with meanings. These interpretative moments are mediated through personal and cultural values, which in turn structure how people experience and use the materials of the past. This fluid process creates a cultural landscape. Absolute space and time are marked and bounded by the physical properties of the space-time continuum (e.g., chronology, topography, latitude, and longitude). The San Pedro Valley, as it exists in the tangible, geodetic world exemplifies absolute space. An example of absolute time is the NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock, which is used as the primary time and frequency standard for the United States. While absolute space and time seem to exist in the “real” world, independent of humans, it is extremely difficult for people to apprehend these absolutes. That is, the very attempt to define the “absolute” is a cultural act, and therefore it begins to slip into notions of the relative and representational. Relative space and time are socially defined with fluid boundaries determined in relation to significant objects and the observer who defines

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them. Relative space, for example, is illustrated in Father Eusubio Kino’s 1701 map showing the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest as he knew it. Informed by his personal experiences as a Spanish missionary, Kino’s cartographic representation uses Spanish and French labels to highlight the villages of allies as well as spatial gaps to underscore the sociopolitical lacunae created by the colonialists’ enemies. Relative time is entailed in an O’odham “calendar stick” or “event stick” that records only special events, each one relative to the last and relative to what was important for the O’odham people. The concepts of relative space and time lie on a continuum between culturally independent and dependent concepts. Relative space and time therefore mediate between attempts at complete “objectivity” and “subjectivity.” Relative is the in-between of absolute and representational. Lastly, representational space and time are encoded with rich cultural symbols and values. An example of representational space is the map of the United States and Arizona, where the very shape of the place allows it to become an emblem, like a flag that emits powerful connotations if one knows the meanings assigned to the salient symbols. Representational time is embodied in the notion of Camelot, which does not reference a “real” time, but a symbolic Golden Age.

THE MANY MEANINGS OF REEVE RUIN AND THE DAVIS SITE The frames of reference for time and place in our research started with the chronologies and typologies created by archaeologists, and these provided a shared language to begin discussions about the past. We recognize that archaeologists sometimes reduce what Native peoples consider to be living parts of the world into inanimate things, transforming dynamic archaeological sites into static objects for scientific scrutiny. This process has a long history (Thomas 2000), which has allowed professional “archaeologists (perhaps unintentionally) . . . to co-opt the American Indian’s unwritten history and material culture” (Watkins 2003:273). Archaeologists explicate the past in terms of precise dates and places. Tree-ring dating and GIS imagery make it easy for archaeologists to focus on the precision of time and space, disregarding the relative and representational meanings archaeological sites hold for other people. Despite the tendency of archaeologists to focus on absolutes, scholars do incorporate a more representational mode when we depict who resided at a site and characterize how American Indians lived. When Reeve Ruin was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places—a listing of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects significant in American, regional,

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or local history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture—the village was selected not because of its distinct spatial boundaries, but for its broader symbolic values, representing ancient Western Pueblo migrations into southern Arizona. To many Hopis today, archaeological sites are ang kuktota (lit. “along there, make footprints”), the footprints of their ancestors, the Hisatsinom (Dongoske et al. 1997; Ferguson et al. 2000). Donald Dawahongnewa explained in an interview that archaeological sites “are our landmarks, our footprints for us. [Our ancestors] were wise to do that. The shrines there are alive, and I feel emotional about that . . . Their lives are relevant today for the knowledge they gained” (see Kuwanwisiwma 2002:161). Archaeological sites are lasting monuments—enduring places that serve as a testament to ancient lives and as a means to learn from those who have passed before. Hopi history is encapsulated in the clan stories and migration accounts that relate how the Hisatsinom traversed the world until at last they reached the Hopi Mesas. Many clan traditions recount emerging at Yayniini (the Place of Beginning), passing through Palatkwapi (Red-Walled City), and arriving at Pasiwvi (the Place of Instruction). This list simultaneously refers to a progression of events and the associated places that represent those happenings. In May of 2002, when five Hopi cultural advisors visited Reeve Ruin, none of them doubted the absolute nature of the place or even the absolute dates archaeologists provided for the occupation of the site. However, as the Hopi elders spoke of their clan migrations, discourse about Reeve Ruin shifted from a discussion of a specific place isolated from the Hopi Mesas to an ancestral village linked relative to the other places in a trajectory of ancient clan migrations that lead directly to the Hopi villages occupied today. Reeve Ruin was recognized as one stop among many on the trail to the Hopi Mesas. In this way, the stories of clan migrations transformed our sense of absolute time, where Reeve Ruin was no longer discussed in terms of being occupied between AD 1200–1350, but in a time from long ago, between Palatkwapi and later ancestral villages. The story of Palatkwapi is of interest because it tells about an ancestral village in the south where moral decadence eventually led to its destruction (Ferguson and Lomaomvaya 1999:108–114; Voth 1905:25). A flood forced the people to leave and resume their journey towards the Hopi Mesas. When Hopi advisors discussed Palatkwapi, it was a general reference without direct mention of absolute time or place. In an interview, Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma made clear how Palatkwapi might not refer to absolute time and space but to an epoch of Hopi history that didactically represents the past in a different, moral sense. Kuwanwisiwma said Palatkwapi “is not just a place, a village, but an era, a time period in which things occurred; it climaxed with the end of a

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village and lifeways, but it was a village that was a center of others and a way of life.” A week before the Hopi visit, a group of Zuni cultural advisors visited the sites of Reeve and Davis. Although the Zuni do not typically employ a metaphor of footprints, they similarly see artifacts as objects that connect people in the present to the past. At one site in the San Pedro Valley, Perry Tsadiasi came across two fragments of a metate and said, “Maybe the people who lived here left these behind so the archaeologists know they were here . . . People leave these things so people later can remember they were here. Maybe these artifacts are ‘memory pieces’ . . . these things are left so we can remember.” The Zuni ancestors left behind such memory pieces on their migration from the place of origin to the middle place of Zuni Pueblo, Halona:Itiwana (Ferguson and Hart 1985:22). Along their journey, the ancestors were obliged to choose between two eggs, one plain and one colored with blue spots. One group chose the plain egg, from which a multicolored parrot was hatched. Those who chose this egg traveled southward, “into the Land of the Everlasting Sunshine, never to return,” becoming the “Lost Others” (Bunzel 1932; Cushing 1896:388; Ferguson and Hart 1985:22). From the beautiful egg came a black raven; those who chose it resumed their journey to the middle place. As with the Hopi advisors, the Zuni readily recognized the absolute spatial attribute of Reeve Ruin and the Davis Site, and the absolute time in which archaeologists situated these places. But as the Zuni advisors’ talk shifted to migrations and the “Lost Others,” the absolute reference of time and space began to dissolve. As the Zuni advisors talked about the Lost Others, it became clearer that they did not think of the migration of the Lost Others as being bounded by a specific time and place. Rather, it was a process that encompassed what is said to have happened at some point and somewhere, but such details were largely beside the point. Zuni advisors also thought that these sites were probably connected to trade networks which entailed continuing interaction between the Zuni and the Lost Others, but they were reticent to suggest specific dates. Zuni advisors left an offering of corn meal at one site, illustrating how these places continue to hold an abundant power and significance. The Western Apache cultural advisors who visited the Davis Site said that their ancestors did not live there, but it was still an intensely meaningful place. Apaches make a distinction between the nałkídé (ancient ones) and the nohwizá’yé (departed Apache people), who followed different paths although they both existed in the distant past. Even though departed Apache people did not build these sites, elders told us that Apaches frequently camped at archaeological sites. And, significantly, elders spoke about the how objects from ancient sites were incorporated

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into Apache ritual accoutrements and ceremonies. Abalone shell, beads, stone points, turquoise, and groundstone are all collected and reused, imbued with a sense of power and sacredness because of their connection to the ancient and their persistence in the present (see Chapter 5). Thus, the power of place and the symbolic associations that are attached to the ancient artifacts transform these sites into something wholly representational. That is, at places like Davis and Reeve, it does not matter so much when they were occupied: only their very antiquity is relevant to the Apache cultural practice of collecting artifacts from sites. In this way, absolute space is important, but time is symbolic and representational. The Tohono O’odham cultural advisors we worked with took a strong interest in the San Pedro Valley. Few of them had actually visited the valley before our fieldwork, although many had heard of their “cousins to the east,” the “Sobaipuri,” a Spanish appellation given to the O’odham people who lived in the San Pedro Valley until the 1760s. After the Sobaipuri had left their homes generations ago, some O’odham families continued to return to the San Pedro Valley to collect plant materials for making baskets. Like the Apache advisors, the O’odham recognize that their ancestors were not the ones that built the villages at Reeve and Davis. Nonetheless, O’odham expressed their feelings that these places are still important. One O’odham elder, Ida Ortega, placed an offering of corn kernels at Reeve, telling us that it did not matter if it was Pueblo people or O’odham people who resided there. “It is important to respect them if they are dead,” she said. “That’s what is important.” In this way, the place had significance as being a tangible locale, but once again, time became relative in which only antiquity mattered. O’odham today have a historical connection to the San Pedro Valley, in that they know with some precision from Spanish documents when their ancestors, the Sobaipuri, left the valley, even if they do not personally know everywhere they lived. While a few villages are known, many more must surely exist. Thus, sometimes when the O’odham speak of the San Pedro Valley, the entire valley becomes symbolic, a representational space inhabited by their ancestors long ago.

HISTORY AND DIALECTIC With this introduction to our work in the San Pedro Valley, we now consider if these different perspective and values of the San Pedro Valley lead to a form of historical schizophrenia in which archaeology is reduced to a cacophony of voices. We believe not, and suggest that a discordance of this sort only develops with an expectation that history must provide a complete and total understanding of the past. We think embracing multivocality within history emphasizes the methods of interpretation

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used to understand the past. To make sense of the different expressions of time and place we recorded in the San Pedro Valley, we draw from an analysis Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966:245–269) provided nearly a half century ago, titled “History and Dialectic.” We summarize his arguments— arguments made to enlighten how we think about the past in the present, and the relationship between the disciplines of history and anthropology, rather than normative arguments about how we should conceptualize the past—because they point to the ways in which truths can emerge from opposites and how ultimately the subject of history leads us to the subject of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss writes that history is often conceptualized as a system of continuous time, of one state unremittingly flowing into another. In our personal lives we typically conceive of our current self unambiguously flowing from the self as it was yesterday and the day before that and so on. So, too, we typically see in the external world a similar causal chain that explains change and how the world has come to be. However, this notion of personal history, the “supposed totalizing continuity of the self,” is as much an illusion as our intuitive understanding of change external to our own lived experiences. Both kinds of history are dependent on concepts of historical facts—what has actually transpired before this moment—which are never given, but instead constituted by the historian. (Historian here is being used in a general sense, as everyone at the very least is a historian of her or his own life—using the past to contextualize the present.) Consider, for example, the migration of a whole community, which necessarily involves a very large number of psychological, physiological, material, spiritual, and sociopolitical movements. To make sense of the entire migration, these movements need not only be constituted, but also selected because a total history—of every thought, action, feeling, word, and sensory experience—would only capture the disarray that is the essence of any event. But it is precisely the historian’s charge to make order from this chaos, to constitute and select facts. “Even history which claims to be universal is still only a juxtaposition of a few local histories within which (and between which) very much more is left out than is put in,” Lévi-Strauss deduces. “A truly total history would cancel itself out—its product would be nought.” No matter how many perspectives or facts are added to a historical analysis, these will always remain a subset of the total. Lévi-Strauss therefore suggests two alternatives. Either we recognize that historians can only attempt a totalization of a subset of events (e.g., one migrant’s psychological experiences at a particular historical moment) and never a complete totalization of the past. Or, we can recognize that all subsets are equally real, but then we must admit, as Lévi-Strauss writes, that “the French Revolution as commonly conceived never took place”; meaning, the selected historical facts

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for the French Revolution, as it is told in history books, are as equally valid as any other set of facts that historians have heretofore ignored and silenced. This argument in part leads to the inference that historians, as any concerned with knowledge, must therefore “employ a code to analyze its object.” Historical knowledge is fundamentally coded by chronology. “There is no history without dates,” Lévi-Strauss posits. He does not mean to say that dates are the only feature of history, its most interesting feature, or its whole, but that dates are the sine qua non of history, “for history’s entire originality and distinctive nature lie in apprehending the relation before and after, which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not, at least in principle, be dated.” Dates are significant for the historian in three ways. First, dates in a historical narrative are ordinal, meaning that dates provide a relative order of events: E1, E2, E3. Second, numerical dates are cardinal in that they indicate temporal distance, or quantities of time. To say that the Pueblo Revolt began in AD 1680 is not merely to say that it came before AD 1681 and after AD 1679, but that the event transpired more than 300 years before today. Third, and Lévi-Strauss says most importantly, “a date is a member of a class.” By this he means that a date derives its meaning from its relationship to a like date. He points out that a date such as 1680 is a member of a class of dates, such as 1899, 1724, and 1996. The year 1680 has no relative meaning with other classes of dates, such as the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd millennium, or for that matter July 1, December 18, or February 28. Lévi-Strauss concludes that the historian’s code does not involve only dates, because dates are dependent things: “Whenever I read 0º C, I know that it is freezing and put on my warmest coat. But a historical date, taken in itself, would have no meaning for it has no reference outside itself: if I know nothing about modern history, the date 1643 makes me none the wiser.” Therefore, the historian’s code consists of classes of dates. LéviStrauss believes it to be both fallacious and contradictory to think and talk about history as a continuous process, for instance, beginning with Ardipithecus ramidus four million years ago, then counting in the tens of thousands once we arrive at Homo heidelbergensis, then to thousands with the emergence of agriculture, then to hundreds of years with increasing sedentism, then to years with writing, then to hours and minutes for Kennedy’s assassination and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. “All these dates do not form a series,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “they are of different species.” In other words, a date of each class is only relevant (except in rare cases) for dates of the like class; when counting by the millions of years, it is hard to make sense of April 1, 2007. And so instead of one continuous stream of dates we end up with classes of dates, each ordered

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Table 3.1 Lévi-Strauss pictures a matrix of classes of dates. Each line is a class of dates, and each dot is isolated from the one before and after it to emphasize how dates are fragmentary and discontinuous. [Hourly] [Daily] [Annual] [Secular] [Millennial]

• • • • •

• • • • •

• • • • •

• • • • •

• • • • •

• • • • •

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• • • • •

• • • • •

as an “autonomous system of reference” in which “the discontinuous and classificatory nature of historical knowledge clearly emerges.” LéviStrauss pictures a matrix of classes like this table above, where each line is a class of dates, and each dot is isolated from the one before and after it to emphasize how dates are in essence fragmentary and discontinuous (Table 3.1). In this conception, Lévi-Strauss writes that the seventeenth century is in the “annual” class, but as a “domain of history” it is coded with the centuries that precede and follow it. Now, each domain “corresponds to histories of different power,” meaning that biography works within the class of days—not millions of years. In Lévi-Strauss’s terms, such “lowpowered” histories are more informative but less explanatory, while “high-powered” histories are less informative but more explanatory. And yet because classes of dates remain distinct, the historian cannot simply “dovetail” low-powered histories with high-powered histories. Instead the historian must select one code even as the decision requires elucidatory sacrifice. Low-powered histories are incredibly rich in lived experience and detail of information of motive and choices, but lack larger explanatory language and insight. The dilemma for the historian is thus to choose between “history which teaches us more and explains less, and history which explains more and teaches less.” A totalized history, Lévi-Strauss maintains, is unattainable. Instead of finding refuge in the historicity of dates, we must recognize that “history is tied neither to man nor to any particular object.” It is only a broad method, albeit an essential one, for ordering the structure of beings and things. “It is therefore far from being the case that the search for intelligibility comes to an end in history as though this were its terminus,” Lévi-Strauss finally concludes. “Rather, it is history that serves as the point of departure in any quest for intelligibility.” We have gone on at length to summarize Lévi-Strauss’s position because it illuminates the seeming contradictions that result from thinking about places as layered with multiple meanings. History in the end is not so much a totality of events and experiences, but rather a method of interpretation. It is a selection of historical facts that turn on

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conceptions of time. These conceptions, as classes of dates, cannot be easily dovetailed to tell one story in one way: they will remain in some measure distinct realms of understanding. In other words, it is not a contradiction for a Hopi cultural advisor to recognize that Reeve Ruin was occupied between AD 1200–1325 and to say that its occupation relates to the epoch of Palatkwapi’s demise. Archaeologists (drawing heavily as they do on the absolute aspect of time and space) seek most often to “explain more and teach less” while Native peoples (drawing heavily as they do on the representational aspect of time and space) seek to “explain less and teach more.” These perspectives can exist in parallel and they can inform one another, but they do not and cannot be fit into one totalized and absolute history. Places, then, are always multivocal and multivalent. However, even as different interpretations remain in part incommensurate, they are not incommunicable. Synthesis is not necessary for dialogue or for cross-cultural understanding. Indeed, in the mode of the dialectic, it is precisely the friction between opposites from which meanings are constructed and truths emerge. “History and dialectic” is the meaning of the past derived from the tension in these different ways of seeing the past. As Lévi-Strauss writes, history is a method of understanding that is a beginning point, not an end point. This conceptualization of history can lead directly to anthropology. When we recognize that history is a mechanism of organization, it falls into the domain of culture and society because communities of social actors employ historical concepts to shape and give meaning to their lived experiences (Lévi-Strauss 1978:32–37). Consequently, a historically informed anthropology promotes understanding how various frames of time and space are constructed, sustained, diffused, contested, and negotiated.

CONCLUSIONS The present-day members of the Hopi, Zuni, Tohono O’odham, San Carlos Apache, and White Mountain Apache Indian tribes all have cultural and historical connections to the San Pedro Valley. Evoked in oral traditions and rituals, and revisited in intermittent journeys, these contemporary Indians have not altogether forgotten their ancestors who once lived in the San Pedro Valley. Even though the San Pedro Valley comprises a single terrain, it contains multiple histories delineated by archaeological science and the descendants of the people who formerly resided there. Through fieldwork, interviews, and museum research we have endeavored to explore historical links and learn how tribal cultural knowledge relates to the archaeological and documentary record. A model of the archaeological landscape as a cultural landscape

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enabled us to delineate how these different groups understand the past using diverse interpretations of time and space. Our cultural landscape matrix provides an intellectual framework that can broadly be used to understand varying concepts of history. Thus, in our work, we did not attempt to situate each and every statement neatly in a specific quadrant of the matrix. Rather, the matrix highlights how statements about the archaeological landscape have differing references to time and space. These references are quintessential historical statements, a method of interpretation. The cultural landscapes associated with Native histories do not have a single interpretation but multiple and multilayered readings which may, but not necessarily, inform one another. A scholarly conclusion that Reeve Ruin (or any other single place) is Palatkwapi would critically misconstrue how Palatkwapi is talked about in Hopi society (cf. Byrkit 1988). There is no uniform way of imagining or discussing the past, and to operate as if there were can be problematical. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999:50–56) observes, Euro-American projections of time and space onto the territory of Native peoples is not innocuous because for centuries this endeavor has worked to shape the world in an image of Western civilization. Recognizing and giving credence to alternative perspectives of time and place allows for more effective dialogue between archaeologists and Native peoples and, at the same time, challenges the historical arrangements of power predicated on Western notions of absolute time and space. This approach is not limited to North America, but could be embraced by researchers in any locale in which descendant communities have a stake in historical interpretations. The anthropological challenge for archaeology is to simultaneously embrace the scientific values and beliefs that underlie our discipline and take into account Native epistemologies derived from different philosophical foundations. When we accomplish this, we attain a multivocal, multivalent study of the past meaningful to both archaeologists and Indigenous peoples.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Funding for this research was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Salus Mundi Foundation, and Center for Desert Archaeology. We gratefully acknowledge the collaborative efforts of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Hopi Cultural Resource Advisory Task Team, San Carlos Apache Elders’ Council, Tohono O’odham Office of Cultural Affairs, Tohono O’odham Cultural Preservation Committee and their advisors, White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program, Zuni Cultural Resource Advisory Team, and Zuni Heritage and Historic Preservation Office.

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REFERENCES Abu el-Haj, Nadia. 1998. Translating Truths: Nationalism, the Practice of Archaeology, and the Remaking of Past and Present in Contemporary Jerusalem. American Ethnologist 25(2):166–188. Anschuetz, Kurt F. 2002. The Transformation of Edge Into Center: Anglo Cultural Landscapes and the Petroglyph National Monument. In “That Place People Talk About”: The Petroglyph National Monument Ethnographic Landscape Report. Kurt F. Anschuetz, ed. Pp. 8.1–8.11. Manuscript on file, National Park Service, Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque, NM. Anyon, Roger, T. J. Ferguson, Loretta Jackson, Lillie Lane, and Philip Vicenti. 1997. Native American Oral Tradition and Archaeology: Issues of Structure, Relevance, and Respect. In Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground. Roger Anyon, Nina Swidler, Kurt E. Dongoske, and Alan S. Downer, eds. Pp. 77–87. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Arnold, Bettina. 1999. The Contested Past. Anthropology Today 15(4):1–4. Ashmore, Wendy, and A. Bernard Knapp, eds. 1999. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bender, Barbara. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg. Bender, Barbara, Sue Hamilton, and Christopher Tilley. 2007. Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Bernardini, Wesley. 2005. Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Breglia, Lisa C. 2006. Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bunzel, Ruth L. 1932. Zuni Origin Myths. In Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology for the Years 1929–1930. Pp. 545–609. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Byrkit, James W. 1988. The Palatkwapi Trail. Plateau 59(4):1–32. Castañeda, Quetzil. 1996. In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itzá. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cheung, Sidney C. H. 2003. Remembering through Space: The Politics of Heritage in Hong Kong. International Journal of Heritage Studies 9(1):7–26. Clark, Jeffery J. 2003. A Brief History of Lower San Pedro Archaeology. Archaeology Southwest 17(3):2–3. Clark, Jeffery J., and Patrick D. Lyons. 2003. Mounds and Migrants in the Classic Period. Archaeology Southwest 17(3):7–10. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, and T. J. Ferguson. 2004. Virtue Ethics and the Practice of History: Native Americans and Archaeologists along the San Pedro Valley of Arizona. Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1):5–27. Cushing, Frank Hamilton. 1896. Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths. In Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for the Years 1891–1892. Pp. 321–447. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Di Peso, Charles C. 1958a. The Reeve Ruin of Southeastern Arizona: A Study of a Prehistoric Western Pueblo Migration into the Middle San Pedro Valley. The Amerind Foundation, 8. Dragoon, AZ: Amerind Foundation, Inc. ———. 1958b. Western Pueblo Intrusion into the San Pedro Valley. Kiva 23(4):12–16. Dongoske, Kurt E., Michael Yeatts, Roger Anyon, and T. J. Ferguson. 1997. Archaeological Cultures and Cultural Affiliation: Hopi and Zuni Perspectives in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 62(4):600–608. Dumont, Clayton W., Jr. 2003. The Politics of Scientific Objections to Repatriation. Wicazo Sa Review 18(1):109–128.

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Echo-Hawk, Roger. 2000. Ancient History in the New World: Integrating Oral Traditions and the Archaeological Record in Deep Time. American Antiquity 65(2):267–290. Ferguson, T. J., and Roger Anyon. 2001. Hopi and Zuni Cultural Landscapes: Implications of Social Identity and Cultural Affiliation Research for Cultural Resources Management. In Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities. Laurie Weinstein, ed. Pp. 99–122. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Ferguson, T. J., and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh. 2006. History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ferguson, T. J., Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, and Roger Anyon. 2004. One Valley, Many Histories: Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni and Western Apache History in the San Pedro Valley. Archaeology Southwest 18(1):1–15. Ferguson, T. J., Kurt E. Dongoske, Mike Yeatts, and Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma. 2000. Hopi Oral History and Archaeology. In Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Kurt E. Dongoske, Mark Aldenderfer, and Karen Doehner, eds. Pp. 45–60. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Ferguson, T. J., and Richard E. Hart. 1985. A Zuni Atlas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Ferguson, T. J., and Micah Lomaomvaya. 1999. Hoopoq’yaqam Niqw Wukoshkyavi (Those Who Went to the Northeast and Tonto Basin): Hopi-Salado Cultural Affiliation Study. Manuscript on file, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Kykotsmovi, AZ. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, Pualani Kanaka Ole Kanehele, and Jennifer Hope Antes. 2003. Repatriation of Indigenous Hawaiian Cultural Property by the City of Providence: A Case Study in Politics and Applied Law. In Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, ed. Pp. 141–158. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Fontein, Joost. 2006. The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Gerald, Rex E. 1958. A Pueblo Kiva in Southeastern Arizona. Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Norman, OK. ———. 1975. Drought Correlated Changes in Two Prehistoric Communities in Southeastern Arizona. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Gregonis, Linda M. 1996. Alice Carpenter’s Corridor Through Time. Journal of the Southwest 38(3):279–298. Harley, J. Brian. 1988. Maps, Knowledge and Power. In The Iconography of Landscape. Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds. Pp. 277–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica 26(2):1–20. Haury, Emil W. 1956. The Lehner Mammoth Site. Kiva 21(3&4):23–24. Haury, Emil W., E. B. Sayles, and William W. Wasley. 1959. The Lehner Mammoth Site, Southeastern Arizona. American Antiquity 25(1):2–30. Ikawa-Smith, Fumiko. 1999. Construction of National Identity and Origins in East Asia: A Comparative Perspective. Antiquity 73(281):626–629. Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. 1980. The Necessity for Ruins. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Küchler, Susanne. 1993. Landscape as Memory: The Mapping of Process and Its Representation in a Melanesian Society. In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Barbara Bender, ed. Pp. 85–106. Oxford: Berg. Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh J. 2002. Hopit Navotiat, Hopi Knowledge of History: Hopi Presence on Black Mesa. In Prehistoric Culture Change on the Colorado Plateau: Ten Thousand Years on Black Mesa. Shirley Powell and F. E. Smiley, eds. Pp. 161–163. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh J., and T. J. Ferguson. 2004. Ang Kuktota: Hopi Ancestral Sites and Cultural Landscapes. Expedition 46(2):24–29.

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1978. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge. Lowenthal, David. 1989. The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions. The Journal of American History 75(4):1263–1280. Lyons, Patrick D. 2003. Ancestral Hopi Migrations. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, 68. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mason, Ronald J. 2000. Archaeology and Native North American Oral Tradition. American Antiquity 65(2):239–266. ———. 2006. Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Masse, W. Bruce. 1981. A Reappraisal of the Protohistoric Sobaipuri Indians of Southeastern Arizona. In The Protohistoric Period in the North American Southwest, A.D. 1450– 1700. David R. Wilcox and W. Bruce Masse, eds. Pp. 28–56. Anthropological Research Papers, 24. Tempe: Arizona State University. Morehouse, Barbara J. 1996. A Place Called Grand Canyon: Contested Geographies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Morphy, Howard. 1993. Colonialism, History, and the Construction of Place: The Politics of Landscape in Northern Australia. In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Barbara Bender, ed. Pp. 205–243. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1995. Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, eds. Pp. 185–209. Oxford: Claredon Press. Nelson, Sarah M. 1995. The Politics of Ethnicity in Prehistoric Korea. In Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology. Phillip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds. Pp. 218–231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paynter, Robert. 2002. Time in the Valley. Current Anthropology 43(S4):S85–S101. Piper, Karen. 2002. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Preucel, Robert W., and Lynn Meskell. 2004. Knowledges. In A Companion to Social Archaeology. Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel, eds. Pp. 3–22. Oxford: Blackwell. Sauer, Carl Ortwin. 1963. Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, Douglas D. 2003. Oral Tradition and Archaeology: Conflict and Concordance Examples from Two Indian War Sites. Historical Archaeology 37(3):55–65. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Stoffle, Richard W., David B. Halmo, and Diane E. Austin. 1997. Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Cultural Properties: A Southern Paiute View of the Grand Canyon and Colorado River. American Indian Quarterly 21(2):1–22. Thomas, David Hurst. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Voth, H. R. 1905. The Traditions of the Hopi. Field Columbian Museum Publication 96, Anthropological Series, vol. 8. Chicago: Field Columbian Museum. Watkins, Joe. 2003. Beyond the Margin: American Indians, First Nations, and Archaeology in North America. American Antiquity 68(2):273–285. Whiteley, Peter. 2002. Archaeology and Oral Tradition: The Scientific Importance of Dialogue. American Antiquity 67(3):405–415. Zedeño, María Nieves. 2000. On What People Make of Places: A Behavioral Cartography. In Social Theory in Archaeology. Michael B. Schiffer, ed. Pp. 97–111. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

CHAPTER 4

Placemaking on the Northern Rio Grande A View from Kuaua Pueblo Robert W. Preucel and Frank G. Matero

Digging to make a “showplace”—that was Hewett. Marjorie Lambert, March 12, 1985

In his book The Myth of Santa Fe, Chris Wilson offers a provocative analysis of the history of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His central thesis is that Santa Fe is an invented community, the product of the interaction of ethnic identity formation and tourist image making (Wilson 1997:7). He documents how Santa Fe’s mythic origins are intimately associated with New Mexico’s pursuit of statehood from 1848 to 1912. During this period, two contradictory images emerged. The first image was of Santa Fe as a thriving, economically prosperous American city located at the end of the Santa Fe Trail. The second was of an ancient and colorful village with distinctive Indian and Spanish roots. After achieving statehood in 1912, the latter image was co-opted in support of the former. As Wilson (1997:95) puts it, “The romantic image of the city became the central vehicle for economic resurgence and the blueprint for its physical transformation.” It is in this context that Edgar Lee Hewett, the Director of both the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico, established the New Mexican historic preservation movement. Inspired by the successes of the California Mission Revival pioneered by Charles Lummis in the 1880s, Hewett proposed a similar program to restore New Mexican historic buildings and missions and thereby promote tourism. Hewett’s first project was the restoration of the Palace of the Governors, supervised by Jesse Nusbaum, from 1909 to 1913. This restoration required the removal of the nineteenth-century “Territorial” renovations in favor of a new local style, quickly named the “Santa Fe style” to distinguish it from its California counterpart. Hewett’s interest in historic preservation also extended to prehistoric sites. His excavation and stabilization of Balcony House in 1910, with Nusbaum as supervisor, 81

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Taos

Santa Fe

Kuaua Bernalillo

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Pauray Sandia Albuquerque Isleta

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NEW MEXICO

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Figure 4.1 Location of Kuaua Pueblo (Coronado State Monument), New Mexico.

brought the first systematic work of historic preservation to Mesa Verde, and his restoration of the ceremonial kiva in Frijoles Canyon (Bandelier National Monument) expanded that vision to include full restoration using ethnographic and archaeological analogy. In our chapter, we examine some of the ways in which Hewett conjoined archaeology and historic preservation to craft a distinctive New Mexican identity. In particular, we examine the case of Kuaua Pueblo, also known as Coronado State Monument, an ancestral Tiwa Indian village located just north of the town of Bernalillo, New Mexico (Figures 4.1, 4.2). We suggest that Kuaua’s “placeness” is largely defined by the successive attempts by Hewett and others to resolve the multiple

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Figure 4.2 Aerial view of Coronado State Monument showing the reconstructed village and the museum. (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors, MNM/DCA, Photo Archives, Neg. 36176.)

tensions and contradictions between its Pueblo Indian heritage, the historical event of the Coronado entrada, and its status as a state monument. By identifying Hewett’s strategies to present Kuaua to the general public, we hope to provide some specific insights into how the invented traditions of New Mexico were created.

PLACEMAKING If we are to identify and understand the nature and implications of past and present human relationships with physical locales, we must do so through the study of place. Places are contexts for human experience, constructed in movement and memory, encounter and association (Tilley 1994:15). This notion of the landscape as memory and experience has enjoyed increased attention as demonstrated through the rise in popularity of historic preservation and public history (Schama 1996). Preservation of individual monuments as icons of cultural and historical identity began early in the late eighteenth century with the formation of modern European nations based on the consolidation and segregation of different ethnic groups. As early as 1903, these preservation interests

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reached such extremes that Alois Riegl described the trend as a “modern cult” in which historical monuments served as the primary vehicles for both the transmission and reception of changing cultural ideas and values over time (Riegl 1996). Monuments and places, like rituals, are ways in which societies remember, where the function of memory and commemoration is the joining of past with present (Bradley 1993:3). While the act of remembering is acutely human, what associations specific memorials and places have at any given time will change. Placemaking can be defined as the social practices of constructing place and is intimately associated with the public inscription of collective memories. It is as characteristic of Indigenous cultures as it is of modern Western capitalist societies. Because the making of place is an inherently political process, certain places may be incorporated into sanctioned views of the social imaginary. Places of resistance, such as battlefields, may be sanitized and depoliticized as they are incorporated into specific narratives emphasizing the continuity of past and present. Alternatively, they may be recuperated and used to deny continuity as a means of challenging the dominant social order. What is and is not considered to be a place is thus part of an ongoing dialogue and the site of contestation and negotiation. The refashioning of space into place is a technology of reordering reality, and its success depends upon the degree to which this refashioning is concealed in the details of material culture and site plan (Boyer 1994). Not all places are of the same representational order. Some places possess certain qualities or features that distinguish them hierarchically from all other places by virtue of the fact that they comment on, or refer to, other places within the cultural landscape. These qualities allow such places to be considered metaplaces, or heterotopias, since they help shape the interpretations of other culturally significant places. The term heterotopia was introduced by Michel Foucault in a 1967 lecture entitled “Of Other Spaces” that was published posthumously (Foucault 1986). Heterotopias refer to places common to every society where “all other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986:24). Foucault identified six principles of heterotopias. First, while they are found in all cultures, there is no universal model. It is possible, however, to distinguish “crisis heterotopias” (privileged or sacred places reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis in relation to the society in which they live, such as adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.) from “heterotopias of deviation” (places such as rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons that house individuals whose behavior is considered deviant). Second, heterotopias can change in function and meaning over time according to the synchrony of the

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culture in which they are found. Third, heterotopias typically juxtapose several spaces that are themselves incompatible in a single place. Foucault provides such examples as the theater, the cinema, and Oriental gardens. Fourth, heterotopias are places of all time that are, simultaneously, outside of time. Here Foucault identifies museums, which represent the desire to contain in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, and all tastes. Fifth, heterotopias typically regulate public access in ways that seem natural, but actually “hide curious exclusions” (Foucault 1986:26). Sixth, heterotopias function in relation to all spaces that exist outside of them. By virtue of the fact that they mark a culturally definable space unlike any other space, they also act as microcosms reflecting larger cultural patterns or social orders. The geographer Edward Soja (1996) has offered what is perhaps the most systematic engagement with Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. He notes that while Foucault’s ideas are frustratingly incomplete, they provide valuable glimpses into what Soja calls “Thirdspace,” the geohistories of otherness. He suggests that most critical evaluations of Foucault’s work have missed a fundamental point, namely that his alternative envisioning of spatiality directly challenges all conventional modes of spatial thinking (Soja 1996:163). Heterotopias are not simply other spaces to be added to previously existing spaces in our analyses, but rather foster radically different ways of conceptualizing space. For Foucault, we need to engage with heterotopologies and heterochronologies because they allow us to highlight the spatio-temporal dimensions of power-knowledge relations (Soja 1996:170). In what follows, we discuss the heterotopic features of Coronado State Monument by focusing on naming, representation, authenticity, and performance.

NAMING Naming is not a neutral practice. To give a place a name is to situate it within a knowable universe and to assert a form of possession. The knowable universe is itself historically constituted, a palimpsest of the knowledge of all previous generations. It is also the subject of potential contestation and negotiation since who has the right to name a place, to single it out from all other places in the landscape, reveals the historically specific dynamics of power relations operative in a particular society. Naming is thus the preeminent act of placemaking and a technology of domesticating peoples and lands by making familiar what might otherwise be foreign and threatening. The politics of naming are particularly evident in the colonial context of land acquisition when the names of the colonizers are used to appropriate the place-names and, by extension, the lands of the colonized.

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The first Spaniard to engage in placemaking in the Southwest was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who named the villages of the Zuni district the “Seven Cities of Gold.” Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked off the coast of Florida in 1528 and made his way overland back to Mexico in 1536 (Weber 1992). On his return, he related tales of the “Seven Cities of Gold” that possessed limitless riches. In 1539, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza authorized Fray Marcos de Niza to lead an expedition to discover the truth of these claims. De Niza returned with his own stories of the wealthy cities of Cibola and Quivira. In 1540, Mendoza authorized Francisco Vasquez de Coronado to lead an entrada to locate these riches. Coronado followed de Niza’s route and attacked the Zuni village of Hawikuh, but found no evidence of wealth. He then moved on to the upper Rio Grande where he established a winter base camp. In the process of pacifying the area, he and his men killed more than 200 Indian men, women, and children. In 1541, he led a party north and east, across western Texas and Oklahoma, arriving at the Arkansas River. There, he found only a Wichita Indian village, clearly not the opulent city of Quivira. The first permanent acts of Spanish placemaking occurred after 1609 when New Mexico was established as a mission field (Espinosa 1988:14). By 1616, there were nine mission centers and Christianized pueblos (Espinosa 1988:18); at the time of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, this had expanded to 39 missions (Escalante in Twitchell 1914:269). Each Pueblo Indian village was given the name of the patron saint of its mission. For example, the village of Ohkay Oweenge became San Juan Pueblo, Kewa became Santo Domingo Pueblo, and Tamaya became Santa Ana Pueblo.1 The renaming of Pueblo Indian villages was a means of situating them within a global Catholic ecclesiastical landscape stretching from Santa Fe to Mexico City and from Sevilla to Rome. The earliest historically documented Indigenous name for Coronado State Monument dates to Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s entrada in 1540. When Coronado entered the south-central Rio Grande Valley, he learned that the province was called Tiguex and that the largest village had the same name. Several scholars have proposed that Coronado’s Tiguex Pueblo was in fact Coronado State Monument (Schroeder 1979). In 1582, Antonio de Espejo visited the same village and learned that its Native name was Guagua (Hammond and Rey 1966[1940]:203 n. 116). This name is linguistically identical to the modern Tiwa name, Kuaua. In the late nineteenth century, Adolph Bandelier gathered several names for Coronado State Monument in his ethnographic research. He visited the site on June 5, 1882, with Juan Trujillo of Sandia Pueblo (Lange and Riley 1966:310). Bandelier described it as a predominantly adobe pueblo, quadrilateral in form and open to the east, and noted

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Figure 4.3 Adolph Bandelier’s sketch map of Kuaua Pueblo in 1882 (from Lange and Riley 1966:312). (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library.)

that although there were no standing walls, the adobe foundations were easy to trace (Figure 4.3). Trujillo informed him that the Tiwa name of the village was To-re-una (Lange and Riley 1966:310–311). Bandelier was apparently skeptical and wrote that “it sounds rather too much like the Spanish Torrejón [tower]” (Lange and Riley 1966:311). In his Final Report, he states that Sandia Pueblo informants gave the name Kuaua for the ruin (Bandelier 1892:225). This name is usually translated as “the evergreen pueblo” (Elliott 1995; Sinclair 1951). Presumably, it refers to the fir trees which are venerated by Pueblo peoples and whose boughs are used in their ceremonies. The most recent act of placemaking took place on March 7, 1935. On this date, Frank Vesely, the New Mexico state and land commissioner, officially designated Kuaua Pueblo and neighboring Puaray Pueblo as Coronado State Monument by public proclamation. Vesely justified the founding of this new state monument on historical grounds, noting that Puaray and Kuaua were the largest villages on the Rio Grande at the time of Coronado’s entrada and that Kuaua was probably the site of Coronado’s winter headquarters between 1540 and 1542 (Anonymous 1935:111). This designation was the first official act of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial celebration scheduled for 1940 and was part of Governor Clyde Tingley’s master plan to boost New Mexico’s tourist economy (Montgomery 2002:219).

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REPRESENTATION Any investigation of place must also engage with the issue of historical representation. Since the Enlightenment, the dominant view has been that statements about the past must correspond to the events to which they refer and the narrative as a whole must correspond to the general sequence of events (White 1987:40). It is the content alone that has truth value. As poststructuralists have shown, this correspondence theory of representation is incomplete since it fails to acknowledge that there is no single narrative sufficient to capture the past. Rather, there are always multiple narratives that come from different political interests and viewpoints (see Chapter 3). Moreover, the specific forms of these narratives also convey important meaning. It is the variety of the relevant narratives both in content and form that creates place. To represent a place thus requires a consideration of all prior cultural representations of that place. Hewett saw the archaeological sites of Kuaua and Puaray as an opportunity to represent the rich Spanish and Indian history of New Mexico to the nation. New Mexico, in fact, possessed an older history than Arizona or California, but lagged behind them as a tourist destination. He considered Coronado’s entrada of 1540 and Juan de Oñate’s colonizing expedition of 1598 to be among the most vivid moments in New Mexico history. Coronado’s army established a winter camp at an Indian pueblo, which some scholars had speculated might be Kuaua. Oñate reported visiting Puaray where he saw wall paintings showing the martyrdom of the three priests—Fray Augustín Ruiz, Fray Juan de Santa María, and Fray Francisco Lopez—who had been left behind during the RodríguezChamuscado expedition (Espinosa 1935:142). Both of these events were of considerable public interest and could be potentially linked to specific sites through archaeological investigation. Hewett proposed to excavate Kuaua in order to establish the location of Coronado’s encampment and to excavate Puaray to look for the famous wall murals. He intended to accomplish this work in time for the celebration of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial in 1940. In June 1934, he began a five-year excavation project sponsored by the University of New Mexico, the Museum of New Mexico, and the School of American Research, and funded by federal monies from Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Works Progress Administration, and Nation Youth Administration relief programs. A year later, Gordon Vivian, the site supervisor, made the dramatic discovery of painted murals in Kiva 3. There was an immediate hope that they might represent the martyrdom of the priests. This turned out not to be the case, but the murals were immediately recognized as an invaluable resource for the presentation of

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an Indian aesthetic and worldview. Vivian’s team eventually excavated 1,200 rooms along with three above-ground ceremonial rooms and six kivas. Hewett also embarked upon an ambitious museum construction project. This project was originally conceived on a grand scale. Extant drawings include plans for a large museum building to be built adjacent to a massive bridge spanning the Rio Grande. A colossal statue of Coronado, approximately 40 ft. tall and facing east, was to surmount its top. Visitors would park their cars in front of the museum and then climb a formal staircase to an observation deck at the base of the statue from where they could look out upon the pueblo. In 1939, because of financial difficulties, Hewett settled on a scaledback version of the museum. He contracted John Gaw Meem, the famous New Mexico architect and early preservationist, to undertake the revised design. The building was a small U-shaped structure of earthen construction and oriented east to face the Sandia Mountains. For reasons that are not documented, it was placed within the archaeological site, immediately adjacent to the south plaza. A smaller statue of Coronado was planned for the south plaza of the pueblo and Eugenie Frederica Shonnard, a prominent New Mexico artist, was selected to be the sculptor. This statue, however, was never executed, presumably because of financial difficulties. There were three main exhibits, each located in its own area of the museum building (Figure 4.4). The south wing contained the “Hall of Tiguex Life,” which presented a picture of Pueblo Indian culture flourishing in the Rio Grande Valley at the time of the Spanish entrada. It included exhibits of artifacts of daily life as well as ceremonial objects used in ritual activities. As visual illustrations, Hewett commissioned a series of paintings by leading Native American artists, including José Rey Toledo of Jemez Pueblo. The central gallery was called “Coronado Hall” and was devoted to objects of Spanish manufacture and use pertaining to the Coronado period. Hewett commissioned paintings by Gerald Cassidy to depict different aspects of the entrada. The north wing was called the “Archaeology Hall” and was devoted to the artifacts from the excavations of Kuaua and Puaray. The museum and its exhibits thus provided the visitor with a snapshot in time. Hewett (1940:178) wrote, “We are endeavoring to restore, at Coronado State Monument, a picture of native life in the Rio Grande Valley as it existed in Coronado’s time and to interpret in the light of what we are learning from the study of the sciences of man.” Coronado State Monument thus became a “type-site”—one site standing for all other Rio Grande villages of the same time period—an idea pioneered by Jesse Walter Fewkes many years earlier at Mesa Verde.

Figure 4.4 Design for the museum at Coronado State Monument by John Gaw Meem with locations of exhibits. (Courtesy of the John Gaw Meem Drawings Collection, John Gaw Meem Archives, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico.)

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Hewett also used the museum to highlight the distinctiveness of New Mexico’s cultural heritage. He wrote that “the Coronado museum at Kuaua, therefore, illustrates one of the most significant episodes in the history of New Mexico, namely, the coming together, at or near this spot, of the three elements destined to shape the future of the state—the Indian, the Conquistador, and the Church” (Hewett 1940:180). Hewett was long committed to representing this unique and still visible confluence of cultural traditions in New Mexico as evidenced by his earlier invention of the Santa Fe Fiesta, which physically reenacted the reconquest of New Mexico by the Spanish crown after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

AUTHENTICITY Authenticity is perhaps the most significant, but elusive and debated, quality to be associated with cultural works and their interpretation. In common parlance, the word authentic means having an undisputed origin, worthy of trust, reliance, or belief. It comes from the Greek authentes, meaning author, and in its earliest uses its connotations were original, genuine, or firsthand as opposed to copied, counterfeit, or imaginary. The concept of authenticity is a cultural construct of the modern Western world, which, from Rousseau to Trilling, has ultimately had to do with the definition of our true self, our individual existence. Authentic objects, buildings, and sites are those original to their creators or possessors; they are unique to their time and place. As cultural property, they therefore stand for the people who made and used them. And in their collection, display, and interpretation, we appropriate their authenticity into our personal experience. Hewett’s grand vision was to transform Kuaua into an outdoor exhibit by means of an authentic restoration. Although generally rare as a practice at sites in the American Southwest, other contemporaneous examples of full reconstruction can be found at Tuzigoot, Kinishba, and the Great Kiva at Aztec. This combination of excavated site, restored buildings, and a site museum began to appear during the 1930s as part of a national trend toward interpreting historic sites for the American public. Hewett’s ambitious attempt stands out because of its application to a large-scale, earthen site. It can only be compared to Fewkes’s earlier and more modest efforts to excavate and interpret Casa Grande to the public in 1906–1907. Hewett’s main motivation was to restore the village so that the public would have an intimate experience of Pueblo life at the time of Spanish contact. He instructed his restoration team to follow the excavation team and build up stabilized adobe brick walls on the remains of the original puddle adobe walls. The project was pressed for time and it seems that, in some cases, excavation took a back seat to restoration. In 1938, Hewett

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reevaluated the project and determined that it was going much slower than planned and was running over budget. Accordingly, he decided not to restore Kuaua to its full architectural form, but rather to build up wall foundations to give the site the “look and feel” of a ruin. He justified this strategy on the grounds of authenticity, writing, “The adobe walls as they were disclosed by the excavations, have been rebuilt from a few inches to several feet in height, so that, without any misleading or doubtful restoration, the original plan may be understood” (Hewett 1940:178). In fact, Hewett’s reconstruction did considerably more than mark out the original pueblo plan. It created a false aesthetic of age. Hewett deliberately gave the reconstructed wall foundations a weathered appearance as though they themselves had undergone the natural processes of decay. He did this by raising up the corners of the walls in a stepped fashion and by using crude plasterwork on their surfaces. Wesley Hurt (1938), the site supervisor, wrote, “We tried to give this (the north) wall more of a ruined appearance by plastering the wall in a rougher manner than before and by raising the corners considerably higher than the other portions” and “we are having the (east) walls built lower than the other walls at Dr. Hewett’s suggestion.” This reconstruction also required reworking some of the already completed walls. Dorothy Luhrs (1938), a project archaeologist, wrote that “the entire south wall has been altered during the past week to give the effects of extreme weathering. The southwest corner has been raised 10 feet; the lowest height from the ground is approximately three feet. The outline of the wall is varied by a series of square block, V-cuts, and broken line wall edges.” When this was not enough, Hewett had water hosed onto the walls to instantly give them a weathered appearance. The desirability for discerning original fabric and the preference for an aged aesthetic was clearly on Hewett’s mind during these years as suggested in his published guidelines for ruins preservation that appeared with his monograph on Chaco Canyon. Hewett, however, was committed to restoring fully one major architectural feature: Kiva 3 with the famous kiva murals. The kiva was 17 ft. square with a floor 10 ft. below the ground surface (Sinclair 1951:213). The north, west, and south walls were relatively well preserved while the east wall was largely destroyed. Due to moisture conditions, the mural was immediately treated with shellac and celluloid as a stabilizer (Dutton 1963). Wesley Bliss supervised the removal project. The murals were first protected with paper facings upon which strips of plaster of paris and burlap were affixed and reinforced by lath. The interior jacket was made in removable sections that interlocked by means of special joints that could be sawn in two without injuring the murals. The entire unit was strengthened and made rigid by a timber framework. These were then removed using a block and tackle and taken to the University of New Mexico for documentation and analysis.

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The kiva walls were found to contain 85 thin layers of plaster, of which 17 were decorated with paint. The layers were all removed one by one and then mounted on wallboard. There were 364 individual figures representing aspects of Pueblo religion including “masked katcinas, flowing springs, cloud symbols and rain, the river, seed and corn, life on earth and afterlife, [and] the animals prized by the hunters” (Sinclair 1951:214). Hewett (1940:179) termed them the “finest examples of aboriginal fresco [sic] decorations that have been found in America” and published them several times over the course of the project in the pages of El Palacio. Albert Ely of the University of New Mexico supervised the restoration of the painted kiva. The walls were rebuilt in concrete to above ground level and then roofed with vigas. An entrance hatchway was provided along with a ladder. The firepit, ventilator, and deflector complex were all restored in their original locations as identified by the archaeologists. A niche was built in the west wall where a slat altar may have been placed. Indian artists then painted one full-scale set of color reproductions on its walls (Figure 4.5). According to Sinclair (1951:214), “The whole restoration shows the kiva as it was when in use.”

Figure 4.5 Restoration of Kiva 3 with a copy of one of the original mural sequences. (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors, MNM/DCA, Photo Archives, Neg. 57807.)

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Not everyone found the project to be successful, and elements of a counterdiscourse were present almost from the outset. For example, Erik Reed (1940:x), a leading archaeologist, regarded the museum building to be “splendid,” but the exhibits to be “mediocre.” He singled out for praise the restoration of the painted kiva where the roof, altar, and murals had been carefully restored. However, he criticized the reconstruction work of the pueblo village, saying that the “rebuilding of walls is generally regrettable, and the placing of the museum and the custodian’s residence in the midst of the ruins is unfortunate” (Reed 1940:12). In fact, Reed considered the site so problematic that he advised the Park Service against acquiring it on the grounds of its lack of authenticity. He wrote, “The extensive rebuilding and development of Kuaua makes it more interesting than [Puaray] to the casual visitor, but because of the nature and quality of the rebuilding and development, less so to the National Park Service. True and proper rehabilitation of Kuaua would entail removal of a vast quantity of adobe brick walls, even if compete restoration of a portion of the site were attempted” (Reed 1940:12). Moreover, because so little of the site remained unexcavated, he was skeptical that it held any additional research potential. He offered the damming statement, “Very little, in short, can be done about Kuaua” (Reed 1940:12).

PERFORMANCE One of the ways in which places and events become instantiated in cultural consciousness is when they are publicly performed in historical dramas and pageants. Such performances have more than simply entertainment value, in that they have the potential to trigger emotional responses among participants and audiences. They are the contexts par excellence where existing power relations are alternatively established, celebrated, mocked, and subverted. Theater and spectacle are thus metadiscursive commentaries about the contemporary social order, which selectively highlight certain aspects of the past that are deemed foundational or original. The Coronado Cuarto Centennial celebration incorporated public performances as well as museum exhibits. The celebration officially began on May 29, 1940, with the dedication of the still unfinished Coronado Monument Museum (Figure 4.6). Numerous political dignitaries were in attendance, including the ambassador of Spain and governmental officials from Mexico. A series of laudatory speeches were given. Only a handful of Pueblo people were present, and several respectfully expressed their disapproval of the celebration. Governor Agapito Abeyta of Isleta

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Figure 4.6 Opening of the Coronado State Monument in 1940. (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors, MNM/DCA, Photo Archives, Neg. 57813.)

Pueblo, for example, criticized the honoring of Coronado who was so brutal in his treatment of Indian peoples (Lambert 1985). The evening of the dedication marked the premier of the Coronado pageant, performed at the University of New Mexico stadium. This pageant, written by Thomas Wood Stevens (1946), was an elaborate reenactment of the Coronado entrada by a cast of more than 20,000 players on a 300 ft. portable stage (Montgomery 2002:220). There were 18 acts, each of which depicted a different location on Coronado’s journey. Stevens had previous experience in organizing historical outdoor spectacles at Fort Niagara, New York, and Yorktown, Virginia. The pageant was scheduled for 50 performances at twelve locations in New Mexico, three in Texas, and two in Arizona. Other events scheduled as part of the celebration included folk festivals, rodeos, frontier days, old trail days, local fiestas, county or local fairs, and pageantry of cavalcades (Sherman 1940:13). Not surprisingly, the Coronado pageant portrayed the Coronado entrada in a heroic light. It ignored the plunder of Tiguex Pueblo and the rape of the Indian women. Instead, it characterized the entrada as “one of the great adventurous exploits of history,” which paved the way for “other conquerors and colonizers; brave men and women who spread

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the Spanish folk, their faith and their language so widely and rooted them so deeply that they modify the life of the entire Southwest even today” (Ferguson 1940:67–68). Despite his sympathy for Indian peoples, Hewett also advocated the thesis of the inexorable spread of civilization. He wrote, “he [Coronado] opened up to permanent European civilization, both Hispanic and Anglo, the land of the Pueblo Indians of the upper Rio Grande Valley, a land theretofore unknown to the outer world, but rich in cultural life reaching back into immemorial time” (Hewett 1940:177). Unfortunately for the organizers, neither the pageant nor the folk festivals drew the expected crowds (Montgomery 2002:221). The Coronado commission attributed this to the turbulent national and international conditions of 1940. However, Montgomery (2002:221) has suggested that a more likely reason was the indifference of the Anglo community, which had little interest in celebrating the Spanish roots of New Mexico. This reaction had an immediate effect on the finances of the Coronado State Monument museum. On June 1, 1940, Fischer was informed that no further funds would be made available.

CONCLUSIONS Edgar Lee Hewett established the New Mexico historic preservation movement with the twin goals of furthering scientific knowledge and establishing New Mexico as a historically and culturally distinctive state. He viewed the archaeological record as a “vast treasury of information” and held that every site “is an object that can contribute something to the advancement of knowledge” (Hewett 1904a:722, 1904b:4). Central to his strategy for creating a distinctive New Mexican identity was the construction of a compelling narrative that showcased “the Indian, the Conquistador, and the Church” as “the three elements destined to shape the future of the state” (Hewett 1940:180). Accordingly, he restored the Palace of the Governors and excavated, repaired, and stabilized Spanish Missions and Pueblo Indian villages (Hewett and Fischer 1944; Hewett and Mauzy 1947). Kuaua Pueblo is a particularly informative case study. Hewett initially planned to restore the village in its entirety to provide an “authentic” visitor experience for the Coronado Cuarto Celebration in 1940. However, he quickly scaled back his plan in the face of cost overruns and chose to rebuild the village as a ruin. In making this decision, he exploited the popular Romanticist aesthetic associated with ruins. Because his excavations failed to identify evidence for Spanish contact, he decided to treat Kuaua as a type-site for the kind of village that the Spaniards encountered

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during their entradas. But in doing this, Hewett deemphasized Kuaua’s own specific history and its relationships to contemporary descendant communities. The story of Kuaua is thus a powerful reminder of how place is constructed through the selective presentation of history to justify the cultural and political hegemonies of the emerging Anglo culture of New Mexico. Kuaua is thus a heterotopia, a place where New Mexico’s history is simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. It redounds in ironies. For example, Coronado State Monument stands today as Coronado’s principle legacy memorialized in architecture. However, there is no archaeological evidence that he ever set foot in the village.2 The Pueblo village visible today is, in fact, a pseudoruin, an artificial reconstruction lying on top of an actual Pueblo Indian village. The reconstruction is now over 60 years old and experiencing substantial degradation due to the processes of erosion (Figure 4.7). Decisions need to be made whether to stabilize it or to return it as closely as possible to its original preexcavated condition. It thus affords a remarkable opportunity to investigate the meaning of cultural landscapes in all their complexity as both transmitters and receivers of memory and cultural identities. As a place of memory, Kuaua endures, serving to connect the present to various pasts, both “authentic” and contrived. As a place of cultural and historical significance, it continues to be subject to interpretations by various stakeholders, expressed through ongoing interventions.

Figure 4.7

Wall erosion at Kuaua, 1997. (Photograph by Frank Matero.)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Patricia Rubertone for inviting us to present this paper at WAC-5. This chapter is an outgrowth of a collaborative Architecture Studio in 1997 between the University of Pennsylvania and the Museum of New Mexico in which we served as consultants. We are indebted to Nadia Alhasani, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Coordinator of the Studio; Michael Taylor, Deputy Director of the New Mexico State Museums; Angie Manning, Manager of Coronado State Monument; Elmer Leon, Ranger at Coronado State Monument; Bruce Bernstein, formerly Director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture; the late Ed Ladd, Past Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture; Claire Munzenrider, Chief Conservator at the Museum of New Mexico; and Curtis Schaafsma, Emeritus Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of New Mexico. We are especially grateful to Tomas Jaehn, Director, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Palace of the Governors; Daniel Kosharek, Photo Archivist, Palace of the Governors; and Audra Bellmore, Curator of the John Gaw Meem Archives at the Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico for permission to reproduce the photographs, drawings, and plans in our text.

NOTES 1. In 2005, San Juan Pueblo officially changed its name back to Ohkay Oweenge. 2. Vierra (1989) has suggested that Coronado established his camp at Santiago Pueblo.

REFERENCES Anonymous. 1935. The 1940 Coronado Celebration. El Palacio 39:111–112. Bandelier, Adolph F. 1892. Final Report of Investigation among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried on Mainly in the Years from 1880 to 1885, part II. Papers of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Series, IV. Cambridge, MA: Archaeological Institute of America. Boyer, M. Christine. 1994. The City of Collective Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bradley, Richard. 1993. Altering the Earth: The Origins of Monuments in Britain and Continental Europe. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Dutton, Bertha Pauline. 1963. Sun Father’s Way: The Kiva Murals of Kuaua, a Pueblo Ruin, Coronado State Monument, New Mexico. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press. Elliott, Melinda. 1995. Kuaua, the Evergreen Pueblo. Report on file at the Museum of New Mexico, Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe. Espinosa, Gilberto. 1935. The Coronado Fourth Centennial. New Mexico Quarterly 5:149–159. Espinosa, J. Manuel. 1988. The Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1696 and the Franciscan Missions in New Mexico: Letters of the Missionaries and Related Documents. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Ferguson, Eugene. 1940. The Coronado Cuarto Centennial. New Mexico Quarterly 10:67–71.

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Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16:22–27. Hammond, George P., and Agapito Rey. 1966[1940]. Narratives of the Coronado Expedition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hewett, Edgar L. 1904a. Government Supervision of Historic and Prehistoric Ruins. Science 20(517):722–727. ———. 1904b. Memorandum Concerning the Historic and Prehistoric Ruins of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, and their Preservation. General Land Office Circular Relating to Historic and Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest and their Preservation. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, General Land Office. ———. 1940. Coronado Monument and Museum. El Palacio 47:172–181. Hewett, Edgar L., and Reginald G. Fischer. 1944. Mission Monuments of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hewett, Edgar L., and Wayne L. Mauzy. 1947. Landmarks of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hurt, Wesley. 1938. Letter to Dr. Reginald G. Fischer, October 26, 1938. Coronado Progress Reports File, Coronado State Monument Archives, Bernalillo, NM. Lambert, Marjorie. 1985. Interview by Andrew Darling, March 12, 1985. Coronado State Monument Archives, Bernalillo, NM. Lange, Charles H., and Carroll L. Riley, eds. 1966. The Southwestern Journals of Adolph F. Bandelier, 1880–1882. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Luhrs, Dorothy. 1938. Letter to Dr. Reginald G. Fischer, December 3, 1938. Coronado Progress Reports File, Coronado State Monument Archives, Bernalillo, NM. Montgomery, Charles H. 2002. The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Erik K. 1940. Supplementary Report on Coronado State Monument. Manuscript on file, National Park Service, Santa Fe, NM. Riegl, Alois. 1996. The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin. In Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. N. Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandro Melucco Vaccaro, eds. Pp. 69–83. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Schama, Simon. 1996. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books. Schroeder, Albert H. 1979. Pueblos Abandoned in Historic Times. In Handbook of the North American Indian, vol. 9: Southwest. A. Ortiz, ed. Pp. 236–254. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Sherman, E. 1940. New Mexico celebrates. New Mexico Magazine, June 11. Sinclair, John L. 1951. The Story of the Pueblo of Kuaua. Papers of the School of American Research, 45. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Stevens, Thomas Wood. 1946. The Entrada of Coronado: A Spectacular Historic Drama. Albuquerque: The Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg. Twitchell, Ralph E. 1914. The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, vol. 1. Santa Fe: The Torch Press. Vierra, Bradley J. 1989. A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Campsite in the Tiguex Province. Laboratory of Anthropology Notes, 475. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico. Weber, David J. 1992. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press. White, Hayden V. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilson, Chris. 1997. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CHAPTER 5

Multiple Places, Histories, and Memories at a Frontier Icon in Apache Country John R. Welch

This chapter examines the sequence of places and histories created at and embedded in Fort Apache, the famous yet little-studied site at the confluence of the East and North forks of the White River, on White Mountain Apache Tribe lands (Figure 5.1). Encompassing roughly a square mile of canyons, hills, tablelands, and stream terraces at the foot of the White Mountains, the locality has been variously used and remembered as a home and farming area in oral traditions maintained by Hopis and Apaches, as the US Army’s Fort Apache (1870–1922), as the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) Theodore Roosevelt (TR) School (1923–present) and, since 1969, as the White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center. At no other hub of US colonial domination has the colonized group reassumed control and begun remaking the site into a locus for sovereignty reassertion, cultural perpetuation, and economic development. The creation and re-creation, at a single locality, of distinctive places by Pueblos, Apaches, soldiers, bureaucrat-teachers, and tribal officials invites a consideration of the site’s “life history,” of how placemaking often also entails displacements, and of how dispossession and loss can resonate in group memories and otherwise affect people’s relationships to place, history, and one another. Lurking behind Fort Apache as a facile frontier icon is a complex and powerful site that continues to play prominent roles in place and history making. Following a discussion of broad historical themes that invite attention to American Indian places and placemaking, this chapter examines specific tangible and intangible cultural heritage linked to the various places created at the Fort Apache locality.

DISPLACEMENTS AND REPLACEMENTS, HISTORIES AND LEGENDS In Personal Recollections, General Nelson A. Miles (1896) recounts his 1886 visit to the White Mountain Apache homeland and Fort Apache. 101

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Figure 5.1 Map of Western Apache and Chiricahua lands and reservations showing places mentioned in the text.

He describes the remote post as situated in “a beautiful and picturesque country of lofty mountains, pine and cedar forests, and near a great rushing, roaring mountain river full of trout.” Miles contrasts his experience of the place’s beauty with his perception of the Chiricahua Apaches, most of whom were being sequestered away from their homelands in Western Apache territory, near Fort Apache: “Over four hundred men, women, and children, belonging to the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Indians, and a more turbulent, desperate, disreputable band of human beings I had never seen . . . called prisoners of war, yet they had never been disarmed or dismounted. After fully considering the condition . . . I became more fully convinced than ever of the necessity of removing that band of Indians to some region remote from Arizona” (Miles 1896:496–497).

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Miles’s suggestion that Chiricahua exile was justified in view of their unsavory appearance and resistance to federal control highlights some under-studied linkages between history making and placemaking. For most non-Indian Americans, histories and places are generally understood in terms of accumulating events and processes. The “Apache Wars” and other US-Indian conflicts have typically been portrayed in terms of a frontier advancing across a generically hostile and unforgiving geographical backdrop (Edmunds 1995). In contrast, many American Indians and other displaced persons perceive history following sustained contacts with colonizers in terms of reductions— of quantitative and qualitative losses of lands, places, traditions, and sovereignties (see Bender and Winer 2001). The actual history of Fort Apache as a military post, like that of most other military duty stations, is a dreary chronicle of arcane bureaucracy, hard work, and institutionalized attention to perceived duties to enforce capricious national policies—all punctuated by brief episodes of brutality (Davisson 2004). In the Arizona uplands, the “Apache Wars” were provoked by and proceeded through Apache displacements. Beginning with US acquisition of Apache territories from Mexico pursuant to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1853), the US sought to subjugate the Western, Chiricahua, and Mescalero Apaches (Spicer 1962). Shortly after the Civil War, as part of President Grant’s Peace Policy, the army increased its pursuits, establishing reservations encompassing small portions of Apache homelands (see Figure 5.1) and slaughtering those who refused to relinquish their attachments to cultural or geographical birthrights (Utley 1984). In 1875, the US concentrated most of the Chiricahua and Western Apaches along the malarial Gila River at San Carlos, a place despised by virtually all who visited or dwelt there. In 1876, the US extinguished the Chiricahua Reservation and prepared to remove the Chiricahuas to Western Apache territory. The prospect of a sustained Chiricahua presence, first at San Carlos and then near Fort Apache, meant residence in foreign territory and within easy reach of federal authority. Most Chiricahuas and all or most Western Apaches despised this policy, deeply resenting non-Indian intrusions into their lands and controls over their lives. General Miles apparently understood the difference between the Chiricahua and the Western Apaches, the latter comprised of bands of White Mountain, San Carlos, and Cibecue Apaches. Compared to the Chiricahua exile and comprehensive disenfranchisement, the US punishment of the Western Apaches was mild, in quantitative terms amounting to the reduction of Western Apache sovereign territory from about 14 million acres to about 3.5 million acres (Basso 1983).

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But Miles made no distinction between those Chiricahuas who had remained peaceful or enlisted as scouts to facilitate military subjugation, and those, like Geronimo and his allies, who actively resisted the loss of their geographical birthrights. Both the peacefully inclined Chiricahua captives and the Chiricahua scouts who were essential to the “success” of the Chiricahua campaign were herded onto boxcars by cavalry troops from Fort Apache and shipped to incarceration in Florida and Alabama. Few survived the rigors of 26 years as prisoners of war to return to the Southwest. The trauma associated with the Apache regional and continental displacements still reverberates, constituting a prominent theme in Apache oral traditions, memories, sovereignty (re)assertions, and the ongoing search for security and atonement with one another, with nonIndians, and with their new lands, places, and lives. Miles, other soldiers (e.g., Bourke 1885, 1891, 2003; Cruse 1941), and generations of historians (e.g., Robinson 2001; Thrapp 1967) have provided detailed chronicles of the bloodiest chapters of the story. Only a few published works have attended to the values that governed Apache interactions with non-Indians (Spicer 1971) or with land and history (Basso 1996). In particular, the dearth of Apache perspectives and accounts presented through Apache voices constitute a nagging gap between the mythical status of the Apache and the historical realities. Introducing his Western Apache overview, Basso (1983:462) observes that “the Apache has been transformed from a Native American into an American legend, the fanciful and fallacious creation of a non-Indian citizenry whose inability to recognize the massive treachery of ethnic and cultural stereotypes has been matched only by its willingness to sustain and inflate them.” Similar terms apply to the non-Indian knowledge and understanding of the place most commonly referred to as Fort Apache. As is true for the US-Apache conflict in general, the history of Fort Apache is so enshrouded in caricature and American mythology that finding common ground among what most US citizens think they know, published accounts, and Apache oral traditions is challenging. At least since John Ford’s 1948 production of Fort Apache—shot “on location” in Monument Valley, about 300 km to the north of the true site—Hollywood has followed General Miles, excluding unsavory or discordant aspects of place and history in the manufacture and sale of a frontier icon. Miles was later promoted to commander of the US Army. His vision of Fort Apache as a heroic beacon of civilization in a dismal wasteland of savagery was similarly successful, thus far eclipsing other perspectives on the place, its history, and its significance. Content with the Hollywood image of a palisaded outpost surrounded by inhospitable wilderness and defended from Apaches by John Wayne and Rin Tin Tin, many visitors to Fort

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Apache, especially those born before about 1960, are confused by the absence of fortifications and interpretive discussions of Geronimo. Some are bitterly disappointed with the complex reality that the fort has been used as a BIA school since 1923 and is now a tribally managed historical park. A few suggest that attention to American Indian perspectives somehow detracts from US soldiers’ shining service. It is no coincidence that so little has been written about “the real” Fort Apache, as opposed to the mythical icon, or that Basso’s quest to humanize Apache culture and history has emphasized the oral construction and employment of place. Basso’s work reveals place as a constellation of meanings bestowed upon a site and history as a process engaging tangibles (e.g., artifacts, plants, landforms) and intangibles (e.g., placenames, stories, songs): “What matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when, and what they serve to reveal” (Basso 1996:31). Ashmore’s (2002:1178) review of archaeologists’ adoptions of placebased analyses complements the discipline’s inveterate quest for pristine, single-component sites and recommends “examining evidence for human recognition, use, and modification of a particular position, locality, or area over the full time span of its existence.” Linenthal’s (1991, 2003) studies indicate how violence adds to site significance and clarify how group contacts make places and perpetuate memories.

SAKWTALA—PLACE OF GREEN PLANTS From about AD 1000 to 1400, the region surrounding Fort Apache was occupied by the forebears of the Zuni and Hopi Tribes. Ancestral Hopi and Zuni villages on Apache lands have long been the focus of archaeological excavations, as well as unauthorized looting, and have more recently been engaged in projects to assess their values from the various perspectives of Apache, Hopi, and Zuni cultural specialists (see Chapter 3). As a part of ongoing efforts to restore connections among landscapes, places, objects, and cultural traditions, the White Mountain Apache Tribe completed a cultural affiliation assessment of its lands in 2005 (Welch and Ferguson 2007). The study sought to facilitate the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act by compiling cultural specialists’ observations and oral traditions to complement the substantial corpus of archaeological data bearing on cultural affiliation. Zuni and Hopi advisors offered evidence relating to their ancestors’ migrations through and use of Western Apache lands in the search for their respective homelands. Oral traditions linked to Hopi clan migration stories refer to Sakwtala as a verdant paradise of grasses, shrubs, trees, and blossoms lying between deserts. Some Hopis also refer to the

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area around Whiteriver as Pavanqatsi because the region’s grasslands, rivers, and forests are a paradise for qatsi (life). Hopi and Zuni advisors agreed that the rich soils, abundant water, diverse biota, and beauty of the White Mountain lands attracted and briefly sustained their ancestors, who built and occupied pit house and above-ground pueblo settlements near the rich alluvial terraces that they farmed along White River and its tributaries (see Welch 2007a). Ben Nuvamsa, the Hopi who served as the BIA Superintendent for the White Mountain Apache Tribe and their lands for two decades, observed that life at Sakwtala was “too easy” for his ancestors, who had committed themselves to finding the place where spiritual unity would make possible a materially difficult village farming lifeway (personal communication, November 1999). There is no clear indication that the Apaches or any other external factors contributed substantially to the departure of the Hopi and Zuni ancestors. Because this area was not the center of the universe that Zuni and Hopi ancestors sought on the basis of divine mandate, they were bound to continue their migrations. For Hopis, this mandate included ang kuktota (along there, make footprints). Hopi ancestors were instructed to live in one place for a while, to grow corn and other food, to have families, and then to continue their migration. “Footprints” include the ruins of former pit house and pueblo village settlements, and the pottery, stone tools, petroglyphs, and other artifacts left behind as offerings (see also Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004). For Zunis and Hopis, such footprints are tangible evidence of waypoints along routes of ancestral migrations, as well as indicators of ongoing landscape connections and stewardship obligations (see Chapter 3). Agriculture and the rituals associated with it reflect continuity between past and present Hopi and Zuni cultures. As indicated by the residential architectural features and ancient pottery, the farmland at the East Fork-North Fork confluence (and virtually every other place with a moderate stream gradient and wide canyon walls) appears to have been cultivated and irrigated first by Zuni and Hopi ancestors and later by Apaches. Just up the East Fork canyon, petroglyphs on the basalt cliff faces depict symbols—including snakes, tadpoles, frogs, and birds— readily interpreted by the advisors on the basis of oral traditions and cultural knowledge. Farther upstream are storage and residential structures in cliff alcoves and caves that were built and used both by Pueblo and Apache ancestors. Continuing upstream to the summit of the White Mountains, the headwaters of the White River and the Little Colorado River, Hopi and Zuni advisors looked north to their current reservation lands, employing visual contact and prayers to affirm and reaffirm the enduring cultural significance of their former homelands as well as the sacred importance of the mountain. From this vantage at over 3400 m

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above sea level, and at other junctures among place, culture, and history, the advisors made offerings to reinforce and commemorate personal and communal connections. Here and at locations across their ancestral lands under Apache stewardship, the Hopis and Zunis identified medicinal and culinary plants, many of which do not occur on their current tribal lands (Welch and Ferguson 2007). These identifications, together with the clan- and society-based oral traditions, highlight the difference between physical displacements and cultural attachments. White Mountain Apache Tribe officials and elders welcomed the Zuni and Hopi advisors and the opportunity to collaborate to deepen and broaden place- and landscape-specific knowledge and to pursue repatriation and stewardship objectives in accord with shared principles of respect, balance, holism, and responsibility. The archaeological heritage of Sakwtala, which fell under Apache stewardship following the Hopi and Zuni migrations and prior to the army’s arrival, shows no signs of Apache disturbance or misappropriation prior to about 1990. As Ramon Riley, the White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Resources Director, stated during the cultural affiliation project, “For Apaches, avoidance is the highest form of respect . . . We use the pueblo beads in ceremonies and prayers, but only with recognition of the power of those people. You have to know what you are doing even to collect those beads from the ruins . . . These days we are not teaching our kids the same kind of respect and there are lots of problems” (see Chapter 3). Apache, Hopi, and Zuni cultures converge on the importance of treating ancestral sites as sacred sites, both out of respect for those who have come before and as the basis for educating future generations and creating opportunities for communication and collaboration with non-Indians, including archaeologists. Core aspects of Hopi and Zuni senses of the place that has become Fort Apache thus persist in their cultural traditions as well as those of the Apache. The next section looks more closely at early Apache use of the area before and during its transformation into Fort Apache, revealing further correspondences among geographies, life ways, culture contacts, and memories.

TŁ’ÓGHAGAII The Apache name for the East Fork-North Fork confluence, and thus for the Fort Apache vicinity, is Tł’óghagaii (white reeds growing). For Apaches today, this name evokes images of a peaceful, productive, and vital place. The remembered Tł’óghagaii is similar to Zuni and Hopi conceptions and memories of environmental abundance, yet very different from Apache memories of Fort Apache, TR School, or the twentyfirst-century landscape—all of which emphasize the built environment.

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Prior to the establishment of Fort Apache, the White River watershed and surrounding areas was the home of the White Mountain Apache. Most non-Indian scholars think Apaches occupied the regions today known as the Mogollon Rim and White Mountains of east-central Arizona beginning sometime between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. Many Apaches have different perspectives on their history and culture, regrettably little of which has been recorded (Welch 1997, 2000; exceptions to this generalization include works by Basso 1971, 1983, 1996; and Goodwin 1937, 1942). Generally, Cibecue and White Mountain Apaches know that they have, since time immemorial, lived on and in the vicinity of the territory their parents’ parents successfully sought to retain as reservation lands. Many are perplexed by the bands and subgroups identified by anthropologists, preferring classifications based on the dialectical variations they detect in speech, their matrilineal clan identities, and the tribal affiliations that have structured much of Apache social life for the last century (Welch and Ferguson 2007). Local groups consisting of clusters of households related through matrilineal clans were the only units of Western Apache social organization beyond residential groups (Goodwin 1942). Prior to about 1870, local groups maintained the territorial boundaries and social cohesion that allowed their constituent households to gather, hunt, farm, and occasionally join together to raid or trade for materials not available locally. Households probably relied on farming for about 25% of their food annually, with substantial variations from local group to local group, year to year, and household to household (Goodwin 1937). Local group leadership came from the most successful and influential male head of a household, carrying with it few entitlements and many responsibilities. Progressing non-Indian encroachment into Apache territory during the 1800s constrained Apache movements while creating new targets for Apache raiding and new diplomatic duties for Apache leaders. Households deprived of the free use of their customary farming areas seem to have placed more emphasis on foraging, raiding, or both. Other households, notably those of the White Mountain bands occupying the White River watershed, remained well insulated from most incursions and, after about 1860, may have intensified their agricultural pursuits as raiding became more dangerous and less productive (see Goodwin 1942). Even for the families with reliably fruitful farmlands along the East and North forks, however, household movements to take advantage of widely spaced foraging opportunities were almost constant, except during the periods surrounding spring seeding and the fall harvest. Permanent residences may have been unknown, but the most important farming localities defined the core of prereservation local group territories and continue to be recognized as origin places of and namesakes for

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the exogamous matrilineal clans that regulate many aspects of Apache behavior (Goodwin 1942). Fort Apache is located near the heart of the range of the largest and most populous cluster of Western Apache local groups, known to outsiders as the Eastern White Mountain Apaches. In one of the earliest reports written in English on Western Apaches, US Indian Agent Michael Steck (1859) notes that the White Mountain people “occupy a fine country, with many beautiful mountain streams, and rich and fertile valleys for cultivation . . . They have shown themselves to be the most reliable of all of the bands . . . [They] cultivate the soil extensively—raise wheat, corn, beans, and pumpkins in abundance. In this particular they are far in advance of all the other Apaches.” Fort Apache is not far down the East Fork from the clan origin place, Túgai (white water), of one of the most prominent Western Apache clans, the Túgaidn´ (white water people). Originally affiliated with the farmland upstream from Fort Apache that previously attracted Hopi and Zuni ancestors, this clan is thought to have ancient ties both to Navajo and Zuni (Goodwin 1942:601). Because Western Apache households moved frequently, employed primarily organic container and shelter technologies, and deliberately left few “footprints” on the land (Welch 1997), the only documented prereservation Apache material remains at Fort Apache consist of a roasting area and irrigation ditch in the farming area at the East Fork-North Fork confluence. It seems likely that the irrigation features, and perhaps the roasting area as well, were first used by Zuni or Hopi ancestors and have served each of the site’s successive occupants. If not for oral traditions and early reports of the intensive use of the region, archaeologists would have little knowledge of the Apache use and occupation of the Fort Apache vicinity prior to the establishment of the reservation. Documents and memories of early contacts with Anglos and US officials have survived with greater integrity than material remains from this period at Tł’óghagaii. One influential man, known to most non-Apaches as Miguel, is credited by both Apache and non-Apache historians as possessing the foresight and diplomatic skill required to make it possible for the White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches to retain the core of their homelands (Davisson 2004). The leader of a local group of the Cibecue Apache with territory located west of Fort Apache, Miguel seems to have become convinced early on of the futility of armed conflict with the US. Apparently in response to a brief experience with displacement and internment at Bosque Redondo in southern New Mexico, Miguel began deliberately working for protection from US authorities. He consulted with other Western Apache chiefs and developed contacts with soldiers and civilians to advocate for his people’s continued occupation

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of their land. In a May 30, 1866, letter dictated for General J. H. Carlton in Santa Fe, Miguel requests the release of the few remaining Western Apaches confined with the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches at Bosque Redondo, gently reminding the General that “I was told, when I was here before, that the Government would select a location in some part of our own country for a reservation . . . Should this be the case, Miguel and his friends and followers will be the first to seek safety and protection under the promise and favor of the Government” (manuscript on file, White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program Archives, Fort Apache). Miguel’s letter achieved its proximal goal of freeing his people from Bosque Redondo, but Arizona Territory was administered separately beginning in 1866, and Carlton had no authority to act on Miguel’s request to pursue reservation establishments beyond New Mexico Territory. The many military posts created around Western Apache territory in the 1860s offered little protection to either the Apaches or the growing populations of non-Indians (Thrapp 1967). Violent conflicts ruled much of the period, but the Cibecue and White Mountain Apaches managed to keep themselves and most of their lands out of harm’s way. By the summer of 1869, however, when the army got around to mounting its first expedition into White Mountain Apache territory, the soldiers were neither expecting nor fostering goodwill. Riding under the command of Major John Green, cavalry detachments proceeded to attack the few Apaches they could find, burning hundreds of acres of corn fields along the forks of the White River and adjacent drainages (Davisson 2004). Instead of retaliating, local groups under chiefs Miguel and Pedro affirmed peaceful intentions. Their circumspect goodwill and subsequent hospitality obliged Green to abandon the scorched earth campaign, retreat southward to Camp Goodwin on the Gila River, and propose to his superiors both an extensive Apache reservation and a military post to protect the reservation from incursions by non-Indians, and non-Indians from excursions by Apaches. Green’s recommendations were accepted, and additional visits with various chiefs resulted in agreements on the boundaries of the reservation as well as the location of the army encampment. In addition to the unresisted establishment of what was to become Fort Apache, Miguel’s peace-focused leadership also facilitated the enlistment, as US Army Indian Scouts, of White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches (Basso 1971:21; Mason 1971; Thrapp 1975). Knowledge and skill developed through battles and raids into Mexico prior to reservation confinements instilled in Western Apache men an impeccable knowledge of land, landscape, and culture that made them uniquely qualified to participate in tactical operations and serve as peacekeepers and community liaisons within reservation boundaries (Dunlay 1982; Tate 1974, 1977; Wharfield 1964, 1965). Apache

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warriors translated their place-based knowledge into a commodity that the army readily and repeatedly purchased (Laluk 2006). One wonders if the savvy Miguel “placed” the soldiers at Tł’óghagaii in hopes that the beauty, abundance, and peacefulness of the locality might facilitate a harmonious confluence of Apache and non-Apache histories and cultures. As Tł’óghagaii, Fort Apache was a place of beauty, abundance, and peacefulness. However, by the 1870s, the harmonious images evoked by the Apache place-name were undermined by conflicts with non-Indians. Although Apache memories of and attachments to Tł’óghagaii were not displaced, neither Miguel nor other peaceful visionaries could have grasped the breadth and depth of the change that accompanied the assertion of military placemaking.

FORT APACHE On December 6, 1869, following his return to swampy Camp Goodwin from his second expedition to the pine-clad White Mountains, Green reported: I have selected a site for a military post on the White Mountain River which is the finest I ever saw . . . It seems as though this one corner of Arizona were almost its garden spot, the beauty of its scenery, the fertility of its soil and facilities for irrigation are not surpassed by any place that ever came under my observation . . . This post would be of the greatest advantage . . . It would compel the White Mountain Indians to live on their reservation or be driven from their beautiful country which they almost worship.

Green’s words proved prophetic. Avoidance of overt hostility by Cibecue and White Mountain Apaches facilitated, in 1871, the reservation of much of their land from the public domain. The US failed to match the Apaches’ good faith, however, or to adopt their respect for other people or the physical remains of previous inhabitants. Instead, the Fort Apache site soon became a base for offensive operations against those Western and Chiricahua Apaches who had not had the benefit of the rare combination of opportunity, inclination, and leadership necessary to establish peaceful relations with the US. As Grant’s Peace Policy floundered and organized military campaigns proceeded, Fort Apache became the base for increasingly oppressive control of the White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches within reservation boundaries (Ogle 1940). The year 1871 thus marks the end of landscape-derived lifeways that had sustained the region’s Apaches for countless generations. The army forced hundreds of Apaches to relocate within reach of Fort Apache and to rebuild their subsistence strategy on the shaky foundations

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of government rations and limited mobility. Employing an extension of a system invented to keep track of Apache scouts, army officials designated heads of households using “tag band” numbers and required the tag holders to appear for roll calls and present their engraved tags to receive food and supplies (Bourke 1891). The federal policy of deliberately increasing Apache material dependence on government handouts fostered both federal dominion over Apache life and Apache participation in the cash economy. The policy threw a wrench into Apache sovereignty, including systems of political authority, religion, and material independence. Federal officials deriving their authority from Fort Apache also sought to commandeer Apache politics by establishing alliances with missionaries (Brown 1963) and engaging Apaches of their choosing in discussions of US plans and policies, often sidestepping leaders selected by Apache consent. Army, BIA, and Christian religious authorities conspired to discourage Apache social and spiritual traditions and to limit Apache control over water, mineral and timber resources, and agricultural land. Non-Indians associated with Fort Apache helped themselves to the game, mineral wealth, and tangible cultural heritage that had been protected by American Indian stewardship since time immemorial (for examples, see Barnes 1941). In response to their duplicitous treatment, the White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches regarded the US and its representatives with what might be termed “progressive suspicion”; that is, they adopted changes that were either unavoidable or potentially useful, resisted other impositions, and maintained a justifiably critical perspective regarding all federal policies and practices. The uneasy cooperation between Apaches and the US has persisted through numerous challenging periods, with Fort Apache playing important and often central roles throughout. The establishment of the reservation, and the boundary enforcement that was Fort Apache’s first function, made possible all non-Apache communities and commercial endeavors in eastern Arizona. Most non-Apaches thus view and remember the site as a symbol of Native pacification. For Apaches in general, the site symbolizes unwelcome external control and disrespectful reductions in freedoms and the quality of life and environment. For some descendants of scouts, Fort Apache is regarded with pride as the duty station for a remembered patriarch; others scorn the site for its role in the “divide and conquer” policy that enlisted scouts to pursue and punish resistors. In conjunction with historical developments, Fort Apache’s distinctively colonial sense of place began to develop by the early 1870s. Troops wasted no time in establishing supply routes and “replacing” Tł’óghagaii with a post reflecting US values and interests emphatically different from those of the Apache. A letter in the Tucson Citizen (February 25, 1871)

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Figure 5.2 1872 log cabin sometimes referred to as Crook’s Quarters at the west end of officers’ row. J. R. Welch photograph, May 2002. (Courtesy of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program.)

states that each of the two cavalry troops at the post occupied eight cabins, with the single infantry troop using five. The sole structure surviving from the post’s early years is the log cabin at the western end of officers’ row (Figure 5.2). In the mid-1870s, Martha Summerhayes lived with her husband, an infantry officer, in either this cabin or a very similar log duplex near the East Fork canyon rim (Summerhayes 1979). Their quarters consisted of a small room with a hall separating them from the post surgeon’s quarters. The detached kitchen was a bare shed. Summerhayes’s notes reflect the physical, social, and emotional privations of an army wife, the mutual mistrust and fear between Apaches and non-Apaches, and the ongoing struggle to establish a semblance of community in a place perceived by all as intrusive, dangerous, and ephemeral. By July 1, 1879, when the army made the temporary camp a permanent fort, the basic plan embraced frontier fort layout conventions repeated across America and traceable to the Roman Empire’s military compound or castrum (De La Croix 1972; Hoagland 2004; Robinson 1977). To define meaningful and defensible space at Fort Apache, the structures exploited the 80-acre plateau above the East Fork-North Fork confluence by outlining a simple rectangle, with the long axis oriented east-west along the southern rim of the East Fork canyon and a parade ground in the

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Figure 5.3 Oblique aerial view of the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School district from the west-northwest. The cone-roofed building in the right middle ground is the Nohwiké Bagowa Apache Cultural Center and Museum, located just above the confluence of the East and North forks of the White River. Photograph by J. R. Welch, 1999. (Courtesy of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program.)

center, accessible primarily from the corners (Figure 5.3). The north edge of the rectangular development, located about 100 m from the canyon edge, is delineated by officers’ quarters (i.e., “officers’ row”) opening onto the parade ground. On the opposite (south) side of the parade ground is a row of enlisted men’s barracks. These were built with a focus on internal courtyards; only the adobe ruins of the last remaining barrack survives. Will C. Barnes’s circa 1880 description provides a generally accurate picture of Fort Apache up until army abandonment: The western military posts of those days were not forts in any sense of the word; rather they were mere camps . . . laid out in a hollow square. The back doors of the officers’ quarters, on the north side, opened into the box canyon of the river. They were all of logs, one story, and extremely primitive as to architecture and finish. To the west, the hospital, a long, rambling, whitewashed building of adobe, lay in the curve of the canyon, absolutely protected from ordinary attack. On the south side of the square ran four sets of barracks, built of slabs, but roomy and comfortable. At the southeast corner stood the stone guardhouse; next was the Quartermaster’s warehouse, of slabs, and the commissary of adobe. At the northeast corner was the Adjutant’s office, also of adobe. Between the Commissary and

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the office of Adjutant were two small log cabins; one the telegraph office, the other the operator’s residence. Thus laid out, the buildings enclosed a parade ground, probably four acres in extent. To the east, stood the four cavalry stables and the Quartermaster corrals. Beyond these, and just at the tip of the hill where the road came up into the post from the east, was the Post Sutler store—a long, rambling, one-story, log and adobe building. Behind the barracks and corrals was “laundry row”—a line of nondescript structures of varied architecture and material, canvas, stone, adobe, log and slabs . . . As for defense, there wasn’t a cannon in the post—not even a “sunset” gun. In the valley about a mile to the east was a steam saw-mill. The Post water-system was based on an immense tank-wagon, drawn by six snow-white mules. In this, the water was hauled from the river and poured into barrels standing at each set of quarters. Later on, a steam pump and gravity system was installed. (Barnes 1941:33–36)

Officers’ row continues to serve as the most important single determinant of the site’s sense of place. A tree-lined avenue separates quarters from the parade field. White picket fences defining front yards contribute to a safe, familiar, and harmonious sense of a small town. Until sidewalks and electric lights were installed in the 1930s, a boardwalk illuminated by a row of wrought iron oil lamps ran between the picket fences and the road, with wooden sidewalks leading to each house. The BIA further co-opted officers’ row as an “axis of authority” by constructing the clubhouse and school physician’s quarters along the row and installing the school principal in the commanding officer’s quarters. By 1890, the soldiers, civilian authorities, and Apaches had reached an uneasy accommodation. Figure 5.4, a watercolor of Fort Apache composed on the basis of an officer’s pencil sketch and memory almost four decades later, depicts a tidy, quiet post surrounded by woods and waters (Adams 1962). The persistence of an Apache presence within the site during the army occupation is indicated by diverse archival records relating to Apache scouts and by substantial material indications of at least three “scouts’ row” camp locations. Apache choices to enlist as scouts in the army were no doubt also a result of, and a response to, mounting pressures on Apache families to become government wards. It is little wonder that within Apache communities, serving in the military has long been regarded as one of the few fully honorable and accessible means for escaping a career as a low-wage laborer or recipient of public assistance. Scouts and many other Apaches first participated in a cash economy at Fort Apache, where a post sutler’s store offered manufactured and processed articles for sale on a cash basis. Fort Apache scrip was also accepted at the sutler’s store, and Apaches could earn cash by cutting and delivering fuel wood or fresh grass to feed the army stock.

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Figure 5.4 Watercolor of Camp (Fort) Apache from the south in 1873, as remembered by Joseph B. Girard, an army medical corps officer, in 1909. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.)

The documentary record indicates that maintenance and repair of Fort Apache’s buildings and grounds deteriorated steadily after 1910 and that the site was in disrepair when TR School was established in 1923. Lacking artillery and tanks, Fort Apache was the last nonmechanized army post in the US when it closed in 1922. As is true for most military facilities (Hoagland 2004), Fort Apache had gradually become integral to the regional economy and social process. Hundreds of scouts and their families depended on the Fort Apache payroll at various times, and many other Apaches served as workers or contractors. Non-Indian communities across eastern Arizona provided goods and services to the soldiers, often at inflated prices. Despite the important role of the site in the regional economy, many Apache leaders during the early 1900s began to advocate for on-reservation educational facilities, and against the ongoing BIA insistence on removing Apache children to off-reservation schools. When it became clear that the military’s tenure was coming to a close, Fort Apache was viewed as an excellent prospective site for the development of a new school to supplement the on-reservation boarding and day schools already maintained by the BIA and the Lutherans.

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THEODORE ROOSEVELT SCHOOL Professional and public support in the US had begun to turn away from Indian boarding schools by the 1920s, but the BIA viewed the adoption of former military facilities as an expeditious means to pursue policies of assimilation and economic self-sufficiency (Littlefield 1993). At Fort Apache—as at Carlisle Barracks, and Forts Defiance (Arizona), Wingate (Arizona), Grant (Arizona), Mohave (California), and Totten (North Dakota)—the federal government barely broke stride as it shifted from soldiers to teachers as primary agents of Indian policy implementation and social control (National Park Service 1969; Welch 2007b). At BIA and denominational schools, the youth of recently displaced American Indians had new places imposed upon them. On November 13, 1922, BIA School Superintendent Ralph P. Stanion wrote the Commissioner of Indian Affairs advocating reuse of the army post as a school: Fort Apache, both as a site and as a plant are admirably situated and equipped . . . There are in the commissaries attached to the post such quantities of equipment of various kinds that will materially expedite the fitting of the place for its first reception of Indian pupils . . . Fort Apache Military Reservation [should], in its entirety, be secured to the uses and purposes of the Theodore Roosevelt School, as the segregation of any part of it from the school site proper, which contains no garden or orchard lands, would impair the efficiency of the school. The garden and agricultural lands are situated in small tracts, along the East Fork . . . The balance of the reservation is grazing land of a very fair quality and of sufficient area to support a considerable herd of dairy and beef cattle that should be attached to the school. Superintendent Chas. L. Davis has volunteered the services of himself and the most influential Chief upon this reservation to go to the Navajo reservations for the purpose of assuring the Navajos of their welcome here and to induce the Navajos to see the advantages of the Theodore Roosevelt School for their children. (manuscript on file, White Mountain Apache Tribe Historic Preservation Office, Fort Apache)

The BIA jumped at the chance to use Fort Apache as a Navajo school. The site provided a means to satisfy treaty obligations and to address the persistent problems with absenteeism and desertion at schools on Navajo lands. Records reveal implementation, through the TR School, of the BIA policy of mandatory attendance, the enforcement of which included abduction of children from their families and conveyance to carefully monitored dormitories (Figures 5.5, 5.6). Novelist Oliver La Farge (1937) explored the social and psychological tolls paid by Navajo students exported to the “Yellow Earth” school in Apache country.

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Figure 5.5 Navajo girls in the morning shade on the west side of the former adjutant’s office immediately following arrival at TR School. Caption on back of print reads, “The school’s first girl attendants as they were received from Keams Canyon, June 19, 1923.” Unknown photographer. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, California, Record Group 75, records of the Fort Apache Agency, central classified files.)

Figure 5.6 Navajo girls in the afternoon sun. Caption on back of print reads, “First girl attendants on the day they were received after having been ‘changed,’ June 19, 1923.” Unknown photographer. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, California, Record Group 75, records of the Fort Apache Agency, central classified files.)

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The policy was also enforced in Apache country. Much as the army had obliged Apaches to first abandon their lands beyond reservation boundaries and then appear at Fort Apache for role calls and ration issuance, by the early 1900s officials forced Apaches to move to towns surrounding BIA schools. This entailed abandonment of outlying residential, farming, and food collection areas that had been used for generations. By depriving households of their subsistence base, the policy forced many adults to forsake family life and seek wage-based employment beyond reservation boundaries (Watt and Basso 2004). The initial TR School enrollment was 250 Navajo and Hopi children divided into five grades, each with a single teacher (Hammond 1923). In addition to special instruction in girls’ industries, farming, engineering, and plumbing, the curriculum included English conversation and oral exercises, reading, literary society work, and religion. Physical training consisted of sit-ups in the morning, group games after school, and military drills after supper, with occasional campfires. Extracurricular activities included Junior Red Cross, weekly socials, marching drills, and band (Figure 5.7). Apaches blinked and officers gave way to bureaucrats at Fort Apache. Intimidated boys and girls replaced crusty soldiers as barrack dwellers and parade ground marchers (see Udall 2001). Arriving children found the old barracks immediately overcrowded. Several sleeping porches had to be constructed, but these lacked screens and doors for months after school began. The boys lacked underwear; overalls, uniforms, and

Figure 5.7 Drill practice on the former parade ground with officers’ row and the former commanding officer’s quarters in the background. B. K. Young photograph, ca. 1926. (Courtesy of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program.)

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sheets were scarce. In part because of inadequate sanitary conditions and marginal diet, students’ health suffered. Despite rules to the contrary, enrolling sick children was a common practice to boost enrollments and remove kids from homes perceived as unhealthy. “We slept in dorms, then the girls’ dorm burned down . . . We had disease come, like spinal meningitis, and some of the classmates died. We had to be quarantined” (Marie Perry, interview, 1998).1 As part of the BIA consolidation of control, school officials regulated all student contacts with their homes. Many Apaches opposed sending children to distant schools or otherwise exposing their children to nonIndian ways. Some parents communicated their fears, encouraging their children to avoid non-Indians and their institutions (Kessel 1976). Edgar Perry suggested that “mothers . . . would tell their children to hide in the mountains all day. That way people coming and looking for school-age kids wouldn’t find them.” But grinding poverty and prevailing hopelessness caused many parents to send their children to school—one of the rare prospects for a better life. Jerry Gloshay Sr., a former TR School student, remembered parting with his mother for the first time: “I didn’t know any English. I had never experienced running water from a faucet or bathrooms or toilets. It was very strange to me. It was weird to sleep on a soft bed with sheets . . . It seemed like the Navajo had it in for us Apache from the beginning, but it got better as we went along. My first teacher was a colored lady. We learned posture and how to take care of ourselves, like brushing our teeth.” The surrounding Apache community disapproved of the first TR School on the grounds that it was serving Navajo instead of Apache needs. In a comment included in a US Senate Report on Improvement of Conditions on Indian Reservations in Arizona (US Senate 1929:30), local Apache Chief Baha remarked, “Why not keep all our children here? It is just as good as outside schools. Also these boys are growing here and if they go outside this reservation they might be thinking of their home . . . We do not like lots of things at an outside school. If they get sick they might die and never come back here . . . lots of Apaches go to Albuquerque. Half have died and never come back. For this reason we want no children to go outside the reservation and we would like to have a larger school here.” A visiting BIA Agent presented his views in a December 30, 1926, letter to the Secretary of Interior that exposes the disjunction between the TR School’s mission and its legal status: “[It is my understanding] that this is the only instance wherein a military reservation within an Indian reservation has not been turned back to the direct purposes, benefit and

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control of the tribe of Indians within whose boundaries it is located. This fact presents to us at the outset a wrong psychological situation. We have an instinctive feeling of opposition from the Apache . . . [TR School] should be devoted to their interests and benefit and not to the benefit of Indians of another tribe.” In a rare convergence of national policy, administrative opinion, and local preference, TR School began the in situ and still ongoing transformation from an off-reservation to an on-reservation school. Apache students enrolled for the first time in 1929. Eighth and ninth grades were added, and a suite of new buildings specifically designed to support the TR School mission transformed Fort Apache into a bona fide campus without sacrificing the sense of military rigor or federal authority. The main classroom and administration building was completed in 1929 along the former barracks row. In the wake of the destruction of the girls’ dorm (former army hospital) by fire, the BIA expedited construction of the girls’ and boys’ dormitories on opposing ends of the former parade ground. The new boys’ dorm, located on the east side just north of the industrial arts building, featured imposing entry pillars; the new girls’ facility, placed just south of the home economics building, had four wings enclosing an open courtyard. Constructed on the eve of the New Deal’s public works programs, the dormitories anticipated both the process (importing gangs of skilled tradesmen and training local laborers) and the products (massive, even overbuilt structures clearly conveying US authority) of the Works Progress Administration (Collins 1999; Welch 2007b). The new buildings blended with the military facilities while further reinforcing demarcations between the highly regulated federal space and the surrounding community. The classroom-administration building, along with the cafeteria and parade ground, defined the common area between the boys’ and girls’ zones. The former parade ground served both the army and the BIA as the central public setting for concerted displays of authority systems explicitly linked to “civilized” order. All group school activities, especially coeducational programs, were carefully structured, closely supervised, and confined to the parade ground or gymnasium. Radiating outward from the parade ground are (to the north and south, respectively) officers’ and enlisted men’s quarters, and the gardens and kitchens; then (to the west and east, respectively) the hospital, and the offices and storehouses; then, farther to the south, the shops, stables facilities, and laundresses; and finally, scout camps and trails leading into “wilderness.” The establishment, amidst a “savage” domain, of a centrally ruled, rigidly organized, and emphatically expansionist and male-focused

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base of operations is symbolized by and embodied in the plan views of “frontier” military posts in general and of Fort Apache and the TR School in particular. With or without explicit intent, the government’s investments in the site created more of a showplace intended to convince and command than a constructive educational setting designed to facilitate or reconcile the obvious differences between Natives and nonNatives. The rigorous and imposing architecture and spatial arrangements made clear distinctions between crooked and straight, then and now, pagan and Christian, chaotic and organized, male and female. The layout reinforced and physically imposed upon students and parents the rules and procedures that obliged American Indians to participate in an utterly foreign culture and socioeconomic system. The layout was further reinforced by and responsible to vast and—to Apaches and other outsiders—largely incomprehensible systems of laws, regulations, and policies that rewarded those who cooperated and punished those who did not. The site’s evolution toward an on-reservation school was interrupted from 1934 to 1939, when TR School served as a special facility for the combined sequestration, treatment, and education of the region’s Indian children suffering from trachoma, an infectious eye disease that spread through poverty-stricken reservations and afflicted thousands of Native people in the 1930s (Trennert 1990). Annie Ethelbah, who was sent to TR School in 1934, remembered, “They used to treat us every morning . . . They would give you drops and scrape the insides of your eyelids. Sometimes they’d have to feed you because you couldn’t see. I hated that.” The treatment protocols developed at TR School through clinical experimentation on both lesser primates and students at the school hospital became nationwide standards (Bureau of Indian Affairs 1940; Hancock 1937). This method halted the spread of the disease, but the epidemic left behind a large number of permanently vision-impaired Native people (Trennert 1990). By the start of the 1939 school year, plans were underway to reequip TR School as a vocational high school where upper-grade pupils could attend as either day or boarding students. For the approximately 240 enrolled students, “the school day consisted of reading, art, arithmetic, music, and language. Vocational activities consisted of woodshop, leather shop, a tannery, and home economics. Also, by the way of assemblies, a school paper, correspondence units, glee club, and harmonica club the children felt a greater desire to improve their English” (Wesemann 1938). The push for education and vocational training tailored to cultivate local opportunities was tempered by the reality that jobs were scarce and subsistence skills essential both during and after the Depression

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(Philip 1977). In much the same way that Fort Apache had been a self-supporting military post, TR School operated as a largely self-supporting boarding school into the 1960s. The school farm inherited from the army and managed with student labor provided important dietary supplements. During World War II, the military discipline and agricultural training that had supplemented the site’s maintenance and subsistence needs since 1871 provided essential food at a time when school budgets were slashed and many goods were rationed. As noted by Szasz (1999:111), “The training born of necessity during the Depression came to fruition the following decade.” Beginning in the 1930s vocational training began to emphasize chores and skills associated with non-Indian society and economy as part of a curriculum that deemphasized critical thinking skills, science, or social studies (Child 1998). Girls learned how to make clothes, prepare meals, clean houses, and assist with basic health care. In an effort to prepare girls for careers as housewives, domestic servants, nurses, and teachers, specific instruction was given in the use of sewing machines, clothes and dishwashers, dryers, stoves, vacuums, and can openers. The young men’s curriculum focused on farming, animal husbandry, working with wood and metal, tanning leather, and maintaining automobiles and other machines. The boys learned how to cultivate unfamiliar crops, like tomatoes and potatoes, and to raise chickens, pigs, and cows. To prepare the boys for farm and ranch work, day labor, and the military, specific instruction was given in using the machine shop, sawmill, irrigation systems, gardens, dairy, bakery, chicken coops, and the abattoir. Many past students fondly reminisce about playing football, basketball, and baseball with their classmates and against other Indian schools: sports were more popular than most other assimilation tools. Students lived a quasi-military life, rising and going to bed at a signal and marching from activity to activity. “We would wake up, go to the shower, the whistle would blow, and we’d walk from the boy’s dorm to the kitchen” (Wright, interview, 1998). Marie Perry reported, “It was real strict. We had to get up early like soldiers. We couldn’t speak Apache or Navajo . . . It was really tough and we had mean teachers . . . Everyone was lonesome for their home.” Another White Mountain Apache, Gladys Lavender, recalled, “In the 1930s it wasn’t as bad. We could speak Apache on the playground. We had more freedom. In the 1920s it was more like a military school. We marched to school, we marched to church, and we marched to the dining room.” Students had little privacy, sleeping and eating in communal facilities. Correspondence to or from students was routinely read by school staff. Punishments were meted out for inattention to the many rules, and included withdrawal of privileges or assignment of extra work details.

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For major infractions, students might be deprived of a meal. Girls were often forced to kneel for an extended period on a hard surface, and boys and girls were occasionally beaten with a strap or rubber hose. Probably because the area surrounding TR School was familiar to most Apache students, there are innumerable stories associated with running away. Ronnie Lupe recalls routinely escaping to participate in family or religious events in his hometown of Cibecue. Mr. Lupe tells of being able to cover the approximately 55 km between TR School and Cibecue by setting off right after the evening meal on a Thursday or Friday and making it home early the next day. In addition to running away, students influenced their boarding school experiences by resisting teachers and occasionally destroying school property. Progressive policies and practices had transformed more publicly visible Indian schools by the late 1930s, but TR School remained mired in the nineteenth century. Change came to TR School in the early 1960s, however, when a new public school district was formed and began to attract most local Apache students. Older Apache children and high school students from the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Havasupai, Yavapai, Mohave, Pima, and Maricopa reservations continued to attend TR School. Adams (1995) argues that the friendships forged across tribal lines facilitated the development of the pan-Indian cohesiveness that persists as a central dynamic in federal-tribal relations. A chat room comment posted by “Mike” encapsulates the memories of many White Mountain Apache Tribal members concerning TR School: It was once the Army headquarters and is now the . . . Cultural center . . . When day schools wouldn’t work . . . the children had to stay there, and live there. No contact with any outside people . . . They couldn’t get the children there so agents would go out at night and early morning to homes all over. Including other reservations . . . Many of the children from those times still have the marks on their backs and legs from going to school there. If the parents wouldn’t give up the child they were beaten and taken. They had the right under laws to do this in the name of saving the child. This happened till 1944 then they would only throw the parents in jail. Then in the fifties the school became too full so they started other schools near by for the tamer children . . . Anyone like my oldest brother that had trouble had to go to the boarding school. Today the Government tried to turn the boarding school over to the Tribe, but they would not repair the school or provide funds for it. So there is a law suit today on it. (www.education-info.com/elementary_school/boarding_school_ msg30871, accessed January 2004)

In a rare instance of (re)seizing control of a hub for colonial subjugation and assimilation, White Mountain Apaches have created an opportunity

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to reverse displacement at Fort Apache, to reestablish Fort Apache as a place of persistent connection to a proud heritage.

WHITE MOUNTAIN APACHE TRIBE CULTURAL CENTER AND HISTORIC PARK Local and national forces operating through the 1960s ushered in the most recent and still-unfolding episode of place creation at Fort Apache. When TR School enrollments and maintenance budgets declined in the 1960s, the BIA began demolishing historic buildings. As Apaches began to reassert their inherent sovereignty and come to terms with dwindling connections to their oral histories and traditions, the Tribe established the Cultural Center at Fort Apache (Welch 2007b; Welch et al. 2005). In conjunction with the Tribe’s recognition of the limits of logging and livestock as economic mainstays, interest grew in developing heritage tourism as a complement to a successful outdoor recreation enterprise. These developments, coupled with the long-suppressed desires to balance non-Indian history with local knowledge, led the Tribe to reassert control over Fort Apache through the publication of Master Plan for the Fort Apache Historic Park (Schuman 1993). By envisioning a tourism-based industry focused on Apache land and cultural heritage, and through adherence to established professional standards for the conservation of structures and objects, the Tribe has attracted support from the Arizona Heritage Fund, the World Monuments Fund, the National Park Service, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Partnerships have resulted in preservation of 11 of the National Register District’s 27 historic buildings, completion of the Nohwiké Bágowa (house of our footprints) Cultural Center and Museum, and recognition as a Save America’s Treasures project, Preserve America community, and a State of Arizona Culture Keeper (Welch 2000; Welch and Riley 2001). Highlights of the Tribe’s effort’s to reconcile the historical uses of the site with the vision of the place as a locus for hope and prosperity include the 1996 rehabilitation of the log cabin for use as exhibit space and as the Tribe’s Office of Tourism and the rehabilitation, completed in 2000, of a masonry residence on officers’ row to serve as the Tribe’s Historic Preservation Office and headquarters for the Fort Apache Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit chartered by the Tribe to facilitate long-term planning and redevelopment at the site. The 2002 exterior restoration of the post’s commanding officer’s quarters included reconstruction, based on historical photographic documentation, of the ornate observatory, or cupola feature. A National Historic Landmark nomination for the site is under consideration by the National Park Service (Welch 2007b).

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The descendants of the Apaches who were the primary target of the military and civilian institutions created to implement federal policy through Fort Apache have readopted the site and its still-unfolding history and accepted responsibilities for integrating efforts in Apache cultural perpetuation, tourism-based economic development, historic preservation, and intercultural education and reconciliation (Welch et al. 2000). Interpretive programming at Fort Apache is creating opportunities for people to share their stories, perceptions, conflicts, and commonalities. Ongoing analysis of community memories, oral traditions, artifactual and architectural remains, and landscape features are revealing site layers and contours with prevailing linkages to Native American and non-Native histories. These initiatives—including documentation and revitalization of Apache oral traditions—are providing a balanced and respectful forum for researching and representing the rich and diverse range of history and perspective eclipsed by the “Fort Apache” place-name. Themes central to the interpretation include Apache survival on the fine line between resistance and acquiescence and the capacity of diverse groups and individuals to create meaningful, even happy lives in difficult institutional contexts. The “Footprints of the Apache” and the “Fort Apache Legacy” exhibits offer first-person presentations of White Mountain Apache perspectives on regional culture, history, and the site’s important roles therein (Mahaney and Welch 2002). The work is not an attempt to revise existing historical interpretations but a means for adding new “layers” of information representative of and meaningful to Native people. In addition to commemorating cultural survival and signaling persistent Apache vitality and hope, the revitalized use of Fort Apache offers a chance to promote dialogue and interaction among groups linked to Fort Apache—modest steps in a respectful process intended to build recognition of the ties that bind these stakeholders together in both history and destiny (Figure 5.8). At the core of the Tribe’s effort to return Fort Apache to active duty in service to the Apache community is implicit and explicit acknowledgment that Fort Apache either caused or symbolizes many of the challenges faced by the Apache, including land loss and alienation, severed connections to ancient cultural traditions, government dependency, and institutionalized racism. Individuals and representatives of military, religious, and civilian groups have begun to focus on shared history and humanity, employing Fort Apache as common ground for learning, forgiveness, and healing. For the White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches—and perhaps for the Chiricahua as well—Fort Apache is uniquely situated in history, geography, and memory to facilitate this healing. With preservation, research, interpretation, and intercultural reconciliation programs expanding since 1993, the site’s complex and

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Figure 5.8 Leaders at the opening prayer for intercultural reconciliation at the first Ndee Łade (Gathering of the People) Fort Apache Heritage Reunion. Left to right: Raymond Stanley, Dallas Massey Sr., Paul Ethelbah, General George Crook (impersonated), Col. Mike Boardman. Photograph by J. R. Welch, May 20, 2000. (Courtesy of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program.)

transcendent historic significance is becoming increasingly accessible to visitors. These programs will be substantially expanded and enhanced as a result of the 2005 settlement of the Tribe’s lawsuit against the US for the BIA failure to preserve and maintain the Fort Apache buildings and grounds as a trust asset. The litigation settlement agreement establishes a permanent endowment for the site’s preservation and maintenance and empowers the Fort Apache Heritage Foundation to serve as the successor to the BIA as the trustee for the site and its redevelopment for the benefit of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and for the commemoration of the full spectrum of peoples and places that constitute the site’s collective heritage. A comprehensive revision of the 1993 Master Plan is in progress. As the White Mountain Apache Tribe pursues plans to restore Fort Apache and return it to active duty in service to the community, the site continues to play a central role in the negotiation of differing views of history, place, and identity (Welch et al. 2006). New generations of Apaches are acquiring skills relating to historic preservation, archaeology, cultural heritage stewardship and interpretation, museums, archives, and tourismbased enterprise development. Mark Altaha, a tribal member who spent

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his early career working for the BIA and the US Army before joining the Tribe’s Heritage Program staff in 1997, now serves as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (see www.nathpo.org). Nicholas Laluk (2006), a tribal member archaeologist enrolled in the anthropology graduate program at the University of Arizona, has examined archaeological indications of scout families’ distinctively Apache backgrounds and activities against a backdrop of diverse and rapidly changing social and technological circumstances. The Tribe’s ultimate objective is to fulfill Fort Apache’s original promise as a guardian of land, heritage, intercultural understanding, and prosperity.

CONCLUSIONS As one part of a broader effort by the White Mountain Apache Tribe to complement the legend of Fort Apache with the reality of Apache historical and cultural identities and senses of place, this chapter has noted some of the roles played by landscapes, popular stereotyping, and colonial encounters. Adopting as its theme the negotiation of identities of place-based groups and group-defined places, the discussion of Fort Apache and the peoples, oral traditions, documentary records, and physical remains linked to successive occupations thereof has highlighted a series of distinctive places that persist in the histories and memories of the five groups that have controlled the site for the last millennium. The site name may have changed, but definitive landscape elements, as well as poignant features, objects, and memories, persist. Only at Fort Apache has a single site preserved a full array of evidence portraying a wide spectrum of American Indian experience over the last millennium. For Hopis the site is Sakwtala—abundant green plants place—and for nostalgic Apaches it is Tł’óghagaii—the white reeds growing place where community and culture thrived prior to the European invasion. Descendants of Apache scouts recruited by the army proudly recall their forebears’ services as intercultural liaisons and peacemakers (Tate 1974, 1977; see Radbourne 2005). American Indian advocates and scholars ponder what might have happened without the scouts’ assistance to the army and grapple with initial examinations of the BIA’s engineering of cultural assimilation in the name of education (Adams 1995). Many former students regard Theodore Roosevelt School as a place where lasting friendships were formed and valuable knowledge gained; others recall resistance to the abuse and bureaucracy of assimilation policies. For non-Indian newcomers—people lacking deep history and culturally established places in the region—Fort Apache is a powerful symbolic and tangible indication that life in an otherwise inhospitable area is possible, even meaningful. The artifacts and built features

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that each group left behind enhance and expand knowledge gained from consultations and documentary research. The review of each of the five groups’ uses, conceptions, memories, and creations of place, and the discussion of how these actual and remembered places were and are being negotiated, offers glimpses of the site history, the processes by which elements of place may accumulate and resonate through time and culture, the trauma associated with displacement, and the academic and practical benefits of integrating multiple perspectives in archaeological approaches to place. Pivotal dynamics bound up in the Apache interface with nonIndians—especially the displacement and manipulation of Native people by the US and the intrepid and creative resistance to this control by Native Americans—are indelibly etched on the Fort Apache landscape. The popular history of Fort Apache was seldom kind to Apache ancestors. Relentless non-Native fascination with conflict and militarism in relation to American Indians and the history of the American West has begun to yield to comparably detailed discussions of civilian implementation of US Indian policy, boarding schools, and other efforts to address the “Indian problem”(Edmunds 1995). Nonetheless, comparably little has been written about either the policy or institutional histories pertaining to Apaches in the century following the federal government’s exile of the Chiricahua and displacement and reemplacement of most Western Apaches. In his introduction to Eva Watt’s history of her White Mountain Apache family, Keith Basso (Watt 2004:xiv) refers to “the early part of the twentieth century” as “a dark and turbulent period” for the Apache, “when their treatment as wards of the US government left much to be desired” (see also Ingstad 2004). Fort Apache represents a vivid continuum of federal Indian policy— complex, tangled, controversial, and understandable only in context. Fort Apache’s significance remains in the process of active reconsideration, but one truth is clear: Apaches have survived the 130-year onslaught brought by apparently unlimited supplies of soldiers, weapons, bureaucrats, and policies that, at Fort Apache and other federal fort-school facilities, resulted in an intentionally constructed physical manifestation of institutions governed and driven by US policy. Fort Apache and TR School forcefully shaped the material and conceptual conditions of existence for many generations of Apache and student populations, but heavy-handed efforts to oblige families to attend school and students to adopt non-Indian ways were incompletely effective. Johnny Endfield (personal communication, May 2002), the White Mountain Apache Tribal Council Vice-Chairman (1998–2006), remembers sneaking around to speak Apache: “The teachers were always watching,” he said. “I learned to like the taste of that soap, and it never washed my language away.”

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Just as soap applied at Fort Apache failed to eliminate Indigenous language, so did a more generalized colonialist enterprise fail to destroy place-linked memories and affections. The reassertion of tribal sovereignty since the 1960s understandably included calls by some Apache leaders for the destruction of Fort Apache as a vestige of unpleasant history (Welch 2000). Other Apaches, notably White Mountain Apache Tribal Council Chairman Ronnie Lupe, viewed the site as a means for reclaiming Apache control over history and place. Community-based investigations completed since the Tribe founded its Cultural Center in 1969 have produced important complements to academic and popular accounts of local history and culture, thus amplifying the truth that the site affected, and continues to affect its placemakers at least as much as they have shaped the site. The evolving understanding of the site embraces the reality that rigorously comparable types and resolutions of information are not available for each of the five layers of place discussed here. Multivocality and the search for common threads and themes appear at this juncture to be essential in the ongoing effort to make the site safe, interesting, useful, and important to all who care about or share in its history. Fort Apache was not solely a place of conflict, but was also a setting for tentative and dynamic alliances between the White Mountain Apaches and the US, as well as among members of the diverse ethnic groups and social segments associated with the military and civilian administration of Indian affairs. Fort Apache is thus, among other things, a monument to the many and varied American Indians, Hispanics, Euro-Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, and others who have come and are still coming together at the confluence of the East and North forks of the White River to create constructive relationships and positive memories under the thumb of difficult institutions. The federal-Apache relations that created and perpetuated Fort Apache, TR School, and the White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center unfolded with parallel consequences across much of Indian Country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The site stands as a reminder of the manifold problems of colonialism, the challenges of social engineering, and the power of tribal sovereignty. The diverse results of the interactions of policies, practices, places, and peoples continue to reveal themselves within the site boundaries, the Apache Nation, and throughout Native America, thus contributing significantly to the identity of the US and to our understanding of spatial conceptions of history. Unlike studies of colonial encounters that productively scrutinize periods and events through lenses of material remains (e.g., Stein 2005), this chapter has presented Fort Apache as a physical and symbolic artifact of human interchange in which the site has been a constant while

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language, culture, technology, and political power have varied through time. Place emerges as a participant-witness, an entity that shapes, absorbs, and exudes experience. It is thus fitting that Fort Apache today is a hub for the protection and culturally appropriate use and promulgation of Apache language and culture. White Mountain and Cibecue Apaches and their many partners are making peace with the past, adding chapters to the history of Fort Apache and creating a new suite of place-based memories dominated by cultural (re)discovery, intellectual and personal growth, socioeconomic success, and intercultural communication and understanding. Fort Apache stands ready to remind and teach, as well as to play new roles in culture, history, and destiny.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This chapter is based in part on the National Historic Landmark nomination for the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School site prepared by the author and submitted by the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the US National Park Service. Karl Hoerig, Beverly Malone, Ramon Riley, and other members of the staff of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center and Heritage Program assisted in the identification of photographs and have otherwise supported the project. I thank Keith Basso for sparking and helping to sustain my interest in Apache places and Ronnie Lupe, Dallas Massey, and Ben Nuvamsa for entrusting me to pursue Fort Apache’s preservation.

NOTE 1. The individual elders’ words and perspectives presented here and in the following pages are derived from a series of interviews conducted in 1998 by Anke Berkhoff, with assistance from Edgar Perry, Beverly Malone, Ann Skidmore, Nancy Mahaney, and John Welch. The transcripts are available in the archives of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program, Fort Apache, Arizona.

REFERENCES Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Adams, Donald K. 1962. A Frontier Sketchbook. The Westerners Brand Book, 9. Pp. 65–72. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Corral of Westerners. Ashmore, Wendy. 2002. “Decisions and Dispositions”: Socializing Spatial Archaeology. American Anthropologist 104:1172–1183. Barnes, Will C. 1941. Apaches and Longhorns. Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchee Press.

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Basso, Keith H. 1971. Introduction. In Western Apache Raiding and Warfare: From the Notes of Grenville Goodwin. Keith H. Basso, ed. Pp. 9–25. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 1983. Western Apache. In Southwest. Alfonso Ortiz, ed. Pp. 462–488. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 10. William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 2004. Introduction. In Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You, by Eva Tulene Watt, with assistance from Keith H. Basso. Pp. xiii–xxvi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Basso, Keith H., ed. 1971. Western Apache Raiding and Warfare: From the Notes of Grenville Goodwin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bender, Barbara, and Margot Winer, eds. 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg. Bourke, John G. 1885. An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1891. On the Border with Crook. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 2003. The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke, vol. 1: November 20, 1872–July 28, 1876. Charles M. Robinson III, ed. Denton: University of North Texas. Brown, Lenerd E. 1963. The Arizona Apaches and Christianization: A Study of Lutheran Mission Activity, 1893–1943. MA thesis, Department of History, University of Arizona, Tucson. Bureau of Indian Affairs. 1940. Indian Service Trachoma Control. Indian Education 44(4). Child, Brenda J. 1998. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Collins, William S. 1999. The New Deal in Arizona. Phoenix: Arizona State Parks. Cruse, Thomas, Brig. Gen., Retired. 1941. Apache Days, and After. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Davisson, Lori. 2004. Fort Apache, Arizona Territory: 1870–1922. The Smoke Signal, no. 78. Tucson: Tucson Corral of Westerners. De La Croix, Horst. 1972. Military Considerations in City Planning: Fortifications. New York: George Braziller. Dunlay, Thomas W. 1982. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Edmunds, David R. 1995. Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895–1995. The American Historical Review 100:717–740. Goodwin, Grenville. 1937. The Characteristics and Functions of Clan in a Southern Athapascan Culture. American Anthropologist 39:394–407. ———. 1942. The Social Organization of the Western Apache. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hammond, E. H. 1923. Condition Report and Recommendations Regarding TR School by Supervisor of Indian Schools. NARA Documents (Record Group 75), Theodore Roosevelt School Records, 1923. Manuscript on file at the White Mountain Apache Historic Preservation Office, Fort Apache, Arizona. Hancock, James C. 1937. Trachoma Treatment at Fort Apache “Trachoma School.” Southwestern Medicine 21:81. Hoagland, Alison K. 2004. Army Architecture in the West: Forts Laramie, Bridger, and D.A. Russell, 1842–1912. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Ingstad, Helge. 2004. The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kessel, William B. 1976. White Mountain Apache Religious Cult Movements: A Study in Ethnohistory. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson.

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Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh J., and T. J. Ferguson. 2004. Ang Kuktota: Hopi Ancestral Sites and Cultural Landscapes. Expedition 46(2):24–29. La Farge, Oliver. 1937. The Enemy Gods. New York: Literary Classics. Laluk, Nicholas C. 2006. An Integrative Approach to Interpretations of an Historical Period Apache Scout Camp at Fort Apache, Arizona. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson. Linenthal, Edward T. 1991. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2003. The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Littlefield, Alice. 1993. Learning to Labor: Native American Education in the United States, 1880–1930. In The Political Economy of North American Indians. John H. Moore, ed. Pp. 43–59. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Mahaney, Nancy, and John R. Welch. 2002. The Legacy of Fort Apache: Interpretive Challenges at a Community Historic Site. Journal of the Southwest 44(1):35–47. Mason, Joyce Evelyn. 1971. The Use of Indian Scouts in the Apache Wars, 1870–1886. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Indiana. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Miles, Nelson A. 1896. Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles. New York: The Werner Company. National Park Service. 1969. Soldier and Brave. Washington, DC: National Park Service. Ogle, Ralph F. 1940. Federal Control of the Western Apache, 1848–1886. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Philip, Kenneth R. 1977. John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Radbourne, Allan. 2005. Mickey Free. Tucson: Arizona Historical Society. Robinson, Charles M. 2001. General Crook and the Western Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Robinson, Willard B. 1977. American Forts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Schuman, Stan P. 1993. Master Plan for the Fort Apache Historic Park. Prepared for the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. Tucson: CGD Architects. Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 1971. Grenville Goodwin: A Biographical Note. In Western Apache Raiding and Warfare: From the Notes of Grenville Goodwin. Keith H. Basso, ed. Pp. 3–7. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Steck, Michael. 1859. Letter report (no. 170) to James L. Collins, Superintendent Indian Affairs, New Mexico, dated August 12, 1859. In Report of the Secretary of Interior for 1859. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Stein, Gil J. 2005. The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Summerhayes, Martha. 1979. Vanished Arizona. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Szasz, Margaret Connell. 1999. Education and the American Indian: The Road to SelfDetermination since 1928. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Tate, Michael L. 1974. Apache Scouts, Police, and Judges as Agents of Acculturation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toledo. University Microforms, Ann Arbor. ———. 1977. John P. Clum and the Origins of an Apache Constabulary. American Indian Quarterly 3:99–120. Thrapp, Dan L. 1967. The Conquest of Apacheria. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 1975. Evolution, Use, and Effectiveness of the Apache Indian Scouts. Fort Huachuca Historical Museum Newsletter 4. Trennert, Robert A. 1990. Indian Sore Eyes: The Federal Campaign to Control Trachoma in the Southwest, 1910–40. Journal of the Southwest 32:121–149.

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Udall, Brady. 2001. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. New York: Vintage Books. US Senate. 1929. Improvement of Conditions on Indian Reservations in Arizona. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Utley, Robert M. 1984. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Watt, Eva Tulene. 2004. Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You. With assistance from Keith H. Basso. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Welch, John R. 1997. White Eyes’ Lies and the Battle for Dzil Nchaa Si An. American Indian Quarterly 27(1):75–109. ———. 2000. The White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program: Origins, Operations, and Challenges. In Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Kurt E. Dongoske, Mark Aldenderfer, and Karen Doehner, eds. Pp. 67–83. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. ———. 2007a. “A Monument to Native American Civilization”: Byron Cummings’ StillUnfolding Vision for Kinishba Ruins. Journal of the Southwest 49(1):1–94. ———. 2007b. National Historic Landmark Nomination for Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School. Washington, DC: Historic Sites Review Board, National Park Service. Welch, John R., Mark Altaha, Doreen Gatewood, Karl Hoerig, and Ramon Riley. 2006. Archaeology, Stewardship, and Sovereignty. The SAA Archaeological Record 6(4): 17–20, 57. Welch, John R., and T. J. Ferguson. 2007. Putting Patria into Repatriation: Cultural Affiliations of White Mountain Apache Tribe Lands. Journal of Social Archaeology 7:171–198. Welch, John R., Karl A. Hoerig, and Raymond Endfield, Jr. 2005. Enhancing Cultural Heritage Management and Research through Tourism on White Mountain Apache Tribe Trust Lands. The SAA Archaeological Record 5(3):15–19. Welch, John R., Nancy Mahaney, and Ramon Riley. 2000. The Reconquest of Fort Apache—the White Mountain Apache Tribe Reclaims its History and Culture. CRM 23(9). Welch, John R., and Ramon Riley. 2001. Reclaiming Land and Spirit in the Western Apache Homeland. American Indian Quarterly 25(1):5–12. Wesemann, Ralph F. 1938. Theodore Roosevelt Trachoma School, Fort Apache, Arizona: Report of School Work Accomplished School Year 1937–1938. Report prepared for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Manuscript on file, White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program, Fort Apache, Arizona. Wharfield, Col. Harold B. 1964. Apache Indian Scouts. Published by the author, El Cajon, CA. ———. 1965. With Cavalry and Scouts at Fort Apache. Tucson: Arizona Pioneers Historical Society.

CHAPTER 6

Claiming an “Unpossessed Country” Monuments to Ownership and Land Loss in Death Valley Paul J. White

INTRODUCTION Whether you take Highway 190 west or east into Furnace Creek, you’ll notice that the welcome signs for Death Valley National Park include the line “Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone.” The Timbisha Shoshone indeed have deep historical footprints in Death Valley. Their origin myths specify a place in the valley, Tumpingwosa, where they were born as a people.1 Archaeological evidence also affirms that people have lived in this part of southeastern California for some 10,000 years (Wallace 1977). The valley clearly has been occupied for a long time. That tagline on National Park signs, however, is a notably recent addition. With President Clinton’s signing of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000, the Timbisha Shoshone became one of the few Native American tribes to have a recognized land base within National Park Service lands. This act awarded 7,500 acres to the 300 members of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe. Though the majority of this acreage is located outside of National Park boundaries, the tribe also acquired rights to comanage a sizable portion of the park’s 3.4 million acres in partnership with the National Park Service. The recentness of this recognition suggests correctly that the fight for a tribal land base was a prolonged and difficult affair (see Burnham 2000; Crum 1998, 2002; Haberfeld 2000; Miller 2004; Rothman 2004). The land award ended more than two decades of direct legal action initiated by the tribe, but Timbisha Shoshone efforts to maintain footholds in their land base also have a much longer legal history. This history extends back to the latter half of the nineteenth century and is documented in property records through a few homesteads, Indian allotments, and other land and resource filings. Though few of these claims stayed long in Timbisha Shoshone hands, they signify an earlier official recognition of a Native presence in the 135

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valley. They have also left enduring physical traces on the land through the survival of property monuments and signs of historic land use. This chapter contends that far from being simple and innocuous indicators of land divisions, property monuments offer important insights into historic Timbisha Shoshone livelihoods, the legacy of land conflict, and indeed, other ways of thinking about this monumental landscape. Land claims offer a notable counter to enduring myths of Death Valley as a barren, inhospitable land. They also bring into focus an unbroken Timbisha Shoshone presence in the valley that historical treatments, emphasizing instead the establishment and growth of Death Valley’s mining industry, seldom acknowledge. The presence of Native land claims from the late nineteenth century demonstrates the long coexistence of tensions with non-Natives over resource ownership and use, highlighting the importance of seeing cultural interactions and conflicts over much longer time periods than “first contact” situations.2 But physical evidence also helps ground these encounters in the local landscape. Claim markers draw attention to particular coveted resources and the legacies of land use in specific locales, and as such, provide a key to understanding the experience of dispossession. The complexities of these interactions are explored here through an examination of changing cycles of ownership over Death Valley’s two Indian allotments. Land conflicts at both sites have a long history, extending back decades before their official recognition as Indian holdings. In both cases, the comparative reading of historical and archaeological evidence reveals incongruities between land use and land claims, discrepancies that help isolate particular processes of land dispossession occurring at the small scale. With it are folded far more complicated stories of assertions to place, of longer-term cultural entanglements, and insights into how historical processes responsible for transforming the North American landscape in profound ways were locally experienced.

CREATING A MONUMENTAL LEGACY When President Herbert Hoover signed Executive Order 2820 establishing Death Valley National Monument in 1933 (upgraded to National Park status with land additions in 1994), the federal government had neither negotiated with nor substantively acknowledged the existence of Timbisha Shoshone people. The 1.6 million-acre reserve nevertheless included the north-central and southern reaches of Death Valley from the valley floor to the ridgelines of the surrounding mountains, encompassing a large proportion of an even larger Timbisha Shoshone homeland (Figure 6.1). With its new designation, Death Valley joined a growing list of scenic areas set aside by the federal government beginning

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in the 1870s as national monuments and national parks. Most shared characteristics of ruggedness and remoteness. As scenic places, these landscapes were unrivaled; they contained landforms and vistas that were dramatic, inspiring, and monumental in scale. Here were sources of pride and identity for a nation many deemed to be lacking in the rich cultural heritage and traditions of Europe. As monuments, these places promoted and naturalized American greatness. They symbolized an identity hewn from a pristine wilderness (Nash 1967; Sellars 1997; White 1991:409–412). This natural wilderness, however, needed to be created. Just as in Death Valley, Indigenous groups were residing in places such as Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Glacier when the federal

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government declared these areas to be national treasures. The National Park Service-era ushered in a period of forced removal and relocation for many Native American groups (see Burnham 2000; Catton 1997; Jacoby 2001; Keller and Turek 1998; Spence 1999). The 150 Timbisha Shoshone living in and near Death Valley at the time of the monument’s formation successfully resisted relocation efforts, though this did not resolve difficulties. As “nonrecognized Indians,” the Timbisha Shoshone had no official status as an Indian tribe and no official land rights. With the formation of the monument, however, the Timbisha Shoshone found government oversight extending into myriad aspects of their daily lives. Monument staff assisted in improving some living conditions, but Timbisha Shoshone people encountered problems whenever their activities conflicted with goals to preserve and present a natural environment (Crum 1998, 2002; Fowler et al. 1994). The extension of mining laws to Death Valley four months after the creation of the national monument highlights the hypocrisy of this situation. The concession acknowledged local mining companies who were instrumental in promoting the valley as a tourist destination (Lingenfelter 1986:441–467), and it also fit with government efforts during the Great Depression to promote precious-metal mining as a source of employment (Miller 1996). Monument officials expressed concern where mining might compromise scenic vistas, but they otherwise saw miners as part of the valley’s living history. Death Valley’s connection with mining extended back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a wayward party of emigrants en route to the California Gold Rush (1849–1865) gave the valley its morbid name after being stranded there for a couple of months. The valley saw several mining booms in subsequent decades, though few enterprises were successful except in the extraction of nonmetals, such as borax and talc. Even so, Death Valley’s mythology as a desolate, inhospitable place grew with each rush. By the turn of the century, the valley was widely touted as a “baked and blistered place,” a land of “glaring whites and dead blacks,” or simply as “Hell on Earth” (San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1891; New York Times, July 27, 1891; see also Lingenfelter 1986). Mining promoters and speculators anchored these sentiments to the land by assigning devilish and macabre names to a host of other features. The National Park Service’s inheritance in Death Valley also included several miners who had first arrived in the valley during the boom years of the 1900s and who still prospected in its canyons. The monument superintendent saw these prospectors in particular as adding a “great deal of color to the locality” and constituting one of the area’s key attractions (White 1931). The Death Valley prospector was not separate, in this sense, from the nationalistic sentiments already threaded into national parks. He was both a survival and symbol of the

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Old West, an era celebrated in such widely varying forms as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis. Both championed this era as being seminal in the formation of an American identity (Moses 1996). With mining continuing into the 1970s, the industry has not surprisingly left a lasting legacy on the physical landscape as well as in the interpretation of Death Valley’s historic sites. Visitor stops include the sites of boomtowns, mining locations and processing plants, and even a few miners’ graves. Miners’ diabolical impressions of Death Valley are both preserved and caricatured in place-names. Visitors can enter and leave the valley via Hell’s Gate, they walk among unusual salt formations at the Devil’s Golf Course, and see the valley at a distance from Dante’s View, a dramatic overlook in the Black Mountains. These aspects are effective in showcasing Death Valley’s significant mining heritage, but they also place Timbisha Shoshone people in a peripheral position. Acknowledged interactions between Timbisha Shoshone and miners emphasize the first years of contact and less so the century and a half following, downplaying the perspective of people who continued to live in the valley and who weathered the classic cycles of boom and bust. Missing are more complex stories of persistence, accommodation, and resistance. These histories, too, have signatures on the land.

A MONUMENTED LANDSCAPE An unusual concentration of survey markers lies on the north side of Warm Spring Canyon several miles west of the canyon’s exit into Death Valley. Here, partway up a rocky bank and easily overlooked because of their surroundings, are two stone cairns, one of which shows evidence of four claims on the land (Figure 6.2). A vertical wooden post and a scatter of orange painted stakes mark two property boundaries at the eastern end of a lengthened cairn. Half a meter to the west, a metal stake labeled “PEMS” identifies the southern edge of the Pink Elephant Mill Site, first claimed in the late 1930s. Wire joins this marker to the fourth and earliest of all the survey monuments. This brass-capped iron stake, stamped “IA330,” demarcates the northeastern corner of an Indian allotment surveyed in 1935 and awarded to Bob Thompson in the following year. Looking toward the south side of the canyon readily identifies this allotment’s focus. A few hundred meters away is a tall stand of trees, the remnants of a historic mining camp, and Warm Spring, a perennial, good-quality water supply. The humdrum appearance of these claim monuments belies their profound connection with the historic division of the North American continent into units of private property. Whether expressed as mining claims,

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homesteads, grazing allotments, or Indian allotments, property markers reified specific cultural values that favored individual land rights, permanent over seasonal use, and the categorization of land according to (taxable) economic activity (Limerick 1987; Scott 1998; White 1991). Not surprisingly, the intimate association of property monuments with the nineteenth-century expansion of Euro-American enterprise across North America deeply connects them with Native American land dispossession. They signify processes through which Native American groups over the last two centuries lost sizable chunks of their land base. Like the allotment marker at Warm Spring, they also signify the larger system that Native people increasingly had to work within in order to maintain footholds in their ancestral and contemporary lands. The notion of private property embodied in the land claims at Warm Spring certainly differs from long-held Timbisha Shoshone systems of land management and use. Timbisha Shoshone people did not extend formal ownership rights to land resources, though land use was patterned. Like other Native groups in the Great Basin, Timbisha Shoshone people moved seasonally between places on the valley floor and mountain ridges as key food staples became available. The family constituted the primary socioeconomic unit, and each family tended to have a

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large territory of use that included summer and winter locales. Family territories were not exclusive, though they were inheritable and generally respected (Fowler et al. 1994). Non-Natives commonly simplified Timbisha Shoshone patterns of land use as being nomadic, believing that the resources of the desert were too scarce to permit any serious attachment to the land. Mineral rushes in the valley starting in the 1870s heralded a period of major economic transformation for the Timbisha Shoshone, beginning with the decimation of the subsistence base. Miners felled trees for firewood and construction purposes that Timbisha Shoshone depended on for nut and bean harvests. Miners stressed game resources by intensified hunting, and pack animals reduced seeds and grasses used for dietary, medicinal, and craft purposes. Many Timbisha Shoshone supplemented their livelihoods through available wage work as a matter of necessity (Sennett 1996). Importantly, too, the arrival of miners also went hand in hand with the division of Death Valley into parcels of private ownership. The General Mining Act (1866, 1872) enabled prospectors to stake 20 acres of mineral land per claim or five acres of nonmineral land for mill sites and gave them the ability to use above-ground resources existing on either type of claim. With water fetching as high as five dollars a barrel during rush periods in the early 1900s, perennial water springs quickly became coveted resources. Miners often filed water appropriations, a system developed in California to prioritize water use rights, but they also staked mining claims over water springs as a quick form of ownership. Sure enough, good quality water springs were also key sites of Timbisha Shoshone settlement. Because most prospecting endeavors in Death Valley were short lived, some Timbisha Shoshone families forced from water springs bided their time until the springs were again unoccupied. Yet the recurrence of non-Native interest spurred others to seek recourse through land laws as a means to both protect use rights and ensure a role in negotiating resource use. The status of most Timbisha Shoshone as “noncitizens” provided only a limited set of federal laws through which individuals could achieve these ends.3 The Indian Homestead Act of 1875 allowed Native people to apply for 160-acre parcels on surveyed land with the proviso that applicants denounce their tribal affiliation. Much of Death Valley remained unsurveyed through the twentieth century, so the more effective recourse was through a provision of the 1887 Dawes Act that permitted “nonreservation Indians” to apply for an Indian allotment. One hundred and sixty acres again represented the maximum acreage claimable for “agricultural” lands. The act is infamous otherwise for its role in the survey of Indian reservations and their reduction by 86 million acres over the course of five decades (McDonnell 1991).

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The full extent to which Timbisha Shoshone people pursued land rights through these laws is difficult to assess, in part because many inquiries were likely verbal. Two Timbisha Shoshone families owned homesteads in the Saline Valley as early as 1876 (Crum 2002; Moyer 1999). Agency records indicate a few unsuccessful land applications during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Tellingly, when Mary Scott, Johnny Hunter, Wilbur Patterson, Bob Thompson, and George Hanson sat down to discuss culture element lists with anthropologists Harold Driver and Julian Steward in the mid-1930s (Driver 1937; Steward 1941), all five had made prior inquiries into their land rights. Thompson was also involved at the time in an ownership dispute to a water spring that he had long used, and Hanson encountered a similar problem within a month of Steward’s visit.4 These examples suggest that Timbisha Shoshone individuals explored a range of possibilities for securing formal land rights from an early date. As seen with Hanson, Thompson, and others, land pressure from non-Native people seems to have served as a leading instigator. Only two Indian allotments were ever granted to Timbisha Shoshone individuals within the 1.6 million acres of Death Valley National Monument, one being awarded before, and the other after, the arrival of National Park Service interests. Far from being cut-and-dry cases of land inquiries followed by land awards, the applications of Hungry Bill (1907) and Bob Thompson (1934) both have complicated histories. As detailed below, government agencies vacillated in their recognition and support of Timbisha Shoshone rights, and these circumstances delayed the patent process. Moreover, because both applications were spurred by the actions of miners who claimed lands under the Mining Act, the effect of bureaucratic delays on Timbisha Shoshone applications had very real implications for land use and land access. Physical evidence reveals different strengths at each site in its ability to inform about these processes and their effects. Both cases, however, show disconnections between land use and land claims in ways that highlight significant inequities in the mechanics of different property laws.

POSSESSION, REPOSSESSION, AND DISPOSSESSION AT HUNGRY BILL’S RANCH The marker for the northeast corner of Hungry Bill’s Indian allotment is located high on a ridgeline on the north side of Johnson Canyon. The claim monument is difficult to locate even amid the thin scatter of pines, for it consists only of a one-inch-diameter iron stake jutting two feet from the ground and with a few stones piled loosely around the base.

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Unlike the marker at Warm Spring, the property corner is not stamped with an allotment number, the brass cap indicating instead that it is the junction of four one-mile-square sections within a township and range block. Another marker of similar description is locatable one-half mile to the west. Together these stakes define the northern boundary of a 160-acre property surveyed in 1924 and awarded in 1927, but applied for 20 years earlier. The convoluted path that Hungry Bill’s application took is an outstanding example of the difficulties that Native claimants often encountered with federal agencies, and the alarming inefficiencies that could result from the land application process being worked through different bureaucracies. Hungry Bill was approaching 70 years of age when he filed for an allotment to the place where he had spent part of each year for practically all of his life. Located on the Death Valley side of the Panamint Range, Püaitungani (Mouse Cave) is situated in the upper reaches of a well-watered canyon where a perennial stream courses fully two miles before sinking back into the gravel. The principal springs are located at an elevation of 5,000 ft. and touch the lowest reaches of extensive pinyon pine stands. The nuts from these trees, about four times larger in size than the pine nuts typically purchased in grocery stores, provided a core staple of the Timbisha Shoshone diet during the summer and fall months. The area immediately around the springs also had soil sufficient to grow a variety of crops, including corn and melons planted possibly as early as the 1840s (Fowler 1996:97; Wallace 1980). The value of this place was not lost on non-Native people, who rushed to the west side of the Panamints in the 1870s to claim silver deposits. Surprise Canyon, the epicenter of mining activity, was accessible from Püaitungani by a mountain pass. Among the stampeders to Panamint City was William Johnson, who, seeing better opportunities for making money than flash-in-the-pan mining properties, moved into Hungry Bill’s canyon to set up a truck garden to supply the mines. Johnson planted vegetables and cleared fields for alfalfa and likely brought in a few fruit trees to start an orchard. Johnson’s occupation, however, proved to be fleeting. The Panamint boom was over in a couple of years and Johnson moved on (Lingenfelter 1986:164). Exactly where Hungry Bill’s family resided during Johnson’s brief tenure—if they moved at all—remains unknown, but there is little doubt that they occupied “Johnson Canyon” afterward. Reports from the 1890s indicate that Hungry Bill and his family lived at the ranch on a seasonal basis and that they maintained many of the modifications that Johnson had made, including walled fields and fences (Figure 6.3).5 Hungry Bill’s ownership nevertheless remained vulnerable to the vicissitudes of mineral discoveries and land speculation. It was precisely these

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Figure 6.3 Present-day view looking west at Püaitungani in Johnson Canyon. (Photograph by Paul J. White.)

circumstances that led him to pursue formal, non-Native recognition of his land rights. In 1907, Clarence Eddy, a newspaperman from Oregon who styled himself as the “Poet Prospector,” sent reports to local newspapers about finding rich gold deposits in Johnson Canyon. Though Eddy recognized an Indian presence in the canyon, the tone of his reports emphasized their “wild” state. In so doing, Eddy drew upon established stereotypes that connected the exploration of Indian lands with adventure, danger, and immense undiscovered mineral wealth.6 Eddy interpreted the walled fields fancifully as a “fortress built of rough stone,” where he found fresh cartridge shells among “other evidences of recently deadly conflict.” The Indians, he postulated, “have probably killed for all of these years, and their victims have been charged to the heat and privations of the desert” (Bullfrog Miner, May 24, 1907). He also furthered that some of Death Valley’s most famous “lost” mines were probably located in this region and suggested that the Indians were guarding them from rediscovery. Under such headings as “Wild Men Attack Poet Prospector” and “Three Bold, Brave Men to Rout Band of Wild, Warring Redskins,” Eddy sought to drum up local interest both in his prospects and in evicting Hungry Bill. Eddy claimed several mining properties in the canyon and also staked claim to the canyon’s water,

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filing his notices at the local land office within the space of a month. He also stationed three men to patrol his property like armed guards (Bullfrog Miner, May 24 and 27, and June 22, 1907; Babcock 1907a, 1907b). The fanfare drew prospectors to Johnson Canyon from neighboring districts. The physical remnants of mining activity, however, support impressions that the canyon’s mineral resources received only short-term interest. Of the nearly 100 claims filed in the canyon during the rush, only one location shows evidence of hard rock mining, and this sixfoot-long adit driven into the canyon wall shows minimal development. No evidence of Eddy’s activity is evident at the main ranch where he is known to have constructed a claim monument. Several mining cairns are, however, located in side canyons east of the ranch and up to one-third of a mile distant from the main canyon where a few suggestions of open cuts and cleared faces occur. More substantive workings have yet to be identified, but some work in the canyon is supported by the presence of three arrastras—a rudimentary and low-cost milling device that crushed ore by dragging boulders around a stone-lined trough. At least one arrastra was powered mechanically, indicating a somewhat higher level of investment. Again, however, use of these devices in North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is associated more with prospecting activities than with sustained development work (see Van Bueren 2004). Hungry Bill attempted to oust the intruders with a verbal threat, reportedly telling Eddy, “This is the Indians’ country . . . The white man has taken all the rest: this is ours. We give you warning” (Bullfrog Miner, May 24, 1907). Hungry Bill also approached a local justice of the peace about the matter and received a notice to help in warning prospectors against trespass. The justice of the peace contacted the land office and these inquiries reached an Indian agent in Nevada. None of these actions proved effectual. Though the Indian agent agreed that the situation was dire, the Office of Indian Affairs refused to institute legal proceedings because Bill had no claim to the land other than occupation. The justice of the peace helped Hungry Bill file an application for a 160-acre homestead in the canyon, but the General Land Office rejected the application on the grounds that the land was unsurveyed. Administrators recommended that Hungry Bill refile his application as an Indian allotment under the Dawes Act (Asbury 1907; Babcock 1907a, 1907b; Larrabee 1907). Hungry Bill complied with this request, but the complications he had already experienced proved to be a harbinger of things to come. His application for an Indian allotment stagnated within the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and General Land Office for two decades.

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Over the course of this 20-year-long wait, the application passed through two local land offices, the office of the surveyor general, the central offices of the General Land Office and Office of Indian Affairs, and eight other Indian agencies. Subject to several misfilings, the coup de grâce occurred when the Office of Indian Affairs sent the trust patent mistakenly to the Fort Washakie Indian Agency in Wyoming—some 600 miles and three states distant from the actual property. When Hungry Bill’s daughter, Susie Wilson, received news of the patent in 1927, the events and people behind the original land application had long gone: Hungry Bill died in 1918. As for the miners who had followed the Poet Prospector excitedly into Johnson Canyon, they found only discolored limestone and nothing indicating promising gold deposits. Eddy moved on to other projects, eventually relocating to Utah where he published two books of poems about his Death Valley experiences, Ballads of Heaven and Hell (1922) and The Burro’s Bray (1923). Contrary to the passion of his newspaper accounts, odes to his actual and fabled encounters with Hungry Bill appear in neither of these poetic works. Hungry Bill’s descendants stayed at the ranch for more than two decades after the trust land patent was awarded. Following the death of Susie Wilson’s husband in 1949, family members made inquiries to the National Park Service about selling the property. The land was auctioned alongside several other Indian allotments in 1951 and later purchased by Death Valley National Monument (Lee 1951; Agnes Sudway (Elder, Timbisha Shoshone Tribe), personal communication May 2006). From this time, the National Park Service has managed this property under the auspices of “benign neglect,” an essentially zero-cost procedure that advocates preservation through natural decay. Despite 50 years of overgrowth, physical evidence still readily testifies to the historic Timbisha Shoshone presence in the canyon. Several habitation sites are discernable, and among them is the standing frame of an open-roofed brush shelter constructed of juniper and pine branches tied together with wire. Enamelware pots, lard tins, coffee cans, and bottle glass, among other domestic items found within these features and throughout the ranch, indicate the addition of mass-produced goods and foodstuffs into Timbisha Shoshone lifeways. Dates from domestic artifacts range from 1880–1910, 1920s–1930s, and 1942–1963 (see Pearson 2005:113–135), and support oral historical evidence of the ranch’s continuing use into the mid-twentieth century. Agricultural and ranching activities extend over a two-mile stretch of the narrow canyon, bookended by historic corrals located at springs west and east of the main ranch (Greene 1981; Pearson 2005). Intermittent sections of stone walls and fences infer that fields occupied one and one-half miles of the canyon floor. Land use activities are especially well preserved

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at the main ranch site, where stone walls demarcate at least two sizable fields and fences mark off smaller sections (see Figure 6.3). A plow and other agricultural implements indicate field preparation. Mature shade and fruit trees occur in several places about the ranch. Fruit trees, primarily figs, are planted in three clusters in the main ranch with a fourth cluster located further down the canyon. Two walnut trees, apples, and a few unidentified fruit trees are also present. A line of wooden posts within a grapevine patch east of the main springs suggests the presence of an arbor. At least some of these features may be attributable to the hand of Johnson. Indeed, one recent assessment notes that a single individual could probably have built all of the stone walls in the canyon over the course of one year (Pearson 2005:109–110). However, the known occupation of Hungry Bill’s family and their descendants for more than 70 years after Johnson directs our attention to understanding finer construction details. Walls show two construction methods: one built with stacked fieldstones and the other including a rubble fill. Some wall segments include both forms. Post-and-rail fences occur alongside those fashioned from barbed wire, bailing wire, and chicken wire. These differences are not differentiated cleanly in ways that would reveal either separate functions or the ranch’s expansion over time. Specific cultural “signatures” are difficult to pinpoint, but the variety of materials suggests upkeep, and that upkeep occurred over a longer time period than Johnson’s two- to three-year stay. Orchard trees provide an additional line of support. In addition to requiring tending over a longer term, their distribution in clusters across the site implies multiple planting episodes rather than a strictly commercial rationale that would favor planting in rows, by species, and in one place. The “1924” stamp on Hungry Bill’s property monuments, which is 17 years after Hungry Bill’s land application, is an important reminder of the marked difference in the processing time between this application and the month it took Eddy to file his claims. The physical location of allotment corners also reveals other significant differences in the mechanics of claiming laws. Whereas miners were empowered to stake and survey mining claims by themselves within certain guidelines, Indian allotments, like homesteads, required that official surveyors map property boundaries. Not only did this delay the process, but it also required that property boundaries relate to the national system of township and range lines established after the Revolutionary War for the settlement of western territories. The comparison of allotment boundaries and land use in Johnson Canyon reveals a striking juxtaposition (Figure 6.4). Hungry Bill’s property included the principal water supply of the canyon, but ultimately

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little else. Features outside of the allotment include the walled fields constructed between the main ranch and the lower spring, a lower fig orchard, and the corrals built at water springs west and east of the ranch. Indeed, only a small fraction of the property covers the canyon floor where agricultural and horticultural activities took place. The property’s southern line cuts across the main ranch to exclude several orchard trees and some residential sites. The balance of the allotment comprises steeply sloping ground dotted sparsely with pinyon pine and juniper. The presence of cut stumps demonstrates some historic use of this area, but the principal stands of pinyon, where pine nut collecting activity likely occurred most, are found farther south and west. Hungry Bill’s allotment deviates not only from the land actually used but also from the property desired. Hungry Bill’s homestead and allotment applications claimed land on the canyon floor for one and one-half miles west and east from the main ranch. Alterations were inevitable since the General Land Office encouraged property boundaries to comply with township and range coordinates, and a snaking three-mile-long strip is about as far from a preferred square as one can get. Even so, Hungry

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Bill’s allotment was clearly surveyed with the easiest possible description for a 160-acre tract—one-quarter of one section. Repositioning the entire tract a quarter mile south would not have complicated the legal description unduly, but this simple move would have included the main ranch in its entirety and brought the property boundaries more in line with Hungry Bill’s actual intent. Correspondence within the Bureau of Indian Affairs one year after the survey offers one possibility why surveyors took the more expeditious option. The superintendent of the Bishop Indian Agency believed that the ranch had been completely abandoned by Hungry Bill’s descendants and recommended that the allotment not be processed any further. Oddly unaware of the circumstances leading to Hungry Bill’s application, he also contended that the property was so remote that Indian use would never be questioned (Parrett 1925). Five years later, this very situation occurred at Warm Spring, also the site of an important water source and located just 10 miles to the south.

MUDDIED WATERS AT WARM SPRING Today, Warm Spring Canyon is recognizable mostly as a developed mining landscape. For fully two miles of the canyon, one passes beside large talc veins and the evidence of their working, including an open pit and adits sized for a truck to drive through. In front of Warm Spring itself are the remnants of a historic mining camp, including several cinder block buildings and a swimming pool constructed beneath shade trees. Distant from these structures, at the middle of the valley floor, is a largely intact 1930s-era gold mill. As suggested by the cluster of claim monuments appended to one of the Indian allotment corners (see Figure 6.2), the land around the spring is intensively monumented with mining claims. The vast majority of these relate to talc claims that Louise Grantham and her associates brought into production during the 1940s. Grantham was also a key figure in contesting Timbisha Shoshone ownership rights to the spring in the 1930s. Bob Thompson applied for an Indian allotment to Warm Spring in 1934, four years after Grantham reneged on a lease agreement with him for the use of the spring. Thompson’s application represented the fourth attempt by his family to secure formal ownership to Pabuna, the place they had used as a winter camp since at least the early 1800s. Thompson’s father, Panamint Tom,7 filed water appropriations on this spring and several others in his territory in 1896, though this only afforded priority for one year and Tom never refiled, perhaps seeing one proof on paper as evidence enough. In 1910, miners contacted the local land office on Panamint Tom’s behalf, complaining that a speculator had

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forced Tom off his land. Indian agents recommended Tom apply for a homestead, though the application was never perfected if it was ever filed. In part, Indian Office staff at the time expressed confusion as to whether Panamint Tom and his brother Panamint Bill (Hungry Bill) were the same person. Hungry Bill also claimed the spring six years later on behalf of Bob Thompson, following Panamint Tom’s death. Bill’s still pending application in Johnson Canyon likely voided this claim, for 160 acres was the maximum acreage permitted to any individual. By the time Thompson negotiated a lease agreement in late 1929, Grantham had established a base camp at the spring for her mining operations in the canyon. Thompson was likely visiting Warm Spring only occasionally at this time; he was working as a construction laborer in the northern part of the valley, and he also picked up jobs as a ranch hand and as a prospector, staking a few claims for himself (White 2006). Monument officials heard of Thompson’s intention to file for an allotment within days of his inquiries to the nearest Indian agent in Schurz, Nevada, some 200 miles distant. They greeted the news with considerable concern. The superintendent knew of two other verbal inquiries into water rights by Timbisha Shoshone and feared that accepting Thompson’s claim would result in other water springs slipping from monument control. Though the superintendent considered himself “entirely sympathetic” to the Timbisha Shoshone, he did not think that “either their needs or their equities justify the alienation of these extremely valuable springs which they have used, in any case, in the most casual manner in connection with their semi-nomadic lives” (Goodwin 1934; Parrett 1934; White 1934a, 1934b).8 Such sentiments discounted that Timbisha Shoshone families each used particular areas recurrently. They also mirrored federal agency attitudes that Native American residence in national parks and monuments was more a privilege than a right. Neither the superintendent nor the Indian agents wanted to give Thompson a fee patent to the springs, for Thompson had expressed an interest in selling it. The National Park Service filed an appeal with the General Land Office to reject Thompson’s application. The General Land Office had actually rejected Thompson’s application once on the grounds that it did not describe the property’s location fully enough, but the Indian Agency had refiled a version that met these criteria. The monument appeal was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1935, a special agent from the Indian Office accompanied Thompson to Warm Spring to look over the property and assess the basis of his claim. The agent concluded from interviews with a few long-time area residents that Thompson’s family had a proven history of occupation extending back 75 years. His inspection of Warm Spring also indicated that Grantham’s company had not been idle during this time. Miners had

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Figure 6.5 Bob Thompson in front of his residence and fig orchard at Pabuna (Warm Spring). Bedding visible in the shanty belonged to miners. (Photograph by C. C. Smith, printed in Smith’s Special Agent’s report, 1935.)

erected several wall tents at the spring and taken over Thompson’s small shanty located in the shade of the fig orchard (Grantham 1936; Smith 1935) (Figure 6.5). Grantham had also staked a mill site and a mining claim at the spring, and a small gold mill now occupied the canyon floor. The mining claim marked out a gold vein found east of the spring and a silver-lead prospect further west, and its boundaries included Warm Spring—situating the spring near the mining claim’s dead center (Figure 6.6). Surviving claim notices identify the southwestern corner and center end line of the Old Mill Stream Quartz claim staked over the spring in 1934. Curiously, the physical location of these cairns places the western edge of this claim some 150 meters away from the boundaries recognized on claim maps—an on-the-ground error likely attributable to the steep terrain of the south side of the canyon. The boundaries of the Gold Hill Mill site are also traceable through the identification of two construction elements. Though cairn shapes differ, a concrete-filled pipe occurs within each rock stack. Most obviously, a barbed wire fence

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Figure 6.6 Indian Allotment 330 and mining claims constructed at Warm Spring. The majority of cairns east of the spring pertain to talc claims worked successfully after the trial. Tent frame locations plotted from 1935 surveyor notes. (Produced by Paul J. White.)

with drill steels employed for fence posts runs the length of the claim’s northern edge, a fitting reminder to mine ownership. The General Land Office approved Thompson’s application in the following year, and surveyors subsequently marked out the boundaries of a 40-acre Indian allotment (see Figure 6.6). The greater distance between Warm Spring and a surveyed township and range line permitted surveyors in 1936 to stake the Indian allotment at Warm Spring in better keeping with Thompson’s developments. The allotment spanned the canyon, included the orchard, and positioned Warm Spring close to the allotment’s southern border. By the time of the survey, the monument superintendent had made an about face in support of Thompson’s claim. In part, the recognition than Thompson would receive a trust patent to the land assuaged fears of a quick sale, for the federal government would maintain oversight over the property for 25 years. Thompson received his patent in the spring of 1936 and the Carson Indian Agency, whose jurisdiction now included some oversight of Death Valley, subsequently requested that Grantham pay up for back rent or leave the property. Grantham did neither, and after three years the Indian Agency initiated court proceedings against

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the company. The nonjury trial was heard in the Northern Division of the Southern California District Court in April 1941. Government attorneys believed they had an open-and-shut case, but the court judgment surprisingly upheld the superiority of Grantham’s allotment. The February 1942 decision ruled that Thompson retained title to his allotment, but he could not assert ownership to the 20 acres that Grantham claimed for mining and milling purposes. The judgment had rested largely on the consideration that Grantham’s company had claimed unsurveyed land first, discarding the lease agreement as evidence of Thompson’s ownership because Grantham had signed it in good faith. Moreover, Grantham had followed the letter of the law impeccably. She had posted claim notices on the ground and filed the mining and mill site claims weeks later, well before Thompson’s inquiries. She had also filed proof of labor forms annually (necessary to maintain title) showing continuing work on the claims. To the courts, these actions demonstrated both Grantham’s legitimate use of and unbroken title to the property. Although a court-ordered specimen of the mining claim assayed at 0.065 ounces of gold per ton (at least five times poorer than the concentration needed to justify work at such a remote location), the vague definitions of what constituted a valuable mineral deposit afforded prospectors considerable wiggle room.9 Because courts favored written evidence of title above all else, Grantham’s documented activities over the course of the decade were sufficient to upset oral historical evidence that documented specific Timbisha Shoshone using Warm Spring since the early nineteenth century. The Department of Interior opted against filing an appeal on the grounds that Thompson’s property ultimately had little value. Grantham and Associates focused attention after the trial on the talc deposits found throughout the canyon, turning the property into one of the most productive talc mines in California. These operations continued into the 1970s. Thompson and his family were not so fortunate: property lines at Warm Spring reveal that all fruit trees and water fell within the bounds of Grantham’s mining and mill site claims. Indeed, the only improvements on Thompson’s Indian allotment existing outside of these claims are two small rock enclosures of unknown vintage near the camp (see Bergstresser and Burton 2000:25). Thompson died during the late 1940s, and his allotment was scheduled for auction in the 1950s during the height of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ termination policies. Indian Allotment 330 became part of Death Valley National Monument in 1954. The long use of Warm Spring as a staging area for mining operations has attenuated signatures of Timbisha Shoshone occupation. Camp modifications are known to have included the destruction of Thompson’s shanty and fenced garden, with the materials reused for

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firewood (Buell 1942). This marked assertion of ownership occurred sometime between the visit of the special agent in 1935 and May 1942, three months after the court decision upholding Grantham’s rights. A flash flood occurring in 1897, reportedly in “Anvil Canyon” but likely Warm Spring Canyon, may also have taken out much of the orchard and development that Panamint Tom had established in the canyon (San Francisco Call, August 1, 1897). Although there are no indications of historic Timbisha Shoshone dwellings or signs of extensive field systems, mining activities did not remove all traces of a Timbisha Shoshone presence. Immediately behind the mine buildings is an orchard of a half-dozen fig trees planted on either side of a short stream with a tangle of grapevines located closer to the spring. Historic photographs (e.g., Figure 6.5) attest to the presence of mature figs in the 1930s. These plantings not only recall developments at Hungry Bill’s ranch, but are also in line with accounts of Native land use at seasonal camps elsewhere in Death Valley and surrounding areas from the 1890s (Nelson 1891; Wallace 1980).

CONCLUSIONS: MONUMENTS REIFIED AND MUNDANE Death Valley National Park is a landscape widely known for its dramatic vistas, its mythos as an uninhabitable land, and its mining heritage. The park’s 3.4 million acres are in many senses a vast monument to colonialist perspectives about the nature of frontiers and mainstream ideas of American Western history. Recent signs installed in and around Death Valley acknowledge, however, that this place is also home to the Timbisha Shoshone. Despite this acknowledgment, and the fact that since 2000 the Timbisha Shoshone have been one of the few Native American tribes to have part of their land base within National Park Service holdings, visitors learn little about the history of possession and dispossession that preceded these developments. Evidence of this difficult history and Timbisha Shoshone perseverance nevertheless abounds in Death Valley, including in such unexpected forms as claim monuments. These small aboveground features, mostly stone cairns and iron stakes, identify land claims filed from the 1870s on by non-Native miners as well as by Timbisha Shoshone. Despite an outwardly monotonous appearance and often peripheral location to centers of activity, claim markers went hand-in-hand with the transformation of the North American landscape. Property monuments reified Euro-American values about land, prioritized economic activities, standardized land plots, and formalized who was eligible to file claims. Whether representing Indian allotments, mining claims, or other types

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of land parcels, these markers championed permanent over seasonal use, individual over collective ownership, exclusive resource use, and alienable rights. None of these accommodated or gave equal footing to codes of land tenure that the Timbisha Shoshone people had practiced for centuries. By delegitimating these preexisting systems of land ownership, and by supporting Native use rights only through Indian allotments or homesteads, property monuments signify key ways that Timbisha Shoshone people experienced colonialism on a day-to-day basis. This occurred irrespective of whether or not they themselves formally applied for property rights. Colonialism in this broad sense was imprinted on the land, partly through land divisions and partly by legitimating certain land uses, and such circumstances have also influenced how these places are remembered and memorialized. Occurrences in Death Valley draw attention to an experience shared among many Indigenous groups in North America and indeed globally, but they also highlight the importance of understanding colonialism’s localized and enduring contours (see also Given 2004; Gosden 1994). Few Timbisha Shoshone people ever sought property rights through these means, and even fewer saw their applications perfected. Significantly, too, even the few success stories reveal complexities and considerable shortcomings. Land disputes in Johnson Canyon and at Warm Spring extend back to the late nineteenth century. The legal histories of these sites reveal multiple claiming episodes by Timbisha Shoshone people, both for reasons of protecting land rights and seeking to maintain a role in negotiating resource use. Uncertain knowledge of legal procedures, distance from Indian agencies, and status as nonreservation Indians were common factors that frustrated these efforts, causing processing delays and increasing opportunities for rejection. And yet the recurrence of land disputes between different non-Natives and the same Timbisha Shoshone families over a period of more than 50 years is powerful evidence of enduring Timbisha Shoshone attachments to place irrespective of legal outcomes. Whether expressed through water appropriations, homestead and Indian allotment applications, or lease agreements, these continuing assertions to land ownership demonstrate how a conviction in inalienable rights was conveyed through the medium of an imperfect, less-than-desirable land system. Juxtapositions between property boundaries and physical land use at these two sites readily demonstrate that victory on paper did not equate cleanly with victory on the ground. Hungry Bill’s allotment privileged arbitrary landlines over actual land use in such a way that protected only a small section of the canyon that Hungry Bill’s family used intensively. Robert Thompson’s “victory” at Warm Spring in 1942 excluded any access to Grantham’s mining and mill site claims that covered the spring and orchard, even though significant discrepancies existed between the

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mining property’s actual and claimed development. Physical evidence indicates mining activity focused exclusively on one end of the claim and a small crew could easily have completed the limited underground excavations within a couple of years, yet the tentativeness of these operations contrasts markedly with their standing in court (White 2006). The Warm Spring case is a reminder that the Mining Act could be a powerful instrument of dispossession not only for securing mineral resources, but also for attaining land and especially water rights so crucial in the arid environs of Death Valley. Consequently, the comparison of land claims with land use in both of these cases highlights mechanics occurring within and between claiming laws that worked to disadvantage Timbisha Shoshone claimants. In so doing, property monuments help reveal a local experience difficult to see at the broader analytical scales typifying historical studies of Native American land dispossession. In short, they reground the study of land conflicts in the physical landscape. Just as the historic recurrence of land conflicts at these sites suggests, recent developments in Death Valley underscore the critical importance of seeing dispossession in the long view. Land loss for these Timbisha Shoshone families was not experienced as a onetime event, nor was it a one-way process. The Hungry Bill and Thompson families lived through cycles of formal and informal possession. Although neither of these allotments currently reside on official tribal land, they have returned to partial tribal oversight through their inclusion in the area now designated as comanaged lands. The process of interweaving Timbisha Shoshone obligations as caretakers and National Park Service preservation principles into a workable management plan is ongoing. The Timbisha Shoshone, of course, have been land stewards for a far longer time than the 70 years of National Park Service presence in Death Valley. If claim markers offer any indication, they are also no strangers to the perseverance and ingenuity needed to get this point across.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Funding for this research derived in part from the Canon Science Scholars for the Americas, a Brown University dissertation fellowship, and the National Park Service. I am grateful especially to Barbara Durham, Pauline Esteves, Madeline Esteves, and Agnes Sudway of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, and to Linda Greene, resource manager at Death Valley National Park, California. Lynn Johnson and Judy Palmer provided assistance and comments through various phases of this research, and Thomas Urban lent a welcome hand in the field. Sincere thanks also to Patricia Rubertone (Brown University), Susan Martin (Michigan Technological University), and Leah Morine Rosenmeier (Confederacy of Mainland Mi′kmaq) for their insights on shaping the manuscript.

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NOTES 1. Tumpingwosa is a volcanic crater located in the northern reaches of Death Valley. Translated literally as “Rock Basket,” the name references a moment in the origin story when Coyote opened the stopper of a water basket, giving people inside the basket an opportunity to run out and settle the land. Versions of this story are widespread among Shoshonean groups (see Steward 1943). 2. Though not treated in depth in this chapter, documenting the physical signatures of ownership and dispossession speaks directly to increasing calls by historical archaeologists to recognize Native American persistence through the longer term (e.g., Lightfoot 1995, 2006; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2005). Close study of longer-term resource conflicts, moreover, could readily contribute to understanding the persistence of resource disputes between Indigenous groups and mining enterprises in the present day. For overviews, refer to Ballard and Banks (2003) and Ali (2003). 3. Public land laws commonly extended citizenship to those who expressed their intent to become US citizens. This proviso, however, had important connotations for Native peoples, for citizenship status necessitated formal declarations of giving up cultural beliefs and practices. Timbisha Shoshone people, like most Native Americans, were not granted United States citizenship across-the-board until the 1924 Citizenship Act. 4. Applications by several Timbisha Shoshone are summarized in Fowler et al. (1995: Appendix A) and also mentioned in Kronquist (1939) and Goodwin (1934). Julian Steward’s activities in the Death Valley area are described in Kerns (2003:175–205). 5. Hungry Bill’s activities in Johnson Canyon are described in newspaper accounts (see especially Death Valley Prospector, November 1907, and “Trip to the Panamints,” Rhyolite Herald, March 12, 1910) and in the diaries of participants in the 1891 Death Valley Expedition (Bailey 1891; Coville 1891). 6. The sense of adventure and danger was romanticized in Buffalo Bill’s shows (Moses 1996), but is also expressed in traveler accounts. Rumors of mineral wealth were enough for prospectors to invade Indian reservations en masse, against which the government could do little. Examples are legion, but the 1870s rush to the Black Hills in Dakota Territory, then part of the Great Sioux Reservation, is arguably one of the most famous instances. Sioux resistance to these and other infractions culminated in the Battle of Little Bighorn. 7. “Panamint” indicates Tom’s position as a head or chief for that section of the valley. The duties primarily concerned arranging fall gatherings (see Stewart 1938:85, 246–248). 8. See also discussions of this case in Crum (1998:119–122) and Burnham (2000:96–101). 9. The Mining Act offered no definition of what constituted a valuable mineral deposit. By the 1900s, however, court rulings favored one that “would justify a man of ordinary prudence, not necessarily a skilled miner, in the expenditure of his time and money in the development of the property.” For this and other variants, see Thompson (1915); for trial proceedings, see United States v. Grantham et al. (1940–1941).

REFERENCES Ali, Saleem. 2003. Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Asbury, C. H. 1907. Letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 18 July 1907. Record Group [hereafter RG] 75, Carson Training School, 64468-07, National Archives and Records Administration [hereafter NARA], Washington, DC. Babcock, H. A. 1907a. Letter to William Dehy, 25 June 1907. RG 75, Carson Training School, 64468-07, NARA, Washington, DC.

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Babcock, H. A. 1907b. Letter to William Dehy, 7 July 1907. RG 75, Carson Training School, 64468-07, NARA, Washington, DC. Bailey, Vernon O. 1891. Diary. Vernon Orlando Bailey Papers, Series 1, Folder 4, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC. Ballard, Chris, and Glenn Banks. 2003. Resource Wars: The Anthropology of Mining. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:287–313. Bergstresser, Laura S., and Jeffrey F. Burton. 2000. Small Contributions to the Archaeology of Death Valley National Park: The Relocated Grapevine Housing and Warm Springs Canyon Mine Complex Surveys. National Park Service, Western Archaeological and Conservation Center. Report on file at Death Valley National Archives [hereafter DEVA], Cow Creek, CA. Buell, Charles. 1942. Letter to Don Foster, 9 May 1942. RG 75, Central Classified Files, 35483-34-Carson-313, NARA, Washington, DC. Burnham, Philip. 2000. Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks. Washington, DC: Island Press. Catton, Theodore. 1997. Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Coville, Frederick V. 1891. Diary, “Death Valley Expedition Itinerary.” Botany Library, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC. Crum, Steven J. 1998. A Tripartite State of Affairs: The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1933–1994. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22(1):117–136. ———. 2002. Pretending They Didn’t Exist: The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe of Death Valley, California and the Death Valley National Monument up to 1933. Southern California Quarterly 84(3–4):223–240. Driver, Harold E. 1937. Culture Element Distributions VI: Southern Sierra Nevada. Anthropological Records (University of California) 1(2):53–154. Eddy, Clarence E. 1922. Ballads of Heaven and Hell. Salt Lake City: Western Printing Co. ———. 1923. The Burro’s Bray: A Book of ’Pomes. Salt Lake City, UT. Fowler, Catherine S. 1996. Historical Perspectives on Timbisha Shoshone Land Management Practices, Death Valley, California. In Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology. Elizabeth J. Reitz, Lee A. Newsom, and Sylvia J. Scudder, eds. Pp. 87–101. New York: Plenum Press. Fowler, Catherine S., Molly Dufort, and Mary K. Rusco. 1995. Timbisha Shoshone Tribe’s Land Acquisition Program: Anthropological Data on Twelve Study Areas. Report on file at Timbisha Shoshone Tribal Office, Death Valley, CA. Fowler, Catherine S., Molly Dufort, Mary Rusco, and the Historic Preservation Committee, Timbisha Tribe. 1994. Residence Without Reservation: Ethnographic Overview and Traditional Land Use Study, Timbisha Shoshone, Death Valley National Monument, California. Report on file at Timbisha Shoshone Tribal Office, Death Valley, CA. Given, Michael. 2004. The Archaeology of the Colonized. London: Routledge. Goodwin, T. Ray. 1934. Letter to John White, 17 July 1934. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1933–1939, 28140 a-d, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Gosden, Chris. 1994. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grantham, Louise. 1936. Letter to Roy Nash, 20 April 1936. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1933–1939, 28140 a-d, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Greene, Linda W. 1981. Historic Resource Study: A History of Mining in Death Valley National Monument, vol. 1. Denver: National Park Service. Haberfeld, Steven. 2000. Government to Government Negotiations: How the Timbisha Shoshone Got Its Land Back. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24(4):127–165. Jacoby, Karl. 2001. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Keller, Robert, and Michael Turek. 1998. Native Americans and National Parks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kerns, Virginia. 2003. Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kronquist, E. W. 1939. Letter to D. C. Foster, 8 January 1939. RG 75, Sacramento Area Office, Land Operations Office, Coded Program Records, Misc. Panamint Valley 1937–1941, NARA Pacific Region, San Bruno, CA. Larrabee, C. F. 1907. Letter to Supt. Carson Indian School, 30 July 1907. RG 75, Carson Training School, 64468-07, NARA, Washington, DC. Lee, Ronald F. 1951. Letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 21 August 1951. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1950–1959, 28142, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship Between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60(2):199–217. ———. 2006. Missions, Furs, Gold, and Manifest Destiny: Rethinking an Archaeology of Colonialism for Western North America. In Historical Archaeology. Martin Hall and Stephen Silliman, eds. Pp. 272–292. Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology, 9. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Limerick, Patricia N. 1987. The Legacy of Conflict: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Lingenfelter, Richard E. 1986. Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion. Berkeley: University of California Press. McDonnell, Janet A. 1991. The Dispossession of the North American Indian, 1887–1934. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Charles W. 1996. The Automobile Gold Rushes and Depression Era Mining. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press. Miller, Mark E. 2004. Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Recognition Process. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moses, L. G. 1996. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Moyer, Wendell W. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the Saline Valley Indian Ranch. Proceedings of the Fifth Death Valley Conference on History and Prehistory, March 4–7, 1999. Pp. 5–18. Bishop, CA: Community Printing and Publishing. Nash, Roderick. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nelson, E. W. 1891. The Panamint and Saline Valley (Col.) [sic] Indians. American Anthropologist 4(4):371–372. Parrett, Ray R. 1925. Letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 8 October 1925. RG 75, Sacramento Area Office, Lands Transaction Case Files, Box 10, Panamint Bill Ind 121, Folder 1, NARA Pacific Region, San Bruno, CA. ———. 1934. Letter to John White, 1 July 1934. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1933–1939, 28140 a-d, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Pearson, Nancy E. 2005. Rock Walls and Wooden Fence Posts: Archaeological Inventory and Ethnohistorical Research in Johnson Canyon, Death Valley National Park, Inyo County, California. Tucson: National Park Service, Western Archaeological and Conservation Center. Rothman, Hal K. 2004. To Ride Alone in a Forever Unpossessed Country: An Administrative History of Death Valley National Park. Report on file at DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000. The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:425–446. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sellars, Richard W. 1997. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Sennett, Beth. 1996. Wage Labor: Survival for the Death Valley Timbisha. In Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives. Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack, eds. Pp. 218–244. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70(1):55–74. Smith, Cassius C. 1935. Special Agent’s Report to General Land Office, 12 June 1935. RG 75, Central Classified Files, 35483-34-Carson-313, NARA, Washington, DC. Spence, Mark D. 1999. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steward, Julian H. 1938. Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. ———. 1941. Culture Element Distributions XIII: Nevada Shoshoni. Anthropological Records (University of California) 4(2):209–359. ———. 1943. Some Western Shoshoni Myths. Anthropological Papers 31, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 136. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Thompson, J. W. 1915. United States Mining Statutes Annotated. U.S. Bureau of Mines, Bulletin 94. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. United States v. Louise Grantham et al. 1940–1941. Depositions and Judgment. Timbisha Genealogy Papers 1933–1938, 28138, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. Van Bueren, Thad M. 2004. The “Poor Man’s Mill”: A Rich Vernacular Legacy. IA, Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 30(2):5–24. Wallace, William J. 1977. A Half Century of Death Valley Archaeology. Journal of California Anthropology 4(2):249–258. ———. 1980. Death Valley Indian Farming. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 2(2):269–272. White, John. 1931. Letter to Horace Albright, 24 February 1931. Situation Reports 1931–1938, 30317, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. ———. 1934a. Letter to Ray Parrett, 19 July 1934. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1933–1939, 28140 a-d, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. ———. 1934b. Letter to Arno Cammerer, 19 July 1934. L30 Landuse Indian Village 1933–1939, 28140 a-d, DEVA, Cow Creek, CA. White, Paul J. 2006. Troubled Waters: Timbisha Shoshone, Miners, and Dispossession at Warm Spring. Industrial Archeology 32(1):4–24. White, Richard. 1991. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

CHAPTER 7

Landscapes of Memory in Wampanoag Country—and the Monuments upon Them Russell G. Handsman

On July 21, 1921, a motorcade left the Bourne Whaling Museum in New Bedford, heading for Plymouth, Massachusetts. The drivers, mostly members of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, chose not to travel by train. Instead they drove northeast, passing by Assawampsett Pond, an ancient lake and wetland system long used by Wampanoag peoples. Then in Middleboro they turned eastward, heading for the coast and Plymouth where they participated in a daily tableau, “The Pilgrims Progress,” in which costumed townspeople “tread the ground, sacred to the memory of those who made it holy, remembering their privations, their courage, their sacrifices for their faith” (Old Dartmouth Historical Society 1921:16). After all it was the Pilgrims, religious dissenters who, after fleeing England for the Netherlands, sailed on the Mayflower to coastal Massachusetts, arriving in November 1620, where, eventually, they established one of the early English settlements in the midst of Wampanoag Indian Country. For centuries the Pilgrim story has been told and retold, celebrated and deconstructed. Even today, the Pilgrims and their places still help shape a national identity that is ever changing. Pilgrimages to Plymouth were common the summer of 1921. One left New Bedford every week and you could ride along for a “nominal charge”—and many did to see and participate in the Tercentenary Pilgrim celebration, a series of walking tours, daily tableaux (Figure 7.1), dramatic readings, political speeches, and a spectacular pageant, “The Pilgrim Spirit,” staged outdoors at night in a 10,000-seat amphitheatre specially constructed near the site of Plymouth Rock (supposedly where the Pilgrims first stepped ashore), itself newly reinstalled beneath a protective canopy and behind a heavy steel grill and watered twice each day as the tidal surge moved through Plymouth Harbor along the “old Mayflower Channel,” recently improved by cutting and dredging (Kammen 1991:384–387; Seelye 1998:589–599; Snow 1993:13–20). 161

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Figure 7.1 The Pilgrim’s Progress, reenacted every day during Plymouth’s Tercentenary Celebration. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

The motorcades from New Bedford were one small part of a monumental spectacle, carefully planned and undertaken with monies raised from subscriptions (voluntary donations) and with an appropriation of $300,000 from the United States Congress. Monuments, both large and small, were everywhere in 1921, helping to shape the public’s understanding of the Pilgrim experience and serving as visible representations, staging sites, and sign posts for those who toured by automobile—that was the summer of the worst traffic jams long-time residents had ever seen (presumably up to that moment)—or for those who chose to make a pilgrimage by walking from place to place. There were guidebooks to help you find your way; some had appeared 50 years before the Tercentenary while others were more recent, including the 1916 Guide to Historic Plymouth (Burbank 1916). Published in Plymouth and priced at 10 cents, with a wood block print of a Pilgrim couple on its cover, this guide was both teacherly and pedestrian. By reading it, you could learn about the town’s then current status as a thriving industrial center and growing summer resort, its institutions and economy, and its modernizations: extensive sewers, macadamized streets and concretized sidewalks, a regular “city-style” fire department, the recently enlarged high school, and a newly built model farm

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prison where inmates labored daily helping the institution towards self-sufficiency. Mostly, though, the guide was a walking tour which began at Seaside, Plymouth’s rail station on the extreme north side of town adjacent to the harbor. You then proceeded southeast down Court Street, following specific directions and the map on the rear cover that showed points of interest related to the history of the Pilgrim settlement, significant individuals in the seventeenth-century community, and events which by then had become embedded in the nation’s consciousness. You needed help to walk Plymouth and discover the “Pilgrim Fathers” (“Where are they?” is the guide’s first line) because Plymouth then (and now) was not a Colonial Williamsburg. The actual, original site of the Pilgrim’s first settlement was beneath the bustling, commercial heart of downtown, and indeed its archaeological remains had largely been destroyed by the town center’s growth, making it difficult to imagine the Pilgrim lives and events written about elsewhere. Guidebooks helped you find your way through and beneath this urbanized place, leading you from site to site along a tour several miles or more in length. You knew you had arrived at one of the stopping places because they were marked with prominent statues or less visible engraved plaques like the marble tablets on Burial Hill where the “Old Fort” and “Watch Tower” once stood and where the Pilgrim ancestors and their descendants were laid to rest. From this prominence, the destination of the 1921 Pilgrims Progress procession, you looked down on Plymouth Harbor, where in 1916 Plymouth Rock—actually just the upper portion of it—sat beneath a colossal Gothicized canopy of granite (others called it the “leaky mausoleum”) supported by four sculpted columns, a baldachino completed in 1867 to provide a final, sacrosanct resting place for the boulder fragment that previously had been moved from site to site by the town’s residents in response to ideological needs or civic improvements (Seelye 1998: passim). In 1916 the canopy would have contained a metallic box with human remains presumed to be those of the first generation of Pilgrims. Some of the fragments had eroded from unmarked graves on nearby Cole’s Hill during a great storm in 1735; others were gathered from skeletons uncovered in 1855 by workmen digging trenches for water pipes (Avery and Doten Publishers 1888:42–44). But neither Plymouth Rock nor these remains stayed where they were seen in 1916. Instead, as part of the grand civic improvements leading up to the Tercentenary celebration, the canopy was demolished and the remains placed in a sarcophagus on Cole’s Hill. And the Rock? It was reconnected to its immovable base on the harbor’s shoreline, where it is today, and encased within a more elegant, petite structure. The

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local landscape surrounding it was beautified; more statues erected, mini-parks created, and trees planted. All of this resulted in a landscape of monuments, a space to be experienced—preferably on foot with new and improved guidebooks. When the members of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society visited Plymouth in the summer of 1921, they did so not out of nostalgia (they were not homesick) but to celebrate and honor the Pilgrims as courageous founders—perhaps not of religious freedom and democracy but of the “cradle of America,” in the words of a 1928 leaflet (Eaton 1928:8). Aside from the motivations beneath their commitment, and the inaccuracies within these statements, these 1921 experiences were shaped and deepened by the careful and conscious construction of a sacred ground. This was a pieced-together yet coherent landscape of special precincts and enclaves made more visible for tourists by the monuments built upon them. Here I use monuments to mean visible, material representations which honor and celebrate people (either as collectives or noteworthy persons) or values, or which affirm rightness or righteousness. Monuments both represent ideals and more actively idealize as they “emplot stories of origins,” “concretize particular historical interpretations,” or “embody the myths of beginning” (Young 1993:2–3). There are other ways to remember and keep memories beside and against monuments, and even underneath them. Monuments are set upon the land, and because they seem immovable, they assume an authority (one we actively and actually give them) by displacing memories and histories that are local, more complex, ongoing, and resistant (Lippard 1999). But the very fact that monuments are built upon the land implies an underlying stratigraphy and thus an archaeology and perhaps alternative, interconnected histories. The story here, of Pilgrim monuments and Wampanoag landscapes, is grounded in a specific place, region, and nation. Yet it is one that echoes any place where, during the millennium now ended, the construction of the Western world and our self-understandings are, in the words of Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1995:13) “neither foreordained nor enduring.”

OTHER PLACES AND MONUMENTS IN THE PILGRIM LANDSCAPE On the 18th of July, 1605, several canoes with Wampanoag people on their way home from offshore fishing stopped in the bay outside the present-day harbor of Plymouth. Anchored there was a ship; on board was Samuel de Champlain, who subsequently went ashore where he

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Figure 7.2 Samuel de Champlain’s map of Port St. Louis, the Wampanoag homeland around present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts. (Reproduced from The Voyages of Sieur de Champlain, reprinted in 1922 by The Champlain Society. Research Library, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.)

saw “many more Indians” (Champlain 1613 in Langton and Ganong 1922:343–346, Plate LXXIV). Champlain’s map of Plymouth, the place he named Port St. Louis (known to the Wampanoag as Patuxet), is both a sea chart recording water depths in fathoms and a bird’s-eye view sketched as if from above and afar (Figure 7.2). The drawing’s perspective is warped and flattened but the natural features shown are an accurate and still-familiar portrayal of the landscapes around Plymouth Bay, stretching north from Manomet Hill past the Eel River outlet and the sand spit at Plymouth Harbor to Kingston Bay and then Duxbury. But this is also a drawing of a cultural landscape showing the settlement areas and planting fields of an extensive Wampanoag Indian homeland. Before arriving in Patuxet, Champlain and his crew had explored and sketched other ancestral homelands on Cape Cod around Nauset (Malle Barre) and Chatam (Port Fortune). These landscapes were connected by well-worn paths and enduring kin networks to other homelands on the outer Cape and Martha’s Vineyard (Aquinnah), and in southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. All of these places comprised Wampanoag Indian Country, the social world the Pilgrims first entered in November 1620 (Figure 7.3).

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Figure 7.3 Map of locations and place-names in Wampanoag Country. (Produced by Lynn Carlson.)

There were no monuments representing this ancient world in 1921, nor were any of Champlain’s maps in the guidebooks. A statue of Ousamequin, the Wampanoag leader Massasoit, stood on Cole’s Hill, and references were made elsewhere to treaties he signed with the Pilgrims. The Wampanoag presence was not forgotten, but their world was made to seem much smaller than the one depicted in Champlain’s drawings. Significantly this diminishment persists today in another monument to the Pilgrims that began to be built in the 1950s. Plimoth Plantation, arguably the birthplace of the most significant theoretical strand in historical archaeology, began as an idea in the aftermath of the Tercentenary and became a reality in 1956 when 50 acres of land in the Eel River watershed were donated to the organization. It is today an acclaimed museum of “living, breathing history,” a place where all those monuments to the Pilgrims in Plymouth Center (three miles to the north) are brought alive—not by some feat of technological illusion, but through decades of insightful research and innovative interpretation.

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Here the Pilgrims become the real people they were in 1627: farmers, artisans, and traders living and working in a re-created settlement that is a virtual reality yet too small by two-thirds (see the museum’s history in Snow 1993:21–48). The Wampanoag presence in 1627 is also represented at Hobbamock’s Homesite where Native staff, some of whom are Wampanoag, are also farmers, artisans, and traders. The homesite is small, more like a hamlet than a village, with two wetuash (wigwams like the ones depicted in Champlain’s drawing), a garden area, and an outdoor cooking arbor. The “smallness” of this place is what visitors notice and remember, by way of contrast to the Pilgrim village located on the bluff above. There a fortified settlement of earthfast, impermanent thatched houses with kitchen gardens dominates the view, while the homesite below appears as a small island surrounded, exactly the reverse of the historic realities of the early seventeenthcentury Pilgrim world. Arguably this reversal matters considerably because it becomes an ideological frame within which narratives of Wampanoag Indian history are presented and contested, explored, and still misunderstood today. Plimoth Plantation seen this way is another monument in Pilgrim Country, very different from the ones at the heart of Plymouth’s Tercentenary celebrations, yet still a monument which “concretizes specific interpretations” and forestalls alternative understandings. Like all monuments, Plimoth Plantation is built upon a more ancient landscape of memories and local histories where Indigenous people lived and died long before 1627.

WAMPANOAG HOMELANDS ON CAPE COD: LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY AND HOW THEY CAME TO BE It was November 15, 1620, and a party of 16 men from the Mayflower was searching for freshwater, firewood, and food while their longboat was being refitted. A small group of Wampanoag came into view briefly but then ran away. The Mayflower party gave chase (or were led on a chase) for 10 miles, stopped for the night, and then continued in hope of finding “some of their dwellings.” Over the next few days, the period the Pilgrims later called the “First Discovery,” these explorations went on. Although face-to-face contact was never established with living people, the newcomers to the outer Cape saw pervasive signs of a wellestablished Native presence: well-worn paths, formerly used planting fields—some with “new stubble” from a recent harvest—caches of

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tools, corn storage pits filled to capacity, canoes, and a deer snare into which their leader, William Bradford, stumbled (see passages in Heath 1963:18–24). These wanderings and landscape sightings continued for another week or two with much the same results—lots of signs yet no real Indians— except that burial places, visibly marked and seemingly still visited, were found and then uncovered, with “the prettiest things” carried away. This happened more than once; in fact, many such grave sites were disturbed as the Pilgrims ranged and searched for more caches of corn—survival food for them as their stores of beer, butter, and meat were running out. By early December they were still exploring, looking for a site to settle that was “healthful, secure, and defensible,” still walking through Wampanoag Country but now on the middle Cape, and still encountering burial places. On December 7, while following yet another wellworn path, they came across a “great burying place,” one part of which was palisaded “like a churchyard,” in their words, with graves everywhere, some fenced, others with “an Indian house made over them but not matted.” Very nearby were more planting fields and wetuash frames, uncovered and unoccupied. The next day, while preparing breakfast, the party was attacked by a small Wampanoag force. Musket fire and arrow shots were exchanged without loss of life. This place became known to the Pilgrims as the “First Encounter” (Heath 1963:33–37). Although the Pilgrims made no maps or sketches, their accounts of the first few weeks of exploration, collected together and printed with other material as Mourt’s Relation in 1622, make visible what Samuel de Champlain and others had already seen: long-used and still-occupied cultural landscapes where Wampanoag communities farmed, fished, buried their dead, and watched as the newcomers wandered in search of their own place. The Pilgrims were good observers and describers. Yet like most outsiders, they could not really comprehend the depth and complexity of Wampanoag homelands, well-integrated social and sacred worlds that shaped everyday life and were structured by Indigenous traditions and ceremonies. In part, they were constrained by their onthe-ground experiences. How much of the connectedness of a homeland could be comprehended while walking or sailing? But even when they stopped and looked closely and recorded what they saw, their accounts lacked insight or at least any sort of questioning or deep reflection. Consider, for example, this scene from Mourt’s Relation which describes two “Indian houses” seen in late November 1620: The houses were double matted, for as they were matted without, so were they within, with newer and fairer mats. In the houses we found wooden

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bowls, trays and dishes, earthen pots, handbaskets made of crabshells wrought together, also an English pail or bucket; it wanted a bail, but it had two iron ears. There were also baskets of sundry sorts (more likely bags), bigger and some lesser, finer and some coarser; some were curiously wrought with black and white in pretty works, and sundry other of their household stuff. (Heath 1963:29)

Wampanoag people had woven the cattail mats and hemp bags, and carved the wooden bowls and trays; the Mayflower party admired their work, recognizing the knowledge and skills involved, and took yet again “some of the best things” with them. But what they could not have comprehended, or even started to ponder in that moment, were the weblike connections amongst these still-used artifacts and specific social relations of production (age, gender, and clan relations), long-practiced traditions of resource use, ongoing ecological histories, and archives of Indigenous knowledge or cultural wisdom. At a deeper level, these outsiders, most of whom were urban dwellers, could never have imagined that the Native peoples they chased were moving through socially constructed and meaning-filled landscapes that had, over long periods of time, been constituted and altered by Wampanoag experiences and beliefs, attachments, uses and reuses, traditions, and innovations. Their ancestral homelands were complexly layered, quiltlike archives woven in part through active processes of memory making and memory keeping. If we believe Edward Winslow, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, evidences of these remembering processes were pervasive across Wampanoag Country in the seventeenth century: Instead of records and chronicles, they take this course. Where any remarkable act is done, in memory of it, either in the place or by some pathway near adjoining, they make a round hole in the ground, about a foot deep, and as much over; which when others passing by behold, they inquire the cause and occasion of same, which once being known, they are careful to acquaint all men, as occasion serveth, therewith; and lest such holes should be filled or grown up by any accident, as men pass by, they will oft renew the same; by which many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory. (Winslow 1996[1624]:66)

For the Wampanoag of that time, and for their ancestors, landscapes are memory, and the features built above the land, or dug into it, or even those that are of the land are “storied,” given voice by the living, generation after generation. The stories might be about survival or loss, community relations and cultural values, or the importance of moral norms (and what happens when those norms are forgotten). Or they might be about the origins of a people or the doings of culture heroes—giants like Maushop who walked the land long before the 1620s creating stillrecognizable features. Or stories might be about individuals’ deeds and

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misdeeds, or significant events like the comings and goings of newcomers (see Simmons 1986 for glimpses of the Wampanoag archive). As the stories are voiced again and again, a collective archive is maintained and passed on: beliefs, knowledge, practices, experiences, and interpretations. Speaking and telling are critical to the remembering, but so too is “doing,” including the construction of aboveground features and the use of special places to extend and enrich memory making and memory keeping. The foot-deep holes (and the mounds of earth beside them), and the graves with fences or wetuash frames rising above them, are memorials in Wampanoag Country. Unlike monuments, memorials are rooted in local communities and become storied through the life cycles, experiences, and histories of the people who lived around them. Memorials help ritualize remembrance—but only for the locals and their relations. They are truly immovable, staying put because their meanings are inextricably connected to their specific landscape placements. Memorials cannot displace local histories or overwhelm local knowledges, as they are imbued with both. They facilitate community persistence, becoming pathways which link past to present, thereby connecting forever the living and the dead. People make and remake memorials to remember and be remembered. Memorials, and the process of “storying” the landscape, fix ancestral homelands as permanent, meaningful places with complex archaeological histories (Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006). Long before the seventeenth century, Wampanoag Indian homelands stretched from Provincetown (where the Pilgrims first made landfall) and Truro on the outer Cape southwards past Brewster and Harwich to Barnstable, Mashpee, and beyond. Important core areas on the middle Cape overlapped from Wellfleet and Eastham on Cape Cod Bay to Nauset and Chatham on the Atlantic side, where the Mayflower party saw the “great burying place” in early December 1620 (Grumet 1995:124–126). Earlier Champlain had drawn two landscape views here in 1605, including one at Misfortune Harbor (Chatham) where Wampanoag people killed four men who were then buried by the French, unearthed by the Indians, and then reburied (Champlain 1613 in Langton and Ganong 1922:420–423). The homeland areas so visible in Champlain’s maps, and elsewhere in southern New England, conventionally are thought to be relatively recent in origin, dating to the advent of corn horticulture about 1,000 years ago (McBride and Dewar 1987), or to the later 1500s and the intensification of trade with Europeans (Ceci 1982). But more recent archaeological studies in both riverine and coastal settings have reconstructed much longer histories, documenting the emergence of regional sedentism and enduring patterns of resource use more than 5,000 years

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ago (Bernstein 1993; Bragdon 1996; Handsman and Lamb-Richmond 1995; McBride 1994). In the middle Cape region, archaeological evidences of sedentism and homeland formation may appear even earlier, between 8000 and 6000 BP, as rising sea levels and water tables created estuaries and freshwater wetlands along the coastal lowlands. The diversity of food resources in these settings, when integrated with those available in the upland oak forests nearby, enabled Native peoples to settle into small regions seasonally, intensively using resources year after year and leaving behind linear aggregations of lithic assemblages which now seem boundless (Dunford 1999). By 5000 BP, this process of “getting-to-know” places was intensifying on the middle and outer Capes during a long cooler and wetter climatic period in which the diversity of forest resources (both food crops and mast) increased as beech, chestnut, and other hardwoods populated an abundant system of freshwater wetlands (Winkler 1985). Over the next several millennia, the archaeological record reflects patterns of long-term sedentism, population growth, and the year-round exploitation of diverse habitats and specialized resources such as shellfish (McManamon 1984). By the fourth millennium, these ancestral Wampanoag traditions of living and working were being fixed to the land by the visible signs of everyday life archaeologists call surface scatters, sites, and midden deposits. These are all manifestations of taskscapes (Ingold 1993), places where people lived, hunted and fished, and collected raw materials and plants generation after generation. As the knowledge of such places and their resources became familiar and more integrated into the rhythms and routines of everyday life, some locales were named and storied. Over time, the assemblages of tools used at such sites and their spatial organization would have been remarkably consistent, showing few signs of stratigraphic discontinuities. Archaeologically, taskscapes appear on the middle and outer Cape by 3500 BP, as evidenced at shell midden sites where there is little visible stratigraphic change yet suites of radiocarbon dates range from the Late Archaic to the Middle Woodland periods, a span of more than 20 centuries, almost 70 generations (Borstel 1984). As taskscapes were created, helping to tie homelands to landscapes, processes of memory making and memory keeping were also bound to specific locations. Periodically during the third millennium, Wampanoag people from overlapping homelands would gather at long-used meeting places. Fires would be built and used to cremate bones of the recent and not-so-recent dead, together with some of the deceased’s possessions and artifacts of the still living: hammerstones, axes and adzes for woodworking, pestles used to grind seeds and nuts, projectile points, and knives. Deposits of the cremated materials would then be buried in communal

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pits, sometimes with sets of finely chipped bifaces. The site of one such meeting place, known as the Coburn cemetery, is located on the middle Cape (Dincauze 1968:66–70). Places like this one evidently were actively used memorial sites, periodically returned to over centuries (Leveillee 1999) so that ceremonies could be conducted renewing the connections amongst the living and the dead. The locations and meanings of such sacred places became part of a cultural archive and were left unmarked by any standing monument. About 1800 years ago, a turning point was reached in the long, continuous history of Wampanoag homelands on the Cape. Archaeological evidence from the later Middle Woodland period suggests living areas and taskscapes became more geographically restricted and intensively used (McManamon 1984). These changes are partly a response to the ongoing development of the Cape’s modern estuaries as series of narrow, discrete, and rich ecological zones were compressed against the shorelines by rising sea levels. During the same time, the diversity of hardwood habitats and the abundance of ecological edges increased as Native peoples seasonally set fires to clear the ground and encourage white-tailed deer populations, a practice which was intensified after 1000 BP to prepare spaces for planting (Parshall et al. 2003; Winkler 1985). In this time of change, some settlement areas on the middle and outer Cape were consolidated and community identities built around specific named places. These territorial identities were grounded and remembered through local genealogies which connected these places to sachems—real people (mostly men) with consensual authority over land and resource use, diplomacy, and justice (Bragdon 1996:140–155). As sachemships were embedded in a matrilineal system, clan relations wove local groups and dispersed communities together within and between homelands, shaping processes of exchange and redistribution, and ceremonies of renewal and remembrance. The complexity of this world and the diversity of its social and political relationships are represented by the range of mortuary practices encountered by the Mayflower party on the Cape. The burial sites of important sachems were fenced to set them apart within extensive community cemeteries like the one seen in December 1620. Here people from different clans—yet the same local community—would be buried, associated after death in the way they had lived. Periodically bones from some of the long-dead “outsiders,” together with the remains of the more recently deceased, would be gathered from community cemeteries and carried to special places where clan-based ceremonies of remembrance were undertaken. Then, in specially prepared ossuary pits, cremated and bundled remains would be laid to rest (McManamon and Bradley 1988). Over the centuries, the bones of many Wampanoag would be buried and reburied

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in more than one place, so the ancestral spirits of the dead helped weave together the homelands and communities across Wampanoag Country (Peters 2006). Many of these burial places were subtly marked by standing memorials—not monuments—which helped keep alive the stories as people visited and revisited. It is no wonder then that the Wampanoag people who killed four men from Champlain’s party in 1605 did not want them buried in a visible and well-marked place. A cross had been erected above their graves by the French; it was removed and the bodies unearthed to be cremated. So incensed were the French, they disembarked and reburied their dead (Champlain 1613 in Langton and Ganong 1922:420–423). Almost certainly after they left, the Wampanoag returned, unearthed the dead, cremated the bodies, and buried the remains in round holes “about a foot deep and as much over.” As the Pilgrims wandered the Cape in search of a home, they must have passed by such memorials without recognition.

THE ANCESTRAL HOMELANDS AROUND PATUXET: BEFORE AND AFTER 1620 By December 12, 1620, less than a week after the First Encounter, a small group from the Mayflower, using their long boat, sounded the bay at present-day Plymouth and then marched “into the land and found diverse cornfields.” Their accounts of this place talk of fine islands, well wooded, and of the bay with its “innumerable store of fowl” and “fish in their seasons,” and of an “abundance of mussels the greatest and best that we ever saw.” Clearly this is written at some later point, after they had become familiar with local food resources and made a commitment to settle permanently. There is no evidence this place was ecologically more diverse or productive than sites on the Cape, although there were “four or five small running brooks of very sweet fresh water” (Heath 1963:38–39). About a week later (evidently the main Pilgrim company had not yet come ashore), more explorations were undertaken during which the party “saw not an Indian nor an Indian house,” only finding “where formerly [there] had been some inhabitants, and where they had planted their corn.” Another week went by spent in further reconnaissance; they even sailed part way up the Eel River but found the land too wooded—not cleared enough for planting—and too far removed from fishing, which was to be a source of income for their sponsors. Soon after, a site was chosen on high ground overlooking the bay where downtown Plymouth is today and where there was “already a great deal of land cleared.” They

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resolved to begin building houses, not yet sure “what people inhabit here . . . for as yet we have seen none” (Heath 1963:35–41). This was the same cultural landscape where some 15 years earlier French explorers had encountered numerous Wampanoag people and where Samuel de Champlain had sketched their settlements. But they were not the first non-Natives to see this landscape. In fact more than twenty recorded European expeditions had explored the coastlines around Plymouth before 1620, including the 1603 voyage of two vessels commanded by Martin Pring. His men came ashore for seven weeks, during which they harvested a boatload of sassafras and traded with Wampanoag people, “at one time one hundred and twentie at once” (Howe 1953:8). Towards the end of their stay, some heavily armed Natives surrounded a work party ashore. There was no loss of life but the woods of sassafras were set afire. That very same day, the remainder of the Pring party departed, likely to the delight of the Wampanoag. Certainly the burned-over district must still have been a memorial when Champlain arrived less than two years later. In the two months after landing, as the Pilgrims set to building their plantation, they still saw no Indians, only signs of their presence, including “great smokes of fire.” Seemingly no Wampanoag lived at Patuxet then, and this may have been due to an introduced pathogen. This was the story the Pilgrims heard from an Abenaki man in March 1621, who told of an “extraordinary plague” some four years earlier that no local Native, he said, had survived. This, the Pilgrims said, explained why they “had found none” (meaning Indians) and therefore why “there is none to hinder our possession” (Heath 1963:51). Yet it seems as likely, given the evidence of recently harvested corn fields, “abandoned” wetuash, and set fires—all things the Pilgrims did observe around Patuxet—that Wampanoag people inhabited this place and still used its resources in 1621. Their invisibility may have been a function of how and when they lived in this homeland: residing for much of the year in small, dispersed hamlets near coastal estuaries and removing during the coldest months to winter campsites located nearby in more protected inland settings alongside rivers and wetlands (a similar pattern in Narragansett Indian country is described by Leveillee et al. 2006). If the Pilgrims had landed in Patuxet just a few months earlier, say mid-September, more Wampanoag people would have been in residence nearer to the shoreline and thus more visible. As was true on the Cape, the newcomers’ explorations and experiences at Patuxet were shaped by the cultural rhythms and ongoing histories of an ancestral homeland, the core area of which, some 15 sq. mi. in extent, stretched inland from the bay and encompassed an extensive series of ancient lakes and ponds in the present-day towns of Plymouth

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and Carver. Although the area is not as well known archaeologically as the Cape, its ecological diversity likely enabled patterns of sedentism as early as 8,000 years ago. Extensive freshwater wetlands played a key role in this process, becoming more diverse and rich ecosystems as their water levels rose in response to climatic change (Shuman et al. 2001). Around Annasnappet Pond, a wetland complex in Carver, the Middle Archaic archaeological record (circa 8000–6500 BP) includes extensive settlement remains and a mortuary feature, signaling this place’s importance in an emerging landscape of memories (Cross 1999). Certainly by 4000 BP the processes of homeland formation had been completed as the ancestors of the seventeenth-century Wampanoag intensively used the resources available in coastal estuaries, inland wetlands, and nearby forest communities. This adaptation strengthened the longterm connections between Wampanoag communities and this landscape, connections which would have been further cemented by the advent of corn horticulture about 1,000 years ago. As early as 800 BP the Wampanoag homeland around Patuxet would have looked familiar to Martin Pring and Samuel de Champlain: dispersed hamlets with gardens, more extensive planting fields, patches of old-growth forest (maintained for their mast crops which attracted wildlife for hunting), younger woods, and even meadows where once there had been farmed land. Burned-over districts were also common as fires were set to clear horticultural fields and to encourage the growth of shrublands, thereby increasing white-tailed deer populations. Fires also renewed the productivity of berry crops in pitch pine–scrub oak communities (evidence of Native-set fires from the sedimentary records of two ponds outside Plymouth is discussed in Patterson and Backman 1988:611–613). This homeland was a quilt of taskscapes, individual sites known and named, where specific food resources and raw materials were gathered and processed, animals were hunted, and fish, marine mammals, and shellfish were collected. Stories about these sites abounded and as they were told, an archive of cultural wisdom and practices was enriched and passed on. Certainly the Pilgrims had no knowledge of these taskscapes or stories in their first months at Patuxet. Yet by the summer of 1621, only a few months after first talking with their Abenaki informant, it seems as though they were becoming more familiar with the language and workings of Wampanoag homelands. Native place-names appear frequently in the later accounts in Mourt’s Relation. In the same way, Edward Winslow’s Good Newes from New England (1624) is filled with ethnographic detail concerning Wampanoag traditions and the daily interactions between Plymouth colonists and Natives. Proper names are used for Wampanoag leaders, trappers and traders, guides, and

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interpreters, and it is Winslow, with assistance from Native informants, who explains the meaning of all those foot-deep holes. Clearly Wampanoag and other Native peoples were an integral part of the Pilgrim’s world after 1620, and for some time what happened in that world was largely shaped by ongoing histories within the Patuxet homeland and elsewhere. Seen from above and afar in 1627—imagine Champlain’s 1605 sketch (see Figure 7.2) with a small, diamond-shaped fortified settlement on a hill overlooking Plymouth Bay—Plimoth Plantation then was “an island surrounded” by a sea of Native communities, taskscapes, sacred sites, and memorials. Looking more closely, one would notice colonial fields and pastures outside the settlement’s walls— small patches, totaling perhaps 150 acres, sown into a Wampanoag quilt that was, by comparison, a world without end, or perhaps a new world for all (Calloway 1997). In this world the Wampanoag were not a people without histories nor were they people who abandoned their traditions simply because they traded with the Plymouth colonists, providing furs, fish, venison, and corn in exchange for beads, metal tools, kettles, and glass bottles. Outside the plantation’s walls, Wampanoag people continued to live and work and mourn their dead largely beyond the view of the colonists, who even when they were “in the midst of them, saw no houses” (Heath 1963:71). Across the countryside Native people continued to farm, using a system of shifting horticulture which involved clearing garden plots and larger fields; using them intensively; and then moving on to a nearby locality, leaving former gardens to become open meadows and then shrub-filled old fields (Cronon 1983:127–156). Fires were still set to enhance wildlife and to clear wooded areas for horticulture, a practice also used by the colonists (Patterson and Backman 1988:613). In the generation after 1620, the ecological diversity of the Patuxet homeland likely increased, providing Wampanoag people with extensive opportunities to gather many different plants, including roots and tubers which grew wild. And of course there were now hogs to hunt, as the colonists let them run roam freely to feed on mast crops and other food. Seemingly this intertwined economy of traditional farming, hunting, and gathering, and of trading with and working for the colonists could have persisted for generations. But by the 1650s, changes were underway which led inexorably to conflicts. More and more land was now owned by individual colonists, who were expanding beyond the plantation’s bounds and creating new settlements in response to population growth and the emergence of new markets to the north around Massachusetts Bay (Rutman 1967:3–27). William Bradford himself described the settlement change this way: “By which means they [the colonists] were scattered all over the Bay [and Plymouth Colony] quickly and the town in

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which they lived [the initial nucleated plantation at Plimoth] compactly till now was left very thin and in short time almost desolate” (quoted in Wood 1997:22). Many of the resulting land transactions and lease agreements involved Wampanoag people who did not hesitate to complain and seek legal redress if injustices were done. So many petitions and memorials were received by the Plymouth General Court—memorials here meaning “statements of fact expressed to the Court in the form of a petition of complaint” (Oxford English Dictionary 1971)—that a law was passed in 1643 making it “illegal to purchase, rent or hire any lands, herbage, wood or tymber of the natives” without prior consent (Rhonda 1974). Still more and more of the Patuxet and other homelands were alienated from the Wampanoag, whose rights in the General Court became increasingly restricted in the 1660s and 1670s (Aultman 2001; Weinstein 1983:144, 204–212). Cooperative relationships declined, tensions increased, and justice was served unequally. Armed rebellion (King Philip’s War) began in late June 1675 elsewhere in Wampanoag Country, threatened Plymouth in July, and then spread west and north to Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts before finishing back in Plymouth on August 17, 1676, when the head of the Wampanoag leader Metacom (King Philip) was staked on a tall pole for public viewing— perhaps the first true monument erected there (Lepore 1998). There are no statistics to tell us how many Native people lost their lives in the rebellion, nor do we really know how many Wampanoag in Plymouth were swept up by Captain Benjamin Church’s force in early July 1676 to be sold as slaves. But what is known is that Wampanoag people continued to live throughout Plymouth Colony in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a fact that so worried colonial leaders they passed a law in July 1682 creating an overseer system—even though there were no reservations—and requiring Indians to have permits in order to “remove from one place to another,” something they did regularly (as a cultural practice) for subsistence reasons or to visit kin and attend ceremonies (Pulsifer 1861:252–255). Well into the eighteenth century, Wampanoag communities persisted throughout Plymouth Colony, including five small settlements stretching from Herring Pond, in the distant southeastern corner of Plymouth township, to Plain Dealing, a small enclave located in and around the farm of Josiah Cotton several miles north of Plymouth Village. There were even Native families living near the mouth of the Eel River in the vicinity of present-day Plimoth Plantation (see locations on Figure 7.3). The Native people who lived in these communities were mostly Wampanoag who remained connected to their homelands and landscapes of memory even as they worked as wage laborers and indentured

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servants, continued traditional subsistence practices, and attended Christian services sometimes held in the midst of wetuash (Winiarski 2004). They no longer needed permits to move from place to place in pursuit of food or work or salvation. And as they walked or rode, they sometimes passed large boulders standing above the landscape, visible and solitary. They would stop and place small stones, or pieces of brush if stones were not plentiful, on top or next to the boulder. When asked, they explained “they do so because they have been taught that it is right to do it, or because their fathers did so before them” (1807 account quoted in Crosby 1993:38; see also Butler 1946 and Simmons 1986:251–255). Such memory piles remained in Wampanoag Country into the 1920s (Speck 1921). Memories and memorials still resided in the Wampanoag homelands bordering Plymouth Bay in the early 1800s. There were no monuments built for the Pilgrims yet; those begin to appear in a little more than 50 years, about the same amount of time it took for the Wampanoag to become a minority in their homeland once the Pilgrims had started their plantation.

CELEBRATING PLYMOUTH’S MONUMENTS: TOURISM AND SOUVENIRS It is now December 21, 1870, and the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth has organized a celebration to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing at Patuxet—though the Wampanoag place-name is never mentioned. The day is cloudless and mild for early winter and the trains are running on time from Boston, bringing visitors who join residents for a mid-morning church service of hymns, prayers, and selected readings, including one from Psalm 107 (“And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation; And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase”). An early-afternoon dinner followed at the rail station on the north side of the village, attended by 900 people who arrived to find on each place setting “five kernels of corn illustrating the extremity to which the Pilgrims were at one time reduced” (Pilgrim Society 1871:115). Their meal was much more, comprised of several courses intermixed with constant toasts and readings of both congratulatory letters and expressions of regret. Certainly General William T. Sherman’s letter won the day as he explained he had to attend a ball the evening of the 19th in Washington (his wife was a patroness) and then leave early the next day for Philadelphia for a grand opening of a “picture of Gettysburg” (at the invitation of General Meade); furthermore, if he had attended the celebration in Plymouth, he would have had to hurry away by midday

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to Boston to catch a New York train to make a dinner at Delmonico’s. “I must ask your kind indulgence,” he wrote, “to spare me such a race after pleasure” (Pilgrim Society 1871:173). Despite the absence of Sherman and other military heroes, the nation’s Civil War experience hung over the celebration. Not surprising, as Plymouth’s population had declined by more than 200 during the war years (71 residents lost their lives) and had not yet, by 1875, rebounded to the 1855 peak of almost 6,500 inhabitants. Speaker after speaker referred to the war, including Edward S. Tobey, president of the Pilgrim Society, who reminded those present of the recent heroic deeds of the “sons of the Pilgrims” who, in their defense of the Union, “honored the Pilgrim principles of civil and religious freedom” (Pilgrim Society 1871:118–120). It was a good thing December 21 was the winter solstice, as the year’s longest night was spent at a grand ball (more food, lots of drinking, no parched corn) lasting until 4 a.m. After all, there were few Pilgrim-related monuments to see in the day’s light, although Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, mayor of Boston and himself a “humble Pilgrim descendant,” had been treated to a walking tour of the “landmarks of the olden time and the vestiges of the first-comers.” The tour included a visit to the “solitary Old Rock,” entombed in its baldachino rising above a wooden wharf (Figure 7.4) in the midst of a cleaned-up waterfront district which had

Figure 7.4 The baldachino and Plymouth Rock as seen from Cole’s Hill. This waterfront scene, with its wharfs and walkways, was a familiar one in Plymouth until the Tercentenary (see Figure 7.6). (Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

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been described in 1863 as “unsightly” and “ruinous” (see Philleo 1863). Shurtleff paid his respects to the Rock’s power: “More enduring will be the fame, and presence too, of that rough unsculpted boulder, than chiseled statue or lofty memorial of smoothly hammered ashler” (Pilgrim Society 1871:158). Yet in his lifetime, both Plymouth village and the memorialization of the Pilgrim experiences were transformed, leading gradually and then more rapidly to the monumental landscapes so visible during the summer of 1921. In 1895, yet another December celebration occurred on the occasion of the 275th anniversary of the landing. Again there were services, this time in the Armory, including an oration by George F. Hoari, who spoke of the many things America owed to the Pilgrims: common schools, Bible readings, a free press, the equal division of inheritance, and the public registration of deeds. There was a 100-person dinner at the 1846 Samoset House, an inn for summer boarders and the traveling public, with many toasts and talk of erecting a monument at Delft Haven in Holland, a western European counterpart to the National Monument of the Forefathers which by then had been standing in Plymouth since 1889 (Pilgrim Society 1896). Actually this monument (Figure 7.5) had been a presence since 1859 when, following four years of initial fund-raising, its cornerstone was laid on a small hill in the village’s north end, west of the railway station. Designed by Hammet Billings, a well-known illustrator of children’s books, the monument of Maine granite rose slowly piece by piece: first the base in the summer of 1876; then a year later the great central statue of Faith standing atop an octagonal pedestal; and then each of four sitting statues with associated alto-relievo carvings—Morality (August 1878), Education (October 1882), Freedom, and Law (both set in October 1888) (Avery and Doten Publishers 1888). Neither Hammet Billings nor his faithful brother Joseph, who directed the work after Hammet’s death in November 1874, lived to see the monument’s dedication on August 1, 1889. It was a day-long celebration with a parade, afternoon dinner for 2,000 under tents, and a ball, as well as fireworks, an evening concert, and an electric illumination of the Forefathers Monument. The crowd was estimated at 15,000, more than double the size of the town’s population at that time (details from Davis 1906:380–384). Once fully in its place, the monument became a focal point for tourists visiting Plymouth, especially in the summer months when there were Pilgrim-related festivals as happened in 1896 and 1897. The 1897 festival, named “Old Plymouth Days and Ways,” took place over six days in late July and early August and consisted of historic house tours and a series of elaborate tableaux in which scenes depicting various

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Figure 7.5 National Monument to the Forefathers, built slowly piece by piece between 1859 and 1889, when it was dedicated in a day-long celebration. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

Pilgrim experiences were enacted by living persons. There were also more fanciful (and stereotypical) reconstructions of “Indian Home Life,” the “Treaty with Massasoit,” and “Moon Dance of Indian Maidens” (Eager 1897). For those out-of-towners who attended, a pocket-sized, red paperback guidebook would, it promised, prove to be “an intelligible and agreeable

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companion in a stroll through town” (Avery and Doten Publishers 1895). Illustrated texts, together with a map on the rear cover, helped visitors find their way from the rail station to selected points of interest, including Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth Rock, Coles Hill, and, of course, the Forefathers Monument. If you wanted souvenirs—the term was in common use then—the guidebook helpfully directed you to Gooding Brothers on Main Street or to the nearby Pilgrim Bookstore, operated by Alfred S. Burbank, where the guidebook could be purchased for a quarter. The 1895 guidebook, published in Plymouth, was the eighth edition; the fifth edition dates to 1888, suggesting the form had been around since the late 1870s and was, therefore, both reflective of and instrumental in the emergence of a tourist economy in Plymouth. By this I mean that Plymouth, like communities in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, or along coastal Maine, became the newest “cutting edge of capitalism,” in Dona Brown’s words (1995:5), marketing scenic and historic attractions with “advanced techniques, served by high-tech transportation systems [for those times] and building methods.” In Plymouth, tourism grew after the decline of the fishing and shipping industries and the emergence of specialized manufactories in the decades after the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1875, the town’s population increased 5%; yet in the next 20 years, it grew 25% more and then, astonishingly, in the decade between 1895 and 1905 another 40%, before slowing down to a rate of 16% between 1905 and 1915 (Table 7.1). Tourism was the engine which helped Plymouth survive, grow, and prosper. In the words of an 1897 guidebook, “That Plymouth does present more than ordinary attractions as a quiet, recreative resort, is attested by the sojourn here of thousands during the summer months” (Murphy 1897:49–50). The emergence of Plymouth’s tourist economy is also evidenced in community directories of the period, including one from 1896 with Table 7.1

History of Plymouth’s population.1

Census Year

Total Town Population

1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880

6,024 6,484 6,272 6,068 6,238 6,370 7,093

Percent Change ---+7.6 −3.3 −3.3 +2.8 +2.1 +11.4

Census Year

Total Town Population

1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920

7,239 7,314 7,957 9,592 11,119 12,141 12,926 13,032

Percent Change +2.1 +1.0 +8.8 +20.6 +15.9 +9.2 +6.5 +0.8

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listings for antique stores, boarding houses and hotels, booksellers such as A. S. Burbank, and summer cottages. Similar listings can be seen in the 1887, 1905, and 1915 directories, along with shops offering crockery, glassware, and dry and fancy goods where souvenirs could be purchased.2 And what a variety of souvenirs there were: sterling silver Pilgrim spoons (Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, Myles Standish, the Pilgrim Monument), reproductions of the Mayflower Compact (on parchment paper made in 1856), Pilgrim dolls and felt pennants, a Mayflower card game (modeled after “Authors”), booklets (Burbank 1900) and histories, an illustrated guide to the Forefathers Monument (Burbank 1897), paperweights, Plymouth Rock charms for watch chains, photographs of local sites, the latest guidebooks, and, of course, tinted postcards like the ones used as illustrations for this chapter (list compiled from community directories and from Avery and Doten Publishers 1888, 1895; Burbank 1900, 1916; Murphy 1897). Perhaps the most sought-after souvenirs were the sets of Pilgrim place settings: blue, transfer-printed, white earthenware plates, cups and saucers, and pitchers with various scenes manufactured in Staffordshire, England. First designed and ordered for the 200th anniversary celebration in 1820, the settings’ popularity grew dramatically in the 1880s, so much so it became impossible, in the words of a Plymouth octogenarian, “to distinguish the pieces originally imported from those which came afterwards” (Davis 1906:153–154)—impossible unless you are a historical archaeologist. By 1915, when final planning for the Tercentenary Celebration began in earnest, Plymouth was already a well-known tourist destination—an estimated 100,000 visited annually—with an infrastructure in place and a local economy committed to enhancing visitor experiences and merchandizing Pilgrim-related artifacts and images representative of how the town’s various histories were and were not misunderstood. Yet some of the monuments so visible in the summer of 1921 had not yet been placed upon the land. Capital was needed and various committees (and subcommittees), many organized under the auspices of the Pilgrim Society, raised funds through subscription efforts and successful appeals to the town ($320,000), the State of Massachusetts ($275,000), and the federal government ($300,000). A special fact-finding congressional committee traveled to Plymouth to gather information, reporting back in February 1920 on plans involving “the restoration, improvement, and perpetuation of certain sites intimately associated with the landing of the Pilgrims and with the hardships they endured.” The committee went on, “It would seem unnecessary to suggest the benefit derived from a visit to these historic spots during these years next, following our emergence from a great war” (Atwood 1921:65, 76).

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Conservatively one can estimate that more than a million dollars was raised to fund the year-long commemoration which began in November 1920 (“Mayflower Compact Day”), continued through December and the celebration of Forefathers’ Day (repeated twice as there was not a hall large enough to accommodate everyone— factories in town were closed), moved on to April and the “return of the Mayflower” (a reconstructed coastal schooner from Boston), and then reached a summer-long climax in 1921, especially on August 1 when President Warren G. Harding visited. The fund-raising efforts helped pay for village improvements, the many different celebrations, the tableaux and daily processions (Pilgrims Progress), the pageant, and the elaborate parade on August 1. And of course there were new monuments, including a bronze statue (the “Pilgrim Maid”), a log cabin said to be representative of the Pilgrim’s first dwellings, a reproduction of an old powder house, plaques galore, and a cenotaph containing Pilgrim bones, a gift of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants (Hebel 2001; Seelye 1998:589–606). These bones were the very same ones discovered in 1855 during the excavations for new water lines, the ones that had been sitting in a metallic box since 1867 under the Plymouth Rock baldachino adjacent to the old wharf. That monument was dismantled, buildings and wharfs removed through the power of eminent domain, landscapes graded and filled, and an elegant, columned temple, still standing today, erected at the water’s edge over the Rock (Figure 7.6). Throughout the summer of 1921, many thousands of tourists, including those from the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, made the pilgrimage to Plymouth; at least 100,000 crowded into the village on August 1. They needed guidebooks to find their way. One was the latest Tercentenary edition of the by-then-familiar Guide to Historic Plymouth: Localities and Objects of Interest (Burbank 1921) with the woodcut of a Pilgrim couple on its cover. Its list of localities, sites, and monuments had been slightly revised from editions stretching back to 1900. Another guidebook was also available, the Pilgrim Plymouth Guide (Atwood 1921) published in Boston, with tours and texts reminiscent of the Burbank edition, and 20-plus pages of advertisements for a variety of products branded with the Pilgrim name (ground coffee, sweaters, gelatin used in jellies and puddings) or Pilgrim-related souvenirs, including a newly minted half-dollar and a “Polly Prim Apron,” designed and sewn by a Pilgrim descendant; both could be purchased at the Pilgrim Book and Art Shop. Buried in the back of the Atwood guide (and not in the Burbank edition) is a half-page notice reminding tourists to visit “the real native Indian camp which the Passamaquoddy tribe has established for the summer in

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Figure 7.6 Cole’s Hill and Plymouth Rock beneath the new portico erected for the Tercentenary Celebration. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

Plymouth.” Under contract with the town’s Tercentenary Committee, 40 individuals camped out in Morton Park, little more than a mile from the town’s center (Figure 7.7).3 The public could visit there for no charge other than a 35-cent bus trip, and experience a “complete presentation of real Indian life under real native conditions” (Atwood 1921:92). Claims of authenticity aside, the Passamaquoddy campsite was one of the most popular Tercentenary attractions (Hebel 2001:282), another living history tableau enacted by people whose local counterparts had been at the center of the Pilgrim experience 300 years earlier. There are no surviving ethnographic accounts of what happened at the campsite that summer, but I am certain that, as evening fell, Wampanoag families came to visit the Passamaquoddy and shared their stories of their ancestors’ hardships. On September 5, 1921, one of the final Tercentenary events took place: an unveiling of the bronze statue of Massasoit (Figure 7.8) standing atop a boulder, caught at the very moment when he “first descried the Mayflower coming into the entrance to his harbor.” The statue was the gift of the National Order of Red Men and was draped with an American flag until uncovered by Charlotte Mitchell, Woontonekanuske,

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Figure 7.7 Two Passamaquoddy making their way to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the 1921 Tercentenary Celebration. (Archives and Special Collections, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.)

a Wampanoag woman of 73 years who lived at Betty’s Neck on Assawampsett Pond near Middleboro, Massachusetts, in the midst of an ancestral homeland (Bittinger 1923:116–120). Through her mother, Zerviah Gould Mitchell, she was a lineal descendant of Massasoit and a keeper of community memories. One wonders what Charlotte thought as yet another monument was built upon Wampanoag landscapes in the place once named Patuxet, and what she and President Harding talked about over lunch on August 1, 1921.

A GUIDEBOOK FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY? In November and December 2020, little more than a decade away, it will be the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim landings at Provincetown on the Cape and at Patuxet. A century has passed since the Tercentenary’s monumental celebrations, and we have learned much about the long-term histories of Wampanoag homelands: histories of changing adaptations, resistance and rebellion, cultural accommodations, and community survival. In a place as small as Hobbamock’s Homesite, it is impossible to represent and explore all the histories which actually happened. So what might a pilgrimage look like in 2020—not a virtual tour, but a real road trip during which travelers, with the help of a

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Figure 7.8 Statue of Massasoit in Plymouth, a Tercentenary gift of the National Order of Red Men. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

new guidebook, would begin to look beneath the surface of familiar landscapes? The tour would begin at Plimoth Plantation with visits to the reconstructed Pilgrim settlement and Hobbamock’s Homesite, followed by a presentation on the Tercentenary Celebration in the Plantation’s orientation theatre. From there you would drive south, out on to the Cape towards Provincetown, stopping periodically in the Cape Cod National

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Seashore to learn more about the taskscapes, sacred sites, and long-used meeting places of the Wampanoag. Each stop would be marked, almost invisibly, by a round hole in the ground, about a foot deep and as much over. At the Cape’s terminus, the tour would begin again at the Pilgrim Memorial Tower in Provincetown, dedicated in 1924 to commemorate the November 1620 Pilgrim landing. From the top of its 252 ft. high, gray granite tower, you could look southwards across all those Wampanoag homelands and then westwards across Cape Cod Bay to Plymouth. From here, the tour would slowly retrace the route and experiences of the Pilgrims, using Mourt’s Relation as a guide, and visiting the sites of the First Discovery, the First Encounter, and the 1605 confrontation between the Wampanoag and Champlain’s party in present-day Chatham. In Mashpee on the inner Cape, there would be a longer stop at the Old Indian Church and a town meeting with Mashpee elders and the tribal council, who would share their stories of the community’s long, recently successful struggle to be recognized as a sovereign Indian nation by the US Department of the Interior.4 Here, our future pilgrims would come face-to-face with the living descendants of the indigenes who had first shared their world and homelands with the Pilgrims 400 years before. Some Mashpee Wampanoag work at Hobbamock’s Homesite at Plimoth Plantation. As they walk around that monument, their people’s memories live on within the landscapes beneath their feet. Eventually the tour in 2020 would proceed to Plymouth and the Rock still lying beneath the granite portico of the Tercentenary, where even today more than one million visitors come each year. What I have in mind are experiences in history deconstructed and tourism reconsidered, as “the closer we are to the surface of events and emotions, the further we are from the depths where meaning and understanding reside” (Lippard 1999:119). And in that space between what is close or taken for granted, between what is buried and still hidden (the landscapes of memory) and what is more visible (the monuments) lies the next generation of Plymouth and Patuxet archaeologies. Suppose all those archaeologies—of Wampanoag homelands, of tourism and souvenirs, of the construction and reconstruction of Plymouth’s monumental landscapes—were undertaken and what was discovered became an integral part of the interpretive programs at Plimoth Plantation. Then that place would no longer be just a monument. It might become instead a contact zone, in James Clifford’s (1997:192) visionary words, where “ongoing historical, political, and moral relationships, a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull” are being worked out every day. And then in the not-so-distant future, we might

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imagine a global network of such contact zones because, after all, there are very few places in the world where monuments have not been built upon and above landscapes of memory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For several years, the Boston Children’s Museum and Plimoth Plantation invited me to participate in workshops exploring the histories of Wampanoag homelands in the seventeenth century. Both these experiences were important to the ideas presented here. My thanks to Joan Lester, Liz Lodge, and Linda Coombs. Respected archaeological colleagues helped clarify my work, including Kevin McBride, Fred Dunford, and Pat Rubertone, who kindly solicited this essay. A special thanks to the staff at the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, and to Omar Morris who provided me with a Brooklyn apartment where much of the research and writing happened.

NOTES 1. The data in the census table are from: The Census of Massachusetts, 1875 (Boston: A. J. Wright); The Census of Massachusetts, 1885 (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company); The Decennial Census of the Commonwealth, 1915 (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company); Plymouth Almanac, Directory and Business Advertiser, 1860 (Plymouth); 1887 Directory and History of Plymouth, Massachusetts (Plymouth: Avery and Doten Publishers); and The Plymouth Directory, 1896 (Shirley, MA: A. B. Sparrow and Company). 2. Community directory data from: 1887 Directory and History of Plymouth, Massachusetts (Plymouth: Avery and Doten Publishers); The Plymouth Directory, 1896 (Shirley, MA: A. B. Sparrow and Company); Resident and Business Directory of Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1905 (Boston: Suburban Book Publishing Company); and Resident and Business Directory of Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1915 (Boston: Union Publishing Company). 3. The idea for a Passamaquoddy campsite likely was inspired by the Passamaquoddy Indian Village, a popular attraction at the Maine Centennial Exposition in late June and early July 1920 (see Maine Memory Network, www.mainememory.net, for photographs and stories). My thanks to Dr. Ann McMullen for finding this connection. 4. For important background on the Mashpee Indian community and its legal struggles, see Jack Campisi (1991), James Clifford’s essay (1988), and “Summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Final Determination for Federal Acknowledgement of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, Inc.” (February 2007), available at www. doi.gov/bia/federal_acknowledgement_decisions. Historically, the Mashpee homeland and community were well known to the Wampanoag who lived in and around the Patuxet homeland; after the American Revolution, some Wampanoag families from the old settlements at Herring Pond, Plain Dealing, and Eel River moved to Mashpee to live with kin (see details in Speck 1921).

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REFERENCES Atwood, William F. 1921. Pilgrim Plymouth Guide and Historical Digest Illustrated. Boston: Blanchard Printing Company. Aultman, Jennifer L. 2001. From Thanksgiving to War: Native Americans in Criminal Cases of Plymouth Colony, 1630–1675. The Plymouth Colony Archive Project. Electronic document, http://etext.virginia.edu/users/deetz/Plymouth/wampanoag.html, accessed July 9, 2007. Avery and Doten Publishers. 1888. Old Plymouth: A Guide to Its Localities and Objects of Interest. 5th edition. Plymouth, MA: Avery and Doten Publishers. ———. 1895. Old Plymouth: A Guide to Its Localities and Objects of Interest. 8th edition. Plymouth, MA: Avery and Doten Publishers. Bernstein, David J. 1993. Prehistoric Subsistence on the Southern New England Coast: The Record from Narragansett Bay. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Bittinger, Frederick W. 1923. The Story of the Pilgrim Tercentenary Celebration at Plymouth in the Year 1921. Plymouth, MA: The Memorial Press. Borstel, Christopher L. 1984. Prehistoric Site Chronology: A Preliminary Report. In Chapters in the Archeology of Cape Cod, I: Results of the Cape Cod National Seashore Archaeological Survey, 1979–1981. Francis P. McManamon, ed. Pp. 231–299. Cultural Resource Management Study, no. 8. Washington, DC: National Park Service, US Department of the Interior. Bragdon, Kathleen J. 1996. Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Brown, Dona. 1995. Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Burbank, Alfred S. 1897. National Monument to the Forefathers, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth, MA: Pilgrim Bookstore. ———. 1900. Guide to Historic Plymouth: Localities and Objects of Interest. Plymouth, MA: A. S. Burbank. ———. 1916. Guide to Historic Plymouth: Localities and Objects of Interest. Plymouth, MA: A. S. Burbank. ———. 1921. Guide to Historic Plymouth: Localities and Objects of Interest. Tercentenary edition. Plymouth, MA: A. S. Burbank. Butler, Eva L. 1946. The Brush or Stone Memorial Heaps of Southern New England. Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Connecticut, no. 19:2–11. Calloway, Colin G. 1997. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Campisi, Jack. 1991. The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ceci, Lynn. 1982. Method and Theory in Coastal New York Archaeology: Paradigms of Settlement Pattern. North American Archaeologist 3:5–36. Clifford, James. 1988. Identity in Mashpee. In The Predicament of Culture. Pp. 277–346. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. Museums as Contact Zones. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Pp. 188–219. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Crosby, Constance A. 1993. The Algonkian Spiritual Landscape. In Algonkians of New England: Past and Present. Peter Benes, ed. Pp. 35–41. Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. Boston: Boston University. Cross, John R. 1999. “By Any Other Name …”: A Reconsideration of Middle Archaic Lithic Technology and Typology in the Northeast. In The Archaeological Northeast. Mary Ann Levine, Kenneth Sassaman, and Michael S. Nassaney, eds. Pp. 57–73. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.

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Davis, William T. 1906. Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian. Plymouth, MA: Memorial Press. Dincauze, Dena F. 1968. Cremation Cemeteries of Eastern Massachusetts. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 59(1). Cambridge: Harvard University. Dunford, Frederick. 1999. Paleoenvironmental Context for the Middle Archaic Occupation of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In The Archaeological Northeast. Mary Ann Levine, Kenneth Sassaman, and Michael S. Nassaney, eds. Pp. 39–54. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Eager, Margaret M. 1897. Old Plymouth Days and Ways: Handbook of the Historic Festival in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth, MA: A. S. Burbank. Eaton, Walter P. 1928. Plymouth. New York: New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad Company. Ferguson, T. J., and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh. 2006. History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1995. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years. New York: Scribner. Grumet, Robert S. 1995. Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today’s Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Handsman, Russell G., and Trudie Lamb-Richmond. 1995. Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke Peoples and Us. In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings. Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson, eds. Pp. 87–117. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Heath, Dwight B., ed. 1963. Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1622). Bedford, MA: Applewood Books. Hebel, Udo J. 2001. Historical Bonding with an Expiring Heritage: Revisiting the Plymouth Tercentenary Festivities of 1920/21. In Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century. Jurgen Heidebing, Genevieve Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach, eds. Pp. 257–297. New York: Berghahn Books. Howe, Henry F. 1953. Early Explorers of Plymouth Harbor, 1525–1619. Plymouth, MA: Plimoth Plantation and the Pilgrim Society. Ingold, Tim. 1993. The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25(2):152–174. Kammen, Michael. 1991. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Langton, H. H., and W. F. Ganong, translators. 1922. The Voyages of Sieur de Champlain (1613). In The Works of Samuel de Champlain, vol. 1: 1599–1607. H. P. Bigger, ed. Toronto: The Champlain Society. Lepore, Jill. 1998. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage Books. Leveillee, Alan. 1999. Transitional Archaic Ideology as Reflected in Secondary Burials at the Millbury III Cremation Complex. Archaeology of Eastern North America 27:157–183. Leveillee, Alan, Joseph Waller, and Donna Ingham. 2006. Dispersed Villages in Late Woodland Period South-Coastal Rhode Island. Archaeology of Eastern North America 34:71–89. Lippard, Lucy R. 1999. On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place. New York: The New Press. McBride, Kevin A. 1994. Cultures in Transition: The Eastern Long Island Sound Culture Area in the Prehistoric and Contact Periods. Journal of Connecticut History 25(1):5–21. McBride, Kevin A., and Robert E. Dewar. 1987. Agriculture and Cultural Evolution: Causes and Effects in the Lower Connecticut River Valley. In Emergent Horticultural

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Economies of the Eastern Woodlands. William F. Keegan, ed. Pp. 305–328. Occasional Papers of the Center for Archaeological Investigations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University. McManamon, Francis P. 1984. Prehistoric Cultural Adaptations and Their Evolution on Outer Cape Cod. In Chapters in the Archeology of Cape Cod, I:Results of the Cape Cod National Seashore Archaeological Survey, 1979–1981. Francis P. McManamon, ed. Pp. 339–417. Cultural Resource Management Study, no. 8. Washington, DC: National Park Service, US Department of the Interior. McManamon, Francis P., and James W. Bradley. 1988. The Indian Neck Ossuary. Scientific American 258(5):98–104. Murphy, James F. 1897. What to See at Plymouth: The Tourist Guide with Maps and Illustrations. Providence, RI: The Continental Press Company. Old Dartmouth Historical Society. 1921. Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches, no. 51: Annual Meeting, The Pilgrim Celebration, The Pilgrimage to Plymouth. New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society. Parshall, T., D. Foster, E. Faison, D. MacDonald, and B. C. S. Hansen. 2003. Long-Term History of Vegetation and Fire in Pitch Pine–Oak Forests on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Ecology 84:736–738. Patterson, William A., and Andrew E. Backman. 1988. Fire and Disease History of Forests. In Vegetation History. B. Huntley and Thomas Webb, eds. Pp. 606–632. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Peters, Ramona L. 2006. Consulting with the Bone Keepers: NAGPRA Consultations and Archaeological Monitoring in Wampanoag Territory. In Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. Jordan R. Kerber, ed. Pp. 32–43. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Philleo, Calvin W. 1863. A Pilgrimage to Plymouth. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8(43):36–54. Pilgrim Society. 1871. The Proceedings at the Celebration by the Pilgrim Society at Plymouth, December 21, 1870, of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims. Cambridge, MA: J. Wilson and Sons. ———. 1896. The Proceedings at the Celebration by the Pilgrim Society at Plymouth, December 21, 1895, of the 275th Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims. Plymouth, MA: Avery and Doten Publishers. Pulsifer, David, ed. 1861. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, in New England. Boston: The Press of William White. Rhonda, James P. 1974. Red and White at the Bench: Indians and the Law in Plymouth Colony. Essex Institute Historical Collections 110(3):200–215. Rutman, Darrett B. 1967. Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620–1692. Boston: Beacon Press. Seelye, John. 1998. Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shuman, Bryan, Jennifer Bravo, Jason A. Lynch, Paige Newby, and Thompson Webb III. 2001. Late Quaternary Water-Level Variations and Vegetation History at Crooked Pond, Southeastern Massachusetts. Quaternary Research 56:401–410. Simmons, William S. 1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Snow, Stephen Eddy. 1993. Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical RolePlaying at Plimouth Plantation. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Speck, Frank G. 1921. Territorial Subdivisions and Boundaries of the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Nauset Indians. Indian Notes and Monographs, no. 44. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Weinstein, Laurie Lee. 1983. Indian vs. Colonist: Competition for Land in 17th-Century Plymouth Colony. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

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Winiarski, Douglas L. 2004. A Question of Plain Dealing: Josiah Cotton, Native Christians, and the Quest for Security in Eighteenth-Century Plymouth County. New England Quarterly 77(3):368–413. Winkler, Marjorie G. 1985. A 12,000-Year History of Vegetation and Climate for Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Quaternary Research 23(3):301–312. Winslow, Edward. 1996[1624]. Good Newes from New England (1624). Bedford, MA: Applewood Books. Wood, Joseph S. 1997. The New England Village. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Memorializing the Narragansett Placemaking and Memory Keeping in the Aftermath of Detribalization Patricia E. Rubertone

On August 30, 1883, a large crowd of Rhode Island’s civic and social leaders, including the governor and members of the congressional delegation, local townspeople, and some Narragansett, gathered at the ruins of an “old Indian fort” to dedicate a monument. At the center of the fort—associated with Ninigret, a seventeenth-century political leader or sachem of the Eastern Niantic, a group closely related to the Narragansett—stood the monument, a massive granite boulder. Carved into the side of the rock facing south toward one of the largest saltwater ponds in southern New England was the inscription “Fort Ninigret, Memorial of the Narragansett and Niantic Indians, The Unwavering Friends and Allies of Our Fathers.” Beneath these words were the names of the commissioners on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, who supervised the installation of the monument and presided over Rhode Island’s detribalization of the Narragansett. When the dedication exercises were over and the invited guests had feasted, some went sailing on the Great Salt Pond; others visited Coronation Rock, where one of the last hereditary Narragansett sachems had been crowned a little more than a century earlier (Providence Daily Journal 1883). The celebration at Fort Ninigret marked the completion of all provisions of the Rhode Island legislature’s 1880 decision to declare the Narragansett people “extinct” and end their legal status as a tribe. After decades of public debate and private deliberations, detribalization implemented ideas about Native American decline and assimilation popular in the United States during the nineteenth century by abolishing tribal relations, conferring citizenship and voting rights on tribal members, and setting the stage for the sale of tribal land. In 1883, the commissioners’ work was done. The investigation to determine which Narragansett men, women, and children could claim membership in the tribe and receive a share from the sale of its remaining land, which the State of Rhode Island 195

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had offered to buy (and would then subsequently auction to outsiders), had ended and the reimbursements made. For many European Americans in Rhode Island and elsewhere in New England, the Narragansett, who they considered dwindled in number, divorced from place, and diluted by blood, now ceased to exist. In the context of detribalization, memorialization could be interpreted as a tactic that symbolically confirmed consensus about what Rhode Island had accomplished through legislation. At the very least, “Memorial Rock,” which recalled the Narragansett as “friends” and “allies,” could be construed as a demonstration of good will. Likewise, so could the preservation of the fort and its surrounding area as a small state park, which ensured that a piece (no more than three acres) of tribal property at Fort Neck would not be divided and sold with the rest of the land Rhode Island acquired through detribalization. However, such understandings seem woefully unsteady and perhaps even cynical. Close readings of the official transcripts of the commissioners’ public meetings with the tribe, including their interrogations into claims of tribal membership, and long-standing tribal memories defy suggestions that the Narragansett agreed to detribalization unanimously or even voluntarily. While aimed at their cultural as well as legal extinction, detribalization neither did away with the Narragansett people nor completely solved Rhode Island’s “Indian problem” (Herndon and Sekatau 1997). Tensions over land and resource use lingered along with persistent prejudices that citizenship and the ideologies of assimilation failed to alleviate (Campbell and LaFantasie 1978; Robinson 1994). So while detribalization and memorialization implied finality, they were merely footnotes to a much longer and more contentious saga of colonialist erasure in New England, and ostensibly, throughout the colonized Indigenous world. Just a few weeks after the dedication at Fort Ninigret in Charlestown, where a local historian delivering the key oration made an impassioned appeal for raising additional boulder memorials to the Narragansett, Rhode Islanders unveiled a monument to Canonicus, a highly regarded chief sachem and “friend” Indian in the city of Providence (Figure 8.1). Soon other monuments would be raised in punctuated episodes of monument building that would continue through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, despite the timing of their appearance on the Rhode Island landscape, the Fort Ninigret and Canonicus monuments do not warrant simple or compulsory interpretations. That these memorials relegated the Narragansett to a relic landscape of a distant past and, as such, served as tools of dispossession that perpetrated conceptual violence on their descendant communities in the postdetribalization period is undeniable. However, what is visibly remembered may only be a fraction of the experiences, memories, and histories entwined with these monument

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Massachusetts

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Figure 8.1 Map of Rhode Island showing the locations of Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument. (Produced by Lynn Carlson.)

sites. Beneath these monuments may lie other, more profound and continuing histories of placemaking and memory keeping that challenge the claims underwriting the commemorative process initiated by Rhode Island’s European Americans in the late nineteenth century. Arguably, these monuments to Indigenous disappearance may have sometimes been consciously appropriated as new sites of memory making and community building by the very same groups they attempted to silence.

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In this chapter, I explore Narragansett peoples’ engagement with monuments European Americans raised to their memory following detribalization. Focusing on Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument, I argue that richer and more complicated histories of these monuments are not only possible, but also may provide critical insights into community survival, cultural persistence and change, and resistant accommodations in Indian New England. In addition, the two case studies may serve as points of departure for investigating monuments and their surrounding physical spaces in other parts of the world where the historical circumstances of Indigenous communities have unfolded in diverse settings close to and apart from tribal lands, and where the tribal predicaments of these Indigenous communities have been matters of fierce contention.

UNCOVERING DEEPER HISTORIES The assertion that other experiences, memories, and histories of monuments European Americans raised to the Narragansett in the aftermath of detribalization are recoverable requires a different approach to how public monuments are usually studied. Historical documents containing detailed accounts about the ideals, desires, artistic conventions, and pragmatic constraints shaping particular monuments have comprised the bulk of evidence for much of the current scholarship on the subject across the humanities and social sciences (e.g., Bodnar 1992; Foote 1997; Shackel 2003; Young 1993). Various documentary records, as well as newspapers, typically furnish descriptive accounts and photographs of the ceremonies conducted at the time of dedication and those held on other public occasions that have enabled researchers to recount the performative behaviors enacted at specific monuments. For example, programs of the dedication exercises for Memorial Rock, the Canonicus Monument, and other Rhode Island monuments outline a highly standardized, even formulaic, repertoire of performances, from an opening prayer to speeches, songs, poems, an unveiling, and a closing benediction, that give insights into the more ephemeral activities of commemoration thought to leave few material traces. Although these historical records are important for understanding processes related to monument construction and celebration, they may not necessarily provide evidence about the deeper histories of the monument sites themselves; that is, about the landscapes in which they are situated and the cultural practices, as well as the myriad of social, political, and economic conditions, that helped shape them over the long term—even after extra labor at the archives. Furthermore, evidence about Native peoples’ engagement with monuments after the dedication ceremonies had ended and the material aspects of such engagements, which would have added texture and meaning to these sites, is probably

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not going to be found in these historical archives. Counterresearch or counterfactual histories of boulders and other such monuments, then, needs to take into account a multiplicity of records in addition to those that are conspicuously represented and officially inscribed by colonizers (Conkey 2005; Handsman and Lamb Richmond 1995; Wylie 1995). In this regard, oral histories and the archaeological record are crucially important to revealing experiences and remembrances that, in general, are not otherwise recorded and that hold the potential of challenging the silences and misunderstandings implied by memorialization. For example, Native peoples’ oral accounts may provide divergent opinions about monuments and reveal changing ideas about them that are grounded in the present realities of their ongoing political and ideological struggles. In addition, oral narratives also may tell implicit discourses of place that rest upon histories of social engagement with the landscape passed down through generations, and that counter a monument’s misleading pronouncements (Basso 1996). Likewise, archaeology, largely underutilized in studies of public monuments, may illuminate “lived experiences” associated with these monument sites. The small-scale processes and daily practices that ultimately comprise the archaeological record can supplement research on the “monumental” with its emphasis on form, design, and construction technology and, in addition, provide a valuable source for critical inquiry. Because monuments are usually structures built on top of landscapes to which they may only relate superstructurally, their underground archaeological pictures may reveal stories that are at odds with what is visibly recalled (Lippard 1997). For example, some monuments might be raised on top of buried features and artifacts that have accumulated through time from the routines of Native peoples’ everyday lives. These material remains might suggest uses of the space for dwelling, fishing and collecting, trapping and hunting, rituals, and other social ceremonies by successive generations of communities and families, which are all masked by placemaking associated with public monuments and wider colonizing processes. However, in spite of the imposed boulder monuments and detribalization, and spatial restrictions dictated by European Americans’ real estate holdings and by the actions of town officials to limit free movement over the land, Narragansett people often returned to places within their ancestral territory (Herndon and Sekatau 1997; Rubertone 2001; see also Byrne 2003; Murray 1993). Not surprisingly, these return visits may have been different than movements within and across their ancestral homelands in the precolonization era, perhaps involving fewer people and less structured scheduling than before. Nevertheless, they may leave archaeological traces that document continuing attachments to place undisclosed by what is visibly remembered by the monument.

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Additionally, the archaeological record may also reveal evidence for Native spatial practices conducted at monuments situated in locations that were not special places in ancestral homelands. Although a particular monument site may not be spatially anchored within existing remembrances, it may sometimes become a local “landmark” through new patterns of movement and engagement. For example, a public monument might be used as a meeting place where Native people gather to socialize, gossip, share news and concerns, or simply to carouse unfettered by the clamor of public celebrations. It is possible that these activities might be represented materially in residues that were left behind (stomped earth, and the like), though admittedly these might be difficult to identify archaeologically. However, it is also possible that some monument sites were purposely marked using the familiar cultural practices by which Native peoples visually inscribed their engagement with the landscape. In Indian New England, these placemaking and memory-keeping practices included digging small holes in the ground, piling heaps of stone or branches, making offerings of material objects, food, or alcoholic beverages, lighting ceremonial fires, and drawing petroglyphs (e.g., Butler 1946; Rubertone 2001; Simmons 1986; Speck 1945). Probably none of these activities were envisioned by the monument builders or condoned by caretakers. Consequently, these signs of engagement may go unrecognized or may be dismissed as irrelevant or damaging rather than part of a monument’s social history. Granted not all monuments commemorating the Narragansett in the detribalization era became spaces of memory making and community building. Although these suggestions do not exhaust the entire spectrum of the Narragansett’s possible interest in and engagement with monuments commemorating them on the postdetribalization landscape, they nonetheless highlight ways that archaeology might contribute to reconceptualizing and reframing how these sites might be studied and ultimately understood. Combined with oral and other historical records, archaeological evidence might help to interrogate the monuments’ silences about Narragansett history and expose flawed, if not erroneous, conclusions generally drawn from the memorialization process. Therefore, while memorialization confined Narragansett experience to the past and to public spaces no longer considered primarily theirs, research on monuments that explores how Narragansett people negotiated the memorialized landscape may provide a key to understanding their complicated histories of survival and resistance during the detribalization period and beyond.

MEMORIAL ROCK Memorial Rock, the name given to the commemorative boulder at Fort Ninigret to distinguish it from other memorial rocks, was not

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Figure 8.2 Memorial Rock at Fort Ninigret, Charlestown, Rhode Island. Photograph, n.d., RHi X3 7694. (Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.)

exceptional. It was a “simple, natural, and enduring” type of monument that the commissioners on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians considered appropriate for commemorating the tribe and more suitable than a “granite column shaped by the hand of man” (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:3–4). Their ideal stone was a five-ton rock, “imposing in size” (though not excessively larger than others used for these purposes) and “shaped by nature,” which they carefully selected from nearby hills and transported “with much difficulty” to Fort Neck, where it was placed on a prepared foundation (Figure 8.2). As part of the commemorative effort, the land around the fort was graded, loose stones removed, and trees planted. The memorial site was set apart from the surrounding geography by installing an ornamental iron fence on the seventeenth-century fort’s earth and stone embankments so that the space would be clearly demarcated and protected from encroachment (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:3–4). Except for the obvious additions, the creation of the memorial site did not significantly alter the fort’s appearance. Exterior ditches may

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have been deepened and the earth and stone embankments faced with additional stone to accentuate its rectangular plan and give its three corner bastions more definition, but otherwise its lines remained pretty much as the “oldest living inhabitant of that vicinity” remembered them from his youth “up to and long” before the commissioners raised Memorial Rock (Goodwin 1932:5). However, excavations around the boulder in the 1930s and the early 1970s uncovered disturbed fill composed mostly of rocks, suggesting that the cobble footing prepared for the monument (see Figure 8.2) was substantial and extended to the depth of the clay subsoil (Goodwin 1932; Senulis n.d.). Buried beneath this memorial landscape are numerous hearths, storage pits, and post molds from structures, abundant artifacts, and animal and plant remains, mostly excavated in the late 1970s (Mayer n.d.; Salwen and Mayer 1978), that offer compelling evidence of Native people living and working at this location continuously from about 1,000 years ago (or possibly earlier) into at least the seventeenth century. The fortification of the settlement, dating from the middle to late seventeenth century, plus stores of corn and increased reliance on local resources, strongly suggests a community whose identity was built around this locale and sustained through ongoing processes of social and ritual exchange as suggested by wampum making, flint knapping, and metal working to craft European copper into ornaments. The archaeological evidence, then, suggests that Fort Ninigret was not merely the storied place of European Americans, but also one steeped in the history of an ancestral homeland and remembered by later Narragansett for its connections to the sachem, a real person whose name it bears. At the dedication of Memorial Rock, a number of speakers remarked on how very fitting it was to erect the monument at the site of the ancient fort. Still others commented on the appropriateness of the boulder itself, reiterating ideas about its durability or implicating that the unpretentious stone was as an apt “memorial to the manly qualities of the ancient possessors of the soil” (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:11, 31). However, the most forceful expository statements on the memorial came from the principal orator, who gave a long speech on Narragansett and Niantic history and, as mentioned previously, used the occasion to launch an appeal for boulder monuments to notable Narragansett sachems and places associated with deeds worthy of remembrance. In the poetics of the moment, Memorial Rock was not merely a modest stone, but “a kingly boulder” extracted from (and apparently ennobled by) the depths of the earth, and the spot on which it stood consecrated ground (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:22–23). Monuments sanctified the land, creating what later geographers call sacred places (Foote 1997:8).

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While the speeches dragged on—most of them congratulatory, a few reflective, and others irrelevant—a poet recited, a choir sang, and a painter sketched this “last scene of Rhode Island Indian history” for posterity. The picture, reported to have included the governor, the commissioners, Narragansett tribal officers, and a group of other representatives of the tribe, has not been located. Because this visual record is missing, it impossible to see faces and gauge, even imperfectly, the expressions of the Narragansett in the crowd as they listened to the rhetoric. However, just before the closing benediction, two members of the tribal council spoke briefly. Gideon Ammons, the president of the council, said he was pleased that the fort had been preserved and commended the commissioners for their hard work, but expressed remorse for the loss of tribal status. The other speaker, Joshua Noka, remarked that he did not seek to garnish the sepulchers of his ancestors. Without wishing to dwell on wrongs, he nonetheless spoke of the scorn and the impatience of some of the tribe’s white neighbors, who had lobbied for detribalization. Not in the least, his words also registered concern that recurring tensions with adjoining land owners over property boundaries and other nagging problems would not simply disappear along with the Narragansett’s legal right to a name. He concluded by saying, “We have the same blood running through our veins that we had before we sold our lands” (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:35). The other three members of the last tribal council remained silent, as did the rest of the Narragansett who attended the dedication. In the transcriptions of the tribal members’ comments, there are no words of celebration. Instead, the remarks speak of experiences and conflicts with the early colonizers and their descendants in which it is possible to detect sadness, resignation, and staunch commitment to resistant accommodation. In contrast to the speeches by European American celebrants, there is no mention of the memorial boulder or references to its physical attributes—only a concise statement expressing appreciation that Rhode Island had decided to preserve the old fort (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:34). The fate of Fort Neck, a roughly 20-acre track of tribal land encompassing the fort, had come up repeatedly during the detribalization proceedings (Figure 8.3). Located in an area of salt ponds, marshes, and once-wooded hills, the setting offered access to salt water, a freshwater spring below the bluff where the fort is situated, and arable soil. These assets made Fort Neck highly attractive, not only to European Americans, but also to the tribe (Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians 1884:36, 42, 89). It was a spot where Narragansett in the nineteenth century could pitch their tents and fish to earn a living, and some might even have rented acreage for income. But it was also where the ancient fort and

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Figure 8.3 Map of the Narragansett Indian lands made for the detribalization hearings, with Fort Neck at the lower right of the image. Ink and watercolor, John E. Kenyon, 1878, RHi X3 2070. (Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.)

other special places, including at least one ancestral burial ground, were located. Although Native people no longer lived and worked at the fort permanently as they had during the seventeenth century and long before, some descendants continued to use the site. The recorded testimony of

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Narragansett informants states that wigwams were still evident at the fort in the 1730s, which is corroborated by the discovery in archaeological contexts of European ceramics with a known manufacturing range dating from the late seventeenth into the eighteenth century (Anonymous 1746; Taylor 2006:281). However, as the eighteenth century wore on, the Ninigret family, including heirs who became the established leaders of the Narragansett during that period, may not have resided there. By around the 1750s, one of the sachems, Tom Ninigret, would build an English-style house near Coronation Rock just a short distance away. Despite these changes in residence, and the sale of huge tracts of tribal land to pay off the sachems’ personal debts, it is highly questionable whether the fort was ever completely abandoned. Archival records indicate that Fort Ninigret continued to be visited even after Memorial Rock was dedicated. Among its visitors were members of the Rhode Island Historical Society, who included the fort on their itinerary for a field outing in 1897 arranged to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of Canonicus (Rhode Island Historical Society n.d.). In a pilgrim-like fashion, the group stopped at the fort and proceeded on to other sites that European Americans recognized as shrines to the Narragansett. Among these were Coronation Rock, the Royal Indian Burial Ground—a cemetery that Rhode Island enclosed and marked about 20 years after a highly publicized incident of grave robbing and an unsuccessful attempt by the Narragansett to have the offenders prosecuted—and the former reservation (Rubertone 1994). In the 1930s, Narragansett Dawn, a monthly magazine published by the Narragansett on their history, oral traditions, social events, and other topics, printed several articles about alternative tours through Narragansett Country. These tours, led by a Narragansett guide and long-time resident of the area who was three years old when the reservation was sold, also included stops at Fort Ninigret and other sites listed on the Rhode Island Historical Society’s junket. But in addition, these tours visited places unmarked by European American monuments, and where there were constant reminders of earlier times, tenacious resistance, and “Indian ghost stories” (Brown 1935). For those Narragansett who had moved away from the reservation after detribalization or perhaps earlier or who may have drifted from the paths of the elders, both literally and metaphorically, these countertours guided by individuals who had stayed close to ancestral lands may have provided a way to rediscover and imagine place-worlds they knew only vaguely or might have forgotten. Today, Memorial Rock is shrouded by a clump of trees and dense poison ivy that make it difficult to discern from any angle or distance within the fenced area defining the fort’s outlines. The inscription is

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badly weathered and can hardly be read. On close inspection, the boulder does not appear to exhibit any signs of intentional damage. There is no obvious graffiti to provide a material record of the Narragansett’s engagement with the monument, which might communicate valuable insights into tensions and conflicts over its very public pronouncements. Unfortunately, archaeological excavations in the immediate vicinity of the boulder conducted in the 1930s and early 1970s, while illuminating activities related to the monument’s construction, have not shed any light on small-scale processes of social engagement. The absence of detailed archaeological reporting, together with research agendas that privileged the fort’s seventeenth-century occupation (and the possibility of its colonial Dutch origins), have effectively obscured the postdetribalization period. Narragansett memories of Fort Ninigret and individuals connected with its history are complicated; their oral history is particularly harsh on the Ninigret’s leadership during the eighteenth century (Robinson 1994:84). Yet, despite its palpable associations with land losses and the economic hardships endured during those times, and its tangible reminder of detribalization, Fort Ninigret was (and is) still an ancestral place for the Narragansett, enriched with stories and strong moral lessons. It was a place worth revisiting, though Memorial Rock never became a spot where Narragansett people gathered to debate its conflicting and unresolved meanings publicly.

CANONICUS MONUMENT The Canonicus Monument, the other boulder memorial raised just after detribalization, was erected in Providence’s North Burial Ground, the city’s oldest public cemetery. The large rock, estimated to be “as tall as an average man,” also exhibited qualities that Rhode Island’s European Americans considered suitable for monuments commemorating the region’s Native peoples. Although a proposal for remembering respected sachems with boulder memorials had been discussed for years, the idea languished until the events celebrated at Fort Ninigret and an admonishment by one of the speakers spurred the need for action. The discovery of a “rude, rough, and rugged” rock of ample proportions eight feet below the ground in a sewer excavation, and of no other use to city officials, provided the proximate cause that ultimately led members of the Rhode Island Historical Society to carry through with the plan for commemorating noteworthy sachems. Furthermore, the boulder’s symmetrical shape, hinting of an original provenience near a stream bank long buried by urban fill, inspired associations with deep time, progress, and thoughts about cultural extinction implemented by detribalization that

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Figure 8.4 The Canonicus Monument at North Burial Ground, Providence, Rhode Island. Photograph, n.d., RHi X3 7701. (Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society).

made it especially adaptable to their purposes (Rhode Island Historical Society 1884:22–24). The monument’s prime mover had the 5 × 2 ft. rock carved with the sachem’s name and mark—“a rude bow and arrow” sometimes penned on colonial deeds—and moved to a new section of the cemetery, where the commissioners of the Burial Ground had donated a small plot of land (Figure 8.4). Unlike the older portion of the burial ground, this area was designed using the landscape conventions of the rural cemetery movement, which gave it a distinctively park-like atmosphere (Sterling 2000). In this “picturesque” setting, a steep hillside unsuitable for burials, massive oaks, winding paths, and an artificial pond served as the backdrop for the monument. With the boulder securely in place, the surrounding area was “graded and turfed” to complete its transformation into a distinctive place of memory within the cemetery (Rhode Island Historical Society 1883:8). The dedication of the Canonicus Monument was quite the social event. By some estimates, as many as a thousand people attended the ceremony, including the mayor, community leaders, history enthusiasts, one of the former commissioners on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, and at least 200 hundred local high school students (Figure 8.5). The official platform alone is described having seats for 300 hundred persons.

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Figure 8.5 The dedication of the Canonicus Monument, September 12, 1883. Photograph, RHi X3 7700. (Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.)

Photographs of the event indeed show a sizable gathering. Although many of the faces are difficult to decipher, the overwhelming majority are white. The only Narragansetts identified in the program were Moses Prophet, who had the dubious honor of unveiling the monument, and a little girl named Annie Thomas, who presented a bouquet of flowers to the Narragansett Indian Affairs commissioner (Rhode Island Historical Society 1883). The event had its share of speeches and songs, along with the requisite poem and benediction. The speakers commented on the boulder, citing its appropriateness as a memorial to the Narragansett sachem and its harmony with the setting. Many also spoke about Canonicus and his friendship, kindness, and generosity to the early colonists. They expressed their gratitude by acknowledging that without his hospitality Rhode Island’s thriving towns, villages, and cities, with their factories, churches, schools, houses, and other signs of progress and civilization’s advances, would not have been possible. Even the Narragansett Indian Affairs commissioner—who was ambivalent about attending the dedication because he felt he had nothing more to contribute—relented, stating that his presence alone testified to his interest in this effort to memorialize in material form someone so intimately connected with Rhode Island’s early history. Assembled at a space intended for reflection, the celebrants praised Canonicus, duly noted the tribe’s recent termination, and contemplated

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what Rhode Island had become. In referring to the event at Fort Ninigret, one of the orators mentioned that the Narragansett who spoke on that occasion “bore public testimony to the justice and equity that marked the dealings of the state” during the detribalization process (Rhode Island Historical Society 1883:17). He implied that the mighty chief had so impressed Rhode Island with his decency and fairness that he served as the state’s role model. Allusions to Rhode Island’s cultural appropriation of Canonicus might have seemed generous given the Narragansett’s recent detribalization. Likewise, so might the gesture of erecting the boulder to the sachem in Providence’s public cemetery. However, on the day of the dedication no Narragansett spoke—not even Moses Prophet, whose name was not listed among the 324 men, women, and children Rhode Island determined could claim tribal membership and a share from the sale of communal property during the detribalization procedure. The site of the Canonicus Monument today looks very different than it does in photographs taken at the dedication. Noticeably absent is the boulder itself. Only a flat, stone base, which originally had been camouflaged by an earthen mound, indicates the spot where it once stood. The mound survives merely as a slight rise on the ground surface. Footpaths that had led to and encircled the monument are no longer visible. Trees have been cut or exist as new growth; though some remnant ornamental plantings, especially yucca, a very resilient and common cemetery plant, can be seen in the vicinity. In addition, there are gravestones on the memorial’s triangular-shaped plot inscribed with dates suggesting that the process of landscape alteration began less than 20 years after the Canonicus Monument was raised. No written documentation indicating exactly when the monument was removed from North Burial Ground has been found in the archives. Oral accounts and circumstantial evidence suggest that it was moved sometime in the 1980s, when some local business owners spearheaded an initiative to have the boulder relocated to a part of downtown Providence in need of revitalization. Their plan placed the boulder at a once-bustling intersection that they learned was officially called Canonicus Square in city records. Relocated to a place that bore its name, the Canonicus Monument was envisioned as a centerpiece for the area’s economic recovery (Figure 8.6). However, the new location was not just a landscape of urban decay and anticipated renewal. It was also a locale where Narragansett and other New England Native peoples had lived and worked alongside, and sometimes married with, other ethnic groups after and even before detribalization—though the existence of the community they had established was as invisible and misunderstood from the outside as the name of Canonicus Square itself.

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Figure 8.6 The Canonicus Monument on Westminster Street, Providence, Rhode Island, 1996. (Photograph by Erik Gould, Rhode Island Photographic Survey.)

At its new site, the boulder became a local landmark that neighborhood people often referred to as “the potato.” On the spot where it stood there is now only a faint imprint suggestive of the solid, rectangular base that it had been precariously perched upon. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance are a mystery, though many suspect that it was the victim of a traffic accident or possibly foul play about 10 years ago. Individuals from several municipal agencies have searched in vain for the fallen monument. A few have campaigned to have a replica made and placed in the monument’s original field of memory in the historical cemetery or in a redesigned Canonicus Square. However, the Narragansett seem unfazed by the missing monument. Their response suggests that the memorial boulder was irrelevant to them. One could surmise that they disregarded the Canonicus Monument while it was at North Burial Ground and later at Canonicus Square because these locations were not special places of memory within their ancestral homelands. And perhaps if they were, processes of colonial settlement and land seizure in Providence going back to the seventeenth century that steadily foreclosed their title to ancestral homelands around the headwaters of Narragansett Bay might possibly have contributed to their forgetfulness about these special places.

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Arguably the same assumptions about colonial history that underwrote detribalization were more influential in shaping perceptions about the Narragansett’s cultural memory and their lives and experiences in towns and cities away from their former reservation in Charlestown, than actually contributing to their forgetfulness about locations in ancestral homelands around Providence (cf. Doughton 1997; Handsman 1999; Lobo and Peters 2001). Admittedly, the extent to which the Narragansett may have been familiar with or continued to visit special locations in Providence is not widely known, since its Native communities are seldom mentioned in older city histories or more recent studies, let alone explored in relation to archaeological histories of place. Nevertheless, Providence has a well-preserved material record of Native American life from the precolonial and early colonial periods. There is evidence of a major settlement dating from at least 3,000 years ago to the 1600s about a mile from North Burial Ground, and artifacts and features have been found in scattered loci throughout the city (Chapin 1924; Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission 2002). Yet, no archaeological materials have been reported from either site of the Canonicus Monument. Even “tests,” presumably involving excavation, said to have been done at North Burial Ground to determine if the sachem was interred beneath the monument did not turn up any remains (Breed 1985). While the results are much less surprising than the question that led to the investigation of the memorial (i.e., cenotaph) in the first place—and a regrettable reminder of disparities in the treatment of Indigenous burial places (even an imagined one such as this)—the findings support the interpretation that the North Burial Ground site may not have been a special place of memory in the Narragansett’s ancestral homelands. Therefore, the Narragansett’s apparent lack of concern about the Canonicus Monument and its disappearance might not stem from hazy memories or even self-selected “forgetting,” but from the fact that its locations had not been special places of memory. Concomitantly, there is no evidence to suggest that the Canonicus Monument became a spot of purposeful gathering for Narragansett in the postdetribalization era. Surrounded by gravestones in its first location, and by neighborhood businesses, schools, and a constant stream of cars, trucks, and city buses in its second, one could easily suppose that the monument would not be a place the Narragansett visited or would take over for purposeful gathering, whether to renew friendships, build community, create new memories, or engage in political activism. According to an oral account, Narragansett and members of other tribes met informally at churches in Providence as early as the 1880s to talk about detribalization, land sales, language, culture, and a host of other matters (McMullen 1996:119). In the 1920s, many of the functions

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served by these gatherings were largely absorbed by the Indian Council of New England. But in addition, the Indian Council, which counted Native peoples from throughout New England as well as European Americans as members, also initiated plans to organize public events at as many as 50 to 100 monuments to the Narragansett (Indian Council of New England n.d.; McMullen 1994). Although its proposal was criticized by a young Mohegan woman, who intimated that a living memorial might be more beneficial to the region’s Native Americans than memorials to the past, the Council went ahead with its plan. During its brief history (1923–1925), the group dedicated and staged other public events at numerous monuments across southeastern New England, though far fewer than it had envisioned. However, the Canonicus Monument was not among the sites visited nor where the Council’s Native leaders and members, deliberately dressed in elements of pan-Indian clothing, announced their cultural identities and shared ancestry publicly in order to challenge assumptions about their cultural extinction. Furthermore, the boulder does not seem to have been a gathering spot of any kind, though written records of the Council indicate that members held less formal meetings at various locations not very far from North Burial Ground.

CONCLUSIONS The accounts of Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument illustrate some of the ways in which the Narragansett engaged with monuments raised to their memory in the postdetribalization era, and how different evidential records illuminate experiences, histories, and memories intertwined with these sites. In the case of Memorial Rock, its location was a place of lived experiences for the Narragansett; some connected with difficult episodes in their tribal history. However, in spite of the monument’s intrusiveness (and reminder of detribalization), Narragansett continued to visit the site, ostensibly supplementing, if not displacing, Rhode Island’s memory of them in its tangible form with their own complicated memories of the space. Alternatively, the Canonicus Monument did not interest them. Neither of its recorded locations seems to have been a special place in their ancestral homelands, based on written sources and current archaeological knowledge. Nor did the monument become a site where Narragansett gathered with other Native peoples from the region to reaffirm their contested identity and shared histories of survival and resistance in public performances such as those staged in the 1920s or later in the 1930s under the leadership of other intertribal organizations. Moreover, the Canonicus Monument, like Memorial Rock, was never boldly taken over

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by activists in the late 1960s and the 1970s to assert political presence or call attention to injustices in symbolic maneuvers reminiscent of occupations of other public monuments such as Alcatraz, Ellis Island, Mount Rushmore, or Plymouth Rock (see Smith and Warrior 1996 for discussion). Indeed, the boulder raised to the sachem does not seem to have been a spot where Narragansett congregated for other reasons at times when they were less likely to be the focus of public scrutiny. However, exploring how the Narragansett negotiated these monuments is not merely a scholarly exercise. Although pronouncements of their demise may have been exaggerated, the Narragansett people continue to struggle with the memorialization of their extinction. Not insignificantly, these commemorative boulders and other monuments raised to their memory are the principal media through which most European American onlookers learn their first—and often lasting—history lessons about the Narragansett, and ones which they may access again and again through celebrations and pageants, visits, or simply as passersby in the course of their everyday lives (see Trouillot 1995). The clear, concise, and repetitive messages about Narragansett extinction made ever so tangible by these monuments are still believed by many who hold onto the notion that being Narragansett today, and since the 1800s, has been mostly a matter of claiming an identity. These opinions persist though the Narragansett assert, and have successfully argued, that no federal law ever took away their tribal status (Herndon and Sekatau 1997:134). Rhode Island’s 1880 action to detribalize them and buy their reservation had violated the United States Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, an important piece of legislation that required the federal government to supervise or approve the disposing of tribal land (Robinson 1994). Additionally, these misconceptions about the Narragansett people remain even after the tribe won back land sold under the terms of detribalization, plus additional acreage, in a 1978 out-of-court settlement, and received federal acknowledgment of their tribal status in 1983. That the Narragansett disapproved of what was remembered about them in the boulder monuments raised in the early 1880s, and continue to be troubled by these reminders of their detribalization, seems undeniable. Apparently they registered their displeasure in different ways. Sometimes it was by sheer indifference or by maintaining their own attachments to, and spatial routines of, place in spite of the disruptive and very alien commemorative practices represented by imposed monoliths carved with banal, literal inscriptions. In other instances, I suspect they harnessed these monuments to tell their own stories, impressing memories through participation and actions they used in creating their own memorials. Thus, the Narragansett’s engagement with the very monuments intended to silence them provides a powerful reminder that

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history is not just made by tellers, but also by doers who take history into their own hands and refuse to be pushed to its sidelines (Trouillot 1995). The alternative stories constructed from Native texts, oral history, and archaeological findings, and not just critical readings of official records alone, offer compelling evidence of the complicated histories of place and locality intertwined with public monuments. Combined with oral and written accounts, archaeology’s emphasis on fine-grained spatial and temporal processes can usefully contribute to how such monuments and the physical spaces surrounding them might be studied and understood differently by revealing “strands of historical contingency” that give glimpses into the perseverance and renewal of Native communities and unfinished colonial relations (Clifford 1997:343). These possibilities provide reasons for believing that there are many other countermonument stories yet to be told, not only in Narragansett Country and across southern New England, but in other parts of the world where Indigenous peoples struggle with the residual effects of commemoration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincere thanks go to Charlotte Taylor of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission for sharing her knowledge of Fort Ninigret, and to numerous others who offered their opinions about the Canonicus Monument, including Thomas D’Amore, Director of North Burial Ground; Kari Lang of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association; and Carol Pace, a former archivist of the City of Providence. I also want to thank Russ Handsman and William Simmons for close and perceptive readings of earlier drafts, and Christine Reiser for assisting with the formatting. Erik Gould kindly produced a new print of his photograph of the Canonicus Monument for the chapter. Lastly, I wish to express my gratitude to Ella Wilcox Sekatau, an elder, ethnohistorian, and medicine woman of the Narragansett Tribe, for teaching me that not all “Indian Rocks” are the same.

REFERENCES Anonymous. 1746. Testimony of Sompauwat, Kouckesatoursow, and Old Queen, Joseph Whipple et al. v. Thomas Ninigret and Sarah Ninigret, September term 1746, Newport County Judicature Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery. Christopher Champlin Papers, Mss 20, Indian Deeds and Depositions, Rhode Island Historical Society Archives, Manuscripts, Providence. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Breed, Donald D. 1985. North Burial Ground Also Serves City as a Recreation Area. Providence Journal, May 8: CL1, CL4. Brown, Theodore Dennis. 1935. Narragansett Territory. Narragansett Dawn 1(3):12. Butler, Eva. 1946. The Brush or Stone Memorial Heaps of Southern New England. Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 19:3–12. Byrne, Denis R. 2003. Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia. Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2):169–193. Campbell, Paul R., and Glenn W. LaFantasie. 1978. Scattered to the Winds of Heaven— Narragansett Indians, 1676–1880. Rhode Island History 37:66–83. Chapin, Howard. 1924. Indian Implements Found in Rhode Island. Rhode Island Historical Society Collections 27(4):105–124. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians. 1884. Fourth Annual Report of the Commission on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, Made to the General Assembly at Its January Session, 1884. Providence: E.L. Freeman and Company. Conkey, Margaret W. 2005. Dwelling at the Margins, Action at the Intersection? Feminist and Indigenous Archaeologies, 2005. Archaeologies 1(1):9–59. Doughton, Thomas L. 1997. Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, A People Who Had “Vanished.” In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Colin G. Calloway, ed. Pp. 207–230. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Foote, Kenneth E. 1997. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Goodwin, William B. 1932. Notes Regarding the Origin of Fort Ninigret in the Narragansett Country at Charlestown. Rhode Island Historical Society Collections 25(1):1–16. Handsman, Russell G. 1999. Towards Archaeological Histories of the Nipmuc Indian Community in the “Lost Century” (1820–1920). Paper Presented at the 32nd Annual Chacmool Conference, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, November 11–14. Handsman, Russell G., and Trudie Lamb Richmond. 1995. Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke People and Us. In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings. Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson, eds. Pp. 87–117. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Herndon, Ruth Wallis, and Ella Wilcox Sekatau. 1997. The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era. In After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Colin G. Calloway, ed. Pp. 114–143. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Indian Council of New England. N.d. Scrapbook of Thomas W. Bicknell of the Indian Council of New England (1923–1925). Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Archives, Brown University, Bristol, RI. Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press. Lobo, Susan, and Kurt Peters, eds. 2001. American Indians and the Urban Experience. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Mayer, Susan N. N.d. Fort Ninigret Site Report. Manuscript on file at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, Providence. McMullen, Ann. 1994. What’s Wrong with This Picture? Context, Coversion, Survival, and the Development of Regional Native Culture and Pan-Indianism in Southeastern New England. In Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England. Laurie Weinstein, ed. Pp. 113–150. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. ———. 1996. Culture by Design: Native Identity, Historiography, and the Reclamation of Tradition in Twentieth-Century Southeastern New England. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI.

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Murray, Tim. 1993. The Childhood of William Lanne: Contact Archaeology and Aboriginality in Tasmania. Antiquity 67(256):504–519. Providence Daily Journal. 1883. Consigned to History: Final Proceedings in the Matter of the Narragansett Indians, Dedication of the Monument at Fort Ninigret, Oration, Poem and Pertinent Addresses. Providence Daily Journal, August 31:8. Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. 2002. Native American Archaeology in Rhode Island. Providence: Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. Rhode Island Historical Society. 1883. Canonicus Memorial: Services of Dedication, Under the Auspices of the Rhode Island Historical Society, September 21, 1883. Providence: Providence Press Company. ———. 1884. Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1883–1884. Providence: Printed for the Society. ———. N.d. Records of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Rhode Island Historical Society Archives, Manuscripts, Providence. Robinson, Paul A. 1994. A Narragansett History from 1000 B.P. to the Present. In Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England. Laurie Weinstein, ed. Pp. 79–89. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Rubertone, Patricia E. 1994. Grave Remembrances: Enduring Traditions among the Narragansett. Connecticut History 35:22–45. ———. 2001. Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Salwen, Bert, and Susan N. Mayer. 1978. Indian Archaeology in Rhode Island. Archaeology 31:57–58. Senulis, John. N.d. Fort Ninigret Field Notes. Records on file at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, Providence. Shackel, Paul A. 2003. Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the PostBellum Landscape. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Simmons, William S. 1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. 1996. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: The New Press. Speck, Frank G. 1945. The Memorial Brush Heap in Delaware and Elsewhere. Archaeological Society of Delaware Bulletin 4(2):17–23. Sterling, John E. 2000. North Burial Ground, Providence, Rhode Island: Old Section, 1700–1848. Greenville, RI: Rhode Island Genealogical Society. Taylor, Charlotte. 2006. The History and Archaeology of Fort Ninigret, a 17th Century Eastern Niantic Site in Charlestown, RI. In Native Forts of the Long Island Sound Area, Readings in Long Island Archaeology and Ethnohistory, vol. VIII. Gaynell Stone, ed. Pp. 277–286. Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Wylie, Alison. 1995. Epistemic Disunity and Political Integrity. In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings. Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson, eds. Pp. 255–272. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Jamestown’s 400th Anniversary Old Themes, New Words, New Meanings for Virginia Indians Jeffrey L. Hantman

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony and the ways in which some events and programs surrounding this anniversary were engaged by, and appropriated by, American Indians in Virginia. The anniversary of the establishment of the Jamestown colony has been observed with celebratory or commemorative events every 50 years since 1807. What has been remembered and promoted at Jamestown is a story of American origins in the South. Jamestown was the place where the first permanent English-speaking colony was established on the continent that would eventually be largely an English colony. It is remembered as the place of the first representative democratic government in America, and a place where successful maritime commerce based on tobacco cultivation and export took root. Early Jamestown has also been remembered as a place of tragedy and loss for the colonists, many of whom died from starvation, violence, and disease in the earliest years of the colony. For the colonists, such tragedy lends a heroic dimension to the story as they overcame these traumatic events to become the first English colony that persevered and survived. For the Native people of the region, the Algonquian-speaking Powhatans and their neighbors, Jamestown was not the first colonial intrusion, but it was the one that survived and began the loss of land appropriated by the expanding colony and a demographic collapse far greater than any other seen in the Southeast in the early colonial era (Rountree 1990; Wood 1989). The memories of those processes, the beginnings of the ultimate loss of sovereignty by the late seventeenth century (Rountree 1990), and the conflicted and competing memories concerning Pocahontas’s role in the Jamestown story, are among the 217

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themes that Indigenous people want heard. Overlaying that is the memory of the role Indians played in helping the colony to survive its first years. With their presence at “the origin” noted by all, and their voice invited and heard clearly in the commemoration of 2007, Virginia Indians are incredulous that they are still in an uphill battle to receive federal recognition. They want that story told above all (see Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life 2008; Waugaman and Morreti-Langholtz 2000). It was also at Jamestown in 1619 that Africans first arrived on a Dutch ship as prisoners and were purchased for servitude—the origins of slavery in North America. It is a conflicted past, a painful past, and yet a logistical point from which to anchor discussion and demand a hearing of contemporary cultural politics and inequality in America today. If American democracy was born at Jamestown, as celebrations and commemorations have trumpeted from 1907 to 2007, this participatory and egalitarian government did not extend to Indians or Africans. How then to participate in the commemorative moments, as, in fact, Native Americans and African Americans have done since 1907? The answer to these questions can be found in strategies to engage and appropriate some of the commemorative events. Interestingly, one can look back 100 years and see that such efforts to offer a counternarrative were a part of the 1907 Tercentenary Exposition (Gleach 2003; Yarsinske 1999). The celebrations or (now) commemorations always look new, but they are in fact familiar and well-worn themes with new words and new meanings attached. In order to grasp the complex nature of Jamestown as a historic monument at the 2007 anniversary moment, I will first briefly review the conflicted and often violent history of the Jamestown colony in the seventeenth century. I will then describe Jamestown as monument— what the core monument looks like (i.e., the Jamestown archaeological site itself), as well as the associated museums and smaller monuments sponsored by the Commonwealth of Virginia in an effort to decentralize the commemorative events. While it seems counterintuitive, looking beyond the central monument of Jamestown is needed in order to better understand Jamestown. This is a position that has long been held at the moments of commemoration, though it is one that has been adopted for widely divergent reasons and was different, but not new, in 2007. For instance, in 1907 Jamestown as monument was presented in a narrative which centered this place as the beginning of the eventual locus of American military dominance in the world. American naval power, not long returned from the Philippines, was on display in Norfolk in 1907 to celebrate America’s global future; Plains Indians and Wild West shows were on display to represent the past (Yarsinske 1999). In 2007, Jamestown as the central monument was the anchor to a narrative which

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now attempted to write about a multicultural America—one which conquered but was reflexive about those conquests and their implications for America today. As American Indian and African American cultures persist and demand a role in the commemorative events, organizers looked past the (ultimately) small and short-lived initial English fort to the places of Indian, African, and other Virginia pasts. To understand the commemorations over the past century and more requires the inclusion of places beyond Jamestown, beyond the central monument of commemoration. Finally, using a continuum borrowed from Kenneth Foote’s (2003) historical consideration of how Americans have treated monuments related to sites of violence and tragedy in American history, I consider in the main part of the essay how such Jamestown-era historical sites have been either sanctified, simply noted (designated), or obliterated. Foote’s heuristic, following on earlier work of memorializing sites of contested or conflicted historical memory, including those of Bodnar (1992), Young (1993), and Koshar (2000), provides a useful structure by which to examine the regional and multifaceted approach of federal, state, and private agencies that oversaw the 2007 Jamestown Commemoration. I will look at Jamestown as the site of sanctification, while a nearby reconstructed living history museum offers an unintended example of obliteration. In the significant intervening space is the category of monuments of designation. I consider these in detail, with reference to a new program of highway historical markers created in the mix of programs and events to commemorate the Jamestown anniversary. These are small but permanent monuments on the landscape, extending well beyond the Jamestown site and its museums, and scripted or vetted by the Virginia Council on Indians. In their topical and language choices, these modest monuments have sent a message that conveys a Native voice as it has rarely been heard in Virginia. I will explore the word choices on the monuments and their significance as what I consider possibly the most original, if subtle and intellectually subversive, change to the manner in which Jamestown has been commemorated for over 200 years.

THE EVENTS OF 1607 AND BEYOND In the spring of 1607, 104 Englishmen sailed into the Chesapeake Bay and up the James River and established a settlement called James Fort, soon to become Jamestown (Figure 9.1). This was a private commercial venture funded by the Virginia Company of England. The colonists were reasonably aware of the Indigenous territory they were sailing into, as the surviving colonists of the late sixteenth-century English Roanoke Colony had provided them information about the landscape

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Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities Property Jamestown Island

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Figure 9.1 Map of Jamestown Island showing the locations of the Jamestown Settlement living history museum and the property owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) containing the archaeological site of Jamestown. (Produced by Sue Ann McCarty and Lynn Carlson.)

and the Native people of the Chesapeake. Perhaps most importantly, the Roanoke colonists had provided details on how to trade with the Indigenous people, especially their chiefs, in order to try to maintain peaceful relations (Hantman 1990; Mallios 2006). The ethnohistoric record of the Jamestown colony is relatively rich, especially in the extensive writings of the legendary Captain John Smith (Barbour 1986; Rountree 1989, 1990). From that record, we know that the colony was established in the midst of the territory of Tsenacommacah, an Algonquian-speaking network of at least 31 polities united into a tribute-paying, paramount chiefdom ruled since the late seventeenth century by Wahunsunacock (Powhatan) and his priests and petty chiefs. In rather familiar colonial practice, the Englishmen first took possession of a recently cleared parcel of land in Tsenacommacah. They were specifically in the territory of the Paspahegh, one of the tributary polities within the paramount chiefdom. While the Paspahegh expressed displeasure at this—with arrows and words—Wahunsunacock had the cultural and political power to insure that the English could stay. With a population of some 14,000 people, a significant percentage of whom were considered warriors by colonist John Smith, it is clear that the decision as to whether the English could stay in Tsenacommacah or not was one made by the Powhatans (Fausz 1987; Hantman 1990). In 1570 for example, in a story less often told, these same Powhatans destroyed a smaller Spanish colony established in their midst (Mallios 2006). But at Jamestown, for the first three years at least, we see a story of elite

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exchanges and interaction, violence and fear, always cycling (Horn 2005; Price 2005). Three subsequent Jamestown events demand attention for reasons that are relevant to what follows here. First, in 1619 a meeting of a General Assembly, a representative government, took place in the Jamestown Church. Many have recently argued that this event marks the birthplace of democracy in America (Kelso 2006). Second, and with a cruel irony that speaks for itself, in that same year a Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown with 20 African prisoners who were sold into servitude. Thus, Jamestown is the site of the beginning of African and African American history in what would become the United States and the birthplace of slavery there as well. Third, in 1699 Jamestown, having been replaced earlier by Williamsburg as the capital of Virginia, was virtually abandoned. Here we confront another irony: the first permanent English colony in America was abandoned as a town within a century, though it became home to two farms (Blanton 2003).

JAMESTOWN AS MONUMENT IN 2007 Jamestown Island today is called Historic Jamestowne, a monument managed by the National Park Service (NPS) and the privately funded Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The National Park Service controls most of Jamestown Island, but the ruins of the original fort and an associated church from the seventeenth century are APVA property. As the town of Jamestown expanded and contracted, an early urban space was created (Horning 2000); the NPS notes the footprint of these ruins, but they were not much a part of the commemoration in 2007. The Commonwealth of Virginia created a popular living history reconstruction of the fort and a Powhatan village, with associated museum exhibits, in connection with the 350th anniversary celebration in 1957. The APVA has focused since the late nineteenth century on preserving a Jamestown-era brick church and, since 1994, on the recovery of the original fort through intensive archaeological study (Kelso 2006; Lindgren 1993). The National Park Service virtually pioneered American historical archaeology at Jamestown (Cotter 1958) and uncovered remains of the statehouse in which the previously noted first General Assembly took place. In the 1990s, the NPS funded a survey of all of Jamestown Island, resulting in a broader context for understanding the fort in its environmental context and a deeper history of Indian life on the island (Blanton 2003). Finally, the Commonwealth of Virginia maintains its living history museum and, for 2007, opened a vastly expanded and impressive indoor museum depicting the historical and cultural contexts of Native Americans (Powhatans), West Africans

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(Angolans), and Europeans (English). Once called the Jamestown Festival Park (in 1957), it is today more soberly called the Jamestown Settlement (see Figure 9.1). An overarching commission to integrate the three organizations, called Jamestown 2007, tried to coordinate efforts for the 2007 anniversary. As with all monuments, Jamestown offers multiple paths for multiple interpretations, for appropriation, and for commemoration in nationalist or alternative, counterhegemonic language. A subjective assessment, based on my own many visits to these places, is that the APVA fort and church were the focus of the 2007 Commemoration. This is worth noting because in 1957, the center of attention was the Jamestown Festival Park, and in 1907, the Tercentenary was held in Norfolk, away from Jamestown itself. Jamestown is a sacred place in the imagination, but its physical presence is flexible. Perhaps with the archaeological discovery of the actual fort this will change, but only another 50 years will tell. One could imagine that by 2057, the sanctified center of the commemoration will be the recently studied archaeological site of Powhatan’s chiefly village of Werowocomoco (Gallivan 2007). Amidst the wide array of diverse voices and cultural perspectives involved in the 2007 Jamestown anniversary, there were dominant master narratives that structured the public commemoration and created serious and unavoidable ironies. These are, first, that Jamestown (not Plimoth) was the birthplace of English-speaking America. That is a matter of simple chronology, on the one hand, and regional politics and never-ending North-South tensions in the United States on the other. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, Jamestown as a monument was appropriated by Southern leaders to combat what is still perceived as Northern hegemony and cultural dominance, not created by, but typified by the central role of the Plimoth Colony story in the American origin narrative, remembered every Thanksgiving in a national ritual day (see Abrams 1999; Lindgren 1993; Pleck 1999). Even today, the home page of Jamestown 2007 introducing the 400th anniversary events began with these fighting words: “The very essence of modern America took root on the banks of the James River in 1607, at Jamestown, Virginia . . . 13 years before the Pilgrims founded Plymouth in Massachusetts” (JamestownYorktown Foundation 2007). Appropriation of the monument to fit regional, ethnic, vernacular, class, or race-driven interests (Bodnar 1992) includes even the strategies of the dominant local planners of the 400th anniversary event, as it did as well for the 300th (Lindgren 1993), in contesting the dominance of the Plimoth story in American folk memory. A second master narrative was that Jamestown (not Philadelphia; not Boston) was the birthplace of democracy in America. This claim derives from the meeting of a representative government at Jamestown (following

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a decade of martial law) in 1619. While long a part of what “mattered” in interpreting Jamestown as a monument, the rhetoric around this site as the birthplace of democracy took on a different meaning in the context of US military involvement in the Middle East as 2007 approached. Because of the perception that America was in a war against terror, the call of the then present administration to spread democracy throughout the world, even if by force, resonated with Jamestown’s claim as the birthplace of American democracy. I think it fair to say that Virginians heard more or less on that theme as the popularity of the administration and its war effort waxed and waned. The third dominant master narrative was that Jamestown was a place of “cultural encounter.” Left to that vague term, this narrative fails to include with any rigor the history of violence, enslavement, and warfare that took place there. Alternatively, a viable model of short-term cultural pluralism (e.g., Lightfoot et al. 1998) is also ignored, although the archaeological data and ethnohistory of Indians and English interacting (living?) within the fort provides evidence for that possibility (Barbour 1986; Kelso and Straube 2004; Mallios and Straube 2000). These master narrative frames risk marginalizing the voices and histories of the people and cultures that were not free to participate in this democracy in 1619, or for centuries after that, and those for whom 1607 was anything but a birthday or a balanced “cultural encounter.” The violence of the time, both within communities such as the Jamestown fort and between English and Indian, and English and African, is lost under the bland and even-handed language of encounters (Perrault 2006; Sandberg 2006). Yet, collective memory reinvented through monuments and commemorative events are constructed on a stage which can be appropriated by those potentially marginalized voices, and they offer a dramatic opportunity for a counternarrative to be told and heard. Whether and/or how to participate in the larger “commemoration”cum-celebration—to appropriate the attention of the nation for particular cultural and historical concerns—was, and is still, a conflicted issue. Jamestown, the multicultural Jamestown, is a monument which has created and creates contestation. In this chapter I am particularly mindful of the events of the Jamestown colony as one example of a place marked by violence and tragedy, yet remembered largely as a place of beginnings. If Jamestown is “the” birthplace of what would become the English-speaking American nation, it was a difficult birth. Forged within the crucible of colonialism and war, built on the institution of slavery, the nation that grew from these events and institutions cannot be defined solely by those processes and institutions; yet historical attachment to the American landscape should confront this violent past. How we mark this past should also attempt to

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include multiple or alternative perspectives. State and federal personnel who are in official positions of evaluating and describing significance and symbolic meaning of historical places are leading the effort to diversify how that history is noted. Even for the “victors,” Jamestown was a place of violence and tragedy. New archaeological research at the Jamestown fort has exposed details not only about the well-known “starving time” of 1609–1610, when nearly all of the colonists died from apparent starvation and related illnesses, but also the unexplained death of an unidentified man from a gunshot wound (Kelso and Straube 2004). Death from disease, from Indian attack, and from violent disagreement within the colony are all part of the story told at the Jamestown site and in publications now available (Kelso 2006; Kelso and Straube 2004). For the Native people of Virginia within whose territory the Jamestown colony was settled, the English arrival was both a short-term opportunity to establish long-distance trade ties and enhance prestige, and more tragically, a place from which a population of ca. 14,000 Algonquian Indians began a long period of war, loss of territory, and demographic devastation. Jamestown was a place of cultural conflict and violence, both within the colony itself, and between colonists and Native Americans (see Gleach 1997; Kelso and Straube 2004).

LANDSCAPES OF CONTESTED HISTORIES: SANCTIFICATION, DESIGNATION, AND OBLITERATION In the American search for an origin story, how is this part of the beginning of English-speaking America—marked by violence and considered the crucible from which a uniquely American society began—to be marked on the landscape? A battlefield may be described the same way, but Jamestown is not remembered as a battlefield; thus the conflict in interpretation. And, what are the parameters by which that landscape itself is to be defined, if at all? Foote (2003), in the United States, and Koshar (2000), in Germany, are among many who have written about monuments and historical memories in landscapes of violence and war. Both Koshar and Foote are particularly concerned with how nations remember a range of historical events, including those defined by tragedy and violence, some of which are celebrated by the present generation and some of which are not. Koshar (2000) observes a continuum of memorialization on the modern German landscape of more than a century of German history (1870–1990) from “monument to traces.” He categorizes memory landscapes into four kinds: the national monument, the ruin, the reconstruction, and the trace, and sees the presence

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of each in the context of the politics of the moment in balance with a tragic national history—from national origins, to National Socialism, to the division of the postwar era. In the United States, Foote (2003:7) offers a broader heuristic that includes a hierarchy of the treatment of historic places marked by violence and tragedy, ranging from sanctification to designation to obliteration. Sanctification, at one extreme, is the process of turning a historic event into a monument or place conveying some “lasting positive meaning”—a sacred place—whether it be an abstract cultural ideology or a specific act of heroism. Sanctified sites share five characteristics (Foote 2003:9): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

They are clearly bounded and marked as to what happened there. They are carefully maintained for long periods of time. There is typically a change in ownership from private to public. There are periodic ritual commemorations. They often attract additional, even unrelated, monuments and memorials.

On the other extreme of Foote’s continuum, obliteration shrouds those places where people lived and events took place that are perceived by the boards and committees with the power to designate as “shameful.” Between sanctification and obliteration there is a seemingly innocuous category of simple designation. This is the marking of a place to note that something or someone important “happened” here. From a listing in the National Register of Historic Places to a local municipality’s historical marker program, this category gives national, state, or local sanction, often without comment or reflection on larger issues, creating the simplest of modern monuments on the landscape. Distinct from sanctified places, designated places are not clearly marked off from their surrounding environment, are not publicly owned, and are not considered consecrated space. While there is usually some community agreement, and state or local sanction, as to the significance of such a place, that is not always the case: “Erecting a sign, or building a marker are ways of designating a site, but such a site gains little long-term attention and is rarely the focus of regular commemorative rituals” (Foote 2003:18). If this seems dismissive and insignificant, Foote’s historical overview of American hierarchical and changing treatment of historic monuments and landscapes of violence bears noting: Along the continuum running from sanctification to obliteration, designation lies squarely between active veneration and direct effacement. This is a pivotal position and designation is sometimes best viewed as a transitional phase in the history of a tragedy site. The meaning and marking of a designated site may change through time, either toward sanctification or toward rectification or obliteration. (Foote 2003:18)

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As such, the heuristic model offered by Foote serves well in structuring a consideration of the multiple roles of Jamestown as monument, the multiple voices that now speak and use this perceived place of origins.

SANCTIFICATION: JAMESTOWN AS MONUMENT There can be little question that the original site of the Jamestown fort, first state meeting house, and the seventeenth-century church have been the object of efforts at sanctification, at creating a bounded and sacred place of origin, carefully maintained. The stories told are large and tied to this one spot over a short span of time, and there has been a continuing renewal of common origin myth themes that have dominated commemoration and sanctification of this one small piece of Jamestown Island for the past century or more (Lindgren 1993; Taylor and Molineaux 2004). All five of the criteria that Foote (2003) suggested mark the sanctified historic site are seen here with the exception that, as is typical for Virginia historic sites, this place has stayed in private ownership. Sanctified sites are marked by periodic, regular ritual commemoration, and Jamestown carries that same history. In 1807, there was a Jamestown Jubilee, including a five-day event with a regatta of sailing vessels, parade, and oratory. In 1857, the 250th anniversary was commemorated by a flotilla, military parade, and a speech by President John Tyler. The 1907 tercentenary commemoration, called the Jamestown Exposition, had an explicitly international focus. It drew over a million visitors to a fair site in Norfolk, Virginia, and in the manner of such events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, took on the shape and image of a world’s fair highlighting American technology and military power. Twenty-one states displayed their commercial and cultural strengths in houses built for the Exposition. In 1907, Indians from Virginia participated by performing costumed plays about Pocahontas and John Smith and sought to use this event to demonstrate to the nation and the world that they were “still here” (Gleach 2003). This point was diminished by the larger and more spectacular inclusion of Indians from the Great Plains, invited by the Exposition’s planners, and of greater, if stereotypical, interest to the Exposition attendees. The Negro Development and Exposition Company was chartered by the state to create a separate, segregated, exhibit hall honoring African American industry (Yarsinske 1999). The 350th anniversary in 1957 saw Virginia construct the Jamestown Festival Park and great excitement surrounded the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II for the Festival (Yarsinske 1999). Anticipation of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia sparked years of planning and 18 months of public events. The intervening years of the civil rights movement, Native American rights,

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and the highly publicized contestation across the hemisphere of the Columbian Quincentenary as a celebration, led to the use of the term commemoration for 2007, the new word of choice for events of unbalanced cultural encounters and colonial control. Commemoration is the term of choice used for national anniversaries tinged, if not steeped, in conflicting cultural memories of events that are as much about violence and tragedy as they are about a place of humble beginnings or unambiguous victories, depending on your perspective. The Jamestown 400th anniversary was consistently called a commemorative event in the language of its planners. Still, it is remarkable how similar the 400th anniversary events are when compared to the brief overview of the events from 1807 to 1957. This is particularly so if one looks at the main event, a three-day “extravaganza” that took place in May 2007. “Extravaganza,” and the words and phrases in quotes that follow are those chosen by the Jamestown 2007 planning committee to capture the tenor of what they romantically labeled “America’s Anniversary Weekend.” Queen Elizabeth II paid a visit in the week prior to the anniversary weekend (Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation 2008a). There were “festivities,” including “continuous entertainment on five performance stages” and “fireworks displays honoring Jamestown’s pivotal role in American history” to conclude each night. Jamestown 2007 invited us to be part of “one of the first great American moments of the 21st century.” For the prior 18 months of planning, the anniversary of the Jamestown colony founding was a “commemoration.” Nowhere will you see the final Jamestown 400th anniversary weekend called a “celebration.” It just looked like one (Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation 2008b). The landscape of the Jamestown monument at the moment of commemoration contextualizes this place in a world frame. That more inclusive perspective reflects many contemporary concerns, from American multiculturalism to larger issues of globalization. But, it is worth noting that while the words and intentions in 2007 were new, the world frame is not new by any means. Earlier commemorations were even more explicitly about putting America, born at Jamestown, into a global context. The theme of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition was, as one author titled it, “American Imperialism on Parade” (Yarsinske 1999) and featured a post-Spanish-American War display of America’s naval power and then emerging world military status. The language of the commemoration, including reference to the true birthplace of America, the birthplace of democracy, and the sacrifice of those colonists who survived the first years of struggle to turn James Fort into Jamestown, all denote a place of sanctification. As I have noted, these themes are not new to the 2007 anniversary events and promotion—but they have certainly been intensified and made widespread. That leading Native American and African American voices do not necessarily share

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in centering these themes has not muted the continuing and intensified sanctification of the original Jamestown site, but it has forced consideration of how to place alternative voices and interpretations somewhere on the larger landscape.

DESIGNATION: VIRGINIA’S HISTORICAL HIGHWAY MARKERS PROGRAM Here I examine a particular category of designated monuments that emerged in Virginia contemporaneous with the 18-month commemoration of the 2007 Jamestown anniversary. These designated sites are in the category of what were earlier referred to as unrelated monuments and memorials that predictably grow from the sanctification of another place. However, in this case whether they are related or not is a matter of interpretation. I am referring to a program instituted by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR) in 2004, in conjunction with the Virginia Council on Indians, to write and display 10 historical markers along Virginia’s highways. As part of a diversity initiative of the VDHR (which also included adding signs concerning African American history in the state), the signs concerning Virginia Indian history offered one path (among many others) for Virginia Indians to engage the 2007 commemoration on their own terms. It allowed the appropriation of a type of monument of official designation that had long been the subject of protest by Native people due to the language found on many of the older signs (with phrases such as massacre and savage), as well as the simply low number of signs one sees which engage with Native histories. The Virginia Historical Highway Markers program offered an opportunity for the state and Virginia Indians to work collaboratively on monuments that would be cast in iron, mounted in the ground, and not restricted to the limited landscape commemorated, sanctified, and made sacred for centuries by others at Jamestown. Moreover, the language on these markers was written or vetted by the Council on Virginia Indians, chaired by Karenne Wood (Monacan) and administered by Deanna Beacham (Council Program Specialist, Weapomeoc). The topics to be addressed were selected by the Council. Scholars who had worked closely with some of the Indian people in Virginia, including myself, were invited to help. But, final topics and language choices were made by the Council. The Historical Highway Markers program is an 80year-old, locally respected, but very traditional means of designating historic sites. Monuments of cast iron are placed along the state’s highway system, traditionally noting a single place where an event occurred, to be

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Figure 9.2 A historic place designated in 2007 by the Virginia Historical Highway Marker program. This sign recognizes the headquarters of Opechancanough, a Powhatan paramount chief, who organized widespread Powhatan attacks on the English colony in 1622 and 1644, noting that these attacks were “an attempt to punish [the English] for encroaching on Indian land.” The wording on Indianthemed markers was chosen or vetted by the Virginia Council on Indians. (Photograph by Jeffrey Hantman.)

explained and commemorated in one hundred words or less (Figure 9.2). Since 1926, more than 1,600 signs have been cast in Virginia, with a predominance of Civil War–related sites, followed in order by homes of famous Virginians, churches, public buildings, and industrial sites (Salmon 1994). Over the past few years, in a dramatic shift and with funding provided by the state, 10 new signs about Indian history have been approved and put in place. More are planned. These signs may seem a small effort, but in the hierarchy of places from obliterated to sanctified, designated places sometimes mark a significant shift in the monumentalizing of history on the landscape. Three aspects of these signs reveal new words and new meanings on an old monument on the landscape, i.e., the highway historical marker. First, they direct attention to places other than Jamestown; second, they define Native history in language written by and/or approved by Native people; and third, they redefine the very idea of the sign program as traditionally conceived and executed. That is,

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these Native signs rarely speak of a single place but instead speak of landscapes and use of the landscape. They speak of cultural histories writ large and over long periods of time, instead of only the stereotypical lives of “famous men” or one particular event. And last, and with the greatest obvious and immediate impact, they speak of resistance and persistence in the face of sustained and expanded European colonization in terms of Native ideologies. To most Virginians, and to any visiting the Jamestown commemoration/celebration in 2007, Virginia Indian history is anchored to Jamestown and seems to begin and end within, at most, a century of colonial encounter. These new highway markers, located across the state and making reference to places, people, and events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and even twenty-first centuries, have written a quietly subversive new text on a very old medium. There are 10 such signs, and their titles are listed in Table 9.1. Five themes emerge in the specific language of the Native-authored signs now marking the historic landscape of Virginia. The titles of the signs taken alone reveal the first change in perspective. Native individuals have names and their life histories, or their engagement with a historical moment, are what is designated, what is remembered. The use of individual names such as Amoroleck, Powhatan, Opechancanough, Cockacoeske, and Black Hawk title more than half of the new markers. In brief, and in sequence, these individuals were a Siouan-speaking Native from the Virginia interior who attacked John Smith when Smith came into his territory in 1608; the leader of the Powhatan chiefdom in 1607, called by his birth name Wahunsunacock in the text of the sign; the leader after Wahunsunacock of the Powhatan chiefdom who led two revolts against the British colony in 1622 and 1644; a Powhatan woman who became a leader of a colonial-endorsed reconstitution of the Powhatan chiefdom in the late seventeenth century; and a Sauk leader of resistance to relocation, briefly held in Richmond Table 9.1 Titles of historical highway markers approved by the Virginia Council on Indians. Amoroleck Encounters John Smith Black Hawk (1767–1838) Creek Delegation in Fredericksburg Monacan Indian Village Paspahegh Indians Battle of Bloody Run Headquarters of Opechancanough Powhatan Uttamusack Cockacoeske

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as prisoner in the early nineteenth century. The texts of the signs make many more mentions of individual Native people and their actions. The first point of the new signs is that they honor Indian leaders, acknowledge their power and efforts to resist the colony, acknowledge the agency of individuals acting within their own cultural context, and, finally, as with Amoroleck and Black Hawk, note the connection to a larger Indian world than only that of the territory of the Powhatans. Second, there is a recurring theme of resistance, and this not only replaces, but to the extent possible, inverts the language of “the massacre” which dominated earlier markers. On one sign, Amoroleck resists the encroachment of colonist John Smith’s exploration into the Virginia Piedmont—the region which the Virginia Company wanted the colonists to exploit for its mineral wealth. According to the text of this sign, Amoroleck told the Englishmen that his people resisted the English because “they heard that the colonists were a people who came to take their world from them.” Amoroleck’s agency, resistance, world view, and voice define this sign—it is he who encounters Smith, not the other way around, and it is he who speaks for himself and his people. The Virginia Council on Indians insured that the action depicted in these 100-word historical markers would lean in that direction. More explicit references to resistance are in the highway marker of the Paspahegh Indians, who we learn “consistently resisted the English settlement (Jamestown)”; of Opechancanough and his leadership of the “attacks against the English in an attempt to punish them for encroaching on Indian land”; and of Black Hawk, who found himself in Virginia after leading the resistance against the removal efforts of Andrew Jackson. Third, violence, where it is depicted, is violence directed against Indians by the colonists. On the Paspahegh Indians sign, the following actions of the Jamestown colonists are now noted on a cast iron marker permanently placed along Virginia’s highways to be viewed by families and tourists who use highway markers as a means of “seeing the historic countryside”: In August 1610, George Percy, on orders from Gov. De La Warr, destroyed the Paspahegh town and its crops, killing 16 people and capturing the wife and children of chief Wowinchapuncke. On their return to Delaware’s ship, the English threw the children overboard and then shot them in the head, and later executed the chief’s wife . . . Wowinchapuncke was killed in a later skirmish near Jamestown. The remaining Paspahegh left the area by 1611.

In this one text, the Native authors have conveyed the horrors of colonization, the violence involved, and the terror and murder that led to some groups withdrawing to alternative locations. What happened to

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the Paspahegh, and did they disappear? The Jamestown museums don’t really answer that question. In less than a hundred words, the “mystery” of the Paspahegh “disappearance,” that familiar trope of Eastern Woodland Native history, is explained not as inevitable but as a decision made in the very real and direct pressures of colonial violence directed at a particular people. Other examples of the violence directed at Native Americans in Virginia include the imprisonment and humiliation of Black Hawk and the similar treatment of Chief Opechancanough, of whom the following is said on the sign which bears his name: “He was nearly 100 years old when he was captured after the conflict of 1644. Imprisoned at Jamestown, he was killed when a prison guard shot him in the back.” The reference to Cockacoeske, the Queen of Pamunkey, acknowledges the significant role of this woman in the political life of the Coastal Plain Algonquians well into the latter half of the seventeenth century. At the same time, and in the manner of colonial governments, her authority was derived from the English, and such interference in Native political structure is a form of violence that must be considered along with the other lethal forms described above. The marker describing Cockacoeske includes the reference to Virginia’s tribes becoming tributary to the colonial government. Sovereignty for Indian people came to an end as the seventeenth century drew to a close. Continuity is a fourth theme. For example, we meet Indians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Black Hawk and the Creek Delegation in Fredericksburg. In a particularly pointed expression, the sign designating a Monacan Indian Village, though it was not occupied after the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, concludes with two sentences that do not allow Monacan history to end with this village. The sign reads, “Monacan descendants still reside throughout the central Virginia area. The tribe’s headquarters today is on Bear Mountain in Amherst County.” This is a significant departure from the norm of historical highway markers which talk specifically about a single place, person, or event. Here, the place is important, but its history is deemed incomplete by the authors of the sign without another refutation of the “disappearance” trope. This village may have been abandoned, but the people live on to the present day. It is also worth noting that this sign states that while this particular town was one recorded by John Smith on his 1612 Map of Virginia, “many more existed.” Based on archaeological data (Hantman 2000), this sign uses those three words to begin to chip away at the inherent authority of the colonial document which had for centuries rendered the Native interior a sparsely settled landscape. Finally, one historical marker, titled “Uttamusack,” makes reference to the religious practice of the Powhatans in designating this temple site,

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called the spiritual center of the Powhatans. The role of priests serving as councilors to the paramount chief is a significant allusion to Native understandings of the limits on the power of the paramount chief (see Williamson 2003). Nearly 10% (143) of the non-Indian-related signs in Virginia relate to historic churches and other religious buildings and sites (Salmon 1994), so this one marker makes a small dent into the landscape of religious memory that the markers create as a whole.

OBLITERATION If one knew where to look, obliteration could be “seen” in the silences and the empty spaces of the 2007 Jamestown story, even as the multicultural museum exhibits strived for an alternative perspective. Foote (2003:25) writes, “A curious feature of obliterated sites [is that] they stand out as much as sacred spaces. They are breaks in the texture of the landscape that are noticeable by way of contrast with their surroundings.” In the Jamestown narrative, knowledge of oral history, archaeology, or ethnohistory allows one to see these breaks in the modern landscape. I will focus on one, the one that is most prominent and which allows me to turn attention to the Jamestown Settlement living history exhibit. In one very literal sense, obliteration of Indigenous places began as soon as the Jamestown colonists arrived in 1607. The first colonists chose a relatively cleared area of the forested landscape to settle on, a landscape cleared because it had been used not long before by the Paspahegh polity of the larger Powhatan paramount. Archaeological evidence gives clear indication of the Paspahegh use of that particular spot on the landscape (Kelso and Straube 2004), as well as the remainder of the island (Blanton 2003). As the colony expanded in the seventeenth century, this predictable pattern of colonization and appropriation of land continued. Even sites that were obvious monuments on the landscape, such as the large earthen burial mounds of the Virginia interior (Gold 2004), were obliterated as the colony expanded further west in the eighteenth century. In the latter instance, there could be no confusion as to the “ownership” of the land—e.g., fenced or unfenced land, land in production or not. These acts of obliteration removed the clearest sign of ancestral territory and the sacred that anyone could recognize. Obliteration of thousands of Indigenous places, without sanctification, without recognition, was the ubiquitous pattern in the region until NAGPRA and related legislation and changing cultural sensitivities demanded otherwise. In 2007, the story of the appropriation of land from the Paspahegh people was told in museum panels and dioramas at the Jamestown Settlement. With a new concern for a particular type of “authenticity” in representation, the reconstructed Indian village at the Jamestown Settlement is now

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based on the archaeology of a nearby seventeenth-century Paspahegh village. This attention to detail served to provide a welcome local amendment to the long standard and uncritical use of John White’s drawings of houses and village plans from the sixteenth-century Roanoke colony, well south of Jamestown and not part of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. At this point, it seems that anything but obliteration is taking place in this museum. But, walking past and through the new interpretive museum and outdoors to the living history part of the museum, one enters first the reconstructed Paspahegh village, then the 1607 James Fort, followed by the reconstructions of the three ships that brought the English colonists to Virginia. These reconstructions were all first created 50 years ago but have been recently updated. There are many critiques one can make of living history museums and the banter that takes place casually if predictably between costumed interpreter and visitor (see Handler and Gable 1996). The topics covered in such conversations at Jamestown seem to stay in the interesting but very comfortable and seemingly apolitical sphere of technology. In the fort, conversations concern the making and wearing of heavy helmets and other armor, making iron nails, and living aboard small ships for months at a time. For the costumed Paspahegh villagers (two or three at most on my visits over the years), the demonstrations and attendant conversation concern making a canoe from a tree trunk, the inevitable grinding of corn with a wooden mortar and pestle, and the making of stone tools. In my years of visiting this place, no costumed interpreter has ever engaged me with respect to their attitudes toward the people in the fort who had taken their land or their attitudes toward their paramount chief, to whom they paid tribute and yet received little protection from the English. And, no one has engaged me in a conversation about relationships that existed between this very modest, but not atypical, village and the other 14,000 Powhatan people who lived in the Virginia coastal plain, or the people they may have traded with or intermarried with in the interior or in any direction on the continent. All activity and conversation is timeless and ahistorical. This doesn’t have to be, as any visitor to Colonial Williamsburg can report regarding discussions on topics ranging from the Stamp Act to slavery. The Paspahegh village, in life caught right in the middle of this incredible moment of history on the American continent, is mute in the twenty-first century on the subjects that matter. The reconstructed Paspahegh village is small, and it is the only Native presence seen or discussed on this landscape (Figure 9.3). It is devoid of the trappings of the paramount chiefdom that the adjacent indoor museum extols for its complexity; nowhere do we see or feel the actions of the powerful leaders such as Powhatan or Opechancanough. And, nowhere is the larger Powhatan world, or the larger world of Native

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Figure 9.3 Houses in the reconstructed Powhatan village at the Jamestown Settlement living history museum. They were rebuilt for the 2007 commemoration with an eye towards authenticity based on recent archaeological research at the village of Paspahegh. Overshadowed by the English fort and its large ships in the harbor, visitors do not see the Indian village as part of a much larger and integrated Powhatan/Chesapeake world. (Photograph by Jeffrey Hantman.)

America, in evidence. For all the language of balance and power in the indoor museum, here on the reconstructed historic landscape the Powhatan world is small, modest, and clearly part of the past. When one considers the evidence for violent engagement between Paspahegh and the colonists, when one considers new evidence for Indians entering and leaving the Jamestown fort, perhaps living there, there is nothing to see or hear here that conveys any of that new information. Instead, this modest village conveys a false sense of place and landscape for the Powhatans. Two hundred Powhatan villages dwarfed the James Fort, but here this one is overshadowed by the fort with its modern technologies, weaponry, and the three ships which link the Jamestown colonists to a larger world (Figure 9.4). They had been so linked in the indoor museum, and here on the boats, that whatever the limits of the conversations that take place, one can’t help but see the connection of the English to a larger Atlantic world, perhaps even imagine that more and more English would be arriving as, in fact, they did. But, no such links can be seen for the “accurately” depicted Paspahegh village. It is small and alone

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Figure 9.4 Two of three reconstructed ships at the Jamestown Settlement living history museum. First displayed at the 350th Jamestown Anniversary, these reconstructions of the ships that brought the first colonists to Virginia are a permanent part of the living history exhibit. Anchored in the harbor, connected to the James River, Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean, the ships appear to link the James Fort to a larger world, contrasting it from the seemingly isolated Paspahegh village. (Photograph by Jeffrey Hantman.)

and not very powerful at all, preoccupied with subsistence activities. At the time of the Jamestown colony, there were over 200 such villages known to colonist John Smith and mapped by him (Barbour 1986). One of those, Werowocomoco, was the residence of the paramount chief and, just as the fort was not actually in the location in which it has been reconstructed, theoretically Werowocomoco too could have been reconstructed here in the Jamestown Settlement, in the continuing interest of balance. Still, or alternatively, any Paspahegh interpreter could talk of his

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or her paramount chief, of the priests and their power, of long distance and local trade—but none of that takes place. The power imbalance which would later characterize the majority of the seventeenth century is inadvertently characterized here as a starting point of these cultures in contact. The obliteration is that the years of first encounter did not unfold like this (Hantman 1990). The landscape of this reconstruction has obliterated 99% of the Powhatan villages, and worse, has obliterated the agency and power of the people as a whole in the years of initial contact. In doing this, it is hard if not impossible for visitors to this museum to see the “success” of the Jamestown colony as anything but inevitable, the obvious working out of a meeting between a superior and globally connected culture and one that is not. It is hard not to conclude that the visual impact of the reconstructed landscape and activities of the Indian village and English fort has a powerful, but historically obliterating, lesson that will be the one remembered. The Jamestown Settlement’s newly opened and vastly expanded indoor museum explicitly, and with measured balance, made their new focus the “blending” of three cultures from across the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century: Powhatan, Angolan, and English. The opening exhibit panel encourages the visitor to see where the United States “really began” and to understand how Jamestown sparked a series of cultural encounters that “helped shape our nation and the world.” In expanding beyond the focus on one monument, this exhibit also moves us forward in time to include the full century past the initial culture contact of 1607. As Silliman (2005) has argued, such a temporal approach is a needed antidote to the last decade or more of emphases on cultures in contact, leaving the continuing historical narrative unexplored. The exhibit succeeds in opening up new perspectives, but is weak in discussing this longer term “blending” of cultures, and fails to deeply engage the issue of slavery and the near destruction of Virginia’s Indian people. The power imbalance is enormous between these three cultures within a decade or two after initial contacts. This is not fully explored. Perhaps one exhibit can’t do all things, but the focus on a creolization model of the encounter in Virginia leaves the visitor with a sense of equality, similar to the balance of exhibit space, which was never in place in the colonial world.

CONCLUSIONS The 2007 Jamestown Commemoration featured many venues in which Virginia Indians were heard. In 2007, Indians were included to a greater degree than before inside the central sanctified arena where events create the collective memory of the colonial era, the purported birth of

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democracy, and the painful and conflicted postcolonial history continuing to the present. Native people want the early history remembered, but it is also critical that the destructive policies of the twentieth century, an era referred to by many as legislative genocide for Indian identity due to the passage of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, also be remembered. While the late twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first have seen state recognition granted to Virginia Indians, Virginia’s tribes that seek federal recognition have been denied, not because of challenges to their identity or continuity, but for fear that Indian gaming would come to Virginia. These are some of the muted themes that Virginia Indians wanted told in the context of understanding the legacy of the colonial event commemorated by Jamestown 2007. Virginia Indian voices were invited and are heard in museum panels written by Native scholars and are part of the federal- and state-sponsored museums. They have been heard in special conferences and events that were supported by Jamestown 2007. A dramatic and highly publicized trip by Virginia Indian tribal leaders to England in May 2006 to speak about Virginia Indian history was particularly important. It included a visit to the grave of Pocahontas, a woman whose memory is very real and very sensitive to the people who consider her an ancestor and a victim of the violence of the early colonial period. Some Native leaders have participated in event planning. Others refrained from involvement given the ultimately small space allotted for Indigenous issues, and because of Virginia’s congressional delegation’s collective failure to support federal recognition efforts. The move toward celebration rather than commemoration also discouraged Indian participation. The local, national, and international attention to the Jamestown 2007 events offered an opportunity to give a much more prominent voice to those who were included but not well heard in the 1907 and 1957 anniversaries. Many in Virginia were hopeful that the flashpoint conflict of the Columbian Quincentenary (1992), and the alternative successes of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial (2003–2004) relative to providing a platform and a voice to Indigenous people, would be lessons learned and internalized. Virginia Indian voices, to reiterate, were a part of the 2007 Jamestown anniversary, and their identity and place in 1607 are part of the exhibits that now accompany the main sanctified monuments. But, Indigenous people wanted those two dates connected with the complicated histories of the postcolonial period. Instead, their voices, in their own words and language, were not heard to the level or impact that one would have expected or hoped for. The landscapes of memory that are seen through the various and varied monuments of Jamestown, or inspired by the Jamestown anniversary year, remain largely unexamined and still contested.

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I suspect that the politically conservative, tried-and-true dominant narratives (birth of democracy, birth of a multicultural nation, Jamestown was first) pushed the Indian voices off-center to those of a counternarrative, hard to fit into what evolved each day to become a celebratory event. That is why I emphasized here the monuments of designation—those places that are not sanctified and not celebrated in ritual on a regular basis, but nevertheless are beginning to filter history through a new lens. Foote (2003) suggests that monuments of simple designation may denote the spaces that a society will soon see emerge as those of sanctification or other less peripheral honorifics. The Virginia Historical Highway Marker program approved 10 new markers on Virginia Indian history that reflected word choices and themes sanctioned by the Virginia Council on Indians. As outlined here, they are Indigenous themes that engage colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary concerns. They redefine the very role of the historical highway marker from the memorialization of a single place to an opportunity to tell a larger story about Native landscapes and long-term historical narratives. In these signs, and the state’s sanction of them, perhaps the seeds for the next Jamestown anniversary have been planted. When that commemoration occurs, and the story of Jamestown is once again told, perhaps the balance of power for defining the narrative for the moment and the monuments may have shifted to where it was in April of 1607—in the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the region. If so, a story with new themes, new words, and new meanings would finally be heard.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Pat Rubertone for inviting me to contribute to this volume. I am grateful to Deanna Beacham and Karenne Wood, whose work on behalf of the Virginia Council on Indians framing the language of the new Indian-themed historical highway signs inspired the more optimistic parts of this paper. Scott Arnold and the staff of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources provided me with the text of newly approved highway historical markers which allowed me to include them in this analysis. Finally, I thank Adria LaViolette for her insightful reading of several early drafts, and her support throughout the research and writing of this paper.

REFERENCES Abrams, Ann Uhry. 1999. The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Barbour, Philip L., ed. 1986. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631), vols. 1–3. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Blanton, Dennis. 2003. Island Wide Survey and American Indians. In Jamestown Archaeological Assessment. Pp. 39–52. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Bodnar, John E. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cotter, John L. 1958. Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Fausz, J. Frederick. 1987. Indians, Colonialism, and the Conquest of Cant: A Review Essay on Anglo-American Indian Relations in the Chesapeake. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95:133–156. Foote, Kenneth E. 2003. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Rev. edition. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gallivan, Martin. 2007. Powhatan’s Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity and Personhood in the Chesapeake, AD 1200–1609. American Anthropologist 109(1):85–100. Gleach, Frederick W. 1997. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2003. Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. Ethnohistory 50(3):419–445. Gold, Debra L. 2004. The Bioarchaeology of the Virginia Mounds. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. 1996. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke University Press. Hantman, Jeffrey L. 1990. Between Powhatan and Quirank: Reconstructing Monacan Culture and History in the Context of Jamestown. American Anthropologist 92(3):676–690. ———. 2000. The Archaeology of the Virginia Interior: 1400–1700. In Societies in Eclipse. David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds. Pp. 107–124. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Horn, James C. 2005. A Land as God Has Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. New York: Basic Books. Horning, Audrey. 2000. Urbanism in the Colonial South: The Development of SeventeenthCentury Jamestown. In Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes. Amy L. Young, ed. Pp. 56–68. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. 2007. Jamestown Settlement. Electronic document, http://www.historyisfun.org/Jamestown-Settlement.htm, accessed April 2007. ———. 2008a. Jamestown Quadricentennial Reaches Pinnacle With Royal Visit. Electronic document, http://www.historyisfun.org/Royal-Visit.htm, accessed July 2008. ———. 2008b. Anniversary Weekend. Electronic document, http://www.historyisfun.org/ Anniversary-Weekend.htm, accessed July 2008. Kelso, William M. 2006. Jamestown: The Buried Truth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Kelso, William M., and Bly Straube. 2004. Jamestown Rediscovery: 1994–2004. Richmond, VA: Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Koshar, Rudy. 2000. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Anne M. Schiff. 1998. Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Cultural Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63:199–222. Lindgren, James M. 1993. Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mallios, Seth. 2006. The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

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Mallios, Seth, and Bly Straube. 2000. 1999 Interim Report on the APVA Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia. Richmond: APVA Jamestown Rediscovery. Perrault, Melanie. 2006. “To Fear and To Love Us”: Intercultural Violence in the English Atlantic. Journal of World History 17(1):71–93. Pleck, Elizabeth. 1999. The History of Thanksgiving in the United States. Journal of Social History 32(4):773–789. Price, David A. 2005. Love and Hate at Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf. Rountree, Helen C. 1989. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 1990. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Salmon, John S. (compiler) 1994. A Guidebook to Virginia’s Historical Markers. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Sandberg, Brian. 2006. Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1492–1700. Journal of World History 17(1):1–25. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70(1):55–74. Taylor, Rodney, and Will Molineaux. 2004. Images of America: Jamestown. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life. 2008. Why Request Federal Recognition? Electronic document, http://www.vitalva.org/fedrecognition.html, accessed July 2008. Waugaman, Sandra, and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz. 2000. We’re Still Here: Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories. Richmond, VA: Palari Publishing. Williamson, Margaret Holmes. 2003. Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wood, Peter H. 1989. The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790. In Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds. Pp. 35–103. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Yarsinske, Amy. 1999. Jamestown Exposition: American Imperialism on Parade. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Young, James. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Index

interpretation, 29; multivocal and multivalent nature, 63–64; public monuments and, 199; technology and, 43 Arizona, 18; San Pedro Valley, 64–77; See also Davis site; Reeve Ruin Arnold, Bettina, 62 arrastras, 145 Ashmore, Wendy, 105 Assawampsett Pond, 161 Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, 36 Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), 221 ATVs, on Native sites, 46, 47 Australia: Aboriginal people, 15; Yolngu people, 67 authenticity, 91; of Coronado State Monument, 91–94

Abeyta, Gov. Agapito, 94–95 absolute space, 68 absolute time, 68 Adams, David Wallace, 124 Algonquian Indians, 224, 232 Altaha, Mark, 127–128 Ammons, Gideon, 203 Amoroleck, 230, 231 Anasazi Indians, 19 ancestral relationships, 17 ancestral sites, 66, 107 ancient artifacts, Western Apache, 71–72 Annasnappet Pond, 175 Anyon, Roger, 18, 59–77 Apache lands: East Fork-North Fork confluence, 106, 107–111; Hopi and Zuni on, 105–106, 107; Tł’óghagii, 107–111 Apache people: ancestors, 65; displacement and conquest of, 103–104; early contacts with Anglos and U.S. officials, 109–111; Fort Apache, 20–21, 31, 101–131; prereservation history, 107–109; relocation, 111–112; reservations, 111; Theodore Roosevelt School, 119–125, 128; See also San Carlos Apache Tribe; White Mountain Apache Tribe Apache Wars, 103 Apess, William, 25 archaeological landscape, 63 archaeological sites, 13–14 archaeology: ancestral relationships and, 17; historic preservation and, 82; “Indigenous” archaeology, 52; involvement in monument building and

Baha (Apache Chief), 120 Balcony House, restoration, 81–82 Bandelier, Adolph, 86 Barnes, Will C., 114 Basso, Keith H., 104, 105, 129 Beacham, Deanna, 228 Belmont site, 37–38; discovery, 50; geology, 50–51; land use and, 46; site protection, 46 Bernard, Tim, 17, 35–54 Billings, Hammet, 180 Billings, Joseph, 180 Black Hawk, 230, 231, 232 Bliss, Wesley, 92 boarding schools, 117–125, 128, 129 Boardman, Col. Mike, 127 Bosque Redondo, 109, 110 Bradford, William, 168, 176 243

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Brewster, Gordon, 50–51 Brown, Dona, 182 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, 139 built monuments, 14, 15; archaeology and, 199 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), boarding schools, 117–125, 128 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nuñez, 86 “calendar stick,” 69 Camp Goodwin, 110, 111 Canadian Indigenous peoples. See First Nations Canonicus, 208 Canonicus Monument, 26, 29–30, 196, 197, 206–212 Cape Breton University, Integrative Science Program, 52 Cape Cod: ancestral sites, 171; taskscapes, 171; Wampanoag Indian Country, 165, 167–173, 188 Carlton, Gen. J.H., 110 Carson Indian Agency, 152 Casa Grande, 91 Cassidy, Gerald, 89 celebrations. See public celebrations Champlain, Samuel de, 164–165, 170, 174 Charlie Lake Cave, 54n5 Chatham, 165, 170 Chiricahua People, 103, 104 Church, Capt. Benjamin, 177 Cibecue Apache people, 103, 108, 109, 110 Cibola, 86 clan migration traditions, Southwest, 59, 60–61, 70, 105, 106 classes of dates, 74–75 Clifford, James, 188 Coburn cemetery, 172 Cockacoeske, 230, 232 Colonial monuments, 19, 22–24, 26–27 Columbian Quincentenary, 227, 238 Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, 18, 59–77

Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq (CMM) Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council, 54n2 continuity, memorials and, 232 Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de, 86 Coronado Cuarto Centennial celebration, 87, 88, 94–96 Coronado State Monument, 20, 30–31, 82; authenticity, 91–94; design, 89–91; erosion at, 97; as heterotopia, 20; history, 86–87; Kiva 3, 88, 92–93, 94; opening, 95; performances and celebrations at, 94–96; proclamation as monument, 87; reconstruction, 91–94, 96–97; representation, 88–91; vision for, 91; See also Kuaua Pueblo Coronation Rock, 195 correspondence theory of representation, 88 Cotton, Josiah, 177 counterevents, 30 crisis heterotopias, 84 Crook, Gen. George, 127 cultural landscape, 63, 66–67; model of, 67–68; symbolizing memory, 66 Dante’s View, 139 dates: classes, 74–75; significance, 74 Davis, Stephen, 37 Davis site, 18, 71; archaeological history, 64–66; origin, 65 Dawahongnewa, Donald, 70 Death Valley, 135–157; Hungry Bill’s land allotment, 142–149; land rights, 135, 138, 141–142, 155–156; mining claims and, 138–139; mining in, 141; mining monuments and markers, 139–140; Timbisha Shoshone people, 138–157; Warm Spring, 139, 140, 149–154

Index Death Valley National Monument, 22, 31, 136, 137 Death Valley National Park, 135, 136, 154 Debert Cultural Centre. See Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre Debert site, 17; future research agenda, 49–52; governance, 38, 46, 47–48; history, 37–38; hunting habits of former inhabitants, 50; land use and, 46–48; as place of healing, 46; radiocarbon dating, 17, 37; site protection, 38, 46, 48; study of separately from cultural landscape, 53 de Niza, Fray Marcos, 86 descent, as Mi’kmaw guiding principle, 39–44 designation, monuments, 225 Devil’s Golf Course, 139 Dincauze, Dena, 52 Di Peso, Charles, 59, 64 Driver, Harold, 142 Eastern White Mountain Apache, 109 Eaton, Ernest, 37 Eddy, Clarence, 144–145, 146 education: Indian boarding schools, 117–125, 128, 129; Theodore Roosevelt School, 21, 101, 116, 117–125, 128 Ellis, Christopher, 54n5 Ely, Albert, 93 Endfield, Johnny, 129 Espejo, Antonio de, 86 Ethelbah, Paul, 127 “event stick,” 69 Ferguson, T.J., 18, 59–77, 65 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 89 “First Discovery,” 167–168 “First Encounter,” 168 First Nations: descent in, 40–41; Mi’kmaw, 17, 31, 35–54

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Foote, Kenneth, monuments related to sites of violence and tragedy, 27, 219, 224, 225–226 “footprints,” 106 Forefathers’ Day, 184 Forefathers Monument, 180, 181 Fort Apache, 20–21, 31, 101–131; design and layout, 113–115; early structures, 113; East Fork-North Fork confluence, 106, 107–111; exhibits, 126; as frontier icon, 101; as heterotopia, 20; history, 111–116, 129; Indian scouts, 115; location, 109; maintenance and repair, 116; as military post, 101, 103, 111–116; Native people’s presence in, 115; as symbol of Native pacification, 112; as Theodore Roosevelt School, 21, 101, 116, 117–125, 128; as White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center, 21, 31, 101, 125–128 Fort Apache Heritage Foundation, 125, 127 Fort Neck, 201, 203, 204 Fort Ninigret, 195, 196, 205; Memorial Rock, 26, 29, 196, 200–206, 212 Foucault, Michel, 20, 84, 85 Frijoles Canyon, restoration, 82 Gadsden Purchase (1853), 103 General Mining Act (1866, 1872), 141, 142, 156 geohistories of otherness, 85 Gerald, Rex, 64 Geronimo, 104 Gloshay, Jerry, Sr., 120 Gold Hill Mill site, 151 Good Newes from New England (Winslow), 175 Grantham, Louise, 149, 151, 153, 155–156 Great Swamp Monument, 29–30

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Green, Major John, 110, 111 Guide to Historic Plymouth: Localities and Objects of Interest, 184 Handsman, Russell G., 23, 24, 161–189 Hanson, George, 142 Hantman, Jeffrey L., 26, 27, 217–239 Hawikuh, 86 healing: of historical trauma, 45; Mi’kmaw concept, 44–46 Heap of Birds, Edgar, 25 Hell’s Gate, 139 heritage managers, Indigenous people and, 14 Herring Pond, 177 heterotopia, defined, 84 heterotopias, 20, 21, 84–85 heterotopias of deviation, 84 Hewett, Edgar Lee, 81, 82, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 96–97 Hisatsinom, 70 Historical Highway Markers program (Virginia), 27, 29, 228–233, 239 Historic Jamestowne, 221 historic preservation: archaeology and, 82; Indigenous people and, 14 historic trauma, healing of, 45 history: Basso on, 105; multivocality within, 72–76; significance of dates, 74 history and dialectic, 63, 73–74, 76 Hoari, George F., 180 Hobbamock’s Homesite, 167, 186 homeland, 39–40 Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, 64 Hopi people, 18; archaeological sites, 62, 70; clan migrations, 70, 105, 106; Palatkwapi, 70, 76, 77; Reeve Ruin, 70; Sakwtala, 105–107, 128; San Pedro Valley archaeology, 64–65,

76; in Western Apache lands, 105–106, 107 Hungry Bill, 142, 143, 146, 147–148, 150, 155 Hungry Bill’s land allotment, 142–149, 155 Hunter, Johnny, 142 Hunter Rd. site, 37 Hurt, Wesley, 92 Indian boarding schools, 117–125, 128, 129 Indian Council, 212 Indian Homestead Act (1875), 141 Indian scouts, 110, 115, 128 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act (1790), 213 “Indigenous” archaeology, 52 Indigenous peoples: historic preservation and public monuments, 14; place and place-names, 66; time, 67; See also Native peoples Integrative Science Program, Cape Breton University, 52 James Fort, 219, 234, 235 Jamestown 2007, 222, 238 Jamestown Colony, 19, 26–27, 29, 217–239; as birthplace of democracy in America, 222–223; as birthplace of English-speaking America, 222, 223; colonial history, 218–221, 223, 224, 233; ethnohistoric record, 220; 400th anniversary, 226, 227; history, 222; as monument, 226–228; as monument in 2007, 221–224; as place of “cultural encounter,” 223; ritual commemoration, 226, 227; as sanctifying site, 219; Tercentenary Exposition, 218, 222 Jamestown Commemoration, 219, 227, 237–238

Index Jamestown Exposition, 226, 227 Jamestown Festival Park, 222, 226 Jamestown fort, 224 Jamestown Island, 221 Jamestown Jubilee, 226 Jamestown Settlement, 233–234, 235, 236–237 Jano, 65 Jocome, 65 Johnson, William, 143, 147 Johnson Canyon, 143, 144–148 Julien, Donald M., 17, 35–54 Kejimikujik National Park, 42 Kennewick Man, 41 Kewa, 86 King Philip’s War, 177 Kluskap stories, 51–52 Koshar, Rudy, 224, 225 Kuaua Pueblo, 20, 31, 81–98; erosion at, 97; excavation, 88–89, 96–97; as heterotopia, 97; location, 82; origin of name, 86; placeness of, 82–83; See also Coronado State Monument Kuwanwisiwma, Leigh J., 70 La Farge, Oliver, 117 Laluk, Nicholas, 128 land rights, Death Valley, 135, 138, 141–142, 155–156 landscape: Cartesian model, 66; as memory and experience, 83 land use, Mi’kmaw Nation sites, 46–48 Lavender, Gladys, 123 Lévi-Strauss, Charles: classes of dates, 74–75; history and dialectic, 63, 73–74, 76 Lewis, Leroy, 61, 62 Lewis, Roger, 43 Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, 238 Linenthal, Edward T., 105 Lomakuyvaya, Floyd, 60, 61 Lost Others, 71 Luhrs, Dorothy, 92

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Lummis, Charles, 81 Lupe, Ronnie, 124, 130 Lydon, Jane, 15 MacDonald, George, 37, 54n4 MacDonald site, protection of, 46, 47 Marshall, Murdena, 44, 45 Mashpee Indian Community, 30, 189n4 Massachusetts, 23; See also Cape Cod; Plymouth; Plymouth Rock Massasoit, 30, 166, 185, 187 Massey, Dallas, Sr., 127 Matero, Frank G., 20, 81–98 Maushop, 169 “Mayflower Compact Day,” 184 Meem, John Gaw, 89, 90 memorialization, detribalization and, 196 Memorial Rock (Rhode Island), 26, 29, 196, 200–206, 212 memory-keeping places, 22 memory landscapes, Koshar on, 224–225 memory places, 71 Mendoza, Viceroy Antonio de, 86 Mescalero Apache people, 103 Metacom, 177 middle ground, 16, 28 migration routes, Southwest, 59, 60–61, 70 Miguel (Apache man), 109–110, 111 Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaw homeland), 35, 36; archaeological periods, 43; future research agenda, 49–52 Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, 17, 31, 35, 36; as place of healing, 46; plans and vision for, 39; See also Debert site Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council: on descent, 53; guiding principles for, 39–52; members, 54n1

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Mi’kmaw Nation, 35–54; Belmont site, 37–38, 46, 50; Debert Cultural Centre, 17, 31, 35, 36; Debert site, 17, 37, 37–38, 46–48, 50, 53; descent as guiding principle, 39–44; healing and spirituality, 44–49; highest priorities, 38–39; history, 38–39; Hunter Rd. site, 37; Kluskap stories, 51–52; Macdonale site, 46, 47; new context for ancestral places, 35–37 Mi’kmaw Rights Initiative, 36 Miles, Gen. Nelson A., 101–103 mining, in Death Valley, 141 Mining Act (1866, 1872), 141, 142, 156 mining claims, Death Valley and, 138–139 missions, of New Mexico, 86 Mitchell, Charlotte, 185–186 Mitchell, Zerviah Gould, 186 model of cultural landscape, 67–68 Monocan Indians, 232 monuments, 14, 28–29, 66; archaeology and monuments, 29, 199; built monuments, 14, 15; decision-making about, 14–15; defined, 164; designation, 225; Foote on, 27, 219; as heterotopias, 20, 21; mining monuments and markers, 139–140; objections to, 25; obliteration and, 225, 233–237; preservation of, 83–84; property monuments, 154; related to sites of violence and tragedy, 27, 219; sanctification and, 202, 225 Morehouse, Barbara, 68 motocross use, of Native sites, 46, 47 Mourt’s Relation, 168–169, 175 Mouse Cave, 143 msi-t, 52 multivocality, 63–64, 72–76, 130

museums, as heterotopias, 85 The Myth of Santa Fe (Wilson), 81 naming, 20, 85–87 Narragansett Dawn (magazine), 205 Narragansett Indians, 25–26, 29–30, 199–200; Canonicus Monument, 26, 29–30, 196, 197, 206–212; detribalization, 195–214; Fort Neck, 201, 203, 204; Fort Ninigret, 195, 196, 205; Memorial Rock, 26, 29, 196, 200–206, 212 National Day of Mourning, 30 National Monument to the Forefathers, 180, 181 National Park Service, Timbisha Shoshone people and, 135, 138 Native peoples, 31; ancestral relationships and, 17; Apache Wars, 103; BIA educational system for, 117–125; “footprints,” 106; Indian scouts, 110, 115, 128; land rights in Death Valley, 135, 138, 141–142; “nonreservation Indians,” 138, 141; objections to celebrations and monuments, 25; past, 17; place and time, 66–67; trachoma epidemic, 122; See also Indigenous peoples; under names of individual tribes and peoples Nauset, 165, 170 Navajo people, Theodore Roosevelt School, 117, 118 Negro Development and Exposition Company, 226 New Mexico, 20, 30–31, 81; historic preservation movement, 81–82; missions, 86; statehood, 81; tourist economy, 87; See also Coronado State Monument; Kuaua Pueblo

Index Ninigret, 195 Ninigret, Tom, 205 Nohwiké Bágowa Apache Cultural Center and Museum, 114, 125 Noka, Joshua, 203 Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaw Nation, 17, 31, 35–54 Nova Scotia Special Places Protection Act, 50 Nusbaum, Jesse, 81 Nuvamsa, Ben, 106 obliteration, monuments, 225, 233–237 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault), 84 Ohkay Oweenge, 86 Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 164 Old Mill Stream Quartz claim, 151 “Old Plymouth Days and Ways,” 180–181 Oñate, Juan de, 88 O’Odham people, 72; See also Tohono O’odham people Opechancanugh, 229, 230, 232 oral traditions, 67 Ortega, Ida, 72 ossuary pits, 172–173 Ousamequin (Massasoit), 166 Palace of the Governors (New Mexico), restoration of, 81, 96 Palatkwapi, 70, 76, 77 “Paleo Americans,” 41, 42 “Paleo Indians,” 40 paleo shorelines, 51 Panamint Range, 143 Panamint Tom, 149–150, 154 Paspahegh Indians, 220, 231–232, 233, 234, 235, 236 Passamaquoddy campsite, 184, 185, 189n3 past, 17; connection to present, 17, 18, 40, 66; Native American view, 67 Patterson, Wilbur, 142

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Patuxet, 165, 173–178 Pavanqatsi, 106 Percy, George, 231 Perry, Marie, 123 Personal Recollections (Miles), 101–103 “Pilgrim Maid” (statue), 184 Pilgrim Plymouth Guide, 184 Pilgrims: Cape Cod, 165, 167–173; “First Discovery,” 167–168; “First Encounter,” 168; history, 161; Plimoth Plantation, 166–167, 176; See also Plymouth Pilgrim’s Progress parade, 30, 161, 162 Pink Elephant Mill Site, 139 place, 13; alternative perspectives, 77; Basso on, 105; multivocal and multivalent, 76; naming, 85–87; representational order, 84; sense of, 16–17 placemaking, 28, 83; defined, 13, 84; heterotopias, 20, 21, 84–85; naming, 85–87; places of resistance, 84; reinvented pasts, 18–19; as reordering of reality, 84; “Thirdspace,” 85 places of resistance, 84 Plain Dealing (Massachusetts), 177 Plimoth Plantation, 166–167, 176 Plymouth, 19; early history, 164–166, 222; Forefathers Monument, 180, 181; guidebooks, 162–163, 181–182, 184; National Day of Mourning, 30; “Old Plymouth Days and Ways,” 180–181; Pilgrim’s Progress parade, 30, 161, 162; Plimoth Plantation, 166–167, 176; population, 182; Tercentenary Celebration, 183–185; tourist economy, 182–183; See also Pilgrims Plymouth Harbor, 163 Plymouth Rock, 24, 163

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Pocahontas, 238 Polingyumptewa, Harold, 60, 62 Port St. Louis, 165 Powhatan peoples, 27, 217, 220, 230, 233, 234, 235 present, connection to past, 17, 18, 40, 66 preservation: of monuments, 83–84; See also historic preservation Preston, Brian, 37 Preucel, Robert W., 20, 81–98 Print, Martin, 174 property monuments, 154 property rights, Death Valley, 135, 138, 141–142, 155–156 Prophet, Moses, 208, 209 Providence (Rhode Island): ancestral sites around, 211; Canonicus Monument, 209, 210 pseudoruins, 97 Puaitungani, 143, 144 Puaray Pueblo, 87, 88, 94 public celebrations and events, 26; Coronado Cuarto Centennial celebration, 87, 88, 94–96; counterevents, 30; objections to, 25, 30; Pilgrim’s Progress parade, 30 public monuments. See built monuments Pueblo people, 18, 31; renaming of New Mexico villages, 86; San Pedro Valley, 59–77 Quivira, 86 Reed, Erik, 94 Reeve Ruin, 18, 59, 61, 62, 69, 71, 77; archaeological history, 64–66; origin, 65 reinvented places, 18–19 relative space, 68, 69 relative time, 68, 69 representation, 88–89 resistance, expressed in memorial highway markers, 231

Rhode Island: Canonicus Monument, 26, 29–30, 196, 197, 206–212; Memorial Rock, 26, 29, 196, 200–206, 212; See also Narragansett Indians Riegl, Alois, 84 Riley, Ramon, 107 Rio Grande, 87 Roanoke colony, 234 Rosenmeier, Leah Morine, 17, 35–54 Royal Indian Burial Ground, 205 Rubertone, Patricia E., 25–26, 53, 195–214 sachems, 172 Sakwtala, 105–107, 128 San Carlos Apache Elders’ Council, 64 San Carlos Apache Tribe, 103; San Pedro Valley archaeology, 64–65, 76 sanctification, monuments, 202, 225 San Juan Pueblo, 86 San Pedro Ethnohistory Project, 60, 63–64 San Pedro River, 59 San Pedro Valley, 18, 64–77; Davis site, 18, 64–66, 71; Reeve Ruin, 18, 59, 61, 62, 64–66, 69, 71, 77 Santa Ana Pueblo, 86 Santa Fe (New Mexico), 19 “Santa Fe style,” 81 Santo Domingo Pueblo, 86 Sauer, Carl, 66 Scott, Mary, 142 Seowtewa, Octavius, 65 “Seven Cities of Gold,” 86 Sherman, Gen. William T., 178 Shonnard, Eugenie Frederica, 89 Shurtleff, Nathaniel B., 179 Siquieros, Bernard, 67 Smith, John, 220, 236 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 77 Sobaipuri, 65, 72 Soja, Edward, 85

Index Southwest: migration routes, 59, 60–61, 70; placemaking in, 86 space: absolute space, 68; relative space, 68, 69 Spain, colonial placemaking in, 86 Special Place designation, 46, 48 spirituality, Mi’kmaw concept of, 44 Stanion, Ralph P., 117 Stanley, Raymond, 127 Stea, Ralph, 50–51 Steck, Michael, 109 Stevens, Thomas Wood, 95 Steward, Julian, 142 Suma, 65 Summerhayes, Martha, 113 Surprise Canyon, 143 Tamaya, 86 taskscapes, 24, 171, 175 Taylor, Dalton, 61 technology, archaeological language and, 43 Theodore Roosevelt School, 21, 101, 116, 117–125, 128 “Thirdspace,” 85 Thomas, Annie, 208 Thompson, Bob, 139, 142, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155 Tiguex Pueblo, 86, 95 Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act (2000), 135 Timbisha Shoshone people, 22, 23, 31, 135; in Death Valley, 135–157; Death Valley Monument formation and, 138; Hungry Bill’s land allotment, 142–149; land management and use, 140–141; Warm Spring, 139, 140, 149–154 time: absolute time, 68; alternative perspectives, 77; in American Indian histories, 67; dating techniques, 66; past-present connection, 17,

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18, 40, 66; relative time, 68, 69; Yolngu people in Australia, 67 Tingley, Gov. Clyde, 87 Tł’óghagii, 107–111 Tobey, Edward S., 179 Tohono O’odham Nation, 18; ancestors, 65; San Pedro Valley archaeology, 64–65, 76; Sobaipuri, 65, 72 Tohono O’odham Office of Cultural Affairs, 64 Toledo, José Rey, 89 Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn/Integrative Science Program, 52 trachoma epidemic, Native peoples, 122 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 103 Trujillo, Juan, 86 Tsadiasi, Perry, 65, 71 Tsenacommacah, 220 Túgaidn´, 109 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 139 “type-site,” 89 Uttaqmusack, 232–233 Vesely, Frank, 87 violence, in memorial highway markers, 231, 231–232 Virginia: Historical Highway Markers program, 27, 29, 228–233, 239; Jamestown Colony, 19, 26–27, 29, 217–239 Vivian, Gordon, 88 Wahunsunacock, 220, 230 Wampanoag Indian Country, 165–166; Cape Cod, 165, 167–173, 188; “First Discovery,” 167–168; “First Encounter,” 168; grave sites, 168, 171–173; memorials, 170; Patuxet, 165, 173–178; Plymouth, 19, 30, 161–167, 178–186; taskscapes, 171,

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175; in twenty-first century, 186–189 Wampanoag people, 23, 24, 161, 164; mortuary practices, 168, 171–173; National Day of Mourning, 30 Warm Spring, 139, 140, 149–154 Watt, Eva, 129 Welch, John R., 21, 101–131 Werowocomoco, 222, 236 Western Apache people, 18, 103, 104, 108 White, Paul J., 22, 23, 135–157 White, Richard, 16 White Mountain Apache Tribe, 103, 108, 110; ancient artifacts, 71–72; Fort Apache, 20–21, 31, 101–131; historic preservation efforts, 125; local groups, 108; Master Plan for the Fort Apache Historic Park,

125, 126; San Pedro Valley archaeology, 64–65, 71–72, 76; Theodore Roosevelt School, 21, 101, 116, 117–125, 128 White Mountain Apache Tribe Cultural Center, 21, 31, 101, 125–128 Wilson, Chris, 81 Wilson, Susie, 146 Winslow, Edward, 169, 175 Wood, Karenne, 228 Wowinchapuncke, 231 Yolngu people, 67 Zuni Heritage and Historic Preservation Office, 64 Zuni people, 18; San Pedro Valley archaeology, 64–65, 71, 76; in Western Apache lands, 105–106, 107

About the Authors

ROGER ANYON is Cultural Resources Program Manager with Pima County, Tucson, Arizona. He was educated at the University of Sheffield, UK (BA Hons., 1974) and at the University of New Mexico (MA, 1984). He served on the Executive Board of the Society for American Archaeology (1992–1995) and on the Smithsonian Institution Native American Repatriation Review Committee (1990–2004). His major publications include The Galaz Ruin: A Prehistoric Mimbres Village in Southwestern New Mexico (with Steven A. LeBlanc, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, 1984), Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground (coedited with Nina Swidler, Kurt Dongoske, and Alan Downer, AltaMira Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Southwestern archaeology, cultural landscapes, and repatriation. TIM BERNARD is the Director of History and Culture for The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq. Following closely in Don Julien’s footsteps, he spent his early career researching and studying Mi’kmaw history and culture. After many successful years as the editor of the Mi’kmaqMailseet Nations News and manager of Eastern Woodland Publishing, he was appointed Director of History and Culture in 2003, taking on the management of the Mi’kmawey Debert project in 2004. He is the Cochair of the Culture and Heritage Committee of the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite forum and is a leading figure in the development of the cultural sector across Nova Scotia. He lives in Millbrook with his partner Priscilla and their three children. CHIP COLWELL-CHANTHAPHONH received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2004 and is now Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. His most recent books include Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (University of Arizona Press, 2007) and Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities (coedited with T. J. Ferguson, AltaMira Press, 2007). T. J. FERGUSON owns Anthropological Research LLC, a research company in Tucson, Arizona, where he is also Professor of Practice in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was 253

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| About the Authors

educated at the University of Hawaii at Hilo (BA, 1973), the University of Arizona (MA in anthropology, 1976), and the University of New Mexico (Masters of Community and Regional Planning, 1986, and Ph.D. in anthropology, 1993). For three decades, he has conducted archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research of Puebloan and Apachean tribes in the Southwest. He is the author of three books: A Zuni Atlas (with E. Richard Hart, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), Historic Zuni Architecture and Society: An Archaeological Application of Space Syntax (University of Arizona Press, 1996), and History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (with Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, University of Arizona Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the cultural landscapes and archaeology of the Southwest. RUSSELL G. HANDSMAN has been exploring the histories of Native homelands and communities in southern New England for more than 30 years. Since June 2004, he has worked at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC), leading a National Science Foundation-funded project to build partnerships for science learning for middle school youth from inner-cities and tribal communities in New England and the Southwest. Currently he is working with MPMRC staff to plan and develop innovative exhibits and programs that will explore the archaeology and history of the Mashantucket Pequot community after King Philip’s War. JEFFREY L. HANTMAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program at the University of Virginia. His principal interests are in archaeology and colonialism, a topic he explores in the context of English and Indian interactions in the colonial-era Chesapeake region of the American Middle Atlantic. Emphasizing the legacy of that history on the present, he works collaboratively with the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia on repatriation, museums, and the public representation of Monacan history. He has also served on the Virginia Historic Landmarks Board and the Virginia Commission on Archaeology. He recently coedited a collection of historical and anthropological essays on American colonial expansion entitled Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America (University of Virginia Press, 2004). DONALD M. JULIEN is the Executive Director of The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq. He was born and raised in the Millbrook Mi’kmaw First Nation Community in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada, and has dedicated his life to the study, research, advocacy, promotion, and sharing

About the Authors

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of Mi’kmaw culture and history. As a widely respected authority on Mi’kmaw culture and history, he regularly addresses public and scholarly audiences. Appointed Executive Director in 1994, he has grown the organization to be one of the largest and most effective First Nation Tribal Councils in Canada. In 2004, he was awarded the Order of Nova Scotia, followed closely in 2005 with an Honorary Doctorate of Civil Laws from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He and his wife Diane have four children and five grandchildren. FRANK G. MATERO is Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director (and founder) of the Architectural Conservation Laboratory, a member of the Graduate Group in the Department of Art History, and a Research Associate at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Since 1988 he has been a lecturer at the International Center for the Study of Preservation and the Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome and for Restore, New York City. His teaching and research focus is on historic building technology and the conservation of building materials, with an emphasis on masonry and earthen construction, the conservation of archaeological sites, and issues of preservation and appropriate technology for traditional societies and places. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and two forthcoming books on the stone industries of North America and a history of archaeological site preservation in the American Southwest. ROBERT W. PREUCEL is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten Curator of North America at the University Museum, and Director of the Penn Center for Native American Studies. He is particularly interested in issues of representation and Native American history. He is the author of Archaeological Semiotics (Blackwell, 2006), and coeditor of Native American Voices on Art, Identity, and Culture (with Lucy Fowler Williams and William Wierzbowski, University Museum, 2005), A Companion to Social Archaeology (with Lynn Meskell, Blackwell, 2004), and Contemporary Archaeology in Theory (with Ian Hodder, Blackwell, 1986). LEAH MORINE ROSENMEIER is a Research and Interpretation Specialist for The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq and Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Brown University. She came to The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq in 2002 after spending nine years implementing NAGPRA at the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts. She plays a central role in the overall development of the Mi’kmawey

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| About the Authors

Debert Cultural Centre and works to integrate archaeological and paleoenvironmental data with the values, perspectives, and knowledge of the Mi’kmawey Debert Elders’ Advisory Council and staff. Her dissertation research addresses the duration and nature of continuity between present-day Mi’kmaw groups and the past. She now makes her home in Truro, Nova Scotia, with her husband and three sons. PATRICIA E. RUBERTONE is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. Her research combines archaeology, history, and anthropology to study questions of colonialism, landscape and memory, and representation. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork in settler and Native American contexts in New England and has worked collaboratively with the Narragansett Indians. She also serves on the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. Her principal publications include Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans” in Annual Review of Anthropology (2000), as well as chapters in One World Archaeology volumes. JOHN R. WELCH is Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Archaeology and the School of Resource and Environmental Management. He spent two decades working for and with the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona, assisting in the establishment of the Tribe’s Heritage Program, Historic Preservation Office, and the Fort Apache Heritage Foundation. His research is made possible through collaborations with the Apache, Katzie, Tla’ Amin, and Tahltan Nations and emphasizes understanding and enhancing links between sovereignty and cultural heritage stewardship policy and practice. PAUL J. WHITE is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Industrial History and Archaeology at Michigan Technological University and a recent Ph.D. graduate in anthropology at Brown University. He has research interests in the archaeology and social history of industrialization and has spent the last several years documenting North American industrial sites in Alaska, California, and Vermont, including research into environmental legacies. His doctoral research examined generational histories of land dispossession in Death Valley, California, by documenting interactions between three Timbisha Shoshone families and miners over the course of a century. He is a coauthor of a forthcoming book on the historical archaeology of mining.