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Preservation Technology Podcast
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Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation.
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The Material Culture of Writing
May 21, 202400:18:24Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with Cydney Alexis, Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University, and Hannah Rule, Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric about studying the objects that are part of writing practice. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-- Cydney Alexis: Cydney Alexis. I am an Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University. My favorite National Park is Grand Teton National Park. I was very excited to see that you work for the Park Service, because I am a big fan of the National Parks. Hannah Rule: And I'm Hannah Rule. I'm an Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric, sometimes called Writing Studies, at the University of South Carolina. And my favorite National Park is … --I'm afraid of the outdoors!. [laughing] Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me today. So, you just wrote a book called The Material Culture of Writing. And I was wondering what led each of you to be curious about the objects that surround and are used in writing practice? Cydney Alexis: Well, we were lucky in that we had a friend professor bring us together, because she knew... She had been working with Hannah closely, and she knew that I was writing about objects. And so, we did a presentation together at a conference, which was great. And quickly the book idea began to evolve, but I'd always been interested in objects. When I was a little kid, I loved Richard Scarry's Best Story Book Ever!. And I would just spend countless hours for years with this book. It has little people and little objects that are labeled. Never knew you could study objects in this way, until I landed at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I was in the English Department studying Composition and Rhetoric, but found that they had a Material Culture program and a Material Culture certificate. And that's when I began to study objects in a scholarly way. The field merges art historians, archeologists, historical archeologists, people from every discipline really. And so, I was so excited to actually be able to study the theory behind this obsession that I had always had. Hannah Rule: Just to go off what Cydney was saying. I think that the origin story of us getting together was possibly eight years ago, and that original conference presentation, from then we were starting the book in a sense. So, it's been a long time coming. But I think for me, I think what brought us together, Cydney is really coming from the material culture studies perspective and has taught me a lot over the course of our collaboration. For me, my work in composition and rhetoric has been focused on composing processes and how people get writing done. Writing itself is a technology of human invention, and it exists only by virtue of things. It literally could not exist if humans didn't take up various objects to make writing also a thing, a material thing that exists and circulates in the world. So, oftentimes in my discipline, people talk about writing in terms of something that happens in the mind or in the imagination, as this ephemeral human act, but I'm really insistent upon and interested in the ways that it's full-bodied and material. So, that's part of, I hope, the work that the book does for people, both inside our discipline and interdisciplinary audiences as well. Catherine Cooper: What was the impetus for putting together these passions into a book and at this particular time? Cydney Alexis: I don't know if Hannah had also been thinking about this book, but I had been obsessing about it already. But when you're thinking about a book and you have no idea how that works, it felt very distant and far away. And when our colleague and friend, Laura Micciche, did bring us together, she said, "You two should know each other. You two should work on this project together." And every time someone encourages you, it just feels a little bit more possible. And of course, Hannah had already been working on a book. I think you were already working on your book when we met. She was able to also show me how it works, which was really nice. Hannah Rule: Yeah. And I think part of our coming together that's been really fruitful, is we've been able to encourage one another that our passions or just casual interests... With that conference that we keep referencing, I was on about writing about keyboards and the stability of keyboards over technological change. And I thought, "Is this a thing? Is it interesting? Does it have stakes?" And I think over our collaboration, we just encourage each other that, yeah, there's something there. There's something interesting. So, I think that's something that we've really benefited from in collaborating is coming from different perspectives and different frameworks, and using them to write about things that we think are cool. And that's been a real pleasure. Catherine Cooper: You mentioned in the book that the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement impacted your thinking while you were putting the book together. Would you be willing to share some of your thoughts on how the material in the book, the choices you made, what chapters you included, how you would approach that possibly differently if you were to do an edited volume or a second edition? Hannah Rule: Cydney and I have thought a lot about this, and I think there's two things that came up while we were in the long process of publishing the book. And one was really aided in part and brought to light through Laura Micciche, who is a mentor of mine and who, again, brought us, Cydney and I, together. And she wrote a foreword for the book where she muses on access. And that's something that we realized was of course part of the book the entire time, but it wasn't at the forefront of some of the stories our contributors were telling. And the other was preservation, which is to say many of our contributors are thinking about contexts, human lives that are historical. And we took for granted, to some extent, the amount of effort and leveraging of power and money that it takes to get someone's stuff to remain. Jefferson's chapter, that Diane Ehrenpreis contributed, she's a Curator of Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors at Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello. And she was writing about Jefferson's writing suite, his furniture. There's fascinating stories to tell there, and she tells it. But it also made us really think about his own legacy, and why it is that we have access to these pristinely preserved objects, and what we don't have about the lives that moved through Monticello. And Diane, along with us, we really thought hard about that chapter and whose stories we could try to tell on the margins of this very well-preserved and curated sense of this historical figure, and try to see him truthfully in an extremely complex and fraught context that it would be unethical to ignore. Cydney Alexis: These are issues that I think Hannah and I have always cared about, but new horrors, what else can you say, emerged throughout the pandemic, that just make the issues crystallize in different ways. And like Hannah said, the various contributors, our Afterward contributor, Kate Smith, and Laura's chapter, it's very interesting to see the touchstones that they pick out. It just raises to the surface the way that someone reads the book. And so, that was very fascinating for us. And then, we could pick up on those issues too. It was something that with us the whole time, and it was very important to us. Catherine Cooper: Is there a second book? Cydney Alexis: Yes, we have a proposal drafted. Catherine Cooper: So, did putting together The Material Culture of Writing spark any ideas of what you want to study next or where you'd like to take your next deep dive? Cydney Alexis: I've been obsessing over a couple of things, other things as well. And one is, I directed the writing center at K-State for a little over five years and came in contact with work in a lot of different fields, the hard sciences, for example. And I would bring in guest speakers from the hard sciences. And they, as you probably know, work on a lot of shorter, newer, fresher research, on short pieces called communications. And it blew my mind that we're still in the 25 pages in terms of consumer research, another field I work in, sixty-page articles in journals. But what people in the sciences are able to do is really prioritize this quick, new, fresh research so that you're not necessarily working for eight years, for 10 years on a project, but you're allowed to take that well-researched quick dive into issues that come up. That and also just reading the research about everyone who got left behind in the pandemic, parents, moms especially, productivity rates and publishing rates just plummeted throughout the pandemic, because people in parent roles were having to caretake during the pandemic, so much harder to get scholarship out, and underrepresented groups who had suffered in the pandemic because of unequal access to healthcare. And so, Hannah and I talked and said, "I'm starting to think a lot about a book that has shorter pieces, where we generate more histories of writing artifacts that are missing in our field and do it more quickly, and allow lots of different voices to contribute." Because you can take a look around your house or in your collection and find an artifact that you want to research, and write a shorter piece instead of that 25 page piece. Hannah Rule: Yeah, I think part of the drive, in addition to a lot of the touch points that Cydney laid out is, I think we're excited to really allow scholars, not just in English Studies or Writing Studies, but those working across disciplines potentially. That's something I've really valued about our collaboration is, it's not easy to do cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary work. Part of the drive too i...
Transcribe →Cherokee Rose
May 7, 202400:17:39Tap to summarizeMegan Reed speaks with Tiya Miles about how historical fiction can help people understand difficult histories. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Subheading: What is “The Cherokee Rose?” Megan: This is Megan Reed from the Preservation Technology Podcast and I am here with... Tiya Alicia Miles: I’m Tiya Miles, I’m very happy to be here, Megan. Megan: The book “The Cherokee Rose”, can you briefly describe that? Tiya Alicia Miles: It's a very different kind of book, but there are also many echoes and intersections across these two books. “The Cherokee Rose” is subtitled A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. It is a work of fiction, though very much like “All That She Carried” in spirit. It is a work that is situated in a southern place; it is very much about the environment surrounding a group of people. And in the case of “The Cherokee Rose,” those people are fictional or fictionalized. But the book is also based on quite a lot of historical research. It was inspired by research that I started when I was a graduate student writing my dissertation, and by research that continued in my first two books, which were about the history of slavery in the Cherokee Nation, about African-American, African-descended people who were sadly and unfortunately and immorally owned as slaves, held as property by Cherokee people in the 19th century. “The Cherokee Rose” is a novel that takes place in two time periods; it's situated in the 19th century and also in our present time. “All That She Carried” is very similar, actually. It is a work of history, but it's also very much about what the history means to us today and about the preservation of the past today, the interpretation of the past today. On “The Cherokee Rose,” I had more leeway, more room to explore, the contemporary period because it was about a fictional set of characters. There are three main characters, all women from different racial and cultural backgrounds, from different parts of the country, who are drawn to one place: The Cherokee Rose Plantation. “The Cherokee Rose” is located in what we now call Georgia, but what used to be the Cherokee homelands and Cherokee territory. These three women come to “The Cherokee Rose” for what they think are their own reasons, but in actuality, they are called there by the ghost of a historical figure, a young girl who used to be a student at a missionary school on the same grounds of The Cherokee Rose Plantation. The women in the present-day time who are named Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne, arrive thinking that they've got a plan and thinking they have their own intentions, and then find themselves drawn into and swept up by a mystery, which has to do with the history of that house and with what took place there 200 years before. Megan: Wow, that's great. You said you had years of research; I believe you said you had 15 years of research in African-American and Native American relationships that were basically the foundation of how this book created. You wrote it from primaries. What historic sources and ideas that you came during that research that helped you, inspire you to tell this story in the way that you have told it? Tiya Alicia Miles: The first primary source was the plantation itself. I really do think of places, human-built structures, and natural features of the landscape as being sources. They inspire me, and they also give me information about things that took place in the past and the people who lived in the past, events that transpired in the past. And in the case of “The Cherokee Rose,” that place is the Chief Vann House State Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia. I visited the Vann House many years ago when I was a graduate student, and I went there as I was trying to better understand this history of enslavement in the Cherokee nation, the history of Black and Cherokee, and Black and Indigenous relationships. And back at the time when I first went, which was in the late 1990s, the Vann House State Historic Site was not interpreting the presence of Black people at all. It was in many ways, a typical plantation museum where the focus was on the people who lived in wealth and luxury on that plantation. The focus was on the architecture, and on the furniture, and on the linens, and on the wealth, and the entertainment, and the recreational pursuits of the people who lived in the house. As opposed to on the people whose labor made all that possible. So that was the first tour that I took of the Vann House. I noticed right away that they weren't doing anything about enslaved people, and I decided that I wanted to try to remedy that in whatever way I could. And so, I wrote about the Vann House in the form of a history and some articles. Visiting that house over the years, because I went back many times, always left me with a very strong sense of the presence of the place -- I mean, the presence of the house itself, the presence of the grounds, the presence of the tree, some of which had been there during the time that the Vann family, a Cherokee family, had lived there. And during the time that the people they enslaved, who numbered more than 100, had lived there. And it seemed as if every time I went back to the house, I noticed something different about the structure itself or about the landscape. One of those things that really stood out to me was the carved roses that actually do exist in the Vann House. I don't think I noticed those roses the first time, maybe even the second time, possibly the third time that I went. But at some point I started noticing them, and they really caught my attention, that level of detail in the architecture. And that detail stuck in my mind as I thought about the history of the Cherokee people, of the Cherokee nation of Afro-Cherokee people, and also the meaning that had been connected up with the flower, The Cherokee Rose flower, in Cherokee cultural life. Cherokee people had connected, The Cherokee Rose, the flower, with the history of removal, and they had a story about how everywhere that a Cherokee mother's tears touched the ground during this very difficult period in Cherokee history, a Cherokee rose would grow. And so, this place of the plantation, the house, its gardens, were incredibly inspiring for the novel that I ended up writing called “The Cherokee Rose.” And that was just one primary source, but it was a fundamental, foundational primary source for me. I could never have written this novel if I had not walked that landscape and visited that house numerous times. I'll mention another source because I find it very helpful and constructive to pair places with written materials, with documents. So the other source I will mention are the Moravian missionary records. There are a whole lot of them. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination, lived in the Cherokee nation for decades. Starting in the late 18th and the early 19th century, they were invited to come to the Vann grounds by the Cherokee owners of that plantation. They wrote diary entries just about every day. They wrote letters back to their home community and around the world all the time, and they wrote reports of what they were doing several times a year. There are hundreds of pages of description and documentation about this plantation and about this place. So marrying those two major sources, I was inspired to write something beyond the history that I had written about the place, to write a novel, which is what we're talking about right now. Sub Header: Discussion on writing non-fiction verse fiction narratives Megan: In your first part of your introduction, you mentioned, and I quote, "If history is intended to enlighten readers about change over time, fiction is intended to take readers on an emotional journey through identification with characters." Was that your intention? Because I know you wrote in your previous history , “The House on Diamond Hill,” about the plantation. Was that your intention with trying to convey to your readers an emotional journey in telling these stories in “The Cherokee Rose?” Tiya Alicia Miles: I had written a history called “The House on Diamond Hill,” which reconstructed the past of that plantation, and that's a nonfiction work. And I had also published an article called “The Showplace of the Cherokee Nation,” which is in The Public Historian journal. I'd given lots of talks -- academic talks, community talks about this place. And I'm very pleased with that work. I was satisfied with what I was able to put together as a scholarly reconstruction and analysis. But, there are limits to what we can do in academic formats and in even public historical forms. We really do have to adhere to the evidence. We really do have to interpret, translate, and share out what it is that we have found in those sources. And we need to be, in my opinion, true to those sources. For me, that wasn't enough. I wanted to go further. I wanted to be able to think about and to share something having to do with the emotional lives of the people who had lived there. And the existing documentary record wasn't allowing me to do that. There are just places that we cannot go in terms of the interiority of human experience when we're only using historical documents. I wanted to think about feelings and emotional journeys, especially of women who had lived on this plantation in the past, and that includes Indigenous women, African women, and Euro-American women because they were all there together. They were all there, living in very close proximity in the same buildings, and they were shaping each other's lives. But the record couldn't really go into full detail or into great depth about what that meant for them and about whether change was possible for them as they got to know one another when it came to the racial lenses that they wore and walked around with. I wanted to explore that. And once I started to think about the women in the past and how they related, I sta...
Transcribe →All that She Carried
Apr 23, 202400:12:25Tap to summarizeMegan Reed speaks with Tiya Miles about her book "All that She Caried" and Tiya's deep dive into the history of an object to tell a family's story. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Megan: This is Megan Reed from the Preservation Technology Podcast and I am here with... Tiya Miles: Tiya Miles. Megan: Thank you so much for being with us. We're here to talk about your book, “All That She Carried.” Can you briefly describe to our listeners what the book's about? Tiya Miles: “All That She Carried” is the history of an artifact and the people who used this artifact and cherished it over the years and across the generations. The artifact is an antique cotton sack that was produced in South Carolina around the 1850s. It was used by an enslaved woman named Rose, to try to care for and support her daughter through an incredibly difficult time in both of their lives, which was the sale of Rose's daughter, Ashley, during the period of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Rose packed this sack with various items that she thought her daughter Ashley would need to be able to survive the separation from her mother and to persevere into the future. Megan: You did a lot of heavy research and background into Ashley's sack. Can you describe how you were able to search for Rose? Tiya Miles: I'd like to back up and fill listeners in on how I even knew to try to identify this woman. This sack is incredibly special because it is not only a bag, it is also an artifact, an object, a piece of material culture that is also a work of art, also, a text. In the book, I talk about it as being poetic. It's like a poem because a descendant of Rose and of Ashley, named Ruth Middleton, told the story on the sack itself. She picked up her needle. She picked up different colored spools of thread, and she sewed sentences onto the sack. So this bag becomes a document in many ways. In that embroidered inscription, Ruth Middleton names Rose, who is her ancestor. She also names Ashley, who is her grandmother. She talks about the separation of the mother and the daughter. She talks about that terrible sale, and she lists all the things that Rose packed into the sack. So that's how I knew that I needed to look for Rose. There are no surnames on the inscription above the signature. There aren't really specifics beyond the fact that it took place in South Carolina, and all those details needed to be filled in in order to reconstruct the history and to tell the story. I started looking at records that have to do with enslavement in South Carolina -- enslaver's records because unfortunately, that is where information about enslaved people is most likely to be found. I was looking at the records at the South Carolina State Archives and also in a wonderful digital archive that was crowdsourced and is available online. I searched for the name Rose in all these records across all these plantation documents that were onsite in South Carolina (the physical documents), and also that had been digitized. I learned through that search that the name Rose, was a common name for enslaved women in the mid-19th century. There were dozens of Roses. Ashley, as it turned out, was a very uncommon name. Ashley was, at this time, more of a masculine name than a feminine name. It was a name that tended to be given to white men. It was the name of a river in a certain part of South Carolina. So with Rose being a very common name, Ashley being a very unusual name for enslaved people, especially enslaved women, I then knew that I was looking for a Rose and an Ashley who might appear together on the same document. I did find that. I found just a couple of examples of Rose and Ashley together, and some of those examples were not in the right time period, which then ended up pointing to a particular Rose and a particular Ashley. Megan: You also mentioned trying to find Rosa Jones, which is I believe Ashley's daughter. How was that? Tiya Miles: On the embroidered sack, there are only three names. The name of Rose, the original mother, who packed the sack, There’s the name of Ashley, her daughter who received the sack, and the name of Ruth Middleton, who was a granddaughter and great-granddaughter who saved the sack, preserved the sack, and sewed the inscription onto it. Ruth Middleton is the recorder. I talk about her as an oral historian in the book. She's the person who makes this story accessible to us. For whatever reason, she did not choose to inscribe her own mother's name in the sack. Ruth's decision not to include her own mother's name on the embroidered inscription left a gap. And the challenge then was to try to identify who stood in that gap. Luckily, time had passed, and record keeping was more helpful because Rosa could be identified in census records. We must say, as I mentioned in the book, that there are places in the reconstruction of this family line and of this history, where I had to make educated guesses. In the book, I always let readers know when I feel more certain or when I'm making an educated guess, when I'm relying on primary sources, and when I'm relying on secondary sources. Megan: You identified there are three objects that Ruth mentioned that were in the sack. Can you tell our listeners what those objects were and how you used that to describe the identity of Ashley in that time period, and how you used to identify what their way of life was? Tiya Miles: There weren't very many documents that pointed directly to Rose and Ashley, and to their story. Like many enslaved people, they did not have the ability, the capacity, the freedom to create or to preserve a cache of papers that would tell us about their lives, and so the sack itself, and the inscription on the sack that Ruth Middleton sewed, really became my major source for trying to identify them, for trying to interpret their lives, for trying to understand what they valued and what they cared about. By focusing on the sack as the source, I was able to open the reconstruction of that past out into various contextual directions. The inscription says that Rose packed a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecan, and a braid of Rose's hair for Ashley. So those were the physical material things she packed. The inscription on the sack also tells us that Rose packed her love for Ashley. The word love is the centerpiece of the inscription, beautifully sewn in large red letters. When I was doing the research and writing the book, I tried to think about each of those items, and then to share how it was that enslaved people might have gotten ahold of those items, how they may have used those items, how they may have interpreted those items themselves and assigned meaning to them. To offer one example, the dress is evocative as one of the things that Rose packed because enslaved women didn't have the capacity, the ability, the freedom, or the resources to possess a large wardrobe that they could choose of their own accord . Instead, they were assigned a certain amount of fabric per year. They were given a very small number of clothing items. They were never provided with enough clothing by their enslavers to keep them covered and warm throughout the seasons. By the end of a year, enslaved people's clothing would be worn, torn, stained. They wouldn't have shoes. They wouldn't have the items necessary to protect their bodies, so clothing was a very important category of material goods for enslaved people. I write about how enslaved women recognized that clothing was sort of a battlefield in which there was a wrestling match going on having to do with human dignity. Their enslavers intended to provide them with the cheapest, most minimal amount of clothing as a way to demean them and to classify them as belonging to a certain category; the category of the enslaved, the category of people who didn't deserve to have beautiful, durable, comfortable, well-fitting clothing. Enslaved women fought against this by doing all they could to quietly or secretly attain fabric on their own. Sometimes they would stay up all night making clothing for themselves or for their children and families. They would embellish this clothing, and they would then dress themselves on Sundays when they were going to church in articles of clothing that they had made that expressed their artistry, and their care for themselves and their family members. So by packing a dress for Ashley, one of the things I think Rose was saying, is: you are worthy of care. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of being covered in a fabric, and dressed in an item that was selected for you. There are other ways in which I talk about clothing as well in the book, in relation to the vulnerability and exposure of enslaved girls and enslaved women, and how important clothing was or could have been as a barrier for them, protecting them from the views of people who would be attempting to buy them on an auction block, from overseers, from enslavers who meant them harm, and especially from people who might wish to exploit them sexually. Megan: My final question to you is did you ever think your book would be such a success that you would win so many awards for it, and that is now on the top eight books for the National Trust of Historic Preservation books about preservation? Tiya Miles: I am astounded and so honored by the attention the book has garnered, by the recognition that the book has garnered, which shined the light on these women who preserved their own lives, and preserved this sack, and preserved the story which we can now all share in. Back when I started the book, Megan, I wasn't sure I could even finish it because I didn't know if there was going to be enough material. To now see the book having such a wide readership is such a gift. Megan: We have a project going on about documenting slave cabin and tenant farming houses across, and w...
Transcribe →Water Conservation and Use in the Western United States
Apr 9, 202400:14:29Tap to summarizeCatherine Coopers speaks with Bob Crifasi about cultural and technological approaches to water conservation and use in the Western United States. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Bob Crifasi: Bob Crifasi. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. Bob Crifasi: Yes, thanks for having me. Catherine Cooper: What first interested you about water in the West? Bob Crifasi: I've always been interested in doing things like backpacking and rafting and canoeing. Ever since I started visiting various desert canyons many years ago, I just became fascinated by it. I also have undergraduate degrees in geology and chemistry and masters degrees in geology and environmental science. One of the things as part of all of that is I became really interested in geomorphology, and really geology is what brought me out to the West so that I could learn about and see things. I went to school at University of Colorado in Boulder and Denver and started traveling all across the region and became very interested in rivers, geomorphology, everything that's associated with that. And the more I learned, the more interested in all of the different arcane aspects of water I became. Catherine Cooper: In the Western United States water is so crucially important. Could you describe that importance to the various cultures in the West and how people approach water differently? Bob Crifasi: Well, the first thing I'd have to say is that in the Western states, water is existential. We need it for everything. Really, our basic survival for any human requires water. In the West, it's another level because you can't necessarily obtain water without manipulating it in some fashion. In the Eastern states, wetter regions, there's ample rainfall, there's rivers, there's lakes that provide relatively easy access to water. Once we pass what's roughly the hundredth meridian, so Central Kansas and going West, the amount of natural rainfall drops pretty substantially, and in certain regions it's very low. Without having supplemental water or adding water to irrigate and grow crops, you just don't have a society or have any ability to have a viable culture. You really need to have water. The Native Americans are really the original savants with using water in the West. They had so many remarkable adaptations to live in this area. In the rainier areas where there were rivers, they built diversions. They started to build reservoirs, check dams. They had remarkable innovations for utilizing the entire landscape for accessing and manipulating water. They would carefully look at the landscape to see which plants should be planted where on the hillsides and in the valley bottoms to take the best advantage of the moisture. And so they were really were some of the original people, with well over 10,000 years of experience, changing and manipulating water. Not only that, but they adapted their plants, corn, and other crops to the water resources that were available to them. They were really integral in paving the way for anyone who came later as to how you use the water. The Spanish came in first in Mexico with Cortes, but then they had the Coronado expedition that came up for conquest in 1540s. And then the Spaniards settled. They brought some irrigation technologies from the Iberian Peninsula, and they started to build ditches that they called acequias. The word acequia itself comes from the Arabic al-sakiya, which means water conveyance. And so they had learned from the Moors of North Africa, also desert people, how to manage water in dry regions. Once the Spaniards were in New Mexico, they watched how the indigenous people were using their water, and their water systems merged in many ways with the pre-existing Indian cultures. They appropriated and took for themselves the Indian ditches and then transformed them. They used some of the processes of cooperation that they saw the Indians doing, and they adopted many things that they saw from the Indigenous people to build their own systems. Today, across the West we have, at least in the Southwest, in New Mexico, parts of Arizona, Southern California, even in parts of Texas, a long legacy of these acequia cultures. They really are integral, particularly for small communities and how they use water. Now, the Euro-Americans came in with the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. And when they came in, they saw how the Indians and the Hispanic people were using their water resources. That informed what the 49ers were doing when they went to California in the gold rush. It informed how the Mormons built their irrigation works up in the Salt Lake area, and how the gold miners and new farmers that were coming into Colorado's Front Range built their systems. It was all a process of building one on top of the other and learning from the previous occupants how to live in this arid environment. Catherine Cooper: All of these technologies have been developed for the use and conservation of water. How do they fit within the current cultural landscape of the West? Bob Crifasi: They like to say the present is the key to the past. I like to invert that in some ways and say the past is the key to the present. If we look to the past and see how our predecessors did things, we find that they were actually very logical people and that a lot of what they did were based on rational decision-making and how to live in the environment. They would see how the rivers flowed on the landscape. They would look at the geomorphology where the terraces were. They would see how the riparian landscape sat in there, and then they manipulated that to survive. As each generation has come in, we've built on that. What we have today is a very layered landscape with the older water facilities having influenced what comes next. For example, when the first white settlers came into the Front Range, they were very practical. They weren't going to do any more work than they needed to, and so they built their irrigation ditches in the valley bottoms. As more people came in, the land was taken, and then the next settlers asked, well, how are we going to get water? And they started to build these ditches that would go up onto the terraces. Then later people would realize, well, the water's polluted because of mining, so let's build a pipeline from the mountains, and so on. And so they systematically built up higher onto the terraces. They moved higher into the canyons. As each generation came in, they layered their new uses on top of pre-existing uses. And so it became pretty convoluted, but really it was all based on a series of rational decisions at each stage of the development process. Catherine Cooper: Where would you say the West is now with regards to water and its psyche? Bob Crifasi: That's kind of the million-dollar question in many ways. Water is an existential question in the West. We're starting to bump up against natural limitations in a way that we haven't previously. We've fully appropriated the rivers and lakes in the West. We've built reservoirs for 150 years, and with climate change, that's kind of dialing back the availability of water in a way that we have never seen before. What we're grappling with is, I think, not how do we develop new water resources, but how do we reallocate the water resources we already have and to utilize what we've already developed in a more efficient and pragmatic manner. We're dealing with scarcity in a way that we haven't in the past. In the early 20th century, water conservation meant building large dams. Hoover Dam was constructed as a conservation project. The people of that era saw conservation as putting water in a reservoir so that it wouldn't run downhill and out of their state. Now conservation is seeing how do we maximize soil moisture? How do we create intricate ways of reusing water? How can we take water that has been maybe flushed down the toilet, cleaning it up and using it for irrigation, or in some instances even in homes. So the ideas of how we utilize water has become more sophisticated and is in response to the scarcity that we're now experiencing. Catherine Cooper: You wrote a book on Western water. Western Water, A to Z. Were there any particular topics that you wanted to include on a personal level but couldn't as an author, or any that you would add now if you went into a second edition? Bob Crifasi: Oh, my. Yes. When I did it, there were two categories of subjects that I wanted to deal with and incorporate. There were some that I was like, this is really cool. I should include it. But when I sat down and actually wrote the book, it was like, well, it's going to just expand the book size beyond any reasonable means, and my publisher will just say, oh, my goodness. We can't do this. There were a few of those, and I won't get into those, but they are out there. There were two or three big things that I had tried to find information about. I would love to see a PhD thesis here or there dealing with some of these things. For example, I'll back up a little bit. One of the things I really tried to address in the Western Water, A to Z was Indigenous use of water and to give them a meaningful voice that other books of water maybe had not done previously. There's a lot of really good books on water, but it tends to start with the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Euro-American era. I really wanted to give a voice to and a shout-out to the Indigenous and Hispanic cultures that did so much to lay the groundwork. Extending on that, I would really love to see some deep work on gender. You start going through the work on Western water, particularly Euro-American, and it tends to be white males, and it wasn't just all white males. The history is rich and varied, and I'd really like to see more with gender. I also think a very important piece is environmental justice. The misallocat...
Transcribe →National Monuments and Contested Land
Mar 26, 202400:12:52Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with McKenzie Long about National Monuments and why some are more contested than others. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-- McKenzie Long: Hi, I'm McKenzie Long. I'm the author of “This Contested Land”, and I'm a writer and graphic designer who lives in Mammoth Lakes, California. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. McKenzie Long: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Catherine Cooper: So could you tell me what the impetus was for writing “This Contested Land”? McKenzie Long: I spent quite a bit of time climbing in Indian Creek, which is an area in Utah that became part of Bears Ears National Monument when President Barack Obama designated it. And I was just madly in love with this place. Well, I still am, and I had spent about seven years of climbing there every spring and fall, and it was my favorite place in the world. It felt like my home place. When the monument became designated and there was a lot of uproar about it, some people were angry, other people were really happy. I was like, what does that even mean for this place that I really care about? And I started to look into it out of casual curiosity, and I realized that there isn't really that much written about national monuments, especially modern ones. There's tons of stuff out there about national parks, but I couldn't really find a whole lot about monuments. And so I started looking into them a little bit more. And for me, the topic just got more and more interesting because these places are public land that's part of our national fabric that people aren't very aware of. And I think there's a lot of really interesting stories in all of these places. Catherine Cooper: I completely agree. How did you choose which national monuments to explore both physically, and culturally, and historically? McKenzie Long: One of the very fascinating things about national monuments is that they're so controversial. I feel like national parks are fairly universally beloved, and national monuments, especially ones that have been designated in the last 20 years, almost always cause an argument between certain groups of people. I think that's really interesting because people are so passionate about these places or different uses of the land that they get really fired up about it. I was looking for the most controversial ones to talk about because I thought that those might have some of the most interesting stories. And I don't want to give Trump credit for the inspiration in this book, but in 2017, he issued an executive order to review 27 national monuments that had been designated since 1996 and on. I started looking at that list to see what monuments were included, and a lot of the most controversial ones were included in that list. I ended up writing about a couple others, but those ones were where I got started in finding out which monuments had some more interesting things to say about them. Catherine Cooper: You share parts of conversations with a variety of people and around the various monuments. Could you talk about how you went about making those connections and relationships and the process of working them into each chapter? McKenzie Long: Most of the connections I made were actually through cold calling. I hadn't written a book before, but I was still really interested in talking to people. And so I started looking for people who were either passionate about these places or involved in these places. So sometimes that was people that were advocates for the monuments getting established or people that were really strongly opposed to a monument designation. And I spoke to several biologists that do work in national monuments that I visited, and I spoke to people like ranchers, indigenous people that have ancestral ties to these places as well as current ties that are very important to them. I just would reach out to people and talk to whoever would talk to me. And in terms of weaving them into the chapters, it was really important to me to write this book in a way that expressed a tangible experience of being in these places. I wrote it from my personal point of view so I could talk about what it's like to be there and give people maybe a little tiny sense of what it could be like to be in these deserts or forests. But I didn't really want the book to be about me because I'm not the most important part of the story. So including the voices of the people that I spoke to was important because everyone I spoke to has a really intense connection to the land. And those stories, I think, become the most important part of the book. Catherine Cooper: One thing I noticed in each chapter is you ask a lot of questions of how people relate to the land. What is preservation? What is conservation? How do we handle this? How do we negotiate it? Are there one or two that you're continuing to think about and work with since writing the book? And do you have any new perspectives or stories to share? McKenzie Long: I would say that probably the one that is echoing in my mind the most is the question of how do we as a nation create a new legacy for public land that includes and respects more people. National parks got their start as a pretty exclusionary thing. Indigenous people were pushed out of places so there could be an illusion of uninhabited wilderness in parks. But even though that's how public land got its start, that doesn’t have to be how it continues forward. I think there's already a sea change happening. Bears Ears was a very indigenous-led movement that was promoted and advocated for primarily by indigenous groups. And so if we look for what legacy public land can have in the future, including the interests and priorities of many groups of people is very important. And I think that there's actually quite a few monuments that are being proposed right now that are being advocated for by specific communities, such as Castner Range, which is outside El Paso. [Note: Castner Range was designated as a national monument by President Biden in May 2023.] It's a predominantly Hispanic community, and there's a very community-led movement to get that mountain range designated as a monument. Since a president can designate a monument by proclamation and it doesn't need to legislatively move through Congress, monuments are easy to create. Monuments, I think, can be a really powerful way to include interests of different people. You're asking about new perspectives, I finished writing this book right around the time that Biden took office, and he reinstated the boundaries of a couple monuments that President Trump reduced. I thought that was really interesting, and it was somewhat expected, but it was also exciting. And after that, I expected him to designate more monuments, actually. And he has designated one, which is Camp Hale in Colorado, and he's promised to designate another one, but he hasn't actually done it yet. And that one is Avi Kwa Ame, I think is how you pronounce it, in Nevada. So I hope that he actually does designate that one, and then I'm hoping that he will designate a few more, especially as he reaches the end of his term. There's Castner Range in New Mexico. There's Range of Light in California outside Yosemite National Park, and I think those would be pretty interesting, and especially since Biden has promoted this concept of 30 by 30, where he wants to protect 30% of American land and waters by 2030, monuments could be a really interesting tool and a way for him to push that forward. [Note: as of February 2024 Biden has designated 5 new national monuments.] The Antiquities Act, which is the law that allows monuments to be created by presidential proclamation, it came about because of archaeological developments. It was a time in American history where indigenous people were being forced out of their places; they were being killed; but at the same time, people started looking at some of the dwellings, and petroglyphs, and ruins left behind and finding that interesting. And so there was this strange parallel that people were being removed, but then there was an appreciation of their history. When the Antiquities Act was created, it was with the goal of protecting some of that history and not letting it get looted or destroyed, though the law did not give rights to the indigenous people who those ruins and history really belonged to, unfortunately. The Antiquities Act started as a way to just protect certain cultural resources in our country. Since the law has slightly vague language, it has actually been used a lot more broadly than that. There's many national monuments that are created that don't have a specific cultural or archaeological resource to protect. Now, it's used to protect things like biodiversity, and wildlife corridors, and things like that, which wasn’t necessarily the original intention of the act. So it's flexible. It allows presidents to do things that they think are important and that reflect the ideals of society of that day rather than from 1906, when the Antiquities Act was written. Catherine Cooper: I read the book as a lover of the national parks and monuments. And who would you say your main audience is and what would you like them to take away from the book? McKenzie Long: My book could reach a pretty broad audience because I think there's the public land lovers, the people that already love parks and monuments, and I think there's the people that are interested in politics in why national monuments are so controversial. I wrote this from the perspective of a recreationist, I'm a climber, a mountain biker, a backcountry skier. That's how I have made really close bonds with land, and I don't think that's the only way you can make close bonds with places, but I think there are a lot of people out there that for them, that is their way. And so some recreationists are more about their acti...
Transcribe →Too Much Stuff
Mar 12, 202400:19:38Tap to summarizeTad Britt and Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speak with Peter Bleed, a retired professor of anthropology from the University of Nebraska, about creation, use, and management of archaeological collections. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- A Fascination with Collections Sadie Whitehurst: My name is Sadie Whitehurst and I'm an archeologist with NCPTT. Today, I'm having a conversation with Tad Britt and Dr. Peter Bleed. If y'all would like to introduce yourselves, Tad. Tad Britt: Hey, y'all. My name is Tad Britt. I work for the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training as the chief of archeology, and welcome to our podcast. Dr. Peter Bleed: I'm Peter Bleed. I'm a retired professor of anthropology from the University of Nebraska. Spent my whole career teaching at the University of Nebraska, but moved down here to Arkansas to be closer to my grandchildren. I'm still an archeologist and still really interested in the work and the activities of archeology. Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for talking with us today, Peter. You've got lots of really interesting ideas of how to continue improving our field and looking back at the way we do things and improving certain aspects of our day-to-day lives as archeologists, such as collections management and curation, and that's what has started this conversation today. I know you have a lot of experience and thoughts to share with us. Is collections management important in modern archeology and what are your thoughts on that? Dr. Peter Bleed: I'm really interested in collecting. Most people assume I'm a collector, and certainly, I have accumulated a lot of stuff, but I'm interested in the behavior of collecting. As an archeologist, of course, I also was actively involved in making archeological collections. I was kind of a square-hole archeologist, teaching field schools and doing research with contracts and grants that involved excavation. As a part of that, I was always involved in teaching archeology. In teaching those crafts, we had to teach and practice collections management. As I look back on it, I think archeologists were more interested in making collections than in keeping collections. Now we've got a whole bunch of collections and we've got to treat responsibly that we've got to make use of and that we've got to decide what to do. I'm also really interested in the activity that lots of people, I'd say most people have collections of stuff that they maintain, even though people will say, I'm not a collector, an awful lot of people do have big collections of interesting stuff. With the generation change, I think we should think about what's going to happen to those collections. I'd like to encourage discussions of how and why we collect and what we're going to do with all this stuff we have. Sadie Whitehurst: I think that's super important moving forward. Those are some interesting observations and they're quite plain, but it's not something we think about as we go along, and it's an interesting perspective. Dr. Peter Bleed: It tends to be the case that archeologists gather materials, curate it, clean it up, put it in bags, do the immediate collections management, but then it's turned over to collections managers. There tends to be a divide or I wonder if there is a consistent divide between collections managers and archeological researchers. That divide is I think, is unhealthy. I think we should find ways of making use of or dealing with the collections we've made. Those decisions of dealing with the collection should involve both archeologists, people who are doing research and who are using the material reflections of behavior as a source of information about the past. But also, the practical decisions of what are we going to do with all this stuff and if we keep collecting, can we do that responsibly and who's going to make those decisions? I think archeologists had in both collections management and in data gathering how to give great thought. Certainly, the folks at NCPTT are actively involved in thinking about what are we going to do with and how should we treat our collections. Sadie Whitehurst: You mentioned who's dealing with the collections, but now you've mentioned the treatment of them, and that's an interesting aspect too. Types of Collections Dr. Peter Bleed: We've got two kinds of collections that I'm interested in, archeological collection, stuff that consists of all the material that we have systematically recovered as a record of the past, and then we've got private collections. In terms of the research collections, we are pretty proud of how we collect things and documenting the standards we use to make this collection. Once it's in the box and once it's put on the shelf, we've got to remember that we've got to drive what we're going to do with that stuff. Putting it on the shelf is not the goal. The goal is using this material as a source of information about human history. Sadie Whitehurst: Now I'm thinking we're really diving into this discussion, but I wonder if we should maybe mention what a collection might consist of for someone who's not familiar with archeology or anthropology. Dr. Peter Bleed: We should talk about what a collection might consist of for archeologists. We've got huge amounts of material that we systematically and responsibly collected, but are we really working hard on figuring out what to do with it? Are we building theory on fire-cracked rock and lots of very bulky material? Or if the challenge of collection, what are we going to do with all these collections comes up? Can we responsibly say this doesn't need to be kept? I'm not comfortable having asked that, I've said that. Those are discussions that I think we've got to be involved in and either we've got to take the responsibility making use of these collections or we've got to have active cogent reasons for keeping them, or we've got to let other people say we can't keep it all. Sadie Whitehurst: Because behind every paper is every method and every artifact looked at is a box on a shelf somewhere, and that's heavy to think about. What do we do with Collections? Dr. Peter Bleed: I'd say I'd go a step farther. For everything we look at, there's a whole bunch of stuff we look at and don't do anything. We've got to actively decide how we are going to treat these materials. I think there tends to be a divide in the profession. We've got to ask the question, how central to modern archeology is collections management? Are the collections managers, curators and collections managers, leading the field? Are they working with? Are they archeologists who are covering the whole front of modern archeology or are they separated from the folks who are doing archeology as opposed to the people? Is there a separation between the people who are doing "archeology" and the people who are collections managers? When I was teaching archeology, we dig, every dig, and then you've got some time in the lab and everybody had to do it. I'm not sure that after the field work is done that the integration between collections and research is positive and effective, or I want to make sure that all of that is archeology and that all of it is supported and encouraged and active. Tad Britt: What do you think of the role of archeologists communicating with private collectors who don't necessarily have a degree in archeology or cultural resource management and how should we move forward in our discussions with private collectors? Dr. Peter Bleed: Private collecting, I think is really an important part of what archeology and the modern generation of archeologists ought to be dealing with. There are people who collect lots of the things that archeologists are interested in, but then there are a whole bunch of other collectors who have good collections that they have built and that they're getting old, you have to ask what's going to happen to those. You've got stone tool collectors and collectors of a whole lot of other things. Archeologists, I think should pay attention to all of that collecting. Now, in terms of archeological collections, the handshake, the intellectual linkage between archeologists and collectors who collect stone tools and other archeological material has been complex. We have a great deal to learn from archeological collectors, stone tool collectors. They can find much more than we can find. They have access to a great deal and they are really, really, really expert. Question we've got, and I think this is the question you raised, Tad, what is our responsibility? What can we do with and for them? Now, I want at some point, maybe in a future conversation, we can talk about all those other collectors who have got great huge swaths of American cultural patrimony. We can talk about that private collective. Let's talk about the stone tool and the archeological collective. I think it's fair to say, well, how much material can archeology, institutional and professional sense, how much stuff can we accept? We can't accept it all. We simply can't have it all. Furthermore, we've got to decide what we would do with it, what we can ask and address with it that are worth asking and that are possibly better or worse what the nonprofessional collectors bring to their interest. Finding that, making that an exciting intellectual activity is pretty exciting to me. What's going to happen to all those collections? I think the reality is we're getting ready for a generation shift. The baby boom has passed. Those of us who are pre-baby boom are certainly leading the passing, but what's going to happen to all of those collections? Everything cannot be tunneled into and sent into institutional collections, or maybe it can. Everything will get collected. If that's the case, the world will just be full of these huge collections, and the job of archeology will be to make use of those collections to find ways of treating them as a source of information about the human and ...
Transcribe →Cultural Impacts of the Apollo Program
Feb 27, 202400:24:17Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with Bret Bennington and Rodney Hill, professors at Hofstra University about the far-ranging cultural importance and impacts of the Apollo Program. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Bret Bennington: Bret Bennington. I'm a Professor of Geology at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York. Rodney Hill: And I'm Rodney Hill. I'm an Associate Professor of Radio, Television, Film, also at Hofstra University in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication. Catherine Cooper: You just published a book called After Apollo. Where did this project start? Bret Bennington: It started because someone in the administration at Hofstra University thought it would be a good idea for Hofstra to do something to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, and the reason for that is probably the location of Hofstra University in Nassau County on Long Island, Nassau County is where there were many milestones in the early history of flight, but it's also where the lunar module was built by the Grumman Corporation. And so there's this connection. Charles Lindbergh took off from a spot about a mile north of Hofstra University, basically from what is now the entrance to Macy's at the mall. So the call went out for faculty who would be interested in organizing a conference, and I've always had an interest in space flight. I was always a wannabe astronaut growing up. I'm an amateur astronomer. My day job is paleontologist, but I'm an amateur astronomer. So I immediately saw that this would be a great opportunity to maybe do something interesting related to the history of space flight. And then they decided they also wanted a faculty member who represented not so much the sciences but the humanities. And ... Rodney Hill: Yeah. I will just also add that Hofstra University has a wonderful cultural center, and they put on conferences throughout the year on many different topics. They're actually known for their series of presidential conferences, looking back on the presidencies of recent administrations. I think the last one they did was ... Bret Bennington: They just did Obama? Rodney Hill: They just did one on Obama. Rodney Hill: So they do conferences on all sorts of things, and so it was kind of natural, given the Long Island connections to Apollo, that they would do something on the 50th anniversary. And as Bret said, they wanted to cover not only the science aspects, but also the humanities and the arts. And so the administration sort of came to me and asked if I would help and sort of oversee the humanities and arts side of things. I do film studies, and one of my big interests is Stanley Kubrick, and of course, Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we were actually able to work that into the conference. It came out in 1968. So the film came out before Apollo, and I think it came out even before we had very good photographs of the Earth from space. So all those visual effects in 2001 are just completely imagined, it's from the imagination of the filmmakers. So that interest in Kubrick, and I've also always been interested in science fiction film, and so this was a great fit for me as well. So out of that conference, so Bret and I ended up sort of co-directing the conference. We had scholars from all over the country. Rodney Hill: One of the high points of my life, and I'm probably speaking for you as well, one of the guests of the conference was Dr. Mae Jemison, one of the Space Shuttle astronauts, and Bret and I did a Q&A with her on stage. And I could have died then and there and been quite satisfied with my life. It was a real honor to meet her. She was just delightful. Bret Bennington: A very impressive person. Rodney Hill: Gave a wonderful keynote talk for us, so that was really nice. Bret Bennington: And there were a lot of little kids in the audience who knew exactly who she was and were really ... There was a little girl, who was probably six or seven, sitting in the second row holding a Mae Jemison doll, and this kid was vibrating in her seat. She was so excited. So that was really cool. Rodney Hill: Yeah, that whole experience really brought tears to my eyes just being there with her and seeing the audience reaction to her. We also did a screening at the Cradle of Aviation Museum of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we brought over Jan Harlan, who was Stanley Kubrick's producer, and he introduced the film and did a Q&A afterwards. And that was a real honor for me to get to meet Jan Harlan in person. Bret Bennington: And we had a film student. Rodney Hill: Oh, yeah. One of our film students, she was a senior at the time, Connie Anderson Castilla, I think professionally now she goes by Connie Tais, she was one of my students in film, but she was also taking an honors course with Bret, and that's how she found out about our conference at Hofstra. And she approached you about, she wanted to do a documentary on the Grumman engineers. Bret Bennington: So about half-a-mile from campus is the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which has the lunar module, the actual lunar module that would've flown on either Apollo 18 or Apollo 19. And they have volunteers, who are the former engineers, retired engineers, who worked on the lunar module, who kind of hang around the exhibit and will talk to you and tell you everything you want to know about it. And so I was able to connect Connie up with the people at the museum who worked with these volunteers, and she ended up interviewing a bunch of them and doing this wonderful oral history documentary. It was very moving, I thought. Rodney Hill: When she first told me about the project, I was thinking, "Okay, this is going to be like a 10-minute student documentary. It'll be very nice." And she said, "Oh, no. This is going to be like forty-five minutes long." And I thought, "No, no, no, you can't do that. That's way too ambitious." But when I saw it, I was really blown away. She did a magnificent job. She traveled down to the National Archives and got a lot of footage and research and things. Bret Bennington: She got a bunch of NASA images and footage, and sort of interspersed them in with the footage of the gentleman that she was interviewing. Rodney Hill: It was really an extraordinary piece of work, and they showed it at the Cradle of Aviation, and I think it's been in a couple of other festivals. And Connie is now working with Ken Burns' company. So yeah, so we're very proud of her. Bret Bennington: Yeah, for sure. Rodney Hill: And so we took the best of those presentations and asked those authors to flesh things out and give us really full-blown essays that ended up in this book. Bret Bennington: I know it's a good example of how if you volunteer to do things that are outside of your comfort zone, it very often leads to interesting opportunities, and that's how you broaden yourself intellectually. Rodney Hill: So these essays come from all sorts of different approaches, different fields of academia. So we have chemists represented in the book, but we also have political scientists and film studies people and cultural studies people. It's a really great collection. I'm pretty proud to be associated with it, to be honest. Catherine Cooper: There's so much variety, and it really shows how interdisciplinary and how broad-reaching Apollo was, how important it was to all spectra of American society. Bret Bennington: One of the things I think that comes out of this book is how it didn't necessarily have to happen. It wasn't inevitable. And there's a chapter that discusses how these German rockets ... So if you think about contingency, one of the things that happens after World War II is we invade Germany, and we capture a bunch of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, and we bring them back to the US, and we put them to work. Itjust so happens that Wernher von Braun was an evangelist for space travel. The thing that he cared about more than anything was getting humanity off this planet, regardless of what you think of him as a human being because of the fact that he used slave labor to build the rockets in Germany, and he was bombing London and everything. If you listen to him, he did what he had to do to realize his vision of getting humans off the planet. And he ends up teaming up with Walt Disney to basically sell the idea, this idea that space travel is human destiny to the American public. And I don't think the space program would've been possible without that sort of propaganda groundwork that was done that planted the idea in the public, because it costs so much money to put astronauts on the Moon. Rodney Hill: Actually, the chapter on Disney and Wernher von Braun is written by somebody who was not at our conference, a former grad school buddy of mine named Chris Robinson. And I knew that he was interested in Disney television and that he had sort of been researching this, so I said, I contacted him and said, "Hey, Chris. We're putting together this book. If you have something, we'd be happy to take a look at it." Rodney Hill: And this is like mid-1950s, we're talking 1955 or so, when Disney had just started his Disneyland TV series with ABC, which really was all about promoting the idea of Disneyland as he's building the park and then getting people excited about that. But then there were these different segments, including Tomorrowland, and this is where the man in space segments with von Braun sort of came into play, this Disney imagination of the future of humanity, right? Kind of fun that way. Bret Bennington: It's good old German propaganda and American fantasy, sort of ... Catherine Cooper: Capitalism. Bret Bennington: ... capitalism combining to lay the groundwork. And then the first chapter in t...
Transcribe →Communities of Ludlow
Jan 30, 202400:17:54Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with Fawn-Amber Montoya and Karin Larkin about the history of the Ludlow Massacre and their involvement with the history and the community. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with: Karin Larkin: Karin Larkin. Fawn-Amber Montoya: I'm Fawn-Amber Montoya. Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me today. You both recently published a book called “Communities of Ludlow: Collaborative Stewardship and the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission.” Could you give a brief summary of the events? Karin Larkin: The Ludlow Massacre was the culmination of one of the most violent events in US labor history, but very few people know about it. It happened over a century ago in 1913 and 1914 when southern Colorado coal miners went on strike to fight for better living conditions, safer working conditions, and fair wages. Thousands of miners and their families went on strike in September of 1913. They were kicked out of their company owned housing, so they moved into tent colonies that were set up in advance for them up and down the strike zone. So, they lived in these tent colonies for 14, 15 months. They suffered through one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record. Tensions ran pretty high between the strikers and the company, the militia, the Colorado National Guard who were policing the strike. Ludlow was the largest of these tent colonies. And on April the 20th, 1914, bullets flew through the Ludlow tent colony. To escape the violence, four women and 11 children went and hid in a cellar that they had dug out underneath one of their tents. When the gunfire ceased, the militia and the National Guard came through, and they lit the tent colony on fire. And all but two women who escaped, the other two women and 11 children were all suffocated and died in that cellar that day. This sort of horrific event was a wake-up call for the nation, not just about the conditions and the coal mines, but the conditions and what was happening during the strikes, which was generally ignored. And this led to a lot of reforms, congressional inquiry, and changes in the labor laws throughout the country, and it's given us some of the privileges that we enjoy today. Catherine Cooper: Could you talk about how each of you became aware of the Ludlow Massacre and became involved in the study and sharing of this history? Fawn-Amber Montoya: My family is actually from southern Colorado. They migrated north from northern New Mexico in the late 1800s and settled in a small town outside of Trinidad, Colorado. It was known as Camp Engle or Engleville. When I was growing up, we lived outside of Trinidad in a small town called Hoehne, Colorado, and it was my first field trip for third grade. We went to the tent colony site. In, I think it was 2005, I was doing research for my dissertation, and I had driven by the site a number of times, been at the site a number of times, but my great uncle, we were getting ready for a family reunion. My great uncle was nowhere to be found because he had gone to Ludlow. And I remember that really sticking in my head about how important it was for my uncle as a former coal miner and to be from Trinidad, to be present at Ludlow on the morning of the family reunion. That Ludlow was as important to him as it was to his family. And so that was just something that had stuck with me for a very long time. Then when I was doing research on my dissertation, I was planning to look at Southern Colorado and the steel mill during World War II. And so, I was driving from Texas Tech University to the Steelworks Museum of the American West to do my research, and I would drive by Ludlow every time. And I reached a point where I had to figure out that Ludlow wasn't done yet. I think sometimes there's been some really amazing books that have been written on Ludlow, “Killing for Coal,” specifically by Thomas Andrews. And so you can get the feel of the work's been done. What I started writing on was the community of Ludlow and the memory of the Ludlow Massacre. And that was a place where I found for my own scholarship, the work hadn't been done or needed to continue to be worked on. And I think Karin and I have addressed this in this book, that there's still more to be researched about the Ludlow Massacre. We in no way see this as the final say or the final piece. So, we would always encourage scholars to continue to embrace this work, but to make sure that they're very thoughtful about the communities of Ludlow and the rich histories and relationships that have been developed and to try to continue to honor those memories. Karin Larkin: I have a very different first experience with Ludlow. I honestly had never heard of the Ludlow Massacre or the site before I became involved with the archeological project to excavate it. I was invited to participate in the archeological excavation, and I thought to myself, what can you do there? What's still left? It was a tent colony. What are we going to find archeologically? And I was very surprised at the rich history that we were able to uncover. At the point where I was invited, I thought to myself, I better start learning this history and do some research. They gave me a reading list, which I went through. And then I started doing the actual archeology, and I became deeply involved and really touched by what we were recovering during the archeological excavations. We were finding things that you would expect, typical miner’s items, ax heads and buckets and stuff like this. But we were also finding children's toys and parts of baby bottles, heirloom dishes and canning jars that still had food in them. And it just really personalized this history for me in a way that it was a touching reminder. So that gave me this direct and tangible connection to the Ludlow history, but also the massacre that really touched me. Catherine Cooper: There seems to be a very deliberate inclusion of multi-vocality in the book. Could you talk about this deliberateness and the variety of ways for sharing and preserving history that you engaged with for this project? Fawn-Amber Montoya: I would probably say I don't think that we started off with the intentionality of this multi-vocality. The book in many ways was “What were the next steps?” And after the end, the sundown of the official commission and the writing of the governor's report, I think that we knew we didn't want it to just sit on a table or sit on a bookshelf. We wanted the story and that experience that we had of connecting with community and these voices to become the history. One of the difficulties of being scholars and for myself of being a historian, it's about who gets to tell a story and what becomes the official histories. And we knew that unless we recorded this in a way where it would become part of the history that what we had done could be lost. And not just what we had done, but all of the contributions and these stories that were uncovered or brought to the forefront would be lost. I think in many ways the book reflects the variety of people who we were able to engage with in the commemorations, both either as audiences or as presenters, as community members who were present in these spaces who sometimes just provided the buildings for us to meet in. One story that it is not included in the book is Carolyn Newman, who is a Mother Jones re-enactor, who runs a museum in Walsenburg Colorado. And she did a series of newspaper articles where she had looked back at the newspapers from 1913, 1914 and put them back into the newspaper 100 years later. And so, if I could go back and say whose story should be included, I would've probably figured out a way to make sure I wrote Carolyn into that. But I think it was also that this wasn't about us trying to control the narrative. We wanted to very much be reflective of how each of these individuals were or are. And so, I think, like I said, I don't think it was always us thinking, oh, we have to do it in this way. It was as we started to put together the book that this is what the commission really felt like on a regular basis. Karin Larkin: One of the biggest challenges for academics is first of all, recognizing the sort of bias and the gaps in the documentary and the historical record, and then how can we ethically as well as accurately complete or fill in those gaps. And so, figuring out ways to make sure that we can include diverse stories, but also make sure that the stories that we're including add value to the historic record, as well as balancing this desire as an academic to make sure that the information is authentic, and it's accurate, there are multiple lines of evidence to help support it. Sometimes you don't have multiple lines of evidence to support some of the facts of history. One of the challenges is figuring out ways to be open-minded and open to different perspectives. And then how do we include those in ways that other academics will recognize their validity, right? And so that's one of the things that we were very intentional in including Linda Linville's story within a published academic book because her family story had been not just excluded, but was discounted by historians in the past. And we felt that there is value in adding the lineal descendants’ stories in an official telling of the story because they had been intentionally excluded for so long. I think one of the challenges is balancing these ethical dilemmas with academic rigor. And that's something that I struggle with in my own scholarship, but I don't think necessarily it's something that a lot of historians, academics spend enough time thinking about and grappling with these issues. Fawn-Amber Montoya: I don't think you're wrong. And I think part of it is who scholars end up writing for and as historians, it's ...
Transcribe →Voices from Bears Ears
Jan 16, 202400:39:31Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with Rebecca Robinson and Steve Strom about listening to and sharing the various opinions surrounding the formation of Bears Ears National Monument. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with. Rebecca Robinson: Hello I am Rebecca Robinson. I am a writer and journalist based in Southwest Washington state. Steve Strom: And I'm Steve Strom, a retired astronomer who has been working for the last seven or eight years on conservation related books. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. You've recently published a book called Voices from Bears Ears. Could you talk about what first drew your attention to the conversation around the proposed National Monument? Rebecca Robinson: This project began it seems like a lifetime ago. In early 2015, at the time, conservation organizations, in particular the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, were leading a campaign to ask the Obama administration to establish a greater Canyon Lands national monument, which is a large swath of land red rock country in southeast Utah, the areas, ecologically and culturally significant to many people and Native American tribes, indigenous peoples in the region and like Bears ears, had natural resources that drilling and mining companies were ready to exploit. So the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA and its partners were asking, as I mentioned, then-President Obama, to establish this National Monument using something called the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906 to quote, “authorize the president to create historic landmarks. Historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States.” It's a mouthful, but it ends up being very significant in the battle over Bears Ears. So in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt ended up using it to protect the Grand Canyon. At that point, as a National Monument because Congress was failing to act. And again, this becomes very significant in the Bears Ears issue as well, so our initial interviews focused on the Greater Canyonlands proposal, but by the summer of 2015, our initial sources, some of whom were part of the same Greater Canyonlands, were really shifting their focus to another conservation movement in Southeast Utah, centered in the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and it was led by a just-formed coalition of five Native American tribal nations. The Hopi, the Navajo, The Ute Indian tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribe. They were petitioning the Obama administration to establish a Bears Ears National Monument that would protect ancestral lands from drilling, mining and the impacts of motorized recreation very similar to Greater Canyonlands, just in a slightly different region. And the Bears Ears is so-called named after a pair of two very large buttes that look to many people like ears of bears poking out of the earth. They really are key landmark in a wild landscape that can be seen for many miles in every direction, and they're sacred to the indigenous peoples of the region and what was unique about the Bears Ears campaign was that while conservation organizations played a key role in promoting and lobbying for protection and establishment of a monument, the true leaders were the tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, it was an indigenous led effort, the likes of which the US hadn't really seen before. It also wasn't a straightforward conservation proposal. The coalition emphasized the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape, which their ancestors had called home since time immemorial and, most significantly, the coalition proposed a co-management agreement with the federal government in which a representative from each tribe, tribes being sovereign nations who have a government-to-government relationship with the federal government would co-manage. the lands of the monument in a way that was consistent with their cultural values and also conservation values more generally. Actually, we also heard that there was fierce opposition to this proposal from some locals, though not all, critically, and elected leaders who saw the establishment of a National Monument as a, quote-uN-quote land grab by the federal government that by setting aside some of this land for protection could rob them of their livelihood. And access to some of their treasured places. [It was] a compelling story, we wanted to learn more. So we headed to the Four Corners region and started interviewing people. As tends to happen when following a story, one interview led to another and another and another until we knew that we had to spend some serious time on the ground in the region to truly understand the issues at play. Steve Strom: The notion of a land grab, often used to oppose the Bears ears is a little bit deceptive in that the land that putatively was being grabbed was in fact public land, like for example a National Forest. So it's important to note that these are public lands that, like national forests ,belong to us all. Rebecca Robinson: We found three themes that emerged that connected people on all sides of the issue. One was that they all had a cultural and spiritual connection to the landscape. Many of them in the local area, felt that their voices hadn't been heard by people who were deciding the fate of landscapes that they called home. And that they lived in a rural area with a lot of poverty and a lot of industries that had come and gone over the years, such as uranium mining, things that had gone boom and bust, and they faced an uncertain economic future, and that also informed their very passionate views on this. And it's also informed by ancient history, as well as more recent. And there's an intersection of religious beliefs and different visions for economic future and the meaning of the word sacred, as well. Catherine Cooper: So it sounds like such a huge scope just around this one National Monument. How did you begin to formulate the project and then put together these interviews? Rebecca Robinson: What drew us to the story was the seemingly epic nature of it and really encompassing so many different intersecting issues that at the time and still inform a lot of political and cultural debates in the West in particular, but also the country at large. So I mentioned before that we started with a couple of initial interviews and one interview led to another and to another and another. And everyone had someone to recommend. And we happened to have the luxury of time in certain parts of this project and we were able to invest the time in going to southeast Utah and other places in the Four Corners region and spend significant time on the ground in the communities we were reporting on and so that made it easier to identify people to interview. Steve Strom: I think a crucial decision was made by Rebecca relatively early on in the process and that is to allow the story to be told by the individuals involved in the conflict, rather than doing as I had originally imagined, a book which would follow a more academic form description of the geography to a description of the indigenous history, Anglo history and so on, and I feel that to the extent that the book has real power, it derives from the decision to let people talk. Catherine Cooper: That is absolutely one of the things that drew me to the book. I know this isn't a question I wrote down, but was there a commonality in how you conducted the interviews? Did you start with one question that was the same for everyone, and then go from there? Steve Strom: My recollection is that we adjusted to each of the sources and tried to meet them. Where they were, I think that to the extent possible, we tried to engage them first on a personal level before going too deeply into the weeds of the Bears Ears discussion. And I think in the end, we followed pretty much the same themes in asking the questions. But I think that each of the interviews usually from my perspective were tailored to the individual. Rebecca Robinson: I think that for some interviews we did get into the weeds because we knew that some politicians or some leaders of advocacy organizations were very much involved in the policy, which was a crucial part of understanding the story especially. One thing I didn't mention is that at the time that the Bears Ears proposal was taking shape, there were conversations led by a Republican congressman in Utah, representative Rob Bishop, that involved many different stakeholders. You had ranchers. You had business owners. You had rock climbers. You had representatives of Native American tribes all trying to come together to find a compromise on these thorny public lands issues. And there were reasons why it went off the rails that had to do with politics and cultural differences, but I think that when we spoke to some of the folks that had been involved with the policy aspect of things, we would tailor our questions more to policy and getting into the weeds of legislation and land boundaries and whatnot. But then we took a different approach with some respected elders in the Mormon community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is hugely influential in the part of Southeast Utah where we were conducting our interviews. And so we very much focused on the spiritual connection to the land and how that very much informs views on how land should be managed and stewarded, and so I do think to Steve's point that we in some ways took the same approach, but approached the interviews from a different standpoint, based on who we were talking to. Catherine Cooper: Steve mentioned this very unique structure to the book. How did you decide which interviews wou...
Transcribe →Creating Inclusive Museums
Jan 2, 202400:23:08Tap to summarizeCatherine Cooper speaks with Dr. Porchia Moore, Dr. Rose Paquet, and Aletheia Wittman about advocating for and building inclusive museums. ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Dr. Porchia Moore: Hi. My name is Dr. Porchia Moore. I'm the rotating program head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Rose Paquet: Hi. I'm Rose Paquet. I am an independent scholar and artist living in California. Aletheia Wittman: I'm Aletheia Wittman. I am an independent consultant and coach working with museums and the cultural heritage sector. I am in Seattle. Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you all so much for joining us today. To kick off the conversation, I'd like to ask each of you how you became involved with the discussion of inclusion in museums. What are your stories? Aletheia Wittman: The way that I came to this subject and personal connection with this subject, is really through starting my graduate studies at the University of Washington. I was getting a degree in museum studies. Rose and I were in the same class. We had different tracks to the research and to projects that we were doing. But through seeking out resources, voices, some practices that were emerging in the field related to inclusion that we really were looking to, to understand inclusion better, so that it could inform our research and our areas of inquiry. We were really feeling at a loss for where to go for those resources. So for us, it was really this connection that we had, that we were both interested in subjects that are leading us to asking new questions about inclusion, "Who's talking about inclusion? What are the different frameworks for talking about inclusion?" For me, I was really interested in the lens of social justice as the fore of how I was investigating emerging curatorial issues in museums. I was interviewing people at different art museums that were talking about how they were committed to social justice. I really wanted to understand, what was the conversation like, before I arrived as an emerging scholar and person who wanted to enter the field. I was really wanting to know, "Where can I build my work from? And how can I find community in accessing information about inclusion?" Really building and making my practice one that I felt ethically good about, both as someone who wanted to work in museums and a scholar. Dr. Rose Paquet: Like Aletheia said, we met when we were in this graduate program, both investigating questions of inclusions from different perspectives and from different projects. I'd moved to Seattle from living in Alaska and working on repatriation projects for a museum called the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. I had experienced a sense of vibrancy around museum really being a place and a resource for the community in terms of the stories that were being told and how they did their work. In Seattle, I was working with an organization that was offering art classes and museum visits to adults who were experiencing homelessness or recovering from homelessness. That became the focus of my work in the museology program; really trying to look at it from the perspective of people who tend to not be included in museums. In fact, I would encounter homeless people sitting outside the museum in Seattle and felt this dissonance of, "We want the museum to be for all people and for our community, and here are people who maybe we consider not part of our community, although they're sitting right here.” What are the resources we have? We have shelter. We have art. We have these things that provide wellness. All sorts of things for people." I don't think in a prescriptive way. Whatever it is, it is valuable regardless of your background. I was focusing my work on that. From the perspective of, "People who had been homeless and who were homeless, how would they want to engage with the museum? What would be meaningful to them?" That’s how we started the Incluseum —as a space that could connect people, connect ideas, and show that this is a network and there are a lot of people who care about these matters. Together we create more strength for this work to happen in the world, rather than working in isolation or in a way that you think, "I'm the only one who cares," which is really saddening and can be discouraging, so building that momentum together. Dr. Porchia Moore: It's so interesting, every time we share that story it's like I get excited because, quite literally, discovering the work that Aletheia and Rose began changed my life. In 2011, I was enrolled in a library information science program at the University of South Carolina. I had been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian Grant. It stands for Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian, or CHIL Librarian. It was a small cohort of us, about eight. Our responsibility was to look across the GLAM sector, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and identify and attempt to solve some really critical problems across the GLAM sector for the 21st century. My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She was largely in charge of organizing her school field trips, so I would go with her. Most weekends, instead of us going to a football game or a basketball game, we would hop in the car and go check out a historic site. My mother was really into history and culture. Her love of history and culture definitely shaped my love and passion and understanding of it. So being in this doctoral program where our entire lens was looking at problem solving across the GLAM sector. And we could also specialize, so I specialized in museums. I also earned a graduate certificate in museum management. One of the critical issues that was really important for me is, as someone who was born and raised in the Deep South, someone who is female bodied and Black, when I would go on these trips, I would be invigorated by beauty and the history and memory, and all of that, but I would often feel like there was a lot missing, a lot of narratives missing. I really wanted to try to also understand why when I would go on these trips, I would either be the only person or one of a small handful of people of color. So that was my original guiding question in my doctoral program and my doctoral research. Then I was really fortunate enough to be able to have a mentor and connect with other doctoral students in the education department who introduced me to critical race theory and this notion around scholarship as a form of activism. So thinking about activist scholarship and thinking about the power of problem solving within that context. Within the context of museums, thinking about repatriation, restoration, social justice, as Aletheia mentioned. I became really, really frustrated because I was not seeing language or ideology or even analytical frameworks that helped me really understand and unpack this issue of barriers to participation in museums. Then somehow I discovered The Incluseum. I was like literally shouting, "Oh, my gosh, these people speak my language. I found my people." So I reached out. I think I heard back from both Aletheia and Rose, but I know that Rose and I spoke for well over an hour in our first conversation. I was so elated. I was looking for new language and new rhetoric, so words like liberation. One of the things that I really did not understand is why within museums we were constantly still having a conversation about diversity, because diversity is a really hegemonic term that does not in any way speak to dismantling current systems of practice or thinking about future building . So this notion around inclusion, I thought to have this collaborative inquiry space where we could all collectively unpack what that word inclusion meant for us in our little part of the globe was really, really important. Dr. Rose Paquet: We'd been talking about publishing a book for a few years prior to working on this concrete project. We thought, "Oh, it'd be fun to do something like this together." Bounced around different ideas. It seemed that with the coming 10-year anniversary of The Incluseum, and of our work together, it was a good time to look back this last decade and everything that transpired in this work together, and what we've learned, so that we can also look forward and position ourself for the future. I was finishing my doctoral studies, this was a couple years ago, and it seemed like, "Wow, maybe some of this research I'm doing for my dissertation could be well suited for the book." So these different pieces started to come together about what this book could include with different reflective pieces, and then a bit of a research piece, and then a looking forward piece. I was like, "Wow, here we go. This is it. We’ve got it." Dr. Porchia Moore: I will also jump in and just kind of say, I think, like she said, we have been talking about writing a book for a really long time. I also feel like a kind of catalyst for writing the book was, especially at the height of the quarantine and COVID-19, was kind of taking a critical assessment of the field in general. In particular in 2020, when we saw so many museums closing and people being laid off and furloughed and we saw open letters, that museum landscape seemed really, really rocky, if you will. We thought it was the perfect time to be able to take an assessment, to be able to look back, especially in light of this notion around museum activism. Rose, Aletheia, and I were dubbed museum activists very early on. We were trying to figure out what that really meant, but we were identified as change agents. I think we all collectively felt like change agents, but I think, like Rose said, it was just a perfect timing to look back at the impact of The Incluseum as a project, look at all of these wonderful collaborators that we've been able to work with for about a decade. And how all of that synergy coming together ...
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