Bones of Contention Documentary

• American archaelogy is a colonial archaelogy
• structure of the American colonies
• every ancient culture could have been Native Americans but the Native Americans themselves
• eventually it was proven that the mounds were made by Native Americans
• Native Americans were seen as a doomed people
• Smithsonian had 18,000 Native Americans
• 1995 American institutions scoured their collections
• dark age for Science and Anthropologists
• complicated migration routes of Native Americans
• artifacts are markers, if they are reburied, we will lose the past
• they make sense of their lives through oral traditions
• we are talking about living human beings who lived in the past, from this we can reconstruct their lives
• scientists are piecing together the history of diseases
• diseases that attack bones directly
• no cure for rheumatoid arthritis, little evidence before the 1800s
• premise: rheumatoid arthritis started in Tennessee
• can compare and contrast bacteria from the past and present
• diabetes change in lifestyle and diet
• activity patterns have changed dramatically
• Omaha had a diverse diet, bison and Buffalo hunting were 40-60% of diet
• bison meat is much lower fat
• in the early 1800s trade between the Europeans and Omaha
• before the epidemic struck, long lives, women had health status of men
• when women got involved in manufacturing, more stress on bones from scraping hides
• chewing hides ruined teeth, Omaha women were dying at 30, population was in a decline
• Native American children were put in boarding school
• severely punished for speaking their own language
• Dr. Rhinehart brought Omaha history to life
• Omaha were more advanced in medical practices than Europeans
• NAGPRA, https://www.nps.gov/nagpra/

Iran: archaeological heritage in crisis Developing an effective management system for archaeology, Kamal Aldin Niknami

• The dynamic social development in Iran over the last decades provided the acknowledgment of the archeological heritage on the one hand, and a confrontation to the current managing system of archaeology on the other
• There is a general agreement that the primary social contribution of archaeology is the information about past human history that can be provided by the systemic study of the material remains of that history using appropriate archaeological methods
• Academic programs such as those at the universities of the developed countries, which offer complete academic programs in the specialty of cultural and AHM, reinforce awareness in our country about this concern
• The problems faced by archaeology in general and AHM in particular is generally akin to the difficulties encountered by Iranian society as a whole
• AHM is regarded to have political and cultural roles, and through its process archaeology is often given social authority as it seen to impact upon and giving meaning to the past
• One of the major issues facing AHM today is an issue that must be faced by archaeologists in both AHM and academia
• It seems that the concepts underlying heritage protection and its implementing regulations in Iran are almost naïve
• The problems experienced in AHM in Iran, were not failures of system or process, but some of which are related to structural flaws in the overall management system while others refer to the practice of practitioners, whether they are regulators or researchers
• How do we justify spending additional time and money on the new fieldwork projects?
• Within academic archaeology, the interest is more extensive dissemination of archaeology to a wider audience can be seen as part of the much wider debate that has discussed the role and the value of the past, as an element of public heritage
• What should archaeologists do to ensure that the knowledge that they generate about the past finds its way meaningfully into the public domain and contributes to debates and literature surrounding the issues of cultural development in Iran?

Program

• archaeologists need to actively challenge the traditional perspectives of archaeology and carefully consider the language and terminology used by the discipline to present and interpret the past
• inclusion of archaeology in formal and informal education programs, to appreciate the vitality of the AHM and its role in modern achievements; and expansion and modernizing archaeological programs in large universities
• emphasis on the general public's interest in archaeology through programs provided by academic institutions
• balancing the past and the present by enlightening the public on the norms and values of Iranian archaeological heritage
• A comprehensive policy for museum collection, and training appropriate personnel, as well as establishing an education office in museums to link with public interests and the educational system of the country must be one of the priorities of the State
• In such a way adequate budgets and necessary equipment should be prepared
• Active encouragement should be given to the establishment of local authority or community museums, since the objects collected by museums in local and community levels have great popularity and archaeological significance
• significantly greater share of funds going into the national archaeological program should be devoted to providing direct public benefits such as site visits, museum displays, school education programs, and quality treatment of synthesized archaeological results in print and visual media
• CHO and individual archaeologists must modify existing practices and regulations to provide greater and more rapid public access to the results of public archaeology
• archaeologists need to recognize legitimate claims made by ethnic groups and other groups regarding the treatment of archaeological sites but they must also take responsibility for defining and defending the public value of the knowledge that only archaeology can provide

03/16/17 African Burial Ground documentary

• coalition of activists, scientists
• city council and mayor tried to stop the federal project
• 850k square foot building on this site
• Congress gave instructions to put this building here
• Christians, Muslims, and African religions
• libations and ceremonies for the ancestors and the newborn
• thousands of people came to play tribute
• most of black history is focused on slavery in the South
• the black experience and slave experience stimulated a new discussion of American history
• writers, artists, poets help up recreate their culture
• a comprehensive inquiry of those long-buried people
• near the major institutional buildings in lower Manhattan
• how are places of burial treated in urban areas when it is a pressing developmental issue

The Clash of Stories At Chimney Rock: A Narrative Approach to Cultural Conflict Over Native American Sacred Sites On Public Land, Howard J. Vogel

The Clash of Stories At Chimney Rock: A Narrative Approach to Cultural Conflict Over Native American Sacred Sites On Public Land, Howard J. Vogel

• Disputes arising from different views of moral understanding and the source of moral authority have been a prominent feature of political conflict in recent years in the United States
• James Davison Hunter refers to this phenomenon as "The Culture Wars"
• The stakes in these disputes ultimately involve a struggle for cultural domination that involves a struggle for survival of a particular way of life
• Rarely is the oldest, and one of the deepest cultural divides in American experience mentioned in the discussion of the culture wars
• That is the cultural conflict, which springs from the collision of European culture, in its various expressions, with that of the Native people of the North American continent 
• Litigation undertaken in the 1980s designed to secure judicial protection of six sacred sites failed dramatically
• This essay undertakes a critical reexamination of the Chimney Rock case, Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the only one of the sacred site cases to reach the United States Supreme Court
• In the course of this essay I will take up four tasks: first, I will offer some opening comments on the historical meaning of the American constitutional commitment to religious liberty within the larger context of the experience of the descendants of the European immigrants to the United States as compared to the experience of the Native American peoples
• Second, I will briefly describe "narrative method" as an alternative approach to analyzing cases of cultural conflict that can aid us in understanding the deep cultural issues at stake in sacred site cases
• Third, I will critically analyze the opinion of the United States Supreme Court in Lyng, with special emphasis on the doctrinal and cultural dimensions of the dispute as seen by the Court
• For European immigrants the First Amendment has been very good news
• But the First Amendment has not been good news for the indigenous people known as American Indians, or Native Americans
• The American historian, William Lee Miller, argues that the American commitment to religious liberty is distinctive as compared to similar commitments in other constitutional democracies
• The distinctive feature of the American commitment to religious liberty is found in the premises underlying the two religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
• The premises underlying these clauses can be summarized by embracing three key commitments: (1) personal religious liberty; (2) institutional independence; and (3) the absence of hostility to the traditional religious beliefs of the colonists of America
• The unique liberty in which the American nation was "conceived" included more than personal religious liberty as it would be understood worldwide; it includes also the full institutional independence of the federal union from all churches and of those churches from the national state
• In the most simple terms these principles may be summarized broadly as a commitment to neutrality between religions by prohibiting the state from establishing religion, coupled with a commitment of tolerance toward all forms of religious expression
• The most eloquent statement of this came from Justice Jackson in his 1943 opinion for the Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In that case the Court struck down a state order that required all public school teachers and students "to participate in the salute honoring the Nation represented by the Flag" on pain of being cited for insubordination if they refused
• This commitment to neutrality and tolerance of diversity does not, however, solve, let alone avoid, Lincoln's Dilemma. Although neutrality and tolerance have been the backbone of doctrinal developments under the two religious liberty clauses, their articulation in specific cases have been the source of great difficulty in developing an intellectually satisfying body of doctrine 
• Against this historical record of some accommodation for religious observance in some government settings, one might expect that there might be some cases of accommodation of Native American spiritual practice at sacred sites on government land. But that has not been the case
• The bad news is the sacred sites cases is especially dramatic when seen against the good news on religious liberty that marks the founding of the American Republic
• The land seizures stretch back to the early years of European immigration, but they become especially dramatic during the nineteenth century with the "Opening of the West."
• In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson's government bought the huge territory in the center of the North American continent from the French, the land mass of U.S. territory virtually doubled overnigt
• A vast area was suddenly available to settlement
• Many new states would be created within their territory during the space of the next sixty years 
• The story of my home state of Minnesota is typical of what happened in these years
• In 1832, the "European discovery" of the source of the Mississippi River took place in what would become the Minnesota Territory in 1849
• Nine years later, in 1858, Minnesota became a state
• With the coming of the settlers and the establishment of U.S. governmental control over traditional Indian lands, the religious beliefs, rituals, and sites of the Native Americans came under severe pressure
• Some rituals, such as the Ghost Dance in the Northern Plains, were suppressed at the end of the nineteenth century 
• Today the picture is not radically different. Even though courts dealing with conflict over government action at Native American sacred sites often now proceed with full knowledge of the history of governmental sanctioned suppression of Indian religious practices, and on occasion express some sympathy for the extraordinary burden this has placed on the integrity of Indian culture, the decisions rendered in these cases have served to extend and entrench the cultural domination of the European immigrants and made it difficult for those Native American people who today are trying to revive traditional spiritual practices as a way to restore their culture
• Six sacred site cases were decided by the federal courts between 1982 and 1988
• In each case Native Americans sought to protect traditional sacred sites from government land use plans that would severely intrude on the spiritual significance and practices associated with these sites 
• What makes these cases especially troubling is the fact that in 1978 the United States Congress took note of the continued difficulties experienced by Native Americans who sought religious freedom on par with all other Americans
• In response Congress adopted the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (AIRFA)
• This Act expressly declared that American Indians are guaranteed the same religious freedom available to all Americans under the First Amendment 
• What went wrong? What can we learn from these American cases concerning how we might deal with the problem of cultural diversity in a constitutional democracy? 
• Cases involving efforts to exempt religiously grounded conduct from the reach of the law of the state as a matter of religious liberty protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution are typically framed as individual rights cases
• One way of speaking about the high importance of particular narratives for particular people is to speak of them as "Master Stories."
• The Exodus story is the master story of the Jews. For them it conveys both the meaning of life and what is is they understand that they are called upon to do 
• Christians, Muslims, Native Americans, and others, all have particular narratives, which serve a similar purpose
• Where any of these people come into conflict with the state, it is often because their particular master story, and the tradition which surrounds it, calls them as individuals, to pursue a course of action which the state is not willing to permit
• Prominent within many of these master stories are sacred sites, and rituals, which embody the story and serve as vehicles for its passage across the generations
• Master stories are not neutral. They embrace and express a particular understanding of reality and are value laden. This means that they can be either "hegemonic tales" or "subversive stories"
• One of the major problems associated with conventional rights-based approaches to dealing with cultural conflict, and especially that involving ethnic or religious groups, is the potential for imposing one particular master story on an entire people in the name of the state; thus, extinguishing the cultural heritage of those who find their identity in the extinguished master story 
• The threat of suppressing or extinguishing a master story is especially serious in cases involving efforts to exempt religiously grounded conduct from the reach of the law of the state as a matter of religious liberty protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 
• The Chimney Rock case involved the question of whether the government had a legal duty under the Constitution to abandon a land-use plan for government-owned land which would burden the use of the land for religious purposes by the Indian people who hold the Chimney Rock site as sacred
• The case involved a twenty-seven square mile area located on land owned by the U.S. government inside a national forest managed by the federal forest service
• In addition to the testimony offered by the Indian plaintiffs on the spiritually sensitive cultural significance of the area, the Forest Service commissioned an extensive study of the cultural significance of the area to the Indian people, which included an assessment of the impact the proposed action would have on the cultural importance of the site 
• The proposed site of the U.S. Forest Service road to connect the villages of Gasquet and Orleans in northwestern California included the site of several mountain peaks located in the Blue Creek area of the Siskiyou mountains rising 7,000 feet above the Klamath River Valley 
• The great power present in the high country is one of the gifts of ancient "pre-human figures who are said to have inhabited the world and to have brought all living things and culture to mankind."
• When a description of the questions presented in the Chimney Rock case takes into account the divergent views of time and space, which made this a case of cultural conflict, then the cultural stakes can more easily be seen  
• The Chimney Rock case is the only case in which the U.S. Supreme Court has fully considered a challenge to a public land use plan that was in conflict with the historic Native American religious purposes associated with the government owned land for which the plan had been prepared 
• The basic holding of the Supreme Court was that the government had no legal duty to accommodate the Native American religious practices at stake, despite the Court's awareness of the cultural injury sustained by the Native American plaintiffs at the hands of the government
• To begin with, it must be pointed out that the government was not unmindful of the religious significance of the Chimney Rock area on its land. 
• Recall the Theodoratus Report discussed earlier, which came out of a study commissioned by the government in 1978 to study the impact of the Chimney Rock area of the road it planned to build through the sacred site area
• Neither the government nor the Court questioned these findings or conclusion
• Indeed the Court went so far as to acknowledge the severity of the harmful effect of the road in dramatic language
• Despite what the Court called "the sympathy that we must all feel for the plight of the Indian people involved in the case, the Court held that the government was under no legal duty to alter its plan of action to lift the burden the road would place on the religious practices of the Indian people
• In the end, despite the Court's explicit recognition of the cultural stakes, the Court was unable to honor and respect the Native American understanding of land on either its own terms or within the conventional principles of First Amendment law
• In taking the approach the Court affirmed the high value traditionally placed on both property rights and on religious liberty under the American Constitution, but declined to interfere with the government's exercise of its property rights for the reasons I have already discussed above 
• In addition to discussing the questions presented as property rights issues, the Court also engaged in an extended analysis of the way in which religious liberty, as a constitutional value, was presented in this case
• Beyond the Court's transformation of the Theodoratus Report from a collective communitarian understanding of the religious dimension of the cultural stakes presented t an individualist understanding more congruent with the conventional understanding of rights found in the dominant culture, the analysis of religious liberty presents a sharp point of contrast between the conventional non-narrative approaches taken by the majority and dissenting opinions written respectively by Justices O'Connor and Brennan
• Against the description of the religious significance of the Chimney Rock Area, Justice Brennan argues that the Court's focus on whether the government has "prohibited' the practices in a formal sense is unconvincing
• Notice that in taking this balancing approach, Justice Brennan creates a duty on the part of the government to justify the means it has chosen to accomplish its objectives
• The balancing approach requires great sensitivity to the context 
• The stance taken by both of these Justices can be viewed sympathetically
• Justice O'Connor seeks to be true to the principle of government "neutrality" so distinctive of the American approach to religious liberty, while at the same time being true to the sanctity of property rights, which are also enshrined in the Constitution
• Justice Brennan, on the other hand, seeks to be true to the purpose for which religious liberty is protected under the Constitution
• Justice Brennan also seems to differ from Justice O'Connor in his view of how to take into account the government's property interest in this case
• We might well consider whether a sympathetic reading of the opinions of Justice O'Connor and Brennan might lead to an accommodation, which honors the concerns they express
• Despite his willingness to engage in a balancing of the interests presented, Justice Brennan gives us little guidance for applying the test he proposes 
• Reading the American story as one in which land is viewed as property, subject to possession and title, surely comports with the history and understanding of the American experience in European-American terms, informed as it is by the ideas of discovery and conquest
• What lessons can be learned from the Chimney Rock case? When we augment our understanding of the decision, with the additional perspective narrative method can provide, we can see clearly that a commitment to the principle of abstract neutrality in religious liberty cases can serve to entrench a dominant cultural view of human experience even where there is a commitment to cultural diversity as in the United States 
• We can now see that the "devastation" Justice O'Connor forthrightly anticipates if the road is constructed is a devastation which comes from the suppression of the Indian peoples' master story because it can no longer be reeneacted in its traditional way in its traditional setting near Chimney Rock
• In taking the master stories in a dispute seriously, a narrative approach is more faithful to the full scope of the American constitutional vision than conventional approaches to adjudication of cases of cultural conflict
• The examples of the dead stories of the past serve as warning to the possibilities for an American future, as each year the people who inhabit the several states of the union become more diverse
• Narrative method does not provide an easy answer to these questions
• It does suggest that understanding the deep cultural stakes present, when master stories are in conflict with each other, may help us find the depth of empathy from which imaginative legal approaches to resolve these conflicts might be fashioned
• We must be careful to avoid being seduced by the detail of what we might regard as exotic when we engage in the descriptions of others
• By gaining an understanding of these cases from this point of departure, despite the difficulties narrative method presents, we may hope to yet develop a creative approach to dealing with clashes of culture that may lead to social healing where the cultures come in the conflict within a particular political society, whether that be in the courts or the political life of the nation
• The warning of the Chimney Rock case is that the Indian peoples' master story suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of another master story--the American story--held dear by the dominant European-Americans who, as carriers of European culture, planned and executed the "discovery" and settlement of the Western Frontier in the United States, in the same way that their forbears had first planned and executed the "discovery" of the "New World"
• To make this argument is not simply to embrace an easy cultural relativism, rather it is to look for ways to embrace the contrast presented in the conflict in a way that can lead to the intensification of experience by all parties to the dispute within a larger synthesis that can hold these parties together without suppressing the contribution that each makes to the larger whole
• As we come to appreciate the master stories of other people, and the importance they have for the life of these people, so too might we see the presence of the master stories in our lives and the ways in which the law embraces and protects or burdens or stories
• Imagination, inspired by empathy and humility in listening to the stories of others far different than our own, can help us understand our own stories better and thus come to see the encounter with difference as an opportunity rather than as a threat
• From this perspective we stand to recover the meaning of our own stories because we are in conversation with those whose stories differ from our own
• In that vital conversation, engaged in with utmost seriousness, sensitivity, and appreciation of our master stories, we may yet learn to live with our differences rather than going to war over them 

Mullins, Paul R FORUM-Escavating America's Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindicationist Archaeologies

• Over more than a century, African diasporan scholars have idenified identity in complex forms that aspire to resist racial essentialism yet stake consequential political claims to collective roots
• Historical archaeology has painted a rich picture of the material details of African American life that also refutes black essentialism; however, archaeologists have crafted many utterly fluid African diasporan identitities that sometimes fail to examine the global connections, antiracist citizen rights, and concrete cultural heritage long examined by diasporan scholars
• In the 1950s Richard Wright proclaimed, "the Negro is America's metaphor," arguing that African American heritage was American history told in its most "vivid and bloody terms."
• Despite such challenges, African diasporan archaeology has explored some of the most meaningful dimensions of American life and archaeology's disciplinary sociopolitics
• The politics of diasporan archaeolog are significantly influenced by how archaeologists define diasporan identity 
• These are complicated challenges, but different constructions of diasporan identity can yield quite different political effects
• Since the 19th century, African American scholars have wrestled with how to define diasporan identity in a politically self-conscious form that acknowledges some shared basis for collective identity while resisting racist essentialism 
• W.E.B. Du Bois spent much of his rich intellectual career examining the complicated connections within the diasporan world 
• A vast volume of the pioneering diaspora history was a consciously "vindicationist" scholarship meant to counter racist historical narratives
• Vindicationist histories charted many political paths, but most wielded the authoritative voice of scholarshp to outline various forms of diasporan solidarity rooted in African heritage, antiracist resistance, enslavement, or some combination of those processes
• Some African historiography in this vein was overwhelmingly focused on demonstrating diasporan people's contributions to American society as a mechanism to secure citizenship without necessarily dispelling the racialized foundation for American citizen claims
• Reddick aspired to fashion a history that confronted both the broad social structures of globalization and everyday life, concluding, "if Negro history is to escape the provincial nature of its first phases, it will surely re-define the area of subject matter in terms of a larger focus
• Archaeologists often have obliquely critiqued deep-seated racist stereotypes
• Most African American archaeology positions itself against a more ambiguous backdrop, aspiring to develop a richer empirical picture of African American life, not one that consciously counters dominant narratives or takes either racialization or racist stereotypes as its targets
• Simply recognizing history as racist or dispelling stereotypes is not an end in itself
• Terrence Epperson argues that there is a pervasive archaeological reluctance to embrace such scholarship because it cuts to to the very heart of American color privilege and is grounded in stakeholder's distinctive political positioning 
• Historical archaeologists often have championed agency to counter the dehumanizing potential of empirical analysis, structuring processes, or identity totalities that imply passivity 
• African American scholars have often focused on similar issues in terms of consicousness within and against racialization 
• Historic archaeology's turn to agency often wrestles with the tension between, on the one hand, individuality and highly localized social circles and, on the other hand, broader collective identity, forcing analysts to assess the degree to which people live within and against collective ascribed identity categories 
• There are complicated effects to forging a European sense of individuality that does not confront the relationship between race and agency or the power of racial consciousness among diasporan peoples 
• Many of the archaeologists who are rethinking diasporan identity have taken aim on ethnicity in hopes of charting an anti-essentialist identity 
• Thinkers like Baldwin, Wright, and Du Bois all confronted racialization and did not disconnect it from diasporan consciousness. They situated various forms of agency and individuality in a direct relationship with racism
• Studies of cultural transformation have long been a staple of archaeological scholarship, but diasporan contexts present especially radical displacement, sociocultural complexity, and lines of power that are collectively complicated by their reach into contemporary social life and dominant scholarly representations 
• Charles Orser views all of these definitions of creolization warily, suggesting that creolization is normally reduced to defining newly circumscribed identity collectives
• The cases of Chesapeake pipes and colonoware are among the best examples of such identity debates over cultural mixing and transformation in African American scholarship 
• Mouer and collagues demolish African precedent and position diasporan identity within a broadly defined creolized experience. 
• This perspective borrows from Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, who invest the essential formative dimensions of African American life in experiences following the Middle Passage and reject facile connections between Africa and the New World 
• Diasporan scholars have always considered some sense of "Africa" to be central to diasporan identity, which must have a material form, and this scholarship cannot be summarily dismissed because of politics or source materials
• Many archaeologists carefully assess untroubled fabrications of African (or creoloized) identity and are cautious about the concrete ways in which material culture demonstrates historical persistence and discontinuities
• Some archaeologists see African influences (if not concrete precedents) embedded in a vast range of social and material practices, for instance, draw on a scholarship of conjuration and hoodoo that borrows heavily from the WPA narratives and usually points to precolonial Kongolese cosmologies
• Timothy Ruppel and colleagues argue similarly that seemingly commonplace spaces such as gardens were "encoded with resonant meanings that disputed notions of dependence, subservience, and inferiority" in what the researchers label a "diasporic transcript" that was "hidden in plain view."
• The recognition of ongoing identity transformations is very much in keeping with many diasporan definitions that focus on continual hybridity 
• In his introduction to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis, Wright argues that whites had failed to confront their uneasiness with racial domination, suggesting that "they feel the essential loneliness of their position which is built upon greed, exploitation, and a general denial of humanity; they feel the naked untenability of their split consciounsess, their two-faced moral theorites spun to justify their right to dominate
• There has not been an especially critical analysis of how and why archaeologists invoke diasporan identity, particularly the implications of scholarship conduced along and across the color line that is serving a wide range of political goals
• Many scholars have questioned how a plural diasporan history should be related when it is theorized by those who privilege from racial domination 
• Unless an engaged archaeology articulates repressed or ignored political demands, it simply paints evocative emotional pictures of the past with no connection to inequality 
• When Wright declared that "the Negro is America's metaphor," he argued that diasporan heritage constructed in discourses like historical archaeology could classify American racialization, white privilege, and the myriad inequalities race makes possible 
• Diasporan archaeology seems well positioned to weave an exceptionally complicated narrative of life along and across the color line that challenges racialized presumptions and fleshes out the genuine roots of diasporan heritage, even as it examines the complicated transfigurations of that heritage

The African Burial Ground National Monument, Purnell B

• Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison remarked in 1988 that she had to write the novel Beloved, a mind-wrenching narrative of American slavery and slave resistance, because, "There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presence of, or recollect the absences of slaves...There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road."
• The ABGNM presents a breath of historical material and offers a unique chance to engage with the politics and cultures that created it. The monument covers three main subjects: the subject of slavery in New York from the colonial period to the state's 1827 gradual emancipation law; the methodologies physical anthropologists and archaeologists use to analyze artifacts retrieved from the burial ground and the ways those processes yield important information about Manhattan's Africans; and the political battles wages to ensure this history became memorialized and that the bones of dead Africans be given pride of place in Manhattan's public space
• The ABGNM is essentially a cemetery, a graveyard, a commemoration of the dead erected by the living. Graveyards says just as much about the buried dead as they do about the living people who build and visit those sites: the memories of those who passed that the living choose to value and honor, and the classes of the deceased deemed worthy of having marked burials
• Colonial Manhattan's sizeable black population, a mixture of free and enslaved people, had its own cemetery in the mid-1600s
• The discovery did not halt the construction, however, GSA officials removed the bones and went ahead with their plans
• Black political and cultural activists organized campaigns to stop the construction on what they considered sacred ground 
• Visitors first experience the fruit of that struggle when they enter the African Burial Ground's outdoor monument
• Entering the memorial from the north, visitors look up at a twenty-foot wall emblazoned with the West African sankofa, a symbol associated with learning from the past
• The monument's lower level is a broad circular space, its walls adorned with carvings of religious and cultural symbols from Africa and the wider world
• Off to the side of the monument's entrance, before visitors come upon the "door of return," are seven mounds of grass under which are buried crypts, each containing sixty coffins
• Upon exiting the theater, visitors enter a circular room with exhibits and presentations on the walls, centered on a life-sized diorama of the film's burial scene
• On the perimeter of the space are images and texts on the nature of slavery in Manhattan
• Another section of the exhibit focuses on the ways archaeologists marked the grave sites, studied the exhumed artifacts of skeletons, and analyzed the data to learn about black life in colonial Manhattan
• The exhibits planners also gave short shrift to the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity that characterizes Africans, their societies, and their history
• It is here that the pitfalls of the "presentism" that led to the creation of the ABGNM are revealed: the cultural imperatives that guided the call for a public commemoration at the burial ground traded complex interpretations of colonial-era African people for less nuanced depictions of the history of "Africans" in Manhattan
• No single memorial or exhibit can adequately represent the extensive history of Africans and their progeny in America

03/07/17 Shoreline apartment preservation campaign

Shoreline Apartments
Save or not?
They represent an attempt to revitalize a community and a location's desirability
-mainly composed of concrete
-Finite life
-30-40 years

Seizing Intellectua; Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground, Cheryl J. La Roche and Michael L. Blakey

Seizing Intellectua; Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground, Cheryl J. La Roche and Michael L. Blakey

• The New York African Burial Ground Project embodies the problems, concerns, and goals of contemporary African and urban archaeology
• The project at once has informed and has been informed by the ever-watchful African Americans and New York public
• Excavation of the New York African Burial Ground has brought scholars, academicians, researchers, cultural resource managers, politicians, religious leaders, community activists, school children, and the general public together in a complex and often contentious philosophical and ideological relationship
• The dynamics of the relationship and the shape of the project have been determined to a large extent by the relentless determination of the African-American descendent community to exercise control over the handling and disposition of the physical remains and artifacts of their ancestors
• When the United States General Services Administration (GSA) contracted for the construction of a 34-story office building at Broadway, Duane, Elk, and Reade streets, New York City, on a site that historical maps indicated had been an 18th-century "Negroes Burying Ground", it did not anticipate the storm of controversy that lay buried and moribund beneath nearly 30 ft. of fill
• Excavations of the African Burial Ground began in the summer of 1991 and continued through July 1992
• Early projections indicated that 50 burials would be recovered from an undisturbed area beneath Manhattan and Republican Alleys
• As chairperson on the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, Congressman Gus Savage brought the influence and power of the U.S. Congress to challenge the GSA
• Allocation of building funds for the federal government was controlled by this subcommittee, and it was Congressman Savage's gavel that signaled the end of the excavation
• Other African Americans were also uniquely positioned for a collaborative "power play" that changed the course and direction of the project
• Journalists brought the power of the press
• A team led by Michael Blakely of Howard University brought the final necessary component, intellectual power and technical expertise
• The research team based at Howard University began presenting its proposal to direct the site's analysis in April 1992
• By that time, it was apparent that no contract had been let for analysis and that the research design developed by the Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc (HCI), the original cultural resource management firm hired to excavate the site has been rejected by review agencies
• In June 1992, negotiations were taking place between Blakely as Howard University's representative and Daniel Roberts of John Milner Associates (JMA)
• JMA was in the initial phases of replacing HCI, which was having difficulty administering a project of this magnitude
• By July 1992, after a constant barrage of petitions, angry rhetoric, and community dissension, congressional hearings, professional meetings, lobbying, and political action, leadership and control of the entire project was eventually awarded to more sympathetic institutions with greater experience and which were better developed for research of this kind
• Howard University has engaged a national and international team of Africanist and African-Americanist scholars for archaeological and historical analysis.
• JMA established an office in New York City and is assisting Howard University with laboratory processing and conservation of artifacts
• The research design specifies three major research questions about the people buried at the site: what are the origins of the population, what was their physical quality of life, and what can the site reveal about the biological and cultural transition from African to African-American identities
• In 1995, the project's specialists added the examination of "modes of resistance" as a fourth major question
• The African presence in colonial New York is approached from an African diasporic perspective, taking into account the African societies from which most of the population is derived and placing New York within the context of the broader American diaspora
• The scientific approach is also biocultural and biohistorical
• The significance of the site, according to the research design, should be understood in relation to the "vindicationist" effort and the critical intellectual, educational, and political concerns of the African-American community
• An adequate understanding of the scholarly and public concerns relating to the African Burial Ground must be informed by an awareness of long-standing debates about the politics of the past among African Americans
• The skeletal population excavated from the African Burial Ground represents the remains of some of the first Africans brought to North America
• The potential for the stereotypical, sterile, and denigrating interpretations of the site based on morphometric analysis became increasingly apparent to the African-American community
• Distortions of the African and African-American past by anthropologists and historians have been a prominent concern of African Americans for nearly 150 years
• Members of the MFAT seemed keen on demonstrating to the public their technical knowledge by showing the cranial and post-cranial traits they used to classify the race of skeletons
• The intellectual background to the issues of racial determination may shed some light, however
• The similarities between this historical example and the forensic approaches initially proposed for the African Burial Ground can be very informative
• Furthermore, the use of inadequately tested post-cranial measurements for determining race raised both scholarly and public questioning
• Biological race--Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids--was viewed by forensics experts as the most objective or scientific means of classification
• The proposed alternative combined morophological, morphometric, and molecular genetic data to assess specific breeding population affiliations
• Embedded in the context of the New York African Burial Ground phenomenon is a sophisticated awareness on the part of the African-American public regarding the demeaning abuses of anthropology and history by Euroamericans
• During the excavation phase of the project, the public was kept informed through a "grassroots," community-based newsletter, Ground Truth, by word of mouth, and by contracting the GSA directly for information
• Sherrill D. Wilson was named director of the Office of Public Education and Interpretation (OPEI), formerly known as the Liason Office
• By focusing on the need to fill the gaps of omission left by Eurocentric public history in New York City, Wilson was participating in the long tradition of what St. Clair Drake termed "vindicationism"
• Eurocentric distortions of Africana history have been viewed not as accidental flaws of individual researchers but as politically motivated and systemic means of social, intellectual, and cultural control
• In virtually every area where evidence from the past is needed to support the validity of a given proposition, a historian can be found who will provide the evidence that is needed
• Carter C. Woodson, perhaps the most important single African-American historian, founded the Association for the study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and published the Journal of Negro History as the first outlet for the dissemination of black history
• Throughout the civil rights and black nationalist movements of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, "Black Studies" programs were fought for by African Americans and established at many universities
• During the 1980s and 1990s, an Afrocentric educational movement emerged in the black community in response to the distorted global and American history
• Indeed, New York's African Burial Ground was a vivid example of the omission of the colonial Africans' presence and contribution to the building of the city and the nation
• The African American public could at once turn to the abundant and tangible physical remains of the people omitted from the city's deficient school curricula
• The African-American public interested in the African Burial Ground was usually quite aware of bodies of "vindicationist," Africana studies and Afrocentric literature which held greater intellectual relevancy, while exposing the biases of "mainstream" or Eurocentric historiography and anthropology
• When vindicationist motivations were explained as part of the site's significance for the African-American community, Euroamericans, including members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, expressed fears and objections, characterizing the approach as ethnocentric bias
• Although the impetus for the project was cultural resource management, the implications have been broad and complex
• New Yorkers sought and still seek authority as the right to exercise influence over behavior, with African and African-American archaeologists and anthropologists directing the research
• For approximately the first 75 years of the history of American archaeology, until 1946, African Americans as well as other groups without an independent income were largely excluded from the profession
• The development of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) has fostered the growth of African-American archaeology since the 1960s, particularly in the South
• Some of the early work in the North included Robert Schuyler's study of oyster fisherfolk of Sandy Ground, Staten Island; Bert Salwen's study at Weeksville; James Deetz's study of black households in Massachusetts including Parting Ways and Black Lucy's Garden; and Mark Leone's public archaeology program at Annapolis
• CRM archaeologists have, however, been accountable to governmental and other clients who frequently are not principally interested in anthropological research, a problem which has pointed to the risk of "deskilling"
• Philosophical divergence occurs in several areas including methods of analysis and interpretation, semantics, and social interpretation
• In the informally segregated United States, archaeology and African-American Studies have developed as ethnically distinct disciplines, the former white and the latter mainly black, with little interaction
• While several important studies have certainly been done, year after year, archaeologists and physical anthropologists, some with a superficial understanding of African-American history and culture, profit from the conduct of research on archaeological sites that influence how African Americans are defined
• Understandably, New Yorkers feared that the cultural significance often hidden from the boundaries of social contract and daily interaction would be unrecognized and overlooked and that obvious interpretations would become problematic in terms of recognition
• Seizing intellectual control has meant that the criteria for competency have been expanded to include an affinity for African-American culture past and present, and comfort with and knowledge of the politics of African descendent populations, their cultures, and their histories
• Furthermore, questions which reflect the general sentiment "should white people study black people? and an insistence on "racing skeletons" give the impression that simplistic questions are being asked rather than complex, insightful queries that also acknowledge the entangled philosophical and theoretical dilemmas archaeology must resolve with respect to the demands of the descendent communities
• As Jamieson correctly observes regarding study of the remains from the African Burial Ground: "The developments in New York City...have demonstrated that contract archaeologists are required to deal with such remains, and that a solid understanding of the historical and anthropological aspects of African-American mortuary practices is necessary before interpreting them
• According to Hodder, "It is only when we make assumptions about the subjective meanings in the minds of people long dead that we can begin to do archaeology"
• Yet, Larry McKee argues in "Commentary: Is it Futile to Try and Be Useful? Historical Archaeology and the African American Experience" that "studying African-American life from just an African-American perspective would end up one-sided and ultimately sterile
• There was a concern among African Americans that what would be deemed the important avenues of inquiry would be hollow and irrelevant for the African-descendent community
• Semantics and the use of descriptive language has been a constant theme in New York
• Not all linguistic restructuring is so easily accomplished
• Recently, scholars have attempted to avoid the use of the term master by using the term "slave holder" or "planter" rather than enslaver as the descriptive which encompasses the slave-owning aspects inherent in the plantation system
• Similar to language usage, analysis of material culture within archaeology is also an area that can be subjective and open to interpretation
• While it is difficult to interpret or extrapolate meaning from a culturally ambiguous symbol within the archaeological context, Adinkra symbolism is more appropriate to the population buried in the African Burial Ground and demonstrates the divergent perspectives which shape interpretation
• The African Burial Ground is often seen as an example of whites and blacks perceiving issues so differently as to merely exist together in physical space while operating in very different words of thought and action
• Most of the Euroamerican government officials and their consultants acted without apparent recognition that blacks understood exactly what was being attempted and had effective strategies for surmounting those obstacles
• Despite the longer track record and established credentials of Howard University's program of research in African-American bioanthropology, members of the original excavation team characterized Howard's efforts as "reverse racism," a characterization that immediately eliminated the multitude of intellectual issues
• Since New Yorkers can be extremely provincial, the choice of the part of the descendent community to remove what must have been viewed as "their" cultural resource to an environment where their interest could be understood, respected, and empowered is a dramatic indictment of the status quo
• In response to provisions set forth in Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requiring the consultation of interested parties, a federal steering committee composed of concerned community  activists and various experts and professionals was formed to foster the dialogue between the GSA, archaeologists, and community members
• The federal steering committee meetings were among the most virulent encounters associated with the African Burial Ground project
• more often, however, it was the need for "sensitivity" toward African Americans that whites recognized, but did not understand
• The charter of the federal steering committee was not renewed once the newly constructed federal office building was occupied in November 1994, leaving many with the impression that the federal government's only interest in addressing community concerns was expediency and that clearly no lasting changes had occurred
• By disbanding the steering committee, expressed interests of the descendent community and issues which require time to resolve have been left unanswered
• Although the ancestral remains have been moved to Howard University and the federal steering committee is no longer in existence, New Yorkers have not relinquished stewardship of nor their desire to be closely involved in every aspect of the project
• Today, New York no longer has a black mayor, Gus Savage is no longer chair of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and Congress is contemplating a decrease in funding and support for CRM
• The Office of Public Education and Interpretation (OPEI) opened in March 1993 for the express purpose of informing the New York and national communities about the ongoing status of the African Burial Ground project
• The OPEI conducts on-site and off-site historical slide presentations about the African Burial Ground project and the complementary history of Africans in colonial New York, archaeological laboratory tours, and educators' symposia for teachers, researchers, and other interested persons
• The OPEI publishes Update, a quarterly newspaper that has a readership of more than 10,000 persons per issue
• The OPEI has supported Richard Brown, former steering committee member, in a community-engineered campaign to have the U.S. Postal Service issue an African Burial Ground commemorative stamp. Denied
• Media coverage of the African Burial Ground project has been extensive in documenting this unique colonial-era archaeological site
• The African Burial Ground has also been included in at least two recent historical publications, The Encyclopedia of New York City and The Historical Atlas of New York City-drawing looks more like the English countryside than 18th-century New York City
• Furthermore, most cartographers of the period also misrepresented the African Burial Ground by eliminating specific identification of the six-acre cemetery from the majority of historical maps
• Intellectual sophistication beyond the narrow limits of customary Eurocentrism requires the participation of people of diverse ethnicities in the practice of anthropology in general and of archaeology and museology in particular
• While spirituality is an issue that was at the core of the African-American struggle for control, there are several other issues of concern that African-American New Yorkers brought to the site
• Various religious communities approach the site from divergent philosophical as well as divergent political perspectives
• For African-American New Yorkers, the excavation of our ancestors has been a cathartic and wrenching experience
• Archaeology is not an end in itself
• Noted historian John Henrik Clarke characterizes the African Burial Ground as a holistic space that touches the lives of African people in this country and might touch the lives of African people all over the world
• While all African Americans are culturally affiliated, New Yorkers have an immediate and special relationship with the African Burial Grond

Placemaking, Preservation and Urban History

• Dolores Hayden is Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• She is the author of several books on the history of American architecture and urban planning including The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and Redesigning the American Dream (1972)
• She has received many awards, including a 1986 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy
• In accordance with Kevin Lynch's proposal to choose a past to construct a future, this article explores the political, historical, and cultural past of the ethnic minorities and women in Los Angeles
• The goal was to develop a "theory of place" that would connect historical research to present issues and thereby establish a new agenda for historic preservation, public art, and urban design
• Kevin Lynch, the urban designer who converted many architects into preservationists with his influential What Time Is This Place? (1972) once remarked, "Choosing a past helps us to construct a future. The task of choosing a past for Los Angeles is a political act as well as a historical and cultural one
• No historian has yet been able to write a definitive social history of Los Angeles' multiethnic population, or a definitive economic history of the city's industries and multiethnic labor force
• By the early 1980s, however, young scholars such as Richard Grisewold del Castillo, Ricardo Romo and Noritaka Yagasaki were creating rich ethnic histories of Latinos and Japanese-Americans that suggested the outline which the larger urban story of Los Angeles might take
• Ethnic minorities are the past, present, and future majority of Los Angeles' citizens
• The pobladores who came from Mexico to found the town in 1781 included people of Spanish, Indian, Afro-American, and mestizo descent
• Like Hispanics, Afro-Americans contributed to the founding of Los Angeles
• Lawrence B. DeGraaf has noted that among the forty-four original settlers in 1781, more than half had some African ancestry
• Asians were also a visible minority in the city by 1900
• The Chinese came to California originally to mine gold, and later to build railroads and aqueducts
• The 299 Historic-Cultural Monuments currently designated in the City of Los Angeles give few hints of this diverse history
• While today the urbanized Country of Los Angeles numbers about eight million people, approximately one-third Hispanic, one-eighth Afro-American, one-tenth Asian American, and less than one-half Anglo -American, the landmark process favored the history of a small minority of white, male landholders, bankers, business leaders, and their architects
• One reason for the neglect of ethnic and women's history is that landmark nominations everywhere in the United States frequently have been the province of passionate rather than dispassionate individuals-politicians seeking fame or favor, businessmen exploiting the commercial advantages of specific locations, and architectural critics establishing their own careers by promoting specific persons or styles
• As a result few cities have chosen to celebrate the history of their citizens' most typical activities-earning a living, raising a family, carrying on local holidays, and campaigning for economic development or better municipal services
• In addition, in past decades the histories of ethnic minorities and women have been obscured by the belief that these activities are not of broad public interest and importance
• In the case of ethnic minorities, some historians and preservations have assumed that only other members of the minority group have an interest in the history
• Using urban economic and social history to guide preservation is completely in accord with national, state and local legislation
• By the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission's definition, a Historic-Cultural Monument can be "any site, building, or structure...in which the broad cultural, political, economic, or social history of the nation, state, or community is reflected or exemplified, [as well as] notable work of a master builder, designer, or architect
• Similarly, the National Register criteria begin with "districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association [and] that are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of history
• When these criteria were developed, the framers may have imagined that battlefields (like Concord and Gettysburg) or Presidents' homes (like Mount Vernon and Monticello) would remain the obvious selections to represent "the broad patterns of our history".
• In the last fifteen years, however, military and political history have been less popular than American social history and urban history
• Some significant steps toward this goal have been taken by the California Heritage Task Force. This group published a report in August 1984, calling for "preservation of a heritage resource base for the good of the California citizenry, for the preservation of knowledge and objects as they hold value for long-term cultural coherence."
• The report stressed the importance of folklife, defined as "the traditional customs, art and cultural practices of a commonly united group of people:
• In California, the obstacles to multicultural preservation and to the preservation of women's history are not in the realm of legislation but in the creation and implementation of workable proposals for specific places
• The as-yet-unpublished survey by the State Department of Parks and Recreation, tentatively entitled "California's Ethnic Minorities Cultural Resources Survey: Afro-Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, Native Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans," is forthcoming in 1988
• An examination of the complete survey nominations in manuscripts suggests that each ethnic group's researcher has a slightly different idea of what a historic landmark should be
• All Americans, they want their communities to be remembered in culturally different ways
• At the same time that these proposals indicate new directions to challenge the uniformity of the Anglo-American history that has previously dominated local landmark selection, there are few proposals that recognize the shared experience of different ethnic minorities at any one building or site, and there are relatively few that recognize ethnic women's experience as part of the ethnic minority experience
• Assuming suitable structures are identified, the urban physical context is still a problem for many inventoried buildings. Some structures are located in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by vandalism, abandonment, arson, and homelessness
• If their preservation is to involve traditional techniques of renovation and reuse, these structures will not attract commercial developers because they will be so difficult to fund and manage
• With the exception of First Street in Little Tokyo, there are few historic districts where numerous adjacent buildings could contribute to a larger whole in terms of interpretation or visual impact
• To preserve effectively, we must know for what the past is being retained, and for whom," warned Lynch in 1972
• In 1982 I began work on the issue of preserving the history of ethnic minorities and women in Los Angeles by establishing a nonprofit corporation called The Power of Place, and seeking colleagues, students and donors to assist that effort
• The first step for a small, part-time, non-profit group was to define a manageable project
• The research and publication of a self-guided tour of historic places, coupled with the organization of community history workshops concerning those places, seemed to be feasible as a first step toward selecting and protecting places that both historians and citizens could agree were important to ethnic minority and women's history
• As a broad theme that would fulfill these criteria, I selected the economic development of the city
• I defined economic development in Los Angeles as a broad history of agricultural and industrial production, government and service industries, that also encompasses the reproduction of the labor force, a definition which includes both wage work and unpaid domestic labor, and captures the full range of economic activity by women as well as men
• The history of economic development explains the physical shape of the city over time
• Often the economic history of Los Angeles has been told in terms of consumption rather than production
• Tracts of bungalows and freeways crowded with cars are said to represent the sprawling boomtowns whose residents are fascinated with automobiles and home ownership. The history of consumption favors the city's outlying areas, not its core, and reinforces the stereotype of Los Angeles as "sixty suburbs in search of a city."
• Nine major sites were selected for this itinerary
• Earliest are the Vignes Vineyard and the Wolfskill Grove, where citrus and vines were cultivated beginning in the 1870s, first by Native Americans, then by Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, and German and French immigrant entrepreneurs
• The produce markets run by Chinese-Americans beginning in the 1870s and the commercial flower fields established by Japanese-Americans in the 1890s come next
• Women's economic history is represented in many ways
• Housewives' contributions are commemorated by the Pacific Readi-Cut Homes demonstration housing site where hundreds of families purchased model dwellings equipped with labor-saving devices and built-in furniture to make the housewife's day a shorter one
• Of the nine major sites selected, two were already Historic-Cultural Monuments that needed new, multicultural interpretation: the site of the Speaker's Rostrum at El Pueblo Historic Park, and the Embassy Theatre, where the garment workers organized a 1933 strike
• The decision to include the last three major sites--which are parking lots--was not obvious, but was a response to the specific conditions in Los Angeles, and to the poor condition of many sites on the state's inventory
• Publishing the walking tour map in late 1985 established some priorities for The Power of Place, and since we have extended practical efforts to save and commemorate two sites, Fire Station 30 (a traditional preservation project) and the Biddy Mason Homestead (a new art installation)
• On the Biddy Mason site, the parking lot is about the become The Broadway-Spring Center, a ten-story garage, sponsored by the CRA and a private developer
• The Power of Place was invited to make a proposal for public art by the CRA
• Perhaps the greatest impact of the Power of Place project so far has been in education
• As a teaching framework, the project worked well for a class at UCLA in 1984 that included seventeen graduate students in architecture and in urban planning
• Several years later, some members of that class are still working on their own projects spun off from the main research--a history of Little Manila and the Filipino community, a dissertation on women's landmarks in the United States, a master's thesis on a local prefabricated housing factory and its importance to the city's residential neighborhoods in the 1920s, and a walking tour of women's history in Los Angeles, as well as several architectural design proposals
• The Power of Place walking tour, in larger part a result of the research of UCLA students, and of Gail Dubrow and Carolyn Flynn, who helped me draft it, and Sheila de Bretteville, who designed it, now carries multiethnic history into other universities and high schools, where a new generation of students are thinking about the city's potential historic resources
• Reporters from Time recently labelled Los Angeles "the New Ellis Island," and Time's cover artist showed ten foreign faces peering out of a nest of freeway ramps, a comment on current immigration without any recognition of the past
• Many new Los Angeles organizations concerned with specific ethnic minorities are now making progress with community history
• Currently Little Tokyo has a new historic district and the state has funded proposals for a neww Japanese-American museum in a former temple
• The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California has published a historical walking tour, and is developing a museum for the El Pueblo complex

Representational Politics of Plantation Heritage Tourism: The Contemporary Plantation As A Social Imaginary, Christine Buzinde

Representational Politics of Plantation Heritage Tourism: The Contemporary Plantation As A Social Imaginary, Christine Buzinde

• Southern U.S. have seen increased plantation heritage tourism
• touring former slave plantations on which the genesis of race-based slavery took place
• plantation heritage promoters have sought to reconstitute, homogenize, and legitimize the nation's legacy of plantation slavery of an idealized version of the past
• Hampton, constructed symbol of national heritage
• symbiotic relationship between myth, ideology, identity, and nationalism is addressed
• idealized and romanticized version of portrayed plantation
• this rewriting of the nation, vis-à-vis heritage, has profound implications for understanding the (re)construction of America, its identity, and its identity, and its relationship with its internal Others

Spatial Dialectics of The Contemporary Plantation

• Lush, deep green vegetation with numerous tall pine trees adorns the entrance
•  the space is a cemetery with numerous graves, many of which are unmarked and, thus, face the constant possibility of being trampled
• why is the cemetery not formally identified?
• Hampton Plantation slave quarters were once situated in and around this clearing
• ole massa mansion with regal portico (porch)
• tax-maintained mansion
• huge window at the back of the mansion to watch the slaves
• tourists bask in the glory of the architectural grandeur and the stories of the elite families, shelter themselves from their contentious history of slavery
• prosperous golden rice age
• slavery as a system is overtly trivialized and at time annihilated from the grand narrative that endorses legitimate knowledge of the nation's plantation past
• mansion, centerpiece of the park and a monument to South Carolina's glorious age of rice
• There is certainly a need for concern because these taken-for-granted grand narratives of the "other" that characterize modern-day imperialism and neocolonialism are precisely what postcolonial scholars have aimed to dismantle
• These discourses, much like the state-endorsed frame of the plantation past, not only mediate power relations but are illustrative of the nation's continual struggle with its contentious past of slavery, a past that cannot be erased  and one that is part and parcel of America's identity
• There is indeed need for concern when such sites of national historical turmoil are rearticulated through harmonious, pure, romanticized narratives and are elevated to symbols of national heritage through the awarding of federal endorsed accreditations
• It is also designated a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior, owing to (a) its possession of "exceptional value in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States," as well as (b) its "importance to all Americans"
• Plantation tourism is not an erratic incident but rather an increasingly trendy pastime for middle-aged, middle-income, well-educated, Caucasian heritage admirers
• Heritage tourism sites, such as the Hampton Plantation, are rife with images of unproblematic and uncontaminated pasts, and as products of cultural politics, these sites exhibit power dynamics and the consequences of hegemonic dominion
• Heritage sites are powerful public places that lend certain historical events an air of legitimacy and intransience
• Utilizing myth, symbol, legend, landscape, and commemoration, the nation's past is effectively fused to the present to create an imaginary sense of homogeneity and to reify a symbolic national community and national identity
• The affective elements of heritage aim to conjure sentiments through pure images of self-congratulatory depictions of nation
• Illustrative of this are the Hampton's iterative accounts of the enslaver's economic prosperity and creativity during the "golden age" of rice through the dissemination of statements such as "due to the great success of rice cultivation... South Carolina soon became extremely wealthy"
• Accordingly, contentious elements of a nation's past are obliterated in order to produce embraceable national legacies that are packaged for popular public consumption
• Heritage is, thus, les about an accurate past than a useful past, often created through conscious omission, distortion, invention and conjured through a set of faiths "nutritive not despite but owing to their flaws"
• These flaws or myths utilized to construct national legacies of contentious national pasts represent what Homi Bhabha refers to as the "writing of the nation"
• The use of myth in the writing of the nation and the construction of heritage sites, particularly those with contentious pasts, is an increasingly common way in which fundamental beliefs endorsed their alleged contribution to national unity and identity are communicated
• According to Roland Barthes, myth, as a system of communication in which a message is communicated, has a naturalizing effect that allows it to be accepted as truth; "it creates and reinforces archetypes so taken for granted, so seemingly axiomatic, that they go unchallenged"
• The manner in which social beings produce and use myth awards it a "historical reality," which over time is portrayed as the natural image of reality
• But by the same token, "myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made for
• For instance, the mythical discursive frameworks characteristic of the Hampton have annihilated the inherent connection to the system of slavery from which the American plantation emerged
• That which appears to be natural within myth is constructed and controlled by those in power; through myth, the values and opinions of those historically in power are emphasized and conveyed as universal truths
• Consequently, what is portrayed as natural is in effect an illusion of reality that is intentionally created to mask societal power structures and social tensions and to encourage society to conform to the values and opinions of those in power
• For instance, the Hampton's mythological discursive frameworks, which center on the enslavers' unproblematic economic prosperity and the virtually nonexistent or peripheral role of the enslaved, provide a "natural" interpretation concurrently escaping the contentious nature of the nation's slavery past
• This conscious annihilation, characteristics of myths, in which "human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world" are obliterated, is referred to as the depoliticization, sociopolitical societal problems are not refuted by myth but rather they are engaged in a dialog that "purifies them... makes them innocent" and awards them "a natural and eternal justification"
• For instance, the evanescent discussions of slaves at the Hampton do not negate the existence of slavery but rather acknowledge it, albeit in a manner that portrays it as a munificent system that spurred the economic apogee of the glorious rice age
• According to Barthes the depolitization process enables myth to convey complex sociopolitical problems with "blissful clarity ... clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact
• This strategy is evident at the Hampton, whereby eminent facts entail statements that allude to the mansion as the symbol of the glorious rice age; however, little to no explanation is provided regarding the immoral means through which this wealth was attained
• It proceeds by abolishing the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident
• Central to our understanding of myth, its naturalization and depoliticization processes, is the notion of ideology as discussed by Len Masterman, who argues that myth is a "mechanism through which ideological representations come to be accepted as common-sensed"
• The ideological underpinnings of myth is not one that is imposed upon subordinate groups but one that appears "to be acceptable and even to speak to the interests of the subordinate classes"
• For instance, in the case of the Hampton, the site was represented in a manner that spoke to "the general interest" in order to "mobilize a great deal of general support"
• The overall message, thus, appeared to be suitable and inclusive of marginalized groups through its speaking of the nation as a whole as well as through its evanescent insertion of terms such as slave(s) within its metanarrative
• In light of this, myth can be viewed as a social construction of reality with ideological undercurrents that obscure societal power dynamics and obliterate social tensions owing to their potential political threat
• It is a harmonious display of essences through signs that sustain taken-for-granted societal power structures
• Hence, an examination of mythological discursive frameworks inherent in the construction and representation of national heritage sites is in effect a revelation of societal power structures and historical tensions
• In light of this, it can be argued that the prominence of accounts of the Hampton's architectural design and its exalted white inhabitants not only reveals dominant American values and beliefs but also discloses the ongoing struggle with issues of slavery and race in America
• The use of myth to assert values that privilege histories of the enslavers within public spaces is not unique to the contemporary rearticulation of the Hampton but rather can be traced back to the history of the region and to some of the first historical monuments erected in South Carolina
• South Carolina was a rice colony that symbolized the capital of southern slavery and the instigator to the confederacy. The institution of slavery in South Carolina was a blueprint of a prototype that earlier English plantation elites had established in Barbados; in fact, a number of the earliest families to partake in slave-based agriculture immigrated to Carolina from Barbados
• It is commonly acknowledged that South Carolina's economy was based on the free labor of enslaved blacks; enslaved blacks sustained an augmenting enslaver elite who gained great pleasure from their high social status, immense political power, and incredible slave-induced wealth
• The dissemination of myths that idealized the plantation past and asserted the benevolence of slavery did not manifest only in the form of public cenotaphs and monumental grounds but also in numerous other cultural arenas, particularly through popular literature
• The plantation myth further manifested within public spaces when the region turned to heritage tourism as a panacea to its economic recession
• At the Hampton, the portrayed romanticized past relies on myths to carry its nostalgic vision of essential American heritage from the annals of the golden rice age years into the present
• The establishment of an effective unity discourse is prevalent amongst heritage sites and can be attributed to the increasingly fractured nature of traditionally centered national and cultural relations within society
• The desire for unity, cohesion, and continuity characteristic of heritage sites is commonly viewed as part of the ideological undertone typical of nationalistic discourses because, like nation, heritage contains a set of shared values such as home, identity, and history
• The era of globalization might indicate that nations and national identities are irrelevant to contemporary society given the progressively borderless global flow of information, products, and social beings
• But according to David Hooson the ideological reality of nation has hardly been vanquished and, in fact, its fervor might be more present than ever
• The contemporary plantation is illustrative of efforts, in the age of globalization, to bring to light local knowledge, values, and identities that aid hosts to locate their shared meanings and experiences and the tourists to understand the portrayal of the nation
• We can surmise to this point that in the era of globalization, heritage has emerged not only as an extremely persuasive logic of nation but also as a cultural commodity that mediates the terrain of identity politics
• The commodification of the heritage tourism industry might have informed novel ways of representing history to suit the tastes of tourists and marketers, but it has also instigated the elevation of pleasant recollections and the diminution of unpleasant ones
• In framing a given part of history and elevating it to national status, heritage commodities always propose a certain preferred reading. The preferred reading at the Hampton can be interpreted as the unproblematic construction of "home" and its selected traditions invoked as an affective response describing feelings of common experiences, unity, purity, identity, and comfort
• Local groups have organized efforts to counter the dominant representations characteristic of numerous plantations in the region
• a newspaper column appropriately titled "Pulling the Cotton over Our Eyes" by Erica Widdup captures the essence of this perspective
• Through the promotion of "the plantation legend," or tradition, plantation tourism in the region has grown exponentially and has become a prevailing decoy for tourists
• The overall argument is that the representation of the contemporary plantation renders the institution of slavery and those that were enslaved under it a peripheral role
• Some may rightfully claim that such reproductions are not authentic and in face there have been numerous oppositions to the manner in which slavery has been incorporated with historic narratives
• The issue at hand as presented in this essay is much broader than what has been captured. For instance, the elementary educational system and its reluctance to incorporate slavery is one of the key factors underpinning the representation of slavery
• There are therefore a few efforts by social groups to combat the unresolved ideological tensions characteristic of slavery-related leisure spaces and the educational system
• Utilizing the Hampton as an example, this essay highlights the ways in which heritage sites are rooted in a specific dominant discursive and taxonomic regime of history
• Within heritage sites, exhibition, collection, and dissemination of information are all shaped by desires to systematize, document, and control knowledge, as well as the wish to annihilate all litigious knowledges of the portrayed past
• There are certainly tensions enmeshed in the construction and representation of the plantation as national heritage tensions that are similar to those described by Stuart Hall
• This conflation of the present and past, characteristic of the heritage tourism industry, resonates well with what Homi Bhabba has called the double session of nation that depends on an impossible logic of two simultaneous trajectories of time--one that suggests that the nature is progressive, futuristic, and developing, and one that proposes that the nation has never changed

Paul Rudolph’s Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, NY Face an Imminent Threat, Do.co.mo.mo

International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement

·         Shoreline Apartments 1974

·         9.5 acres, downtown Buffalo

·         Called for demolition

·         Sculptural modernism

·         Reduced in scale

·         Original scheme: monumental, terraced, prefabricated housing structures

·         Alternative e to high-rise dwelling

·         Meant to recall the complexity and intimacy of old European settlements

·         Today: scaled down, shed roofs, ribbed or corduroy concrete exteriors, projecting balconies and enclosed garden courts, spatial radicalism with experiments in human-scaled, low-rise, high-density housing developments

·         First scheme was in a 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition entitled Work in Progress

·         Complexity, sculptural details, effects of scale, texture

·         Architecture, besides being technology, sociology and moral philosophy must finally produce works of art

·         Norstar Development, owned since 2005

·         Crime, disrepair, startling vacancy rates

·         Norstar presented plans to City of Buffalo to demolish 5 of the currently vacant Rudolph buildings, with 8 suburban style affordable residential townhouses with 48 units

·         2,400,000 from state, $8,800,000 total cost

·         Private balconies and garden courts are desirable features

·         The Willert Part Courts a ten two and three stock brick multiple dwelling complex is owned by the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority who has announced plans to demolish the entire complex

·         The design was based on the functional, flat-roofed blocks similar to German public housing projects and is ornamented with a series of cast relief sculptures on the theme of labor and family life

·         Both of these were in MOMA’s Work in Progress and guidebook, Guide to Modern Architecture of the Northeast States

State Sues Over Sitting Of Shoreline Apartments, Buffalo Courier-Express, 06/08/1980

·         Design defects

·         Florida styled

·         Shouldn’t have been built on Buffalo’s windy waterfront

·         MB Associates, a Boston real estate firm says it will spend up to $2 million to improve the property

·         More expensive to heat than projected

·         New York State Mortgage Loan Enforcement and Administration Corp (MLC) sues architect Rudolph

·         MLC tries to become a separate organization from the state Urban Development Corp (UDC)

·         MLC would take over mortgage portfolio of the Housing Finance Agency (HFA)

 

Singles, Families, Elderly—Living Together In an Unusual Development: ‘The Shoreline’

·         Pueblo-like?

·         Ultra-modern stacked multiple dwellings?

·         Functional modern? With a Victorian touch?

·         Large green fields

·         A playground

·         Near marina

·         Waterfront School

·         View of City Hall, Lake Erie, new lakefront Marina, downtown at night, Canadian shoreline

·         No overcrowding

·         No high crime rate

·         NOT a project

·         Lawyers, doctors, secretaries

·         No carpeting, no dishwasher

·         Own patio, new pool, tennis courts, baseball diamond, a track, a general picnic area, playground

·         Meals program for Seniors

·         Young couples with children

·         Elderly couple “Our Best Move” and “saves gas”

·         Community of young families

 

Shoreline Apartments Have Distinctive Lines, Courier Express 10/25/1974

·         Architect Paul Rudolph

·         “warm human scale”

·         142 units on Carolina, Phase I

·         472 units, Phase II, 18 low rise buildings

·         Midrise building for the elderly

·         Ceramic tile bathrooms, vinyl floors, drapery rods in every room, individually controlled electric heat, coin-operated laundry, off-street parking

·         Low and moderate income families under section 236 of subsidized housing of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

·         $125/mo studio

·         $200 for 3-bedroom apartment

·         “the complex’s grounds are attractively landscaped and maintained and the bright and airy apartments are fully fulfilling a housing need”

·         Organized to help WWII servicemen

·         VSP teaches volunteers to teach rehabilitative photography

Home & Garden April 1973

• floor-to-ceiling windows makes the apartment feel more spacious 
• bright red plastic chairs
• table expands from to seat four to six 
• New York State Urban Development Corporation-dynamic? 
• large-scale, integrated, low-cost housing for low and moderate income families who live smack in the middle of the city where they work 
• tight construction budget
• strict guidelines limited room sizes
• "Shoreline apartments is planned to contain initially about 1,000 apartments, a school, a shopping mall, a community center, parks, playgrounds, a skating rink, and there's even dreamy-eyed talk of a grassy-banked amphitheatre."
• “Within walking distance of downtown Buffalo, N.Y., on a wide swath of land on the shore of Lake Erie, once a run-down sprawl of dilapidated houses, warehouses, and industrial buildings, a strikingly imaginative new community of housing is taking shape.”
  
  
  “When construction is finished, grass and lots of trees will weave throughout the site, creating a refreshing park-like setting” 
  
  
  “It seems we’re incessantly tied to the automobile but within the community I definitely wanted to encourage the pleasures of walking. Residents will be able to walk from their apartments without crossing any of the parking areas, along paths to the community center, the school, the shops, and the pedestrian mall, which leads to downtown Buffalo, with all its shops, theatres, and restaurants.”
   
  
  “Even at this initial stage, the impression of this exciting, new community is inspiring, and it proves that with lively imagination, fresh approaches, and a deep care about people that extends not only to putting a roof over their heads but also to creating an invigorating environment for them to live in a massive, low-cost housing projects can be built that will truly revitalize our cities and their inhabitants.”