INTRODUCTION

It goes almost without saying that landscape plays an important role in how the past is remembered. The huge literature on place—specific portions of landscapes entwined with personal experiences and historical narratives—tells through theoretical inquiries, and richly textured and culturally and historically anchored accounts, of the power of places to provoke and evoke memories (e.g., Basso 1996; Bender 1998; Casey 1987; Clifford 1997; Jackson 1994; Lippard 1997; Lowenthal 1985; Schama 1995, to name a few). Place, then, is personal and political; indeed, placemaking, the social practices of constructing place and inscribing memories, does not necessarily require particular skills or special sensibilities. Questions about what happened here (or there), how it was formed, who was involved, and why it should matter can often be answered more or less spontaneously, alone or with others, or with varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm (Basso 1996:5; Lippard 1997:7). Although anyone can be a placemaker and places lurk everywhere, on the familiar and proverbial beaten paths as well as off them, the process is never entirely simple. What is remembered about a particular place is triggered, guided, and constrained, largely by visual “landmarks” but also by verbal accounts and other sensory stimuli (e.g., Bender 2001; Ingold 1993; Tilley 1994; Witmore 2006). These images of place are reshaped and reinterpreted, sometimes by placemakers who selectively seek to cultivate certain responses and, therefore, attempt to define for others what should be remembered and how it should be remembered.
Not surprisingly, archaeological sites—ranging from “picturesque” ruins to small, barely perceptible physical traces on the landscape preserved through antiquities legislation—and built monuments of all sorts figure prominently among places that invoke memory by serving as tangible reminders of people and events in the past worth remembering and how they should be recalled. Both are “monuments” in the sense that they are reminders, places intended to prompt memory and raise historical consciousness (or at least they should) about pasts most visitors have never experienced firsthand and know little about. They “can be seen as an apology for the betrayal of forgetfulness, a half-hearted bow to the significance of histories we are too lazy to learn” (Lippard 1997:85). Archaeological sites and built monuments especially may “relieve viewers of their memory-burden” (Young 1993:5) by doing their memory-work for them and, therefore, divest onlookers of the responsibility to contemplate, let alone imagine, deeper, layered, and alternative histories and meanings entangled with place.
Such charges suggest that the relationship between archaeological sites championed for preservation and monuments in a conventional sense, and the memories thought to be inspired by them may be problematic. By situating some people and events in the past, these places often deny a present and preclude a future by supplanting histories that are being lived. For many Indigenous peoples throughout the world, historic preservation, other site protection efforts, and monument building have selectively and deliberately generated and condoned remembrances which may have little or no correspondence to the memories and experiences they themselves attach to the specific locales targeted by these activities. Indigenous groups therefore may be, and indeed often are, ill-served by historic preservation and public monuments that protect, preserve, and seek to commemorate vestiges of their history (e.g., Carmichael et al. 1994; Deloria 1992; Joyce 2003; Keller and Turek 1998; Smith 2006). Choices made by preservation specialists or heritage managers, and also archaeologists, about what sites to privilege or disregard, about which time periods are valuable or more valuable than others, and about which cultural or ethnic groups are recognized or ignored have defined what is important and representative in Indigenous peoples’ pasts. Although there is a powerful global movement afoot to involve Indigenous people in the decision-making process and in the practice of archaeology (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997; Smith and Wobst 2005; Swidler et al. 1997; Watkins 2000), what is made known to outsiders has all too often excluded, suppressed, and devalued histories of place still shared by insiders.
Similarly, decisions about built monuments—whether they should mourn events of tragedy and violence or celebrate colonists’ heroic victories over Indigenous peoples in bloody encounters, whether they should be representational or starkly abstract, or whether they should accurately mark the spot or simply reference another place and time (see Foote 1997; Lippard 1997; Young 1993)—have generally not been made in consultation with living descendant communities. During long and grueling public debates, stiff design competitions, aggressive fund-raising campaigns, and innumerable compromises, they are seldom, if ever, asked what kinds of monuments they would like to see and where specifically, or whether they want any at all. Consequently, a monument may be, and often is, built on top of memories it only relates to superstructurally and, indeed, subversively (Lippard 1997:107).
Whether elaborately sculptural or deceptively bland, public monuments commemorating Indigenous people typically project images explicitly commensurate with “colonialist views of Aboriginality” as Jane Lydon has observed in Australia (Lydon 2005:114). There, public monuments generally built before 1970 commemorate “treacherous Aboriginal killers, faithful Aboriginal guides of White explorers, or the death of ‘the last of their tribe’” and hardly ever comment on the diverse experiences of Indigenous people in postcolonial contexts (Lydon 2005:114). In North America, iconic brave-on-a-horse monuments and lone nonequestrian statues reproduced in many sizes, forms, and mediums echo the logic of assimilation rather than resistance by depicting American Indians as stoic witnesses to an inevitable demise (Kammen 1991; Lippard 1997:108). Subtler and more ubiquitous monuments such as free-standing, inscribed boulders and polished stone tablets, mounted plaques and roadside markers found in locales everywhere, and frequently emplaced with far less agonizing than sculptural and architectural monuments identified as public art, also serve to “quell associative ponderings” by pushing certain interpretations and precluding others (Lippard 1997:110). Through spatial overwriting, built monuments, regardless of their scale or artistry, construct certain memories at the expense of others, ostensibly curtailing the possibility of alternative and new experiences and memories coincident with the place of memorialization.
This collection of essays explores the tensions between prevailing regional and national versions of Indigenous pasts created, reified, and disseminated through monuments here broadly defined, and Indigenous peoples’ memories and experiences of place. Through detailed case studies from across North America, the contributors ask questions about processes of historic preservation and commemoration, and build connections between these processes, Indigenous peoples’ histories, and archaeology. Although the case studies cover vast ground, from California to Virginia and from the Southwest to New England and the Canadian Maritimes, the book is not intended as a comprehensive or comparative survey of popular or less well-known Native North American monuments (see, for example, Cantor 1993). Instead, the chapters, encompassing a select group of studies by archaeologists engaged in ongoing and collaborative research with Native Americans in the United States or with First Nations in Canada, raise critical questions about the very complicated and uncertain intersections of history and memory, place and displacement, public spectacle and private engagement, and reconciliation and reappropriation that resonate loudly all across the Indigenous world. While broadly relevant to Indigenous groups globally, these issues are not exclusive to Indigenous peoples. They also concern subordinate and minority groups throughout the world whose pasts and, indeed, living traditions have been conspicuously excluded and marginalized on the landscape by monuments of the dominant culture. The North American case studies in this book, therefore, have broad applicability, not only to archaeologists, historic preservationists, and heritage managers working in other locales, but also to individuals and communities everywhere poised to look beyond what is visibly remembered and imagine what is less visible.
Without neglecting the undeniably fascinating and incredibly intricate politics of placemaking and collective memory, the authors venture into and examine the ambiguous and murky middle ground of monuments. However, the essays are not merely about compromise over contested terrain as might loosely be implied by the metaphor of a “middle ground,” a phrase used by the historian Richard White (1991) to characterize colonial relations between American Indians and Europeans around the Great Lakes region of North America. Instead, the essays are more correctly about middle grounds as actions “in the realm of cultural meaning-making, performance, and communicative practice” (Deloria 2006:16) and their material expressions. Thus, the authors look at processes that transform places, erase actors, and delight the masses and also at those which involve routine visitation, dissent and resistance, and occasionally countercelebrations. Through the lens of monuments, the book shows many Native peoples’ deep attachments to place and the efforts that some have taken in the past or are currently taking to reverse insinuations about their disappearance and other misconceptions and reclaim moral territory for the future.

SENSES OF PLACE, SENSES OF HISTORY

That the past is intimately tied to place goes without saying, though not in ways that its manipulators would like us to think. Clearly attempts to freeze a place in time do not always truncate or entrap memories (Bender 1998). Nor do such efforts to keep the past separate from the present as a place to be visited when we want to escape modernity seem entirely successful (Lippard 1997). Past and present are inextricably intertwined on the contemporary landscape. The past is not distant and may not be that foreign, in spite of interpretations to the contrary. In its material forms, it shapes how we move through and experience the world on a day-to-day basis, perhaps even without fully knowing or appreciating the meanings of these places, distorted or otherwise.
For North America’s Native peoples, the notion that the past is a separate world is especially troublesome. Standard archaeological approaches that construct linear narratives tracing the successive replacement of one archaeological culture by another identify ancestral places in ways that may not conform to community memories. While archaeology may be able to retrieve evidence of deeper pasts than can be preserved through memories of personal histories and community experiences, and arguably may add to and enrich the history of a place by making it more profound, standard archaeological approaches and terminologies may be alienating. As Donald Julien, Tim Bernard, and Leah Morine Rosenmeier suggest in Chapter 2, such categories and labels “alienate people from the landscape and places of their ancestors.” The vocabulary of culture history, which conceptualizes the past in terms of discrete archaeological phases or cultures, not only ruptures relationships temporally, but also serves to disconnect Native people from places they consider ancestral. Moreover, assumptions about “disconnection” impinge on the dominant society’s perceptions of Native peoples’ identities and, therefore, may undermine interpretations of their land rights and shape opinions about other critical issues that affect their lives.
Nevertheless, ancestral relationships to place are complex and multidimensional. Clearly, they cannot be reduced to biology, gauged merely by similarities in technology, artifact styles, or language, or even fixity. The past may not be foreign—that is, separate from the present as some might assume—but an ancestral place need not be a site of continuous experience extending into deep time either. To Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia, Canada, for example, the “Paleo Indian” Debert site, radiocarbon dated to 11,000 years old, is considered ancestral because they perceive a connection that is firmly rooted to place and historical experiences, and not because they are directly descended from the ancient inhabitants who lived there (though they concede they might be). They are in some way descendant from Debert’s occupants because Debert is located in their homeland. It is part of, rather than apart from, the landscape in which generations of Mi’kmaq have dwelled and still do today. Although ancestors who resided at the Debert site might not be remembered in local genealogies, the Mi’kmaq have a relationship with them. This emotional and spiritual relationship is playing a crucial role in community-based initiatives to protect and care for sites like Debert, and paving the way for interpretive and educational programs that squarely situate them in a Mi’kmaw, rather than a foreign and anomalous, context.
Similarly, some Native Americans may have important relationships with places on the landscape they do not consider specifically ancestral. The Reeve Ruin and Davis site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley are cases in point (Chapter 3). Archaeologists have long hypothesized that the Reeve Ruin was settled by Pueblo peoples, who migrated from the Hopi Mesas around AD 1250 and who eventually returned to their home or stayed and became part of local communities. The Hopi do not disagree with the archaeologists’ interpretation. They see the Reeve Ruin as part of their collective past, a place “that memorializes the lives of their cherished ancestors.” The Reeve Ruin and other San Pedro Valley sites are documents that identify the paths their ancestors took in their migratory routes and evoke emotional responses that far transcend concerns about the sites’ archaeological particulars. But as the authors, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, T. J. Ferguson, and Roger Anyon, note, other Native American groups living in nearby areas also have connections to archaeological sites in the San Pedro Valley. Drawing on conversations conducted during a three-year collaborative ethnohistory and archaeology research project, they report that both the Reeve Ruin and Davis site are intensely meaningful to Western Apache and Tohono O’odham peoples, who say their ancestors did not build these sites, and the Zuni, who speculate that, like the Hopi, their ancestors might have lived at these places.
For these groups, the past is neither distant nor separate from the present. In spite of archaeological chronologies that arrest sites in time and seemingly fracture spatial connections, the Hopi, Zuni, Western Apache, and Tohono O’odham have historical and cultural relationships to places in the San Pedro Valley. Rather than seeing the sites only from the fixed and distanced vantage point defined by archaeologists, they apprehend other meanings of place. The stories e...