Dissertation Information for Tonia Woods HortonNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Indian lands, American landscapes: Toward a genealogy of place in national parks
Abstract: In his Remembrance of Things Past , Marcel Proust declared that "[T]he real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Perhaps nowhere can this be demonstrated more cogently than in the American national parks, long held as repositories of resources--heritage--that illustrated the importance of the American past to contemporary visitors. Once a consensual history interpreted through sites is now an arena of conflict and silences, where ideological models of the past ("history") and its preservation as "heritage" splinter under the weight of contemporary management needs. This dissertation studies the relationship between history and landscape forged by ideological frameworks--interpretations--that privilege national identity over the complexity of cultural interaction, artifact over process, portraits of stability and stasis in the face of instability, complexity, and change. A two-tiered study, it first seeks to reveal different histories of place in three national parks--Mesa Verde, Little Bighorn, and Glacier Bay--by writing stories of the ethnohistorical encounter between American Indians and EuroAmericans framed by the idea of landscape. A concluding discussion of landscape as heritage analyzes the potential of this alternative history as a challenge to the current model of historic preservation and interpretation representing an artifactual past. This study borrows heavily from an interdisciplinary mix of American Indian history, environmental history, cultural geography, landscape architecture, anthropology, and the public history-heritage debate. Viewed through the paradigm of landscape as its primary framing device, it seeks to reveal the storied genealogy of places that speaks to their scale, complexity, and interpretation as heritage. |
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