Indigenous Cultural Landscapes
By David Driapsa
The traditional uses of indigenous cultural landscapes resonate with the idea that a landscape is made up of all of the relations that a community has and needs to survive within an area: the land, the water, the flora, and the fauna. This indigenous cultural world and world view of the ancestral home is a dispersed landscape in which native people moved around on paths between places without maps.
The landscape is inextricably related to the cultural identity of the group, their life ways, cultural traditions, and practices originating from creation to the present. The landscape may be an entire canyon or entire mountain significant to traditional cultural beliefs for thousands of years. Traditional cultural property character-defining resources and features may be biotic and abiotic, such as a hot springs area, ceremonial clearings, a lithic site, petroglyph sites, medicine rocks, big horn sheep, native plants, whiptail lizards, clay, quartz, turquoise, caves, and rock shelters.
For example, berry fields are a cultural landscape resource on the 1.6 million acre Pacific Northwest Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in the Southern Cascades of Washington. Known by the Yakama Cowlitz name Lawetlat'la which means "the smoker", the monument was listed in the National Register for significance as a landscape important in tribal identity. The nomination included no historic buildings and defined the landscape related to tradition rather than archaeological properties. Significance is tied to traditional use on a seasonal basis for harvesting, processing, and preserving huckleberry, one of five foods sacred to the local people.
Native people had routinely suppressed forest vegetation through a fire regime to maintain clearings for huckleberry fields. Huckleberries grow in understory thickets of forest clearings. Productivity of the berry fields decreases as trees encroach into clearings. Production will return only by removing trees to open up the understory to light. That is accomplished through periodic burning to clear the undergrowth from the forest.
Change in vegetation growth from clearing to forest is the result of fire suppression when the Forest Service brought an end to fire maintenance of clearings. The suppression of maintenance fires and extinguishing wild fires reduced the extent of berry fields. Loss of fire maintenance led to diminished huckleberry productivity.
Consistent themes of a tribal cultural landscape include place, widened or expansive space, cultural connections and the intersection of cultural and natural of places, linked activities and cultural connections. This defines any place in which a relationship, past or present, exists between a spatial area, resource and an associated group of indigenous people whose cultural practices, beliefs or identity connects them with that place, determined by and known to the people with relationship to that place.
An example is the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site in Oklahoma, the site of the 1868 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal people by the U.S. Cavalry. A combination of an ethnographic landscape and a historic landscape was listed in the National Register as a National Historic Landmark. The 1976 nomination does not meet present standards in describing landscape in detail and in terms of contributing and countable traditional cultural resources. Without adequate description of the cultural landscape that nomination cannot be used as a tool to address potential external threats within the view shed. Close coordination with the tribes is needed to develop cultural landscape management treatments.
The Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon got involved with concerns that studies looking at off-shore energy development on the outer continental shelf were not adequately addressing landscape level issues. Oral histories mention Lake Allison on the interior of Oregon and tribal people trying to escape from floods synonymous with Coyote Stories, but for Tillamook folks it is South Wind.
The coming of South Wind coincides with the Paleo sea level rise that displaced resources for gathering, hunting and traditional food. Continuing climate change will adversely impact some view sheds, including rock complexes built for specific ceremonial activities. Sea level rise on Tillamook Bay will inundate fishing sites and the primary fishing locations will be completely lost. It is the same with plant resources that grow in marshy areas on the margin of the bay, where traditional foods, basketry material and medicine will be lost.
The oral histories seem amorphous and the unwritten tribal stories depict epic-creating figures like South Wind, who set the world the way it is so that people could be here. It is hard for the public to understand indigenous perspectives that the disappearance of these landscape features breaks the continuity with the next generation.
Tribal oral history of the Narragansett Indian Tribe says that ancient villages of the Narragansett people are submerged below the ocean. The number of artifacts of mastodons and mammoths recovered by fishermen is quite large along the eastern seaboard. An archeological site of several hundred stone tools found in Narragansett Bay was occupied from 12,000 years ago until inundated by the ocean about 1,000 years ago. Among artifacts dredged up by fishing vessels from the continental shelf is a bifacial rhylolite blade. Evidence indicates that the blade came from an ancient butchering site, now submerged 47 miles out in the ocean. It is believed to come from an ancient mining area 200 miles up the Susquehanna River. Radiocarbon dating found it 23,600 years old.
The paleo-cultural landscape, including ceremonial landscapes consisting of stones, some quite large, may be preserved offshore. The interaction between culture and landscape types evolved over time. There were family groups of hunter-foragers during the paleo-Indian period. About 4,500 years ago cultures became more complex as both hunter-foragers and forager-horticulturist groups. Over the last millennia, chiefdoms and agriculturists evolved. As culture became more complex social behavior dictated the importance of location for cultural things like ceremonial stone landscapes. These ceremonial sites are not randomly distributed on the landscape.
Theory suggests that distribution of ceremonial sites is related to astronomical events, and on land these sites tend to be aligned. Submerged ceremonial stone landscapes seem to align with ceremonial stone landscapes on the mainland.
In tribal oral history, Upton Chamber was an ancient ceremonial site, a traditional property important to local tribes. Upton Chamber extends into the hillside from where may be observed the movement of stars that inform yearly rhythms for planting. A mile away on Pratt Hill, are stone groupings. It was discovered through GPS mapping that the summer solstice sunset aligns across the view shed from the throat of Upton Chamber through the stones on Pratt Hill.
Tribal medicine people utilize ceremonial stone landscapes in communication with mother the earth pleading for balance and harmony. Turtle effigies remind us of our responsibilities as a cooperative resident of this continent, Turtle Island. The serpentine effigy meanders across the landscape, starting with the tail in a spring and ending with the head pointing to water. A human effigy is representative of the spirit of the humans who used the site. An effigy ceremonial stone grouping characterized as a crow points to the west where the departing spirit goes. The Narragansett oral history articulated the story of a crow bringing seeds of corn, beans, and squash to initiate the agrarian period of life for northeastern tribes.
Turners Falls Ceremonial Hill is related to the Perseid meteor shower. A triangular stone platform faces west to where the sun sets. Fifteen miles away at a notch in the hill on the horizon the sun will set at the time of the highest concentration of the meteor showers. Standing stones in the notch align to form a cosmic calendar used by ancient people to know the appropriate time to prepare for and conduct ceremonies.
An effigy face on the Narragansett Indian Reservation revealed a ceremonial stone landscape was revealed where tribal people for thousands of years had sat for celestial observations. The device continues to teach tribal people astronomy with tools used by the ancestors.
Black Plain Hill is a bear effigy and observation seat. The effigy bear stands on hind legs and behind it another bear stands on all fours. Looking very closely reveals the big dipper in the sky. The effigy depicts the evening sky and relates to the big dipper in the form of what is referred to regionally as the bear's tail touching the earth, believed a part of ceremonial practices dealing with the deceased.
Tribal oral histories reveal the cultural context and values of ancient American ceremonial landscape features were shared from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This way of life is far beyond what most people think of as archaeological sites. Many archaeologists are not willing to accept that tribal people believe these landscape features retain the prayers of medicine people that harmonize the precarious balance with earth mother. An elder medicine man said not to rely on tribal oral history or tribal lore alone. What you must do is let the landscape speak for itself and let the tribal oral history and lore stand as witness.
David J Driapsa Landscape Architect
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