The White Mountain Apache Tribe Heritage Program: Origins, Operations, and Challenges (original) (raw)
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Environmentalism on the Ground: Processes and Possibilities of Small Green Organizing, 2019
This chapter links thinking and working in environmental conservation and historic site preservation to Indigenous sovereignty theory and practice. Since 1992 I have worked for and with the White Mountain Apache Tribe (“the tribe”) at the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School National Historic Landmark in eastern Arizona. This experience reveals how stewardship for buildings and grounds that previously served as instruments for Western Apache colonization has converged with environmental protection while also advancing and actualizing conceptions of a Native nation’s sovereignty. The quest to “save Fort Apache,” while consistently well intentioned, initially adopted non-Apache ways of thinking and doing. The project’s early focus on non-Apache sources of ideas, technical assistance, and heritage tourism markets implicitly imposed limits on engagements with and benefits to the local Apache community.
Best Cultural Heritage Stewardship Practices by and for the White Mountain Apache Tribe
As is true for most indigenous programmes concerned with cultural heritage management, the White Mountain Apache Tribe Historic Preservation Offi ce (THPO) operates at dynamic and contested intersections of expanding populations and economies, shrinking budgets, diversifying international interests in heritage issues, and increasing indigenous demands for self-governance, self-reliance, self-determination, and self-representation. Faced with limited funds, large mandates, and land users having variable support for cultural heritage protection, the White Mountain Apache THPO has harnessed longstanding and emergent community heritage values as authentic foundations for 'actionable' rules promoting consultation, identifi cation, documentation, and protection for tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Developed on the basis of a decade of interactions with elders and other cultural experts, foresters, hydrologists, engineers, and planners, the Tribe's Best Cultural Heritage Stewardship Practices illuminate challenges and opportunities faced by many THPOs and illustrate the crafting of appropriate institutional frameworks for community-based historic preservation initiatives.
Indigenous Archaeology in a Settler-Colonist State: A View from the North American Southwest
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Collaborative, open, participatory, community-based, public, and Indigenous archaeologies are frequently discussed collectively as a paradigm shift for the discipline. As these approaches mature, we begin to understand some of their less-than-positive repercussions. However, the archaeology of Indigenous descendant communities in a settler-colonist state differs from reactionary populism. In this article, I approach these concerns from my vantage point as a Euroamerican academic archaeologist working in the Southwest United States. I first situate Indigenous archaeology within its historical context. I then explore the issues faced by archaeologists working in the ancient Indigenous Southwest United States. As Southwest archaeologists work to decolonize our discipline, there have been successes, but there are also tre-mendous challenges and obstacles. I conclude with an example from my own work that illustrates how archaeologists can collaborate with Native commu-nities to fight against global capitalist and neoliberalist interests.
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