Help wanted: A 'Sierra Club' for historic preservation to fight development
The case for doing a better job of protecting our cultural resources. It's especially important for a society bent on progress.
Washington Secretary of State
U.W.
The following is adapted from a keynote speech I gave to the Cultural Resources Planning Summit held at Kiana Lodge, Suquamish, on June 7, 2010.
For those of you who aren't familiar with me, I am a Seattle-based writer, the third of five generations to call Seattle home. We came here a century ago, stayed and put down roots. Those roots are something I draw on as a writer.
My beat for Crosscut is self-defined. I think of it as The Heritage Beat. I write about Northwest politics and civic culture, but I describe it as writing stories about where history and public policy meet. This includes historic preservation, archaeology, place names, local customs and traditions, and trying to explain why Seattle and Puget Sound are the way they are: Why is there political gridlock? Why do we squabble? What are the competing visions for the future, and where did they come from?
Who are we, anyway?
This interest goes way back for me personally. As a child, I was curious about who we were, and how we got here. What was Seattle? In this remote corner, what was our place in history, and the world? Big questions for a child. I came from a family that had a house filled with historic and cultural artifacts, as well as books. Old swords, Native American masks, antique medical instruments, curios of all kinds.
My father told me stories of local history based on his experience, of his adventures as a young man exploring the region. From his days working in logging camps on the Olympic Peninsula, he told me about seeing Indian tree burials, and about once finding a musket ball in an old tree that he dated to the first Spanish settlement in the Northwest in Neah Bay in 1792. He told me about once finding the brass button from a Royal Marine's jacket on the beach at English Camp on San Juan Island. How many people have souvenirs of the Pig War?
This was not the history we learned in school, or from television.
Growing up in the 1950s and '60s, I watched TV Westerns. I knew Seattle was in the West, but we had no cowboys and our Indians didn't dress like Hollywood Indians. You might remember a TV show about Seattle called "Here Come the Brides." This was what the world knew about Seattle. It's theme song was "The Bluest Skies You've Ever Seen are in Seattle." Really? We have blue sky? It was based on the musical "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," the story of mail-order women who married our frontier men. This confused me. Everyone else in the West got gunfighters and Indian warriors and what did we get?
Dancing loggers. That was our history.
It got worse in school. In fifth grade, we had to take Washington state history. My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, was so old there was actually a picture of her in our textbook standing in front of a one-room schoolhouse. But I couldn't find anything to interest me, and I was a kid interested in history.
There was no Wild West, no Revolutionary War or Civil War, no guts or glory. Just loggers, and stumps, old schoolhouses, and the dull Alki pilgrims, Seattle's founders, the Dennys and the Borens. I called them the Dennys and the Borings.
To me, there was a gap between the history I saw on TV and the history that seemed so exciting when my father told it, when he described a boyhood that sounded like Indiana Jones'. You might be horrified to hear this, but hunting for arrowheads, or scrounging for old whisky bottles in abandoned homesteads were things that we did as kids. The most interesting history was something you found, and then learned about. It was something you could hold in your hands, something that told a story.
I'll be honest with you. People have no idea what "cultural resources" are. "Cultural" sounds like art, and "resources" are something you exploit, or use up. Forests are called "resources" now. People are called "resources" too, just like coal and oil: "human resources." Who ever wants to go to the Human Resources Department? Sounds like they will serve you up as Soylent Green. History, culture and heritage, apparently, have no inherent value except as a consumables, a resource.
Most people have never heard of NEPA, SEPA, SHPOs, TCPs or Section 106. Most people don't know that protecting cultural resources is something written into our laws, rules, and regulations.
But people are interested in artifacts, landscapes, landmarks, graves, myths, and most of all, stories.
This latter item, stories, I think is most important. Because stories tell us who and where we are. Stories are the way we honor our ancestors and guide our future. Stories are the way we inform, entertain, and pass on vital knowledge. Stories are what give us comfort and perspective, and spur us to act. This is why I have found cultural resources such a rich and interesting area to report on. That is the place where policy and history meet every day. And sometimes collide.
Cultural resource professionals are the ones asking the kinds of questions that excite me as a journalist who wants to know more about this place. What does a mountain mean to people who have lived here 10,000 years? What should it be called, Rainier or Tahoma or Tacoma or Ti'Swaq ("tea-swawk"), as some Puyallup tribal members have proposed? What is in that pile of 3,000-year-old seashells? How did people live here in ancient times, and was it anything like we live now? Is that Denny's diner in Ballard really a landmark, even if it's only 40 years old? Is the place we want to expand the 520 bridge a burial ground of someone's ancestors? What are the histories worth uncovering, and which are best left alone?
To me the preservation of our collective heritage is a no-brainer. But unfortunately, while it is important, it is often an after-thought, or worse, it's considered a nuisance or waste of time.
This is because the laws seem designed to mitigate the damage of so-called progress. So much of the resource work isn't for the joy of knowledge, of getting closer to our past. It's on a check list of hurdles, the list of risks to be documented.
The money and the momentum are not with historic preservation or archaeology or expanding our knowledge and heritage, or confirming our connections to place. The momentum is with the builders, the developers, the engineers, the transportation policy makers, the shovel-ready folks who don't care much about the past. They want a future built on a blank slate.
Our modern economy pushes and encourages us to bulldoze and steamroller the past, despite the rules. It often pretends that history is something that happened somewhere else, or casts it as a barrier to a brighter future.
History is often equated with nostalgia; commitment to place is seen as being stuck, as stagnant. And those who have the longest, deepest history in this place are often viewed as obstructionists. The burden of proof is always on the people who question change.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Jun 21, 9:47 a.m. Inappropriate
As a recent attendee of the Cultural Resoruces Planning Summit, I'd like to say how inspiring the two keynote speakers were - Knute Berger and former tribal chief of the Coast Salish Tom Sampson - each in their own way. I'd also like to reiterate the points that Knute makes here by repeating a recent post on my Facebook page:
"Touring the B-17, the Flying Fortress, at Felts Field today with my father. He served in Greenland during WWII, where the planes laid over on their flights to Britain, and later worked at Boeing Plant #2, where the B-17 was manufactured. Over twelve thousand B-17s were produced between 1935 and 1945 at the plant. Most were operated from bases in England, undertaking critical missions in Europe. Today only 14 are still flown, most having been lost to scrap. Of these, even fewer saw combat, as the large number of ‘new’ surplus planes after the war ensured that these had a longer life than the ‘veteran’ planes.
Today Boeing Plant #2 is slated for demolition. At the height of production Boeing Plant #2 produced 16 B-17s per day, representing the embodied energy of hundreds of people and an unimaginable amount of resources. The popularity of this touring B-17 demonstrates to me that people need occasions like this to bring out their stories. They need buildings and planes and reasons to share them with others. Beyond the inherent significance of the buildings and objects themselves, we need these props to remember our places in the evolution of these important, historic events."
Diana Painter
Posted Mon, Jun 21, 10:58 a.m. Inappropriate
"Fascinating stuff is buried in the paperwork, reports, assessments, and EIS's."
Fascintating stuff is not buried in EISes produced by the state highway department. Their EISes tend to contain fantasies that mega-projects will not harm the cultural resources that are acknowledged, and many cultural resources are minimized or not mentioned at all. The most recent Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the SR 520 Bridge Replacement Project is riddled with misstatements, omissions, and rhetoric that contribute to an overall impression that hardly any cultural resources at all will be adversely affected by the SR 520 project, whereas hundreds will. Please don't send researchers to the seriously questionable documents produced by WSDOT. The versions of the importance and extent of cultural resources in WSDOT's documents seem to be routinely as inaccurate as the notorious Graving Dock Project reports' account of the extent and importance of Native American burials at the site. An archaeologist who was paid $7,000 for his evaluation estimated that the site of the project would contain no more than 25 burials and a few artifacts, whereas WSDOT was planning to erect its graving dock atop one of the most significant archaeological sites discovered in recent history, containing 300 full burials and 10,000 artifacts. The governor and the legislature responded to that archaeological scandal by passing a bill that raised standards for the evaluation and treatment of burial sites and extended the standards to pioneer cemeteries as well. They need to pass analogous legislation for the treatment of cultural resources of the built environment, which are currently regarded as expendable. Where WSDOT does acknowledge that adverse effects to cultural resources will result from the construction and operation of its projects, it offers scrapbooks and interpretive displays as mitigation. The deterioration of our architectural and cultural past continues apace.
Posted Mon, Jun 21, 8:54 p.m. Inappropriate
As I read the article and the accompanying comments, I am struck about how little factual information is truly known about our area. Knute is greatly appreciated when he uses terms like skid road rather than skid row. While my interest is more current, contained to our recent industrial past, I am still amazed when people here do not know of A.S. Kerry who helped finance the Olympic Hotel, and had the town of Kerriston named for him. (On the upper reaches of Raging river from 1910 to 1950.) Or communities like Sherwood, Bayne and other small burgs in Southeast King County.
What is more discouraging is the wholesale rewriting of history by whoever has an ax to grind. I grew up around several children of Puyallup Indians. Their grandparents were always angry about the current (of the moment) Puyallup leaders who were rewriting their history to fit their personal political views. I have since learned that is just the way things happen, everywhere.
One of the greatest events to come out of the nations bi-centennial in 1976 was the funding of local writer doing oral histories. I have been able to read stories of my great uncle’s times in North Idaho, tales of horse ranching in North Central Washington and many other stories of the late 1800’s to the early 1950’s All stories were from a personal view, but one is always able to shake things out and get the factual feel of life back then.
I applaud Knute’s family (whose equipment I logged under) and their desire to teach their son our rich history wherever they found it and his desire to maintain the endeavor.
Posted Tue, Jun 22, 6:29 p.m. Inappropriate
A Sierra Club for Washington State? What about the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation? They're at http://www.wa-trust.org/ Maybe the argument is that the WA Trust ought to be doing more? Or something different? Or?
Posted Thu, Jun 24, 9:14 a.m. Inappropriate
@seattlelifer: The problem is a preoccupation with stories. Everyone loves stories, not just historians. Good stories are built on top of data, though.
I think that creating data sets (scanned documents and photos; historic locations of streetcar stops; topographic details of hill and street regrades; demographics; etc) is the single most important responsibility of archives and librarians.
Any decent historian should be getting in on the act. Once you build the framework for creating your story, that framework is as valuable as the story itself. If you share your tools, methods and data, other people will discover new things and continue to draw value from your work.
As far as the "Sierra Club for Cultural Resources", the pieces are all there, but something's missing.
We have great research libraries at the UW and MOHAI for example. But I'm frankly tired of being told that the records I'm looking for don't exist. This morning I got the sad email that Kuner nautical supplies records were tossed in the 70s. I added it to the virtual stack with Olympic Foundry, tossed in the 80s, and Mayor William Devin tossed or sitting in a descendent's attic (every mayor before Clinton really, but my brick wall was Devin).
Maintaining records and making them available to the public is great. But is someone out pounding the streets talking with small businesses and Seattle institutions about preserving their heritage? Is someone working the networks of 2nd+ generation Seattleites, looking for what treasures are available -- and making those available to the public instead of hording them?
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree on the records issue... maybe it was something corrected in the 70s and 80s, and I'm just suffering the ripples of that? I'm worried that in 30 years, when I care about software companies of the 90s, those records will have been carelessly tossed as well. And key objects and data will be sitting in someone's storage unit.
Posted Sun, Jun 27, 11:24 a.m. Inappropriate
Speaking of software company history of the 90s, Nathan Myhrvold while at Microsft wrote a famous memo called "Roadkill on the Information Highway" that expressed concern about the ephermeral nature of so much content published on the Internet. The "(Accessed xx/xx/xxxx.)" appearing at the end of footnotes for Internet-acquired material, right after the link to such material, speaks to a real or anticipated loss of access to the material. It seems to be a way of saying, "Well it was there back on xx/xx/xxxx." It would be interesting to check some of the links in older footnotes to see whether the content they supposedly lead to is still there.
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