George Washington Carver National Monument

George Washington Carver National Monument commemorates the life and achievements of Dr. Carver, the Tuskegee scientist, at his birthplace in southwest Missouri.  The 240-acre site covers the old Moses Carver farm where George was born near the end of the Civil War.  George's mother disappeared at the end of slavery and George was raised on the farm by his former owners until he left at about age nine and went in search of an education.  The national monument features a mix of woodland and prairie and the spring-fed stream and glen where George first developed his interest in nature, and there is an elaborate visitor center museum.

NPS photo

Our job is to write an administrative history of the unit, describing how it came to be established, and examining all the major decision points in its subsequent development and management.  We knew very little about Dr. Carver beforehand, so we began our project by learning about this fascinating man who was so widely acclaimed in the first half of the twentieth century.  When Congress established the national monument shortly after Carver's death in 1943, there were just two other birthplace national monuments and those were the birthplaces of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  It was the first National Park System unit to commemorate the achievements of an African American.

In writing this report, it has been interesting to place the story of the national monument in the context of the civil rights movement.  A major argument for commemorating Dr. Carver with a national monument in the midst of WWII was to shore up African American support for the war effort and also to appeal to nonwhite peoples around the globe by countering Nazi propaganda that the U.S. was a racist country.  As the Park Service developed this unit in the 1950s, it took deliberate steps to create a racially integrated park staff and public space in a racially segregated state.

Pipestone National Monument

The past year we have been working on a Historic Resource Study for Pipestone National Monument.  This site in southwest Minnesota features an ancient quarry from which Native Americans obtained a soft reddish mudstone used to carve pipe bowls.  The substance was traded far and wide and the place was (and is) sacred and surrounded in myth.  The thin layer of pipestone is geologically associated with a thicker layer of Sioux quartzite, which rises out of the prairie in a dramatic escarpment a short distance from the quarry pits.  When you see the quartzite cliffs, especially at sunset when they turn blood red, it is easy to appreciate the place's mythic quality.  About a hundred people continue to work the pits with hand tools a few weeks of the year, and the trees about the place are hung with their prayer flags.  Native Americans also gather there in August for a traditional sun dance ceremony.

Quartzite cliffs at Pipestone N.M.

Our project is to write a history of Native American occupation and use of the site from prehistory to the present day.  We have been there twice so far, once in winter and once in late spring.  A highlight of our second visit was to sit in on discussions that the National Park Service was having with tribal elders and traditional leaders of more than a dozen culturally affiliated tribes.  It was fascinating to hear the participants speak passionately about the sacred pipestone and the sacred power of that place.  Although in general the Native American tribes are supportive of Park Service ownership and management of the site, many voiced strong objections to the continued sale of pipestone trinkets in the visitor center, which they perceive as a sacrilege sucking the very life out of their people.

Rainy Lake House

My book about the fur trade is being published by Johns Hopkins University Press this fall 2017.

RAINY LAKE HOUSE weaves together the biographies of three men involved in the fur trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.   John Tanner was a “white Indian” who was taken captive and raised by Ottawa, and lived among the western Ottawa-Ojibwa for thirty years, hunting across the northern forests and plains of present-day Ontario, Manitoba, and northern Minnesota.  Dr. John McLoughlin fled Quebec at the age of eighteen to work in the fur trade in the Lake Superior region during two decades of escalating strife between the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies.  Major Stephen H. Long explored the northern borderlands in a time when the United States aimed to take over British-Indian trade in its new western territories.  The three men met at Rainy Lake House in 1823 after Tanner was attacked and badly wounded while taking his daughters out of Indian country.  Foregrounding those incidents in 1823 and telling the story of the three men’s experiences in the fur trade leading up to them, the book presents a nonfiction Rashomon tale about the British-American-Indian frontier.  By interweaving and juxtaposing the three biographies, the book describes the world of the fur trade from its various colliding vantage points:  American, British, and Indian; imperial, capital, and labor; explorer, trader, and hunter.  RAINY LAKE HOUSE is original in its narrative conception: it is a work of historical nonfiction that is character-driven and inspired by the multiple-person narrative mode sometimes used in works of fiction (and in cinema, most famously in Akira Kirosawa’s Rashomon) while true to the canons of history.  (Picture: Shooting the Rapids, 1879, by Frances Anne Hopkins.)

New Zealand National Parks and Maori Sacred Sites

We are working on a comparative history of national parks in the U.S. and New Zealand.  Here is an abstract of a talk we gave in Pipestone National Monument's guest speaker series.

In 2012, environmental historians Ted Catton and Diane Krahe of Missoula, Montana travelled to New Zealand on a Fulbright to study the country’s national parks. New Zealand’s 14 national parks, which comprise more than ten percent of its land mass, showcase this island nation’s scenic beauty and unique ecology. The indigenous people of New Zealand – the Maori – are an integral part of the history of the national park system. This story began in 1887 when a Maori chief gifted three magnificent volcanoes to the nation. Today, the Maori are regaining a voice in national park management. Ted and Diane’s informal slide presentation will focus on Maori sacred sites and highlight some of their experiences learning about this culture. Their talk will offer comparison with sacred site protection at Pipestone National Monument.