David Nickell
Associate Professor
West Kentucky Community and
I wish to express my gratitude to Ann Goetting, Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Douglas Clayton Smith for their helpful suggestions in the development of this paper.
ABSTRACT: Drawing from the writings of George Ritzer, James Scott,
and others this paper offers a critical, first-person account of a people’s
struggle to defend their cultural heritage and connection to place against the
Weberian application of “order,” and
“modernity” by government agencies attempting to “improve” their lives. This paper focuses on the experiences of the
Between the Rivers people, who, since the eighteenth century, lived on an
inland peninsula formed by the
Personal Reflexive Statement: I was among the sixth generation on a Between the Rivers farm that had been in the family since the eighteenth century. Among my earliest memories are community gatherings to plan strategy in the fight for our place. As an adult I have taken my own children to innumerable gatherings of the same communities, now forcibly dispersed, to strategize in the same fight. While government policies, agencies and managers have retained little continuity, we remain the constant that unifies this struggle to retain the cultural connection to place that defines the land as an authentic “place.” It is a fight that has become an essential part of what it means to be from Between the Rivers. It has become the fight for the very soul of my homeland and its authentic cultural heritage.
Between the Rivers: A Socio-historical
Account of Hegemony and Heritage
Early in my studies of sociology I encountered references to Max Weber (1947, 1958). I was excited to find a systematic and penetrating warning against the Orwellian evils of “rational” organization and the disastrous impacts it could have if not held in check. My enthusiasm quickly dissolved when my professor described Weber as a champion of bureaucracy and of the efficiency that rational organization promised for human progress.
How, I wondered at
the time, could my reading of Weber be so dramatically different from that of
my professor? Being from Between the
Rivers, an inland peninsula formed by the
Some twenty years later I found myself involved in renewed efforts to protect the Between the Rivers homeland and heritage and witnessed the transition of management from one form of government bureaucracy to another. I experienced first hand what changed and what remained the same, as first TVA and then the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) Forest Service attempted to usurp our cultural heritage for their own use as a commodity to be marketed as heritage tourism, denying us any standing as they did so. It was in that tumultuous context that I encountered George Ritzer’s (1996) newly released work titled The McDonaldization of Society, which laid open the dark side of Weberian rational organization that had seemed so obvious to me years before. I found in this work, and in my rethinking of Weber, an initial theoretical framework for understanding why the struggle to retain ownership of our heritage was gaining no traction. The very agencies and policies created to protect our homeland and the culture embedded in that landscape threatened to destroy all that was authentic in order to preserve it. The officials who were charged with this preservation saw us as the major obstacle to managing the land and heritage with which they were entrusted. Later writings by Ritzer (2004, 2005) provided a language and a more nearly complete conceptual framework that resonated with the Between the Rivers struggle but offered no favorable outcome.
I searched for ways to apply existing laws pertaining to heritage preservation and encountered inexplicable resistance. In Conserving Culture, Mary Hufford (1994) describes the fragmented advances beyond initial attempts to legislate protections for local cultures. As those working with heritage issues in many disperse fields found overlapping concerns, they began to share resources and information. The result was a gradual emerging of consensus for “…shifting the government’s preservation paradigm—away from a top-down, prescriptive approach to heritage planning toward an approach more open and responsive to grass-roots cultural concerns” (Hufford 1994: 1).
These were encouraging words, indeed. They seemed to both capture the frustrating impasse facing the Between the Rivers people and to outline the path to resolution. Unfortunately, Hufford’s words had not reached beyond the academic community to government policy makers and policy implementers. With great expectation and more than a little naïveté, I provided to appropriate agency officials my literature-based advice on managing heritage. That included my co-authored paper with Thomas King (Nickell and King 2004) using the Between the Rivers cultural heritage as a case study demonstrating how government regulations are often misapplied and how this might easily be corrected. I erroneously assumed that such evidence would alter their behavior. Proper application of the government’s regulations was their job, after all. The result was an overwhelming disinterest followed by concerted efforts first to dismiss and discredit those of us who raised the issues, and then to circumvent the organized and long-standing efforts of the Between the Rivers people to be involved in defining and conserving our own cultural heritage.
James Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State provided significant insight into the government’s resistance to the efforts by the Between the Rivers people to preserve our local culture and heritage. A state, he explains, attempts to bring people and resources under its authority by working with models of the world rather than with the world itself. The people and the resources must be made “legible” by placing them into a rational model that lends itself to efficient calculation and manipulation by distant “experts” who need have no direct knowledge of the place or the people who are the subjects of that model. A state may then use its power “to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview” (p. 5). The model is manipulated until it theoretically produces the desired results; then it is imposed upon particular places through official policy and regulation. These policies and regulations are implemented by underling officials who have intimate knowledge of the model and authority to do whatever is necessary to impose the model anywhere they are instructed to. One place is considered to be the same as any other. The complexities of the many and diverse local realities of human praxis are necessarily excluded from consideration, which can prove devastating to communities and places that do not adequately fit the plan.
Though
Scott (1998) utilizes numerous anecdotes to illustrate his thesis, his prime
examples are Soviet collectivization and the forced villagization in
In what follows, I offer a socio-historical critical account of ill-fated attempts by Between the Rivers people to block rationalized government efforts to improve our lives. The evolving government model, by its continued inability even to recognize the complexities and specificities of local culture, has imposed a generic definition upon us and thus continues to externalize us from our own placed identity. James Scott (1998) puts it this way:
The state…is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. …certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being. Short of that draconian but all too common situation, we are left to weigh judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their costs (p.7).
Without critical examination nothing has prevented the scale from tipping toward colonialism and imperialistic outcomes for the Between the Rivers people. The result has been a slippage into hegemonic conflict in which we must fight for ownership of our heritage and our ability to define ourselves within it. It is not true that all government programs designed to benefit the people have such disastrous outcomes. This paper focuses on the Between the Rivers struggle as an example of how government programs can go awry and the difficulty involved in correcting the situation.
I divide the paper into four main sections. The first lays out the early settlement of the peninsula in accordance with government policy and how the geographic and socio-historic forces resulted in the construction of a place-based cultural identity that was independent of that policy. The second section covers the series of government attempts to bring “improvement” to our lives by means of its models of “progress” and “preservation,” with the resulting deconstruction of our cultural heritage. In the third section I describe recent interactions between government agencies and the Between the Rivers people that have resulted in my rethinking the concepts of heritage, place-specific culture, and what it means to have ownership of one’s cultural heritage stripped away. In the final section I offer what I believe is an inkling of a way forward, allowing the reconstruction of the Between the Rivers cultural heritage in a manner that will acknowledge “ownership” of the heritage by the Between the Rivers people rather than impose from above a generic model designed by outside experts.
Geographical realities and social forces combine to shape how people live their everyday lives. Over time these everyday activities alter the geographical realities and even how larger social forces, originating from “outside,” are experienced. In such a context the people no longer live in a mere location among many possible locations but rather in a socially constructed “place” embedded with shared meanings, collective memories and common assumptions sedimented to form a multi-generational continuity. A constructed “place” defines the people as much as the people have defined the place.
In this section I summarize the multi-generational experiences that transformed the peninsula located between the rivers into Between the Rivers as a true place. I divide this process into two thematic headings: (1) the initial settlement of the peninsula by early social planning and (2) the brief exposure to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century with the resulting early community-based conservation efforts.
By official accounts, the inland
peninsula that is the focus of this analysis remained uninhabited by Native
Americans long before the historical period (
The rivers inscribing
the peninsula were a natural obstacle to travel, settlement, and commerce so the
peninsula continued to exist in a migration shadow; the routes of less
resistance went around the 40-mile peninsula.
The rivers may even be said to have resulted in a population that
self-selected for independence of character.
As late as the mid-twentieth century a large portion of the peninsula’s
population remained descendents of the early pioneering veterans. Access to the peninsula was primarily by
ferry, which created a strong sense of “insiders” and “outsiders,” strengthened
by the clear perception of a common heritage and distinct community structure. Amenities and the government agencies that
were shaping daily life across the rivers from the peninsula were often only
marginally present or absent altogether Between the Rivers, even though the
area officially shared the same state and county governments as those
surrounding areas. With both county and
state boundaries in flux, the sense of “belonging” to any of those governing
entities remained tentative (Wallace 1992).
The Nickell farm has been located in two states and three
Life in the northern part of the peninsula, where our farm was located, was heavily influenced by the Coalins, a piece of wild terrain that ultimately centered the settled land. (The origin of the name “Coalins” is unknown.) Land grants and land patents provided each war veteran an exact number of acres but, because formal surveys of the area were not yet completed, specified only a general location, leaving the settlers free to lay out their farms according to the geographic realities between the large rivers. The Coalins was so rugged, with deep folds in the hills and both rock and ore protruding from the thin soil, that the original settlers avoided it. The result was that as communities built up, they ringed this rugged terrain with no one having filed a claim to it.
As unclaimed land surrounded by communities that were effectively insulated from outside influences and regulation, the Coalins helped define and was defined by the pattern of life that was emerging Between the Rivers. It belonged to no one, so it effectively belonged to everyone. It was a remnant piece of the unclaimed world surrounded by communities and farms. It was very early on that turning livestock into the forest of the Coalins to forage during times of pasture shortage became a common practice. Families established their own brands to identify their cattle and their own ear notches to identify their hogs.
Ferries had provided ready access to the outside soon after settlement, but the people between the rivers remained leery of outsiders. Within living memory, the ferry operators would ring their bell as they approached the landing if they were carrying outsiders. Most of the homes used dinner bells as a form of communication among homesteads and across the communities—distinctive rings could signal not only dinner, but summon help, indicate a death, or call people to a meeting. The signal indicating the presence of outsiders would be passed from bell to bell across the community. This insulated agrarian way of life, however, did not offer an impermeable barrier to the social changes of the nineteenth century.
The Coalins, to my knowledge, was
never called a “commons,” but that was the informal pattern of agrarian use
that emerged. Lacking official
regulation, people relied on the informal trust and respect that had emerged through
daily interdependence. The rapidly
changing structure of commerce and ways of life off the peninsula had little
influence on how things were done between the rivers. In 1841, however, Thomas Watson, a
businessman from Nashville, Tennessee who had established several iron furnaces
(which produced iron from raw ore and were thus vital to the nineteenth-century
American manifestation of the industrial revolution) got wind of the abundance
of iron ore in the area (Henry 1975). He
discovered that no legal claim to the Coalins land had been filed in government
offices. Watson filed legal papers and acquired a land patent on all unclaimed
land in the Coalins area—roughly 37,000 acres—and the iron industry made its
entrance between the rivers. Shortly
after establishing legal title to the land, Watson entered a partnership with a
speculator from
The iron furnaces
were shut down during the Civil War due to Union concerns that the iron could
benefit the Confederacy. Though
re-opened after the war, by the 1880s the iron industry’s operations between
the two rivers had ceased to be significant, and Hillman moved his operations
to
By 1908, several local farmers had united to initiate aggressive wildlife conservation efforts on their farms to protect the dwindling numbers of wild turkey, white-tailed deer, and other wildlife—and the forest itself. Arrangements were made with the overseer of the Hillman land to expand this conservation effort onto the Coalins, with local farmers traveling off the peninsula to be officially sworn in as unpaid game wardens in 1912 (Henry 1975). They worked with their neighbors to assure that inappropriate hunting in the Coalins was controlled.[1] The day-to-day agrarian use of the Coalins by the locals, rather than being curtailed, became the core of the conservation efforts. The success of these community efforts would ultimately be their undoing.
As government programs to “improve” the lives of the people found their way onto the peninsula, the traditional ways of life of the people would be first modified, and sometimes criminalized, before finally being disrupted altogether. This deconstruction of the traditional ways of the Between the Rivers people came in successive waves as “problems” were identified and addressed by programmatic solutions from the government. Each stage replaced traditional patterns and social order with an “improved” model designed by distant experts to bring development and modernity to the lives of the people. This section is divided into two parts. The first describes how successful community-based conservation efforts between the rivers attracted the government, and its regulatory structure, onto the peninsula. This set the tone for government interactions with the Between the Rivers people and for the five waves of population removal that followed. Part two describes these removals and their aftermath.
The Hillman Company entered a
cooperative agreement with
Through these changes the local residents continued uninterrupted their practices of open grazing, planting, communal hay cutting, and supplemental hunting on the Coalins. The use of the Coalins as a commons was structured by community customs and assumptions extending across five generations with no formal regulation. Legitimate authority was earned by those who had proven themselves capable through long community engagement. Still this would be challenged by the Coalins’ new formal status as “public” land, which is not compatible with traditional community use as a commons. The unpaid game wardens had their limited official status revoked, having evidently not done much to restrict use of the land that the Between the Rivers natives saw as an essential component of day-to-day living as well as a long-standing tradition. The government has, to this day, not acknowledged our early conservation efforts, which incorporated the long-standing traditional use of the Coalins as a commons and which gave way to the Hillman Game Refuge.
It is not always true that
government “improvements” require the removal of populations, but for the
Between the Rivers people “government help” became associated with forced
removal. Implementation of plans from
afar resulted in five rounds of removals in one generation and brought dramatic
change to the lives of the people. These
removals would leave our cultural heritage connected to the place by only a
promise. These five removals and their
aftermath are described in the six parts that follow.
Such attitudes about neighbors and boundaries did not mesh with the legalistic model that was structuring life off the peninsula. These informal ways must have caused dismay for the record keepers in the government courthouses. Well into the mid-twentieth century it had been a common practice for families to take up temporary residence according to the season and the work at hand. They might move the entire family to a small building or camp along the river when fishing and mussel harvesting, then move the family to another dwelling when labor was needed for farm work, and still another while working in the forest. Existing structures might be occupied by different families at different times—or stand vacant until “fixed up” for another round of use. Where a family was living at any given time might have little relation to who “owned” the land. Such arrangements were consensual rather than legal. Even families with a central home on established farms often relocated during the winter months so that the children could be within walking distance of a school. Cultural values and folkways that were reflections of our geography had emerged, and the geography was coming to reflect our cultural patterns.
The
outsider’s claims to the Coalins land, first for the iron industry and then for
access for tie production by the
The Resettlement
Administration, one of numerous New Deal programs, arrived in 1935 to “assist”
the people by freeing them from land that would not support a modern lifestyle. The farms that adjoined the Coalins (now officially
the Hillman Game Refuge) were declared to be unsuitable for profitable
agriculture (
Many families who
lost their farms through the Resettlement Administration managed to find land
between the rivers and resumed their way of life—others had to leave the
peninsula. Through the Resettlement
Administration, the federal government also took possession of the 37,000-acre Hillman
Game Refuge from the
Carolyn Bonner (1999) recalls the first time she saw one of the federal refuge signs, sometime in the late 1940s. It was the first “real” sign she had ever seen. Not even a stop sign had intruded on the lives of the Between the Rivers people, but now federal officials had moved in among them with signs and regulations to bring the rationalized model of modernity.
Numerous official reports were filed expressing frustration with the inability to control the open grazing and hunting by the locals. The government experts wanted to eliminate the traditional use of the land in order to “protect” it through regulated use. In 1941 the federal government began impounding livestock found on the refuge. The Between the Rivers constables (chosen by community members from the Between the Rivers communities in compliance with new regulations that required a police presence) arrested the federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials for taking the livestock and interfering with the people’s use of the land. They remained in jail for eight hours before federal authorities intervened and had the Wildlife officers released (Lane 2003). This clash with the government marked another escalation of widespread bad feelings between the people and the government officials.
TVA’s efforts
began with the conversion of an uncompleted World War I munitions plant at Muscle
Shoals,
The many low dams
constructed by TVA provided flood control and dependable river traffic, but did
not inundate much of the surrounding land.
This high dam on the lower Tennessee River, to be called Kentucky Dam,
would produce one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the nation, to be
called
While a
significant portion of the adult male population was gone to war, whole
communities scrambled to relocate farms that had been in place for
generations. Louis Vogel’s experience
was perhaps exemplary of what the families along the
TVA experts testified at that hearing that the quality of the stone on the Vogel land was of such low quality that it was of no value, and because the land had been quarried it was of no use as even farmland. The “offered” price was determined to be more than generous. TVA constructed railroad tracks from the dam site to the Vogel land and quarried, by all estimates, several million dollars worth of stone to construct Kentucky Dam. The Vogel family left the area after Louis Vogel died of a heart attack, which the family and community members always believed was the result of his treatment by TVA.
With a short time
allowed, families not only had to find a place to relocate, but they had to construct
homes, barns, and fences and relocate livestock, equipment and other rudiments
of traditional farming life. In the
midst of the resulting chaos, some cemeteries were moved in time; others remain
below the waters of
Those families
along the
Again the Between
the Rivers people found themselves scrambling to move farms, cemeteries,
churches, and schools. Again some cemeteries
had to be left behind, whole communities were disbanded, and families were left
to find a way to fit into the portion of the peninsula that remained above the
water. The events surrounding a woman
named Babe Williams became emblematic of the
Babe Williams (known locally as “Miss Babe”) had never been married and farmed land that had been in her family since the original settlements. Her land was the site for the dam itself. The only time she had ever left the farm was to attend the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where she developed her talents as a painter. The independent ways that she had learned from working a farm on her own were a challenge to government attorneys. Condemnation notices and letters from government agencies simply went unopened. After nearly two years of attempting to remove her, with government bulldozers already working in the river bottoms of her farm, a pickup truck with government officials approached her two-story house. They got out of their truck and walked up the path toward her house, shouting that they had come to remove her. She reached inside the door of the house, took out a double-barreled shotgun and blew the windshield out of their truck. The agents drove back across her field without Babe Williams.
A few weeks later the Corps of Engineers convinced the mayor of nearby Grand Rivers, who knew Babe Williams well, that if he would bring her to their office, which was over an hour away, they would work out an agreement with her. The mayor told me the story years later. He swore till his death that he had believed the government officials were on the level. When Miss Babe and the Mayor arrived at the office they were escorted into a back room and offered coffee. After waiting for some time they realized no one was there to meet with them and so they left. As they began the descent into the river valley they could see smoke rising. The government bulldozers had pushed the stone columns from the front of Babe Williams’ house through the walls, shoved all that remained into a pile, and set it afire. Her possessions, including a lifetime of paintings, were inside.
Babe Williams remained in the area for the rest of her life, but never cashed the government condemnation check. This was the only event of this kind reported by the local media. The numerous confrontations that were to come went unreported, apparently because they were seen as unfortunate, but necessary, steps to deal with the backwards and stubborn people standing in the way of progress and economic development.
A federal attorney who worked on the condemnation of land appeared on a local television program years later. He told the interviewer that he believed at the time that he was just doing his job and had thought nothing about it. He confessed that he had misrepresented the people and the value of the land and lied repeatedly to get the land condemned as quickly and as cheaply as possible. He concluded, “If I die and go to Hell, it won’t be for drinking whiskey and chasing women; it will be for what I helped do to the Between the Rivers people” (video recording of the interview is in the author’s possession).
The experts had calculated that it would take 10 to 15 acres of upland habitat to “replace” each acre of lost bottomland habitat (many from Between the Rivers wished they had gotten the same deal). This replacement, of course, would take the form of yet another round of eminent domain, taking the replacement land from private citizens. Counting the Resettlement Administration relocation, Kentucky Dam, and Barkley Dam, this was now the fourth round of removals between the rivers. Many people had already been forced to move multiple times. As Koochie Pinnegar described it to me, “Every time you would about get settled in, here they would come again; and they acted like it was your fault for being in their way” (audio recording of conversation in possession of author). It was common for people to find another place, move in, and then discover their land had, again, been condemned—with the “offered” price being less than that for which they had just purchased it.
Hurried and
rudimentary government surveys were made of potential Native American sites
that would be destroyed by these projects but no government agency tried to identify, much less protect, sites
significant to the cultural heritage of the Between the Rivers people. The Corps of Engineers did move the grave of
Thomas Watson—the
By the early 1960s
most residents along the “
The farm where I was
born was located near the northern end, where the peninsula narrows
dramatically. Our place had originally
reached from the Tennessee River, across the peninsula’s ridge, and down to the
As the scramble
for information and options began, it was learned that this project had been on
the drawing board for some time. Harold
Van Morgan, a TVA planner, had been assigned to find a way to compensate for
the lost tax base that resulted from the many government projects in the
region. With so much land taken out of
private ownership by the government projects, the resulting loss in tax
revenues, coupled with the loss of income the removed families would have
contributed to the local economies, there was a negative effect on potential regional
development. Social engineering,
bringing modernity to our “backwards” culture, had been TVA’s original goal, but
their actions were having the opposite effect.
To salvage their efforts to “improve” our lives we would now face terminal
improvement. In the late 1990s I
contacted Morgan, who was then nearing 90 and living in
Harold Van Morgan
told me that after lengthy consideration of options for offsetting the negative
economic impacts of the government land acquisitions in the region, a colleague
suggested that he “give it [the land] back to the Indians,” meaning that the
peninsula would be reverted to a completely natural condition. He took as his model for the project the
The original plan for LBL was drawn up by the National Park Service (U.S. Department of Interior 1961) and included provision for many already existing businesses and some communities to remain in private ownership in order to serve the public. I mentioned to Mr. Morgan that my family had once held out hope that we would be among those allowed to stay. His response was quick and defensive: “Boy, we did you a favor. You were living in a rural slum.”
I changed the
subject by asking why the Park Service plan had been abandoned and the project
taken over by TVA. He explained that the
National Park Service had to go through the process of gaining Congressional
approval and full appropriations for their projects. That could have taken a couple of years. “But,” he said, “we [the U.S. Government] had
to hurry because
For TVA’s LBL demonstration project to work properly there could be no inholdings, not “even homes or farms,” for if new facilities and services were to be barred, “the older ones must also fall within this bar” (Smith 1971: 92). Everything would have to go, with the peninsula being restored to as natural a condition as possible. Rumors circulated throughout the communities and often included outdated information from the Park Service plan. In preparation for that original plan, several individuals had been informed that they would be allowed to keep their businesses and that certain communities near the new entrances to the new park would be allowed to stay to provide services for the coming flood of tourists seeking to spend their dollars. It was as if they had been told they had won the lottery. This added to the confusion as the removals began. There seemed to always be a vague possibility and hope that staying might be an option. TVA appeared to play on these rumors to prevent organized opposition to their plan. The agency had, after all, been in the business of removing populations for their projects since 1933 and had become very efficient. Confusion of the people was an effective strategy.
A delegation from Between the Rivers managed to make the trip to Washington to see our Congressman, Frank Stubblefield, and the team was instructed to go back home and not to worry because there was no way the people could be forced to sell against their will for the sake of a recreation area. It was not until years later that I learned, from researching Congressional records, that Congressman Stubblefield had been a main proponent of the project and was working to ensure its implementation while telling us it could not happen. The deception delayed organized resistance.
At one point TVA hired and trained a team to go door-to-door throughout the peninsula explaining the purpose of the LBL project. The team was told to explain that TVA had to evacuate everyone in order to protect the land from the development that would be inevitable if left in private ownership. TVA explained before Congress and civic groups in the surrounding region the necessity of excluding all private ownership and commercial development from the peninsula in order for the demonstration to work. The people Between the Rivers were assured that TVA was not taking our land for profit, but rather that it would “remain forever free to the public and undeveloped commercially” (Dulaney 1996). More than anything we wanted to keep our land and our communities, but we found some comfort in the assurance that this land that we considered sacred would stand forever in its natural state as a tribute to the unique culture of the seven generations of Between the Rivers people who had lived and worked there. Understanding that our land would be protected from outside intrusion and, in that way, that it would be forever “our” land brought some sense of compensation for our great loss. In the context of our total evacuation, we took seriously TVA’s promise to us about the protection of our place. We came to call it The Promise. In time we would learn, however, that the government does not see promises in the same way we did.
When government
surveyors began appearing and an LBL “acquisition office” opened, people
attempted to gain information but found they were treated with contempt. As I later learned from my conversation with
Harold Van Morgan, the government officials were so convinced they were doing
us a favor by offering us an opportunity to be liberated from our way of life
that resistance was seen as proof of our ignorance. Stories of being called ignorant, backward,
and worse are ubiquitous among Between the Rivers people, yet there is no
documentation of such treatment. The
promotion to the surrounding region of the LBL project announced that the
people being removed were being offered a tremendous opportunity and that the
few resisters were simply evidence of how backward the Between the Rivers
people were. I have often pondered the
similarity to the former
One of the first
actions of the LBL project was to close our Between the Rivers schools and bus
us around the lakes to the county schools.
It was a one-hour bus ride each way for me. The Between the Rivers children stood out and
were often subject to ridicule. Teachers
used the LBL project as an example of the progress
It was discovered that the government could not base their “offered” price on a “drive-by appraisal.” The people became vigilant and refused to allow the surveyors onto their land, with neighbors keeping watch over each other’s property. The government responded by basing appraisals on tax records housed in the courthouses across the lakes. Teams of Between the Rivers people made a daily trek to the court house, checked out property records, and took turns sitting on them so that the TVA officials could not get access. This strategy worked until a court order gave the appraisers access to the records.
Rather than doing appraisals and condemnations across whole communities at a time, the acquisitions came in a pattern that seemed designed to break the opposition. Those who had purchased property after the dams were built, mostly for summer and retirement homes, were given a reasonable offer first. These people, having no cultural connection to the place, were not inclined to resist and took the “offers.” This initial round of accepted offers was widely touted in the press and before Congress as evidence that the Between the Rivers people were willing sellers and eager to leave. No mention was made that these early sellers, though land owners, were not actually Between the Rivers people.
When it came time to remove the Between the Rivers people the method changed. The owner would receive a letter stating the “offered” price. This price was based on one-half the value of the farm land as assessed for tax purposes (with no consideration that it was now prime real estate located between two major lakes). Testimony before Congress justified this practice on the basis that (1) the low price was necessary to discourage the rampant land speculation that was taking place—evidenced by the number of individuals who had already been repeatedly bought out in previous projects and (2) the people were so impoverished that they were glad to take that amount, as evidenced by the low number of appeals of the price (Stubblefield 1968). Not included in that testimony was the fact that the only mechanism for appealing the price—no mechanism existed for appealing the taking—was to go before a three-person TVA review board that always lowered the “offered” price, often by half (Stubblefield 1968). It did not take long for word to circulate, and the number of appeals rapidly declined. We were described as a culture that had failed based on the steady decline in population on the peninsula over the past decades (U.S. Department of Interior 1961). No mention was made of the role four prior rounds of removals had played in this decline or that those who could find a way to stay on the peninsula had done so (I know one man who moved his two story house three times, the third time being across the lake. His wife told me the house has never been nailed to the foundation in its present location, in hopes that someday they may “take it back home.”)
The letter revealing the TVA “offer” provided a date by which the land owner had to vacate. Federal marshals would then arrive and remove the family from the house—sometimes in hand cuffs—and bulldozers would push the house into a pile, burn it, and bury the ashes. All possessions still inside were burned with the house. Many people held out till the end, even knowing there was no way to stop the inevitable. TVA officials called them “staywarts.” I have heard these people explain that, “I know right from wrong; what was being done was wrong, and I wouldn’t pretend it was right.” Others were left to this fate because they were not paid enough to afford another place. The daily stress—which stretched on for years—of wondering when the letter would arrive took a tremendous toll in the communities, especially among the elderly. One elderly woman had her “sick bed” removed to her yard, from where she watched as a cable was wrapped around her house to pull it down. An elderly man, standing by the rubble of his freshly demolished home, was asked why he had not arranged to go elsewhere. His answer: “Where are you going to go when you’re already home.”
With nearly a thousand families looking for land across the new lakes, there was a real estate boom. The promised economic benefits for the surrounding region never materialized. For the Between the Rivers people this boom had a different face. Being paid one half the assessed tax value for their ancestral lands on one side of the lakes, then having to pay the tremendously inflated real estate prices on the other side of the lakes meant they were seldom able to acquire equivalent land and a home. Whole farms—farms that had been in the family since the eighteenth century—were traded for small lots with a house. Or, the entire “offered” amount was used to acquire land at the inflated price and their existing house was moved to the new location. Houses had to be loaded onto a truck, taken to the shoreline, loaded onto a barge and floated across the lakes. I remember sitting on our front porch on summer days, watching the neighbors’ houses go down the road.
This relocation process required specialized equipment, and there were few people equipped to do the job. Rainy weather could put the house movers far behind schedule. Notifying TVA that the mover was behind schedule would not get an extension on the demolition deadline, and houses were sometimes destroyed before they could be moved, leaving families with nothing. A neighbor was in the process of moving his family’s possessions from their house well before the scheduled demolition date when he returned to find the house had been destroyed. Upon inquiring why the house and their remaining possessions had been burned before their deadline arrived, he was told that TVA had begun a “scenic improvement” project. The officials had looked through the windows and “didn’t see anything worth moving.”
As entire communities were being evacuated, trucks and cars from across the lakes drove the Between the Rivers back roads seeking abandoned buildings from which they would take anything of value. As families tried to move their possessions, it became necessary to leave someone with the house to prevent looting. Our farm had a large shop filled with tools and farming accessories accumulated in the nearly 200 years we had lived there. These were more than old tools; they connected our daily lives into a six-generation continuum of caring for our place. We managed to salvage my great, great grandfather’s anvil and a few other odds and ends, but most was lost to the rampant thieving.
Near the end of
the population purge a well-maintained two-story house had been left by an
elderly woman. The local
Congressman
Stubblefield, who had told us the project could not happen without our consent
and who at the same time deceptively pushed for its passage in Washington, had heard
enough of the horror stories coming from Between the Rivers to have a change of
heart—or at least to see the number of voters affected. Stubblefield took
action by collecting a stack of affidavits about the abuses and mistreatments
at the hands of the government. He used these
to amend the TVA Act of 1933 (Stubblefield 1968: H.R. 4846 & S. 1637 to
Amend the TVA Act of 1933), which altered TVA’s power of eminent domain.
As a result of Stubblefield’s amendment, those who now face loss of property by eminent domain may challenge the agency in court before a jury, rather than merely appealing to a three-person board of officials from the agency. This marked a major step in the rights of citizens when faced with the government’s power of eminent domain. The people were ecstatic over the victory but because the property condemnation phase of the LBL project was already underway before the law was amended, the option for a jury trial did not apply to the Between the Rivers people. I have talked with many from Between the Rivers who remain proud of this victory won at our loss for the benefit of all who might someday face a similar situation. In the context of such terrible loss, a victory that could not apply to us was bittersweet.
It was obvious from my conversation with Harold Van Morgan that the TVA officials had never understood why we would want to stay in what they saw as a “rural slum.” They never saw the vital communities we knew and loved. They saw only an absence of amenities and an economy they could not calculate. They were blind to the rich cultural heritage that meant so much in our understanding of who we are. A TVA lawyer who came to our home to finalize details for our removal explained that “heritage isn’t worth a dime” and could not be taken into account. As my 95-year-old aunt recently put it: “TVA told us we were poor and needed their help, but it was news to us. The only change I saw when the government arrived was that we had to put locks on the doors.” How we valued our place and how the government valued it could not have been in greater disagreement.
It was not uncommon for the older people to suffer heart attacks, strokes, or other fatal afflictions before removal. Many had sworn they would never leave, and they kept their word. Some committed suicide after their removal. There are people still living who never cashed the condemnation check, refusing to give legitimacy to what was done. In the end, the expulsion was complete. Those who did not appeal to the three-person TVA board or wait for the federal marshals and bulldozers to remove them are officially listed as “willing sellers.”
As the inevitability of complete expulsion became apparent, communities began to seek concessions. Despite originally being told we would have to move our cemeteries or else abandon them to the returning wilderness, heirs did retain burial and maintenance rights for the cemeteries. We requested that our many small churches be allowed to stay so that we might return on Sundays to preserve community. We were told the churches would be treated as any other structures—we could either remove them or they would be destroyed. A handful of communities were able to gather enough resources in the midst of the chaos to move their buildings. Most were bulldozed and burned. The full force of the federal government was turned to removing all evidence that we had ever occupied that peninsula, and we could do little to retain any sense of our place. The emotional and physical upheaval endured by the Between the Rivers people throughout the removals, and especially toward the end, was in the context of hostility from the surrounding region that saw our ignorant and backward ways as depriving them of their entitlement to economic progress. We were a defeated people clinging to The Promise that our homeland would be protected as a wilderness.
When it no longer served the government, The Promise, as we saw it, was ultimately broken. It never held the permanence to the government that it did in the hearts and minds of the Between the Rivers people. Since the 1970s we had experienced relative stability in our relationship with TVA. We were under the impression that nothing more could be taken from us and that the management course for LBL was secure in The Promise. Communities began to hold yearly reunions, and families quietly worked to maintain the many scattered cemeteries and continued to bury their dead within them. Children and grandchildren were raised with stories of place, and many of them developed a deep respect for the homeland that had been taken.
However, in the mid 1990s TVA unexpectedly announced its plans to completely abandon The Promise completely, and the Between the Rivers people were again forced into action to protect our homeland. As events unfolded our efforts would result in the first-ever organized movement of the Between the Rivers people to protect our heritage rather than merely to live it. This transition of our heritage from something unquestioned and unspoken to something that must be defended has marked a reframing of our persistent struggle for place into a hegemonic contestation over reconstructing the cultural heritage.
The difference between us and the government in terms of the importance of place in the understanding of our “heritage” had always been a critical factor in our strained relations with agency officials. Those differences were about to become the focus of our struggle. Because our placed cultural heritage had always been intuitively natural to us, we were unable to articulate its essence effectively. Recognizing the government’s inability to understand either the importance of place or the significance our heritage holds for us, I set out to clarify these to myself and then to the outsiders in the federal government. I would discover that the cultural barrier between placed peoples and the “modern” world-view held by those with no connection to any place was pervasive. I came to see “our” struggle for recognition of placed heritage as part of a broader hegemonic clash between cultures—the contestation over who will define and who will be defined determining what is judged to have importance as well as what will be dismissed as irrelevant.
Each step in this process of attempting to articulate what place means to us has been in reaction to a renewed government intrusion, and each has forced me to rethink the concepts of cultural heritage, place, and what it means to be in the possession of an authentic cultural heritage. This process is in its beginning stages, and the final outcome of our dealings with government officials is far from certain. From their modernistic world-view, heritage is merely a collection of artifacts and official records equally accessible to everyone. From our more traditional perspective, our heritage is a communal connection to place from which individuals construct identity within the continuity of generations of accumulated memory; our heritage, as we see it, is only minimally accessible to outsiders. My efforts to understand and communicate the concept of placed cultural heritage have been driven by events that also led to the transition of management of LBL away from TVA, a partial-government agency, to a more formally-structured total government agency.
This section is divided into five parts. In the first, I describe the series of government actions that have forced me to formulate and express our intuitive sense of our placed cultural heritage. Each step in this process has been in response to a renewed threat from government authorities and their apparent inability to comprehend our concerns. The result, which is described in the second part, was the first organized, but still informal, effort to preserve our heritage. The third part explores our attempt to use to our advantage the existing government model designed to acknowledge and protect cultural heritage and how that attempt has produced our growing realization that the rational model and the traditional patterns it is designed to protect do not mesh. This incompatibility between model and reality is the source of continuing conflict as government authorities insist upon forcing our heritage to fit their model and we attempt to alter their model to fit our heritage. The fourth part addresses our efforts to reach out for assistance in understanding the government model for preserving heritage and in making it work to our advantage. The last part of this section explores how the Forest Service’s application of its rigidly bureaucratic heritage programs has resulted in the current struggle over the reconstruction of the Between the Rivers heritage—and whether, officially, a Between the Rivers heritage even exists.
TVA officials saw the LBL as one of TVA’s greatest accomplishments and originally made lavish efforts to ensure its success (Smith 1971). Through the 1970s and into the 1980s innovative outdoor recreation was combined with an aggressive environmental education program. The popularity of the LBL did bring economic benefits to the business owners surrounding the park during this time.
The nation’s social climate and political forces in the 1980s, however, shifted toward conservatism. TVA’s power production programs had fallen billions of dollars in debt as administrative boards and agendas changed with each new presidential administration. With the Cold War fervor gaining strength, conservative members of Congress were pointing to TVA as an example of the failure of socialism. Attempts to dismantle its government component and transform TVA into a private power company were led by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. Groups organized throughout the South to defend TVA, which intensified the debate. The Reagan Administration had viewed public lands as representing yet another socialist program, and this increased the influence of powerful lobbying groups that sought to commercialize public lands in order to unleash their sequestered economic potential and eliminate the need for federal subsidy. It was in this context that two forces, one targeting TVA as an agency and the other targeting tax-payer funding for public lands, merged at LBL to result in severe pressure against funding throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
As a
quasi-governmental agency, TVA had never before bothered with many of the
federal regulations for land management, such as seeking public involvement to
develop a management plan. Instead, it
tended to manage its affairs in accordance with its role as a private
corporation. Yet in December of 1995 TVA,
in compliance with the “government agency” facet of its identity, released the “Preliminary
Concepts for a Public Use Plan,” the federally required initial step in forming
the first-ever official management plan for LBL. It proposed large-scale commercial developments
combined with the closure of currently free facilities and activities. The development concepts included
condominiums along the more than 300 miles of shoreline, two professional-level
golf courses, an upscale marina, a resort hotel and a “heritage theme park” based
on the Between the Rivers heritage, including a waterslide depicting the course
of the
The first group to emerge with an organized opposition was the Concept Zero Task Force, a grassroots coalition including Between the Rivers people and other individuals opposed to commercialization in LBL for reasons ranging from concern about economic competition from within the park to environmental interests. The name implied that we preferred none of the development concepts. This Task Force marked the first expansion of concern beyond the Between the Rivers people to the larger public. Concept Zero garnered enough press coverage that before the comment period had expired, TVA filed notice of official withdrawal of the Preliminary Concepts in the Federal Register. This appeared to be an unprecedented victory for Concept Zero. Then word came that unannounced construction projects had been underway throughout the winter. These consisted of small versions of commercial development that would produce less alarm from the public, including grocery stores at the two main campgrounds; gift shops at all public information centers; a restaurant, tack store and rental cabins at the horseback riding area; and fees instituted throughout the park in tandem with the elimination of many of the popular free sites and activities—all violating The Promise. In response to our complaints TVA officials explained that The Promise had never been legally binding. Because LBL was a TVA demonstration project, it was unique among public lands in that no Congressional legislation had given it any legal designation at all—no legally-established purpose and no legally-binding management constraints.
During the coming
summer months TVA’s Director announced that he was asking Congress to cease all
funding for its non-power programs, including LBL, its most prominent non-power
demonstration project. This request, at
first blush, seemed illogical, but it is important to consider that the only
legally binding restraint on TVA’s management of LBL came in tandem with
Congressional appropriations. Once
released from government regulation, the 170,000 acres of mostly hardwood
forest surrounded by one of the largest man-made lake systems in the world could
become a long-term money-maker for TVA and be used to finance its other
operations as it saw fit—all in full compliance with the TVA Act of 1933. With a fully developed system of marinas,
golf courses, condominiums, a resort hotel and a heritage theme park combined
with world-class hunting and fishing, LBL could rival
By summer’s end 1996, Concept Zero had acquired more than 30,000 signatures on a petition to be presented to both TVA’s administrators and our Congressman, Ed Whitfield, asking that commercialization of LBL be stopped and The Promise upheld. One copy of the signatures, gathered over months of intensive effort by many volunteers, was ceremoniously delivered to LBL headquarters, escorted by several dozen supporters. The LBL Manager came to the front lobby to receive the petitions, politely thanked us for them, and then returned to her office. As we left the building we saw a worker unceremoniously depositing the petitions in a dumpster.
Congressman Ed Whitfield had already informed us that he was aware of our position but had to consider all perspectives (some prominent developers, locally and nationally, favored commercialization at LBL) and that he did not need to hear from us anymore. Upon receiving the 30,000 signatures, mostly of voters in his district, he arranged for a Congressional hearing on the future of LBL. I was among those who gave testimony at that hearing while the panel of prominent Congressmen read newspapers or talked among themselves.
Through the
efforts of Concept Zero, The Promise became the central theme of public
discourse regarding threatened changes at LBL. Congressman Whitfield, with our
encouragement, joined forces with
While the LBL Protection Act removed the immediate danger of a Disney-scale development at LBL, the land remained under the management of a financially strapped TVA, and the nation-wide push to make public lands turn a profit rather than rely on taxpayer subsidies was still in place. The small-scale LBL developments that TVA had already initiated were being heavily promoted and were producing little resistance from the general public, who were satisfied with the derailment of the immediate plans for mega-development. Our concern now was that TVA would opt for a creeping commercialization effort, slowly adding more development over time.
The realization that The Promise, which we considered inviolable, remained tenuous made us aware of how vulnerable our cultural heritage might be. We saw an obvious need to establish a precedent for our right to maintain sites significant to us, including cemeteries and old church and school sites. Some of our cemeteries are a simple cluster of stones in the forest with no family remaining and no record of who is buried there. We consider all those buried Between the Rivers to be our ancestors. With no official burial records (the government’s rationalized version of memory), the cemeteries were at risk, especially if the Forest Service were to inherit LBL. Then the agency would be under no obligation to acknowledge our sacred burial grounds. We needed to establish our claim to what little was still ours.
We thus formed the first organized effort to restore any unmaintained cemeteries and to identify and protect any other source of cultural heritage that was in danger. Each Saturday a convoy of pickup trucks loaded with volunteers and tools would head into the forest to reclaim our heritage. Through this process, community and family alliances that had been in disarray for more than thirty years were reconstructed as stories were shared about the many places where we were working that day to repair and reclaim cemeteries or to erect signs at former church and school sites. Individuals often possessed pieces of information, but did not know the “whole story.” As individuals told what they knew of places and events, the stories were re-woven into whole narratives of place—communal memories were given new life and their oral transmission revived. Elders were restored to their prominence as repositories of the culture’s memory. Stories were physically connected to place through remnants of building foundations in the forest; through steps alongside an old dirt road, steps that now lead to nowhere; or through patches of jonquils and daffodils that blossom each spring where a home had been. The landscape began to re-emerge as a place imbued with a living cultural memory. Most important, a reconstruction of a sense of community was underway, and a sense of empowerment began to replace the familiar feelings of loss, despair and isolation. The Between the Rivers heritage that had almost slipped away was regaining vitality in our lives.
TVA officials resented our having blocked their commercialization plans and reiterated to us that, because we had been paid for our land, we had no claim to it. We assumed they would move to block our efforts to reclaim our heritage when they learned of them. We invited the press to come with us as we worked, so feature stories of our activities quickly made it into the Associated Press and circulated nationally. Though we still had no official agency recognition of our heritage claims, we calculated that by making it untenable through public opinion for TVA to stop our work, we had established, at least informally, our claim that the heritage was still ours.
One result of the
publicity was that we were contacted by Corky Allen, a Euchee tribal member,
who was living in eastern
One step to getting land protected as a heritage site is to have the managing agency and the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) acknowledge that site as eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, which is maintained by the National Park Service. The bureaucracy involved would be formidable, and Between the Rivers people had bad recollections of dealing with government bureaucracy. This option was viewed with varying levels of skepticism by the people, many of whom were suspicious of any such formal mechanisms.
We had been successful in establishing an informal claim to our heritage by our well- publicized work. We were now aware of the possibility of using the government’s own legal system to gain official acknowledgment and legal sanction for our claim. About this time TVA announced plans to log in the old Coalins area. I saw this as an opportunity to use the formal system to our advantage. Federal regulations for such actions on public lands mandate that the public be allowed to submit written comments on proposed projects. The agency must then release a finalized plan for the action that addresses the concerns raised in the public’s comments. Finally, the public is allowed the opportunity to appeal the agency’s determination that all of the public’s concerns have been adequately addressed. Following Corky Allen’s advice, I submitted written comments to LBL’s Resource Manager stating that because the proposed logging project was in the Coalins, the project should be evaluated to determine if it would diminish the heritage significance of the area. My goal in submitting the comments was not necessarily to stop the logging, but to have TVA formally acknowledge the significance of the Coalins to our heritage. By merely stating in their response to my comments that the logging would cause no harm to the heritage value of the place, we would have been provided with the first official acknowledgement of our cultural heritage.
TVA steadfastly
refused to acknowledge that the Between the Rivers site has heritage
significance, so I appealed that decision to
That study (
The only meeting between
the researcher and anyone from Between the Rivers was with me (as the complainant)
and Ray Parish, the president of the Between the Rivers organization. The purpose of that meeting was for the
researcher to explain the findings of the study—not to gather information from
us for the study. Our concerns had been
addressed by a single prefatory statement that the study was not the “proper
vehicle” for evaluating the “non-tangible values” that we ascribed to the place
(
The clear implication was that criteria other than those employed by the Coalins study would have to be used to provide the “appropriate vehicle” for evaluating the “non-tangible values” that the place holds for us. The Coalins had been central in the development of our community structure and is thus essential in understanding our cultural heritage. We wondered what criteria could designate our heritage as the “historical context” for evaluation of the Coalins? The author of the study was unavailable for consultation on that question.
I began research into the question of what alternate criteria could acknowledge our use of the land as significant to the development of our culture, which led me deeper into the concept of “cultural property” law and the principles upon which it is based. The legal system recognizes two broad categories of property; one based on the writings of John Locke, the other on the writings of G.W.F. Hegel (Drimmer 1998). Under Locke’s model, property is fully fungible, meaning that when transferred from one owner to another the seller is left with no remnant claims at all—as in selling a car or a house. This type of ownership was of no use in understanding our claims, though it was the model shaping the government’s decisions, including the assertion that, having been paid for our land, we had no remnant claims in LBL’s management.
Under Hegel’s model, however, property ownership stems either from it belonging as much to future generations as to the present or from its being an intimate expression of the producer’s innermost soul (whether the expressions of individuals or of a culture). Such ownership is non-fungible. Copyright laws are grounded in this concept as it applies to individual expressions: if I purchase a painting from an artist it is, in Locke’s notion of “ownership,” my painting and I can do with it as I please but I have no right to remove the artist’s name from the work, replace it with my own, and sell it as my work. Hegel’s notion of ownership dictates that it will always be the work of that artist. Extending Hegel’s notion of ownership to the cultural level, the present generation cannot sign away the future generation’s rights to cultural property. Sites with deep religious significance, or sites where events essential in the formation of a cultural identity took place, belong to the culture in Hegel’s sense. A legitimate claim remains that is communal and thus cannot be signed away by any individual. Future generations will always have a legitimate claim to those sites regardless of who “owns” them in Locke’s sense. This is the legal model under which traditional cultures routinely request the return of artifacts housed in distant museums. (Much of the infamous Middle Eastern conflict can be understood as a problem of sorting out competing cultural claims to specific locations.)
The government designation
for places that possess cultural significance—allowing future generations to “possess”
their cultural heritage through access to, and a sense of ownership in, those
places—is “
Before the dispute over logging in the Coalins could be resolved, some members of Congress apparently attempted to block allocations for TVA’s management of LBL, which would activate the LBL Protection Act and transfer LBL to the Forest Service. Others in Congress, however, were working to secure funding to keep TVA in control of LBL. TVA began a public relations campaign as a last ditch effort to retain the LBL. Seeing as an opportunity this desire for TVA to ingratiate us, some of us applied for and received “consulting party” status from TVA’s manager at LBL. This became the first acknowledgment that we should have an elevated standing with regard to our heritage because the heritage was ours in a way that it could never belong to anyone else. This victory would be short-lived.
The LBL Protection Act, under the guise of protecting The Promise, contained a provision to ensure access to our cemeteries, and the section dealing with heritage also authorized the Forest Service to establish a heritage program, but failed to mention our role in it. There was also a clause, added at the last minute and without our knowledge, that authorized the Forest Service to charge fees and construct commercial facilities as it deemed appropriate. All revenues raised by these means were to be used in the management of LBL, supplemental to regular federal appropriations. This reflected the growing trend toward commercialization of public lands[2], and a major component of this commercialization agenda is the push for “heritage tourism” on public lands. Not only did the Protection Act turn out to allow The Promise to be violated through the establishment of commercial facilities in LBL, our heritage could also be treated as a commodity and marketed. This implied that the heritage had been taken from us along with the land itself and that we had no more claim to our heritage than we did to our land. The LBL Protection, which we had initiated and supported, turned out to operate against us. It was suddenly important that we figure out how to apply those obscure cultural resource laws to establish who “owned” the Between the Rivers heritage.
In the fall of
1999 Congress provided no appropriations for TVA’s management of LBL; that
marked LBL’s transition to the
As it became apparent that we would have to use the government’s legal structure to gain formal recognition of our heritage, I immersed myself in the regulations for applying the existing laws. What I found was a maze of laws dictating complex interactions among numerous state and federal heritage agencies—each with its own complex bureaucratic structure. A series of bulletins had been produced to serve as guidelines for agency managers on how to navigate the complex tangle of laws. Two bulletins were produced for meeting the Section 106 requirements. The first, often called “National Register Bulletin 30” (McClelland, Keller, and Melnick 1989/99), provides guidelines appropriate to historic buildings and rural landscapes of buildings, fences, and roadways. These are the guidelines that had been used unsuccessfully (from our perspective) in the evaluation of the Coalins (Hudson 1999).
The other set of guidelines is contained in “National Register Bulletin 38” (Parker and King 1990/98). This bulletin deals with, among other things, how to evaluate significance that is not apparent to “outsiders” and has been commonly applied when dealing with Native American sites. For instance, if a hillside were the location of an event that plays prominently in a people’s understanding of their cultural heritage, there may be no physical feature on that hill differentiating it from other hills and yet it possesses great significance for that culture—even if the event “exists” only in the mythology of that people and is not acknowledged by outsiders. Being granted a role in deciding how that hill is recognized and protected is essential to future generations’ ability to retain their sense of a placed cultural heritage. Bulletin 38 provided guidance on how to acknowledge a people’s ownership of their own cultural heritage and to interpret the significance of places from their perspective. These guidelines were the missing “appropriate vehicle” for evaluation of the “non-tangible values” we had been claiming. Dr. Thomas King was the co-author of Bulletin 38 and had since left his government post to become an internationally recognized private consultant on the protection of cultural resources. I contacted him for clarification on the regulations.
Resulting from our conversations was a paper[3] Dr. King and I co-authored (Nickell and King 2004) making the case that Between the Rivers is a TCP, fully meeting the official criteria of eligibility if the proper guidelines for evaluation are used. The acknowledgment of Between the Rivers as a TCP would establish a formal mechanism wherein the Between the Rivers people and the U.S.D.A. Forest Service could work together to identify and protect sites, such as the Coalins, that possess significance from our perspective. This would be the “bottom up” heritage management that many heritage professionals believe is needed (Hufford 1994: 1).
Our paper was submitted
to Forest Service and Heritage officials at the local, state, regional and
national levels. We received many useful
responses from the Heritage officials, and the paper went through several
drafts as a result. We never received a
response from the Forest Service, though I learned later that the LBL Supervisor
had contacted both the
Transition of LBL to the rigidly bureaucratic structure of the Forest Service was a glaring shift to the Between the Rivers people in not only what would happen, but how it would happen. The Forest Service officials expressed much frustration at having to integrate long-standing programs and policies from TVA that had never been in full compliance with federal regulations and were dismayed to find the Between the Rivers people working inside the park (maintaining cemeteries and other structures) with no formal framework to either authorize or regulate our projects. For us, the fact that this new agency was always going to operate “by the book” meant everything was about to change, but we anticipated an overall improvement once regulations and laws were properly applied.
One of the first tasks of the new Forest Service archeologist at LBL was to write the required Heritage Resource Management Plan (HRMP), which would be tiered to the full Management Plan for LBL. We requested an active role in its writing but were told that a preliminary draft of the HRMP would be provided to us when completed and that we could offer input at that time.
The Draft HRMP (
I asked the archeologist why no mention of applying guidelines from Bulletin 38 for evaluation of the significance of the Between the Rivers heritage was included. His response was, “Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen” (Wise 2003). As people at the meeting suggested aspects of our heritage, including the inhumane forced removals, that should have been addressed, he closed the conversation by slamming his fist on the table and proclaiming that he was “tired of hearing those stories.” “I’ve read all the records,” he said, “and none of that ever happened. TVA did everything they could to help you people out.” One man present responded, “Federal marshals took me and my wife out of the house; if that’s what you mean by ‘helping us out,’ I guess you’re right” (Wise 2003).
We were told that the HRMP had been written in a deliberate attempt to “keep the bitterness out of the record” and that we should be grateful for that. It is a surreal experience to sit in a room full of people who lived through such a traumatic time and have a government official tell you it never happened. None of it was in the records left by the state or federal conservation agencies, the Corps of Engineers, or by TVA, and the intention was clearly to keep it that way. The meeting ended with the Forest Service archeologist agreeing to re-write the HRMP to better represent our views but, as expected, the revision simply never materialized; there was no legal requirement for revision, and an official merely stating that it would be done implied no commitment. By our not being included in the official version of the heritage, our objections need not be addressed.
The comprehensive
management plan for LBL stated that all heritage issues would be handled under
the guidance of the HRMP, which had been prepared in consultation with tribal
representatives and the
The official goal of the heritage plan is to “preserve LBL’s rich heritage.” I have repeatedly tried to explain to LBL officials that LBL does not have a heritage. “LBL” is a bureaucratic designation; no one is from Land Between the Lakes or ever lived in Land Between the Lakes. “Between the Rivers” has a rich heritage, and that heritage belongs to the Between the Rivers people—not the government. Our heritage was not removed by eminent domain and it is not fungible. Within our collective cultural memory Between the Rivers still exists as a “place” and Land Between the Lakes is merely a government designation imposed upon it. The officials have expressed extreme frustration with my claims and refuse to discuss the matter.
Interactions with the Forest Service worsened when a handful of seemingly random Between the Rivers people received a copy of the “Cemetery Handbook” in the mail. The LBL Supervisor insisted that because the LBL Protection Act acknowledges our right of access to and use of the cemeteries, that access and use must be regulated under the agency’s authority. According to the Handbook, formal approval from the Forest Service would be required before we could cut dead or damaged trees from the cemeteries and the Forest Service could regulate the type of markers used for graves. We would not be allowed to fill in the settling graves of our ancestors without government permission. Some cemeteries would even be locked behind a fence and family members would have to request a key—during business hours. This was all being done, we were told, because the Forest Service now owns the cemeteries.
The impact of this
on people who had long felt the cemeteries were the only remnant of our
homeland that we could still claim as completely our own was inestimable. The many cemeteries will eventually merge
each of us into the landscape itself, passing the shared concern for place to yet
another generation as they care for our graves.
The cemeteries are a tangible nexus through which individuals are joined
in the sustaining continuity of a shared heritage. We thought the purpose of a heritage program
should be to assist us in preserving such connections to our placed heritage. The government managers saw their mandate as
protecting the heritage resources from us—the sterile artifacts being pieces of
a generic national heritage that belongs equally to all
In an ironic twist, it was the condemnation papers from when our land was taken that allowed us to fend off the Cemetery Handbook. Those papers specifically stated that all the government’s rights to use of the land within the cemetery boundaries are superseded by the burial rights withheld for the heirs. The Forest Service was forced to admit that ownership of cemeteries, as relating to actual use of the land, is not fungible even if the federal government does own the land the cemeteries are on. Nevertheless, retaining control over our burial grounds was possible only because arcane distinctions in types of “property” had been embedded within the layers of law, not because traditional values had been respected. The Forest Service’s begrudging relinquishment of its ownership claim to our cemeteries was not going to be seen as extending to our broader heritage concerns.
I continued communicating with the Kentucky SHPO regarding the paper Dr. King and I had written, trying to get some movement on the TCP option. The SHPO informed me that his office resisted applying Bulletin 38 guidelines and acknowledging Between the Rivers as a TCP because to do so would be outside standard procedure. Adopting a “new” model and allowing us that designation would “open the floodgates” of communities everywhere seeking involvement in the management of places that were important to them. It would become a “bureaucratic nightmare” for all government agencies involved.
The quagmire of regulations representing every level of government control was clearly intended to produce a model to increase local community involvement in protecting local cultural heritage. The Forest Service officials, however, have used the regulations as a mechanism for screening out such local public involvement so that “expert” management of the places that their model does recognize will be more efficient. Identifying and protecting cultural heritage for future generations is undeniably a worthy goal. Still it appears that the bureaucratic mechanisms for achieving this goal of local public involvement, when misapplied, can actually separate local peoples from any authentic relation to their heritage.
In explaining his reasons for denying Consulting Party status to the Between the Rivers people, the LBL Supervisor denied that there is a Between the Rivers cultural heritage (but offered no justification for that assertion). He explained that part of his role in managing and protecting the “LBL heritage,” which he sees as public property, is to ensure that a “small group” does not have a “louder voice” than other interested citizens (Lisowsky 2006).
The Supervisor at LBL has recently told the Between the Rivers group that we may not continue our informal efforts to preserve our heritage sites but that we may participate in the Forest Service’s new heritage program as individuals if we choose. If we do so it will be on an equal footing with any other interested citizen. Between the Rivers people may share information with LBL heritage managers and heritage interpreters if they wish, but will have no more say in what information is used, how it is used, or how it is interpreted than will any other citizen. An individual might be consulted if the agency officials determine that a project could have direct impact on that individual’s “personal heritage;” beyond that, “…all can have an equal voice and role” (Lisowsky 2006). Despite my repeated protestations that the concept of a “personal heritage” is nonsensical, under the current policy at LBL there will be no recognition of a shared cultural heritage or generations of cultural memory that accumulated in a particular place and continues to inform our identity. Our “ownership” of the heritage is critical to its survival; we can belong to the cultural heritage only to the extent that it belongs to us. That ownership had now become the focus of dispute.
According to Thomas King (2003: 6), legitimate “self defined groups” qualify for official recognition, but the LBL Supervisor has defined us as a non-group. This official determination did not involve input from us and does not acknowledge the simple fact of our on-going organized efforts. It does, however, eliminate the need to consider our perspective on what has heritage significance within LBL. This, no doubt, streamlines the Forest Service’s task of protecting heritage sites and providing educational programs (heritage tourism) for visitors. This rationalized efficiency appropriates our heritage for commercial use, removing any sense of ownership from us. The cultural hegemony I experienced as a child, but could not yet name, not only continues, but has reached greater dimensions than I could have imagined.
When the Forest Service announced it was reinitiating the logging project that TVA had proposed for the Coalins, I was joined by Heartwood[4] in filing a law suit in federal court to halt the logging. We argued that the Forest Service had not met NEPA and NHPA requirements for Section 106 review in that they had failed to “consider new evidence” (as the regulations require) by not responding to the paper Dr. King and I had submitted and by not doing an evaluation of the area under the appropriate Bulletin 38 guidelines. Forest Service attorneys argued that the regulations are only “procedural requirements.” As the legal precedent puts it: “NEPA prohibits uninformed actions, but not unwise actions” [Colorado Envtl. Coalition v. Dombeck, 185 F.3d 1162, 1167 (10th Cir. 1999)]. As long as the Forest Service claims that it has considered everything that the regulations mandate it to consider, its conclusions do not have to reflect the information it “considered.” In this case, the Forest Service claimed that it did consider the Bulletin 38 guidelines and the submitted paper but chose not to apply them; and no amount of evidence indicating that Bulletin 38 guidelines were the appropriate guidelines mattered. The Sixth Circuit judge concurred that the only requirements on the agency were procedural and ruled that the courts should not be involved in second-guessing the agency’s expert judgment. As the LBL Supervisor has often told me, if the law does not require the agency to take a particular course of action, being the right thing to do does not enter consideration.
Since the revolutionary formation of a new kind of rationalized nation-state in the eighteenth century, the Between the Rivers people have endured an almost continuous application of ever-changing models for bringing “progress” and for “improving” our lives. It is clear that there is now a model in place for preserving disappearing cultural heritages and that, at least at LBL, this model is being devised by remote experts without consideration for the specific enculturated peoples or places to which it will be applied. The distant experts are busily tweaking their model to yield the results that their model tells them they should value; local officials busily work to circumvent local concerns that would encumber application of the model. The result is that official efforts to preserve cultural heritage cannot consider the authentic cultural heritage.
The current debate among the government’s heritage experts favors preservation through more astute marketing. Selling products associated with “place” and “heritage” is a promising preservation tool if “strategies for marketing and branding” the items can be devised in ways that promote “sustainable tourism” (Diamant, Mitchell, and Roberts 2007: 9). In the same way that “Amish made” has become a valuable brand in the marketing of certain goods, a Between the Rivers logo might someday be used to attract tourists so that “LBL’s rich heritage”—or at least agency-selected artifacts that lie about the park—might be preserved.
The question that the model builders do not ask is whether the people who, over many generations, constructed an authentic cultural heritage in a particular place can retain “ownership” of it under that model. If my children and grandchildren will have no standing towards the Between the Rivers heritage beyond that of any other citizen, then in no meaningful way can they claim it as “theirs.” If marketing that heritage is the strategy for preserving it, then our heritage will have become a commodity, not a living connection to place and community.[5]
Seyla Benhabib (2004) captures this predicament of cultural loss in the description of Max Pensky’s concept of “Yoder’s Dilemma”:
…either one must abandon the claim to the holistic and totalizing aspects of one’s identity, recognizing now that it is one among many such identities competing for equal recognition in the public space of democracies; or one must adopt a purely strategic attitude towards legal norms and make one’s culture a good which, just like money and power, can be pursued strategically. It would appear that the price of democratic protections for cultural difference is either Weberian disenchantment or strategic (p. 292; emphasis in the original text).
Still Benhabib offers hope: “There is a third alternative. This is the narrative resignification and reappropriation of one’s culture within a more reflexive framework” (p. 292).
Most Between the Rivers people have accepted that we will never again live in our homeland. The best we can hope for is a continuous redefinition of our heritage that encompasses the many struggles we have endured, including our expulsion and the current struggle for control of our heritage and cultural identity as a displaced people—the displacement itself serving as a powerful symbol that keeps us connected to place. Agencies, officials and policies have come and gone; we have remained as the sole source of integrity that makes the land a coherent “place.” We can hope to remain the conscience and the protectors of our homeland, but only if we can retain ownership of our cultural heritage. In Benhabib’s (2004) words, “…traditions, worldviews and belief-systems can only continue as hermeneutically plausible strands of meaning for their members insofar as they can engage in such creative resignification and renegotiation of their own core commitments” (p. 293).
In short, the Between the Rivers people can keep alive the sense of being a placed people with a shared cultural heritage only to the extent that we retain an authentic engagement in how that heritage is manifest and carried forward. If the narrative of what it means to be from Between the Rivers is to survive, it must embrace the new distinction-building oppositions as well as the old. Our relation to our place will never be what it was prior to the government intervening with its improvement projects, and this has been used to declare the demise of our culture (Wallace 1992). However, only dead cultures fail to change; evolvement of the narrative of identity is the survival of a culture. Short of this, nothing will remain but sterile artifacts for public display, interpreted by outside experts. This is expressed in Mary Hufford’s (1994) assertion that “cultural specialists” should cease to pursue “cultural preservation” as a goal and begin to think in terms of “cultural conservation” ( p. 3). Preservation is the job of taxidermists; conservation seeks survival.
This shift in official perspective would require a willingness of the expert model makers and model implementers to leave room for retention of engaged ownership by the people whose cultural heritage is being conserved. Setha Low (1994) describes how, without the involvement of the keepers of the local knowledge, the expert managers merely recreate the place in terms that are meaningful to the experts. The result is that, “…the meaning of place and place conservation becomes separated from the locality and the lives of the people affected. The professionals…deconstruct and reconstruct a world of images rather than deal with the reality of local lives, and they thus maintain a stranglehold on the cultural reproduction of place…” (p. 71).
This contrast in perspective was manifest in our restoration of St. Stephen’s church, the sole remaining Between the Rivers church. It had been long abandoned by the time its remote location resulted in TVA passing it over for destruction in the 1960s, and our restoration of it in the late 1990s was well before there was any discussion of a heritage plan at LBL. When TVA officials learned of our restoration efforts they attempted to demolish the building as a “safety hazard.” After the SHPO intervened on our behalf (acknowledging the integrity and age of the structure itself, but not its role in our heritage), TVA officials favored moving the building (which would have destroyed the integrity recognized by the SHPO) closer to a road where it would be more accessible to tourists and more easily protected, and suggested that grant money be obtained to purchase materials and to hire professionals to do the extensive restoration work. We continued our restoration efforts, refusing to comply with TVA recommendations, and after the Forest Service arrived we were threatened with arrest for continuing our work outside its authority. All labor was provided free by the Between the Rivers people, and materials were obtained by locating and dismantling abandoned buildings with similar construction. A large crowd gathered each Saturday for nearly a year, producing as much talk and food as work. Many elders observed from under shade trees, providing both advice and stories of the place and the events associated with it. We continue to maintain the church in the same informal manner, albeit now with the tentative blessing of the Forest Service in the form of a written agreement “allowing” us to provide all labor and materials.
The result has been that the restoration of the building was equally a restoration of community. The significance that church continues to hold in our collective heritage would have been destroyed had we followed the model offered by government officials. We also insisted, with strong objection from the Forest Service, that The Promise be upheld for at least this one site. The building remains open to anyone anytime, with no fees and no promotion as a tourism attraction. Signage explains the history of the church to visitors who happen across it, but there is no doubt of whose heritage it belongs to, and it is not a commodity.
We are insisting that our relationship to the rest of our heritage be the same: full engagement sustaining our sense of shared connection to place through our planning and our labor—all in accordance with our understandings. This way the heritage would remain far more than a collection of generic artifacts marketed for tourism. Tourists would be welcome anytime, with no fees and no promotion as a tourist attraction, but the heritage would remain “ours” in a way no one else could ever claim. The place in which our collective care is expressed through shared effort would give validation to our “self-defined” identity, reaching back across the generations for meaning and, it is hoped, informing our way forward as well. This, I believe, is the correct model for conserving heritage. “Ownership” of the cultural heritage must be through active engagement by the people according to their own traditional values and understandings, not through agency models designed by distant experts. Government agencies could provide invaluable assistance, but the people must own their heritage. “Experts” would assist the local people in achieving their own goals rather than goals imposed from on high.
In a time when local cultures everywhere are disappearing, the continuing efforts of the Between the Rivers people, in spite of and because of overwhelming and almost continuous losses, are an illustration of possibilities that I believe others should heed. Government programs can be of true benefit to the lives of the people, but they can also go terribly wrong. At this time it is uncertain if we will be successful in salvaging what little remains of our cultural connection to place. The determining factor is whether the experts can leave room for the locals to make it happen on our own terms. It cannot be mandated from above without slipping into cultural hegemony. At present, we are officially obstacles to the agency goal of preserving LBL’s heritage.
References
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ENDNOTES
[1] According to oral history accounts, large parties from off the peninsula had begun coming to hunt. These sport hunters would camp in the area for weeks at a time, killing vast quantities of the game that the locals still considered a vital part of their everyday food source. By being sworn in as “wardens,” even though unpaid, they were given the limited authority to control the hunting in the Coalins.
[2] A data base with links to primary sources in this important debate can be found at: www.wildwilderness.org.
[4] Heartwood has been the only environmental organization that has shown an interest in this issue. Other national and regional organizations have been contacted but have not seen the significance of cultural heritage as it relates to environmental concerns. Heartwood places environmental concerns within the context of local cultures that preserve knowledge and care for their places through sustainable use of resources. For more information see: www.heartwood.org.
[5] In Husserlian terms, the culture shifts from a constitutive function within the noetic pole of the
relation to place to become a constituted object within the noematic pole of the bi-polar stream of
phenomena. In other words, it ceases to be a nomic matrix within which meaning is constructed
to become a generically interpreted meaning. In its constitutive function it unites individuals into a
community of shared assumptions sedimented through generations of meaning construction; as a
constituted object it is equally accessible to all and no longer serves as a perspectival point for anyone.
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