Traditional Cultural Properties, “Long-Term Use,” and “Sustained Awareness”

I’m reviewing a report on an area’s “cultural resources” (by which the authors seem to mean archaeological stuff, with an occasional bow to old buildings), prepared in connection with an environmental impact assessment of a proposed land use project. Toward its end, as something of an afterthought, the report talks a little about whether the landscape within which lie the hundreds of “archaeological sites” it’s described might be a “traditional cultural property” (TCP) that’s eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

The report was prepared by contractors working for the private company that proposes to build stuff all over the subject landscape, so predictably (given sad current practice) its authors do everything they can to downplay the area’s cultural significance – except to some extent the research significance of the “archaeological sites,” which they can be paid to dig up as “mitigation.” So, despite pretty vehement representations by tribes that value the landscape (and without consulting the tribes, the SHPO, or apparently anybody else), they say nope, it’s not a TCP.

Why? Because, they say:

TCPs … must exhibit long term use or sustained awareness by the community.

In other words, if the relevant community hasn’t “used” the property over the “long term,” and/or maintained some kind of unspecified “awareness” of it, the property is not a TCP.

Now, in this particular case it’s notable that nobody seems to have asked the tribes whether and how they “use” the landscape in question, or what “awareness” they have of its cultural significance (Archaeologists, after all, are experts, so they must just know this stuff through osmosis or something).  In fact there are good reasons to think that tribal members are well aware of the landscape and its cultural character, and use it for both spiritual purposes and the education of youth. But never mind the particulars: does it make sense to say, in principle, that a community must continue to “use” a place, or be “aware” of specifics about it, in order for it to be a TCP, and eligible for the National Register as such?

Continuing Use

National Register Bulletin 38 (http://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/pdfs/nrb38.pdf ), which (like it or not) is the National Register’s official word on the subject, says:

The fact that a property may have gone unused for a lengthy period of time, with use beginning again only recently, does not make the property ineligible for the (National) Register.


The Bulletin goes on to posit a situation in which a group revered a particular mountain in the past, but then was forcibly relocated to someplace where it could not readily access the mountain, and coerced into a religious conversion that caused them to ignore the mountain’s spiritual significance. It goes on to imagine the group now undergoing a cultural revival in which it seeks to reconstruct its relationship with the mountain, and concludes:

The fact that the contemporary use of the peak has little continuous time depth does not make the peak ineligible; the peak’s association with the traditional activity reflected in its contemporary use is what must be considered in determining eligibility.

So you don’t have to have “continuing use,” and let me add that it would be especially ironic (to put it mildly) for the federal government – which for many decades pursued policies of disconnecting tribes from their traditional religions and lands – to insist on “continuing use” as a prerequisite to recognizing a place’s cultural significance.

Sustained Awareness

But does the tribe or other group not at least have to be aware of the place in order for it to be significant? We didn’t think about this one in writing Bulletin 38, but it soon came up in practice, and I discussed it on pages 256-7 of Places That Count, my 2006 book on TCPs (http://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Cultural-Properties-Resource-Management/dp/0759100713) . As an example I looked briefly at Hopi and Zuni beliefs that their ancestors traveled all over the Southwest after their emergence into this world, guided, facilitated, and impeded by supernatural forces. The Hopi and Zuni have said that wherever their ancestors left evidence of their passing, that’s a TCP. They don’t know where all those places are, but they know them when they see them. Similarly, I quoted from an Australian case in which an aboriginal expert from one part of the country was able to recognize a place in an area he had never before visited, because of the way it is described in a traditional story, and thus know that (a) it was associated with a moiety not his own and (b) it was to be respected as such.

Clearly, a Hopi or Zuni elder cannot be said to have had “sustained awareness” of, say, archaeological site AZ-CIB-666P5 (if there is such a place), which he or she has never seen.  But he or she knows that such places – with particular kinds of potsherds and masonry – are associated with the ancestors, and he or she knows that if he or she does visit it, there are things to be done to show respect – prayers, maybe an offering – and that one ought not mess the place up if one can help it. The aboriginal expert in the Australian case knew that there were things to do – maybe recite from a song, maybe refrain from picking things up – to respect the ancestral spirits of the moiety associated with the hitherto unvisited place. Are these associations sufficient to make such a place eligible for the National Register? I think so, though perhaps reasonable people can disagree. But surely it is clear that the mere fact that the Hopi don’t know precisely where each site associated with the ancestors is and what it looks like does not automatically make such sites ineligible for the Register; still less does it render them “not-TCPs.”

Unfortunately, the “continuing use” and “sustained awareness” criteria seem to be slipping into the practice of identifying (or trying hard not to identify) TCPs – spurred by the desire to avoid recognizing and dealing with such properties and to facilitate the projects of those who pay us CRM practitioners to make ostensibly objective and authoritative studies. If you want to use these criteria to help your client run roughshod over the cultural environment, that’s up to you, but please don’t pretend that you’re reflecting some widespread best practice or government guideline.

Thinking, and What to Do About It

One of my publishers is considering a new edition of one of my books, and sent out requests for recommendations from folks who've used it as a textbook. One of the responses went like this:


"(King) is getting more crotchety in his old age, but he makes you (the teacher) and the students think. I don’t always, or even 50% agree with him, but he always stimulates debate in my classes."

and...

"(I tell people): 'You need to read Tom King’s stuff. You laugh, you cry, you cringe, you yell at the book, but it always makes you think.'"

I appreciate those comments; I naturally like to think that my writings stimulate thinking. But I can't help but be a bit frustrated, too. "Hey, Reviewer," I think, "if you don't agree with half of what I write, and if you find yourself yelling at my books, why in the world don't you write something about the subject yourself? A book, a journal article, something on my (or someone else's) blog? Why don't we have a dialogue? That's how we both -- all -- can learn."

I expect the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other bastions of the lightly-considered status quo to ignore my existence, and my expectations have never been disappointed.  But I do wonder about academics, who theoretically engage in scholarly discourse and encourage students to do the same. If you don't like or agree with what you read, sheesh, there are things to do about that. Question it!  Challenge it!  Argue about it!  Isn't that what scholars are supposed to do?
 
Only the most stultified of bureaucrats simply ignores what doesn't comport with what he thinks (or has been taught to think) and waits for it to be forgotten. But -- maybe I'm missing the real point.  Maybe life in a stultified bureaucracy is the kind of career for which you think you ought to prepare your students.

The Lihir Islands: a Cultural Heritage/Resource Planning Model?

The latest issue (18:1, 2011) of the International Journal of Cultural Property (Cambridge University Press) contains a number of thought-provoking papers. One that should be of special interest to those involved in environmental impact assessment (EIA) and cultural resource management (CRM) is "Stepping Stones Across the Lihir Islands: Developing Cultural Heritage Management in the Context of a Gold-Mining Operation," by Nicholas Bainton, Chris Ballard, Kirsty Gillespie, and Nicholas Hall (pp. 81-110].


The Lihir Islands are in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Bainton and his colleagues provide a concise summary of how cultural heritage/resource management law and practice have developed in PNG in the post-colonial period, including their hopeful if rather tenuous relationship to national development schemes and the interests of extractive industries like gold mining. They then discuss their own experience with a particularly tricky relationship -- that between the traditional people of the gold-rich Lihir Islands and the mining company Lihir Gold Ltd. (LGL) At the center of this uneasy relationship is Ailaya, a cultural landscape of considerable spiritual significance to the Lihirians, around which mining has taken place and within which there are economic incentives to mine (i.e. there's gold in that thar landscape). The evident conflict between mining and preservation of the landscape has not been resolved, but the Lihirians and Stepwise Heritage and Tourism, the Australian company that engaged Bainton and his colleagues and drew financial backing from LGL, have taken significant-seeming steps toward creating a context in which to address this and other development/culture conflicts by developing the Lihir Cultural Heritage Plan, whose pidgin name translates as “A Plan for Social Stability and Harmony on Lihir.” The authors' discussion of how this plan was developed in active collaboration with (really BY) Lihirian communities is fascinating, and may provide something of a model that – with much adaptation – could be useful elsewhere. It was interesting to me that the Lihir initiative employed the popular Australian "footsteps" approach to planning, which I've seen referred to and described but never until now could quite get into my head. Bainton and his colleagues show how "footsteps" works, and it seems very sensible. It will be interesting to see how successful the Plan is at resolving the seemingly inevitable conflict between mining and the sanctity of Ailaya, but one of the Plan's heartening aspects is that it does not (apparently) focus on the sacred landscape in its own right, for its own sake, as we would tend to do if it were in the U.S. and treated as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.  Rather, as I understand it from this article, the Plan truly focuses on social stability and harmony on Lihir.  In this broad context, management of Ailaya will inevitably play an important role, but not necessarily a determinative one, and not in isolation from the rest of what Lihirians value in their culture.

Public Hearings, Public Participation, and Consultation

From Basin and Range Watch at http://basinandrangewatch.org/Stateline.html

September 3, 2011 - The Moreno Valley office of Bureau of Land Management (not the local Needles BLM office) held what was thought to be a scoping meeting at the Primm golf course for First Solar's Stateline Solar Farm application for a Right-of-Way for about 2,200 acres of public land next to the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Members of the public drove hours from as far as Palm Springs, Needles, and Las Vegas and beyond to the meeting thinking that they would be able to give voice to comments concerning the project. Union members, environmentalists, members of the Chemehuevi Tribe, and other concerned citizens attended the meeting hoping to have a chance to give comments in a public venue to the federal agency responsible for permitting the project.

They were denied this chance.

The meeting turned out to be a chance for First Solar to tell the public a few items about the proposed project, and then a "crowd-management" session of tables with various contractors available to answer questions privately. This is not what the public wanted. Quite often, in well-run BLM offices, scoping meetings will give people a chance to vocally enter comments into the record, and even have a recorder present to do this. Often an audience wants to hear other's concerns and learn about different issues and opinions. This is democracy after all.

But lately a new style of scoping has emerged, where the public is handed a sheet of paper and in 75 words or less asked to write comments to be handed in to BLM. No oral comments allowed. Jeffery Childers, BLM Project Manager for the application out of Moreno Valley, California, denied the public any chance to give public comments at this meeting after First Solar gave a brief review of the project. In addition, a county sheriff squad car was parked outside the building, and three BLM Law Enforcement Rangers armed with handguns and tasers were present in the room.

A colleague sent me the above link, asking if I was aware of similar forms of “consultation” or “scoping” used on other projects around the nation. My answer was sort of “a pox on both your houses.”


I’ve seen the basic format described above – presentation followed by breakouts – used quite responsibly in a lot of public participation efforts; it can be a lot more effective than the traditional “public hearing” as a means of sharing information and helping people understand a project and its potential impacts. Public hearings, in my experience, too often devolve into what a tribal colleague once defined for me as “Three-I” sessions: “Inform, get Input, and Ignore.” The proponent makes its pitch, the public officials blather, then each member of the benighted public gets 3 or 5 or 7.2 minutes to speak, and does so with greater or less coherence and vitriol, whereupon the “responsible” agency thanks everyone and checks off “public hearing” on its list of things to do.


It’s sad that people concerned about project impacts, like Basin and Range Watch in this case, put so much stress on public hearings. Such a hearing is a chance to vent, but that’s about all it is.


On the other hand, a “present the project and have breakouts,” by itself, may not accomplish much, and certainly lacks the synergy of a public hearing. It may be particularly ineffective – even counterproductive as seems to have been the case with the First Solar “hearing,” particularly when people have to drive in from considerable distances with the expectation of being heard.


It ought to be noted that neither the traditional hearing nor the “present and breakout” approach constitutes “consultation” as defined in the regulations implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Nor, of course, does it have anything to do with an agency’s responsibility to consult with Indian tribes on a government-to-government basis. Section 106 consultation is defined as:


the process of seeking, discussing, and considering the views of other participants, and, where feasible, seeking agreement with them (36 CFR § 800.16(f), emphasis added).


Tribal consultation, and, I think, all consultation, ought to be similarly understood – you try to find out what people’s concerns are (which may be aided by hearings and presentation/breakout sessions), you discuss them – which means a back and forth conversation, whether face-to-face or via phone, letter, internet or smoke signal – and consider them, and most importantly, unless for some reason it’s not feasible to do so, you seek agreement about how those concerns will be addressed. You may not achieve it, but you try. Which means negotiation, and documenting its results before you make your decision.


That’s how an agency or project proponent actually respects somebody’s concerns. Hearings and presentation/breakout sessions may contribute to this sort of consultation, but they don’t substitute for it.

Reflections on a Visit to China II: The Hegemony of Archaeology

I’m old enough to remember when the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) used to fulminate about “hegemonism.” It was a kind of post-colonial version of rants on colonialism, and referred to how, in the PRC’s view, the U.S., sometimes the Soviet Union, and various European powers tried to push their values and points of view on the rest of the world – to exercise hegemony over everyone else.

The term kept running through my mind in Beijing while listening to papers at the World Archaeological Congress’s Intercongress on Cultural Heritage Management in East and Southeast Asia. It did so because the hegemony exercised by archaeology seemed so manifest in – it seemed – everyone’s understanding of cultural heritage management. There seemed to be a widespread shared assumption that “archaeology” and “cultural heritage” were essentially synonymous. Or rather, that there was academic research archaeology, and then there was cultural heritage, which was essentially applied archaeology and the care and interpretation of archaeological sites and historic architecture (itself not much represented in the WAC’s gathering of archaeologists, co-sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology in the Chinese Academy of Social Science).

I know, I know, this is my usual complaint, expressed in the U.S. context as “cultural resource management isn’t just archaeology and old buildings, dammit!” But it was kind of discouraging to find myself lodging the same mental criticism against what my Asian and European colleagues were doing, and how they were thinking.

It seems so painfully obvious: “cultural heritage” means the heritage of a community, group, tribe, nation, or planet that is cultural in character, and that heritage includes customary ways of doing things, systems of belief, values, practices of all kinds – as well as, rather incidentally, the sites, buildings, building complexes, landscapes, and artifacts with which all those things are associated. When we implicitly, virtually without thinking about it, redefine the term to mean only the sites, buildings, artifacts and other physical leavings of culture, we’re ignoring most of our – everyone’s – heritage. And since most people aren’t interested only in culture’s physical leavings, since most people value their cultures as whole things that include but aren’t limited to stuff on and in the ground, we risk losing, or never gaining, the support of most of the population. Both things strike me as sad, and unwise.

Before someone protests – yes, UNESCO has fairly recently begun promoting the care and feeding of “intangible” cultural heritage, but it’s done so by putting together a convention that reflects the intellectual traditions of site/structure/artifact management. Signatory nations are to put together lists of nifty intangible stuff (Manchurian throat singing is a hot issue in China), and then – uh – do something about it. Exactly what they’re to do besides listing stuff isn’t clear, and of course there are already the inevitable arguments about what ought to be listed, by whom, and how it ought to be described. None of this strikes me as a very useful exercise in cultural heritage management. It does, though, illustrate the hegemony of archaeology (and architectural history) over the cultural heritage game. If something like throat singing is going to be recognized as cultural heritage, it seems, it’s got to be officially vetted, given a professional, official, governmental stamp of approval, and put on an official list. That’s the way we’ve always done it with archaeological sites and old buildings, so that’s obviously what we’d better do with anything else we’re going to call cultural heritage.

Of course, my own paper was about doing it another way – eschewing official lists and professional vettery and simply respecting what people and communities view as their cultural heritage. Leaving them alone to practice it except when some sort of conflict arises, and then consulting respectfully about how to deal with it. I beat the drum as usual for my favorite (sort of official) guidelines on the subject, the Akwe:kon guidelines of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The paper went over like the proverbial pregnant pole-vaulter; people clapped politely and that was that.

Still, though, there were quite a few discussions at the Intercongress about how to engage communities in “cultural heritage” work, and about the effects of things like World Heritage Listing on living communities. It’s not that academic and governmental cultural heritage managers don’t realize that cultural heritage exists in people’s minds and influences people’s behavior, and that it extends beyond the boundaries of sites and the walls of buildings, or that we don’t care about it; it’s that we don’t have a model for dealing with it.

We cultural resource management (CRM) types in the United States sometimes talk like we do have a model, because we, after all, are anthropologists first, archaeologists only second. Unlike those benighted Brits and other old-worlders who define archaeology as a discipline in its own right. But in fact it’s rare that we do much with our anthropology, and particularly rare that we pay much attention to the fundamental anthropological ethic of trying, first of all, to understand, respect, and help the people we “study” in maintaining their own lives, lifeways, and traditions. It’s much easier to focus on the buildings and sites in their own right, for their own sake.

Back in the days when the PRC was beating the drum about hegemonism, we hegemonists pretty much ignored them. Not (I think) that people like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz didn’t see some merit in what they said, but that no one could figure out anything to do about it that didn’t compromise our essential national interests. Similarly in archaeology/CRM/cultural heritage, some of us can recognize that our centralized, bureaucratized, place and thing-dominated models are faulty, but we don’t know what to do about it.

But times change, and things happen, whether we’re ready for them or not. And those once hegemonized can become hegemonists themselves. There’s something to be said for the idea that this is what’s happening today with the PRC vis-à-vis the rest of the world. I wonder what would happen if the people whose sites and buildings we seek to “preserve” in accordance with our own notions of propriety and professionalism ever found a way to exercise real hegemony over us. I wonder how this could happen, and what its outcomes might be.

Reflections on a Visit to China, Part 1: Generalities

Introduction
With my wife, Pat Parker, I recently enjoyed a little under three weeks in the People’s Republic of China. At the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Institute of Archaeology, I gave a paper in Beijing at the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) “Intercongress” on cultural heritage management in eastern and southeastern Asia, and we visited sites around Beijing, Xi’an and the mausoleum of emperor Qin shi Huangdi, often with the kind and knowledgeable assistance of Institute archaeologist Mr. Wang Renyu. On our own (with guides) we visited Hangzhou, Suzhou, Honcun, Xidi, Tongli, the Yellow Mountain Huangshan, and (briefly) Shanghai. I’m very grateful to Mr. Wang, CASS researcher Li Chunlin, Institute Deputy Director Prof. Chen Xingcan, and all their colleagues, as well as our China Odyssey guides, for making our visit a pleasurable and very educational one.

Three weeks in a country confers no expertise in its character, history, archaeology or culture, but there may be something to be said for first impressions, so I’m going to take this opportunity to offer a few reflections on our visit, for whatever they may be worth.

Environmental Matters

What they say about the air in Beijing is true. Within three days, the Navajo silver bracelet that Pat routinely wears had turned black (it cleaned up, though). Luckily (or maybe due to cloud seeding) there was then a thunderstorm and the sky turned clear and blue. But yes, pollution is a serious issue. However, there is apparently a serious effort underway to reduce emissions. For example, almost every rooftop seemed to sport a solar water heater. I saw few or no photovoltaic arrays, but lots of solar heating was going on. And while there are certainly too many gasoline and diesel vehicles on the (extensive and seemingly well-maintained) expressways, we also saw a vast number of bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and other vehicles driven by electricity, heavy use of public transport, and a lot of cars running on compressed natural gas.

As an inveterate recycler, I was charmed to see recycling bins almost everywhere, side-by-side with containers for non-recyclable trash, clearly labeled but often disguised as architectural forms compatible with historic structures, as rocks, as ancient urns, and in other clever ways. And lots and lots of people collecting discarded trash, moving huge piles of flattened cardboard boxes to collection points, and so on. The big cities we visited (e.g. Beijing, Shanghai) were remarkably clean, as big cities go.

I came away with no clear idea of how environmental impact assessment (EIA) is done. That it is done, somehow or other, was clear from, for example, an interesting paper at the Intercongress on archaeological survey and data recovery along a stretch of the humongous South-to-North Water Transfer Project (where, as here, “avoidance” of archaeological sites is apparently given precedence over excavation/destruction). Clearly studies are done and efforts are made to minimize and otherwise mitigate impacts, but it’s not clear to me how it happens, or what range of environmental variables are addressed. I’d like to know more.

Oh yes – and we rode the bullet train from Hangzhou to Shanghai the day after two similar trains collided not far away in Wenzhou City, and for what it’s worth, it was clean, pleasant, quiet, fully loaded with passengers, and really fast. And on time. I can’t testify to its safety, except to say that we survived, and enjoyed the ride.

Social-Cultural-Political Matters

We saw no particular evidence of oppression or repression (though there was no getting on Facebook, and one of the sites on which I routinely “click-to-donate” was blocked – doubtless because the donations go to Amnesty International). On the contrary, we were impressed at how many people we saw simply enjoying themselves – dancing, singing, and playing traditional instruments in the parks, in one case an apparently impromptu brass band of retirees playing patriotic music while people around them sang with seemingly unrestrained enthusiasm. We found people to be unfailingly gracious, friendly, and seemingly positive in their outlooks. And we were impressed at the volume of internal tourism we saw: thousands upon thousands of Chinese tourists crowding every historic or scenic site we visited, apparently having a good time and appreciating their country’s heritage. And having the disposable income to do so.

But in talking with some ordinary citizens, where language barriers permitted (neither Pat nor I, alas, speak Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect, and Rosetta Stone, while helpful, wasn’t enough), I was interested to encounter a lot of pretty frank expressions of unhappiness with corruption at high levels of government, inefficiencies, restraints on freedom of speech (especially as regards the Internet), and the growing gap between rich and poor. “Communism is dead,” one person volunteered; “all we have left is the Party.” And we crossed paths with one group of high Party officials getting the royal treatment at a couple of hotels where we stayed, to the disgruntlement of some around us. Of course, one could hear similar things expressed, and see similar kowtows to authority, in the U.S.

I couldn’t resist the impression, though – in the context of observing the incredible amounts of money being lavished on historic site development and internal tourism – that the government is pursuing a sort of bread and circuses policy: giving the people enough goodies to keep them off the streets, except when engaged in seemingly innocuous pursuits like tourism.

Cultural Heritage Management

Speaking of which: we were literally agog at the financial resources the PRC and its provincial governments are committing to aspects of cultural heritage/cultural resource management. At Xi’an, for example, the site of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) Daming Palace – leveled hundreds of years ago and built over – has been cleared (relocating 100,000 or so people in the process) and developed as an archaeological park complete with a reconstructed monumental gatehouse, a scale model of the whole palace complex, an interactive archaeological museum (that even tries to explain field methodology!), and an Imax movie house showing relevant 3-D movies.

That’s before you leave town to go visit the first emperor, Qin shi Huangdi (aka Qin shi Huang, Qin Shihuangdi; 259-210 BCE) in his mausoleum, guarded by his terra cotta soldiers and horses. The terra cotta army as excavated so far is actually about a quarter mile from the mausoleum, in a very handsome park/museum complex incorporating the ongoing excavations. There are lots of soldiers, horses, and chariots, apparently, still to be uncovered, and who knows what else?

A quarter-mile away, the protected, still unexcavated mausoleum itself (bigger than the Great Pyramid of Khufu) and its extensive grounds have also become a park, with two museums under construction on the sites of major discoveries of burials, bronze chariots, armor, and other remarkable stuff. There are moves afoot to clear away nearby residential and industrial developments and expand the controlled area. All these developments are relatively recent; Mr. Wang showed me images from the early 20th century showing the whole area under agricultural use.

Xi’an is not unique in its attention to and investment in cultural and natural heritage sites. We saw similar investments being made in the interpretation and development of segments of the Great Wall, the Zhokoudian H. erectus site, river towns on the lower Yangtze, the Bund in Shanghai, and the Yellow Mountain Huangshan. All these places – most of them inscribed in the World Heritage List (and proudly advertised as such) were drawing vast, vast numbers of tourists, all paying fees for the privilege of visiting.

I was very impressed – mostly favorably – by all this investment, and all this interest. But the impression of bread and circuses continued to rattle around in my mind, and it generated another (though related) niggling worry as well. The history of China is characterized by a series of fairly autocratic imperial dynasties punctuated by peasant revolts. The uprising of 1989 that we associate with Tiananmen Square (where now a huge TV screen straddles the space, complicating assembly while inspiring with scenic and patriotic views but, I’m told, playing hell with the place’s feng shui) can be viewed as a recent unsuccessful example of the latter; the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was, in a twisted way, another such revolt. I had to wonder – viewing the magnificent cultural site developments, many of them seeming to glorify the imperial past (There’s a huge statue of Qin shi Huangdi – by all accounts not a very nice fellow – that greets visitors to the terra cotta army), and hearing people grumble about the rich/poor divide and the power of the Party – is the PRC government setting itself up for another revolt, and is “cultural heritage,” in the form of all these magnificent archaeological parks and similar developments, likely to become a target of revolutionary ire?

As it did, in many ways, during the Cultural Revolution. Countless times we were told: “There used to be a Buddhist shrine here, but during the Cultural Revolution….,” or “There was a handsome tablet here memorializing the ancestors, but during the Cultural Revolution….” I sat one day in the garden of a 19th century Qing Dynasty official, handsomely restored by his son in the early 20th century before he, the son (also a distinguished government official) was denounced and had to flee the country during the Cultural Revolution. The garden was classic – a complex of plantings, elaborate pavings, sculptures and stone constructions providing delightful vistas and enclaves. Many of the trees were marked with old marble slabs on which genus and species were inscribed in Chinese and Latin. I thought, “How beautiful, and erudite, and precious (in both senses of the word),” and – rather to my surprise – found myself kind of sympathizing with the Cultural Revolutionaries. I imagined them wondering, with sneering ire, where this aristocrat got off sitting around contemplating his beautiful garden and pondering the splendors of speciation when The People were suffering? It was an easy jump to imagining contemporary or near-future revolutionaries asking similar questions about massive investments in exhibiting the relics of past emperors.

Only after I’d left China did it occur to me to wonder whether anybody is pursuing the archaeology of the 700,000 workers said to have been involved in building Qin shi Huangdi’s mausoleum – along the lines of the recent exploration of the workers’ town associated with the Giza pyramids. It seems like some serious attention would be in order to the archaeology of the common people on whose labors the emperor (and every emperor) depended – both because it would be fascinating research and because it would convey a more populist, if not precisely communist, message to the visiting public about the glories of China’s past.

-- To be continued --

My Blather in Beijing

Here's the paper I'm scheduled to present next week in Beijing at the World Archaeological Intercongress on Heritage Management in East and Southeast Asia.  I'm grateful to WAC and the Institute of Archaeology in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for the invitation to do so.

Cultural Heritage, Environmental Impact Assessment, and People

Abstract: Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is the procedure by which the impacts of proposed construction and land-use projects are assessed and – in theory – made to influence development decisions. Cultural heritage tends to be poorly considered in EIA. Much of the blame lies with cultural heritage professionals. We tend to focus our energy on inscribing places in formal lists, and on debates about the formal interpretation of such places. We are too wrapped up in promoting the selective presentation and management of places that governments recognize as significant, and we too easily facilitate development schemes by excavating and thus removing sites that lie in their way. Most importantly we fail to engage the people of our countries, who alone have the power to redirect destructive development. We fail to engage them by failing to respect them and the places that they think are significant. Instead we insist that they respect our evaluations of places and our plans for management. We come to be seen as elitist, and as junior partners in the very development projects that destroy heritage. As junior partners we are easily ignored when conflicts arise between development and heritage, and the people who should be our allies in pushing back against destruction find us irrelevant to their concerns. We need to reconsider our priorities, and our methods of pursuing them.

Introduction: Assessing Environmental Impacts and Cultural Heritage

It is no secret that development projects of all kinds – housing and agricultural schemes, dams, highways, rail lines – do injury to the environment, however justified they may be on economic, social, and even environmental grounds. One has to destroy in order to build; it is in the nature of the enterprise. To control such damage, since the early 1970s virtually every national government, and such nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as the World Bank, have put in place procedures for “environmental impact assessment” (EIA). The reason for such procedures is summed up in the Confucian’ maxim: “If you do not consider the future, you will be in trouble when it comes near.” Governments and funding bodies should consider what damage a project is likely to do before they decide whether and how to go forward with it. This is not to say that damaging projects should not be undertaken: only that if we know what damage is likely to occur, perhaps we can do things to keep it from happening, to reduce its severity, or make up for the damage somehow.

Of course, among the aspects of the environment that can be damaged by modern activities are what we call “cultural heritage.” We in this conference can probably all agree that potential impacts on cultural heritage should be closely examined in the course of EIA, that alternatives to damaging activities should be considered, that steps should be taken to avoid or reduce the damage. In general terms, the world’s people seem to agree; most communities react badly to actions that they perceive as damaging to their cultural heritage, and most governmental guidelines for EIA indicate that impacts on cultural heritage should be considered in planning.

Often, however, when EIA is performed on proposed projects, not much attention is paid to cultural heritage. EIA analysts merely list affected historic monuments or places included in the World Heritage List, and assert that these will be taken care of by following whatever standard procedures governments have put in place. Often the people and communities whose heritage is most at risk are poorly engaged in the process of EIA, their heritage values are poorly considered in planning, and the steps taken to mitigate impacts – decided on by project proponents and governments, if indeed any such steps are taken – are inadequate or even irrelevant to the people whose heritage is affected.

In my experience there are several common, interrelated reasons that cultural heritage is not addressed well in EIA. In this paper I want to outline some of these problems, and suggest steps that we might take to solve them.

Problem One: What is Cultural Heritage?

Different people conceptualize cultural heritage in different ways, and this complicates its consideration in EIA. In my own experience in the United States and the Pacific islands, and in reading the international literature, I find that cultural heritage is variously defined to include – or exclude (among other things) –

• Monuments, archaeological sites, and cultural landmarks;

• Traditional ways of using the land and its resources;

• Culturally important plants and animals;

• Stories, songs, philosophy and language;

• Traditional forms of subsistence;

• Traditional ways of life;

• Religious and cultural practices;

• Objects of material culture (artifacts, antiquities);

• Art forms, and

• Books, manuscripts, and other literary products.

Each of us academic and professional practitioners specializes in one or more of the above types of heritage. Most of us at this conference, in fact, specialize in a subdivision of the first type shown on my list: archaeological sites, which may also be thought of as historic places and/or landmarks. We understandably do not take responsibility for other kinds of cultural expression, other parts of the cultural environment. But here is the problem: we also often fail to inform those who plan and carry out EIA that we are not authorities on all aspects of cultural heritage. And we fail to recommend that they consult those who are authorities on cultural things other than archaeology, notably including the local people themselves. This results in assessments in which “cultural heritage” is equated entirely with monuments or archaeology, while the other aspects of culture are given little consideration or even ignored entirely. These aspects of the cultural environment may be just as worthy of protection as – even more worthy than – archaeological sites, and they may be much more the concern of local people, but if they are considered in EIA at all, they are often considered in spite of us rather than with our support.

Consider, for example, animals or plants that figure importantly in a community’s self-identity. I have been involved lately with the Okinawa dugong, significant in the beliefs of traditional Okinawans; the dugongs’ habitat is threatened by the proposed construction of a new U.S. military base. To those performing EIA on the project, the dugongs were simply animals of professional concern to biologists and natural resource managers. To the local people, however, the dugong is literally a sacred animal. Had it not been for legal intervention by Okinawan, Japanese, and U.S. environmental groups, and near-violent demonstrations on the project site by Okinawans, the cultural value of the dugongs and their habitat to the people of Okinawa would have been ignored in the military’s EIA and its decision making about the project.

Problem Two: The Limitations of Traditional Thinking About Cultural Heritage

EIA has developed as a widespread aspect of governmental and non-governmental planning only in the last half-century. The management of historic landmarks, monuments, and archaeological resources, of course, has a more venerable history, by some reckonings going back to the 10th century ACE and perhaps farther. Organized government systems for heritage management were being put in place in Europe by the early 19th century, and spread across the world with colonialism. So the ways archaeologists, architectural historians, and our close colleagues think about our aspects of cultural heritage were well set in place before EIA ever came on the scene. These ways of thinking feature the following more or less standard elements:

• A narrow focus on places: that is, buildings, other structures, monuments, and archaeological sites, and on portable antiquities;

• The compilation of official lists of heritage places, variously called registers, inventories, and schedules, among other things;

• An expectation that listed heritage places should be preserved unchanged in perpetuity;

• Little or no consideration given to places not on official lists, or regarded as eligible for them;

• Official governmental bodies that compile and maintain lists, and promote preservation;

• Laws and regulations aimed at protecting listed places to varying degrees, or at least at reserving to government the right to destroy them.

• More or less rigorous constraints on the private appropriation of heritage places, or of antiquities.

These standard elements are embedded not only in the legal systems of most nations, but in such international instruments as the World Heritage List. Even when we try to bend our minds around cultural things that are not archaeological sites and historic landmarks, we automatically apply our traditional ways of thinking. The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, for example, directs that signatory nations compile lists of intangible cultural heritage, despite the inherent fluidity and evanescence of intangible culture.

When this list-based, hierarchical, bureaucratic and rather rigid system of thought intersects with EIA, it further narrows the scope of impact analysis. Not only does EIA come to represent archaeological sites and landmarks as the only culturally significant aspects of an affected environment, it tends to recognize as significant only those sites and landmarks that government has officially declared and listed as such. In the United States, for instance – to hold up only my own country as a sad example – if a local community fears that a place it holds to have cultural significance may be destroyed by government action and wants it considered in EIA, it must show that the place is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. This requires the community to explain the place’s significance to government archaeologists and architectural historians, following technical regulations issued by the National Park Service and understood only by specialists. In most EIA documents in the United States, if a place has not been found to be eligible for the National Register, it is assumed to be of no significance, and can be destroyed with impunity. And cultural heritage that is not embodied in places – animals, plants, belief systems, traditional food – has almost no chance of being considered in EIA. This strikes me, at least, as a strange way for a grandly self-proclaimed democracy to consider its impacts on the cultural values of its people.

Problem Three: Attitudes and Assumptions

When people conducting EIA seek to consider the cultural aspects of the environment, they understandably turn for advice to government’s cultural heritage authorities – ministries of culture, official archaeological surveys, agencies that maintain schedules or registers of cultural places and things. They assume that such authorities can advise them about – perhaps even provide them with a list of – significant cultural heritage that may be affected.

The cultural heritage authorities often have little understanding of EIA, but they do know their own programs, regulations, policies, and professional specialties. As far as they know, when they are asked to advise about cultural heritage, they are being asked to advise about what is on their lists, what they are officially responsible for, or what falls within the ambit of their professional expertise. They advise about archaeological sites, scheduled monuments, registered buildings. What they almost certainly do not advise about is how to interact with local people, local communities, to find out what they think is important and what they think ought to be done about it. That sort of engagement has never been part of the portfolio of most government heritage offices, and few of them are staffed, funded, trained or encouraged to promote such engagement.

Presuming that they now know what cultural heritage may be involved, the people conducting EIA duly report it and proceed to analyze environmental impacts without further consideration of culture. If local people and other interest groups then object – perhaps violently – to what they think the project will do to their heritage, it often comes as a surprise to the project’s proponents and their EIA specialists (and perhaps to the cultural heritage authorities as well).

Government, Culture, and People

This situation is fundamentally unfair and counter-democratic, and it undercuts our efforts to preserve cultural heritage. Surely it is true that only the citizens of our countries, only the people, have the power to redirect and control destructive development, but our traditional ways of managing heritage disconnects us from the people. By focusing attention only on the kinds of heritage that we understand and appreciate, we fail to engage the people. By failing to respect them and the things that they think are significant, by insisting instead that they respect our evaluations of heritage, our ways of discussing it, and our plans for its management, we cause ourselves to be seen as elitist and irrelevant to the people’s interests. This leaves us in a relatively powerless position when confronting the development projects that destroy heritage. We become, in essence, junior partners in such developments, and as such we are easily ignored when conflicts arise between development and heritage.

Ironically, failing to engage the people and address the heritage they value can also impede development projects. I have personally seen important, highly justified projects held up for years, at very high cost, and sometimes abandoned altogether, because of last-minute controversies over locally valued cultural heritage. These controversies often could have been avoided or efficiently resolved had affected people and communities been respectfully consulted, early in project planning.

I suggest that it is in everyone’s interests – the interests of governments, of archaeologists and other heritage professionals, of our institutions and agencies, of communities world-wide, and of the development community, to make EIA more sensitive to cultural heritage, broadly defined, and notably to the cultural values of local communities. Interestingly, a way to do this has been offered, not by us cultural heritage experts, but by biologists.

The Akwé: Kon Guidelines

The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity – a convention to which China and other Asian countries are signatories but my country, I am sorry to say, is not – has produced a sophisticated set of guidelines for considering cultural heritage in EIA. These guidelines are called “Akwé: Kon”(“Ahgwégoh”) a term in the language of the North American Mohawk tribe meaning “everything in creation.” They outline how to conduct social, cultural, and environmental impact assessments in concert with affected communities.

A government or NGO planning some form of land-use – say a dam, a highway, an agricultural or urban revitalization scheme, or a power plant – that is conscientiously following Akwé: Kon would actively and creatively engage local communities in every aspect of project planning. It would work with such communities to identify who speaks for different cultural interests. It would learn how to communicate with these groups, find out and record their concerns and negotiate ways to address those concerns. In doing so, it would make sure that affected groups have the financial and other resources necessary to participate fully in impact assessment and decision making. It would negotiate and put in place agreements with the communities about how the impacts of the project would be identified and considered. Following such agreements, it would conduct cultural impact studies addressing the project’s possible impacts on, for example:

…cultural heritage, religions, beliefs and sacred teachings, customary practices, forms of social organization, sys¬tems of natural resource use, including patterns of land use, places of cul¬tural significance, economic valuation of cultural resources, sacred sites, ceremonies, languages, customary law systems, and political structures, roles and customs.

(Secretariat of the CBD 2004:13)

The scope of such studies would take into account:

(a) Possible impacts on continued customary use of biological resources;


(b) Possible impacts on the respect, preservation, protection and mainte¬nance of traditional knowledge, innovations and practices;


(c) Protocols (negotiated with communities);


(d) Possible impacts on sacred sites and associated ritual or ceremonial activities;


(e) Respect for the need for cultural privacy; and


(f) Possible impacts on the exercise of customary laws.

(Secretariat of the CBD 2004:14)

The government or NGO would carry out environmental assessments coordinated with the cultural assessments. These would “respect existing inherent land and treaty rights as well as legally established rights of indigenous and local communities” and “con¬tribute to the protection of the rights of indigenous and local communities by recognizing (their) distinct activities, customs and beliefs…” Such assessments would consider, among other more strictly eco-biological factors:

• areas of particular economic significance (as hunting areas and trapping sites, fishing grounds, gathering areas, grazing lands, timber harvesting sites and other harvesting areas);


• particularly significant physical features and other natural factors which provide for biodiversity and ecosystems (e.g. watercourses, springs, lakes, mines/quarries that supply local needs); and


• sites of religious, spiritual, ceremonial and sacred significance (such as sacred groves and totemic sites).


(Secretariat of the CBD 2004:16-17)

Coordinated social impact assessments would:

…. take into account gen¬der and demographic factors, housing and accommodation, employment, infrastructure and services, income and asset distribution, traditional systems and means of production, as well as educational needs, technical skills and financial implications… and evaluate …. tangible benefits to such communities, such as non-hazardous job creation, viable revenue from the levying of appropriate fees from beneficiaries of such developments, access to markets and diversification of income opportunities.

(Secretariat of the CBD 2004: 18)

Economic assessments would recognize that:

…changes to traditional practices for food production, or (that) involve the introduction of commercial cultivation and harvesting of a particular wild species (e.g. to supply market demands for particular herbs, spices, medicinal plants, fish, fur or leather) may lead to pressures to restructure traditional systems of land tenure or expropriate land, and to pressures on the sustainable use of biological diversity, in order to accommodate new scales of production. The ramifications of these kinds of changes can be far-reaching and need to be properly assessed, taking into account the value systems of indigenous and local communities. Likely impacts associated with the cultivation and/or commercial harvesting of wild species should also be assessed and addressed.

(Secretariat of the CBD 2004: 19-20)

The results of all these assessments would be brought back to the community and coordinated with its own planning, in a transparent, consultative manner, with provision made for the resolution of disputes (Secretariat of the CBD 2004:22-25).

Opting for Akwé: Kon

An EIA system based on Akwé: Kon would not discourage consideration of things like World Heritage sites and places or things listed in a national schedule or register, but it would recognize that those who are fixated on such places – that is, let’s admit it, many of us – constitute only one set of cultural stakeholders, whose values are not privileged over those of others, notably including local people. It would be significantly more democratic, more transparent, more inclusive than most existing systems. It would also, I think, produce a higher degree of predictability for development project proponents than they currently enjoy.

Adopting an Akwé: Kon based system would require administrative, legislative, and policy actions of different kinds, depending on the nation or NGO involved. In the U.S., unfortunately, it would require action by our legislative bodies, which is very unlikely to happen. In nations with less fossilized EIA and cultural heritage systems than ours, and among NGOs and even private-sector development proponents, there is probably much more hope.

I have no magic formula for replacing the world’s ineffective cultural heritage systems with something like Akwé: Kon, and I certainly have no wisdom to impart. My purpose here today is just to suggest that many of our existing systems for relating cultural heritage to EIA are self-defeating, and to suggest that we consider such creative alternatives as Akwé: Kon. I hope that WAC and other cultural heritage organizations, and the smart young people who are rising to leadership in such organizations, will undertake this consideration.

Gail Cohen’s Comments on the Cape Cod Dune Shacks: An Example

Introduction

I post the following comments with their author's permission – the original addressed to the Superintendent of Cape Cod National Seashore – for a couple of reasons.

First, the case of the Dune Shacks is really a classic. The Shacks, which have been occupied by a self-defined community of non-conformist artists, writers, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells for generations, is obviously a traditional cultural property (TCP) by any reasonable definition, has and has been found so by repeated studies into which the National Park Service has thrown good money and bad. But NPS won’t agree that they're eligible for the National Register as a TCP; no, no. They are eligible, says NPS (and indeed are on the Register), but simply as pieces of interesting vernacular architecture with historical associations but no links to the living community's cultural identity. The Register staff itself have gone along with this, as they regularly do when it's NPS making the outrageous determinations (How could they do otherwise, and expect to coast untroubled on through to retirement?). 

Why is NPS so up-tight about the matter?  Apparently because it perceives, with some justification, that if the Shacks are viewed as a TCP, its representatives would have to (horrors!) consult with the Shacks’ residents and friends about their management, and perhaps not have the free hand it wants to have in evicting people and wasting tax dollars on prettying the Shacks up for tourists. 

My second reason for posting Gail’s comments -- which apparently relate to a currently proposed NPS plan for the Shacks -- is that they’re exemplary of the form in which comments often come in from concerned, knowledgeable, impassioned citizens in cases like this, and the form is likely to cause public servants in agencies and SHPO offices to throw up their hands in despair. The comments are longish and rather rambling. They assume a considerable level of knowledge on the part of the reader about the place, the case, the situation, the issues, the individuals involved. They assume that the reader has been paying attention to the nuances of the case.

All reasonable enough assumptions for a citizen to have, one might think, and we oughtn't expect concerned citizens not to express their concerns, in their own vernacular.  But for the SHPO staffer trying to juggle a hundred simultaneous cases while his or her job is threatened by budget cuts and he or she is being burdened with a thousand kinds of administrivia, it has to be enough to cause hair-tearing and the temptation to toss the whole thing into a file and forget it. It’s to the considerable credit of the Massachusetts SHPO that they’ve not done this; they keep poking NPS about the matter.  I suspect, however – no, I know – that in other cases such tossing and forgetting is exactly what pretty routinely happens. It’s a problem that preservation authorities ought to attend to, if they expect to build and maintain public support.  At the same time, members of the public ought to try to remember that they're trying to communicate with real, overworked people, and try to make it as easy as possible for those people to get the point that they're trying to make.

Tom

Public Comments (number 50 or so). DUNE SHACKS - Historic District Preservation and Use
Plan Etc. By Gail Cohen


Maria Burks put a hold on years of Injustice to the Dune Dwellers, Betrayal to the Citizens of Cape Cod, and to Provincetown concerning the promises made to the People in the Hearings that led up to, and in the Legislation that created the Cape Cod National Seashore. Maria let the Dune Dwellers stay when their stipulations ran out - the Tasha’s, Lawrence Schuster, and Zara Ofsevit Jackson in 2005.

George Price to this date refuses to attempt to make the National Park Service more Just, but he Could - as could any one in the National Park Service, any Congressman or Senator, and the Secretary Of The Interior. The person who does this would be a Hero or Heroine.

They could never erase the pain of the Dune Dwellers since 1961, those evicted, those harassed, and those who had their Dune Shacks (cottages) destroyed by the Cape Cod National Seashore. They could never erase the pain of the American Taxpayer over the Millions of dollars spent litigating the Dune Dwellers, the numerous public comment periods, reports, outside consultants, battles over the eligibility of the Dune Shacks to the National Register Of Historic Places, and that of the Traditional Cultural Property where the CCNS went against the recommendation of the person hired to make that determination.

It is high time that the Cape Cod National Seashore, and National Park Service start telling the Truth about the Dune Shacks (cottages). Not only has this continually been withheld, as evident in the recent released Listing of the Dune Shacks on the National Register for which no one from the Public or Dune Dwellers were allowed to speak to the outside consultant (PAL) that did the Listing, but the CCNS has directly lied to the Press telling them that none of the Dune Dwellers had any Property Rights when the last three law cases proved property rights, and others had deeds whose dune shacks were moved from their tracts due to the nature of the dunes, and peril of falling into the sea.

The only real dune dwellers are those whose dune shacks and property were taken by Eminent Domain in 1969, and 1971. Every thing concerning the Dune Shacks should have this FACT included. No One handed their dune shack over to the Cape Cod National Seashore. The Braaton’s did loan their dune shack to the U. S. Navy during WWII which threw out Eugene O’Neill’s sink, as much of the dune shack was salvage from the Peaked Hill Coast Guard Station where O’Neill lived that fell into the sea. Even though this was long gone, the O’Neill Estate property - over 50 acres was taken by Eminent Domain when the rest of the dune shacks and property were taken by the National Park Service.

However, one dune dweller who sold the CCNS land was allowed to stay - except for a cement foundation his dune shack was as all of the others. His was destroyed, so one was built on his Father’s property. One has to wonder why his was declared Improve Property, when the others who had deeds and proved their property rights in court were not . To understand this one only has to look as to why a Congressman was allowed to stay in Cayuga Recreation (National Park) when all others were forced out.

CCNS refused to let me speak to Bob Wolfe. I did the last day when he presented his findings which was the first time recognized that the CCNS destroyed many dune shacks on purpose - Tony Vevers when he was away teaching, 2 of Ozzie Ball’s, 2 of Grace Bessay’s - one in which the CCNS forced her to pay for its destruction, Carl Tasha’s, 3 of Pat Patricks, others that the fire department were given as fire practice, and Charlie Schmid’s that was bulldoze, and Herbert Olson had one protester actually picked up by the bull dozer. The dune shack was left in rubble for a year on the dunes inspiring the creation of Peaked Hill Trust by outraged citizens.

The Fleurant, Watson, Jones, and the Boat House were allowed to rot. The CCNS was to be cited for Demolition By Neglect. That is why they were allowed to be leased due to the extensive repairs that had to be made. Otherwise, they would not have been occupied. Even though the CCNS was mandated in 1989 to maintain the dune shacks once they were declared eligible for the National Register - the dune shacks were leased, and all of the owners which they were called had the full burden of maintaining them. I have often talked about Leo Fluerant’s jeep buried in the sand with the top of the jeep sticking out reminding me of the Statue Of Liberty in the film PLANET OF THE APES.

James Killion of the CCNS once he retired admitted that he did not even tell many of the dune dwellers that instead of Life, the stipulations could be for 25 years. Frenchie Chanel would not sign her stipulation until it was added that her daughter could have the dune shack for her lifetime which they did include. Yet, the Chaplins had to spend 18 years in court to get the exact same stipulation for their children as the NPS would not pay them what they were owed for their property claiming they had no money, though David Adams was paid the hundreds of thousand of dollars owed to him as their properties are oceanfront. All 3 dune dwellers who remained in court wanted to stay in their dune shacks only.

In Grace Bessay’s Historic law case (the oldest individual Federal one in America) the judges kept saying NO PUBLIC UTILITIES. Under the legislation that created the Cape Cod National Seashore the dune shacks only had to be in accordance with local zoning laws which they were. Instead the courts applied the Federal definition. The U.S. Court of Appeals did not even care that the dune shacks had just been declared eligible for the Historic Register in which public utilities were not allowed. Grace Bessay proved her property rights, but as in the other dune shack law cases, except for Conrad Malicoat they were not declared Improved Property. In the Legislation that created the Cape Cod National Seashore the dune shacks are listed as Improved Property.

George Price likes to state that the Dune Shack Stipulations which all were forced to sign will be enforced. Yet, Herbert Olson, a former Superintendent went against the stipulations for Hazel Hawthorne Werner’s dune shacks by allowing Peaked Hill Trust as an experiment to use Hazel’s two dune shacks while she was still alive.

The stipulations as do most state for residential use only. Later stipulations did not allow dune dwellers to rent for less than 90 days, or at all. Yet, all the 3 non-profits are allowed to rent out the 6 dune shacks given to them, or allowed for a large sum of money. Ironically, this was the reason given by the Keeper of the Register in denying the dune shacks Traditional Cultural Property status - that the non-profit stays were temporary. Peaked Hill Trust was founded because the Cape Cod National Seashore was destroying, and intended to destroy all of the dune shacks. There is not one word about Dune Shacks in their original Charter. They did initiate the Historic Register status, however the dune shacks were saved in 1989 by the efforts of many, and Beth Savage at the National Register. I saved the 3 that were allowed to rot by the Cape Cod National Seashore, and eventually were leased under historic leasing agreements.

That this report and the Historic Register Listing calls the Fuller-Bessay Dune Shack the Al Fearing Dune Shack is ridiculous, and directed at Peter Clemons and his Family as well as Grace Bessay who was in court for 23 years. Grace was evicted 3 times. At the 11th hour an agreement was reached. The Supreme Court would not hear her law case. This was wrong, and what happen to Grace has happen to many all over the country by the National Park Service. Change the name of this dune shack which has been on all of the owner/occupancy lists since the 1960’s. It should be done immediately. It was Dorothy Fearing who testified in Grace Bessay’s law case on her behalf.

It is clear that the Cape Cod National Seashore, and the National Park Service CONTINUE to destroy dune shack culture, and ignore the findings of Bob Wolfe. It is clear that the National Register of Historic Places needs to be removed from the National Park Service which is totally political, and does the bidding of the NPS. The Keeper of the Register refused to sign the eligibility statement in 1989 which is why Beth Savage had to sign it. Paul Loether refused to say what was the recommendation of his Staff when the Keeper at the time, Janet Matthews denied Traditional Cultural Property Status. NPS and the National Register claimed there was NOTHING in writing about the above when I filed for Freedom of Information documents. The conclusions of the Consensus Building Institute which were paid over $100,000 were the Exact Same as those reached in 1991 by the Dune Shack Subcommittee of the Advisory Commission of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The highlight of injustice is George Price making sure that he is not responsible for choosing who remains in the dune shacks, and had the rule changed so that it will be the NE Regional Office, and the Director of the National Park Service who will decide.
I have been involved now for 23 years in the dune shack/dune dweller issues. At every turn there has been injustice, lies, false and incomplete information. It is not the Dune Dwellers problem, but that of the American Taxpayer, and all citizens of Cape Cod who have been betrayed by the Federal Government. Promises were not kept, nor was the 1961 Legislation adhered to over the years. The Cape Cod National SEASHORE has been treated like all other National Parks. It was not suppose to be.

If there is any brave person out there, or George Price wants to be known for something good - I am submitting what little Justice can be gotten NOW. Even though Senator John Kerry claimed in a press release that the Dune Shacks Were a Traditional Cultural Property, he was ignored and there was no appeal at all allowed by the Keeper of the National Register. The only real solution for the Dune Dwellers can come from simple Legislation as that of Mineral King Permit Cabins, or by the Secretary of the Interior who should have in the 1960’s declared all of them Improved Property. Those at Mineral King have no property rights at all, but were allowed to stay, and pass them on to their families and heirs. This has to happen to sweep away decades of INJUSTICE. It is way too late for those who suffered the most now dead. A little Justice though can be had if someone has the courage to right the wrongs of the National Park Service and Cape Cod National Seashore.

HARRY KEMP IS WATCHING. The following should be implemented:

1. Jean Miller Cohen Dune Shack - I have no objection to the Provincetown Community Compact keeping this dune shack. However, if relatives of Jean Cohen or heirs exist they should have a week or two weeks. Please note that because this dune shack was in the Province Lands, Jean Miller Cohen got only a 15 year stipulation. The State did not recognize squatter rights. Her heirs had the dune shack, and were evicted. One died, but if the other one is still alive he should have a week or two at the dune shack. I have been told that Bob Wolfe put in his report that it was the Gail Cohen dune shack. This is untrue, and I am not related to Jean Cohen.

2. Leo Fleurant Dune Shack - Emily Bebe, and Evelyn Simon spent thousand of dollars rehabilitating this dune shack that had been left to rot by the Cape Cod National Seashore. They should be allowed to stay, and their lease renewed for a long term.

3. David and Marcia Adams Guest Cottage - The Adams family should be allowed to stay, and have use of this cottage.

4. David and Marcia Adams Dune Shack - The Adams family should be allowed to stay. They have total property rights, and were paid over $400,000. However, all of the dune shacks are Improved Property and were thus should not have been TAKEN. Just for keeping them in court for so many years, they should be allowed to keep the money. A way to pay back is documented in the film FOR THE COMMON GOOD, when the residents of Cayuga National Recreation Center (now changed to Park) were evicted, and paid for their property when they thought the Secretary of the Interior were going to let them stay. I have been told that after throwing these people and businesses out that new ones are in that Park which was also not to be treated like all the other National Parks.

5. Hazel Hawthorne Werner Dune Shack - Euphoria -- I have no objection to Peaked Hill Trust keeping this dune shack. However, only if they tell everyone they rent to about Hazel. Also, as soon as Aaron Avellar died - his wife Anna and sons were no longer given their week or two in Hazel’s dune shack. This time in Hazel’s dune shacks needs to be reinstated immediately. In addition, last time I spoke with Sue and the Uffords - Hazel’s other relatives - they had never been picked for the PHT lottery. A week or two should be set aside for them in one of Hazel’s two dune shacks.

6. Hazel Hawthorne Werner Dune Shack - Thalassic -- Same as Above. I will add that Hazel’s family is not happy at all with Peaked Hill Trust. The relationship is strained due to how the family was treated. I am annoyed that when Hazel late in life tried to go to her dune shacks - PHT was not able to get her up there though they tried. They should have succeeded.

7. Boris Margo and Jan Gelb Dune Shack - This dune shack should never have been given to Peaked Hill Trust. Murray Zimiles helped Boris build the dune shack. He paid the taxes when letting PHT use it before Boris died. He, and the entire Family are artists. Though Dawn Zimiles works at the Fine Arts Center run by Hattie Fitts, they have never spoken about the pain of the Family losing the dune shack. Murray Zimiles applied for it, and the CCNS instead gave it to Peaked Hill Trust. This was wrong, and needs immediately to be rectified. Murray was given two weeks at the dune shack by Peaked Hill Trust. They then reduced it to one week. This dune shack needs to go back to Murray Zimiles who can then decide if PHT can rent the dune shack when the family is not using it. The Family has a close relationship with the memory of Boris and Jan.
8. Harry Kemp (Tasha) Dune Shack - Harry Kemp willed his dune shack to Carl Tasha. Coastguardman and Provincetown Player Frank Henderson had given him the dune shack in writing. Due to his being underage, the dune shack was obtained by his Mother - Sunny Tasha for the Family. Carl was a brilliant artist and sculptor who also made jewelry though PAL did not mention him in the National Register Listing. Sunny Tasha was a Provincetown Icon who had survived the Johnstown Flood. Of course, the Tasha Family should remain in this Dune Shack, as should the upcoming generations. If the Tasha’s had remained in court, they would have proven their squatter rights. Their lawyer told them to drop out when the Justice Dept. lawyer said to him, “We are going to get those asses out of there”.

9. Zara Malkin Ofsevit Dune Shack - Though Zara has in recent years let Peaked Hill Trust rent her Dune Shack - she has told me that she would give any thing to get it back, and be able to do what she wants with it. Zara’s Mother (

Alice Malkin) purchased this Dune Shack from a Provincetown City Clerk. There is a deed, and Zara is the rightful owner and heir. This dune shack had to be moved off the deeded tract. Zara should decide who gets to have her dune shack in the future.

10. Nicholas and Ray Wells Dune Shack - Ray Wells purchased this Dune Shack and 50 acres from Eugene O’Neill’s wife Carlotta Monteray. There was a deed. When Ray was away, the dune shack was moved by the caretaker off of the deeded property to maintain it from erosion. It is Ray Wells Dune Shack, and at 103 Ray is living for that dune shack. She did not even want PHT to rent the dune shack until her death, though Joyce Johnson was allowed to maintain it along with Peaked Hill Trust. Ray should be allowed to decide who gets her dune shack after she is gone. If the Watson Dune Shack is not given to Joyce Johnson - this one should be given to her, along with Peaked Hill Trust to maintain it.

11. Andy Fuller and Grace Bessay Dune Shack (It is Not the Al Fearing Dune Shack) - I don’t care what you do with this one. However, Peter Clemon’s children are innocent victims and have grown up on the dunes. The dune shack should be given to them in 2016. PAL neglected to state that Peter Clemon’s is an artist. Grace Bessay fought for her way of life, and her property. That should be Honored.

12. Jeanne Chanel (Frenchie) Dune Shack - Frenchie Chanel was also an artist. When one went into Town Hall on the right hand wall was her painting MY DUNE HOME. I have a photo of Maria Burks in front of it. It was her Dune Home, and her daughter Adrienne (Shatzi) should be able to decide who gets it after her death. Originally, she wanted it to go to a relative who I believe is no longer alive. It should be her decision alone.

I do not know of the arrangements she made with the Del Deo’s. I do not want to know. If Shatzi wants the Del Deo’s to have it after she is gone fine. I have been told that the Del Deo’s son wants the dune shack. However, as far as I know he has never done any thing, or been involved in any of the Dune Shack issues. Though involved in a messy divorce, Andrew Clemon’s was also in one but has participated. The Del Deo’s son too is a prominent artist, and they have a daughter.

The one thing to note is that the Cape Cod National Seashore, and National Park Service has cause agony to Schatzi who loves that dune shack. After the war it gave her and her Mother peace. She has let Josephine Del Deo deal with the dune shack, though she did come to several meetings in the past. The pain has been too great.

13. Theodore and Eunice Braaten Dune Shack - This dune shack is one of the most sad stories up on the dunes. The National Park Service stopped Special Permits which the Braaten’s had one. This was at the same time they stopped the Special Use Permit for the Provincetown Landfill (Transfer Station). Since Special Use Permits have been reinstated. The Braaten’s purchased their dune shack. The land was owned by the sand company, yet the Braaten’s paid all of the taxes. All of a sudden when the Braaten’s were in their 90’s and still using the dune shack their Special Use Permit was not renewed. Eunice called me in tears. It remained empty until Lawrence Schuster had no place to live, and Eunice asked him to take care of the dune shack for them. This was totally illegal at the time since there was no Special Use Permit which was renewed annually. Eunice gave Lawrence a place to live from her own generosity.

For awhile, Lawrence let the Braaten children or grandchildren visit - then stopped. When Ted Braaten died at age 103, Lawrence was evicted. Before the eviction was carried out, Maria Burks decided to let Lawrence stay going against the Braaton stipulation. I have no objection to Lawrence who continues the tradition of year-round living on the dunes, but only if he allows the Braaten grandchildren time in the dune shack when he is not at home. The dune shack is rightfully theirs, and this should be done while David Braaten who grew up on the dunes is still alive. The Grandchildren who I have talked to want to visit the dune shack and claim their rightful heritage. If Lawrence does not allow them access, the dune shack should revert back to the Braaten Family.

14. Margaret (Peg) Watson Dune Shack - When wills were allowed by the CCNS, Peg Watson willed her dune shack to Charlie Schmid. Charlie in turn willed it to Joyce Johnson and another woman who helped him in his later years. They should be given the dune shack which is rightfully theirs. Peaked Hill Trust can also share it, as Joyce does not want to be totally responsible for the maintance. Julie Schechter’s (Peaked Hill Trust) Sister has no right to it whatsoever though I appreciate the fact that she lets Joyce use it in the Winter. The Dune Shack belongs to Joyce Johnson, and it is high time she had it. Joyce has Charlie Schmid’s ashes, and deserves this dune shack. She needs it now in her later years, and for the artist that she is.

15. Randolf and Annabelle Jones Dune Shack - Another sad story. Randolf and Annabelle loved this dune shack. Their ashes are there, and were upset by the current occupants from where they had been placed. Michael Sperber was willed Charlie Schmid’s dune shack which all of its unique 3 stories had been destroyed by the Cape Cod National Seashore. The Jones said Michael could have theirs. Michael’s children grew up in that dune shack. When Randolf Jones died, Michael Sperber was evicted. Michael Connelly, MA. Secretary of State had written that there were to be no more Evictions from the Dune Shacks. This was ignored, and has continued to be ignored except for Lawrence Schuster.

The dune shack rightfully belongs to Michael Sperber and his Family. At first, Marcia Dunn wanted to contact Michael to learn about the Jones. The Dunn’s, friends of the Fitts were allowed to lease the dune shack. At a meeting last year, Scott Fitts belligerently said he would not let Michael use the dune shack. This dune shack should immediately be returned to Michael Sperber and his Family. In addition, Randolf Jones left $25,000 for the maintenance of the dune shack. The CCNS rejected this gift, which instead went to the Jone’s church. The CCNS lied that they had not been told of this gift earlier, but Randolf had written them about it, and it had been received.

16. David and Connie Armstrong Dune Shack - The Armstrong children should have this dune shack when their parents die. They had to drop out of court due to the expense, and raising a family. The daughters are the rightful heirs.

17. Stanley and Laura Fowler Dune Shack - Another sad story. Since Peter Clemons has not been forthcoming with me about his arrangement with Laura Fowler, this dune shack should be given to the Fowler children. Immediately, the Fowler’s furniture, stove etc. should be moved back in. They should have never been ordered to be taken out by the CCNS. The Clemons should remain as caretakers as Laura Fowler may have had an issue with one of her children not taking care of it the way she wanted. Peter Clemon’s and his Family were evicted from this dune shack after Laura Fowler died, even though all the others were allowed to stay when stipulations were over - and George Price pledged that all would remain the same until the final dune shack use plan. This was wrong. Many dune dwellers had two or more dune shacks. The Provincetown Community Compact has no right to it, though except for the high rent I have no objection to them using it. I do object to how CCNS handled this, and the heartache it brought to the Fowler children and the Clemon’s Family.

18. Tony Vevers Dune Shack - Destroyed on purpose by the Cape Cod National Seashore. This dune shack was given to the Vevers by the son of Heinrich Pfiffer who had owned the Artist Theatre on Pfiffer’s Wharf which became the Provincetown Playhouse On The Wharf in 1940. Tony Vever’s wife and daughter should immediately be allowed to rebuild their dune shack on the property. Peaked Hill Trust has offered to build it for them. All of the Vevers are well known artists, and Tabitha Vevers has an art gallery in Provincetown.

19. If the Patrick Family wants to rebuild they should be allowed to do so. And since also Carl Tasha’s dune shack was destroyed while he was away at college, the Tasha Family should be allowed to rebuild it given that the family is a large once.

20. Given that the stipulations that ended in 2005 were allowed to continue staying in their dune shacks - this is a precedence for allowing ALL of the Dune Dwellers another 6 or more years. Meanwhile leases that expired were also renewed in recent years. You and NPS can’t give 6 or more extra years to some, and not to the other Dune Dwellers.

Gail Cohen
St. Petersburg, FL. 33710

Making the Section 106 Regulations More Effective and Less Burdensome

Here are my June 2 comments in response to the

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's request for advice

(See http://www.achp.gov/EO_13563.pdf).

Dear ACHP:


I'm writing in response to your notice of June 1, requesting public comments to assist with your retrospective review of the effectiveness of the NHPA Section 106 regulations. My comments are organized with reference to the nine questions you posed.

1. How should the ACHP periodically review its regulations to ensure they are serving their stated purpose efficiently and effectively? Please provide specific recommendations on appropriate outreach and timing.

The first step would be to rework the regs to make them much simpler and easier to understand (see below). Until that's done, it's going to be very difficult to "review" them in any meaningful, transparent way, because only specialists will understand them and be able to participate in review. Having reworked and simplified them, I'd suggest asking some outside organization -- NOT a preservation advocacy group like the NTHP, or an industry organization, or a contractor's lobby like ACRA -- to put together a stakeholders' group every 5 years or so to review the record of consultations and make recommendations. This might be a job for the Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution. Of course, this review should be coupled with general public review and comment, and there should be some process for bringing the review to an actionable conclusion.

2. How can the ACHP reduce burdens and maintain flexibility for participants in the Section 106 regulatory process in a way that will promote the protection of historic properties?

First, and without the need for any regulatory or statutory changes, do the following:

a. Insist that the ACHP staff focus on serious issues and cut the crap. We should not, for example, be troubled in the process by wet-behind-the-ears ACHP staff members insisting that we really have to focus on avoidance before minimization before mitigation. If this requires re-educating your legal staff, do that, too.

b. REALLY beat up on agencies, SHPOs, and NPS as the SHPOs' overseer to focus attention on 36 CFR 800.3, initiating review. Try to get them all to understand that the process needs to start early, and that early consultation necessarily entails a degree of ambiguity about project plans, effects, and affected properties. Try to get them to understand that review really is supposed to be an open, public, consultative process, and that among the very first things an agency's supposed to do -- and an SHPO ought to help agencies to do -- is to identify and engage consulting parties.

c. Insist that NPS re-think the standards by which SHPO performance is judged; at the very least, the nonsense that SHPOs are required to keep track of should be consistent with the current regulations, not those left over from the 1980s. Try to get them to understand that however much they may be in love with National Register nominations and equivalent forms of hyper-documentation, these are seldom useful in real-world planning, and are not required by the regulations.

Preferably, however, change the regulations, and even better, seek changes in the statute (see below).

3. How can the process set forth in the Section 106 regulations better achieve positive preservation outcomes?

The question implies that the process is SUPPOSED to result in "positive preservation outcomes," and that strikes me as not necessarily true. It's also very ambiguous: "positive" in whose eyes? Have you forgotten that the ACHP is ON Historic Preservation, not FOR it? The process should be aimed at achieving outcomes that are broadly accepted as being in the public interest; it should NOT be aimed at achieving some abstract measure of historic preservation goodness. This being (I think) the case, the process should be revised to make broad, early, systematic consultation much easier to do, with truly meaningful participation by all parties, aimed at reaching agreed-upon results. In other words, it should emphasize what makes Section 106 review nearly unique in the federal system -- consultation -- and de-emphasize a lot of the fol-de-rol that inevitably comes into play when one insists on seeking "positive preservation outcomes."

4. How can the regulations be better harmonized with other federal environmental review procedures, such as the National Environmental Policy Act?

By actually relating to them. Presumably CEQ is going through an exercise similar to the ACHPs, so there may perhaps be opportunities for mutual revisions of regulations to make them more compatible. The ACHP ought to work on CEQ to get it to adopt a consultation-based approach to NEPA review, and then embed 106 review within it.

5. How can the ACHP ensure that the Section 106 regulations are consistent with and coordinated effectively with other regulations promulgated by the National Park Service pursuant to the National Historic Preservation Act?

Like what? I'm afraid there is a subtext here: "NPS good; cannot be questioned; ACHP must be consistent with good NPS, otherwise ACHP bad." BS. NPS regulations need fixing just as much as the ACHP's do, and NPS has shown brilliantly over the last several decades that its only coordinative capacity lies in its anatomically impressive ability to pat itself on the back. Your review should include review of all NPS regulations that relate in any way to Section 106 review, and you should make recommendations as to how THEY can be made less burdensome and more effective. NPS can then happily spend the next decade or so ignoring them.

6. How can the ACHP ensure that information developed to support findings under the regulations is guided by objective scientific evidence?

OK, I know that's in the Executive Order so you've got to address it, but it's really only marginally relevant. Trying to find "objective scientific evidence" as the basis for findings about, say, visual effects on the ambience of a historic district is like trying to catch a will-o'-the-wisp in a jar. It's a waste of time and will just frustrate everyone -- AND tend to make the process inaccessible to the public, which mostly is not made up of scientists, is not objective, and doesn't necessarily judge "evidence" the way scientists do. What the ACHP COULD do is look to the SOCIAL sciences -- anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, and the hybrid disciplines that study decision making and public engagement, both within and across cultural, social, and economic groups, and try really hard to make the 106 process reflect the best that these sciences have to offer.

7. Should performance metrics that demonstrate agency compliance and document Section 106 outcomes be developed? Please cite specific areas where metrics are needed.

Not just no, but hell no. "Performance metrics" applied to historic preservation have already resulted in agencies wasting time trying to calculate what percentage of historic properties under their control have been preserved, and by how much. Utter nonsense, and even more nonsensical when applied to something as necessarily flexible as Section 106 review. The only meaningful metric is the answer to the question: "did we or did we not, in this case, reach a conclusion that was broadly accepted as being in the public interest?" If you can count up the times you did and the times you didn't, I guess that would be of some interest.

8. Are there better ways to encourage public participation and an open exchange of views as part of Section 106 review? Please cite specific areas where improvements could be made and indicate what tools or mechanisms might be made available to achieve this goal.

"Better" ways? Better than what? Never mind; are there ways? Certainly. To start with, rigorously expunge the jargon and nit-pickery from the regulations. Specifically, do away with abstractions like "adverse effect" and "no adverse effect." When an agency wants to do something, the process ought to seek to find out whether anybody has a problem with it that's somehow related to historic preservation (broadly understood); if not, the agency ought to be good to go, but if there are problems, the process should be aimed at resolving them through consultation. It is outrageous to spend time and money arguing about whether something is or is not an adverse effect when nobody really gives a hoot whether the adverse effect occurs or not. It is equally outrageous to have an effect that people think is terrible treated as "not adverse" because it's possible to make a lawyerly argument that it doesn't "diminish the integrity of the property's location, design, setting, etc. etc. etc." The regulations are awash in such abstractions, and the related NPS regulations are even worse. Secondly, train your people to engage the public, and insist that SHPOs do likewise (Ridiculous as it is, they are, according to the regs, supposed to represent the people of the state). And restructure the regs to force such engagement. There is a lot of literature and expertise out in the world about how to engage people in defining and resolving disputes; the ACHP staff should become expert in it, and promote its use by others.

9. How else might the ACHP modify, clarify, or improve the regulations to reduce burdens and increase efficiency?

Oh, let me count the ways! To start with, think about restructuring the regs to address different project or program types in different ways. A project conducted directly by a federal agency is different from a project an agency assists, and both are different from projects that agencies permit. Procedures tailored to each type might be helpful. And/or try to build systems for determining the extent to which a given project outrages public sensitivities, and give projects that do a lot more rigorous review than is given those that don't. Whatever is done should be done in concert with CEQ, so that reforms are reflected both in 106 and NEPA, with EPA so they're reflected in the implementation of CERCLA, RCRA, and their toxic kin, and with the land managing agencies so they're reflected in planning under laws like FLPMA.

Seek ways -- and I realize that it would be hard and tricky -- to do away with the noxious practice of letting project proponents hire and fire those who analyze the impacts of their projects. Proponents doubtless need expert advice and advocacy, but it's ridiculous to pretend that a self-understood member of a proponent's planning team, who can be canned if he or she doesn't give the proponent's preferred answers, can objectively analyze impacts or reflect public concerns.

Ideally -- and this, I know, would require legislation -- uncouple the consultation process from the National Register and let it address WHATEVER is of concern to people about the cultural environment. Let the Register go off and be its happy, irrelevant self, while Section 106-type consultation (or rather, an improved version thereof) is applied to resolving concerns about impacts on "cultural resources" broadly defined, or on whatever people value in the environment

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Tom King

ACHP Seeks Advice

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) has just published a notice requesting advice from interested parties about how its National Historic Preservation Act Section 106 regulatory process (outlined at 36 CFR 800) might be improved to make it more effective and less burdensome.  This is in response to President Obama's Executive Order 13563, which directed all rulemaking agencies to undertake such a review.

The ACHP's request, which includes specific questions to which it solicits responses, can be accessed at http://www.achp.gov/EO_13563.pdf .  I'd certainly encourage everyone interested in how the Section 106 process does and doesn't work to take a close look at the request, and respond to it.