CFP: American West Center Symposium

CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND PARTICIPANTS

WESTERN LANDS, WESTERN VOICES:
The American West Center at Fifty

A Symposium on Public Engagement in the Humanities and Social Sciences

University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
September 19-21, 2014

"Western Lands, Western Voices," a three-day interdisciplinary symposium exploring the past, present, and future of public engagement in the Humanities and Social Sciences will be held in Salt Lake City, September 19-21, 2014. The symposium marks the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Utah's American West Center, the oldest regional studies center of its kind in the West. Our goal is to bring together college/university and community based practitioners for a lively discussion of the place and power of publicly engaged/applied scholarship in the American West.

Participation: We seek submissions from college and university based scholars, community based organizations and institutions, state and local historical and cultural entities, and indigenous Nations. The symposium will engage diverse fields including history, anthropology, political science, ethnic studies, literature, cultural studies, and the arts. We strongly encourage participants and projects that span disciplinary divides. Submissions from graduate students, early career scholars, and community based scholars are particularly encouraged, as are those that address innovative ways of reaching public audiences.

Topics: We are seeking proposals for panels, sessions, and individual presentation that illustrate the power and potential of publicly engaged scholarship. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· Indigenous Sovereignty

· Cultural Preservation and Indigenous Peoples

· Oral History Methods and Applications

· Community Based History Projects

· Environmental Policy and Politics

· Public Lands Management and History

· Literary and Artistic Representations of the American West

Session Formats: We are seeking submissions for sessions and presentations in a range of formats. Traditional research presentations are welcome, but we encourage collaborative formats such as roundtables and the NCPH's "working group" format. Working Groups connect individuals working on similar projects or problems through the discussion of pre-circulated scholarship.

For complete panel or session proposals a designated contact person should submit a single PDF document that includes a one-page (approx. 250 word) abstract describing the general purpose of the session as well as one-paragraph presentation abstracts and one-page CV's for each of the session participants. Contact information (address, phone number, and email) for all participants must be provided.

Individual presentation proposals should include a one-page abstract as well as a one-page CV with complete contact information (address, phone number, and email) . We will do our best to match individual submissions to create viable sessions.

Working Group Submissions should be made by individuals planning to serve as facilitators for the group. They should include a one-page abstract describing the central issue that the group will address and a one-page CV with complete contact information (address, phone number, and email). If the proposed topic is selected we will assist the facilitator in recruiting appropriate working group members.

All submissions should be sent in PDF format to AmericanWestCenter50@gmail.com by March 1, 2014.

For more information see http://awc.utah.edu/ or contact us at AmericanWestCenter50@gmail.com

Book of the Month

Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia

Review by Dusty Hoesly

In Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, BC: Ronsdale Press, 2008), editor Douglas Todd and the volume’s contributors seek to pin down the secular spirituality which they claim pervades the region.  Bringing together a diverse group of writers—including historians, sociologists, theologians, and poets—Todd, a Canadian journalist who covers spirituality and ethics for the Vancouver Sun, insists that while Cascadia has some of the continent’s lowest religious affiliation rates, it remains very spiritual.  Todd defines spirituality broadly to mean “the way that humans create for themselves ultimate meaning, values, and purpose,” and he brings a flexible attitude even regarding committed secularists: “we assume that atheists, who live in record numbers in Cascadia, can and are making profound contributions to this region’s particular sense of spirituality and place” (4).  For nearly every contributor, Cascadian spirituality is characterized by sacred reverence for nature and utopian idealism.  While some authors worry whether Cascadian spirituality is too individualistic and too forward-thinking to sustain a robust social and moral community, Todd claims that Cascadia can serve as a “model for measured progressive transformation, especially regarding how people of the planet interact with nature” (11). 

For the purposes of this book, Todd limits Cascadia to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, which he claims share a bioregional and cultural cohesiveness.  (Ernest Callenbach’s prescient novel Ecotopia charts a similar boundary, although it includes northern California.)  Prominent themes and similarities include connectedness to nature, sense of place, anti-institutionalism, individualism, idealism, liberalism, experimentalism, openness to contrasts, and a shared history as the last frontier.  In a more critical mood, several authors, from both American and Canadian perspectives, note that Cascadian spirituality can have a dark side too, leading to self-absorption, lack of roots and collective memory, imperialism, faddishness, and rural-urban bifurcation.

In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight some of the diverse approaches and conclusions presented by the book’s contributors. 

Patricia O’Connell Killen—echoing arguments she made in an earlier volume, which was reviewed previously on this blog—contends that the region’s lack of an established religion, low rate of affiliation with religious institutions, and imposing natural environment all shape its spiritual sensibilities.  Since the region had no established political order until the mid-nineteenth century and has never had a dominant religion, she argues, residents have had to actively construct their religious or spiritual identity, if any.  Moreover, due to high physical mobility rates, many residents experience loosening social ties.  The resulting individualism and anti-establishment mentality also indicate a liberal and libertarian moral worldview for the region, she claims. 

Sociologist Mark Shibley states that Cascadian spirituality reveres both self and nature in a “secular but spiritual” matrix.  He locates three prominent strands of this spirituality in apocalyptic millennialism, nature religion, and New Age and new spirituality.  “None of these spiritual practices is unique to Cascadia, but in the absence of a dominant religion, they define regional culture and identity more substantially than they do elsewhere,” he asserts (35). 

Andrew Grenville, a market researcher based in Toronto, observes that Cascadians exhibit privatized belief, skepticism, social liberalism, weak affiliation with institutions, and a DIY attitude—summing up their ethos as “live and let live” (59).  In this open religious environment, fluid spiritual identities flourish. 

Mike Carr, a regional planning professor, outlines the contours of the Cascadian bioregion before presenting his understanding of Cascadia’s “bioregional Earth-centered spirituality,” giving examples (particularly from native peoples) and arguing that this spiritual worldview can serve as a counterweight to the globalization and rapacious capitalism which threaten natural habitats (129).  Mark Wexler, a business ethics professor, examines Cascadian workplace spirituality and notices the tensions between Pacific Northwest environmentalism and utopianism, a paradox perhaps best illustrated by his image of organic farms with Wi-Fi connections. 

As these examples show, Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia articulates a shared cultural identity between Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and an anti-institutional, DIY spirituality that suffuses the region.  Nevertheless, critical omissions and challenges remain.  The work is largely representative of white, middle-class, urban, liberal perspectives.  It ignores the perspectives of Asians, Latinos, and conservative evangelicals, despite their significant presence in the Cascadian population.  Moreover, since much of this “elusive” spirituality takes its cues from indigenous and Asian traditions, this volume fails to analyze sufficiently issues of cultural appropriation or to give voice to members of those communities.

Aside from these omissions, I wonder how unique Cascadia’s landscape and spirituality are.  All of the volume’s authors agree that the “spirituality of place” that pervades the region is based upon its natural beauty and spectacular wilderness, and several claim that environmentalism is the region’s civil religion.  However, these authors do not explain why the landscape in Cascadia is more inspirational than in other regions, a project which would require a more comparative perspective that is missing from this volume.  The Great Basin region, for example, has produced several notable authors who describe its sacred geography, as have the Rocky Mountains.  Is the rugged landscape of the Pacific Northwest any more beautiful, imposing, or regionally-defining?  And now that New Hampshire and Vermont have eclipsed Oregon and Washington as the least religious states, what remains about Cascadia that is so unique from other regions?  In other words, how would the authors explain a Cascadia which is no longer as singular as they have described it?  

Environmentalism, Sacred Native Land, and the Failure of the First Amendment

by Kenny Richards

American Indians have had serious trouble winning religious freedom cases in the high courts of this country.  Felix Cohen, a legal scholar who set much of the groundwork for practicing federal Indian law, once remarked that we should watch closely what happens in the federal courts when American Indians are involved, as these cases often act as canaries in the coal mine.  If what Cohen warns is true, then these canaries fell to the bottom of their cages a long time ago.  The persistent failure of the American government to protect the right to the free exercise of religion for American Indians suggests that this government is enforcing a particular and biased conception of religion.  In landmark cases such as Employment Division v. Smith, Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, and Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the United States court system has repeatedly shown its aversion to protecting the religious rights of American Indians. 

          

In response to this pattern in high court decisions, different tribal entities have begun arguing for environmental conservation as a way to protect their sacred places from destructive forms of development.  Across the United States, various forms of destructive development, from open-pit mining to energy production are currently threatening the existence and perpetuity of many American Indian sacred places. The shift in legal argumentation from religious freedom into environmental arguments for the protection of American Indian sacred places offers an important opportunity for many to see how, exactly, the court’s interpretation of the First Amendment is failing to protect American Indian religious traditions.  

This past winter, the Snowbowl Ski Resort in Arizona began making snow from recycled human wastewater to spray on their ski runs in the San Francisco Peaks.  This forested and ecologically rich mountain range is a sacred place for many of the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest.  Klee Benally is a member of the Navajo Nation and an Indigenous and environmental rights activist.  Benally has been working for the protection of the San Francisco Peaks for many years now. As reported by media outlets such as Indian Country Today and The Navajo-Hopi Observer, this past December, Benally participated in a public protest in Flagstaff Arizona where, with a group of other Indian peoples, he argued that snow production violated their human rights, namely their right to the freedom of religion. Benally told Indian Country Today, “what needs to happen is the government needs to afford the same rights to Native Americans that everybody else in this country enjoys.” Not long afterwards, Benally marched with more than a dozen people down to the local U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Cococino National Forest and hand delivered letters of protest addressing the recent promise by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help protect American sacred places.  With the flair of an activist, Benally poured a 5-gallon bucket of treated sewage effluent, the same water to be used on the mountain for snow-production, in the center of the main entrance to the park headquarters.  The Forest Service promptly called in a Hazardous Materials Response Team, or “HAZMAT” to clean and neutralize this hazardous spill.  Benally was then arrested and now faces a maximum possible sentence of $20,000 in fines and 2 years imprisonment.  In a written statement responding to his arrest, as published in the Navajo-Hopi Observer, Benally wrote, “The irony is that the USFS has authorized to spill more than 1.5 million gallons of treated sewage effluent per day onto a rare and pristine alpine habitat, yet they feel it’s appropriate to call hazmat when a pail of this same wastewater is allegedly poured onto their polished tile floors?  I hold the USFS liable for the environmental poisoning that is set to occur on the peaks right now.”

Step back four years: in 2008, after years of litigation, appeals, district, and federal court decisions the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the production of artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks did not violate the right to the free exercise of religion for several thousand Indian people. The Indian plaintiffs in this argued that the use of treated sewage effluent for snow production at a skiing resort on Mt. Humphrey’s would desecrate one of their sacred mountains, thus destroying their ability to practice their traditional religions. 

After the 9^th Circuit decided the case, Indian peoples continued to protest snow production, alleging human rights infringements in terms of both Indigenous rights and U.S. constitutional rights.  All the while, the Snowbowl Ski Resort continued to put pipes in the ground and make preparations for snow production from recycled sewage effluent.  Since their First Amendment case failed, several groups, including the Hopi Tribe and the Save the Peaks Coalition (an environmentally focused group), have brought lawsuits arguing that the production of snow from treated wastewater will violate certain environmental laws. 

This turn to environmental law for the protection of American Indian sacred places in Arizona is not a singular phenomenon.  Disputes over uranium mining on Mount Taylor in New Mexico, Copper mining from the Pebble Mine in Alaska, and the proper management of the Ka’u Forest Reserve in Hawai’i are all examples of sacred places that are being fought over in environmental terms. Tisa Wenger, a historian of American religions, argues that many American Indians adopted the Euro-American concept of religion as a means of responding to and resisting colonial force.  Not surprisingly, in light of the almost complete failure of American Indian religious freedom cases brought before the U.S. government there is emerging a new adaptation as a way to protect Indigenous ways of life and landscapes. 

Congress and the judiciary must come to terms with their own coercive history and to the limited and unjust definitions of religion that they enforce. The American Indian turn to environmental law in religious freedom cases speaks loudly to the failure of the U.S. government and the First Amendment as protectors of equal rights.   It is high time for the courts, and perhaps Congress, to reassess their definition of religion to include the Indigenous peoples who have not historically fallen under the protection of the First Amendment. 

    

Book of the Month

Anne Butler, Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 

Reviewed by Jennifer Meredith

Anne Butler restores Catholic Nuns to the narrative of and highlights their contributions in shaping the American West. In Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920, Butler uses an array of archived materials from religious convents in the West to trace interactions of Catholic nuns and the variety of people in the West. From creating needed institutions, such as hospitals and schools, to relief for the poor, nuns influenced surrounding communities in the West. In this process, however, Butler argues the environment and interactions with minorities in the West also changed the sisters and shifted their ideas of gender, race, and class. Butler’s analysis portrays the sisters as real, complicated, and flawed women who influenced the West.

Butler asserts the environment and process of civilizing the west forced nuns to become independent and more self-sufficient. Most had come from established convents of order, routine, and authority. The new, harsh conditions and problems of communicating forced the nuns to make their own decisions. Butler writes, “After a few blunder’s, religious women on their own in the West learned to select the sensible solution and defend their actions at a later date” (47). Butler’s argument is compelling partly because she does not discount the community aspect of the sister’s experience. Rather, her argument suggests the nuns as a group became more independent and not just individually.

Through their interactions with different racial and economic groups the sisters began to view the west not simply as a savage place but a place of inequality. Drawing from the diaries of the nuns, Butler demonstrates their activism on behalf of American Indians, African Americans, and Mexicans and their disgust for minority mistreatment. Butler complicates her narrative, however, by acknowledging most sisters continued to hold racist views common in American society at the time. Butler admits, “The women endorsed a dominating Christianity and the layering of one culture over another until the latter became invisible” (245). Rather than these interactions changing the sister’s views of minority culture that they saw as inferior, they continued to try to teach and civilize the minorities into the white dominant culture at the expense of ethnic identities. Butler portrays the sisters as real people limited in their altruistic vision by their subscription to a dominant racial perspective.

Butler also analyzes gender roles and slight power shifts brought on by independence and self-reliance forged in the west. Butler asserts the sisters obeyed the patriarchic system of authority, yet at the same time, they also pushed for autonomy and freedom that many had become accustomed to in the West. Most sisters did not outright challenge the authority of males in the church, nor did they call for women’s liberation. Rather, they worked within the system to subvert individual male authority where it interfered with their goals. They understood their own capabilities and shifted their roles to increase their authority without undermining the patriarchic structure. Gender roles and identity shifted slightly with the introduction of an independent mindset, but governing gender roles continued to prevail. Butler highlights the sisters’ complex interactions with forces and people in the west that shifted their views and identities.

In Butler’s analysis, the West becomes malleable in form as a process with changing boundaries. Her sources draw their own borders, sometimes reaching more east than many western historians would allow. As a process, the boundaries shift with the progression to the Pacific and as savagery gave way to civility. Butler’s West allows us to view the process with its complex intersections of race, gender, class and environment. This analysis offers an appraisal of nuns’ contributions and restores them to their rightful place as important actors in the building of the American West. It also demonstrates the environments affect on the sisters. Merging process with ethnic convergence and conquest, Butler also provides a symbiosis of New and Turner West that demonstrates the value of both approaches.

Environmentalism vs. Indian Religious Freedom

by Tisa Wenger

Yet again, legislation aimed at protecting the environment ends up doing violence to Native American cultural and religious traditions. As reported in Indybay’s online newsletter earlier this week, tribal leaders in California are protesting a new law banning fishing and harvesting activities—including their traditional practices—in special marine protected areas along the state’s north central coast. Above all this is an issue of environmental justice. Environmentalist goals needs to be pursued in ways that allow indigenous cultures to flourish—especially when the cultures in question have historically maintained sustainable practices.

This story is also important for understanding the dilemmas of Native American religious freedom, as well as the intertwined histories of land and religion in the region—two important topics for the study of religion in the American west, as Quincy Newell reminded us in her post just a few days ago. The Indybay piece reports:

Members of the Kashia Pomo Tribe and other tribes are now banned from their traditional seaweed, abalone and mussel harvesting grounds by the creation of a massive new no-take marine reserve off Stewarts Point in Sonoma County.

The reserve is the largest in a network of 21 marine protected areas (MPAs) that took effect on May 1 along California's north central coast under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative.

To mark the final day before the unprecedented closure, tribal leaders held a historic ceremony to bless an area where the Kashia Tribe of Pomo Indians has gathered seaweed, mussel, abalone, clams and fish for centuries. Stewarts Point, called “Danaka” by the tribe, is sacred to the tribe since it is regarded in their creation story as the place where the tribe first stepped on land, according to Eric Wilder, former chair of the Kashia Pomo.

Like Wilder, other Pomo tribal leaders quoted in the article emphasize the religious quality of their relationship with the site. Their story illustrates the disjuncture between indigenous traditions on the one hand, and the concept of religion as framed in American law and governmental practice on the other. As Tribal Elder Violet Chappell put it, “I don’t think the Fish and Game would be allowed to close down a Catholic Church, would they?” Although some exceptions have been painstakingly created, the system is simply not set up to work for land-based traditions. Come to think of it, maybe mainstream America’s lack of any real connection between land and religion is what got us into this environmental mess in the first place.

Religious Bodies & Western Landscapes

by Quincy D. Newell

I’ve been pondering bodies in the American West lately. Religion is, of course, often understood as an intellectual, doctrinal matter – it’s about what you believe. We struggle, in religious studies, to get our students (and sometimes our colleagues!) to remember that religion is about more than this – that there are literal bodies involved. Right now, as I write this, my students are my living, breathing reminder that bodies are involved in everything we do. Even the most intellectual exercise, like the final exam my students are taking, is a physical activity as well as an intellectual one. I look around and I see students stretching hands that have wearied of writing; cracking knuckles and bouncing legs; raising hands and asking for relief from the most physical of discomforts – tissues for running noses, bathroom breaks for full bladders. Religion is about bodies – bodies born, bodies dying, bodies dancing, kneeling, joining hands, giving voice to creeds and chants and prayers and songs. But that’s religion around the world – I’m wondering if thinking more about embodiment can help us understand religion in the American West. What’s special about religious bodies in the American West? Perhaps it’s just because I live in Wyoming, but I think the environment has something to do with it – the problem of adapting these religious bodies to an environment that is not prima facie suited to human habitation, or adapting that environment to habitation by religious bodies.

The West has long been an object of attention for environmental historians, and it’s an environmental shift that some historians use to define the boundaries of the region. I’ll not rehearse the “where is the West?” debate here – it seems to have gone dormant, and it’s best to let sleeping dogs (and dead horses) lie. I’ll merely remind you, dear reader, that some scholars have seen environmental factors such as the lack of rainfall as the primary, defining characteristic of the region. That and other characteristics made this place a forbidding one for human settlement. Of course, various groups of Native Americans lived in the West quite successfully for eons. But places like Laramie, where I live and work and where, even in early May, we have snow banks and days full of wind gusts topping 50 miles an hour (two days ago they were warning of 80-mph winds in the western part of the state) -- as I say, places like Laramie have only been the sites of year-round human habitation since the late 19th century.

The last century or two have seen humans in the West progressively distance themselves from, and then fetishize, this harsh environment. Jared Farmer’s book On Zion’s Mount, which Tisa Wenger wrote about here not too long ago, explores one example of this progression in detail; Lynn Ross-Bryant’s work on religion and the national parks explores others. There’s a religious aspect, then, to the way humans relate to the environment out here in the West that seems to be missing – or at least less prevalent – in the east. The explanation for this seems simple: eastern landscapes don’t threaten human lives the way western landscapes do.

National Public Radio recently ran a remembrance of Floyd Dominy, the man responsible for the Glen Canyon dam, who died last month at the age of 100. (Listen here.) The same kind of non-specific environmental religiosity that values places like Mount Timpanogos and Yosemite National Park ran through the piece – but in an apparently opposite way. Dominy declared himself the “messiah” of water development and Elizabeth Arnold describes his enthusiasm as “downright evangelical.” Here, the environment was not fetishized so much as demonized: humans needed saving from this parched landscape, and Dominy saved them. He tamed the land by controlling the water – and along the way he flooded the harsh, wild landscapes that outdoors enthusiasts and environmental activists cherish. In part, it was Dominy’s work that allowed humans to separate themselves sufficiently from their environment to be able to fetishize it subsequently. (Those who extol the spirituality of the southwestern desert landscape, for example, live well-hydrated lives because of Dominy’s dams.)

There’s a lot more to religion in the American West, of course. But, especially in the early years of white settlement in the West, I think the relationship between religious bodies and their natural environment bears scrutiny. Weber tells us that religions and economic systems shape one another, but religions and natural environments also have effects on one another. Dominy’s sense of himself as a “crusader” was surely shaped by a Christian ethos that took God’s command in Genesis 1:28 to “subdue” the earth (I’m using the language from the KJV) as justification for altering the natural environment to make it suitable for human habitation. Other readings of Genesis and other scriptures have undergirded environmental movements. And surely the environment has guided religious peoples’ interpretations of their scriptures. Would the Mormons have placed so much emphasis on the prophecy that the desert would “bloom like a rose” if they had ended up in the Pacific Northwest (where it rains a lot)? It seems unlikely.