Read Online Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
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constitute an erasure of the past.
Monuments are reminders that something important happened somewhere and interpretations of its significance. The premise of monuments—that without such markers the history of a place would be lost—may be true for cultures whose memory is preserved in material forms and whose members do not remain long in one place—that is, for cultures such as that of the settlers and contemporary Euro-Americans. Leslie Marmon Silko writes of the web of stories woven around everyday life in her Laguna Pueblo community, stories that “carefully described key landmarks and locations of fresh water. Thus a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers and lost piñon-nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock formation.” She continues, “Indeed, stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing by a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place. It is impossible to determine which came first, the incident or the geographical feature that begs to be brought alive in a story.”
Anthropologist Keith Basso describes a similar relationship in the culture of the Western Apache, for whom natural places call forth stories, so that the landscape provides a practical and moral guide to the culture. Even allowing for the profound differences between tribes, the many accounts like this suggest a worldview in which oral tradition continually generates a network of stories that map and make intimately familiar a landscape in which, as Silko puts it, “the precisedate of the incident is often less important than the place.” All of which suggests that bronze sculptures and granite obelisks with their inscriptions and emphasis on dates might be alien or redundant to such a tradition. In her essay in
Sweet Medicine
, however, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick argues that “Americans ought to know what acts of violence bought them their right to own land, build homes, use resources, and travel freely in North America. Americans ought to know what happened on the ground they stand on; they surely have some obligation to know where they are.” Knowledge of such past violence, she says later, might save Americans from nostalgia for “a prettier time in the past.” For Limerick, such monuments would speak most powerfully to the nonindigenous population. By these terms, putting up monuments is as significant a project as revising those that exist.
One European-style monument to insurgent indigenous history has long been in the works: the giant equestrian figure of Crazy Horse being carved into a mountain near Mount Rushmore. The brainchild of Boston-raised Korczak Ziolkowski, who assisted Gutzon Borglum in the carving of Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial was begun half a century ago and, according to its web site, will be the biggest sculpture in the world when completed. It could be argued, however, that the European sculptural tradition within which this work fits and the massive blasting of the mountainside it requires celebrate the artist and the technology more than the dead leader, who refused to be photographed.
The continent is already densely populated with monuments—that is, sites of significance—recognized because of oral traditions, which means that those outside the traditions are often unable and or unwilling to see them. A case in point is Devils Tower National Monument, in northeastern Wyoming, where conflicting interpretations, or at least interests, led to a lawsuit. A steep and startling granite butte standing alone in the landscape, with ridges sweeping up to its flat crown, it was designated in 1906 as the first National Monument in the country (a National Monument is a national park named by presidential order rather than by an act of Congress). Devils Tower has been mainly a recreation destination during most of its subsequent
Monuments are reminders that something important happened somewhere and interpretations of its significance. The premise of monuments—that without such markers the history of a place would be lost—may be true for cultures whose memory is preserved in material forms and whose members do not remain long in one place—that is, for cultures such as that of the settlers and contemporary Euro-Americans. Leslie Marmon Silko writes of the web of stories woven around everyday life in her Laguna Pueblo community, stories that “carefully described key landmarks and locations of fresh water. Thus a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers and lost piñon-nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock formation.” She continues, “Indeed, stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing by a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place. It is impossible to determine which came first, the incident or the geographical feature that begs to be brought alive in a story.”
Anthropologist Keith Basso describes a similar relationship in the culture of the Western Apache, for whom natural places call forth stories, so that the landscape provides a practical and moral guide to the culture. Even allowing for the profound differences between tribes, the many accounts like this suggest a worldview in which oral tradition continually generates a network of stories that map and make intimately familiar a landscape in which, as Silko puts it, “the precisedate of the incident is often less important than the place.” All of which suggests that bronze sculptures and granite obelisks with their inscriptions and emphasis on dates might be alien or redundant to such a tradition. In her essay in
Sweet Medicine
, however, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick argues that “Americans ought to know what acts of violence bought them their right to own land, build homes, use resources, and travel freely in North America. Americans ought to know what happened on the ground they stand on; they surely have some obligation to know where they are.” Knowledge of such past violence, she says later, might save Americans from nostalgia for “a prettier time in the past.” For Limerick, such monuments would speak most powerfully to the nonindigenous population. By these terms, putting up monuments is as significant a project as revising those that exist.
One European-style monument to insurgent indigenous history has long been in the works: the giant equestrian figure of Crazy Horse being carved into a mountain near Mount Rushmore. The brainchild of Boston-raised Korczak Ziolkowski, who assisted Gutzon Borglum in the carving of Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial was begun half a century ago and, according to its web site, will be the biggest sculpture in the world when completed. It could be argued, however, that the European sculptural tradition within which this work fits and the massive blasting of the mountainside it requires celebrate the artist and the technology more than the dead leader, who refused to be photographed.
The continent is already densely populated with monuments—that is, sites of significance—recognized because of oral traditions, which means that those outside the traditions are often unable and or unwilling to see them. A case in point is Devils Tower National Monument, in northeastern Wyoming, where conflicting interpretations, or at least interests, led to a lawsuit. A steep and startling granite butte standing alone in the landscape, with ridges sweeping up to its flat crown, it was designated in 1906 as the first National Monument in the country (a National Monument is a national park named by presidential order rather than by an act of Congress). Devils Tower has been mainly a recreation destination during most of its subsequent
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