Masters Thesis

The cultural landscape of Northcoast lumber communities

Cultural landscapes are a recognized type of historical resource and also an interdisciplinary category of analysis that can help to illuminate the relationship of people to their environments- how people interpret space. Cultural landscapes reflect the values and conflicts of society as well as the physical results of changing practices and attitudes toward the environment that we inhabit. This paper is an introduction to academic research on the concept of cultural landscapes, and will demonstrate the application of this method of analysis in case studies of three cultural landscapes of worker communities in the lumber industry. Studies such as these can provide additional insights into the relationships between immigrants and citizens, labor and management, gender roles and gendered occupations, "marginal" and "productive" lands, cultural identities and Western and non-Western cultural perspectives. The goal of federal laws, practices and policies for the documentation, interpretation and preservation of historical resources is to create a sense of history and national identity. Federal and state guidelines for the assessment of historical significance are based on the long established practice of memorializing people, places and events, and fine architectural and engineering design. This approach privileges a view of history which is based on Western culture, and a dominant narrative of American history with its roots in the 19th Century. This perspective is further framed into local programs to document cultural resources, and have typically focused on individual examples of the built environment. The cultural landscape of the Northcoast region can illustrate the often conflicting cultural attitudes, values and perceptions of space and place, and the political processes that have shaped the landscapes of settlement and industry. Among the men and women who arrived here were large numbers of immigrants who stories have largely been bypassed in local histories. The histories of Indigenous peoples and their cultural resources are popularly considered as part of pre-contact history. This study of cultural landscapes highlights a few of these undocumented stories in order to provide a more complex analysis and illustrates how different concepts of place and space, history, culture and political processes have shaped the landscapes of settlement.

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