Author: Deward Walker

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-24

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781511434638

"An Ethnographic Assessment of Some Cultural Landscapes in Southern Wyoming and Idaho" addresses one of the most challenging aspects in federal and state land management today: how to address the effects of major energy projects on large land masses that are sacred to American Indians. Despite decades of assessments conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, the importance of cultural landscapes to tribes continues to be overlooked by scholars, recreationists, commercial interests, and some state and federal agencies.Drawing on ethnographic information secured from cultural experts and tribal elders of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, Dr. Walker and his colleagues document and describe the importance and inter-relatedness of thirty-five cultural landscapes. In giving voice to these landscapes, the authors demonstrate why new approaches for addressing project effects are needed to meet the needs of the people whose future is dependent on such landscapes.Part I is a review of published literature concerning cultural landscapes previously recorded by anthropologists and other scholars in southern Wyoming and Idaho. Part I shows how the landscape and its many parts are central to the lives of the people, past, present, and future, in ways that non-Indians typically cannot fully appreciate. Part II contains a photo log of 269 photos of the cultural landscapes noted by tribal elders and cultural experts. Ethnographic interviews focused on both the past and present uses of these cultural landscapes by tribal members, including their locations, histories of use, purposes, and various cultural resources each may contain.