Books by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
Open access edited volume, Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic... more Open access edited volume, Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Open Access Link: https://www.routledge.com/Toxic-Heritage-Legacies-Futures-and-Environmental-Injustice/Kryder-Reid-May/p/book/9781032429977
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California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage, 2016
Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award (2019); t... more Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award (2019); the Historical Society of Southern California Norman Neuerburg Prize (2019); the Vernacular Architecture Forum' Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize (2018) (http://www.vafweb.org/Cummings-Prize) and the Foundation for Landscape Studies John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize (2017)
“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history?
California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do.
Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.
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Articles & Chapters by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
The Conversation, 2023
https://theconversation.com/the-importance-of-shining-a-light-on-hidden-toxic-histories-211657
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Toxic Heritage Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice, 2024
This chapter explores the narratives of that dry cleaning pollution and the ways it both resists ... more This chapter explores the narratives of that dry cleaning pollution and the ways it both resists and registers as toxic heritage. It focuses on the intersections of laundry, labor, racialized bodies, and the environmental harm that decades of use of perchloroethylene (PERC) and other solvents have created for laundry workers and across urban and suburban landscapes. Through an analysis of narratives produced by industry, dry cleaning workers, environmental regulatory and advocacy organizations, and formal cultural heritage institutions, the chapter interrogates ideas of environmental amnesia, toxicity, and responsibility in an industry that was dispersed throughout residential neighborhoods and that created contamination that is typically underground and invisible. It also illuminates how this invisible contamination may be made visible through activist archives, journalism, and participatory heritage in collaborations between the university and communities affected by PERC and other industrial contamination. The investigation speaks to toxic heritage as a central legacy of the Anthropocene and as an opportunity for activist, public-facing environmental humanities to raise awareness and support dialogue about environmental risks.
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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2020
Biographical entry for Elizabeth Kryder-Reid by Larry J. Zimmerman for the Encyclopedia of Global... more Biographical entry for Elizabeth Kryder-Reid by Larry J. Zimmerman for the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Clair Smith, Springer International Publishing 2020
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Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy, edited by Sierra Rooney, Jennifer Wingate, and Harriet F. Senie,, 2021
This chapter, co-authored by Laura Holzman, Modupe Labode, and Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, expands the... more This chapter, co-authored by Laura Holzman, Modupe Labode, and Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, expands the study of teachable monuments by considering what can be learned from an absent object -- not one that has been removed, but one that was never made in the first place-- and how those lessons might engage people in meaningful conversations. We take as our focus the afterlife of E Pluribus Unum, a public art project in Indianapolis designed by Fred Wilson, and explore how it has been mobilized across physical and virtual spaces of public discourse.
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International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
Introduction to "Tools for a Critical Heritage: Exploring Shared Authority and Stakeholder-Define... more Introduction to "Tools for a Critical Heritage: Exploring Shared Authority and Stakeholder-Defined Values of Heritage" a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies. The Introduction frames the context of seven case studies from around the world: Australia, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and a variety of methodologies, the authors explore examples which privilege the political and phenomenological concerns of diverse stakeholders in a wide variety of geographic, institutional, and cultural contexts.
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International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
Abstract
Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying... more Abstract
Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying attention to the fields of power in which the sites operate and applying methodologies that are open to user-defined paradigms of value. In the U.S., official discourse often frames the value of heritage sites associated the deep Native American past as archaeological sites, an interpretation that is consistent with settler colonial ideologies. This narrative generally obfuscates connections between the heritage of the sites and contemporary peoples, and it effaces the history of colonialism and dispossession. A study of stakeholder-defined heritage at two contested sites in the central Midwest revealed both congruencies and conflicts among diverse constituencies’ articulations of the sites’ value. At Mounds State Park a proposed dam and reservoir ‘Mounds Lake’ project would inundate a large portion of the site. At Strawtown Koteewi, Native American tribes have made repatriation claims under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).The study also problematised the term ‘cultural heritage’ as it is understood and used by the different constituencies, particularly for culturally and historically affiliated Native Americans. It also highlighted the positions of the constituencies within the broader fields of power implicated in these contested sites.
Keywords: Settler colonial, stakeholder, value, repatriation, contested heritage
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Cultural Contestation: Heritage, Identity, and the Role of Government, edited by Jeroen Rodenberg and Pieter Agenaar, , 2018
Over the last several years, Mounds State Park and Strawtown Koteewi Park, two government-owned a... more Over the last several years, Mounds State Park and Strawtown Koteewi Park, two government-owned and managed sites in central Indiana, USA, have become the focus of debates that reveal a variety of perspectives on the value of heritage sites among different groups of community stakeholders including Native Americans, recreational users, economic development promoters, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. A study investigating “stakeholder-defined values” of these heritage sites has revealed how different groups perceive the physical remains of the past. Discourse analysis of the debate around these sites highlighted how governmental entities, including tribal, county, and state governments, navigate the often conflicting agendas and interests of these groups by deploying different concepts of cultural heritage.
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Pedagogy and Practice in Heritage Studies, edited by Susan J. Bender and Phyllis Mauch Messenger. Gainesville: University Press of Florida., 2019
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2010
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Heritage & Society, 2015
Small-scale representations of the California missions in the form of mission models and miniatur... more Small-scale representations of the California missions in the form of mission models and miniatures have circulated in public and private display contexts for close to a century. Produced by students, hobbyists, preservationists, and artists, this material culture constructs, in specific and codified ways, an ideal mission materiality. For more than 100 years the mission models have been consumed through the distinct discursive practices of crafting, collecting, displaying, and buying. The models trace the production of cultural memory in daily life through the materialization of heritage constituted through formal and informal practices, across personal and public spheres, and over multiple generations. In their representation of landscape, labor, and Native Americans, these discursive cultural artifacts contribute to the construction
of a highly politicized past that reinforces a romanticized and valorized presentation of colonialism. A postcolonial critique of the models also raises questions regarding the roles of heritage professionals in mediating community-curated history.
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Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes , 2014
Each of the twenty‐one missions constructed from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscans and Native American ... more Each of the twenty‐one missions constructed from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscans and Native American “neophytes” along the California coast and inland valleys has some form of a “mission garden” as part of the contemporary landscape. In contrast to the more utilitarian uses of the landscape during the colonial era these ornamental gardens, were first constructed in Santa Barbara in 1872 and continued to be built throughout the twentieth century in the central courtyards and forecourts of the missions. Using historical and contemporary documentary and visual evidence, this paper analyzes features such as sundials, inscriptions, memorials, and ruins (both real and fabricated) as literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical markers of time. In this construction of time, past, present, and future are registered in the gardens’ design elements and the embodied experience of the landscape. Specifically, the gardens are cast as peaceful, beautiful oases in which visitors can ‘step back’ to a simpler time. They commemorate the lives lived and lost in the missions, and they signal the biblical associations of the cloister gardens as Edenic sanctuaries and portents of a paradise yet to come. The time markers operate in a recursive way to locate the spaces in a broader historical narrative and to signify "heritage" in contemporary cultural practice. Even as the missions are promoted as iconic sites in the state's origin story, these time markers in the mission garden mediate the contradictory meanings of California's colonial past.
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Landscape and Identity: Archaeology and Human Geography (British Archaeological Reports International Series 2709), edited by Kurt D. Springs, pp.83-102. Oxford: ArchaeoPress., 2015
This paper explores the relationship of place and identity in the historical and contemporary con... more This paper explores the relationship of place and identity in the historical and contemporary contexts of the California mission landscapes, conceiving of identity as a category of both analysis and practice (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The missions include twenty-one sites founded along the California coast and central valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missions are all currently open to the public and regularly visited as heritage sites, while many also serve as active Catholic parish churches. This paper offers a reading of the mission landscapes over time and traces the materiality of identity narratives inscribed in them, particularly in 'mission gardens' planted during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. These contested places are both celebrated as sites of California's origins and decried as spaces of oppression and even genocide for its indigenous peoples. Theorized as relational settings where identity is constituted through narrative and memory (Sommers 1994; Halbwachs 1992) and experienced as staged, performed heritage, the mission landscapes bind these contested identities into a coherent postcolonial experience of a shared past by creating a conceptual metaphor of 'mission as garden' that encompasses their disparities of emotional resonance and ideological meaning.
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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Helaine Silverman, ed., Heritage Section, , 2020
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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Helaine Silverman, ed, 2014
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Public: A Journal of Imagining America, 2014
This article examines the hybrid careers of a group of public scholars who form the core faculty ... more This article examines the hybrid careers of a group of public scholars who form the core faculty for an academic program on a campus defined in part by its commitment to civic engagement. To better understand our status as public scholars, we posed four questions to ourselves that invited reflection on our work, our positionality, our professional objectives, and the expectations that others have for us. The text presented here is a synthesis of our responses to that questionnaire. We each define our work differently, and none of us took quite the same route to arrive at our current faculty appointment. Looking closely at the pathways that lead to and through our hybrid careers reveals an intricate combination of personal commitments, professional identity, larger goals, and broader perspectives. https://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/a-random-walk-to-public-scholarship-exploring-our-convergent-paths/
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Public: A Journal of Imagining America , 2013
As the faculty of the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis... more As the faculty of the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), we are fortunate to be part of a small but vibrant intentional community formed around our shared dedication to civic engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public scholarship. The nature of our daily work is hybrid, and so are the routes that we've taken to arrive where we are today. This issue of Public provided a welcome opportunity for us to examine our different professional backgrounds. Although our varied experiences shape our teaching and research and come up in conversation when we make group decisions about our program, we do not usually have the luxury of reflecting on our intersecting career paths. Looking closely at the routes that lead to and through our hybrid careers reveals an intricate combination of personal commitments, professional identity, larger goals, and broader perspectives. http://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/hybrid-discourse-exploring-art-race-and-space-in-indianapolis/
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Books by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history?
California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do.
Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.
Articles & Chapters by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying attention to the fields of power in which the sites operate and applying methodologies that are open to user-defined paradigms of value. In the U.S., official discourse often frames the value of heritage sites associated the deep Native American past as archaeological sites, an interpretation that is consistent with settler colonial ideologies. This narrative generally obfuscates connections between the heritage of the sites and contemporary peoples, and it effaces the history of colonialism and dispossession. A study of stakeholder-defined heritage at two contested sites in the central Midwest revealed both congruencies and conflicts among diverse constituencies’ articulations of the sites’ value. At Mounds State Park a proposed dam and reservoir ‘Mounds Lake’ project would inundate a large portion of the site. At Strawtown Koteewi, Native American tribes have made repatriation claims under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).The study also problematised the term ‘cultural heritage’ as it is understood and used by the different constituencies, particularly for culturally and historically affiliated Native Americans. It also highlighted the positions of the constituencies within the broader fields of power implicated in these contested sites.
Keywords: Settler colonial, stakeholder, value, repatriation, contested heritage
of a highly politicized past that reinforces a romanticized and valorized presentation of colonialism. A postcolonial critique of the models also raises questions regarding the roles of heritage professionals in mediating community-curated history.
“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history?
California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do.
Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.
Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying attention to the fields of power in which the sites operate and applying methodologies that are open to user-defined paradigms of value. In the U.S., official discourse often frames the value of heritage sites associated the deep Native American past as archaeological sites, an interpretation that is consistent with settler colonial ideologies. This narrative generally obfuscates connections between the heritage of the sites and contemporary peoples, and it effaces the history of colonialism and dispossession. A study of stakeholder-defined heritage at two contested sites in the central Midwest revealed both congruencies and conflicts among diverse constituencies’ articulations of the sites’ value. At Mounds State Park a proposed dam and reservoir ‘Mounds Lake’ project would inundate a large portion of the site. At Strawtown Koteewi, Native American tribes have made repatriation claims under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).The study also problematised the term ‘cultural heritage’ as it is understood and used by the different constituencies, particularly for culturally and historically affiliated Native Americans. It also highlighted the positions of the constituencies within the broader fields of power implicated in these contested sites.
Keywords: Settler colonial, stakeholder, value, repatriation, contested heritage
of a highly politicized past that reinforces a romanticized and valorized presentation of colonialism. A postcolonial critique of the models also raises questions regarding the roles of heritage professionals in mediating community-curated history.
Course link: http://www.shapingoutcomes.org/course/index.htm