Matthew J. Hill
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Anthropology, Associate Director, Center for Heritage and Society
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Heritage and Society at UMass Amherst, a multidisciplinary research, teaching and policy initiative to craft new approaches to cultural heritage conservation and communication internationally. My research examines the examines the late socialist transformation of Old Havana, a UNESCO World Heritage site, into a global heritage tourism destination in the context of Cuba's transition to post-Soviet socialism, a period that combines a highly-centralized economy and socialist ideals with a limited opening to market capitalism.
My broader research seeks to understand how different histories of colonization, plantation slavery and dependent urbanization, in conjunction with distinct forms of heritage management, preservation policies and local memory practices have shaped contrasting urban heritage landscapes in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
In addition to my academic research, I also have applied experience in cultural resource management, public outreach and civic engagement through my consulting work for the National Park Service (NPS). As the principal investigator on NPS projects for Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Fort Stanwix National Monument, I have used ethnography to identify indigenous groups who attach cultural significance to territories under NPS management, and specific park resources that are important to Native peoples' sense of place, culture, and lifestyle.
I graduated from the University of Chicago and hold a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology.
My broader research seeks to understand how different histories of colonization, plantation slavery and dependent urbanization, in conjunction with distinct forms of heritage management, preservation policies and local memory practices have shaped contrasting urban heritage landscapes in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
In addition to my academic research, I also have applied experience in cultural resource management, public outreach and civic engagement through my consulting work for the National Park Service (NPS). As the principal investigator on NPS projects for Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Fort Stanwix National Monument, I have used ethnography to identify indigenous groups who attach cultural significance to territories under NPS management, and specific park resources that are important to Native peoples' sense of place, culture, and lifestyle.
I graduated from the University of Chicago and hold a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology.
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The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism.
Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty.
Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York.
Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
“save” one of Old Havana’s main squares, the Plaza Vieja, by remaking it
into a traditional plaza and upholding it as a marker of Cuban patrimony and national identity. In doing so, I examine the role of heritage as a “mediator”
that both configures and is shaped by human interactions. The process
of assembling heritage sites, I argue, sets up new associations between
heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things—including
materials like buildings, documents, maps, and plans—which as part of
the network of associations gain the ability to make other members of the
network do unexpected things. I examine this process of reassemblage
in two historical stages. These include: a socialist stage (1979–1992) in
which the Cuban state promoted local history and traditional architecture
alongside the classless, egalitarian dimensions of a Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary identity; and a post-Soviet phase (1993–2015), in which
the reconstruction of the Plaza as an early 19th century square reflects a
broader ideological shift that emphasizes local identity and colonial history
in lieu of a de-emphasized Marxism-Leninism. The article concludes by examining how power operates through assemblages and questions their
potential to become fixed as more stable apparatuses that contribute
to processes of subjectification. [Keywords: Actor network theory,
assemblages, materiality, heritage, Cuba, socialism, urban spaces]
The Iroquois’s role in treaty-making figured centrally in directing the course of empire in the colonial and post-colonial periods. After the arrival of Europeans in North America, two factors made Iroquois conventions pervasive in cross-cultural diplomacy in northeastern North America: the combination of Iroquois political acumen and the geographical location of their homelands astride key water routes linking the Atlantic to the continental interior. Through the end of the American Revolution, the Iroquois engaged actively with competing empires on the periphery of their homelands, balancing skilled negotiations conducted by a large and experienced corps of diplomats with calibrated direct involvement in warfare that preserved their well-known reputation for military strength. Post-revolutionary Iroquois diplomacy witnessed efforts to protect remaining homelands from the depredations of settler governments. The legacy of traditional Iroquois diplomacy continues in the contemporary era through calls from Iroquois political activists for the return of treaty-making as a critical means of restoring their sovereign standing eroded by colonialism and post-colonialism.
Chapter Two provides a summary overview of the history and culture of Iroquois treaty-making from the pre-contact era through the early national period of the United States. Chapter Three considers the issue of freedom of movement as reflected in the Iroquois diplomatic record from 1624 to 1794, with special attention to the impact of the 1768 and 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaties on this crucial aspect of Iroquois political sovereignty.
Yet the Iroquois’s diplomatic acumen did not prevent widespread land loss and dispossession over a period beginning with the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty and extending into the mid-nineteenth century when a majority of Oneidas had relocated to Wisconsin and Canada due to the expropriation of Oneida lands by New York State and factional divisions dating from the mid-eighteenth century. The second part of this report, then, attempts to reckon with the various actors, legal regimes, and cultural values that contributed to this process of Iroquois confinement and removal. In the course of dispossession, the ethnohistory reveals that legal instruments based on notions of European superiority played a critical role in this process of land loss, enabling the land grab involved in establishing federal and state borders. Foremost among these instruments was a monopoly right, known as preemption, which the British, and its successor, the United States, claimed in expropriating Iroquois property at depressed prices through treaties, and then reselling it at a handsome profit to land speculators. This period is also characterized by a transition in Iroquois sovereignty over a vast area that encompassed the Mohawk and Ohio River Valleys to a reduced sovereignty that was confined to bounded reservations located in central and western New York.
Chapter Four, then, considers the issue of Iroquois dispossession from the vantage of the loss of Iroquois neutrality in the context of the Seven Years’ War, Iroquois incorporation into the British Empire, and their attempts to redirect the course of white settlement away from their ancestral homelands to West Virginia and Kentucky through the 1768 Fort Stanwix Boundary Line Treaty. Chapter Five examines the United States’ expropriation of the Iroquois’ lands in the Ohio Valley through the application of the “conquest doctrine” in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War at the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty. It also explores the Iroquois’ reluctant decision to negotiate with the federal government in exchange for receiving recognition of their status as independent nations as well as the territorial integrity of their homelands in central and western New York. Chapter Six examines the New York State treaties with the Oneidas and Onondagas, resulting in the loss of the majority of their lands. It situates this land loss in the context of the intense competition for Iroquois lands on the part of the federal government, New York and Massachusetts, and private land speculators as well as the strategic location of eastern Iroquois lands astride several key transportation and communication routes. These routes (including the Mohawk River, Wood Creek, and Oneida Lake), which would subsequently form important components of the Erie Canal (1825) and the Genesee Turnpike (1813), contributed as place-making actors in their own right to a “transportation revolution” in central New York that would lead to the “undoing of the Iroquois” (Hauptman 1999:3). Finally, Chapter Seven examines the contemporary legacy of the Fort Stanwix Treaties, focusing on contemporary Oneida land claim cases and the ways in which they invoke the historic Fort Stanwix treaties.
“save” one of Old Havana’s main squares, the Plaza Vieja, by remaking it
into a traditional plaza and upholding it as a marker of Cuban patrimony and national identity. In doing so, I examine the role of heritage as a “mediator”
that both configures and is shaped by human interactions. The process
of assembling heritage sites, I argue, sets up new associations between
heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things—including
materials like buildings, documents, maps, and plans—which as part of
the network of associations gain the ability to make other members of the
network do unexpected things. I examine this process of reassemblage
in two historical stages. These include: a socialist stage (1979–1992) in
which the Cuban state promoted local history and traditional architecture
alongside the classless, egalitarian dimensions of a Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary identity; and a post-Soviet phase (1993–2015), in which
the reconstruction of the Plaza as an early 19th century square reflects a
broader ideological shift that emphasizes local identity and colonial history
in lieu of a de-emphasized Marxism-Leninism. The article concludes by examining how power operates through assemblages and questions their
potential to become fixed as more stable apparatuses that contribute
to processes of subjectification. [Keywords: Actor network theory,
assemblages, materiality, heritage, Cuba, socialism, urban spaces]