Mount Hood Stories

Welcome!  Here you will find research conducted by graduate students in Prof. Sarah D. Wald’s University of Oregon graduate seminar ENG 660: Racial Ecologies in collaboration with Bark and UO Libraries DREAM Lab.  The goal is to tell stories that provide new or alternative ways for advocates, users, and land managers for Mt. Hood National Forest to grapple with Mt. Hood’s pasts, presents, and futures.  These stories will be featured in Bark’s annual People’s Forest Forum held online December 9, 2021 from 6:00pm to 8:30pm PT.

MOunt Hood Stories

Welcome!  Here you will find research conducted by graduate students in Prof. Sarah D. Wald’s University of Oregon graduate seminar ENG 660: Racial Ecologies in collaboration with Bark and UO Libraries DREAM Lab.  The goal is to tell stories that provide new or alternative ways for advocates, users, and land managers for Mt. Hood National Forest to grapple with Mt. Hood’s pasts, presents, and futures.  These stories will be featured in Bark’s annual People’s Forest Forum held online December 9, 2021 from 6:00pm to 8:30pm PT.

 

View of Mount Hood taken from base in 1912.

Memory Haunts This Mountain

Mount Hood National Forest contains layers of memory–indigenous, immigrant, personal–that are often invisible in dominant narratives about this space. Recognizing and sharing these memories can fill spaces and bridge gaps to elevate silenced histories and facilitate a more reciprocal, respectful relationship with the land. How might Bark’s forest advocacy better reflect and engage with these silenced histories? And how do your own memories help to define your relationship with this place?

Presenters: Annalise San Juan and Rosa Inocencio Smith

Representing and Naming Mount Hood

How has white settler culture represented land and Indigenous peoples in film, generally and in the case of Mount Hood? How could such representations be overturned, rewritten, dismantled?

What are the different histories of the Indigenous and settler naming practices in Mt. Hood? What would be at stake in renaming? What would accountability look like in such a process?

How might this knowledge change the way Bark depicts Mt. Hood in film and photographs and how Bark thinks about place names?

Presenters: Matthew Bicakci and Rachel Combs

Food, Fire, and Grazing 

What happens when we view fire as a natural versus a cultural process? How have settler colonial and racial ideologies imprinted federal forest and fire policy?

How might Bark honor the sovereignty and knowledge of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs?

How is Mount Hood a foodscape? How have cultural relationships to matsutake mushrooms and huckleberries intertwined with Mount Hood’s fire ecology and landscape history?

How could public lands be used to further food sovereignty? Can agroecology play a role in public lands, perhaps replacing cattle grazing models of food extraction?

Presenters: Kaleb Beavers, Kathleen Gekiere, and Meredith Jacobson

Indigenous and Settler Mapping Practices

This break-out group looks at the consequences of settler mapping practices. Cartographic silences, or empty spaces on maps, are constructed to erase Indigenous communities as a function of settler colonialism. We also explore Indigenous counter-mapping that combat this narrative of erasure and demonstrates how space is never empty. What would it mean to look at land, not as something subject to control by outside forces, but as a subject with its own consciousness? What might it mean when we think about a management plan for land which is inseparable from the people who never relinquished their rights to “manage” it in the first place?   As part of this group, we’ll ask what these questions and insights might mean for Bark’s own mapping practices and vision of forest management.

Presenters: Nikki Cain and Maya Revell

Carceral Geographies

The term carceral geography refers to geographical and space centered research into the practices and expansion of incarcerating institutions ranging from prison facilities to detention centers to borders and beyond (Moran et al 2011). Yet, carceral geographies are not limited to the borders/boundaries/spaces of the prison. This break-out group will explore the entanglements between carceral geographies and Mt. Hood National Forest. What do we learn about wilderness when we examine it through the perspective of carceral geographies? How does Oregon’s origins as a white utopia manifest in forest management practices? How do Black people reclaim agency and make/disrupt/transform space through collective practice, poetry, oral histories, and art?

Presenters: Ashia Ajani and Hannah Gershone  

Glacial Spectres: A Glossary of Mount Hood

We offer a glossary of Mt. Hood and its glaciers following critical theories of haunting. Haunting, a mode of acknowledging the presence and contemporary inheritance of the past, helps us to explore some of the concepts and terms commonly associated with the environmental figure of the glacier including mountain, crevasse, fissure, fracture, porosity, recession, opacity, and change. By invoking past representations of the glaciers that shape Mt. Hood found in historical maps, texts, images, and environmental criticism, we hope to clear space for alternative visions of Mt. Hood to emerge. Our project revisits the glacier, a common image of environmental exploration and destruction, to ask: How can we mobilize issues of glacier loss and climate change that do not center narratives of white recreation in the management of Mt. Hood National Forest?

Presenters: Jessie Heine and Hannah Zeller

About the Collaboration

Sarah D. Wald, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English at UO,  Kate Thornhill, UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Librarian, Gabrielle Hayden, UO Libraries Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian, and Courtney Rae, Associate Director of Bark are the central initiators and collaborators in this project.

This project presents the scholarship of the following UO graduate students: Ashia Ajani, Kaleb Beavers, Matthew Bicakci, Nikki Cain, Rachel Combs, Kathleen Gekiere, Hannah Gershone, Jessie Heine, Meredith Jacobson, Maya Revell, Annalise San Juan, Rosa Inocencio Smith, and Hannah Zeller. Thank you to Quilt Sahme and Carina Miller for sharing your experiences and knowledge with us. Special thanks to Sarah Stoeckl in the UO Office of Sustainability and Alison Mildrexler of the UO Program in Environmental Studies. We appreciate the contributions of UO librarians Elizabeth Peterson, Kathy Stroud, and Dean Walton who shared their expertise with the class.  Aparna Rajagopal and Ava Holliday, founding partners of the Avarna Group, contributed to the conceptualization and on-going development of the project. Thank you to the Free Mt. Hood Committee and all Bark volunteers and staff for your trust and attention. We also acknowledge Center for Environmental Futures, PNW Just Futures Initiative, the Department of English, and the Program in Environmental Studies at UO.

Territorial Acknowledgements

From Bark and the University of Oregon

We affirm that the lands managed as Mt. Hood National Forest are the rightful homelands of the Multnomah, Mollala, Kalapuya, Chinook, Wyam, Clackamas, Tenino, Wasco, Wishram, Tiah, Paiute, and the many other Native people who live here and who have always lived here, who have always belonged to and cared for this land and whose bold resistance to colonial oppression should guide us all.

The University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon. Today, Kalapuya descendants are primarily citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and they continue to make important contributions to their communities, to the UO, to Oregon, and to the world.

In following the Indigenous protocol of acknowledging the original people of the land we occupy, we extend our respect to the nine federally recognized Indigenous nations of Oregon: the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, and the Klamath Tribes. We express our respect to the many more tribes who have ancestral connections to this territory, as well as to all other displaced Indigenous peoples who call Oregon home.  Hayu masi.