Culture as Inspiration: A Metaphorical Framework for Designing Products with Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs)

There is a lack of emerging methods for guiding designers in innovating cultural contents beyond superficial manifestations in the process of product design with the consideration of modern lifestyles. Grounded in metaphor theory from cognitive linguistics, this article proposes a theoretical model—as a diagrammatic tool for design practice—assisting designers and/or researchers in analyzing and integrating the elements derived from Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) into product functions meeting modern needs. A quasi-experiment was conducted to illustrate how this theoretical model was applied in two design cases, which aimed to blend the value of TCPs and modern lifestyles metaphorically. We argue that this theoretical model can assist designers and/or researchers in designing products, which can spur reflections on culture, enhance the user experience, and improve modern life with local identity through metaphorically blending of TCPs and modern lifestyles.

Religion as Cultural Resource

This chapter explores what results when Native peoples articulate religious claims in the language of culture and cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law. It argues that cultural resource laws have become more fruitful in two respects. First, there is more emphatic insistence on government-to-government consultation between federal agencies and tribes. Second, in 1990, National Historic Preservation Act regulations were clarified by designating “Traditional Cultural Properties” as eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and in 1992, that law was amended to formally engage tribal governments in the review process. In light of these developments, protection under the categories of culture and cultural resource have proved more capacious for distinctive Native practices and beliefs about sacred lands, but it has come at the expense of the clearer edge of religious freedom protections, while still being haunted, and arguably bedraggled, by the category of religion from which these categories ostensibly have been formally disentangled.

Translating Tribal Values

Tribal governments in the Southwest employ a number of individuals to help with the preservation of tribal values and places. In this chapter, Theresa Pasqual, former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office and an Acoma tribal member, talks about her professional pathway, how Acoma has worked with other tribes to protect traditional cultural properties (TCPs), the challenges that tribes face in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and how tribal values can be incorporated into the preservation process. Based on her long experience, she emphasizes the importance of stewardship, listening, and collaboration—with the latter including collaboration between tribes as well as with archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. She also provides insights into the process for the recent successful nomination of Mount Taylor to the New Mexico Register of Cultural Historic Properties, the largest such property currently on the register.

Traditional Cultural Properties

Traditional cultural properties are significant because of the role they play in the retention and transmission of historically rooted beliefs, customs, and practices of a living traditional community. They are routinely identified and evaluated as historic properties during research activities needed for compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on cultural resources. To be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, traditional cultural properties need to be tangible places (a district, site, building, structure or object), must meet one or more of the National Register eligibility criteria, must have integrity of relationship and condition, must have been important for at least fifty years, and must have definable boundaries. The methods and concepts pertinent to research of traditional cultural properties in the Southwest are reviewed in this chapter.

Epilogue

The epilogue closes the volume by considering ways that contemporary Native communities in the region have assumed an activist role and begun to reclaim a greater part in representations of their pasts. Virginia and Maryland tribes have achieved state recognition, partnered with federal and state agencies, reburied ancestors, created indigenous archaeology programs, and prevented the destruction of traditional cultural properties by residential development and dam construction. For today’s Native communities in the Chesapeake, the deep history of Tsenacomacoh represents a powerful basis for reaffirming a place on the landscape.

Co-Creation of Knowledge by the Hopi Tribe and Archaeologists

For two decades, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has worked with archaeologists to co-create knowledge about the past and document contemporary values associated with heritage sites. Much of this work has been accomplished within the framework of research mandated by the National Historic Preservation Act and National Environmental Policy Act. Here we describe a case study that illustrates the processes of this community-based participatory research, including research design, implementation of fieldwork, peer review of research findings, and reporting. The case study is a project conducted in 2014 by the Hopi Tribe in partnership with Anthropological Research, LLC, to investigate traditional cultural properties associated with an Arizona Public Service Company transmission line. The Hopi Tribe’s collaborative research with archaeologists provides intellectual benefits for the management of archaeological resources and the humanistic and scientific understanding of the past.

The Snow-Capped Mountain and the Uranium Mine

Known in English as Mount Taylor, Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne (“in the east snow-capped mountain”) in northwestern New Mexico is a sacred landscape to the Zuni people. From an archaeological perspective, the mountain is dotted with hundreds of discrete archaeological sites that record 12,000 years of history. From a Zuni perspective, Mount Taylor is a rich cultural landscape—a tangible record of ancestral migrations, a living being, a pilgrimage site, a referent in religious prayers, a spiritual source of rain, and a collecting place for spring water, animals, minerals, and plants. For Zunis, all of these facets of the mountain combine to create a “total landscape” that is both a source and an instrument of Zuni culture. This article presents a case study of a compliance project to document the potential impacts of a proposed uranium mine at the base of Mount Taylor on Zuni traditional cultural properties. The project demonstrates how archaeologists can benefit from a landscape perspective that builds from the traditional knowledge of descendant communities. The Zuni standpoint further helps shape a CRM practice that is anthropologically informed and consistent with a developing federal mandate to use landscape-scale analysis in heritage management and mitigation practices.