Heritage and Its Missions: Contested Meanings and Constructive Appropriations

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name ""critical heritage studies,"" Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif­ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of ""heritage"" collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.

Cristóbal Gnecco is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca and chair of its Anthropology Program, where he works on the political economy of archaeology, geopolitics of knowledge, discourses on alterity, and ethnographies of heritage.

Adriana Schmidt Dias holds an MA in History from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD in Archeology from the University of São Paulo. She is professor in the Department and in the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Archeology at the Federal University of Pelotas. She has carried out research and published on Brazilian precolonial archaeology; theory and method in archaeology; Indigenous history; and cultural heritage.

Deana Dartt is Coastal Chumash and Mestiza, descending from the Indigenous people of the Californias. Her scholarly and professional work strives to address the incongruities between public understanding, representation, and true acknowledgment of Native peoples, their cultures, histories, and contemporary lives. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Oregon and has held curatorial positions at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Portland Art Museum, as well as teaching appointments at the University of Oregon, University of Washington, and Northwest Indian College. She recently completed a writing fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, where she revised her book manuscript for publication titled, Subverting the Master Narrative: Museums, Power and Native Life in California.

Lisbeth Haas is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written three books on Indigenous California, all of which place Native knowledge and political ideas to the foreground of colonial history. Her first book, Conquests and Historical Identities in California (1995), examined the Spanish, Mexican, and American eras in two places and how Indigenous, Mexican, Anglo, and European immigrants defined their histories and sets of rights through conflict and settlement. More recently, in Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar writing on Luiseño History and Grammar (2011), she examines the history of Pablo Tac, born at Mission San Luis Rey in 1821, on the land of his father’s tribe, and the manuscript he wrote in Rome; Tac’s writing reveals how Luiseños understood and survived a drastic colonization. Her book Saints and Citizens (2014) similarly works from Native sources and colonial and national archives to render the significance of tribal history in California under Spain, Mexico, and the United States. She is currently co-editing the book Indigenous Archives (University of Nebraska Press) and cooperating with tribal Chair Valentin Lopez on his book concerning Amah Mutsun history.

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies in the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, Director of the Cultural Heritage Research Center, and former Director of the IUPUI Museum Studies Program (1998–2013, 2017–20). With a background in archaeology, art history, and public history, her research investigates how humans appropriate the tangible and intangible remnants of the past and mobilize them in the constitution of social relationships. Her particular focus is the intersections of landscape and power and how materiality, whether the built environment or other forms of material culture, is deployed in the contestation of social inequalities across boundaries such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. She has disseminated this work in a variety of scholarly formats, including peer-reviewed publications and publicly accessible exhibits, forums, and online platforms. Her research focuses on landscape history and the production of public memory, particularly in the Chesapeake, the Midwest, and California. Her work on the California missions has explored their landscape history, place in public memory, and significance in settler colonial context of contemporary US cultural narratives. She has published this work in architecture history, heritage studies, and archaeology literature and in the award-winning monograph California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Her current research investigates toxic heritage and the ways in which places of environmental harm are mobilized and marginalized in contemporary memory practices.