One of our nation’s newest National Historic Sites, the site of Honouliuli, will interpret the history of civilian incarceration and the experience of prisoners of war in Hawaii during World War II— an important and often glossed over part of America’s past. To use the words of the National Park Service, it “will be a place to reflect on wartime experiences and recommit ourselves to the pursuit of freedom and justice.”

Join me as I chat with Hanako Wakatsuki, JHU Museum Studies Program alumna and Superintendent of Honouliuli National Historic Site, about the importance of interpreting complicated histories. And how understanding the historical context and trajectory of events in our nation’s past can help us in the present and the future. She talks about the ways her own family’s history is intertwined with the powerful stories she shares regarding the lived experience of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Hanako Wakatsuki, Superintendent of Honouliuli National Historic Site, in front of the Minidoka National Historic Site tower.

Hanako is an alumna of Johns Hopkins University's Museum Studies program. She has over 14 years of experience in museums and public history. She has worked for Minidoka National Historic Site, U.S. Navy Seabee Museum, Tule Lake National Monument, and the Idaho State Historical Society. She received her B.A. in History and B.S. in Political Science from Boise State University and her M.A. in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Hanako is passionate about visitor services, making cultural institutions accessible to the community, and bridging the gap between academia and the public.

To learn more about the sites and resources mentioned in the podcast, see the links below:

• Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
• Vincent Chin

The 21st century has seen an unprecedented threat to our global heritage—from natural disasters, extreme weather events, and climate change to military conflicts in some of our most sensitive areas of global heritage alongside the intentional targeting of cultural sites for destruction.

During this episode, join me as I chat with Corine Wegener, director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), an outreach program dedicated to protecting cultural heritage in crisis situations. SCRI’s work includes U.S. domestic and international responses to disasters in Haiti, Nepal, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. It also offers disaster response and leadership training for cultural heritage stewards worldwide.

Cori Wegener at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Cathedral sustained extensive damage during Haiti's 2010 earthquake.

Cori has spent many years working on disaster preparedness for Heritage sites and assets. Before coming to the Smithsonian in 2012, Cori was an associate curator in Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. During a concurrent career as a U.S. Army Reserve officer, she served on several military deployments, including her last assignment as an Arts, Monuments, and Archives Officer in Iraq after the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum. In 2006, Cori founded the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield (USCBS), the U.S. branch of an international NGO dedicated to implementing the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property during Armed Conflict. She serves on the USCBS and the Civil Affairs Association boards and provides advice and training to U.S. and international military personnel regarding cultural property protection. Cori holds a BGS in Political Science with a minor in Military History from the University of Nebraska Omaha, where she also received her ROTC commission. She has M.A. degrees in both Political Science and Art History from the University of Kansas.

To learn more about the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, visit culturalrescue.si.edu. To learn more about the 1954 Hague Convention, visit uscbs.org.

Additional Resources:

Links to some the organizations and initiatives Cori mentioned in our chat.

• Conflict Culture Resource Network
• American Institute for Conservation: National Heritage Responders Program
• Heritage Emergency National Task Force (HENTF)
• HEART: Heritage Emergency and Response Training
• Saving Your Family Treasures
  • Facebook Live Workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvLc2slDGVU&feature=youtu.be
• U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield (USCBS)
• Alliance for Response Communities

The 2020 fire season in the US has seen another historic year, with record breaking fires across the Western US. But fire is not new, it has been part of the Indigenous cultural landscape for millennia; not framed as something to be feared but rather as something to be embraced as an intentional part of stewardship. For this episode we unpack a bit about this relationship and what it can mean for land management moving forward.

This episode is co-hosted by first-year Cultural Heritage Management graduate student, Emily Dayhoff. Emily is a Southern Sierra Miwuk and currently works as a Cultural Demonstrator and Park Ranger in Yosemite National Park. She gives interpretive programs on her ancestors and a variety of other topics related to the park.  Emily often engages in conversations about Indigenous fire stewardship and cultural burns with park visitors.

Valley view of Yosemite National Park by King of Hearts - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28519137.

During this episode Emily and I speak with Dr. Don Hankins, a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico and Field Director for the California State University Chico Ecological Reserves. His areas of expertise are pyrogeography, water resources, and conservation.

Combining his academic and cultural expertise as a Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) traditional cultural practitioner, he is particularly interested in the application of Indigenous land stewardship practices as a keystone process to aid in conservation and management of resources. Dr. Hankins is currently engaged in wildland fire research with an emphasis on landscape scale, prescribed and cultural burns; water research focused on ecocultural approaches to place with an emphasis on the Bay-Delta and tribal water rights.

Dr. Hankins has been involved in various aspects of land management and conservation for a variety of organizations and agencies including federal and Indigenous entities in both North America and Australia. More about his work can be found HERE.

Landscape shaped by fire. Hundreds of lupins and fireweed. Photo by Leithen M'Gonigle retrieved from: https://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/news/2016/03/how-fire-diversity-promotes-biodiversity.

Additional Resources:

Dr. Hankins mentions the chaparral ecosystem, a definition of chaparral can be found on the US Forest Service’s website HERE.

Find out more information about a few of the fires referenced in the podcast:

• Rim Fire (2013)
• Ferguson Fire (2018) 
• Camp Fire (2018)

A conversation with Wanda Raschkow and Elizabeth Hora reveals some of the possibilities along with some of the challenges for implementing a statewide site stewardship program.

Wanda serves as the Statewide Site Stewardship Program Coordinator for Friends of Cedar Mesa, a conservation-focused non-profit located in Bluff, Utah. Friends of Cedar Mesa works to ensure that public lands in San Juan County, with all their cultural and natural values, are respected and protected. 

As part of that mission Friends of Cedar Mesa has partnered with the Utah Bureau of Land Management to develop a heritage stewardship program. Wanda served as a federal-agency archaeologist for 20 years before joining Friends of Cedar Mesa, she’s worked with the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service. In each agency, she trained and mentored volunteer site stewards.

Wanda believes that engaging the public in the care of our shared heritage is critical to preserving archaeological sites for the future.

My other guest is Elizabeth Hora. Elizabeth a Public Archaeologist for the Utah State Historic Preservation Office or SHPO in Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds a Masters in Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management from Utah State University and specializes in Fremont archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and dendroarchaeology. Her most recent work focuses on eliminating damage to archaeological sites through education, stewardship, and public outreach.

If you are interested in learning more about how to become involved in some of the initiatives we talked about in this episode you can reach out to Wanda Rashchow at archmonitor@cedarmesafriends.org

Visit with Respect: https://www.friendsofcedarmesa.org/visit-with-respect/

ArchMonitor: https://www.friendsofcedarmesa.org/archmonitor/

Utah Heritage Stewardship Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/UtahHeritageStewardshipProgram/

Utah Public Archaeology Network (UPAN): https://history.utah.gov/antiquities/upan/

Sign up for UPAN’s monthly newsletter:  https://mailchi.mp/f859c0ec6602/oor2019

Utah Professional Archeological Council (UPAC): https://www.upaconline.org/

HB: 163 https://le.utah.gov/~2020/bills/static/HB0163.html

We welcome Kaitlyn Kingsland, for a conversation about Archaeogaming. Kaitlyn is a doctoral student at the University of South Florida and a researcher at the Institute for Digital Exploration or iDEx. Her work focuses on 3D and digital applications to archaeology, history, and cultural heritage. She also studies archaeogaming and is the current manager and editor of Archaeogaming.com, a blog dedicated to the discussion of the archaeology both of and in video games.

Be sure to visit Archaeogaming.com and follow Kaitlyn on twitter at@ Archaeogaming. Interested in learning more about the subject? Check out the website’s resources page. 

Join us for a conversation with anthropologist and digital humanities specialist, Elizabeth Galvin, as she shares with us her previous work at the British Museum as the project manager and leader of a major digital research project on African Rock Art. We discuss issues of technology, digital curation, and engagement and the ways digital outputs can aid in efforts to increase access to museums.

Elizabeth has worked throughout Africa, but mainly in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia. She has collaborated with national and local museums throughout the continent, researching indigenous knowledge systems, material culture, and pictorial collections as well as increasing open access to museum collections and cultural heritage through online digital databases and resources.

In her current role as the Head of Learning and Digital Programs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Elizabeth manages the research, formation, and implementation of digital programs and educational technology to explore collections. Her academic interests are focused on the intersection of technology and digital outputs in academia with traditional museum research and engagement practices

Browse 3-D models of the British Museum's African Rock Art collection. 

Gamepass shelter (UNECSO World Heritage site) VR experience.  

Follow Elizabeth on twitter @LisaGalvin_

Fortress of Guaita, San Marino.
By Max_Ryazanov, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia.

Perched on Mount Titano and surrounded on all sides by the country of Italy, San Marino, is a small republic with a big history. The San Marino historic center and Mount Titano gained UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2008. As one of the oldest continuing republics in the world and the only surviving intact Italian city-state, its historic contributions to the development of democracy have been profound.

Dr. Paolo Rondelli was born in San Marino and attended the Italian University of Bologna where he received degrees in Chemical Engineer, Environmental Science, Historical Science, and Humanities, as well as a Ph.D. in Historical Communication. Dr. Rondelii served as San Marino’s Ambassador to the United States between 2007 and 2016. Since October 2016 he has served and continues to serve as Ambassador and Permanent Delegate for San Marino to UNESCO.

Dr. Rondelli worked on the initial UNESCO nomination for the site of San Marino and shares with us the unique history of this important city-state.

With its rice terraces and water temples, the subaks of Bali’s cultural landscape blend the natural, cultural, and spiritual through a cooperative social system of management. The 2012 designation of the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: the Subak System as a Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy, as a World Heritage site, brought about the potential for additional preservation alongside increased tourism but continued challenges to site management remain.

Dr. Stephen Lansing, co-director of the Complexity Institute & a Professor in the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, talks about these challenges and potentials. Dr. Lansing worked on the successful nomination of Bali as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The nomination efforts developed out of his study of the subaks and water temple networks of Bali, a system key to the World Heritage site’s eventual designation.

Learn more about the UNESCO nomination process, the subsequent impacts on site management, and the future of Bali’s cultural landscapes.

Documents related to the World Heritage Site of Bali referenced in the podcast are available at UNESCO.

Additional links to Dr. Lansing’s work on Bali’s subaks including publications, film, and video are available at slansing.org.