Change for Tradition and Historical past, Small and Massive

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Local weather and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Local weather Heritage Initiative

There’s been a change at Lake Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a 114-year outdated historic marker set on prime of the final burial mound within the space has been taken down. This can be a good factor. 

A number of elements led to the elimination. One was recognition that the position of the signal on prime of the mound was prompting individuals to stroll up the mound to learn it, which is disrespectful. As properly, the title of the marker described the mound as “prehistoric.” Because the Nationwide Affiliation of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO) mentioned of their sharing of this information on Fb, “[i]f you ask nearly any THPO, they’ll let you know there’s nothing their ancestors did that was ‘pre-historic,’ as a result of their historical past reaches again millennia and lives on in them and their descendants.”

I’m sharing this right here as a result of it strikes me as such an necessary instance of how our understanding of what historical past is and relationships with it are described and shared can and will change. Elimination of an historic marker could sound like an remoted occasion. However concurrently, as the worldwide local weather assembly COP29 is nearing the tip of its first week, the nation of Tuvalu is preventing for adjustments to the regulation of the ocean in order that it might retain perpetual connection to its space of the Pacific as seas rise and pioneering approaches to making a “digital nation.” In each circumstances, Tuvalu is utilizing new authorized and technological instruments to hold ahead deep cultural connections. 

As local weather change and efforts to deal with it convey large environmental, social, and financial adjustments, I see actions at each of those scales as essential. Honoring and repairing connections on the native scale certainly is crucial to constructing a future that may broadly combine care, justice, and connection to locations we reside.

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Picture credit score:

Historic marker being faraway from Lake Park in Milwaukee, WI (picture isn’t credited however, as printed on the hyperlink above, seems to have been taken by Cari Taylor-Carlson).