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Forumjournal VOL ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 Intangible Heritage Contents NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION VOL. 32, NO. 4 PAUL EDMONDSON President & CEO Historic Preservation Without Place TABITHA ALMQUIST DENNIS HOCKMAN . 3 Chief Administrative Officer LYNN ENGLISH Away From Place: Expanding Intangible Interim Chief Development Officer GEOFF HANDY Cultural Resource Protections Under U.S. Chief Marketing Officer and International Law KATHERINE MALONE-FRANCE EMILY BERGERON ...............................................4 Chief Preservation Officer THOMPSON M. MAYES Is There Such a Thing as Tangible Heritage? Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel JEREMY C. WELLS .............................................. 15 PATRICIA WOODWORTH Interim Chief Financial Officer Shared Spaces, Invisible Imprints: Intersections of Latinx and African American PRESERVATION LEADERSHIP FORUM Intangible Heritage SEHILA MOTA CASPER AND LAWANA HOLLAND-MOORE. .25 SUSAN WEST MONTGOMERY Vice President, Preservation Resources Vestiges of Vietnam: Uncovering the RHONDA SINCAVAGE Hidden Heritage of Virginia’s Little Saigon Director, Publications and KIM O’CONNELL ...............................................34 Programs SANDI BURTSEVA Content Manager Engaging Communities to Identify KERRI RUBMAN Intangible Heritage in Minneapolis Assistant Editor MICHAEL TOLAN . 44 PRIYA CHHAYA Associate Director, Working-class Intangible Heritage from Publications and Programs the Pennsylvania Coal Fields DENNIS HOCKMAN Senior Director, Editorial CAMILLE WESTMONT ...........................................54 and Creative MARY BUTLER Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Creative Director Preservation Practice Among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies ANDREA R. ROBERTS ...........................................64 Cover: Parade in Minneapolis, Minnesota. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN Forum Journal, a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (ISSN 1536-1012), is published by the Preservation Resources Department at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 1100, Washington, DC 20037 as a benefit of National Trust Forum The National Trust for Historic Preservation works to save America’s historic places for membership. Forum members also receive four issues of Preservation magazine. Annual dues start the next generation. We take direct, on- at $195. Send email address changes to [email protected]. Copyright ©2020 National the-ground action when historic buildings Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. Of the total amount of base dues, $6.00 is for and sites are threatened. Our work helps a subscription for Preservation magazine for one year. Support for the National Trust is provided build vibrant, sustainable communities. We by membership dues; endowment funds; individual, corporate and foundation contributions; and advocate with governments to save Amer- grants from state and federal agencies. The National Trust Forum Journal is a channel for express- ica’s heritage. We strive to create a cultural legacy that is as diverse as the nation itself ing opinions, encouraging debate, and conveying information of importance and of general inter- so that all of us can take pride in our part est to Forum members of the National Trust. Inclusion of material or product references does not of the American story. constitute an endorsement by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Historic Preservation Without Place DENNIS HOCKMAN hen the general public thinks about historic preservation, they envision house museums, historic neighborhoods, Wand battlefields. But we know that many important histories cannot be attached to place, because the buildings were demolished, landscapes paved over, communities redeveloped, leaving little evidence of the tangible places that once existed. Often, these erased places relate to the histories of marginalized communities—minorities, people of color, immigrants, the working poor. These histories we now recognize are equally foundational to who we are as a nation as the histories of political leaders, captains of industry, and war heroes. To preserve the history of marginalized communities, it is often necessary to focus on intangible heritage— elements of culture such as community traditions, dialect, music, art, craft, and cuisine. In the following pages, you will find wide ranging explorations of this theme. While most of the articles in this issue focus on specific communities and the efforts to preserve intangible heritage, others take a broader view of the topic. We explore the work to preserve intangible heritage in African American, Latinx, Vietnamese American, immigrant, and coal mining communities throughout America in places as disparate as San Diego; Pennsylvania Coal Country; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Arlington, Virginia. But first we position intangible heritage within the context of historic preservation. In the preservation of places, for example, there is a legal framework guiding the protection of historic sites. With intangible heritage, such legal protections are also starting to take shape. Another article evaluates validity of intangible heritage, asking “If heritage is itself intangible, how can there be an intangible version of it?” I’ll leave that for you to decide. ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 3 Away From Place: Expanding Intangible Cultural Resource Protections Under U.S. and International Law EMILY BERGERON hether due to war and political unrest, economic hardship, natural disasters, or other forces, communities around the Wworld, throughout history, have been displaced from their homelands or other places of cultural connection. Climatic activities, including global warming, pose growing threats. From the obvious effects of catastrophes like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico or the wildfires in Paradise, California, to the slower, less-publicized impacts of sea level rise on the Alaska Native village of Newtok or the residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana—environmental events have caused people to be increasingly separated from place. One estimate puts the number of Americans migrating in 2017 alone due to disasters at 1.6 million (IDMC, 2019). By 2050 climate change could force more than 140 million people to migrate within their own countries, including the United States (Rigaud, et al, 2018). Community-wide relocation is best approached through managed retreat, which will require some focus on protecting heritage after its dislocation from place, as well as protecting the cultural rights of refugees (Kim, 2011). Deliberate migrations force individuals to abandon built structures, land, and natural features. But they should provide people who are migrating with opportunities to plan for the protection of their heritage even though it will be untethered from a specific location. This will make legal protections of intangible resources an important next step. Seeking to protect what remains of natural resources also warrants the protection of traditional knowledge about those resources. As researchers and policy-makers are increasingly realizing, traditional knowledge, on everything from architecture to land management, has been integral to indigenous survival for ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 4 thousands of years—often providing more effective envi- ronmental approaches than those of mainstream science— and have great potential to stop (or at least slow) the tide of environmental destruction (Hermann, 2016). But the poten- tial for commercial exploitation of this information at the expense of indigenous people is also great. Protecting what UNESCO refers to as living culture could help maintain diversity amid increasing globalization, promote international exchange despite increasing nationalism, encourage the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to The artisanal process of harvesting and generation, and ensure that the drying the materials used to make pintao social and economic value of hats in Panama is an example of intangible heritage. both natural and cultural PHOTO BY ©MICI, 2014, WITH THE PERMISSION OF UNESCO resources remains in the community of origin. International conventions set forth by UNESCO, as well as laws ranging from statutory protections to policy-level initiatives in countries around the world, have demon- strated that laws can successfully be enacted and enforced to protect intangible cultural heritage. But the U.S. response, both in adopting international conventions and in establishing its own, has been regrettably slow. Changing the U.S. regulatory framework to address resources that are not completely reliant on their connection to place would encourage more equitable preservation and avoid the constraints of physical integrity, which has been criticized for limiting the protection of resources of traditionally under- represented communities. ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 5 INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS The most widely recognized international convention concerned with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) was established in 2003: the UN Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Convention on ICH), representing a conceptual shift in what heritage, and therefore historic preservation, actually are. Before that, there were other international laws and conventions to address heritage,1 but these were often faulted for being Eurocentric to the exclusion of indigenous culture in determining how heritage is assessed and managed, and for favoring the interests of research communities over the
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