WEEK 8: AS WE NEAR THE FINISH, A SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND

“To acknowledge past human impacts upon these islands is not to call into question their wildness; it is rather to celebrate, along with the human past, the robust ability of wild nature to sustain itself when people give it the freedom it needs to flourish in their midst.”

- William Cronon, The Riddle of the Apostle Islands (williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Riddle_Apostle_Islands.htm)

After a marathon week of lectures, critiques that stretched the limits of grit and endurance, and the looming urgency of the quarter’s end a mere 3 weeks away, we emerged to find ourselves at a crossroads.

Where do we go from here?

We were in search of a common framework, a common sense of purpose; we were looking for [a]common ground.

This idea – that of San Juan Island National Historical Park as common ground – became a focus of our work for the week, as we broke into final working groups and developed our critiques of business as usual for our park and the National Park System as a whole.

Out of our discussion, a new working group emerged to consider the National Park System in the realm of digital technologies and communication. This group will assess the effectiveness of the site and the system in relation to the digital fluencies and desires of future generations of park users.

Finally, as the studio winds down (or ramps up, as the case may be) we will be working to bring the specificities of our site analysis into a larger conceptual framework – or idea – for the future of the National Park System.

Here, we will need to be reflective with regard to how our local site reflects larger themes across the American landscape, the natural and cultural preservation of which it is the NPS’s charge to uphold.

What does the space of SJINHP tell us about the American experience?

SJINHP offers a message of cultural peace and natural sanctity across a landscape that is common ground for competing narratives, shifting ecologies, histories layered atop the other, stories dens-ifying and dispersing as if buffeted by the swirling winds atop the bluffs and on the beaches of American Camp.

We’ve heard the story of the Pig War, of peaceful arbitration and recognize it as but one of the stories to celebrate here, only one part of the American cultural landscape and we are cognizant of other voices in the midst – the whispers of the Lummi oars and the hot smoke of burning prairies; the plodding and plowing of early American settlers reaping an agricultural bounty; and more recently the encroachment of suburban development along with the whir of the automobile.

We search for space to hold [in]common our [un]common histories; in the landscape we seek the tension of our diverse pasts grounded in the unity of our American democracy.