Anatomy of a Traditional Cultural Property: The Saga of Auke Cape

In an era when indigenous people face limited sovereignty, minority status, and continuing pressure on traditional lands and resources, how can important cultural landscapes best be conserved as living landscapes? For Native Americans, the process for evaluating and conserving traditional cultural properties (TCPs), first introduced twenty years ago, constituted a small but important governmental response to the accelerating problem of erosion of their communal lands and historical and sacred sites. Bulletin 38 offered a set of guidelines for evaluating these places as “living landscapes” of national historical significance due to their association with “cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that (a) are rooted in the community’s history, and (b) are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of a community.” If a cultural property receives a positive evaluation, it can then be nominated for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. To mitigate a property’s vulnerability in the interim between a positive eligibility determination and the completion of the nomination process, the property can be treated “as if ” it had been successfully nominated and placed on the Register by the keeper. This procedure is followed because often agencies do not have the time and resources necessary to complete the formal nomination process; the interim listing provides protection until the formal nomination process is completed. Traditionally, the Register had been biased toward non-Native landscapes of significance—battlefields, architectural marvels, pioneer trails, etc.—based primarily on the antiquity of material remains and a rather singular interpretive framework for how these sites fit into the master narrative of the nation’s or region’s development and character. Although sites on the Register can be of local, regional, or national significance, the bias was nearly always toward the physical and material objectification of history in a “built” environment (i.e., structures, landscapes, etc.) This framework held little regard for places of continuing symbolic and material significance to Native American communities, and so they remained either unprotected or invisible, or both. Hence, there was a need for new guidelines to address these kinds of cultural properties. There is no question that the TCP process and criteria are more inclusive than those of the conventional Register, but the critical political–ecological questions remain: what is being conserved and for whom under the guise of historic sites conservation in the United States? Has the TCP process helped conserve cultural landscapes of significance to Native American communities? In Alaska, where not a single Alaska Native TCP has been formal-