THE INDIGENOUS CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: EXPLORING A COMMUNITY-CENTERED APPROACH TO HERITAGE PRESERVATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Preservation becomes meaningful only when it honors the ongoing relationships that connect communities to their cultural landscapes. Cultural landscapes hold memory, knowledge, and belonging, yet preservation in the United States has long relied on frameworks that separate people from place and privilege tangible form over relationships. These systems shape what counts as heritage and whose stories are recognized. This thesis argues that centering relational worldviews, rooted in continuity, reciprocity, and responsibility, offers a path to transform preservation into a practice that reflects the living significance of place.

This study positions the Indigenous Cultural Landscape (ICL) framework as a practical and ethical model for reorienting preservation toward place-based stewardship. The framework expands, rather than replaces, existing tools and provides a structure that practitioners can apply to landscapes to strengthen relationships between communities and the lands they call home. It moves preservation from compliance to care, from procedure to partnership, from documentation to relationship.

Indigenous voices—of elders, scholars, and community advocates—whose teachings and lived experiences redefine what preservation can mean. Their perspectives form the foundation of this study. Drawing from Indigenous scholarship, community narratives, and public discourse, I demonstrate how this thinking parallels work undertaken both in the United States and internationally. If we can rehabilitate, restore, and reconstruct the physical fabric of places, we can also restore the ethics of the discipline itself by aligning practice with equity, accountability, and relationship. The Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework builds upon earlier models by advancing a community-first approach that prioritizes Indigenous worldviews of continuity, stewardship, and relationship over Western notions of access and ownership. I acknowledge the dedication of those trying to reconcile the existing authorized heritage discourse in these systems with the values they aim to protect, as I address how documentation processes identify landscapes but rarely reflect their living significance, and management structures still separate consultation from collaboration. I recognize the progress already made while offering a clear guide and rationale for why and how we must continue. Ultimately, I aim to bridge commitment and action, aligning federal intent with community leadership and providing practitioners with a framework that links ethics, process, and practice. I apply the Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework to Bear Lodge, also known as Devils Tower National Monument, to demonstrate how Indigenous and federal perspectives on stewardship converge and how relationship-based preservation can emerge from that dialogue. Comparative examples from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand further illustrate how relational worldviews can be integrated into national heritage systems.

In a broader sense, this treatise contributes to theory by integrating Indigenous epistemologies and lived experience into preservation discourse. It contributes to practice by providing a framework for agencies, including the National Park Service, to embed relational worldviews into documentation and management. It aligns with former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s Secretarial Order 3403 (2021) and the Department of the Interior’s Guidance on Indigenous Knowledge (2022), which affirm the federal responsibility to support Indigenous sovereignty, dignity, and traditional land use. I recognize that preservation must operate as a relational act of reciprocity that sustains communities and landscapes. The Indigenous Cultural Landscape framework transforms preservation from a record of the past into a living dialogue of care, sovereignty, and belonging.