Faces in the Wilderness: a New Network of Crossdated Culturally-Modified Red Pine in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Northern Minnesota, USA

Evan R Larson,Thomas C Wilding,Kalina M Hildebrandt,Kurt F Kipfmueller,Lee R Johnson,Lane B Johnson

doi:10.1007/s10745-019-00109-4

Abstract

New dates from culturally modified red pine rediscovered in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota provide an opportunity to merge tree-ring records of human land use with archaeological records, historical travel accounts, and traditional knowledge to enhance understanding of Anishinaabeg land tenure in the Wilderness. Records from 244 culturally modified trees (CMTs) demonstrate varying intensities of human use along historical water routes, notably the Border Route that connected Grand Portage to Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods during the North American fur trade. Crossdated modification years from 119 CMTs provide direct evidence of human-landscape interaction along historical travel routes utilized by Anishinaabeg and Euro-American traders from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s. This CMT network preserves a fading biological record of fur-trade-era cultural history that contributes to a growing cross-cultural conversation on the storied traditional use of a cultural landscape that is now the most visited federal wilderness area in the United States.

Highlights

The wilderness concept is a powerful idea that shapes land conservation ethics and management options and decisions, and draws clear lines between people and nature (Vale 1998).Increasingly, wilderness advocates are beginning to grapple with the reality that wilderness is a western social construct (Cronon 1996) that diminishes the histories of Indigenous groups who continue to treat wilderness landscapes as important components of their current and past cultures and identities
A network of 244 Culturally modified trees (CMTs) was developed that enhances our understanding of Anishinaabe use of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) landscape prior to 1900
This network offers new information that may be used to assess the impact of Anishinaabeg land use on the forest mosaic of the Border Lakes and could serve as a catalyst for cross-cultural conversations on the stewardship of a federal wilderness area established on the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples

Summary

Introduction

The wilderness concept is a powerful idea that shapes land conservation ethics and management options and decisions, and draws clear lines between people and nature (Vale 1998).Increasingly, wilderness advocates are beginning to grapple with the reality that wilderness is a western social construct (Cronon 1996) that diminishes the histories of Indigenous groups who continue to treat wilderness landscapes as important components of their current and past cultures and identities. The ecological legacies of Indigenous groups, who at times played highly influential roles in shaping historical vegetation patterns and disturbance processes (Stewart 2002), in present-day wilderness have been a topic of theoretical debate (Denevan 1992, 2011; Vale 2002) but remain an aspect of ecology that is underrepresented in the scientific literature. The failure to acknowledge Indigenous peoples as important agents in shaping the historical ecology of today’s wilderness landscapes, and protected areas more generally, has resulted in hands-off management policies that adversely impact the resilience of ecological and social systems, since establishment of the 1964 Wilderness Act. In federally-designated wilderness areas, tangible and intangible reminders of Indigenous land tenure, both physical artifacts as well as Indigenous histories, can help reframe western perspectives on wilderness landscapes and the relationship between people and the land.

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