Memoryscapes, Whiteness, and River Street: How African Americans Helped Maintain Euroamerican Identity in Boise, Idaho

By William A. White, III

PhD StudentSchool of AnthropologyUniversity of ArizonaTucson, Arizona

African American homesteader Pearl Royal Hendrickson kills 2 peace officers in Boise Foothills. Hours later he is shot to death by 30—50 officers

No Pearl Royal Hendrickson memorialNearly stricken from Euroamerican consciousnessLong-time African American residents recall the shooting as an affirmation of Euroamerican dominance

Recreational trails near location of Hendrickson shooting

Boise, Idaho evolved from Fort Boise (1863)• Capitol of Idaho (1890)• Has always been about 90% white• 1.5% of Boise’s current population is African

American• Historically, most black people lived in the River

Street Neighborhood

Area that would one day become the River Street Neighborhood in 1903

Memoryscapes, Geography, and Archaeology

Means of describing the ways people interpret their surroundings and navigate their relationships with the places in which they live

Production of place through the inhabitation of spaces by cultural bodies

Borrowed from ethnography

Uses same source references as landscape archaeology

The memoryscape is a refinement of any of the theoretical concepts in social science that promote the idea that, “cultures are planes of meaning through which individuals sustain intelligibility and comprehensibility” (Clack 2009:119)

Why Consider Whiteness?

Emic Etic

“Us” “Them”

Racial Identity

Individual Ontology

Societal Structuration

White studies is predicated upon three core theoretical positions first established by Ruth Frankenberg (1997:1) 1. Whiteness is a location

of structural advantage of race privilege;

2. It is a standpoint from where white people look at themselves, others, and society, and;

3. Whiteness refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed

(cf. Hartmann et al. 2009:406)

At River Street, memories of the dialectic between white and black people is visible on the landscape

River Street as a Racialized MemoryscapeInterviewees agree on some things and disagree on others. Here are some of the ways race plays a role in recollection.

The neighborhood’s boundaries are uncontested

Bad reputation was isolated to a small area by all neighborhood residents, but not by outsiders

Residents constantly reaffirm the neighborliness of within River Street

Map of Black households in Boise in the 1960s, YWCA papers

“Don’t call this a ghetto over here because we don’t like it. It’s not a ghetto. Now when Pioneer was over there, it was horrible…. Everything went on over there on Pioneer. You couldn’t even drive through there, which I didn’t want to”

Bessie Stewart (1980)

One white descendant recalled that the, “…perception of commonality and difference was expressed in terms of those belonging to the neighborhood as being ‘residents of Idaho’ or a ‘resident’ of the neighborhood.” For her, longtime residency outweighed ethnicity in determining who was different. Time living in the neighborhood trumped skin color. Discrimination came from outside the neighborhood.

Descendants disagree over the role the neighborhood played in their identity in the greater community• Black descendants were discriminated against because of their race• White descendants were discriminated against because they lived in the “Black

Neighborhood”

How does this relate to current archaeological

theory?

Ontology

Entanglement

Systematics

Epistemology

METAPHYSICS OF RACIAL IDENTITY

Relational Knowledge

Community of Practice

InteractionObservation

Sensory Input

“Memory Work”

Knowledge Transfer

Folk Taxonomies

“Bundling”

Social Logics “Meshworks”“Networks”

“Who are we/you?”

“What is our/my place in the universe?”

“How do we/you know?”

Structuration

Against a backdrop of:Environment TimeEvolution Collapse/SurvivanceTechnology PowerEconomics Habitus

Conclusion• River Street has evolved over time and, today, exists largely in the memories of former residents and

other Boiseans• Landscapes are human constructs within the natural environment that are interpreted differently

based through the lenses of culture, race, society, and other social constructs• Memoryscapes are not only the way we remember places but also the way we interpret the existing

world based on our individual life experiences• The racialization of River Street was necessary in order to establish whiteness as a distinct racial

identity• Enormous effort was taken by Boise’s Euroamerican community to maintain River Street as a place

where the “others” lived. These efforts have shaped the way we remember that neighborhood• In reality, River Street was just a middle-class neighborhood where people of all races co-existed• The concept of memoryscapes is useful for a variety of archaeological theoretical paradigms

Generous funding provided by:University of Arizona Graduate Access FellowshipUniversity of Arizona Traditions, Transitions, and Treasures FundCity of Boise Department of Arts and History Grant FundCharles Redd Center for Western Studies

Acknowledgements:Pam Demo, Pam Demo ConsultingDr. Jill Gill, Department of History, Boise State UniversityMichal Davidson and the rest of the staff at the Idaho State Historical SocietyMaría Nieves Zedeño, Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA)John Bertram, Dick Madry, Lee Rice, II, and Warner Terrell, III