100 |
Finding 10: The Constraints of Boundaries, Enabling Legislation, and Founding Histories The Park Service’s own founding histories and boundaries are too often construed as constraining, rather than facilitating, the presenting and interpreting of history. Partly because of the manner in which parks are created and partly because of their need to fulfill missions dictated by enabling legislation, histories in and of the parks are often trapped in confining, static boxes. The inflexibility of interpretive and management plans has the same effect. A more sophisticated, innovative, and flexible approach to these histories, boundaries, plans, and enabling legislation would strengthen NPS’s aims with regard to relevancy, stewardship, and education. History at many sites seems to be understood as having ended at the park’s creation and stopped at its boundaries, its interpretation fixed in time based on language of often decadesold legislation. But these outdated conceptions of the past hinder sites from highlighting continuities between past and present, relationships with larger contexts, and notions of so-called natural or recreational parks as having relevant histories too. Similarly, the possibility of understanding historical parks (and even now-dated exhibits, when still in place) themselves as artifacts of ongoing public and professional discussion of the meaning of the past is diminished. We understand that history practice in the NPS is constrained by legal mandates that do not apply to historical inquiry in academic settings.166 Nevertheless, openness to ranging beyond the strict confines of legal boundaries and establishing legislation varies greatly from one NPS site to another. Trained historians could help increase such openness where it is absent, and explore ways to think creatively beyond those limits. For instance the language captured within a site’s enabling legislation is itself a historical artifact that documents the time in which the legislation was passed; hence, contemplating together with visitors why certain themes were emphasized and others were not in that particular moment in time becomes a chance to contextualize the legislation itself. Enabling legislation need not—and should not—be used to close interpretive opportunities, but rather should become an opportunity to open them. It follows, then, that a park’s mission is also to research, interpret, and explore the moment at which it was created—and this is work that historians are well positioned and trained to undertake. Our survey respondents describe ongoing struggles with defining parks’ areas of mission and focus as tension arises between the original ideas about the park and its ever-changing needs over time. For example, one respondent complains, “parks do a lousy job of breaking out from the confines of their enabling legislation; they interpret their stories too narrowly.”167 Another agrees: “community members, and the NPS to a point,… tie the hands of park sites [so] that they can only talk about subjects covered within their enabling legislation…, while historians identify that everything is tied together… . If you talk about George Washington, it is appropriate to discuss his practices, his views, the impacts of his views on slaves, American Indians, etc. But…[communities] haven’t embraced [this] more comprehensive view” of history.168
166 Stephanie S. Toothman, “Cultural Resource Management in Natural Areas of the National Park System,” The Public Historian 9, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 65–76. 167 Respondent 10329. 168 Respondent 11602.