Change for Culture and History, Small and Large

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

There’s been a change at Lake Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a 114-year old historical marker set on top of the last burial mound in the area has been taken down. This is a good thing. 

Several factors led to the removal. One was recognition that the placement of the sign on top of the mound was prompting people to walk up the mound to read it, which is disrespectful. As well, the title of the marker described the mound as “prehistoric.” As the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO) said in their sharing of this news on Facebook, “[i]f you ask just about any THPO, they’ll tell you there’s nothing their ancestors did that was ‘pre-historic,’ because their history reaches back millennia and lives on in them and their descendants.”

I’m sharing this here because it strikes me as such an important example of how our understanding of what history is and relationships with it are described and shared can and should change. Removal of an historic marker may sound like an isolated event. But concurrently, as the global climate meeting COP29 is nearing the end of its first week, the nation of Tuvalu is fighting for changes to the law of the sea so that it can retain perpetual connection to its area of the Pacific as seas rise and pioneering approaches to creating a “digital nation.” In both cases, Tuvalu is using new legal and technological tools to carry forward deep cultural connections. 

As climate change and efforts to address it bring wide environmental, social, and economic changes, I see actions at both of these scales as critical. Honoring and repairing connections at the local scale indeed is essential to building a future that can broadly integrate care, justice, and connection to places we live.

Featured Link: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2024/10/16/historical-marker-being-removed-from-milwaukees-last-indigenous-burial-mound/

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.

Photo credit:

Historical marker being removed from Lake Park in Milwaukee, WI (photo is not credited but, as published at the link above, appears to have been taken by Cari Taylor-Carlson).