There is growing awareness of the importance of public outreach in archaeology. Many professional archaeologists argue that in order to ensure continued funding we must communicate the relevance of our discipline to the public in a more effective manner. Furthermore, it is often argued that public outreach and education provides perhaps the only reliable defense against looting and rampant psuedoarchaeology. Current outreach activities, however, tend to focus on what archaeologists have discovered about the past. While this type of outreach is important, a more effective model for public outreach would focus on the methods of archaeology, rather than the results. Archaeology, with its focus on multiple lines of evidence, intertwining of the sciences and humanities, and multi-cultural perspective provides a unique model for addressing and answering questions, a model which could serve as a base for education. Promoting the methods of archaeology as an educational model, or at the very least, remembering the methods in our outreach activities, may be, in the long run, the most effective method for establishing the relevance of our discipline.

On March 22, 1958 David Brower's film Wilderness Alps of Stehekin premiered to an audience of conservationists in Seattle, Washington. Almost two years in the making, the thirty-one minute film advocated the preservation of nature in Washington's North Cascades through the creation of a national park. Over the next decade, Wilderness Alps of Stehekin became the most influential publicity tool in the struggle to preserve the North Cascades. Because of the region's geographic isolation, the film was the first time many people throughout the nation were exposed to the scenic grandeur of the area. Images of craggy peaks and colorful alpine meadows resonated deeply with many Americans and persuaded them to join in the campaign. It was the voice of these citizens that led Congress to pass the North Cascades Act of 1968, which placed 674,000 acres of the North Cascades under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. In this thesis I tell the creation story of North Cascades National Park from a conservationist perspective and trace the influence of Wilderness Alps of Stehekin within this context. Although the film was never shown in movie theaters and never aired on national television, many thousands viewed it from its premiere to the signing of the North Cascades Act. The film first introduced the idea of a North Cascades National Park, and it was important in convincing conservationists to unite around a national park solution. Ultimately, Wilderness Alps of Stehekin changed the approach activists took in the North Cascades and helped to preserve a wild and scenic nature experience for future generations through the protection of old-growth forests and alpine meadows.

Modern cities are often perceived as the antithesis of nature; the built environment is understood as the transformation of raw and untamed nature into a rationalized human landscape. However, a variety of scholars since the nineteenth century have noted the persistence of nature in cities, not only in providing essential services but also resisting human control. Most recently, urban geographers and environmental historians have argued that processes of urbanization do not entail the replacement of natural with artificial environments, but are more accurately understood as a reconfiguration of human/nature relations. In this dissertation, I employ this relational perspective to study a specific form of urban nature: stormwater flows. Urban drainage or stormwater management activities in US cities are a vivid example of the tensions between nature, society, and technology. In this study, I present a comparative case study of two US cities--Austin, Texas and Seattle, Washington--where stormwater issues have been a central focus of public debate over the last four decades. Using textual analysis, in-depth interviews, and experiential research methods, I argue that stormwater management practices involve not only the rational management of technological networks but also implicate a wide range of seemingly unrelated issues, such as local governance, environmental protection, land use decisionmaking, community development, aesthetics, and social equity. To describe the relational implications of urban nature, I present a framework of ecological politics to characterize drainage activities as rational, populist, or civic. I argue that the latter form of politics has the greatest potential to relieve the tensions between urban residents and their material surroundings by embracing a systems perspective of human/nonhuman relations and engaging local residents in the hands-on management of environmental flows. It is through the development of deliberative and grounded forms of civic politics that urban residents can forge new relationships between technology and nature, and in the process, understand their place in the world. / text

Together, British Columbia and Washington State have constituted a uniquely secular region. Residents of the Pacific Northwest were (and are) far more likely than their counterparts elsewhere to reject or ignore religious institutions, and religion itself. Historians have devoted little attention to this phenomenon. This dissertation draws on a wide range of manuscript, quantitative, and oral history sources to interrogate the nature and meanings of Northwest secularism in the years between 1950 and the early 1970s. Scholars have typically depicted secularism as something produced and disseminated within institutions and by cultural elites. Inspired by the rich literature on popular and lived religion, this study departs from convention and explores secularism at the social and everyday level. It does not reveal any coherent doctrine of secularism, nor does it suggest that the Pacific Northwest was a region of atheists. Just as church involvement is not the sole measure of religiosity, atheism is not the singular expression of secularity. Northwesterners were secular in multiple, ambiguous, and contested ways - ways that did not exclude encounters with the sacred. This dissertation traces certain widely shared elements of secularism in the postwar Pacific Northwest, including an indifference towards organized religion, and ambivalence around personal religion and belief. Influenced by normative ideas of race. class, gender. and family, postwar religious and cultural commentators blamed the distinct irreligion of the Northwest on single, working-class men in the region. Northwest secularism also tended to be constructed as a problem particular to whites in the region. In rejecting religion. white Northwesterners were seen as contravening dominant expectations of respectable whiteness. This study argues that Northwest irreligion was broadly based rather than anchored to a particular demographic group within the region. It challenges the assumption that secularity had little to do with women, the middle classes. and families. At the same time, this study also contends that class, race, gender, and family shaped and differentiated the meanings and experiences of religion and irreligion. For example. white, middle-class women in the Pacific Northwest were far less committed to organized religion, and religion itself, than their counterparts in other regions. However, in everyday life, secular women confronted and struggled against entrenched ideals of feminine and middle-class piety. On the other hand, working-class men were freer to behave in non-religious ways, since for them this behaviour conformed to, rather than contradicted, class and masculine norms. For men and women from all social locations, the deepest tensions around religion emerged in relations with family. The ambivalent secularism of the Northwest took shape in ordinary households, as people worked to reconcile their own secular impulses with family demands and expectations. Although they were secular in different ways, all social groups helped to produce and sustain the distinct irreligion of the Northwest. This dissertation argues that certain historical, demographic, and imaginative factors combined to broaden the possibilities for rejecting or avoiding religion in this cross-border region. While the region has been, and remains, a place of abundant spiritual energies, over time irreligion has become entwined in the myths and expectations of Northwest culture. This dissertation highlights the neglected intersections between geography and religion, and demonstrates the importance of place to secular and religious practice and identity.

As ecological restoration expands as a practice, so does the complexity, cost, and scale of many projects. Higgs (2003) terms these projects technological and argues they limit meaningful community focal restoration practices, one component of good ecological restoration. The planned removals of two large dams on the Elwha River in Washington State provide a case study to investigate this theory. I conducted 18 in-depth interviews with community leaders and restoration practitioners in order to explore the question, “How do technological restoration projects enable or constrain community engagement, and in the case of the Elwha River, how might such engagement be enlarged?” This interpretive study suggests that technological restoration projects, particularly when managed by federal agencies, expand engagement through a broadened 1) public audience and 2) suite of engagement activities. I argue for a “focusing” of engagement activities, and propose a matrix for assessing opportunities for local community engagement.

Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 367-382). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

xiv, 296 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call numbers: KNIGHT F853 .V64 2007 / This dissertation argues that Columbia River management and politics have been shaped ever since the New Deal by a conception of the Columbia River as the defining feature of the Pacific Northwest region. The study examines how that conception was developed, how it became institutionalized within and by a government agency, the Bonneville Power Administration, and what its impacts have been. Drawing on a mix of archival materials, published and unpublished secondary accounts, interviews, and the author's experience working on Columbia River policy, the dissertation shows that the definition of a Columbia River-centered Pacific Northwest was laid out in 1935 by the four-state Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission, influenced in part by a "regionalist" ideal of shared social and environmental well-being. It was institutionalized but narrowed into the federal BPA in 1937. Soon, a three-and-a-half-state Pacific Northwest consisting of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana was being knit together by shared transmission lines and uniformly inexpensive power rates, and by a federal power agency that positioned itself as a regional Chamber of Commerce. Since the Second World War, the Columbia River-centered Pacific Northwest has shaped its collective economic fortunes around exclusive regional access to BPA-provided Columbia River hydropower. But geographically distributed wealth did not end political conflict; private power companies, state governors, Native American tribes, and fish and wildlife agencies have had to be accommodated with distributions of BPA power and money. BPA-centered Columbia River management has through political conflict gradually expanded to serve wider interests, moving closer to the New Deal regionalist ideal. Yet in controversial decisions since 2000, Columbia River managers have chosen to risk wild salmon rather than breach federal Columbia River hydropower dams or allow Pacific Northwest power costs to escalate. They have done this because they have prioritized the most fundamental, and the most regional, Columbia River benefit of all: broadly shared inexpensive power. Understanding the opportunities and constraints of BPA-centered regional Columbia River management is essential in order to meet upcoming Columbia River policy challenges. / Adviser: Alexander B. Murphy

The past decade has witnessed both steep reductions in federal housing assistance and an intensification of local housing problems including homelessness. In light of these trends, this study explores alternative means available to municipalities of meeting the housing needs of low-income households. The methods chosen to accomplish this were two-fold: a literature review and a case study. The literature review revealed that in response to the Reagan administration's 1981 cutbacks to housing programs a new low-income housing delivery system, based largely on public-private partnerships, has emerged from the grass roots level in communities across the United States. In the new production system efforts have focused on preservation rather than new construction, and large for-profit developers have been replaced by nonprofit community-based development corporations and local public agencies. With the assurance of federal subsidies gone, local governments and nonprofit developers have sought to increase the effectiveness of current resources, direct more general revenue to housing activities and have raised new resources. Today, financing packages for low-income projects are usually built upon customized and creative financial packages that are difficult to replicate, and as a result, no definitive solutions have yet been found. Despite the hard work and creativity that has gone into developing low-income housing in the U.S. over the past decade local programs have been able to meet only a fraction of the country's housing needs. The case study method was chosen to focus on the City of Seattle, Washington's specific housing initiatives. The City's response has closely followed the national experience. A new delivery system has emerged which depends largely on the efforts of the City's municipal government, through its Department of Community Development, and the community's growing nonprofit sector. As a matter of policy Seattle has chosen to spend most of its low-income housing dollars on preserving the downtown's remaining 7,311 low-income units. The City does not. build housing itself, but instead, acts as a "bank" loaning money generated, for the most part, by off-budget strategies to nonprofit housing developers to rehabilitate existing low-income units to meet housing code standards. Seattle's housing programs have had mixed results. Despite their efforts, due to downtown's expansion, the City has continued to lose low-income units in the downtown to demolition and rent increases, no gain has been made on the City's overall housing need, and while the City has replaced the lost federal subsidies, it has not created significant ongoing revenue streams for future housing development. Results of this study indicate that, only the long term commitment of federal funds to a national housing strategy can stem the growing tide of homelessness across the U.S. and avert, a deepening of the country's housing crisis. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

Featuring an ethnohistory of two Coast Salish communities — the Suquamish Tribe in Washington State and the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation in British Columbia — this dissertation is a transborder study of Indigenous shellfish harvesting and foreshore rights in the Salish Sea across the twentieth century. It explores the history of the interface between land and sea within the context of treaty rights to resources and Indigenous nations’ sovereignty over marine habitats. This study also turns the ethnographic lens on the settler population. Using tools offered by recent scholarship on settler colonialism, it helps explain why the general public has resisted treaty and Aboriginal rights to fisheries and other resources. This dissertation also reveals Coast Salish nations’ responses to settler encroachment of their foreshores and state disruption of their management of the marine environment throughout the twentieth century and offers two community studies to illustrate how local Indigenous communities have re-shaped relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers on the Salish Sea. The first study examines Suquamish’s right to shellfish under the Point Elliott Treaty and affirmed by the 1994 Rafeedie decision, as well as the interrelated 1980s tidelands case for ownership of the beaches attached to the Port Madison Reservation. The second examines W̱SÁNEĆ people’s defense of Saanichton Bay from a marina development, when the SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) community wielded its Douglas Treaty rights in Claxton v. Saanichton Marina, 1987. Utilising Karl Jacoby’s concept of a “moral ecology,” this study argues that by ignoring Indigenous Knowledge regarding marine resource management, and by creating an overly complex regulatory scheme guided by principles of capitalism, settler officials on both sides of the border missed opportunities to avoid some of the greatest challenges to marine health and resource survival in the Salish Sea. / Graduate / 2023-04-12

Portland and Seattle are often considered to be divergent in character, partly because civic leadership in each city has a different vision. The adoption of contrasting downtown core plans, projects, and policies in each city allows us an opportunity to understand the nature of each city's regime. As defined by Elkin, an urban regime is the community's governing coalition, those who exercise public authority in a legal sense and those private actors able to act collectively and bring concerted influence to bear. The time frame for this study begins with the first modern planning document, the 1972 City of Portland Downtown Plan. During this period, both central business districts were transformed, simultaneously losing some retail, commercial and industrial functions while gaining further control of regional economies. Portland perfected the entrepreneurial urban regime. The linkage among the land use alliance (property owners, investors and private professionals); the bureaucracy; and politicians was established by the success of the 1972 Downtown Plan. There is little conflict in Portland. Systemic bias is masked by overly extensive citizen involvement processes; city subsidies and grants which influence activists' positions; and use of tax increment money to hire consultants who reinforce the business point of view. Seattle never perfected the entrepreneurial regime. The business community was fractured into conservatives and progressive camps. Also, the bureaucracy was caught in the Mayoral-Council crossfire. There is great controversy in Seattle. The prodevelopment decisions are still made but activist groups can successfully make it to the ballot box. Primary sources of information included planning studies; reports; memoranda; minutes of meetings; resolutions; budgets; and activists' printed materials. Participants in each city were interviewed. Secondary sources of information included articles, and census materials.