In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past," at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For part two of this session on the rural American West we look to the ways in which rural communities have fictionalized and whitewashed their history, erasing past and present diversity, framing Indigenous peoples as extinct, and creating a historical imaginary that is feeding into modern cultural divides. The papers in this session will reinvestigate these origin stories, explore the mechanics and motivations behind their creation and endurance, and highlight the importance of community engagement in efforts to challenge counterfactual narratives and recenter historically marginalized populations in local constructions of the rural American past.

Other Keywords
American West • Memory • Chinese diaspora • Crow • Fur Trade • Chinese • CRM • Public Archaeology • Rural Communities • Community

Geographic Keywords
American West • Pacific Northwest • Western United States • Western US • Plains, Montana • Wyoming/Mountain West • Mexico-US Borderlands • Great Plains, United States of America

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)

  • Documents (10)
Documents
  • Archaeological Perspectives on Tejano Erasure in the Rio Grande Valley (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Gonzalez-Tennant.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Anglo settlement of the Rio Grande Valley began in the late 19th and early 20th century. Part of this colonization involved the whitewashing of the region’s history, including the erasure of Tejano communities, populated by descendants of earlier Spanish,...

  • Between Urban Renewal and Rural Decline: Community Engagement and Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in Southern Idaho (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Renae J. Campbell.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Separated by less than 40 miles, Boise, Idaho, and the nearby Boise Basin share a history that is inexorably intertwined. Although their relative prominence was once reversed, Boise is now the state’s largest urban center while post-gold rush population...

  • Bonanza Farms, Railroads, and "Important" White Men: EuroAmerican Settlement of North Dakota (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David R Hubin. Kristen R Fellows.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The mythos that exists regarding “settlement” of present-day North Dakota largely revolves around the introduction of the railroad and industrial-scale Bonanza farms that followed. The result is a historical narrative that prioritizes a few key actors, all of...

  • Challenging The Use Of "Transition" In The Interpretation Of The Second Crow Agency Site (1875-1884) (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria L Bochniak.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the early reservation period, the US government established successive reservation headquarters for the Crow Tribe (Apsáalooke) of present-day Montana, in part to attempt to “assimilate” Crow people into European American culture. The Second Crow Agency...

  • Combating the Ongoing Erasure of Native Americans from Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Archaeological Landscapes (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas E Ross. Bridget R Wall.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. It’s been 30 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology. Yet, problems of this nature persist in California CRM. Precolonial and historic components of sites are regularly...

  • Landscape, Popular Histories, and the Racialization of Chinese in Evanston, WY (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only George Matthes.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the present day, race and its imagination remains a prominent force that structures and shapes people's lives as it has in the past. This paper uses the lens of racialization to examine Evanston, Wyoming’s Chinatown community from 1870 to 1922 and as an...

  • Monuments, Memorials, and Memory: Marking History and Claiming the Past (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Lau-Ozawa.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The memorialization of sites of Japanese American Confinement is uneven at best, with some sites extensively marked while others remain anonymous. At the same time, practices and histories told about certain spaces create particular narratives about the ways...

  • The Oregon Tale: Creating and Maintaining a Rural Fantasy Past (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Rural Oregon is a very White place, but it wasn’t always. Over the past several years the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP) has investigated a dozen sites and documented dozens more where Chinese Americans lived, worked, and built community. This paper...

  • Pageants, Prunarians, and Firsts: The Centennial of Fort Vancouver and the Reimagining of its Bicentennial (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Wilson.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1925, boosters promoted the centennial of Vancouver, Washington, as the “oldest continuous home of white men in the State.” America’s Vancouver numbered slightly over 12,000 people, serving a rural county associated with orcharding, farming, lumbering, and...

  • Specially Brewed for Export: Farm Laborers and Alcohol in San Mateo County, California during the Twentieth Century (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only William A. White. III.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Gender, culture, class, and race all play a role in alcoholic beverage preferences and consumption patterns in the American West. Archaeologists are also keenly aware that the early twentieth century labor void on farms in rural California was filled by...