* Joel K. Jensen teaches philosophy at North Hennepin Community College. He has published books about sandwiches and free couches. He is currently working on a book devoted to Minnesota’s lost and recovered land art sites. He writes…

The longest continuously transmitted stories are stories about land. This is true in North America and Minnesota— where I live— and indeed around the world. Famously, several coastal Australian communities tell stories about sea level rise 7,000 years in the past. But the story of Budj Bim, told by the Australia’s Gunditjmara, makes such accounts seem comparatively recent. Budj Bim was a giant being who crouched upon the land and turned himself into a volcano. His teeth became lava, and he spat them out. As reported in Science, Budj Bim (Mount Eccles) last erupted 37,000 years ago, making the story of Budj Bim the longest continuously transmitted story known.[i]

Budj Bim, located in the traditional country of the Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in southeastern Australia

If any of these accounts are accurate, serious and uncanny epistemological questions are raised. Consider: if the Budj Bim story really has been told for thirty-seven millennia, it would have been originally told in a language now extinct. Over such a head-spinning temporal expanse any evidence of genetic relatedness with existing languages would be undetectable.[ii] The sounds, phrases, and names originally describing Budj Bim are for all practical purposes unrecoverable, even while the story lives on. It may be time to take seriously the idea that land itself may be epistemologically potent, a medium in its own right.

It’s no surprise that like material remains, landscapes can outlive the cultures and languages they shape (and are shaped by). We all live on inherited lands and, in time, will pass the same lands down to cultures unrecognizable to our own. But today, at a scale previously unimaginable, we are altering landscapes in ways that will not only outlive us, but will outlive any existent culture or language— the long-term storage of nuclear waste and the carbonization of the atmosphere being just two obvious examples. How can we today ensure that our descendants will understand (and care about) the radical landscape interventions we’re initiating now?

I’ve been thinking about these future problems a lot lately, which got me thinking about the past. How do we understand landscapes from which cultures have migrated, vanished, or been removed or supplanted? Broadly speaking, we archive remaining clues. Archivization of landscape knowledge is the transfer or duplication of in situ information to a storage-ready medium. Material or textual remainders are collected or recorded, transferred to libraries, warehouses and servers, and thereby saved from physical decay and cultural obsolescence.

The challenges involved in archivization are many. Data must resist decay, remain accessible and decipherable to those who would encounter it in the future, and most elusively, must remain relevant. Well-preserved information may still be met with shrugs by future observers who can’t imagine why an object was ever worth keeping. Anyone that’s been to a county museum in the rural American Midwest can attest to the difficulty of this last task; here are warehouses chock full of dresses, kitchen wares, tools, home furnishings, each a cache of ever-diminishing significance.

The point of all this archiving is prima facie obvious, particularly in regard to data about land. Who was here? How did they live? What shape did the landscape take in the past? How did it function ecologically? Culturally? We know land is ever-changing; if we don’t record the data now, it’ll eventually be bulldozed or plowed under. But the stunning longevity of oral histories like that of Budj Bim raises serious questions about the utility of archiving, especially over deep time— not spans of decades, but millennia. Might archiving sometimes have exactly the reverse of the intended effect, hastening information loss?

* * *

In Archive Fever Jacques Derrida drew attention to the inevitably political nature of archives. Control archives and you control memory; those with access have a power over memory that those without access do not. More significantly, archives have physical and practical limits; what is included and what is excluded shape the future understanding of the past.[iii] Archives, libraries, and historical records legitimize information. In Derrida’s phrase, information is moved to the house of the archon. Loose in the world, in the present moment, archivization gathers information under the archon’s protection, making the present into the past, the momentary into official word.

But Derrida’s worry can be taken further. Given the constraints of the media in which data can be archived, only certain kinds of information can be legitimized. If we take the archival legitimization of information as given, then we have to ask about the fate of information for which there is no easy transfer to an archival medium. What of land?

I live in Minneapolis, just down the road from Mní Ówe Sní, also called Coldwater Spring. I recently rode there on my bicycle looking for Uŋktehi, the Dakota water guardian and horned serpent of the underworld. Does he yet dwell beneath the waters of the spring? And if so, when did he arrive? These are abstract questions, but precisely the ones asked in 2006 when Mní Ówe Sní was evaluated for eligibility as a Traditional Cultural Property for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.[iv]

Mní Ówe Sní is today sandwiched between the Mississippi River and Minnesota Highway 55, a busy thoroughfare connecting downtown Minneapolis with the airport. The site has a long and fiercely contested history.[v] At the time of the Traditional Cultural Property Evaluation, ownership of the site was transferring from the U.S. Bureau of Mines to the National Park Service, after a long and politically fraught dispute.

To be eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property, several criteria are considered. Among them is whether a site can be linked to a specific person or their achievements. Thus, Uŋktehi. A place associated with a historically significant person— even if that person is mythological— may be eligible for designation, inasmuch as continued cultural significance over an extended period is established.

In looking for that cultural link at Mní Ówe Sní, three broad methods were employed. First, the site was physically surveyed for material remains. Artifacts were unearthed, but they belonged to the historical era, and gave little indication of the pre-settler use of the site. Second, people with knowledge of the site were consulted, including local residents and Dakota elders. Interviewees confirmed the ongoing cultural significance of the site, including an association with Uŋktehi, but their testimony confirmed nothing about the site’s use two hundred years ago. Finally, the archived historical record was examined. This turned out to be a dead end. No historical documents could be found to establish a connection between Mní Ówe Sní and Uŋktehi, and the study concluded with a recommendation against inclusion on the National Register.

The archives were silent, but was Uŋktehi there? In Dakota understanding, the being is said to travel underground to the spring from its home in Taku Wakáŋ Tipi, a hill separated from the spring by the highway. This hill, also known as Morgan’s Mound, was itself evaluated in 2004 for Nation Register inclusion.[vi] And unlike for Coldwater Spring, a connection between Uŋktehi and the hill was established in the archival record, the only location specifically named in association with the deity.

Two inquiries, two different outcomes. Why the divergence? In one case, comments recorded in the early 1800s established a connection between Dakota belief and a specific site. In the other case, the record was silent. Today, the water burbling from Mní Ówe Sní continues to flow downhill from Taku Wakáŋ Tipi. Ironically, because Unktehi is understood to travel underground and emerge from springs, he is only coherent as a being if connected to both places. There can’t be one without the other.

Garter snake at Mní Ówe Sní, photo by the author

So, what went wrong? The only way to make sense of Uŋktehi’s connection with the landscape, and thus to understand the importance of the land to Dakota cultural ways, is to consider landscape as a set of interrelated features, mutually dependent and nonreducible. In the written record, landscapes are archived as discrete “sites” and “properties.” These may be overlapping (properties contain sites), but both concepts regard landscape features as autonomous and reducible loci of meaning. By definition, they’re bounded. Taku Wakáŋ Tipi and Mní Ówe Sní are thereby necessarily distinct, each to be evaluated according to their own unique properties, one independent of the other.

So it’s not surprising that a process expecting one-to-one correspondence between topographical feature and name should have produced the results it did. The Dakota language only began to be written in the 1830s. Thirty years later, the Dakota were formally exiled from Minnesota, leaving written records of Dakota sacred sites profoundly sparse. Even the name, Mní Ówe Sní, is a translation back into Dakota of the English name “Coldwater Spring.” If there was ever an “original” Dakota name for the site, it is not remembered today. It couldn’t be recorded because, as a distinct and autonomous site, it didn’t exist. A process intended to ensure retention of information makes it impossible to retain data of a certain sort, that is, stories about land.[vii]

* * *

Humans and landscapes form each other. Each is a palimpsest. We encounter landscapes with stories already inscribed, stories that are learned, amended, forgotten, written over, remembered, replaced. Landscapes, then, are both generative of, and sustaining of information. In archiving, knowledge is recorded and removed from land, separated from terra, its power sequestered. The ideal dream of the archive is the future reunification of land with knowledge, the yet-to-come time when rediscovered stories inform and revitalize future uses. In practice, this reunification seldom comes to pass, because the mediums, word and land, are incommensurate. Transforming land into word, land into disembodied information, a fundamental shift occurs. When land becomes information, it becomes extra-terrestrial.

For Derrida, there is something eschatological about archiving— it aspires to an eternally deferred future. Until that future arrives, access to the knowledge is controlled, granted, or denied. To this we might more prosaically add that the fate of archived information, particularly information about land, is not that it is denied, but that it is forgotten. Land just goes on changing, whatever our best intentions. The archive is a hedge against time, a hope that a moment can be captured, recorded, held fast at the moment of passing. Consider the overwrought protagonist of Laszlo Krasnahorkai’s novel Spadework for a Palace. Taking the archive to its absurd logical extreme, he declares that the ultimate library would have no doors, and would have no visitors.

The profound longevity of Budj Bim occurs because landscapes convey information, they “speak.” As long as people are there to listen, to engage with, to regard land as community member, that information stays relevant. The continual re-encountering of land sustains knowledge, whereas the sequestering of knowledge can leave it moribund. For Derrida, archivization is a symptom (rather than cause) of collective displacement, occurring at the formation of memory, when present moves into past. That separation of story from land can lead directly to forgetting.

I recently went looking for the Stone Man of the Minnesota prairie. The Stone Man was a “petroform,” an eight-foot human effigy formed in boulders. Though small, it was at one time a significant landscape feature. The first conventional map of southwest Minnesota, made by Joseph Nicollet, has no towns, but features the Stone Man prominently.

The Stone Man in 1967. Image on file, Murray County Historical Society

Today the land is privately owned, farmed for cattle, corn, and beans. On the trail of the Stone Man, I found a lot of hazy memories. I spoke with neighbors who remembered visiting the Stone Man in their youth, but who hadn’t been there in years. I was directed where to search, but what I found was an empty, plowed expanse, the harvest in, and not a stone in sight. In years past, the Murray County Historical Society erected a metal fence around the effigy. And who knows, perhaps I was looking in the wrong place. But I suspect the Stone Man is gone. It’s easy to imagine the scene: someone encounters a twenty square foot fenced off patch in the middle of a beanfield, and not recognizing its purpose, removes the fence and adds to the productive acreage. The story had been lost— no one transmitted it. So, even though several records of the site are held by the Minnesota Historical Society and others, the story was not heard, and the landscape went on changing without someone to interpret it. Preserved information only has power to the extent that someone reads it.

The Stone Man site today, photo by the author

Perhaps the foregoing, and Derrida’s Archive Fever, too, really just echo Plato’s dismay over the written word. Once we can all read, no one will remember anything. Archiving can work against itself, by introducing forgetfulness into the heart of the monument. Are there alternatives? Should we record archeological sites at all? In broad terms, the answer seems to be an obvious yes. Innumerable sites exist today only as recorded statements, their landscapes long since vanished. But archiving is nevertheless a solution with limits.

John Norder has related that regarding rock art field work in Ontario, Aanishinaabeg elders expressed the wish that pictographs no longer be photographed and recorded.[viii] At first blush, the concerns seem proprietary, reflecting the desire for more autonomy over contested sites. But something more complex is at work here, too. The sites are present, not past. They are still “used,” still part of a living cultural context, one in which new paintings are added, and in which others fade or are forgotten. In the context of present caretaking and use, certainty over who originally made the paintings, or what they originally “meant,” become less important. They are integrated within a living relationship between human and landscape. The paintings are meaningful because they speak now, not because they spoke in the past.

The point is not that landscape information shouldn’t be recorded, but that when epistemological primacy is separated from land, when it becomes extraterrestrial, forgetting is all but guaranteed. Landscapes facilitate thinking, they transmit knowledge. The most enduring stories are transmitted continuously, by peoples continuously connected with land. The stories are “living.”

To successfully explain to the deep future the changes we’re instituting now, no archiving of data will do the job. The best laid plans will be increasingly irrelevant to people absent from the landscape. Consider, for instance, the United States’ plan to make a nuclear waste warning message that will remain functional, without human maintenance, for 10,000 years. Or consider Montana’s Berkely Pit, a body of water whose official status asserts that it will remain dangerously toxic “in perpetuity.” Many creative solutions to these problems have been offered, but it should be obvious that the solution needed is one that commits to continual re-engagement. Sequestering a message away— or, sequestering humans away from the information we wish to preserve— renders that information quickly obsolete.

References

[i] Barras, Colin. “Is an Aboriginal Tale of an Ancient Volcano the Oldest Story Ever Told?” Science. February 11, 2020.

[ii] Walsh, Michael and Harold Koch. “Australian Languages and the Deep Past.” In Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History, edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy, 147-163. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; American Philosophical Society, 2023.

[iii] Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[iv] Terrell, Michelle, Andrea C. Vermeer, and Mollie M. O’Brien. The Cultural Meaning of Coldwater Spring: Final Ethnographic Resources Study of the Former U.S. Bureau of Mines Twin Cities Research Center Property, Hennepin County Minnesota. GSA RFQ No. 71599. St. Paul: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, prepared by Summit Envirosolutions, Inc. and Two Pines Resource Group, LLC, June 2006.

[v] The history of Coldwater Spring is long and complex. For an excellent narrative of a particularly tense period, see Mary Losure, Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State

[vi] Ollendorf, Amy L. and Carolyn R. Anderson. Traditional Cultural Property and National Register of Historic Places Eligibility Asessment for Taku Wakan Tipi (Morgan’s Mound), Hennepin County, Minnesota. Peterson Environmental Consulting, Inc. Prepared for 934th Airlift Wing, U.S. Air Force Reserve, Minneapolis-St. Paul Air Reserve Station, 2004.

[vii] In later years, Mní Ówe Sní (Coldwater Spring) was re-evaluated as a Traditional Cultural Property, this time with a different result. In 2023 it was added to the National Register. Ironically, Taku Wakáŋ Tipi (Morgan’s Mound), remains off the list. The years of consideration and reconsideration of the same questions, with different results, perhaps emphasize Derrida’s concerns – the use of an archive is an expression of political power.

[viii] Norder, John. “The Creation and Endurance of Memory and Place Among First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada.” International Journal of Historical Archeology 16, No. 2 (June 2012): 385-400.