Elizabeth Kryder-Reid

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/35095

Indy Toxic Heritage: Pollution, Place, and Power

Indianapolis’ toxic heritage includes residue from lead industry, coal ash and heavy metals from power plants, raw sewage in urban waterways, and contaminated ground water from gas stations and dry cleaners, to name just a few of the sources. The burdens of these urban pollutants have disproportionately impacted lower-income areas and communities of color, and they impact health outcomes across the city. Compounded by policies and practices predicated on reproducing social inequalities, such as redlining and zoning, are systematic and structural issues such as the disinvestment of public dollars, lax environmental and industrial regulation, and inconsistent enforcement. These environmental crises, and their intersection with climate change, are significant issues for Indianapolis residents across the city. They must therefore be recognized not simply as neighborhood-specific concerns but as part of a shared citywide heritage that shaped Indianapolis as we know it today and will continue to shape it in the future. Community leaders in neighborhoods such Riverside, Martindale-Brightwood, and Norwood, have been advocating for years for mitigation of past pollution and to end ongoing sources of pollution, but these efforts are often seen as isolated and local problems. Similarly, organizations such as the Hoosier Environmental Council have been working across the city and state on the systemic and structural issues around environmental health, but generally without an historical and public interpretive framework.

Through a community co-curated traveling exhibit, a series of public conversations, and digital humanities, this project will trace the history of environmental harm in select sites across the city and highlight the structural forces that have created a legacy of contamination and negative health impacts, particularly impacting marginalized communities. The objectives are 1) to situate environmental damage as heritage 2) to demonstrate that this heritage is citywide, and 3) to help a broad public audience understand how this toxic legacy is registered, often in hidden ways, in the landscape. By historicizing the sites and making connections among them, the project will advance a citywide conversation about the enduring racial and structural inequalities underlying what are often understood as distinct episodes or neighborhood problems. In addition to addressing the history of environmental harm, the project will expand our imagined paths forward by highlighting the longstanding work of environmental advocates and promoting action through organizations such as the White River Alliance and Hoosier Environmental Council, as well as campus-based initiatives such as the Anthropocene Household project. This project builds on existing relationships with Indy Parks and Recreation, Kheprw Institute (KI), and independent scholars Kaila Austin and Kay Hawthorne. Professor Kryder-Reid's translation of research into a community-curated public humanities project telling stories of Indianapolis’ history of environmental harm and legacy of community activism is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING their RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 19

Dirty Laundry: The Toxic Heritage of Dry Cleaning in Indianapolis, Indiana
(Routledge, 2023) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Dwyer, Owen; Filippelli, Gabriel
This chapter explores the narratives of that dry cleaning pollution and the ways it both resists and registers as toxic heritage. It focuses on the intersections of laundry, labor, racialized bodies, and the environmental harm that decades of use of perchloroethylene (PERC) and other solvents have created for laundry workers and across urban and suburban landscapes. Through an analysis of narratives produced by industry, dry cleaning workers, environmental regulatory and advocacy organizations, and formal cultural heritage institutions, the chapter interrogates ideas of environmental amnesia, toxicity, and responsibility in an industry that was dispersed throughout residential neighborhoods and that created contamination that is typically underground and invisible. It also illuminates how this invisible contamination may be made visible through activist archives, journalism, and participatory heritage in collaborations between the university and communities affected by PERC and other industrial contamination. The investigation speaks to toxic heritage as a central legacy of the Anthropocene and as an opportunity for activist, public-facing environmental humanities to raise awareness and support dialogue about environmental risks.
Conclusion: Why Toxic Heritage Matters
(Routledge, 2023) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; May, Sarah
Critical perspectives have developed to reconfigure heritage as a tool for constructing a just future while heritage is historically founded with imperialism and settler colonialism. Toxic heritage stands, therefore, as a counternarrative to the denial and amnesia that often serve corporate and state interests, just as it has the potential to activate citizen awareness and advocacy. The stories of pollution, contamination, and their effects on people's health and livelihoods are particularly compelling when they engage those affected populations in participatory heritage strategies. Rankin et al. discuss how the authorising framework of heritage management can surface toxic harms to indigenous communities which have been hidden through centre/periphery dynamics of isolation. Fiske uses both tours and graphic narrative techniques more commonly associated with valourising heritage to reveal harmful pasts in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Baptista's toxic tours similarly expose the intersections of unjust practice that have created Newark's sacrifice zone.
Toxic Heritage: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2023) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; May, Sarah
The intersections and frictions among the contributions raised important issues and illuminated emerging lines of inquiry into toxic heritage. The shadow of toxic heritage now extends in a quite material sense across every continent and community. The consideration of toxic heritage as a planetary phenomenon highlights the scale and complexity of issues that transcend the typical national boundaries and chronologies of heritage. Instead, toxic heritage must consider eco-centric narratives and account for “the great acceleration” of the post-WWII years. “Framing toxicity” explores fundamental issues of conceptualizing environmental harm as heritage including considerations of the nature of toxicity and its implications for understanding human heritage in the Anthropocene. “Approaches and Interventions” highlights the ways in which individuals, organizations, and industries operate in the creation and enduring consequences of toxicity, including reflections on the role of heritage studies and organizations in the construction of toxic heritage.
Exploring University-Community Collaborations
(2021-10) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Fillipelli, Gabriel; Boyd, Phyllis; Brooks, Paula; Nadaraj, Aghilah; Sangsuwangul, Alvin; Humphrey, Leah; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
The Riverside neighborhood bears multiple burdens of environmental harm. Running the gamut from groundwater contamination in subsurface waters to lead in soils and dust and paint to particulate matter in the air from highways and industry, these environmental insults harm the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the community. The community has also faced an information gap where data was scarce, hard to locate, and sometimes wrong. Activists have long worked to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood, but faced barriers in the form of policies (e.g. Red Lining, zoning variances, disinvestment in public services such as street lights and sidewalks) and practices (e.g. absentee landlords, illegal dumping). Features such as the Central Canal that were developed into recreational amenities in other parts of the city were minimally maintained or restricted from use by residents. In the face of these challenges, IUPUI faculty, students, and community members have partnered on multiple projects to document the history of environmental harms, assess exposure and risk of residents’ exposomes, and share information in ways that are accessible and relevant for residents. The work supports the agency and activism of the community, particularly as it faces pressures of gentrification and university encroachment with the prospect of 16 Tech project expansion. The work also takes place in the context of contested interests and harmful legacies as representatives of an urban university that displaced longtime residents work to partner ethically and transparently with those same communities. As a result, current faculty-community collaborations operate within a space complicated by the problematic legacy of harm and ongoing structural racism. However well-intentioned, faculty, students and community members have to navigate that history and enduring power dynamics as they design their research, identify relevant questions, and share results in ways that are accessible and meaningful to community members.
A Random Walk to Public Scholarship: Exploring Our Convergent Paths | Public
(2014) Holzman, Laura M.; Wood, Elizabeth; Cusack-McVeigh, Holly; Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Labode, Modupe; Zimmerman, Larry J
Hybrid Discourse: Exploring Art, Race, and Space in Indianapolis
(Public: A Journal of Imagining America, 2013) Labode, Modupe; Holzman, Laura M.; Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
Of, By, and For Which People? Government and Contested Heritage in the American Midwest
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Zimmerman, Larry, J.
Two government-owned and managed heritage sites in Indiana, USA, offer an opportunity to explore the role of governments in adjudicating the competing paradigms of value and contested uses. Strawtown Koteewi is a Hamilton County park and Mounds State Park is part of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources statewide park system. Each site has come under scrutiny in recent years. Strawtown Koteewi is one of the most significant sites in the area for understanding the history of Native peoples. After almost a decade of archaeological excavations, several Native American groups, under the auspices of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), initiated repatriation processes for the recovery of human remains, and some objected to the ongoing archaeological research. At Mounds State Park a coalition of citizens opposed a planned dam project intended to ensure a safe and plentiful water supply and to spur economic development in the area. In each case, the government entities have had to navigate the political landscapes of competing claims about the sites. These case studies expose the fissures between authorized heritage discourse and the paradigms of meaning among the diverse constituencies of the sites, and they highlight the tenuous position of public governance in privileging competing cultural, economic, and social interests. While not unique, the state and county agencies’ positions within these fields of power and their strategic choices reveal some of the barriers and constraints that limit their actions as well as the deep-seated ideologies of policies that perpetuate settler colonial politics in the control and interpretation of indigenous heritage.
‘I just don’t ever use that word’: investigating stakeholders’ understanding of heritage
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Foutz, Jeremy W.; Wood, Elizabeth; Zimmerman, Larry J.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying attention to the fields of power in which the sites operate and applying methodologies that are open to user-defined paradigms of value. In the U.S., official discourse often frames the value of heritage sites associated the deep Native American past as archaeological sites, an interpretation that is consistent with settler colonial ideologies. This narrative generally obfuscates connections between the heritage of the sites and contemporary peoples, and it effaces the history of colonialism and dispossession. A study of stakeholder-defined heritage at two contested sites in the central Midwest revealed both congruencies and conflicts among diverse constituencies’ articulations of the sites’ value. At Mounds State Park a proposed dam and reservoir ‘Mounds Lake’ project would inundate a large portion of the site. At Strawtown Koteewi, Native American tribes have made repatriation claims under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).The study also problematised the term ‘cultural heritage’ as it is understood and used by the different constituencies, particularly for culturally and historically affiliated Native Americans. It also highlighted the positions of the constituencies within the broader fields of power implicated in these contested sites.
"With manly courage”: Reading the construction of gender in a nineteenth-century religious community
(The University of Arizona Press, 1994) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
"Perennially New": Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden
(UC Press, 2010-09-01) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
The evidence presented in "Perennially New": Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden shows that the iconic image of the mission garden was created a century after the founding of the missions in the late eighteenth century, and two decades before the start of the Mission Revival architectural style. The locus of their origin was Mission Santa Barbara, where in 1872 a Franciscan named Father Romo, newly arrived from a posting in Jerusalem, planted a courtyard garden reminiscent of the landscapes that he had seen during his travels around the Mediterranean. This invented garden fostered a robust visual culture and rich ideological narratives, and it played a formative role in the broader cultural reception of Mission Revival garden design and of California history in general. These discoveries have significance for the preservation and interpretation of these heritage sites.

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