Finding Balance In the Landscape || A Site Portrait of Great Falls
Team names, titles, and institutions:
Jose Cotto, Collaborative Design Projects Manager, The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design Adjunct Lecturer, Tulane University School of Architecture
Alaine Hutson, Associate Professor of History, Huston-Tillotson University
Nkem Ike, PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, The University of Tulsa
Ann Kendall, Assistant Professor, Literature and Languages, Heritage University
Site description
For many people Great Falls Park's historical significance lay in the Patowmack Company’s building of the 1785 Patowmack canal originally envisioned by George Washington. During this time the town of Matildaville (chartered in 1790 and named after the first wife of Revolutionary War general Henry Lee and mother to Confederate leader Robert E. Lee) formed, serving as the headquarters for the Patowmack Co. and home to the company's laborers. After the company went bankrupt, the Patowmack canal charter was transferred to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1828 which also failed, and for almost a century after Great Falls became a leisure getaway for well-to-do whites in the region. Today, the Falls 800 acres are known as a recreational hotspot for hiking, cycling, and kayaking made possible by the scenic Potomac River’s cascading waterfalls and robust wildlife. However, we aim to problematize this uneven narrative of Great Falls by embedding the epistemological, ontological, and aliveness of Black and Indigenous peoples on this landscape. Considered the front door to the Piscataway Nation ancestral homeland, the Falls were considered central to trading networks between the Piscataway, Powhatan, and Iroquois tribes in the 17th-18th century. Today, the Piscataway Nation continues to be not only visible but necessary to our understanding of this place. Black peoples contributions to Great Falls reveal a complex history of enslaved/exploited labor used in the construction of the Patowmack Canal in the mid 19th century but also tells a story of freedom and advocacy for the land. Although remnants of Matildaville are still present and used as justification for Great Falls protection as a historically significant site by the National Parks Service we situate Black and Indigenous peoples entanglement with this landscape as integral to understanding our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
Disciplines/unit or lesson title and brief description
English: Braiding Stories (Spiritual)
Architecture: Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry (Emotional)
Archeology: Haunted Timescapes as Knowledge (Intellectual)
History: Water is the Path (Physical)
Learning impacts
Physical:
Compose in a variety of forms including reflections, descriptions and research which may include poetry, descriptive or persuasive essays, art/photography (maker) projects and multimodal projects.
Intellectual:
Discern subjective and objective through conversations, critical/close readings, oral histories, interviews to build critical thinking about place of self and others.
Emotional:
Recognize and understand relational value of self to place; and value of story of self and others in a specific place through photographic inquiry.
Spiritual:
Honor and understand the implications of place on self and others; understand, employ and recognize interdependence of place-based stories to serve community.
Transferability to other disciplines
Waterways are the locales of essential components of cultures and societies. Waterways are at the center of the ecological, economic, spiritual, political, and martial aspects of settlements, villages, nations and empires. Waterways are the sites of the first permanent settlements. Most of the first innovative agricultural zones, cities and civilizations began along major river valleys and basins. Boats/ships were (and still are) the way goods (and at one time merchants) were moved over long distances and international boundaries. The ecology of waterways can shape the hydrology used in irrigation and agriculture, human diet, spiritual and herbal medical practices. Waterways are associated with powerful spiritual entities and rituals in many religions. Demonstrating control over the access to or the flow of waterways occupied political and military leaders and is still a site of control by military branches around the globe (e.g. Army Corp). Straightening, dredging, and taming rivers are matters of public health as well as part of economic activity. Many factories and mills first utilized waterways as sources of energy, water, goods distribution and waste disposal in the industrial age. Waterways are also the sites of contention between societies, merchants, militaries, religions and polities. Water's centrality to all life on Earth makes for the transferability of waterways’ uses in several disciplines.
Module E Citation
Cotto, J., A. Hutson, N. Ike, A. Kendall. “Finding Balance In the Landscape || A Site Portrait of Great Falls, Module E,” (Roberts, A., Way, T. Directors), 2022. Available from Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital, NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, Retrieved on (date retrieved) website: https://www.apeopleslandscapehistory.org/syllabus-bank.