{Ozark National Scenic Riverways image originally posted by @usinterior} The homeland of the Osage and Quapaw Nations, Ozark National Scenic Riverway is a great example of the bias settler history and interpretation puts on the built environment. As the National Park service itself says, this is a place with a long and rich human history where “every time and every group of people has a story to tell.”
However, the stories they tell are largely tied to structures in the park, built environments legible to American society. This tendency to tell the stories of buildings, and this is true throughout the country, erases indigenous impacts on the environment that were often more ephemeral or simply unrecognizable as human intervention to European settlers - thus also erasing indigenous history and presence from the land. (Let’s also not forget that archeologists and explorers often ascribed the permanent structures that were built by Native people to mythical or lost races because they refused to believe American Indians could build them). How much someone leaves behind should not be the basis for whose stories get told.