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Item 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.Item Pyrrhic Victories: How the Secularization Doctrine Undermines the Sanctity of Religion(2013-03) Blake, William DOver the past 25 years, federal courts have sanctioned displays of religious symbols on public property – including the crèche, the Ten Commandments, and the Latin cross – by privileging their secular value or because nearby secular symbols wash away their religiosity. This paper contends that these cases have resulted in government secularization of the religious. Though the appearance of religion has increased in the Public Square, this effort has been partially self-defeating because the distinctive substance of religion has been eroded by this jurisprudence, thereby weakening the sanctity of religion. Minimizing the religious import of these symbols makes dialogue over the proper reach of the Establishment Clause effectively impossible.