April 23, 2003
Contact: Joel Geffen (509-962-6966/e-mail: geffenji@yahoo.com)
ELLENSBURG, Wash. - Stereotypes regarding “Indianness” have been used for generations to characterize Native American ideas of nature. Contemporary timber harvests on the Yakama Reservation do not fit these stereotypes and are controversial.
Joel Geffen will discuss this controversy during the next Central Washington University department of geography and land studies colloquium Thursday, April 24, at 4 p.m. in Lind 104 on the Ellensburg campus. Geffen's presentation is titled “Images and Material Landscapes: Iconography and Timber Harvests on the Yakama Reservation.
Geffen spent more than six years working with the Yakama Nation as a forest archaeologist and land use historian. He worked on timber sales there surveying proposed sale areas for cultural and archaeological places.
“And, I was heavily involved in the negotiations in what they called the ‘interdisciplinary team process’ to select sites in the context of timber sales,” Geffen says. “During my six-and-a-half years, I heard a lot of discussion -- and a lot of arguments -- over what was right or not right with what goes on in those sales. It’s all about values.”
His presentation will focus on the divergence of opinion on the reservation concerning ideas of nature and how those ideas impact the overall identity of the Yakama Nation.
“Are trees a commodity, something to be cut and made money from or is there some sort of spiritual quality to the woods?” he says of the competing schools of thought. “Depending on which view you take, you’re probably going to act in different ways, so you get a pretty big controversy.”
Geffen, 47, earned his bachelor’s degree in 1984 from the University of New Mexico and then added two master’s degrees from CWU, in resource management in 1989, and individual
studies in 1997. He is now working on two doctoral dissertations: one in cultural geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a second in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
For more information about his free, public presentation, or for persons of disability to arrange for reasonable accommodation, call (509) 509-963-2044 or (for the hearing impaired) TDD (509) 963-2143.
