National Park Week is April 20-28, 2013. Entrance is free to all NPS sites from Monday, April 22 through Friday, April 26, including parks with archeology! Where will you go—the mounds at Hopewell Culture? Kingsley Plantation at Timucuan? Community gardens at Manzanar? Montezuma Castle? Get started on the Visit Archeology page, or find a park near you. Experience why the national parks are America’s best idea!

Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Come out to the parks to volunteer and participate in special events, including trash pickup, gardening, invasive weed removal, and more. Parks will host information sessions about Leave No Trace ethical principles, some of which, such as “leave what you find,” apply to archeological sites. Learn more on the Leave No Trace website.

Saturday, April 20 is National Junior Ranger Day. Kids, take your parents to Canyon de Chelly for a nature walk. Explore the world of ancient Native American symbols at Glen Canyon. See petroglyphs carved in lava and learn about fishtraps at Kaloko-Honokohau. Activities and special events for kids will take place throughout the NPS system. Scheduled activities are listed on the National Park Week website. Learn More >>

The national parks are home to a wide variety of research and educational projects. Our Projects in the Parks series touches on all aspects of archeology, including site survey, analysis, curation, consultation, education, technology, and ongoing efforts to recover sites being destroyed by erosion.

Most recently we looked into the Hawaiian presence at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Fort Vancouver, as the colonial “Capital” of the Pacific Northwest in the 1820s-1840s, supported a multi-ethnic village of 600-1,000 occupants. A number of the villagers were Hawaiian men who worked in the agricultural fields and sawmills of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) operations. Identification of Hawaiian residences and activities has been an important element of studies of Fort Vancouver since the 1960s.

Kauanui calls for a “broad research agenda that accounts for Hawaiian movements in their respective contexts of conditions, periods, reasons, and desires, to allow us to better account for Hawaiian presence on the North American continent.” Her call is to counter attempts to minimize or alter modern Hawaiian cultural identity and to better define the Hawaiian diaspora history. Research on fur trade Hawaiians dispels the notion that Hawaiian history is limited to Hawaii and allows us to better contextualize the broader issues of fur trade identity and social transition in the Pacific Northwest associated with indigenous, fur trade, and American immigrant eras. Archeologists hope to learn more about Hawaiian life at Fort Vancouver by further studying the village site adjacent to the fort.

It appears that most of the Hawaiians hired by the HBC were of the Hawaiian commoner class (maka'ainana). That there are some difficulties in assessing exactly what Hawaiian occupations were in the fur trade is illustrated in the outfit records for 1845, where most of the identifiable Hawaiians at the Vancouver Depot (Fort Vancouver) were identified solely as “laborer,” exceptions being “Spunyarn,” who was a cooper, and William Kaulehelehe, the Hawaiian preacher, who was referred to as a “teacher”. Hawaiians primarily served as canoe middlemen (paddlers, but not bowmen or sternmen), sailors, farmers, and woodworkers. Some specialized as shepherds, sawyers, cooks, coopers, and woodcutters/stokers (for the Beaver steamship).

In addition to Hawaiians, the village was the home of a surprisingly diverse community of Fort Vancouver’s working class employees and their families, including French Canadians, Scots, English, Métis, and Native Americans representing tribes from across the North American continent. Seasonally, trapping parties (called “Brigades”) would deliver furs to the fort and to refit, which would swell the population of the village.

Many people of the fur trade spoke languages that were not intelligible to their comrades and exhibited unique racial and ethnic qualities. George Simpson called his bateau-load of people on the lower Columbia “the prettiest congress of nations, the nicest confusion of tongues, that has ever taken place since the days of the Tower of Babel.” To confuse things further, it is clear that, like the other inhabitants of the village, some Hawaiians took American Indian wives and raised multiethnic families. Learn more >>