Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Social Sciences

Advisor 1

Melissa F. Baird

Committee Member 1

Angela Carter

Committee Member 2

Mark Alan Rhodes II

Committee Member 3

Erika Vye

Committee Member 4

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles

Abstract

Industrial heritage refers to the material remains, sites, landscapes, and practices associated with industrial and extractive activities. As a field, it has historically been concerned with the conservation, management, and interpretation of industrial sites and activities and forms a central narrative within Minnesota's museums. Yet such accounts often privilege object-centered narratives while silencing the presence, knowledge, and contributions of Indigenous and Descendant communities, obscuring their enduring relationships to extractive landscapes. In recent decades, critiques of traditional industrial heritage approaches have identified gaps in the discipline related to the exclusion of marginalized populations, including Indigenous Peoples. Minnesota is home to eleven federally recognized Tribes who have maintained deep ties to the lands and waters. This study focuses on Minnesota’s ‘Iron Range,' a settler name for a region defined by more than a century of iron ore mining.

This dissertation centers the complex, enduring relationships Indigenous and Descendant communities hold with extractive industries and landscapes. It introduces the concept of authorized industrial heritage discourse to show how dominant accounts erase Indigenous presence, voices, and lived experiences, while perpetuating settler colonial narratives of “discovery” and progress.

It further demonstrates how Indigenous storywork, guided by ethical principles of the Two-Row Wampum (Gaswéñdah), reframes and centers Indigenous knowledge systems and lived experiences in industrial heritage contexts. The Gaswéñdah principles serve as an ethical framework that provides a relational basis for interpreting industrial heritage and histories while ensuring relational accountability and cultural competence throughout the research design.

Employing a Feminist-Indigenous research approach, the study engages with co-researchers through semi-structured interviews and oral histories. Drawing on these narratives, the study identifies examples of Ojibwe labor in the historic underground mines of Ely, MN, and the complex relationships with resource extraction. These stories highlight how communities balance the economic security provided by mining jobs with profound concerns over environmental impact and treaty rights, including maintaining ties to lands through labor.

The findings unsettle dominant narratives, restore the voices of those who long carried relationships with these lands, and lead to the articulation of an Indigenous-Industrial Heritage, a framework that prioritizes community voices to re-story industrial landscapes through multi-vocality. It proposes that the systematic inclusion and amplification of long-hidden community narratives can serve as a critical form of restorative justice and offer pathways toward repair, reciprocity, and reconciliation in contexts where the physical return of land (#landback) is not yet possible. This dissertation provides a practical and theoretical model for heritage institutions to adopt, to support ongoing efforts to advance more collaborative and equitable interpretation practices.

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