This panel explores how landscapes function as active agents of memory, holding and generating layered histories that shape religious imaginations and impact religious communities. Moving beyond accounts of memory as exclusively human practice, these papers attend to the material, ecological, and geological dimensions of remembering inscribed in specific North American landscapes. These include the Grand Canyon, the Hudson River Valley, and nearby Boulder, Colorado. Together, these papers explore how attending to the memory-bearing capacities of land offers fresh directions for the study of religion.
This paper examines Fort Chambers and Valmont Butte, adjacent sites in Boulder, Colorado, as landscapes that hold layered memories of Arapaho dispossession and settler colonialism. The first, Fort Chambers, is a city-owned plot that was a training ground for militia members who participated in the Sand Creek Massacre, and Valmont Butte is simultaneously a Native sacred place, a settler cemetery, and a site of radioactive industrial waste reclamation. Through these two sites, I argue that landscapes remember. Fort Chambers and Valmont Butte are shaped by Native and settler religious practices, settler colonial mythologies, and modern sites of memory of settler violence. These landscapes hold the memories of what has happened on and to them precisely because people revisit these memories and forge new stories, but also because the land itself, in the form of radioactive soil capped with clean fill, makes forgetting materially impossible.
This paper examines a mile-long pathway along the Hudson River as a “carceral landscape” holding a dense assemblage of images, stories, and memories—which, considered together, both reinforce and trouble dominant narratives of the prison as a necessary or inevitable feature of American life. Engaging histories of colonialism (including the seizure of Munsee land by European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries) and carcerality (such as the establishment of Sing Sing Prison’s first cell block in 1825, built by incarcerated labor) as ongoing processes inscribed onto the geography of upstate New York, this paper contends that the Hudson Riverbank offers productively incoherent modes of remembering that actively resist the linearity of the progress (or declension) narrative. Moreover, it positions these modes of remembering as religious practices, oriented toward the recovery of excesses and silences typically relegated to the sidelines of secular histories of the prison.
This paper argues that memory emerges through reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-human subjects, and that land itself generates, retains, and expresses memory through its ecological and geological processes. Using deep mapping as a methodological framework, it examines the Grand Canyon as a living parchment where cultural, ecological, and geological histories are read together as layered memory systems. Expanding deep mapping beyond its usual focus on human narratives, this paper demonstrates how landscapes tell their own stories as memory-bearing and memory-generating agents. Landscapes retain traces of past events and actively shape human perception, religious imagination, and commemorative practices. Drawing on phenomenology, ecology, and relational ontologies, the paper suggests that memory is co-produced through ongoing relational entanglements between humans and more-than-human entities. This approach offers a fresh direction in the study of religion by showing that landscapes are sentient actors in the emergence of religious worlds.