This document summarizes a PhD student's research on the River Street neighborhood in Boise, Idaho and how it functioned as a "memoryscape" in shaping racial identities. The student interviewed both black and white former residents. While they agreed on boundaries, white residents saw the area as crime-ridden while black residents emphasized neighborliness. The neighborhood allowed for co-existence but was racialized by outsiders to establish whiteness. Memoryscapes are shaped by individual experiences and interpret the world through social lenses like race. The racialization of River Street maintained it as a place for "others" and has shaped its remembrance today.

1. Memoryscapes, Whiteness, and River Street: How African
Americans Helped Maintain Euroamerican Identity in Boise, Idaho
By William A. White, III
PhD Student
School of Anthropology
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona

2. African American homesteader Pearl Royal Hendrickson kills 2 peace officers in Boise
Foothills. Hours later he is shot to death by 30—50 officers

3. No Pearl Royal Hendrickson
memorial
Nearly stricken from
Euroamerican consciousness
Long-time African American
residents recall the shooting
as an affirmation of
Euroamerican dominance
Recreational trails near location of Hendrickson shooting

4. Boise, Idaho evolved from Fort Boise (1863)
• Capitol of Idaho (1890)
• Has always been about 90% white
• 1.5% of Boise’s current population is African
American
• Historically, most black people lived in the River
Street Neighborhood

5. Area that
would one day
become the
River Street
Neighborhood
in 1903

6. Memoryscapes, Geography, and Archaeology
Means of describing the ways people interpret
their surroundings and navigate their relationships
with the places in which they live
Production of place through the inhabitation of
spaces by cultural bodies
Borrowed from ethnography
Uses same source references as landscape
archaeology

7. The memoryscape
is a refinement of
any of the
theoretical
concepts in social
science that
promote the idea
that, “cultures are
planes of meaning
through which
individuals sustain
intelligibility and
comprehensibility”
(Clack 2009:119)

8. Why Consider
Whiteness?

9. Emic Etic
“Us”
“Them”
Racial
Identity
Individual Ontology
Societal Structuration

10. White studies is predicated
upon three core theoretical
positions first established by
Ruth Frankenberg (1997:1)
1. Whiteness is a location
of structural advantage
of race privilege;
2. It is a standpoint from
where white people look
at themselves, others,
and society, and;
3. Whiteness refers to a set
of cultural practices that
are usually unmarked
and unnamed
(cf. Hartmann et al. 2009:406)

11. At River Street, memories of the dialectic between white and black
people is visible on the landscape

12. River Street as a Racialized Memoryscape
Interviewees agree on some things
and disagree on others. Here are
some of the ways race plays a role in
recollection.
The neighborhood’s boundaries are
uncontested
Bad reputation was isolated to a
small area by all neighborhood
residents, but not by outsiders
Residents constantly reaffirm the
neighborliness of within River Street
Map of Black households in Boise in the 1960s, YWCA papers

13. “Don’t call this a
ghetto over here
because we
don’t like it. It’s
not a ghetto.
Now when
Pioneer was
over there, it
was horrible….
Everything went
on over there on
Pioneer. You
couldn’t even
drive through
there, which I
didn’t want to”
Bessie Stewart
(1980)

14. One white descendant recalled that the, “…perception of commonality and difference
was expressed in terms of those belonging to the neighborhood as being ‘residents of
Idaho’ or a ‘resident’ of the neighborhood.” For her, longtime residency outweighed
ethnicity in determining who was different. Time living in the neighborhood trumped
skin color. Discrimination came from outside the neighborhood.

15. Descendants disagree over the role the neighborhood played in their identity in the greater
community
• Black descendants were discriminated against because of their race
• White descendants were discriminated against because they lived in the “Black
Neighborhood”

16. How does this relate to
current archaeological
theory?

17. Ontology
Entanglement
Social Logics “Meshworks”
Systematics
Epistemology
METAPHYSICS OF RACIAL IDENTITY
Relational Knowledge
Community of
Practice
Interaction
Observation
Sensory Input
“Memory
Work”
Knowledge
Transfer
Folk
Taxonomies
“Networks”
“Bundling”
“Who are we/you?”
“What is our/my place
in the universe?”
“How do we/you know?”
Structuration
Against a backdrop of:
Environment Time
Evolution Collapse/Survivance
Technology Power
Economics Habitus

18. Conclusion
• River Street has evolved over time and, today, exists largely in the memories of former residents and
other Boiseans
• Landscapes are human constructs within the natural environment that are interpreted differently
based through the lenses of culture, race, society, and other social constructs
• Memoryscapes are not only the way we remember places but also the way we interpret the existing
world based on our individual life experiences
• The racialization of River Street was necessary in order to establish whiteness as a distinct racial
identity
• Enormous effort was taken by Boise’s Euroamerican community to maintain River Street as a place
where the “others” lived. These efforts have shaped the way we remember that neighborhood
• In reality, River Street was just a middle-class neighborhood where people of all races co-existed
• The concept of memoryscapes is useful for a variety of archaeological theoretical paradigms

19. Generous funding provided by:
University of Arizona Graduate Access Fellowship
University of Arizona Traditions, Transitions, and Treasures Fund
City of Boise Department of Arts and History Grant Fund
Charles Redd Center for Western Studies
Acknowledgements:
Pam Demo, Pam Demo Consulting
Dr. Jill Gill, Department of History, Boise State University
Michal Davidson and the rest of the staff at the Idaho State Historical Society
María Nieves Zedeño, Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA)
John Bertram, Dick Madry, Lee Rice, II, and Warner Terrell, III