Wednesday, May 11, 2022 – Authenticity over interpretation

There was never a significant Indigenous settlement near Manitou Springs, Colorado. But the Manitou Cliff Dwellings site is drawing 100,000 paying tourists a year with the promise of seeing "ancestral Puebloan ruins that date back 800 to 1000 years". The structures are really non-Native interpretations of a once-thriving pueblo that organizers built nearly a century ago using materials stolen from their original site. Those original organizers looted and destroyed the pueblo ruins under the guise of protecting them from being looted and destroyed. We hear about the importance of encouraging tourism and other experiences that originate from Native sources.