Jennifer Ladino spent 13 summers working for the National Park Service and is now an English professor at the University of Idaho. Memorials Matter is a scholarly work published by an academic press heavy on theory but also based on personal field research at six sites of historical significance.

The sites in the American West, with one exception, focus on diverse inhabitants who have suffered ill-treatment in the region’s history; Mexicans, Chinese, African Americans, and Native Americans. The sites are Coronado National Memorial, Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, Golden Spike National Historic Site, WWII in the Pacific National Monument, Manzanar National Historic Site, and “Buffalo Soldiers Overlook” at Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

One of her goals is to “consider how the physical environment makes people feel things, how it shapes the ‘flows’ of peace and many other affects at NPS sites.”

Reading this book is hard work for several reasons. First, the audience seems to be her fellows in the environmental humanities and especially in “affect studies.” She attempts “to combine affect theory, a notoriously dense interdisciplinary body of work that appeals primarily, if not exclusively, to academics, with what ecocritics call narrative scholarship: a type of research-based writing that integrates personal stories and is meant to reach a wider audience.”

The affect theory is indeed dense and her use of it hard for a non-specialist in the field to follow, but the narrative part rescued the book for me. She quotes extensively from the literature of her field (674 notes) and this heavily referenced scholarly approach sometimes made it difficult to follow what she was saying.

A second reason this book is hard work involves the stories that it tells commemorated by the national memorial sites she visits. Though some are classified as “historic sites” they are all memorials to people who have experienced traumatic histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. As she visits all the sites, she analyzes how the natural and built environments in each affect the emotional responses of visitors, and critiques how the Park Service tries to encourage such a response. She also analyzes how literature, as in memoir, fiction, and poetry, about the story commemorated at the site contributes to understanding of it.

The site of the Sand Creek Massacre, for instance, is in a remote corner of southeast Colorado’s high plains. Visitors can read in interpretive displays that this was a place where “a posse of temporary volunteers” attacked a camp of approximately 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho and “slaughtered 230 of these human beings, indiscriminately and without mercy, and how they mutilated their bodies and how they burned the camp to the ground, scattered the horses, and looted what they could, and how they took scalps and other body parts as trophies.”

Ladino comments that the Park Service is “well aware of its high-pressure role as ‘national narrator.’” She knows the agency is reluctant “to prescribe any particular emotions for tourists,” but it is “also an affect manager, and Sand Creek Massacre NHS has a very traumatic story to tell.”

Ladino reads the Park Service exhibits, visits with managers and interpreters, and attends an interpretive talk, then walks the land, analyzing how she feels and what agents affect her emotions. She finds that the “affective agency of the physical environment quiets the trauma [for her] of the massacre story and facilitates, instead, an atmosphere of resilience, peace, and healing.”

When she visits Manzanar, where thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated during WWII, she experiences a more striking affect from the physical environment.

What’s striking to me is the feeling of being confined in one of the barracks, then stepping outside into the bright, dry air and seeing the mountains. This inside-outside contrast – the affective dissonance between the cramped quarters and the vast natural spaces outside – hits me “at a level of the body.” I’m not sure what I feel is the sense of the “loss” and “frustration” the NPS plans aspire to, nor is it “shame” exactly, but I’m certainly unsettled, anxious, and uncomfortable while inside, and relieved to get out. For incarcerees like Houston [who wrote a memoir Farewell to Manzanar] the natural environment didn’t provide that relief; instead, it accentuated the sense of entrapment enforced by the built environment. For me, there is irony in the contrast between the connotation of freedom in my cultural associations with big mountains and the confinement I feel in the barracks.

The National Park Service uses language to tell the stories of these sites, but Ladino asserts, from her experience at Manzanar and the other sites she visits, that “(L)anguage is only a small part of a greater affective assemblage, including the mountains, the obelisk, the gravestones, the sagebrush, the wind, the raven’s caws, the dry heat, and our own bodies.”

She leaves Manzanar unsettled by her experience of the “dark energy” of the place. She asks, “If we are encouraged to feel shame or even outrage at Manzanar, then what are the prospects for turning these so-called negative emotions into compassionate political action in the present.”

Here she speaks to what I think is the core goal of her project. What affect do all of these elements of a memorial site instill in visitors; fear, guilt, shame, outrage, compassion, patriotism?

Concluding her analysis after her visit to Coronado National Memorial, which is on the Mexican border with its hot issues of immigration, the affects she finds are fear and anxiety. “Perhaps, then, the very real anxieties of people of color might be heard and understood [by anyone who visits the site]. One thing is certain: Both the diagnostic capacity of fear and anxiety and a skeptical evaluation of their circulation are urgently needed in the post-November 8, 2016, United States.”

Despite the hard work of reading this book, I found myself fascinated by the topic and persisted to the final word. What so captivated me? After struggling through the long and dense Introduction with its exploration of affect theory in which Ladino demonstrated her scholarly chops, I was ready to quit. But then I wondered what her project could teach me about how people are responding to presentations at National Park Service sites of truly awful parts of American History, and how the agency is handling the delicate task of presenting this regretful history today.

I learned a lot, more than I can possible describe here. Ladino sums up some of what she has learned in the concluding chapter, which she titled “Going Rogue with the Alt-NPS.”

Today, in a nation that seems anything but united, the NPS seems poised to reframe its sites and their stories, many of which are steeped in whiteness and a history of expulsion, violence, and more banal discriminatory practices so that they are welcoming to all visitors. Its training manual makes connections between ecology and social justice, maintaining that “biodiversity boosts ecosystem productivity and helps improve nature’s ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Likewise, nationally significant events in our nation’s past tell the stories of diverse cultures and perspectives that make our nation what it is today.” Many NPS employees are getting training that emphasizes these connections and positions diversity at the root of environmental identity.

She notes that the Park Service “identifies two of its ‘critical needs of the future’ as ‘a civil informed social discourse and building a national community’ and ‘an understanding of our vulnerable natural world and what we must do to maintain it.’”

The American history most of us learned in school was the story of how people of European descent colonized North America and built a powerful nation. That history includes the story of public lands and management of those lands as in the National Park System and is a proud product of white America. Telling of the story of America often ignores the dark underside of that history.

Memorials like those Ladino studies in Memorials Matter provide opportunities to confront this dark side, which involved great injustice to people of color. I think she studied the memorials and wrote this book because she loves national parks but understands that they are not part of the culture of the people who have suffered great injustice at the hands of the American people.

How do we include these people in appreciating and protecting the natural heritage of Americans? It must begin with we white Americans, Ladino and I among them, confronting with affect the injustices done and with deep examination of what we can do to atone for these injustices. National memorials and the challenges faced by those who manage them show us some of what we must do.