Changing Images of the Clark Fork Watershed:  1803-2000
Alex Philp, EOS Education Project, University of Montana, Missoula, MT

Over the course of the past two hundred years, cartographical impressions of the Clark Fork watershed have changed dramatically. Each image reflects the current state of understanding regarding the nature of the watershed, its connection to larger watershed units, and its significance as a corridor for the movement of good and services, ecological flows, and general human migration.  This poster captures these various snapshots in time, allows for a comparison of these landscape impressions and depicts the role a Cartesian coordinate systems plays in transforming a three-dimensional percept into a two dimensional concept. Of notable significance, the last two hundred years have produced a number of geographical names for the Clark Fork Watershed.  This dynamic nomenclature reflects the power of geographical place names to change our understanding of an ecocultural system.  In particular, the pre-Euroamerican, indigenous place names, which largely described landscape processes over political or social references, have been lost through a succession of Euroamerican naming conventions.  As such, the psycho-spiritual connections to place have been concealed from the geographical ethnology of local and regional pre-Euroamerican inhabitants.  Today, the “Clark Fork” name reflects the impact of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its role in re-imagining the landscape through political, economical, and social filters.  It is this historical cartographic legacy that defines in part our conceptualizations and impressions of the hydrological unit that we know as the Clark Fork watershed.  Our challenge is to excavate the lost or hidden meanings of pre-colonial names and use these meanings to redefine our perceptions of the watershed as a holistic unit consisting of diverse ecosystems and cultures interacting in a discrete, perceivable place.  Such efforts can be described as an archaeological phenomenology of the Clark Fork watershed as place.”

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