Redemption in an Unlikely Place

Place and memory intertwine; it's a familiar human experience. But when a place is associated with trauma, the feeling intensifies. It is as if the space itself remembers. We talk about it as though it were alive, not just a piece of property. In the case of Ground Zero, we want to hear it speak and honor the memory of what happened there. Whatever is eventually built over the ruins of the World Trade Center, the site will remain a sacred memorial.

But there are other sites that remind us -- or most of us -- of things we desperately want to forget, places so redolent of rage that we would rather bury them for good. This is a story about such a place and about how one community struggled to transform the memories that had been created there by another.

On a midsummer evening in 1998, Victoria Keenan and her 19-year-old son Jason were driving down Garwood Road near Hayden Lake, Idaho, on their way home from a wedding. Fumbling to pull a card from his wallet, Jason inadvertently dropped the whole thing out the open car window. Unfortunately, at that moment the Keenans were passing the whitewashed gates of the 20-acre headquarters of the white supremacist Aryan Nations organization. When they reversed to pick up the wallet, there was a bang. Maybe their old Datsun backfired. Maybe a firecracker went off nearby. Whatever it was, the three Aryan Nations guards at the gate mistook it for a gunshot. They piled into a pickup truck and gave chase, firing at the Keenans with an assault rifle until they ran the Datsun into a ditch. As one of the guards tried to drag Victoria from the car by her hair, headlights were spotted in the distance. The men fled.

With help from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, the Keenans sued Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations, for his guards' actions. More than two years after the incident, an Idaho civil jury found Butler negligent in his selection, training and supervision of the guards and awarded the Keenans $6.3 million. This bankrupted Butler and his organization, forcing him to auction the Hayden Lake property. The Keenans bought it in February 2001; then, weeks later, they sold it to a foundation formed by Internet entrepreneur, human rights advocate and native Idahoan Gregory C. Carr. The Carr Foundation had the compound buildings demolished and donated the property to North Idaho College in nearby Coeur d'Alene. The college has decided to build nothing on the land, christening it a "Peace Park," and taking botany and geology students there on field trips.

For the Aryan Nations and related groups worldwide, losing this property to human rights advocates amounted to a crisis of biblical proportions. For 25 years it had been the headquarters for Butler's organization, which dreamed of establishing an "Anglo-Israel" in the Pacific Northwest. Butler hosted annual world congresses there, bringing together hundreds of white racist leaders for fellowship, weapons training and strategic planning. In the 1990s, he also hosted annual youth festivals on Adolf Hitler's birthday, which attracted a younger generation of neo-Nazis and skinheads. Butler's compound was the sacred center, the Zion, for anti-Semitic and homophobic white supremacism in America. Without it, the movement finds itself in exile, with the compound ruins its own version of Ground Zero.

For most northern Idahoans, by contrast, the Keenans' victory was a victory for the whole region. Local people were weary of being harassed and intimidated by Aryan Nations members -- whose tactics ranged from hate mail and vandalism to actual assaults -- and then having to accommodate their parades down the main street of Coeur d'Alene every summer. Moreover, they had suffered for too long a kind of guilt by association. Here was a chance for northern Idaho to shake its reputation as the nerve center of white racism and maybe even recast itself as a hub of the human rights movement.

I first visited the site of the former headquarters in the summer of 2001, a few weeks after the buildings had been demolished. A faint smell of burnt wood and paper hung in the air. Amid tall evergreens and open grassy areas were large patches of bulldozed dirt, where the compound buildings had stood. Still, traces of the past remained. There was a charred scrap of typescript listing biblical passages that revealed, to those with eyes to see, Jimmy Carter and the Feds as agents of the New Babylon. There were pages from a booklet praising Hitler's model family. And there was a large sign asking visitors to "please keep this room clean" out of respect for Pastor Butler's home, his church and the Aryan Nations.

Most chilling was a large piece of wallboard full of bullet holes. In itself it wasn't so remarkable; you would be hard-pressed to walk a mile in this farm country without finding a can or board that had been used for target practice. But I remembered seeing an earlier photo of this same kind of target board, from before the demolition, on which a photo of an African American man's face had been pinned. The only other target left when I got there was an empty paint can: Riddled with bullet holes, its tattered generic label read "WHITE."

I visited the place again this past summer. The deer have returned, leaving droppings and daybeds of flattened grass. Wildflowers have grown on the razed patches, making them look like untended gardens.

Human artifacts and wildlife are blending. Shoots of new growth wrap themselves around a white plastic spoon. A molehill has exhumed a bright pink plastic half-egg, probably from some long-ago Easter egg hunt. A lunchbox, unmoved since I saw it a year earlier, is now camouflaged in dark brown rust. Same with the paint can. And rain is slowly melting the target board into the soil. Despite the effort to destroy all traces of the former occupation, the place remembers its past.

In "The Production of Space," the noted French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued that space is not simply an object that human occupants act upon and shape, as we so often assume. It is also a subject that acts upon and shapes us. "Space is alive: it speaks," he wrote. And it has a memory, including traces of memories now consigned to oblivion, burnt or buried or hidden under new facades. This, Lefebvre suggested, calls for a kind of "psychoanalysis of space" that attends as much to what is repressed as to what is preserved.

Psychoanalysis is one way to respond to a place like Hayden Lake. While I was in northern Idaho talking to people about life in the aftermath of the Aryan Nations occupation, I heard the story of another way.

Not long after acquiring the property, the Carr Foundation hired Solid Rock Crane & Excavation in Post Falls, Idaho, to demolish the buildings. It so happened that Solid Rock's owner was a member of an area church, Faith Tabernacle Church of the First Born. He told his pastor, the Rev. Mike Walker, about the contract, and together they decided that their church should hold some kind of service on the site before demolition began. A few days later, a group of church members and local ministers drove to the site for a communion service "to rededicate the land to God."

When they first arrived, everyone felt extremely anxious, Walker said, and an evil aura seemed to permeate the space. Recalling the biblical story of Abel's blood crying out to God from the ground, one woman declared that she could hear the blood of countless victims of racial violence crying out from the trees, as though the place somehow bore the sins of the entire history of white racism. Several people felt moved to repent on behalf of the land for the hatred that had been nurtured there.

They then prepared for communion, a Christian ceremony in which participants reconcile with one another and with God by sharing bread and wine consecrated as the body and blood of Christ. Now by all traditional standards of orthodoxy, only human beings participate in communion. But in this service, the land participated as well. After consecrating the bread, the minister broke off a piece and pressed it into the soil before giving pieces to the others. He did the same with the wine, pouring it onto the ground before passing the cup around. He then declared that the land had been rededicated to God.

My guess is that Faith Tabernacle doesn't have a copy of Lefebvre's book in its library. Yet its service of rededication at Hayden Lake expressed a strikingly similar philosophical conception of space as a subject rather than an object, in need of the kind of redemption that is made possible only by directly confronting the past.

Sifting through the ruins of the Aryan Nations headquarters, one can recognize both the understandable desire to obliterate all memory of its former occupants and the impossibility of ever doing so. An abominable past is deeply inscribed on that place. To deny its presence is to risk inviting its return. In their own unorthodox way, the people of Faith Tabernacle understood this. By ritual means quite different from those of psychoanalysis, yet similar in its effects, they brought the place's past to the surface and made it speak , not to mention eat and drink. But it is not necessary to share their particular religious convictions to learn something from what they did at Hayden Lake that day: There are certain kinds of recovery that can't be achieved with bulldozers and shovels.

Timothy Beal is Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University and the author of "Religion and its Monsters" (Routledge).