Manitou Cliff Dwellings

The Ancestral Puebloans lived and travelled the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1300. Ancestral Puebloan peoples did not permanently live in the Manitou Springs area, but lived and built their cliff dwellings in the Four Corners area and across the Northern Rio Grande, several hundred miles southwest of Manitou Springs. The Manitou Cliff Dwellings were built at their present location in the early 1900s, as a museum and tourist attraction. Some of the building materials were looted and stolen from a collapsed Ancestral Puebloan site near Cortez in southwest Colorado, shipped by railroad to Manitou Springs, and assembled in their present form as Ancestral Puebloan-style buildings resembling those found in the Four Corners. The project was directed primarily by Harold Ashenhurst and Virginia McClurg, founder of the Colorado Cliff Dwelling Association. Virginia McClurg focused her life on advocacy for women and fighting for human welfare and stability, especially within Indigenous cultures. This is why she was inspired to take on this project of preserving historical Indigenous historical art. After failed labors of trying to come up with an agreement for the future of Mesa Verde Park and how it would have been organized as well as trying to get Congress to pass the Antiquities Act, McClurg established the Colorado Cliff Dwellings Association, which led to the beginning of the dwellings endeavor. == Controversy ==

McClurg's creation of Manitou was highly controversial even at the time of its opening, in part because it was being promoted as authentic, and since they were built as a form of entertainment to promote tourism. Edgar Lee Hewett, a famous early Southwest anthropologist, is widely cited at Manitou and in the attraction's materials as having approved of its construction, but in reality, Hewett was reluctant to legitimize the site and had little regard for the reconstructions. Kanien'kehá:ka and Monica Snowbird, visitors to the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum who are a part of the Pikes Peak Indigenous Women's Alliance, were left with many negative emotions after visiting the site because they believed it did nothing but add towards the already negative common stereotypes of Indigenous people, calling out offensive terms used within the museum tour. ==See also==