Ethan Michael Karnes

ETHAN KARNES, then a graduate student at George Washington University, Washington, DC, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Coalfield Encounters: Memorialization and Materiality of the West Virginia Mine Wars,” supervised by Dr. Sarah Wagner. This study examines how narratives of the West Virginia Mine Wars are constructed, preserved, and forgotten in Matewan, a historically significant site of labor conflict. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, the research reveals that until recently, many local residents reported limited awareness of the Mine Wars — a phenomenon that scholar Guy Beiner describes as “social forgetting.” Through analysis of vernacular resources and community legacy-building efforts, particularly surrounding the Battle of Blair Mountain, this study investigates how suppressed histories transform into valorized cultural heritage, illuminating connections between historic labor struggles and contemporary issues of violence and environmental degradation in the region. Using multiple methodological approaches — ethnographic observation, oral history, material culture analysis, community archiving, and archaeological survey — this research examines how coal mining’s physical and social traces are utilized to shape collective memory and narrative history in Matewan. Representing more than a simple reawakening, the re-emergence of Mine Wars memory shows how residents construct historical meaning through a locally established vernacular. This process extends to historical narratives through what I term “vernacular archaeology”: a locally negotiated approach to history-telling that privileges affective encounters over institutional authority, producing dynamic rather than static accounts of the past.