Palestine Park is a scale model of Palestine built in 1874 as an instructional tool on the grounds of the first Chautauqua Assembly, on the shores of Chautauqua Lake, NY. Built merely a year before the foundation of the first Zionist colony in Palestine, the model is a Biblical and Christian-oriented depiction of that land.

The model serves, in this work, as a starting point for an investigation and comparison of the colonial traditions of two geographies: The land it depicts, and the area where it is located.

In 1875 Eliezer Roke’ah, the leader of a Jewish group of the Old Yishuv in Safed, bought half the lands of the Arab village Jaauneh (Al-Ja’una). Roke’ah would later create a new colony on these lands called Gei Oni - a Hebrew adaption of the Arabic name. In his actions, Roke’ah set precedent for the Zionist colonies that would appear across Palestine in the next decade. He also began the practice of naming new Zionists settlements in Hebrew by adapting the previous Arab local names. The people of Jaauneh were violently displaced by the Israeli military in 1949. The Israeli town of Rosh Pinna currently occupies the village lands.

It is conflicted whether the name Chautauqua is based on the Seneca phrase ga-jah ga-dah-gwah which means - ‘place from which the fish was taken’, or rather on Johdo:Gwëh which means - ‘where the great serpent emerged’. In 1715, at the end of the Tuscarora War in North Carolina and the beginning of the Tuscarora displacement and migration to New York, one of the villages destroyed by Swiss settlers was called Chattoka, at the site of today’s New Bern, NC. It is suggested, regardless of the meaning of the name, that it was brought to New York by the Tuscarora migration, evoking a memory of a previous home.