What is National Heritage Area

Using an auto-ethnographic approach, this chapter describes aspects of how a story about cultural and heritage tourism is produced as a documentary for public television. A documentary storytelling production about a proposed national heritage area in the United States provides a case study for the chapter. Included is a discussion of ethical dilemmas that arose during documentary production and how the dilemmas were addressed. Ethical dilemmas included dealing with concerns about protecting people and property, telling stories about subjects that could be viewed as controversial, covering narratives that have been neglected through history, and avoiding advancing stereotypes about people in the subject region. Solutions to dilemmas were found in how stories were crafted for the documentary production.