Diving With a Purpose Underwater Archaeology Program

DWP

Kenneth Stewart, DWP Program Coordinator
Jay Haigler, DWP Lead Instructor
Erik Denson, DWP Lead Instructor

February 11th, 2016

Diving with a Purpose (DWP) is a volunteer underwater archeology Program in Biscayne NP under a partnership with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS). The goals of the DWP program are to train divers in underwater archeology; document historic sites for national archiving and public use; expose youth, minorities, and the community to the marine environment, maritime history, and the importance of preservation and stewardship of underwater resources.

Open Transcript 

Transcript

Karen: Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the NPS Archeology program speaker series for 2015-2016. This is Karen Mudar and I'm an archeologist in the Washington Archeology Program office. This is the first webcast in 2016, and our series examining maritime archeology. Our speaker on January 14, Michael Faught, principal investigator for SEARCH, Inc. was forced to cancel his presentation, but his talk, "Submerged Prehistoric Sites: Pioneering Into the Deep," has been rescheduled for next Thursday, February 18, so mark your calendar.

Our last speaker last December was Steve Lubkemann of George Washington University, who is the founder of the African Slave Wrecks Project, and this project has been investigating the slave ship Sao Jose which sank off Cape Town while carrying more than five hundred people. Steve's presentation uses the Sao Jose project as a way to discuss the potential for collaborative investigation of the transatlantic slave trade and the possibility for more meaningful incorporation of maritime archeology into this research. Steve gave a nuanced discussion of the cultural context for engaging about enslavement at the point of departure in Mozambique, and also considered the ways that communities in Brazil received these individuals. I was particularly struck by the research to identify and talk with the descendants of Brazil. It was extremely interesting, and it provides a framework for examination of other historical trajectories of enslavement from a global perspective. I expect to hear more about this important project in the future.

As I mentioned previously, on February 18, we will hear from Michael Faught, principal investigator of SEARCH, who will give a talk entitled "Submerged Prehistoric Sites: Pioneering into the Deep." This webinarwas previously announced so I don't want to repeat that announcement, except to urge you all to attend. Michael's presentation will outline the history of sea level rise and show the chronology of humans that would have been affected by it and some of the sites, underwater sites, that are known in North America. I'm greatly looking forward to this talk and I know that you are, too.

The speakers for today are Ken Stewart and Kamau Sidiki, and they will be talking about the Diving with a Purpose: Underwater Archeology Program "Preserving Our History." Diving with a Purpose originated at Biscayne National Park and was co-founded by park archeologist Brenda Lanzendorf and Ken. Although Brenda is no longer with us, Ken and others have carried on work at the park to provide opportunities to educate avocational archeologists and opportunities to participate in underwater archeological investigations. Kamau, our second speaker today, is a lead instructor for Diving with a Purpose, and a very accomplished diver. He's also Vice President of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers.

Both of our speakers are careful to emphasize that they do not have formal archeological training. This is, however, for us, a great opportunity to talk to one of our archeological partners about their experiences working with the Park Service, to hear about some of our projects from their point of view. We can ask questions about how to attract and keep good partners, and things that we can do better to facilitate good advocates and stewards of our archeological resources, and also to ask them how do we improve. How can we improve? How can we make this a better experience for everyone? Ken and Kamau are also involved in a Youth Diving with a Purpose Program, and I hope that they'll talk about this program as well.

As always, please set your phone to mute, and don't put us on hold to answer phone calls. Stay on the line, please, after the formal presentation, because we'll have discussion. Kamau and Ken, thank you for accepting our invitation to speak today.

Ken: Thank you Karen. I appreciate you having us on, as I told you earlier. I am just going to give you a brief history of how the DWP started, and then Kamau will probably take it almost to the end until we get to the youth component of it. If you look at the first slide, it talks about Diving with a Purpose, how we started. I'll be very honest with you guys, prior to 2003, I didn't know a lot about archeology, and I surely didn't know anything about maritime archeology, but I was an avid diver, and I was a member of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers. At that time, in 2003, I was a southern regional rep, and I covered all of the southern region states. At that time I got a call from a young lady named Karima Eberl who was producing a documentary called “The Guerrero Project”. She asked me if I knew any Black divers, and I said to myself, "Now that's a silly question. Of course I do." I sent out an email to some of the NABS members and asked them if they could be a part of this documentary that Karuna was producing.

To be honest with you, up until that time, I still didn't know what the Guerrero was, and I didn't know what maritime archeology was. Obviously, I knew what archeology was. The members of NABS participated in that documentary, and if you haven't seen it, it's a very good documentary. It's also about a slave ship called the Guerrero, which we think lay in the national park, but it also tells you about the relationship between archeologists and salvage hunters. I don't know if it's a relationship. It talks about the competition. That's the key word. The star of that documentary is Brenda, and she talks about the archeology efforts and so on and so on. It's a very good documentary.

Prior to that, I didn't know her. I had never met her, so I took a visit down to Biscayne Park, where she worked, and I went and visited her. When I met her ... some of you guys on might have known her, she had an infectious personality. Brilliant young lady, and we hit it off right away. We had this long discussion, and at the end of it she says to me, "You know, I work in this park, and I don't have anybody to dive with me," and everybody who's on as a diver, one of the first things about diving is you don't dive alone. I said, "Okay." I went home and thought about it, and then I just came up with a e-mail and this is exactly how it started. ”Are you tired of the same old diving? L et's dive with a purpose. More than three people responded, Erik Denson, who was a lead instructor, Erly Thornton and Roge Stevenson were the first DWPers to take it with Brenda. That was in 2003.

We have evolved to where we are today. Kamau will probably elaborate on what we have done so far but, as Karen was saying, I am not an archeologist. In fact, we only have a couple of archeologists that we have trained. One is on today, Justine Benanty, who is a PhD candidate in maritime archeology, and we have a couple students from Mozambique who are archeologists. Other than that, we're just skilled divers who love history. That's how it all started, and from there, I will let Kamau have it.

Kamau: Can I have the next slide, Ken? Here's a bit about how we do things. If you want, I can do that as well.

Ken: Yeah, go ahead.

Kamau: Yeah, so thank you all, and thank you, Karen, for inviting us to be in the ArcheoThursday program. we appreciate that. Ken talked a bit about how everything got started. I'm just going to, over the next several slides, talk a bit about the program, what we do and how we do it, and some of the projects, some of the very interesting projects that we are engaged in right now.

The Diving with a Purpose program is essentially an intense, immersive sort of program over a week's time, where we actually do dive on shipwrecks and we document those wrecks as best we can over that period of time. Students learn everything from trilateration to a bit about the history of archeology, what shipwrecks look like, a bit about shipwreck architecture, a whole host of things related to underwater archeology. We immerse them, and then we throw them in the water and tell them to document this ship. They learn how to develop in situ drawings, the importance of not disturbing a site, particularly artifacts, because they all have a story to tell and we want to maintain that story. I'll show you later on in one of the other slides, the end product that we come up with after this week-long session and some of the missions that we've been on.

Karen, if you transition to the next slide. This is just our mission statement. We went through sort of a strategic retreat over the last year and come up with a tagline, and our tagline is, "Restoring our oceans and preserving our heritage." We think that has a nice ring to it and it kind of defines what we're all about, and you can see our mission statement there. I won't read it, but we are committed to conservation. We are committed to cultural heritage, preserving cultural heritage for future generations in this country and globally. There are tremendous amount of rich cultural heritage and incredible stories that these shipwrecks can tell, and we want to be a part of that process and the work that we do in documenting and surveying and evaluating and researching these wrecks and artifacts and telling their story.

The DWP has a particular interest, archeology has become a very fascinating field for those of us who have been involved in it. We specifically want to do work focused on African slave shipwrecks. I'll talk a bit more about that, and the reason being that if you look over the history of particularly the academic side of things, not a lot of work has been done on African slave shipwrecks, and we think right now, we being DWP, we think that might be a good thing because it leaves the field sort of wide open and a lot of these wrecks are undiscovered and untouched, for good reason, I guess. Treasure hunters don't have an interest in these vessels either because a lot of times the material value, or economic or financial value, if you will. They don't have a huge interest.

We think they have incredible stories to tell, and we want to raise these stories off the bottom of the sea and that's where I’m on when I talk a bit about the slave wrecks project. In our community engagement and outreach piece, we want these stories to be told far and wide, and particularly the local communities to be engaged in telling that story as well.

On the next slide, it talks a bit about our accomplishments. Ken is the keeper of the books here, but there's a whole list of things. Probably the most ... the last one, the last one we’ve received recently, one we're most proud about is the President's Chairman Award for Achievement in Historic Preservation ... I'm sorry, from the President's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. We were recognized also by the, what they call it now, the FLOTUS? The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. She and her Preserve America Program recognized DWP as well. You can see, again, a number of other awards there. Take Pride in America National Award for volunteerism a few years ago. It was at the headquarters of Interior and I think Secretary Salazar, I believe, at the time gave us that award. We continue our work, not necessarily for the recognition, but if we get recognized, that's a good thing. We can just put in our portfolio that people are beginning to recognize this work.

I talked a bit about this, but this is just some images and bullets on what we teach in our Diving with a Purpose Program. Surveying the site, identifying and locating artifacts, how we go about that. We use techniques, tried and true techniques, in terms of how we identify artifacts and think how they are significant to the wreck site, and if any of you have any experience with under-water archeology for some of these sites, aren't in pristine conditions. Some of them have been tampered with, artifacts have been removed. Some of them have other, more contemporary, garbage if you will, on these sites, so we have to decide what is important in terms of the story we want to tell and so forth. The technique of trilateration is just orientating the artifacts that we do locate to our reference point, in this case, a base line. It might be a base line. We identify those significant or important artifacts and begin the process of drawing them, and bringing the whole site together in a composite map. Later on, I have a slide in here to show you one of the end products of all that mapping.

The historical and cultural research piece is important as well. We do engage in some terrestrial research, if we get a mission to learn as much as we can about a particular project, and also cultural research is critically important as well. Maybe I'll hit upon those points when we talk a bit about the slave wrecks project. Next slide, Karen?

Karen: Ken, what are the rings at the bottom of the ... ?

Kamau: The rings at the bottom of the screen? Those are called ...

Ken: Manillas.

Kamau: Those are called manillas and they was used as a currency in the slave trade. Of course a lot of things was used, iron bars, et cetera, cowry shells, et cetera was used as exchanges for human bodies, and those manillas that was found at ... I was going to say the Henrietta Marie but I'm not absolutely sure. But those definitely are manillas that was used in the Atlantic slave trade to purchase Africans that was captured for the trade.

Karen: Thank you.

Kamau: One of the things that we think are critically important is the behavior and the ethics, if you will, of the people that we train. One of the things that we are very adamant about is the commodification of cultural artifacts. That is, we're not in the business of treasure-hunting. We're in the business of preservation. In some of those bullets, it talks about what ethics is key to our core values as an organization. You can see them there, I won't read them all, but again what is key is we do not sell any cultural artifacts and we do not disturb any sites. We like to leave them in situ, as we found them, and as we say in diving, we take only pictures and leave only bubbles. ... a site to remain as is, and let the natural forces take their course and learn how that site changes over time, but we do not want to intervene in that process. We want to preserve it for future generations to benefit from.

I'll talk a bit about DWP missions. We've engaged in a number of missions over the last 13 years. Some of them are extremely exciting, some of them are just par for the course, but last year we were engaged in a very exciting mission, although this is newer territory, but we partnered with a number of organizations, both public and private, and this particular one is up in Lake Huron. It's on the bay, in a NOAA sanctuary. Near it, anyway. Back during the war, the Tuskegee Airmen ... if you don't know about the Tuskegee Airmen, they was a specially trained group of African American pilots that was trained down in Tuskegee, Alabama, and once they completed that basic training they were sent up to a Michigan base on the coast, near the St. Clair River. Actually Lake Huron flows into the St. Clair River, interestingly enough, as opposed to the river flowing into the lake. Anyway, in that training, they go there and do a lot of fire training, low-flying, flying at low elevations over the lake.

We got a call from NOAA saying that, ironically, 70 years to the day, April 14, 2014, 70 years to the day that this plane went down, it was serendipitously discovered, by coincidence discovered by a salvage crew that was doing some work in the lake. They called us up and asked if we'd put a mission together. That was in April. We put the mission together and went up in August. We was very excited about this. We put a team of about 8 diverstogether, and we found some incredible artifacts. You can see on the upper right there, that diver is joining a wing of this airplane in the middle left there, it's a P-39 Airacobra airplane, and that wing is very well preserved. You can see the Army star there, and if you see about where the slate is, there should be a little red light there, where the navigational lights were on this aircraft. In the middle there is the instrument panel.

To the right, the middle right, that wasthe first artifact that was discovered, and that's the door. That's the starboard door of the P-39 and when this particular salvar saw this door, he thought it was the door of a car, and was wondering why was a door of a car doing in the middle of Lake Huron. They basically did a survey of the area, and found the airplane. We also found the engine, we found the prop we found machine guns, and the site is basically littered with ... You can see on the lower left there, that's one of the 50 caliber machine guns. The site is littered with live ammo. We was the first to document this site. We're not quite done yet. At the bottom middle of the photo is one of the drawings that we produced of that wing that's in the upper right, and we still have some more work to do. We think one or two more missions at this site will complete the documentation, and hopefully no one has really disturbed this. As you might imagine, those machine guns would be very interesting to treasure hunters and so forth.

Hopefully, the site hasn't been disturbed, we don't think so. We're planning to go back this August and continue to work and complete that work in Lake Huron. There's another P-39 flown by a Tuskegee Airman that went down actually in the St. Clair River that we know is there, and so hopefully we'll find that wreck in the river, it's very treacherous conditions in that river because the currents are very strong, and do the survey work on that airplane as well.

I think as we go along here, I don't mind you all interjecting and asking questions if you have any or as we talk about these. Go to the next one, Karen, next slide.

Karen: Before we leave this slide, how deep is the water that they're diving in?

Kamau: At this particular wreck was found at about 35, 30 to 35 feet in Lake Huron. That's about a mile, about a mile and a half, off the eastern coast shoreline, near Port Huron, Michigan.

One of the most interesting sites that we worked on had probably our last effort on this site here this past summer - next slide - is this site called the Hannah M. Bell. The Hannah M. Bell is a 1907 iron steamer that went down off the coast of Key Largo, ran into Elbow Reef and sank. It's about 300 foot long, about 40 foot berth, and you can see the images there. We spent about four or five missions thus far on this particular site. Divers are working, documenting some of this site This site was particularly challenging because it had a lot of what we call relief, a lot of material was raised up off the sea floor or was just scattered across the sea floor. If you go to the next slide, you can see some very good images of what that site sort of looked like. You can see the framing there. I think we are looking back toward the bow, so on the right there ... Yeah, we're looking back toward the bow, and as I mentioned, the site is over 300 foot long, so it was a lot of work to get the divers scattered across and get the base line.

You can actually see the baseline to the left of the photo there, that white line running down almost the keel of the ship. Up there, to right there. That's the baseline, that gives our reference points when we're gearing up to look at the Hannah M. Bell This wreck was known as Mike's Wreck for the longest of times. This wreck is in the north in the Florida Keys Sanctuary, and they call it Mike's Wreck, because they didn't know exactly what it was. Through some terrestrial research with an archeologist up in Massachusetts, Matt Lawrence, and with the data that we provided him, he was able to conclusively identify this wreck a couple of years ago as the Hannah M. Bell. It created quite a stir down in Florida there in the archeological community, that this huge wreck was identified, because it is part of the Heritage Trail down there.

Go to the next slide, you get another big picture of the upper deck, that has kind of flayed over. In the foreground here is part of the upper deck, and the siding has fallen off to the extreme right there, and the divers are down in the bottom of the ship, documenting the framing there. If you go to the next slide, there, Karen.

Karen: Okay.

Kamau: If anyone has any questions at any point, please don't hesitate to ask, chime in and ask.

Once we finished the work, this is the picture of the Hannah M. Bell, this is sort of like the finished product that we deliver once we complete a mission. This a full document, this is the cover of the Hannah M. Bell work that we did, the composite map, if you will. Go to the next slide there, Karen. These are the in situ drawings. Each person was given a section of the ship to document, to draw, to measure, and to capture all the intricacies of the artifacts and of the ship itself. We pull them all together in what we call a composite map based on that baseline, referenced to that baseline that I pointed out earlier. Not to be too vain here, but the lower right picture here is a perspective that I did of the upper deck. That's looking from the keel, looking up under the upper deck, and the lower right drawing there of the Hannah M. Bell. That's a buck board (?) to the extreme right of that picture.

If you go to the next one, you'll see what the composite map actually looks like, and this is a completed composite map, and this is exactly what the site looks like. You can see that middle right there, that's where those divers were in the framing, and so we just pull it all together, those in situ drawings, in a CAD sort of program, that lays out this wreck. This is how the wreck looked as of 2014, and it gives the archeologists a good perspective on how the wreck is deteriorating over time, so we might go back in another couple of years and develop a similar map, and simply compare, and see what has changed, what sort of forces have caused the types of deterioration, but more importantly to see if the site has been disturbed, has been disturbed by unnatural forces like treasure hunters, et cetera, that has disturbed the site, which we hope not, but this is a good way to document the site.

These maps are also used for recreational diving, for cultural and heritage trails, if you will, for divers who want to dive the site, who are particularly interested in the engine room, for example. They can go to that part of the ship, to the right side of this drawing, where the boiler was and steam engine for this particular vessel.

Karen: Can I interrupt?

Kamau: Sure, absolutely.

Karen: I guess NOAA owns this particular wreck, or manages this wreck. Would they put markers at both ends of the dividing line so that the divers can orient themselves?

Kamau: Yeah, yeah. On some of the wrecks, it's NOAA's, they have to make that decision in terms of how noticeable, if you will, they want the wreck to be. Sometimes they put a buoy on the surface. In this case, I think their strategy is to not necessarily put markers on the site, but on the site map will have markers that would orientate the divers, and they can use GPS to get to the site, locate the site, and once they develop the map, the map will have reference points on it to say - it's hard to tell where the bow or stern is here, and so forth, and other particular features. Right near this wreck is the City of Washington. They have some very unique features in there as well. Actually, on this particular wreck, another wreck got entangled with it, and we had to kind of sort all that out as well. Elbow Reef is just littered with all sorts of wrecks. It's a very material-rich site. This is particularly the Hannah M. Bell, but Karen, to answer your question, yeah, there would be some references to orientate divers or other people who venture onto the site. Sometimes it's done on the site if it doesn't cause too much disturbance, other times it's shown on the map given to the diver that goes to the site.

Karen: You help interpret the site as well.

Kamau: Yes, absolutely. We give them our perspective and they do the final interpretation document. The principal investigator do the final interpretation of the site. We work all the time with the principal investigator, a professional archeologist that's basically leading the mission, if you will, and after we do our work and present them this data, they will go in and interpret the data and say, "Well, you hit it right on here," and that's what happened in this case, actually. After we did the work here, he went back and kind of correlated with some other research he had done, and said, "This has to be the Hannah M. Bell," and it was later verified with some other work that he was doing that it was that Hannah M. Bell that went down. It shouldn't have been called the Mike's Wreck, that's for sure. It was the Hannah M. Bell. Mike lost in popularity there, but, sorry Mike.

Karen: I should mention to our audience as well that many of the people in Diving with a Purpose have backgrounds in engineering and other professions that contribute, that certainly help in the work that you do.

Kamau: That's a good point, Karen. Yes, we have a broad range of professional folks from educators to engineers, to doctors, folks in the medical field, and so forth, and so they bring those skill sets to DWP, and particularly on missions, that helps out tremendously. If you know a little bit about how to measure things, and sense of distance, and orientation, a little bit about geometry, that's a benefit for sure. But we don't discourage those that don't have those skills, and we basically try to give them the basic skill sets to be able to go on an archeological site and do the appropriate survey.

We can transition a bit. DWP is a strategic partner in a relationship called the Slave Wrecks Project. As Karen mentioned, Dr. Steve Lubkemann was here last month to talk a bit about this. This is probably one of the most exciting undertakings that we've been engaged in here, over the 13 year history of DWP. As you can see by those folks listed there, other strategic co-partners with Diving with a Purpose, that includes the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, who are going to be opening up here a museum here in Washington, DC, near the Washington Monument on September 24. The date just got announced, so they're going to be opening up September 24. I believe the President is going to cut the ribbon. We're aligned with the George Washington University Capitol Archeological Institute, and other international partners as well, IZIKO Museums of South Africa and the South African Heritage Resource Agency which is a governmental agency in South Africa, and African Center for Heritage Activities, which is based in Cape Town as well.

As Karen mentioned, Dr. Lubkemann talked about what the strategy is, the new archeological strategy, a paradigm if you will, that Slave Wrecks Project is trying to set, in terms of going in and doing just the hardcore archeological work, more broadening out and doing significant outreach to local communities to get them engaged in the project, to have a broad base of collaboration that brings expertise and skill sets to a project to tell a very holistic story from beginning, inception, all the way to the end, the end product where slaves were deposited, and what happened to their lives post the trauma of coming across the Atlantic slave trade.

Our focus is not just the trans-Atlantic slave trade. What we're beginning to emphasize, I'll show you in the next project, is that the institution of slavery was a trans-oceanic trade, not just Atlantic, but it was a global sort of thing. Actually, it's the largest forced migration of humanity since humanity. We think that through documenting these wrecks globally, doing the correct training and educating and preservation of course, and beginning to get a little bit into exhibiting and interpretation on the next project but also stressing the research and scholarship that surround these vessels that we're discovering.

In June of last year, if you can transition to the next slide, we made a significant announcement that is the Slave Wrecks Project that we have identified and done some work on the Sao Jose Paquete de Afrique, and the Sao Jose Paquete de Afrique was a East India slave ship that was sailing from Mozambique Islands to the Cape Town, heading toward [inaudible 00:34:36], Brazil. It was pulling into port into Cape Town to get some provisions to continue to journey across the Atlantic, and it pulled into what's called Camp’s Bay off Clifton Beach, there, and the surf picked up, storm moved in, and the ship began to flounder. They had over 500 captured Africans on it, and in the sinking event that took almost a day or so, about 212 Africans drowned in that event. The captain realized that he was going to lose his ship so he did begin a process of trying to save some of these captives, and he launched several boats that took some of them to shore. Once they got ashore, those Africans were sold in the slave ring and left atCape, very interestingly.

We've done the dive on the wreck of the Sao Jose over the last five years. The principal investigator is in Cape Town there, and we've recovered some artifacts that's on display now that's telling the story of the Sao Jose Paquete de Afrique in the IZIKO Museum in Cape Town, and those artifacts are going to be brought to the US for the opening of the museum I mentioned earlier, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Lonny Bunch is the director of the museum, he's been very supportive of this project, and he wanted those artifacts to be the centerpiece of a very sacred area within the museum so that's going to be a very important, humbling, emotional sort of experience to go through that museum. I dove this wreck, I worked on the Sao Jose and one thing that we've done when we identified who the ethnic group is of those Africans that were captured, we want to go back to the village very respectfully, and tell those people of that village that we found your ancestors. What is it that we should do appropriately, ritualistically, to honor them?

Back in June, it was incredible. Once we made the announcement that we'd found the Sao Jose, there was huge global media response, and so the Makua people, M-A-K-U-A, Makua people of Mozambique Island, they gave us dirt, earth from their village, and told us, looked us right in the face, and I'll never forget this. Very emotionally, after about an hour of talking about the heritage and the pride of the people, he said, "I want you take this dirt, take it to that site, and bring my people back home." Very humbling experience. We took that earth, we took it back down to Cape Town, we left Mozambique Island, and the intent was for us to dive the site and deposit the material but because the seas was rough again, the same seas that probably sank the Sao Jose, we waded out in the water. I waded out into the water, and we sort of represented the diaspora. It was myself from the US, African American. We had another diver, archeologist actually, from South Africa, and another young lady who was a marine archeology student at the University atMaputu

All three of us went out in the water, and the media was just going crazy, and we sort of ritualistically deposited the earth back in the sea, and bring those people back home, honoring them. We think that's an important piece of the Slave Wrecks Project, to treat these sites very respectfully as sacred sites and tell the story of what happened there. There's a lot more work that needs to be done at Mozambique Island. One is L'Aurore, the L'Aurore wreck. We haven't found it yet, but we got a good GPS location on what has happened. The people of Mozambique were so distraught on leaving the island before the ship could even set sail, they rebelled on the ship and actually sunk it. Everyone was lost in that effort.

We got several other global efforts going on. In Senegal, Goree Island, if you're familiar with Goree Island, a huge UN National Heritage Site, we're developing working with the archeology department at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar , Senegal. We're also working with NPS down in St. Croix. We were going to go there this summer, but things logistically was a bit challenging so we'll definitely be there next year doing some work in St. Croix. Of course, there's work in Brazil, there's work in St. Helena Island in southeastern Atlantic. Ironically that's where Napoleon was exiled. If you know the story of St. Helena Island, that's where he died. That's where, after the abolition of slavery, the British abolition in 1808, and the US as well, they had an interdiction program to stop ships from crossing the Atlantic, but once they captured them, the British took them most primarily to St. Helena. The US repatriated a lot of folks to Liberia.

There's a lot of wrecks around those sites. We know of quite a number of them. That's okay, this is a good transition point to talk about the youth component of Diving with a Purpose. At least three, four years ago we started Youth Diving with a Purpose, and this is a photo of the class of 2014. Ken, I don't know if you want to jump in here to talk a bit about this, but we have a video that can really give you some insights on how it was developed by the Submerged Cultural Resources Program out in Denver, that's headed up by Dr. Dave Conlin. His team, his video team, developed this video that we'll show you to tell you a bit about the Youth Diving with a Purpose Program. Karen, if you can flip it over to the video, and hopefully, folks will be able to not only see it but hear the audio, so if you can't hear the audio, please let us know, and we'll try to adjust the volume accordingly. Again, this is a video that was produced by NPS Submerged Cultural Resources office out in Denver.

Karen: ... turn it up.

Charles (video): Welcome to Biscayne National Park. This is Youth Diving with a ...

Karen: Sorry everybody, we'll just have to wait for it to finish buffering.

Ken: ... I think you've got to hit play again ... Oh, I do? OK.

[We could delete this section, as the transcript is already captioned on the video]

Charles (video): ... Purpose Program, the first annual Youth Diving with a Purpose Program. We are sitting right now on the bottom of the ocean at the site of the Outline wreck. It's a 19th century wooden sailing vessel, about 150 foot long, and what you see going on around you are a bunch of high school students from all over the country who have come here to the park to get an experience doing underwater archeology and helping the National Park Service by producing a site plan of the ship wreck that's just below the sand. This is the tenth year that Diving with a Purpose has operated at Biscayne National Park, and this is the first year that it's an entirely youth-driven project. The students that you see are from all over the country, and they've all come down here to south Florida to learn how to map shipwrecks and to be future stewards of archeological resources on land and underwater.

One of the things that the Diving with a Purpose program is the mapping of shipwrecks underwater, and what this young man is doing right now is he's examining a fragment of the ship's keel. He'll take detailed measurements and transfer all of that onto the plastic mylar paper that we can write on underwater. Back in the classroom tomorrow, we'll take all the individual drawings that the students have produced and place them on an overall site plan and a map. Every tiny drawing will be used to create an overall plan that allows you to see the whole wreck at once, not just the little bit that you can see in front of you.

One of the things that's great about the Youth Diving with a Purpose program is that not only does the National Park Service and Biscayne National Park get this great document that we can use in the operations of the park, but these kids get an awesome experience. They get a chance to see a little bit of what it's like to be an underwater archeologist and what it's like to work underwater, not just to be a tourist, not just to visit the site and look at it, but actually to get down into the science, into the detailed documentation of how archeologists work underwater. One of the things we hope is not necessarily that all these young people are going to become archeologists when they grow up, but all of them do come away with a new respect and understanding for historic sites and archeological sites, both on the land and underwater.

The shipwrecks in Biscayne National Park are under constant threat. There's a lot of people out in the public who don't necessarily understand the value of a historic resource in place, and one of the goals of the National Park Service is to keep these sites intact for future generations. These young people will come away as stewards. They will go back to their communities and explain to the world why it's important for these sites to stay where they're at and hopefully bring a little bit of attention to them.

Kamau: That was, again, a video of the Youth Diving with a Purpose program, to give you a little flavor of what we're doing there and as I mentioned, we're now in our fourth year of doing the Youth Diving with a Purpose program, which is going to be in July of this year. I think, if I remember the last report from Ken, he said we are filled to capacity in the program for our July program. We've trained over 40 youth, 40 or more youth at this point, and some of them have gone on to the university level of maritime archeology studies at University of Texas A and M, and other universities as well, down in South Florida as well. Ken, I'm going to toss it back to you. You can kind of wrap it up.

Ken: Okay, well, I guess to give an idea of how the YDWP started, normally I'm very much involved with DWP, but I run a program here in Tennessee called the Tennessee Aquatics Project and Development Group, and we use aquatics as a way to [inaudible 00:46:43] our young people, and eventually they will learn how to dive. Back in 2007, I decided ... I took two of my kids who were very accomplished divers and I brought them down to the DWP. They were in high school, and I said, "Listen. I'm going to introduce you to a cause." Actually, I introduced them to it blind, they didn't have a clue what was going on. They came down and they did magnificently. They picked up on everything, and successfully completed the program. I did that for the next three years, bringing one or two and integrating them with all these adults. If you work with young people, you're sure to know that sooner or later young people stop communicating. They don't talk to each other anymore, because maybe they run out of things to say. I don't know what it is. Usually, after a day or so, there's no more intermingling between the young people and the adults.

At that time, I said, "Well, listen, let's try to find, have our own youth DWP. Thanks to the National Park Service, they calmly with a tremendous support, not only logistically and financially, we were able to have our first one which is the one you saw in the video in 2012. It was extremely successful. The kids were enthusiastic, and it's the same program as the adults. In fact, I think the youth program is harder than the adults, because couple things they have to do is they have to blog every night when we're at the field session. They have to blog, so they have to stay up quite late every night, and then if they want to come back, they have to give presentations to their community. They have to document it, they have to tell me where, they have to find a group. It could be a church group, a library, Boy Scout group, Girl Scout group, anybody who will listen to them, and they have to document it.

They have to do two, one in the first part of the year and the other one in the second part of the year, to be able to come back, to be eligible to come back the next year. If they choose not to come back, then they don't have to, obviously, do it. To date, for the last four years, they've done over 120 outreach. They have a similar PowerPoint presentation that we just saw today, obviously it doesn't have all the up to date stuff, but it's something that they develop during the course of the session. We make them go through it with us so we can make sure that we critique them, and they do quite well. The good thing about adult DWP, if you come three years. Your third year, you can apply for what we call DWP instructor status. That means that Kamau, Eric and them will critique you throughout the week, and if you successfully pass you become a DWP instructor which will give you to actually go and teach. You can actually teach.

Last year was a couple of the students' first year, so we had our first DWP instructors who will be back this year and they will be teaching the course to the younger people. We have three DWP instructors, four DWP instructor candidates and the rest are what we call advocates. We give them the opportunity to actually teach maritime archeology and the good thing about this year is we have two, for the first time we have two students who are maritime archeology students. They are archeology students, let me put it that way, and they want to become maritime archeologists, so we're moving quite well in that direction to get some more young people into archeology and maritime archeology. I'm just excited about this year and what's going to happen in the years to come. I think that's about it for me.

Kamau: Go to the next slide, I think there's one other slide here, Ken. We basically talked about most of that, and we want to emphasize we're getting some students from South America this time. This shows the age range there, 15-23.

Ken: Okay, yeah, so, the age range is from 15 to 23. Don't ask me why I did that, I wanted high school students and obviously that's into college students by 21, 22, and 23. Maybe they’ve come on. We had some students last year who were a little older, and they were from the Florida Keys community college, and their teacher or their advisor got them to get some credits for taking this course, so that was a nice key relationship that we have. Maybe we can create a program where students can get credits for taking this course, because like I said, it's a very intense course. It's hard, it's not easy, so if we can get college credits here, the more the better.

Kamau: The 15 is the certification age to become a certified diver, I believe, Ken.

Ken: It's 12, actually. You can become certified at 12, but we're not going to take no 12-year-olds. This year we don't have any 15-year-olds, I think we have only one 16-year-old, and the rest of them are 18 and up. I'm excited about the program coming up in July.

Kamau: Go to the next slide there, Karen. I think this is the last slide. We saw that, go to the next one. This talks about the upcoming missions. This year the adult program is going to be diving in Key Largo, working on a new wreck called the Acorn wreck in June, and of course Ken mentioned the DWP program in July. Ken, you want to talk a bit about coral restoration?

Ken: Yeah, so, to be honest with you guys, when I very first started with DWP, the very first mission was with Eric and Kamau all on the same boat, and then half of them went with Brenda to document the outline (?). The other half of us kind of wanted to do some coral identification and reef identification, so that's always been, I always wanted to have some type of biology component to DWP, but it lay dormant for ... that didn't work out very well on that first one, so it lay dormant. If you have a boat that goes to a shipwreck, and the divers are documenting the shipwreck, and the coral reef is a mile away, we can't leave divers down, obviously, and go do the coral and come back. That lay dormant for many years, until such time, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Coral Restoration Foundation in Key Largo. What they do is they work with staghorn and elkhorn coral to bring it back to prominence in the marine sanctuary.

I went there one year and partnered with them. I just took the course, and I loved it, I fell in love with it. Now we have DWP Coral Reef Program, so actually this year will be our 14th mission going down by the end of the year. It's three times a year, we go in July ... actually, we go in June, and then what we do in July, because we have the young people down there, I give them the option of taking the Coral Restoration Program, because that way if they decide they want to take it, I already have them down there and we've already paid for their airfare. All we do is we extend it a couple days. We do that in partnership with the Coral Restoration Foundation, and it's a wonderful experience, if anybody's ever done it. If you've never done it and you're a diver, I suggest that you do. What they do is, Coral Restoration Foundation has a nursery where they cultivate staghorn coral, so it's a three-day course,

we go down, there's classroom in the morning for the three-day course, and then you dive in the afternoon. The first day you go to the nursery and you clean off the contaminants on the coral that are hanging from the trees, and you clean it off and you clean the coral, clean the staghorn coral. Then the next day, you go back to the nursery and you actually cut down the coral. It's called fragging. You frag the the coral, and you actually take it to the marine sanctuary, and you plant it in the marine sanctuary. It's just a wonderful feeling to be able to know that you're a part of helping to restore the oceans. So, if you do both of them in July, it turns into an 11-day or 12-day program. We do maritime archeology one week, and then coral restoration the other four days. In June, it's adults only, and October we come back and do it again.

This year, I'll just end on this note, this year we adopted a whole tree. If you go on to the website, you can see the trees are made out of PVC pipes and stand about 6 feet tall, and the coral is actually hung from that PVC pipe, so they call that a tree. Last June, we adopted a whole tree. That means we ... each tree can hold about 100 pieces of coral, so we went back in July and the coral had - the young people were here - so we went back to clean the tree and make sure that the coral had grown so much that we were thinking that we would have out-plant again in October. The whole plan was just to wait a year for the coral to grow and out-plant it, but it had grown so much that by the time October came around that we had to out-plant many pieces of coral. The satisfying thing was to see the coral flourish, and the young people be excited about it, and that's part of that Coral Restoration program. It's in partnership with the archeology program, and the DWP Coral Reef Program. I think the DWP clearly has a great model, and we just love it.

Kamau: Okay. Thanks, Ken. You can go to the next slide. I think we're a little bit past the 4 o'clock hour, so we want to give folks an opportunity to ask any questions they might have or clarify any other things that we might not have spoke about very clearly. If there are any questions, we'd love to entertain them

Karen: Do people have questions, for either Kamau or Ken? Well, I'll start. I actually have a series of questions. The first is talking about youth diving with a purpose. How many students do you have in ... ?

Ken: We can only accommodate the number that the boat allows, so usually we get the biggest boat, which is 25 people. We have chaperones that Kamau ... lead instructor, he's a chaperone and mentor. If the child is under 18, they have to have a chaperone and a mentor. If they're over 18, all they have to have is a mentor. There's eight of us, so that means we can take 17 youth between those ages 15 to 23. That's the maximum we can take is 17.

Karen: Wow, what a big responsibility. You guys are very brave.

Ken: Well, you know, to be honest with you, We partner with a school up in New York called the Harbor School, which is a wonderful school that teaches a lot about the oceans, it's devoted all to the oceans. They teach how to maintain and drive boats, and they have a scuba program, just dedicated to scuba diving. They partner with the National Park Service, they're part of this Billion Oyster Project. I don't know if you have guys have heard of this. They plan to plant a billion oysters in New York and Jamaica Bay in the harbor by the year 2020, and the Harbor School is a big part of that. Most, to be honest, half of our students come from the Harbor School.

One of the things that we do have problems with is finding young people who can apply. We do make it very clear, we do not teach scuba diving. It's only a one week program, so we don't have time to teach anybody, so you have to be qualified. The qualifications are almost the same as the adults. You have to have a minimum of twenty dives, a minimum. You have to have what we all buoyancy certification. For a lot of young people, 20 dives are a lot to get. We do have problems attracting young people. This year, we only have Harbor School, the kids from Tennessee, a couple from New York. We don't have any young people from Florida, and then we have one young man coming from South America.

We have sent out applications to different universities, but we've had no takers. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, Karen, was how could you guys help, and we would like to get more applicants, make it more competitive. I've reached out to several organizations, and we haven't gotten any responses, but we do have the Harbor School kids. Actually the Harbor School could take up every slot if they wanted to. I would not allow them to do that, but that's one of the problems that we have, is finding enough really qualified students.

Karen: I wonder if you could work with our VIP program, our Volunteers In Parks program, to get the announcement that you're looking for applicants posted. You have enough people for this year, though, don't you?

Ken: Yeah, we are full this year, and so next year I would really like to make it more competitive for the Harbor School kids, because they are probably going to get in. Not that they're not deserving, they are very good divers. I have not met- as Kamua can attest, they are extremely qualified divers and well-behaved young people, but we would like to maybe get some maritime archeology students, I think Justine Bernathy is on here, and she is a PhD candidate in maritime archeology. She's our only archeologist, really.

Justin: I am on.

Ken: Okay, so she is on. She's somebody that could add a little something to that. Justine, why is that we have problems attracting students?

Justin: Well, frankly it's just our advertising and the cost of the boat and things like that. We could expand tenfold if we were able to actually get into schools like the HBCUs, just talking to other dive shops and dive programs around the country because a ton of them really target adults but a lot of them have children or young kids in college, things like that, other universities. Frankly, it's just we don't have the manpower to kind of do the advertising the way that we should. That's been one of our biggest problems, but if we were able to get additional funding for bigger boats or more operations, frankly, than once a year, we could be targeting way other types of schools than just Harbor, because they're great, but like Ken said, the whole program could be just from Harbor School.

As much as I love them, there's definitely a lot of kids, I feel like, from across the country that we could be reaching. Then we also have the university level that we've been envisioning, also, which is just young professionals and grad students outside of high school. That's a whole other level of audience that we haven't reached yet.

Kamau: ... Article in Scuba Diver magazine or something like that, you could, there's a lot of ...

Justin: Right, yeah, and you'd think that a lot of, you know ... I mean, part of it is us not reaching these organizations, but part of it is we were a very small program and we had a little bit of resistance and some organizations just didn't really get what we were trying to do, I think, initially, and now that we've had some success I think we have to re-approach the organizations like CADY(?) for example, or any of the other dive operations. Just advertising in those magazines, but since we're non-profit, they might be able to help us out, and just kind of getting that message clear to them, I think.

Karen: Do you have any trouble filling the adult programs?

Ken: No.

Karen: Okay.

Justin: Adults are easy, because we also have the NAVs network for That, too, which has been really crucial for that.

Ken: The thing about the YDWP program is, it's relatively free. We tried a registration fee, because I really believed there has to be some kind of value. If young people are going to have a buy-in in terms of monetary value that they kind of look at like a welfare program like I said, [inaudible 01:06:26], so they don't have that commitment. [inaudible 01:06:28] or whatever it is that you got, so we only charge a registration fee, and for the first year it's 200 dollars, and after that it's 100 dollars, and that money is to pay for T-shirts, insurance, not like we're trying to make money on it, but there has to be some kind of value. After that, there are no expenses. Through the generosity of the National Park Service, and some other grants that we've been running into and that we’ve been able to run into], we've been able to offset all their costs. For that reason alone, we should have people knocking down the doors, but we don't.

Next year, I don't know what's going to happen, because funding has run out. Our funding has run out. Half of it has run out, but we're not going to give up, we know it's going to happen, it's just a matter of seeking it out.

Justin: I think right now, now that we've established ourselves as we're going into our fourth year, I think that finding particular sponsors or private, kind of like an endowment-style thing is probably a way that we should be thinking and that we have been talking amongst ourselves about. Because the project is fully funded for the students, I feel like a lot of people would be really interested in that now that we've shown what we can do.

Karen: Wow. Well, it sounds really promising. I know that I invited people from the youth programs here to come and attend this webinar, I don't know if anybody's on the line, but I know that they're aware of this program and are very interested in it. You may get new sponsors within the park service.

Justin: Great.

Karen: Ken, you said that you had taken a coral reef restoration class. Where did you take it?

Ken: With the Coral Restoration Foundation. They are located in Key Largo, Florida. I just went down, it was a group of us that went down, and I had no idea really what it was about, and I don't know if you know Ken Nedimyer, Ken Nedimyer is the CEO of the Coral Restoration Foundation, and he started this program as a 4H project with his brother. They've been in existence as long as DWP. It's a really good program, and now it has expanded to not only to Key Largo, they got the lower Keys, and now they’r in Bonne Aire and I understand they're going to Columbia and other places because what they do is just proving very successful. There are many other coral restoration organizations doing similar work, but their techniques may be a little different, but the Coral Restoration Foundation has found a very cheap way of bringing staghorn and elkhorn back, and they have really, really been successful.

Karen: Wow, nice. That is a nice addition to the Youth Diving with a Purpose. You've got a natural resource focus as well as a cultural resource focus.

Ken: That's the key to it, the thing that's interesting is that most of the kids are biology students. They're not archeology students, so obviously they really like the coral stuff, but now we do have some archeology students. We did change a couple of students' minds, one young man has gone from biology over to archeology. The balance is more toward biology, but we can see that some of the young people are beginning to like the archeology component of it, so we may be able to get some PhDs out of this.

Karen: And some new park service employees.

Ken: That's right. Another good thing about, my hat's off to, I know you had Dave on last year, I listened to his program, I listened to Steve's, and somebody else that you had. Dave has been a tremendous supporter of ours, tremendous. He really agrees with what we're doing. We've been able to secure a couple of internships with the park service this year via the park service. I think we have an internship at Dry Tortugas, one at Biscayne, and one in ...

Kamau: Channel Islands.

Ken: Channel Islands.

Karen: Oh really? Oh, very nice.

Ken: He's looking for the young people, very deserving young people, and like I said Dave was very instrumental in promoting that aspect of it, and like I said my hat's off to the National Park Service. You guys not only ... you put your money where your mouth is.

Karen: Well, we try. Let me ask you a couple questions. How can we do better, besides outreach activities? How can we do better for our partners and for you?

Ken: That's a good question. I'm very much an advocate for young people. It's one of the things that I tell them all the time, that my generation has contributed to the undoing of this planet, and it's going to be on you and maybe your children, and maybe your children's children, to undo what we have done. I can see the National Park Service is doing a great ... they're doing great things trying to outreach, get young people outdoors. I don't know if you're doing enough, I can't say. I'm in Tennessee, and the closest national park for me is about 30 miles away, and then the other one is 150 miles away, so I'm kind of landlocked here. I don't know if your message is getting out there. I know the National Park Service is very much into cultural diversity. I think you're trying, but I don't know if your message is getting out.

Karen: What are some different things that we could do to get our message out?

Ken: Well, that's a good question.

Karen: At the moment, we're targeting really young kids.We're targeting fourth graders.

Ken: I saw that. I got that email. That's a good, I'm glad you said that. I got the email from Ira Levin (?) about the fourth graders. I have a youth group, I don't have any fourth graders. I have fifth, sixth and seventh and eighth, ninth, graders.

Karen: Oh, you do?

Ken: Yeah, I have the Tennessee Aquatic Project and Development Group, so when I got that email from [inaudible 01:13:51] I said, "Well, it doesn't apply to me," so what about the demographic after the fourth graders? Fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth graders?

Karen: Well, that's an interesting question. We'll have to see what the park service does after this centennial year.

Ken: Yeah, I know, like I said, you guys do what you say you're going to do and you put your money where your mouth is. Like I said, I did see that fourth grader bit, I couldn't apply for it because it didn't benefit me, because I couldn't do it. Maybe you forgetting about another demographic, the fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth graders.

Karen: That's true, that's true. You're right, we are having trouble getting diversity within our staff, within our employee core that mirrors the diversity in our population across the country. I see volunteer programs like Youth Diving with a Purpose and Diving with a Purpose as a venue for getting people of different backgrounds interested in park service employment. I think these types of programs and organizations are really important because we do have trouble reaching our constituents.

Ken: Let me just say, if somebody asked, how come minorities don't go to the national parks? There's a lot of organizations out here that are trying to get young people out there. One of them is Outdoor Afro, there's a lot of them, Origa Peterman is doing a lot of stuff, trying to get young people out there. I was at a seminar last year and they asked that question, and I told you, remember that I was part of the generation where I couldn't go to the national park, or if I did go, it was made clear that I was unwelcome. That has permeated into the next generation. African Americans, we felt that we couldn't go outdoors, so we wouldn't go. It went to the next generation, the next generation, but even with what I'm trying to do, is to get my generation's young people out and into the parks, so it's going to take some time. That's my point. You have to remember, I grew up in ... we're still here.

I think that the bad tase in the mouth has not alleviated itself, so for me, that's not a problem, because I love the outdoors. Always have. But for that generation, my generation, they don't get outdoors. They don't do anything outdoors, so their kids don't. It's going to take some time. I think you guys are really doing some good stuff, I really do, I actually appreciate it, but it's going to take some grassroots efforts, support of smaller organizations. One of the things that I do find is that I have group intensive project and I can tell you this. Bar none, this is the best program in the state of Tennessee, bar none, but we're very small. I got 16, 17 kids, so we get no funding. A lot of organizations want to see big people, lot of numbers. Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. They're huge, so they get all the money. Little grassroot organizations like mine and other people, we don't get the money, so we struggle.

I don't let that stop me from doing what I need to do to help educate the next generation. I think it's important to be able to identify some of the smaller groups who do very good work, but don't get that financial support, or get that support, period.

Kamau: Ken, you made good points there. Karen, I just want to interject, in terms of outreach and I guess getting the park service messages out, that you have this incredible resources out there, particularly in the African American community, I don't know how to frame it, I'll just throw out that you can do more outreach to African American professional organizations, particularly for dentists, doctors, et cetera, et cetera, but more specifically, particularly in times where your American national park, your maritime national parks, there might be some sort of collaboration project we can do through the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, and that would act as a node, because most of those folks are professional folks, they're parents, and they can send tenticles ou,t not only to their families, but to their broader families as well. If you go want to go diving, check out a national park, maybe a terrestrial park, for that matter, if you're going to have a family reunion, et cetera, et cetera. Those sort of front doors can be conduits to other possibilities as well, that those people are welcome out there.

Karen: Yeah, absolutely.

Duration:

1 hour, 19 minutes, 14 seconds

Kenneth Stewart; Jay Haigler; Erik Denson, 2/11/2016, ArcheoThursday