[music]
Foundation
[music]
Blessed be the feet walking on sacred ground Blessed be the sunshine blessed be the cloud Foundation
Foundation
Welcome to the valley of kings where we willing and able To rise like burning fire active volcano
Salute to Rebels, poets and people working for something greater Self determined and focused Empowered when all together
Take our time with every step to remember the way Never Distracted, stay collected with each breath we speak life into existence
You know where to find us, majestic promise land No its not a dream we manifest visions in ceremony
Last of a dying breed, lead and inspire by any means We Champions / Upsetter healthy survivors Destin to grow
With exceptional plans of being timeless Strong and everlasting only reason with the virtuous
Brick by brick (brick by brick), and stone by stone (stone by stone) brick by brick (brick by brick), I and I build the throne.
Blessed be the feet walking on sacred ground Blessed be the sunshine blessed be the cloud Foundation
Foundation
We nourish the spirit to strengthen the root Stronger the soil sweeter the fruit
Foundation. Foundation.
We are firm in our purpose, we never doubt if it's worth it We put wings on our words, we turn our prayers into birds
We got no reasons to worry, divine time never hurries We have futures to build for many generations to flourish
Our enemies they ssss with whispers and curses Their intentions is dirty cause their vision is blurry
They can’t see we raising Nations with patience and perseverance The presence of holy spirits No wonder the evil fear us
We shout it from the Mountain top so everybody hear, loud and clear, Listen here, message made for every ear
We don’t have to settle for these castes made of sand We can build a Kingdom for our people with a purpose and a plan.
Brick by brick (brick by brick), and stone by stone (stone by stone) brick by brick (brick by brick), I and I build the throne.
Blessed be the feet walking on sacred ground Blessed be the sunshine blessed be the cloud
Foundation, Foundation
We nourish the spirit to strengthen the root Stronger the soil, sweeter the fruit
Foundation. The Mighty Mighty Foundation
oh oh oh oh oh
[music]
Yo Yo Yo Yo yo. Foundation
You now rocking with the original Born Champions sound system Aja Black, Big Samir, Nicodemus Foundation for all the Nations
Foundation - yea yea yea yea yea. Foundation ooo oooo
Good evening and thank you for joining us tonight. My name is Katie Woods, and I'm a
Visual Information Specialist with the National Parks of Boston, and a member of the Unfinished:
America at 250 planning group. I use she/her pronouns, and I am a young white woman with
shoulder-length dark blonde hair wearing a National Park Service uniform. Welcome to
Questioning Our Storied Past, the second program in the Unfinished: America at 250 engagement
series. Launched by the National Park Service Region 1, the National Parks of Boston, Greater
Boston area national parks, and an expansive network of non-governmental partners, Unfinished:
America at 250 aims to energize the public through discussions, performances, and digital
engagements that will help us grapple with the critical questions that have long been
at the heart of this nation. By broadening our understandings of the past, we can begin
to shape our own answers to these questions that generations of Americans have been asking
and redefining since our founding. I would like to acknowledge that we are all on Indigenous
land. I am calling in from Boston, the ancestral land of the Massachusett, who have stewarded
this land for thousands of years and continue to do so today. I recognize the continued
resilience and ongoing work of Indigenous leaders, scholars, culture bearers, and communities
across what is now the United States as they preserve their cultures and histories in the
face of historical and ongoing oppression and trauma. In his recently published work
"How the Word is Passed," writer Clint Smith poses the question: "What does it take for
you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been
told throughout your life?" That question, I feel, is at the center of why we are here
tonight. The white-washed, uncomplicated, heroic stories surrounding the founding of
the United States are ingrained in so many of us. They are constantly re-established
in the form of school textbooks, popular culture, social media, and political discourse. While
some have been working for decades to challenge, dismantle, and transform the founding narratives
of this country, we all need to take on this hard work. It is our mutual responsibility
to learn, to listen, to confront, to acknowledge, and to move forward with a fuller, more honest
understanding of this nation's founding. And I believe we could not have brought together
a better panel to get us thinking about this work tonight. Before I introduce our esteemed
moderator, a couple of notes: To access closed captioning, please click on the link that
has been dropped in the chat. The link will display captions in a new browser. We invite
you to join into the conversation; for those in Zoom: contribute to the chat and post questions
in the Q&A. For those on Facebook: post freely in the comments. I ask that you keep your
thoughts on topic and please remain respectful and nonpartisan. And please limit questions
to under 25 words; we will track your questions and try to address them throughout. Finally,
please spread the word and share your thoughts on social media now and throughout the program
using #Unfinished250. Invite friends to join the program on the BostonNHP Facebook page.
With that, it is my pleasure to introduce the moderator of tonight's program. Philip
J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his
research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations
among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books,
including “Playing Indian,” “Indians in Unexpected Places,” “American Studies:
A User's Guide with Alexander Olson,” and “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American
Indian Abstract.” Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in
1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University
of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria is a trustee
of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. He is the former
president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Philosophical
Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes
and recognitions, and serves as the president of the Organization of American Historians
in 2022. Thank you for being here, Phil, and I'll let you take it from here.
Thank you so much Katie, I really appreciate this. I am going to begin by introducing our
three distinguished panelists, and then we'll get right into some questions. So Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian, writer, and professor emeritus at California State University and
a longtime social justice activist. She is the author of numerous books, 15, including “Roots
of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico,” her American Book Award-winning
2014 book “An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States,” “Loaded: A Disarming
History of the Second Amendment,” and “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism,
White Supremacy, and A History of Exclusion and Erasure.” Elon Cook Lee is a historian,
educator, curator, and interpreter. She became the Director of Interpretation and Education
at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2019 where she leads a variety of initiatives
that focus on interpreting historic spaces through frameworks of repair, and equitable
collaboration with descendants of slavery, exclusion, and colonization. That work includes
creating and leading a new vision for the interpretation of sites with histories of
slavery and organizing convenings on interpreting slavery at historic sites throughout the Atlantic
world. Before coming to the Trust, she received her bachelor's degree from Spelman College,
and both a master's degree in Public Humanities and the Fellowship for the Study of the Public
History of Slavery at Brown University. Nathaniel Sheidley is the first President and CEO
of Revolutionary Spaces, a new cultural organization dedicated to connecting people to the history
and continuing practice of democracy through an encounter with two of the nation's most
important Revolutionary sites. Previously Nat taught at Wellesley College and served
as the Bostonian Society's Director of Public History. He has curated and provided creative
direction for numerous exhibitions and programs, including “Blood on the Snow,” an immersive,
site-specific work of theater that dramatizes the pivotal aftermath of the Boston Massacre
in the very room where the events took place. Nat's work is guided by a deeply held belief
that public history at its best can do more than tell us about the past; it can also deepen
our understanding of the present and equip us to build a more just and equitable future.
So the United States has a series of stories, maybe five or six of them, that qualify as
founding myths, master narratives. There’s the New England story about the pilgrims and
“the city on the hill,” the bold visions and religious freedom. There’s the story
about the founding fathers and the War for Independence and the crafting of American
democracy. There’s a story that centers slavery and the Civil War as a kind of bloody
national redemption. And one about the frontier and the ways American character was shaped
by Westward pioneering. And then there is the immigrant narrative centered on Ellis
Island, more than Angel Island perhaps, in which people come to America seeking a new
start, struggle for a generation or two, and then find success even as they enrich a multicultural
nation. I don’t think these are all the stories that we tell, but they’re some of
the big ones. Like all stories, these both reveal and conceal. They allow us to congratulate
ourselves on many things to celebrate and oftentimes not unjustly. At the same time,
they paper over other histories. So tonight, we want to think more about these stories,
about how they become so powerful, what they obscure and erase, and how we think about
telling better, richer, more complicated, more inclusive stories, particularly as we
think about commemorating, and I always have to pause, the semiquincentennial of the Declaration
of Independence in 2026, and the many things that we might find ourselves marking in the
years surrounding. So, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, I wonder if we might begin with you. In your
latest book, “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants:’ Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and
A History of Erasure and Exclusion,” you criticize the term “nation of immigrants”
as not only mythologizing the national origin story, but also erasing the destructive history
of settler colonialism. And I’m wondering if we can start perhaps with you just talking
a bit about the how and the when of the national immigrant's myth. Where did the story come
from, why is it so powerful, and how exactly does it erase history, and with what consequence?
Yeah, really the phrase, to my surprise, when I started researching it, is fairly new. It
was invented by John F. Kennedy in 1958 when he was a senator but beginning to run for
president. And being a son of Irish immigrants and a Catholic, it wasn’t very likely that
he could get elected given the past, because every single president had been either originally
a settler or -- like George Washington, settler in the colonies -- or a descendent of settlers
and either Anglo or Scotch-Irish, and not Irish Catholic. But the colonizers of Ireland, the
Scotch-Irish. So, he had quite a hill – he had a lot of money, his father was rich, but
money can't really erase those prejudices. So, I think this was the reason he wrote this
little book, which is still a bestseller today. It’s gone through many, many printings and
editions with new introductions and forwards and so forth, but it caught on. It's mostly
about the Irish famine refugees coming and their plight, their difficulties adjusting,
and then their success stories and so forth. It’s very interesting because he calls Native
Americans the first immigrants, and that entered textbooks as, I don't know if you remember,
but in the early 90s, it was quite frightening when suddenly textbooks started calling Native
Americans immigrants. I think that that has receded now. There was enough complaints about
it that that’s no longer the case. But he mainly, he didn’t, he never even mentioned
Mexicans or the border, so it was really a kind of a propaganda piece. It seemed to have
worked, you know. Of course, he barely won, I mean just really barely, barely, but it
did take off among liberals mainly, right-wingers generally still, or all along, have -- following
in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton -- been very suspicious of foreigners and immigrants.
But it is a part of the package, became a part of the package of multiculturalism in
the 1960s and 70s. So the problem as you say, the problem with the myth is that it obscures settler
colonialism to say everyone, which Kennedy says in that book, everyone who ever came to this
continent came from somewhere else. And he even has the Native people coming from somewhere
else, from Asia. So it, really the definition of an immigrant has to be something that has
a legal mechanism to it, and the first immigration law was actually not until 1884, and that
was exclusion of the Chinese. And the second one was a few years later, and that was an
extension of that exclusion to all Asians. So this was the onset of immigration. Chinese
had been coming, had been recruited to work on the railroads and in agriculture, came in
significant numbers, not huge numbers. So, yeah, the erasure of Native people and settler
colonialism and the exclusion of non-Western Europeans, it pretty well sets the standard
for immigration to the United States until this very moment today.
So it sounds like one of the things that’s being erased, Native history, you know, a
history that we’re now tracking back into the 20-some-thousand-year mark, which makes
it hard to imagine thinking that using the word immigrant when we're talking about people
who have been here for tens of thousands of years. But the other is that longer history
of xenophobia, you know, and particular kinds of hostility. You know, Roxanne, I wonder
if you might sort of elaborate a bit more for us about settler colonialism, what it
is that you mean when you use that term? How it might differ from that thing we might think
of as regular colonialism? Cause it is a term with some specificity, and it’s a term that gets,
gets used a fair amount, you know, these days, and I think it’s always useful
for us to pause and just kind of, you know, say what it is when we mean when we’re talking
about something like settler colonialism and perhaps you would do that for us.
Yes, it’s, settler colonialism – the United States is the first nation-state formed as
a settler colonial state. But the British had practice in settler colonialism with,
of course they had colonized all of Ireland, but then in Cromwell’s period, they decided
to implement settler colonialism in the north, in Ulster, in the counties in the north, which
is still an issue today. And so, they started pushing the small Irish Catholic farmers,
barely eking a living themselves anyway, off the land and bringing in Welsh and Anglos,
but mainly Scots, Cumberland Scots, and giving them free land. So, we see this replicated,
you know, immediately and deliberately in the colonies, the development of the colonies,
is the clearing of people. So, immigrants are people who come to an already existing
polity. They’re not in a position to clear anyone away, you know, the government wouldn’t
support that at all. They can develop a consciousness as a settler, and that’s sort of how the
Irish became White – in Native’s term, I say how they became settlers, partly because
they were light, mostly light blondes and spoke English. And even though they had a
very tough time because they were starving famine refugees, they were able to assimilate
pretty quickly. So, settler colonialism started with, of course, Plymouth, and, it actually
started with Jamestown, violently. Every one of these, including the pilgrims themselves,
every one of them had with them a mercenary. I mean, these are people who had been fighting
in Turkey, fighting the Muslims, John Mason, of course you know, in Massachusetts was the
head of the--so these militias, settler militias, that developed, were fundamental to clearing
Native people out. So, and then taking their land and of course then what it became, the
United States, the Northwest Ordinance laid out maps all the way to the Pacific and how
this, this would continue. And of course then they created the plat system which hadn't
existed before. It was the first time in human history, really, that the total commodification
of land as real estate that didn't go by natural boundaries, but by these plots of 160 acres.
So all the way to the Pacific this march across the country was settler colonialism. It took
100 years of war, Native resistance to be suppressed into reservations by 1890. But
it was bloody and genocidal. Settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, who was the late Australian
anthropologist, was studying mainly Australia -- which also, you know, they imitated Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, were also successful settler colonies that followed in the 19th
century -- and he says built into settler colonialism is always the whiff of genocide, which
means not only killing people, but destroying their ability to remain intact as people,
as a people, even if not every individual is killed. So, that’s settler colonialism.
Some of it was practiced in imitating the United States. The apartheid regime in South
Africa very openly imitated. Israel, Palestine-- when Israel took over and created a state,
also implemented that kind of settler colonialism.
I think you and I, you know, have so much in common in this, but I oftentimes tell my
students it’s the Land Ordinance of 1785 that puts the grid on the landscape and the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that sets up the structure for American colonization across
the entire continent. And I think as Patrick Wolfe, you know, has argued settler colonialism,
settlers come to stay, you know. Immigrants come and they throw themselves in front of
the state, and they say, “Recognize me. Think about me as a citizen potentially,
grant me rights.” And settlers come and sort of develop their own, you know, their
own political entities, right? I mean, this is one of the distinctive kinds of parts of the
settler, kind of, society. It’s also worth us remembering, I think, as Robin D.G. Kelley
has argued, right, the fundamental story of slavery involves taking the indigenous of
Africa and putting them in a settler colonial context and literally removing them, right,
from that context. It is a form of erasure, so it’s a global kind of phenomenon that
we oftentimes think about and should think about in comparative kinds of terms. Elon
Cook Lee, I wonder if we could, I wonder if we could turn to you and maybe chat a bit
about some of the things that happens in historic sites. Your work is focused on education that
takes place in particular spaces and places, and in particularly interpretation of histories
of enslavement. So, I’m wondering what kinds of erasures of history have you seen at various
sites, and what are the consequences of those untold stories that happen in place?
Sure. I mean, first I want to say I'm loving this conversation so much. I've already started
taking a lot of notes and learning something. And really, the challenge for historic sites
is number one, the near complete erasure of Indigenous history at those sites, so we have
a lot of colonial era sites that should be talking about this early history as part of
the foundation of this is where the land came from before the very first owner of this
property purchased the land or was given the land or took the land, however he acquired
the land, usually a he, and put that house on top and then hundreds of years later, we
take tours of it. So that has to be something that our historic sites address right away.
And the next thing is really the challenge of talking about the history of slavery. In
this country, at some point we decided or most of the country in the 60s and 70s, we
decided slavery was bad. Okay. And so that ended up with a transition in the storytelling
at a lot of our historic sites where you started seeing the disappearing of what few enslaved
people stories you may have heard, any Black tour guides who may have been there suddenly
began to disappear and are replaced by the complete focus on the valorization of white
masculinity, especially. Even historic sites that have strong female narratives, especially
stories that should be focused on white female slave owners, you see her suddenly disappearing,
becoming just a wife and mother, to refocus onto the husband or the son and all the awesome
things that he did supposedly. So, I think really that that erasure of anything that has
to do with race, which is such an uncomfortable topic even today, anything that makes it difficult
to look up to that owning man at the center of the narrative, anything that colors him
or makes him look like he might not be someone that our children can look up to, we take
away, so race, slavery, any kind of violence, unless it’s military-related violence, and
that violence is, becomes more fun, it becomes about tactics, it becomes about masculinity
and intelligence and not about death and killing and all the blood. And so yeah, my focus really
has been the history of slavery and so that’s where a lot of the work that I’ve been doing
has been focused, and so that’s where I have been really gearing a lot of our historic
sites toward, actually looking at our primary source documents that a lot of historic sites
have their documents or have access to these documents, but for many reasons that I just
stated have ignored the parts of those documents that have anything to do with history – that
have anything to do with slavery, downplayed the history of slavery, or trivialized the
experiences of enslaved people, you know, turning them into, you know, ghost characters
on haunted hayrides or sexualizing, especially young women characters, and really just basically
turning real people into caricatures and archetypes instead of actually talking about them as
real, authentic human beings with lives and aspirations.
This is so interesting. I mean, what I’m hearing you say, let me sort of make sure
I’m getting it right, there was a moment when, you know, the history of slavery was
told in a way that didn't actually have the negative connotations, right? There was this
sort of, you know, naturalizing of slavery, and the fact that a historical critique of
slavery emerged, you know, coming out of the 60s and 70s, you know, and, you know, arguably
out of the Civil Rights and the political movements that attached to that, right, a
critical new history actually generates the erasure, rather than generating a more, you
know, kind of fully-fledged engagement. I mean, it does feel to me like we’re at a
similar kind of moment of inflection right now, and I’m wondering if you are seeing,
you know, something similar or if the dynamic has changed? If now is the time to sort of
think "no, we’re actually going to tell a deeper narrative" or if there is an inclination
to retrench back and engage in further forms of erasure? How is it looking, you know, on
the ground?
I believe change making is a lot like watching the ocean at the beach. You have a big wave
that comes through, pushes something hard and necessary and then it gets drawn back.
And so there’s always going to be that force pulling those things back. And that's something
that I have seen currently in my work at a variety of different historic sites, not just at the
National Trust, but even a lot of sites outside the Trust, that you have a lot of really amazing
work that’s happening right now or has been happening especially in the last 10-15 years,
and then you have that pushback. You can see it with the school board protest and people
getting into fights. You can see it with some of our visitors coming through and making
really ugly comments or jokes to our interpreters when they are trying their best to tell these
full stories. So you’re always going to have that pushback. The thing that’s happening
right now and it really actually started, I would say, with the election of Donald Trump
is that you see a very, very strong determination at a lot of historic sites all around the
country to say, you know what, we are going to tell the truth because it is the truth. We have primary source
documents to back it up and we’re going to just keep going. And it’s been absolutely
fascinating to see this new wave of action really starting in 2015, especially 2016.
And it ebbs and flows, but it’s continuing to push. The thing that I am really excited
about is that there has been a lot of really excellent organizing work that’s been going
on. There's been a lot of new rubrics coming out of the American Alliance of Museums, out
of this really amazing program that happened a couple of years ago at James Madison’s
Montpelier, that have been helping historic sites work strategically and thoughtfully
as they move forward, often in collaboration with descendants of slavery. And it’s just
been a lot of really amazing work that’s been happening.
Is the Madison home perhaps, I’m wondering if you could maybe give us an example of where
is a real successful strategy when it comes to sort of challenging these big mythic stories
or these big erasures. Is there perhaps, you know, can you take us to a real grounded kind of location and let us
know a good example of what’s been going on that’s been good and productive?
Sure. There’s been several really great examples that have been popping up in the
last couple of years. A lot of times the best examples are popping up because you have historic
sites that are finally creating lasting and authentic relationships with the descendants
of slavery, especially the descendants of the people who had been enslaved by the former
owners of that particular property. So James Madison’s Montpelier being a really excellent
example where they have the Montpelier Descendant Committee that was established a couple of
years ago to really create a voice, a powerful voice for descendants of the people who had
been enslaved by James Madison.
And this past year they actually, for the first time in our nation's history, the Montpelier
Descendant Committee is now working toward equitable co-stewardship with the Montpelier
Foundation of James Madison’s Montpelier. So that’s not something that exists anywhere
else in the U.S. in any of our historic sites. It’s absolutely revolutionary and outstanding,
and I always want to congratulate them for that. But it’s also really hard, steady
work. This has been hard steady work that has been going on for decades really, even before
the establishment of the committee, even before the creation of some of these relationships.
And so there’s always going to be pushback and they’re always going to have to keep
pushing harder to keep these things going. There are also historic sites that are--like Whitney
Plantation in Louisiana, where they were founded to be different. And I think for the field,
Whitney was just a sudden spark where people recognized wait a minute you can make money
telling the truth? You can make money focusing on African-American history at a former plantation?
You mean we can get attention, we can actually do this work and do this work well? And so
I think you’ve got a few different examples that have been going on. You’ve got places
like Oak Alley also in Louisiana that used to be one of those traditional, literal moonlight
magnolias. I mean you get your little drinks, you have hoop skirts. You've got all that
foolishness; you’ve got a Confederate soldier sitting outside telling you all kinds of stuff
about the Confederacy. And then now all the tours talk about the history of slavery, and
they do it in a thoughtful, authentic way. They name the enslaved people. They have the
slavery tour and that was the premier thing for a while, for a historic site to have a
slavery tour—wow that’s progressive. But now you must talk about slavery in all aspects
of the work. Because enslaved people were all over the house, in fact they were usually
the majority of the people in the owner's houses, especially a lot of these plantation
sites. That might be 70 to 90 percent of the entire population of the property. So it suddenly
has started becoming very necessary to talk about to the vast majority of the people who lived
and worked at the sites. So there’s a lot of really great examples. Shadows-on-the-Teche,
also in Louisiana, also has been doing a lot of outstanding work just this summer to turnaround
the way they tell their stories, and they have really fascinating, one of the best archives
of documentation and artifacts in the country. So there’s been a lot of great things that
I'm really excited about that have been in the last couple of years.
You know, it's funny I remember when I was a kid my parents visited Oak Alley and they came back and my father
in particular was so completely disgusted by the whole experience.
It was pretty bad. Yeah, yeah.
He said the only thing that I found interesting about this was how low the doors were and
how small everybody must have been, you know. He’s like, the rest of it I just, you know, could leave it all behind.
Nat Sheidley, perhaps we could turn to you. You're the leader of Revolutionary
Spaces, dedicated to conveying the history and practice of democracy and getting visitors
to deepen their understandings through an encounter with particular sites from the Revolution.
And I think we can say iconic sites. Two sites on the Boston Freedom Trail, the Old State
House and the Old South Meeting House, which apparently is taking on water even as we speak.
You have a lot of visitors who come into your sites with a very, I would say, hardened, focused, specific
understanding of what the founding era looked like, and I’m wondering if you could talk
to us a little bit about how do you deal with that. How do you balance their expectations
with the mission that you have to expand the narrative? You know, how does it work on the ground
in the places that you are dealing with?
Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question, and I think it bears noting at the outset that historic
sites are challenging. We can’t treat them as just objective remnants of the past that
speak for themselves, right. They're the products, the sites that have survived are the products of a selective process.
The two sites that we care for, the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, were selectively
preserved in the 1870s and 1880s, for very specific reasons. Partly yes, the story that
is told about the origins of the preservation movement has some merit. People didn't want to see
all the old buildings that seem to define Boston lost, but also the founders of the
organizations that rescued these buildings from possible destruction in the second half
of the 19th century were very concerned about their own loss of power and prestige in the
face of industrialization, mass immigration, and the project of preserving these sites
was part of a reassertion of their own primacy. “Step back, our families were here at the
time these buildings were put up. They helped put them up. The rest of you can just stand
by the side of the road and watch us get on with the work of ruling.” Right, and I think we
know that when we look at monuments, that they were the product of a very selective
process, that they’re encoded with a particular ideology, that they are telling us something
very specific. We don't always recognize that when we think about canonical historic sites,
like Old South Meeting House and the Old State House. But they were chosen because they could
be part of the canon that sustained those founding myths, right. You know, what was the Revolution all
about? Well, it was about some people that were unhappy with taxation that they didn't
have a voice in, and they had a project of making the colonies the independent. And that’s
the narrative that is elevated. So I think, how can we respond to that? How are we working
to grapple with that? One is we probably do need to historicize commemoration. We do need
to share with our visitors the selective process that led to these sites, and not the sites
that might tell the story of those who were enslaved in Boston being preserved so that
they can have an encounter with it. So I think that’s a piece of it. The other thing is
we need to widen the aperture. We need to recognize that the sites, while they contain
canonical stories that seem to support our founding mythology, also contain many, many
other stories. And if we widen the aperture we can tell those stories as well. Back in the
day when I used to teach an introductory course to the American Revolution to students at
Wellesley College, I used to tell myself jokingly if I can just achieve one thing in this course
I want my students to be equipped when someone says to them, “well the founders thought,
or the founders said,” to just be able to respond with the question: Which founders?
And I think our sites are equipped to allow people to see the power of that, right. So Old South
Meeting House is best known as the place where the meetings that became the Tea Party took
place. It was also the place where Phyllis Wheatley Peters, the first published African-American
poet, worshipped. It was the place where so many of those who were enslaved in Boston,
and 10% of Boston’s population—roughly, maybe a little bit less—was enslaved at
the time of the Revolution, where they worshipped and the one of the few places where they could
gather in the community because many who were enslaved lived scattered in different households
throughout the town. We can tell those stories, and help people understand that the struggle
that happened in the 1760s and 1770s wasn’t one struggle. It was many struggles. Yes,
there’s the story we think we know, but there’s also the struggle of those in bondage
to be free. The struggle of Native people to recover or in some cases to retain their
sovereignty. We need to see this as not a single struggle but a multilateral struggle
which had an outcome that privileged the goals and objectives of some, but not of all. So we’re
really thinking about how can we elevate those stories with the human dimension with power
so that our visitors can connect to them, so that they can see the complexity. Because
I think that’s really the only way to respond to the power of the myths of the expectations
that people walk in our doors carrying in many cases.
Can you talk maybe a little bit more about what it means to say well here’s Phyllis
Wheatley. I mean, now I think that’s super cool, but I can imagine a lot of people who are
like that’s trivia, that’s incidental. That doesn't have the power to sort of, take on the
sort of big narrative. But what I am hearing you say, Nat, is in some ways the power of biography
of individual people, you know, may be the kind of tool in the tool kit that is useful in taking on
these things. So I'm wondering how you, you’ve just framed this in terms of let's have a big complicated story
in which we’ve got multiple people coming in from multiple sites and multiple angles.
Complexity, as everyone who’s ever stepped inside a history classroom or tried to do
public history at all, knows that complexity is the bugaboo of the general public in some
ways. So how do you think about getting to that complex story? And how do you think about
it in terms of the actual place and the site itself?
So the first thing I want to say is that I think it’s really important to give people a frame that
connects to their own lives and that relates to questions they find resonant and authentically
relevant. The way that we have chosen to do that at our sites is to say the Old State
House and Old South Meeting House represent a core piece of the argument that took place
during the 1760s and 1770s, but that we haven’t finished having. So the Old State House was
the seat of power where those either vested with power by royal appointment or elected
by the towns of Massachusetts met to do the work of governing. Old South Meeting House
became this really important gathering place for political protest, where those, the people out
of doors struggled to have their voices heard. It’s the sort of push and pull between those
that defines the stories that we can tell. But I think the way that we’ve tried to
frame that story is as the emergence of a set of questions. How is my voice heard? Whose
voice matters? Yeah we have this phrase “We the People,” but there’s not necessarily
consensus in the Revolutionary period about what “we” means and hey, there’s not consensus
about that today, right. So let's understand that we’re part of this long current. That the work we’re
doing today around those questions, the advocacy that we’re doing today around those questions,
is really not different from the advocacy that took place 250 years ago. And in that
sense, can we not see ourselves as founders too? If you provide people with that frame,
the story of Phyllis Wheatley Peters finding her voice and articulating a very particular
vision for herself in America has a different resonance, that claiming a voice, that asking
or addressing some of these very same questions. I think when we try to pick from the wide
range of stories that can be told, it’s with an eye to that frame, and then the other
piece is, yeah you need to help people see that connection across time. And there's--It is true that
the power of the humanity of those who lived 250 years ago can really awaken us to what
was distinct about that moment, but also what we may share in common, the struggles and
the aspirations that may not yet have been resolved. I’m happy to give examples of
particular work that we’ve done, but why don't I just leave it there and see if others
have anything to add?
It seems like one of the things you were talking about, Nat, is sort of like, whenever we see the “we,”
the “we” is so often linked to one or two or three or five of these big narratives, right,
and the “we” tends to sort of exclude a lot of folks. So if you can take deconstruct the
“we,” take the “we” apart, but then build a newer and better and bigger, more
inclusive kind of “we” in which the visitors can actually see themselves as part of a different
“we.” This feels like some part of the task. Not to use the word “we” many, many,
many times as I have just done. Roxanne, I wonder if we can kind of turn back to you, you have talked
about decolonizing the founding narratives, and I'm wondering how you see that in terms
of perhaps working in historic sites and or simply challenging the way that the narrative
is framed? What does it mean to sort of decolonize, what would it look like to decolonize these stories?
Well, there are a number of ways to go about it. I talk about decolonizing history, which is
more abstract than actual, let's say, full sovereignty for Native peoples and a sufficient land base
to be real nations, communities. But I think listening to Nat, I was thinking about
the previous to founding and how important that was and how the mythology of the founding,
is not the beginning of the story. That is, it had people going into the—especially
the Scotch-Irish when they started coming in the 1720s in great numbers—not much land
left in the colonies, and what was left often was overused by commercial agriculture agri-business,
raising nonfood crops and planting over and over again. So this urge to take more land, more native
land and then these Scotch-Irish coming, who resented, I mean there’s a lot of resentment
for the large plantation owners. The royals in charge of the colonies had an incentive
to make more land available to people without land, so they started entering
into the Appalachia, you know, what is now Appalachia, illegally. Illegally in the sense that it wasn't--the king did not allow
it. So it was illegal but then it became the proclamation after the French and Indian War,
the Seven Years War. Britain won but did not want to expand into Indian country, did not
want the cost of the war. So that restriction on expansion, settler colonialism, which by
then was so ingrained after the period from 1607 to 1764, was a long period of time to
ingrain a new way of thinking of these settlers. It wasn't so much democracy as privilege.
White privilege of settler colonialism that everyone should have land. So the proclamation, the British
proclamation ordered everyone out who had gone there illegally. And of course the so-called
founders like George Washington, he made his great fortune off of going in and surveying,
surveying teams and selling plots of land that did not belong to him, that they just mapped. There
were Native villages there, Native farms, and selling them so there was also the monetary
interest in making those land sales legitimate. So I think it gives a very different perspective
on independence, and it puts a cloud over any kind of celebration. I mean the Declaration
itself you know was kind of obscure things that go beyond the first, very poetic the right
to free speech and right to have guns and all that, is the complaints. And all these
complaints had to do with the proclamation. The billeting of the redcoats, they brought
soldiers to ferret out the people who had gone in there illegally and not allow
others to go in. So I don't think the British had any particular interest in the
protection of Native people but by then Native people had learned a lot about settlers and
the colonization and they had built very large confederations to resist. You know, the Haudenosaunee
and of course the Shawnee Confederation, which they did. So I think you have to --the self interest, it’s
not that it’s never been dealt with, it has by historians, the economic interests
of independence. To really teach this, to actually decolonize the history so that
people can face that, and not expect something good to come out of it. Oh well yes that’s
true but look at the beautiful country. Well let's look at this beautiful country right
now that was built and maybe we have second thoughts about the direction from the very
beginning that formed it. And I think other people in the world who’ve had experience
with U.S. domination and bombs falling down have a very different perspective on the beauty
of the United States. So I think it has to be presented as a very dark history. And what I find
with young people today is that they feel liberated by this truth because we’ve been
lied to so much about this history and confused by it. That the only people who really know
what they are doing intentionally are white nationalists. They know exactly where they
came from and that they own this country, you know, and they’re up in arms now. So I think we
have to not see this as just a phenomena of Trump or something that came from nowhere.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma, the Scotch-Irish settlers, my Dunbar name is my father's family,
are from this, and I know that story just from oral history as a positive story, as
told by these settlers. So I think we have to be bold. I think that it’s going to take
boldness, but we have to have confidence that almost cliché of the truth shall make you
free really has meaning I think.
You know we’re starting to get some pretty interesting questions going on, and I’m
wondering if, Elon Cook Lee, we could turn back to you and I’m going to try to consolidate
a couple of these. So we've had a couple questions about, sort of,
you know, the voices of women at these sites and sort of, like, you know,
what kinds of measures really need to be taken. If the archive, and this is one of the things
that I think, Elon, you were saying that was quite interesting to me, is that on more than
one occasion you went back to these sites and said, “oh and look they’ve got archives,
they’ve got documents, they’ve got stuff, this is actually the stuff of history,” right.
Well as we know these archives are themselves sort of selected products in same way that
Nat was talking about the structures themselves being selective products of history. So I’m wondering
if we can think about how women and the presence of women work on the sites. And then a
couple of specific questions about maybe saying a bit more about how and why women who were
slave owners were sort of ignored. Say more a bit about that perhaps, Elon, and about their
husbands being made more prominent. And then Julia Rose asks a question about
how to show us things that are perhaps less physical and material? For example, the role
of laws that protected slavery, enabling the institution of slavery which may be somewhat
more challenging to discuss. You know, the sort of legal and political aspects as opposed to the social
and cultural things that can happen on the ground in a historical site. So Elon, I wonder
if you could meditate with us a little bit about some of those issues.
Sure, I had to take notes; that was like four different topics.
Sorry!
That's okay, that's okay! When it comes to the presence of women, the vast majority of historic sites
are focused—not just colonial era historic sites or mid-century modern sites—the vast
majority of historic sites are focused on men. You go to art museums, a vast majority
of works of art were created by men. So it’s not really anything different. And yeah that’s
even though women are half and often more than half, generally more than half of the population. The challenge
often is that when we actually go into the records, really learn who these women are—well
one part of the challenge is you have often less women writing the farther back in time
you go. You have literate women who can read but may not necessarily be keeping diaries,
writing letters. So sometimes there is a silence in the record because there is less record.
And also all going throughout history less attention being paid to women, so stories
about them are not always being kept and maintained and focused on. But for more recent histories,
especially at our historic sites we often have these documents, we have the letters,
we have people writing about women who lived and worked at our sites. And it’s just that
many of these stories break down the idealization especially of white womanhood, that Victorian
era white womanhood that these are supposed be wives, mothers. They are the arbiters of
all that is good. That they are the moral center of the family. That they really only
exist within the home. When you have, as an example—we have two female slave owners
who I’ve been doing especially more research on in our portfolio of historic sites—one
side where you have a woman, her husband has died, or her husband has gone off to New England
actually for his own health and left her in charge of the plantation. And eventually he dies
and then she remarries a guy who is not interested in plantation running, he doesn’t care,
he’s a politician. And so basically she ends up being in charge of this business and shepherding
it through its most financially successful time period in its history. And we had basically
made her a fainting southern belle who is really only worried about those horrible Union
soldiers at her gates. And she was just a mother and a wife and a daughter; she was
just a girl. And so when we went into the archive, really did that really amazing research especially
that has been happening over the last few years and especially this summer, it was immediately
obvious that this is who we should be focusing on in our story. And then we started realizing
there was a lot of enslaved women who were also really, really fascinating people who
were using what limited power they could have to mediate their situations to ensure the
safety of their children, to ensure that their children could remain close, they wouldn’t
be sold away. Women who were able to find ways to stop from ending up being sold away,
either because they run away. So we have these really, really fascinating women's histories.
We just really hadn't put that much time into sharing those stories. And I think that Nat had mentioned
the challenge of dealing with visitor expectations. Visitors expect to go to a plantation site
especially and hear about awesome men. So it’s a shock often to present instead a focus on
women's history at these sites because it’s just not what you expect. And beyond that,
we at the National Trust, we also have the Farnsworth House, which is a mid-century modern
house, which is now the Edith Farnsworth House. She used to just be some lady with a lot of
money who may have had a crush on her architect, and now it’s like no, she actually had a
lot of power and decision-making in making that site. There’s been a lot of a big push
to refocus in on women. If you’re interested in learning more about the history of female
slave owners, Stephanie Rogers Jones came out with a really amazing book called "They
Were Her Property," which is an absolutely fascinating book. Really breaks down all the
stereotypes that we have about femininity, about women, about female slaveowners. A lot
of it is absolutely horrific and it‘s all very well documented. But because it really
breaks down those ideas we have about women, it's something that must be covered over because
it kind of ruins the images that we have about people from the past. When it comes to slavery
laws, that was the big thing I was nerding out on before I left New England. At the Center
for Reconciliation in Providence we had actually just started doing a legal history of slavery
in Rhode Island tour. And it sounds super dry; it was done by a retired lawyer, but
it was absolutely fascinating because the laws, the legal system in this country is
amazing. And the ways in which you can actually watch certain incidences happen in local communities
and then all of a sudden there’s a major lawsuit or all of a sudden there’s a battle
in the streets and then a new law is put in place to stop whatever that was from happening.
One of the really fascinating things I found out when I was in Rhode Island was that there
was a late 1700s law that forbid Black women from suing white men in court for paternity.
Why would you need a law like that? And so even just letting people know that that was
a law that existed and talking about when it started, when it was taken off the books,
that provokes questions and deeper thinking within visitors. And when you’re working at
historic sites, my favorite thing to do is take people in small groups on tours, present
them with those primary source documents, present them with those quotes, and engage
them in discussion to get them to think for themselves about how do they think, how do
they feel about these histories. And so it's really, you don’t really have to tell people what to think,
you can just present them with the evidence, and a lot of times people start recognizing
what a fuller history we have. What an amazing and complicated, and what is it, James Baldwin
says, more beautiful and more terrible history that our country has that we never really
explored in quite such a way before.
Fabulous words, thanks for calling them back to our mind. There is this joy of history,
we’re getting a number of comments or questions from people who are confessing to be history
nerds, frankly. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is needing to leave us at 7:30 and in fact she may have
just left. I think she did. And I meant to try to sort of grab one last-minute to thank her for being here
and it looks like I missed it. But, she apparently has another obligation and is on her way to
that. Nat Sheidley, there’s a question here from Julia Rose asking you to go back
to the quite useful statement that you made about asking visitors to see themselves as
founders too. And Julia Rose is asking you to think more about this and I would link
this up to a question that’s coming from Sarah Jenks as well who comments that the
session is being attended perhaps by a lot of history professionals, wondering how we
can best take the conversations we’re having with one another, that we’re beginning to
enact at our sites and talk about how to introduce them most effectively to the generic white
tourist visitor who seems to come to our sites to have their ideas about their heritage affirmed
by us, noting we’re not there to affirm but that is kind of a change from the past.
So, perhaps you could use this question about seeing ourselves as the founders too to sort
of think a bit more with us about how we’re dealing with that kind of average visitor.
Yeah, Thanks for those questions. They’re really challenging questions, they sit at
the heart of the practice of public history. I think the core of the work is really, it’s
an invitation, right? We are at our best not when we’re telling people what they should
think about the past but when we’re extending an invitation to them to participate with
us in making meaning from that past. I think, you know, that’s the spirit in which we
try to link our stories about the founding era to a conception people can have about
themselves as makers of our values and our policies and our future together. And it’s,
I think also the way in which we can most effectively engage folks who might not think
of themselves as history buffs. Elon was just talking about the power of showing people
the primary source documents and then discussing with them, right, that’s making meaning
together, it’s not, it’s not standing up there and saying this is what you should
know about the past and here are the five things I want you to walk out of the room
with, it’s putting something challenging in front of them and asking them to walk away
and, and, well make sense of it together in the room, and then to walk away thinking more
about it and bringing those conversations back to their own networks. We’ve had some
success in our work by mounting very short dramas. We’ve done, we’ve done a play
that dramatizes the anti-slavery petitions that were brought by people of color in Boston.
In 1774, there’s this whole series in the 1770s that are heard in the Council chamber
of the Old State House, and that ultimately are not – you know, they’re heard but
there’s no action taken on them. And the play sort of asks, well, hey we’re punting
this to future generations to grapple with how to reconcile what’s going on here and
the active decision not to pursue an end to slavery right in this moment. We just,
we’ve just mounted a play called “I Am This Place,” which, which explores Crispus
Attucks, one of the five people who died at the Boston Massacre and was a man of mixed
African and Native American ancestry, who self-liberated himself from bondage and found
himself, you know, in King Street outside the town house, the old State House, on March
5, 1770, and the, but the play is really about, in many ways it’s about motherhood. And
it’s about the maternal lineage that carried the cultural knowledge that shaped him, and
then it ends with an imagined scene of his mother holding him after he dies. And that
play was written by the playwright Miranda ADEkoje in the immediate aftermath of the
murder of George Floyd and the national conversation we were having about, you know, police brutality
and are still having. Those plays are meant to be a platform for meaning making, and our
staff were- when we mounted "The Petition," the play about the anti-slavery petitions,
our staff were very anxious that there would be pushback – Hey this isn’t the history
I heard - What you mean I have to come in here and hear about slavery? That’s not
why I’m here. And we actually brought in Elon to help train our staff on how to have
those conversations. Thank you, Elon. It was really, it was wonderful and, but what we
learned was we didn't get any pushback because rather than telling, we had shown, and we
had put people in a situation where they had to make meaning out of something very challenging
that they had just been privy to. And they, after every play we had a conversation, a
deep, challenging conversation about race in America. And 80% of those who saw the play
over an entire summer’s worth of performances stayed for the discussion. We had people
of all political persuasions working together to ask questions and figure out what do I
make of this? And I think, like that’s public history at its best. It’s using the past
as an invitation for those conversations and it’s in a platform where we can recognize
what we have in common, right? We all, as human beings, have to make meaning of the
past, and when we can do it in a way that creates an opportunity for people to reach
across the political barriers that sometimes divide us and realize actually, you know,
maybe there’s work we can do together here we’ve really achieved something. And we
can leave people with that question like what does it mean to conceive of myself as a founder
and my own charge to go out and make history?
You know, I think that Crispus Attucks’ case is just so emblematic, right? I mean,
I remember as a kid sort of learning about Crispus Attucks without having any sort of
identifiers attached. Just a guy who got killed in the Boston Massacre. And then it became
the celebrated figure Crispus Attucks as an African-American man who was killed at the
Boston Massacre, oh, and wasn’t that surprising. And only recently, right, has this sort of
been like, no, no, no, he was actually also Native and what does that tell us, right?
So this increasing series of complications, right, that we can attach to even one biographical
figure does seem emblematic of this kind of work, you know, of deepening things up. I'm
going to try to combine two questions, here. Beth Fuller asks, if there’re any historic
sites that come to mind that do particularly well in bringing in the stories of Indigenous
peoples who lived in those lands? And I think it’s the question, Beth’s question is
usefully paired with a question that Ralph Nelson asks in a somewhat abstract way. Is
it better to put stories of previously not mentioned groups, and maybe we want to insert
Native people in here, into a site that was chosen to highlight another group, right,
to say we’re going to put Indigenous histories into the Old State House, you know? Or should
we develop sites that are better suited to those previously unmentioned groups to tell
their stories within more compatible kind of sites. It’s an interesting question about,
sort of, how we might develop future sites relative to how we change the sites that we
already have and I am wondering if either of you have some thoughts on that?
I definitely have some thoughts because that’s been, I think that’s been one of the big
conversations that our - at the National Trust that we’ve been having. When you have spent
so much of your time and resources often over decades focusing in on telling certain stories,
when you make a shift to integrate other stories it can sometimes feel like a loss. Like, are
we taking something away from that story that used to be so important? And I feel like that
is, well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways it can be a bit shortsighted and it doesn't
recognize the ways in which people like me, people of color, women, immigrants, when you
go to a site and a history that you can very easily connect with has always been there
but has not been present, you feel like you’re also erased, you feel like your stories don't
matter. And that was always my experience going to museums and historic houses where
I was like wait a minute, I know what time period I’m in, I know what state I’m in,
I know what kind of plantation this is, I know what kind of property this is, and
what they were doing to make money. My ancestors should be here. Why aren't they? And so, to
me it’s not about replacing, it’s not about losing anything, it’s about expanding.
And it’s not just expanding to be more inclusive, it’s also expanding the story about even
the White people in the story so that White male owner who used to be the sole or the
majority of the storytelling, you get to see him as a fully realized human being which
includes being a slave owner. Someone who interacted on a daily basis with people of
color, especially Black people. Someone who was only able to get the land that they have
because Indigenous people were forced off of it in one way or another. So, you lose
something when you only have that one idealized way of seeing someone. And you gain so much
by allowing everyone to be fully realized in the storytelling. So, I think it’s more
welcoming, it ensures that a larger variety of people can be part of that experience.
And in this day and age the – you know, as our nation becomes, you know, more racially
diverse, and just like what Roxanne was saying, our nation's youth are feeling more and more
like we’ve been lied to. As a millennial, I definitely felt like I was lied to when
I went to a lot of museums. And the more I learned about our nation’s history, the
more I was like, well, why wasn't I just told that? You could have just said that when I
was in high school U.S. History. Why wasn't I told? And so it’s more frustrating to
find out that the full history wasn't told to you in the first place, then to just get
it right from the start. So I think it’s - to me I think it’s really exciting, it’s
something that I want, you know, my son, and all my nieces and nephews and all the children
to be able to see themselves, and as a last thing, you know, even in doing these conversations,
so instead of having tours at historic houses where it’s kind of like a walking lecture
around the building but actually allowing people to ask more questions, to be guided
in conversation, having that opportunity to learn, sometimes right along with the guide,
it’s just such a richer, more powerful experience. And it helps people see themselves, even people
who are different from one another. So if it’s a farmhouse that was owned by a Scotch-Irish
family, there were never any enslaved people, there was no Black population, no – and
the Indigenous people have been forced off, you know, 100 and something years before,
if you do the storytelling right, if you’re really truly thoughtful of and explore these
people as real individuals, anyone should be able to relate to those stories. It doesn't
have to be about finding someone who looks just like you or has your identity. But when
it’s really thoughtfully done, that storytelling, everyone should be able to see themselves
in those stories.
Fabulously and beautifully well said. And I totally agree with you on this. You know,
I’m wondering if we’re – we’re sort of heading a little bit to, you know, to concluding
our session. We’re not there yet, but I’m wondering if maybe each of you might sort
of reflect a little bit, we’re in the midst of preparations for the upcoming 250th anniversary
of the Declaration of Independence, and I’m wondering what kinds of things you’re looking
forward to when it comes to using this particular celebration and the things that are going
to cluster around it, you know, as an opportunity to reframe the past. What kinds of things
are we thinking about as we’re coming up to this particular anniversary and some of
the places that you’re, you know, where you’re doing your work? Nat, maybe we should
start with you.
Yeah, I mean, I think all of my thoughts tend to the big picture of using this moment to
frame a really fundamental conversation that all of us feel like we have a stake in and
a voice in and to broaden that circle of dialogue using our sites as platforms. You know, Old
South Meetinghouse is going to be at center stage in 2023 when we commemorate the 250th
anniversary of the Tea Party. But I think, we’re still – we’re a little behind
because of the pandemic, but we’re, we are actively shaping our plans for that commemoration.
And I think, you know, what we would like to do is not tell the straightforward often
celebratory story that people think they know, but to use that moment as a – as an invitation
to explore aspects of the Meetinghouse the people don't know as well. You know it because
of the Tea Party, but did you know that this was a seat for community, did you know this
was a place where families came to worship together over generations and to be part of
each other's lives. And can we think together about the relationship between the shaping
of community and the values that sit at the center of community and protest, right? Protest
is born of a sense of speaking for someone, for one’s community and its needs and
how, how did that – how has that since shaped? And what role did the Meetinghouse play in
it in the 1770s and then to translate that to the present. So, I think, you know, a commemoration
of the Tea Party is a really important opportunity for us as Americans to have a conversation
about what protest is and what its role is in a free society? And to think about that
not just in historical terms but in terms that relate really deeply to the present and
to the recent history that we’ve all lived through. Yeah, so, you know, where do I
think I want us to be in 2026 when we’re sort of having the moment of commemorating
the Declaration of Independence? I think understanding that this shared past is a resource for change.
And having a conversation as a country about the changes that we want in order to realize
a more just and more equitable future together.
Thanks Nat, and Elon, perhaps I could give you a very quick last word here about where
do you see things happening around this semiquincentennial of celebrations?
I do want to do, I do want to quickly say that the Declaration of Independence is absolutely
fascinating document and one of my favorite things to do with past- some of the past organizations
I worked with was a deep dive, like a critical deep dive into the language of this document.
And so, the Robbins House of Concord, Massachusetts, and the Old North Bridge, we used to do a
collaborative program every year, that was sponsored by Mass Humanities where we would
do a reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” that
was the original idea for that program because that is such a powerful speech. And I think
those things really should be in conversation with each other, those two documents. But
we would often start the program with a costumed group reading of the Declaration of Independence.
So, we would have a National Park Service guy who would, instead of wearing his normal
uniform would come over in a Revolutionary War soldier uniform and he would start off
reading the Declaration of Independence. And then he would be interrupted by a man in Indigenous
clothing, and then he would be interrupted by, well, me dressed as a early - or late
1800s abolitionist, or early 1800s abolitionist, and then we would keep being interrupted by
a Civil Rights protester, a Black Panther, and a Black Lives Matter protester. And the
reason why these different costumed characters would start popping in was because there are
direct parallels between the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the demands
of the March on Washington, the demands of the Black Panther Party, the demands of the
Black Lives Matter Movement, the demands of many different tribal organizations for Indigenous
sovereignty, it’s absolutely fascinating. And plus, having these different groups read,
do readings of certain sections or certain lines of the Declaration of Independence,
you can also highlight some of the interesting contradictions and a little bit of the hypocrisy
that you also see in that document. So, you know, calling Indigenous people savages being
one, talking about how the British are stirring up insurrections amongst us because Black
people otherwise wouldn’t care to be free if the British didn’t plant that idea in
our heads. So it’s an absolutely fascinating way to go through that Declaration is to
compare it to more modern, more recent demands for independence and sovereignty and freedom
from harassment and freedom from occupation. So I would love for y’all to you know, check
out the past programs, I think there’s a couple of videos of that online. But also
just to spend some time - it was so fascinating - we would pack the streets really, pack the
property with sometimes hundreds and hundreds of people and we would always engage the audience
afterward in a conversation. And there were so many people who had just never really read
the Declaration of Independence. Or maybe in class they only read sections of it and
then they moved on to the Constitution where they only read sections of it and then they
moved on and talked about something else. And so actually spending some time doing a
close read of that document really says a lot about who America was and those really
early founding days. What our ideals were and really what our founding contradictions
were. So I’m excited to continue encouraging the historic sites in the National Trust to
do civics oriented work, to really explore the ways in which all of our historic sites
regardless of their time period or what their core themes are, can really explore some of
these really founding ideas. Cause once again, there’s all kinds of fun stuff that our
visitors come with in their minds, but being able to help show them there is a wide breadth
of topics that can be talked about at our historic sites. And please come back again
and again and again because we’ve got something new, we’ve got something interesting, and
we’ve something ready for everybody.
Fabulous. You know, we’re on a webinar format so we can’t see all the people who are applauding
<>, and I’m just going to applaud and say thank you, you know, to both of you and
to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz who’s not with us at this moment, but you know, for a fabulous
exchange and with that, Katie I turn things back to you.
Thanks, Phil and again, I also want to echo that and say thank you to Phil Deloria, Roxanne Dunbar-Oritiz,
Elon Cook Lee, and Nat Sheidley for such an energizing, I think hopeful, and
truly resonant discussion. And thanks to all of you for adding your voices to the conversation
through the chat. Stay tuned for more “Unfinished: America at 250” events and programming coming soon,
we're just getting started here! Be sure to add the UNFINISHED: America at 250
website to your favorites and follow @BostonNHP on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And if
you missed our opening session, “Remixing the Revolution,” a fully accessible recording
is now available and linked to our website. So look for those links in the chat. To close
us out, I'd like to pass it off to Amanda Bradshaw, a 21-year-old artist from Maplewood,
New Jersey who is currently pursuing her Bachelor's degree at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Her arrangement of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" reminds us of the continuing relevance of
past struggles and activism, as well as the power and importance of raising our own voices
and sharing our own stories to shape our ongoing and unfinished national narrative.
Hello. My name is Amanda Bradshaw. I’ve had the honor of making an arrangement of
“Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I was very excited when I was also asked to speak about
its significance. It was written by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson in 1900
for an event celebrating Abraham Lincoln's birthday in Jacksonville, Florida. Ever since
that event, the song was passed down from generation to generation until it was dubbed
the Black National Anthem by the NAACP in 1919. This hymn had such a powerful message
it was used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s. The song’s
lyrics are a hopeful appeal for freedom and liberation for the African-American people
in the midst of all the injustice they faced in past and present times. This eloquent prayer
has been sung for generations and is still needed to this day. Even with how old the
hymn is, we the African American people are still struggling with injustice. There is
a new battle to fight everyday with some of the most recent ones making worldwide recognition
such as Sandra Bland, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. I originally made this arrangement
for a Black History Month program at Berklee College of Music. I’ll admit, when I first
did it, I approached it as any other project and thought nothing of it. As a Black woman,
I had heard the song plenty of times. But the response that it got reminded me how powerful
and significant this chance was to show people, especially who had never heard it before,
the significance of this song. I was surprised and excited that it was shown to a whole new
audience of people and was even more surprised when the National Park Services contacted
me to use it. I was weary at first, but when I had a meeting to hear about how this program
was to show the history of America through the eyes of people not as heard through history
textbooks, I was all for it because it got the chance to see a whole new audience that
also needed to be reminded of how powerful and special the song was. So I hope you enjoy
“Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
<> <<mix of “do-do-do-do” at different pitches followed by
slow tempo of “ah----” at different pitches.>>
Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise. High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the ro-, the rolling sea.
<<mix of “do-do-do-do” at different pitches followed by slow tempo of “ah----” at different pitches.>>
Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring.
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies.
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea – rolling sea.
Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught---oh,
Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought – brought - brought -- brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day, our new day begun.
Let us march on till victory is won – won – won -won-----