Project Showcase: Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac

Posted on May 21, 2013 by editors

In 1969 the Canadian and New Brunswick governments agreed to create Kouchibouguac National Park along the east coast of this Atlantic province. At the time, establishment of a national park required removing the people who resided there, in the belief that nature should be exhibited to visitors without signs of any human presence. Over 1200 individuals were uprooted, having been told that their lives were worthless and that they could only be helped by being forced to move.

But government officials had not taken into account how this particular case of forced removal would be viewed by the residents, most of whom were Acadians, a people with a strong memory of having been deported by the British in the mid-18th century. There was large-scale resistance that resulted in the park being shut down on several occasions.

And the leader of the resistance, Jackie Vautour, remains a squatter on his land to this day.

The Kouchibouguac story of removal and resistance has provided a source of inspiration for Acadian artists working in a variety of genres. But the story of resistance only tells part of what happened at Kouchibouguac, because most families simply and quietly left their lands to create new lives, often within kilometres of the borders of the park. Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park tells a wide range of stories inspired by the experiences of the residents.

The central feature of the site is the presentation of 26 video portraits drawn from interviews with former residents, who often told their stories while standing on the lands where they once lived. (One of these videos has been embedded below.) Visitors are encouraged to interact with the map that was created at the time of the expropriation to facilitate the process. Here, however, the map has been subverted to serve as a navigational device to return the voices of the residents to their lands.

The residents who were removed to allow the creation of Kouchibouguac National Park can never return to their lands, but this project makes it possible for some of their voices to return, if only virtually.

~ Ronald Rudin, Concordia University

NCPH 2013 Student Project Award: Learning from community

Posted on April 10, 2013 by editors

The congregation of Cedar Grove Baptist, one of the two churches in Terra Cotta, in the 1930s
Photo courtesy Dennis Waddell.

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Ellen Kuhn, Shawna Prather, and Ashley Wyatt, students at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and co-creators of the exhibit “Past the Pipes: Stories of the Terra Cotta Community,” which won the 2013 Student Project Award.

What creates a community?

In the face of significant social and economic constraints, a tightly-knit, self-reliant community developed in Terra Cotta, a segregated company town located a few miles west of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. From the 1900s to the 1970s, members of this community worked at the nearby Pomona Terra Cotta Company, manufacturing clay pipes used to build sewer systems. Terra Cotta was the kind of place where family meant more than just blood kin; it meant giving food to the homeless man who lived in the woods nearby–even though residents had to feed their own large families on less than eleven dollars a week. It meant sharing one church building between Baptist and Methodist congregations, alternating services each week. It meant welcoming white children to play in their homes when a reciprocal invitation to play at white homes was never extended. Today, community in Terra Cotta means keeping bonds initially formed in the neighborhood alive through shared memories.

Now, these previously unheard voices are featured at the Terra Cotta Heritage Museum in a permanent exhibition that was created through a collaboration known as the Terra Cotta Community History Project. Continue reading →

NCPH 2013 Project Award: The power of place within us

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Yolanda Chávez Leyva

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Yolanda Chávez Leyva, co-director of Museo Urbano at 500 S. Oregon, the winner of the 2013 NCPH Public History Project Award.

El Paso is a windy city. Its dusty winds blow noisily into homes and offices, tear shingles off roofs and lift trash swirling up into the atmosphere where papers and plastic bags dance with desert sands that hide the mountains beneath a hazy cloud. Most El Pasoans dread the wind but I am grateful for it because it helped me learn what a public history project could mean to a community.

One summer day in 2011, I woke up early and on a whim decided to take a drive to Museo Urbano, a community museum I co-directed in El Segundo Barrio, one of the most historic Mexican American neighborhoods in the United States, located in one of the poorest zip codes in the county. When I arrived, I noticed a group of men sitting on the stoop of the turn of the 20^th century tenement building where we were located. For over a hundred years, men have gathered on street corners in El Segundo waiting to be contracted for work so I wasn’t surprised to see them. What did surprise me was what they had to say. Continue reading →

Impacts and outcomes: Learning to measure success

Posted on February 8, 2013 by kate p

The ultimate challenge: How can we measure what a place means to a visitor?

We are just passing that time of year when my team at The Trustees of Reservations transitions out of our high season and into the relative quiet of the winter. With a busy program season for our historic homes from around April to October and a budget planning season starting in December, I have about two months in the fall to review all of the data that we have collected. I use the information to determine where I will allocate staff and resources for the next year, what the key promotional opportunities might be, and what projects will become priorities for our winter fundraising efforts.

Being able to do this thoughtfully and comprehensively is critical to my programs and, more importantly, to the people we serve. Continue reading →

Writing locally, thinking globally

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Robert Weyeneth

It is welcome news to hear about all the many ways that NCPH and the field of public history are internationalizing these days.

Our annual meeting in Ottawa this spring has a program rich with participants from Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. The meeting also marks the inaugural conference of the International Federation for Public History, which NCPH as an organization – and many of our members individually – have been actively supporting from its inception.

Much of the brainstorming about the future of The Public Historian has also been focusing on how to incorporate more international content, building on the good foundation the journal has constructed in recent years. Continue reading →

Oral histories of the land: Creating community dialogues on the environment

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Will Walker

Doing public programs is never easy, but it is the most immediate and rewarding way to engage directly with your audience. This past semester, the Cooperstown Graduate Program’s oral history project experimented with a new type of public program. Taking our cue from the statewide “Community Conversations” sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which also provided funding for our project, we decided to use our large archive of oral histories as the basis for a series of dialogues about important environmental topics. Continue reading →

The happy historian (part 1): Are you up to speed?

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Liz Almlie

Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch stars in the Hulu series ‘Up to Speed.’ (Credit: Hulu.com)

There’s a show on the website Hulu you may have seen, called “Up to Speed” with host Timothy “Speed” Levitch and director Richard Linklater. Speed is a licensed tour guide—kind of—advising us that “to truly travel is to appreciate the beauty in the unexpected.” The show takes viewers on the magical history tours we all secretly dream about. His tours are not constrained by a route, by chronology, or by the fact that inanimate objects can’t talk. We go to “hang-out and empathize with the inner psyches of famous landmarks and visit with the great monumentally-ignored monuments,” because “why the f#@! not?”

Each episode of “Up to Speed” has a broad theme—aimlessness, self-perception of reality, labor & activism, boundlessness, etc. Each stop is a great story, magically and historically told, and most can lead easily into critiques of traditional heritage tourism. Continue reading →

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 2)

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Joseph Cialdella

To address the issue of how to make historic designation and documentation a part of Cliveden’s ongoing dialogue with its various publics, the site sponsored a forum themed around the question “Do National Historic Landmarks Represent Our Historic Values?” This event was an opportunity to bring together community members, museum professionals, and preservationists from the Germantown area to discuss the NHL process, our research for the nomination, and moreover the changing meaning of Cliveden’s history today, all while enlivening what can otherwise seem on the surface to be a closed and static process of filling out a bureaucratic form. Continue reading →

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 1)

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Joseph Cialdella

Cliveden is best known for its associations with the Battle of Germantown during the Revolutionary War.

Through the support of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan, I recently found myself, along with my team of colleagues, navigating unfamiliar territory in the form of partnership with Cliveden of the National Trust to update the site’s National Historic Landmark (NHL) nomination. The collaboration presented us with many challenges, but two problems we encountered seem particularly relevant to the work of historic sites and historians today. First, could the somewhat bureaucratic process of updating NHL documents be aligned with more public conversations about the meanings of the past? And second, what role could we, as experts but outsiders, play in this process? Continue reading →

Project Showcase: MNopedia

Posted on November 30, 2012 by editors

MNopedia is a new born-digital, open-access encyclopedia of Minnesota. It is a project of the Minnesota Historical Society, one of the largest and oldest historical societies in the nation. Funding so far has come from a special statewide fund established in 2008 by the taxpayers of Minnesota, the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund (ACHF), a portion of which is specifically dedicated to projects that preserve Minnesota’s historical and cultural heritage.

MNopedia is a growing resource. It launched in August 2011 with approximately thirty articles on a variety of topics and now has over one hundred entries. New articles are created and published on an on-going basis. Contributors come from all over the state. They include in-house staff, volunteers, and commissioned subject area experts. Many contributors use MNopedia as a way to bring attention to lesser known, but still important topics in their communities, lifting up and making available previously unpublished resources. Subject ideas come from a variety of sources, including reader and contributor suggestions, but all final content decisions are made by the in-house editing team.

MNopedia’s target audience is the general public. Each article is meant as a quick, factual introduction to a topic, with short overview text passages accompanied by multimedia, a chronology, a bibliography, and additional related resources, so that researchers, including students, have jumping off points for further study. Content is licensed to be easily shared and a citation function is built into the site. MNopedia won a MUSE award in the Education category from the American Alliance of Museums’ Media and Technology Committee at the Annual Meeting in Minneapolis this past spring. Please visit us and let us know what you think! We welcome your feedback.

~ Molly Huber, Editor and Project Manager

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Tag Archives: sense of place