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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

Preservation and Decay as Public History at the Moon-Randolph Homestead

by Gwendolyn Lockman

Past the local dump and the interstate, and separated by foothills from the nearby historic neighborhoods of Missoula, Montana, the Moon-Randolph Homestead can be found, steeling itself against the modern world but not quite stuck in the past. It is an unusual historical site where the ecological and the human, and the past and the present melt into one another.

Figure 1: Entrance gate for the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

Before U.S. westward expansion and federal homesteading efforts, Indigenous people traversed the North Hills of Missoula on the Trail to the Buffalo. They passed through nearby Hell Gate Canyon, named both for the cold, rough waters of the river and for the ambushes between tribes that occurred at the canyon. Once the U.S. seized the land in the late nineteenth century, homesteaders in the Missoula valley tried to raise subsistence crops and livestock there. These small parcels of land had little of the potential for profit that large, thousand-plus acre ranches enjoyed.

Ray and Luella Moon came to Missoula from Minnesota staking their homestead claim in 1889. They came to “prove up,” sell the land, and move on. Ray Moon sold his land to his relatives, George and Helen Moon, the same day he acquired the deed to the property in 1894. Then Ray and Luella left Missoula. George and Helen Moon had moved to Seattle by 1907. William and Emma Randolph came to Missoula from White Sulphur Springs, Montana to buy a farm so Emma could raise chickens and get William to settle down. The Randolphs tracked down the Moons in Seattle and wrote to them to purchase the land.[1]

William and Emma lived the rest of their lives in Missoula, alternating between the homestead, which they called the Randolph Ranch, and a home in town. They raised their three sons there and often let extended family stay with them for long stretches of time. William and Emma passed away in 1956 within months of each other. Their youngest son, Bill, continued living at ranch until his death in 1995. In 1992, Bill put a conservation easement on his land, which protected it from development after his death. The City of Missoula purchased the nearly 470 acres in 1997 and created the North Hills open space and trail system. Of those acres, 13 became the Moon-Randolph Homestead site. The North Missoula Community Development Corporation, a local nonprofit, created the Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission in 1998 to advocate for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. [2]

Figure 2: Panorama of the Moon Randolph Homestead Site from the Barn looking South and West, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

In 1998, the city began a program to house caretakers on site to oversee the Moon-Randolph Homestead, raise livestock, host events, and interface with the public. The Department of Interior listed Moon-Randolph on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. It is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm, May through October, and is used by several groups during the week, including the Montana Conservation Corps, Opportunity Resource, Youth Homes, and Parks and Recreation Homestead Camps.[3] Dr. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, was the first caretaker for the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She wrote her dissertation about her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s cataloging the Randolphs’ belongings.[4] DeSilvey’s scholarship contemplates the role of decay in heritage sites. She advocates for what she calls “encounter[s] with the debris of history,” allowing deterioration to proceed as a mode of historic interpretation.[5] Her approach to Moon-Randolph was to interfere as little as possible with anything on site. Though DeSilvey catalogued all of the artifacts and documents at Moon-Randolph, the decision to curate decay combined with a lack of dedicated city resources left much of what was on site to erode away or be eaten by the mice that inhabit the site.

Figure 3: Photos of decay at the Moon Randolph Homestead Site, June 2019. Photos by Gwen Lockman.

DeSilvey acknowledged in her dissertation the virtual impossibility that the city-managed property be allowed to totally decay. She suggested that, “Future management of the site will have to find a compromise between a celebration of entropic heritage and the conservation of material traces.”[6] As an intern for the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Department of Parks and Recreation, the priority for my summer job at the Homestead was to help the preservation and interpretations methods for the site to evolve.

Figure 4: Photo of winch, still standing after original Mining Shed Collapse in 2014. Photo from Moon Randolph Homestead/City of Missoula.

My duties included the curation of the reconstructed Mining Shed. The Mining Shed had been entirely reconstructed, out of both new and salvaged materials, after collapsing in 2014, and exists in direct contradiction with the decay at the Homestead. The original Mining Shed stood from around 1900 until its collapse in 2014. It sheltered a hoist for the small-scale coal mining operation that William Randolph maintained on his land. Coal mining was not an especially profitable venture in Missoula, though at least one company, Hell Gate Coal, successfully mined the North Hills in the early 1900s. The naming of the Coal Mine Road, which led to the family ranches of the North Hills, Randolphs’ included, suggests Missoulians knew the area to bear coal. One must still use Coal Mine Road to get to Moon-Randolph and its neighbors, the city dump included.[7] Coal at the Homestead was likely found by George Moon, if not Ray Moon. Mining was a special interest for William Randolph, who was more of a dreamer and tinkerer than a farmer. The Randolphs’ quaintly named “Little Phoebe” mine produced low-grade coal, mostly traded with neighbors or used at home. They hired men to work in the mine, signaling either some profit or William’s financial dedication to his side projects. Robert, the middle Randolph son, wrote about the mine in his boyhood diary during the winter of 1916-1917. The Randolphs used coal from Little Phoebe until the 1930s, then let it fill with water to use to irrigate the pasture. In 1937, Robert wrote from Spokane, Washington to ask his father if he had given the coal’s use any further thought. William converted the building into a workshop but worked around the hoist, which still stands in its original place. Snow in the winter of 2014 caused the original building’s collapse. City and private crews completed the reconstruction in 2018. The new building is slightly larger than the original structure but is a close reproduction of the old shed.[8]

Figure 5: Photo of reconstructed Mining Shed, July 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

My curation of the Mining Shed sought to more formally interpret the space while maintaining the Homestead as a place both lost to time and still writing its history. The floor space must be kept free so that the building can be used as a gathering space in inclement weather. It is the safest and largest covered space on site, which will be slow to change, because historic site classification restrictions prohibit new permanent foundation construction. The Mining Shed interpretation does not recreate a specific year of its lifespan but instead illustrates the several layers of its use over time and restoration. We arranged artifacts from mining and shop work. We integrated elements of the original building into the structure of the new building. This protects the intact remains of the old shed and makes the reconstruction apparent through comparison. I wrote limited interpretative signage and selected for display original documents from the Moon Cabin archive related to William Randolph’s mining ventures away from the Homestead.

One of my goals for the Mining Shed was to connect the Homestead to Montana’s economic history from statehood in 1889 through the post-war era. The Moon-Randolph history connects Missoula’s river, trade, agriculture, timber, mining, and railroad economy and history. William Randolph’s investments and work in Montana and beyond call attention to the several ways he sought to make money outside of agriculture. His ventures included work for Standard Brick Company in Missoula, management of the Sibley timber property in Lolo, Montana, and attempts at placer mining in the Nine Mile Valley east of Missoula. Presenting this history highlights piecemeal economic survival in Montana prior to the 1960s and the survival of the Randolphs’ story through material and documentary evidence.

Figure 6 Photo of “Little Phoebe” Mining Adit, June 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

These changes marked a shift toward formal curation at Moon-Randolph. However, we sought to maintain “The Spirit of the Homestead,” a term defined in the Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update for 2015-2024. The Spirit of the Homestead aims to maintain Moon-Randolph as “a living place, where historic activities continue and new uses are established, and a place where natural processes of aging and ecological renewal can be appreciated.”[9] The idea of “living history” at the site is not produced as reenactment or period restoration. Rather, the Homestead is kept “alive.” Trees overtake metal refuse from rusty, repurposed farm equipment. There are mice, chipmunks, rabbits, songbirds, hawks, snakes, deer, and the occasional bear. Buildings collapse. Caretakers raise pigs and chickens, haul non-potable water for irrigation from a cistern, and tend to a 130-year-old orchard that still produces cider apples. There is almost no signage and very little written interpretation. The site is left to speak for itself, otherwise visitors must speak to a caretaker or volunteer to ask questions, enjoy a tour, or help with chores.

Figure 7: Photo of Summer 2019 curation in the Mining Shed, August 2019. Photo by Gwen Lockman.

And speak for itself it does: when I returned to the Homestead in May 2020 for a socially distanced excursion, the mining shed had new tenants. Magpies built their winter nests in the rafters of the reconstructed shed. Springtime bunnies darted in and out of the shed. Their curation enhanced ours. As much as there is curated decay at the site, there, too, is resplendent life. History and the present, decay, life, and curation, negotiate their coexistence in the North Hills of Missoula.

Figure 8: Photo of magpie nest in the Moon Randolph Homestead Mining Shed, May 2020. Photo by Caroline Stephens, Moon Randolph Homestead.

[1] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; Montana Association of Land Trusts, “About Conservation Easements,” http://www.montanalandtrusts.org/conservationeasements/; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 2-5. 

[2] Caitlin DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties: a History of a Montana Homestead, second edition (Missoula, MT: Hill and Homestead Preservation Commission, 2002); Caitlin DeSilvey, Salvage Rites: Making Memory on a Montana Homestead, doctoral dissertation, Open University (2003); Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; City of Missoula, North Missoula Community Development Corporation, and Five Valleys Land Trust, “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” Final, Adopted by Missoula City Council May 4, 2015, 7, https://www.ci.missoula.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/31846/MoonRandolphHomestead_StrategicPlan_2015?bidId=. 

[3] Moon-Randolph Homestead, “History,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/history; North Missoula Community Development Corporation, “Moon Randolph Homestead,” http://www.nmcdc.org/programs/moon-randolph-homestead/; United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010, https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/presmonth/2010/Moon-RandolphRanch.pdf; Moon-Randolph Homestead, “Welcome,” https://www.moonrandolphhomestead.org/.

[4] University of Exeter, “Professor Caitlin DeSilvey,” College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geography Department, http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Caitlin_Desilvey; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 4-5.

[5] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 10.

[6] DeSilvey, Salvage Rites, 176.

[7] City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records; DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; J.T. Pardee, “Coal in the Tertiary Lake Beds of Southwestern Montana,” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II (1911);

[8] DeSilvey, Butterflies and Railroad Ties; DeSilvey, Salvage Rites; National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Moon-Randolph Ranch, March 1, 2010; Robert Randolph, Diary, 1916-1917, Moon-Randolph Archive; City of Missoula, Historic Preservation Office, Moon-Randolph Homestead Records.

[9] “Moon-Randolph Strategic Plan Update: 2015-2024,” 7.


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Digital Archive – Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

Digital Archive - Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

by Jaden Janak

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

 

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News.  That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

 

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

 


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The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

By Edward Shore

Carlitos da Silva was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the Ribeira Valley through hydroelectric dams, mining, and commercial agriculture, da Silva defended his community against Francisco Tibúrcio, a rancher from São Paulo. In 1976, Tibúrcio falsified a deed to usurp lands belonging to the residents of São Pedro, a practice known in Brazil as grilagem. When da Silva and his neighbors refused to leave, Tibúrcio dispatched thugs to intimidate residents, burning down homes and setting loose cattle to trample the community’s subsistence garden plots (roças). Several families relocated to the sprawling shantytowns of Itapeuna and Nova Esperança, joining thousands of refugees from rural violence throughout the Ribeira Valley. Yet many others, including Carlitos da Silva, fought back.

A 1982 newspaper clipping documenting territorial dispossession of peasant communities in the Ribeira Valley.

Supported by Liberationist sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church, da Silva and his neighbors pursued legal action against Francisco Tibúrcio and his associates. In 1978, they formed a neighborhood association, claiming collective ownership to their lands based on usucapião, equivalent to the English common-law term “adverse possession,” meaning “acquired by use.” Their militancy coincided with a wave of activism throughout the Brazilian countryside, as indigenous peoples, landless workers, and descendants of slaves pressed for agrarian reform and reparations. Large landowners, flanked by rural politicians and the police, responded with repression. On the morning of July 2, 1982, assassins gunned down Carlitos da Silva in the doorway of his home, in front of his mother, wife, and young children. Francisco Tibúrico had sought to crush the São Pedro neighborhood association by silencing one of its leaders. Yet the assassination of Carlitos da Silva became a rallying cry, emboldening the descendants of quilombos throughout the Ribeira Valley to fight for land rights and social justice.

“We were threatened. Some of us left [São Pedro] and others fled the region altogether,” Aurico Dias of Quilombo São Pedro told me in a 2015 oral history. “But thanks to our faith in God, we were able to rise up again, quickly, and discovered the courage to take back what was ours.”

I learned about Carlitos da Silva’s story while conducting archival research at the Articulation and Advisory Team to Rural Black Communities of the Ribeira Valley (EAACONE, formerly MOAB, the Movement of Peoples Threatened by Dams), an Eldorado-based civil society organization that defends the territorial rights of quilombos residing in the Atlantic Forest of São Paulo state and Paraná. During my first trip to EAACONE in 2015, I found a dossier documenting the history of political activism for communal land rights in São Pedro, a village established during the 1830s by a fugitive slave, Bernardo Furquim, and his companions, Coadi and Rosa Machado, near the banks of the Ribeira de Iguape River. The dossier was the tip of the iceberg. For more than thirty years, MOAB/EAACONE’s staff has compiled historical documentation—property deeds, baptismal records, court documents, photographs, and oral histories—to strengthen the legal claims of quilombos to their ancestral lands. In 1994, the quilombo community of Ivaporunduva brandished land titles belonging to Gregório Marinho, a fugitive slave, as historical evidence of their long-term territorial dominion when its residents sued the Brazilian government for its failure to apply Article 68, a constitutional provision that accords land rights to the descendants of maroon communities. The lawsuit, the first of its kind in Brazil, paved the way for thousands of quilombo communities to enlist history and genealogical memory to demand collective land rights.

1861 land title belonging to Gregório Marinho

These archival materials documenting the history of the African Diaspora in Brazil are at risk. Government officials have enacted deep cuts to public education, museums, and state archives in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. Although the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro and the Public State Archive of São Paulo have digitized vulnerable materials, many archives and museums throughout Brazil have fallen into disrepair. The electrical fire that tore through Rio’s National Museum in 2018 destroyed priceless artifacts and historical patrimony pertaining to indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians.

Collections documenting underrepresented populations in Brazil, especially quilombos, are politically vulnerable, as well. In 1890, two years after abolition, finance minister Rui Barbosa ordered the treasury to burn all records related to slavery, in part to stave off the demands for the indemnification of slave owners, but also to suppress the historical claims to land rights and reparations that quilombola activists assert today. In 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro declared war on rural activists, pledging to amend the Brazil’s terrorism laws to prosecute members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and vowing never to cede “another centimeter” of land to quilombos and indigenous communities. Amnesty International has reported sabotage, arson, and hacking of human rights activists and progressive civil society organizations throughout Brazil. In light of the dire political situation confronting traditional peoples in Brazil over the past several years, and given EAACONE’s gracious support for my research, I wanted to give back. Then fate intervened.

In March 2015, during my first research trip to the Ribeira Valley, I received an email from my dissertation adviser, Seth Garfield, with exciting news. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation had invited LLILAS Benson to apply for a grant to build local capacity in Latin America to preserve vulnerable human rights documentation and to make the resulting documents digitally accessible. The project embraced a post-custodial approach to archival collection. According to the Society of American Archivists, post-custodial practice requires that “archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.” Through this model, LLILAS Benson establishes contractual partnerships with smaller, underserved institutions with archival collections, including community archives and civil society organizations based in Latin America. Partner institutions maintain ownership of their original materials and intellectual rights over digital copies, while LLILAS Benson provides funding, archival training, and equipment to produce and preserve digital surrogates. Additionally, LLILAS Benson promotes online access to the collections through the Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for historical materials pertaining to human rights in Latin America, which launched in November 2015. Designed to be mutually beneficial, the post-custodial model aims to democratize the traditional power dynamics of archives by repositioning LLILAS Benson as collaborative partners and centering communities as contributors and owners of their own documentary heritage.

Homepage for Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for human rights documentation in Latin America supported by LLILAS Benson and UT Libraries.

The University of Texas at Austin has long been a pioneer in the area of post-custodial archival preservation and human rights. In 2011, LLILAS Benson, UT Libraries, and the School of Law’s Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice partnered with the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) to create an online digital repository of their collection. The existence of the archive, long denied by the Guatemalan government, was uncovered in 2005, and contains nearly 80 million documents relating to the National Police, including their activities during Guatemala’s brutal civil war (1960-1996). Although the collection was physically fragile and remains politically vulnerable, its relationship with the University of Texas at Austin assures its continued viability, providing critical evidence in trials related to human rights violations committed by the National Police and other state actors.

This collaboration laid the foundation for an innovative project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to digitally preserve and provide online access to three archives in Central America: Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA, Nicaragua); the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI, El Salvador); and Center for Regional Research of Mesoamerica (CIRMA, Guatemala). In Spring 2015, LLILAS Benson announced a “call for partners” to support post-custodial initiatives with partners in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, with particular emphasis on archival collections documenting human rights, race, ethnicity and social exclusion. I excitedly shared the news with my friends at EAACONE and the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA), a São Paulo-based NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of traditional peoples in Brazil and a longtime ally of MOAB/EAACONE.

Although my colleagues in Brazil were intrigued by the project, they voiced serious concerns related to privacy, access, and power. EAACONE is hardly a traditional archive. In fact, the collection serves primarily to furnish historical evidence to support quilombos’ legal battles for land and resources. While EAACONE grants access to their archive to vetted researchers, the organization was understandably reluctant to publish any sensitive materials that might jeopardize ongoing cases. Furthermore, their members underscored the necessity of maintaining intellectual and physical control of their collections in their original context. They pointed to the sordid legacy of imperialist collecting practices, whereby researchers from the Global North extracted documentary heritage from communities in the Global South and re-concentrated them in museums and archives in Europe and the United States. In a similar vein, members of quilombos have long lamented how scholars have conducted academic research in their communities, only to withhold their findings or publish them in English. EAACONE and ISA were eager to participate in the post-custodial project, but only if it promoted collaborative partnership to advance the territorial and socio-environmental rights of quilombo communities.

Vanessa de França, teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, speaks at the University of Texas at Austin at the 2017 Lozano Long Conference, “Revoluciones Alimentarias.”

We took their concerns to heart. Over the next four years, I worked with Rachel E. Winston, Black Diaspora Archivist at LLILAS Benson, to build trust and foster partnership between EAACONE, ISA, and LLILAS Benson. “There is something very powerful in helping to facilitate a community’s efforts to document themselves and their experiences. To that end, one of the things that has to be examined very carefully is the equity of the partnership,” Winston later reflected. “This is something that, at its core, has to serve a meaningful purpose for our partners and the larger institutional goal of providing online access to vulnerable, underrepresented, important documents.”

In November 2015, LLILAS Benson invited Frederico Silva, an anthropologist at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) in Eldorado, to participate in a workshop in Austin, Texas, alongside representatives from archival collections in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. Two years later, in Spring 2017, I invited Silva and Vanessa de França, a teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, to Austin to participate in a roundtable discussion about threats to quilombola agriculture and food security at the Lozano Long Conference. Last summer, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Eldorado to deliver our pitch to EAACONE and ISA personally. We assured their full autonomy in selecting materials for digitization and publication, guaranteeing that sensitive documentation would remain inaccessible to the public. In August 2018, members of EAACONE and ISA voted to accept our proposal, joining the Process of Black Communities of Colombia (PCN, Colombia) and the Royal Archive of Cholula (Mexico) as members of LLILAS Benson’s second post-custodial cohort in Latin America.

Last fall, collaborators in Eldorado and Austin prepared for the implementation of this ambitious, transcontinental project. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, EAACONE hired two full-time archival technicians, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes, to process, digitize, and describe the collection materials. De França is a student and activist from Quilombo São Pedro, who has worked with ISA and EAACONE to support the training of quilombola youth leaders. Mello de Gomes is a geographer from Piedade, São Paulo, who has long collaborated with EAACONE and quilombo communities to support human rights, youth education, and the collective mapping of traditionally occupied lands. In Austin, David Bliss, Digital Processing Archivist at LLILAS Benson, researched and ordered scanning equipment and software to meet the needs of our partners, developing a detailed scanning workflow to guide EAACONE’s team through every step of the digitization process. Itza Carbajal, Latin American Metadata Librarian, developed schemas and templates for the capture of metadata, the information displayed alongside archival materials to describe their content and historical context. Under a post-custodial framework, Carbajal will work with de França and Mello de Gomes to produce their own metadata to describe the contents of EAACONE’s collections. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation, I translated workflows and digitization manuals into Portuguese while serving as a liaison between LLILAS Benson and our collaborators in the Ribeira Valley. In February, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Brazil with Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives at LLILAS Benson, to deliver equipment and co-teach a week-long seminar on digitization and metadata for EAACONE’s team.

Back row, from left to right: Rachel E. Winston, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Edward Shore, Sueli Berlanga, Ângela Biagioni; Front row, from left to right: Tânia Moraes, Theresa Polk, Leticia de França, and Camila Mello de Gomes.

The training was the highlight of my professional career, an exercise in community building, collaborative research, and transnational solidarity. Accompanied by Raquel Pasinato and Frederico Silva of the Socio-environmental Institute in Eldorado, we met with EAACONE’s team—Sister Maria Sueli Berlanga, Sister Ângela Biagioni, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Heloisa “Tânia” Moraes, Antônio Carlos Nicomedes, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes—to exchange stories and talk politics over a cafézinho. The group gave us a tour of the archive, displaying historical maps, nineteenth-century land deeds, and photo albums capturing popular demonstrations against the Tijuco Alto hydroelectric dam project during the 1990s. Sueli Berlanga, Sister of Jesus the Good Shepherd nun, attorney, and co-founder of EAACONE, shared pedagogical materials from her early experiences as a community organizer in the countryside, unveiling lessons plans she used to teach literacy and promote conscientização (similar to “consciousness raising”) of the historical legacies of slavery in Brazil. Meanwhile, our teams installed equipment and prepared a work station. Mello de Gomes, de França, and members of EAACONE practiced scanning various kinds of fragile materials—posters, maps, photos, and bound books—creating TIFF files for storage on external hard drives and generating checksums to detect errors that may have occurred during digitization or storage.

Sister Maria “Sueli” Berlanga displays pedagogical materials to promote conscientização (“consciousness raising”) about the history of slavery and white supremacy in Brazil.

Among the materials that EAACONE chose to digitize was the Carlitos da Silva dossier. Leticia de França, a resident of Quilombo São Pedro, identified her relatives in the newspaper clippings, photographs, and testimonies documenting Carlitos’ assassination in 1982 and the murder trial of Francisco Tibúrcio. In capturing metadata for the dossier, she and Mello de Gomes stressed the importance of recording the names of every quilombola who was affected by the violence and who fought for justice for Carlitos da Silva and his community. “Our greatest challenge is to remember all the people whose work has gone unnoticed, those who appear [in the documents] and those who have managed to preserve all this information for so many years, so that today, the archive remains intact to be digitized,” de França reflected. “Now those documents that capture the history of our struggles can be passed onto the communities themselves.”

Camila Mello de Gomes, Leticia de França, and Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva capture metadata for newspaper clippings pertaining to the Carlitos da Silva dossier.

Over the next several months, she and Camila Mello de Gomes will continue to scan and create metadata for more than five thousand documents pertaining to the history of the Quilombo Movement in the Ribeira Valley. They will deliver external hard drives to LLILAS Benson, where the Digital Initiatives Team will process the materials and upload them to LADI. The EAACONE Digital Archive is scheduled to launch this November, together with the PCN and Fondo Real de Cholula digital collections. But the real work is what comes next.

From the very beginning, our collaborators have reflected on how best to use post-custodial digital archives to promote international research, teaching, advocacy, and collaboration to defend the rights of vulnerable communities in Latin America. This week, the Digital Initiatives Team at LLILAS Benson is hosting a symposium in Antigua, Guatemala, where representatives from each of our post-custodial partners will share their experiences and plot future steps.

Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Camila Mello de Gomes, and Leticia de França.

Camila Mello de Gomes and Leticia de França shared with me their vision for EAACONE ahead of the symposium. Mello de Gomes proposed the creation of a Center for the Historical Memory of Traditional Peoples of the Riberia Valley, based on the EAACONE archive, which would encompass the collections pertaining to indigenous communities, caiçaras (traditional inhabitants of the coastal regions of southern and southeastern Brazil, descended from Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants), caboclos (persons of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), and small farmers. She expressed hope the Center would furnish historical documentation to advance territorial claims and redistributive justice. “As these documents make visible the history of human rights violations that traditional peoples of the Ribeira Valley continue to suffer, I believe that international and scholarly pressure can jointly advance calls for historical reparations and accountability for those responsible for this violence, as well as ensure the care and preservation of an extremely powerful and revolutionary collective memory of the work of MOAB/EAACONE.”

Leticia de França expressed hope that the digital archive will serve as a pedagogical resource for preparing the next generation of quilombola activists in the Ribeira Valley. “I hope [the project] draws more young people into confronting the day-to-day challenges that our communities still face…I hope this makes young people more aware of the importance of preserving each document, every single handwritten draft, that tells the history of the struggle of the quilombola people,” Leticia de França reflected. “All these documents are evidence of the social struggles that we have endured throughout history. Our people never had the support of the rich and powerful. Each victory we achieved was [society’s] recognition of our basic rights. Since we are a humble people, our rights are too often ignored. But with the preservation of this archive, the world will know that every single document that we digitized is a human right that we fought for and won.”

LLILAS Benson and Latin American post-custodial partners in Antigua, Guatemala. From left to right: Itza Carbajal; Albert Palacios; Edward Shore; Jessica López (CIDCA); Theresa Polk; Thelma Porres (CIRMA); David Bliss; Marisol Alomia (PCN); Lidia Gómez (Fondo Real de Cholula); Carlos “Santiago” Henriquez Consalvi (MUPI); Leticia Ester de França (EAACONE); Camila Mello de Gomes (EAACONE).

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The author would like to thank the Reed Foundation’s Ruth Landes Memorial Fund, the Mellon ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for supporting his fieldwork in Brazil, which led to post-custodial collaboration between LLILAS Benson, ISA and EAACONE.

In defining post-custodial theory and practice, the author drew from: Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Itza Carbajal, and David Bliss, “Post-Custodialism for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships,”  Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2: 1 (2019).

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You May Also Like:

The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation – Part 1
Review of Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia
Labor history in the sugar industry in Brazil
Labor history in Sao Paulo
Social history of the lottery in Brazil

Other Articles by Edward Shore:

History and Advocacy: Brazil in Turmoil 
Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, by Glenn Cheney
Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today
Beyoncé as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Sound Maps: The New Archive (No. 6)

by Henry Wiencek

In the study of history, it’s easy to fall back on national identities: “Irish music,” an “English accent,” “American Exceptionalism” are just a few examples. But a closer examination of the local cultures—music, dialects, history—that exist within nations demonstrates how misleading those generalizations can be. Just look through one of the British Library’s “Sound Maps” and you’ll be convinced. This remarkable site takes many of the library’s 50,000 recordings of music, regional accents, and oral histories and arranges them geographically on Google Maps. The project is at once global and local—each sound map is an aural window into a unique part of the world. You can hear birds chirping in Algarve, Portugal, a folksinger perform in Carlistrane, Ireland, or the local dialect in Morton, Mississippi.

US_AccentsOne of the most fascinating—and addictive—features on the site is “Your Accents,” a global map of the world’s seemingly endless variety of dialects. The map features recordings of people from across the globe reading the same English phrases, allowing listeners to discern how each locality articulates “scone,” “garage” and “schedule” among other richly pronounceable words. The most immediate differences are apparent along national lines, as English, Indian, American, and various other accents contour the words in unique ways. But the map goes even deeper—revealing the astonishing regional differences that exist within those nations. Although people from Brighton and Leeds ostensibly share an “English” accent, the sonic differences between them are vast.

Holocaust

Other sound maps use the same technology to tell far more sobering stories. “Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust” archives oral histories of that traumatic epoch. Again using Google Maps, the page arranges survival stories based on geographic origins: individuals from France, England, Germany, Poland and even Azerbaijan are all represented. These unique and deeply affecting histories underscore the striking heterogeneity of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors. They were rich and poor; came from big cities and small towns; and identified as religiously devout and irreligious. By mapping their oral histories, the British Library visually captures that geographic and experiential diversity.  And by letting them speak, reinforces the kinds of variations that get flattened out or even erased when reading text on a page.

lumbermen_violin_and_sticks_1943The British Library’s “Sound Maps” is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in hearing what the world sounds like. Cultural historians and preservationists will take particular interest in the collections of music and dialects—time capsules of old folkways quietly vanishing in a globalizing world. Readers may note the site’s emphasis on English speaking regions, especially the UK, but the geographic breadth of its collection remains deeply impressive. These maps do not just capture the sounds of the world, they capture its most compelling minutiae: the small town pubs, the remote jungles, and the fascinating people.

Explore the latest finds in the NEW ARCHIVE:

 

Charley Binkow on iTunes’s salute to Black History Month

And Henry Wiencek finds a new way of looking at Emancipation

 

Photo Credits:

Screenshot from “Your Accents” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Screenshot from “Jewish Survivors Of The Holocaust” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Quebecois lumbermen making music with a violin and sticks, 1943 (Image courtesy of National Film Board of Canada)

 

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