VT Folklife Goes to Tulsa!
This month, the VT Folklife Education team, Sasha Antohin and Mary Wesley, attended the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They joined folklorists and colleagues from cultural organizations around the country for four days of lively discussion, presentations, sight-seeing with local guides, music and dance performances, and connections with collaborators previously encountered only via Zoom.
AFS began planning a gathering in Tulsa in 2018, to be held in 2020. After two years of pandemic disruption, this event had a palpable air of gratitude and the hard work of the local partners and organizers was evident in the excellent array of programming. With recent national attention on the host city following the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre on June 1, 2021, ongoing local efforts to reconcile with this painful history were front and center at the meeting. Local organizations, scholars, community activists, and artists offered an array of perspectives and calls to action for restorative justice and elevating histories of resilience and struggle from Tulsa’s Black and Indigenous communities (see 2022 conference theme “Re-Centering the Periphery”).
Presenters at the Local Learning “Teaching with Primary Sources in Folklife Collections” session
A highlight of Mary and Sasha’s time in Tulsa was an in-person meeting and presentation with colleagues from the History Miami Museum and the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at the Oklahoma State University library, both partners with Vermont Folklife in a two-year project through the Library of Congress’ “Teaching with Primary Sources” program. Coordinated by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education, this project draws together collection materials from the three partner institutions to create regionally-specific educational resources that resonate with national concerns.
Tulsa street art in the historic Greenwood neighborhood
After a year of remote work, it was a thrill for staff from the three organizations to come together and share progress on this project. In a 3-hour presentation, the team gathered with fellow conference attendees, local teachers and teaching artists to explore what it means to learn from primary source materials, in particular materials gathered through an ethnographic- or oral history-based process. Vermont Folklife offered a preview of their primary source set on Vermont farming and foodways and facilitated a listening activity on the value of text and audio records. History Miami presented the multiple ways their museum showcases community history through their exhibits and outreach programs. They also discussed strategies for object-based learning, drawing from their collections. In one example, the Oklahoma team walked us through an exercise examining photo images from their archival collections. Educators helped us grapple with the fact that following the massacre, images from that traumatic day were made into widely distributed souvenir postcards (see below). These artifacts of racism are now some of the key primary sources that historians and researchers refer to when trying to understand the horrific event. Inviting teachers and students to reinterpret the postcards and the different archival labels and tags they’ve been given over the years was a powerful exercise in exploring how various groups have interpreted these events at different moments in time.
The second half of the session featured artists and educators from Fire in Little Africa (FILA), a multimedia hip-hop project commemorating the 1921 massacre through the music and art of over 50 rappers, singers, producers, and artists from Oklahoma. The resulting body of work includes a music album, documentary film, podcast, music videos, and a teaching curriculum, the stated goal of which is “to commemorate the ancestors that we lost, but also acknowledge the living ancestors that we are working to build up in this present moment: our children.” The project’s name is derived from an archival tag hand-written on one of the souvenir postcards mentioned above–across a plume of smoke rising from the burning Greenwood neighborhood, it reads: “Little Africa on Fire.”
Photograph Retrieved from the Library of Congress
FILA Logo
Presenter and Executive Producer of FILA Stevie “Dr. View” Johnson explained that rephrasing the caption was an act of reclaiming community agency and conjuring an active spark of creativity and activism through the project. Alongside discussions of archival holdings, primary source descriptions, and historic records, the team from FILA provided a tangible example of how documentation of the past can act as a reference point to inform and shape the present and future.
The TPS team is grateful for the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by this work.
