Recovery Through

Interviews

One of the major goals of the CTN project was to get a small team of diverse (age, race, gender) scholars to engage in telling their own stories and also engaging in the stories of African American ancestors past and present in order to find shared themes among our lives and then engage in conversations around race and racism. After a months of engaging diverse people in the Kalamazoo community in deep conversations around race and racism, five diverse scholars emerged to engage in these final two pieces of the project: Telling Michigan Stories.



There were two components to Telling Michigan Stories:


1. Scholar Biographies Workshop to tell Participant Stories


2. Pensioner Stories

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Goal 1: to recover the stories of a multi-generational group of descendants 

​Part 1 of the project: Scholar Biographies Workshop

The scholars were asked to bring  3 primary documents about themselves that they could share. In doing so, this would inevitably serve as their documentation of their lives for the other historian/scholars in the group. Some of those documents could include:
- newspaper article
- short autobiography
- birth certificate
- transcripts
- health records
- bill
- driver's license
- plane or bus ticket
- letter
- poem
- card
- photograph

Ultimately the participants were asked in the workshop to add some additional objects or documents to the ones they brought. The additions were to be things in their purse or bag that they intended on throwing away but hadn't yet. They were then asked to put all of those documents and objections together without distinguishing between the "valuable" and the "disposable" and hand them to another scholar in the group without explanation. That scholar was then supposed to use those objects and documents to tell the story of that person based on the objects. The goal was to both attain their stories and to become, for a moment, an historian who interprets objects and documents from people in the past in order to tell their stories. This workshop was also intended to prepare them to interpret the pension records of an African American of their choosing in the next workshop. They used the following process to complete these scholar biographies:

​Step 1: Inventory the objects / decide what is important
Step 2: What story does each object tell?
Step 3: What is the collective story when you put the objects together?
Step 4: What is missing? Think about biases, limitations, omissions.
Step 5: What other information do you need to round out the story of this person?
Step 6: Where can you find this information?
 
The product/outcome:
  • The scholars got to tell each others stories and then engage in conversation about accuracy, bias, race, omissions and next steps. Read the process and rough draft biography for one of the participants here.
  • The scholars got to know each other and interrogate their own biases and assumptions. Read a transcript of the workshop experience of the participants here.
  • The scholars learned tools to engage the pensions.

Recovery &


Preservation


Through Primary


​Sources
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Goal 1 continued: to recover and preserve the stories of a multi-generational group of ancestors 

​The project: Civil War Pension Records 

At the commencement of firing in 1861, Black individuals and groups in places like Detroit and Battle Creek prepared for and organized efforts to enlist black men in the War of the Rebellion. From the time the 1st Michigan Colored Infantry was formed on February 17, 1863 to the end of the war in 1865, 1,446 enlisted men fought in what became the 102nd Michigan Regiment.  Before and after Michigan began recruitment in 1863, at least 90 men enlisted in regiments outside of the state like the 54th Massachusetts. 
 
After their service, hundreds of these veterans, their widows and children submitted pension applications for a plethora of the injuries and diseases the men contracted from the time they enlisted until their discharge. Each file generated thick tomes of accounts from the claimant, other veterans, physicians, coworkers, family members, employers and neighbors.  These rich documents illuminate outstanding late 19th and early 20th century perspectives on place, family, gender, economy, resistance, health, relationships, power, story, credibility, identity, work, community, progress, legality, government, love, survival, networks and borders. 

Denise Miller, project director of CTN, helped Dr. Michelle Johnson collect and digitize more than 95 of these pension records. Then CTN participants engaged with these records to take inventory of important narratives by identifying what story each document in their chosen pensions told, what the collective story all of the documents in the entire pension told, what information was missing due to bias or omission, what that pension tells us about the social, political and economic climate for black people in Michigan at the time and finally what themes emerged from that pension that connect to themes regarding race, racism today.
 
The product/outcome:

Participants were able to complete a summary of their pensioner and contextualize them in their lives in the South or the Midwest before the Civil War, their lives in the Civil War and then in Michigan after the war. They then added that information to the Michigan Historical Center's Exhibits for A New Century database of black people in Michigan from 1815 -1915. They also completed a short biography of their pensioner that will be included in the CTN book. Some of those autobiographies can be found here.

Re-pen, Repaint and Restore


through Community Conversations

Goal 2: production of the following: a. a 3-act play that reflects the authentic narratives, and b. facilitate multiple, creative and layered community conversations that use the authentic narratives and documents, the ancestors, the descendants, the young people and the larger community to talk to each other in order to begin to accurately rewrite us. 

​The project: Monthly Community Conversations and workshops
 
The product/outcome:
  • participants produced material for and some participated in two multimedia performances at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts called Common Grounds
  • an anthology of participant poems, most significant change experiences and historical paragraphs
  • formation of a white allies and people of color allies to the white allies groups