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Mar 30
7:00 P.M.–9:30 P.M.
CUNY Graduate Center New York

The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the cracks in our social contract, both locally and nationally, yet it also renewed interest in civic engagement and rearticulated our common purpose. An examination of the diverse ordeals of New Yorkers prompts questions about the relationship between local health infrastructures, the American federal system, …

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Environmental Storytelling in the St. Lawrence Watershed

“The North Country Art, Land and Environment 2020 Summit,” held this past September, brought together individuals and organizations from across the Adirondack region, using art and the humanities to think about local solutions to a global problem. The summit was organized by Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo of Talking Wings, an environmental filmmaking and  storytelling collective, in partnership with St. Lawrence University, which hosted the summit. The project’s planning and implementation phases were funded in part by HNY Vision and Action grants, respectively. 

This interview, held in August before the Summit, by HNY’s Joe Murphy, is the second in a series of pieces with scholars and grantees exploring the question of how culture and science relate to one another in our public discourse and how that shapes the environmental movement today. Read the first interview here.

Photo: Aerial view of the St. Lawrence river by Abdallah Hussein

What brought you to your work in environmental humanities and film? How did the mission of Talking Wings bring you into partnership with St. Lawrence University?

The thing that most clarified for us the relationship between film and environmental humanities is education. One of us (Tzintzun) went to St. Lawrence University to study film, but never actually became a film major; instead, they were a liberal-arts student who deliberately crafted their coursework so that they could see film studies as part of a broader humanities tradition. The other of us (Blake) — who was born and raised in Italy and educated at a modern-language school, immersed in history and literature — has a background in art, strictly speaking, but the humanities have always been fundamental to their worldview. This pattern continued during our undergraduate years, Tzintzun at St. Lawrence University and Blake at SUNY Potsdam. Blake started with art proper but gradually moved toward documentary filmmaking, to the point where, now, their focus is almost entirely on documenting the climate crisis and the solutions put forward by ordinary people. 

This combination of film and the humanities, especially history, shapes our work to this day. Talking Wings is a storytelling collective that focuses on the environment. Our goal is to use various kinds of storytelling — conferences, summits, conversations, documentary media, contemporary art and dance — to communicate the history and memory of land and water and to work towards concrete solutions to environmental degradation. Our documentaries and public-facing events routinely blend art with history and public memory. 

The Summit, NCALE for short, is really a crystallization of our philosophy and public-facing work up to this point. We recently returned to St. Lawrence (after a period of living in Massachusetts) because we wanted to give something back to this community, preferably through a collaborative project with St. Lawrence University. Our purpose has been to tell the the environmental history of the St. Lawrence Watershed, through the prism of several key themes, such as land, water, food production, and social justice. The St. Lawrence Watershed has a very complex history. It’s an enormous region spanning 300,000 acres. The land is Haudenosaunee-Akwesasne, primarily Mohawk territory. Beyond New York State, it expands into the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec and of course, Akwesasne. The part of the Watershed inside New York State contains 11,371 miles of water from all the tributaries that flow into the St. Lawrence River. There’s just so much water here. The region’s history is bound up with that water precisely because so many people depend on it. This is true of the region’s aboriginal inhabitants as well as the settler-colonial communities that, after conquering the land, relied on the waterways for travel and transport of goods to market. In the twentieth century, massive corporations like GM, Renault, and Alcoa used the region’s damworks to power their respective industries, each one polluting the rivers in turn. So, given this history and our eagerness to delve into it with others, we reached out to some of our former professors and to organizations we had worked with in the past, and before long our network in St. Lawrence had expanded to include people and institutions from across the region.

What is the overall objective of the NCALE 2020 summit? What questions did it raise for you?

At this stage, what we’re trying to do is raise awareness about positive developments in the North Country, hopefully setting an example of community development at the regional level. We want people to start thinking about the future in practical terms. It is expected that, in the wake of the pandemic, this part of the state will see an awesome influx of new residents. This, in addition to the fact that the Akwesasne population has been growing rapidly and will continue to do so in the decades ahead. The question becomes, how do you plan for demographic change on this scale? What will the relationship be between people and the natural environment, especially the water, the region’s most valuable resource? How might everyone, natives and new arrivals alike, enjoy those resources without contributing to ecological disaster? We want to include as many people as possible in this conversation, not just students at the local colleges but also entire communities, including the Akwesasne Nation. 

A key part of this conversation is challenging what can be called the “doomsday narrative” on climate change, this apocalyptic tone that pervades climate discourse in contemporary mass media. Doomsday rhetoric is employed mostly by corporate media outlets to sow doubt and complacency in the general population. It’s this fatalistic idea that, since human extinction is pretty much “locked in” at this point, we might as well double down on the hyper-consumptive lifestyle that contributed to climate change in the first place. It’s like a perverse variation on that line you hear in TV commercials: “Get it now while supplies last!” Solutions to the climate crisis are almost never mentioned in this discourse. We hear the incessant drum of bad news—Marine life is dying! Polar bears are starving! Invasive weeds are strangling native flora! Solutions are rarely, if ever, put forward. The doomsday narrative systematically denies the proposition that, if humans have contributed to the problem of climate change, they can also contribute to its amelioration, if not its reversal. 

Not only is that narrative false, it also obscures the real work that people are doing everyday to discover and activate solutions to the climate crisis. There are solutions to the climate crisis. People all over the world are working hard to create technology that can slow down the systematic destruction of the environment and generally improve humanity’s relation to the earth. The solutions advanced in different parts of the world reflect the unique needs of their respectives community, but there’s no doubt that everyone is working together in the grand context of the climate crisis. We’re hoping the Summit will contribute to a shift away from problem-mongering toward problem-solving. We can start by changing our mentality, individually and collectively, by thinking positively about solutions to the climate crisis, not just the problems. 

Our goal is to connect the groups and individuals who are doing this kind of work in the St. Lawrence River Valley, and then cultivate those communities into a broader network that can expand across the country and, we hope, the globe. To this extent, the Summit is just one phase of an ongoing conversation among the people of the North County and between the North Country and the wider world. 

Climate solutions are being developed all the time, all over the world, and yet people tend to do this work in isolation, unaware of what other communities are doing along similar lines. We want to make people’s ideas — their work — more accessible to a broader audience, while at the same time building a sense of community and shared purpose. We also want to contribute to a growing sense of momentum in the climate movement, this feeling that things are indeed changing, that people are moving toward a better, brighter future. In this sense, we’re just providing the infrastructure for communities to share ideas and lay the groundwork for concerted action in the future. This is what the NCALE Summit is all about: bringing together people from multiple disciplines and contexts — environmental studies, arts, humanities, community activists — and placing under the same canopy, town by town, region by region.

Why is it important to think about local communities and solutions when addressing global patterns? What is unique about the St. Lawrence River Watershed in this regard? 

The animating idea here is to strengthen communities at the local level so that they can resist the imperatives of the global market — to imagine and take steps toward creating an agriculture and an economy that works for ordinary people and not just corporations. The paradox of contemporary economics is that, as the world becomes increasingly commodified, the environmental conditions on which the global economy depends break down ever faster. Society is broken down, too; people are divided, socially and politically, unable to resist the human devastation of environmental destruction. 

Our emphasis is on repair. We want to repair the bonds of communities in ways that plant the seeds of resistance to global ecological breakdown. The thing is, it’s impossible to start at the global level. To be sure, it’s a global crisis, but holistic societal and environmental repair becomes impracticable, if not impossible, if you tackle something of that scope and scale. Instead, we believe that fundamental change begins at the local level, with individuals acting in unison, first in their own communities, and then on ever-larger planes of resistance. When people engage with their own communities and create networks of support, then they discuss and implement practical solutions that reflect the community’s actual needs rather than the demands of the global market. 

Words like sustainability and revitalization get bandied about quite a lot in the corporate media, which contributes to a kind of cynicism about them, an emptying of content that is consistent with the doomsday narrative. But at the local level, with regard to things like regenerative agriculture, sustainability and revitalization are real, tangible goals that not only can be realized, but that contribute to this all-important sense of momentum, of turning the tide against the doomsday narrative and all that it represents. You can’t solve everything at once, but you can build momentum toward global solutions, town by town, region by region, nation by nation.

Why is it important to consider issues like the climate crisis historically?

If you’re like us and you’re trying to imagine the future, then you absolutely must know and use history. History and cultural memory are essential building blocks for a forward-looking, community-building project like ours. You simply cannot move forward with confidence if you lack a basic grounding in history. We don’t mean to imply that history “repeats itself,” but we do think that history imparts lessons about human behavior and societal patterns. You develop a kind of wisdom when you study history, and when you apply it to contemporary climate resistance, it gives the current work a weight rooted in precedent. There is a kind of legitimacy bestowed on these projects vis-a-vis continuity, when you situate climate pushback in the context of centuries-old traditions, some of which are dead, others of which are very much alive and kicking. 

Of course, you’ve got to work hard to distinguish actual history from the myths and misinformation, the twin pillars of the doomsday narrative. The dominant narrative about U.S. history, the one we all learn in school, was written from the perspective of colonizers, or at least the descendants of colonizers — the very demographic that peddles doomsday narratives today. That story is closely entwined with national myth, sometimes indistinguishably so, as we’re all coming to understand. Contrary to that story, our history is one of conquest, genocide, division, and exploitation. What we and our collaborators and countless other communities in New York State and elsewhere are doing is recovering the “hidden histories” occluded by that standard narrative. We’re looking carefully at cultures and traditions pushed into the background by settler colonialism and thinking hard about the lessons they impart for sustainability, revitalization, and general optimism about the future. 

Members of the Akwesasne community are a key part of your audience, and issues of environmental justice central to the project and that community. What can people learn from the Akwesasne experience about the links between environmental history, justice and ethics?  

First, we should acknowledge that neither of us are native to the region, having grown up in Mexico and Italy, respectively. But we’ve learned a great deal about Akwesasne history and culture by speaking with people and reading historical documents. It’s a truly humbling experience to have a tradition like that passed down to you. 

The history of the Akwesasne Mohawk is unique, of course, but it also fits into general patterns of North American and global history since 1500. The Akwesasne Mohawk have been defending their treaty rights against the federal and New York State government for generations. Their many victories for environmental justice are important in their own right, but they also exemplify the kind of institutional, spiritual, and intellectual momentum we need for a better future to be realized. Akwesasne environmental standards are far more stringent than those for New York State and certainly the federal government. They have a strong record of protecting their community from PCB’s and other contaminants associated with industrial farming. In several recent lawsuits, they’ve succeeded in holding to account polluters like GM, Monsanto, and Alcoa. They’ve used money from these suits to provide key services to their communities and force companies to clean up the tributaries of the St. Lawrence River. 

One ongoing project is the cleanup and revitalization of the Grasse River, whose bed was dredged by large companies who wanted to streamline the water flow. The companies eventually covered up the contaminants in the river bed, but in ways that failed to keep the chemicals from seeping back out and into the water supply. So now the Akwesasne are using new methods to decontaminate and revitalize the riverbed, including, fascinatingly, the use of freshwater mussels to feed on the biomass. It’s the second such project in the Northeast. A few people who are working on it will participate in our regional Summit to share information about the project. 

The Akwesasne are now at the point where they are able to buy back huge swaths of land — a controversial notion, to be sure, given that the land was theirs to begin with. Their example contradicts the settler-colonial image of indigenous communities as perennially oppressed peoples, divided and powerless before the march of “progress.” This is yet another pillar of the doomsday narrative. Contrary to that view, they demonstrate that indigenous peoples—indeed, all minority communities — have real agency in the climate fight, real power to change things on a structural level. Even after a brutal history of conquest and violence, the Akwesasne have managed to preserve an ecological tradition that centers sustainability and revitalization. They have cleaned their rivers and restored life to their communities. If they can do it, then imagine what all of us can do together, as an ethnically and intellectually diverse community? They are an example to us all. It is a history that should be taught in our schools. 

How has the pandemic affected your planning for the Summit, conceptually as well as practically? What advice would you give to other organizations planning a conference of this scale? 

At first it was a real setback. Initially we had planned for six in-person events, one of which was a full-day workshop on organic farming and preservation, with a concluding roundtable discussion. After the lockdown, we knew that none of this would be possible, that we would lose the dynamism of in-person programming. This was a real problem, not only in terms of project implementation, but also because the pandemic seemed likely to dissolve the social bonds we were trying to strengthen. 

We adapted quickly, realizing that we had the technology for a public-facing virtual event. We could use digital platforms to reach as broad an audience as possible, in ways that were unimaginable before the lockdown. We reduced the number of events from six to four, and reframed our discussion in the light of the public-health crisis. For instance, we already had a panel on food production lined up, but now we’re going to talk about the ways Covid has disrupted markets for industrial agriculture. Similarly, we’ve added a panel on environmental justice in the North Country in light of this summer’s uprisings over police brutality and systemic racism. We’re happy with the balance we’ve struck between the local and the global, between the universal experience of climate change and the particular solutions developed in the North Country. 

Our main events will take place on Zoom, but we’ll also stream them live on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Of course, Zoom and other communications technologies have their limits. Not everyone has access to the internet, and we all know that social media erects as many barriers to civil dialogue as it tears down. But our hope is that we can mitigate the intrinsically divisive qualities of social media and use this technology to bridge gaps and share ideas. 

Finding common ground on climate science and/or pandemic science requires not just better communication but a restoration of trust, too — between individuals, groups, and the institutions that represent them. How do you think ordinary people might contribute to that restoration of trust? 

The first step toward rebuilding trust is for individuals to get involved in public life, to take responsibility for things that we’ve long assumed would be handled by our institutions. Institutions are only as effective as people make them. For far too long now, people have delegated responsibility for environmental stewardship to state and federal authorities, and while those authorities often do good things, they are no substitute for active civic engagement or local, rooted knowledge of one’s community. Now is the time to learn about and engage with those institutions, to work through them so as to bring about the change we all know is needed. 

Reaching consensus is neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, diversity of opinion actually militates against conformity of thought and tyranny of the mob. Our priority with this project and future ones is to foster dialogue. At the very least, you should be open to engaging people with whom you disagree. It takes courage to reach out and communicate with others. But it’s the very act of reaching out that can kick-start the process of trust-building. 

And this has to happen on a personal level: you have to incorporate another person’s life, their thinking and their material circumstances, into your own vision of a shared community and a common future. It’s very similar to what we said before regarding local versus global approaches to climate change: the strongest and most effective coalitions begin at the human level and gradually expand to encompass ever greater portions of the globe. The same principle applies here: wide-ranging, productive dialogue in our society depends on trust, and to build trust, you first have to make human connections, at a personal level. Only then can you begin to agree on the basic questions, before building bridges and talking strategy as the dialogue continues. 

Climate change may be a global crisis, but the dialogue that gets us thinking about solutions is actually quite local and personal, as we’re discovering here in the North Country.

Interview by Joe Murphy, Humanities New York.

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Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo are part of Talking Wings, an environmental filmmaking and  storytelling collective. They are currently working on “Burning or Breathing: A Series about Regenerative  Solutions.” The multimedia project follows Earth Guardians from across Turtle Island/North America as  they create a sustainable and restorative future. Talking Wings stands in solidarity with the communities  and indigenous nations on the front lines of this climate emergency. Their films and works of art/resistance call for a renewed consciousness for the land, its inhabitants, and their collective memory. 

In the Fall of 2020, Blake and Tzintzun organized the North Country Art, Land and Environment Summit. During this month-long series of events, community members from the St. Lawrence  Watershed (Haudenosaunee Territory) came together to discuss regenerative solutions for the climate  crises. The Summit featured a series of outdoor exhibitions and online panel discussions. Throughout  these vital conversations, the environmental future of the St. Lawrence Watershed was highlighted. 

Previously, Blake and Tzintzun also collaborated together on Memory Flow / Water of Boston. The  project explored the layers of history hidden under the Quabbin Reservoir, source of Boston’s drinking  water. During this project, Tzintzun and Blake coordinated multiple exhibitions and organized a weekend-long conference/conversation with native elders.  Tzintzun and Blake’s short films and installations have been exhibited in a number of venues, such  as the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, The ROAR Magazine, the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, the TAUNY Center, the Godine Family Gallery/MassArt, and the K&P New York Gallery.

Definitions of Black Agency: The Legacy of Mildred Johnson Edwards

Ansley Erickson, a historian at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Karen Taylor, the founder and director of “While We Are Still Here,” a Harlem-based heritage-preservation site, received an Action Grant to host two public events as part of their process in documenting Harlem’s rich tradition of education.

Ansley is Co-Director and Karen is Director of Public History at the Harlem Education History Project, which uses archival materials and oral histories to preserve and share stories of education in Harlem. Humanities New York sat with them to learn about what inspired this initiative―and Mildred Johnson Edwards, whose vision materialized a legacy of its own in the Modern School. 

HNY: Who was Mildred Johnson Edwards, and how did she respond to the conditions in which she grew up and began her work?

Ansley: Her father was J. [John] Rosamond Johnson, who was a famous composer and musician, and her uncle was James Weldon Johnson, who was a leading intellectual and African American figure. Together her uncle and father wrote and composed the Negro National Anthem, as it was called, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” 

Choral program for "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
J. Rosamond Johnson, co-wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” with his brother, James Weldon Johnson in Jacksonville, Florida in 1900. Courtesy of Yale University Library.

A song about citizenship, presence and participation in a nation that was denying presence and participation, and citizenship to African American people for a very long time. That’s not a direct answer to your question but I think it’s certainly part of the story…

And she’s in Harlem at a time when, because of the structures of segregation, there was relatively more class diversity than certainly was the case by the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s, when a larger number of African American families with means might have chosen to move to more suburban areas.

Karen: Mildred Johnson Edwards was an educator. She attended the New York Society for Ethical Culture [now the Ethical Culture Fieldston School].

Ansley: At the time a famous, progressive education space that was a predominantly white institution. 

Karen: For her to graduate she had to student-teach. But because of racism, she was not allowed to teach white children.

Ansley: None of the predominantly white, segregated, I would say, private schools in New York would hire her. Part of the way she solved that problem: create a school where she could be a teacher.

Karen: So she found eight little children, probably about three, four, five years old. And she founded the Modern School, at St. Philips Church. She sustained that school from approximately 1934 to the late 1990s. Before it became popular in the ‘70s, Mildred Johnson Edwards was very much into progressive education; that is, more child-centered lessons and curriculum. And the level of education was high– thus far all of the people I have met who attended that school have extraordinary intellect, and they’ve achieved extremely high professional positions.

That’s the wonderful side of it.

Ansley: In the context of New York and its racial segregation, Mildred Johnson Edwards wanted to create an institution for Black children that modeled the pedegogical beliefs that she held. And yet, her need to create that school was itself a result of segregation.

James Weldon Johnson (left) and John Rosamond Johnson at a piano, creating music together. Courtesy of Yale University Library.

HNY: How would you define segregation?

Ansley: That is a wonderfully complicated question.

Segregation, in this context, is the arrangement that we have in this country, in which most children today go to schools that are composed predominantly of children of one racial background or category. And that’s the result of a very long history of policy choices we’ve made, as well as lots of choices by individuals.

Karen: We live in a segregated society. We have always lived in a segregated society. And the United States is a segregationist, white supremacist society. Harlem was developed out of that reality. Mildred knew that she was functioning in a world that’s completely segregated and that opportunities for African American people were … constricted.

Ansley: But, defining segregation is hard, because it means so many different things in so many different ways. One way to define it is as a policy problem. Another way to define it is as a context in which people variously positioned live their lives, and do all kinds of things in those segregated spaces that gives them different kinds of meaning.

It’s also a construct that rests on these fundamentally problematic and socially contested ideas of racial categories. And so, in that way, it’s inherently problematic. We don’t really have the intellectual tools to pull apart what segregation is without recognizing that it itself rests on categories that are themselves not real. But they become real by virtue of policy and history… it’s a very tangled problem.

One of two buildings comprising the Modern School in the old Sugar Hill section just uptown of Harlem. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Karen: But that did not stop her from educating the children of Harlem.

And she had Camp Dunroven [she founded and ran Camp Dunroven from 1933 to 1965], which would extend the Modern School experience throughout the summer. They learned horseback riding and various kinds of things that are associated with, you know, middle class white America.

Ansley: The basic desire that Mildred Johnson Edwards was noticing—to create a quality educational space for children—is a basic desire that still remains present certainly in Harlem, and for many children.

In many ways, that’s a good microcosm to think about segregation, right? Which is a set of structures that are imposed upon people, outside of their control. But her story within that segregated context also really matters. In the ways that she adapts to it, and uses the networks that she has amongst African American communities in Harlem, and her own entrepreneurial spirit, to build this institution that operates as a school for roughly sixty-five years. 

Karen: And in terms of the educational landscape in Harlem, there were many Black independent schools. When you had these Black communities, many times, the public school experiences were inferior, and so people called upon their agency and developed [private] schools of their own.

HNY: Why document and preserve the history of education in Harlem?

Karen: So that there’s a record. So that a record exists.

We have to retain memory. We cannot negate the importance of the history of Black people in Harlem, nor can we negate the history of the importance of Black people in the United States. Before discussing the Modern School with Ansley, I don’t think many in the Teachers College community were aware that there was this Black independent school in Harlem, that lasted for approximately six decades. It’s important to keep these histories, because history is important… It’s very, very important.

Ansley: I learned of Mildred Johnson Edwards through Karen. I learned of the institution that [Mildred Johnson Edwards] started through a student of mine, Deidre Bennett Flowers, who had actually been a student at the Modern School.

Modern School invitation. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

It’s not surprising that I encountered the story of the Modern School through a student. I have spent a lot of time reading books that other historians write, and some archival material about the history of education in Harlem. But, there are parts of that history that are not captured in the existing scholarship.

The story of Mildred Johnson Edwards and the Modern School is not particularly visible in the scholarship. And it’s not just her school. It’s lots of educational spaces that were created often by African American women, sometimes by African American men, in Harlem for Harlem residents and children, that have not received a lot of scholarly attention.

Or, even more pointedly: Probably have not gotten a lot of scholarly attention from people in elite positions, publishing in a sort of narrow band of a predominantly white academy. 

Karen: The wonderful aspect of keeping that history—of gathering that history, of codifying that history—is that it shows Black agency. It shows self determination. And the will that Black people have, who said, “I don’t care what you say about me or my people, we are going to be educated and we are going to be highlyeducated, and there’s nothing you could do about it.”

A community member speaks at an event about the legacy of the Modern School.
A community member speaks at an event about the legacy of the Modern School. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

That agency. That drive. That intense desire to be educated. I think that’s exemplified by people like Mildred Johnson Edwards.


Ansley: The Harlem Education History Project—the broad umbrella, and then our focus on the Modern School is a subset of that—that project, is inspired by the recognition that this is important history. That this is not history that’s necessarily documented well in the archives that exist.

Karen and I share the sense that oral history can be a really robust way to make sure those historical absences or disappearances don’t happen entirely, right? To some extent things do disappear, but at least we can try to create traces of time that would let us think about them in the future. Oral history tries to prioritize the voices of the people who have these experiences themselves, and have their stories shape the documentation that’s created.

Modern School alumna Cherilyn Wright revists historic Modern School documents with a Teacher’s College student Rachel Klepper. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

HNY: Can you walk us through the organization of the public recording events?

Ansley: Karen conceptualized a “multigenerational reunion.” Then, we made oral history a part of that day. We started with a panel in which several alumni and one scholar spoke in front of about one hundred alumni. While those were not formal oral histories, they were story-sharing times that set the tone for the day. [This day] became another venue where people were telling their stories, sharing about experiences at the school.

Later in the afternoon, we sat with people who volunteered to be interviewed. They talked about what their experience was at the school, how they had come to be at the school, what their recollections were from their time there, how they reflected on the school later in their life. Several people who participated had become educators, so they often were thinking about the relationship between what had happened at the school and their later choices.

And with the support of Humanities New York, we did two additional events in which we invited alumni to join us for more interviews. One woman who was both a student and then a board member at the school, joined us for two sessions. We knew more about the school having heard from the first set of people, so we were a little bit more informed about what kinds of things to be listening for and asking people to reflect on [And we had met with a group of alumni before hand, to discuss the project and confer about themes for the interviews]. 


HNY: Who conducts these oral history interviews, and what do you hope they gain from this multigenerational, cross-cultural exchange?

Ansley: The oral history interviews are conducted largely by students here at Teachers College, who have taken a class with me in oral history practice, and also a class focused on preparing for this particular oral history project. If I can teach a class and I can have six or seven students interested in doing interviews, then we can do a good body of interviews. 

A Teacher’s College, Columbia University student Jean Park working with Modern School alumna Jacquemar Fudge-Law at an event session. Courtesy of  Teachers College, Columbia University.

It’s also a really valuable pedagogical space because students here, who are either future historians or future educators, get the chance to sit down and listen to people who can reflect on how important schooling was to them; can describe educational experiences that were really consequential for them.

I think oral history, and especially listening to somebody’s account of their childhood in school, is a really fundamentally humane experience. I would hope that it creates, for future teachers, or anybody working in education, a sense of both aspiration—you’d like to be a part of helping someone feel as connected to and as supported by their schooling, as we were hearing from people about the Modern School. 
But also some sense of humility—when you work with children you’re doing work that shapes people’s lives.

HNY: What’s next for the Harlem Education History Project?

Ansley: Since the first event in 2017, and every time we’ve done an oral history recording day, we’ve also created an informal museum, where people who came to be interviewed can listen to and see the other materials that we have gathered.

Actually, [an] important audience for these oral histories is the Modern School community itself. People really enjoy getting to hear their friends and former friends, or people from a different generation, with their own recollections.

I think Karen would say—maybe you’ll ask her—that this should be a documentary video project. And maybe it should be.

Karen: I would love to do a documentary.

Ansley: But I hope that this particular kind of story, about an autonomous educational space created and led by a Black woman for sixty years, becomes part of what scholars and public historians think of when they think about what education in Harlem looked like. 

Modern School alumna Daphne Skeeter shares thoughts with Teachers College, Columbia University student Shellina Shidnia at an event session. Photo courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

HNY: Why ought funders support oral history preservation projects?

Ansley: That’s a very big question. It’s a very important question.

To the point about listening to people’s stories: We are all individuals trying to make our way in the world. I fundamentally think we can do better when we have a sense of what people’s stories have been before us. And those stories can inspire us, those stories can challenge us, those stories can humble us. I think that’s a really valuable part of learning.

And if we don’t fund history, it doesn’t necessarily get preserved. It doesn’t necessarily get taught, and it doesn’t necessarily become available to people who could benefit from encountering it.

Karen: I cannot underestimate the importance of community. I think having a community—that has the same historical imperatives, the same kind of historical experiences—is important, for every person. For people to have a sense of their own powerful histories, and their contributions to the world. That’s really important.

And I’m talking about all people—not just Black people, not just white people, not just straight people, not just gay people.

Ansley: I think Humanities New York’s interest in not just having historical resources exist but putting them into conversation with audiences and communities that can care about them, is also really important. That emphasis on public programing I think is really important.

Karen: It’s an even more wonderful thing when those various communities can come together towards the liberation of humanity. People have to call upon their self-determination and their agency to make the world a better place.

Mildred Johnson Edwards in June, 1937. Courtesy of Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters, Yale University Library Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

HNY: And one last question before we go. How does legacy define this project?

Ansley: When alumni remember the presence of their principal, who is also sometimes their teacher, and they remember viscerally how they felt as children… clearly Mildred Johnson Edwards is present in their lives.

There are a lot of people who went there who really appreciate the experience they had, and that matters a tremendous amount. In a couple instances in interviews, people have commented on the kinds of decisions they’re making for their own children. It seems quite clear that their decisions are shaped in some way by the experience they had as children.

That’s a legacy. That’s Mildred Johnson Edwards, having created something that is shaping the education of people a hundred years beyond her passing.

And my hope is that other people down the road will be able to connect to her story, and so that the legacy—that her legacy, is not just about the particular students [she had] worked with. It’s about the ways in which her story can cause people in education, people working in African American communities, African American community members themselves, to reflect on what this history is and what it means for the future.

You can learn more about the Harlem Education History Project on the web and on Twitter, @EduHarlem.

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Interviewed by Kordell K. Hammond, HNY Graduate Intern

Ansley T. Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. Co-Director, Center on History and Education. Affiliated Faculty, Institute for Urban and Minority Education. Affiliated Faculty, Columbia University History Department

Ansley T. Erickson is a U.S. historian who focuses on educational inequality, segregation, and the interactions between schooling, urban and metropolitan space, racism, and capitalism. Her first book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016 and won the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award in 2017. Her work has also been awarded the History of Education Society Prize (2016), the Bancroft Dissertation Prize (2010), and the Claude A. Eggertsen Dissertation Prize (2011).

Erickson co-directs the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) with Ernest Morrell, Coyle Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. HEHP supports a digital history project and collaborations with local schools. The project has produced an edited volume, Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, that was published by Columbia University Press in November 2019 and available online as a free enhanced digital edition at harlemeducationhistory.library.columbia.edu.

Karen D. Taylor is the founder and executive director of While We Are Still Here, a heritage-preservation organization founded to ensure that the “‘post-gentrification’ community of Harlem and beyond will honor and find a meaningful connection to the legacy of African-American achievement, and its paramount importance to world culture.” Ms. Taylor produced and directed a feature-length documentary film, In the Face of What We Remember: Oral histories of 409 and 555 Edgecombe Avenue, which was a Reel Sisters Film Festival selection, as well as a selection of the Inwood Film Festival.

Additionally, she consults as the director of public history for Teachers College-Columbia University’s Harlem Education History Project. Ms. Taylor is currently completing a memoir, Calypso Blues: A Black Woman’s Song In White America, which recounts her experiences as a woman of African-American and Barbadian heritage.

She is also a multi-genre artist, who has appeared as a vocalist and poet at the Schomburg’s Women In Jazz series; and at Transart’s Jazz In the Valley, she premiered a spoken-word/music tribute to Jayne Cortez, “A Jazz Fan Looks Back.” Her essay, “Still Occupied: My Report on the Safety of My Sons,” published in Transition Magazine  was cited in the Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction Category, in 2016 Best American Essays, edited by Jonathan Franzen. She has also had articles published at espnW.com, the Amsterdam News, Downbeat, and Essence.

Ms. Taylor received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction.

Into the Rainforest with Community Conversations

Starting with one conversation on the environment, Mambo Tse has seen how Community Conversations can bring people together, and how those conversations can lead to other fruitful projects. From discussions on immigration and food insecurity came an idea for project exploring the community’s relationship to African history and how it impacts them today, which was funded by an HNY Action Grant.

In this interview, Mambo shares how public humanities programming has helped her group engage with youth across New York City, in classrooms and afterschool programs, as well as the general public and elderly populations at senior centers discussing topics related to the environment, immigration, and more.

HNY: How did you first learn about Humanities New York, and what motivated you to get involved?

Mambo: In high school, I had a teacher who called herself a “humanities expert.” I never really knew what that meant. Of course, I was in her humanities class and all that. She had a dance company I was in, and she used to take us to the Senate in Austin, Texas (I grew up partially in Dallas). We would perform and then she would do these speeches, from the African-American perspective, on whatever was happening at the moment. It didn’t fully click until I started my work at Sirens and started thinking about doing something outside of just dance.

HNY: Right, so, tell us about Sirens, and why the company has that poetic name.

Mambo: Sirens–Protectors of the Rainforest was started by five first-generation African dancers at the P.S. 261 school with the idea of of giving back to the community through dance. The use of “Siren” comes from the West African and South African regions, in these stories there is a creature called Mami Wata who is usually described as a female water deity associated with healing and fertility, but is also known to lure people to her, much like the Greek Sirens. The name Protectors of the Rainforest came later from our conversations in the community. The school is located in a food desert, and the children were very disconnected from the food they ate, so we started a small garden on the property. People in the community walked by our garden and told us it was like “a little rainforest in the desert.” So we decided we would be the protectors of it, and what it means to the community.

The dancing we do is a great way to share culture, but people need to start talking more to each other too, especially here in New York. We have a sense of a protected, personal space in New York, but when you get people together, they start talking, no matter what. We started thinking of ways to present history to the community, specifically African history. And we started looking for funding to produce this sort of work and, lo and behold, Humanities New York pops up and we thought: This works for us. This does exactly what we want to do.

My partner said let’s do an African history conversation so we can introduce the people who live in this neighborhood to better understand black history and heroes and get away from negative connotations of black history. Because it can be traumatizing at times. We have to find a way of not just having conversations but healing people, so to speak. The best way to heal people is letting them get whatever is on their chest, off. I think a lot of problems, physical and emotional, stem from suppression. So we scheduled an appointment with Humanities New York and we thought the appointment was at your office [laughs] and not a phone conversation. So this guy was calling us on the phone and I was like, “We’re coming up in the elevator.” [laughs] I think it was you actually.

HNY: It was me. [laughs]

As we learned more about HNY’s Community Conversations program, I knew that was exactly what we were trying to do. Our first conversation was on the environment. People think that low-income people don’t care about the environment, which is a huge fallacy. Poor people are the ones that have to live in the houses with lead paint, the neighborhoods that used to be landfills or chemical plants. They face pollution every day, from plastic bags on the street to the factories spewing out toxic chemicals. They are on the front lines of what we are doing to our environment in cities, so for them the environment is something they have to think about every day. It wasn’t surprising to me that this conversation has been, by far, our best attended. Something we didn’t expect, though, we had people come in from other zip codes to Bedford-Stuyvesant who wanted to know about the food supply. I think that what the environment is, means very different things to different people.

HNY: You used the term “food desert” earlier, can you say a bit more about that?

Not only was our environment “Conversation” held in a food desert, but the neighborhood also has one of the biggest community gardens in NYC–right where many of the residents are on SNAP (food stamps). That’s a big disconnect. We wanted that garden to be an oasis for the kids and the parents that came. Participants were talking about not having fruits and vegetables in the neighborhood. I come from a carry-your-food kind of family. So I always have a healthy snack on hand. And I had never really thought deeply about how a lack of healthy options affected the neighborhood. The best part about the conversation was that it wasn’t just people from the neighborhood. It was also people from co-ops, people from community gardens. It wasn’t just about the problem that way! It was also: well here are some solutions, these people have some small answers. They said: you can come to our garden, we have fresh fruit and vegetables. If you help us with the garden, you get food.

HNY: Solutions actually arose from the conversation?

Mambo: Yes, exactly. That was amazing in of itself and I really valued that. It was a very diverse mixture of people and everyone left feeling better after the conversation. After the success of that conversation we applied for a Vision Grant from Humanities New York for ARISE – African History, Past to Present, a project to build self-awareness by breaking down immigrant stereotypes in the Bedford Rehab Houses. There had recently been five shootings in the area, and several people had been assaulted so there was a lot of tension. We decided as part of the conversation to do a mural together to start the conversation, and with the help of the New York City Housing Authority, the NYPD Community Officer, and others we were able to get permission for the mural. The idea for painting a mural as part of the healing process come from Ghana, and South Africa, where after one hundred years of war they used community painting as a way to process the history and as a way to heal. And that was interesting. Over thirty people contributed to the wall mural. There were police officers, gang members, multi-generational families. It was normalizing the conversation, cops could talk to the gang members in a completely different context. It was about healing through art and conversation. That was incredible. The event was supposed to start at noon, I was told there were people who’d been waiting since 10:00 a.m. The excitement came from people lacking a space to turn for meaningful conversation. It creates what we call, in dance, a “cipher”–a space for people to just put out how they feel.

HNY: Could you tell me about the project you organized at Glenwood Senior Center?

Mambo: The immigration stories? That project was so amazing! Again, the perception you have of people, whether it’s your own personal bias or stereotypes, can be so different from the truth. My mind was completely blown away by all the different stories people shared at the Center. The people that come into these senior centers have lived these incredible lives, but they are entering this phase in their life when society doesn’t think they should have any input. What really brought about the immigration stories project was one of the Community Conversations we had on immigration. The number of people that showed up grew every time we held them; we used to host it in this small room, but we had to move it to the cafeteria to fit everyone in.

At the Senior Center they hold breakfast and lunch programs and they try to keep people interested and active between meals but mostly the seniors just come in, eat and leave, so we started the Community Conversations as a way to keep them here. Out of that we heard so many stories from many generations of immigrants, you could even see the historical changes in immigration policy and understand them just from listening to the stories told by participants. From all different perspectives, from the islands to overseas.

At first the conversations got very heated since few people in the conversations knew each other. We had Haitians, Dominicans, Native Americans, Asians–there was this one lady from St. Lucia, she got up and she said, “When I’m talking, you hear my Lucian accent, but you don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know where I’ve lived. I speak Spanish, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at me. And the reason I speak Spanish is because when I left St. Lucia, I left with a Venezuelan family.” And that’s when I knew we needed to do something more with this, to talk to more people about their immigration experience.

HNY: And how did those conversations then lead to the “immigration stories” project?

Mambo: Out of the work we had been doing through HNY, I was able to get a mini-grant from Brooklyn Arts Council to record people’s personal stories. We’re in the process of finishing them and I’m excited to make them available soon. These are people who, well, no one had ever asked them, and now their story can be listened to by people all over the world, so for them, this is really empowering. We need to share more of our history, especially to the younger generations. They’re so enthralled, on computers. They don’t know who their neighbors are or where they come from.

Interview by Connor Goodwin, Program Officer and Nicholas MacDonald, Communications Manager

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Mambo Tse is known as a choreographer, artistic director and performance artist. For seventeen years, she has conducted many community engagement workshops on African dances, histories, music, and cultures globally. She is the founder of Siren–Protectors of the Rainforest and has taken her group on corporate sponsored tours around the United States and Canada. Siren–Protectors of the Rainforest is a private non-profit dedicated to preserving culture using music, dance, arts, and history as a platform to educate people about the benefits of reducing, recycling, and reusing.