This post will be very short because my drive home was very long.

For me, the best part  overall of attending AASLH annual meetings is that it renews my feeling of being so grateful for having found and chosen this field of work. My last session of the conference was “Building Community Connections: Collaborations for the 21st Century.” The collaborations discussed were between middle and high schools and local history institutions. One of the schools was my alma mater, Timberlane Regional High School, Plaistow, NH and they won another award last night!  The students got to do the work of real public historians and produce documentary films. I think it’s pretty amazing what they’ve accomplished, but I’m jealous – to think I could have experienced this field in high school, if they did projects like these way back when!

Today was a great day, from beginning (“Mythbusters: Beyond American Indian Advisory Committees” session), middle (Plenary address by Gerard Baker to end (Awards Banquet with speaker Jim Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me). Gerard Baker was incredible. He made me think back to when I used to work at Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska in the mid 1990’s. The Park was only just beginning to recognize the Hoonah Tlingit for whom the Park was their ancestral homeland. Now I am in Louisiana and the group that is in general underrepresented at our historical center is the African-American population. So I have been trying to see how I can transpose what I’m learning in the many sessions that deal with including Native American voices, via advisory committees in particular, to inviting more African American participation and perspectives. I think forming an African American history advisory committee might be a good idea. Perhaps then we could ask, like Dan Provo did of the Native American advisory committee at the Oklahoma History Center, ‘Okay, we have this space – what should people know?’ From listening to Jim Loewen tonight, there’s going to be so much they don’t know. But as I learned in a session yesterday, “Moving Beyond Material Culture,” don’t fault your visitors for coming to your door with misconceptions, just don’t let them leave with them.  

You’ve got to appeal to both parents and kids equally –  that was a take-away message from the session “Engaging All Ages – A Discussion of Successful Family Programming.” If the kids don’t like it, the family won’t come back or if the parents don’t like it, the family won’t come back. It is the ideal, of course, that parents and kids have an equally satisfying visit when families visit your museum or historic site. But I think the scales are tipped in the kids’ favor. If the kids aren’t engaged, the family will be out of a particular gallery in five minutes, even if the parents love it. But if the exhibit or program is well ‘below’ the parents’ level and they’re bored to tears while the kids are having the time of their lives, the parents aren’t going to drag them out of there after five minutes. And if the kids beg them, they’ll probably come back with them.  Of course, I’m not a parent. A voice from those trenches may say something different.

On another note, I might be having slight inferiority complex here. I went to a session titled, “Digital Collections in the Classroom and Beyond” and all the panelists were from Wake Forest University, two from the university’s anthropology museum and one professor of African history who had his students use the museum’s collection in a seminar. Their slides and literature showed gorgeous, colorful masks and figurines and other ethnographic items from around the world. I wondered, could we get teachers and students as interested in our collection, which is largely archival and photographic material of our parish (a Louisiana county) history? My initial reaction was to  think that their collection was dare I say – cooler. To ease this sense of inferiority, is there any small historical museum or archive out there who is using their collections in classrooms at any level, grade school through college? I wish you were on the panel, too, but care to share anything here?

I’ve already blogged about being excited to reunite with my high school drama coach at the AASLH conference. Another reunion will be with members and staff of the Caddo Nation. The tribe is headquartered in Binger, OK, not too far from Oklahoma City, but their ancestral homeland includes our part of Northwest Louisiana. A few years ago a coworker and I traveled to Binger to meet with the tribal council and staff about collaborating on an exhibit and symposium of Caddo Indian culture. The exhibit started with a loan of Caddo Indian pottery and stone tools that are several hundred to a thousand years old, but the tribe wanted to be sure we emphasized the living Caddo culture. When we were in Binger, the tribe’s NAGPRA coordinator strongly suggested we visit Indian City, USA near Anadarko, OK to see an authentically constructed round, thatched Caddo house. We never made it there because we were in a bad, but injury-free wreck in downtown Anadarko. This time I don’t know if I’ll have time to try again to visit Indian City, USA (the name sounds suspiciously like a tourist trap, yet its depictions of villages of seven tribes were planned and constructed under the supervision of the Department of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma). I definitely plan to get to the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City to see “Caddo Leadership and Community”, an exhibit curated by the Caddo Nation’s tribal museum. And it will be great to see Bobby Gonzalez et al. He and the tribe’s historic preservation officer, Robert Cast, will be part of the NAGPRA workshop tomorrow (wow, tomorrow, already!).

I am very excited to go to AASLH this year. It’s my fourth time attending, but this is the first time it’s been within driving distance for me, albeit a very long drive. Even though we’re almost neighbors with Oklahoma, I noticed there are just a handful of us coming from Louisiana. The big surprise for me is that it looks like there are at least as many people coming from my small-town New Hampshire high school. Even my former drama coach will be there – Mr. Eric Constantineau. You may have read an article by him and co-teacher Scott Strainge in an issue of History News earlier this year about partnerships. They used the analogy of a hukilau and ‘casting the net wide.’ He and Scott Strainge were at AASLH last year as award winners for producing documentaries on the Scopes trial with their humanities students at Timberlane Regional High School. They were on a panel last year and I blew my former teacher away when I went up to him before the discussion started and said “Hey, Mr. C” (he’s still a “Mr.” to me). Then he blew me away when after a brief pause he remembered my name even 20 years and hundreds of students later. This year Scott Strainge is chairing “Building Community Connections: Collaborations for the 21^st Century” and I can’t wait to find out if Timberlane won an award again this year.