Aja Bain
Making Radical Repairs: How to Tell an Inclusive Story When Your Collections Are Stuck in the Past
2019 NCPH working group case statement
Living History: Peopling the Landscape of the Past
Contrary to popular belief, being stuck in the past is not the primary goal of history museums today. Stale collections can be, at best, unengaging and trite, and at worst they can be the stuff of modern public history nightmares. Cases of artifacts of suspicious provenance, rooms filled with spinning wheels and Minié balls, and displays that focus on the political and military achievements of great white men may have once been par for the course, but today’s historians and audiences are correctly skeptical about such dated and static approaches.
Stuck collections are a result of objects acquired and displayed with colonial perspectives, stories told and silenced by the victors alone, and spaces that present the past while telling visitors just as much or more about the curators who designed them. Nearly every museum could benefit from re-evaluating their collections and how they interpret them, but too many lack the resources and/or motivation to do so. Sites struggle to tell stories without artifactual support, but renovating galleries is expensive, rebuilding collections nearly impossible. For most museums, objects are the bones upon which we build our stories, so how can we flesh out engaging and inclusive stories when the collections framework is not made for this purpose? How can we address the sins of omission we inherited from our museum ancestors?
One promising but underutilized approach: add people. Living history techniques have tremendous potential for not only engaging modern experience-focused audiences, but also reasserting the presence and voices of marginalized groups into the narrative. When people only appear in museums through objects or documents, we are denying an enormous segment of humanity the opportunity to tell their stories. There are millions of stories that are important to our national narrative that go untold because individuals left no artifacts or written traces, and while many sites have a healthy fear of “getting it wrong” without traditional interpretive building blocks, doing nothing is far worse when it leads to a monolithic, monochromatic interpretation of the past based on survival bias.
Twentieth-century living history catered to the Bicentennial impulse of celebrating an imagined real America through interpretation of great men, pioneer farms, antebellum mansions, and colonial towns: established to present monocultural and unidimensional stories that celebrate the experiences of a single group while also interpreting them in a vacuum. Many living history sites (where structures and landscapes comprise the collection) that were founded in this time period are the definition of stuck collections, and when your collections are buildings and your interpretation space has acreage, retrofitting to tell new stories may be impossible.
For living history sites, it might not be feasible to recollect artifacts in a way that illustrates the dominant narrative as just one of many stories, or to redesign the grounds in a way that locates the “Indian village” more centrally or portrays it more accurately. Non-living- history sites struggle similarly with overhaul, no matter how admirable their intentions. Adding interpreters who portray historic individuals or composite characters through first or third- person interpretation, people who can literally give voice and presence to those missing from collections, is a viable if daunting option. Certainly, concerns over who has the right to tell a story apply when an interpreter actually assumes the role of a historic figure or persona, but refusal to tell the story at all is not the solution.
In the past few years, living history has pivoted towards offering more inclusive stories and helping stagnated sites portray the true diversity of the past, even in the absence of collections. There are now interpreters reclaiming physical and historical space for enslaved people, free blacks, servants, women, Native Americans, and others who became so easy to overlook in traditional museums for (among other things) their lack of “stuff.” Azie Mira Dungey portrayed black women around the D.C. metro area, including as a housemaid at Mount Vernon (a site that hired its first black interpreter in 1995) before creating her living history web series “Ask a Slave.” “Downstairs” tours at historic house museums are bringing the experiences of the working-class and servant women to visitors, even as the homes themselves were designed to conceal their presence. Sites across the southeast where the Indigenous landscape has been obliterated now host Native American interpreters who reassert this history and their contemporary survival. In 2005, black Civil War reenactors formed the United States Colored Troops Living History Association. These individuals and groups present the diversity of the past in order to counter stereotypes and misconceptions, engage contemporary audiences, and supplement insufficient collections that have hidden their lives for so long.
Jeremy Morris, who portrays eighteenth-century black men at Colonial Williamsburg, sums up the importance of his role thus:
“Some people try to understand what it was like for people like Booker, who had no standing in the world. They ask what it’s like to listen to the rhetoric of the day, before the Revolutionary War, about freedom, justice and equality when you’re on someone’s inventory. When I say there were more free and enslaved blacks than whites in Williamsburg in the 1800s, it goes against what some people have been taught and can shake their foundation.” (1)
Employing living historians as interpreters and working with living history groups to bring their perspectives to sites with stuck collections is not a universal solution to our field’s problematic inheritance, but it is a start. As we ask ourselves how we can tell more inclusive, relevant, and truthful stories, we also must question the necessity of relying on inherently- limiting collections to frame our narratives. Broadening our understanding of how to build stories to include building platforms to showcase and amplify unheard voices (as closely as we can approximate them) would be a bold first step.
1 Patricia R. Olsen, “Portraying 18th-Century Black Men in Colonial Williamsburg,” The New York Times, June 8, 2018. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/portraying-18th-century-black-men-in- colonial-williamsburg.html