Category Archives: Historical Projects

Pioneer of a different way of working—Janet D. Spector, 1944-2011

Historical Projects, Minnesota culture, Minnesota history

Janet D. Spector, who died on September 13, 2011, worked in the 1980s with Dakota people to study the history of Little Rapids, a 19th-century Dakota village site on the Minnesota River. This work led to her pioneering book What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Spector’s work was pioneering not just for the topic—the historical village and the roles of the men and women who lived there—but also for the methods employed, the collaborative nature of the work itself and what it represented about the connected fields of anthropology and archaeology.

As a feminist, Spector was interested in questions about the roles of women in communities and the ways in which the gendered roles of men and women are represented in the archaeological record. Before her time, anthropologists and archaeologists usually wrote about men and what was viewed as their primary roles in many societies. This began to change in the 1970s when cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians who applied anthropological concepts to history, started to take the role of women more seriously. In the introduction to the influential 1983 book The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, Patricia Albers (a longtime friend and colleague of Janet Spector’s) wrote: “The side of Plains Indian life most often seen by the American public is the male half. It is the male-dominated universe of native diplomacy, warfare, and hunting that has captured the attention of national image-makers in Hollywood, New York, and Toronto.” The same was true in academic studies. Except for Sacagawea and a few others, women were “conspicuous by their absence in the historical literature on the Native Plains.”

Janet Spector, 1991, at White Bear lake, with a group of students, including archaeologist Randy Withrow in the background. Withrow was one of the students who worked with Spector on the Little Rapids project.

White academics did not write about women in part because they believed that women’s work was uninteresting. In historical accounts, women were viewed as “drudges” who did a lot of manual labor, but who had little power or influence over trade, diplomacy, religion, or countless other topics of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. This view was, in fact, an illusion based on the inability of those academics to actually see women and what they did, and the projection of European-American values onto Native communities in the past and present. If, for example, women cut wood, made gardens, built houses, cooked meals, scraped hides, and carried heavy burdens, this was viewed by European men and later anthropologists as the sign of their subjection, their lack of power in these communities. Unseen was the role that women might play in community decisions or in ceremonies or in interactions with traders or diplomats.

In an essay in The Hidden Half, Alice Kehoe noted that the inability to see women’s experiences and contributions with clarity was due to the “shackles of tradition,” not the traditions of Native people, but the traditions of Europeans, including “the Victorian notion of Ladies’ frailty,” which survived in classical anthropology along with many other European folk notions about women. Spector herself contributed to The Hidden Half, writing a paper on “Male/ Female Task Differentiation Among the Hidatsa,” intended to further the development of an “archaeological approach to the study of gender.” If archaeologists could differentiate the tasks that men and women did among the Hidatsa and relate that to the tools they used, it would be possible to look for evidence of the varying activities of men and women when studying the archaeological evidence left in the ground. Spector, however pointed out that simplistic notions of a Native division of labor and the tools related to it could not substitute for grounded knowledge. In this case Spector’s work was aided by earlier anthropologists, including Gilbert Wilson, who had documented the role of women in Hidatsa society (see, for example Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden.).

Shortly after the publication of The Hidden Half,  Spector and Margaret Conkey published a 1984 paper on “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” which dealt more fully with a critique of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology at the time. This work can be viewed as the beginning of feminist archaeology, one which continues to inspire many archaeologists. (A Google search today for the phrase “Conkey and Spector” comes up with almost 5,000 hits.) By 1984 Spector had already spent four years studying the Little Rapids site. She had approached her work with the same gendered task-differentiation model described in the 1983 article on the Hidatsa. But she also realized that while she might be breaking new ground in terms of gender and archaeology, she was facing cultural issues: she was a non-Dakota person studying the Dakota. Spector’s feminist approach meant that she understood the problems created when a person of privilege studies a less privileged society.

For women in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, this understanding was inescapable, because of the power relationships in colleges and universities. In many disciplines women were rare, and it was difficult for them to gain respect of colleagues and administrators. In a 1994 interview (available in pdf form), Spector noted that after she was hired by the University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology in 1973, she began to hear from colleagues that she was an “affirmative action hire,” and that another archaeologist hired at the same time was “the real hire.” Because women were treated as though they were not entitled to the positions they obtained, they may not have developed the same sense of entitlement and privilege that male colleagues did. They understood the problematic nature of the very positions they held and the way those in such positions exerted their power in relation to the living people who were affected by their work. In fact, feminism was one of the intellectual movements that lead to a greater understanding of how academics exerted their power and a greater concern that this power be used carefully and with humility.

In this same period, in the United States, the position of the anthropologist and the archaeologist was being called into question in Native American communities, where many in the field had worked with few problems for generations. While it might be possible for the anthropologist to go to the other side of the world and enter non-western communities with the same sense of entitlement as they had in the past, this was less and less possible inside the United States. Archaeologists could not routinely excavate Native American burial sites as they had done in the past. Anthropologists working in the United States could not avoid questions about what they were doing in the communities where they worked and what would happen to the information collected, where it would end up, and who would control its use.

In What This Awl Means, Spector explained:

Those of us who produce knowledge about other people hold a powerful and privileged position. Male domination of the field of anthropology has produced distortions about women in many cultural settings and time periods. Similarly, Indian people have had little part in producing archaeological knowledge about their past, and archaeologists have surely produced and perpetuated similar distortions about Indian histories and cultures. I did not want to do this. I no longer wanted to investigate the archaeology of Indian people unless their perspectives and voices were incorporated into the work (What This Awl Means, 13).

Working with Native American sites and in Native American communities meant thinking through more carefully who you were, where you were coming from, and how you intended to interact with the people whose communities you were studying. And that process of thinking it through was as rich a part of your research as the ostensible topic of your work.

Spector got in touch with a professor of Indigenous Studies, Chris Cavender/ Mato Nunpa, who was descended, she later learned, from Mazomani, one of the leaders of the Little Rapids village up until the community left that site in the 1850s. After several meetings, Mato Nunpa and Spector developed plans to work together with students and other faculty in further excavation guided by Dakota people, during the summer of 1986. The resulting collaboration with Mato Nunpa, his relatives, and others and the knowledge and insights it provided is discussed in detail in What This Awl Means.

The book is not a long one, but it is satisfying and thought provoking. Much of Spector’s archaeological work was ethnographic. She studied archaeological sites to obtain a cultural understanding of people in the past. More than that, she sought to relate that past to the living culture of the descendants of the people she studied: The relationships Spector had with living Dakota people were not a means of accomplishing an archaeological study of a site, but were bound up in the project itself. Readers gain insights into a Dakota village at an important moment in time, shortly before their exile from Minnesota, and at the same time learn from the perspectives of the Dakota who returned to Minnesota from that exile. Few other books documenting Minnesota’s past combine so effectively archaeology and the living history of the people who lived at a place in the past. In fact, there are few archaeological works of any kind that show the same commitment to bringing alive the subjects of their research.

Unfortunately for the health and vitality of the fields of anthropology and archaeology, Spector stopped teaching in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Anthropology in the late 1980s. She then moved on to accomplish a great deal in the University’s Commission on Women. Its goal was, as Spector put it, “to develop a kind of system-wide, systematic plan of action to improve the climate for women” (see 1994 interview in pdf form), and Spector was given “carte blanche.” She later described the process of work as a form of ethnography:

I started with what I thought of as ethnographic interviews, starting with people I knew, and then expanding out. I asked people three questions. I said, “Tell me what you see as major obstacles and barriers for women—just in your experience.” This was both men and women, predominately women, but I did talk to men, department chairs, deans. I asked everybody to tell me anything successful that had happened to improve or make their climate better, anything, formal or informal. Then I asked everybody to tell me their vision of the transformed university.

From Spector’s work developed The Minnesota Plan Two, which outlined “a kind of framework for change” and lead to the establishment of a system-wide commission on women for the entire Minnesota university system. For these efforts, Spector will be remembered far beyond her work in anthropology and archaeology. More details on this aspect of her work are found in an obituary by Barbara Noble. There are other obituaries online, including one from her home town of Madison, Wisconsin.

I was fortunate to be a student of Spector’s starting in 1986, when I entered the graduate program in anthropology.  Although I was not there to major in archaeology, she was my faculty adviser in the work I did on Ojibwe photographs. I was seeking to combine anthropology and history in ways that were not exactly comfortable for other anthropologists. She encouraged me in every way she could. She was the right person to be advising a student who was interested in looking at historical photographs and how they reflected the culture and history of Ojibwe people in Minnesota, who wanted to talk to Ojibwe people today about those photographs, and who wanted to make those interactions as much a part of my research as the historical context and content of the photographs. Perhaps because of her revolutionary perspective on academic privilege, or perhaps because she was also a loving person, she was not afraid to be a friend to her students, to share good food and to socialize (often in boats). I could not have found anyone better to guide me. I am certain that without her help I would never have completed my graduate work in 1993. She was a good friend and colleague in so many ways. Thank you, Janet.

Mary Black Rogers, Anthropologist and Ethnohistorian, 1922-2011

Bdote: A Public EIS, Historical Projects, Minnesota history

Mary Black Rogers, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian from Minnesota who studied the culture and history of Ojibwe and Métis communities in Canada and the United States, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on January 27, 2011.

The daughter of Fred R. Bartholomew and Stella LaVallee Bartholomew, Mary Rose Bartholomew was born on May 6, 1922, in Minneapolis, where she grew up. In the 1940s she married a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot from Texas named Alan J. Black, from whom she was later divorced. After World War II she contracted tuberculosis, which she survived after the removal of part of one lung. In 1950 she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where she received a BA in 1954 and a MA in 1958, both in Anthropology, with a focus on Native Americans. She wrote her MA thesis on “The Value System of the Winnebago Indians.”

Mary Black Rogers at Weagomow Lake, Ontario, in 1975

In 1960 she enrolled in graduate program in Anthropology at Stanford University, where she was a student of anthropologists Joseph H. Greenberg, George D. Spindler, and Paul Kay. Four years later she started her fieldwork among the Red Lake Ojibwe at Ponemah, Minnesota. In 1967  she completed her dissertation, “An Ethnoscience Investigation of Ojibwa Ontology and World View,” (authored under the name Mary B. Black) a study of the Ojibwe language and the way in which Ojibwe speakers classified the natural and human worlds, as reflected in their rich language. She described the way in which the Ojibwe saw the world around them as animate, including trees, plants, rocks, and other natural features that other cultures saw as mute, lifeless, and inanimate.

The Ojibwe elders Mary came to know at Red Lake were Native speakers, for whom English was a second language. Learning Ojibwe, viewing the elders as her teachers, she developed a special relationship with Red Lake spiritual leader Dan Raincloud, Sr. In an essay about Raincloud published in 1989, Mary wrote with gratitude of what she learned from him:

Dan always operated from the true center of “his Indian way,” whether dealing with his own people or outsiders. His distinctiveness emanated from the very centrality of the role he sustained, central to what remained of the traditional culture. This was the essence of the complex identity he imparted.

Mary also wrote about Dan Raincloud’s knowledge and about his sense of humor. She said that Raincloud had initially given her an Ojibwe nickname that he said meant “I wonder why.” It was a reflection not only of her anthropological calling, but also of the curiosity that many others who knew her saw also.

Mary was inspired by the previous work of the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, who had learned through his studies that the Ojbwa on the Berens River in Manitoba made no distinction between “natural” and “supernatural.” Ojibwe people believed, he wrote, that they obtained many of their abilities from powerful non-human beings, or spirits. Black-Rogers noted that her research at Red Lake strongly supported this idea. She wrote that the people there did not separate “special” or “magical” powers from “those which are requisite for everyday living.” Instead they included within everyday skills, “the abilities for which they must depend on non-human beings.” She wrote: “There seems to be a continuous spectrum of powers, going down to the most mundane, which are receivable from some non-human source and which are not inherent in human beings.” Such abilities might include the success at hunting, or designing and making beadwork for which a human beings needed to show gratitude for their success. At the other end of the spectrum would be things completely beyond “natural human abilities.” Both ends of the spectrum involved “supernatural” involvement; the difference was merely one of degree.

In later years, Mary applied her understandings of the way the Ojibwe at Red Lake viewed the world to analyzing the history and culture of the Ojibwe people in the past, as it was recorded in historical documents. Her influential 1985 paper, later published as “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subarctic Fur Trade,” showed how an understanding of Ojibwe semantics could explain the way Ojibwe people interacted with fur traders, in complex exchanges. English words such as “starvation” or “starving”—when used by traders to describe the condition of Indian people who came to their trading posts—had much more complex Ojibwe nuances than apparent to people today or even to traders in the past.

After completing her graduate studies, Mary was hired by the anthropologist Edward S. Rogers, curator of ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to work with him in a study of the history and culture of the Weagamow Lake (or Round Lake) Ojibwa-Cree First Nation in northern Ontario, near the Manitoba border. Subsequently she married Rogers. In their work together at Weagamow Lake, Ed and Mary developed a close relationship with the community. Mary was adopted by the elder Mamie Quequish to replace a child who had died fifty years before. Ed and Mary left Weagamow Lake for Burlington, Ontario, in 1975, but continued to have contact with the community. After his death in 1988, Edward Rogers was buried at Weagamow Lake with the permission of the community. His gravestone described him as a “Weagamow Friend.” Mary returned to the community for the burial and again in 1991 and 1994. She also received visits from community members in Burlington.

Mary Black Rogers, in 1991, with Mamie Quequish, the woman at Weagamow Lake who had adopted her 1969

After her 1991 visit she wrote in a letter to friends,

In late September, another visit to my husband’s grave was very rewarding. By bush plane north from Sioux Lookout to Weagamow Lake, Ontario, in whose cemetery he was honored to be buried in 1988, by the northern Ojibwa/ Cree people we had known for so long. It was joyful to see so many old friends and adopted family. This year it coincided with their annual feast which culminates a week of hunting and cooking in the old ways. These ways have not disappeared altogether, but the youngest echelon of Weagomow people had never seen it full-blown. This was for me a time of mourning, and also of renewal. I was happy to be able to take the trip, though it was a bit more tiring than I recall from the past.

Like her husband, Mary was interested not only the current culture but in the history of Weagamow community, many of whose members had descended from a man known as Ojicak, or Crane, in the 18th century. As a result, the community was mentioned in records of the Hudson Bay Company and governmental agencies as “The Cranes.” Mary continued to do research on “The Cranes,” in the years after returning from Weagamow, presenting her findings in articles and at conferences. In the 1980s Mary became interested in studying the history of the people of mixed European-Native marriages, sometimes called Métis. Her interest stemmed not only from her anthropological work but also from her own ancestry. Her mother Stella LaVallee was the granddaughter of Antoine Pepin, a trader and blacksmith who lived in the Coldwater Spring area near Fort Snelling in the 1830s, later moving to Little Canada, north of St. Paul.

For Mary, studying the history of people like Antoine Pepin was a “Roots” project, a link between her own family history and the broader sweep of events. Though they had long careers in the fur trade that took them across the Great Lakes and northwestern Canada, they founded local communities in Minnesota and Canada and were intermediaries socially and culturally in the fur trade and in settlement times, She saw the potential in telling a broad history through the “life histories” of particular families, which she believed would demonstrate the broad patterns in the development of the Métis people. In her later years Mary engaged in extensive research on Métis communities, presenting her ideas in conference papers and in an extensive correspondence with colleagues and Métis descendants. Her letters were as full of detail as her notes and papers, reporting her lastest finds and her newest ideas. Though she never completed her study of Pepin and other Métis, her ongoing work in showing how the large picture of Métis history could be told through individual and family histories has inspired many others to undertake such research.

My own initial knowledge of the work of Mary Black Rogers came from reading her thoughtful foreword to a published collection of Ojibwe stories entitled Clothed in Fur: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View, which included annotation about the Ojibwe culture contained in the stories. In her foreword she wrote about how story-telling among the Ojibwe was a method for teaching young people about the culture. She herself had learned Ojibwe culture from hearing such stories, when doing her fieldwork. She remembered how impatient she had been in hearing such stories, with the “strange happenings and seemingly irrelevant connections and unexplained motivations” contained in them. Yet she noted that when Ojibwe children were told such stories they were not as impatient. They could deal with the unknown because there was much they did not understand about life in general. Mary wrote:

I have observed children enjoying a story immensely even when large portions remain beyond their understanding. They apparently can accept those parts, like so much in their daily experience, rest upon knowledge yet to be attained, contain clues to a future unraveling of the mystery of life—the still largely mysterious life of the adults around them.

Mary compared the reactions of children to acceptance many people have in reading mystery stories, which contain puzzles but also of the promise of an understanding to be reached in the end. She concluded:

The readers of this book will receive some outside help in western-culture style, since the authors have generously provided explanatory keys to the Ojibwa doors to life. But please, dear reader, don’t cheat and look at the ethnographic sections first. Be like the child of the culture, or at least like the ethnographer—trust that the meaning is there; proceed as thought the only way to find it is the hard way—by living, and wondering.

When I read these words they were inspirational, but I did not understand the extent to which they came from a complex, nuanced mind, one capable of extremely detailed analysis of culture and history. In 1984 my friend John Fierst and I both had research to do at the Hudson Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, where Ed and Mary were working on The Cranes, the people of Weagamow Lake. They seemed as eager to know about our research as they were in telling us about theirs. We had several good meals with them, (at Ed’s expense, I think) and had a delightful time. Because Mary was working on her Roots research, relating to Minnesota history, I often saw her and corresponded with her in the following years.

Like many others, I soon became the recipient of long, richly detailed letters, full of information, ideas, and an amazing energy that came from someone who in person gave the misleading impression of being frail. After Ed’s death she started to spend part of the year in Minneapolis for research at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. She and I often went to lunch at It’s Greek to Me, or any other Greek restaurant that might happen to be nearby. The last time I saw her was in 2007, when she came to the launch party for my book and we had lunch at Christo’s. Now I wish that I could talk with her again, but reading her articles, her rich letters, I feel again the inspiration of her energy, her knowledge, and her understanding. Even though she is gone, our conversations with Mary and her ideas will continue.

Those interested in reading some of Mary’s many published essays and articles should know that during her professional career her work was published under several names. Her first work was published under the name Mary Bartholomew Black or Mary B. Black. Later on, after her marriage to Edward Rogers her name was usually given as Mary Black-Rogers or Mary Black Rogers, without the hyphen.  Eventually I hope to put together a more complete bibliography. For now, most of her essay on her adoption at Weagamow Lake can be read online at Google books.

Wanted: Historian to study development of Twin Cities suburbia

Historical Projects, Minnesota culture, Minnesota historical organizations, Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota history

Todd Mahon, Executive director of the Anoka County  Historical Society, writes that he is looking for a historian to do a study of suburbanization in Anoka and Hennepin Counties in Minnesota. The work is to be funded by a a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, through the Minnesota Historical Society. Here’s how the grant application explained the topic of study and below that is the job announcement:

The phenomenon of suburbanization has had a huge impact on the lives of Minnesotans.  The populations shifts away from the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul and from rural areas to suburban communities of the Twin Cities metro area has changed the state’s political makeup, its natural environment, its infrastructure, its education system, and much more.  Anoka and Hennepin Counties share a unique history that lends itself to telling the local and national story of nineteenth and twentieth century suburbanization in the United States.  Columbia Heights was among Minneapolis’s first streetcar suburbs when Thomas Lowery brought his streetcar line up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights, where he owned and developed real estate.  The two counties share one of the largest school districts in the state, and the transportation corridor of the Mississippi River—a transportation corridor that has been reemphasized with the opening of the Northstar Commuter Railroad in 2009.

"Interior view of the living room in one of the new homes in the Thompson Park housing development near Northdale Boulevard and Foley Road in Coon Rapids"5/23/1955; Minnesota Historical Society Photo, Photographer: Norton & Peel Photograph Collection, Location no. Norton & Peel 230772 Negative no. NP230772

The 21st century finds both counties at a crossroads in their suburban development.  Each has only one township remaining (Linwood and Hassan), and Anoka County has seen two other townships incorporate in just the last four years.  Hassan has recently started its own historical society over the threat of annexation by Rogers.  Hennepin County is seeing its first ring suburbs, like Richfield, Bloomington, and St. Louis Park, face redevelopment issues, while up in Anoka County, Ramsey and Nowthen (Anoka County’s newest incorporated city), are facing land use decisions and other pains of suburban growth like the extension of city municipal services and law enforcement.  Policy makers across the two counties are in need of resources to inform their decisions that will impact the planned growth of these communities.

In addition to their shared histories, the impact of suburbanization has been felt, and continues to be felt, but it has only recently been the focus of a serious academic study.  The suburbanization has occurred and it is now time to examine it through an historians lens.  Both counties have nationally recognized historical societies, but neither have tackled this subject in depth.  A report on their shared history will be a benefit for policy makers, academics, and more.  The final product will also include tangible programming ideas with realistic road maps to produce these programs and bring the history of suburbanization to the greater public and encourage them to think about and discuss their community, what it is, how it became that, and what they want it to be in the future.

Contract Historian Position

The Anoka County Historical Society (ACHS) and Hennepin History Museum (HHM) seek applicants for a part-time, independent contract position to complete a history of the suburban development of Anoka and Hennepin Counties.  This position exists through a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.  The Contract Historian will compile an extensive, written history using primary and secondary sources, administer an oral history program, and create a resource guide for others interested in researching the suburban development of the two counties.  Other duties will include working with ACHS and HHM staff to hire two interns that will assist with the project, and work with high school students from the Breck School on a phase to be determined by the contract historian and the students’ advisors (possibilities include researching community incorporation dates and changing municipal boundaries, etc.).  The final draft must be completed by May 15, 2011.  Funding for the grant provides for 973 hours for the contract historian at an hourly rate of $20.00.  The successful candidate must have a Bachelors Degree in History or a related field and demonstrate skills commensurate with this type of project.

The project is contingent upon a request from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

Applicant Instructions

Candidates for this position are required to deliver:

1)      Letter of Application

2)      Resume

3)      Two Letters of Reference

4)      Two writing samples (excerpts from larger works will be accepted.)

Please provide copies as materials will not be returned.

To:
Suburban Development Contract Historian Position
Anoka County Historical Society
2135 Third Avenue North
Anoka, MN 55303

Call Todd Mahon, ACHS Executive Director, for more information.
Phone # (763) 421-0600 x104, or via e-mail at [email protected].

The application deadline is July 23, 2010.

The selection of applicants for interviews will be based on the above materials.

Anoka Shopping Center, Anoka. Photograph Collection ca. 1955; Minnesota Historical Society photo, Location no. MA6.9 AN3.1 r5 Negative no. 6046-A

Stains on “White Paper”–On the nature of bureaucratic information-gathering

Bdote: A Public EIS, Historical Projects

Bureaucratic approaches to the study of history and culture are fundamentally authoritarian. Understanding bureaucratic knowledge-gathering and bureaucracies in general requires ethnographic knowledge, including the folk knowledge, traditions, and practices of bureaucrats, which is sometimes only retrievable through the Freedom of Information Act.

Bureaucrats insist on the codification of rules for gathering and interpreting history. Though apparently scientific and unbiased in nature these rules are self-serving for the bureaucrat, serving the goals of government agencies or private bureaucracies. It is always easier when dealing with information that is challenging to the position of the bureaucrat if one can question its adherence to a set of bureaucratically-established rules, rather than deal with the meaning of the information itself. Similarly, it is easier to call attention to the use of bureaucratically-defined terminology than to deal with the merits of an opposing argument.  If the non-bureaucrat–that is to say, the person–can be shown to have used a word or phrase in the wrong way, then this will be used as a way of defeating the person’s argument without necessitating the use of real contradictory data.

The concept of data, itself, is often a bureaucratic concept. In drafting rules and in defining terms, the bureaucrat seeks to define the very nature of what is information and what is not. The bureaucrat defines data in ways that is supportive of the bureaucratic position. Written records, viewed as authoritative, especially when created by a bureaucracy, are preferred over oral history or tradition, even in circumstances when the meaning in question has to do with living oral tradition itself.  When information that does not accord with arbitrary standards created by the bureaucrat is presented in a public arena, then the validity of the information can be easily undermined.

Bureaucracies are more forgiving of the flaws in their own historical records than they are of the history assembled by others.  Information that fits the bureaucrat’s own preconceptions, prejudices, and assumptions is assumed to be accurate. If information gathered supports the motives and beliefs of bureaucratic managers, standards for judging it are lower than evidence that contradicts those beliefs and motives. In fact, what bureaucrats know or think they know requires little evidence at all. Few critical standards of accuracy are applied to it.

In most public contexts, including in bureaucracies, history is respected if it comes from official sources. Information from such sources is sometimes labelled a “White Paper“–an ostensibly “authoritative report,” one without blemish or flaw. Information from bureaucratic sources is preferred to information from non-bureaucratic sources. Information from tribal governments is preferred to information from tribal people, even from tribal historians, elders, or spiritual leaders. Individuals are assumed to have an ax to grind. Bureaucracies are, by definition, never motivated by personal motives.They are believed to be purely dispassionate and scientific in their points of view. They never have an ax to grind or a dog in any fight.

Media are simply another form of bureaucracy. Newspapers in particular prefer information from official sources. Questions about the accuracy of historical information are often discounted by media when it comes from individuals, especially if this involves a challenge to information collected by official bureaucracies. When official sources question the accuracy of information from individuals, the official source is assumed by the media to be accurate.

All of this explains why it is difficult to call into question the accuracy of information gathered by a bureaucracy. Since bureaucracies naturally protect other bureaucracies, it usually takes a major scandal, such as a hand in the till, sex, or some vaguely shocking facts of some sort or another. Even if these facts are only related indirectly to the accuracy of information, they are often enough to raise questions. Once questions start being asked, it is finally possible to change the equation in the process of bureaucratic information-gathering. But the questions raised have to have some basis in fact or they will simply affirm the false legitimacy of the bureaucratic information structure.

The application of this analysis to the bureaucratic information-gathering practices of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area’s in regard to the Coldwater/ Bureau of Mines Twin Cities Campus property in Hennepin County, Minnesota, will be discussed next time.

Fears about a major Iron Range historical collection

Historical Projects, Minnesota historical organizations, Minnesota history

What will happen to the endangered archival collection in the Iron Range Research Center (IRRC) on the campus of the Minnesota Discovery Center (MDC), formerly known as Ironworld Discovery Center? The fate of the archives, which opened in 1980, is up in the air because of the closing of the center in the fall of 2009, due to funding cutbacks.

The center’s collections contain thousands of cubic feet of unpublished materials including government records, personal records, church records, and records of numerous business, civic, and social organizations. They include the papers of former governor Rudy Perpich, mining company newsletters, maps, photographs – many very rare, oral histories, and microfilmed newspapers. According to Barbara Sommer, whose book, Hard Work and a Good Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota, based in part on research in IRRC collections, won a 2009 Minnesota Book Award and a 2009 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award:

Its [IRRC] collections contain archival materials that cannot be found elsewhere. . . . They represent “stunning examples” of materials documenting “people’s history” of 20th century America and Minnesota. As a former historical organization director, I know the task of preserving the materials and making them accessible … is not easy. But I also know we in Minnesota are proud of our history and supportive of protecting it.

The Ironworld Development Corporation (IDC) manages and operates the Minnesota Discovery Center, including the Iron Range Research Center. This is done under a contract with Iron Range Resources, a state economic development agency with funding from a taconite production tax. Rick Puhek, IDC Board chair, stated in a February 11, 2010, press release the Board remains committed to re-opening the Minnesota Discovery Center.

Aaron J. Brown, author of Overburden, Modern Life on the Iron Range, wrote on his MinnesotaBrown.com blog on December 14, 2009, the Iron Range Resources Board had approved a $450,000 expenditure to the Minnesota Discovery Center “to pay some bills, do an audit of the operation, heat the buildings, secure its historical documents, and also to reopen the facility to those who want to use its vast collection of area research data.” For more information from Brown, see his MinnesotaBrown.com blog. To date, although the audit has been completed, the Iron Range Research Center remains closed.

Researchers hope a sustainable operating plan for the Minnesota Discovery Center would include preserving, protecting, and maintaining IRRC collections intact and housed permanently on the Iron Range, continuing the Center’s purpose as a repository for materials documenting Minnesota’s Iron Ranges. If you would like to add your support for maintaining the IRRC collections intact and housed permanently on the Iron Range, contact:

Sandy Layman, Commissioner
Iron Range Resources
P.O. Box 441
4261 Highway 53 South
Eveleth, Minnesota 55734-0441

Senator David J. Tomassoni- DFL, District 05
[email protected]

Rep. Tom Rukavina – DFL, District 05A
[email protected]

Rep. Anthony “Tony” Sertich – DFL, District 05B
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Getting at the truth in history

Bdote: A Public EIS, Historical Projects

Henry Ford, or maybe it was Harry Truman, said that the trouble with history was that it was “one damn thing after another.” Other people say that historians are god-like because they can make history in their own image. George Santayana said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sergeant Joe Friday, on the show Dragnet said: “All we want are the facts.” Patricia Hampl wrote at the beginning of her poem Resort: “The point of this place: don’t ask for much, ask/ for everything. Get: details as everywhere.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that everyone was entitled to his or her own opinion but no one was entitled to his or her own set of facts.

All of these thoughts are worth considering when thinking about the process of gathering information to figure out what happened in the past. Let’s suppose you are doing research on the history of bathtub use by early European-Americans in Minnesota.  Suppose that one of the drawbacks or, perhaps, attractions to writing about this subject is that there are many people with very decided opinions about the topic.

For example, some people may say that in the 1840s and 1850s, when white settlement began in Minnesota, taking baths was not a common practice anywhere in the United States. They say that people just didn’t have a real hangup about bathing. They say that for people then cleanliness was not next to godliness, nor was it all that important. They say that the first European-Americans in Minnesota never bathed. On the other hand there are other people who claim that cleanliness was sweeping the country. They say that bathing was all the rage, especially in places like Minnesota where there was plenty of water to spare, except in the winter when all the water was frozen. And even then they would melt the ice and bathe in it, or cut holes in the ice on lakes and jump in for a brisk soak.

So if you plan to do research and write about the topic of bathtubs in the first years of European-American settlement of Minnesota, you have to be aware of this controversy and you have to expect that at some point you are going to have to express an opinion on this controversy. But, regardless, in doing research on the subject you are going to want to look at all the available documents about the subject, oral history, letters, newspaper articles, books, even works of fiction, to figure out not only whether people in Minnesota in those days had bathtubs, but also how they used them.

You will want to be very thorough abut this, to get all the facts and all the details. And even though there is this widespread controversy on “Cleanliness in 19th-century America,” you can’t just set out to prove that Americans in the 19th century did or did not care about being clean. You can have a theory about that, but you have to keep an open mind. You have to look at all the facts that you find and then draw some firmer conclusions. Otherwise your work will be a real stretch. If you decide beforehand, before you’ve looked at all the information, you will look like an idiot, someone just picking an choosing from among the facts to prove your point.

If you write about the topic and ignore or leave out some of the information and it turns out that that information contradicts what you’ve written then you are going to look pretty silly, unless you are willing to incorporate the new information and show, somehow how it either proves your point or how you have changed your theory to mesh with the facts. Suppose you write: “There were no bathtubs in early Minnesota,” and then someone finds half a dozen letters describing bathtubs on farms and in towns like Chatfield, Red Wing, Dawson, and Alexandria how will you be able to explain that your statement was accurate? One way to justify your description of the lack of bathtubs is to attack the messenger, saying, for example, that the person who provided the information was an idiot, an adulterer, a vivisectionist, or an opponent of highway construction and should therefore not be believed. Or you could even pretend that the contrary evidence proving your theory wrong simply did not exist.

But these strategies have dangers because at some point people are going to ask you why you are ignoring the facts. They will repeat Moynihan’s statement that you are entitled to your own opinions but not to your own set of facts and they will say that if you are going to do history you have to deal with all the facts, not just some of them. One strategy to get around this is by suggesting that not all pieces of information are really “facts.”

What are “the facts” anyway? Some people who do history intentionally stack the deck by deciding that some information is factual and other information is not. For example, they may claim that oral history is not reliable but that information written down or printed is likely to be very reliable. So, if you find an oral history with someone who recalled, years after coming to Minnesota in 1853: “We carved our tub from the trunk of a red oak tree and when we were done we filled it with water from the spring behind the barn, in which we bathed after thanking the Lord for our bounty,” you might question its accuracy, especially if there were no discussion of bathtubs or bathing in issues of the St. Paul Democrat or St. Paul Pioneer from the 1850s. And to prove your point you might add that this description says that the people “bathed” but that it was an ambiguous statement suggesting that the people bathed in the tub, the spring, or even the barn and that if they bathed in the barn they may have been bathing the animals and not themselves. You could even point out that the tub in question was homemade and therefore not really a bathtub in the proper sense of the word. Who’s to say, you would ask, whether or not this particular settler was an odd duck who happened to like bathing in water, unlike the vast majority of his fellow settlers?

The success of any one of these strategies depends in part upon your status and the status of the person or persons who presents the contrary evidence. If you are working for a well-known agency or institution and the person offering evidence to the contrary happens to a blogger of uncertain reputation then it is likely that you are not going to be asked any hard questions about your theory that “there were no bathtubs in early Minnesota.” Newspaper reporters or editors in particular are not going to want to give attention to information supplied through websites. In fact it is likely that you will not get questions at all on the issue of bathtubs in early Minnesota because, someone might say, who really cares one way or another about this antiquarian issue? What difference does it make whether settlers bathed or had bathtubs anyway? This is a helpful attitude, because it it is always better for well-known institutions if their employees do not have to answer for any mistakes they may have made.

But the blogger who maintains that there were really bathtubs in early Minnesota might be a persistent person. He or she might keep posting stories like “Why is the well-known institution lying about bathtubs?” or “The truth about bathing that the well-known institution has chosen to ignore.” After a few of these stories, people, even newspapers, might start to ask you hard questions. You will try to simply ignore the blogger and other disgruntled people but it will start to make you feel really testy. It will be harder and harder not to respond. Even when people send you emails to ask you simple unrelated questions you might end up itching to throw in a few odd thoughts about bathtubs to defend yourself, at the end of the email such as: “You may be seeing a lot of untrue or unreliable information about bathtubs on the web. Let me know if you have any questions.”

That’s when you know know that the obligation of the historian to deal with the facts, all the facts, is really getting to you, in spite of your plan to stack the deck in favor of your own theory.  One of these nights you are going to wake up screaming: “Yes, I know there were bathtubs in Red Wing and Chatfield! Leave me alone!” Your family is going to wonder about you, but it is a good start. As Fran Lebowitz, Harvey Fierstein, or Harry Carey once said, “Denial is not just a pool of water in Egypt.”

How to do historical research

Historical Projects

My mother, who was a tenacious historian, used to ask, when she was involved in some particularly difficult historical research: “If I were that piece of paper where would I be?” She practiced a kind of method-historical research, in which she thought about the process through which the information might have been written, collected, and stored in order to determine where the information might have ended up. As a result she found documents that no one else could find, and tracked down answers to questions that other people thought could not be answered.

Many people think that all it takes to researching and writing about a historical topic is to go into a library or archives and find the books and folders of information that are labeled conveniently with the topic of your research. So, for example, if you want to study the use of bathtubs in early Minnesota or somewhere you just go into the library and say: “Show me everything you have on bathtubs,” and the librarian will be able to pull out a folder, or a few books that give you everything you need on the topic.

Most of the time that is not how it works. Most of the information is not collected for you in advance. You have to have think about who might have been interested in writing down the information you want or collecting it later. Perhaps there are a few published reminiscences in which someone wrote about using a bathtub in Minnesota in 1849.  Letters or diaries written by some of the first settlers may mention taking baths in bathtubs. Some 19th century county histories might mention bathtubs, too.

But one thing you have to keep in mind is that there may be mentions of bathtubs in early sources, but there is no guarantee that someone who indexed a book or inventoried a collection of manuscripts thought that bathtubs were something important enough to put in the index or inventory. If someone did write about bathtubs in an early county history, the words bath or tub or bathing, might still not be present in the index to the book. The whole idea of bathing might have seemed so mundane, compared to the more important topics of the first schools, the first churches, and the “first white child” born in a small town, that the publisher of the book would simply have left it out of the index, even though it was referred to in passing in the book.

This is why when I see that someone is planning a “literature search” on a particular historical topic, I am skeptical. Doing a comprehensive survey of all the available published and unpublished sources on a particular topic is certainly important. But it is only the basic first step in any kind of historical research. Even with the increasing amount of published texts available online with full text-search capability, there remain a lot of books and manuscripts that are not online and that are imperfectly cataloged or indexed. In the 1980s when I was writing about the common practice of gift-giving in the fur trade and among Indian people, I found out quickly that the terms “gift” or “present” were seldom indexed. Furthermore, people writing about gift-giving sometimes wrote about it without even using the word gift. You had read through fur-trade journals, account books, and reminiscences page-by-page to find the information that was there but not listed in the indexes.

Historical research on any topic requires a thorough knowledge of the available sources and the ability to make sense of the information you find in them. Someone who states that he or she has done a comprehensive literature search may simply have skimmed the surface, without seeing the most important or significant information buried below.