Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director
Missouri Humanities Council
Contents:
Chautauqua to Feature Mary Elizabeth Lease
Next year's Chautauqua season introduces the theme of "America The Bountiful" in connection with our tour of the Smithsonian exhibit, Key Ingredients. The theme also resonates with an initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities titled, "We The People." Our Chautauqua looks at the notion of American bounty as connected with natural wealth, human hope, and social conflict over how we slice the bountiful pie. The tour begins in Pike County, location of the international fruit tree business, The Stark Bros. Nursery, continues in Osage Beach, and concludes in Diamond, Missouri, birthplace of George Washington Carver.
We will highlight one of the five Chautauqua scholars in each of the coming e-news issues. This month we introduce Glenna Wallace, who has written a note about why Mary Elizabeth Lease's voice is an important part of "America The Bountiful."
http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/Nov04/lease_essay.htm
Changing Demographics and the Arts of Inclusion
The closer you look at Missouri, the more you see the world. In Marble Hill, the Bollinger County Museum of Natural History is being developed in what used to be a small college's Administration Building. Thirty years ago that building was remodeled to create a cluster of small apartments for Laotian refugees who the residents of Marble Hill made welcome. The little town of Marble Hill became a haven for displaced families, adding new faces, new names, new languages, and new cultural histories to our state.
Stories like this abound in Missouri. We have seen new faces arriving here for centuries. A little over two hundred years ago another wave of refugee families were invited into that region of southeast Missouri. These were Shawnee and Delaware Indians seeking peace and prosperity away from the scene of constant strife in their homeland in Ohio. They built towns along the Apple Creek, prospered, appeared to the visitor as "civilized" as anyone else in the vicinity, and preserved their cultural memory.
In Kansas City last month a READ from the START teacher, fluent in American Sign Language, taught a group of new parents how to use stories with toddlers. The group was composed of 3 Asian women and 2 Asian men; 1 Black woman and 2 Black men; 11 Caucasian women, one of whom was deaf, and 4 Caucasian men; and 2 Iranian women. Of the total of twenty-five participants, eight were fathers. This is very good news!
So many programs about community and cultural heritage can include people from every ethnic and social background. We don't have to think in terms of segregated museum space or segregated slices of the program money or time. We can learn about each other's differences in a context of experiences we share as human beings.
Humanities councils have known for decades that groups who come together to share stories form themselves into new communities. The stories may come from history or literature or a personal encounter and they serve as a means to connect us as we explore who we are, how we have developed and what we hope to become.
Ntozake Shange is Featured in Read MOre for 2005
People
all over Missouri will have the pleasure next spring of reading and discussing
Betsey Brown during Read MOre, Missouri's statewide book club.
Written by Ntozake Shange in 1985, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account
of an African-American St. Louis family affected by racial tensions, desegregation
and marital conflict in the late 1950s. (The author's name is pronounced
En-toe-ZAK-kay SHONG-gay.)
Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey in 1948. According to a biographical sketch by Mafo Kosseh-Kamada, "In 1956, the Williams family moved to Missouri. Being a gifted child, Shange was sent several miles away from home to school in St. Louis to receive special schooling. For the first time, she attended a non-segregated school. She experienced overt racism and was constantly harassed by the other students.. Seeing reality as such at an early age created a sense of displacement for Shange while becoming the motivational force behind her writing. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager...and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that... (Interview with Brenda Lyons 1986). Shange's goal became to be a part of a collection of books that someone might give to a female child.
"In 1966, Shange enrolled in Barnard College in New York. [She] became starved for Black literature. In an interview with Henry Blackwell, Shange summarizes her college education: For years, I was able to tolerate being chastised and denigrated in American literature and any other kind of literature because that is where we were, and that's how women were regarded. She graduated with honors in 1970 with a B.A. in American Studies. Deciding that there was no space for an independent woman's voice, Shange moved from New York to California, and attended graduate school at University of Southern California. Here, Shange taught writing and began to associate with poets, teachers, performers, and feminist writers. My craft was seriously nurtured in California and that probably has some influence on what my writing looks like (Interview with Henry Blackwell). It was in graduate school where she became 'Ntozake Shange.' In 1973, she earned her Master's Degree in American Studies.
"Shange continued living in California and taught courses in humanities, women's studies, and writing at various colleges. Not only was she writing poetry, Shange and her friends began to perform their poetry, music, and dance in and around San Francisco. The poetry of the Black writer on the West Coast clarifies - migrations, our relationship to the soil, to ourselves in space. There is an enormous amount of space in the West, and you do not feel personally impinged upon every time you come out your door, like you do in New York and Chicago (Blackwell). In addition to teaching, writing, and performing, Shange joined Halifu Osumare's dance company. Here, she met a woman by the name of Paula Moss. They began collaborating on poetry, music, and dance that would become part of Shange's first choreopoem, For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem."
The full biographical sketch is at the University of Minnesota:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/authors/SHANGEntozake.htm
Another of the many sketches is at Rutgers University:
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~cybers/shange2.html
Here is a link to the author's autobiographical poem:
http://myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=n_shange
We are fortunate that Ntozake Shange will return to St. Louis in April to discuss her novel.
Read MOre is a nonprofit community effort organized by Missouri librarians, with the Missouri Humanities Council leading the cheering section. A schedule of programs will appear on our web site next winter.
Cultural Citizenship and the Process of Election
Despite the fatigue of spin-overload, and the extreme relief of being done
with campaigns for a while, I am moved to write a few lines about citizenship
as it applies to forms of community service having to do with "heritage
preservation." My essay includes mention of the museums in
Marble Hill and Poplar Bluff, with a lovely picture of an Edison phonograph
and a story of three people who made such an object socially constructive.
http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/Nov04/election.htm
--Michael
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Published monthly by the Missouri Humanities Council, a tax-exempt, non-profit
organization affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Federal
agency.
http://www.mohumanities.org
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