Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director
Missouri Humanities Council

Contents:

• Chautauqua to Feature George Washington Carver
• Interpretive Planning for Communities?
• Family Reading -- Investment in Lifelong Relationships
• Mizzou Hosts Conference on The Haitian Revolution Next Month
• Transitions at the Missouri Humanities Council
• Farmers and Decency

Chautauqua to Feature George Washington Carver

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 Paxton Williams, who has written a note about why he wanted to interpret George Washington Carver for the Chautauqua tour.

http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/Oct04/carver_essay.htm

Interpretive Planning for Communities?

Our Charette program has occasionally focused on the interpretation of a whole community.  In one of our earliest charettes, we brought consultants into the village of Arrow Rock to suggest ideas for new interpretive approaches.  I still remember the crisp autumn air that morning that we visitors were given a walking tour of the town.  We were surrounded by potential stories, a bounty of possibilities for the Friends of Arrow Rock.  There's the story of Dr. Sappington and the introduction of quinine.  In his day, people took it for granted that "yellow fever" would reduce the number of able-bodied workers in any season by about half.  It was just a fact of life.  Sappington did not "discover" quinine.  His unique contribution was in the art of persuading people to try something new, a frightfully difficult thing.  His success effectively doubled productivity without adding to the population.  It's a story of someone getting something done against the usual steep odds, but it was one of many stories that had not yet been told evocatively. 

We're about to tackle the same challenge in two communities that are separated by only 48 miles on the map but are worlds apart: Sedalia and Waverly.  Sedalia is a big town with a big railroad history, a big ragtime history, and a big State Fair history.  There are many cultural organizations in town.  The Sedalia Heritage Foundation seeks a way to conceptualize an "interpretive plan" that can include the missions of all those organizations and give them all a common "playbook" for telling the stories of Sedalia.  This is bold work, visionary work.  It's the kind of thing we've been working toward with our partner in this program, The Missouri Arts Council. 

Waverly is due north, on the Missouri River.  It is an appealing little town with fewer than a thousand residents.  The orchards of Waverly yield 75% of Missouri's apple crop, and its schools get high marks.  I'm told that in the old days a hundred boats called at its natural harbor on any given day.  There's an Arts Council there, and a cadre of devoted history buffs, and no museum, no historical society, and, amazingly, no genealogy group.  The people want to move a one-room schoolhouse into the center of the village and develop it as a community center for history and other cultural programs.  They want to find a way to involve a few more people each year in the work of interpreting Waverly's fascinating and rich history.  I am looking forward to this challenge because Waverly, like so many small towns, is short of money but blessed with human capital.  It has occurred to me that with a town web site and with good schools there might be ways to involve people in low-cost projects that will interest them in Waverly's stories and involve them in making those stories available in a "virtual history room" on the internet. 

Our charette schedule has one more opening for 2005, and the deadline is "open" until that slot is filled.  We help cultural institutions address the challenges of interpretation.  Highlights of recent seasons include services rendered to the Blind Boone Home in Columbia, to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, to the Mark Twain Home Foundation in Hannibal, to the Champ Clark Home in Bowling Green, and to the county historical societies in Newton, Cass, and Osage counties. 

Charette guidelines: http://www.mohumanities.org/programs/cultural/charettes.htm

Investing in Lifelong Relationships

Many people imagine that "literacy" is only about deciphering words on the page.  It is much more than that.  For a new parent, literacy is an activity of mind in which an adult meets a child on the playground of the imagination.  The payoff of this interaction is a habit of communication that spills over into the rest of the day, the rest of the year, and the rest of life.  Family reading is a creative act.  It creates the institution of the family in ways that are active, playful, and open-ended.  When I think of the more than fifteen hundred families of limited resources who we helped to discover the wealth of their own minds, I beam with happiness.  My colleague, Kathryn Ballard, collects the stories that come in from discussion leaders and parents who attend READ from the START.  Here is one from recent months:

One grandparent shared that she was attending the program because she was one of only a couple people in her family that could read. Several others shared details about someone in their family who also could not read following that comment. When another parent stated, "Just because someone reads slowly that doesn’t make you dumb," I heard a couple of the participants breathe a sigh of relief.

A young mother came up to me at the conclusion and began to talk. She shared that she has a learning disability and by talking as a group about reading, she felt better. She said, "I was afraid you would think I am stupid for being a slow reader." She talked about how her husband does all of the reading to their children because she doesn’t always know all of the words. She said she now has books that she can read to her children. She asked questions about the books for the next session and we looked at them briefly to reassure her that she would be able to do it. She seemed excited and nervous about the second session.
At the second session, the same mother asked if she could read first. As she began to read, she read with a lot of expression. The rest of the group followed her lead.

As a Discussion Leader, it was very rewarding to see a parent with low reading skills excited to be reading. I felt this one program will help generations of children in that particular family and in the community at large.

--From a discussion leader in Washington County

A Fresh Look at the Haitian Revolution

Scholars from around the world are converging on UM-Columbia for a two-day conference on interpretations of the Haitian Revolution.  It will take place on November 4-5 from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the MU Memorial Union.  The public is cordially invited to attend the conference free of charge.  There is a Friday evening banquet at 6:00 p.m. for which there is a charge, with a keynote speech by James Arnold to follow at 7:15.  People who would like to attend only the speech will be admitted at 7:15 free of charge. Details are available at the following web site:

http://www.missouri.edu/~afroroma/

This multidisciplinary conference will convene scholars of Caribbean and Latin American studies to discuss the influence of the Haitian Revolution upon Caribbean and Latin American discourses of ethnicity, nationalism, internationalism, and cultural contact. The symposium's eventual goal will be to propose new models for excavating, assessing, and envisioning the role played by black resistance in the formation of alternative model American identities and forms of political and cultural resistance. 

His successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, led the battle that expelled the French forces from Haiti.  On January 1, 1804 Dessalines declared Haiti independent, making it the first Black republic in the world and the first independent nation in Latin America.  Thus, Haiti figures hugely in the literature of the Caribbean.

Transitions at MHC

Barbara Gill, known to people throughout Missouri for her tireless and enthusiastic promotion of the Missouri Humanities Council, is retiring on November 1 in her twenty-fifth year with the Council.  Barbara served as Acting Director during a leadership transition in 1995 and was promoted to Deputy Director early in 1997.  She has been a colleague of good judgment and the sharpest of editorial eyes, a manager of MHC finances, a manager of the Chautauqua program, and most recently a manager of our Program Bureau.  She has carried these responsibilities without regard for her own drawdowns of energy and has found the time to contribute in equally tireless ways to the Brentwood Historical Society.  I can't think of a colleague who I have admired and respected as a decent human being more than Barbara Gill.  She has epitomized the concept of "walking the talk."  As time permits, we hope to retain Barbara's services on a part-time basis at least until she reaches her 25-year milestone next March. 

Board members Nancy Dornan of Springfield and Rosa Archibald Shockey have completed their terms of service on our board.  Randy Russell of Springfield has resigned because of scheduling difficulties, and Alan Perry of Kansas City has resigned to pursue a new career as a teacher of English in China.  Alan sends regular posts to his friends in the U.S.  Here is an except from a recent one:

Tuesday, September 14

There are bouquets of flowers and the contents of a fruit basket scattered about the room. As Dana said, it looks like someone died. But no, no one died; Friday was Teacher Appreciation Day. Students bring a bouquet to each class, or make a personal delivery to your residence! I’ve even received a Wheat Man, a gorgeous little flour, water and dye man with a feather in his hair that I plan to get home one way or another. So even having done damn little by way of teaching so far, and that little being more feeling my way than charging confidently ahead, these past two weeks I’ve been showered with gratitude. It begins when the class applauds when you walk in the door the first day (“to welcome you!”) Students may waylay you following a class to tell you how much they hope you like it in Jinzhou, or how happy they are to be learning English, or if you can speak Chinese and if they can help you learn it, or if they can take your picture. One such group of five or six shouted “Happy Teacher Appreciation Day!” on Friday. When I mentioned that there is no such day in America, one guy was appalled. “How do they show their appreciation?”

Initially I think I gave them little to appreciate. Several people told me I was speaking too fast. Of course I was nervous as the proverbial cat anyway, never having taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and not having any real idea what the students’ level of English might be. Still, things improved as I slowed down my delivery and began to concentrate on a small number of new sentences and words hopefully relevant to their medical training. I can usually get a laugh by describing riding the bus over the bumpy local streets and how the good Chinese food will have me fat and jolly by the time we leave Jinzhou.

MHC has elected four new board members starting November 1.  They are Marianne Inman, President of Central Methodist University in Fayette; Fred Janzow, Dean of University Studies at Southeast Missouri State University; James Achison, a banker in Hayti; and Eric Zahnd, Platte County Prosecuting Attorney.  Also, Governor Holden has named Patrick A. McInerney, an attorney in Kansas City, to succeed Karen Holland of Kansas City.

Farmers and Decency

October 1 would have been the 60th birthday of my friend, Dick Black, a Vietnam veteran, a descendant of the Keetowah Band of the Cherokees in Oklahoma, an advocate for Native American rights, and a man of justice.  The drive to Dick's memorial service at the Providence Baptist Church in Half Rock, Missouri prompted a flood of thoughts which I've pulled together in an essay about "Farmers and Decency."

http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/Oct04/decency.htm

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