102 years and one day.
Prohibition came and went. 
There was a Great Depression. 
A Great Recession.
COVID-19. Y2K.  9/11. 
All of the events in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.
When compared to 102 years and one day, my 26 years and 19 days seemed rather inconsequential. 
And yet, here I sat, 
on June 23rd, 2021, 
102 years and one day later. 
The sound of the whirring A/C unit shaking the room as it battled the 90 degree heat. 
The lights dimmed to keep the temperature down. 
The oscillating fan in the corner rustling the ephemera 
I had unceremoniously stacked in a pile to inventory.

Atop this pile was a delicate envelope containing three postcards,
from June 22, 1919;
“Ladies Potatoe Race// Eugene Field Picnic”,
“Boys 3 Legged Race// Eugene Field Picnic”,
“‘Going Some’ Childrens Free For All Race// Eugene Field Picnic.”
Blurred figures and frozen smiles 
Caught between the historical moments of history books.

It was only my third week as a fellow at the Hennepin History Museum.
Working on a project about pairing of Field and Hale schools in South Minneapolis,
I had been tasked with inventorying the materials inside a green bin. 
Materials that had been collected over the years by community members, but had never been properly inventoried or archived.
Scrapbooks of newspaper clippings,
Old school assignments,
School newsletters,
Photographs colored by age,
Flyers,
Letters,
Meeting minutes,
And three postcards.
I spent 20 hours a week
Filling a spreadsheet with their
NameDateSizeDescriptionConditionEtc.
Counting the faces of children in a class picture,
Flipping through the details on library volunteers and measles vaccines,
Scanning digital archives for matching headlines.

Most often those 20 hours allowed me to get lost in the mundane and inconsequential.
A letter from Lisa Smith detailing the most dangerous things she’s done —
Sitting in the street and throwing rocks in the air.
The marriage of Miss Jane Olmsted, now Mrs. Papageorgiou.
A Pairing timeline for Hale and Field detailing the over 30 coffee parties held in Hale and Field communities to bring proponents and opponents of the pairing together. 
These coffee parties didn’t make the history books.
Nor did the Eugene Field Picnic from 1919. 
However, as the summer moved on, I was granted more and more insight on the importance of these coffee parties. 
Listening back to the interviews with elders who worked to pair Hale and Field, there seems to be no doubt in their minds that these coffee parties played an integral part in the pairing. 

It is these between moments that make history happen. 
The moments that seem mundane and inconsequential, like
Going to a picnic,
Hosting a coffee party,
Or flipping through ephemera on a hot summer day.
These are the moments that connect us to the past,
That make us stop and reflect on the choices that brought us here.
Like how a postcard from 102 years and one day ago can interrupt the rhythm of
NameDateSizeDescriptionConditionEtc.
And cause me to stop
And think.
It was only a Google search, an essay, and an application fee that brought me here.
But it was so much more.

On September 2nd, 1971, Hale and Field had their first day as a paired school. 
A move meant to facilitate school integration in Minneapolis. 
50 years later I was logging off a Zoom meeting, 
Waving through my screen to a former student of the Hale and Field pairing,
After discussing plans about the future exhibit on this history.

Hannah L. Coble is a storyteller and public historian. She received her Bachelor’s of Arts in both English and Anthropology from the College of Wooster, and is expected to graduate with her Masters of Heritage Studies and Public History from the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) in spring of 2022. In her writing, Hannah aims to incorporate different strategic and creative forms, such as poetry. She believes that by doing this she is decentering the institutional voice, while conveying and validating the emotional truths behind the stories she tells. It is her hope to help legitimize poetic forms of storytelling — and other traditionally non-academic forms of storytelling — in order to uplift and center voices that have not been traditionally privileged in telling histories. This is specifically relevant to Hannah’s research on place, narrative, and identity. Hannah believes that place is a powerful repository of stories and identities, and it is important to recognize the vast array of stories and voices located in place.

At the beginning of my museum career, I wanted to remain as neutral as possible regarding race. Not because I believed that race is a neutral topic, but because doing Indigenous work was really mentally taxing. Doing racially relevant work can be exhausting for any POC, but especially those who have to tackle the inequalities that exist in a colonial cis white world. On top of it all, I didn’t feel valued or seen with the museum I was working for at the time, so why would I give them something so valuable to me? However, I recognized that to remain neutral, I would have to ignore all of my core values. They weren’t something I was willing to compromise. I couldn’t run from my Indigeneity within the institution, so I would need to use it to my advantage, so my community could be seen. My indigeneity is an asset to these organizations. My connection to this community, land, language, and learning impact how I do my job. These are just some of the core values that I reflect in the work that I do. 

Community Relationships

Relationship building is an integral part of any community-based job. These relationships can take months and sometimes years to build, grow, and gain trust. Without specific knowledge of the community and who does what, community outreach work can be a shot in the dark. Many of these relationships don’t stem from work done at the institution but stem from our work outside it. This comes from being a part of the community, family,  volunteering, organizing, and supporting. When members of a community know who is working within the institution, they are more likely to reach out or respond. To see themselves, their peers, and other Indigenous people doing this work gains community trust.

Land

Understanding where your institution stands when it comes to Indigenous land rights, whose land you sit on, and whose land you have stolen are all questions that need to be asked before starting your work with these communities. If your institution cannot address these issues on its own, it’s not ready to be working with Indigenous communities. White people can draw conclusions about how Indigenous people may feel or react to the institution’s legacy; without Indigenous voices inside the museum, reconciliation work is nearly impossible. But we cannot do all of the work. To begin mending past harms, we first need to acknowledge that most of these institutions have a long past in taking from the people of this land, physical lands, and their ancestors who were buried there. Our ancestors grew up on these lands, and our ancestors are buried here, our ancestors lost these lands and our buried were dug up. And a lot of trauma can stem back to museums and educational institutions. However, we are moving forward. Indigenous peoples have a deep-seated respect for how we treat mother earth, how we talk about her, and utilize her. To recognize Indigenous communities means recognizing their vested interest in the future of the lands you reside on, for Indigenous communities to finally have a voice and a say with what happens to their ancestral homelands. 

Language

Language goes hand in hand with community relationships.  It connects Indigenous people together, is a source of resilience, and a way to claim what was once stolen. To have knowledge of the regional language is a huge part of making those connections. Beyond Indigenous languages, we also need to talk about representation and interpretation. Historically, museums and educational institutions have not represented these communities accurately or respectfully. Acknowledging Indigenous people correctly within the institution for the work they do makes a significant difference in the direction your community outreach will go. When Indigenous peoples feel as if they are accurately represented within the institutions, they will feel like they have space to work with the institution rather than for the institution. 

Multigenerational approach to learning and collaboration

Indigenous people learn and absorb information in different ways. We often rely on traditional oral stories, connection to land, language, and humor to teach across all ages. This way of learning does not always align with museums’ organizational and data driven work. But by understanding how Indigenous people best learn we can also better understand how to best serve as resources for these communities and how we can best collect the correct histories. If museums start to create programs for Indigenous communities, by Indigenous community members, we begin to create space for them that they can benefit from. The changes we make as Indigenous peoples are not only for this generation but future generations,  and the relationships created with historical and educational institutions will lead the future relationships within these institutions. These relationships between community and institution are not short term projects but rather the long term goal.  

Angel Swann is a citizen of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Born and raised in the Minneapolis Indigenous Urban Community, Angel focuses her work on bringing the Indigenous Community into museums. 

Introduction

In 2014, I co-founded Soomaal House of Art (Soomaal), an artists-run organization based in Minneapolis, and the only Somali-run studio and gallery in the state and nation. Through this initiative, I support the development, creation and presentation of the arts by our local artists Using art, we explore the pressing and vexing contemporary issues of our community, including heritage, memory and identity, as we continue to forge a new life in our new home. Furthermore, art allows us to examine and critique the historical and provincial stories of our communities as well as documenting our lived experiences.

My journey and experiences over the years have led me to think about the breadth and vibrant stories, histories and visuals that come through our art programs, and how to preserve them for present and future Minnesotans.

Community-based Archiving

The Somali American community in Minnesota is one of the largest communities outside of Somalia. Its members encompass the range so familiar to immigrant communities, from elders who have spent most of their lives in the home country and refugee camps to youth born and raised in the United States.

According to recent research, Minnesota’s people of color residents have grown in the last decade and continue to rise with the highest numbers in newborns, where Somali Americans rank second. Therefore, the course of the arts, archives, research and education in Minnesota must change to reflect this demographic trend. As the recent immigration and cultural diversity of our state increases, we have to acknowledge the various needs of each community’s rich expressions and cultural innovations by starting to lay the groundwork to help them grow intellectually and artistically.

As it stands, Minnesota’s mainstream archival institutions lack the diverse records of our citizens, and it remains to advocate a dominant heritage narrative that does not represent the many communities of our state. Lack of access and the absence of representation in the state’s archives continues the systemic inequities that immigrants and people of color are already dealing with in Minnesota.

Archives are records of a certain community’s lived experiences through documents, photographs, postcards, and other primary sources. For the past years, I have been rigorously researching and working towards community-based archiving that is outside of mainstream archival institutions featuring our locality and community.

Community-based archiving allows local community members and researchers, from all fields, to grow professionally and conduct research into the arts and storytelling, history and heritage, create new narratives, and augment the historical interpretations of our diverse communities in Minnesota. Furthermore, it is both the archives and access to these collections that allow our communities to build capacity, promote a strong sense of belonging and identity, and be culturally responsive.

Archival repositories are thought of as something the state and higher educational institutions do and not local communities. Yet, these repositories hold the memories of the communities they serve. This power differential is what creates an imbalance in memory making and historicity; whose memory is remembered, whose history is celebrated, and who is considered the voice and custodian of our lived experiences? This classical form of dealing with the archives creates silences.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us of this in his seminal book, Silencing the Past: Power & The Production of History, that “[s]ilences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”

For communities to think about their archives in posterity, the groundwork has to start with what they have in their possessions and they must actively preserve their archives along the way.

Collections & Conclusions

In my personal collection and Soomaal’s repositories, I have thousands of my community’s archival materials documenting the memories and histories of Somali Minnesotans. In addition, for the past seven years and presently, I have documented the works of art, stories and behind the scenes of all the artists and programs that ensued at Soomaal. These immense and valuable archives tell us the history and presence of contemporary Somali American arts in the state and nation.

These archives have educational, economical and historical values for present and future generations of our state. To improve Minnesota’s collective heritage and memory, local communities have to consider community-based archiving, an effort to keep the archival records of our state diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Kaamil A. Haider is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work examines the relationship between objects, meanings, and heritage in contemporary Somali art, with an emphasis on memory, both private and public. He draws from diverse cultural, archival, and oral tradition references. Kaamil is a cofounder of Soomaal House of Art, an artists collective based in Minneapolis. He is a second year student in the Masters of Heritage Studies & Public History program at the University of Minnesota.