Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities 2022: Digital Legal Studies Plenary

Holly Brewer, Linford Fisher, Julia Lewandoski, William G. Thomas III Author

11/11/2022 Added

5 Plays

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A scholarly discussion of digital humanities tools and approaches uniquely suited to community-engaged projects drawing on archival legal materials.

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[00:00:00.150]Welcome to the Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities.
[00:00:03.000]This is the plenary session on digital legal studies.
[00:00:06.660]And I'm Will Thomas.
[00:00:08.430]I'm a professor of history,
[00:00:10.050]and I'm the Angle Chair in the Humanities
[00:00:12.360]here at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:00:16.050]And it's my pleasure to moderate this evening's conversation
[00:00:19.560]with our distinguished guests and scholars.
[00:00:22.980]This is the 16th year
[00:00:24.870]of the Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities
[00:00:28.230]here at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:00:31.020]And we brought wonderful scholars to Nebraska
[00:00:33.930]for this forum who are at the leading edge
[00:00:37.320]of the field of digital humanities.
[00:00:40.020]And we're grateful to the staff and the faculty
[00:00:43.110]at the Center for Digital Research and Humanities
[00:00:46.080]who have helped make this possible.
[00:00:49.410]We have a great audience tonight here in the law college
[00:00:52.020]and on the campus of UNL
[00:00:54.330]and online through the Zoom webinar.
[00:00:57.570]So, welcome. We're glad you're here with us.
[00:01:00.690]Thank you to the College of Law for hosting us this evening.
[00:01:06.180]We'd also like
[00:01:07.013]to thank the American Society for Legal History.
[00:01:10.920]This group of scholars,
[00:01:12.270]this society supported this conference with a generous grant
[00:01:17.550]and we're very grateful to the ASLH.
[00:01:21.690]Tonight's format will be a conversation.
[00:01:24.510]Our guests are going to introduce their digital projects,
[00:01:27.900]their legal history research,
[00:01:30.090]and I will start the conversation,
[00:01:32.610]but we want you all to be part of the conversation
[00:01:35.190]and to ask questions.
[00:01:37.290]Those of you who are
[00:01:38.220]on the Zoom webinar can put your questions in the chat.
[00:01:42.840]And Dr. Cory Young, post-doctoral fellow
[00:01:46.080]on the Petitioning for Freedom Digital Project
[00:01:48.540]here at CDRH will be helping moderate the webinar.
[00:01:53.790]And Dr. Jeannette Jones,
[00:01:55.710]associate professor of history and ethnic studies,
[00:01:58.980]will be helping moderate the chat as well.
[00:02:02.460]So, let me introduce our panel and then I'll start off
[00:02:07.680]by asking them to introduce their projects.
[00:02:11.970]And I'm gonna go actually in reverse order, sorry,
[00:02:15.870]to my far left here,
[00:02:17.460]Julia Lewandoski is a historian of early America.
[00:02:21.330]She is an assistant professor of history
[00:02:23.970]at California State University San Marcos.
[00:02:28.140]She was a post-doctoral fellow
[00:02:32.220]in history and digital humanities
[00:02:34.680]at the University of Southern California.
[00:02:37.470]In 2019, she received her PhD in history
[00:02:40.770]from the University of California Berkeley,
[00:02:43.920]and she had a designated emphasis
[00:02:45.720]on science and technology studies.
[00:02:48.990]Her research, which we'll hear about tonight,
[00:02:50.880]brings together Indigenous, legal,
[00:02:53.070]imperial and cardiographic histories
[00:02:55.740]to study land tenure regimes
[00:02:58.710]across contested Indigenous territories
[00:03:02.076]in 18th and 19th century North America.
[00:03:06.090]She is broadly interested in the history of cartography
[00:03:08.670]in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, women and gender,
[00:03:11.520]Native American and Indigenous studies,
[00:03:13.530]and science and technology studies.
[00:03:16.680]Lin Fisher is an associate professor of history
[00:03:20.250]at Brown University.
[00:03:22.050]He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2008.
[00:03:27.030]And Lin's research and teaching relate primarily
[00:03:30.540]to cultural and religious history of colonial America
[00:03:33.930]and the Atlantic world,
[00:03:35.670]including Native Americans, religion, material culture,
[00:03:39.690]and Indian and African slavery and servitude.
[00:03:43.770]He is the author of "The Indian Great Awakening:
[00:03:47.430]Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures
[00:03:50.550]in Early America,"
[00:03:52.170]and he's the co-author of "Decoding Roger Williams:
[00:03:56.700]The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father."
[00:04:00.990]He's authored over a dozen articles and book chapters,
[00:04:04.170]received grants from the NEH and the ACLS,
[00:04:08.550]and he's currently finishing a history,
[00:04:10.590]we'll hear some about that tonight I think,
[00:04:12.720]of Native American enslavement in the English colonies
[00:04:16.527]and the United States,
[00:04:19.380]tentatively titled "America Enslaved:
[00:04:22.290]the Rise and Fall of Indian Slavery
[00:04:24.810]in the English Atlantic and the United States."
[00:04:28.170]He is the principal investigator,
[00:04:30.330]the project director of Stolen Relations,
[00:04:34.320]a digital project recovering stories
[00:04:36.740]of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas.
[00:04:39.720]And we'll also hear about that this evening.
[00:04:42.690]And finally, Professor Holly Brewer,
[00:04:45.930]here right beside me is the Burke Professor
[00:04:48.630]of American history at the University of Maryland.
[00:04:52.440]She specializes in early American history
[00:04:56.430]and the early British Empire,
[00:04:58.530]as well as early modern debates
[00:05:00.510]about justice, law and slavery.
[00:05:04.560]Her first book traced the origin and impact
[00:05:08.040]of democratical ideas across the Empire
[00:05:10.680]by examining debates about who can consent
[00:05:15.330]in theory and in legal practice.
[00:05:17.850]And that book, prize-winning book,
[00:05:20.880]was titled "By Birth or Consent: Children, Law,
[00:05:24.450]and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority."
[00:05:28.830]She is currently finishing a book,
[00:05:30.609]that I think talking about this evening,
[00:05:32.700]that examines the origins of American slavery
[00:05:36.270]in larger political and ideological debates
[00:05:39.150]in the British Empire.
[00:05:40.860]And it is tentatively entitled "Slavery and Sovereignty
[00:05:44.280]in Early America and the British Empire."
[00:05:48.030]Holly received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
[00:05:51.120]She's won numerous grants, prizes and awards.
[00:05:55.260]She published a major significant article
[00:05:58.470]in the American Historical Review,
[00:06:00.577]"Slavery, Sovereignty and Inheritable Blood:
[00:06:03.840]Reconsidering John Locke
[00:06:05.730]and the Origins of American Slavery."
[00:06:08.910]And she currently co-directs a digital project funded by
[00:06:13.650]the National Historical Publications and Records Commission,
[00:06:17.070]the NHPRC, that is titled Slavery, Law and Power.
[00:06:22.110]It's an edited scholarly edition of texts drawn
[00:06:25.980]from the archives and rare manuscript sources
[00:06:28.950]about slavery and the Empire.
[00:06:31.140]So, three wonderful scholars with us tonight,
[00:06:34.110]and I'm excited to have this conversation
[00:06:36.210]and be able to moderate it and be with you this evening.
[00:06:39.087]And I'd like to start by just asking each of our guests
[00:06:43.200]to talk about, say a few words
[00:06:45.810]about your respective digital projects.
[00:06:49.050]You know, why did you start the project?
[00:06:52.680]What did you expect to hope to accomplish with your project?
[00:06:56.494]What are you trying to do with this digital project,
[00:06:59.305]your work in digital form?
[00:07:02.063]And just what choices did you make along the way?
[00:07:05.640]Maybe a couple sign posts that you think are significant.
[00:07:08.730]So Holly, do you wanna start off?
[00:07:14.100]Sure, if I can give the,
[00:07:16.489]oh, mark it?
[00:07:18.840]Okay. Press.
[00:07:21.420]There you go.
[00:07:22.390]Okay. Now you gotta lean.
[00:07:25.800]Well, delighted to be here.
[00:07:26.910]Thanks so much, Will, for that introduction.
[00:07:29.520]So, the project had its origins in the realization
[00:07:34.890]that so many, after I had spent a long time,
[00:07:41.220]especially in British archives
[00:07:43.680]and other archives of the Empire,
[00:07:46.500]researching the origins of slavery
[00:07:48.840]and realizing how deeply the Empire was connected
[00:07:51.840]to a story that we normally tell just about the colonies.
[00:07:57.180]I realized that there were so many sources in manuscript
[00:08:01.560]that people had not been consulting
[00:08:03.420]because they couldn't read them.
[00:08:04.500]They were in old handwriting,
[00:08:05.820]because they had to travel to them,
[00:08:06.977]'cause they didn't know where they were.
[00:08:09.600]There's vast archival collections
[00:08:12.000]that we haven't been using almost,
[00:08:14.520]you know, at all to tell these stories.
[00:08:17.370]And I wanted to find a way of creating a set
[00:08:23.310]of curated documents that help to illuminate
[00:08:27.120]or help to make available particularly important documents
[00:08:30.240]or examples of patterns,
[00:08:32.580]documents that show the kinds of things
[00:08:36.270]that were happening in terms of slavery
[00:08:38.220]and the involvement in the Empire.
[00:08:40.830]And the larger questions surrounding it is really one
[00:08:45.390]about whether slavery kind of emerged almost naturally
[00:08:49.560]as a result of market forces
[00:08:51.120]and even of sort of proto-democracy in the colonies,
[00:08:54.810]or whether there were larger policies and forces,
[00:09:00.330]larger policies and programs at work
[00:09:03.090]that helped to underpin it.
[00:09:05.250]And my own scholarship has been showing for a while
[00:09:08.250]that the slavery in itself is kind of a fragile system.
[00:09:13.500]If you think about it,
[00:09:14.520]like if one person claims to own a hundred people,
[00:09:17.250]they are not by themselves controlling and manipulating
[00:09:20.490]and making sure that those people labor.
[00:09:22.740]There is a whole host of legal structures behind that
[00:09:27.120]that's making it work.
[00:09:28.770]And so, my work
[00:09:31.080]and my own scholarship has been unpacking a lot
[00:09:33.690]of those legal, those legal connections.
[00:09:36.090]And this website helps to make some of the primary sources,
[00:09:40.110]the manuscript sources,
[00:09:42.390]that are in old fashioned handwriting,
[00:09:44.460]are buried in archives and all over the place
[00:09:47.580]that are crucial, more available.
[00:09:49.830]But it not only does that,
[00:09:51.570]because that's what it started out as,
[00:09:54.090]partly because I was thinking initially of it
[00:09:55.650]as a kind of short edited volume,
[00:09:57.540]just a few crucial pieces related to my own work.
[00:10:02.310]It aims to become a platform where anybody
[00:10:06.960]who's working on these questions, it connects slavery,
[00:10:09.090]law and power in the early modern world,
[00:10:11.010]particularly related to early America
[00:10:12.690]and the British Empire can share crucial documents,
[00:10:15.870]can create introductions,
[00:10:17.190]can show the original images and the transcriptions
[00:10:20.490]and get full credit for it.
[00:10:23.340]And through this sharing of information,
[00:10:26.760]we can come to better understanding
[00:10:28.710]about the extent to which the emergence of slavery was,
[00:10:34.020]relatively speaking, authoritarian versus democratic,
[00:10:37.350]the kinds of compromises that took place,
[00:10:39.240]the change over time,
[00:10:40.620]why there was so much difference between different colonies.
[00:10:44.340]So, those are some of the really big questions.
[00:10:47.160]And I'm gonna just pause, and before I,
[00:10:51.403]I mean, I can give some examples, but just to say,
[00:10:56.220]when historians started, when historians like, you know, as,
[00:11:00.960]and political theorists and even English professors,
[00:11:04.530]often, when they choose texts to assign,
[00:11:07.320]and you think back to the 19th century
[00:11:09.090]or even the 20th century,
[00:11:10.440]what kinds of texts get reproduced?
[00:11:13.320]Often, they've been texts that are models
[00:11:16.020]for our future selves or for the current,
[00:11:17.820]like they're the enlightened texts, right?
[00:11:19.920]They're the forward looking texts.
[00:11:20.753]They're the democratic texts.
[00:11:23.100]But if we only reproduce those,
[00:11:26.190]we have an image of the past where that's all it was.
[00:11:29.040]And then you look for,
[00:11:30.510]to try to explain slavery within them,
[00:11:32.670]and what I feel is really crucial to acknowledge is
[00:11:37.710]that slavery and racism
[00:11:41.640]and these profound inequalities need to be understood
[00:11:44.670]in the text that we haven't chosen to reproduce
[00:11:46.980]in the past, the unenlightened, the racist,
[00:11:51.660]the really horrible laws that were passed
[00:11:55.500]that are sometimes really disturbing.
[00:11:57.690]And only when you really look at those,
[00:12:00.990]can you begin to get a sense of the struggle over rights,
[00:12:04.770]over slavery, over power in the 17th and 18th centuries.
[00:12:11.130]Great. Thank you, Holly.
[00:12:12.150]Lin?
[00:12:16.110]Good evening, everyone.
[00:12:17.190]It's really fantastic to be here.
[00:12:18.930]Thanks to Katrina and to Will
[00:12:21.327]and others who are part of organizing this forum
[00:12:24.270]in general and also the College of Law.
[00:12:26.520]It's really great to be part of this conversation.
[00:12:29.730]So, for the past seven years now,
[00:12:32.760]I've been the PI on a project called Stolen Relations,
[00:12:35.610]Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas
[00:12:38.490]as Will has mentioned.
[00:12:40.620]And the idea then and now is to do a lot
[00:12:45.210]of centralizing work about biographical information
[00:12:48.750]related to Indigenous people who were enslaved
[00:12:51.240]in the Americas as a whole,
[00:12:54.570]even though that's maybe too ambitious at the moment
[00:12:57.600]to really be comprehensive hemispherically.
[00:12:59.610]That's the idea, ultimately.
[00:13:01.650]And it came out of the book that I was writing,
[00:13:04.080]still am writing.
[00:13:05.460]It's been a long slog,
[00:13:06.330]but that was trying to understand enslavement practices
[00:13:12.660]across time and space and really just being astounded
[00:13:16.680]by how much was out there once you started digging
[00:13:20.070]in different kinds of archives and repositories.
[00:13:23.160]Right away in 1492, and then past the American Civil War,
[00:13:27.990]and not really being able
[00:13:29.310]to understand the disconnect it seems we have
[00:13:32.310]in our educational systems and public discourse
[00:13:34.860]and public knowledge,
[00:13:36.570]but also in other kinds of contexts as well,
[00:13:39.750]even among the academic community too.
[00:13:41.310]That was, you know, it's emerging now,
[00:13:43.710]the sort of full scope of it.
[00:13:45.150]But the question I was trying to figure out is,
[00:13:47.790]how can we create a resource
[00:13:51.480]that would centralize some of this information?
[00:13:53.637]And we were joking about earlier,
[00:13:55.140]like some future version of a Meta Google folder
[00:13:59.910]where we all dump our research in
[00:14:01.530]that everyone can access, you know,
[00:14:02.760]simultaneously across time and space.
[00:14:04.560]Like, why are we all sitting on this information? Right?
[00:14:06.570]So, I'm sure all of us have a little bit of that
[00:14:09.810]in our projects as well,
[00:14:10.980]to make this available to a wider public.
[00:14:13.740]And for me, it's not just academics, the wider public,
[00:14:17.160]it's also for Indigenous communities and tribes as well,
[00:14:20.430]to give them, in a way,
[00:14:21.720]first access to the first information on,
[00:14:26.520]regarding these histories as well.
[00:14:28.680]So, a really central component is this collaboration
[00:14:31.440]with Indigenous tribes and communities,
[00:14:33.570]just in New England for right now.
[00:14:34.770]But we're hoping to really broaden that,
[00:14:37.290]and these collaborations have shaped a lot
[00:14:39.510]of the project's framing.
[00:14:41.220]So, we're focusing on individuals and stories
[00:14:44.880]and not just documents, and documents have their place,
[00:14:47.670]but we wanted to highlight the people themselves.
[00:14:51.930]Thinking about Indigenous perspectives on slavery
[00:14:54.390]in ways that de-centered labor
[00:14:56.910]and make ideologies, and from an Indigenous perspective,
[00:15:02.250]this sense of loss be more central to the conversation.
[00:15:05.520]So, that's why we renamed it the project, it was to be
[00:15:08.070]The Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas,
[00:15:10.200]a horrible name, I know.
[00:15:11.310]Now it's Stolen Relations. Why?
[00:15:12.600]Because across, you know, time and space,
[00:15:16.860]the experience of having Indigenous people stolen
[00:15:19.410]from communities is central to sort of that experience
[00:15:22.020]on the receiving end.
[00:15:23.520]And so, I just, I've been so,
[00:15:26.010]you know, challenged in a really good way
[00:15:27.300]to think about slavery differently from that perspective.
[00:15:29.820]We think about it in terms of labor
[00:15:30.930]and economics and production,
[00:15:32.520]but it's about loss, right?
[00:15:34.470]On the Indigenous side of it.
[00:15:35.430]So, other things too,
[00:15:36.966](indistinct) as an important part of settler colonialism.
[00:15:41.220]So it's again, not just about labor.
[00:15:43.590]When you steal Indigenous people away,
[00:15:45.870]you are essentially doing the work
[00:15:48.030]of destabilizing their communities, leading to, you know,
[00:15:53.400]eventually dismissing them because they're not strong enough
[00:15:55.890]or large enough or powerful enough.
[00:15:57.480]Also, leading to land loss as well,
[00:15:59.190]which is really an important part
[00:16:01.200]of what settler colonialism eventually does.
[00:16:03.960]And also a recognition
[00:16:05.220]that these events are not just in the past.
[00:16:07.230]So, thinking more specifically about historical trauma
[00:16:09.630]and other things
[00:16:10.463]that sometimes historians aren't often great
[00:16:12.120]about discussing and including in their work.
[00:16:14.913]So, what is a database? What records are we drawing from?
[00:16:18.270]I'll be very brief here.
[00:16:20.250]This project is still in development.
[00:16:21.720]We have this NEH grant.
[00:16:22.860]We're very grateful for it, but it's not public yet.
[00:16:25.830]So, if I would take you to the website,
[00:16:28.560]there's nothing you can access at the moment,
[00:16:30.570]but check back in a year or so, hopefully.
[00:16:33.240]Essentially, we're just trying to find records related
[00:16:37.500]to enslaved Indigenous people wherever we can find them.
[00:16:40.260]And unlike with African slavery,
[00:16:42.900]where you find larger concentrations of records,
[00:16:47.370]Indigenous slave movement is really diffuse
[00:16:49.830]in terms of the archival evidence.
[00:16:51.570]And so, it is hard work,
[00:16:53.070]and I think this is part of why it hasn't really been done,
[00:16:55.590]because it's not like you just go to the National Archives
[00:16:58.890]in the UK and you find reams of ship manifests
[00:17:02.220]or something, right?
[00:17:03.053]It's tucked away here and there.
[00:17:05.190]So, we're drawing upon all the usual, you know, things,
[00:17:08.100]estate inventories, legal documents, records, wills,
[00:17:11.970]diaries and so forth.
[00:17:13.620]And to date,
[00:17:14.453]we have about 4,500 individuals in our database,
[00:17:16.770]drawn from 1,500 records,
[00:17:18.720]starting in 1492 all the way up to 1869,
[00:17:22.470]mostly from North America,
[00:17:24.090]but also the Caribbean and some Central America as well.
[00:17:29.940]There's a few more things I could say,
[00:17:31.530]just very, very quickly.
[00:17:32.910]So, there's a lot of questions about, that we all share,
[00:17:36.000]I think, about how to take people centered histories
[00:17:40.815]and put them into a digital environment in a way
[00:17:43.620]that doesn't flatten people or their experiences, right?
[00:17:47.220]So, that's just a broad category that we're wrestling with,
[00:17:50.310]I would say, over time.
[00:17:52.230]But along the way,
[00:17:53.280]because we're trying to fit humans and their experiences
[00:17:57.120]into digital environments, we, like lots of other projects,
[00:18:01.050]are really wrestling with the question
[00:18:02.600]of how to both interpret
[00:18:04.890]but then present really thorny questions
[00:18:07.320]about race, for example.
[00:18:09.420]The archival documents are really problematic and biased
[00:18:13.830]and full of harmful language
[00:18:15.420]that we don't wanna just simply replicate.
[00:18:17.040]So, this is one thing.
[00:18:18.600]The other thing is around the question of,
[00:18:21.210]what is slavery at all?
[00:18:23.580]And so, describing slavery and its diversity
[00:18:28.410]and putting that into a database form
[00:18:30.150]I think is really interesting as well.
[00:18:33.030]So, there's lots of things that do relate
[00:18:35.040]to legal documentation.
[00:18:37.140]I think one of the most interesting
[00:18:38.610]in this regard are freedom suits,
[00:18:40.350]which we've heard a lot about today in the forum elsewhere
[00:18:43.380]or the conference more generally,
[00:18:45.690]but it's really astonishing
[00:18:46.980]to see enslaved Indigenous people argue for their freedom
[00:18:50.430]and narrate their own sense
[00:18:52.050]of their family's history over time.
[00:18:54.420]It's a really powerful thing to see in the documentation
[00:18:57.030]in the archives.
[00:18:58.560]So finally, to close,
[00:18:59.940]what will we learn or know as a result of all this?
[00:19:02.640]I think that we will be, I hope,
[00:19:04.800]astonished at the immense prevalence and persistence
[00:19:09.420]of enslavement of Indigenous people across time and space,
[00:19:12.510]starting 1492, going up into the late 19th century.
[00:19:15.990]Our Indigenous collaborators are making a strong pitch
[00:19:18.960]for us including the residential boarding system
[00:19:21.990]as a part of that,
[00:19:22.823]and the outing system, in that whole system as well.
[00:19:26.280]We are thinking capaciously about unfreedom,
[00:19:28.710]not just enslavements.
[00:19:30.389]And that changes what we ingest
[00:19:32.610]and put into the database as well.
[00:19:35.040]But again, every colony, you know,
[00:19:36.630]every corner of the Americas is involved
[00:19:39.930]in the enslavements and coercion of Indigenous people.
[00:19:43.260]And I think that this database can help educate
[00:19:47.400]on that point.
[00:19:48.870]I also think this project can help us think
[00:19:50.557]in a more complicated way about race
[00:19:53.070]and race making and how that is operationalized.
[00:19:56.910]The archive, and I think we've all seen this
[00:19:59.520]in different ways,
[00:20:00.353]tends to minimize Indigenous presence.
[00:20:02.250]And so, how do we as scholars go back
[00:20:05.040]to those same documents and refuse to perpetuate
[00:20:10.320]that myth of disappearance and of sort of the myth
[00:20:13.950]of meeting 100%, quote unquote, you know, "Blood quantums"
[00:20:18.420]to be fully and authentically Indigenous.
[00:20:21.150]Then thirdly, I think this project will help us think
[00:20:22.830]about the nature of slavery and its diversity
[00:20:25.590]and also how that changes over time.
[00:20:28.530]So anyway, we're actively seeking collaborators.
[00:20:31.170]If anyone's listening tonight who wants to join in
[00:20:33.240]and help out, please, please contact me.
[00:20:35.760]I'm sure that's true Ditto.
[00:20:36.777]Of everybody else,
[00:20:38.303]and you can also follow us on Twitter @stolenrelations.
[00:20:40.920]But thanks so much.
[00:20:42.060]All right. Thank you, Lin.
[00:20:44.262]Julia?
[00:20:45.450]Thanks so much.
[00:20:47.070]I'm honored to be here at this fantastic forum in Nebraska.
[00:20:52.710]So, my GIS project really evolved outta my book project,
[00:20:58.290]which is about Native peoples who used land ownership,
[00:21:03.450]either to defend territory, or in a lot of cases,
[00:21:06.270]actually to reclaim territory during the 19th century.
[00:21:09.960]And in particular, I look at Native peoples
[00:21:12.270]who were excluded from treaty processes
[00:21:15.780]in 19th century United States and Canada
[00:21:18.780]because they were already entangled with land tenure systems
[00:21:22.680]in prior empires.
[00:21:24.630]And so, one of those places is Southern California,
[00:21:27.780]the Los Angeles Basin, San Fernando Valleys,
[00:21:31.110]that I'm just gonna share about briefly today.
[00:21:33.480]So essentially, in the mid-19th century,
[00:21:36.510]after Mexico secularizes California's missions,
[00:21:41.250]Tongva, Tataviam, Chumash, and Serrano peoples,
[00:21:45.720]families and communities use land claims processes
[00:21:50.250]to essentially reclaim important places
[00:21:52.950]in their former territories.
[00:21:55.410]Pretty soon after that, in 1848,
[00:21:57.510]the US conquerors Mexican California,
[00:21:59.520]and then they go through an additional land claims process,
[00:22:02.340]now with the US, to get those titles approved,
[00:22:05.910]and then they go through decades of litigation
[00:22:11.430]to try to hang onto these properties.
[00:22:14.880]So, my goal in the project,
[00:22:17.730]and in part this is answering some of the calls I've heard
[00:22:20.820]from California Indian scholars
[00:22:22.440]to tell a story that's about resilience, survival,
[00:22:26.940]and persistence and connection to place
[00:22:29.790]rather than the story of mission colonization and genocide,
[00:22:36.870]which has really been predominant
[00:22:38.670]in California Indian history.
[00:22:41.010]So, as I was working on the book project,
[00:22:44.280]I was also collecting a lot of property maps
[00:22:48.180]with these land documents
[00:22:50.220]and I knew I needed it a better place than, essentially,
[00:22:54.150]a Word document as a way
[00:22:57.000]to try to understand what the visual arguments were.
[00:23:01.140]Because one of the things that I've found
[00:23:03.780]with a lot of these maps is
[00:23:04.860]that they don't exactly correlate
[00:23:07.410]to just the properties themselves, right?
[00:23:11.730]So, Indigenous landowners are labeled
[00:23:15.660]on their neighbor's property maps,
[00:23:17.310]and sometimes, their names sort of persist on these maps
[00:23:21.180]after they actually still don't own the land.
[00:23:24.030]So, I started with these questions about,
[00:23:26.430]how is Indigenous land being racialized on property maps?
[00:23:30.690]And then, like many GIS projects,
[00:23:34.410]once I started actually working with ArcGIS,
[00:23:38.580]things took a turn.
[00:23:41.550]So Jeannette, if you could advance to the next slide,
[00:23:45.930]that would be great.
[00:23:46.860]So, the premise of ArcGIS is
[00:23:51.390]that everything is locatable, right?
[00:23:53.340]Everything is locatable via satellite coordinates
[00:23:58.311]and it can be precise.
[00:24:00.270]And so, what I'm looking at here are, essentially,
[00:24:03.750]the variations in the public land survey system grid
[00:24:08.850]that you see here in the Los Angeles Basin.
[00:24:12.570]However, once I started to try to put historic property maps
[00:24:16.590]in there, and Jeannette, you can go to the next slide,
[00:24:21.390]this is where I ran into problems.
[00:24:23.250]So, mapping land,
[00:24:25.470]mapping in Mexican California is an interpretive practice.
[00:24:36.150]And there's a large genre of maps
[00:24:38.880]that essentially look like this, right?
[00:24:40.830]They look like landscapes,
[00:24:42.930]but they're perfectly legible outside of ArcGIS, right?
[00:24:46.320]They have recognizable landmarks.
[00:24:48.300]They have mountain ranges.
[00:24:49.650]they have arroyos.
[00:24:51.150]You can read these maps and know where your property begins
[00:24:54.447]and your neighbor's property begins,
[00:24:56.280]but when you put them into ArcGIS,
[00:24:58.928]ArcGIS distorts them and warps them
[00:25:02.310]and essentially sets them up to look incorrect, right?
[00:25:07.080]In this sort of positivist way about, you know,
[00:25:11.040]mapping becoming a evermore correct technology.
[00:25:16.740]So, the sort of work-around that I developed,
[00:25:22.770]and if you could go to the next slide,
[00:25:23.910]is essentially starting in ArcGIS
[00:25:26.850]but then working to articulate these maps
[00:25:31.320]in relation to one another
[00:25:33.810]rather than affixing them all to a present day base map.
[00:25:37.980]And essentially, by doing that,
[00:25:39.570]if you go to the final slide,
[00:25:41.400]what I was able to figure out is
[00:25:43.680]that some of these Indigenous properties are actually,
[00:25:48.390]because Indigenous people had to spend so much time claiming
[00:25:51.870]and reclaiming them
[00:25:53.400]and essentially generated so many legal documents,
[00:25:57.900]because their claims were so fragile,
[00:26:00.480]because they were Indigenous,
[00:26:03.450]that their properties become
[00:26:06.090]these sort of persistent linchpins
[00:26:10.590]or persistent landmarks that the property grid,
[00:26:15.150]as it develops in southern California,
[00:26:18.180]are essentially built around.
[00:26:22.602]So, (laughs) you know, while that,
[00:26:26.280]I would say that's, as a research project,
[00:26:29.490]I would say that's what I've learned
[00:26:32.190]from working with ArcGIS in this way.
[00:26:34.470]But if I can just speak a little bit more broadly,
[00:26:37.080]you know, I think what has come up for me is,
[00:26:41.190]especially as I've become an assistant professor teaching
[00:26:45.030]in a digital history program,
[00:26:47.790]is to start thinking more carefully about the impulse
[00:26:51.480]to just spatialize things, right?
[00:26:53.223]Oh, you should make a map for your book.
[00:26:55.680]Oh, you should, it would be great to see a map, you know,
[00:26:58.260]and just spatialize that history.
[00:27:00.330]And if, you know, are we doing that applying, right?
[00:27:05.010]If I wanna make a map of land ownership
[00:27:07.650]in 1840s Mexican California,
[00:27:10.140]does it make sense to plot precise locations in ArcGIS
[00:27:15.360]when the social reality during that era,
[00:27:21.150]you know, they're essentially systems
[00:27:24.390]that are essentially illegible to one other.
[00:27:26.577]And then finally, you know,
[00:27:27.990]I think this is especially relevant
[00:27:32.250]to the legal concerns of Native peoples today.
[00:27:35.580]So, for example, part of the reason
[00:27:38.250]that my project isn't public is that,
[00:27:41.460]you know, since I started working on it,
[00:27:43.470]the Fernandeno and Tataviam Band of Mission Indians,
[00:27:46.710]they're going through a federal recognition process
[00:27:49.950]right now, and federal recognition requires them
[00:27:54.120]to recount their own histories and their own geographies
[00:27:59.400]in a way that expresses their territory
[00:28:03.240]in a way that's legible to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
[00:28:08.130]And that's, you know,
[00:28:11.250]and that's not necessarily exactly what my project is doing,
[00:28:15.720]essentially, you know, so, I think as,
[00:28:21.750]you know, spatial DH practitioners,
[00:28:26.550]we have to think, you know,
[00:28:27.900]what are the stakes of, especially in GIS programs
[00:28:32.340]that locates things super precisely,
[00:28:34.890]what are the stakes?
[00:28:35.723]Especially with Indigenous communities, right?
[00:28:37.860]Are we opening up places to looting, to desecration?
[00:28:42.510]Are we sharing things beyond where they're appropriate
[00:28:45.240]to be shared?
[00:28:46.410]And then second, you know,
[00:28:48.900]we have to take seriously what any sort
[00:28:51.840]of authoritative representation of the land
[00:28:55.800]and the very real legal places
[00:28:58.320]that those are gonna be used in the present day.
[00:29:00.810]But I hope that, in a long term way,
[00:29:03.780]what I'd really like to do is be able to use maps
[00:29:07.860]to open up conversations about territoriality,
[00:29:11.340]so that we aren't just replicating, you know,
[00:29:15.900]the particular kinds of territoriality
[00:29:18.510]and geography that programs like ArcGIS do so powerfully,
[00:29:23.970]and that we're not imposing that on the past
[00:29:25.980]and that we're not imposing that on Indigenous communities.
[00:29:34.440]It strikes me,
[00:29:35.273]each of your projects works with archival legal records
[00:29:40.440]to one degree or another in a variety of forms,
[00:29:44.400]and two, but I think all three
[00:29:47.400]of the projects undertake really long, sweeping time periods
[00:29:53.850]in many ways, centuries of records.
[00:29:58.560]So, they are both spatially broad,
[00:30:02.220]Julia, you talked about your California work,
[00:30:04.200]but you're also working on Quebec and lower Canada.
[00:30:07.260]And so, these are spatially wide-angle projects
[00:30:13.230]across the British Empire,
[00:30:14.857]and Lin from Columbus to 1869, I think he said.
[00:30:21.810]So, spatially and temporally extraordinary in their scope.
[00:30:27.150]And I guess I'm wondering
[00:30:28.560]what difficulties you've confronted with that scope
[00:30:33.150]or with the archival record,
[00:30:36.720]and I'm particularly thinking about the legal record,
[00:30:38.850]which is often, you know, almost microscopic.
[00:30:43.230]It's a particular case, a particular moment in time,
[00:30:46.110]a particular cadastral survey.
[00:30:50.340]So, how have you dealt with the range you seek here,
[00:30:56.160]to undertake, and the archival record itself in the law?
[00:31:05.432](Holly laughing)
[00:31:09.240]Just have to,
[00:31:10.110]There you go.
[00:31:11.483]Hello?
[00:31:12.316]Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[00:31:15.300]That's been one of the real difficulties.
[00:31:18.630]As I was talking about earlier today,
[00:31:21.210]there are literally millions of documents
[00:31:23.280]that could be relevant to these questions of slavery,
[00:31:26.370]law and power over more than two centuries.
[00:31:29.430]Even when you said, as we have,
[00:31:31.710]that we're more interested
[00:31:32.670]in the role of the colonies
[00:31:36.912]that were part of the British Empire
[00:31:38.310]and how the British Empire interacted with them,
[00:31:42.300]that's still a pretty big scope.
[00:31:46.592]And then, of course, you still gotta do a little bit
[00:31:49.650]of comparative work regardless.
[00:31:52.200]But where we came down on that,
[00:31:56.340]and this was in conversations with the team
[00:31:59.100]of mostly graduate students
[00:32:00.450]and also with our advisory board,
[00:32:03.570]is that we try to choose documents that illustrate patterns
[00:32:07.710]that point towards larger collections
[00:32:09.630]or that are themselves very important,
[00:32:12.120]that people recognize is important,
[00:32:14.370]or that are important but also not known about,
[00:32:17.850]or nobody even thinks about.
[00:32:19.440]For example, a lot of people know that,
[00:32:23.280]in fact, we were talking about it earlier today
[00:32:24.810]with Cory's project
[00:32:27.150]that Pennsylvania had a gradual abolition act.
[00:32:30.370]It was passed in 1780, far fewer people know,
[00:32:33.600]and in fact, I've talked to so many people
[00:32:35.340]who are teaching in the field don't know that, in 1796,
[00:32:39.990]St. George Tucker proposed a gradual abolition plan
[00:32:42.630]for Virginia, which was, in fact,
[00:32:45.030]seriously debated in the lower House.
[00:32:46.680]And we have quite a bit of information about that.
[00:32:50.100]And so, it's, and in fact, from what I can tell,
[00:32:54.090]of the 13 original colonies,
[00:32:56.010]at least 10 actively debated gradual abolition
[00:33:00.360]or abolished it outright by court decision
[00:33:02.670]in the 20 years after the revolution.
[00:33:05.280]That's interesting.
[00:33:07.560]So this, I guess the focus, just to return to this question,
[00:33:12.600]it's trying to find documents that are important,
[00:33:16.470]lesser known, and that point towards larger collections,
[00:33:20.370]and realizing in the process,
[00:33:22.800]that there's so much of the story that we don't know,
[00:33:25.740]because in a way,
[00:33:26.573]we just haven't even been asking the right questions
[00:33:29.250]of the archives.
[00:33:30.789]Yeah, you said earlier in our session
[00:33:32.940]that there were 40 British colonies
[00:33:35.850]at the time of the American Revolution.
[00:33:38.130]So 13 revolt.
[00:33:40.070]Yeah, could you? 40 British colonies
[00:33:41.310]in the Americas at the time of the revolution,
[00:33:44.040]of which only 13 revolts, and figuring out,
[00:33:48.750]and many of those who don't revolt
[00:33:51.030]have far larger enslaved populations.
[00:33:54.060]And there's really interesting dynamics that go on.
[00:33:57.840]Just to give you one small example,
[00:34:01.860]Jamaica had had a fairly substantial slave uprising
[00:34:06.150]called Tacky's Revolt, which in fact,
[00:34:08.130]there's a good website about by Vincent Brown.
[00:34:12.270]And as, and even before then,
[00:34:14.220]they'd had a substantial presence,
[00:34:17.250]British troop population there to keep peace.
[00:34:20.070]After that, there was even more.
[00:34:22.002]And in June of 1776, as the British Crown decides to,
[00:34:27.750]the British government decides to move troops to New York,
[00:34:30.750]and this is the part of the story we know, right?
[00:34:32.910]It's this is, or to,
[00:34:35.460]sorry, first to Boston and then to New York,
[00:34:41.040]there's an attempted slave uprising in Jamaica
[00:34:44.100]as soon as they know those troops are gone.
[00:34:46.260]So, it's, how do we tell this story
[00:34:49.830]in an interconnected way?
[00:34:51.600]How do we think about slavery as part of the story?
[00:34:55.467]And how complex it is,
[00:34:57.720]so just to go back to the story I was saying,
[00:35:00.427]10 of the states that were former colonies
[00:35:04.320]considered gradual abolition,
[00:35:06.690]of the rest that were part of the British Empire,
[00:35:08.640]none debated it that I know of.
[00:35:12.120]And the British Empire added eight new colonies in the 1790s
[00:35:16.590]after losing 13.
[00:35:17.790]And all of them were slave colonies, so.
[00:35:21.330]Right. So that's the advantage of the scope, right?
[00:35:23.700]Yeah. To be able to see
[00:35:26.130]what's happening in the British Empire
[00:35:27.930]and the relative scale of what the 13 colonies,
[00:35:33.720]American Revolution, relative to the British Empire
[00:35:37.140]in the Caribbean,
[00:35:38.340]and nine more colonies with slavery coming
[00:35:40.860]into the British Empire in the aftermath
[00:35:43.470]of the American Revolution.
[00:35:44.700]Suddenly, slavery and its imperial presence has,
[00:35:49.530]only with that kind of perspective
[00:35:51.567]can we get a handle on what's happening, right?
[00:35:56.190]But what about, what are the difficulties though,
[00:35:58.050]the difficulties of this?
[00:35:59.430]We have advantages, I think, in this scale,
[00:36:02.250]but what about the difficulties
[00:36:03.780]of this kind of long history?
[00:36:09.000]Yeah, well,
[00:36:11.820]on yet.
[00:36:12.653]Hello?
[00:36:14.550]Okay, I'm all right.
[00:36:16.050]So yes, lots of difficulties.
[00:36:19.350]Too many to list all at once, perhaps.
[00:36:21.930]But one of the things I think
[00:36:23.340]that is interesting is what I sort of referenced earlier,
[00:36:26.010]which is simply finding documents, I think,
[00:36:29.430]is one of the biggest things that we've encountered.
[00:36:32.010]And so, this is why it's gonna take a long time,
[00:36:33.840]and think back to like the origins
[00:36:35.970]of like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, right?
[00:36:39.330]Like, how long that took to develop on how,
[00:36:43.050]the backs of how many scholars
[00:36:45.030]dating back to the '60s basically.
[00:36:47.700]And then it comes out on CD-rom,
[00:36:49.380]then eventually like, you know, website.
[00:36:51.600]That's right. And we forget,
[00:36:52.980]you go to the website now and it's like,
[00:36:54.660]the Inter-American Slave Trade
[00:36:55.860]and the African Names Database and all these things there,
[00:36:58.320]but it took literally decades
[00:37:00.420]to pull that information together and present it.
[00:37:02.520]And so, you know, I take the long view here
[00:37:05.760]that this could be
[00:37:06.593]a multi-generational project even, perhaps.
[00:37:09.570]So, finding the documents,
[00:37:10.860]then when you find them, it's limited info, right?
[00:37:12.780]So, often, we don't have names or tribal affiliations
[00:37:15.900]or things like that.
[00:37:16.733]So very, very difficult.
[00:37:18.660]I would say another challenge is
[00:37:20.160]just the changing legal context, to your question
[00:37:22.770]about sort of the specific legal challenges too,
[00:37:25.320]when you have a long scope,
[00:37:26.400]if you have a case, you know,
[00:37:27.810]in Virginia in the 1620s or something like that
[00:37:31.230]versus something in California in 1869,
[00:37:35.190]those are really different contexts.
[00:37:37.050]And how do we, in a digital project,
[00:37:39.540]that kind of just you can't have the sort of space
[00:37:43.320]to really do that interpretive work,
[00:37:45.210]how do we make sure
[00:37:46.043]that we're not flattening these contexts?
[00:37:48.240]Two other things I would mention,
[00:37:49.140]which I've sort of referenced before is,
[00:37:51.570]another difficulty is the language of the archives
[00:37:56.430]with regard to race and slavery.
[00:37:58.290]And I think these are persistent problems
[00:38:00.480]that require very careful work.
[00:38:02.580]So, there's a clear racial shifting over time,
[00:38:06.510]and there's a propensity
[00:38:07.500]to continually suppress Indigenous identity
[00:38:11.400]by using other kinds of terminologies
[00:38:13.500]that call into question the authentic nature,
[00:38:15.690]or like, not even authentic,
[00:38:16.830]but like the Indigeneity of individuals under consideration
[00:38:21.270]and enslavers have a motivation to do this.
[00:38:24.780]Indigenous enslavement is not quite so legal
[00:38:28.020]or operates in a grayer area in some colonies,
[00:38:30.260]in some spaces, and in some parts of the United States.
[00:38:32.880]And so, if you are racially re-categorizing people as,
[00:38:37.320]you know, Black or Negro or whatever else, like,
[00:38:41.760]or just slave,
[00:38:44.070]then that places them in a different category
[00:38:46.200]in terms of enslavement.
[00:38:47.220]The other one is also how to define slavery.
[00:38:50.760]This is the persistent challenge too that gets at the heart
[00:38:52.920]of sort of the legal definitions or the legal,
[00:38:55.740]the legality of certain kinds of cases.
[00:38:58.170]And the language shifts over time.
[00:39:00.150]You find people
[00:39:01.500]that are clearly enslaved being called servants.
[00:39:04.260]You find people that are clearly, you know,
[00:39:08.490]not so clearly sometimes,
[00:39:09.690]but being called other things as well.
[00:39:10.980]And then you have limited term enslavement
[00:39:12.630]in some cases as well,
[00:39:13.860]or you have indentures that never end, right?
[00:39:16.830]Or my favorite is, in Bermuda, there's a spate of sales.
[00:39:22.860]I know what you're gonna say Oh, you know about this?
[00:39:23.929]Yeah. Right.
[00:39:24.762]It's a classic example.
[00:39:26.130]So, in the 1640s especially but up into the 1660s,
[00:39:29.460]there's a whole bunch of bills of sale,
[00:39:31.470]not just for Indigenous people,
[00:39:32.700]but a lot of them are Indigenous,
[00:39:34.590]where they say, this person is sold as a servant
[00:39:39.210]for four score and 19 years.
[00:39:41.930]99 years, yeah. Yeah, which is 99 years.
[00:39:44.490]Right? So, or. A little more
[00:39:46.080]than a lifetime. And then they say,
[00:39:47.550]if this person's shall so long lived, right?
[00:39:50.400]Like, they even know like that this is a lifelong sentence.
[00:39:53.910]Anyway, I think knowing that the legal records,
[00:39:58.830]the archives are complicated
[00:40:01.620]and often obscure what's really going on,
[00:40:04.770]sometimes self-consciously,
[00:40:06.120]makes this immensely challenging.
[00:40:08.940]Yeah. Julia?
[00:40:11.693]Yeah, I think I was gonna talk about the advantages,
[00:40:14.100]but I think the challenge,
[00:40:17.580]so, I think a lot of us turn to DH projects
[00:40:19.877]'cause we have big ambitious projects
[00:40:22.440]that are long in scope
[00:40:23.550]and we think digital tools will solve that problem for me,
[00:40:26.970]which they don't,
[00:40:29.100]but they do make them more interesting.
[00:40:31.680]I think one of the challenges
[00:40:33.780]for me is it's less the scope is so long
[00:40:37.530]and that it's sort of like,
[00:40:38.820]there's the early modern map is
[00:40:42.750]precious individual art object era,
[00:40:44.850]and then there's the timeless present
[00:40:49.278]of the public land survey system fitting seamlessly
[00:40:53.370]into ArcGIS.
[00:40:55.590]So, it's more about trying to figure out,
[00:40:59.010]navigate that transition, than it is the scope as a whole.
[00:41:02.340]And then I would also say that I think
[00:41:04.530]that I want it to be longer or that one of the problems,
[00:41:10.140]what I actually worry about is ending the story,
[00:41:13.050]particularly, you know,
[00:41:14.640]I think there's a lot of projects
[00:41:16.200]about land loss for Native communities,
[00:41:19.590]and obviously, that's incredibly important to represent,
[00:41:23.400]but I think, often, it's frame,
[00:41:27.900]land loss is like the end of the story, right?
[00:41:30.150]The reservation, that's the end of the story.
[00:41:32.370]And they used to to have this land,
[00:41:33.480]but now they have this land.
[00:41:35.730]And I think it can obscure the extent
[00:41:40.650]to which most Native people are in ongoing litigation
[00:41:46.140]and have been for generations and really takes,
[00:41:49.740]and that we should take seriously, as they do,
[00:41:52.920]that the negotiations over land are in no way over.
[00:41:57.360]Yeah, and are sort of ongoing,
[00:41:59.940]and that these whatever boundaries,
[00:42:02.250]like they're unstable and they're not fixed, yeah.
[00:42:05.489]Yeah, that really leads to my next question,
[00:42:08.190]which is about the public facing aspect of your projects.
[00:42:15.660]Each of your projects I think is attentive and aware of
[00:42:18.900]and engaged with and responsive to present struggles
[00:42:25.650]over history, over memory, over, and over law.
[00:42:33.540]And these are, Lin, I think you call this, on your site,
[00:42:39.180]difficult histories, right?
[00:42:41.400]Or hard histories.
[00:42:43.650]These are challenging histories.
[00:42:45.300]And so, I guess I'd like to hear some discussion
[00:42:48.960]from each of you about, why is it important
[00:42:53.010]to connect these histories to our present circumstances?
[00:42:56.970]What are your thoughts about that?
[00:42:58.950]And how have you've,
[00:43:00.870]how you've engaged present communities affected
[00:43:05.040]by your subjects, if at all.
[00:43:07.693]So, why is this important to do?
[00:43:11.880]And who wants to lead off?
[00:43:16.059]This time?
[00:43:17.017]You want me to go?
[00:43:17.850]Okay, sure.
[00:43:19.650]Yeah, so I should say that,
[00:43:23.010]yeah, I sort of worked, just,
[00:43:25.770]you know, contacted the tribal office
[00:43:27.635]and met with folks at the Fernandeno Tataviam Band.
[00:43:32.190]And then basically, they've sort of like entered,
[00:43:35.398]they're in a,
[00:43:36.450]they're trying to put together a federal recognition claim,
[00:43:39.600]which is a ton, or they're,
[00:43:40.800]it's already been submitted there.
[00:43:42.810]It's just a ton of work.
[00:43:44.070]So basically, my collaborative effort at, right now,
[00:43:47.730]is to not bother them with my project.
[00:43:52.380]So, and you know, to be totally honest, like I have real,
[00:43:56.010]I'm not sure my project will ever be public facing
[00:44:01.380]because I'm not sure it would be legible.
[00:44:05.790]And I also,
[00:44:08.130]I just really don't like fixing historic maps into,
[00:44:13.110]I don't like, yeah, fixing the idea
[00:44:16.140]that I'm gonna put something out publicly that,
[00:44:19.320]you know, will precisely lead people to places,
[00:44:22.980]whether that's right or wrong, you know,
[00:44:24.570]luckily there's lots of other great public history projects
[00:44:28.350]that the tribes in the LA Basin have put out.
[00:44:31.230]So there's, I would send people to, you know, the UCLA,
[00:44:36.960]yeah, to those projects instead, you know?
[00:44:40.080]So, I think that,
[00:44:42.540]yeah, sort of ironically,
[00:44:44.670]because I'm trying to think in a public facing way,
[00:44:47.370]my project's not probably. (laughs)
[00:44:54.360]Yeah, I think that it's been a learning curve,
[00:44:56.700]I would say, for me in many ways.
[00:44:59.880]So, this project started out more as an academic project
[00:45:03.300]and I was in communication with the contacts I had
[00:45:08.490]in local communities and tribes,
[00:45:10.050]but it wasn't until 2019 that we kind of stopped and said,
[00:45:14.977]"Who is this for?
[00:45:16.380]And how can we more fully engage the Indigenous communities
[00:45:20.070]that are actually, you know,
[00:45:22.050]whose this history really is and it's about?"
[00:45:24.027]And so, we, through tribal leadership,
[00:45:26.670]convenes kind of a series of meetings
[00:45:30.030]with tribal representatives that were officially appointed.
[00:45:32.430]And one of the questions on the table was,
[00:45:33.840]should this project go forward?
[00:45:35.760]And it was a hard moment for me
[00:45:37.230]'cause I'd invested like, you know, five years,
[00:45:39.120]four years into it by that point, and we,
[00:45:42.000]you know, eventually all agreed that it should,
[00:45:43.560]and there's certain parameters
[00:45:44.610]and part of it is giving tribal representatives
[00:45:50.100]and communities first access in a way,
[00:45:53.460]but also a little bit of say, or a lot of say actually,
[00:45:56.580]about when and how things go public.
[00:45:59.040]So, we not only meet twice a year
[00:46:01.350]with a larger representative group from our,
[00:46:03.930]from these communities,
[00:46:04.763]but also have members on the development team, for example,
[00:46:10.710]that as we're talking about technical stuff
[00:46:12.930]and how to build a database,
[00:46:14.100]like they're a part of that.
[00:46:15.030]So we're trying to, it sounds cheesy to say,
[00:46:17.370]but like trying to be attentive to decolonization
[00:46:20.550]and Indigenization in a way throughout the process,
[00:46:23.460]so that even the look and feel
[00:46:25.080]and the way we talk about the project
[00:46:26.877]and these histories are sensitive and careful
[00:46:29.640]and reflective of those conversations.
[00:46:32.430]I don't think we're doing it perfectly at all.
[00:46:34.380]We're learning,
[00:46:35.213]and I still get caught red-handed in my academic-ness,
[00:46:42.300]by treating these as just past stories in a way.
[00:46:47.520]And I can think of two poignant moments,
[00:46:50.460]times when, you know,
[00:46:52.380]we would be sharing with our Indigenous collaborators
[00:46:55.590]and they would basically just be like,
[00:46:57.397]"Can we stop for a second?
[00:46:58.650]Like, you're just plowing through this example
[00:47:01.200]or this material,
[00:47:02.340]but these are my ancestors
[00:47:04.770]and I just wanna stop for a moment," you know?
[00:47:06.600]And there was another instance
[00:47:08.250]where one of the collaborators
[00:47:09.840]in our summer institute, for her kind of final project,
[00:47:14.430]started her presentation by saying,
[00:47:16.077]"I wanna just stop and apologize to my ancestors
[00:47:21.630]who I did not know had been enslaved in this way.
[00:47:24.540]And I'm sorry that we forgot about you,
[00:47:26.460]and I'm so glad that we know about you now,
[00:47:28.170]and we wanna," you know, right?
[00:47:30.180]Like that kind of stuff
[00:47:31.170]we don't really ever, ever do as academics typically, right?
[00:47:35.280]And so, when I think about public facing aspects
[00:47:40.230]of this project, since 2019,
[00:47:42.630]that first public is our tribal collaborators.
[00:47:45.180]And that really changes how we think about things.
[00:47:48.090]If the wider public can use this and be educated,
[00:47:50.610]whatever else, that's awesome, genealogists.
[00:47:53.340]But having that sensibility
[00:47:56.250]and orientation has been humbling
[00:47:58.770]and hard and transformative, I think, for us.
[00:48:01.920]So, yeah.
[00:48:04.681]So, I don't think our project has exactly the same,
[00:48:10.290]slightly more discrete (laughs) people to consult,
[00:48:13.890]but one of the, a lot of this material is difficult.
[00:48:19.950]And so, one of the things we've been trying
[00:48:22.020]to do is listen really carefully
[00:48:24.210]to Black digital scholars
[00:48:27.720]about how to deal with this sensitive material, you know,
[00:48:31.830]how you confront the past
[00:48:33.240]but do it in a way that's sensitive
[00:48:35.340]and that acknowledges the pain
[00:48:38.670]that's in some of these documents,
[00:48:40.080]which sometimes it kind of catches me off guard,
[00:48:44.160]when you're realizing, you know,
[00:48:46.440]just typing up the text of the Barbados Slave Code in 1661
[00:48:50.520]and realizing the really horrific punishments,
[00:48:52.830]which are just laid out in a pretty blase way.
[00:48:57.420]But I will also say that I've been working on this project
[00:49:02.730]for a long time before the 1619 Project came out,
[00:49:07.410]and the 1619 Project, in some ways,
[00:49:11.610]I mean, it's been so important
[00:49:12.990]in bringing attention to these issues,
[00:49:15.090]but in some ways, builds on an older scholarship
[00:49:17.700]that I'm challenging.
[00:49:18.810]And so, for me, one of the questions is,
[00:49:21.720]how do I respectfully engage what they're,
[00:49:27.450]which she's, Hannah and Nikole Jones
[00:49:29.190]in particular has been doing,
[00:49:30.900]and yet, also use this opportunity to raise other questions
[00:49:36.210]and talk about not just paradoxes,
[00:49:38.190]but struggles over time?
[00:49:41.670]And that means, for me in particular,
[00:49:45.120]acknowledging part of what I began with today,
[00:49:47.850]which is denaturalizing the emergence of slavery,
[00:49:52.080]realizing, you know, how,
[00:49:55.380]you know, people, to use an,
[00:49:57.750]when I studied economics in college,
[00:50:01.110]we talked a lot about widgets and, you know,
[00:50:03.510]supply and demand and how, you know, what,
[00:50:05.940]how much a widget costs.
[00:50:07.140]I don't know if that's still used at all but (laughs)
[00:50:11.025]but people are not widgets.
[00:50:13.770]And so often, when people have written about the history
[00:50:16.400]of slavery and they talk about (indistinct)
[00:50:19.139]as though people were as easy, you know,
[00:50:20.627]like there's no questions of control or whatever,
[00:50:23.910]when in fact, these questions are super important.
[00:50:26.610]So always, for me, it's, and you know,
[00:50:31.080]the team of people I work with,
[00:50:32.550]and as we talk with others,
[00:50:34.800]it's recognizing humanity of everybody involved
[00:50:39.540]in these processes.
[00:50:41.310]And as I was saying, so say,
[00:50:43.946]I was saying this earlier to Lin,
[00:50:48.030]in a way, it's acknowledging how injustice became justice,
[00:50:53.850]but marking it as injustice.
[00:50:56.100]Like, how did this happen?
[00:50:57.420]How did something that is, in fact,
[00:50:59.520]especially when you look
[00:51:00.353]at some of the things that happened,
[00:51:01.560]really horrific, how did it become like normal?
[00:51:09.990]Do you wanna follow up?
[00:51:12.060]Okay.
[00:51:14.400]Well, I have further questions
[00:51:15.870]about each of your interventions.
[00:51:19.470]What's your,
[00:51:20.303]where you really rest the intervention you're making
[00:51:24.540]and how that takes shape in digital form.
[00:51:29.670]And I think earlier today, Holly,
[00:51:31.860]you gave us an indication of that, the,
[00:51:35.344]and you alluded just a moment ago
[00:51:36.960]to the millions of documents, right?
[00:51:39.360]There's just this enormous record
[00:51:41.490]that has largely gone unconsulted and unnoticed
[00:51:45.240]and is unable to be reached.
[00:51:47.100]And your intervention is to bring that record
[00:51:51.660]into circulation, if you will,
[00:51:55.290]but you have other, you know,
[00:51:57.600]interpretive interventions that you're hitching
[00:52:00.360]to this site as well.
[00:52:01.620]We just heard a couple of them, about like the paradox,
[00:52:04.770]but can you each give, and very briefly,
[00:52:07.920]like what is the intervention you're making
[00:52:09.974]in the digital form,
[00:52:11.430]using the digital form to accomplish it?
[00:52:15.600]Well, for me, one of the crucial things is,
[00:52:18.480]a lot of times, people have assumed
[00:52:20.070]that the history of slavery needs to be told only
[00:52:23.070]from each colony's perspective,
[00:52:26.040]as though each colony was
[00:52:27.300]on their own kind of democratically
[00:52:28.920]through these separate laws.
[00:52:31.440]But in fact, there's an authoritarian structure
[00:52:34.020]behind a lot of it,
[00:52:34.917]and the real profits are going to the Crown.
[00:52:38.340]And so, for me, partly it's breaking a kind of mythology
[00:52:43.020]of over America as democratic,
[00:52:44.790]which is actually pretty toxic.
[00:52:46.740]Not that there weren't some democratic elements
[00:52:48.810]or struggles over democracy
[00:52:50.310]and of who should have rights and privileges and power.
[00:52:53.400]But it's a long term struggle.
[00:52:55.031]And just to make the point very precisely,
[00:53:00.900]I think there's a connection between the growth of slavery
[00:53:05.220]in England's Empire and two revolutions
[00:53:08.400]over questions of rights and privilege.
[00:53:09.900]And we tend to say, "Oh, these are separate."
[00:53:11.280]No, I don't think so,
[00:53:13.170]especially when you realize
[00:53:14.280]that James II was King of England between 1685 and 1688
[00:53:20.430]and also governor of the Royal African Company
[00:53:23.070]and actively involved in promoting the slave trade
[00:53:25.650]as he had been for 23 years.
[00:53:28.380]Yeah, Lin?
[00:53:29.213]Yeah. Or Julia?
[00:53:31.020]Yeah. So, really great question.
[00:53:33.750]I think I've mentioned several already.
[00:53:35.370]I think the sense of the persistence and durability
[00:53:39.240]of enslavement of Indigenous people
[00:53:41.250]in every single corner of the Americas, I think is,
[00:53:44.820]I hope a big intervention at least, you know,
[00:53:49.320]I think for academics, but also the wider public too.
[00:53:52.890]So many people I talk to say, you know,
[00:53:56.347]"Oh yeah, the Spanish.
[00:53:57.660]The Spanish did that," right?
[00:53:59.970]And don't realize that whatever state they're from,
[00:54:03.690]I can probably find a case
[00:54:04.830]that comes from that state, right?
[00:54:05.910]It's really astonishing.
[00:54:08.160]And I think, you know,
[00:54:09.210]questions about the nature of slavery,
[00:54:11.400]the nature of race and race making,
[00:54:13.410]I think is really a part of this as well.
[00:54:15.840]But the one I haven't mentioned really is this idea
[00:54:18.240]of simply returning individuals to our consciousness
[00:54:24.240]through stories and storytelling.
[00:54:26.430]And that's why we're building many biographies
[00:54:29.640]and making connections between people
[00:54:31.680]and trying to illuminate individual experiences in a way
[00:54:37.860]that has just been sort of buried in a way.
[00:54:39.960]I hope that that is, in itself, a worthwhile endeavor
[00:54:43.500]that is an intervention of sorts in a way.
[00:54:48.030]Yeah.
[00:54:48.863]Yeah, absolutely.
[00:54:51.420]I'm gonna do two, but quickly,
[00:54:53.850]yeah, I think in the history of cartography, it's about,
[00:54:57.540]you know, do settler colonial mapping genres
[00:55:02.070]just absolutely erase Native territoriality?
[00:55:06.780]Is it impossible, you know,
[00:55:08.910]to see Native lands and Native peoples when you look,
[00:55:12.750]you know, in the belly of the settler colonial beast?
[00:55:16.140]Which is private land ownership.
[00:55:18.840]And it turns out, no,
[00:55:21.780]those records are full of Native peoples
[00:55:24.150]and they are persistent on property maps too.
[00:55:28.920]So, that's one.
[00:55:29.753]And then I think the second is about how a lot of historians
[00:55:35.340]of early America and Native America talk about engagements
[00:55:39.690]between settler legal systems and Native peoples,
[00:55:42.300]particularly having to do with land ownership, right?
[00:55:44.910]If I was teaching 19th century survey course, right?
[00:55:47.730]I'd go from removal to allotment
[00:55:51.090]and I would talk about individual property ownership
[00:55:53.340]as a coercive, you know, weapon to destroy tribes.
[00:55:57.600]And a lot of studies of, you know,
[00:56:01.680]Indigenous use of settler land tenure systems focuses on,
[00:56:05.640]well, how did it change the tribe?
[00:56:07.260]How did it, you know,
[00:56:09.180]destroy their traditional governance structures?
[00:56:11.940]But that's just not the only story, whatsoever.
[00:56:16.560]And really, I'm finding the opposite, right?
[00:56:19.320]That people are reclaiming land,
[00:56:21.420]and because they're reclaiming land,
[00:56:23.340]that's places where they're able to consolidate
[00:56:26.070]and really bolster structures of traditional governance.
[00:56:31.140]So, I think yeah, complicating some of the, you know,
[00:56:34.980]sort of simple like,
[00:56:36.157]"Oh, well this was about incommensurable systems
[00:56:39.300]of land tenure."
[00:56:40.133]It really wasn't.
[00:56:43.440]So, we have a good amount of time for questions
[00:56:47.220]from the audience and from our viewers online.
[00:56:52.290]And so, why don't we open the floor for questions,
[00:56:56.820]both in the room and online?
[00:56:59.100]Jeannette, you are our online or,
[00:57:04.050]oh, Cory is.
[00:57:05.160]Okay. So, who has a question?
[00:57:13.260]We're waiting for people to dial.
[00:57:14.828]Matt? Max Mueller.
[00:57:16.500]Professor Max Mueller has a question. Go for it.
[00:57:19.808](Max speaking indistinctly)
[00:57:22.200]Oh, I need to speak into,
[00:57:24.120]Only because so people can hear you
[00:57:25.740]on Zoom. Yes, ma'am.
[00:57:26.790]Thank you.
[00:57:29.190]I'll sit down, back down though.
[00:57:32.220]Thank you all three and four of you for such illuminating,
[00:57:38.670]my mind is racing with a set of different questions.
[00:57:42.690]I just wanted to speak to a little bit
[00:57:44.520]about all of your projects disrupting the idea
[00:57:49.320]of linear time, right?
[00:57:52.920]Whether it's changing maps, reintroducing,
[00:57:57.750]individualizing stories that are often anonymous, right?
[00:58:02.910]In various contexts.
[00:58:05.460]And I was, in the book that I'm currently working on,
[00:58:08.910]and I also wanna disturb that idea of lineal time,
[00:58:15.840]in part because it has disserved all of us,
[00:58:18.960]but has purposefully erased Indigenous presence, right?
[00:58:23.607]You know, in American history, right?
[00:58:24.990]This linear knowledge and also an inability to,
[00:58:31.680]so, instead of thinking of linear history,
[00:58:34.410]I will often think of removal
[00:58:36.870]and genocide coupled with a resistance
[00:58:42.300]and return as a histories of diaspora
[00:58:46.860]and also the ideas of return.
[00:58:50.010]And I think, when we're going into the archive,
[00:58:51.930]one of the things,
[00:58:54.330]anyway, I'm just curious about that
[00:58:56.217]and those notions of how you think
[00:58:59.100]about how your projects disquiet
[00:59:02.520]that idea of linear, lineal time.
[00:59:04.710]And I also just wanted to mention, about the archive,
[00:59:07.110]one of the things that I think you all were speaking
[00:59:09.330]about is when we're visiting the archive,
[00:59:11.520]it's, I've been taught to consider that,
[00:59:14.220]by my mentors, Indigenous mentors,
[00:59:18.720]American Indian mentors, as like as visiting elders, right?
[00:59:22.590]With that same reverence as visiting an elder or,
[00:59:26.220]and visiting ancestors who are speaking to us.
[00:59:29.340]And that really has helped me to think
[00:59:31.440]about these as not only, right?
[00:59:35.160]It re-embodies, and I mean that both metaphorically,
[00:59:38.880]but also intangibly,
[00:59:41.670]re-embodies the written colonial archives
[00:59:47.760]with embodied beings.
[00:59:56.670]Thank you.
[00:59:58.110]Who wants to start?
[01:00:02.880]So, thanks, Max.
[01:00:04.590]I really appreciate this idea of disrupting,
[01:00:08.130]sort of what I hear in that question is like,
[01:00:10.530]the narrative of American progress in some way, right?
[01:00:15.701]That we are marching inexorably towards something.
[01:00:20.130]Along the way, there's some casualties,
[01:00:21.570]but it was, you know, inevitable in some ways.
[01:00:24.900]Sorry, not all.
[01:00:26.670]I feel like,
[01:00:27.660]Turn it on.
[01:00:31.133]Okay, so hopefully you can hear me.
[01:00:34.080]So thank you for that question
[01:00:35.340]about the sort of the new progression.
[01:00:38.040]One of the things that stuck out to me,
[01:00:39.570]both in this project, but also my book project too,
[01:00:41.400]one of the comments I got from reviewers is that,
[01:00:44.940]because my book also spans kind of the 15th century
[01:00:48.750]up through the late 19th century,
[01:00:50.597]one of the criticisms was that it is repetitious. (laughs)
[01:00:55.470]And I've come to think of that as almost compliment
[01:00:57.564](laughs) it's like,
[01:00:59.100]yeah, these things return and they cycle through
[01:01:02.160]and they come back again in different forms
[01:01:04.260]over and over and over again.
[01:01:06.342]And that's a really important thing to say and to highlight.
[01:01:10.500]And so, I think there's a way in which there is almost a,
[01:01:14.427]not to naturalize, but there's a way in which
[01:01:16.200]if you tell this history properly, you,
[01:01:18.960]there's not a linear line actually, in a way.
[01:01:22.290]There are changes over times and look at, you know,
[01:01:25.170]things you could talk about.
[01:01:26.700]Back to the archives for a second, I love that idea,
[01:01:29.970]I'm nervous about it when we're talking about documents
[01:01:34.740]that are primarily settler colonial produced.
[01:01:37.980]So, I just wanted to mention that,
[01:01:40.715]that I feel like there's a tension there,
[01:01:42.150]that there are moments,
[01:01:42.983]I have felt that moment of being taught in a way
[01:01:45.570]and listening to the wisdom from past,
[01:01:47.850]more often than not, in my own experience in the archives,
[01:01:51.450]it's one of horror and deep sense of loss and grievance.
[01:01:56.700]And so, but I really, I do, I treasure that idea.
[01:02:00.240]And when there's moments of that,
[01:02:01.740]I think it's really great to capitalize on.
[01:02:06.990]Did anyone else want to respond?
[01:02:09.450]Yeah, I will say a thing or two.
[01:02:12.750]I think that's,
[01:02:14.310]yeah, I think one of the things I think a lot about
[01:02:17.940]in my project is,
[01:02:19.950]these documents are cumulative over time.
[01:02:23.070]So, like to be, for example, right?
[01:02:26.700]We're talking about, you know, Spanish letters of office
[01:02:30.870]to 15 nations people in the 1780s,
[01:02:33.810]you know, and then those are marshaled as evidence
[01:02:36.480]in an 1815 land claim.
[01:02:38.700]And then they show up again with the 1815 land claim
[01:02:42.570]in an 1849 court case.
[01:02:44.550]And then they show up again in the 1980s,
[01:02:47.940]you know, in a federal recognition claim.
[01:02:50.040]And it's sort of about how,
[01:02:51.027]and a lot of documents are really kind of quotidien, right?
[01:02:54.750]They don't, they're not that meaningful
[01:02:56.790]if you just look at them on their own
[01:02:59.790]and how they're sort of,
[01:03:01.260]they're like aggregating meaning
[01:03:05.130]and reinterpretation over time,
[01:03:07.920]which I've come to see
[01:03:08.940]as this sort of like incredibly creative process
[01:03:13.170]of these communities in the 19th century,
[01:03:15.120]basically like putting their own histories of colonialism
[01:03:19.140]to use by creatively reinterpreting them
[01:03:23.160]to fit what the US thinks is a land title, yeah.
[01:03:28.110]And,
[01:03:30.150]sorry, is that on?
[01:03:31.830]No. Yeah.
[01:03:35.070]Hello?
[01:03:35.903]No, tap the back. Yeah.
[01:03:36.990]I tried. I'm not very good at this.
[01:03:41.610]So, one of the patterns
[01:03:44.310]that I've been tracing with, in these,
[01:03:48.750]through these documents is how certain kinds
[01:03:51.840]of religious arguments were used
[01:03:54.480]to justify both slavery and the divine right of kings
[01:03:57.480]and how those were connected.
[01:03:58.950]So, you're born a prince, the son of a king,
[01:04:01.470]you're born a free man, the, you know, the son of free man
[01:04:04.470]with an obligation to obey your king,
[01:04:06.357]and you're born a slave, the son of a slave.
[01:04:08.280]So they're, these are actually the subjects
[01:04:10.110]of sermons in the 17th century,
[01:04:15.120]and more eerily still, the doctrine of passive obedience,
[01:04:18.180]for those who know or have ever studied it,
[01:04:20.490]was actually deliberately flipped in a Maryland sermon
[01:04:24.060]in 1749 where, instead of the key ruling divine right
[01:04:28.860]and being God's representative on Earth,
[01:04:31.050]it's the master as God's representative.
[01:04:33.180]And the subject is the slave, I mean,
[01:04:34.623]it's just crazy how this language is used,
[01:04:38.340]but what was so bizarre is, when I was first,
[01:04:41.670]I was working with an,
[01:04:42.660]actually an undergraduate student who was volunteering
[01:04:44.490]and he was typing up some of these texts
[01:04:46.020]and we're then reading about how,
[01:04:48.360]the key passages are, for example,
[01:04:50.460]Romans 13 and Ephesians 4 through 6,
[01:04:53.250]and we're, he's typing this up
[01:04:54.930]and there's, news breaks that,
[01:04:56.790]about Trump's Bible study group.
[01:04:59.430]I'm talk, reading Romans 13 and I'm like, hello. (laughs)
[01:05:03.750]I mean, it's so much of what's going on
[01:05:06.870]in the authoritarian right, right now.
[01:05:09.900]People are saying, "Oh, this is completely new."
[01:05:11.640]No, it's not completely new.
[01:05:13.410]And so, actually paying attention to these struggles
[01:05:16.230]and debates of this earlier modern period
[01:05:18.810]actually gives more continuity into the present.
[01:05:23.010]Interesting. Yeah.
[01:05:24.327]All right, our
[01:05:27.870]there we go.
[01:05:28.740]Our next question comes from Zoom.
[01:05:32.340]It's from Dr. Jagodinsky,
[01:05:33.720]who unfortunately could be with us this evening.
[01:05:37.290]She has a handful.
[01:05:38.130]I'm gonna couple them into a tech question,
[01:05:40.470]if we have time, a more conceptual one.
[01:05:43.410]So, the tech questions for all of you are,
[01:05:45.750]what practices have been most effective in identifying
[01:05:49.290]and incorporating archival materials into your data sets?
[01:05:53.220]So, practices of archival work,
[01:05:55.230]and how also are all of you thinking about interoperability
[01:06:00.930]or compatibility with other projects?
[01:06:03.090]So, archival practices for location and incorporation
[01:06:06.780]and also interoperability.
[01:06:15.390]Salim?
[01:06:16.763](group laughing)
[01:06:18.000]That's such a big question.
[01:06:19.431]It's actually really tough, and I mean it's wonderful
[01:06:26.010]in a way because there are some other projects
[01:06:27.960]that are really wonderful,
[01:06:29.160]really, really exciting
[01:06:31.140]that we are able to link to in conversation.
[01:06:34.710]But one of the really frustrating things right now is
[01:06:39.750]that there's digitization projects going on
[01:06:43.050]that are done by private companies
[01:06:44.970]that are behind really expensive paywalls.
[01:06:47.850]And sometimes, when they take images of things,
[01:06:49.980]it's harder for us then to even see them
[01:06:52.410]and we can't use their images without copyright.
[01:06:55.890]So, this is actually huge
[01:06:58.320]and one of the things that I've been writing about
[01:07:00.690]and thinking about is, right now, did,
[01:07:05.550]hand-written text recognition technology,
[01:07:07.350]which is using AI
[01:07:08.542]to read early modern text is actually really taking off
[01:07:11.910]and you can develop models that are about 95% accurate.
[01:07:15.480]But the main company doing it, advertises itself as a co-op,
[01:07:19.770]it's based in Germany,
[01:07:20.640]is called Transkribus or actually Austria.
[01:07:23.850]But unfortunately the, not only their platform,
[01:07:26.400]but the main HTR program
[01:07:28.110]that they're been promoting is actually owned
[01:07:30.180]by a private company.
[01:07:31.260]And that's actually owned by Adams Matthews, Adam Matthews,
[01:07:33.900]which is one of the main private digitization companies.
[01:07:37.200]And a lot of people are paying for credits
[01:07:39.750]and doing the work and then their knowledge is being used
[01:07:43.260]to create algorithms that are then copyrighted
[01:07:45.780]and going to a private company.
[01:07:47.400]So, those are frustrations actually more than.
[01:07:51.690]Other thoughts on this?
[01:07:54.360]Yeah, so I found,
[01:07:56.520]basically, GIS was useful as a place for me
[01:08:00.630]to dump all my Southern California,
[01:08:02.640]I dumped on my San Fernando Valley maps
[01:08:04.830]into the San Fernando Valley, right?
[01:08:07.800]But I'm actually working just as sort of a educator partner
[01:08:13.170]on a new project called Booksnake
[01:08:15.240]that's being developed by Sean Fraga at USC.
[01:08:19.590]And essentially, it works with iPad and iPhone right now.
[01:08:23.250]But essentially what it,
[01:08:24.150]it's an augmented reality device
[01:08:26.250]where it essentially allows you to lay a document out
[01:08:30.480]on the table virtually,
[01:08:32.520]then look at it through the screen of your phone.
[01:08:34.200]So, I think that there's gonna be better tools
[01:08:40.530]for working with materials visually, right?
[01:08:43.170]I wanna look at a bunch of maps, I wanna move them around,
[01:08:46.530]I wanna flip them.
[01:08:47.700]I wanna change, you know,
[01:08:49.170]their visibility and layer them, you know,
[01:08:51.450]and I don't want do it in GIS, you know?
[01:08:54.480]So, that's part of why I think Booksnake
[01:08:56.612]and other tools that are coming are able to do that.
[01:08:59.937]And it's just about really thinking
[01:09:02.400]about what you wanna be able to do in a creative way.
[01:09:07.620]And just quickly, so the archival practices,
[01:09:11.130]as I heard question in terms of collecting and finding,
[01:09:15.750]we have about 20 RAs working with us.
[01:09:17.363]We have a lot of high school students actually too.
[01:09:19.500]So, if any high school students listening,
[01:09:21.030]feel free to contact me.
[01:09:22.380]It's been really great.
[01:09:23.250]But we don't have enough people to scour the archives.
[01:09:25.587]And so, really what we're dependent
[01:09:27.630]on is other people coming to us and saying,
[01:09:29.407]"Hey, have you seen this?"
[01:09:30.480]Or here's a pdf,
[01:09:31.313]or here's a scan or something, and then we ingest it.
[01:09:33.750]And I don't really know.
[01:09:35.790]I think the future of this is like crowdsourcing.
[01:09:39.300]You know, we set up something
[01:09:40.500]that's sort of an automated process
[01:09:42.540]where people can log in and, you know,
[01:09:44.970]enter this stuff themselves if they wish.
[01:09:47.250]And I guess, in terms of interoperability,
[01:09:51.360]we are pursuing that through enslaved.org,
[01:09:54.990]thinking about other projects as well,
[01:09:56.430]about how to sort of make sure
[01:09:58.080]that what we're doing is compatible and legible.
[01:10:00.330]But it's challenging,
[01:10:01.650]because when you have a collaborative project,
[01:10:05.070]you go through a process with your community partners
[01:10:07.530]to develop language and verbiage
[01:10:09.510]that's specific to the documents.
[01:10:11.400]And then you try to find ways
[01:10:13.500]in the world of interoperability to flatten that language,
[01:10:17.310]so that it's compatible other projects.
[01:10:19.860]Suddenly, you feel like you're taking five steps back.
[01:10:22.290]And I don't really know how to resolve that at the moment,
[01:10:24.930]but it's certainly on our mind
[01:10:26.430]and we wanna be attentive to that.
[01:10:28.100]So just one tiny comment,
[01:10:30.270]that's one of the things we've been wrestling
[01:10:32.040]with explicitly, and one of the ways we've decided
[01:10:34.890]to do that is
[01:10:36.090]to try to feature documents from other sites
[01:10:40.260]that can illuminate what they're doing
[01:10:42.450]on their own terms and give them the ability
[01:10:44.550]to create the introductions and the references, et cetera.
[01:10:47.550]So, that it's interoperable as kind of an open door
[01:10:52.530]in terms of the project
[01:10:53.640]rather than being the same data set
[01:10:56.220]with the same parameters.
[01:11:07.170]I was thinking about the fact
[01:11:11.700]that we all use documents that are, I mean,
[01:11:15.690]for lack of a better word,
[01:11:16.620]I was thinking about perpetrators letters
[01:11:18.210]that are, you know, produced by the perpetrators.
[01:11:21.420]And I think one of the kind of ethical issues
[01:11:25.740]that a lot of my students have asked, right?
[01:11:28.290]When we're reading,
[01:11:29.123]particularly when we're doing close readings in classes,
[01:11:31.200]like, how can we trust this source?
[01:11:32.880]And how can we tease out, you know, Black agency?
[01:11:36.570]I mean, I think with, in the case of the freedom suits,
[01:11:39.060]it's easier for me to do that, right?
[01:11:40.737]But there are other sources
[01:11:42.510]that I think kind of complicate that.
[01:11:45.267]And I'm really interested in place,
[01:11:48.660]and you can all speak to this,
[01:11:49.590]where you've seen the agency
[01:11:52.380]in these perpetrator sources, right?
[01:11:54.150]That we can tease out and we can try to make sense
[01:11:57.330]of how people navigated these structures of oppression.
[01:12:05.880]Yeah, I mean, I think,
[01:12:07.920]like accumulation, I also think about reverberations,
[01:12:12.150]you know, and I think often it's I don't have the text
[01:12:18.720]or the motivation of the particular legal action, right?
[01:12:22.530]What I have is the reverberations of that legal action,
[01:12:26.100]which is, you know, the map changing
[01:12:29.070]or the label on the map changing.
[01:12:31.634]And I think that it's important not to be dismissive
[01:12:35.910]of those, right?
[01:12:36.743]Just because we don't have that person talking doesn't mean
[01:12:40.800]that we can't follow the consequences of their actions
[01:12:46.080]and all the places that they went, yeah.
[01:12:51.420]I think it's really a problem.
[01:12:52.470]And I don't know that we've solved it entirely,
[01:12:54.900]but one of the things that I didn't really mention tonight,
[01:12:57.630]but that we're doing now
[01:13:00.570]with our experimental search we have
[01:13:01.890]for our community partners,
[01:13:03.000]and also for ourselves as the research team,
[01:13:05.190]but also for the future version for the public,
[01:13:07.710]is to have what we're calling now a decolonizing context,
[01:13:10.710]so that every time you try to run a search on tribe
[01:13:13.410]or on status or on whatever,
[01:13:16.530]a little thing pops up that says,
[01:13:18.367]"You know, dear reader, these archival materials suck."
[01:13:21.630]Right? No, not really.
[01:13:22.710]But like they, you should be suspicious of them.
[01:13:24.617]Right. That they are going
[01:13:26.280]to use language that's misleading.
[01:13:27.930]That they're crafted by the perpetrators, by the,
[01:13:32.067]you know, by the people who are actually self-consciously
[01:13:36.780]self-interested in how they are framing
[01:13:40.170]what they record, right?
[01:13:41.340]And that doesn't solve it,
[01:13:43.410]but it also educates people along the way
[01:13:47.370]and gives people a different lens for understanding this.
[01:13:50.370]Rather than some sort of objective truth,
[01:13:52.290]they hopefully will have a set of tools
[01:13:54.150]to understand what they're reading.
[01:13:56.010]And then I think another way that we try
[01:13:57.180]to do this is we try to supplement
[01:13:59.580]with Indigenous perspectives.
[01:14:02.250]And I think that not allowing the archives
[01:14:05.310]to have the only say in these histories is really important.
[01:14:08.910]So, having Indigenous perspectives, oral histories,
[01:14:12.090]other kinds of sources and documentation,
[01:14:15.510]I think is, this is not you to, this is, for this project,
[01:14:20.070]I think we collectively are learning new ways
[01:14:23.220]of supplementing the archives,
[01:14:25.650]even as we're still dependent upon it
[01:14:27.930]in a really fundamental way, unfortunately.
[01:14:30.930]So, that's a fantastic question.
[01:14:33.630]Yeah, a really important question.
[01:14:36.425]I guess one of the things that interests me is,
[01:14:40.680]on some level, because we have to recognize,
[01:14:44.760]because most people couldn't read and write,
[01:14:46.680]and especially people who were enslaved
[01:14:48.360]and speaking a different language
[01:14:49.907]and then there's also survival,
[01:14:53.460]especially documents in the Caribbean.
[01:14:55.320]So, in some, to some extent,
[01:14:56.880]the archives are simply silent
[01:14:59.160]with respect to certain voices,
[01:15:01.470]but also recognizing that there's silencing going on,
[01:15:05.010]that certain voices aren't allowed to be heard,
[01:15:07.560]that they're perceived to be dangerous.
[01:15:10.980]And thinking about how that happens
[01:15:15.360]and how that works in terms of especially the printed word
[01:15:19.140]and the differences between manuscript sources
[01:15:21.210]and the printed word is part
[01:15:23.430]of what we've been deliberately playing,
[01:15:25.890]not playing around with,
[01:15:26.940]but just confronting, I think is the right word.
[01:15:29.700]And then also, yeah,
[01:15:33.360]I guess, that's the most important response.
[01:15:39.840]Another question from the chat?
[01:15:42.690]Yes.
[01:15:44.910]This is a another question from Dr. Jagodinsky,
[01:15:47.760]but I think an excellent one, which is again for everyone.
[01:15:52.740]Have you, have there been any sources that you've found
[01:15:56.460]that have turned out to be much more useful
[01:15:58.770]or interesting than you realized at first glance?
[01:16:04.950]Yes.
[01:16:06.191](group laughing)
[01:16:07.980]Next question.
[01:16:08.834](group laughing)
[01:16:10.770]Yes, next question.
[01:16:12.240]Yeah, this sort of ties into the previous questions,
[01:16:14.417]'cause I actually had the very sort of lucky experience,
[01:16:18.630]as a graduate student,
[01:16:19.680]I'm finding way, way, way, way more
[01:16:21.780]than I ever thought I would and dealing with a happy problem
[01:16:25.560]of having too many sources.
[01:16:28.350]And yeah, I think in terms of,
[01:16:35.310]yeah, sources that have been more interesting,
[01:16:37.440]I think, with a lot of sources comes the challenge
[01:16:39.960]of making them meaningful and which ones, right?
[01:16:42.540]What's representative?
[01:16:43.920]What's, you know, what's the sort of archival chat?
[01:16:48.180]But I think probably the most interesting one was,
[01:16:52.650]so, I was looking for 1850s US land claim process,
[01:16:58.890]looking at Native claims, right?
[01:17:03.570]Getting US titles.
[01:17:04.590]And it turns out that, within those claims,
[01:17:07.200]is nested the whole history of their Spanish,
[01:17:12.390]their Mexican era land grants,
[01:17:14.460]and in some cases, even their petitions for emancipation
[01:17:19.140]from the missions.
[01:17:20.070]And then they are included in their handwritten copies
[01:17:25.890]of the original Spanish ones,
[01:17:27.330]and then also an 1850s English translation of them too.
[01:17:33.870]So, not what I, yeah, getting way more.
[01:17:39.030]And that sort of got me on this thread
[01:17:41.340]of what I was talking about before.
[01:17:43.050]I was trying to understand how these records aggregate
[01:17:46.620]and our uses records in the past
[01:17:49.800]as we're using the present too.
[01:17:56.793]Okay, any, oh, I was gonna,
[01:17:58.980]go ahead, Holly, please.
[01:18:00.900]Well, no, that's okay.
[01:18:03.300]Thank you. (laughs) All right.
[01:18:04.470]I think Julia's point about the cumulative nature
[01:18:08.880]of documents is so important and the aggregating of,
[01:18:13.440]I hadn't thought about it in those terms,
[01:18:15.600]but you're bringing to us the documents that are sort of put
[01:18:23.160]into various contexts over,
[01:18:25.350]all the way to the 1980s, you said.
[01:18:27.297]And that just the idea of the documentary record becoming
[01:18:32.970]then used and transformed, aggregated cumulatively,
[01:18:40.110]is one that I'm gonna be thinking
[01:18:42.990]about for a long time from this panel.
[01:18:47.160]I guess, just one example
[01:18:48.710]of something particularly interesting is
[01:18:52.470]there was a minister named Morgan Godwyn.
[01:18:54.540]He worked for about 10 years in Virginia
[01:18:58.020]and then in Barbados
[01:18:59.340]and then came back to England in 1680 and wrote something
[01:19:02.100]called the "Negros and the Indians Advocate."
[01:19:05.370]And one of the most important things to me
[01:19:08.610]about that book is the way he doesn't give people names,
[01:19:13.800]but he tells people's stories,
[01:19:16.470]and they really come alive
[01:19:18.330]if you're paying attention to them as stories,
[01:19:20.640]even though records for them themselves don't survive.
[01:19:26.610]And so, one of the things that you can do with a book
[01:19:30.090]like that is read it in a multilayered way,
[01:19:33.720]but the voices that he's talking about,
[01:19:37.230]the conversations that he's repeating,
[01:19:40.440]and make those come alive.
[01:19:41.700]So, not just thinking about it as Godwyn's voice,
[01:19:44.220]but his reflection on this society of which he was a part,
[01:19:48.030]and the ways he purposely tried
[01:19:50.250]to give all the different perspectives,
[01:19:53.940]and especially to center Black and Indian voices.
[01:20:00.570]Yes. Do we have a question?
[01:20:02.310]One more question? Yes.
[01:20:04.561]Please.
[01:20:10.862](panelists chatting)
[01:20:13.737]No, that's alright.
[01:20:14.730]We're gonna get you a microphone
[01:20:15.900]and hang on, so everyone online can hear you.
[01:20:21.930]Thank you, Max.
[01:20:23.070]Okay. Hi.
[01:20:25.170]Yeah, I still wanna start by saying,
[01:20:26.760]I apologize if this question comes across as,
[01:20:28.237]oh, we're just gonna hash that?
[01:20:30.180]Okay. (laughs)
[01:20:33.870]So, sorry.
[01:20:38.310]To what extent do the communities
[01:20:42.120]where these legal documents are sourced from,
[01:20:43.800]to what extent are they informed or involved?
[01:20:50.087]To what extent are these communities informed or involved?
[01:20:54.630]Like in the, yeah.
[01:20:55.470]About, so these, In your projects,
[01:20:58.350]I guess, right? Yeah.
[01:20:59.374]Yeah.
[01:21:01.350]Well, Lin spoke earlier about, partly about that,
[01:21:05.010]but do you wanna add anything to that?
[01:21:10.410]Yeah, so I heard in your question something even bigger
[01:21:14.190]than just these projects.
[01:21:15.150]Like, are they informed about repositories
[01:21:18.060]that hold material relevant to their communities?
[01:21:20.070]Was that part of it or just for our?
[01:21:21.911]Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:23.430]So, I think this is an interesting part
[01:21:25.680]of what we've learned
[01:21:27.000]from our community partners is that the,
[01:21:30.900]which is understandable,
[01:21:31.830]but the world of colonial,
[01:21:34.740]and I use that about the United States, right?
[01:21:36.990]Colonial record keeping and archives is this,
[01:21:41.220]is almost this impenetrable kind of wall to them.
[01:21:45.000]And it's very difficult to really stay up to speed
[01:21:48.150]on what's available online,
[01:21:49.650]the pay walls we're talking about, the scanning,
[01:21:52.500]even like how to go into a manuscript archive,
[01:21:55.920]which is not easy, frankly,
[01:21:58.320]if you don't know that world and how to register
[01:22:01.290]and those sort of what you need to do and where
[01:22:03.900]and the pencil that you bring
[01:22:05.310]and put your stuff in a locker, right?
[01:22:07.170]All this stuff that you learn over time is,
[01:22:10.230]it's not worth the effort.
[01:22:11.880]So, I feel like there's a way
[01:22:13.290]in which they might know generally, but that's part
[01:22:16.440]of what I think our projects collectively can do,
[01:22:18.690]is actually bridge that gap in some way.
[01:22:21.300]And if you use this phrase, let people have as well,
[01:22:23.803]I don't think it's right,
[01:22:24.690]but I'd be curious to know what people think,
[01:22:26.040]this idea of like digital repatriation,
[01:22:28.410]so that the stuff that is in archives
[01:22:32.040]that people might not go see themselves
[01:22:34.170]from the communities that we make accessible to them
[01:22:36.390]as a way of returning that material back to them.
[01:22:39.060]And in our own project,
[01:22:40.380]we're trying to come up with how to tap
[01:22:43.140]into the traditional knowledge labels or TK labels
[01:22:46.500]to signify to the outside world users of our website
[01:22:50.400]that this knowledge, this information, you know,
[01:22:54.240]is with relation to an Indigenous community.
[01:22:57.030]And in that way, also educate users about these connections
[01:23:01.020]that have been severed over time, if that makes sense.
[01:23:02.970]So yeah.
[01:23:04.680]Yeah, I think it's a great question.
[01:23:06.510]Funnily enough, in my project, these,
[01:23:10.500]really, I'm working with documents
[01:23:12.870]that these communities already know about
[01:23:15.210]because they've already extensively researched them
[01:23:18.420]to mount federal recognition claims.
[01:23:21.150]And so, usually my first research stop is petition
[01:23:25.980]for federal recognition.
[01:23:27.300]And those are just, you know,
[01:23:30.510]hundreds of pages long, hundreds of copies of documents.
[01:23:35.130]So I really, yeah, I'm,
[01:23:38.790]they've been there basically.
[01:23:43.020]Well, we are at our time
[01:23:45.630]and I want to thank everybody for joining us this evening.
[01:23:48.870]I want to thank our guests for their participation,
[01:23:52.830]their wisdom, and all that they brought to us tonight.
[01:23:56.580]Let's give them a round of applause, please.
[01:23:58.650]Thanks so much for having us.
[01:23:59.940]Yeah.
[01:24:00.773]Great panel. Yeah.
[01:24:02.640]Thank you and good night.
[01:24:04.107]And those of you on online,
[01:24:05.730]good night and we'll see you next time.

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Tags:
Digital legal studies
legal studies
history
digital history
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Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities 2022: Digital Legal Studies Plenary

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