Gnarled branches of memory - intentional and unintentional consequences

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After getting a lot of helpful feedback from our peers and learning from other groups' processes, our goal is to add more variation in our sources in their media type as well as their time period. Once I finished my lacrosse game and saw my messages from what I missed in class, I was excited to see we were given a new artifact to add to our collection that is unlike anything else we have. My groupmates described this piece as an old botany journal from a student in 1871 full of pages of carefully dried-out plants pressed and labeled by the hand of the author. This artifact will add a unique dimension of personality to our curation, helping us get closer to our goal of having as much variation in our media as possible. 

Through Yazdiha’s work, “The Struggle For The People’s King” we spent a lot of time in class discussing the effects of using such a well-known historical figure like Dr. King for one’s movement. Coincidentally fitting in nicely with our environmental archives project, something that definitely stuck with me from Yazhida’s work and our class discussion was her tree diagram as a model of collective memory rooted in systems of power. (Figure 2.3. Gnarled Branches of civil rights memory). We discussed that this model shows all of the different branches as ways that the narrative of Dr. King has been framed and twisted, ending in narratives that are so distant from the “roots”. The branches are also twisted with each other so many different ways, showing how these branches are often overlapping and hard to distinguish from each other and where they came from. 

As we are reading Yazida’s work alongside looking through the archives and crafting our own collection of artifacts, I continue to get stuck and frustrated with the lack of historical evidence we have on major events and leaders that we speak about so frequently. Memories of people and moments in history are so easily able to be twisted based on what kind of message someone wants to convey and just as much even when someone doesn't even have an agenda but just because of their own bias. As we continue to finalize our project, we need to have an open mind when looking through our artifacts, even if they don't give us what we are looking for, otherwise, we risk creating a misleading narrative of the environmental activism at Kenyon that is far from the roots. One way we can do so is by making sure we get more work from a range of time periods we can, even if that means it's a piece that shows that environmental activism was not something that was a priority at Kenyon at the time. Acknowledging and showcasing these potential gaps will help us curate an honest collection of the environmental activism history at Kenyon.

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