HERITAGE
LEADERSHIP*
Engaging with Contested Heritage:
Working Through and Walking Alongside (Part 1)
An image of Manzanar National Historic Site in California. According to the Lonely Planet webpage: “A stark wooden guard tower alerts drivers to one of the US history’s darkest chapters… Little remains of the infamous war concentration camp, a dusty square mile where more than 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry were corralled during WWII.” Benjamin T. Arrington served as an National Park Service historian, park ranger, and manager. In an article he published on the We’re History: America then for Americans now webpage, Arrington lists seven sites that “force us to confront some of the ugliest episodes in our national history.” In addition to Manzanar NHS, these sites are: Gateway Arch National Park, Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, and Flight 93 National Memorial. As you read this article, think about the contested heritage that these sites represent and the ways our model for engaging with contested heritage might apply. Photo by Getty Images.
Thank you to our contributing authors: Theresa Coble, Ryan Lindsay, Pamela Blair-Bruce, Christina Cid, Jim Craig, Carol Fitzsimmons, Rachel Galan, Keith Miller, Lisa Overholser, Bob Stanton, and Laura Westhoff
*The posture of a heritage leader is one of cultural humility, a readiness to rebalance power dynamics, and reciprocity.
Theresa:
This is one of those “dear interpretive colleagues” moments. So much is happening in our world today. We think the need for authentic content, trusted settings, places of social inclusion, opportunities to connect to the full spectrum of human experience, and skill development that supports empathy, tolerance, and understanding has never been more pronounced. In 2009, the Institute of Museum and Library Services framed the role of museums and libraries broadly:
Museums and libraries offer rich and authentic content, dedicated and knowledgeable staff with deep expertise, and safe, trusted settings for individuals and families, all of which invite and support effective learning.
The collections in libraries and museums…connect people to the full spectrum of human experience.
These institutions operate as places of social inclusion…In them, we learn about ourselves and others, and enhance the skills that contribute to empathy, tolerance, and understanding.
The Heritage Leadership doctoral cohort at the University of Missouri – St. Louis is a learning community of practice that conducts research, discusses concepts and texts, and develops approaches to understand and respond to contested heritage topics at interpretive sites. We talk a lot about heritage in our program. We’ve come to understand that we don’t create heritage by doing history. Instead, we create heritage when we “repackage the past for some purpose in the present” (What is Heritage?, Section 2.1). We think that heritage becomes contested when different groups claim the same heritage but interpret the past differently, or when members of the same group don’t view the past in the same way. Heritage becomes hotly contested in the public arena when groups compete to have their values, interests, and perceptions hold sway (Liu et al., 2021).
Keith:
This article is co-authored by six faculty mentors (Theresa, Keith, Bob, Lisa, Christina, and Laura), four doctoral students (Ryan, Pamela, Jim, and Carol), and our long-time heritage site partner, Rachel Galan, the Assistant Site Manager at Caddo Mounds SHS in Texas. With other heritage leadership doctoral students and partners, we are immersed in Heritage and the Human Spirit research. That is, we’re immersed in an exploration of how contested heritage can influence the human spirit, especially in situations where there’s a need to heal. Clint Smith’s best-selling book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America, served as a touchstone for how we approach our work.
In this two-part article series, we’ll introduce the conceptual model that’s guided our research and inquiry thus far. Part 1 will explore the concepts of contested heritage, meaning making, crucial conversations, and trauma-informed heritage practice. In Part 2 we’ll examine four truth inquiry, crucial engagement, liminality and place, and being moved.
Together, these articles will help interpreters work through contested heritage topics for themselves. They will also support interpreters as they walk alongside others who engage in this meaning making journey with them, in part or in whole.
The Newsweek webpage features an article titled, “75 Years Later, Internment of Japanese Remains Stain on American History.” Alexander Nazaryan tells us the story behind this photo: “A Japanese family returns from a relocation center camp in Hunt, Idaho, to find their home and garage vandalized with anti-Japanese graffiti and broken windows in Seattle, Washington, on May 10, 1945. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the hatred and paranoia regarding Japanese-Americans fueled the drive to violate their rights and lock them up.” Photo by Newsweek/AP.
According to the Gateway Arch National Park website: “St. Louis and the Gateway Arch are both referred to as the ‘Gateway to the West.’ The arch is an inspirational, transcendent symbol of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of building a unified continental nation and St. Louis’ role as a confluence and gateway to the American West during the 19th century. The park’s museum interprets key individuals and cultural groups involved in exploring, exploiting, and inhabiting the lands from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.” Some people think about this structure as the largest monument to colonization in the United States. Photo by Daniel Schwen.
On the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta toured the Flight 93 National Memorial and called the passengers and crew of the ill-fated plane flight American heroes: “[They] responded with selflessness, determination and tremendous courage. And at the cost of their own lives, they made the fateful decision to fight back.” Photo by Air Force District of Washington.
Contested Heritage
Pamela:
When visitors arrive at heritage sites, they bring a lot more than their backpack, their water bottle, and their curiosity. They bring a wide array of personal experiences, a lifetime of learning, and an internalized set of cultural norms and values. As they engage with a heritage site’s interpretive themes, various aspects of who they are become salient. They think about the site’s interpretive content through the lens of their own experiences and identity. If the site addresses contested heritage, visitors will demonstrate a wide range of receptivity or reluctance to pursue those topics. While history requires deep inquiry into the past, heritage is a selective picking and choosing of elements from the past in ways that support identity formation and meaning making in the present. Whether you work at a site that actively engages contested heritage or one that runs the other way, if you want to “enhance the skills that contribute to empathy, tolerance, and understanding,” we’ve got a process to guide your efforts.
We tip our hat to Daniel Yankelovich, a researcher who studied public opinion for decades. He identified a three-stage process that supports forming sound judgments on complex, emotion-laden issues: consciousness raising (stage 1), working through (stage 2), and resolution (stage 3). Although Yankelovich’s process seems simple, he lamented, “We are seriously lacking in institutions that can midwife the stage 2 phase of working through.”
Christina:
Our model for engaging with contested heritage—illustrated below—takes the need for stage 2 midwifery seriously. We call stage 2 “Trauma-Informed Heritage Practice,” and it includes everything in the middle columns. Since you can’t lead others on a journey that you haven’t taken yourself, our primary audience is interpreters. But we hope, as you learn to engage contested heritage, as you learn the ins and outs of trauma-informed heritage practice, that you’ll be moved to think, to listen and hold tension, to connect with others and take action, and to be whole. We think being moved in all these ways puts us en route to resolution (stage 3). And being moved doesn’t leave you in a static position. Rather, it nudges you to jump back into the fray, to engage another contested heritage topic, and to launch into another round of consciousness raising, working through, and walking alongside others. The process is iterative, and if our experience is any guide, you’ll need cultural humility, a readiness to rebalance power dynamics, and reciprocity to make it work. In other words, you’ll need to develop your capacity as a heritage leader.
The Heritage Leadership faculty mentors and students at the University of Missouri - St. Louis propose a Model for Engaging with Contested Heritage that encapsulates our approach to addressing contested heritage topics at interpretive sites. Photo by Heather Waterman and Theresa Coble.
Meaning Making
Bob:
Colleagues, as the Director of the National Park Service in the Clinton administration, I did my utmost to preserve the resources entrusted to my care. I was emphatic that parks be maintained to the highest possible standard. But at their core, national parks are not about scenic vistas or intact historic structures; they represent contested heritage. When they spotlight the challenges that have tested our nation, and the diversity of people who contributed, incrementally, to the flourishing of American ideals, they bring up stories that are often omitted from history textbooks. By sharing untold, lesser told, or purposefully excluded stories, they reveal contradictions to the American myth.
During my tenure, Tuskegee Airmen NHS, Little Rock Central High School NHS, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP, and the Minuteman Missile NHS were established as NPS units. I was heavily involved in getting construction funds for the visitor center at Manzanar NHS. I was at Brown v. Board of Education NHS for the 50th anniversary commemoration of that piece of landmark legislation. The Little Rock Nine were my contemporaries. I was delighted to see that story told, especially given my own experience with the “separate but equal” doctrine. When I consider the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, it seems unthinkable that our nation sent Black soldiers to fight in WWII, but military leaders still segregated us because of our race.
When I think about contested heritage, I think about our collective efforts to form a more perfect union. Telling that story means we must understand meaning making. How do people think about a more perfect union? What do they believe is required to build a more perfect union? Does the idea of a more perfect union motivate them? Why or why not?
Lisa:
Although heritage sites do affirm our cherished notions, they are also riddled with discrepant meanings. There are events that happened in the past that don’t align with how we think the world should work. Crystal Park, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, refers to our beliefs about how things are supposed to work as our global meaning. When there’s a gap between a particular situation and our global meaning, we experience distress and discomfort. Sometimes the interpreter's job description is to nudge visitors toward engaging with people, places, events, and ideas that make them uncomfortable.
I think our model of engaging with contested heritage is about that very choice: How will each of us respond when we encounter natural and cultural heritage that makes us uncomfortable? As Laurajane Smith, a professor in heritage and museum studies at The Australian National University, says:
No matter how this concept is defined, “heritage” is charged with representing individual and group identity, sense of place and belonging…The conflicts over statues are explicit struggles over the legitimacy given by the state to either consensus national narratives or claims for recognition of the ongoing material legacies and injustices of racist and colonial exploitation.
According to the Little Rock Central High School website: “The controversy in Little Rock was the first fundamental test of the United States resolve to enforce African-American civil rights in the face of massive southern defiance during the period following the Brown v. Board of Education decisions. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was compelled by white mob violence to use federal troops to ensure the rights of African American children to attend the previously all-white school…” In this picture, a group sits outside Little Rock Central High School as a park ranger tells the story of the school’s desegregation and the courage of the Little Rock Nine. Photo by National Park Service.
On their webpage, the Legal Defense Fund says the Brown v. Board of Education decision was “the case that transformed America.” As the Legal Defense Fund describes, “The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education occurred after a hard-fought, multi-year campaign to persuade all nine justices to overturn the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that their predecessors had endorsed in the Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.” Photo by Bettmann Archive.
According to the NPS Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: “In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act… Most Indians fiercely resisted this policy, but as the 1830s wore on, most of the major tribes—the Choctaws, Muscogee, Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickasaws—agreed to be relocated to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma)... In May 1838, the Cherokee removal process began… The impact of the resulting Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ was devastating. More than a thousand Cherokee—particularly the old, the young, and the infirm—died during the trip west, hundreds more deserted from the detachments, and an unknown number—perhaps several thousand—perished from the consequences of the forced migration.” In this photo, community members walk part of the trail during an organized remembrance gathering. Photo by National Park Service.
Crucial Conversations
Carol:
Smith tells us that heritage is vigorously contested, and heritage professionals find themselves right smack dab in the middle of that controversy. They have to help people manage their emotions and fend off perceived threats to their identity. To do that, interpreters must defuse their own fight or flight instincts, and resist their inclination to go silent about uncomfortable truths. That is, they need to lean into crucial conversations. Joseph Grenny and his colleagues say that crucial conversations happen when opinions vary, the stakes are high, and emotions are engaged. Further, they claim that “at the heart of almost all chronic problems in [society] lie crucial conversations—ones that we’re either not holding or not holding well.”
Yankelovich says that during the consciousness raising stage, “people become aware of an issue and start to take it seriously.” At this point in the process, you can identify the broad contours of a contested heritage topic. You can assess the size of the gap between global and situational meanings. You can map the truth claims that different social groups have staked out. You can anticipate future events that might heighten or defuse tension. You can even pose essential questions that could inform your inquiry and engagement efforts. But if you stay in stage 1, if you don’t move into the working through phase, and if you don’t avail yourself of the tools of trauma-informed heritage practice, you won’t experience the seismic shifts that can happen as you work through contested heritage.
Trauma-Informed Heritage Practice
Ryan:
Carol, won’t people run the other way if you talk about seismic shifts? But seriously, I’m with you. There’s so much to be gained as we do this work. Grenny and his colleagues caution that, “we often back away because we fear we’ll make matters worse.” They counterbalance this observation with a reminder: “You don’t have to choose between being honest and being effective.” In our model, we’ve identified the elements that we think are central to trauma-informed heritage practice. Before diving in, however, let’s think about trauma and the principles that support trauma-informed heritage practice, including safety, agency, collaboration, and trustworthiness.
I’m a social work professor at Washington University. I focus on mental health, trauma, and the intersection with suicide. One definition of trauma is from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). They specify that trauma results “from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances” that an individual experiences “as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening.” Further, trauma has “lasting adverse effects” on people’s ability to function and their physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. Some of the lasting effects of trauma are trauma triggers. A trigger is an automatic response that’s outside a person’s control. Any sensory information, including a sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell can become encoded during a traumatic event and associated with danger.
Jim:
Understanding trauma and trauma triggers can support the creation of spaces that are physically and emotionally safer. But people respond to trauma differently, and perceptions of safety exist along a continuum. My safety may bump up against another person’s truth telling, and then the question about that space becomes safe for whom?
I tend to think that creating safe spaces is a process of deepening one’s awareness of human experiences and providing clear communication about site content. With regards to safety, the goal is to prevent the intense re-triggering of traumatic responses. It’s also important that participants can exercise agency. People need to know what an experience might entail and how they can extract themselves from the situation if it becomes overwhelming.
When sites engage contested heritage topics, it’s essential that they collaborate with stakeholders and descendent communities. Ciurria says that activists in the disability community popularized the Nothing About Us Without Us (NAUWU) movement in the 1990s. They emphasized that content about people with disabilities should not be produced without first consulting with people who live with disabilities. Nothing About Us Without Us has become a rallying cry for people from many marginalized groups, including Indigenous interpreters in NAI and beyond.
Heritage sites can and should engage community members in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of programs. By engaging the community in a co-creation process, sites can identify relevant narratives, ensure that stories are accurately represented, and incorporate community insights about what trauma-informed practice looks like in that instance.
Trustworthiness is an emergent quality of positive community interactions. It’s built through transparency, consistency, accuracy, and ethical practice. Issues of trust are historical and contextual. It’s probably safe to say that no heritage site is free from enacting historical harm on one community or another. Trauma-informed heritage practice requires sites, and site personnel, to wrestle with past actions that maintained systems of oppression. It generates a readiness to listen to people’s stories, value their lived experiences, acknowledge trauma and injustice, and repair relationships. It takes time, and it requires consistent effort, but it’s part and parcel of trauma-informed heritage practice.
Laura:
Ryan and Jim, I appreciate your explanation of trauma and the principles that support trauma-informed heritage practice. Collective trauma is another topic that can help us explore challenges and opportunities related to trauma-informed heritage practice. Gilad Hirschberger is an Israeli scholar who tells us that collective trauma can affect whole societies: “Collective trauma is a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Aside from the horrific loss of life, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning.”
I think heritage sites can help people grapple with key dimensions of collective trauma, including victims, perpetrators, collective memory, representation, group identity, culpability, moral standing, the social construction of meaning, and how the present actively shapes our memory of the past. Hirschberger explores what collective trauma means for both victims and perpetrators. When the descendants of perpetrators look back, they see the reality of historical crimes. But they may also feel the need to “uphold a positive image of [their] group.” Or they may struggle with the idea that acknowledging those crimes also means accepting guilt in the present, a misunderstanding of the intention of heritage practices and historical research. Historians like me are grappling with ways our research can remain true to its ethical and professional practices AND more fluidly contribute to trauma-informed heritage practice. We often wonder how to move people to think, to listen and hold tension, to connect and take action, and to seek wholeness.
Chip Colwell, 2017, aeon magazine: “There’s a tension inherent in the term ‘healing,’ which is derived from the Old English hoelan - meaning ‘whole.’ To be healed is to be whole again. Yet for Native peoples, the wounds of history might never fully disappear. ‘I myself will never be healed,’ Karen Little Coyote, who now now helps direct the Southern Cheyenne’s repatriation programme, once told me…’I’ll always have the scar of what happened to our people.’ Yet scars are a particular form of healing. As a constant reminder of the orginal wound, they can provide a source of strength for Native Americans to endure. Scars are proof of survival.” Artwork by Cheyenne warrior-artist Howling Wolf; photo from the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.
Rachel:
Laura, we learn from Laurajane Smith that when people face collective trauma, they may resort to denial and backlash, emotional distancing from historical truths, or a range of “thought-terminating cliches” including: “morals were different back then,” and “it was such a long time ago,” and “you have to move forward.” Hirschberger notes that collective trauma poses real consequences for subsequent generations. He highlights that German churches adopted “a post-war theology of repentance,” and that German society coined the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung to represent “their struggle to overcome the negatives of the past by raising uncomfortable questions about collective culpability.”
As a survivor of an EF-3 tornado, and as a person of Jewish descent whose family was affected by the Holocaust, I have a deep appreciation for how trauma and collective trauma play out in people’s lives. And I know I’m not alone. In fact, Milanak and colleagues found that 80-90% of adults will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime and 7-11% of those exposed to trauma will develop post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Some adults, including heritage professionals, may experience a trauma exposure response. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky works with vulnerable populations. As a social worker, she describes her experience with trauma exposure in this way:
After so many years…of bearing witness to others’ suffering, I finally came to understand that my exposure to other people’s trauma had changed me on a fundamental level. It was like a kind of osmosis. I had absorbed and accumulated the trauma to the point that it had become part of me, and my view of the world had changed.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, empathetic strain, or even burnout.
Imagine that you’re an interpreter at San Antonio Missions NHP, Andersonville NHS, Women’s Rights NHP, Fort Laramie NHS, Sand Creek Massacre NHS, Oklahoma City NM, the Whitney Plantation—or any of 1000 other heritage sites that attempt to take an unvarnished look at America’s past. Knowing, as van Dernoot Lipsky warns, that “oppression thrives on misunderstanding, alienation, and us/them binaries,” you focus your heritage work on helping people cultivate empathy, tolerance, and understanding. But doing this work at sites of historical trauma means that you’re continuously exposed to secondary trauma. Engaging the structural underpinnings of contested heritage on an ongoing basis means that, very likely, you’ll experience a trauma exposure response.
Theresa:
I think interpreters have to learn how to take care of themselves. Unfortunately, self-care isn’t something they teach you in interpretation class. Fortunately, for those of us in NAI, and those of us in a learning community like the one at UMSL, and those of us who’ve learned to be authentic with our colleagues and embrace vulnerabilty, we can find strength in community. I suspect that if this work doesn’t move us individually and collectively to be whole, then we’re not doing it right. But being whole, and forming a more perfect union, are processes of becoming and belonging. Perhaps that’s why working through and walking alongside are central to trauma-informed heritage practice?
Rachel, I’ve seen how your experiences with trauma and trauma exposure have deepened your capacity for heritage leadership. In his classic text, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Parker J. Palmer said: “When the heart is supple, it can be ‘broken open’ into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world’s pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.” Perhaps the working through stage is really about keeping our hearts supple, so that they’ll break open not apart?
Engaging with Contested Heritage, Engaging with You
On behalf of the faculty mentors and students in the Heritage Leadership doctoral cohort at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, we’re so grateful to be able to think with you about how to engage contested heritage topics at heritage sites across the country and the world. We think this challenge is worth pursuing; in fact, it may be the niche where interpreters can move the dial on public opinion and make their biggest contributions to the human spirit. In Part 1 of our two-part series, we introduced our model of engaging with contested heritage. We explored contested heritage, meaning making, crucial conversations, and trauma-informed heritage practice. Next time, in Part 2, we’ll explore four truth inquiry and crucial engagement as the work that interpreters do when they engage in trauma-informed heritage practice in place-based contexts. We’ll also suggest that heritage sites are liminal spaces; that is, spaces that facilitate human growth and development. Finally, we’ll consider the importance of being moved as a necessary precursor to resolution. It’s no accident that we launched this two-part series in the November-December issue of Legacy. If you’ll be in St. Augustine in December for the NAI National Conference, we’d love to chat with you, pick your brains, and further explore the relevance of this model to your work.
If this discussion has piqued your interest, dig deeper through these action steps:
- Ask yourself, “How do you help audiences engage with contested heritage at your site?”
- Do an inventory. Are there contested heritage topics that you and/or your site have embraced, that you’ve avoided, or that have confounded your interpretive efforts thus far? Why do you think this is so?
- Grab a coworker and do a talk-aloud. What’s your experience with and/or knowledge of trauma? What’s your experience with secondary trauma or a trauma exposure response? What motivates you to pursue trauma-informed heritage practice? What gives you pause? What would change at your site if contested heritage and trauma-informed heritage practice became central to your work?
- Make a plan. How could you strengthen your engagement with a contested heritage topic at your site? What would it take for you and your coworkers to lean into a new contested heritage topic at your site? Toward that end, generate a do-list that specifies who will do what, by what time, using what resources. Then support each other to achieve those goals.
Finally, check out these recommended resources:
- We think The Open University’s free online course titled “What is heritage?” is a good primer on heritage. The course provides an overview of the concept of heritage and its critical study. We like how they frame heritage as both a “process” and a “product.”
- Richard West Sellers (NPS historian and author of Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, 1997) published a two-part article series in 2011 titled “War and Consequences: The American Indian Movement vs. the National Park Service at Fort Laramie” (Part 1) and (Part 2). Sellers provides a personalized look at how a historian unpacks contested heritage and makes events from the past relevant to the present.
- The American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges put out a handy one-pager that summarizes how to navigate crucial conversations.
- Our heritage leadership cohort has spent a lot of time in The Last Archives—a history podcast by Harvard historian, Jill Lepore. In Season 1 she asks, “Who killed truth?”—we’ve had deep conversations about that question! If you listen to these episodes, we predict you’ll be hooked: Unheard (Season 1, Episode 4), For the Birds (Season 1, Episode 9), The Farming Game (Season 3, Episode 5), and The Word for Man is Ishi (Season 4, Episode 2).
- Our model is based, in part, on our own experiences, understandings, and insights. But it’s also based on the scholarly literature. You can learn more about the literature we cite by clicking this link: Engaging with Contested Heritage (Part 1) - Literature Cited.
- Last, there are a number of fabulous websites that delve into contested heritage topics where opinions vary, the stakes are high, and emotions are engaged:
- The New York Times’ interactive webpage on the Tulsa Race Massacre uses text, photos, and a virtual re-creation of the prosperous black neighborhood that “perished at the hands of a violent white mob” to tell the story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
- The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery at Ferris State University “addresses the complexities of race, race relations, and racism” and is a leader in the anti-racism movement worldwide. Dr. David Pilgrim’s goal for the museum is to change the way that people talk about race.
- The National Park Service’s Women’s History webpage features the Home & Homelands Virtual Exhibition and other content that examines the contributions of women and femmes.
