Aunt Francis's Garden. Yell County, Arkansas.

It’s gardening season here in Arkansas, and both my daily life and research seem to be circling things in bloom. The tomatoes are ripe; the pole beans are taller than me, and the peppers are plentiful. I love coming home from running errands to find squash, zucchini, snow and purple hull peas on my front porch left by anonymous kind friends who plant for a purposeful surplus. I enjoy the few calm moments I  spend in my own garden picking herbs or engaging in that necessary yet futile feeling task of weeding. And then there are the flowers. The magical, beautiful flowers. But I’ll get to them in a minute.

Here are just a few ramblings and ruminations on fieldwork, garden work, grief work, and dreams for the garden I plan to someday create.

Food

Raised beds of beans. Photo by Bryan Moats.

Within the vast field of cultural studies garden topics are becoming increasingly popular. Wholistic food education in particular is gaining national attention, and famous folks like Jamie Oliver, for example, are working hard to get kids interested in the food they eat. School garden projects are popping up everywhere, and it’s all just so inspiring. Recently fellow Arkansas folklorist Rachel Reynolds-Luster worked with teachers, students, and community members to create a Edible Schoolyard-inspired school garden in her home in Couch, Missouri. From what I hear, the upcoming issue of CARTS will feature stories about school and community gardens.   I can’t even begin to touch on the depth of all these wonderful goings on that fall under the community gardening and food topic. But I have inculded a a few links at the bottom of this page if you want to learn more. If you have a suggestion for a link I have not included please let me know.

Flowers

California Giant zineas next to the Greasy Grits beans.

I love flower gardening.  So did my mother. When she came to visit us in Kentucky in 2007 we took her to a local butterfly habitat and she was amazed and full of laughter, watching all those butterflies as they landed on our clothing. One of my future goals is to create a memorial butterfly/bee garden in honor of my mother and many others who have lost their lives to cancer in the Yell County area (and that’s a lot of people, folks). In my dream the garden will be on site at the McElroy House, in the same spot my grandfather once kept his flower garden. In fact, discovering some of his iris in the tangled weeds near his house first led me to think about the McElroy House as a concept.  This memorial garden will be right beside the center’s veggie garden, for which I also have big plans (If you want to know more about the goals for the McElroy House: Center for Regional Folklore and Oral History go here).

When I first started thinking about the butterfly and bee garden I spent some time reading articles and how-to books on the subject. The pictures were beautiful, and the articles somewhat helpful, but what has really helps me conceptualize future plans for the garden is experimenting with my own.  Everything I do outside these days seems to be garden practice. I’ve learned to pay attention to what leaf and flowers shapes work well together,  which plants seem to encourage one anther’s growth and which ones seem to stall when placed too close. I observe how the colors complement each other or drown each other out. Mistakes make the best teachers.  I’ve recently learned that bachelor’s button simply will not transplant, daisies have to be routinely deadheaded or cut to retain their beauty, and – just as the little tag said – blanket flowers really can’t take wet soil. Having learned these lessons from observation I won’t soon forget them. I also try not to over-think things and strike a balance between informed decisions and random accidents. I believe a good flower garden is a bit reckless looking.

I’m rather new to flower gardening, and I have so many lessons yet to learn. This experimental garden I am creating in the front yard is only my second. The first real flower garden was the small flower-lined walk we had in Bowling Green, KY. It started out as a kind of afterthought, but I soon became obsessed with waiting for things to bloom. I can remember walking our walkway in the mornings, barefoot, coffee in hand, to examine each plant’s daily changes.

Bryan in our first flower garden in Kentucky.

I started the garden for two reasons. When we came back to Arkansas we moved across the street from my parents. My mother was dying of cancer, and I knew she  was going to be spending a lot of time on the couch. She loved flower gardens, had a passion for the color red, and admired hummingbirds and butterflies. When she looked out her living room window every morning I wanted her to see nothing but color, motion, and life.

Arkansas Garden in June of 2010.

The second reason was purely selfish. I needed the life it would bring. Caregiving is terribly difficult.  Helping someone face their final days leaves the caregiver craving any semblance of growth and renewal. Moments when my mother was resting, and I felt overcome by the weight of knowing I was losing her – and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to keep her here – I would cross the street to my front yard and just start digging.

Two years later I am still digging, and I’ve managed to dig up a rather large portion of the front yard. My end goal (with this house or wherever we wind up making our home) is to leave nothing but a few walking patches through the grass. Just enough to get the reel mower through. The rest of the yard will be covered in wild, crazy, colorful flowers. I imagine myself walking through my flower-filled yard remembering my mother and calling out the different flower names to my playful boys. In talking to others who have lost loved ones, I have discovered that the urge to plant a garden during illness or after loss is quite common. Every time I see a flower garden I wonder which of their plants have ties to people they have lost. Maybe that makes me morbid, I think more likely it’s just part of the mental landscape of anyone whose lost someone very close to them.

Close up of garden.

A few days before my mother died she asked me to push her wheelchair to the front door so she could look at the flowers. It was October, but the zinnias were still fuschia and pink, tall and bright; the orange, red-trimmed marigolds had grown round and heavy with blooms, and the deep purple morning glories wound around the bamboo poles and front porch columns, reaching all the way to the roof. I pushed her to door and she stared out through the glass for a few moments, said something about the flowers looking pretty, and then asked me to help her lay down again. It turned out to be the last time she got out of bed. Almost two years after her death I still think of that moment almost daily.

After she died I found out that gardening was actually nothing new to me as I had originally supposed. According to my mother’s detailed daily planners, which I began reading after her death, she gardened often when she was pregnant with me. Her jotted down notes reveal which flowers were planted on which days. A few marigolds put in the ground on Monday, a hibiscus on Tuesday, cannas on Wednesday. Coming across these notes brought back forgotten memories of helping her tend to the flowers, deadheading the petunias and marigolds she always kept on the front porch. In fact, her hydrangeas, hibiscus, and liliacs still bloom each year, reminding me that some things we put in the ground will outlive us by decades.

So until I can create the McElroy House garden I work in my own. I watch which flowers bring in the bees, the butterflies, the hummingbirds. I try different varieties; I save seeds; I talk to farmers and gardeners; I try different plants in different places and combinations. And as a folklorist, I pay attention to how plants have a way of connecting us to other people.

Research: The Garden and the Gardener

Surprise squash in the compost pile.

Recently myself and Utah folklorist-extraordinaire, Nelda Ault, began working on some garden research, looking at how home gardens differ between central and northwest Arkansas and her native Utah. Both of us are interested in the realm of folklore and education, and one of our goals with this fieldwork is to look at the garden through the eyes of its caretaker. How did the garden come to be? How did the gardener learn to garden? Why do they keep doing it year after year? These are the kind of questions we’ll be asking.

We’re both very interested in how regional traditions can help connect youth with older members of their communities and vice versa. Learning more about both the passion and practicality that gardeners bring to their creations hold such promise for community youth education projects. We will be presenting our research at the 2010 American Folklore Society Conference held in Nashville, Tennesse.

People

Site of McElroy home place. Cotton Town, Yell County, Arkansas

As a child my mother often took me to the sight of her father’s old home place, pointing out the tree near where her grandparents— Rostus and Ivy McElory— built their home in what used to be the  Cardon Bottoms community. Last year when visiting the site with my cousins I dug up some wild yarrow and brought it back home to my garden.  It took root and began blooming this year. I often wonder if that same yarrow was growing when my grandfather was young.

I placed the yarrow right next to the lilies I had recently bought from a woman in Dardanelle who was having a plant sale to scale back her large garden. Her husband was ill, and she was his primary caretaker. We talked about flowers and care giving as I made my purchases, which also included orange dayliless that remind me of my good friend Tonya Taylor. The lilies are next to the marigolds I’ve been growing from saved seeds my mother gave me the year I moved back to Arkansas.

A garden is naturally filled with the flowers of interesting people, and I’ve worked hard to make it so. After my mother died and I tried to figure out what to do with my hands now that my caregiving duties were over, I emailed friends requesting they tell me their favorite flowers so I could purposefully plant them along side the ones I stumble onto. There are Texas bluebells from Mo, Coral Bells for Kristen, Tulips for Wendy, roses for Rebekah, and the daylillies for Tonya, as I mentioned above.  There is a Gardenia Heather helped me plant; a Peony from Marcia, and the tulips from Kristin, all presents I received for my birthday, an event Rachel helped to make happen . Many of the flowers come from plants  people dug up from their own yards, leaving them on my front porch for me to find and transplant. I have zinnia seeds my mother gave me the first year I moved back; mums from the woman who used to live in my grandparents house, plants given to us for my mother’s funeral. There are dogwood trees on the garden’s outskirts sent from fellow folklore graduate students in honor of my mother.

Dogwood tree sent in honor of my mother

I’ll keep going. There is a thrift plant from my cousin and sorrel  from my grandparents home. There are hollyhocks from Nelda. There is a butterfly bush, which we purchased per the suggestion of the honey vendor at the Pope County Farmers Market when we asked him what we could do to help combat the decreasing bee population.  And I have hundreds of daisies, Mom’s favorite flower, all planted from seed after she died.

Gardening is such an exercise in storytelling.  It’s about listening, observing, putting down (sometimes pulling up) roots. All those plants I water every morning  have a story and a larger community of people connected to them.  Sure, I’ve pushed my hand to make my garden especially story-populated, but talk to pretty much any flower gardener, and they’ll have similar tales of their plants origins .  In a sense the plants are tradition bearers in their own right. They tell their own story and help to tell ours as well.

Daisies for Mom

The analogies are endless and spill over one another. It would be easy to perhaps over analyze how the garden and folklore research are alike. But I am reminded of what poet besmilr brigham’s daughter, Heloise Wilson, told me once during an interview about her mother’s work. She recalled how she and her and mother and father once spent an afternoon discussing John Galsworthy’s story “Justice.” Her memories of that discussion have stuck with me and come to mind today:

And with anything, [we discussed] how did the writer give a certain sense of the story      to the reader? What did they do to achieve that? trying to take things apart and        analyze them and not kill it.  Be careful you don’t kill it in the process. Keep a little  distance there.

So I think it will suffice to say that what amazes me most about gardening is that in the peace and quiet of working the soil— whether I’m working to grow food or just create beauty—I am lost in thoughts about the human experience with all it’s struggles and grace.  When I first started gardening I set out to grow flowers. But I wound up listening to stories.

The article claims the growing trend of women in agriculture is a movement that could save the future of farming and tackle food insecurity issues throughout the world:

In a feminine approach to farming—and you don’t necessarily have to be a female to do it—Costa says growers favor relationships, community, and thinking long-term about how decisions will impact future generations. It’s about nurturing, she says, not domination, and working with your community.

It’s a quick read and a great article. I would highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it, especially if you have an interest in local economies, sustainable living, and organic produce.

Provided within the article is information on how we can all support small scale community farming in our region and beyond. Among the list is localharvest.org, a great link that can help you find local produce and meats in your area.

But there was one link that was new to me: Farmlink.org

Here is how they describe themselves: “a social and economic networking tool to help communities and farmers build local food connections.” Based in Florida, it’s kind of like facebook for farmers.  The site serves to connect people selling farm land with those wish to buy. It also provides support to those new to farming, including assistance in connecting with current small scale farmers who can provide real-world information and support. There is also information for restaurants who wish to work with and support local farmers as well as detailed information and how the average consumer can help support local farms. For those who sign up and become members of farmlink.org there is a section to post job listings related to small scale farming as well as want and for-sale ads.

There is not a whole lot of information on the webpage as of yet, but it’s an interesting and useful concept. In thinking about how we can support local economies and a land-based ethic (sustainable food production and the like), a site like farmlink.org has many possibilities for encouraging and supporting small scale farming and local economies.

What do you think?

I grew up watching my family participate in Decoration Days. When my father was young, decoration days served as  a home coming of sorts. There was dinner on the ground, sometimes even a sermon, and a great  deal of visiting. By the time I was a child dinner on the ground had largely disappeared in the  Yell County area, but the visiting still went on, especially at the Harkey’s Valley cemetery in Yell  County.

My mother was the tradition bearer (a phrase we folklorists use for someone who keeps a tradition or craft alive) of decoration days in our family. She  purchased the flowers, knew which graves to decorate (some were unmarked), and kept up with  which weekend we were supposed to decorate which cemetery. My mother passed away in  2008, and last year when decoration day came around I, along with the help of my father, found myself taking on the role of the  tradition bearer, decorating the graves she tended to while also decorating her own. Although I had always been interested in the tradition, it took on a new meaning to me as I decorated my own mother’s grave. I also realized that not too many people in their thirties or younger are carrying on this tradition.

Therefore I decided to start documenting the tradition in our area. I’ll be doing the same thing this year, and I hope to interview more folks who participate in this tradition. I don’t have any specific plans for this research as of yet. My goal at the present time is just to document as much as I can.

Below are a few photos from last year.

If you or someone you know takes part in this tradition or has memories of taking part in this tradition I would love to hear from you! Email me at Meredithmartin_moats at yahoo dot com or leave a comment below.

Brearley Cemetery, Dardanelle, Arkansas

This cemetery is quite old, and one of the fascinating things about decoration day is the visual difference between the newer and older portions of the cemetery. The newer section of the cemetery is so vibrant and colorful after decoration. Here is the newer portion of the cemetery two days after decoration day last year.

Brearley Cemetery, Dardanelle, Arkansas May 11, 2009

And here is a photo from the older portion.

Brearley Cemetery Dardanelle, Arkansas May 11, 2009

Chickalah Methodist Cemetery, Chickalah, Arkansas

Unlike Brearley Cemetery, this cemetery is quite small and very few people still decorate graves. My father has a few relatives buried here.

Broken headstone at Chickalah Methodist Cemetery

Harris Cemetery, Cotton Town, Yell County Arkansas

Cotton town is one of many now defunct communities in the Cardon Bottoms area, which was once a thriving cotton picking community. Very few people still decorate. My mother’s family lived in this area before moving to Dardanelle in the 1940s. I visited the cemetery last year with my cousins.

Headstone for my great grandparents, Rostus and Ivy McElroy. Most people knew her as Mama Mac.

Gravestone for my mother's stillborn sister. My mother and her brother had this stone made years after the baby's death.

My mother’s sister is one of many infant graves located in the cemetery. The area was swampy and filled with illness during the cotton picking years. Many children did not survive. Here is another headstone to mark infant deaths. This family is not related to me, but if you know something about them I would be very interested to learn more.

Milligan Children

Harkey’s Valley Cemetery, Harkey’s Valley, Arkansas

Although this cemetery is quite old, people still make yearly trips from as far as California to decorate graves. These photos were taken last year at decoration day, May 17, 2010. This is the only cemetery my family visits where people still congregate before and after decorating the graves. When I was a young girl there was a large crowd. Now there are only about fifteen people who come.

My father speaking with fellow grave decorators.

These women came from California to decorate their relatives' graves. Photo by Bryan Moats.

Decorating the graves.

View from the road. Photo by Bryan Moats.

A very pregnant me recording people talking about decoration days and growing up in Harkey's Valley. Photo by Bryan Moats.

Graves after decoration.

Once again, if you participate in decoration day, know someone who does, or know any related information you would be willing to share, please contact me.  As of right now I do not have any specific plans for this research other than to record the tradition while it is still alive. I am very interested in hearing from anyone who participates in any decoration day.

Thanks for reading.

I also plan on giving the updated information on the McElroy House very soon, which I am happy to say was unanimously approved by the City Planning Commission. More details on that to come!!

I am a bit behind on just about everything because just two days after I presented before the City Planning Commission and the plans for the McElroy House were approved, my husband and I had twin boys!! They were born a tiny bit early, but are healthy and happy and are sitting in their bouncy seats on the kitchen table as I write this post.

Needless to say, I have been a bit busy!

I am currently a full time mom, and plan on staying that way for quite a while…BUT that does not mean I am giving up plans for the McElroy House or that I am exiting the world of oral history and folklore. It just means I will be moving at a much slower pace for now.

More details on the plans for the Center and more are on the way, but before I go I want to mention the Center’s first donation. A good friend and distant relative named Floy came by our house the other day with something she thought I would enjoy. Inside the large trash bag was a Friendship Quilt made in the 1930s in an area of Yell County, Arkansas known as River Side. The community no longer exists today, but was once part of the cotton farming communities which is often collectively called Cardon Bottoms. Floy, and many of my mother’s relatives grew up in that area. The quilt was part of a fundraising event for the local schools, and when she was a young girl she was the one who drew the name of the winner of the quilt. She just so happened to draw the name of her teacher.

Years later after the teacher had died she ran into his wife and asked if they still had that quilt. His wife found it in storage, still in great shape, and passed it on to Floy. Floy kept it in storage for years. Recently she came across it, and decided to give it me. The quilt contains over twenty squares with names of women whose relatives still live in the area. Among the names are my two great grandmothers (women I never had the chance to meet), my great aunt, and my own maternal grandmother, Golda McElroy, who owned the McElroy House. I can think of no better place to hang it then in the living room of the Center.

We are far, far away from having the Center up and running. We need grant funding, lots of elbow grease, extra hours in the day to write the grants, and so much more.

But you have to start somewhere. So that’s what we are doing.

If you want to know more about the backstory on the Center continue reading. If you want to skip to the proposed plans for the McElroy House scroll down.

For a long time it has been a dream of mine to do something like this. My time in graduate school, and especially my time spent working with Michael Morrow and the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center as well as the Kentucky Remembers! Project, shaped my ideas and further pushed me toward this dream (If you want to know more about these projects please visit my portfolio. Their work is amazing, and I highly recommend checking it out). Through their example I saw how oral history and folklife research projects have the capacity to encourage dialog; I witnessed firsthand how youth oral history projects can truly build bridges between generations and members of a community.

I recently inherited my grandparents’ home, the small 1940s house I practically grew up in. It is located one street from my hometown’s historic Front Street. With its proximity to the Arkansas River and the historic district, the location for a folklife center is ideal. Wanting to honor my wonderful grandparents and uncle who once lived there, and my amazing mother who left me the house, I can think of nothing more appropriate then to dedicate the house to researching, and teaching others to research, the history and the folkways of the region they all loved so much. My grandparents’ last name, and my mother’s maiden name and uncle’s name, was McElroy, hence the name of the Center: The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

The house is located in a residential area, which means the first step in the process is to apply for a special use permit to open a non-profit in the neighborhood. I have applied for the permit, and the the hearing will be held August 24th at 7:00 pm at Dardanelle City Hall. I will give a presentation detailing my proposed plans and will answer any questions the City Planning Commission and citizens of the community may have. The hearing is open to the public. If you are in the area already or happen to be passing through, I would love for you to come to the meeting and bring any questions, concerns, and/or suggestions you might have. If you are interested in the Center’s work, I would especially love for you to come by. On a lighter note, please be advised that I am having twins—they are due sometime between August 25th (the day after the meeting) and September 15th— so I may be quite a spectacle to behold by the time the meeting rolls around. haha!

It is possible that the City Planning Commission may deny my request for a special use permit. Should this occur, I won’t give up on the dream. I will just regroup and begin looking for a more suitable location.

Below are the proposed plans for the McElroy House. I welcome any comments and/or suggestions.
If you are interested in learning more or would like to support our work, please contact me. We greatly need volunteers who are willing to give time and lots of elbow grease (as my mom used to say) to our efforts–especially people who like garden work. If you are interested in helping out in any way, please let me know!

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McElroy House: Center for Local Oral History Research and Folklife Research.

What I plan to do with the property should the special use permit be granted:

• The Center will focus on the documentation of local history and living traditions. It will be named in honor of my grandparents, Lloyd and Golda Taylor McElroy, and uncle, Bobby McElroy. As noted above, the Center will be called The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

• Our main goals will be educational in nature and include cross-generational outreach programs between our community’s young people and elders. We will teach young people how to document oral history and living community traditions and preserve this information for decades to come.

• I will write grants to fund this work and partner with state and national historical agencies to make these things happen. I will work toward becoming a non-profit organization. What follows are some of the services we plan to offer.

A Few Specific Examples of What the Center Will Do:

• We will offer audio and video recording equipment and classes to teach interested community members and youth in our public schools how to use this equipment so they can interview their relatives or friends about their life history and the history of their community. Recording equipment will be available for checkout for events such as family reunions, city gatherings and the like.

• We will have scanners on hand so that community members can bring their old photos to the Center to be scanned into the computer allowing these invaluable photos to be saved for generations to come. We will offer “Photo Sharing Days,” wherein community members can get together to share and discuss their historic photos pertaining to our community.

• All these interviews and photos will be housed in the Center in our database so that they will be available for others to view and hear. A few topics we have already began researching are the cotton industry and its history in the community and the tradition of Decoration Days throughout Yell County. We plan to add many more topics to this list.

• We will partner with local schools, after school programs, and state historical societies to accomplish this work. While we will not be a museum or archival institution, we will work closely with other agencies throughout the state and region that can appropriately house historic documents and artifacts people may wish to denote.

• The small garden space that my grandfather once used to grow tomatoes and peppers will be converted back into a small vegetable garden where we will grow local foods. We will offer workshops, led by community members, on how to grow vegetables, save seeds, and can for the winter. Our goals for the garden will be to preserve and pass on these important gardening skills for generations to come. Any food produced in the garden will be donated to the community.

• A small memorial butterfly garden will be created and named after my mother, former City Clerk, Mary Sue Martin. She was the daughter of Lloyd and Golda McElroy who once owned the house. It will be called the Mary Sue Martin Cancer Memorial Butterfly Garden. Both my grandmother and mother loved butterflies. The garden will bear my mother’s name, but will also serve to honor the many people in our community who pass away from cancer each year. Before cancer took her life, my mother expressed her desire to use her life to help cancer patients in our community. I hope the creation of this garden will be just the first step in raising awareness regarding cancer in our community. Community members will be invited to add plants to the garden in honor of their relatives who passed away from this horrible disease.

This is just a small outline of some of our plans. At the core of our work is a desire to document and preserve the countless living traditions in our community and learn more about our local history. We want to help build bridges between the old and young and help young people know more about their community’s past and present while also looking toward the future.

SO—

I am beginning some research on the folkways of Mother’s Day and Decoration Day here in Yell County. I am going to possibly put together a radio piece about traditions in this area. I hope the research will continue past the radio project as a part of my general research here in Yell County. In general terms, I am curious who celebrates these holidays, how they celebrate them, and why.

Do you or anyone in your family celebrate Decoration Day? You may not do it yourself but perhaps know that your grandmas do. Or maybe you have some far off memory of Decoration Days past. Basically it’s when members of the community go and decorate all the family graves within cemetery. Each cemetery has a different Decoration Day and many families attend different Decoration Days throughout the month of May. Back when I was a kid many people used to spend the whole afternoon at the cemetery visiting with one another after decorating the graves. A few cemeteries still do that.

Meshed in with this tradition of decorating the graves is the wearing of corsages on Mother’s Day.Do you or anyone you know take part in the tradition of wearing corsages on Mother’s Day?

If you participate in any of these folkways or know someone in your family who does (regardless of where you live, but especially if you live in the Yell County area), I would really, really love to hear more about it.

Email me at meredithmartin underscore moats at yahoo.

In the closing essay to Cultural Conservation: A New Discourse on Heritage, Green notes that in much of academe the “term advocate has become a slur, implying departure from value-free norms.” But he questioned the moral nature of this assumption, suggesting such implications purposefully turn a blind eye to the daily life of the people who are creating the folklore we folklorists aim to collect: “Cultural conservationists cannot escape political action, whether testifying on local zoning laws or articulating outrage at the sight of oil-drenched otters in the Prince William Sound or oil-drenched cormorants in the Persian Gulf (249).” Rather than try and ignore the social and political implications of his work, Green jumped right in, taking a stance alongside the people with whom he worked.

This past week many people have written about Green’s life and work much more eloquently than I ever could. I have included a few links to recent articles below.

*NPR published a great, albeit short, piece about folklorist and activist Archie Green.
To listen go here.

*Mother Jones Magazine also published a piece with eulogy here.

An excellent post at the Daily Yonder blog. Read it here.

* Another great tribute published by Politico can be found here.

*You can find the New York Times obit here.

*And even CMT published a piece on their webpage here.

Do you know of more links? Please let me know and I will post them!

And a question for you:
How has Archie Green’s work had an impact on your life?

I just finished reading Horton’s autobiography The Long Haul. I’ve been reading it on and off now for probably seven months. It’s so full of great stuff that it will probably take me the rest of my life to really digest it all. I have countless notes in the margins and the first few blank pages are covered in scribbled ruminations. It’s one of those kinds of books. So, as I say, I will probably be coming back tot his work over and over.

But for now I wanted to share Horton’s definition of “participatory research” found near the end of the book. We public folklorists, as a group, don’t tend actively embrace this concept. But I think our work would be better served if we did. Sure we might have to give up our “expert” title, but one could argue we never had it anyway. Or at least we didn’t have it to claim only for ourselves. After all, what good are our skills if we can’t pass on these skills to others? Instead of experts we would see ourselves as partners in research, possibly in a facilitator-type role, standing alongside and helping the communities of which we are also a part. In this way we would recognize we are all always learners, especially when it comes to cultural studies. This is not to say that some public folklorists are not already doing this kind of research in their varied forms of work. But as profession we don’t hold participatory research as the standard. Perhaps we should.

Here is what Horton had to say in 1998 when The Long Haul: An Autobiography was published:

“Participatory Research is defined by different people in different ways, but there are some universal characteristics. It is an in investigation and an analysis of a problem by a group of people whose lives are directly affected by that problem. Ideally, their investigation will lead to action. Participatory research differs from the more conventional kind done by experts, usually identified with universities, in that it doesn’t take decision making away from the people. Instead of becoming dependent on experts, the people become experts themselves.”

The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”

The great thing is, the Compact is as specific as it is open-ended. The compact supports specifics such as making sure broadband is available in all rural schools, assuring preventive health care is available to all rural Americans, and supporting financial and structural investments in rural communities that can help keep youth from having to choose between leaving their homes and finding a job and/or make a decent living. The Compact also focuses on greater environmental protection while also supporting job creation, understanding that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

One of the things that really stands out to me is that in the context of the Rural Assembly’s Compact the term “rural” or “small town” is not defined in that devise way Sarah Palin revived during her Republican National Assembly speech (Although it was certainly around long before her speech). Rural is, instead, a diverse collection of places across this nation where we have rich cultural heritages but also poor incomes. Where we have beautiful mountains or valleys or prairies but we also have large companies who do a great deal of damage to this land, and we often find ourselves forced to work for these companies if we want to remain here. In a lot of rural communities there are just no jobs at all, even though rural areas are full of creative thinkers, inventors, artisans, writers, etc. We have the resources. We just have to put those resources to work.

Rural, this diverse collection of places, is not homogenous and it’s for sure no Utopia. But it is a beautifully diverse place just as important to this nation’s success as any other.

So, what I really like about the Compact is it does away with any mention of rural as being some sort of pastoral, racist, or time-warped collections of places—a stereotype that is so counterproductive to doing anything to address the beauty and problems in rural America— but instead embraces “rural” this way:
“Rural America is more than the land. It is a way we are connected in culture, heritage, and national enterprise. While it may be vast, it is far from empty. Sixty million of us live in the American countryside, and far more grew up there. Rural Americans reflect the full diversity of the country in who we are, what we do, and what we want to achieve.”

To read the contract in full and to add your name go here:Read and Sign the Compact.

You can also see who else has signed it, which is a great way to find out people in your area to work with.

At this past year’s Assembly meeting, videos created by rural youth were screened. The videos address areas of concern such as “Education,” “Environment,” “Heath”, and “Investment.” These videos are great because in our media world we hear so little from rural youth about how they perceive their lives and their futures and opportunities and lack thereof. Somehow in much of popular culture rural is almost synonymous with elderly people. But that’s so far from true. To see the videos go here and scroll down near the end of the page.

These videos reminded me how important media production opportunities are for young people. I am so excited to think about the possibilities of getting documentation opportunities available in our own rural area of central Arkansas.

Maybe you have already heard about the Rural Assembly or have worked with them. I would love to hear about it.

Please consider joining the contract! And if you live in the central Arkansas area, I am waiting on a response from them as to how we can get our area more involved in the Assembly. I will keep you posted!

See original statement post on the Human Rights Watch webpage here.
Or visit Human Rights Watch.org

Israel: Allow Media and Rights Monitors Access to Gaza
(Jerusalem, January 5, 2009) – Israel should immediately allow journalists and human rights monitors access to Gaza, Human Rights Watch said today. Their presence can discourage abuse by warring parties and help save lives.

Human Rights Watch urged the Israeli government to abide by an Israeli high court ruling on December 31, 2008 and allow foreign media into Gaza. The presence of journalists and human rights monitors in conflict areas provides an essential check on human rights abuses and laws-of-war violations, Human Rights Watch said.

Since early November 2008, when the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began to deteriorate, the Israeli government has sharply restricted access to Gaza for foreign journalists and human rights monitors, and none has been permitted entry since the current military campaign began on December 27. Israeli journalists have been denied access to Gaza for the past two years because of an Israeli government policy prohibiting Israeli citizens from entering Gaza on security grounds.

“Journalists and rights monitors should be allowed into Gaza to investigate and report on the conduct of both sides,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Israel’s excessive restrictions on access to Gaza only end up impeding this deterrent effect and placing civilians at greater risk.”

According to the United Nations, Israeli attacks had killed more than 430 Palestinians in Gaza, about one-quarter of them civilians, prior to the onset of Israeli ground operations on January 3. Palestinian rockets launched into Israel have killed three Israeli civilians in this period.

The Israeli High Court ruled on December 31, 2008, that the Israeli government should allow 12 foreign journalists into Gaza. The government said it will allow eight journalists into Gaza every time it opens the border at the Erez crossing, but so far the crossing has remained closed to entry. The decision by the High Court came in response to a petition by the Israeli Foreign Press Association, which represents more than 400 members from the world’s leading international print and electronic media. The association called the ban “an unprecedented restriction of press freedom” on Israel’s part.

On November 21, 22 executives from the world’s major news organizations, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, and Reuters, sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, complaining about the “prolonged and unprecedented denial of access to the Gaza Strip for the international media.”

The restrictions create a very different reporting atmosphere than that during Israel’s last major war, the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon in July-August 2006. At that time, the media and human rights organizations were able to report on the conflict from both sides.

International human rights law, applicable during armed conflict, upholds the right to freedom of expression of journalists and human rights monitors. States may restrict freedom of expression to protect national security, but only as permitted by law and as necessary for genuine and specific security reasons. This principle is elucidated in the 1995 Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information:

“Any restriction on the free flow of information may not be of such a nature as to thwart the purposes of human rights and humanitarian law. In particular, governments may not prevent journalists or representatives of intergovernmental or non-governmental organizations, which monitor adherence to human rights or humanitarian standards, from entering areas where there are reasonable grounds to believe that violations of human rights or humanitarian law are being, or have been, committed. Governments may not exclude journalists or representatives of such organizations from areas that are experiencing violence or armed conflict except where their presence would pose a clear risk to the safety of others.”

“The presence of journalists and human rights researchers is not just about the right to information,” Abrahams said. “Independent monitoring during an armed conflict can discourage misconduct and save lives.”
Human Rights Watch Press release

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HREA – www.hrea.org