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

–
HREA – www.hrea.org

To listen go here.

Let me explain why I am so curious about this.

Due to the illness and recent loss of my dear and wonderful mother, it’s been over two months since I have really posted any new writing to this blog. Since my mother’s death over a month ago I continue to spend a lot of time thinking about who she was and the legacy of perseverance, hope, courage and love she left for all of those who knew her. My mother was a woman who gave everything to what she believed in, namely that people are sacred and deserving of love and hope. I feel so honored I was able to care for her and spend the last few months of her life listening to and learning from her. As I try to figure out how to move forward, I wonder how I can incorporate her memory and spirit into my daily life.

You may be wondering why I am posting this personal information here on my ‘work’ related site. At first I thought it might not be appropriate to do so.
After all, most of our popular narratives about mixing ‘work’ and ‘personal life’ are cautionary tales outlining the dangers present and disasters that ensue when these two arenas overlap. Sure, there are some times when it’s best not to merge the two. But I think one of our most hopeful qualities as humans is that our lives continually intersect, and we influence each other in profound and mysterious ways. If we try and impose some kind of distinct boundary between the various sections of our lives, we may end up missing the whole point of what our work is all about. In the case of folklorists and others who work in cultural fields or activist work, a forced separation is especially detrimental because one of our major goals is to document, understand, and protect the very essence of our daily lives and expression. I know I am probably preaching to the choir here, but I say all these things because sometimes I have to remind myself of what I believe.

I know that everything I do from here on out, whether as a folklorist, family member, or friend will be influenced in some way by mother’s life and death. I know this is true for everyone else she was close to. She had such a presence.
She spent her entire life in Dardanelle, Arkansas; she loved this place. She was a dedicated member of the Dardanelle Church of Christ where she knew everyone by name and will always be known there for her generosity, spirit of thankfulness and her gentle spirit. She was considered a spiritual leader for the church. She took care of family cemeteries where distant and not-so distant relatives were buried; she bought an engraved Bible for every baby that was born; she knew everyone’s birthdays and always remembered to send a card. She took care of kids when people had to work late and needed a babysitter; she made food for the sick and grieving, and sat in hospitals with the ill and dying, comforting them and their families. When a family was grieving she would visit and offer to do things like take out the trash or clean the kitchen, knowing that sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference. She prayed for and encouraged everyone. People are always telling me about the gift she had of a truly kind and gentle spirit. But perhaps what is even more amazing is that she was very humbly aware of her gifts and always used them to build others up and give back to her community.

Since her passing the whole community is in mourning. Three poems have been written about her by three different people (none of whom typically write poems), hundred of memorials made to Children’s Home, churches, and Hospice, and millions of beautiful stories told and shared. I feel so honored and humbled that this amazing woman was my mom.

Most days I still struggle to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other. Without her life seems bleak and lonely. Losing someone and then reincorporating that loss into our personal lives is something the grieving have to do. After all, it is one of the major ways that the dead live on in this realm and become our ancestors. To help with my grief, my good friend Tonya, like any Folk Studies grad student would do, recently picked me up a copy of Steve Zeitlin and Ilana Harlow’s Giving Voice to Sorrow: Personal Responses to Death and Mourning while at this year’s American Folklore Society meeting. Published in 2001, the book aims to explore “how we use storytelling, ritual, and commemorative art to cope with death and to celebrate life. It both documents and encourages outward expressions of inner struggles. I am greatly enjoying this book and will probably post more on it in the future. It’s strangely comforting to read about others’ need to give shape to human memory.

The book explores our outward expressions, or our folklore, as manifestations of those difficult grieving processes that take place in the wordless part of our brains. I can certainly relate. I know I feel a strong need to arrange silk flowers to place on my mom’s grave because in those flowers there is a whole narrative of loss and time spent together in the real garden. Even the color of the flowers holds a story about why my mother loves deep red and purples hues. These outward expressions help me get through the day, and they also help me mark time. Yet as I try to figure out how to re-enter my life as a folklorist, I want to be sure and always carry my mother’s spirit and memory with me in my work. One way I hope to do this is to work on cancer narrative research and see how folklore research can help in the realm of cancer patient advocacy (post about this to come in the near future).

But as I sit here and think about her and think about my work as a folklorist, I am curious about the countless less tangible ways we all honor our loved one’s memory, and our own sorrow, by allowing their lives to influence the way we live ours.

The word that comes to mind most when I think about the spirit of my mom is perseverance. As I watched her face the ups and downs of cancer, I saw that, for her, hope and perseverance were unquestioned partners in a well-lived life and a peaceful death. I think a lot about those words—hope and perseverance— and their applications, and sometimes it’s hard to see where the concept ends and my mother’s spirit begins. I turn the words over in my mind as I try to figure out the kind of person I want to be.

I imagine I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to live out the daily shape of these words. But this got me to thinking—probably all of us carry someone else’s spirit with us in our work. We probably carry lots of spirits. As folklorists we are highly conscious of others’ narratives, but what about our own?

So, I am curious, whose memory do you carry in your life? Whose life and attributes do you think about when you contemplate the folklorist, activist, person you want to be?
I think it would be fun and healing to share this kind of stuff. If you feel like writing a post about a memory you carry, please either post a comment or send me the writing in an email and I’ll post it here. Even just a few sentences would be great. Thanks so much.

~Meredith Martin-Moats
November 23, 2008