This little farm house is the place where Mrs. Wilder became a writer, first of occasional pieces about rural life, and later in a series of beloved memoirs of her childhood in her "Little House" books.
Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director
Missouri Humanities Council
Contents:
Tribal Exhibits in Missouri Museums
We're moving beyond the Lewis and Clark bicentennial this year with a new demonstration project that will be realized in three regions of Missouri. The idea is to recover a connection between present-day Missouri and the American Indian tribes and communities that were once settled here and called this land "home" until the mass relocations of the 1830s. Today in Missouri there are 25,000 citizens who identify themselves as "Native American" on the census. They represent a share in a national movement to shift our historical metaphor from "melting pot" to "weave." The strands of a weave retain their identity while contributing to the overall texture, strength, and beauty of the fabric.
We're launching the project this summer as part of the national "We The People" initiative. We have composed teams of exhibit designers, historians, and tribal consultants to create three new exhibits at local museums. The project will demonstrate how small institutions can succeed in mounting a good, low-cost exhibit of a tribe's Missouri presence, with some information about the living descendants of those tribes. We are supporting a new display on Osages in Missouri at the Lexington Historical Museum. The Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma is going to help out. We have assembled teams to interpret the Sac and Fox people's presence in a zone of western Illinois that probably included a lot of contact in northeastern Missouri, and a third team will interpret the community of Shawnee and Delaware settlers who arrived around 1787 on the Apple Creek, north of Cape Girardeau. This particular group were "settlers" in the term almost always reserved for the arrival of white pioneers. They were invited by the Spanish Governor of "Upper Louisiana" and were granted lands to form new communities. Spain hoped to blunt the westward expansion of the U.S. by populating the west bank of the Mississippi with loyalists. The idea never worked out, of course, and just after the babies born on the Apple Creek became teens, "Upper Louisiana" passed into U.S. hands and Lewis and Clark came through. That's a whole 'nother story.
We're now looking for one local or county museum, or group of museums, in northeast Missouri and one in southeast Missouri to engage in this venture with the teams we've assembled. The result will be a long-term display, not something that is temporary. If you are associated with a likely institution in those two regions, please invite me to come see your facilities and talk about the potential for doing more.
"If You Interpret It, They Will Come!" K.C. Style
The Association of Midwest Museums conducted a very stimulating workshop in St. Louis six weeks ago. There was a lot of hands-on, interactive learning for museum people interested in upgrading the experiences available to visitors. A companion workshop in Kansas City had to be rescheduled, so here is a wonderful opportunity to benefit from the expertise of one of the Missouri Humanities Council's premier museum consultants, Alisha Cole. Alisha will be joined by Dr. Novella Perrin, Dean of the Graduate School of Central Missouri State University and an authority on the interests and learning styles of older Americans. Patsy Moss will also help present this program. She is a Ph.D. history student with years of experience in the foundation world.
Alisha will conduct the workshop on June 17, 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the
Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, 3700 Blue Parkway, Kansas City. Admission
is free to members of the Missouri Museum Association or the Association of
Midwest Museums. For non-members, admission is $10.00. Further details are available
at
http://www.midwestmuseums.org
Little House in Mansfield
Eight weeks ago I brought a team of consultants to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum to conduct one of our strategic planning seminars known as "charettes." Pictured below, left to right, are Philip Cotton (architect, St. Louis), Ted Jackson (Director of the Champ Clark House in Bowling Green), Carol Grimes (Development, Springfield/Greene County Libraries), Alisha Cole (Living History Specialist at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center in Kansas City), David Watkins (member of a national consortium on "distance learning," Ithaca, NY), Carey Tisdal (professional museum evaluator, St. Louis), Michael Bouman, Jan Turnquist (Director, The Alcott Home, Lexington, MA), Brian Phillips (Director, Poplar Heights Farm Museum, Butler), Terrie Young (MHC Development Director), John Dalzell (Director, Campbell House Museum, St. Louis), Jean Coday (CEO of the Wilder Home), and Vicki Box (Wilder Home volunteer).
This little farm house is the place where Mrs. Wilder became a writer, first
of occasional pieces about rural life, and later in a series of beloved memoirs
of her childhood in her "Little House" books.
The purpose of our two-day charette was to look at the outline of the next large era of interpreting Laura's place in the American story. The invitation from the Wilder Home presented an opportunity to allow a number of similar institutions to inspire each other while focusing on one of them. In effect, we were all consultants to each other!
I hope you make an excuse to drive to Mansfield this summer if you don't live nearby. You can take a look at what I believe is a "World Cultural Site" and a unique treasure of the people of the United States. You will see the house, the museum, the property, and the Rose Wilder stone house as it has been interpreted for the past three decades.
Laura's books are translated into 52 languages. For many people outside the U.S., the Wilder stories amount to an archetype of core American values and formative national experiences. The international status of the Wilder stories is what makes the home in Missouri a world cultural site. It is a pilgrimage site for countless people who grew up with her stories. Every year sixty thousand people stop in for a visit during the warm months. We were there in the first gush of springtime growth, trying to imagine Laura and Almanzo, the apple orchard, the bright yellow forsythias, and the postman bringing boxes of fan mail every day during the Presidencies of FDR, Harry Truman, and Ike.
The web site of the Wilder Home is at this address:
http://www.lauraingallswilderhome.com
Our Charette program is not for everyone. It's limited to three or four institutions a year, places that are ready to invest some energy in upping the ante. If you are connected with an institution that is ready to attempt a change for the better, please contact me. We'll be accepting applications for charettes all through the summer.
Chautauqua!
If you already know about the special pleasures of tent Chautauqua programs, check the schedule and make your plans. The first program is Tuesday, May 8 at the Powers Museum in Carthage.
If you've never been, there is no better time than now. A Chautauqua, in one sense, is a celebration of a community's life. People gather outdoors on summer evenings, some bringing picnics and their own lawn chairs, and they enjoy some local musicians as the heat of the day abates and the red sun descends toward the horizon. Then our colleague, Kathryn Ballard, introduces the crowd of several hundred people to the evening's presentation. The evening program is given as a first-person reenactment of a historical figure. After the presentation there are questions and discussion. Some of the best questions come from kids!
This year's Chautauqua focuses on the lives that were woven into a national tapestry by the Louisiana Purchase and the expedition of Lewis and Clark. You will meet York, the manservant (slave) of William Clark, whose black skin seemed magical to the residents along the route of "discovery." You will meet the expert hunter and interpreter, George Drouillard, who was raised by his mother's Shawnee people and who learned to survive in a multi-cultural world. You will meet Andrew Jackson a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, long before he becomes President Jackson, and long before he invites the defeated Sac and Fox leader, Black Hawk, to come to Washington and be awed by U.S. power.
In this Chautauqua you will also meet the cultural descendants of George Drouillard and Black Hawk. Professor Glenna Wallace, a Tribal Secretary with the Eastern Shawnee, will speak about her tribal heritage, and Sandra Kaye Massey, a Cultural Preservation Officer with the Sac and Fox Tribe of Oklahoma, will speak about the Sac and Fox people then and now.
This is the second and final season of our "Changed Lives" Chautauqua. It will travel to Maryville for programs during the third week of June, taking place on the Northwest MO State University Campus. The last community on the tour is the Mississippi river town of Alton, Illinois. Chautauqua evenings in Alton are memorable for the Victorian elegance of the nearby neighborhoods as you enjoy the tent show in the city park. I wouldn't miss the pleasures of these evenings for anything!
"By The People" Discussions: Our Nation's Role in the World
McNeil/Lehrer Productions has sponsored a national initiative to get people talking together about our nation's role in the world. Their "By The People" project offers grants to support the costs of organizing such programs in local communities. Deadline for application is July 16, 2004 for programs to take place this coming fall. A large number of community organizations are eligible to apply for grants to sponsor these activities. The list of eligible organizations includes:
You can obtain full details at http://www.macneil-lehrer.com/btp
Key Ingredients: A story about a banana train
Next year's program theme, "America The Bountiful" takes it's cue from a Smithsonian exhibit about people and their foods. MHC Chair, Nick Knight mentioned the banana train at lunch the other day, and I asked him to write this little vignette about the way a toy can lead a person into some research.
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organization affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Federal
agency.
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