Love, Trust, Authority
Tis the season for thinking about love. And we interpreters have a lot of love to give! We love our topics, our sites and organizations, and our audiences. I know interpreters who can gift wrap an entire city and interpreters who help audiences explore one small thing, illuminating each facet until the result is a glittering jewel.
This month as I was writing a piece for an upcoming Legacy issue, I began thinking about the way we can sometimes fall in love with the stories we tell, and how hard it can be to let them go. Sometimes, we let go of stories that we learn to be false – made for gripping storytelling but are actually flat out wrong. Other times we get asked to let a story go, setting it free to be told by someone else. I'm thinking here about authority and who has the strongest authority to tell which story.
My first site (25 years ago now) was Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park in Sacramento, California. The fort sat in the middle of a park that it shared with the State Indian Museum. But there was no overlap between the two except when the Park Aid of the fort would go down to cover the ticket desk for the Park Aid at the State Indian Museum to take lunch. When I was new, I thought it was a shame that there wasn’t more partnership. What I learned later was that there was a breach between the two institutions that staff now are trying to repair.
During my time at the fort, there was no discussion with the Miwok, the Nisenan and the Maidu about how their stories would be told at the fort. No conversation about how to describe the arrival and later behavior of John Sutter, a Swiss colonist who nabbed a giant land grant from the Spanish and was actively trying to turn the Sacramento Valley into a US territory. No conversation about what language would be used to describe Sutter’s relationship with native people who had been traumatized by the Spanish mission system that enslaved and brutalized so many. We told ‘The Sutter Story’ and explored the material culture of the colonists in a way that virtually erased the impact on the native cultures already there.
There is more awareness than ever before about the rights and the authority of people to tell their own stories in the way they want them told. More awareness that if members of a community ask an outsider not to tell their cultural story, that we shouldn’t tell it. Even if we’ve fallen in love with the stories we interpret, some stories aren’t ours to tell. In my day, there were no members of any of the three Sacramento Valley tribes on any committee, in the docent cadre, or on staff at the fort. No representation in the training, in the planning, or in the interpreting. We assumed that with enough research in documents kept by colonists and research of academics, we could accurately share stories that weren’t ours. We were the outsiders, and we were blind to the limits of our own understanding.
However, where both parties are amenable, partnership between outsider and community member can illuminate the interpretation, sparking thought and connection for the audience in ways that neither can accomplish alone. It makes me think of another aspect of love and that is trust. Trust is earned, it is nurtured, and it must be cherished. It might take time for the community members to decide that they want to be part of the process and that partnership will be more than just further exploitation. If outsiders and community members are partnering on a story, it might take time to agree on how the story is to be told, to agree on what authority each is bringing to the conversation. Thinking back to my days at the fort, it would have been a different conversation entirely had we found partners amongst any of the three tribes, shared the storytelling, and participated in co-creating a complex narrative about the early days of the fort and about John Sutter with perspectives that were less aggrandized and glorified. Stories that represented the Maidu, Miwok and Nisenan in their own cultural richness, their skill, innovation and joy as much as the exploitation and brutalization they endured.
If we want to give visitors deep, rich experiences of places with complex, cross-cultural histories, sharing storytelling and identifying perspectives that both insiders and outsiders have the authority to tell is critical. Budgetary realities often mean that a single guide will still end up sharing perspectives that are not theirs, but by co-creating the experience in insider/outsider partnerships we can develop programming where multiple perspectives get explored without any being misrepresented or marginalize it. We become facilitators helping visitors uncover connections and explore complexities that may be in tension and may lack easy resolve.
And helping people stay in that place of tension and reflection can also be an act of love, a love letter to the future society we wish to see.