Description
Keywords Log: Record instances of your selected Keyword that you encounter. This log should be a place to record usages of your keyword throughout the semester, pose questions about your term, grapple with various meanings and definitions of your word, plan and outline your paper, and begin to analyze the usages that you discover in the course readings and discussions:
Here, you should archive usages of your keyword throughout the semester, drawing on class readings and class discussion.
You may record out-of-class encounters as well: video, music, conversations, day-to-day interactions, etc.
Try to be as specific as possible. For written sources, record the specific title, author, page #, and, if possible, an exact quote where the word in being used. You should also make a couple notes about the context to help you later on. For video, songs, conversations, and so forth, try to note the date, setting, and provide some context.
In addition to recording a usage, it is a good idea to provide some initial thoughts (questions, connections, insights) about this usage. By “usage,” I mean the specific way in which the word is being use in the examples you find.
In your readings, you may find related terms – feel free to record these as well. For example, if your Keyword is ethics, you may wish to note instances in the reading where you encounter morality, values, or principles.
Readings attached and below:
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (“Long-Billed Curlews” to “Avocets and Stilts”; pp. 141-280)
“The Clan of the One-Breasted Women” (at end of Refuge)
“The Lost Daughter of the Oceans” (at end of Refuge)
Selections from Farming While Black, Leah Penniman:
“Introduction: Black Land Matters”
“Healing From Trauma”
“Movement Building”
Selections from Black Faces, White Spaces, Carolyn Finney:
“Bamboozled”
“Black Faces”
“It’s Not Easy Being Green”
Selections from As Long as Grass Grows, Dina Gillio-Whitaker:
“Environmental Justice Theory and Its Limitations for Indigenous Peoples”
“(Not So) Strange Bedfellows: Indian Country’s Ambivalent Relationship with the Environmental Movement”
“Ways Forward for Environmental Justice in Indian Country”
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Trace:
Memory, History, Race, and the
American Landscape
(Part 2: “What’s In a Name” to “Epilogue”)
Lauret Savoy
“What’s in a Name”
Erwin Raisz, Landforms Map of the United States (see pp. 70-1).
“What’s in a Name” (cont.)
• Power of names: “Names are magic. One word can pour such a flood
through the soul” (Walt Whitman).
• Names and history (truth v. “Truth”)
• “What troubles me is how some readers embrace these namings as America’s history,
‘our’ heritage, without asking if there might be other narratives, too” (73)
• Read pp. 75-6
• Native place-names and language
• “The land may be the ‘matrix; of linguistic meaning for oral cultures. Leslie Marmon
Silko has described how ‘the continuity and accuracy of oral narratives are reinforced
by the landscape’ for Laguna Pueblo people” (81)
• Naming patterns and languages from Africa
• Slur-names
• Check out these websites Savoy mentions in this chapter:
• Wampanoag Nation’s Language Reclamation Project: https://www.wlrp.org/
• Use of racial slurs in place-names: U.S. Board of Geographic Names
“Properties of Desire”
• ”Heritage Tourism” and interpreting history; Silence on historic ties to slavery, north and south
• Walnut Grove Plantation (Spartenburg, South Carolina)
• “I’ve found few plantation or colonial attractions, north or south, that honestly acknowledge the presence and
contributions of African Americans” (109)
• Walnut Grove tour guide “did not speak of those who used the tools to serve the household or work the land-–
not until asked,” and then “My queries near tour’s end—Where were the quarters? How many people were
enslaved here?—met polite silence. Was I impolite to ask such a thing?” (91)
• History of dispossession
• “[I]nto the twentieth century very few African American families came to possess land as their own property. I’ve wondered
what deeper forms of possession, more concrete and felt, they had. Not finding their stories doesn’t mean they never existed”
(101).
• Historic Deerfield (Massachusetts)
• “If I had any illusions that the told and untold stories from Spartanburg, the properties of desire, were unique to
the South, they ended here” (103)
• Presence of enslaved persons in Deerfield and the rest of New England: “Puritan New England was as
implicated as South Carolina” (106)
• “So what?” i.e. why is it important to recognize this??
• American paradox: “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave
labor” (107)
• Historic ties to slavery among present-day institutions: banks (JPMorgan Chase); insurance (Aetna); Ivy
League schools (Brown, Harvard, Yale) (108)
• “A supposedly long-gone past offers an illusory comfort to the living. It’s not my fault, I wasn’t there. I didn’t
own any slavey, and neither did my family. Barricaded safely in the present, the living can even condemn the
institution while ignoring what made it desirable to privileged classes—and what has fed an ever-mutable caste
system to the present” (111).
“Properties of Desire” (cont.)
From Savoy’s End Notes: “I learned later than the poet Lucille Clifton had a similar experience at
Walnut Grove as the only person of color on a tour in 1989. The silence she experienced about slavery
prompted her to write [this] poem” (202).
“at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, South
Carolina, 1989,” Lucille Clifton
among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.
nobody mentioned slaves
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did this work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.
tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and I will testify.
the inventory lists ten slaves
but only men were recognized.
among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark
some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this honored work.
tell me your names
foremothers, brothers,
tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear
“Migrating in a Bordered Land”
• U.S.-Mexico border wall (pp. 123-4)
• Mother’s WWII experiences: “My mother came to the San Pedro Valley as part of a massive but
little recognized migration and containment” – what does she mean by this?
• Juxtaposition between
• human migration (man-made border walls; Indian reservations; detention centers; segregated Fort Huachuca)
• San Carlos Reservation = “the world’s first concentration camp still existing today” (141)
• bird migration (bird corridors)
• “Some migrations, it seems, matter a great deal; some gatherings of diverse lives are a cause for wonder,
celebration, or concern” (118).
• Fort Huachuca, a “segregated city[,] resembled no other in the nation”
• “a place for many firsts” (145-6)
• “first army station hospital…to be staffed and commanded by African Americans, with the Medical Corps’ first black colonel at
the top”
• Hospital “was the largest African American medical facility in the nation at the time and the first army hospital to give formal
basic training to Black nurses.
• First installation to have Black WAACs commanded by Black officers
• “noteworthy firsts such as these might elicit great praise until one realizes they resulted from the military’s
policies of segregation magnified” (146)
• Black nurses and Jewish doctors took care of Nazi POWs and Savoy’s mother “and the other Black officers
couldn’t patronize stores, cafes, or other businesses that welcomed and served German prisoners” (152-3).
• Prejudice of white officers towards Black nurses (153)
“Migrating in a Bordered Land”
• Who writes history? Whose story gets told? What “truth” matters? (141)
• Public story of Fort Huachuca v. Savoy’s historical research: “The museum
stories give no hint of what I found in the National Archives. Nothing of the
protests against incident after incident, against untried murders, against
discriminatory practices. Nothing of the complaints, charges, and calls to
justice…the sheer volume of once confidential records show some of the
lies in the army’s slippery bureaucratic language, even as it was becoming a
basis for official history. The noncommittal spin of acceptance of one
million African Americans into a Jim Crow military, of equal opportunity
for ‘Negro’ doctors and nurses within a just and fair segregation that federal
officials claimed was ‘at the request of representatives of the Negro medical
profession,’ The fight for a Double V for victory against fascism overseas
and against racism at home wasn’t won on at least one front” (155)
“Placing Washington, D.C., After the
Inauguration”
• “the paradox that is our nation’s capital” (162)
• January 20, 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama
• “It was then that I saw with a new clarity how Washington, D.C., is an invented place.
For unlike capitals of most other nations, the District began far from the country’s
economic, intellectual, or cultural centers. Its origins arose instead from a political
deal. The capital also harbored from its earliest days a ‘secret city’ of free and
enslaved African Americans—a secret city my father’s people inhabited” (163).
• “secret city”
• Presidents who brought enslaved servants to the White House: Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and
Zachary Taylor
• African American labor in construction of D.C.
• Few historical traces of free Black population; Black Codes
• Slavery legal in D.C. until part way into the Civil War (1862)
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