Transcript
Welcome, all, to the first week of Place-based United States History, from early colonization to Reconstruction!
I feel honored to be gathering this amazing group of people from a span of 5,000 miles and an age range of eight decades. I believe that we're all here because we consider this fall to be a unique and vital moment to deepen our understanding of where we are and when we are, in relation to the nation-state of the United States and the land that it currently occupies.
This course is designed to guide each of us in investigations of our local place in historical periods from the beginnings of settler colonization, to the Reconstruction period which followed the United States Civil War. By sharing what we find and confront, we will be teaching each other about histories of widely diverse land currently occupied by the US.
Each week, I'll provide an audio introduction like this one. The offerings of the week will be in a document that contains readings, prompts for you to respond to, and links to audio recordings or external resources. You'll be able to download the document and audio from the email message or enter Blackboard to read and listen. Each week, we'll also engage with teaching each other. On five occasions, we'll have a virtual gathering. On other weeks, we'll have an online discussion, or a collaborative prompt that you will submit to me and I will share with the group. In the rest of this introduction, I will give an overview of the themes and offerings for this week.
I've been thinking recently about the word intimacy. During the pandemic, I found that I've noticed what is closest to me, and what kind of relationship exists with what is closest. In experiential education, the term 'sense of place' is often used as a goal for an experiential pedagogy. And I've found during this time that having a 'sense' of things is not enough and is actually destabilizing to only have a 'sense' of the news, or a 'sense' of people who I'm not able to be with. What I've craved is proximity to the people and places I have the deepest connections to.
And when I looked up the etymology of intimate, I found that it is an old word, from Latin, whose meaning hasn't changed much, and it has consistently referred to profound or close friendship. Intimate also refers to something closely connected in knowledge, or through closeness of observation.
And I was reminded of the verb form, 'to intimate,' and I hadn't made that connection. To intimate is a verb that, in the early parts of the period we're studying, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was a verb that described to make something known formally, to state something, to even declare, to declare war, to say forcefully. Now, most often 'to intimate' something is quite different— to say something in a subtle way, to insinuate something, to suggest something. In each of these cases, this word has to do with telling, with relating, with narrating, with describing.
I was struck within the range of this word— intimate, and to intimate— this range that I think also exists within this group. I was led to offer this course out of an interest in bringing the types of teaching and dialogues that I was having with people who I was just meeting through courses in a place that was far from a place that I knew well, and engaging with those historical ideas and approaches to education with family and friends and friends of friends in ever widening circles, but through connections of friendship and connections to certain places. And, in this sense this course, to me, feels like an act of bringing home something that I had offered to those I met far from home. It is also a course of becoming closely connected in knowledge and in closeness of observation.
I know that many of us, I think that all of us in this group, occupy roles that range between educators and storytellers and artists, and in each of these roles there is this connection between being intimate in knowing a place, or a community, and intimating in telling and relating and describing and creating story out of that knowledge. It's a role that we will each occupy during this course as well, in terms of taking leadership in sharing what we discover about our local places. In coming into proximity with the places where we are, we are also coming to know those places through the act of telling about them, narrating them, and describing them to each other. This bridging between intimate and intimating.
I also, within that word intime, hear the root 'time.' Time is also an old word that shares a common Germanic root with the English word 'tide,' and a closely related sense with the post-classical Latin 'tempus.' So, tide, referring to an action of the ocean, and tempus, a root that often takes form relating to weather. This connection, even within the word that we're saying here, between time and place, and the time that we are being expressed in the movement of the ocean or the movement of the climate.
It feels significant to be looking closely and listening closely to this word, because throughout this season we'll be thinking about 'how is the history of settler colonialism present in our most intimate places, spaces, daily experiences?' That will happen through these themes that will shape the weeks of each section of the course— land, movement, and shelter/fire/water/food. These themes shape how I would think about an expedition, and how we can think about moving through a learning expedition. What is the land that we are moving across? How are we moving across it? What are the basic conditions of living that are formed by the history that we are studying?
Throughout all of that, a through-line of our experience and communication that is most intimate is language. The language that we use to communicate about all of this, that is profoundly shaped by the history of English settler colonization. Intimate and intimate.
I'll now share some about what is coming up this week. The theme of this week and next week is Orienting. These two weeks, our intention is to take stock of where we are and when we are, and what our sense of that is, going into this semester.
The first reading that you'll find in Orienting to Place is a collaborative writing piece that we have all created through your contributions last week. It is based on prompts by the poet and author Brandon Shimoda called 'the ancestors reside in the answers themselves.' Considering that we will be introducing ourselves to each other and our places throughout the whole semester, this is a point of first introduction.
The next offering this week is a journaling reflection, followed by posting to a discussion online, about the question 'Where are you a local?' You'll watch a short talk and reflect; part of this process will be choosing a locality or a set of localities that you will plan to focus on throughout this course. That will be an exciting moment of exchanging with other people in the course and learning a little bit more about each other.
The third offering is called Questions for Laying the Ground, and it’s a sort of survey about your place where you are, orienting to your place and time. It's something that we'll come back to when we have our first virtual gathering this week.
The last offering is a score. This semester, I'll use the word score to refer to something that is a set of prompts or a guided experience that will be by audio, where you are listening and also doing something with your body somewhere, oftentimes. It's not necessarily meant to be read, although I've provided a transcript, but you're listening and doing as you listen. That will be called a score.
I am grateful for you entrusting me and each other with this experience, and really excited for this week to get going, and for us to get to know each other!