Project Enhances Access to and Expands Urban Native American History for Educational and Public Use

The mission of the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies is to connect diverse interdisciplinary communities and cultivate innovative liberal learning. A new project in the Kutsche Office of Local History, which resides in Brooks College, captures the essence of this mission by making Native American history more accessible and complete for researchers, educators, students, and community members.

Grand Valley, Grand Rapids Public Library, and Grand Rapids Public Museum signed a memorandum of understanding on May 18 that will make more than three generations of Native American urban histories publicly available for the first time in Michigan’s history. 

This collaboration is a part of the Gi-gikinomaage-min (“We are all teachers”) Project. As Levi Rickert, editor of Native News Online and a member of Grand Valley’s Native American Advisory Board said, “This agreement sets a plan for working together for years to come.”

Melanie Shell-Weiss, director of the Kutsche Office of Local History, said the project comes from interest in how the Urban Relocation Program of the 20th century impacted generations of Native Americans. The program created one of the largest movements of Native Americans in U.S. history and remains largely undocumented and unexplored.

“The native experience in Grand Rapids and West Michigan is part of a much bigger story about one of the largest forced movements of people in the world,” said Shell-Weiss. “It’s a story most people don’t know about, so it’s difficult for educators and community members to learn about it. Our goal with this project is to preserve and share history.”

The project kicked off with a community history harvest on November 13, 2014, at the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi Northern Health Center. Individuals were given an opportunity to share their family’s stories and were encouraged to bring photos, letters, and other two-dimensional materials.

Alex Forist, curator at the Public Museum, said the current content is on VHS and reel-to-reel tapes, making it nearly obsolete.

Later this year, this project will digitize the materials in the Native American Oral History collections of the Grand Rapids Public Library and Grand Rapids Public Museum, as well as collect 50–60 new oral histories from Native American elders in West Michigan. These materials will all be made available to the public via a common website.

“This collaboration with local Native American communities, the Kutsche office, and historical curators to preserve and share generations of stories of our first people in their own voices, emphasizes just how essential the technology is to the understanding of our culture,” Richard said.

Having these oral histories available through one portal is important for providing broad access to the community, as well as for researchers, said Tim Gleisner, head of special collections at the Grand Rapids Public Library. Other key Grand Valley partners in this project include University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives, Native American Advisory Board, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

Community Reading Project Provides Forum for Interdisciplinary Learning

The Community Reading Project (CRP), a signature event for the Office of Integrative Learning and Advising within Brooks College, is a way of stimulating campus-wide conversation around a single text. Throughout the year, the CRP includes a number of on- and off-campus events that engage students and faculty, staff, and community members in conversation around the ideas of that year’s chosen text.

The 2014-2015 academic year marked the 10th year of the CRP. This year’s text, Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, brought several discussions and events to Grand Valley, enhancing the experiences of students in more than 50 courses across the university that included the book as required reading. The CRP culminated in a visit by Sheri Fink in March of 2015, who described her experiences writing about the events at Memorial and, more recently, in covering the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone.

Five Days at Memorial gives readers a glimpse into the events transpiring in a public hospital during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans. Through meticulous research, Fink’s book recounts the multiple perspectives of health care workers and patients in the hospital, both highlighting the ethical and legal dilemmas surrounding end-of-life care and revealing how ill-prepared many major hospitals are for large-scale natural disasters.

“It is a very interdisciplinary book connecting health professions, social work, philosophy, nursing, and engineering to an important event in our history,” Provost Gayle R. Davis said in introducing Fink at the March event.

To ensure the Grand Valley community was prepared to engage with the book in substantive ways, the CRP kicked off the year with a faculty development workshop in which several faculty members across the disciplines — from legal studies to nursing to public health — facilitated roundtable discussions with other faculty members. These discussions allowed faculty members to share ideas about how to incorporate the text into their courses and facilitate meaningful conversation among students.

The CRP further supported engagement with the book by hosting several events throughout the Winter 2015 semester. A New Orleans Symposium held in January 2015 gave students, faculty members, and community members an opportunity to explore cultural, political, and historical issues relating to New Orleans and the context of events depicted in Five Days At Memorial. In February 2015, Dr. Joseph Fins, a professor of medical ethics and chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City gave a lecture on professionalism in the face of disaster.

“Helping readers establish a sense of place is important,” said Brian Jbara, director of integrative learning and advising, in explaining the importance of these campus events to engagement with the book. “Knowing the history of the city, construction of levees, geography, and more allows us to make connections to why things happened during Katrina. Understanding the people helps us understand the resiliency they displayed during the story and the rebuilding of New Orleans.”

Faculty members approached the text in a number of ways in their classes. Assistant Professor of Nursing Susan Strouse asked the students in her class to portray characters from Fink’s book. Half of her students acted as the health providers, while the other half acted as the patients. “We tried to simulate what we could,” Strouse said. “They wore extra clothes to make themselves warmer and limited their access to water,” she said.

Her exercise was successful and stressful. Strouse said, “When we talked about the book before the exercise, the students couldn’t believe how nurses and other health care workers could have let that happen. At the end, they didn’t agree with some of the decisions made by the characters in the book, but they said they had a better understanding of why those decisions were made.”

Jane Toot, professor in the Frederik Meijer Honors College, also discussed Fink’s book in her bioethics course. “We don’t have massive flooding here or hurricanes, so it may be hard to relate, but the author successfully puts you there,” Toot said. “And she makes you ask the big question, ‘Does martial law supersede moral law?’”

Meijer Lecture Presenters Discuss Leadership

Two business leaders shared their insights on leadership and liberal education during the annual Frederik Meijer Lecture Series.

Norman R. Augustine, past president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, gave a presentation on September 23, 2014, and Patrick Doyle, president and CEO of Domino’s, spoke on February 17, 2015.

Augustine is an aerospace expert, chair of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, and member of the board of regents for the University System of Maryland. Doyle was named CEO of the Year by CNBC in 2011, recognizing Domino’s success at reformulating its pizza recipe and reinvigorating the 50-year-old brand.

The Frederik Meijer Lecture Series was established with a gift from the Meijer Foundation to provide local and national presentations that focus on issues of leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship from the perspective of students, faculty members, and participants in business throughout the region. It is organized each year by the Frederik Meijer Honors College.

Sixth Annual Local History Roundtable

The Kutsche Office of Local History hosted the sixth annual Local History Roundtable on Thursday, March 26, 2015, at the Grand Rapids Public Library auditorium. Open to the public, the conference brought together librarians, archivists, curators, community members, preservationists, educators, students, and others who share a passion for local history.

The theme of the roundtable was Food, Farm, and Table, highlighting West Michigan’s diverse foodways and food history. Hank Meijer, co-chair and CEO of Meijer Inc., gave the opening keynote address and discussed his family’s history and the importance of food, place, and markets in West Michigan. Professor Ellen Messer of Tufts University also gave a keynote address Local to Global Food Values: Policy, Practice, and Performance. 

H. Sook Wilkinson, of Bloomfield Hills, received the second Gordon Olson Lifetime Contributions to Local History award. The award is named for Olson, former Grand Rapids city historian. Criteria for receiving the Olson award include contributions to local history that give voice to diverse communities.

A Korean adoptee herself, Wilkinson has written several books on the experiences of adoptees. She has chaired the Governor’s Advisory Council on Asian Pacific American Affairs, as well as the Michigan Pacific American Affairs Commission, and serves on the Board of Trustees for Northern Michigan University. 

Finalists for the award were Cindy Laug, administrative assistant for Grand Valley’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Lori Shusta, who works at the Grand Valley American Indian Lodge.

Kutsche Office of Local History Celebrates Project

The young scholars who worked for a year documenting the history of their Grandville Avenue neighborhood celebrated the successful conclusion of their project at the Cook Library Center on September 18, 2014.

The project, Portrait of a Community, included a video documentary and archive materials collected by Cook Library Scholars (CLS) comprised of 31 students in grades K–8. Melanie Shell-Weiss, director of Grand Valley’s Kutsche Office of Local History, facilitated the project with Cook Library Center staff members.

Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell and other area leaders joined CLS scholars and their families for the celebration.

Area Studies Connects Students to Local Cultures

With four distinct programs, area studies plays an important role in connecting students to the world at large — but also to the West Michigan community.

Each program — African/African American studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, and Middle East studies (MES) — has established partnerships with West Michigan organizations. An example of this kind of collaboration is the Grand Rapids Latin American Film Festival, organized by Grand Valley’s Latin American studies program and held annually with support from other area colleges and universities. The MES program recently cosponsored an exhibit on religious tolerance, Islam in the Sultanate of Oman, with the Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Rapids Public Library.

Connecting students with people in the community can be a way to deepen students’ understanding of the concepts they study in their classes. Coeli Fitzpatrick, coordinator of Middle East studies, said that an important learning event each year is when students enrolled in MES courses and Meijer Honors College students enrolled in that program’s Middle East Civilization sequence travel to a mosque in Dearborn and the Arab American Museum. New course offerings reflect area studies’ commitment to teaching students to understand the relationship between global to local, often referred to as “glocal.” Latin American studies is offering Latinos/as in West Michigan, a course in the general education program open to students of all majors that incorporates service-learning into the curriculum. Middle East studies will launch a new course, Arab Americans, in Fall 2015. Steeve Buckridge, director of area studies, said learning about issues by connecting with local cultures helps students develop their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.

“You cannot learn about your community if you don’t know who the people are and how they work to address an issue,” Buckridge said.

Area organizations also gain from these partnerships, Buckridge said. “Grand Valley is a resource to many West Michigan nonprofits and our presence in the community says a lot. Grand Valley cares,” he said.