Event Title

(Un)natural Disaster; Honoring the Dead

Presenter Information

Christina Boyles

Location

CB1-107

Start Date

3-11-2017 3:30 PM

End Date

3-11-2017 4:30 PM

Description

(Un)natural Disaster: Depicting Racialized Responses to the 1928 Hurricane (Christina Boyles)

Although the hurricane of 1928 is the second deadliest natural disaster to occur on U.S. soil, the legacy of the storm has largely been lost to history. In fact, one of the few well-known sources about the storm is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nicole Sterghos Brochu asserts that this is "because the vast majority of those who died were black migrant workers, segregated in life and abandoned in death" ("Florida's Forgotten Storm"). The fallout of the storm, however, has left a lasting cultural legacy in central Florida. Notably, anger has simmered for decades in West Palm Beach's African-American community over disparate memorials for black and white storm victims. Sixty-nine white victims in a segregated mass grave received personalized burial markers. In a nearby pauper's cemetery, a mass grave of 674 black victims was forgotten and left unmarked, later sharing space with a dump, a sewage plant, and a street extension ("Storms Path Remains Scarred after 75 Years"). Government documents reveal that the racialized response to the 1928 storm was intentional. Seeking to protect Florida's burgeoning tourist industry, federal officials minimized the damages caused by the storm, even going so far as to dramatically underestimate the death toll. Since many individuals who lost their lives were transient—meaning their names and residences did not appear in census data—the government could easily downplay and even negate their existence. To bring the stories of the storm's underrepresented victims back into our cultural memory, I am creating a Neatline exhibit demonstrating the loss of life the 1928 hurricane caused in both the United States and the Caribbean which includes embedded interviews with family members of survivors. As the hurricane occurred before the National Weather Service had established a system for naming hurricanes, I also am compiling resources about the storm from each nation affected. Doing so will produce a comprehensive database of resources about the storm and its aftermath. The exhibit, which is currently a work-in-progress, can be viewed on my website christinaboyles.net under the "research" tab. This project expands upon Hurston's narrative by highlighting the racialized context and response to the storm. Moreover, it demonstrates the need to focus aid efforts communities of color both during the Hurricane of 1928 and more recent events like Hurricane Katrina. Failing to do so risks contributing to the ongoing insecurities caused both by hurricanes and disaster relief in the U.S.

Honoring the Dead—A Digital Repository of Documents Related to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians 1903-1934 (John Nelson and Stacey Berry)

In a demo session, Dr. John Nelson and Dr. Stacey Berry will show their recent grant-supported work on a digital collection of documents related to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a unique institution opened in 1903 and closed in 1934. These documents relate the government's use of the asylum to house Native Americans deemed too difficult to house on reservations, the only such institution in the United States. The demo should fit well with the conference themes regarding indigenous peoples, race, and community development. The documents will become available for scholars, writers, and Native Peoples whose interests include tracing what became of the hundreds of patients at the asylum. Little now remains of the asylum, only a plaque at the site, a cemetery surrounded by a golf course, and hundreds and hundreds of documents that reveal the nearly continual battle over how the asylum was run, who was sent there, who might be released, and what the impact on families and friends of those who found themselves committed to the institution. This project is being built in Omeka, with planned tagging to facilitate searches for individual patients, government officials, place names, and other related topics. Users will be able to view a searchable repository of images of individual documents and read digitized versions of the same documents. Our demo session would allow participants to see, search, and examine documents, with an opportunity to share and discuss future options, concerns, and suggestions. Our efforts are intended to help provide what governmental evidence exists regarding the internment of Native Americans from across the country, from as far away as Washington, Florida, New Mexico, and California. Held from public view for decades, these documents now are available in microfilm and other format copies in repositories in Pierre, South Dakota; Washington, DC; Kansas City, KS; and in other far-flung places that make it difficult for researchers to address the institution and its legacy. Our project aims to make this material more accessible and useful. Documents include annual reports, listings of patients, letters of transferal, and reports on the state of the institution, including the revelations that finally led to the closure of the institution.

Dr. Berry has worked on the online Whitman Project and the Civil War Washington at the University of Nebraska, and Dr. Nelson and Dr. Berry both teach in the English for New Media program at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, less than 60 miles from where the Asylum once stood. This program seeks to provide a Digital Humanities background for undergraduates, including courses in databases and textual analysis.

This demo should illustrate our effort to accumulate, organize, digitize, and make available the documents to tell the tragic story of this institution, revealing the changing relationship between the dominant White culture that built and ran the institution and the Native Americans and their allies whose voices were finally heard.