Presenter:
Rose Brewer, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies, University of Minnesota, Minnepolis, MN

Introduction

john powell:
Dr. Copeland Carson mentioned the idea of postmodernism and the struggle that postmodernism poses for the notion of any identity. Even for those who never experienced the middle passage, the issue of constructing an identity in today's world differs from that of constructing an identity a hundred years ago. It will be different again a hundred years from now. With that thought, I now introduce Dr. Rose Brewer who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has written a lot about these issues and I believe that we are in for a treat

Rose Brewer:
I am a sociologist. In many ways, my field, African American studies, Africana studies, black studies, has a history that is deeply linked to the idea that there is a bond, an inseparable connection between community and academy. There was also a deep understanding on the part of our intellectual and community foreparents that there are multiple ways of knowing and that the academy only addresses a very narrow range of that knowledge, that we understand through lived experience, as well as through empirical studies.

From my perspective, the planning committee represented the best of this practice, the idea that multiple knowledges can inform a process. I feel that Sister Atum and Steven Miles subverted the normal way that these conferences are put together, the practice of having a conference and then inviting the community. There is Mother Atum, who is a center woman in the African American community here in the Twin Cities, with a deep commitment to wellness at every level, and her wonderful sidekick, Ms Chiyedza, and a whole group of community women, community mothers, who inform the work of that Wellness Center. There are young women involved: Waneda Muhammad, Brikti Hiwet, Cara Lawrence. There are also some very powerful community scholars, whose insights were, from my perspective, not as deeply reflected in our dynamic, but we are hopeful that these conversations will go on. They reflect the understandings and teachings of Professor Ahmet Azzahir and Dr. Semerit. There is Dr. Miles who knew that something like this would require the deep commitment and connection to the community and this conference required a community dialogue. The community struggled around these issues for many, many weeks. They came prepared, through the teachings of these community scholars. I came away awed and in many ways checked in some of my assumptions about knowledge for whom, and who knows what. So this conference process, which I believe represented some of the best of what's possible, and what's going to have to happen with these next steps on how we are going to use this material, how we are going to struggle with it, was a case in point.

I would like to focus on how we might use these materials in the community and in the classroom. In Africana studies, we look at a legacy that has often been marginalized. Young people have recently built on the work of earlier thinkers and strugglers around this world African experience. They understood that they were being made invisible, that their histories and knowledges were not included in the curriculum. They demanded with the utmost urgency that this had to change. In this context African American studies, Africana studies became a part of this campus and campuses all over the country, in institutions that had not treated these histories seriously. These were predominantly research-based, white institutions. Even though, had been a 30-year struggle, we give too little credit to how this has transformed institutions like this, making a space for a conference such as this.

I believe that science should be interrogated. Students and all of us must understand that science is a way of knowing. It is a very effective way of knowing for certain kinds of things but it cannot answer every question. I want all of our students in Africana studies to understand that it is incumbent on them to dissect, to deconstruct, and to understand science in its proper social context and its location. I have used a number of resources in several of my courses to do that. One of the best pieces is The Racial Economy of Science which looks at this history that we have been discussing. I have in some of my courses selected out a piece on the Tuskegee experiments and pair that with a visual rendition of those experiments, a film called, "Miss Evers' Boys." Pairing selections of "Miss Evers' Boys" with the history of the Tuskegee experiments opens up a profound critical space for our students, that science must be examined in its particularity and that it is a social product. Genetic mapping is a social product as well. This does not deny its importance but it helps us understand it. That is what I call critical thinking about these issues.

The documents that Professor Hall has generated around Louisiana histories connect very well to many of the things I do in a family course. I ask students to do a family history project and we have been debating the complications of locating our histories in a particular clan or tribe or region of Africa. But, our young people are struggling with the here and now. They are trying to connect with their own families and their own histories in a narrow space. I can see how this work will inform the longer view, they are grappling with second-generation, third-generation issues.

I do sevcral things in interrogating this material or in putting science on the line. The social sciences have been terribly remiss in pathologizing the African American experience. They depict black families as nothing but matriarchal cesspools. That kind of thinking continues to the current moment. What happens when your lived experience is very different from that even as the written experiences articulate it? I try to connect those misunderstandings with a kind of critical view at how rich and incredible is the history of African American people. There is a balancing act: oppression and resistance and you need that dialectic to understand this.

I brought a video that I use quite frequently. It is very powerful in that it does what Professor Mills does in terms of the history and the social science of genealogies, and it raises new questions about this genetic piece. I want to show 15 minutes to give you a little bit of insight on how we use critical thinking, the interrogation of documents and visuals and films to have the complicated discussions that we need to have. It is titled, "The Language, You Cry In."

Video Narrator:
Africa, 18th century. A young woman is snatched from her village by slave traders, forced apart forever from her mother, her motherland, her language, her identity. This is the non-history of millions of African American women and men, a wall of silence, a mysterious past that memory fights to preserve from the onslaught of time, but which ends up shrouded in darkness. Who are the African Americans? Where do they come from?

Three generations ago, the parents of our grandparents lived in the era of slavery. Slave owners knew that to master a human being, no matter what his race or color, all you need to do is to strip him of his identity, his land, the strength of his culture, and the memory of his ancestors.

Memory is power. We cannot rewrite the history of humanity, but we can rekindle memory, or at least a part of it. Neither time nor centuries of oppression have been able to erase America's African heritage.

40 million African Americans live in the United States today, and in this nation searching for its past, some of them can show things. [song]

And this is the story we are going to tell you today, the story of how a person was able to go back before the arrival of the slave ships to the coast of the New World.

This is a story of memory, the story of how the memory of an African American family was pieced together through a song sung by a woman named Amelia Dowley.

An ancient African song of a legend, to have the mystical power to connect those who sing it with their ancestors, with their roots, in time and in space.

The story began in 1931 in [inaudible] which was then a tiny Gullah fishing village on the coast of Georgia. Linguist Lorenzo Turner and musicologist Lydia Perish came here to carry out research into the language and music of the Gullahs, a unique African American community in coastal South Carolina and Georgia that has preserved more Africanisms in their speech, customs, rituals and music than any other in the United States.

Professor Turner made a momentous discovery here, a 50-year-old woman who sang a haunting song, the longest text in an African language found in the United States.

Woman's Voice:
My husband told me that he collected a very interesting song from a lady named Amelia Dowley. That song, and the melody, we would frequently play when he came back to Chicago because he did lectures. He would go around showing slides and using the song. He took a wire recorder early on, and he would ask his informants to stand usually in the open because he chose the season of the year when everything was favorable to being out of doors, and I do know he interviewed some people on their front porches. He would make the tapes, the wire recordings.

Narrator:
10 years later, Solomon Corker, a young student from the British colony of Sierra Leone recognized Mende, his native tongue in Amelia Dawley's song. It was Turner's first clue about the origin of the text. Though some words had changed, the theme line was very clear. Corker had never heard the song before, but the word "kambay," grave in English, led him to suspect that it was part of an ancient funeral dirge. Turner and he made the first translation of the song, published in Turner's 1949 book, Africanisms of the Gullah Dialect.

Woman's Voice:
We were all enthralled by the sound, the music, the melody. It was so [inaudible] the words, the meaning, we enjoyed it even more. He played it often in the family and we all learned to sing the song. I think it goes something like, [sings].

Narrator:
Turner's research into the song stopped there. No further attention was given to the song until the late 1970's when Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist began studying the slave trade between Sierra Leone and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, what has been called, the Gullah connection.

Man's voice:
The basis of the Gullah connection is rice. During the 18th century, coastal South Carolina and Georgia were rice-growing areas, and the rice planters over on this side were willing to pay higher prices, premium prices, for slaves that came from what they called the rice coast of West Africa. That meant the traditional rice-growing area from Sennegambia all the way down to Sierra Leone, and the northern part of Liberia.

So you had a period of time in which a great many people were being taken from a small part of Africa to a small part of what is now the United States. Between about 1750 and around 1800, many thousands of slaves came from Sierra Leone and neighboring areas of the rice coast, came to the ports of Charleston and Savannah.

Narrator:
Scarcely two centuries ago, here in the port of Savannah, ships arrived carrying hundreds of slaves. The Africans brought their skills, traditions and songs. Their lives and those of their descendants would be forever marked by rice. The landscape of coastal South Carolina and Georgia is still scarred by the irrigation channels these slaves dug with their bare hands. Mr. Opala's research showed that between 1785 and 1800, more than 45% of the slaves arriving in Savannah came from Sierra Leone, and many came from this one place, the British fort on Bunce Island.

Rose Brewer:
I have to stop because we are almost out of time, but it goes on in a very emotion-filled way to talk about the connection of a family to this song, and the connecting of the Africans on this side of the world with Africans on the continent. It becomes a source of tremendous discussion and dialogue as we try to sort through the identity question and the issue of family, and who are my people.

I also ask students to think about this question of who my people are in a family history project. I brought some excerpts from those papers. One is from a from a young woman whose roots are here in the United States.

Upon researching my family's roots, I discovered my people are rooted within the South in every aspect of that word. This means that three generations of my family were born and raised in the South. I traced my family's lineage back on my father's side, and discovered fragments, snapshots and extremely limited information on my ancestors. My family history is told from the aging perspective of my 76-year-old grandmother. My research begins with an abbreviated story of my great-grandparents. Their birthplace and birth dates are long forgotten, due to the age and the little value placed upon the information by my family. They were both raised in the South, somewhere in Louisiana, and grew up poor. My grandmother was of dual heritage; her father was white, but she was only raised by her mother. The number of siblings that each family member had is unknown. They did not have education, and only my grandmother completed the sixth grade. Specific reasons for this limited educational opportunity are not known by me at this time. The couple had 12 children. My grandmother was born November 6, 1926, in Otona, Louisiana.

The reason I selected this is that as I was seeing Dr. Hall's Louisiana citations, it dawned upon me, would not it have been wonderful to be able to have pulled up that Web site and maybe connect this history?

The other is from the young man from East Africa. The Twin Cities has a large Somali, Eritrean and East African population. He starts with who are my people?

I'm originally from Eritrea. However, the time when I was born in Eritrea was a period in which the war for independence was going on. The war lasted some 30 years, the longest war in Africa. The war came to an end on May 3, 1993, when Eritrea finally gained independence from Ethiopia. So technically I was born at a time when Eritrea was a part of Ethiopia, but born on what is now Eritrean soil.

I think the question who are my people, has a variety of meanings. One is, who are my people in terms of relatives, the family tree that my uncle and mother and father helped me put together, shows, to some extent, who my people are. It may be a bias, but most of the names are written as son of, not daughter of. However, I did manage to get the family tree from some of my female relatives. Even then my family tree continues in terms of daughter of, and then the next generation continues with the male descendents.

She goes on to describe a bit more about that family's history and concludes with: While my background and history is Eritrean, however I do not believe just because new borders are drawn up on paper, that eliminates what existed for hundreds of years. The history of the Eritrean people will forever be one that is interconnected because Eritrea and Ethiopia, in the larger picture, are all of Africa. Since I came to the United States in 1986, by most people I have been classified as African American or black. I personally do not think that, but I do have some of the same history as African Americans.

These student papers are an incredible exercise, full of emotion. They open up a space for us. In my class, the students work with one another. One of the things we might do is address the question that was asked by the panelists this morning: "Genes won't tell us who we are." We would put that on the table for discussion and then I would ask people to turn to a partner in a small group and ask the question, what makes you who you are?