Places That Belong to All of Us

The Smithsonian, maple syrup and the humanities of the crossroads.

Last week, I argued that the humanities are alive and well. I suggested that we need an expanded vision of the humanities that acknowledges and celebrate the ways in which people engage with the humanities beyond the confines of higher education. No more obituaries, just bigger maps.

There is a vibrant, growing humanities life off-campus.

The list of locations where this work happens is long and evolving, with nowhere off-limits and new spaces emerging every day. We’ll visit many places this year, but I want to start with the ones right under our noses. These humanities venues hold a unique place in our democracy.

Our journey begins at a state park.

Massachusetts Exceptionalism, Yes and No

OK, OK, Massachusetts is blessed. We have world-class cultural institutions, including renowned destinations that attract visitors from around the world.

But like too many other states, Massachusetts struggles with public transportation, disparities in wealth, and a concentration of resources in its largest city. Not every globally-important museum is reachable, even for residents of Boston. Nor is every globally-important museum accessible or responsive to the needs of the surrounding neighborhoods.

What we do have—here and around the nation, though no doubt the Commonwealth’s history, culture and sizable state government make it unique—are public libraries and state parks, National Park Service sites and even town and city halls.

I believe we should recognize them as humanities spaces and embrace their potential as crossroads—touchstones of inclusion and intersection.

Because let’s be clear: no matter where you live, those places belong to you and me as tax payers and Americans. In a time when our democracy feels threadbare, these humanities spaces can and should serve us as shared turf.

Here’s an example of a place striving to do just that.

A crossroads, then and now

Turners Falls bears a vicious name. Located on the Connecticut River, forty miles north of Springfield and part of the town of Montague, the village has a population of less than 5,000. Originally known as Peskeompskut or “place where the fire bursts from the rock,” the land surrounding the nearby falls served for thousands of years as a gathering ground for Indigenous people.

From a brief history by scholar and Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band tribal member Cheryll Toney Holley:

Death came in the early morning hours on May 19, 1676. Hundreds of Native families were gathered under the Falls on the for the annual fish run. In May and June of each year, salmon, shad, eel, lamprey and herring made their journey upstream to spawn. The Connecticut River was thick with fish, making it an ideal time to gather food for the entire year. Annual corn fields were also growing nearby- come autumn, it would be picked and stored for the winter. And on this occasion, hungry Native refugees from war-torn Southern New England had also made their way to the Falls.

The region was engulfed in the conflict known as Metacom’s Rebellion or King Phillip’s War. English troops under the command of Captain William Turner were stationed downriver in Hadley.

Turner led more than 150 men on the 25 mile ride from Hadley to (what is now the town of) Gill. They gathered on the hill above the camp containing the families there to gather fish. The soldiers rushed down the hill and slaughtered the elders, women and children still sleeping in the early morning light. The noise of the assault woke the Native warriors camped nearby. The warriors gave chase to the English soldiers fleeing downriver but killed relatively few. Captain Turner was among those that perished and as a reward for his role in the deaths of those families, the area is now known as Turners Falls.

Opened in 2004, the Great Falls Discovery Center (GFDC) does not carry the Turner name. Perched above an old canal, the facility is operated by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. It sits within the network of heritage parks and state parks that dot the state, everywhere from Roxbury Heritage Park to the Fall River Heritage State Park to the Walden Pond State Reservation to Mt. Greylock State Reservation.

A local + state + federal humanities partnership

Last month, GFDC welcomed Crossroads: Change in Rural America, a Smithsonian Institution “Museum on Main Street” traveling exhibit touring the state in 2022-23 with coordination and support from Mass Humanities.

“Museum on Main Street” began in 1994, following a study by the Smithsonian that found that museums and libraries in rural areas were central locations for information and community-building. They were also underfunded and understaffed.

So the world’s largest museum began designing exhibits to build audiences and capacity at the nation's smallest museums.

Crossroads is the latest exhibit. After stops in Essex, Hull, and Rutland, Crossroads reached Turners Falls last month. It moves on to Sheffield before closing out in Athol in June. To date, the tour has attracted nearly 10,000 visitors.

Each host site develops free events that engage the public in conversations about the relevance of the exhibit’s themes to their own experiences. In this way, local people use the humanities to connect the dots, add context, and translate the local to the national and global. They also respond to questions interlaced throughout the panels and photos, including:

Is rural America endangered, thriving, or just scraping by?

Do you see dwindling options or a bright future?

How do local retailers survive in an economy dominated by large businesses?

How has immigration changed rural communities?

These are not abstract questions for visitors to the exhibit, and it’s significant that public facilities are the setting.

In Essex, the exhibit was set up inside Town Hall, where you’d apply for permits or attend town meeting. Another host, the Rutland Free Public Library, sits across the street from the fire and police stations and the town hall. Every Sunday for six weeks, 75-100 people showed up in Rutland.

To listen and talk with each other.

The problems facing rural Massachusetts include crumbling infrastructure, aging populations, and food insecurity. You can read more here. Since September, we’ve heard conversations about the impact of Red Tide on clamming in Essex, the history of enslavement in Rutland, what it was like to grow up LBTQ+ in Hull, and what it’s like to grow up in Turners Falls today.

But there’s also resilience and courage on display in these towns. Over the last six months, we’ve seen people gather in public spaces to engage with the humanities. I’m hard pressed to think of another discipline or form of expression that brings out a community’s pride of place AND encourages people to confront the complicated histories and realities of life in their hometowns.

At the opening event at GFDC, people crowded into the Great Hall, a former machine shop of the Montague Paper Company, for a ribbon cutting. The exhibit takes about 30 minutes to consume if you stop to read and listen to the interactives.

About an hour into the reception, a group of young people entered the hall. They wore green shirts emblazoned with the Crossroads logo and the name of a local girls club. I asked one of the chaperones to tell me more. The club served the children of migrant farm workers, she told me, by providing tutoring, mentorship and activities like today. Over the last few weeks, they’d read about the Smithsonian, its history and the complex of museums in Washington that are free and open to the public.

“They need to know that this belongs to them, too,” she said.

Views on maple syrup, or why complication is essential

A week later, another Crossroads event attracted a packed house, this time just up the street at the Shea Theater, a town-owned venue that seats 300. The evening began with a “A Love Letter to Rural Life,” a presentation by Dr. Leo Hwang, a geographer and UMass Amherst professor who serves as the tour scholar. With more than twenty years living and studying the region, Hwang weaved together global perspectives with the familiar description of starting a fire on a cold morning in Montague.

“We often think of a crossroads as a dichotomy, a choice between two things,” said Hwang. “Good or bad. Progress or failure. Technology or tradition.

“But as I’ve thought about crossroads over these last few months, I’ve come to think about it more as a place where things come together, rather than where things separate. Therefore, being at the crossroads is being at a place where new possibilities and old traditions meet to decide, What will that relationship look like?”

For me, this brought up the story of Peskeompskut, a meeting place a few hundred yards from the theater, where a way of life thousands of years in the making fell prey to the weaponry of an ascendant empire. A crossroads desecrated by colonialism.

Hwang was followed Steve Alves, who introduced A Sweet Tradition, a documentary he directed in 1999. The film follows young people in western Mass who participate in the annual maple sugaring season. It is a time capsule with a sweet tooth. There are dorky hair cuts, hilarious sibling rivalries, senior citizens with sage wisdom, and a general slyness in the storytelling. Some of those kids are now grown, he told us, and are in the audience tonight.

I’m reminded of a conversation among local farmers at the previous Crossroads stop, in Rutland. Jon Williams of Overlook Farm explained how climate change played havoc on maple sugaring. Warmer weather means an earlier sap flow, and the erratic weather fueled by climate change makes the timing of tapping a costly gamble. As we laughed along with the film, I wondered how many of those kids-turned-adults are experiencing that disruption.

This past Sunday, the Shea was near capacity on a Sunday afternoon for the closing event of Crossroads, “Deepening the Power of Place: Exploring our Cultural Crossroads through Story, Song and Spoken Word.”

The program began with song as Nipmuc Tribe citizens Andre Strongbearheart Gaines, Jr., Daishuan Reddeer Garate and Miguel Wandering Turtle Garate took the stage. When the song concluded, Gaines greeted us in Nimpuc, then switched to English for a monologue mixed with performances of dances and songs alongside his nephews. An artist-in-residence at the Ohketeau Cultural Center in Ashfield and a founder of No Loose Braids, Gaines is a gifted visual and spoken word artist, eloquent yet matter-of-factly. He pointed to what appeared to be a papier mache head, fixed to a staff positioned at the front of the stage. This is to make us think, he said, about the way it feels to walk through this land and what took place here. It is a reminder of bounties and massacres, extermination and forced assimilation. This, he said, was the law.

We’re still here, he said. He praised the resilience of ancestors who preserved tribal language and practices, despite those ways of life being outlawed.

In November, Gaines was one of the group of tribal members who burned the first mishoon, or traditional canoe, in Boston in more than 300 years. He observed that, up until 2004, an Indigenous person was prohibited from entering Boston unless accompanied by a musketeer.

I am hesitant to quote him at length or even attempt to summarize the range of insights he presented. You should hear Andre Strongbearheart Gaines, Jr. yourself.

But toward the end of his talk, Gaines talked about public land. No disrespect to the people here from DCR, he said, but the state that takes pride in land conservation has taken that land from Indigenous people. It could share some of that preserved land instead of allowing it to be overgrown and deprived, he said. Indigenous people continue fight for access to places and practices they hold sacred, the woodlands where they harvest sumac or sassafras. Or tap maple trees.

How many of you tapped this year? Gaines asked. A few hands went up. C’mon, he said, I know there are more than that.

He, too, noted the way climate change disrupts the rhythm of maple sugaring. But the disruption is different for an Indigenous person. Their relationship with the land is part of a world view based in reciprocity, not ownership. They don’t share so easily in the joyous tapping captured in the documentary film.

You don’t know how insane it makes me to go to the store to buy maple syrup, he said with a slight smile. But I need it, too.

Let’s uplift these humanities spaces

Our investment in spaces dedicated to public life is nothing new. Yet we live in a time that calls on us to recommit to fair access to them, to create the conditions for honest reckonings to take hold.

The humanities imbue these public spaces with the spirit of the crossroads. The humanities offer those of us passing through these crossroads the chance to stop, to listen, and to decide on where and whether we move forward collectively.

We need places where people can speak their truths and learn together.

I applaud the team at the Great Falls Discovery Center and their many visitors and partners for doing that great humanities work.

Read more: “Remembering & Reconnecting: Nipmucs and the Massacre at Great Falls”

Support:

• Friends of Great Falls Discovery Center.

• Ohketeau Cultural Center.

• No Loose Braids

Special thanks: Janel Nockleby, Sheila Damkoehler, Diane Dix, Suzanne LoManto, Sarah Doyle, Marie Waechter, and Jen Atwood.