Author Archives: Allison Mills

Confronting the Legacies of Racism and Colonialism in Special Collections

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For almost a year, we in Special Collections have been working on a statement documenting the ways in which we are trying to confront the legacies of colonialism and racism in our collections. In June 2020, Black students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford composed an open letter to the Bi-College community. Their letter, which demanded that Bryn Mawr Special Collections acknowledge the colonial racism present in Bryn Mawr’s African Collections and, where possible, create a plan to repatriate objects, represents ongoing, student-led anti-racism efforts at the College—efforts that came to the fore again with the Student Strike in fall 2020. The effects of colonialism and racism in the collections are part of the historical and present-day forms of racism and inequity at Bryn Mawr College that we are committed to addressing, foregrounding, and remediating in the department and at the College as a whole. In response to student voices, the concerns of the wider college community and society, and our own professional ethics, we began working on this statement. 

Tied to College and LITS-wide efforts towards diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism, our statement, Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Racism in Special Collections, is meant to serve as a starting point for conversation. It is by no means complete or final, and we plan to continue to modify the document as we identify additional ways in which we can address racism and colonialism in Special Collections. As we’ve worked on the statement, we have shared it with some internal stakeholders—the LITS Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism Team, the BMC Collections Committee (which includes faculty and trustees), the President’s Diversity Leadership Group, BMC Alumnae/i Relations and Development, and members of the Bryn Mawr administration. We hope to create a space that allows for on-going discussion, including hosting community-wide conversations about the document in the coming year. 

In the meantime, Special Collections staff are engaged in work aimed at addressing the on-going effects of racism and colonialism in our collections, and at increasing the transparency around them. This is a multi-part, long-term project. In addition to addressing our current collection and how we are presenting the material we currently have to the community, we also need to think about future collections. This means identifying and redressing harmful language in descriptions and metadata, actively and ethically acquiring material from a diverse range of voices, and recognizing that we have a professional and ethical obligation to do this work. Special Collections, comprised at Bryn Mawr of Rare Books & Manuscripts, Art & Artifacts, and the College Archives, is primarily intended to be a teaching collection. As educators and caretakers of these collections, we have a responsibility to continue to learn and grow, and we welcome interrogation, critique, and insight into how we can improve our practice. 

Read the statement: Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Racism in Special Collections 

Current, concrete efforts towards this work include: 

New Summer School for Women Worker’s Digital Exhibition Launches

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by Beck Morawski ’21

Photograph of curator Beck Moraski '21 sitting at a table in Special Collections reading room.

Exhibit curator Beck Morawski ’21 sits at table in Special Collections reading room.

When I was brought on as a student curator to design an exhibit for the centennial of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry last April, I could not have imagined the journey this project would take me on. In putting together a digital exhibit that centers the lived experiences of often-overlooked students, I was able to engage with the history of Bryn Mawr College in ways I never expected.

The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, often abbreviated as the BMSSWWI, was a program that ran on Bryn Mawr’s campus during the summer from 1921 through 1938. It was intended to use the empty campus buildings during the summer months to educate industrial workers—such as factory workers or manual laborers—who sought to continue their education, since often their life circumstances had prevented them from finishing it. The unique program allowed for a two month retreat to the secluded campus to study not only Economic Theory, but also topics meant to enrich life outside of the workplace including Literature, Astronomy, and Music Theory.

Photograph of students looking on, situated right near the ivy outside of the cloisters, as an instructor reads from an economics textbook.

Image courtesy Bryn Mawr Special Collections. An Economics Class in the Cloisters. BMC-Photo Archives, Series I, PAE: Events and Groups, SSWWI. SSWWI_00195. https://digitalcollections.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/object/bmc60985.

While classroom lessons and lectures were instrumental to the students in attendance, some of the most formative experiences they recounted in the Summer School literary magazine Shop and School were of exploring the campus and experiencing life away from the smog and cramped confines of cities and mills. It was exciting to get to read these students’ stories and experiences attending college for the first time, and then to find a way to share them with the Bryn Mawr community today. By putting our current campus culture and experiences in conversation with our history, we can gain new understandings of how unique Bryn Mawr can be.

Developing a digital exhibit of photographs and documents was an interesting challenge to take on while working remotely. Working in Special Collections during my time at Bryn Mawr, I learned the importance and value of physical records to the day-to-day ongoings of campus and how they enliven history to those that study it. However, what does that look like when one can’t work hands-on with the many photographs, letters, and books that we have saved from the Summer School? Luckily, the influence of the School was wide-reaching and impactful. Even without going into Canaday Library I could find material that explored the history of the School from unexpected angles. I was also able to participate in conversations around the digitization of parts of our collections, hoping to make our holdings more accessible to those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access the materials we hold.

My exhibit—For Roses, Too—provides an overview of the Summer School program and its history, while asking readers what lessons they can take from its history to apply to Bryn Mawr College today. The BMSSWWI exemplifies both what progress Bryn Mawr has historically sought to accomplish and what that vision can achieve when embraced by the community. It is my hope that this exhibit can start new and exciting conversations about our institutional identity and its place in history at large.

Photograph of a group of women on the lawn in front of a campus building. One woman is looking through a telescope.

Image courtesy Bryn Mawr Special Collections. Students from the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. BMC-Photo Archives, Series I, PAE: Events and Groups, SSWWI, SSWWI_00016. https://digitalcollections.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/object/bmc60806.

 

Indigenous Representation in Children’s Literature

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I grew up knowing I wanted to write for kids because children’s literature is what made me fall in love with reading. I wanted to try to provide that experience for other people, but in particular I wanted to write the kind of books I wished I’d had as a kid—books about Indigenous characters who got to experience magic and adventure too.

That was one of my main goals in writing The Ghost Collector, which centers around a Cree girl, Shelly and her grandmother, who help lost souls transition to the next world by catching them in their hair. The version of the supernatural presented in The Ghost Collector is rooted to Cree culture. Shelly’s experience of the world around her is tied to and influenced by her Indigeneity. It is an attempt to address what was lacking in the novels I read as a kid.

Children’s literature is fraught territory for Indigenous people. Although many classic works in the genre include Indigenous characters, the ways in which we’re represented are often harmful and problematic. They frame Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race, or happy to assimilate to European ways as a means to justify settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that seeks to replace the original population of a colonized territory with a settler society. The United States is a settler colonial nation.

You see this harmful depiction of Indigenous characters in Little House on the Prairie, where Native Americans are portrayed as violent and stereotypically “savage” in comparison to the “civilized” settlers; in Peter Pan stories, which positions Native Americans alongside fairies and mermaids; and in the Leatherstocking Tales, in which the white protagonist surpasses his Native guides in mastery of their own culture. These stories frame Indigenous characters as little more than props or set dressing for white protagonists. These works present us as violent and less than human, as mythical creatures, and as inherently inferior to European settlers.

This 1953 Garth Williams illustration for the Little House series depicts two stereotypical, shirtless Native American men stealing food and furs from the Ingalls’ cabin.

Even in the 90s, when I was a kid, there weren’t a lot of children’s books out there with good Indigenous representation and even fewer by Indigenous authors. My mother, who is a teacher-librarian in addition to being Cree, did her best, but the pickings were slim. This was especially true when it came to fantasy and sci-fi—my genres of choice. Science fiction in particular is notable for an emphasis on colonization narratives. For example, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is essentially just The Last of the Mohicans in space. When books did include Indigenous representation, it was mostly misrepresentation. Sometimes we didn’t exist as people at all, but as non-human characters (like the Na’vi in Avatar).

Either way, it was obvious the authors didn’t consider an Indigenous audience when writing their books. The effects of this go beyond the pages of books to the real world. These portrayals normalize our absence and create a fictional tale of peaceful, inevitable settlement in North America that means settlers never need to confront their complicity in the violent colonial history of the Americas. More often than not, when we pick up a book, we encounter a world we are not present in.

I have hope that this is beginning to change. In publishing—particularly in YA publishing—we’ve seen a push for greater diversity and more #OwnVoices books. People are becoming more aware of the need for better representation in children’s books. Novels like Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe, and Eden Robinson’s Trickster Drift all present worlds in which Indigenous characters take center stage. Readers have access to criticism and scholarship by Indigenous academics and writers through social media and sites like American Indians in Children’s Literature.

We’re on the precipice of a potential sea change, but it requires a sustained investment in treating diversity as more than a trend from publishers and readers alike. Indigenous readers are here—we have always been here—and we’re invested in making children’s literature more representative. I hope, for the sake of future Indigenous kids, that non-Indigenous readers are turning up for more diverse voices too.

Allison Mills, College Archivist. Author of The Ghost Collector.

https://allisonmillswrites.com