The Weight of Water is the title of a site-specific work by Christine Sciulli, currently on view as part of our exhibition, Space – Sight – Line. Sciulli used the discussion of the work to present a public dialogue that explores the work’s themes and inspiration, dealing notably with race, the history of slavery on the East End, and its pernicious wake. The Conversation included presentations by Meghan McGinley, Director of Education at Sag Harbor Cinema, in addition to local educators, Carrie Clark and Cara Nelson, and New York State Senator James Sanders Jr. Senator Sanders made a special appearance via Zoom to share his work on reparations.
The Audience had a first-hand look at how education connects to policy, how children process revised and relevant history, and how families and the community at large may learn to generate an informed and engaged electorate who can together move the needle of social justice.
my name is Sarah Cochran and I am chief curator here at the church um I would like to acknowledge Christine Shi uh who is the impetus for today’s program I am deep grateful to Christine for the work she did um on the piece under which we sit the weight of water which is the inspiration for uh the program today um I am here to do some brief int introductions and also to explain the Run of show for today um I also have a very very important job which is to please silence your phones um but before I silence my phone I would like to my glasses um the church would like to acknowledge that as situated on what traditionally is shinok man man sorry Monet and Manet unseated land we acknowledge and honor all the indigenous communities and their fundamental relationship to the region in the past the present and the future um this is going to be particularly important given the subject today um so essentially the way today is is going to run is that we will have a presentation and a conversation by the lovely individuals who are over on the other side of the stage Senator Sanders will be joining us um and you have all received hopefully cards and a pen what we’re going to ask you to do is if you have questions please write them down um and you can sort of raise them in the air and we will come and collect them we will be collating questions um in the back uh so we hope to get to a shape of your question if not your question uh exactly but please understand that our time is limited um and with that I would like to give just um a short introduction to the very uh honored and lovely speakers who have joined us today we are deeply grateful to each of you for bringing your expertise and also your knowledge to us this morning um I will start with uh Megan McGinley who is the director of education at the Sag Harbor Cinema she is the former manager of forgetting to remember which of course is the excellent program that was run by Sag Harbor Cinema and also the plain sight project um this project was funded by a grant from the US Department of Education and nean is currently a doctoral C candidate at vanderbelt University so we’re deeply grateful to have her here and thank you for the time stolen from your doctor studies um Carrie Clark is the Ross school dean of cultural history she teaches a grade 11 cultural history um she holds a ba in history from UCLA and an MA in Sunny Sony Brook and she has been involved in um adapting some of the the curriculum in order to uh work with the 11th grade this is obviously essential work and we are delighted to have you with us too Cara Nelson is the social studies teacher at the East Hampton Middle School she has been there for 11 years which is incredibly important work um she is also a force of nature literally she is the Guinness World Record holder for the fastest female time at the world’s highest Trail Marathon which is on Mount kjaro and she has also completed but wait there’s more she has also completed the World Marathon challenge which is running seven marathons in seven days across seven continents that deserves follow you will hear a lot more about J SAS Jr who is a New York state senator um but we should just note here that he is a sixth term uh Senator devoted public servant Community Advocate uh Marine uh veteran and family man he has a a being a in African studies from Brooklyn’s college and he served previously to uh being a senator 10 years on the Queen’s uh school board so again somebody whose expertise is going to be essential to this um conversation and then last but not least Christine Shuli um who is a visual artist based in New York City and amaganset uh she is known for her immersive light installations which have been shown in the United States and also in Europe she is also a community activist and in 2020 I have the enormous pleasure of working with her on her overarching produ sorry project present tense black lives matter um uh we did that with obviously pristine managing it but uh Guild Hall the church and also Duck Creek all work together on that she holds a VA in architectural engineering from pen an MFA in Hunter College he teaches at parans and she is currently doing graduate work in social work at NYU please help me to welcome her P oh that works uh thank you guys for coming I mean this this moment to me is like a strange dream come true um I’ve always wanted to combine my art practice with social activism and I have never really found the exact right platform to do that um I wanted to open with um this quote so I I’m going to talk about the work I’m going to talk about the connection to education and then policy but policy and the effort to create reparations movement and program is kind of part and parcel of what led me in the development of this particular work the consequences of slavery in New York state is not an echo of the past but can be observed in daily life so the title of the bill that Senator Sanders is going to be speaking later um the title of this bill kind of sums up everything about to me like the inspiration for this piece the title is very long um but it’s the title of the the bill which created the New York State reparations commission and it was created it was voted on finally after being introduced in 2017 for the first time in the in December 23 it’s an act to acknowledge the fundamental Injustice cruelty brutality and Humanity of slavery in the city of New York and the state of New York to establish the New York State Community Commission on reparations remedies to examine the institution of slavery subsequently deur and de facto racial and economic discrimination against the people of African descent and the impact of those forces on living people of African descent and and to make determinations regarding compensation and providing for the repeal of such Provisions upon expiration thereof so that was actually approved the commission has been formed the work starts in June in the 18 months to do their study and to make recommendations to New York State I have the so I’m really excited to see you guys today and um I thank you for coming um so I was trying to um build this project around momentum that had started in 2020 with Co with social justice movements around black lives matter and you know a lot of people were worried like what’s going to happen in four years where are you all going to be like you’re here with me now but will you be with me later and I kind of committed to being there later I didn’t have the opportunity to put together a show I was busy doing shows that were light installations but when SAR approached me I think two years ago I thought well this is my platform this is my time to share my platform to try to move over a bit so I created this project knowing that the title would be fundamental to the reception of the work and to the conversations that started and I worked with Megan like I guess starting about 6 months ago trying to put together this program and see how we could tie education because history is really important to understanding where to go and so um and then we wanted to have someone speak from the reparation side of things so then Senator sard got involved about a month ago I CER I keep I put together this chart um which is a combination of different things from like Congress from people who’ve aggregated who’s been in power when and the number of times that hr40 which is the United States reparation commission bill which has not even reached the floor for a vote this is a similar Bill to what New York state is trying to do and it’s just to study the problem it’s just to study what happened in slavery and how it’s played out through lives today it impacts policy it impacts people’s ability to get hous to get adequate healthare education social Mobility that a lot of people just take for granted they take for granted that they have a house and they can pass it under their kids or use it for collateral for a college loan so this bill has been introduced every year since 1995 with the exception of of one um session in Congress and you can see that laser here use it but you can see that as the black lives matter movement starts to to gain momentum in 2013 and when Obama gets elected we see a surge of co-sponsors this graph is co-sponsors in Congress who are supporting Conor and then supporting Sheila Jackson it Peaks when Biden has office in 2021 it Peaks when we all stood there and said we want this to happen we want a better world we want social justice it peaked after the murder of George Floyd we were all in the streets in 21 Biden was in inaugurated and we had control of the Congress and it still couldn’t get passed and I don’t know if you guys watched the hearings on the reparation commission but it was really in one way up uplifting to hear people tell their stories of how the system has been built against them and then equally decimating to realized that it couldn’t even move to a vote on the floor and this is when we had complete control so then Biden loses you know we lose the house and then like political will starts to decline so the number of co-sponsors in the house like granted there are less Democrats to support the bill but this isn’t a Democrat issue right it should be a human issue so public support meaning pressure on your legislators to be behind this bill starts to decline so I I wouldn’t say that this work is a work of activism but I have artivism I have defined a problem which is part of it and I’ve made a piece that is set to bring a conversation to the floor and I’ve engaged people to go out into the community um so this has been really important to me it’s not perfect but it’s my start and um thankfully SAR and I are planning on trying to take this and Megan I hope to broader audiences in different places in the country so now I’m going to talk about where I’ve been a bit so in 2020 I started a project I was working with a group organized by T hus that was called artist for Nancy and I wanted to get people actually out to vote and put together a coalition of 63 artists and we all a lot of you were here thank you we um we made videos and project them in places from Brooklyn to eastampton and it was really it was a nonpartisan message come out vote Voice yourselves democracy matters right like there’s no point in being this country if you’re not going to get out and vote but a lot of marginalized places do not vote I through school I ended up doing a policy brief for team pregnancy prevention in the South Bronx and the district that has the highest rate of teen pregnancy no matter what interventions have been enacted has the absolute lowest voter turnout in basically the whole country and they’ve given up so I worked with um an organization that’s really great called Center for artistic activism which is where I learned a lot about how to engage in with the public and my partner nor bre and I got a grant of $10,000 to do an action across the state of Pennsylvania and the best thing about the project was that we were able to pay a lot of community organizations so we had this Sixers drum line who is started by this guy antie map and his grandmother who just wanted to keep him safe so he gets kids from the neighborhoods they learn how to play drums they get out and drum for the Sixers he gives them you know tutoring opportunities they get food on Saturdays when they’re out all day getting you know carted around from show to show um and then we work with path vots another amazing organization run by Angelie Hinton and we had superheroes information superheroes and those kids were incredible they knew more about Jerry Mander than anybody I know and it was a quote off-ear election which we know there’s no such thing as an offe election so these kids were answering questions on the street in people’s park in Philadelphia and we had a commensurate action in Pittsburgh we made a flags with um Jerry Mander districts and what was at stake in this off your election in Philadelphia was the judge election so if you have bad judges they support bad districting so there was actually a lot at stake because one judge in particular needed to get voted out I ha I don’t think we helped so but I like to think we did um another sort of super fun action that I did was with Center for AR artistic activism during Co so during covid-19 it was it was called season 3 of free the vaccine and um you sat in seminars every week and you had small group projects to work on so it was a cohort of 50 people mostly students from all over the world and we worked on vaccine Equity um one of my colleagues and I did a a punch car at he’s in Pittsburgh so we did a punch card where people should just you know go around and have conversations about the VAC and if you did have conversations you could go and get a free coffee haror Market actually participated with us but a lot of the problems about vaccinations as we can probably remember back was there was a lot of skepticism and a lot of that was rooted in racist policies and testing on people um I also developed a giant a tool kit because they said we we’re doing these actions I own to an action that was a people shareholder meeting at fizer and we were asking for the patent to be released and so we had a giant syringe so they wanted a toolkit plan so that you could send it all over the country and people could make their own toolkit out of household parts or things you could just get at the the hardware store so that’s what the plan is over there and that’s me and the Care Bear outfit at Wasing and as we were protesting for vaccine equity for sh sharing is caring was a tagline from Center for artistic activism the news came through that the United States was backing a patent wer and then another thing that I’m I’m proud of and it’s a funny thing to say but I actually am was the night that R Ginsburg passed away I got people just send me images and I took a projector and found a plug at hook Mill in East Hampton and made a memorial visual for her so a lot of people just stopped by and talked about well God what do we do now I mean half of it was mning her death but the bigger part was mourning what what happens now we know that didn’t go well so now I’m going to back up and talk about this this project the weight of water so I had thought that I was doing some kind of activist work in the abstract like installations that I was doing but I think it was way too obscure so part of it was taking these simple GM geometric shapes and projecting them onto elaborate networks of fabric or string and people would be positioned and sometimes they would just see squiggles like a lot of people think these are just squiggles but I don’t really do that kind of abstraction work the squiggles were because you were out of sync with the projector so if you stood in line with the projector everything flattened out and if you move to the side of the projector you would see something abstracted and nobody could possibly have the same point of view um this is an installation in I like to work really big it’s something I’ve always enjoyed I don’t know and I like to work with an architectural Rhythm so you’ll see these this work is organized around the windows and strategically not hitting the lights and um reaching from one side of the space to the other and in this project I takeen this really beautiful architectural bistr and the rhythm of beams and this column and created a language where the strings that supported the the projection piece ran from the balcony railing bounced off of the column and then translated to an um an appointed beam in the ceiling so it was very architecturally reg regulated and regimented but the piece itself is sort of ethereal um this is a projection Network that I made at Southampton Arts Center where I was projecting lines of light planes of light onto string so the language of working with string and and rope is something that I have explored this is the mapping of the planes of light onto the string it results in points of light and it’s video this isn’t a video but it is video projection so the planes of light move around so it looks like swarms of Lights dots of light so in the Rope work that I’ve done this is at Southampton Art Center ironically like three of these FES in a row are Southampton art center but I wanted to do something during Co where people could feel connected but not be physically engaged with each other so I had this idea of making a line drawing that people could change so you’d walk into the space and some will have taken a string from a cleat on the wall and hoisted it and then put it back together and then it would be different and you would manipulate it and I think that was on the heels of this project I have the slides in reverse order but this is a project that I love doing with Bastian who’s here and we created a project called handoff leing space Also in Co and 10 of our friends who were artists got together and did an Exquisite corpse kind of installation so I used my rope drawing and basan had a grd on the wall and artists would schedule themselves to come in for chunks of work time and work by themselves in the space and then leave you know Tidings for the next person to work from so the making of this work now to go back to this work in GRS in this space in this current time started with my drawing waves so waves almost like sign waves and you know my background is in light so looking at like the spectrum of light or looking at sound waves or looking at waves in water was a language that I knew I wanted to this project I worked in my studio to say well how do you get a curve that stays up in space so I tried using reinforc a rebar curved rebar and stuffing it into the Rope um I tried using pencils and Dells but the thing that seemed to work best was to suspend the rope with more rope which was um waxed cell cloth mending l so I had to figure out how I was going to actually support it so I did some drawings trying to figure figure all that out um before I committed to what the waves would be and then looking at how they stacked up on each other from mezan which I hope you guys can go up there it’s and the rest of the work is really good um so then I I took that stack drawing and I looked at it in space on the computer with Vector works and then developed a projection and the projection went onto a life-sized piece of paper in this corner over here this is a 30 second time lapse of the entire installation so we hoisted up each wave with um conduit and then each wave had to be transferred over onto the grid but it was fun because I was actually instead of drawing with the twine I was drawing with rope but each at each juncture I had to sew through the the Rope um so that it would have a suspension point to move the open r and then after that work was done I went up onto the mezanine and and did the other other pieces and there was a lot of finishing work to do so to make a tiny little Loop in each each line each lead and then there’s a curve needle that my friend Liz gave me to work on with the Rope the rope’s 2 inches thick and there’s Richie one of the riggers and Joe diamond from you guys might know from Southampton Art Center was like the master riger to make sure that everything was intention and did not fall apart still here thankfully so just give Ahad give me a so so back to the weight of water which refers to our responsibility we did not create the system of slavery we did not create people coming here and taking land that didn’t belong to us or them but we do benefit from it and every policy has been written mostly in you know in the last century and most of this Century by people who were not affected in an oppressed way so I want to go back to the project that actually Sara mentioned and I was happy to produce this project for my friend Jeff clovin he wrote a book oops hi senator um so my friend Jeff cin wrote a book africaville which follows it’s multi-generational story following a family from their life in africaville Nova Scotia and Halifax was a place which was destroyed through urban renewal which has happened in so many places here the place I studied in the South Bronx AC Cross Bronx Expressway displaced 40,000 people from their homes and their homes were of no value they’ve been redlined which I I have an uh an oped about Redlin in the reading room if you want to read it okay anyway there was a three-part effort and it was during Co and Jeff said I I want to do a reading in my book and I said why don’t you come out to S haror and do a reading like I know some people like we could get you a reading so then it turned into what about a staged reading but it was Co but Guild game and they let us work in the outdoor theater and then uh he said I have a friend who wants to make sound pieces about some of the text in the book and some of the themes of police brutality and social protest movements I was like well let’s ask Duck Creek if they can put it there so um and and then the great other great part that the church was part of and the church found funding for the project that got a base Grant from s Harbor partnership to fund the I think we had $5,000 and we got some extra money so everybody got paid um and we could fund fund the work and there was a panel discussion of activists like where do we go from here and his title present tense black lives mattered matter mattered is a call to history it’s a call for us to really understand where we’ve been in order to go forward this has sound attached to it uhoh Qui quick not I did get stuck on the lift without my cell phone and it wouldn’t go down which I thought was absolutely impossible that it happened my place of the year I’m feeling that again and sound so Jeff installed this work I don’t hear the sound yet he installed this work at Duck Creek in said well this is oh the mic is getting really loud I can play it for my computer um at Duck Creek in different places um I think there were seven different pieces and this one is about social protest movements the social protest movements reflected in history in his in his novel so this this piece that Jeff created is true artivism to me he’s taking literature he’s combining it with other forms and he’s bringing it out into the public real to people I’m going to play the sound from my computer [Music] hold on a second you think we’re going to get the sound no can you hear ch’s [Music] [Music] voice oh anyway okay well there’s Trump saying that basically people out there destroying the memory of George Floyd are just anarchists murderers and looters um and then there’s actual sound from people who are being brutalized by the police taking from handheld video cameras it’s a really powerful piece how to get this audio out um it’s actually I’ll share the link for the video because me video of it so as James B not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it’s faced and I find that people just don’t know right we don’t know and it’s important for us to educate ourselves and then to put pressure on our schools on our elected officials on our government to be able to make change and I’m very fortunate that Megan has wanted to be part of this project and going to take it over from here and talk about how they have actually tried to move the needle into getting real education and real information out to the schools in particular law school and East Hampton Middle [Applause] [Music] School I am so grateful to be here today thank you so much for and thank you to the church for organizing this um it’s my deep honor to share the work of the forgetting to remember project with you all um Christine um to share the work of the forgetting to remember project with you all um as it’s been mentioned my name is Megan McKinley and I’m the director of education at s Harbor Cinema the former forgetting to remember project manager and I remain a volunteer for the pl sight project I came to this work as a concerned citizen who is deeply invested in social justice I am not a historian and I am not a scholar of the Atlantic world my background is in French studies and I specialize in French film I am also a teacher and taught French language and film leading this project has brought together the personal and the professional for me my mother is a black woman woman and as a white passing person of mixed race Heritage is important for me to better understand my positionality and the ways in which it different it different from hers from both sides of my family and from the larger communities that I belong to the idea of for forgetting to remember recalled a quote to me coming from French studies from Mel K uh his fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time in which he writes the real Voyage of Discovery consists not in seeking new Landscapes but in having new eyes this project and the work of the plain sight project has allowed me and many others to look at our familiar environment with new eyes to discover hidden histories of enslaved indentured and free people of color that were foundational members to our community um again I’d like to thank the host to thank the church for hosting us Christine for envisioning this talk Carrie Clark and Karen Nelson for joining us today and the forgetting to remember project team Donna Marie Barnes David ratray jenevie vlor Anna deso Ellen young Bill collage Dr Jennifer Morgan Sam Hamilton Julian Alvarez Jackie Dinan and Daria Ren today with Carrie and Cara we’re going to talk about the implementation of the for getting to remember curriculum in their classrooms Carrie in grade 11 at the Ross School and Cara in seventh grade at East Hampton Middle School today our discussion will touch upon Notions of accessibility adaptation and the reception of this educational material there we go the forgetting to remember project was a 16-month collaboration between the pl sight project and sad cber Cinema funded by the United States Department of Education from 2022 to 2023 its aim was to expand upon the critical work of the pl sight project whose mission is to unearth the identities and the stories of enslaved indentured and free people of color on the East End of Long Island from the 1600s to the mid 19th century during the the project period the forgetting to remember team uh had several objectives um we did 360 hours of archival research held public exhibitions and events at s Harbor Cinema in the Eastville Community Historical Society uh with Dr Georgette Kee produced a short form documentary forgotten Founders David Hemstead Senor which perhaps many of you have seen it won the audience award at the Hampton’s International Film Festival for best short film last year uh we commissioned an original portrait of David Hemstead senior from renowned local artist Michael Butler which you can be seeing on the right hand side of the screen and we developed an inquiry driven place-based curriculum for a seventh grade level what’s going to be particularly interesting today is we’re going to see how it was implemented on a seventh grade level but also on an 11th grade level which speaks to the adaptability of this curriculum across grade levels okay the three main goals of the forgetting ter member curriculum to understand that American slavery happened in the north right here on Eastern Long Island to know the names and the stories of some of those who are enslaved indentured and free people of color in our community and to for students to share their learning with others so as there there is an acknowledgement of this history so here’s a brief breakdown of the curriculum which you also have on your postcards as well um so this inquiry-driven social studies project serves as an extension and a supplement to the existing New York state 7eventh grade social studies practices content and literary standards at the center of this project projects learning are New York States and Long Island’s forgotten founders the project is struct structured through two connected case studies and one culminating unit for an authentic audience and what is an authentic audience it means that the product that students are creating at the end of these case studies reaches beyond the peers in their classroom and Beyond getting a grade from their student this project is geared towards a larger audience ideally the community so they’re sharing their work beyond the classroom and it has a much bigger impact on their learning and for the community at large um The Learning expands around on-site or virtual fieldwork visits to Sag Harbor Cinema and Sag Harbor neighborhoods where students are immersed in research about the history of Long Island’s forgotten Founders and the impacts of slavery on the enslaved indentured and free people of color in the American Northeast so guiding questions and Big Ideas in case study one for students to understand the practice of American slavery during the colonial period was widespread across the colonies that enslaved people resisted their conditions and sought freedom and two guiding questions throughout the curriculum why has the story of American slavery been largely misunderstood to have only happened in the South and why are some of our forgot our Founders forgotten in case study 2 students move into understanding more about the process of abolishing slavery in New York state and that it was a gradual process even though slavery was abolished in 1827 well before the Emancipation Proclamation changes were slow to take rote the insl indentured and free people of color on Long Island organized and resisted to under overcome the challenges of gradual emancipation and the large question that they grapple with in case study 2 who was freedom four in the United States and finally in our culminating unit case study 3 students ask themselves what is my role in in accurate retelling of a forgotten founder and they work to synthesize information across the case studies to share with an authentic audience what we envisioned uh in this curriculum is having students make a mini documentary based on forgotten founders David Hemstead senior and all of the work that they’ve been doing with primary and secondary sources so they work to retell a factual place-based historical account about the enslaved indentured and free people of color in their communities last year was a pilot program we’re still working with schools and we hope to see some of these mini documentaries in the coming year from Ross from eastampton middle Southampton intermediate and other schools on the East end so transitioning to um Carrie and Cara um my first question is how did you learn about this curriculum or the work of the plain sight project and how have you Incorporated it into your teaching thanks Meg it’s nice to see you all here thanks to the church too um the way that iuse curriculum BR school is uh an independent school so we don’t follow the New York State Standards I teach 11th grade history so I worked this into my first unit it’s a global history curriculum and this time I’m teaching about nationalism imperialism and resistance uh we start with the development of nationalism in Europe its uh Origins and its Evolution over the 20 over the 19 century when it um developed strategies for creating a national identity with symbols imposed languages and other cultural products and what I look at is the southern uh the southern secession the Confederate States of America as a nationalist movement moving away from the American well from moving away from the union oops okay um We Begin by looking at examples of texts that describe America’s national identity as it was being defined in the 19th century oh I’m sorry that’s the that’s the wrong that’s the wrong thing I begin by showing them um whitewashed history I found I have seen a lot of textbooks that misrepresent the history of the United States and you can see that the slide on the right describes the Africans who survived in mid passage as immigrants who came to America as workers to do chores which is quite a misrepresentation of what was actually going on and so so in showing them not just this example but several others uh we talk about what’s missing and what that implies and how you learn about what is missing from the story and that’s how the plain side project and the forgetting to remember project uh came in very handy so in 2019 I actually had a former student come uh to the Middle School to speak to me he was now at the high school he was in nth grade now he is uh at University at the moment right now and he had injured himself and was no longer able to participate in track after school so that had led him to get involved with the eastampton star and to work as a student intern with David ratray and he began working on the plain sight project and once he began this research to uncover the names of these enslaved individuals who had been lost to our history here in East Hampton whose stories had never been told he thought that it would be perfect to bring this to me and so we scheduled a meeting I sat down with my former student Jonathan with David ratri and as a history teacher as a student of History myself I was shocked at what I myself did not know and to sit there and to see them present all of these primary sources that are right here under our noses to have learned about a a grave of an enslaved individual right in East Hampton to have found out that so many of the buildings that I drove by and walked by every single day were built on the backs of enslaved labor it was a really powerful thing to also be given that information from a former former student myself so we sat down and we decided that we were going to work together to bring this information to light to the students so I sat down with Jonathan and with David and we had many meetings and we created resources um and they had given me primary sources to then Implement in the in the classroom so that’s what began my work here so with the pl side project and then last year that expanded to the forgetting to remember project and that’s when I was introduced to Megan and we had our students last year now build on what they had already been doing in the classroom and now they got to watch a documentary about another forgotten founder David Hemstead senior so for me what was really important about bringing this to life for your students is as an educator you want them to be informed right for me I’m never going to tell students what they have to believe what perspective they must have where they need to stand politically but in order for them to become uh future participants of this country they have to be informed and they have to be given that information and they have to be given the tools to to be able to to analyze that information and so once I I realized I wasn’t taught this it’s so easy for us to say well I wasn’t taught this I didn’t know but you have to break that cycle of ignorance I didn’t want to perpetuate that and of course I had always known about slavery here in the north but you never understood the prevalence of it and that’s what was so shocking to me in all of the research that they have been able to do to see how it was hidden in PL sight all his time um thank you cara um and Carrie you’re also developing a new course next year as I understand it with these materials year after yes um when I had always taught the southern uh secession as a as a as a nationalist movement uh what was great about the plainsite project and especially the forgetting to remember curriculum that I in Megan’s Outreach she reached a colleague who then shared with me so I reached out to Meg it and that’s how I became associated with it and that um that curriculum is so good and it had so many resources that I could use locally to teach about enslavement as it happened not just in the South but also in the north and this matters when we look at the way that American national identity was created over the 19th century and so the curriculum is very rich it’s incredibly detailed and there are so many excellent resources there but teaching global history in my core class it’s very difficult for me to get through all of it and so what I’d like to do and I’m really excited about trying to do is actually get my students to create the films that are suggested in the third uh in the third case study and even the links to the plain sight project people the people who have been um who have been given names and places and lives by that project so I I look forward to doing that so I want to develop a curriculum in for I want to develop a course next year uh perhaps during our field Academy term which is a two we intensive um and and ultimately move through all the curriculum because it’s very detailed on every level and well scaffolded and Megan and her colleagues to agre thank you both I’m really excited to see um the work that you do and to see some of these many documentaries that students create based on the research that they do and what they learn in case study1 and case study2 of the curriculum um moving on um how have your students responded to the curriculum have you noticed any differences in their engagement or understanding based on their grade level or their background um and this is an activity that Carrie has designed um that she’ll talk to you uh I on here you’ll see actually this a handout I got from the forgetting to remember curriculum but reminding the students about the language that we use for example in the world geography textbook that I showed you uh I asked the students to think about how language is used and so this handout asks students to look at uh the words in the leftand column to Define them and then to think of a potential alternative that is more accurate it comes from the Frederick Douglas Historic Site website so there’s a lot of explanatory material there for the students after but first I ask them to do it themselves which I’m now going to ask you to do you don’t need to give me the definition I think we know those but thinking about what a different words that could be used for say master yeser enslaver yes that is the that is the term that is chosen that is suggested by the uh by the site the fredi of the site uh fugitive runaway escap B what’s another word very good well they’re running away so captive and hostage are two of the terms that people came up with for slave um but these are people who are who are not who are Away From Slavery for the moment anyway or maybe longer yes freedom very good that’s right Freedom Seeker is another um one that is recommended by the site and how about discipline and punish torture torture abuse yes so we go through this exercise they spend more time on it doing the definitions and I wonder if you want to say something about your kids reaction and then I have a sample that I can share from my own students I think just very quickly with this it’s it’s very important for us to understand language and how it’s evolved and the language that was used back then to justify the power structure that was in place and how we need to actively change that now going forward and things like this are important for students to be able to understand the power of words and how your words matter and we need to speak about individuals with the decency and the respect and the humanization that they need and that they deserve um on this next slide we have an example from one of K’s students in response to this activity it was actually a pair of students and and and one of them is international about 40% of my students are international students and they’re aware of some of the broad brush Strokes uh I chose this example to share because the students had some very impassionate responses to this like you can see some of the some of the examples of tra African person attempted to get Freedom From Hell or you know Unholy and Evil practice some of it was very load uh some of them actually were very good at choosing the ones you know coming up with the ones that were uh recommended by the the site that I referenced but um they put a lot of time and energy into it and I think that it was um very enduring later on when I well actually I’ll talk more about the endur the enduring things they learned um as we moved through the curriculum after we look at another example okay perfect thank you so much um moving on my next question um how what resources or materials have you found most effective we’ve included Lots within the forgetting to remember curriculum itself but of course there are more resources that Cara has worked with previously and that Carrie has incorporated for her grade 11 students so what books films or primary resources have been part particularly impactful for your students they love the film when we saw the film uh this is an image of some of the primary documents that I had them looking at and by far the primary documents were so helpful not only were they really well contextualized but there was an abundance of them and they’re all from the East End of Long Island there are also wonderful links that were provided that are Ed in the curriculum including uh to a collection at learning for justice and that is a really it’s called teaching hard history and there are 10 quite short videos from academics discussing various features of enslavement and what it actually you know in like three minute shortclips I don’t know if any of you have seen them but they’re really really good and so I showed the students a couple of those that was super helpful I had worked with those uh that collection before but in this um example these are three of a set of eight documents that I put together for the students with a little bit of context at the top which I pulled from the site that came from from FTR and I gave them a worksheet to work with and this was super super helpful and they were absolutely fascinated by it just fascinated now some of the texts are difficult to read because they’re handwritten and they’re old so the materials that were provid it also included a transcription and I included those in the handouts that I gave them and they had to work in pairs or trios on each of several each of the eight documents and then they shared out what they found and there’s such a variety of them the first one is a will in which this um I have notes Here the first one is a will in which there was a dispute um amongst the the um the children of the of a woman named Sarah compin and in the text they reference things like the Wench called hope which you know sounds really harsh to students today but also just listening to or reading about how people were um part of this you know collection of of items to be uh bequeathed um in the middle that’s a stored Ledger from the Havens General Store on Shelter Island where if you look at the top you prob can’t see it but there’s top and bottom sections of that column the top column all of the people are named um negro like negro Kato or negro phis or whatever their name was but it begins with negro and then on the bottom it doesn’t say that so the students were you know appalled and fascinated you know by that and then the last one that you up there is from a journal of a man named M Haven another Havens and he kept a journal and he just sort of lists in this particular passage uh the number of enslaved people and who uh who they worked for uh and it’s very nonchalantly itemized and there’s quite a long list and it really illustrates just the prevalence of the practice on Shelter Island so those are just three of the many examples that can be found among the curricul materials like I said I used a thank you Carrie and I’m wondering Cara in seventh grade um transcriptions are incredibly helpful um in approaching this material because a lot of the handwriting is incredibly difficult to read primary source documents fade over time there’s materiality attached to these that isn’t always captured well in scans so I’m wondering how your students responded to using primary doents as well so just to back up for a second before I directly answer that question um as a teacher one of the things that I constantly tell my students is we learn about the past to help us better inform our present to understand what is happening right now and then we use that to uh create a more just and Equitable future it was what you had been echoing since the beginning of this presentation and as a history teacher sometimes teaching about the past students can feel very disjointed from it it happened so long ago not here not my community none of this really relates to them and it’s finding that through life for that and with these primary sources and this curriculum that has been introduced it has been able to provide these students with a through line to from the past to the present and to this question of what do I do now that I know and so in working with these primary sources and having them actually come from our community from the area that they live in that they are going to school in so this one document right here very difficult to see the students struggle with it as well on the Chrome books we blow it up it’s a 200% zoom and then even from there they’re struggling but it is an inventory of David Gardner and an inventory of everything that he owned in 1774 and when you look at something like this you assume for somebody who has a lot of Farmland you’re going to see your typical shovels your axes your he uh your ha your oxy cards and then as they read through it not only do they find those materials but they find people and for students in seventh grade to see that and not just think that this was something that happened down south in another state but this was something that happened right here where I am as I’m looking at this and to see on there that names of individuals and there’s a a boy on there KO age 12 the same age that they are as they’re looking at these documents and for them to be able able to see that and then the two tiny excerpts right there one of them lists Jesus and Jesus are listed as 14 gold and then below it you see a woman named Phyllis aged 52 years and she is valued at eight gold and for these students to then take a look and say my gosh there is an individual a person a human being who one has a value plac to them and number number two is being valued at less than an assortment of Jesus it is an extremely powerful moment to watch these students realize it and not look at it as something that didn’t happen here not our backyard it was down south but it was here it was real these people’s stories are here and they need to be told these people should not be a name in an inventory book but they should be stories that are uplifted that are told and that are continued to be told throughout history thank you Ken um for the sake of time um here are some photos so on the right hand side we have the screening that we did with Cara students last year in seventh grade at East Hampton Middle um David there is doing um a Q&A afterwards at the screening and on the other side we have Sam Hamilton one of the co-directors uh forgotten founders David Hemstead senior and David rash doing a Q&A at saror Cinema with Carrie students in this past September um and the questions that students had from vocabulary to the socioeconomic impact of slavery and how it’s still very much evident in our communities today every time are astounding and inspiring to see how they grapple with this material and how they attempt to answer the question now that we know what do we do and we’ve screened the film for students as young as 10 years old Southampton Intermediate School has come to the sad cber Cinema to screen the film as well um and did a Q&A afterwards and again the reception from the students to this material every single time it’s it’s different and it’s inspiring and we hope to continue screening the films for student groups that are interested in and seeing the film at the cinema um so moving on to Reflections uh my last question to you both what advice would you give to other Educators who are interested in adapting this curriculum for their own classrooms as we’ve spoken about this is very locally based and though it’s in driven um the curriculum is rooted in this community so if someone who is not a e Hampton or sag Harper wanted to use this in their classrooms what advice would you give to them well um I found first of all there’s the material is very rich it’s comprehensive and there’s a lot of it so I think that it can be pieces of it I use pieces of it like I said I want to do a course that takes advantage of all three case studies and has a culminating project that contributes to the to the the body of work that’s here um and your project and this wonderful work but you can I you can pull pieces from it if you’re ever teaching about not just uh the history of enslavement in the United States but of marginalized people in a number of places my own students have applied some of what they learned about untold histories when they’re looking elsewhere for instance a little bit later that unit we were studying the European ex European imperialism in the late 19th century in which among other things they carved up Africa and took over a good chunk of that continent and much of the histories that we learn about that is told through primary documents from the European point of view and the students were really really eager to learn about what the African people said like how did the maharero reply to the Germans or what did the santes say to the British when they showed up and so they want to know the other side of the story and I am able it’s not as easy but I am able to find material or the experience of um African-American soldiers in World War I or the the Navajo World War II we’re going to be looking at code talkers and there’s a piece up there related um the Navajo code talkers when we’re looking at World War II now those two are American examples but uh they’re interested in what the Korean people thought when Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910 so I think having them look at the untold stories and on the reflections that they noted uh particularly the top one where they say that a harmful legacies need to be corrected this from one of my students and like I said 40% of them are from abroad but I think they have gotten a lot of lessons from looking at this very local personal thing especially since so many of them are surprised at the prevalence of enslavement right here in their hometowns and and for foreigners so prevalent in the north when they learned about the red summer of 1919 they were less surprised to hear that one of the major places that the RIS to place was in Chicago in northern city and uh you know that that the legacy is not as simple and the story is not as simple as it sometimes is portrayed so thank you so much guys that was really unbelievable so we as you guys know we’re running pretty late and we’re not entirely sure that the senator is still able to join us he’s was on the zoom but I’m going to introduce him and then we can move to Q&A if he’s had to run off but Senator James Sanders Jr is currently in his sixth term as New York state senator he was elected to the 10th senatorial District in 2012 he was born in ham hous public housing development and rockaways he’s a product of Southeast Queens he earned his bachelor’s degree we we’ve heard that from Sara sorry but what I think is fascinating is he started his political career at the school board the school board level which is something we can all do right after the school board where he was um then he was elected to District he was at the school board District 27 and he was President for seven of his 10 years he was the first African-American to hold this position in his district then he ran for city council was elected in 2001 and served until his time limit ran out for the term and then became state senator and he’s been state senator ever since he is the chairman on the senate committee on Banks and heads the Senate task force on minority and women-owned business Enterprise and he’s also the chairman or he’s on 11 other committees including Commerce economic development in small business and Veteran Homeland Security and Military Affairs he says he acknowledges that the journey forward is never easy but he’s willing to take the difficult path if it means that his constituents and Southeast Queens will be afforded the protections and access to resources that they deserve do we have this s on it we could move to Q&A while we I suspect that you can hear me we can hello can you hear me not yet all right I can hear you a little bit but not everybody can hear you well it is good to be here with the church at Z however uh I one more time I trust you can hear me yes we can hear you you can hear you you’re not on the screen yet can you see we’re getting you can you see me hi thank you so much for joining us I am [Applause] projected I will continue to speak with the hope that you will get me and uh and you’ll give me a thumbs up when you see me one uh live perhaps I look better know unseen so I will continue to speak um there are so many things I can tell you one of the most important things that I would tell you that’s not on that resume is uh and as you’re backing away I suspect that you either had me or you giving up no one of the things the most important things that I actually could tell you H I do see that I I am being seen I am until 16 I was going to be a ad Minister a pastor so I want awards for knowing the Bible so I feel very comfortable with you here today uh as we speak of the Lord’s work uh of Justice which is we are meant to walk towards uh I currently I’m working hard on the issue of reparations as you may or may not know and and it is an issue that my whole life has been drawing me towards and I and I guess I am here now the historian in me commends the previous speaker and the great work that you guys are doing with history because even as we speak America finds itself at war with itself at war with the truth at war with what what is history what will we tell ourselves and and we seem to be determined to um to forget to not remember to not only consciously not remember the past but to jail anyone who who says that uh this pretty picture that we painted ourselves is not the truth uh look at FL look at other places for example so Amer seems to be at war with itself and you guys are going to play an incredible part in this now in order to do this you got to do a couple of things you have to remember that this this Union this America is just an exp and experiment America is what you and I do or don’t do every day and if we the children of Samuel Adams of Tom Pay of of so many we our school of thinking in one sense lost doubt in the American Revolution I draw your attention to uh child beard for those of us who like to read [Music] history now one school of lost out another school won the well healed the 1% the rich and super rich W and they have presented a history of America which is basically not true but we who uphold the best traditions of America uphold the best traditions of the church the church of the uh uh that that didn’t make its peace um with Rome early on WE who hold the best traditions of the church are called upon in a time like this to help bring Justice in this day and age so I find myself at a curious juncture uh I find myself a child of the church and understanding that church has been called upon to intercede you are called upon to be the intercession on Earth uh for for people and we uh called upon to intercede and that doesn’t mean that we simply sit back so with that tradition and then with all of the political Traditions that we found ourselves in the Civil R the woman’s R these strle gate Rises struggle over uh the proper role of women in society all of these things we find ourselves as the children of these and now we are faced with a strange strange place on one hand we see the push back of all of the things that we pought for uh all of the rights that we just knew were going to be extended are threaten and this is epitomized I would argue by the rise of uh Donald Trump uh on the one hand this itemizes that one America one school of D wants to go back to the 50s and 40s and another school wants to go forward we can see this when we look at the fall of affirmative action was left of it in the school system on to the university but we also seen it with several other things voting rights something as sacred as the right to vote being denied more in more and more more places so some would say that the best thing that we can do at time like this is too high to say nothing to make no sound hopefully it will pass over us that’s not the best theory I would argue I would say that uh the best defense is a good offense and that I would suggest you as a thing called reparations reparations to repair something that the church has no small knowledge of our history going back to when uh the Hebrews left Egypt they were not sent out empty-handed it were sent out with gifts and and other uh gold jewelry things that would help make them whole the so many Bible passages will speak you of the need to repair and to for us to stand in the in the Gap to make sure that these things happen so New York state is undergoing an incredible experiment where we have chosen n people this was my bill that is now the lord of the land we’ve chosen people to study the issue of reparations to study the issue of reparations and to come up with a findings that they may find that there’s no need for it that’s a possibility it’s a fair committee you have to have an honest committee they may find that there is a need they may find many different things and I suspect that they’re using it type of L they will come to a similar position that I that there is a need for reparations and uh and and it needs to be massive to some degree and I say that because every statistic every study is saying that the wealth gap between black and white is growing larger not smaller it’s expanding at a faster rate than ever before I was speaking to a president of the Federal Reserve for those who know banking they know that that’s the banks bank if you wish I was speaking to one of the most learned uh men in society over the question of economics and I said to them short of reparations is there any way that Liv can catch up in America and without blinking in ey to no no there’s simply no way you can all work great jobs you do whatever you wish uh you you’re just not going to catch up so if we want this America that we see we’re going to have to fight for it we’re going to have to really get out there and the role of white people is going to be very interesting in this one uh very very interesting those who have been shown the Great like those who seen the truth uh and and I commend you you’re you’re swimming Upstream you are it is so difficult to be a person of conscience in this day and age and especially a white person of conscience in this day and age I I commend you it’s a uh it’s it’s easier for me I have no choice I must fight to survive uh you can deny and you can live a life of of blinding yourself and so many do so I commend you for trying to get the education that you need to decide what you want to do this battle of reparation be which will not be fought in communities to come well be fought but it will be fought at one in the white Community which means that you have a great role that you have to wage spiritual warfare against powers and principalities against powers and high places where you will have to bring a truth a a truth of the Gospel a truth of here is how we can lit together in peace a battle for a Beloved Community which you uh are in a cheap space for uh and I would I would encourage you to do this without guilt yes American history is is an incredible thing and those of us who know again I am at storming by training um it’s an incredible thing but guilt is not going to help us much we need allies who understand that guilt should only be for those who are tied to things dead and dying if you are not W to those things if you’re not determined to keep a system of Oppression and pleas then you should not operate from a place of guilt you should operate from a place hope of Love Of Truth that you are not going to be tied down by guilt you going to join hands with us and move towards love Truth uh and hope uh hope that of course at the end of the day our efforts will be blessed by God so we will find uh Redemption to some degree through our actions we will find it by the things that we do on on a daily basis the small battles and large battles where we don’t think it need to follow that we just say no we’re not going to allow injustices In Our Lifetime that there’s nothing that anybody in this room could do about slavery P we were not there you could not you couldn’t intercede but we can do something about things that are taking place before our very hours and those are the things that we will be held uh to account for the sins of omission and commission uh Omission in most of our lives so uh the process of of reparations is is easy enough you’re going to have nine people go through a process at the end of roughly a year they’re going to issue a report and that report will go to the state legisl and state legislature will battle it out and they will uh endorse uh zero or some or all of the findings and we will move towards a different New York uh regardless of what happens from there now I’m the kind of guy who loves questions uh but I urge you do not ask ask me any question that you don’t want me answer to don’t don’t ask me because I’m not I will give it to you I’m here to give you the truth uncut it’s Sunday and we are in church church of course is with two or three are gathered in his name and I suspect that there’s at least two or three of you gathered in in his name so we are very much in church and I try not to lie and certainly would not lie in the church I’ll stop for a moment and see if there’s any questions about reparations about history about where we are going in New York where we are going in America tonight have either Bo you silly uh a question or the are no questions I have I have a question um I was just curious oh no not you you to I don’t someone else of course I’ll take your question I was curious if there was examples of reparations historically that um we can look to to sort of study how it’s been done well reparation is actually occurs every day uh and you may have heard that in camp leun at Mar cor there was the water was terrible and people were drinking it for years and it had cogens and and cancer causing substances and every and make M worth government knew it and by the time that the information came out to the public the St stat of limitations had passed in North Carolina where the camp was and therefore no one consume the government passed a law saying oh no we’re going to change those rules and we will try to repair those who have been hurt who have been DED uh that’s reparations my friend that’s an attempt by government to repair for damages caused other attempts of course the largest one that everyone knows quickly are our Jewish brothers and sisters from the Holocaust where they were made as whole as um as they could at that time now let me remind you that the population in Germany was now in support of those reparations they had 11% of the German population uh po showed who were in support of reparations at the end of World War II now it’s 95% we start out in America at a higher level 22% of the white population as a whole is in support of reparations that’s twice what they had in Germany uh other examples are of reparation of course on the Japanese and how they were made whole after the internship but you can also to the Armenians who sued turkey in a court in Los Angeles and won reparations over the Turkish massacres of uh I believe 1920 of that time period uh there are many uh examples of reparations in Native Americans who have gotten some of their land back and some of their uh mineral rights these are all examples of reparations but then if reparations happens for farmers who were uh round up there was a and civilians for that matter there’s a company that’s monant there you go made a Pro were round up and it was found that it caused cancer and yet the statute of limitations that passed on some of these many of these cases it was overturned and therefore people can get uh payment these are reparations these are government attempts to uh to make a population whole trust I answered the question decently hi um what would you say about South Africa and the reparations there you coming in ch I said can you hear me now can you hear me yes yes oh can a little louder sounds would be nice my voice isn’t the best this morning I was wondering about South Africa you didn’t speak about them I I thought you all would be looking at at that country more than you know Monsanto for instance South Africa is a very interesting example they have Truth and Reconciliation uh commit uh did some amazing work but they dealt very little with trying to make people whole they they limited their making people whole to allow people to tell their stories they did do a certain amount of um of people some people in the most egregious circumstances getting some compensation but the vast majority the overwhelming majority of the people who told their stories would not made hope in terms of financial compensation uh they were allowed to tell their stories but that is basically all so South Africa is an example of what to do but we really want to go beyond that uh that’s would be the example of or the equivalent of the Hebrews leaving Egypt and telling how they would treat in egyp but not given anything to make the pole as they were leading out I see so they weren’t given any money they very few of them received any compensation and what compensation they did receive uh most people argue was not equivalent to what they went through so what what are uh African-Americans uh what What’s on the the paper for us I mean is it for families of uh of the enslaved and you know the South who move to to other places do you have to show proof what what’s the deal is it going to be every africanamerican in America or what in America I Invasion an attempt to make sure that there is equality of opportunity equality of opportunity meaning that everybody starts out at the same place that they that the starting line is made equal for every person or as many people as we can of course uh and to do that you have to deal with the wealth Gap and you will never have true quality of opportunity if uh white people have uh a minimum of I’ve seen different studies on this everything from uh 10 to1 to close to $2 to1 for every dollar that a black family has in weth not in money not in salary if you wish but but in wealth uh and and there way to measuring that so you have to equalize the question of wealth and that’s you can do that many different ways you can do that through uh a lot through education a lot through um the ability to buy a home the ability to buy a business it will be many attempts and sadly I’m not on the commit that will put in this recommendations so I can only tell you what are standard ideas that that people use when they speak of trying to create equality of opportunity and trying to create uh an even starting Place uh in this race of Life hi Senator Sanders um I have a question would you consider the reimagining the Cross Bronx initiative as some form of reparations in this in the Bronx South Bronx you this one more time with the reimagining the Cross Bronx initiative that’s talking about reconnecting the communities after the destruction of all of the the communities that were taking over to build the Cross Bronx Expressway and you’re talking about knitting them back together creating programs maybe covering the cross bronze and right now it’s also it’s just in the study stages if I heard your question right she forgive me if I haven’t uh but I’ll give an interesting answer even question U you one of the very uh ruthless features of the system of pression that we found ourselves and still do is how it ritten community of part in the name of progress in the name of uh of making uh things better so you can see this with communities that were whether it’s a cross Expressway which dividing a a minority soal minority Community uh whether it is uh roads and Tulsa roads and and upstate New York that we communities apart part of the efforts that we see undergoing now the B Administration actually is trying to repair these roads that were were driven through communities we we we’re trying to either put them underground and allow these communities to to be bound back uh now on the larger issue since I’m taking a Shad question um how do we prepair the African Community how do we um the African-American Community if you wish how do we what are the efforts that we will undertake how do we deal with this generational trauma that these people find themselves in how do we deal with this gen generational uh divestment of of generational intergenerational poverty and other things well we will find the best way is to follow some of their best leaders and there are there have always been efforts to put to heal the greef internally uh these efforts need to be joined by the people of good will all over as we for our sake of all of us as we deal with it you want one reflection of this is the amount of mental uh illness that we find ourselves confronting where uh we’re now getting a lot a clue of good Studies have come out over what is causing all of the mental illness in many different communities especially the communities of color and the the process of weathering process of Oppression is really having an impact now on these communities that’s always sad but especially now uh and we will for the sake of all of us because no one wants to be assaulted in the streets and no one wants to be uh pushed at the train or any of these other Horrors that we hear we have to deal with the madness that is producing Madness uh now I hope that happens in the your question but not on another day me and I’ll be glad to be with your question but I told you even if it’s not your question I hope that you found the answer useful absolutely I mean we’re so grateful that you took the time to be with us today thank you so much Senator Sanders thank [Applause] you you my telephone number in the book if anyone wants to catch up with me you’re more than welcome I really appreciate the greatness that you guys doing you are showing some of the greatness of America uh and the greatness of God so iour you to go with God and be a blessing Take Care thank [Applause] but