USAIN/CBHL 2024 Biennial Meeting

Remembrance and Resilience: Documenting the History of African Americans through Plants, from the Slave Trade to Present Day
Rhonda Evans (New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library)
Lucas Mertehikian (New York Botanical Garden, Humanities Institute)

A three year-project generously funded by the Mellon Foundation, The African American Garden seeks to narrate the history of the many diverse Black communities in the United States through the lens of plants. Including more than one hundred different species. The plants selected for the African American Garden represent the journey of those whose ancestry hails from West Africa via the Transatlantic slave trade, the Caribbean community, and the broader Diaspora including South and Central America. Each year, the garden’s eight beds are rearranged to cover a wide array of themes, from the plants that fueled the plantation system in the Americas to those whose creative, curative, and transformative uses remain culturally significant for Black people all over the world. This presentation discusses in detail the development of this ambitious project, which has resulted in a carefully curated experience enhanced with poetry, food, public lectures, symposia, and art, and which has attracted more than 100,000 visitors. The presentation will discuss the Garden’s origins, and how, under the umbrella of the Library, the staff collaborated with experts across multiple disciplines, community members, artists, and horticulturists to bring this project into fruition. Finally, there will be an analysis of the impact of this specialized garden on the institution, the community, the creators, and an exploration of how this garden will influence similar future projects.

Plowing their sacred spaces: The history of colonial agriculture as it relates to the prehistoric earthworks created by the Indigenous Peoples of the Mississippi Valley.
David Luftig (Washington State University)

Over two thousand years ago, indigenous cultures within the Mississippi Valley began creating magnificent earthworks in the form of conical mounds, effigy works, and ceremonial complexes. Amongst the most well known of these earthworks are the Serpent Mound (Ohio), Cahokia (Illinois), and the Poverty Point complex (Louisiana). All three are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Earthworks, large and small, were ubiquitous in many parts of the Midwest when colonial farmers arrived. At the beginning of the 19th Century, there were 10,000 sites in just Ohio. Today, that number has been reduced to around several scores.

Farms have played a transformative role in the destruction, interpretation, and preservation of these sites. As farmers worked their land they inadvertently dug into an archival record of human activity. As such, farms became a place where knowledge was both generated and destroyed.

This study provides a historical overview regarding the relationship between these earthworks and the farmers who came to occupy the land containing them. Although agriculture was the most destructive force of these sites, the history is more nuanced than typically accounted for.

This presentation looks at multiple aspects of this relationship including (a) experiences and opinions of farmers regarding these sites, their creators, and the artifacts that kept turning up in the fields (b) the logistical hurdles that came with plowing and grazing earthwork sites (c) the legacy of colonial farming communities as it relates to Indigenous Peoples and their creations (d) the complicated relationship between archaeologists and farmers and (e) recent trends regarding preservation and collaboration.

Exploring Inclusivity: A Diversity Audit of Life Science Library Exhibits
Janis Shearer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Yanling Liu (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Funk Library (Funk) has three exhibit cases with a goal to display materials related to Funk subject areas, university events, or campus groups. Display materials are drawn from the Library’s extensive collection for agricultural, consumer and environmental sciences, biology, city planning and landscape architecture, the Prairie Research Institute and agricultural communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus.

Exhibitions offer an opportunity to connect with our patrons and to provide a glimpse into the unique topics, subjects, and services that science libraries have to offer. They are also opportunities to develop strategies that integrate diversity into our work, increase our impact, and maintain our relevance. With motivations to foster diversity through our exhibits, the authors’ reflection on past work attempts to identify gaps in representation that can address inclusivity and a sense of belonging within an academic community.

This paper will discuss the process and findings from a diversity audit of physical materials exhibited by Funk over the past 5 years. Applying methods used to audit print collections, the authors will discuss their manual methodology to assess diverse representation of authors and subjects, their tools used to document findings, and how the resulting information will be used.