The Seven H S of Heritage Interpretation

The Seven “H’s” of Heritage Interpretation

I am a storyteller, focusing mainly on events from the history of the American West from the Territorial period to the latter twentieth century. I tell many of these stories in the vernacular of cowboy poetry requiring me to use vocabularies specific to ranching, mining, and railroading; to adopt an exaggerated persona; and to employ a variety of accents and vocal mannerisms. Diligent research and respect can make the difference in the audience’s perception: am I conveying an essential truth, or am I ridiculing others? Humility is mandatory. I’m not infallible, and I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Authenticity and integrity are indispensable if one is to speak for, or to speak the actual words of, people who lived in times and circumstances often very different from one’s own. Heritage interpreters and historical re-enactors must develop an empathetic rather than a sympathetic world view relative to their subjects. Interpreters must become informed about the various conflicting points of view that influenced the events they interpret or the characters they portray. Historic personages and “ordinary people” are products of the choices they made or make in their lives. The strongest of these choices result in their championing or rejecting conventional and/or controversial ideas of their day. No matter which side of an issue your character was or is on, it is necessary to be familiar with arguments for other points of view. Sympathy is the role of the audience. Human beings are naturally sympathetic to their own individual feelings and predicaments, but they are more consciously engaged in self-justification or propagandizing, and are capable of being motivated by shame and even self-loathing. The principles of good drama apply here: sympathy is bland; struggle and conflict are exciting and engaging. Laughing with is simpatico; laughing at is alienating. Interpretive integrity demands we strive for understanding, leaving judgment to the audience.

Another problem confronting heritage interpreters is “gatekeeping”. That is, some people are reluctant to provide information to “outsiders” or to accept them as qualified to interpret “their” history. They may mistrust the motives or question the competency or legitimacy of the researcher. They are emotionally invested in the events in question, perhaps even defining their own identity by their ethnic, familial, or regional association to a particular time, place, or historical event. They may seem defensive, and be suspicious of versions of the story that do not accord with their feelings. Author Zane Grey encountered this while writing his novel To the Last Man, about Arizona’s Pleasant Valley range war of the latter 1880’s. His initial attempts at interviewing local residents met with silence or hostility. Only after spending several seasons living in the region and interacting with the resident families did he gradually induce some individuals to speak to him. Their recollections were often conflicting, and as is to be expected, reflected the biases of the two major factions that had engaged in the hostilities. I have encountered similar instances of such gatekeeping. On one occasion, as I was preparing to perform my program, I was confronted by a member of one of the local ranching families who demanded, “What gives you the right to call yourself the voice of the Verde Valley?” I explained to him that he had misunderstood the title of my program, Voices of the Verde, and that I was in fact giving voice to the written words of some of the valley’s early settlers. Following another program, I was told that an elderly lady had taken offense at what she considered to be my slanderous treatment of her father’s reputation. I contacted her to apologize for any unintended offense I may have given. She angrily told me I had gotten my facts wrong, and that I had no business doing such a program since I “didn’t know what I was talking about.” When I asked her to name the specific facts, it turned out I had not gotten them wrong. She had misheard and conflated them. I told her that I had taken my facts from an interview given by her own uncle, quoting them from a transcript of the interview which lay open before me as we spoke. “My uncle had Alzheimer’s when he gave that interview,” she said. “I know because I was his caretaker at the time!” Both of these offended parties forgave my “transgressions” and invited me to contact them if I had any future questions regarding my researches into local history. What seemed to matter most to them was my acknowledgement that they were more directly connected to these events in local history than am I.

Listeners often conflate facts and stories. They combine or hybridize elements from different stories, resulting in inaccurate associations and misperceptions. I perform several stories in the course of a single program, so I’m not surprised by this (see George Miller’s “magic number” 7 + or – 2) and try to prevent it by making myself available for questions at the end of every performance. However, most such conflations tend to come after a period of time has passed and I receive these mainly in the form of email queries. An adult education coordinator colleague once contacted me after one of his students gave a confused opinion and cited my program as the source for his scrambled information. As interpreters, personal integrity obliges us to address such inquiries in the interest of promoting correct information and clear communication. I have changed the way in which I deliver certain pieces of information after being informed of these kinds of misunderstandings.

In dealing with humorous stories which are based on historic records or anecdotes I allow myself more artistic license in adding color and atmosphere to the details (poetic rhyme schemes provide additional challenges) but I always remain true to the facts as best as they are known. When history and heritage are my topics, I focus on seven “H’s”: humanity, humility, heroism, hubris, hardship, humor, and above all I strive to honor those whose stories I tell.

Michael Peach, MFA, CIT, CIG

Interpreter of Cultural and Natural Resources

Pink Jeep Tours

40 Camino Del Sol

Sedona, Arizona 86336

(928) 282-5000

Sources

Beck, Larry and Ted Cable. Interpretation for the 21st Century. Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing. 2002

Fowler, Loretta. Whose Past is it Anyway? in Anthropology Explored, The Best of Smithsonian AnthroNotes. Ruth Osterweis Selig and Marilyn R. London, editors. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1998

Grey, Zane. To the Last Man. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1921

Schrift, Melissa. Melungeons and the Politics of Heritage in Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, editors. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press. 2011

…I was aware that being Melungeon involved varied and contested interpretations of history.

The group was not as homogenous as I first thought – in appearance or agenda. The several hundred participants [attending a Melungeion Union gathering] included small pockets of people from varied multiethnic communities similar (and possibly related to) Melungeons… Other participants included those with Melungeon surnames who sought missing links in fragmented genealogies, many of whom were unable to establish a geographical connection with any of the original Melungeon settlements. Still others participating had no readily identifiable genealogical or geographical connection to Melungeons but identified as Melungeon.

[Melungeon author] Brent Kennedy contends that Melungeonness is boundless, and identity that serves as a metaphoric platform for multicultural harmony. [Melungeon Union] organizers and participants alike tend to elasticize Melungeon identity to the point of anonimity, repeatedly communicating the inclusiveness of the Melungeon movement. The public dismissal of any gatekeeping mechanisms posits Melungeonness as a catchall identity…

from Melungeons and the Politics of Heritage, Melissa Schrift

Thinking about the past or about a distant world through things is always about poetic re-creation. We acknowledge the limits of what we can know with certainty, and must then try to find a different kind of knowing, aware that objects must have been made by people essentially like us – so we should be able to puzzle out why they might have made them and what they were made for. It may sometimes be the best way to grasp what much of the world is about, not just in the past but in our own time. Can we ever really understand others? Perhaps, but only through feats of poetic imagination, combined with knowledge rigorously acquired and ordered.

A history of the world told through objects should therefore, with sufficient imagination, be more equitable than one based solely on texts. It allows many different peoples to speak, especially our ancestors in the very distant past. The early part of human history – more than 95 percent of humanity’s story as a whole – can indeed be told only in stone, for besides human and animal remains, stone objects are all that survive. A history through objects, however, can never itself be fully balanced because it depends on what happens to survive.

…How different history looks depending on who you are and where you are looking from. [Artifacts housed in the British Museum are interpreted by persons] from the communities or countries where the objects were made. This is, I believe, indispensable. Only they can explain what meanings these things now carry in that context: only a Hawaiian can say what significance the feather helmet given to Captain Cook and his colleagues has for islanders today, after two hundred and fifty years of European and American intrusion. Nobody can explain better than (a contemporary Nigerian) what it means to a Nigerian now to see the Benin bronzes in the British Museum. These are crucial questions in any consideration of objects in history. All around the world national and communal identities are increasingly being defined through new readings of their history, and that history is frequently anchored in things. The British Museum is not just a collection of objects: it is an arena where meaning and identity are being debated and contested on a global scale, at times with acrimony. These debates are an essential part of what the objects now mean, as are the arguments about where they should properly be exhibited or housed. These views should be articulated by those most intimately concerned.

from the introduction to A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor

The following selections come from essays in The West, by Geoffrey C. Ward, 1996, Little, Brown & Company, Boston (companion volume to the film series by Ken Burns)

The story of the American West, we believe, is at once the story of a unique part of the country and a metaphor for the country as a whole. With all its heroism and inequity, exploitation and adventure, sober realities and bright myths, it is the story of all of us, no matter where on the continent we happen to live, no matter how recently our ancestors arrived on its shores.

Stephen Ives and Ken Burns

Writing history in terms of the present has its virtues, but it can be an odd procedure. Presentism can yield what might be called the horseshoe crab theory of history, where signs of the present in the past come to define the past. The horseshoe crab is an arthropod related to the spider. It is very old, first appearing in the Upper Silurian period of the Paleozoic Era, about 425 million years ago. Trilobites and much of the other life that once shared the seas with horseshoe crabs appear now only as fossils. The horseshoe crab is still around. As evolutionary winner, it has survived while the vast majority of what once surrounded it has vanished. But to think that we can understand that Silurian past as if its true significance resides in producing the horseshoe crab for posterity is slightly mad. In the past the horseshoe crab mattered no more than the rest of the teeming life of the ancient seas. Its survival into the present doesn’t alter its role in the past. The past existed on its own terms.