Historicizing Heritage

Items

• Excerpt from the essay "Take, Eat"

  "How many times as a child did I see the inside of a deer’s body? How many times did I smell it, touch it?"
• Local Contexts

  Local Contexts is focused on increasing Indigenous involvement in data governance through the integration of Indigenous values into data systems.
• A word: “y’all”

  "Y’all: It’s a word that immediately locates one in a dialect, that embraces and includes at the same time as it may implicitly push back."
• Romines Smith Family Tree

  "There is a discomfort to my heritage, knowing it is not truly mine to claim, and yet the throughlines are still there, growing ever fainter."
• "Golden Bear" pendant

  "As time has passed, it’s taken on new significations that weren’t present to me in my childhood: the forcible displacement of Indigenous people, the impact of industrialization on the landscape, and the effects of climate change. I wear this necklace every day, as do my grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters, and female cousins. One day, my nieces will wear it too."
• International Ladies Garment Workers Union, messaging

  "I discovered this item in the course of going through my grandmother’s house just before her death from COVID-19 ..."
• Salt-rising bread

  Jenny Bardwell and Susan Ray Brown developed their recipe for salt-rising bread and made it the signature item of Rising Creek, the bakery they opened just over the WV border in Mt. Morris, PA.
• Kentucky Toponyms: Hell for Certain / Hell fer Sartain + Disputanta

  "What I miss about places like this in the hills of Kentucky is hard to pull away from those places, hard to extricate or distinguish from afar, hard to move beyond the limits of the being-present (what Heidegger would concatenate with a part of the Dasein in that being) of a place."
• Cicada Tattoo

  "I count my lifetime in 17-year increments..."
• A Brand: "Almost Heaven"

  "The language is forward-looking, but conceptually it relies on the image of a mythical past, in which West Virginia is stuck in time and place as a perfectly preserved, more-than-Eden."
• Melting Ice Globe

  "As the substance erodes, what are the concomitant impacts upon identity? What kind of world is left to be inherited?.."
• Gun Violence

  "It’s one thing that makes us unique as Americans; unlike almost any other place in the world, we gun each other down regularly. Every day. Probably every hour...."
• A word: VIOLENCE

  "When we talk about culture being ‘problematic,’ heritage being ‘problematic,’ why don't we say they're violent?"
• Bloody Butcher Red Corn

  "When you’re given a recipe or you're given a seed, you’re also given this responsibility to share its story..."
• Statement by the tribal council of the Talimali Band of Apalachee Indians

  "While most Americans are unaware of the obscure origins of the name for the ancient mountains extending down the eastern edge of North America from Maine to Georgia, the European misuse and abuse of their name is something that the Apalachee have never been able to forget..."
• West Virginia apples and cider

  "Growing up in 1970s California, I didn’t much care for apples..."
• A word: AFFRILACHIA

  The word is a portmanteau of “Africa” and “Appalachia" ...
• His and Hers silhouettes (1934)

  "Although only in outline, I see the contours of my father’s and my face in my grandfather’s profile ..."