 Today, we have our own Loli Wilkie. I don't think we do need any introduction. She is our fearless leader of the department. And today, with all the political terminals on campus, she volunteered to do a background talk, which I'm sure raises a lot of issues that are related to a lot of the discussions that we are having on campus. So the title of her talk is Racializing Assemblages and History-Making. Why the Black Regulus of Fourth Day's past is told the way it is. Please welcome Loli Wilkie. Sorry, let me get connected up. I'm told its eyes will adjust. So thank you, everybody, for coming today. As Junco mentioned, I thought it might be useful to time my talk for this particular week. If we had to cancel somebody, better to cancel the chair of the department than one of our grad students. That's fair, right? I want to thank the Stahl Endowment for funding the archival research that went into shaping a bunch of today's talk. This is what I did over my summer vacation talk, which the bag lunches are quite famous for. It's just over my summer vacation, I spent time in the National Archives. And as I was sorting through, trying to think about primary sources and the way the history of this particular place I've been working has been represented both in public interpretation and in scholarly writings. I thought it would be useful to start to work through some of those thoughts with you guys. So this is still formative, it's still developing, it's emergent, all those things that we like to talk about. For those of you who don't know, I've been working for the past several years at a place called Fort Davis in remote West Texas. It was a military fort that was first founded in 1854 to guard the Overland Trail and defend against Mexican bandits and Indians was the rhetoric. It was held by the US government until 1861 when the Confederate forces who were dominating Texas took it over. It was reclaimed and resettled in 1867 by the US government. And from 1867 until 1891 it was an active fort. But what I'm particularly interested in is from 1867 to 1880 it was solely occupied with black enlisted men and white officers. So this is one of the places where the Buffalo soldiers, as they're now collectively known, were stationed. During the postbellum period, the troops stationed there were mainly charged with protecting travel and building both communications and travel infrastructure. So these guys spent most of their time building telegraph lines and roadways. They were also enforcing reconstruction law. Remember, Texas was a Confederate state. They were under reconstruction. And they were patrolling the border and protecting commerce. They also had some engagement with Comanche and Apache who were moving back and forth across the Mexican border from reservation lands in what's now Oklahoma and New Mexico. The troops at Fort Davis included men who had been civil war vets, people who had been formerly enslaved, and black men from the north. So it's a really interesting moment in time. Despite the high profile of Buffalo soldiers and popular imagination, there has not actually been a lot of scholarly research on them and why that is the case. There's a whole nother talk about that. I've put pictures of some of the more well-known historical works. Most of the scholars who are writing about the black regulars and the frontier are military historians. They're not scholars of the diaspora, which makes their work have a different gloss to it. Fort Davis specifically shows up in a lot of frontier histories. And there is a structural reason for this. They have a lovely archive. And Fort Davis is located. It's part of a national historic site, National Parks Historic Site. They have an archive on site. And the Fort Davis Mountains is a lovely place. So a lot of historians who are looking at the experience of the frontier world will go and spend weeks at Fort Davis, because it's a really pleasant place to be. And it's closer to a lot of them who are in Southwestern and Texas universities than going to the National Archive. For me, as an archeologist, there's been a sort of unique circumstance arising out of this, which is I do my own primary archival research. But it's typically been at sites that no one else is doing archival research on. So there hasn't been a lot of secondary literature to plow through. So in this particular case, I'm doing a lot of reading of secondary literature produced out of archival records that I'm also going through. And this has led me to have a different set of engagements with that whole process than I've had before. It's also a publicly interpreted site. It's a historic site. So I'm dealing with looking at the ways that that secondary literature and primary archival materials represented in the present for a broad audience, as well as the way that it's operating in the scholarly literature. So it's really got me thinking about both the craftsmanship and the politics of writing history from beyond just an archaeological context. The idea that history writing is a political act, that history telling is political is not new to anybody in this room. So I'm not trying to generate anything new or different that way. And of course, we're also all familiar with the idea that some actors in the past get excluded and others overrepresented. And I found myself thinking more and more as I've been working through this material and trying to decide how to write about it and talk about it. I'm thinking more and more about the ways that some pasts come to be more valued than others. And specifically how historical scholarship has been racialized in the United States. And given that we are currently living in a world where white supremacist ideologies are paraded without shame, I think there's a greater urgency to some of these thinking exercises and conversations. I do absolutely believe that archaeologists are the best place people to engage in these discussions because we are the people who are working with documents, material culture, monuments, and architecture, all these things that are collectively forms of artifacts, things that are things. And we're really the only discipline that is moving across all those sort of subdivisions of things in a holistic manner. So I think we are really best situated to think about how these collective vehicles for embodied and entwined practices of history making and history telling are deployed. So I'm gonna use that idea of both history making and history telling to talk about the ways that we produce historical knowledge and the way we share historical knowledge. My thinking of late has been shaped by three sort of primary sources. In general, black feminist theorizing. Most recently, I've been working through Alexander Wahili's habeas viscus and returning back to Patricia Hill Collins' ideas about enduring gender stereotypes. And as I'll expand a bit more soon, I've also been working through Mel Chen's animacies, thinking about the ways that animacy hierarchies and the liveliness of things falls into this. And I've also been thinking generally about the way that folklorists talk about narratives and the way that narratives circulate. And those things together are all kind of shaping the conversation I'm gonna have with you today. The place to start with is this idea of racializing assemblages. And this is not a totally new concept, I think, to any of you. The idea that racialization is not a biological or a cultural descriptor, but a conglomerate of sociopolitical relationships that discipline humanity into full humans, not quite humans and non-humans. So if we talk about racializing assemblages, we're talking about that collection of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not quite humans, non-humans. Related to this is something, one of the vehicles that I think is very important in mobilizing racializing assemblages and naturalizing racializing assemblages are something that I'm going to refer to as racializing narratives. And I would describe these as just so stories that make the end results of racializing assemblages make sense, seem natural, be common sense. So that way that the way that social inequality, that sorting of people into humans, non-humans, not quite humans works. I think it's really important. And I think that if we start with Patricia Hill Collins, black feminist thought, where she introduces the idea that there are at play today in contemporary America, these enduring stereotypes of blackness that are rooted in the period of enslavement. And they're very sexualized. So the intersection of race and gender is at play here. For instance, she refers to the mammy being an enduring stereotype from slavery, the idea of a black woman who is so devoted to rearing of the white family that her family becomes secondary. Or the Jezebel, the over-sexualized black woman who is first not capable of being raped because she is so over-sexualized, it's impossible to take advantage of her and who's the constant threat to the stability of white families because of her voraciousness. That's one of the enduring stereotypes. Within male stereotypes, one of the great enduring stereotypes of blackness has been the image of Buck or the black rapist. And what I'm arguing is these racializing narratives are expanding upon those gendered stereotypes and are the just-so stories that naturalize those stereotypes. So to describe this or to give a, and just to think about how these things are deployed, we know that during Jim Crow that the idea of the black rapist was used as justification for the terrorization and the murder of black men throughout the South and the US. You may recall that Emmett Till, the 15-year-old who was brutalized and murdered, the justification for that was he had whistled at a white woman with that disrespect. Of course, if you follow the news, you know that last year, the woman who made that accusation has finally admitted that he never whistled at her. So these racialized narratives are these just-so stories that go to naturalize these stereotypes and promote their enduring nature. And to explain how, to give an example of how I think these things are operating, I wanna talk about a case that's emerged from Fort Davis. And some of you in here have heard me talk at Nauseum about Daniel Telfaro, but I'm going to do it again today. In reading through the secondary literature on Buffalo soldiers and specifically Fort Davis, there is one story that comes up all the time that's recounted constantly in secondary literature. And that is the story of Corporal Daniel Telfaro and how he died and why he died. This is the earliest version, and you're gonna have to be patient. This is the earliest version of the showing up in the secondary literature, 1968, Erwin Thompson in an article in the Journal of Western History. And he writes, "'Still, the Negro enlisted men were present, "'usually without wives, "'and the folklore about Negro sexual powers "'was as prevalent then as in more recent time, "'not often spoken about there was always lurking "'under the surface of the routine garrison life, "'the fear of assault and rape.' "'This potential problem emerged in the open "'at Fort Davis in the fall of 1872. "'Lieutenant Kendall 25th Infantry "'was absent from the post on duty. "'About 1 a.m. on November 21st, "'Mrs. Kendall was awakened by the sound of breaking, "'not bracken, sorry, breaking glass. "'She discovered a man climbing "'through the bedroom window. "'She ordered him to go away, but he kept coming. "'Mrs. Kendall fired a pistol on him.' "'And then he quotes, "'The ball taking effect on the top of the man's head, "'the blood spilling into the room, "'his cap falling into the room, "'while the man fell back from the window "'and on the porch dead,' end quote. "'Neither the officers nor their families doubted "'that Talaferro's intentions had been rape "'or that this was to be expected of Negroes.'" 2001, and I've found published references as late as 2009, so far, the same case. Here's another take on it from Doeback and Phillips, very well-known military historians. In 1872, a court marshal at Fort Davis awarded 25th Infantry musician, Martin Petey, a dishonorable discharge and seven years imprisonment for attempting to rape the wife of another soldier in his company. The reviewing authority deleted Petey's dishonorable discharge and reduced his imprisonment to one year's hard labor to be served at Fort Davis along with a $12 fine per month, nearly all the private monthly earnings. Not long after Petey's trial, the wife of Lieutenant Frederick Kendall shot and killed Ninth Cavalry Corporal, Daniel Talaferro, when he tried to break into the Kendall's quarters. She told investigators that she had fired only after Talaferro ignored the warning to Halt and she had no doubt that he intended to rape her. Reporting the incident, Colonel Andrews emphasized that married officers were reluctant to leave their families for any purpose after dark, dot, dot, dot, and that these feelings were shared by married enlisted men. Now, I first came across the Talaferro stuff in the secondary literature and it shows up again and again and again in unpublished reports for the interpretive plan of the park and other things. And based on the way that these stories are told and they have different elements to them, I was convinced that as I went into the archival record, I was going to find a lot of different records talking about this case. So my initial engagement with it was irritation that all these historians decided to focus on this one historical incident where you have the myth of the black rabies being embodied. So I was irritated that they were choosing to focus on that aspect of the Fort history to the exclusion of other things. But as I got into the archival record, my feeling about the case changed. I became absolutely horrified at the lack of documentation surrounding this case, especially when compared to other incidents of violence between civilians and military personnel. Just in the same year as the Talaferro case, anytime that there was violence between soldiers and civilians, sometimes soldiers being the object of violence, sometimes civilians, there are inquests and in the inquests there are witnesses and they're all called up and to give their account and to talk about who was doing what and when and why people were where they were. There's no inquest for the Talaferro. Despite the suggestion in the two narratives I just read, there's nothing to indicate that there was ever a formal interview with Mrs. Kendall. There was no inquest. There was no questioning of Talaferro's superior officer. The only two accounts are a letter from George Andrews, the commanding officer who you see over there, of the post, to the Texas adjudant, and I'll talk about that letter shortly, and a letter of another guy, E.J. Stivers, to newspapers. Kendall is never interviewed, that's Kendall down the bottom. His wife is never interviewed. No one who served with Talaferro is interviewed. The mysterious daughter of an officer who was staying with Mrs. Kendall at the time of this was never interviewed, nor is she even ever named. So, and there is no autopsy. And in fact the post surgeon goes on to say he didn't have the facility to do an autopsy even though there were three autopsies earlier in the year. He did, however, take a wire and stick it through the hole of Talaferro's skull and poke around and found that there was a bullet lodged in his spinal column. So there's all these irregularities that immediately emerge as I went through the records. I was scouring through everything trying to see if there was something I missed because it was strange to me none of the authors talked about the paucity of documents surrounding this when the military is known for over-documenting everything. When we look at the physical evidence, the sort of both from what can be gleaned from the archive but also from the material world of Fort Davis, the event took place in closely packed officers' quarters. We're talking about quarters that are like no more than eight to 10 feet apart from one another. Supposedly at two in the morning there's screams and breaking glass and shouts and warnings to not move. Someone should have heard. No one reports anything. There's this absolute silence. Andrews in his letter makes it clear that the window that Talaferro was supposedly trying to break through, the sash was nailed shut and the letter has this weird description about him breaking out pieces of glass and systematically removing them from the pain while ignoring the shouts of Mrs. Kendall to cease and desist and go away and that he's ignoring that and then sticks his head through the pain. There's no discussion of the fact that the pains of glass are this big. You might get your head through there. You're not getting your body through there. The first account makes it sound like he's in the house. So this whole weird thing about the cap falling in the house is to try to make some sort of argument that he's entered. No one talks about the fact that he was wearing a cap. When they use the word cap in these military things, they're talking about the foraging cap. Well, guess what's on your foraging cap? Your insignia with your regiment and your company. This guy was in uniform, at least enough uniform to try to be self-identifying. And then his shot in the head, on his knees. So he's wearing a cap. No one also talks about the fact that officers rose right by one of the guard stations and that Talaferro shows up in the records in court martial interviews as a witness because he's been on guard duty at two in the morning when this is supposed to have taken place. No discussion of that. Mrs. Kendall supposedly fired a revolver over her sleeping children at the man's head from across the room. Revolvers at this time are notoriously inaccurate. That's why it was safe to have duels. You go a certain distance from one another and you're unlikely to hit your target. That's why they were not popular weapons. So we're supposed to believe that this woman who's terrified yelling for, go away, please go away. But not loud enough that anyone hears her is shooting at someone with such deadly accuracy that the ball goes through the top of his head while he's on his hands and knees with his head through a window. It's problematic. Do we agree this is sort of problematic? It gets more problematic. Remember in the second quote, PD and Talaferro are tied in that one passage. Talaferro comes after the court martial Martin PD. Well, the reason that the historians link the two cases isn't because they've done all this research to find, oh there was this court martial and then there's this event. The letter that Andrews writes is explicitly to the adjudant of Texas describing the Talaferro case so that he can argue that the overturning of the sentence originally given to PD be reinstated. It's a letter to convince the adjudant to change the sentence in another case. None of the historians have talked about the intent of this document and why it was written. It's to try to get poor Martin PD a longer sentence after the adjudant had reviewed the court martial and said it's not clear there was any attack here. This witness is really unreliable and the defense testimony indicate is supported by the witnesses. So he overturned it but felt he still had to give a year sentence to keep the fort from freaking out. The officers. So in this letter that Andrews writes he does things like change the race of the woman who is attacked by PD into a white woman even though she was a black woman. She couldn't have been married to a black man. The census shows she was a black woman. I've got her traced. But he changes the race to make it a more provocative incident. So he refers in the letter that several other officers didn't believe that there were rapists roaming the forts and that these were exaggerated. Interestingly enough Andrews has Lieutenant Kendall whose wife is implicated in the Tal Farrow case removed from a court martial of the PD trial by having him court marshaled for drunkenness. And in the transcript of that court martial Kendall explicitly says he's being set up by the commanding officer. He's being set up so that because of other events and he's evasive about what it is. But the big thing that happens as a result of him being court marshaled is he's removed from the court martial of Martin PD. One of the defendants witnesses, one of PD's witnesses was Captain David Scooley who also seems to have had very progressive attitudes towards his troops and testifies that PD was a great soldier. He's known him for years and he was a great soldier. So taking Kendall off of the court marshal changes the outcome of the PD case, which then is overturned. Interestingly, so overall, Andrews seems very invested in the idea of black rapist. So let's go back to the historians. They also seem to be very invested in the narrative of the black rapist. So let's look at their editing. So Colonel Andrews emphasized that Mary officers were reluctant to leave their families only for any purpose after dark and then they've omitted something and start their quote next. And that these feelings were shared by Mary and listed men. The part that's been cut out of the letter is basically, and the black soldiers come into my office with tears rolling down their cheeks begging not to be put on patrol. It's over the top, crazy. It's like, it's a rhetorical flourish. The historians know enough that this is a rhetorical flourish, but they're not repeating it because to repeat it starts undermining the authenticity of the letter, right? You'll note in the first quote, the ball taking effect, that is the only piece of evidence that is actually quoted in that 1968. He summarizes the rest of it and embellishes, oh well in the investigation, there's no investigation, but creates this again, this authenticity in the narrative and the only part that is taken from the letter summarizing the surgeon's findings is that replication of the physical violence, black feminists call this a porna trope, is in keeping with lynching narratives that are popularly published in newspapers throughout the post reconstruction Jim Crow period where there's this pornographic pleasure in recounting the violence against black bodies. And it's the only part that he quotes directly, the rest of it he summarizes to create this conclusion of his that neither the officers nor their families doubted that his intentions had been rape. Most interesting to me, all of them ignore the witness testimony in the PD case, PD's defense is that he's asleep in his quarters and multiple witnesses say yeah, he was asleep in his quarters which he happened to share with his first sergeant. So he's behind a locked door sleeping with his first sergeant, John Sample, private Martin PD. This is highly irregular and when there's sort of question about the witnesses are uncomfortable, like well why would PD be sleeping in his first sergeant's quarters and the answer is a very evasive, well he's the only one who had a reason to. Those of you who are at our bag lunch on Fort Davis a couple years ago know that one of the things we found was an Antonist watch fob suggesting that there was some male relationships happening at Fort Davis. Happens to be right next to where Sample's quarters were. Everyone's so invested in the rapist narrative that they don't explore the other interesting social things that might be indicated. So why has this come the way it has? Why is there such an investment? Not just in this racializing narrative but why has the letter of Colonel Andrews become this important piece of literature supporting this? So this is where I wanna turn to Mel Chen and her discussions of animacies. So animacy is a term that she takes from linguistics that denotes the quality of liveness, sentience or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical often synatic consequences as a tool that can help us theorize current anxieties, not anxieties, around the production of humanness in contemporary times particularly with regard to humanities partners in definitional crime. So animacy is this idea that things are ordered. Animacy hierarchies recognizes that people attribute in every culture different degrees of liveness to different things. With in human hierarchies, people are the top. The most living are people. Then there's animals, plants, inanimate objects in different ways. And one of the really important parts about Chen's work is that they recognize that these hierarchies are culturally constructed. There's not a universal hierarchy that matches every human society. Every group produces these hierarchies recognizing the variety of liveness. So how does this inform the Talaferro case? I would argue that some documents are more lively than others. And that a document written by a white officer had greater resonance, had greater sentience for historians, for white historians, than either the silenced words of a white woman or the dead body of a black man. And that the primacy given to white produced documents has created this really uncomfortable moment in the historiographic record. Now turning to that, I wanna talk explicitly about some of the structures of archives that I encountered over the summer working at the National Archives that also speak to racializing assemblages and practices that promote the silence of some voices over others. One of the racializing narratives that shapes all archival research on African Americans is this idea and particularly the military. There were few sources written by black soldiers, therefore we must write about them through the eyes of the white officers who led them. Well, the archeology provided plenty of evidence of objects used to write with. So the question becomes, where do the things they write end up? And that was one of my questions going into the archive. And I found lots of structural reasons that voices disappear. One of the primary reasons is that there are curation and historiographic practices that absolutely silence black voices. Let's go back to Sergeant Sample. Sergeant Sample, really interesting guy. This is a picture of him from about 1864 when he was part of the US color troops. And he actually did a whole lot of interesting things over his career in North Carolina. In 1867, he was sent on court martial duty escorting prisoners from Goldsboro to Raleigh. When he got to the post at Raleigh, his black soldiers and himself were told that there was no barracks that they could sleep in because there were white soldiers there. So they were put into the guard house to sleep and was also told that they couldn't eat in the mess hall while the white soldiers were there. Sample was irritated about this and he sent a letter to the commanding officer for the department and wrote that, I'm not asking for equality, which was a very low-determined term at the moment, but I am asking that my soldiers be treated as they deserve as military soldiers in the US military. The commanding officer for the department wanted more information and starred this whole, blah, from the, that's a scientific term. Caused this whole uproar from the white officers who ran the rally post, denying it and different testimony and letter writing and throughout it, the officers in Sample's direct chain of command said this is an honorable man. He's as good as any of the white officers I've worked for and it basically, the rally was chastised for the way that they had treated the soldiers. But there's nothing about any of that that shows up in Fort Davis because military records are organized by posts. Posts have greater animacy in military structure than any individual people. So people get moved from post to post all the time. Sample served in Goldsboro, Rally, Ship Island, Mississippi, New Orleans, Jackson Barracks at the mouth of the Mississippi, Fort Clark, Fort Davis, Fort Concho, but his career becomes scattered and fragmented between those different spaces. And this is true for any of the black soldiers, with the difference being that for white officers, the letter sent becomes a really important category for organizing post records. So their voices float to the top of any post, but Sample's letters went to a different department and this happens a lot with black soldiers who are writing within the military. They often find that they have to jump over different levels of hierarchy to try to get heard because the people in their immediate chain of command are not listening to them. I've fallen way behind my thing. Court marshals are another body of records that that black voices both emerge from but are also curated in. So here is Sergeant Major William Henderson, the one on the right. In his court martial, he was accused of disrespecting a white officer and he ends up giving as his defense a whole history of his service in the military, starting from his enlistment in 1863 in the New York U.S. color troops and the honor with which he has served and how there's never been any problems with him and that, and what he wants to say is that the white officer is making a lie, this never happened, but he can't do that. So instead he recounts his history of honor. This is buried in a court martial case. In many instances, we have within court martial cases not just transcribed testimony, but people writing their own defenses to submit to the court so that they will not get confused under direct examination or other things. So you have these written documents but they're so black voices telling about events from their perspective, but hidden in court martial. Similarly, if there are any complaints or registers of disputing court martial cases, those letters, no matter where they're sent, also get stuck into court martial cases. So this is a letter from Private Allen who's protesting not the fact that he was convicted. He has no problem with that. His problem is that he was supposed to get sent to the Penitentiary, the Federal Penitentiary in Baton Rouge, and instead he has spent the last year still in Fort Davis in the guardhouse under very unhealthy conditions and under officers who he's pretty sure are treating him worse than he would be treated in the Penitentiary. And at this point, this is the third letter he's written to the Secretary of War. So he's just jumping every rank and going right to the Secretary of War. And in this letter, he's getting frustrated because it's the third letter he's written. And he goes, so can you just check your records and see if you have a letter from a prisoner in Fort Davis because this is the third time I've written to you and I've got no response. And he says that he's pretty sure I think that our letters were broken open before they leave Fort Davis. So you can also get that sense of concern about rights being trampled on at the post level. That there is a greater chance of getting equality equal treatment later on. But perhaps, oh, so another example of a letter that comes from a black author that's hidden in the archive. This was in miscellaneous letters. Fort Davis, 1873, it's an anonymous petition to a general auger, Department of Texas, in support of someone who's being dishonorably discharged. So this is a letter from a black soldier, a non-commissioned officer who has served with this private saying that he's a good soldier. It's terrible that he's serving the sense, but seems terrible to dishonorably. That being discharged dishonorably is enough dishonor. It seems a shame to put him in jail as well. I've supervised him. He's a good guy. I've not seen this letter reproduced anywhere or even referred to. It's shoved in miscellaneous letters. So the sort of unthought about, uncatalogued. The most fruitful area for future research, however, are pensions. Pensions could be applied for by veterans of the frontier military and by the civil war vets. In this case, this is a letter. My dear wife, with the greatest of pleasure, I set myself to write you a few lines to inform you of my health, which I am well at this time present and hope that one of these few lines come due to you that they find you well as it goes on. This is in the pension application of the widow of Anthony Jackson. Anthony Jackson was literate. His widow was not. They met and married while they were enslaved, which meant there was limited legal documentation of their union. So to prove that she was his wife, as was required in the pension, she handed over a stack of letters that he had sent her. 21 letters dating from 1867 to 1871. Black soldier writing about his experiences first in North Carolina and the last one is from Texas at Fort Clark. Talk about why there aren't more in a second. She also, in her testimony, talks about a book that she has. And in this book on a blank page about middle of the book, the soldier recorded the date of our marriage, which I show you. The following memorandum, Alexandra, Virginia, December the 25th, 1862, I, Anthony Jackson, were married to Lucinda Day in the soldiers, and it's in the soldiers handwriting. And they match it to the letters. So when did the soldier buy this book, which bears the date as being copyrighted in 1864? This is a questionnaire. Oh, this must be fake, right? And she says, he bought it soon after the death of President Lincoln. We were both slaves when we married. And the title of the book is, Slavery, Its Sin, Moral Effects, and Certain Death, by Justice Kiefer. And it's a poem sermon. This is an extraordinary insight, right? Into the politics that motivated a man who then goes on to join the frontier army, buried in a pension request. The only reason it exists is because she successfully got the pension. So $36 a month. She applied earlier for a pension, and she didn't know what happened to that application, but she had sent off all of his later letters with that first application. So all of the most recent letters, including his time at Fort Davis, were sent with this earlier pension application, which the National Archives has a record of, but they discarded it because it was a failed pension. So I want you to just imagine all the primary documents related to Black family's lives that were discarded through this kind of curation policy. There is no index of which pensions have letters in them. And for Civil War documents, it's very common for Black soldiers to have letters submitted in widow's pensions. So to end this on a happy note, let's think about the fact that Anthony Jackson, who died in 1875 through the power of his writing, was able to do one of the things he's very concerned about in those letters, providing for his wife, that the power of his words 20 years after his death allows him to continue to support his wife. His writing abilities were as able to trump animacy hierarchies that sorted Black men into the range of animals, and he was able to, through the legacy of his writing, take care of his family. That's an extraordinary testimony to the importance of literacy. But it also shows how some kinds of privileging of proof over other parts of proof is part of this racializing assemblage that undermined the legal recognition of Black unions. So just to finish up, in the last several minutes, I wanna talk about the ways that history-making is also embedded in landscapes. So this is an illustration done by an officer in 1857 of the area around Fort Davis, Olympia Creek. This was a site of an Apache village before the fort was settled. Early fort livers talk about finding squash plants and other remnants, other testimony to the previous occupation there. This is Fort Davis, as it is today. It's an unincorporated town that has emerged in several different historical moments. This is the post up here, which is now part of, this is the green is the NPS site. This is the Davis State Mound, which park, a state park that goes across it. This is the main strip. The original part of the town, white settlers, settled on this area, immediately adjacent to the post. There was an area known as Chihuahua, which in the earlier records is described as four miles away. So about here coincides with the area of the Musquez Ranch. Two years later, it's described as one mile away. So this is this area here. Today Chihuahua refers to all of this part of the opposite side road of the post with some people recognizing this little part up here is Newtown, being founded late in the post history. So this is a palimpsest of all these different settlement times. Of interest is this area here, which was not part of Chihuahua, but was called by people who live there Bentleyville. And you'll see Bentley Drive here. Bentley was a buffalo soldier who after his enlistment was over settled in the area, married a Mexican woman and raised a family there and a number of black soldiers settled with their Latina wives and raised families in this area and their descendants are still there. Let's go back to the idea of liveness. 1961 is when the NPS takes over the site. Fort Davis, the antebellum part of the site, you can see the ghosts of it. When NPS took over the site, the way that you interpret historic places is you reconstruct buildings. The second post had much more liveliness to it. It was much more alive, much more visible, easier to reconstruct. NPS decides to reconstruct the second post. In doing so, they're privileging inadvertently the black history of the post. This was not necessarily popular with the people who wanted the site in the first place. So here at the courthouse of Fort Davis, 1963 as the NPS site is being developed, you have a marker put up to Old Fort Davis CSA. That's Confederate States of America for those of you who haven't lived in the South. Confederate supply point and frontier outpost on Great Military Road from San Antonio to El Paso, 1861 to 1862, after surrendered by U.S. Army occupied by detachments, Second Texas Malad rifles, Apache's ambush, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a memorial to Texans who served in the Confederacy, erected by the state of Texas, 1963. They did this with federal money. The federal government gave out money to the states to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. Texas took a lot of that money and put up monuments to the CSA on the grounds of courthouses. So let's just think about that for a moment. Now, you may argue because there weren't really many blacks and still left in Fort Davis, this is not a violent object. But you have to remember that Texas is also part of the Southwest that was involved in what's been called Juan Crow or discrimination against Mexican-American citizens in the same ways that black citizens were discriminated against. So you put a object dedicated to a government, dedicated to white supremacy on the grounds of a supposedly neutral space. And that's what you get. But you need to also think about the location of the courthouse. The monument is right here. And this whole area is Bentleyville. So the object is also placed in a way that it is countering this other population. Now, in 2014, Lon Taylor, a former Smithsonian curator approached the residents of Bentleyville suggesting that a marker be put up to commemorate George Bentley and the other black soldiers that lived there. And the descendants said, no, thank you. And to Marfa Public Radio, several of the descendants talked about memories of being labeled as black when they were children and being told to get off of public sidewalks, of trying to hide that ancestry. So what we see is this not only privileges a particular white history, the fear of violence that it provokes keeps this population from even wanting to talk about their history. So there is no marker to Bentleyville. There are no commemorative markers to that occupation. So this is some of the liveness and violence that objects can do artfully deployed. So when people talk about these kinds of monuments being heritage, they're not about heritage. They are about political violence. So what I want to end with is just urge us as we are in this very unique position as archeologists to really be able to think about the strategic deployments of the past and the present but also the ways that the things that we create may be utilized or used. Du Bois in writing about the Souls of Black Folks talks about the idea of double consciousness, that any person of color needs to move through a landscape being continuously aware, not just what they're doing but how someone else may read what they're doing, that you have to be constantly aware that you are a racialized body and a racialized landscape. And what we need to do is we need to employ a kind of triple consciousness where we think not just about how the people we study were thinking about the ways that they moved and the ways they were perceived but the ways that we're perceiving what they did. So we don't write things like the Tal Faro narrative or we don't simply agree that these objects are simply historical moments. So thank you for your attention. Stay away from the helicopters. But I'm happy to answer questions. Yeah, I think it's a great point you raised about the documents and the whole nature of how they're curated. One that I haven't really thought too much about that makes great sense. And not only in terms of dealing with African-Americans and all sorts of other populations. So when the curating facilities themselves today, you know, like the National Archives in Bangkok, are they trying to basically, do they recognize that as an issue? Are they actually trying to do something so that scholars can begin to use those collections in a much more sophisticated way? So the National Archives is very much dependent on funding. Before the president administration came in, they were involved in scanning the compiled service records of black civil war troops. So those things were scanned and are now searchable on online platforms like Ancestry and Fold Three for military records. So they were working their way through and the US Civil War records are so important to people. And it's not a, it doesn't have the same sort of layers of concern that the frontier has. So there's also the politics of the frontier and that one of the other, I didn't talk about one of the other narratives that comes up in black frontier history is the sort of apologetics where, well, it seems bad that the black people were like fighting the Indian people and this is really uncomfortable for us to write about. And it puts a certain kind of narrative on there that has kept research from, so that one of the major works actually starts with this anecdote about how uncomfortable was talking to her young son about the fact that, yeah, these black soldiers were chasing native Americans and that makes it really uncomfortable, so let's talk more about these other histories instead of that there were actually other kinds of motivations and things that were happening. And one of the things that the Civil War pension letter show is that the motivation of black soldiers serving in the military in the Civil War was not to preserve the union. It was to end slavery. And when you consider the fact that slavery is still happening actively in the Southwest and one of the first things that the 9th Cavalry does when they get out at Fort Davis is they free two Mexican boys who had been enslaved by the Comanche. So the Southwest also becomes a space to continue fighting slavery. So there are different motivations and things that are going on with, and it's one of the only employment places where they've already won the right for equal pay. So there's a lot going on there, but it's one of those other narratives that squelches, but also means there hasn't been as much effort to trying to scan pensions and these other things. So if you wanna see a pension or even understand if it exists, you have to go there and find the records and pull them in the Confederate monuments. The arguments that are being made right now are that these represent historical markers that are commemorating heritage. Yeah, not in the way they're deploying it. They're saying that we need to keep these things up because Southern history is important too. There's a difference between Southern history and monuments put on courthouses that are meant to disenfranchise certain populations from legal rights. So that monument, no, it's a political tool that we're now reading as heritage. It's a political deployment of the past and that's why I don't think, these aren't simple conversations, but when the state of Texas decides to commemorate only the Confederate soldiers, when there were multiple Union soldiers who served in the Civil War from Texas and ignores all the Black soldiers who served in the Union War from Texas in the Civil War, when they take federal money given to the state and put up a marker on a courthouse, which is supposed to be a space where equal rights are guaranteed and they put that thing up there on the courthouse. So if you walk by to the back door, which is the only place the Mexican and the Black residents were allowed to go in, you're doing something violent there. That's no longer about, that's no longer about, oh look, it's great, we had this history too. Okay, it's part of the heritage, but if we're gonna do that, we need to recognize that these have violent connotations and maybe we don't want to recognize objects of violence as being shared heritage. I say take the thing down. Put it somewhere else and contextualize it that way. It doesn't need to continue to be doing the violence that it's doing. Yeah, don't, I mean, some of them could be melted down. They're all replicas of the same thing, but yeah, put them somewhere where we're not trying to put up a signpost explaining in the same context where it's doing the same violence. Oh, this is a moment. That would be my argument. Annie? I was kind of flagged by one of those first quotes that you put on that call the racializing assemblage of visual modality because I think one of the interesting interventions that doing a historical, archaeological intervention that you're working with could do for that understanding of animacies in archives is the other embodied or like multi-sensory or, you know, like a personal sensory soapbox. Modalities that are at play in the same assemblages and the way that assemblages, and you did it. So I'm wondering if you're thinking about that as like an explicit facet of the research in terms of, because the monument is both visual but it's in a landscape so it's a spatial structure. I've got a lot more to say about the way that the park is interpreting particular spaces too and choices that they've made with CERN. Yeah, yeah. It became clear to me the more I worked with this that I couldn't separate stuff out and just talk about an archeological past that I had to present it. Part of that archival thing, like both the content are probably the quality of the keeping of those records in a sort of, not just their visual quality but probably their materiality contributes to that. That's how much of it gets disappeared or those structural things that. And the, because I'm not talking today about the past of Fort Davis in terms of, there's also very clear evidence of animacy hierarchies at play in the past, you know, past understandings and my asthma theory flows into that really nicely in terms of debates about health that emerge between black soldiers, post-surgeons and white officers. There's a real understanding of the power of bad air to affect health and the need to actively combat that and the animacy of the liveliness of air and how the layout of the fort was not helping or the ways that overcrowding or failure to come up with standard living quarters. My brain is, it's going out. U.A. else? I want to add more broadly to the stories that we tell about human evolution, the relationship, racialization of ancestral roots. Oh yeah. In the case with the way in which, for example, the ender tolls have more than depicted and the best relationship of interesting examples is of course the way in which people always have assumed that the ender tolls were dark skin, which of course, given that the modern humans came out of Africa, the ender tolls were probably very light skin compared to the incoming and there's the wonderful novel called Dance of the Tiger which was written and about several different groups. They called it the Browns of Blacks and the White, the Blacks of the incoming modern humans and when Steven J. Gould wrote a forward to the book, he expressed himself that when they started talking about the Blacks, he assumed they were talking about the ender tolls and then he taught himself in our racialized stereotypes and about these different analyses. If you actually could explain them. Nice. I'll have to check that out, yeah. Yeah, right, yeah. Cool. Thank you. I hope I answered your, at least through my filter. But yeah, it is a heritage. My question is about the positioning of it. All context, it's all archeological, all context. Thank you. Thank you.