 Hello, everyone. Welcome to diversity in Florida preservation. I'm Adrienne Burke, principal planner with Miami-Dade County's Office of Historic Preservation. While we wish we were here with you in Miami, we're delighted today to share some of the exciting preservation efforts going on around the state of Florida. Historically, the land we refer to today as the Miami area is on the traditional homelands and territories of the Tequesta, their ancestors and the Seminole. The state is home to the Seminole, Mikosuki, Muskogee and Chokta, and to individuals of many other Native groups. We acknowledge the historical and continuing impacts of colonization on Indigenous communities, and we will continue to work to be more accountable to the needs and history of Indigenous peoples. We encourage all attendees of Pass Forward to learn more about the Indigenous people in your community and their way of life. Again, welcome. Today's agenda consists of short presentations from our guest speakers. The session is intended to get you thinking about diversity in historic preservation in a couple of ways, using Florida's stories as an example. One is to be more inclusive of the stories we tell and the histories and sites we seek to preserve and promote. We can and should all work together to tell a more diverse and inclusive narrative through our work in historic preservation. The other way is to think about historic preservation itself in a more diverse way. Preservation is increasingly moving beyond the building. How can we think about preservation as more than just architecture? Today's speakers represent academia, nonprofits, archaeology, and government. They will share examples of the above through their work in storytelling, working with communities, highlighting diverse history, shifting organizations internally, and ways to think differently about local government preservation. I'll introduce each speaker before we get started, and I, or before they get started, I should say, and I'm happy to introduce our first speaker, Reverend Houston R. Cypress. Reverend Houston R. Cypress, he, they, is a two-spirit poet, artist, filmmaker, and environmentalist from the Otter Clan of the Mikosukee tribe. Art, conflict management, facilitation, multimedia communications, gender diversity, and spirituality are priorities he contributes via local, regional, and international organizations. He invites you to join him in creating portals between worlds. Welcome, Reverend Cypress. Thank you, Adrienne, and thank you friends here at the conference. It's really an honor to be with you here and to share some of my perspectives and some of the work that I've been doing out here in South Florida in the watershed that's known as the Greater Everglades. And just to say just a little briefly a bit more about myself, I happen to have a non-profit that I operate with my colleagues. It's known as Love the Everglades Movement, and I also serve my community, the Mikosukee tribe, as a member of their Environmental Advisory Committee. Aside from that, some of the other things that I appreciate are the arts. I have an artistic practice, but I think that my artistic practice and my spiritual practice kind of embraces all the things that we're going to talk about today. And another one of my priorities in my work is gender diversity. So I wanted to talk briefly about how environmental conservation work can support and can be considered as historic preservation in a way, and how this is linked to the land-based learning that we're conducting out here as Indigenous folks in South Florida. And this is from my perspective as a member of the Mikosukee tribe and a member of the Otter family. So I hope that you all know that you're always welcome to come and visit me here in South Florida whenever you're ready. But I wanted to begin by talking about the sanctity and the sacredness of the landscape. It's the perspective and practice of respecting the entire landscape as a sacred site. It's not just the partial that has been delineated or delimited. One cannot just say that, oh, the area within this border is sacred and everything else can be desecrated. No, it's that the totality of the landscape is alive. The totality of the landscape has dignity, especially in its integrity as a functioning ecosystem. It has resilience. So when we support the cycles of nature, we see the incredible bounce back of the species and the biodiversity. But the sacredness is also added to because of our own human activities on the land, because we have these places as historical sites for historical events, whether those are the conflicts that we fought or the peace that we have made or the ancestors that we have buried. Maybe we're looking into things archaeologically. Maybe we're celebrating our religious or spiritual events or gardening or even collecting plant medicines. These are some of the sacred activities that imbue the landscape with this special feeling and special appreciation. And down here in South Florida and across the peninsula, we're engaged in a massive restoration project. And it so happens that the Everglades restoration process is threatening some of our sacred sites. Throughout the Greater Everglades, we're talking about an area that spans from central Florida all the way down to Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay. This restoration project is reconfiguring the land, trying to put things back, improve water quality, and also provide for our own activities as people and protecting plants and animals, our friends, the plants and animals. But when we look at some of these restoration projects, these are threatening sites that the indigenous communities respect highly. People like the Seminole. And there's one project in particular that's referred to as the EAA Reservoir. The Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir because there happens to be a site of cultural concern. What we mean is a burial site that is smacked at in the middle of the proposed project site. So you can see how we have to be very careful in what we're doing and also navigate and coordinate with other jurisdictions and other sovereignties like the indigenous communities. And this goes back to that reconciliation is vital to improving knowledge. Since 2009, we happen to be in an American context of reconciliation. That's when the United States actually apologized to the Native peoples for the troubled history that we have endured as people on this land on Turtle Island. What we need to do is strengthen our relationships with our indigenous neighbors, our indigenous hosts, and work together on these important issues because among the decision makers in my community, people like the elders, the voters, and the elected officials, there's a legacy of historical trauma caused by colonization and policies that is manifesting today as a distrust of state and federal governments. But there's a positive side to this because this kind of historical trauma can also lead to innovations. And that's what our indigenous communities are doing, especially in the realms of the sciences, especially in governance and the arts. For example, in my own Mikusuki community, we have our own version of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. We have the Mikusuki EPA, and they happen to be leaders in the Everglades sciences. And the scientific knowledge that we're producing is definitely contributing to the kind of preservation work that we're doing here on the land itself because knowledge is embedded in the land. But how do we access that knowledge? Well, there's a couple of different techniques that we can use, a couple of different tools and analysis that we can deploy. On a personal and spiritual level, we can talk about deep listening and intuition. On a cultural level, we can talk about the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge, stories and legends and spiritual practices. But in a broader contemporary sense, we can also definitely use tools and analysis. And we're being taught by the land itself and by the many species that the land embraces. But the land is being threatened by so many of the negative outputs of our activities like agriculture, generating electricity, tourism, commerce, and even war. So that's why I'm talking about reconciliation here because this brings up environmental justice concerns. And that's one of the direct criticisms that Mikusuki folks have about the restoration process. So that talks about the strategies that we need to overcome political challenges because many communities across the United States, we're negotiating this polarized political landscape. Things like critical race theory and other perspectives are being demonized. And this is stifling the kind of critical and deep conversations that we have to have as communities. And it also limits the kinds of activities that we can engage in. Like what I mean is, how am I going to help people understand environmental racism that my community is suffering from if we can't even talk about this in our public institutions? Meanwhile, as all this is happening within our own people communities here in the Everglades, we are losing the Everglades tree islands. We're tracking the loss, the acreage of loss because of the mismanagement of water levels. And think about it this way, when the tree islands of the Everglades are dissolving, this is the same thing as the crumbling of a cathedral, a place of worship, a place where knowledge is embedded in the architecture of the natural growth of the trees, the plants that heal our communities. And so much of this traditional ecological knowledge is embedded, for example, in our Mikusuki language. When the language is threatened, the world is threatened. And it's kind of hard just to continue to speak our language when the world that we're describing is disappearing. So I think that an Indigenous Cosmovision, Indigenous languages and landscapes are another kind of history, another kind of epistemology, another opportunity for healing and friendship and reconciliation. And I feel like these are things that ought to be embraced by the broader community of historic preservation and beyond. But friends, I want to invite you to come visit and see what we're talking about. And I hope to see you soon somewhere here deep in the greater Everglades. Thank you for your time. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Reverend Cyprus. That's a great challenge and a wonderful invitation. I'm going to take you up on it, certainly. So thank you so much. Our next speaker is Dr. Brittany Brown. Dr. Brittany Brown is from Jacksonville, Florida. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Florida with a major in anthropology. While attending the University of Florida, she completed her undergraduate fieldwork at Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville. She received her Master of Arts and her PhD in anthropology from the College of William & Mary. Dr. Brown is an American historical archaeologist. Her regional areas of specialization include the African American Southeast and the British Caribbean. Her current research interests include post-emancipation era mortuary practices among African Americans in Jacksonville, Florida and maritime archaeology. Welcome, Dr. Brown. Thank you all for having me. So today I want to talk to you all about preserving African American cemeteries. So in written history, African American people often appear in legal documents like wills, inventory, or in newspapers as fugitive runaways or targets of anti-Black violence. It's often a perspective of enslavers that get to shape the written histories of African American people. And this is what makes preservation of the material culture a crucial part of understanding who Africans and their descendants were beyond what is written about them in history. And I believe that archaeology is a field that is uniquely suited for this endeavor. However, the field of archaeology didn't include however the field of archaeology didn't include a history of African American heritage until 1968. So the first African American historical site to be explored through archaeology is Kingsley Plantation which is situated in Jacksonville, Florida. And it's named for the Kingsley occupation of 1834. And the plantation was owned and operated by Zephanai Kingsley and his West African wife Anna. Together they held roughly 60 captive African people. And today the park is a national site. So everything from the building's big house to the tabby cabins that served as captive African dwellings were are perfectly preserved and you can visit them today. But I think that there's something else, an archaeological feature that is also worth highlighting and that is the captive African cemetery. So the captive African cemetery is situated also on the plantation and cemeteries in and of themselves are tangible records of history that have been created and shaped directly by Africans and their descendants. And historic cemeteries encapsulate centuries of African American history and indigenous African knowledges. They are what Toni Morrison calls cultural sites of memory. They also give us data. So they also offer isotope signatures which offer insights about African origins, birthplaces, migration patterns. The bones can tell us a lot about the causes of death and the age of people at the time of their death. They also offer a bevy of artifacts, handmade headstones, painted tombs, white and reflective objects, and broken pottery as well as biblical iconography are some of the things that we can expect to find when we walk into a cemetery and also landscapes. African American communities use shells and landscape features like yucca plants and oak trees to mark burials. Those are some of the landscape features that are used in cemeteries commonly throughout the southeast. And what we are seeing is that African Americans are using African knowledge systems to navigate shape and create these burial spaces in the North American world more broadly and that their culture that they're bringing with them from Africa into the New World is literally embedded into the landscape. Each preservation project for me I believe should foreground descendant community voices. They should actively involve the community from start to finish and ensure transparency which means making research objectives going into the project and the data that comes out of the project accessible to community members. Practitioners have to work actively with communities if they want to preserve structures, artifacts and sites which also includes landscape features. So while there's a myriad of ways that we can do this I think that perhaps one of the best ways we can do this is establishing a federal policy. So establishing policy to not only protect the spaces and burials but that also outlines a code of ethics for dealing with descendant communities. One of the things that I've thought deeply about is modeling this after the Native American Protection and Repatriation Act also known as NAGPRA that would require practitioners working in African American historic graveyards to consult with descendant communities as it relates to human remains and other cultural items. Protecting and planning for the discovery of African American human remains and other cultural items especially if they're at some point going to be removed from the site. Identifying and reporting all African American human remains and other cultural items held in collections currently and giving notice prior to repatriating or transferring human remains or other cultural items. However establishing policy for cemeteries for African American people also means protecting the environment. So the final resting place of captive Africans and African American heritage sites more broadly stretches beyond the terrestrial landscape and into our world's oceans and so underwater archaeology has become a new frontier for African American archaeology and nevertheless like terrestrial projects these maritime archaeology projects will require that we consult communities protect our oceans protect our landscapes and preserve our material culture but also enlist and work to enlist the next generation of cultural heritage stewards in order to tell our stories. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Brown both your presentation and Reverend Cypress's presentation certainly are doing what we wanted to do with this presentation which was think about preservation beyond the typical things that we as historic preservation practitioners think about so the environment the ocean this is really amazing so thank you so much Dr. Brown. With that we will turn to our next speakers. Ennis Davis is a senior planner with Alfred Benes and company a civic activist dedicated to improving communities. Ennis is also the vice president of membership services and community outreach for the Florida chapter of the American Planning Association. He's a Florida trust for historic preservation trustee and chair of the Florida trusts 11 to save committee a groundwork Jacksonville board member author of award-winning books reclaiming Jacksonville co and brother's the big store and images of modern America Jacksonville. He's also co founder of online media publications that Jackson mag.com and modern cities.com Ted Johnson is a park ranger who has served 20 years with the national park service. He's currently the community engagement specialist at Timokwan ecological and historic preserve in Jacksonville Florida. Throughout his career he's developed numerous African-American history and cultural related projects designed to ensure that more diverse stories are included in the national history narrative. He works closely with the Gullagic cultural heritage corridor commission and other partners to engage culturally diverse communities throughout the southeast including Cosmo a gateway community in Jacksonville that neighbors the national park. He's been instrumental in numerous collaborative efforts to preserve and promote cultural heritage throughout the corridor and beyond telling the story together. I'm glad to be here today. My name is Ennis Davis and when I start my these types of presentations off I always like to give a little homage to my ancestors of the past because without their sacrifices I wouldn't be where I'm at today to even be able to participate in this program. With that being said I am an urban planner and a sixth generation Floridian. I'm also the vice president of membership and outreach for the American planning associations Florida chapter and a trustee for the Florida trust historic preservation. And also I happen to be a Gullagic descendant and so this is a great presentation that I'm honored to be a part of. So you may say you know who are the Gullagici? But the Gullagici are basically descendants of Central and West Africans that have traditionally lived along the low country the southeastern U.S. basically stretching from St. Augustine Florida to the south to Wimbledon North Carolina to the north and about 30 miles inland. Over time because of living in isolation for a number of decades this culture has retained significant portion of American I mean African American or African culture that has been integrated into the southeast and USA and is still pretty much present within our religious institutions arts and crafts architecture music and food throughout the low country area. In northeast Florida specifically there are a number of Gullagici communities both rural and urbanized but for the next few minutes we want to talk about and focus on the community Cosmo. So Cosmo was settled around 1877 by recently freed men and freed women and to sustain themselves many harvested oysters from the St. John's River as well as fish for mullet. In the second half of the 20th century Cosmo is a community that has been engulfed by suburban sprawl and today residents of the community are working to preserve the heritage and culture and history. So with that in mind in 2020 the Florida trust the story of preservation named the community of Cosmo to its left and the save list and really this was a part of an effort to bring awareness and to support the community's ongoing work to preserve and tell its story. So with that in mind I do want to go ahead and hand this presentation off to Ted Johnson of the National Park Service and Ted's going to highlight some of the ongoing work that has taken place in Cosmo community. All right thank you very much Anas and so yes I get my name is Ted Johnson. I'm the community engagement specialist here at Timaquan Ecological and Historic Preserve so a National Park Service site here in Jacksonville and we work very closely with the Galagici Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission so Anas has already clarified basically where that corridor exists and so it is a national heritage area so the commission works closely with the National Park Service sites along that corridor to help engage with these Galagici descendant communities in ways that can be mutually beneficial to help promote and preserve a Galagici cultural heritage. So as it turns out Cosmo is only about a mile or two from one of the major sites that we preserve and interpret here in the Preserve for Caroline. So I'm just going to showcase some of the the highlights of the collaborations that have been successful over the past three years that I've been working here at the Park and with the community. The community's preservation effort really was formally established in 2014 the Cosmo Historic Preservation Association that's now known as the Corporation and it is a 501C3 but it was established by Reverend Ethel Dolores Demps whom we see pictured here. She was a lifelong resident of Cosmo, so born raised. She did pass in 2017 but it was her passion to preserve and protect the memories that she had of growing Cosmo and so they can see here she has in the center there's a major design there that I think is meant to characterize what it is about the community that is significant in its resilience. The idea is the concept of educate, develop, and preserve. The cookbook that we see here is something that the community continues to keep in print as a part of their homage to Reverend Demps. One of her major goals was to establish a community park that not only preserved the natural environment so the foods could experience and enjoy that and benefit from that but also preserve the culture and the heritage and the history of the community of Cosmo and that came to fruition officially this year or this year. It is a park that's established by the city of Jacksonville known as Freedom Park so it also you can see that the layout there. It's also a park the park is shared to acknowledge veterans with PTSD but the idea here was with our work our collaboration with the community and the commission. One of the things that we did was and Anis also worked with this and he has worked with several as he said several of these initiatives and activities with the community. So we established a team to develop some signage interpretive signage and they're in the park that talk about not only the Gallagogy people but specifically the community of Cosmo and then as you can see community landmarks there in Cosmo that are significant and remain in some form or another. One of the ideas of the future is to hopefully kind of try to establish a Cosmo historic trail that folks can visit and learn more about these sites of significance through signage and then as you see there down the bottom right is a panel dedicated to Reverend Demps. So the the city had an official ribbon cutting dedication ceremony March 18th of this year and then the the next day the 19th of the community of Cosmo had a real throwdown it was the Cosmo heritage celebrations of all types of performances relating to Gallagogy cultures spoken word dance performances music by the provided by the McIntosh County shouters and then unique Jacksonville flavor performance was also included and that was under the umbrella of the Jacksonville Gallagogy Nation Community Development Corporation another group with whom we work that is an umbrella corporation that works for several other descendant communities here in Jacksonville. There is also working with the commission we developed a new brochure updated the brochure for the historic preservation now corporation so they utilize that when they go out to any of their outreach activities so that has served very well again this has really been a mutually beneficial relationship between Park Service and the community so not only do we assist in helping them to research some of their cultural heritage especially as it relates to the preserve itself but they are very willing to share with us various aspects of their cultural heritage so that we can share that with a much larger kind of global audience. So earlier this year we recorded several oral histories with elders of the community and those now live on the National Park Service meaning Temequan Preserves website. We also conducted some recordings and videos of the spiritual music of the community and this was conducted with one of the churches here in the community so we have about three or four songs that are available to hear also have a home on our website. Earlier this year the park received funding from the National Park Foundation to host a series of public events family events known as the junior ranger angler events and so these events are basically meant to to provide training for young anglers to learn about ethical angling and we also though incorporate a cultural aspect so not only do we demonstrate some of the traditional indigenous Temequan fishing techniques but the members of the community of Cosmo they come out and they demonstrate some of their traditional techniques and in the center you see the president of the Cosmo Historic Preservation Corporation Levi White and his mother next to him Daris she is also the the matriarch of the community and from my understanding she's the master fisher person there in the community they have really embraced this opportunity to bring and share more of their culture to a much wider audience. Earlier this year we also worked with a team from Auburn University they were already researching the impact and influence and activities of U.S. color troops here within the boundaries of the preserve then we realized that we would learn more by engaging the descendant communities so we reach out connected with not only the folks of Cosmo but then also nearby Lone Star many of the descendant communities have families that exist in several because they would you know marry and migrate especially those are in close proximity so we learned in researching the Lone Star Cemetery where we found several U.S. color troop markers that Levi again the president there of the Cosmo Association his and Daris's ancestor was not only a U.S. color troop's red excuse me veteran but he also was a prominent property owner who would share and donate property to the established community of Lone Star including the church itself connected to this cemetery. What I think has been most significant in maintaining the relationship is I make sure that I attend the community's monthly meetings and these meetings are a fantastic forum for the community to share you know new news and aspirations they have for preserving their cultural heritage and then we the park service and the commission can share opportunities to assist the community in doing that again in a mutually beneficial way resonates I think mostly with me is that at each meeting the community displays material culture that reinforces their devotion and dedication to the ancestors who are not only continually influential but are really significant in the resilience of the community and then just recently this past Saturday we worked reported with the the Florida public archaeology networks crypt which is the cemetery resource protection training and in that they instruct communities on how to properly care for their cemetery markers in a way that is also safe for the environment as well as the markers themselves and so there are about 30 different community members between both a Cosmo and Lone Star who participated this was conducted at the community's only really lasting cemetery historic cemetery Palm Springs and that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2020 and we just got word this past Monday that they received a grant that will enable them to establish an official National Register marker what I really want to share here in closing is that not only are there we see many more opportunities developed for preserving and promoting the the culture even through the commission's tourism alliance that's connected all along the corridor but also we're finding that students are interested in the culture we attended an African-American history writing kind of a competition students developed curriculum on various aspects of African-American history here in Watsonville and one of those was all about the nature and the roots of the Gullagichi culture so they're going to be continued opportunities to to work together collaborate with these descendant communities Cosmo and others to assist in continuing to promote the the Gullagichi culture and heritage and I look forward to continue to work with that and of those communities thank you very much and we'll turn to Frederick Frederick Mitner FAICP is the Historic Preservation Planner and CLG coordinator for the city of West Palm Beach Miss Mitner has designated districts and sites on the local National Register completed section 106 reviews and coordinated regulations for building size scale and mass including intensive public outreach components Miss Mitner is a trainer with the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions past president of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation and member of the Palm Beach County Historic Resources Review Board she enjoys working with property owners architects and developers to achieve viable preservation projects for commercial and residential uses welcome Frederick thanks Adrian I appreciate you including me in this a great panel and my focus is going to be on what we've done in West Palm Beach and a designation we completed last year in 2021 and it is the known as the HG rooster site at 823 Belvedere Road so I'm going to just briefly share that story and hopefully that will encourage other communities at the local preservation level at the regulatory aspect to really look at their criteria and open up some sites that maybe traditionally wouldn't have been designated so we do have a major east-west thoroughfare as you can see on the aerial there Belvedere Road and on it is the structure that if you saw it architecturally probably wouldn't really meet the level of integrity for the traditional architecture that we have in mind it was built in 1945 so it does meet at least that 50 year criteria but it didn't really meet anything else except for its very very important association with the LGBTQ community and the fact that it has been a safe space for gathering of members of the LGBTQ community and the philanthropy and the safe space that it has created throughout its continued use as a gay bar and so we were able to utilize our designation criteria which are embedded in our local land development regulations specifically A and B, A being the associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our city's history and associated with lives of persons significant in the city's past and so HG roosters being 50 years old and meeting those two criteria definitely met that it is significant for our community and we did have the findings of fact by both our historic preservation board as well as our city commission that again at 76 years old associated with the development of West Palm Beach as a diverse community that we're very proud of and it is the location of the oldest still operating gay bar in Palm Beach County and again associated with the safe community space so therefore our historic board and our city commission was able to designate it on our local register of historic places and we had really just some great support at these hearings from members of the community and the one thing though that has kind of come out of it opportunities and challenges that I just want to present and put out there for those listening is that of course the design review process we will not be regulating much in terms of design review perhaps the elements that are important to us are the entry that's on the side the high windows and those were because of privacy and originally when there was some altercations when the door was in the front it was relocated towards the back for again that privacy and so those would be elements that are integral to the use but we wouldn't be regulating paint color which we don't anyway or any other architectural element the other opportunity that has come upon us because of this designation is the building exempt some building codes the site did suffer from a fire and the owners want to rebuild a significant portion of it and they would not have met some of our zoning criteria for landscaping and parking and other measurements and we are able to exempt some of those because our Historic Preservation Board also serves as our zoning board of adjustments for historically designated structures so that's been an opportunity however there's been challenges too the challenges with the wonderful owners in terms of explaining what a historic designation means and that you'll still need to meet other code criteria we can't exempt you from sprinklers and other life safety requirements and so just delineating what you know a designation means and what benefits it comes with and also explaining to other property owners why perhaps architecturally this use or the site may not be regulated to the same level as theirs may be and that the criteria are different so those are some challenges that we do have with the site but we are really happy to have added it to our local register making it our 47th individually designated site and we're really open to designating sites that really encompass our broader community thank you thank you Fred Rieck and I believe we think that this is the first site in Florida that's been locally designated specifically for its context with the LGBTQ plus community is that correct that's my yes that's my understanding yeah yeah so hopefully it's the first of many certainly a history that still needs to be explored in Florida a lot more so thank you you're a great example on West Palm thanks all right so we will turn to our next speaker Sarah Cody Sarah Cody is the historic preservation chief for Miami-Dade County in this role she administers the county's preservation program for 24 municipalities and our unincorporated communities with the background and landscape architecture Sarah aims to proactively protect the county's diverse resources through the lens of cultural landscape preservation given the expansive physical jurisdiction here in Miami-Dade Sarah's work touches on resources that exemplify the county's unique history and development from its agricultural lands and early 20th century pioneer homes to segregation air motels and mid-century modern neighborhoods she and her staff incorporate important community issues in the preservation work such as equity and inclusion affordable housing and resiliency welcome Sarah thank you for that intro Adrian and as Adrian referenced our team at Miami-Dade County she is a very integral member of our team at the county so thank you for you know putting this together and today I'm going to talk to you about diversity and inclusion in Miami-Dade County's historic preservation program so when we talk about the history of formal historic preservation in the U.S. you know most of the early grassroots preservation leaders were white women focusing on telling the stories of white male history the majority of the historic preservation framework that we still use today was established before the Civil Rights Act during Jim Crow era segregation before movements for women and LGBTQ plus rights and you know of course I think as most of us know this formal preservation movement it's really not inclusionary of voices outside of a white privilege perspective and has largely ignored efforts of other communities and the emphasis here on formal is really because you know this is what is traditionally recognized and taught as the history of the preservation movement in the U.S. really this is the story that we tell about historic preservation in the U.S. but like much of our work it doesn't tell the full story it excludes stories like Mary Burnett Talbert and the National Association of Colored Women who worked on saving the Frederick Douglass House and excludes other stories that have either been lost or have been purposely not highlighted you know those are the stories of communities trying to preserve themselves in the face of structural racism and in the book edited by Erica Abrami social inclusion and historic preservation she says marginalized communities have always taken place based collective action in resistance to state backed oppression but these efforts are largely not seen as preservation they're not recognized as part of this formal historic preservation movement and they're not recognized as people trying to preserve their communities so now we have to ask ourselves what should we be doing to proactively tell this fuller story so let's look at a couple um preservation stats real quick of the 95 000 sites on the national register only eight percent focused on women or racial or ethnic minorities and of that eight percent only two percent tell the stories of african-american sites less than six percent of the national park service employees are black and we have equally low representation in the fields of archaeology architects and engineers and professional preservationists um data at the state and local levels really varies it either doesn't exist or it's not easily accessible so in our office we did an audit in 2020 of the data that was available so of the 1844 national register sites only four percent deal with sites related to african-american or black history four percent related to ethnic heritage one point five percent related to women's history and inconclusive data related to sites associated with lgbtq plus history when we look specifically at my mid-eight county and our demographics the 2019 demographic estimates show that our community is majority hispanic or latinx it's uh 69.4 percent and then 16.7 percent african-american 51 percent women and 6.8 percent lgbtq plus now when we did an audit on our own historic sites um and again this was done in 2020 so we do have a few more designations since then that will be including when we update our audit but at the time we had 188 designated sites um we had 24 you know close to 25 percent related to indigenous history um so we're doing okay there that's because we've always had a very robust archaeological program at the county but you can see for instance if we look at that our community is almost 70 latinx we've one percent of our designations that address that history so we're not doing a good job of representing our community so what can we do about this um and these are some of the things that we're focusing on in my mid-eight to really center our preservation program in equity we can broaden the concept of historic preservation beyond the building we can proactively identify more diverse sites for potential listing or other preservation strategies aside from designation uh evaluate and update existing designations to tell the fuller story of the sites prioritize future survey work for historically excluded sites and neighborhoods conduct community outreach and engagement encourage diverse board membership and staff identify local partners that you can work on these initiatives with we are very fortunate we have a very active and engaged non-profit in mind the county called date heritage trust and we work with them a lot and also ensure ongoing education around these issues for staff and board members another thing you can do is identify advantages in your ordinance you just heard from pred rick that they use their ordinance to be able to designate the first site in the state related to lgbtq plus history so in my mid-eight county our ordinance is a really big advantage for us we don't have a specific number of designation criteria that must be met oftentimes you see in local ordinances you know maybe you'll have seven criteria an ordinance says oh to the else really have to meet three out of seven or two out of five or whatever we have only you only have to meet one criteria and then on top of that our very first criterion is incredibly broad it says you have to be associated with distinctive elements of the cultural social political economic scientific religious prehistoric paleontological or architectural history that have contributed to the patterns of history in the community the county south florida the state or the nation so that's incredibly broad and that's only one of our criterion we also have flexibility with the age of a structure if there's exceptional importance so we can designate sites that are less than 50 years old if our board determines that they are exceptionally important and we do have a local circuit court case that gives us precedence to say that our board members have the expertise to define and find when a site is of exceptional importance and we can also designate archaeological zones and sites so our ordinance in action the richam heights historic district and the liberty city elks lodge are two examples of recent designations based on cultural significance rather than architecture and these are designated with notable differences in the way that we regulate these resources and if you want to hear in more detail about those differences in regulation and how we approach those designations then look for another conference session titled do we need another standard and we'll be talking about those examples in more detail so moving forward in mimodate county what are we trying to do we do have a 10-year plan that really focuses on a lot of equity initiatives we are currently undertaking a diverse heritage survey that is looking to identify neighborhoods facing planning challenges so intense redevelopment pressures gentrification climate gentrification as well as resources related to our historically excluded communities we're also including indigenous heritage as a starting point for local designation reports we're continuously identifying community outreach opportunities we're conducting a lot of outreach to municipalities throughout the county and then also internally to county planning and development services staff and we're making a lot more information accessible with an upcoming website update so that is a very very quick overview of some of the efforts that we're taking in mimodate county to really focus on equity in our preservation work and look at preservation as a community issue beyond just the building and feel free to reach out to our office if you want to discuss any of these initiatives or if you have any questions or anything thank you so much thank you sarah and thank you to your tiny assistant that was a fun treat and thank you for the shout out too as being part of the team it's a privilege and an honor to work with you in mimodate county it's really exciting to see all the initiatives we have going on so happy to be a part of the team and thank you and your assistant and with that we are going to turn to sarah miller sarah miller is the regional director for the northeast and east central centers of the florida public archaeology network hosted by flagler college in st augustine florida she received her master's degree in anthropology from east carolina university in 2001 where she developed archaeology education programs at tryon palace in newburn north carolina upon graduation from ecu miss miller supervised field and lab projects with public involvement for the kentucky archaeological survey as well as reviews reviewed compliance projects for the kentucky heritage council she currently serves on the board of directors as secretary for the society for historical archaeology chair of the society for historical archaeology's heritage heritage at risk committee chair of public outreach grant committee for the southeastern archaeological society statewide coordinator for project archaeology and serves on the editorial board for the journal of archaeology and education her specialties include historical archaeology archaeological education site stewardship heritage at risk advocacy and historic cemeteries welcome sarah i'm wonderful adrian i'm really excited to be with you today and the other panelist and talking about something that means so much of us is diversity and inclusion i am your archaeologist here to talk about how we can expand opportunities for learning and for outreach on historic preservation in our communities i work for the florida public archaeology network in the nutshell our unit exists to help protect the states buried it has their education and that education and outreach piece is really important but we also assist local governments which is how i met adrian and some of the other panelists as well as assist our state's division of historical resources some of the good things about archaeology is i feel like there's already automatic community interest in archaeology whether they're thinking of artifacts or ruins or things of the past archaeology is also a great way to look at people who are less documented than others in the historic record and we can find evidence of people who are in places that maybe erasure was an issue or they wanted that part of their past to disappear but luckily we can still go and take a look archaeologically and find evidence of past cultures and do a lot of work today with living communities as well so that could look like us doing throwing adult adults with kids at schools working with museums making posters making interpretive panels doing 3d digital technology it's it's a really wide open field of doing outreach with the community on the left is an example of us doing our coastal walks and having community conversations about heritage at risk so we have descendants we have stakeholders we have other people who are out on this lovely long walk with us to look at a site where people have lived for 6000 years the menorkans who are minority group were brought over as indentured servants they have an area of the site where they lived and also it was managed as a plantation so there about 90 enslaved people that lived on this peninsula so being able to take a walk and see it's not just a site it's not just a dot it's a whole peninsula a whole ecosystem that works together people are really interested in that and getting outdoors as well and we are very committed to our work in public schools and public libraries we had our group just wrap up with our summer library programs and that's always important to get out into the communities and offer free activities for them to participate and learn more about their heritage we're known for our cemetery resource protection training workshop the theme of that is what can we do to make sure human burial sites stay in place for a hundred years so we're getting people together to talk about how to manage cemeteries how to list a cemetery on the site file which is very important for protecting it the laws that apply to human burial sites and also how to monitor them how to keep an eye out for them year after year other activities related to cemeteries and I spend a lot of time on cemeteries because wherever there's people there's dead people so there's an opportunity everyone has to work with the community on historic cemeteries there's right now a florida historic cemetery inventory where people from the public can fill out a form or postcard let them know about a cemetery in their area make sure it's got its dot so we can help preserve and keep an eye on it through the state's official inventory and on the right there's about 1200 cemeteries in that map but that's probably only a fraction of what cemeteries are really there in florida and when we go to these sites we find a lot of these dots are not mapped in the right place and you can't manage what you don't know so getting people out to these cemeteries very engaging very good for the sites and good for the communities to be aware and again keep them there for another 100 years. I have an article if anyone wants to reach out to me on the building blocks of that CRIP program if you want to replicate it in your state or your area you're working in it's very adaptable and again the community is very interested in these kind of opportunities so getting them out there is great you know we often start in a community with cemeteries and then we'll extend to churches or community centers or other places that are important to them we'll look on the site file and see that inequity that sarah was just talking about what do we need to go back in the site file and correct what sites are not there and then adding this other layer of what's happening from climate change impacts and make that our priority to get those sites listed so they're also considered for protection and one of the main problems again is that they're mapped or not on the right location so that can be an easy fix if we can go out together and take a look at where they are and people generally really like site visits. I wanted to point out something in Florida that maybe didn't go as we hoped but there was a lot of advocacy to get the Florida African-American Burials Task Force started and the legislation was passed to convene the Burial Task Force and they have their final report that has great recommendations on identification and protection maintenance memorialization education they filed a bill to have this go further and that bill was not passed but we can still be following these recommendations and it's true for cemeteries and for archaeologists it's true for many other resource types that we can continue with those kind of recommendations. The other thing fpn is known for is our heritage monitoring scout program we just got done with a two-year study to look at a minimum of 500 sites across the state and assess the threats we did this with 116 people so much more than fpn staff and land managers a lot of volunteers we identified 13 new sites we did updates to 94 sites but we found that the climate change is surpassing development and impacts to the sites that we were looking at almost two to one so we have more data on that part of our poster and report and finally our people of guana program we have now and that's again looking more holistically at some of the land features and the communities so our monitoring you can see under the M monitoring is a part of it with the HMS Florida but we want to do some modeling what's going to happen to these areas how do people need to be engaged and thinking about areas at risk especially those that were erased and still need to be identified meeting with the community and many stakeholders and then doing some mitigation doing that kind of 2.0 work of doing field schools or community digs and working these issues out so finally just further reading if you're not familiar with the society for black archaeology I strongly encourage you to check out their website amazing members of African American and African descent all over the world and you can just see the diversity of the projects they're working out of course sites of enslavement are important to many archaeologists but there is so much other history so many other important sites and I think they capture the breadth and width of that diversity and inclusion that we're hoping to promote the black trowel collaborative is a group that give micro grants for education and outreach generally so you can visit their page and they have a lot of ideas funded for about five hundred dollars of things you can do to get active in your community and also keep a note on that national African burial bill it's been circulating around but really as preservation experts we need to be available to our elected officials and let them know how important it is to have resources and network funding to help preserve those very special sites so here's my contact information at the Florida Public Archaeology Network and my Twitter handle and you're welcome to contact me in any way for any of the information presented here thank you thank you Sarah FPAN is always an amazing partner especially with our local government preservation programs there's so much we couldn't do without FPAN and as a disclaimer I'm on their board so I have to be a cheerleader but I would do it anyway it's your fault that I'm into cemeteries and climate change entirely so we oh well I'm not I'm not I'm not going to apologize for that no we're so glad that you're involved and and thank you to you and Dr. Brown we had two archaeologists representing the exciting work going on here in Florida especially with African American cemeteries so thank you so much and with that I will say a huge thank you to all of our panelists today and to the National Trust for having us as a part of the Pass Forward Conference I echo Reverend Cypress's invitation we hope you'll come visit us in Miami and the greater state of Florida and explore our incredible historic cultural and environmental spaces and places thank you all for joining us today and we hope the presentations have inspired you to look at preservation more broadly and inclusively in your community