 This is Dennis McMahon, and welcome to Positively Vermont. Today, my special guests are going to be speaking about the Vermont Folklore Center, and my guests are Kathleen Hoy, the Executive Director of the Vermont Folklore Center, and Andy Colabos, the Director of Archives and Research for this very interesting facility. Welcome to Positively Vermont. Thank you. Thank you, Dennis. Tell us each a little bit about yourself and what you do with the Vermont Folklore Center. Well, it's the Vermont Folklife Center, and I'm the Director there. I have a background in music performance and Spanish literature, and then I studied ethnomusicology in grad school, and that's what brought me to Vermont and the job at the Folklife Center. I'm interested in studying a lot of different things through ethnomusicology, and right now I'm working on my dissertation, and I'm working with Bhutanese Nepali refugee musicians in Burlington and working to help sustain their cultural traditions. So let's just do a little bit about my own background. Tell us about yourself, Andy. Well, I first came to Vermont in the late 80s as a Bennington College student where I studied literature, and then eventually went to graduate school to study folklore. You can do that at Indiana University, and while I was there I kept thinking, what am I going to do with a degree in folklore? So I also got a library science degree. So I'm an archivist and a folklorist, and that's what brought me to Vermont was getting a message from the Folklife Center founder, Jane Beck, saying, hey, are you interested in a job? So they brought me out, and I've been here ever since. That's great. Well, Vermont Folklife Center is very interesting. Tell us a little bit about the history of it. Yeah, so the Vermont Folklife Center, it's a cultural research and education nonprofit statewide, but our offices are based in Middlebury. It was founded in 1984 by folklorist Jane C. Beck. Before that she was the state folklorist at the Vermont Arts Council. And previously kind of our focus in the 80s and 90s was more on kind of old time Vermont. But through the years we've shifted to also be paying a lot of attention to contemporary life. And so we do both, I'd say, at this point. And we have four programs that we can talk about. Do you want to talk about the archive? Sure. Yeah, I mean one of the key things we do is interview people out in the state. And the nature of those interviews is the best way to think about it is like we're cultural anthropologists in Vermont, although we're not anthropologists, my wife who is an anthropologist likes to remind me. But the archive is where all the research ends up. And it's a collection of about 5,000 audio recordings, several hundred videotapes, and we estimate about 25,000 images. The recordings date back to the 40s as far as original recordings. And the content they contain we estimate goes back to the 1870s, depending on the time they were made and the age of the person interviewed. So we add our own stuff to it as we create new recordings, and we also take in donations. So we have all sorts of donated collections, including, for example, one is material from folks singer Margaret McArthur who was recording folk songs in Vermont in the 60s. So she gave us all of her tapes, and we digitized all that and made it all available online. Well, I'd like to describe what the facility looks like at present and how it evolved over the years. Okay, well, today we're at an old building. I don't know exactly when it was built. Early 19th century, I can't remember the exact date, but between 1810 and 1825. It's a big old red brick building in between Otter Creek Bakery and two brothers on the traffic circle in Middlebury, downtown Middlebury. That's a really great location. Middlebury's a wonderful place. It's just a great atmosphere there. Yeah, and we've kind of moved around over the years, but we've been there for about the past 10. I think so. It feels, yeah, it's about that long. It feels longer and shorter at the same time. And do you have visiting hours and a program of people when people can visit? Yes, we are open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5. And we have a gallery. Our first floor, we have two gallery spaces. We have a vision and voice gallery, which Andy can talk more about. And we also have upstairs where our offices are, and we have a workshop space there. We teach workshops for people in the community. And our basement is the archive, and we have a recording studio down there. On the same floor as the galleries, we also have a small shop where we sell Vermont-made items. It could be Somali Bantu embroidery or blacksmiths. We have hooks and stuff that a local blacksmith has been making. Hand weaving. That's great. A lot of Vermont-based art. What I'd like to focus on for our viewers is some of the current projects and programs that you're involved in. And why don't you tell us a little bit about this Discovery Community Education Project? Yeah, so Discovery Community is one of our four major programs. Again, that's archive, our vision and voice gallery, and our traditional arts apprenticeship program. And then our fourth is Discovery Community. And that program gets young people out into the community using media to tell stories about themselves and their own experiences, as well as people in their community. And so we offer workshops in public schools and private schools, and we do professional learning opportunities for educators. We have a summer institute and a summer which kind of puts teachers through the whole process of learning about ethnography and media documentation and the ethics behind that. And then they go out into the field and do some research and documentation, and then they create a final media piece. And that's kind of the same process that the young people in the schools that we work with would go through. So that's kind of a small snippet of what we do with our education program. Excellent. Yeah, its focus is basically teaching teachers to do what we do. Interesting. And do you encourage class visits and things like that? Do you go out to classes? Yep, yep, we do. I think we've worked this year so far. We've worked with other 700 students in Vermont. We usually do between 25 and 30 different projects in different schools per year. So we're kind of all over the place with the education program. That's amazing. That's really vast, actually. And one thing about we discussed before we started, tell us about this traditional arts apprenticeship program. Yeah, so that program started in 1991 and it's funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. And that program pairs a master and some type of traditional cultural expression with someone or a group of people who are interested in learning that. So that could range from Somali Bantu instrument making or blacksmithing or hand weaving or polyfolk dancing. So every year we support between 15 and 20 apprenticeship projects. And again, those are statewide. Over the years, when that program started, we were focusing mostly on supporting Abenaki artists and basket weavers. And as the years have gone by and more refugees are being resettled in Vermont, we've started supporting a lot of different refugee artists and musicians and helping to sustain their cultural traditions. Well this indicates the changing landscape of people in Vermont. Normally someone, particularly someone from out of state who's watching this might think of Vermont as a certain category of people. Could you tell us what types of new people have come into Vermont and what have they brought to our folk life? Well, we can't forget the hippies. You know, and the culture of Vermont was radically changed by back to the landers and hippies who came up here in the 60s and 70s. So that's a big piece of the culture change we've experienced. And then of course there are people like us who weren't born here but come here for work or for some other reason and love living in Vermont. And with us we bring our background and that has an impact on how things go. I don't know much about the history of refugee resettlement in Vermont and I don't know if you know the details of that at all. Not all of them, but I think in the late 80s, early 90s was when it really started happening here formally at least through the Vermont refugee resettlement program. And through the years Bosnia and people started arriving then Somali-Bantu the latest kind of group is the Bhutanese-Napali communities who are being resettled here. So it's just every couple of years there's a new group and we've been working with those groups from the beginning really. How really close partnerships with community organizations like the Vermont-Tibetan Association and the Vermont-Napali Heritage Dance Group and the Somali-Bantu Association. So we've been involved in supporting the cultural activities of refugees since they've been arriving here in Vermont. And immigrants to these states who settled here from all over the world have always been one of the focuses of our work. Gosh, do you remember the year he published it? The original director of education, Greg Sharrow, put together a book called Many Cultures Won People that was an immigration history of Vermont pulled together through primary sources and also interviews and it included Vietnamese who were some of the earliest people and folks from all over the world. There's a chapter on Finns and the Finnish community in Vermont and on the Dutch community there were a lot of Dutch farmers who settled in Addison County. Vermont isn't way more complicated than most people realize. I know quite a few people from the Nepali community but I didn't know we had Finns emigrating here. That's old immigration. That's historic immigration. We have a lot of people from the Welsh community in Slate. Certainly the Somali community. How does the Vermont Folklife Center interact with these new Vermonters and maybe preserving their cultural heritage or researching their cultural heritage? Tell you how you do that. Well, a lot of the ways in which we initially are interacting with new Americans are through our traditional arts apprenticeship program. But we do fieldwork in order to meet people and learn who in the community considers himself an artist or are there people who are doing traditional things? Maybe they don't consider it art but need support in finding the resources in order to do that. Through our research as cultural ethnographers we identify people and we have conversations and we interview people to figure out what it is that we can do to help sustain their work and also we archive those interviews and have them around for people in the future to listen to. What kind of access do these archives do they afford to people in the state? Well, the archive itself is open by appointment. So you just call and make an appointment and we try to find a time for you to come in. A handful of stuff is available online and it's mostly music collections a number of Franco-American music collections English language folk song and then a bunch of oral history material. That's amazing. One of the recent projects was this Franco-American project. Tell us about that, please. To go back to the topic of immigrants Franco-Americans were probably the largest single immigrant group to Vermont over various points in time in the 20th century. One of the things that a lot of Franco-Americans I know will say, particularly older people were not terribly cool to be French-Canadian descent and people they were stigmatized for it and all sorts of stuff. What I've noticed since I've been here is that by and large that stigma is gone and that the number of French last names across the state has proliferated and what people have lost is the language first and foremost although many still have it and many still do maintain connections to relatives in Canada but the two pervasive things that stick around are food and certain types of celebrations and also music. So a lot of our interaction around French-Canadian culture or Franco-American culture in Vermont has been around music. In the 90s we worked with a woman named Martha Pellerin who some people may remember who was a cultural advocate and singer, song collector herself and when she passed away gave her whole collection of recordings and song books to the Folklife Center and one of our projects several years ago was scanning those transcribing them and then trying to make them available online to people to access the content and one of the things we realized is that well if you have songs that are written down people don't necessarily remember the tunes. So we reached out to a colleague of ours named Lisa Ornstein who is an archivist and also an amazing French-Canadian style fiddler who is an expert in this area to figure out what the tunes are classify them a little better and then also one of our key things was figure out a way to make this material accessible to people of Franco-American descent who don't speak French so to provide phonetic versions of the songs so that they can sing the words and then provide synopses or translation so they could understand what the songs are about and then also have some of the context of this song within the family that created the song book or within French-Canadian culture in general so the two projects are working on simultaneously and Lisa Ornstein is involved in both of them is to do more more I'm going to say more deeper more deeper, deeper cataloging of the collections we have which include the stuff from Martha Pellerin and what she's focusing on is a collection from the Baudouin family the Baudouins who are a Burlington-based musical family they still live where they grew up to create those sorts of materials and then get that stuff online and then also to work with Carmen Baudouin one of Louis Baudouin The Fiddler's Daughters and a woman named Kim Chase to develop a program to basically teach kids these songs as a component of Vermont cultural heritage so not even trying to frame it as just Franco-American cultural heritage, but make the point that Franco-American culture is Vermont culture it's very interesting the idea about songs I spent a lot of time in Ireland and you could have a song that has 19 different versions of it I'm sure it's the same thing with that what about photography and visual expressions of folk life how do you work with that? the primary way we do that is through our exhibit program and the long short of our exhibit program is the organization as an independent organization got it start with an exhibit Jane Beck pulled together an exhibit called Always in Season Folk Art in Vermont that toured the state and since that time we've had different flavors of an exhibit program going on lately we've been doing a lot of exhibits that focus on photography and often mix that photography with audio either from our archive or stuff that we've created or stuff people have loaned us so the current exhibit we have is photos taken by a couple named Neil and Suzanne Rappaport and Neil and Suzanne both taught at Bennington College they were there when I was there Neil used to really intimidate me and didn't know Suzanne when I was a student but when I came up here met her and really came to love Suzanne they both passed away, they both died of cancer over a period of several years but back in gosh 1952 their mother passed away and they sealed up the house and my impression is that Neil and Suzanne in Paulette, Vermont where Neil and Suzanne were and what Neil and Suzanne, one of their big avocations was doing this massive documentary project of Paulette they photographed everybody in town from the early 70s until the mid 80s and that's another resource we actually have online we're working on revamping the database that Neil created so you could see all these pictures so they were aware of this house and they were interested in seeing the inside and one day one of the brothers unlocked the door and let him in and what they saw was essentially a time capsule of this woman's home so Neil took really very beautiful, powerful photographs of it and then to add to it Suzanne sat in the house and hand colored each photo from life Wow over the course of a year a year in the cold until it got too cold and then she had to bring the images home with her and work on them currently on display and it's a powerful collection of photos and really an interesting way to think about documentary where you have these photographs of this place telling a story of this woman's life and then you have someone else bringing their own personal and subjective touch to how they interpret that space which honestly is something that we would say is all documentary whether it's photos, film or whatever there's always a subjective element to it and in the case of Neil and Suzanne's photos the subjective element is you can't escape it because it's integral to the images themselves That's amazing stuff and what about letters and personal correspondence? I know we did a project on the Neil in Winooski there's a lot of lore that came in people's letters back to their relatives and things like that do you deal with letters and those kinds of documents? Yeah, very little correspondence in the collection usually what we say is that we're primarily an audio archive and video and film are a component of that focus and we do have papers and letters associated with certain collections but usually when they're tied to a larger body of media so Greg O'Sharrow did a series many, many interviews with a woman named Catherine Duclos who lived in Braintree, Vermont and Catherine gave us recordings she made with her father in the 60s and then when Catherine passed away a whole collection of family photographs and diaries came to us so that collection was a whole cohesive body and the reason we have that extra stuff is because we have all the other stuff too. We have a very interesting website and there's a lot of interactive kind of sources of material, tell us a little bit about that we're going to put that on our line here and tell us about the website who created it and what's available there Well, we just read out our website about two years ago now and we it's through Squarespace the website platform and we were able to do it largely within our staff but we have an outside consultant that helps us a little bit and on our website you can find information about the work we do and our different programs some archival collections are on there we have a blog called Field Notes where we write about some of the recent work that we're doing and share photos or audio from that so you can sign up to wait, do we send it out you can sign up to get a notice when it gets updated we put up a new field note every couple of weeks or so we also have a newsletter that you can sign up for via our website and that goes out once a month just to update people about what we're doing what else about our website can we say Well, there's links through the archive section and some other resources that way Also our Discovering Community Education program we have kind of a separate site for that but you can access it through our Vermont Folk Life Center website and there are a lot of examples of student projects and student based kind of ethnography and media and storytelling projects that we've done that are supported with schools so there's a lot of that up there too That's great. Well we're recording this at the beginning of March and why don't you tell our audience what's going to be happening throughout the rest of the year Okay Well, right now we have the exhibit called Up Home which Andy spoke about with the hand colored photographs and that will be up through I believe the end of this month, end of March and then we'll have another exhibit starting in April of Richard Brown's photographs and the next exhibit I believe is about the farming renaissance that's happening in the Rutland area with a lot of older farmers who are mentoring younger farmers who are interested in getting involved in farming but there's a lot of cost and time and they need more support from these farmers so we're doing a video and audio documentation of what's happening there so that will be our next exhibit In the spring we offer a lot of different workshops through our cultural sustainability institute and series so those workshops range from storytelling for social change which we're offering on March 17 in Stowe to the art of the interview which Andy teaches we also do workshops on audio recording what other workshops do we have coming up I think we're trying to think this that might be it video, documentary how to make a documentary workshops those are all you can go on our website and find out the dates for those we might be doing a comics workshop nonfiction cartooning workshop from historical sources so that's another thing that might be happening in June we also have a fundraising concert in Middlebury on April 21 at 7pm and that is Anna and Elizabeth who are kind of an up and coming folk music duo Anna is from Vermont do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Anna and Elizabeth really started focusing on Appalachian music and they got interested in looking at New England and Vermont music so they came to us to access the archive and see what material was there and they also work with the Helen Hartnest Flanders Ballad Collection which is a huge collection of traditional songs at Middlebury what they do is really their own thing but it's very much tied to the tradition so it's an updating and a reinvention at the same time it's really fascinating and that's exactly the kind of thing we like to support these things don't exist in Amber they're constantly changing and evolving and if there's one thing we want to take away we're interested in the past but we're interested in the past and things from the past and how people continue to make them meaningful in the present that's great well thank you very much Andy Calabos Casting Hoy from the Vermont Folklife Center thank you for appearing with us here on Positively Vermont check out their website and all the very exciting things going on in this very interesting field this has been Dennis McMahon for Positively Vermont