Speakers at Saturday’s annual meeting of the Society of Virgin Islands Historians explained the challenge and importance of maintaining a community’s records – written, oral, artistic and in other forms.
Then a panel discussion on the proposed designation of St. Croix as a National Heritage Area demonstrated how the economic and social benefits make that effort worth the trouble.
The meeting was the 24th annual gathering of the historian’s group, held Saturday at the University of the Virgin Islands.
People tend to think of an archive as shelf after shelf of dusty old pieces of paper, property transactions and other business and government records, and that’s partly right. But the story of a community is recorded in much more, according to Jeanette Bastian, associate professor and director of the archives at Simmons College in Boston, who for a decade worked with the archives on St. Thomas.
Most of the records of the territory’s colonial past are thousands of miles away from the Caribbean, in archives in Denmark and in Washington, D.C., Bastian said. When a community loses access to its primary records, “the cultural memory of a society is at risk.”
But the story of a society is also told in the things it does. For Caribbean cultures such as the Virgin Islands, the history of carnival and festival become important touchstones.
“Carnival on St. Thomas and St. Croix are essential to understand the Virgin Islands community,” she said, and that history can be found in such talismans as old festival booklets, newspaper stories, photographs and family mementoes.
Susan Lugo and Milagros Flores Roman then discussed ongoing efforts to preserve and make accessible the cultural records of the territory.
Lugo, territorial coordinator of the archive, gave an overview of how the Virgin Islands archive system works, the kinds of documents it preserves and how and why documents are saved or discarded.
She said there is no era since the settlement of the territory that is fully documented. And while the archive is now systematically working on preserving records, the huge expansion of electronic media has made the job even more daunting.
Digital information in the form of documents, digital photos, sound recordings, videos websites, email, digital news sources, and more are often never printed out at all. Archivists not just in the territory but around the world are struggling with how to collect and preserve material that by its very nature is so ephemeral.
In her role as historian for the National Park Service’s Caribbean group, Roman has been on the front line of preserving the history of the Virgin Islands National Park on St. John. The park was founded in 1956, but it’s only been in the last decade that its extensive records and documents have been sorted, preserved and made accessible, she said.
At its founding, the park had 28,500 objects in its collection, but many of these were stored in Tallahassee, Fla., because there was no way to preserve them safely in the territory. The collection now stands at more than 556,000, but there is still much work that needs to be done to protect the collection.
The meeting concluded with a panel discussion on the ongoing effort to get St. Croix designated as a National Heritage Area.
Claudette Young-Hinds, director of the group SUCCEED, which has been designated to manage the area in the event it is approved, said having the designation will give locals the resources to promote and build on the island’s cultural resources.
“This territory needs smart growth,” Young-Hinds said. “By embracing Crucian hereitage this can be the basis for growth and development.”
There are designated heritage areas across the country that foster economic growth by emphasizing regional culture. A 2007 study showed that the first 47 such areas generated $8.5 billion in spending, supporting 150,000 jobs, she said.
Delegate Donna Christensen, the driving force behind the movement, said the fear that the national heritage area designation would lead to a federal takeover of the island or somehow usurp local control are unfounded. Each area is different, some in fact are controlled by quasi-governmental agencies. That is not what is being proposed for St. Croix, she said.
The draft application was hammered out after a series of meetings and hearings across St. Croix, and people were adamant that a local entity be in charge. That led to SUCCEED being designated in the application as the agency that will administer the program. She expects the draft to be ready for review at further meetings in early February.
“Nothing is final until the people of St. Croix say it is,” Christensen said.
Young-Hinds said that once the island receives the designation, as much as $1 million a year for 10 years will be available for local programs to enhance, promote and showcase local culture. That money will be “re-granted” by succeed to local projects, she said.
The meeting was held in UVI’s Great Hall. Society president Edgar . Lake hosted the gathering.