(Note: if you’ve not yet had a look at my first post, please go back and read that, as it offers context on the project behind this blog. Thank you for reading!)

Where do I begin?

Before I can start sharing what I learn from elders, experts, and community members, I really ought to back up and say a little bit about the “background” research I’ve done to prepare the regional outreach I hope to do in the weeks to come. The most pressing preparatory questions I’ve asked myself are “Who do I need to talk with?” and “What do I need to talk with them about, to learn more about what I want to know?” (It would help, of course, to know what I want to know in the first place, but that’s another story, for a different post…)

The “who” question is one that’s evolved as I’ve begun to try to answer it. When I first started to put this project together last fall, my focus was on nearby Indigenous communities, including state- and federally-recognized Native American tribes and nations. The Native presence in the Savannah area is relatively small, however: there are no federally-recognized tribes in Georgia, and only three tribes with state-level recognition, none which are headquartered in the southeast part of the state. This is unsurprising, as the nations whose historical lands comprise the Savannah area were long ago removed from the area or assimilated into other nations (e.g., the Guale and Yamassee).

That’s not to say that there is no Native presence, and I’ve not given hope in contacting relevant experts and elders. I’ve reached out, for instance, to the Yamassee Indian Tribe of Seminoles of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, headquartered about an hour and a half north of here in Allendale, SC. The Edisto Natchez Kusso Tribe of South Carolina is a bit further away, with its headquarters in Ridgeville, just outside of Charleston, and I’ve not yet reached out to them.

Meanwhile, I’ve already had much more luck making contact with members of the area’s Gullah Geechee community. This community comprises people of West African descent with roots in the sea islands of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. After emancipation during and following the US Civil War, the Black descendants of slaves who occupied these islands found themselves relatively isolated from the influence of White culture, and modern Gullah lifeways still reflect this isolation in diet, religion, occupation, and language. Gullah language, for instance, is a creole language that shows the influence of English and an assortment of African languages. (Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect is a milestone work on Gullah language.)

I’ve already spoken with representatives of a few of the area’s Gullah Geechee organizations, including the following:

• The Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island (hereafter GMHHI)
• The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Center (hereafter GGCHC) at Georgia Southern University’ Armstrong campus
• The Geechee Kunda Cultural Arts Center & Museum (hereafter Kunda)

At this time, I’ve made initial inquiries only, but future posts will share what I learn from museum directors and board members.

I’ve also found friends at SCAD who are running along paths somewhat parallel to my own. A chance social encounter introduced me to a colleague in the Art History Department who has considerable expertise in Indigenous art; she is making an ongoing effort to engage our students in this art in whatever ways she can, and she’s reaching out to fellow faculty who may be interested in integrating Indigenous ways of knowing more fully with the SCAD curriculum. She, in turn, has given me the names of other colleagues, one in Foundation Studies and a second in Architectural History, with similar interests. I’ve met with one of these folks already and have yet to make contact with the other. More, no doubt, on these collaborations in the posts to come. (Note: I don’t want to share others’ names here without their permission to do so; I will follow this practice throughout my accounts to come.)

Finally, I’ve begun to compile two sorts of secondary resources: (1) resources related to contemporary instantiations of IWLN elsewhere or in a generalized setting and (2) STEM-adjacent (or at least STEM-adaptable) resources related to the historical, rather than contemporary, art and architecture of the region’s Indigenous communities. In the first category I place things like Aikenhead and Michell’s Bridging Cultures: Scientific and Indigenous Ways of Knowing Nature (2011) and others’ numerous accounts to incorporate place-based IWLN into Western STEM classrooms. In the second, I include websites on topics like mound-building in Savannah and the patterns adorning pottery produced by historical residents of the area. I’ll say much more about these resources and how I hope to use them in future posts, as well. In fact, I’m planning to make pottery patterns the centerpiece of my next post, and I hope you’ll return soon to read more on that.

In the meantime, thank you for joining me on this journey. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to share your own ideas! I’d much rather this be a conversation than a monologue.