Academic Allies: How Academia Can Empower Communities

“During our early discussions Bailey conveyed in detail her disdain for us from the University who had come to her island and taken, taken and not given anything back. During these conversations I came to understand through Bailey’s experience that I was a trespasser, I was part of a group of people who had colonized Sapelo Island through science… and in doing so had worked to isolate and alienate the Saltwater Geechee community.”¹

Nik Heynen, geographer

This is Nik Heynen, professor at the University of Georgia, talking about his early experiences working with Cornelia Walker Bailey, who he would end up spending two years working with. Bailey’s home island of Sapelo is one of the few Sea Islands that hasn’t been developed, but only because it has and still does serve a different purpose for (mostly white) scholars: it is used for ecological and marine research. The University of Georgia opened the Marine Institute on Sapelo Island in 1953, and for decades white researchers would come to Sapelo to conduct research, but never to engage or share research or resources with the Geechee community on the island.²

Through his conversations with Bailey, Heynen came to realize he could not merely work with the land of Sapelo Island, he had to work in “the politics necessary to fight cultural erasure and the attendant grip of white supremacy that makes this possible.”³ In Cornelia Walker Bailey’s eyes, losing the land on Sapelo Island was akin to losing the mortar in the foundation of their culture, and it was high time the ecologists began taking that into account.

Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture – Marine Institute

The University of Georgia Marine Institute At Sapelo Island

Nik Heynen worked with Cornelia Walker Bailey until she passed away in 2017. “The last time I sat at her kitchen table with her, one month prior to her passing, I did my best to assure Bailey that we would keep pursuing her vision of growing sugarcane, peas, and other crops in the wake of Hurricane Irma.”⁴ Bailey passed onto others the importance of connection to the land, to crops, to food, to ancestors, to history. Today, Heynen works with Cornelia Walker Bailey’s son, Maurice Bailey. Together, they co-created and direct the Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture based at the University of Georgia which “works to address important questions on the history, present status, and future of agriculture, property politics and related issues on Sapelo Island.”⁵ Click the link above to learn more about the program.

By collaborating with Gullah and Geechee communities, Heynen and other researchers are working to reestablish trust and form new bonds with the stakeholder communities whose culture and legacies are rooted deeply in the soil within which the researchers are working. By working together, they had planted close to 40 acres of crops on Sapelo Island at the time of Heynen writing his article in 2020.⁶ Check out The New York Times article below to learn about Bailey and Heynan making Sapelo Island purple cane syrup in December 2020.

Reviving a Crop and an African-American Culture, Stalk by Stalk (Published 2020)

On the Georgia coast, Maurice Bailey is making sugar cane syrup as a way to preserve a tradition, and the community, of his enslaved ancestors.

These practices—collaboration, communication and connecting directly with communities—can and should be adopted into the research practices of many different academic disciplines, including history. And there is a way to do that that is honestly a lot of fun…

The Strengths of Digital Humanities and a Website Thesis

The definition of “Digital Humanities” changes depending on who you ask. The Oxford English dictionary’s definition seems designed to make the reader’s eyes glaze from an overload of academic jargon: “an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy.”⁷ It’s really not as boring as that definition makes it sound. Quite the opposite, digital humanities means being creative, using tools located in the digital realm to conduct research and/or present research in a new way. It is a whole world of possibilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic made traditional historical research methods—traveling to different archives and even to Gullah Geechee communities to speak with people there—difficult and dangerous. Instead, I relied on the firsthand written accounts of Gullah Geechee chefs and authors. These were the storytelling cookbooks and memoirs that—as we discussed in the last webpage—are acting to reclaim histories and share them outside of the walls of academia. If I had written a 40-page academic thesis paper on the subject, I would have just been re-translating their works back into the medium they are working to break it free from.

Instead, these storytelling cookbooks inspired me to think about how I could present this information in a novel way. Digital Humanities provided the answer. By creating a digital space for these conversations to take place and this research to live, it ensures that this information can be seen by anyone with internet access and a desire to learn more. By making the space accessible to those outside of academia—avoiding jargon, writing in a narrative style and weaving in multimedia pieces—a website can bridge the gap between academic institutions and broader audiences. By focusing on the voices of the Gullah Geechee themselves, it serves to amplify their messages and knowledge. In this digital space, scholars can give more room to the voices of those who are at the heart of the discussion, while at the same time opening the discussion to even more participants.

Seeking out and inviting participants was one of the key elements to this website…

The Comments Section

The comments sections on each page are really crucial to this work. It is a space where scholars and viewers to be able to join this conversation and offer feedback or critiques. Because I am not a Gullah Geechee person, I wanted to make sure there was a place for viewers who are Gullah Geechee to offer their corrections, opinions and knowledge. Here are a few of the places where this site is being sent for review:

• The Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies at Coastal Carolina University.
• Dr. Scott Alves Barton, PhD in Food Studies, teaches at The Culinary Institute of America, New York University and is a faculty fellow in race and resilience at Notre Dame’s Institute of Advanced Study. He has known Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, Sallie Ann Robinson and Matthew Raiford personally.
• Dr. Nicole Morris Johnson, Assistant Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, studies Gullah culture and met Cornelia Walker Bailey in person.
• Dr. Ndubueze L. Mbah, Associate Professor of history at the University at Buffalo, a West African historian who uses oral, written and material sources in his work.
• Kelly Doyle, Open Knowledge Coordinator for the Smithsonian Institution, current resident of Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina. She has offered to share the site on the island’s Facebook page, so all the residents can see it.

These are just a few of the people who have offered their support, encouragement and willingness to engage with this project and I cannot thank them enough. I am thrilled to get their feedback and to use it to understand what works in this website, and what can be better. The ability to be versatile, adaptable and changing is probably the largest advantage to creating a website as a thesis. It is a living space that can grow and evolve based on feedback from an enormous range of experts and community members. This is one of the great strengths of digital humanities.

Next Page:

Hello and Thank You’s

Who I am and all the amazing people who helped me be here.

Footnotes

1. Nik Heynen, ““A Plantation can be a commons”: Re-Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology,” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2020): 96.
2. Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, University of Georgia, accessed May 12, 2021, https://ugami.uga.edu/.
3. Heynen, ““A Plantation can be a commons”,” 97.
4. Ibid, 110.
5. “Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture,” Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, University of Georgia, accessed May 12, 2021, https://ugami.uga.edu/education/cornelia-walker-bailey-program/.
6. Heynen, ““A Plantation can be a commons”,” 110-111.
7. “Digital Humanities,” Oxford Languages, Google, accessed May 10, 2022, https://www.google.com/search?q=define+digital+humanities&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS938US938&oq=define+digital+human&aqs=chrome.0.0i512j69i57j0i390l4.2912j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.