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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Slave records, jazz archives, Jefferson Davis' mansion: Hurricane Katrina has put them all in peril.
Sep 10, 2005 | On Thursday Sept. 8, Shelly Henley Kelly, the immediate past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists composed a letter to the editors of major newspapers.
"Imagine that Washington D.C. is struck by a CAT 5 hurricane and the National Archives has been damaged and/or flooded," Kelly, an archivist at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, wrote. "Archivists and conservators are trained to have a disaster response/disaster recovery plan. They will get in and begin the massive effort to reclaim the damaged documents... But what happens when the archivist is prevented from returning to the repository? How long can the many important documents, photographs, sound recordings documenting our nation's history and culture sit alone, un-airconditioned, possibly wet, before they rot beyond any hope for recovery?"
This, Kelly argued in her letter, is precisely what has been happening for nearly two weeks in New Orleans' cultural and historical repositories. "More than ten days after what will probably become the greatest natural disaster in the United States... archivists have NOT BEEN ALLOWED into their collections -- not for a day, an afternoon, even an hour," read the letter. If these collections are ignored, wrote Kelly, "they will soon be unrecoverable... New Orleans, a city so rich in history, may soon become a city with no history."
It's a terrifying prospect, and one that grows more real every day. As the human costs of Hurricane Katrina mount, so too do the possible historical, cultural, and intellectual losses. Some attention has been paid to the conditions at the New Orleans Art Museum, the region's zoos and aquariums, its hobbled architectural landscape. But what about New Orleans' delicate and vital documentary history, the papers and books that tell us how the country was built, and who its citizens were: who they married, to whom they were born, and in many cases, to whom they were sold.
Papers -- brittle, ancient, susceptible to mold, mildew and complete disintegration -- have been sitting in the toxic fug of flood-ravaged New Orleans for two weeks. For many curators, initial fears that water might enter through blown-out windows gave way to panic about the stew that was surely drowning basement archives, which in turn gave way to anxiety about dangerously muggy conditions. For two weeks archivists and preservationists have batted messages back and forth online -- trading in rumor and satellite photos to try to guess which repositories got flooded and which stayed dry. This week, while good news emerged about imperiled collections that escaped flooding, it also became clear that the risks to the miles of paper that provide a one-of-a-kind story of the United States are far from over.
Their collections abandoned and vulnerable to looting and humidity and fire, preservationists are worried -- and we should be too -- that among the many casualties of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath will be portions of one of the nation's richest histories.
"There's a little bit of desperation coming out," said Brenda Gunn, current president of the Society of Southwest Archivists, which set up a message board to track information about the condition of the region's archives. "No one's getting in; assessments aren't being made; the clock is ticking for these collections and records." Of course, said Gunn, "the first priority is rescuing people and saving lives. But we also need to address some of the important cultural issues." Gunn wrote a letter to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco on Thursday Sept 8, "appealing ... for assistance in allowing representatives from New Orleans archival institutions back into the city." Access and assessment, Gunn pleaded with the governor, "is the only way to avoid a cultural catastrophe."
