A Season of Stories 10: Seeking Justice

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 10…

“The Cepalinos’ Global Fight against Inequality” – Dr. Margarita Fajardo, Alice Stone Ilchman Chair in Comparative and International Studies, Sarah Lawrence College

“Addressing Slavery in the Museum” – Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University

“The Perseverance of Menominee Women” – Dr. Jillian Marie Jacklin, Lecturer in Democracy and Justice Studies, History, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Harlem” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“Creative Community Responses to Climate Change in New England” – Emma C. Moesswilde, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History, Georgetown University

Transcript

90 Second Narratives
Season 10: “Seeking Justice”
Episode 6: “A Season of Stories 10: Seeking Justice”

Sky Michael Johnston:

Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that gives you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” I am your host and the creator of 90 Second Narratives, Sky Michael Johnston. And this is the podcast’s tenth “Season of Stories” episode bringing you all the stories from the season in one show. The theme for Season 10 has been “Seeking Justice,” and today’s five stories offer diverse perspectives on the topic. Listeners should be aware that today’s episode does discuss violence. Our first storyteller is Dr. Margarita Fajardo. Listen now as she shares, “The Cepalinos’ Global Fight against Inequality.”

Margarita Fajardo:

In mid-twentieth-century Latin America, an intellectual movement that changed the region, the world, and the global economy emerged. The members of the movement were called cepalinos because they came together through the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, whose acronym is CEPAL in Spanish and Portuguese. The institution, located in Santiago, Chile became a springboard for cepalinos in their efforts to fight against inequality at the global level. Cepalinos were concerned with the inequalities between the rich industrial centers and the poor raw material producing peripheries, especially the inequalities brought about by international trade between the two. 

To promote global justice, cepalinos championed the monetary cooperation of the periphery, among other initiatives, and in the process, they found a powerful opponent. Or rather, I must say, this powerful opponent found cepalinos blocking their way. The staff of the International Monetary Fund, one of the key institutions of the global economic order, saw the cepalino initiative as an encroachment in a territory they believed was their own. The tension between the institutions grew over time, especially as the IMF staff saw cepalino setting the economic policy agenda in the region. The cepalino ideas about inflation became tools to contest the IMF stabilization plans in the late 1950s. A few years later, the IMF staff was forced to concede defeat and recognized that they had not produced compelling ideas of their own. At the moment, they acknowledged that cepalinos had won the so-called debating cup. 

The story of these and other cepalinos are important because they remind us of the extent to which Latin America and the global south sidelined more powerful opponents and shaped the institutions of global economic governance in the North. It is also important because it shows that ideas do and did matter; that the financial resources of an institution like the IMF became a liability in the battle of ideas won by cepalinos at the peak of their influence in the region and the world. 

It was with this and other initiatives that cepalinos created a world from and for Latin America.

Sky Michael Johnston:

I love that Dr. Fajardo’s story captures the agency of Chileans in shaping the twentieth-century world by successfully taking on the IMF. In our next story, we shift contexts to a different subject: slavery. Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo shares a story from her study of how the history of slavery is told today. She finds that there is room for more focus on daily acts of resistance and less focus on victimization. Here is Dr. Araujo with the story, “Addressing Slavery in the Museum.”

Ana Lucia Araujo:

In the past three decades black social actors, committed curators, public historians, and academics have pushed western museums to examine slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in their exhibition spaces. 

But the introduction of slavery in the museum has been very problematic.

In most museums I have argued, the way slavery is exhibited tends to focus on four main themes: wealth and refinement; submission and victimization; resistance and rebellion; and achievement and legacies. 

Through the development of these topics most museums were not always successful in conveying the complexities of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. 

At the end of the day, institutions and exhibition displays operate in the framework of particular national and local contexts.

By attempting to provide an overview of slavery systems, they often place an excessive focus on victimization. 

They omit how enslaved persons lived diverse experiences that not always involved the organization of rebellions, but rather included resisting slavery on a daily basis.

Moreover, most museums avoid addressing topics such as sexual violence. 

With few exceptions, in the United States and England, museum exhibitions exploring the problem of slavery remain caught in the chains of white supremacy, conceived here as an ideology, a global political, economic, and cultural power structure that privileges in multiple ways individuals and groups racialized as whites.

In some museums in France, Brazil, and England, most exhibitions celebrate racial mixture and emphasize the achievements of only a few black luminaries, neglecting the experience of ordinary black men and women. 

Ultimately, by focusing on wealth and refinement; submission and victimization; resistance and rebellion; and achievement and legacies, most exhibitions fail to fully discuss the legacies of slavery such as anti-black racism and persisting racial inequalities.

Sky Michael Johnston:

That was a rich analysis from Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo of contemporary portrayals of slavery in museums around the world. The important and difficult topics of persisting racial inequalities and sexual violence—which Dr. Araujo highlighted—do receive treatment in our next story. Dr. Jillian Marie Jacklin now shares, “The Perseverance of Menominee Women.”

Jillian Marie Jacklin:

On November 20, 1955, David Ames, an anthropologist and research associate with the Wisconsin Legislative Council’s Menominee Indian Study Committee spoke with Phebe Nichols Jewell the wife of Angus Lookaround at their home on the Menominee reservation in Northeast Wisconsin.  He interviewed the white woman about her perspectives on the United States federal government’s efforts to terminate tribal sovereignty, recognizing that she had lived among Native Americans for several years and was married to an influential one.  Just one of many questions, the researcher wondered what role the Bureau of Indian Affairs had played in Menominee life prior to the onset of the loss of federal trust status in 1954.  In response, Jewell explained that the BIA had “performed a greater disservice than a service” because officials had “tried to de-Indianize the Menominee by making them ashamed of their traditional culture, including the sexual behavior of both Native men and women.” She claimed that there was a traffic in Indian women and that U.S. government representatives had supported this practice on the reservation and that “similar to colonial officials in Africa,” they used their political connections as weapons to gain access to Native women.  But it was not only men in positions of power, according to Jewell but traveling lumberworkers had actively participated in sexually soliciting and physically threatening Native women as well.  She added, “the older women will tell you they used to lock their doors during the spring logging drive” to protect themselves against white men who were rough-necks.  Meanwhile, the BIA did little to protect these women and rather encouraged the practice by reinforcing the stereotype that Indigenous people were racially inferior and sexually promiscuous.  Indeed, politicians, loggers, and lumber-mill workers all competed for access to Indian women, often fathering children without accepting parental or even financial responsibility.  As a result, Menominees looked to the local criminal justice system for purposes of abandonment, though rarely winning their appeals for economic support. Instead, local authorities criminalized area indigenous people, a practice that continues into the present day.  Phebe Jewell’s discussion with David Ames is important, because it sheds on the complexities of the termination era as well as the diverse perspectives that Menominee Indians had on their de-tribalization.  Although members of the Nation worried about further settler encroachment on their lands and resources, Native women suffered under federal trust status both prior to termination and after restoration in 1968.  The movement to unearth the long practice of sexual assaulting, murdering, and disappearing Indian women has roots in this story as well as broader efforts to gain access to indigenous ecosystems and natural resources.  As a method of self-defense, Native women have carved out spaces for collective action through social media and public protest in their ongoing attempts to save their communities and secure justice for their lost sisters.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Dr. Jacklin’s sobering story about systematic oppression and violence raises the question of how societies permit such injustices. In the next story, I tell of noted Nazi resister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I recount part of the somewhat circuitous route that led him to stand up against injustice in his home country. This is the story, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Harlem.”

* * *

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the most significant theologians of the twentieth century. To this day, large audiences are still drawn to his important writings including The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Ethics. But Bonhoeffer is even more widely-known for his remarkable and tragic biography.

Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany in 1906. He studied theology in Tübingen and Berlin, earning his doctorate in 1930, and served in various academic and ministerial positions. After the Nazi party took power in Germany in 1933, Bonhoeffer became a leader in what was known as the Confessing Church—a relatively small alliance of German Christians who opposed the large-scale capitulation of the Christian Church during Nazi rule in Germany. Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 and from prison participated in a failed coup that included an attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945 just shortly before the conclusion of World War II.

Especially in light of his tragic death, Bonhoeffer is remembered for giving everything to oppose the injustices of the Nazi regime in his home country. He took a stand against the currents of his nation. One experience that contributed to Bonhoeffer’s moral clarity as his country descended into the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust was a season that Bonhoeffer spent in the United States in 1930 and 1931. Bonhoeffer held a fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While in New York, Bonhoeffer learned something about the experience of life in America for African Americans after befriending Frank Fisher who connected Bonhoeffer to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

Sometimes an outsider’s perspective can reveal injustices that people are slower to question within the culture and community in which they were raised. Bonhoeffer came from a place of privilege in Germany. But as he spent time in America with an African American community that grappled with the injustices it faced, Bonhoeffer faced those injustices as well. In this way, Bonhoeffer developed concerns for justice in America that were not shared by a majority of Americans. But Bonhoeffer’s experience of living with an oppressed community within a society also shaped his outlook towards his own country. Bonhoeffer’s time in America helped him on his path towards eventually giving up the security of his own privileged social position in Germany for the sake of the oppressed victims of his own government.

* * *

Our final story today is told by Emma C. Moesswilde. While many of the challenges of global warming today are unprecedented, Moesswilde reminds us that people have confronted climate change in the past as well. Here is her story, “Creative Community Responses to Climate Change in New England.”

Emma Moesswilde:

In the spring of 1816, the weather in New England turned suddenly chilly. A distant volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 had expelled sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere in such quantity that they reduced the amount of solar energy that could reach Earth’s surface, resulting in cooler temperatures not just in Indonesia, but across the globe as these particles circulated in the atmosphere. So the following year in Maine, rather than a slowly greening landscape, snow and then ice thickened on the ground. Corn crops were stunted in the icy weather and dry climate, and as the summer wore on many farmers harvested early to save what they could. The lack of corn meant a lack of food as well as a loss of profit for many farming families. Scarcity – and in some cases near-starvation – was widespread. Some wealthier Mainers or those with a more successful harvest worked to supply their neighbors with additional corn, but for many there was no alternative but to leave their frozen fields and head west. The “Ohio Fever” – or a desire to head west to the supposed mild, fertile plains of the Ohio Valley – set in along with the cold, and thousands of families left Maine altogether in the wake of what came to be called “the year Eighteen Hundred and Starved to Death.” Yet many others persisted through a scanty harvest and another chilly winter to be rewarded by warmth in July of 1817 and a bumper harvest in the fall – enough to persuade enough folks to stay and continue farming the land, even changing how they farmed to include more cold-resistant crops, like rutabagas, in case of another chilly year. 

Consequences of the so-called “Year Without A Summer” were widespread and unequal; yet responses were also varied, creative, and flexible. This story highlights the multifold strategies that helped people to persist in the face of climatic disruption. Such small-scale actions ensured community survival, resilience, and integrity.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Thank you for joining us today on 90 Second Narratives. If you are new to the show and enjoyed today’s episode, I invite you listen to the past nine “Season of Stories” episodes in the archive. You’ll find many fascinating stories on themes including Cities, Family, Icons, and Friendship. And please subscribe for more “little stories with BIG historical significance.”