Conner Prairie slavery re-enactment draws criticism

The man told her she was lazy and stupid.

When the 13-year-old girl looked at him, he told her not to look him in the eye and to kneel down in the mud. He then continued to yell at her.

“There’s enough lazy, darkies in Kentucky,” he said, before making her stand up and get in line with the rest of the young girls that he called “breeders.”

The only excuse from labor is pregnancy, he said.

“If you ain’t dropping them, you better be working hard,” he said.

The man was an actor, pretending to be a slave master of a group of eighth-grade students who were playing the role of slaves being illegally sold from Kentucky to Indiana. The students were participating in an award-winning program called Follow the North Star at Conner Prairie, an interactive history park in Fishers. Through character re-enactments, students as young as 12 learn about slavery and the Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses that slaves used in the 1800s to escape the South for northern states and Canada.

Conner Prairie representatives said the experience fosters empathy and encourages participants to have conversations about issues in their own lives that they might not otherwise have.

But the 18-year-old program and others like it are drawing criticism from parents, academics and the American Civil Liberties Union, who say such re-enactments present a sanitized version of history, lack depth in connecting the impact of slavery to present day race relations and can traumatize children, specifically children of color.

Some organizations have ended their programs after complaints surfaced.

“What’s problematic to me is this is voluntary; slavery was not,” said Dr. Lori Patton Davis, an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis whose research focuses on critical race theory. “There were gruesome things that happened to people, black people, and there’s no amount of re-enactment that can help you understand the tragedy that slavery was.”

An award-winning program

Cathryn Ferree, vice president and chief operating officer of Conner Prairie, said the park wanted to create an educational experience that would make people feel empathetic, but not personally victimized, in learning about slavery. She said it’s a difficult line to walk.

“A museum’s responsibility is to present topics and allow people to have conversations in a safe environment that they might not have anywhere else,” she said.

In 2003, the program, which draws thousands of students each year, won the national award for Excellence in Programming from the American Alliance of Museums (formerly known as the American Association of Museums), and in 2012 won the national Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.

It was based on a similar Underground Railroad program at the Great Miami Valley YMCA’s Camp Campbell Gard in Ohio. Conner Prairie talked to professors and other experts, held focus groups and invited groups from the black community to experience the re-enactment. Michelle Evans, interpretation program developer at Conner Prairie, said it was the most extensive research the park has done for a program.

Slavery was an ugly chapter in U.S. history — people bought and sold as property, coarse language, demeaning behavior — and Conner Prairie’s re-enactment aims to reflect some of that.

Teachers are given a packet of information to help them prepare students for the experience. Once there, students, in groups of 15 or fewer, are prepped for the journey with a short video about how slavery came to be in the U.S. and the importance of the North Star, which slaves used to navigate their way north.

Afterward, students are told they will play the role of a slave and are given white headbands to wear should they feel uncomfortable and no longer wish to participate. Ferree said it’s a method to ensure no one is traumatized from the experience.

Once outside, students encounter characters who can either help the students find freedom or send them back into slavery, including Indiana Quaker families, a slave hunter and a freed black family.

Parts of the experience are intense. The students, most of whom are white, are verbally berated, forced to do manual labor, told to not look white people in the eye and to line up according to gender. “It’s making people uncomfortable,” Evans said, “but not pushing them over the edge.”

After their Underground Railroad journey ends, students discuss their thoughts and feelings about the experience. A Conner Prairie employee leads the conversation and helps the students make connections to their lives.

“Whatever their interest for coming to the program, we tend to focus on that in discussion,” Ferree said.

“Domestic violence, bullying, things that are happening in the world around them,” Ferree said. “Things that they see happening because we’re not about telling people things. We’re about getting people to think about their world maybe in a different way than they came in.”

Some teachers focus on race, while others do not.

Alan Hughes, a seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, said he has brought his students to the North Star program for almost 16 years. He said in his classroom he shows students parts of “Roots,” a film that follows a black man’s journey from enslavement to liberation. Hughes said he also talks about unjust laws, who was affected by slavery and racism.

“North Star gives them somewhat of an experience of what that would have been like,” Hughes said.

Jan Lustig, who teaches sixth- through eighth-grade at St. Maria Goretti in Westfield, said her class talks about the Civil War and Reconstruction before going to the North Star program.

But her classroom discussions do not focus on race, she said. “We don’t go in depth in it because it’s not the standard,” she said.

The picture portrayed

In April, Patton Davis played a promotional video for the graduate students in her IUPUI “Race and Racism” class. The video was about Conner Prairie’s North Star program.

The graduate students said the video made them uncomfortable — but not for the reasons Conner Prairie intended.

For as much as the history of slavery in the U.S. is about the inhumane treatment of people bought and sold like commodities, it’s also about beatings, rape and death.

Even more, echoes of white supremacy from that time still ripple through today's society.

Such graphic details of slavery’s past and the complex realities of race relations today are factors North Star and similar programs largely omit.

“I think it can almost be a mockery of and diminish the actual severity of things,” said Lauren Kolkmeier, a student in the class who as a 13-year-old attended a similar program in Ohio with her eighth-grade class. “I think that can be really frustrating and make somebody really angry to not get slavery.”

Davis, who is black, said the North Star program is well-intentioned and has its benefits. It talks about slavery and provides historical context. She said 12 years old is an appropriate age for the experience, as long as it’s not the first time a student has heard of slavery and racism.

However, the instructor said it’s an experience she wouldn’t subject her children to.

Davis said the benefits don’t outweigh the consequences. She questioned why a black student would be asked to participate.

“When you’re benefitting from a race that is privileged above all others, it’s easy for you to not see, whereas those who are racially minoritized, you live it every day,” she said.

Davis said she suspects those who say they have a positive experience at the North Star program are white because for them role-playing as a slave is a new experience.

The program would do better by making the connection to race relations rather than discussing issues such as free trade or bullying, Davis said. She said the program could give visitors a false understanding of what slavery was, how it has affected people and what impact it plays today.

“Does it make you better understand how you are better positioned in society versus black people,” she said. “Does it help you want to address societal racial injustices? What does it do?”

'Very disturbed by the experience'

Critics of North Star and similar programs certainly are not suggesting that children be exposed to re-enactments of the true graphic brutality of slavery. What they are suggesting is that re-enactments on the topic can do more harm than good.

Last year, Tiffany Birchett of Dearborn Heights, Mich., was concerned when her black daughter came home from a YMCA Storer Camp that had an Underground Railroad experience. Like Conner Prairie’s North Star program, the YMCA Storer Camps had existed for almost 20 years. Dozens of schools were sending students to participate.

Birchett said her daughter, a fifth-grader, and other elementary school students were instructed to role-play as slaves, act as if they had shackles on, stand in a single-file line, hold up for-sale certificates and scamper through the woods as if escaping.

“One of the things that stuck out to me after the whole thing happened, my daughter asked, ‘Can they make us slaves again?’ ” Birchett said.

Birchett said she found the program too troubling.

After failed attempts to get the school district to quit the program, she took her concerns to the ACLU of Michigan. Attorney Mark Fancher wrote a letter to YMCAs nationwide. He called the program emotionally and intellectually harmful. He asked that the Underground Railroad activity be terminated immediately.

“It does not provide for the children what the actual experience was,” Fancher said. “It would be inhumane to actually expose them to that.”

In the letter, Fancher referenced the Understanding Slavery Initiative, a British learning project that has reported dramatization has limited usefulness while comparing the experience to the tragedies of the Holocaust.

“Few teachers would consider re-enacting scenes from the death camps of World War II whilst teaching the Holocaust. Taking this approach to the history of transatlantic slavery is inappropriate for many of the same reasons,” the letter said.

Fancher told IndyStar that such Underground Railroad activities can go too far with the name-calling and other uncomfortable aspects of the re-enactments while simultaneously not going far enough to illustrate the true horrors of slavery.

Students, he said, can either be traumatized by the experience or think of it as a theme-park adventure.

“They’ve internalized that it was a bad period in history,” Fancher said, “but in the end saying they have been through an actual slave experience and that it wasn’t so bad.”

For students of color, the experience can be traumatic.

In the letter, Fancher said students who participated in the Underground Railroad activity were “very disturbed by the experience.” He also said that while it is important to teach children about slavery, it is equally important to ensure “children descended from enslaved Africans are not publicly humiliated and traumatized.”

The YMCA of Greater Toledo, the umbrella organization for the YMCA Storer Camps, declined to comment to IndyStar, but a representative for the organization said the YMCA Storer Camps discontinued the Underground Railroad activity earlier this year.

The camp is not the only organization that has received complaints that led to ending an Underground Railroad re-enactment where students pretend to be runaway slaves.

In March 2013, Sandra Baker filed a complaint with Connecticut’s Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities after her daughter’s seventh-grade class participated in an overnight field trip. The trip was to Nature’s Classroom, an experiential learning program in Charlton, Mass. Baker’s daughter is black.

In the complaint to the school district, Baker wrote that her daughter was distressed for several days after the experience and that she and other students imagine terrorizing, physical torture and killing of their parents by slave masters. She filed a second complaint the next year, in which she called the program “horrifying.”

Baker said the re-enactment was traumatizing, abusive to children and insensitive to African-Americans.

Nature’s Classroom decided to end the program.

Dr. John G. Santos, the executive director of Nature’s Classroom, said almost 200 schools participated in the program the same year Baker’s daughter went through the experience. Like Conner Prairie’s program, Nature’s Classroom had been applauded by local educators.

Santos said Baker’s complaint was “good criticism.”

The executive director said Nature’s Classroom stepped away from the Underground Railroad activity to re-evaluate the program. However, he said he thought the activity was good and was a viable approach to teach about a historical event. Santos said there had not been complaints in the first 10 years of the program. He said the complaints were a sign of the changing political mindset of the country.

“We backed away from a legitimate educational activity because of the court and the business reality,” Santos said. “It is just not worth the fight as an educator to make as a business, which is really a shame.”

Avoiding pitfalls

Talking with children about the history of slavery in the U.S. can prove difficult. Due to the history and discomfort associated with the topic, experts say people have very individual experiences in conversations, making a one-size-fits-all educational experience problematic.

However, such discussions need to be had, said Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting in the Cafeteria Together: And Other Conversations about Race” and “Can We Talk About Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation.”

“It might be upsetting for some people, but for others that’s true of a lot of things,” Tatum said. “Not every eighth-grader is ready for algebra, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have it. But that does mean that it does need to be well-taught, well-facilitated.”

Tatum, who declined to offer an opinion on the merits of Underground Railroad re-enactments, said the key factor that will determine the outcome of educational experiences is the facilitator.

Tatum said it’s not surprising that students of color would find an Underground Railroad experience to be painful, especially for black children in predominantly white classrooms. She said teachers should be prepared to ask the right questions and facilitate the discussion accordingly.

Her suggestion: Teach the subject in a way that also teaches students to not be a bystander to social injustice.

The discussions that come before and after an experience like the North Star program can make the difference, said David Stovall, professor of educational policy studies and African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Stovall said in those discussions, it’s imperative for teachers and facilitators to make the connection from slavery to race, institutional racism, white supremacy and American society today.

“If they try to do it without those things, the entire operation is bankrupt,” Stovall said.

Tatum and Stovall said instructors should acknowledge the intent of their work before they begin.

Stovall said that is where so often teachers and programs get it wrong.

“You have to be purposeful in your intent, and I think that’s where U.S. schooling kind of misses the boat,” Stovall said. “Everybody wants to make it sanguine, but there’s nothing nice or sanguine about slavery.”