A young friend sent me a message recently, posing a question they have been exploring, interested in my take on it.
Since I’m very rarely without an opinion on things, I was delighted to answer.
And maybe you’d like to hear my opinion on it, too. Grab a warm beverage… this is not short.
Is what I do (living history and living history education via interpretive design and material/internal culture recreation) important to the world? And, what do I get out of it, personally? Does living history matter?
Me with two of my favorite Dress-Up friends, perpetrating shenanigans in the Chaperone’s Corner.
Why is what I do important to the world? That is an excellent question, and I’d counter with another one: does it matter if it does or does not matter to the world? I mean, I’m not curing cancer. In the grand scheme of human survival, what I do in living history could entirely be described as superfluous.
I play dress-up and tell stories.
I do it because I think telling stories is vital to the survival of the human soul, and dressing up is one of the tools I use to bring those stories to life in a different way, using different neural pathways for myself and my audience, than more typical cultural and knowledge transmission avenues.
I’ve always been drawn to stories told visually, verbally, musically, physically. Art, literature, dance, music, story-telling, poetry: those are my groove. I find poetry in science, art in geology… I’m what you’d call an omnivorous learner, an auto-didact with aspirations of the polymath state. Curiosity drives me, pretty much always. I’m never bored.
Me, the lanky blonde one in the middle, with a group of lovely weirdos after our wrap-up dig presentation.
When I was 12, I was part of a GATE program (Gifted and Talented Education–we were weirdo guinea pigs for scientists of average intelligence in the mid-1980s. It was… well, we were experimental, and I survived it. Mostly intact.) One of our opportunities was to go on field archaeology digs under the supervision of a really phenomenal archaeologist from Eastern Oregon State University, Dr Jaehnig. Little bitty German/Austrian fellow, with a tall Swedish wife/field tech. I was the youngest of all the students by a full year by virtue of starting school early (which fact doesn’t really matter to the story, but does inform how shy and generally scared I was at the time).
One day on the dig, someone found a stone pestle in their pit. Dr J helped them record the find, then brought us all together and had us pass it hand to hand, feeling the balance of it, weight of it, etc. Plenty of teenage gripes ensued: how miserable to use a stone tool, what a lot of work it would be, the lumps were wrong, etc. We were bright kids, but still teenagers, after all.
Then it came to me.
I held it in my hand, and the grooves worn into the stone fit my fingers perfectly. The balance was just right–effortless to move in a circle, no extra weight anywhere. I gave it a few turns and said, “Oh, yeah, I could use this!”
Dr J shouted, “STOP.”
I froze.
Dr J said, “COME HERE.”
I did so, right up in front of the group.
He took the pestle from me and said, “Put up your hand, please.”
I did, stretching it up above my head.
He got very solemn and stern. He took my wrist and moved my arm to display my open palm across the semi-circle of kids.
“800 years ago, in this village, lived a woman with THESE bones, and THIS flesh.”
My bones.
My flesh.
Similar enough to a woman I would never meet that we could trade tools with ease, and share work seamlessly.
My bones, my flesh–we had walked the earth before. This was proof, in my hand and in my hands.
The time stream collapsed, for a breathtaking moment that still bring tears and joy to me.
I went home an entirely different person than I arrived on the site that morning.
AND THAT MATTERS.
Me, right in the middle of a literal time stream… (image by CC Davis)
When I engage in living history, I’m doing so having put in the work to set environments and experiences that increase the chances another human being will have that moment: when the timestream collapses, and they are THERE. They are history. They have a human connection with someone they have never seen. They share emotions, and physicality, and dreams, and experiences, and flavors, and scents with people from an era far before their own. They recognize the past as Full of People… people who become THEIRS, their family. Forever. And it changes them.
That human connection to the stories of the past unites us into one shared family history–the family of man, the history of our world, with all its warts and joyful moments combined. When we can see ourselves in the stories of the past, really connect to them and understand them in a visceral way, we are more able to then connect to the modern people around us, to inhabit others’ stories in compassionate and profound ways.
Every single living history interaction, even the unspoken ones, has the potential to spark something in another human soul, and they go home a different person than they arrived. Forever.
Humans are made to connect. We crave it. Without it, we wither and grow cruel and lose our spark. We are made to share stories. We are made to create. Finding connections to our shared human past lets us tap into deep memory, and all the multitude of human pursuits.
The history site where we volunteer, and where I help design the interpretive experiences, has a theme of “Historic Roots, Modern Fruit”–because we’re not about history static and disconnected: we’re focused on how connecting to our historic roots can help us yield beautiful and nourishing fruit in modern life.
When I teach others how to research and recreate material culture from the past, or how to evaluate and experience internal/societal culture for themselves to share with others, I’m really trying to show them how to hold a stone pestle in their hands, and feel the echoes of their historic family in their bones, and in their flesh. I want them to have those moments, because I know what they mean to me, and how they change me for the better.
What I do, when measured by monetary rulers or political power brokers, is absolutely nothing of importance, or even worth.
But I don’t work by their measurements or value structure.
I’m working for the 12yo kid with a stone pestle in her hands, with tears in her eyes and goosepimples over her whole body, recognizing that her flesh and bones have inhabited this world eight centuries before she came to it.
I’m working for the 11yo emigrant kid who doesn’t yet speak English, but lights up when the translator shares my stories with him, and he sees that we are all emigrants, and he has an important place in our shared family story.
I’m working for the kid whose eyes light up when we talk about what choices we make when we start a new life in a new place, or why some choices are harder than others, or how sometimes, things don’t work out the way we planned… and this is how our family in the past handled that, and survived it, and we can, too.
I’m working for the mom whose heart leaps to see her child engaging with someone outside of mandatory therapists, because we arrange things for safe sensory exploration in a living history setting, and they can create their own unique connection to the past.
I’m working for the grandparents who don’t quite know how to share their history with their family, or a sense that no one cares about their story, or that they didn’t really do anything important in their life–but go home with all sorts of tools to help make those connections more easily, and a sense of re-evaluating their own life experiences as worth something.
I’m working to connect generations who have never met–because the past is not really past! We are downstream–we are ripples, we are waterfalls, we are diverging streams and merging whitewater cataracts, we are endless waves on unseen shores–but we are all the same waters, and the more we FEEL that reality, the better we can build the world for everyone.
So: yep, I get a wee bitty something from living history. It’s been my gig for 35 years so far. Three quarters of my life so far.
I do it because I feel the connections are that important. I think other people should do it, too. We need connection.
In the end, I do think it’s important to the world, even if the world doesn’t know it.
But in the very very end, whether or not the world thinks it is objectively important doesn’t actually matter at all.
Because it matters to that 12yo girl standing, filthy, in the middle of an archaeological dig site, her hand in the air and the waves of history crashing through her soul.
