How does art and local history have anything to do with preventing crime and promoting public safety?

Both are helping a Rainier Valley community gain a sense of pride and identity, with the help of a few young people not afraid to get their hands dirty.

Inspired Collaboration

Don Fels is a participant in the city's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs pilot program Arts Up, an initiative which links artists with neighborhoods to address community issues. The program does not proscribe specific outcomes for these collaborators and has led to unusual and creative solutions.

The program matched the Courtland Place neighborhood with Fels who has been an active artist, educator, and facilitator of public projects since the early 1980s. Courtland Place is a two block area slightly northwest of Columbia City behind a Safeway on Rainier Avenue South. According to Fels, until about five or six years ago, the neighborhood was plagued with drug problems that were making residents feel unsafe. The community responded by creating a block watch, starting a P-Patch, and supporting other improvement projects that brought greater stability.

When Fels and the community came together to consider how he might help them improve the neighborhood further, both agreed he should explore a creative design for a hillclimb from the intersection of Courtland Place South and Charlestown Street South. Long before Fels' partnership with the Courtland Place neighborhood, decades of residents, (mostly children) scaled the rise up to Mount Baker through a right of way where his project is planned. This footpath is somewhat unsafe and generally overwhelmed by blackberry bushes.

As a part of his planning for the project, Fels researched the area's history. Fels found very little documentation of the specific site in the City of Seattle's archives or those of the Rainier Valley Historical Society. In a casual conversation with a city transportation employee overseeing tree plantings near the site, Fels learned the tiny neighborhood had once been a garbage dump.

Dumps or middens are treasure troves for archaeologists. Much of what we know about the domestic lives of colonial Americans comes from middens. The construction of the hillclimb afforded a window of opportunity for digging and exploring below street level. Being an educator, Fels saw an excellent chance to teach kids about history.

Fels contacted the Burke Museum, and connected with Peter Lape, the museum's Archaeology Curator who holds great interest in public archaeology projects. Public archaeology engages community members and connects residents to local history, and to educates participants in archaeological methods. The process of archaeological investigation is intrinsically "discovery based," and a terrific learning tool.

Unearthing Personal Histories

Once the general idea for the project was in place, Fels sought teachers and students for the dig. John Muir Elementary's Parent Teacher Association pointed Fels toward Kathleen Hennessy and Sue Broder, who later helped develop and implement the project. The project fit into a number of educational requirements (Essential Academic Learning Requirements or EALRs) for science and social studies. The archaeological component and related work like a follow up exhibit based on the findings, and oral histories conducted with older community members, seemed an ideal way to teach 4th and 5th grade students many important lessons at once.

The project was strongly supported by the school and by funders and organizational partners because the learning methods provided a unique way to learn about common heritage, and to help the young participants understand who and what the community was made of before they became a part of it. In the beginning of the project, these general goals were understood broadly - artifacts from the 1920s were definitely on the site, but precisely what the children would learn was discovered during and after the dig.

The project was educational on a number of levels, not only for the children participating. Several University of Washington archaeology graduate students studying through the Burke Museum program participated, primarily on the five days of the dig which took place in October of 2002. Graduate students and volunteers helped set up each day, directed kids around the site with excavation and alternated between various stations.

In addition to excavating, the fifth grade participants also screened the artifacts on site, sorted them, and filled out paperwork with the help of the attending graduate students and supervisors. The kids were shown how to date things and were encouraged to interpret meaning from the objects.

Robin Goldberg, Archaeology Outreach Coordinator for the Burke Museum, and staff to this project recalls that, "the kids responded very favorably to the hands-on approach of the project. The kids walked away with a great understanding and respect for their neighborhood." When asked about one of her favorite memories of the project, Goldberg noted, "one girl was frustrated at the end of the day because she couldn't weigh her artifacts. She felt measuring and weighing her artifacts was part of the scientific process of archaeology. She felt if wasn't scientific without this component, which she took very seriously."

The young participants reflected the ethnic diversity of the neighborhood. Roughly one-third of the children working on the project were white, one third were black, and one third were Asian.

Community Partners

The Rainier Valley Historical Society played a number of roles throughout the course of this project. Mikala Woodward, RVHS Director, and Don Fels trained students to gather oral history interviews and integrate historical information with archaeological evidence. After the dig, students worked with the historical society and Fels to research, document and create an exhibit of their findings. The exhibit will be on display at the RVHS and other locations until the end of the school year, and includes a number of original art pieces as well as artifacts found at the site.

The historical society served as the organizational sponsor for this effort to aid in fundraising. The project, with a budget of around $30,000, could not have taken place with partial funding. With the RVHS as the organizational lead, donors and sponsors could provide tax deductable support. The historical society also has a strong track record conducting large scale community projects - a history of success is key to fundraising.

The historical society will maintain the artifacts once the exhibit is dismantled.

The project was especially exciting to the historical society because it satisfied many of its organizational goals at once. The RVHS is interested in uncovering new information and artifacts that would support greater understanding of minority populations, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and areas outside of Columbia City. The Courtland Place project covered all these bases.

The project generated new oral histories for the RVHS archives, and drew attention to local history in a highly visible and positive way. As Woodward noted in a letter of support for this project, "people who would normally never consider their neighborhood's past will be drawn in by this project.

The King County Office of Cultural Resources provided funding for this project through its Cultural Education Grant and Arts Education Grant programs. The Washington Commission for the Humanities and the Ferguson Foundation were also sponsors.

Other partners included the Seattle Transportation Department who removed the asphalt on top of the site carefully to allow for the dig, and helped coordinate traffic while the kids excavated. The state's Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation worked with Dr. Peter Lape the Principal Investigator (the director of the archaeology component of this project) to be sure that appropriate permits and review were maintained. The Courtland Place site is now officially listed on the state's roster of archaeological sites.

The Courtland Place project, including Don Fels hillclimb design, is sure to be a model for other organizations and neighborhoods looking to link art, history, education, community development and infrastructural improvements. Discovering and interpreting personal histories through archaeology and art is inherently respectful to the subject matter. In projects such as this, art was a thread knitting history and archaeology. The final products, including the hillclimb which tells the story of the place through casts of objects found, and references the stories of the residents, communicate to present and future generations in a way that is personal, yet inherently public.

The results of the project were inspiring for all involved. Don Fels noted, "I wouldn't be at all surprised that some future archaeologists will come out of this group of kids, maybe even an artist or two".

Holly Taylor, with the King County Cultural Development Authority (originally the Office of Cultural Resources) was a cheerleader for the project all along, and hopes for more like it. "I've encouraged the Burke and Don Fels to write a manual on the Courtland Place Project," she said, "it's exciting to think what might happen if more artists, neighborhoods, and kids got together and used heritage as a tool for solving larger community problems."

View last month's Young Voices article

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