Freedom's Frontier Heritage Area: Missing...Freedom?

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Not sufficiently for it to be adopted by the National Park Service without substantial additional informed, caring, and inclusive work. We find;

1. It insufficiently builds awareness of the struggles for freedom that took place within the boundaries of Freedom’s Frontier…” (Goal 1);

2. Categories of individual destinations have been ignored by the Master Plan process, or in some cases, further dissipated by actions of local, state, and federal governments as advocates strived to save them and get them included in the Master Plan process (Goal 1, work with individual destinations);

of slaves to begin the process of ending the civil war along the bistate border, and to honor those Knowns and Unknowns whose final resting places are willingly and knowingly threatened even though there are funds for their management and defense.

4. “Enhance, sustain, and preserve the unique cultural and historic…”. This second goal was not attained. We find the Management Plan method flawed in that it is consciously unaware of readily known repositories of “watersheds of stories”; Promised “protection” remains a pledge unfulfilled.

5. “Inspire tolerance and respect for multiple perspectives”. Unproven how intolerance and continued disrespect for some aspects of this heritage are not perpetuated by this Management Plan.

Notes on the Resources Encumbered For This Analysis and The Watkins’ Foundation “Frontier Heritage” Area Advocacy:

The Foundation, through this consultant’s emails to Judith Billings and through Warren Watkins’ phone calls and attendance at two meetings, was unable to get a response to the work of the Foundation on the Frontier Heritage Area. This includes, for example, the story of the Unknown graves at KCI Airport, (how the City has resisted following the required federal 106 law on documentation of the historic assets on the grounds of KCI); and the efforts to restore the pauper’s cemetery in Leeds, Kansas City, Missouri, along the historic Blue River.

A failing of the Management Plan’s design and execution is that it relies on a participation model based on an “open channel” invitation to any interested party. That model assumes all points of view are listening to the given advertising channel, or that if they are, that they have the resources to respond. This form of engagement is rarely tested for how well, or not, it penetrates the affected or intended audiences.

The Watkins Foundation works primarily in and around issues of Freedom for all peoples, specifically, how African Americans experience Freedom. Like its primary audience, the Foundation’s support comes from inadequately capitalized sponsors. The work of the Foundation has stretched its scarce time and resources in extraordinary ways. The research, litigation support, litigation, organizing, and correspondence over the past three years exceeds $100,000 in person hours and funds invested on stories and places of national significance in the Freedom Frontier area.

Our communications to Judith Billings indicated the Foundation and its clients have stories and work to contribute, but lacked the volunteer or paid resources to keep up to the pace of the fully funded staffing and the sponsored volunteers of the Heritage Area effort. The realization is that the organizations which are able to provide volunteers can do so because the volunteers can afford to have hobbies. The community which this Foundation serves does have a significant portion of its available human resources doing volunteering, but these tend to be absorbed by social issues with people in dire need of food, shelter, and protection from life threatening illness or social tragedy.

The model for the Freedom Frontier Heritage Area inadvertently repeats a pattern of this country. The African American story, being out of sight, is not heard from. Because it is not heard from, the African American community further withdraws from integrating itself, its history telling, and from worthy initiatives of the larger community. Because the African American community withdraws its history or remains divorced from its own history it is unable to participate in a community future. The entire Kansas City community fails to be in a state of balance because not all of its constituent population is participating with equal strength relative to numbers or passion or importance of story.

What the Management Plan fails to do is acknowledge this problem and then investing in a solution. Certainly, the outreach effort which has been exercised is laudable, and reflects the recognition from 40 years of public policy formulation that many open channels will help self motivated points of view to enjoin in community betterment. What must happen before the Management Plan is accepted is those communities which are low on participation must be afforded technical assistance that will enable their point of view to be expressed.

Well prepared excellent document which corresponds effectively with the body of the work.

Too rarely public policy does not start with the science of the environment itself. The Frontier Heritage Area work is an example of how to build policy with a foundation grounded in the physical environment. A strength of the team which composed this plan is that its authors are exceptional landscape designers, and understand and explain the underlying environment in ways which enable the history of the human settlement to be better understood.

However, it is seen from later segments of the Plan that aspects of the human settlement are missing (African-American and other immigrant stories). While the Power of Place section can remain intact, its dominance in terms of budget and the background of the skilled consultants short circuits the overall value of the work.

For segments of our community, exposure to the history of the landscape presents information they did not know influenced their forefather’s life experiences. The graphics and written explanations are well prepared for the non-professional’s ease of comprehension. The influence of climate on conditions we see today is, for example, outstanding.

Pages I-17 through I-19 do have tables which hit the key milestones of African American events. Notably, the text lacks any discussion of the relationship amongst slavery, how it was integral to the economy, and how the economy was so entirely dependent on the character of soils, rains, etc., in “Little Dixie”, or western Missouri. This error needs to be corrected. The data exists, and has been studied scientifically by anthropologic and archeology science.

We see no mention in the middle 1900’s, as an example of missing scholarship, of why blacks migrated from the south, how the declining soil character and climate forced domicile choices on hundreds of thousands of people. We see no mention of the accompaniment of slaves with their migrating Masters from the east. Those relocation choices were aided because electrical generation was more plentiful in other areas of the Freedom Frontier Area, so industry could offer jobs. This chapter is incomplete.

“21^st Century Growth” lacks any reference to how African Americans, and other more recent immigrant groups, are faring given the historic truths which persist in today’s mores. Are these people’s encountering any left over social or economic challenges? If they are, what tools or strategies are available for overcoming these lingering structural problems? Do natural or now man-made landscapes play a role in solving the problems that lead to the border wars?

The biggest question of all: Why has the civil war never been settled? (And…how do we do we know that it has not been settled?).[1]

The Management Plan is incomplete. The metaphors at the end of the first chapter do not appear to have much affinity for or relationship to peoples of color who might more naturally use metaphors for Freedom like “quicksand” (you will lose yourself if you try to walk into it); “birdlike” (you can see it but you can’t catch it); “tar pit” (you try and try to get free and the pull just gets worse and worse the harder you try).

What metaphors get collected from participants are very important. If those who have stories to tell do not recognize the metaphors being used in planning efforts, their contributions may be less rich, or their participation be more muted and edited because they feel like their experience is invalid. This Management Plan needs to show where the metaphors used come from, and likely, before the Plan is adopted, more populations need to be engaged. They need to be reflective of audiences which have not yet been represented or are underrepresented. The engagement process may need to use techniques to reach people which are not reusing the same channels employed in the part of the Management Plan already complete.

The “sense of place” we do not see defined here is that which is formed from the pain of slavery, both for captive and captor. The point of the Plan must be to describe and understand the fullest range of human meaning to those settlements which have placeness. The pain has morphed into positive strength, for example, in hearing the direct descendant of Platte County slaves today saying “ be nice….be nice”.

We are limited in the most difficult way of having access to the time to properly review this material. Without adequate time, we cannot explore affirmative solutions to the deficiencies this section reveals.

The point of view chooses to recite the well known points of historic inflection, major events which seem to signify changing conditions or expectations. In this regard, the work is complete. In regard to the notion of “watersheds” of stories, the use of the misguided metaphor needs correction. “Watersheds of stories” may be an architect, or a landscape architect’s notion of what binds the people to the landscape. An anthropologic view would take into account that the stories of the people themselves contain within them the values over and by which their struggles were waged. What did it mean to the African American that Dred Scott tried to acquire his freedom in a Missouri Court? What did it mean locally, and regionally, and nationally, that the Supreme Court of the United States said these people held as slaves were not US Citizens?

Even today we fight vigorously in Federal Court to make Dred Scot’s very point. The story of the City of Kansas City avoiding any effort, indeed, employing deliberate steps to deny the possibility that graves of Unknown people are contained within the City’s airport boundaries, presents the great themes of huge importance to our entire nation. The case we fight for today makes the point that before the Unknowns’ graves can be moved, the buried persons must be acknowledged the citizenship that was granted by Presidential Proclamation. The highest court of the land must be asked to revisit the question whether slaves are citizens.

Once the part of the story of whether the slaves are citizens is answered, then we can discuss the package which posthumously must be granted, (recall the procedure we do with each new immigrant citizen). Once (symbolically or otherwise) that package is bestowed on the Unknowns or their descendants or their guardians ad litem, then we can talk about how to relocate the graves. Of those grave relocations, some of the people if given their choice might have elected to return to their homeland, so we must at least in some fashion honor those assumed requests.

Once we take all these steps, would we be ready to build the Museum at the airport that will be an ongoing tourism generator and classroom for teaching the world about the sacrifices made by all the ancestors whose blood is in these soils?

None of these stories made it from our efforts to communicate into the Management Plan. The Management Plan cannot be accepted until we go back and capture all the stories, and understand the meaning of those stories. Why, for example, have we not settled these questions, so the healing can begin? Why do we fear facing the challenges these brave settlers and plantation owners and servants and slaves met each day?

They all paid the price they did….so we should, in the largess we enjoy because of their efforts, be free to forget?

Observations: We have had no time whatsoever to fill out the worksheets. We had requested that the Planning staff make some allowance somehow for helping us get some time to fill out the forms for the activities in which we are engaged. We note that the firms themselves are very useful……..but for organizations like the Watkins Foundation, all efforts and resources are fully engaged in trying to save elements of the African American places and culture which are decidedly threatened and have no other defense from private or governmental threat but those of the Foundation.

One example of where adjustment is needed in the Plan is that for African American and Native American people, their stories may contain very little of “what does your place look like”, as they now are dust and faint memories of aging citizens. Asking someone who has nothing to recall what the thing they never saw looks like is offputting. They start out the story-telling exercise with an empty memory, which symbolizes the pain and loss of what was taken from them. Perhaps we need to ask more about how those ancient stories have meaning in today’s living.

We really need to do some work with the questionnaires about market. Typically, African Americans experience the sensation that no one outside themselves has any interest in their stories. We need to understand how to communicate with non-minority audiences so the substantial numbers of native Americans and African Americans who populated this area when the western migrations occurred can have their stories surfaced, shared, understood, and celebrated, not just by people of color.

Connecting the stories to the land may be of great interest, but to a narrow population. The Management Plan needs to prompt respondents for “how did the survival of the slave families effect you today?” “what does your story tell us about how close the slave families and the plantation owners’ families were?” what does this closeness mean to us today”? “How does your story contribute to our understanding how it felt for some slave owning families that were trapped and could not free their slaves without grave physical, social, or economic harm?”

Changing behaviors is a piece of research which must be invested in, now, before we can consider this Management Plan having the ethical, moral, or even constitutional right to be filed with the National Park Service. That we have our antiquated beliefs does not justify that we should still have lingering racism, or fears by African Americans or immigrants to exercise rights granted them.

The Watkins Foundation projects include the discovery, and reburial of the new citizen/former slaves graves at KCI, with a museum to celebrate the Freedom Frontier Area. The Foundation was and is unable to provide Partnering with the Freedom Frontier Area. The Foundation needs to Partner with Freedom Frontier as it is a most natural advocate for other African American family Foundations, and businesses, to find capacity and reason and be active players. Too many black institutions are controlled by units of government and therefore not able to find their own voice, or staffed or directed by persons whose income is entirely dependent from the government sector. The Freedom Frontier Area can and should be a “place” where these issues can be worked on and solved, in collaboration with other representative component institutions and people.

The Guiding principles are not accomplished. On Page 4-7, where is the Partnership support for Inner City groups, minority, etc.? What is referred to here?

Table 4-9 invites exciting opportunities for discovery. When we look at the items on the axis of that Table, we realize that African American people have some involvement in many of the intersections, but those “places” are largely invisible within the community of color and to the majority. The Freedom’s Frontier area is an opportunity to make up for years of not “comparing notes” about the degree or lack of degrees of participation. This is an opportunity to show the historic reasons why the races have operated in separate worlds.

As in the “place” and “story” of the Unknown graves at KCI, the descendants of plantation owners called the descendants of slaves and asked, “hey, don’t you have some people buried up here?” The reburial ceremony conducted by Archie Williams at the Circle of Prayer, in April, 2008 was louder and more spiritually powerful then the thunderous, earth shaking descent of the huge commercial airliners lumbering only a few feet above the heads of the celebrants.

The Implementation stage will need to measure the amount of resources needed to bring underrepresented sites and institutions into the Star Mentorship program. The Management Plan is fundamentally unsound where it invites participation when the non represented parties do not get their responses included, or have the resources in the first place to participate. There is inherently lack of balance when using the volunteer model for how unrepresented stories and places can get themselves included. The Implementation will need an outreach function, certainly staffed from within the missing community segments. This corrective process cannot impose leaders appointed because they profile just like the government or civic officials who have initiated this very well done and very important process. It is by self-defined achievement that balance of freedom will be fully shared by even those shut out of its full enjoyment.

The criteria which is weighted against sponsoring duplicated events or places needs to be examined. There may be good reason to have several slaves’ graves memorials for example. We learn how widespread were the Plantations throughout western Missouri.

So must the Management Plan show graphics and narratives which give life to this history.

One gets the sense from the Management Plan point-of-view that the author of the Plan feels we should know about milestone vents, but the actual experience of the people’s lives in relation to the landscape is a lesser detail, left for the telling of individual stories. While the individual stories can get us to understanding the character of the lives that were lead, so we can understand the values of for example slaves and slave owners, if because of how the Management Plan was composed those folks are unable to get access to the story telling, then the Plan itself is unacceptably flawed. So the point-of-view is flawed, and must be corrected before the Plan can be adopted.

None of the work steps back and tells us how this Management Plan model differs or is alike, or why, other Management Plans. For example, this Management Plan relies greatly (because of changing ability of the Federal government to fund such socially important advancements) on a volunteer model. However, many of the human elements of the “story” , ‘or “actions” or “partnerships” lack the economic position to volunteer their organization or story.

As an example, there is a Black Archives of Mid America. A natural function of it’s Mission is to perform as a fully vibrant participant in the formulation of this Management Plan. The organization, formed three decades ago, had been going through a wrenching decline as this Management Plan was starting. A praiseworthy and refreshing rescue effort was mobilized by an enlightened Kansas City civic leader and a state government official, and the organization entered a transition phase.

However, in the course of the transition to a new, responsible and equipped Archive, its original voice was lost. It became cut off from the roots of the organization, which had been steeped deeply in the history of the African American. Not only was this story not told, it could not have been accurately told because the new leadership was selected by outside leaders, and not through a natural progression of the organization finding its own nature and strength. In transition, it has become an extension of those with resources, and is emptied of its soul.

No praise should be left unstated for those civic leaders who stepped forward and sponsored the saving of the Archives, likely at some curiosity to their own majority community. The fact is we have not developed the tools to enable black institutions to work their way through their crises, engaging important and welcome resources from a partner majority community. Maintaining the African American institution’s ability to be true to its own voice and therefore be cared for and nurtured by those whose stories it is responsible for preserving and sharing is an achievable community asset. The Management Plan needs a toolkit for how those parts of our collective story can be told when the people who own the stories do not automatically have the skills, time, or feel welcomed in giving their participation. The Management Plan lacks a solution to the continuing isolation of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans.

The political power of landscape, discussed near the end of the Power of Place, is enlightening for revealing the point of view of the authorship. That these planners managing this process talk about the beauty of the landscape is a point of view which this analyst, himself a university trained architect and planner, overly delights in. To say that that the beauty of landscape had much to do with east coasters in pre-settlement thinking, (readers in their day of the New York Times), adds greatly to how design and landscape beauty influenced a portion of the vast westward movement.

But anthropologic approach might also include the influence of writings of wider distribution but lower brow. A broader point of view might help us understand the percentage of migrants who moved because of failing economic conditions, discrimination against immigrants, and so forth. Belief that visual beauty can shape mass migration

The Management Plan is well prepared, accessible for some, and partially fulfills the requirements asked of it. It is incomplete in areas which are critical to product useful to the region and our nation.

Absent from the Plan is information which tells us the character and values of population segments which lack advocates or access to articulate advocates who can present the truth of their experiences. When the Management Plan is complete, we will experience much more richly the texture of thee differences. Said one of our participants, “you can go to 25^th and Benton, and have some black eyed peas….and you can go to 215^th an Metcalf and have some black eyes peas……at each place, those peas are totally different”.

What we will learn from a completed Management Plan is what is missing at this point: we are different, our differences make us unique, and, we are unified….in our differences. It is that unity which is the freedom which this region tells the story of and celebrates.

National Park Service invite the Office of Public Advocate, sponsored by the Watkins Foundation, to provide a scope of services and budget for professional services to manage the input of the underrepresented segments of the Freedom’s Frontier area to the National Park Service.

[1] This author’s work on the first efforts to restore the Jackson County (Truman) Courthouse since the 1930’s for reasons explained elsewhere could not make it into this study. In that work, two critically important aspects of Jackson County life still were quite alive: Vestiges of Pendergast’s influence, and the Civil War itself have not been settled.

[2]Due to the shortness of time; the lack of resources; and the pressure of current emergency projects, this report is issued without the normal vetting done by the advisors to the Watkins Foundation. It was felt that something of a message needed to be provided because the process went this long with the process not synthesizing Watkins Foundation input. Once this has been reviewed by the Watkins Foundation advisors, it may be resubmitted and it may be radically different.