>> Nicole Saylor: 
Hi, I'm Nicole Saylor.
I'm the director of
 the American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress.
I'd like to welcome you 
to today's presentation,
which is part of our ongoing
Benjamin A Botkin Lecture series.
The Botkin Lectures allow
 us to highlight the work
of leading scholars in 
the disciplines of folklore,
ethnomusicology, oral history
and cultural documentation,
while enhancing and expanding
the collections here at the library.
So each lecture is 
recorded, as you'll see,
and will become part 
of the library's collection
and freely available online.
And so this would probably
 be a good time to remind you
to turn off your cell
 phones so you are not
archived in the Library of Congress.
All right. So today, I'm very excited.
We have the honor of introducing
 the distinguished folklorist
and respected colleague, 
Marilyn White.
Dr. White who is --
Yeah, right. Give it up.
[Applause] All right.
Dr. White, who is currently president
of the American Folklore Society
is a retired professor
of anthropology at Kean 
University in New Jersey,
where she taught from 1985 to 2011.
She received her PhD in folklore
from the University 
of Texas at Austin,
her MA in folklore
 at Indiana University,
and her BA in English 
from Hampton University.
She is a key member
 of such influential groups as
the Association of African and
African American Folklorists,
City Lore, the Center for Urban
 Folk Culture in New York City,
the New Jersey Folklore Society,
and she serves on academic 
and public folklore committees
too numerous to mention.
Her research interests include
 African American folklore,
family folklore, 
stratification jokes, and humor.
She has been conducting
 long term research
in Little Cayman Island
 in the Caribbean.
Today, yes, Dr. White
 will reflect on her career,
her experiences and the
 challenges that must be met
for the field of folklore 
to become more inclusive
and reflective of 
21st century America.
So please join me 
in welcoming Dr. White
for her Botkin lecture
"Folklore Today/ Folklore Tomorrow:
Expanding the Conversation"
Welcome. 
 [Applause]
>> Marilyn M. White: 
So thank you.
And it's so wonderful to be
 here and to see a number
of my folklore friends, 
even somebody
who's from my own 
home town, Jim Deutsch,
who've taken time out of
 work or vacation to be here.
And special thanks to Nancy
 Gross for reaching out
to me to be one of the
 Botkin lecture speakers.
When she first asked me
if I'd be willing to 
come and speak,
reflecting on my career
 and some of the challenges
that the field faces, I had
 a somewhat grandiose idea
of the talk and a title, 
but Nancy let me know
that this is also 
for the general audience
and not just folklore scholars.
Relying on her expertise,
 I revised my ideas
and decided to go with her title.
And while I do want to talk about
expanding the conversation,
I realized that I had a problem
with Folklore Today/ Folklore Tomorrow.
When I was still teaching, 
especially
my African American studies courses,
it was necessary to 
put things in context.
And that context meant
 looking back in time
and letting the students
 know something about
West African history and
 culture and even discussing
other parts of the African diaspora.
Likewise, in this talk, I could 
not talk about Folklore Today
without looking back
 to the past, and equally,
I could not reflect on my career
without looking back at my past.
For me, then, this is also
my folklore origin story.
While our discipline 
is incredibly wide ranging,
covering almost all 
aspects of human life,
especially a people's
 various identity groups,
in many respects, it's also
 perceived as being esoteric,
as not even being 
recognized as a field of study
by some as being insignificant
 or lower tier by others.
Therefore, one of the 
questions that we folklorists
are interested in knowing
 is each other's origin story.
How did you become a folklorist?
How did you find out about 
and learn about the discipline?
Because of the number 
of folklorists here,
If you're not a folklorist, you
 might want to take advantage
of the opportunity and talk 
to us and find out about
the Folks's own origin story
because their stories
 might be very different.
You might want to talk to
 several different people.
That way you'll have a greater
 sense of the field itself
as what we've done since
 we came into the field
will be incredibly varied as well.
I started off as a biology
 major in college,
but a C in botany, a D in Zo, 
a D in math
let me know pretty quickly 
that if I didn't change majors,
I was going to have a really
 short college career.
Though the term was not 
used back then,
not everybody is cut out 
for a STEM major or career
though I still love especially
the life sciences
and have a number of
 books on birds
as Barry might be able 
to attest and on sea life.
And I've often joked in
 my next life,
I might want to be an ornithologist
or a marine biologist.
I also loved the 
English language and literature
and so switched 
to English education.
But I soon realized 
that I did not want to be
a high school English teacher.
I then switched to
 English liberal arts,
but that would mean 
going to grad school
as I wasn't sure what 
I was going to do
with just a bachelor's degree.
One of my professors
 thought that I was interested
in linguistics and
recommended Kent State
and Indiana University.
I got both catalogs
 when universities
were still mailing them
 out and pored through them.
For Kent State, 
I decided on their
English Master of 
Arts in Teaching, (MAT).
I looked at both IU's English 
and linguistics departments,
but then when I was flipping
 through the catalog,
I saw the folklore department
 and the list of courses;
folk narrative, mythology, 
North American Indian folklore,
English and Scottish 
popular ballads.
It wasn't sure exactly what
 all the courses were about,
but I was a kid who had devoured
 fairy tales and stories
from other cultures who
 had taken two years of Latin
in high school and learned
 the Greek alphabet
years before I joined a 
sorority and had read
a ton of stories of Greek 
and Roman deities.
I had fallen in love with folk 
music and would go over
to Greenwich Village
 with a friend
and take in the folk scene.
And I'd even bought a 
guitar and strummed badly
and even worse, finger 
picked more badly
and learned those tunes, as a
matter of fact, from song books.
These courses in IU's 
catalog weren't just
about reading and 
analyzing literature.
They were teaching how 
to study and understand
the people who told the stories
and the context in 
which they were told
and the audiences
 who heard them.
This was everything and 
more that English was not.
I applied to both 
Kent State and Indiana,
and Kent State 
offered me a full ride.
Indiana, a partial scholarship
called up my father
 and told him
that I really wanted 
to go to Indiana,
even though it would mean
 more money out of his pocket.
A serious consideration,
 what with my sister in college
and my brother 
soon to be there.
Fortunately, 
my father said yes.
Ironically, sadly, 
during my first year at IU,
the four students were
 killed by the National Guard
at Kent State while 
protesting the Vietnam War.
In a subsequent conversation,
 my father said
that he was glad that
 I hadn’t gone there.
While at IU, I had a number 
of courses with Richard Dorson,
Fieldwork with Henry Glassie,
Ballads with W. 
Edson Richmond, among others.
I had wanted to take narrative
 with Linda Dégh,
but she might have been
 on sabbatical,
so I took it with 
Warren Roberts,
who later specialized
 in material culture.
Some of my classmates, 
at the MA and Ph.D level
included Bill Wiggins, 
Frank de Caro and Rosan Jordan,
Yvonne Milspaw, Bill Ivey, 
Cam Collins, and so many others!
During my first year,
I was staying on campus
 during Spring Break,
and Dr. Dorson asked if
I would stay with Stith Thompson
and his wife, help them out,
take them to doctor’s
appointments, etc.
—and I did so.
As a relative newbie
folklorist, and overwhelmed
to be in such close proximity
to such an important 
figure in folklore
(I mean, the Aarne-Thompson 
Tale Type Index,
the Motif Index!),
I really did not take 
advantage of sitting
at the great man’s feet, 
as it were,
and asking all kind of questions
 and learning what I could.
At the end of the week,
Dr. Dorson asked if I’d be willing to stay
with the Thompsons
 for the rest of the semester,
continuing to help them out.
I actually declined,
 especially because,
from almost my first day
 in Eigenmann Dorm,
I had made friends with a varied
 group of Black grad students.
Though there are all kinds of
 racial issues surrounding this,
you might want to look at
Beverly Daniel Tatum’s 
classic 1997 book,
"Why Are All the Black Kids
Sitting
 Together in the Cafeteria"?
This was exactly how 
we had come together,
seeing a black student sitting
 at a table in the dining room
and joining that person 
and others coming to join.
And soon we occupied several 
tables and continued to meet,
eat, hang out together 
and become friends,
some of whom I know to this day.
Often when one is in
 the minority in numbers,
one looks for, "one's own,"
where you don't have
 to be on guard,
where they can be 
shorthanded conversations
because you're speaking
 the same language,
where there is or can be
 mutual understanding.
This is what I found 
with that group of
black grad students
 in Eigenmann.
What I found with 
my sorority sisters,
Delta Sigma Theta
 Sorority Incorporated,
especially when I was at
predominantly 
white institutions.
What I found with 
African American faculty
and staff groups, whether 
formally organized or not,
and what I found 
when what became
the Association of African
and African American Folklorists
had its first conference 
in 1975.
In regard to the four AF,
that's a shorthand for
 the long title.
In regard to the four AF,
 though,
we only had three conferences 
of our own during the 1970s.
We have met for decades
 during the AFS annual meeting.
In addition to our 
traditional dinner,
we have organized 
panels and forums
and or have sponsored others, 
including financial support.
We attend each 
other's presentations.
We reach out to and welcome
 new members to the fold,
often serving as 
mentors for them,
and share news and
 information through emails.
It's all our way of 
saying we're here
and we too are doing the work.
At the end of two years at IU,
 I would have my masters,
but I wasn't sure what
 would come next.
I couldn't burden my father
with all three of us in college,
but I wasn't sure what
 would come next.
I couldn't burden my father
with all three of us in college,
so I wrote to my favorite
 professor back at Hampton
asking if there might be
 the possibility
of my joining the faculty.
She wrote back that 
Hampton wouldn't work out,
but she gotten a request from an
English department chair
 in Washington State,
and they were looking 
for someone
who could teach African
 American lit folklore,
cultural studies, as well
 as traditional English courses.
I did a phone interview
 and got interviewed
and then hired at what is now
Central  Washington University
 in Ellensburg, Washington,
literally right smack dab in
 the middle of the state.
Again, I made 
wonderful friends there
and had a great 
experience teaching
a wide variety of courses,
including Native 
American folklore,
Mexican American folklore, 
as well as African American lit,
English lit, the dreaded 
composition.
I realized, however, that
 if I were going to stay
at the university level,
 I'd need a PhD.
In 1972, AFS was meeting
 in Austin, Texas,
and I decided to go 
because Roger Abrams
was teaching at UT and 
I wanted to study with him.
One of the foremost scholars of
African American folklore
 and culture.
When I attended the
 annual meeting,
I had a chance to 
talk with Roger,
as well as with Dick Bauman,
who headed the
 folklore program at UT.
They urged me to apply.
I did, got accepted along
 with an offer to be
a teaching assistant teaching
 African American folklore.
When I went to Texas, 
my fellow students
included John McDowell 
and Beverly Stolski,
who subsequently ended up
 on the faculty at IU,
Nick Spitzer at Tulane and
 of American roots,
Sabra Weber, later of 
Ohio State University,
Meg Brady at Utah, José Limón
and the recently 
deceased John Vlach.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
 was just about to leave
as well as my long term 
roommate, Susan Roach,
recently retired from
 Louisiana Tech.
The program in the early
 and mid-70s was incredible
and productive and innovative,
led by Dick Bauman, Roger Abrams
 and Américo Paredes,
as well as my fellow
 Indiana alum
Frank de Caro, among others.
With the subsequent departure
 of Roger and then Dick
and Beverly and without
 university support to replace
all of the lives lost, 
the program was diminished.
But not before 
producing Kay Turner,
past president of AFS
 and, among others,
recent AFS fellows Pat Sawin,
Ricky Saltzman and
 AFC Zone Guha Shankar.
During my early years at Texas,
my mother came to visit me
and of course, among others,
I introduced her
 to Roger Abrams.
Roger shared some 
of his stories about his time
and work in Philadelphia.
My mother told him
 that some members
of her extended family
 had left Cumberland, Virginia,
about 45 miles west of Richmond
 and had moved to Philadelphia.
This was not just an
 ordinary move,
but a specific subset
 of the Great Migration.
They moved and 
crossed the color line,
passing for white, 
seeking a better economic
and social life
 and escaping prejudice,
discrimination
 and lack of opportunities.
Escaping racism
 and everything that entailed.
There are two ways 
of passing, as this was called.
One way was to
 live black and work white.
In other words, one would obtain
a job by passing for white,
but the person would carefully
 live life outside of work
as a black person hoping
 not to get caught
by white work colleagues.
During my dissertation 
fieldwork,
I learned that my great
 uncle Grant Dungee,
did this for a time, 
but as I was told,
he found it too stressful 
and stopped doing it.
The other way of doing it 
was the way that some
of my Coleman relatives did,
 permanently crossed
the color line, passed for 
white concealed everything
about one's former life and 
again, hope not to get caught.
While these relatives did pass,
apparently, they kept some
 lines of communication open,
as my mother shared that 
they would send packages
of goods back to 
their family in Virginia.
Though this would have made
for an interesting study
 in and of itself.
Man, I could have been 
Isabel Wilkerson.
"The Warmth of Other Suns."
But you got to share
 the wealth, as it were.
But the conversation
 between Roger and my mother
did lay the groundwork for
 what became my dissertation,
a study of my mother's family
and two more 
interrelated families.
The relationships that these
 three branches of the family
had with each other, as well as 
with the black community
and the white community 
in that rural county
focusing on the years 
1860 to 1940,
from the time when 
I could find records
to the time of the last of my
mother's siblings left the area.
And just so you know, 
those of us of the next
and the next generations 
still own the land
and the house is still there, 
though unoccupied.
Interestingly, I was 
recently contacted
by a middle school
 teacher in Cumberland
and using my dissertation,
 he and his students
continued to research 
and recently submitted
a proposal to the state 
to have a historical marker
installed to honor two of 
my ancestors.
My great grandfather 
Shed Dungee,
who was a matter of
 fact served in
the Virginia House of
Delegates during Reconstruction,
and my great, great uncle,
Reuben Turner Coleman.
So Spring 2024 will be a family,
a county school system 
and community celebration
when the marker is installed.
And though it was an
 important time in my life,
I don't have this might be
 a little bit long anyway.
I don't really have time to 
detail all of my experiences
at Western Kentucky
 when I taught there
from 1977 to 1985, 
teaching folklore
and black studies courses.
I've explored erasure in a lot
of what I've already discussed,
and I'll return to it later.
But suffice it to say
 that Western Kentucky
was guilty of it
 when they decided
to eliminate Black Studies
in 1984 and thus 
also my position,
although they 
ultimately revived it.
It was after I left.
Fortunately, they 
gave me one year.
I wound up going to 
AFS meeting in San Diego,
which I wasn't planning 
on going to, but they said,
okay, we can maybe help 
you do a job search.
That's another story as well.
But I wound up being hired
 at Kane University in 1985,
which was fabulous 
because it meant
I was back home and actually 
lived in my parents' house.
Kane presented me 
with several opportunities
that led to wonderful 
fieldwork research.
In my own department, 
one of the sociologists
had lived and taught in Japan.
When I taught 
at Western Kentucky,
I played on an intramural
 volleyball faculty
and staff group with people
 from all over the university.
One who was part of 
the landscaping team
for the city was also the 
husband of a sociologist.
Kaz Abe had grown up in Japan,
studied and knew 
Japanese martial arts,
and took his volleyball
 seriously—
even playing in 
volleyball-specific shoes.
When he offered a course on
 Japanese language and culture,
I jumped at the chance and 
took it for a semester.
When my Kean colleague 
found out about it,
he and I shared our love and
interest in all things Japanese.
Dr. Don Wheeler, along
 with a colleague of his
at another New Jersey
 state college,
applied for and received
 a Fulbright grant
to take New Jersey 
college faculty to Japan
for six weeks over the
 summer to study and learn.
I applied and got accepted 
to the program.
Each of us had our own
 research topic,
and I was fascinated by a
 group of people in Japan
who had been discriminated 
against for two thousand years!
Though they are, "racially or
 ethnically" Japanese,
they have been discriminated against
 because of their occupations.
The Buraku, meaning 
“village” or “hamlet,”
and sometimes Burakumin, 
with -min meaning people,
have traditionally slaughtered
 animals, tanned hides,
worked with leather, and done
 jobs that have been
seen as being ritually pollutin
g by both major religions
in Japan, Shinto and Buddhism.
Especially in the past, they
 were called names such as Eta,
or “extreme filth”; sometimes
 Hinin, or “non-human”;
or been referred to
 with four fingers held up
or the word yotsu, a variation
of the number 4 
or 4-legged, or “animal”;
while it may be considered
 a good location now
or in the past, near 
the riverbank was not
where one wanted to live, 
especially if it were outside
the safety of walled
 cities, and, thus,
one of the old names
 for the Buraku
was kawarimono, or 
“riverbank people.”
The occupations that
 they were restricted
to have been described, 
in the Japanese language,
as the three “K’s,” that translate to “hard, dirty, dangerous.”
Though a lot has changed in
 recent years for the Buraku,
we know that it’s sometimes
 easier to change laws
than to change people’s minds.
Changes were made
 beginning with
the Meiji Restoration
 in the late 1800s,
but when I did my research
 in the early 1990s,
I was able to visit Buraku 
communities still in existence
in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka—
 and all of these communities
were right by the riverbank.
I interviewed a woman
 who worked for
a human rights 
organization who told me
that she had wanted
 to be a journalist,
but she said that she 
knew better than to apply,
as they’d do a background search
and find out about her heritage.
She was referring to
 the family registers
that go back generations,
 that, among other things,
indicate where one’s
 family lived,
and if it showed that it was in
a traditional Buraku
 neighborhood,
they would know her
 background and not hire her.
Part of what fascinated
 me so much about this group
were the many similarities
 with the history
and experiences of 
African Americans—
from neighborhood or
 housing restrictions;
economic, educational,
 and social segregation;
derogatory names and prejudice;
as well as violence 
perpetrated on the group;
and so many other examples.
Ironically, there was 
also another  connection
with African Americans
 and my family.
I had earlier mentioned 
members of another branch
of my family who had moved away,
cut most ties with their family,
and passed for white; 
as well as my great uncle
who, for a time, “lived 
Black and worked white.”
At a gathering of Buraku
 that I attended in Osaka,
a woman spoke of 
doing exactly this—
though, as I said, 
Buraku are “racially”
or “ethnically” Japanese.
She was “passing” by 
hiding her Buraku identity.
She said that she had
 gotten a job that,
had they known of her heritage,
 she would not have gotten.
She would go into the city and
 work and return on the train.
When she disembarked,
she said that she would 
hang around at the station,
pretending to look at 
displays or look in the shops.
She did this in case any of
 her co-workers might see her.
When she was sure 
that she was safe,
she would literally 
cross the railroad tracks
and go to her home in
 the Buraku neighborhood.
Very much like my 
great Uncle Grant,
she said that she had
 to stop “passing,”
because it was too stressful,
 living a double-life,
fearing that she
 might get caught,
pretending to be
 something she was not.
Another fieldwork opportunity
 came when a colleague
in Geology reached out to me
because she heard
 that I was a scuba diver.
In 1998, Dr. Carrie Manfrino
 had started
a choral monitoring program
that tracks the changes in 
coral and fish densities
that led to the founding of
the Central Caribbean 
Marine Institute, CCMI
and the physical site of the
 Little Cayman Research Centre.
When I first went there,
 it didn't look like this
because some of those 
buildings weren't there.
So the building on the left,
the smaller building t
hat wasn't there.
So you had to --
in order to use the bathroom,
 you had to go down the stairs,
walk either by the water 
or by the road
to the baths building, which
 is where the toilets were.
You had to go up the stairs,
 use the toilets
because there were 
composting toilets.
I mean, it was seriously 
green energy.
And I don't have time to go
 into all of the details.
I want to talk about some
 of my research,
but there's so much more.
So during the academic
 year 2004, 2005,
Carrie invited interested 
faculty from across
the university to a meeting 
where she was discussing
the research center and
 the kind of work
that people were doing there,
from coral monitoring to 
research on mangrove habitats
or iguanas or fish populations.
While all of the other
 attendees were scientists
of one kind or another,
I was the only 
folklorist/ anthropologist,
but I'd been wanting to do
 a long-term project somewhere,
and this fit the bill as it 
was a small island
with a relatively 
small population.
In summer of 2005,
I began a long-term ethnographic
 research project
on Little Cayman, returning 
over many summers
to conduct interviews with a 
number of the residents
and exploring foodways 
issues of identity,
sense of place, among others.
The Cayman Islands, part
 of the British Commonwealth,
are located just south of Cuba.
They are comprised of Grand 
Cayman, the seat of government,
The sister Islands, Cayman Brac 
and Little Cayman.
It might be a little small, but 
they're not like this.
They're more like this with 
Cayman Brac further to the east.
Then there's the Little Cayman. 
And then you go quite a ways.
And then there's Grand Cayman.
So Little Cayman, the smallest
 of the islands,
is approximately one mile wide 
and ten miles long.
It wasn't until May 1992 that 
everyone on Little Cayman
got electricity from a high 
of about 190 people
and now has a population
 of about 161.
One of the shaping forces 
of the Cayman Islands
was very late hurricane 
occurring in November 1932.
That took the islands by
 surprise and especially
devastated Little Cayman
 to the point where
it never regained its 
pre-hurricane population.
Of those 161 people, 
no more than a dozen
are actually eligible to vote.
Of the people, only
 a tiny handful,
maybe half a dozen, are
 actually from Little Cayman.
Many are, "ex-pats," 
people from the United States,
Europe, Central America
 or other islands
in the Caribbean
 who had permanent--
who have become permanent
 residents of Little Cayman.
A few of these have become 
nationalized as Cayman citizens.
Others have status.
That is, they have 
some of the privileges
that citizens have except
 the right to vote.
A number of other people were
 born in Cayman Brac
or Grand Cayman and have
 made Little Cayman
their permanent home.
A small number of people
 have permanent residences
elsewhere, but live part of 
the year in Little Cayman.
While many residents 
have come to claim
a little Cayman identity, 
the differences in nationalities
or ethnicities, whether 
they are ex-pats or locals,
whether they work or
 on permanent vacation
and whether they work in tourism
 or some other businesses,
have led to differences
 in the level
of community 
involvement and interests
in how they may see their
 roles and that of others
in Little Cayman 
society and culture.
It's led as well to differences
 in how they see,
understand and choose to use
the natural built 
and cultural environment.
Thus, my research
 projects over the years
have explored cultural 
and environmental sustainability
and sense of community 
or lack thereof.
One of my key 
research collaborators
was Perry McLaughlin, 
a Caymanian of color
Originally from Cayman Brac.
He was a successful businessman
 with a rental car company,
a real estate company, a liquor 
store or insurance company,
among other businesses and 
governmental involvements.
He was also a member of the 
Liquor Licensing Board.
He was incredibly articulate
 in discussing
some of the problems 
facing the Cayman Islands
in general and Little 
Cayman in particular.
His greatest concerns were
in the areas of tourism 
and education.
Regarding tourism or 
hospitality industry,
Perry said that there 
was something wrong
when foreigners run the resorts
and there's not 
a single Caymanian.
He thought that the
 industry needed Caymanians
instead of foreigners.
But there's a problem of wages
as he said, money is so small.
Specifically regarding
 Little Cayman,
he thought that the 
people are selfish,
that there was a problem
 when ex-pats outnumber
the native Canadians
 and are not fully
and deeply aware of Caymanian
 history and culture.
As an example, when I asked 
the late Gladys Howard,
the founder of Pirates
 Point Resort,
as well as the James Beard
 Award winning chef
about the extent to which 
she included Caymanian culture,
she said she did so 
through cooking.
For example, when people
 come to Little Cayman
for the four-day Easter
 holiday, she said
it was a treat for her guests 
to have the native cooking
and that, "the native ladies
 do the cooking."
Moreover, Perry noted that the
 ex-pats point their people
to their own people and 
not to the natives.
He went so far as to say
 that he thought
they would want the 
island free of natives.
He did point out that 
it had changed a little bit
when he came back
 to Little Cayman
as a permanent resident in 1991.
He described it
 as being hostile.
One example of the
 way things hadn't changed
was that he 
described how someone
had come into the
 liquor store and bought
a lot of liquor for a party,
and the person also
 gave out invitations
to the party but 
did not include Perry.
He mentioned that he
 was invested in Little Cayman,
but sometimes he
 felt as if he were
between a rock 
and a hard place.
He said that he thought about
 walking away around 1998,
but he said he would have
 been beaten metaphorically
and he didn't want to do that.
While he felt that he had
 a role and was happy
in the business community,
he said he felt closed 
off after 6 p.m.,
As he poignantly put it, 
he’s “nobody”; “Perry dies.”
Furthermore, he expressed 
great concern
that the ex-pats did 
not really know
Caymanian history,
 traditions or culture.
As a result, Perry said that
 Non- Caymanian celebrations
have been introduced 
to Little Cayman.
One that has been very
 popular among
a number of ex-pats 
and tourists is Mardi Gras.
This is a celebration 
that Gladys Howard introduced
because she missed the 
New Orleans celebration.
But Caymanians traditionally
 do not celebrate it.
Perry went so far as to say
 that he felt
that his culture has
 been hijacked.
This ties in with education.
He mentioned that 
many of the teachers
don't know Caymanian
 culture or traditions
either because they
 are not Caymanian
and or because 
they haven't learned them.
He felt that the teachers, 
for the most part,
were doing the best 
that they could,
but also that too much of
 Caymanian culture is lost,
gone on, disappeared.
For context, the Cayman 
Islands has a total population
of around 70,000, but 
only 37,000 are Caymanians.
The Non- Caymanian 
workforce is 47%.
For Little Cayman of 
a population of 161,
only 48 are native Caymanians
with 113 being 
from somewhere else.
Perhaps one of 
the most telling comments
that illustrates the difference
 between little Caymanians
of whatever origin was 
the one made by Perry.
I get spoken to
when it's convenient
 for them to speak to me.
No want to consider larger 
issues in the field of folklore,
reflecting on folklore 
and especially
the American Folklore Society.
I'm reminded of
 a certain governor
who says about his state
is where woke goes to die.
What I love about folklore
 is that we're woke
and we're proud of that.
First of all, the governor 
doesn't understand
the meaning of the term.
It means being aware, 
knowledgeable, informed,
sensitive to others, 
willing to listen
and hear their stories, 
experiences, histories.
Understanding that one's 
own story isn't the only one.
When I was a kid, I had 
memorized a poem.
I had no idea of the origin.
And in those days, there wasn't 
very much gender diversity.
I did a search and
 found the poem
learning that it's a
 Persian origin.
He who knows not, and 
knows not that he knows not,
he is a fool—shun him.
He who knows not, and 
knows that he knows not,
he is a child—teach him.
He who knows, and knows 
not that he knows,
he is asleep—wake him.
He who knows, and knows
 that he knows,
he is wise—follow him.
In many respects this sums
 up what being woke
is about and in my opinion, 
we know who should be shunned.
Folklorists because
 of the broad, inclusive,
encompassing work that 
we do should be followed,
although granted, sometimes
we're not quite awake.
Over the decades, folklore 
has responded to the needs
of folklorists and the 
communities that we serve,
and we're still learning 
more and better ways
to do this within AFS 
recognising the diversity
of the field and the many
 interests of folklorists,
there are now more
 than 30 sections
ranging from those focused
 on regions or ethnic groups
such as African, African-
American, Latino, Caribbean,
Transnational, Asian 
and Pacific;
genre such as dance, folk arts,
 narrative, literature,
creative writing and 
storytelling, oral history,
medieval music and song,
foodways, comics, gender or
 identity such as LBGTQIA+,
women or responses or 
approaches to current events
such as Politics 
and social justice,
Socialist and Postsocialist.
and a soon-to-be
 new one focusing
on climate change 
and so many more.
Examples of the kinds
 of work that folklorists
are doing range from the 
aforementioned creative writing
where folklorists are not just 
studying but doing their own.
And we can see this in
 — I had no idea.
And we could see this
 in the novel "Seasonal"
by Betty Belanus, whose
 protagonist is a folklorist.
And in Peggy Yocom's 
creative rewriting
of a Grimm fairy tale
 where she explores
the main characters
 experiences by considering
what is literally hidden within
or erased from the
 words and lines.
So I don't know if 
you could see this
and you might want to
 maybe take a look
at a book if you don't 
want to buy it.
But I mean, even the very
 title, all kinds of fur
but you see the letters 
in red, kittens fur.
So what she does is 
she takes the page,
the story itself, and 
then plucks out letters
and plucks out words.
And so you get the
 retelling of the story.
The Journal of American Folklore
has recently recognized this
 creative use of folklore
by including a new section
 within the journal
that presents creative works,
 an example of
the evolution of the field or
of Folklore Today/
Folklore Tomorrow.
Because of our unique 
training and perspectives,
we have numerous examples
 of folklore speaking out
on and helping
 the general public
understand critical
 issues of the day.
These include 
the great work that
both Kiran Singh and Queen Nur 
do with storytelling,
using it for movement building, 
conflict resolution and healing.
Among others, we can point
 to the valuable work
that Pat Turner has been 
doing in researching
African-American culture 
and exploring the roles
that rumor has played in
 explaining the experience
of being black in America, 
as well as the racism
that Barack and Michelle Obama
 had to deal with
before, during, and even 
after his presidency.
Andrea Kita also has explored 
the role and effect of rumour,
but her work is focused on
 recent medical crises,
vaccine development, 
public health issues.
These folklorists, 
as well as many others,
are using folklore tools
 and ethnographic research
to understand and
 explain climate change,
sustainability
 in its many forms,
relationships between
 humans and other species,
refugee and migrant experiences
and what can facilitate 
adaptation in new cultural
and geographic locations
 and cultural preservation
in times of war or
 natural disasters.
For this latter, as an example,
I instituted a new AFS prize,
the Presidential Award
for Meritorious Service, 
because a folklorist—
a student—no less, 
initiated efforts to protect
a wide variety of cultural
 heritage documentation
when Ukraine was
 suddenly invaded
by Putin's forces from Russia.
While she and her colleagues
 in need of information
and resources as they sought 
safety during the invasion
and became a resource
 to journalists
and scholars trying to 
understand what was happening
in real time on social
 media apps,
she also took action
 as her colleagues
in Ukraine worried
 about their work.
Multimedia, research collections
 documenting decades
of traditions in 
communities across Ukraine
were under threat 
in individual homes,
holding researchers' hard drives
 and in digital collections
housed in museums and other
 cultural institutions.
This work involved listening 
to the needs
and advocating for support 
of colleagues in Ukraine,
coordinating a team to amass 
appropriate resources
and relentless efforts to assist
in the dissemination
 of information.
Significantly, AFS, along with
 other learned societies,
has spoken out on 
critical issues
affecting the people
 we represent
and the communities 
where we do our work.
These have included
 our own statements
or those that we 
have signed off on
or issued by various individual
learned societies 
or the larger body,
the American Council of
 Learned Societies or ACLs.
With the Supreme Court's recent
 ruling on affirmative action,
both the ACLs and the American
 Anthropological Association
issued statements and AFS
 signed off on both.
And in explaining this to
 our membership and others
included the following as 
part of the lengthier statement:
The American
 Folklore Society, AFS
is firmly committed to
 welcoming all who wish
to honor and study 
expressive cultural traditions.
Our guiding framework
includes our mission and vision,
our commitment to diversity,
equity and inclusion, 
and our history.
So on the AFS website
 is this statement
and also more 
detailed information
about both the 
mission and the vision.
Additional position
 statements have included
a stand against race-based
 violence and injustice,
compensation for 
self-employed folklorists,
research with human subjects
and promotion and 
tenure standards and review.
In addition, when our 
annual meeting has been held
in locations that have
 proven problematic
for any number of reasons,
including labor issues
or the Supreme Court decision
affecting women's 
health choices,
AFS has sought to
 create dialogue
to help increase our own
 understanding and sensitivity.
Whether this has meant
 changing the theme
of the meeting to 
address the issue,
meeting with affected 
parties in the location,
creating more space
 in the program,
holding events in the community,
 and not just at the hotel
and giving space to our own
 and to community members.
In regard to this
 last point, while folklore
has always valued the people
 that we work with in the past,
this often meant that they
 were the ones giving us
the information and we
 did the interpretation.
To provide the semblance
 of even more objectivity,
we often didn't even work 
within our own communities.
Over the last decades, there
 have been radical shifts.
The people who used 
to be called informants
are now often referred to
 as research collaborators
or research partners, 
among other terms.
Because of their in-depth
 knowledge of their communities
And/or subject matter, 
they are often referred
to as community scholars.
What we're just talking
 about last night.
And a number of folklorists are
or have been doing research
 in their own communities,
including the late 
Américo Paredes,
who was on my 
dissertation committee
and who did brilliant work in
his own Chicano community.
And those of us who have
 studied our own families
and their folklore,
 including Peggy Yocom,
Steve Zeitlin, the late 
Kathryn Morgan, and yours truly.
Another example of change 
in AFS is with the fellows.
For those attending the 
annual meeting,
one of the highlights 
every three years or so
is the croning that the 
women's section does,
honoring the accumulated wisdom
of women who have turned 50.
While the croning is often a
 raucous and irreverent event,
it's also something that
 everyone looks forward to.
Its origin was in the fact
 that there were relatively
few women who were 
in the fellows,
and it was recognized that
 women and their research
needed to be 
acknowledged and celebrated.
Eventually, the fellows elected
 more and more women,
and in recent years it's 
undergone another change
electing people who have 
made significant contributions
to the discipline in a wide
 variety of ways,
and not just through 
publications.
Just a few short years ago,
I never thought 
that I'd be a fellow.
But miracles happen 
and times change.
Thinking about the relationship of the past to the present,
I was reminded of the origins
of the American Folklore Society
Founded in 1888, many of
 the early studies focused
on African American and
 Native American cultures
as the consideration
 was the possible loss
of firsthand accounts 
from individuals
who had personally 
experienced enslavement
or the heyday of American
 Indian culture
before the completion 
of what came to be known
as the westward expansion.
In a similar vein, we can
 compare the establishment
of the Veterans History
 Project of the AFC.
As is stated on the
 website, it collects,
preserves and makes accessible
 the firsthand recollections
of US military veterans
 who served
from World War 1 through 
more recent conflicts
and peacekeeping missions
 so that future generations
may hear directly from veterans
 and better understand
what they saw, did, and felt
 during their service.
What would be lost if we
 didn't have those
"firsthand recollections"?
I'm reminded of a concept
 that is both old and new
in folklore that harks back
 to the beginnings
of the discipline and 
is of concern
to current day folklorists.
And that I've already noted
 in some previous examples
only because I totally love her
and I love how she does
 this wording of this.
Michelle Obama speaking
 about book banning,
even said we need to stay
 aware of whose stories
are being told and whose
 are being erased.
For folklorists, we can
 add all of the genres
that make up our field 
music beliefs, material culture,
clothing, hairstyles, 
agricultural
and maritime practices,ways of
 knowledge, etc., etc., etc.
What is lost when erasure 
in whatever form occurs?
More so in the past, too often
the work of folklorists of
 color was not included
in the folklore curriculum even.
So the student folklorists
 didn't know or learn
about these people or
 their contributions.
They had been erased.
So what's important?
Both of these pages 
are on AFS's website.
This is why the exhibit 
and the pages
for the notable folklorists of 
color are so significant
because they seek to unerase
 people and research
and contributions
 to the field and expand
the knowledge base,
 especially for folklorists.
How can we do research
 with a tool kit
if that tool kit is actually 
missing key pieces?
Two important individuals
who excuse me––
will undoubtedly be 
added to the group
whom we lost recently are
 the late James Lane,
brilliant community scholar
 of and from Crisfield Maryland,
and the late Roland Freeman, 
whose incandescent photos
and research shed new light 
and different light
on African-American communities
and material culture,
 especially quilts.
A different kind of erasure
 has occurred
over the last several decades, 
with decisions made
by universities that have
 drastically cut
or eliminated folklore programs.
When university administrators
 don't understand
the value of certain programs,
 they are underfunded.
Or when faculty retire or go 
elsewhere, their lines are cut
and new faculty are not hired,
ultimately leading to programs
 not being sustainable.
Sadly, and unfortunately, 
we have seen this happen
to the programs at the 
University of Pennsylvania,
the University of Texas at 
Austin, where I received my PhD,
and most recently 
the graduate program
at Western Kentucky University.
Though I'm not 
a public folklorist,
I mourn the loss of 
Western Kentucky's program
because they taught in 
the program from 77 to 85
and because of its 
leadership and training
a great number 
of public folklorists,
as well as those who
subsequently received doctorates
and became university 
professors, among others.
What effect might these
 erasures of programs
have on the accessibility
 of future folklorists
to obtain the necessary 
education and training
that they will need?
Might it mean the 
decrease in our numbers?
Or might it mean 
an even greater role
for community scholars
with new folklorists coming into
the field from any number 
of different pathways?
Earlier, I had talked 
about my fieldwork
for my dissertation on my
 mother's side of the family.
I interviewed my mother 
and all of her siblings,
members of my extended family
and a number of 
community members.
One elderly woman to
 whom I was introduced
was a gold mine, as well
 as making sure–– so sorry.
She had known a 
number of members
of past generations of my
 family sharing many stories,
as well as making sure that
I knew when she was
 telling me what were
from her own experiences
and what could be 
described as hearsay.
Mrs. Mary Booker Gilliam
was a wonderful 
research collaborator,
but during the interview,
she said something 
that brought me up short.
She said to me,
"Well, you didn't ask me 
anything about my family."
I'd been so single mindedly
 focused on learning
all about my family that I didn't
 think to ask her about hers.
I apologized,
 tried to save face,
and asked her
about her own family.
Apparently, I redeemed myself
because when we 
concluded the interview,
she said with intense gratitude.
I'm so glad I'm telling 
these stories.
I've been wanting to tell 
them a long time.
This is what we folklorists
 do or try to do.
Listen to the stories that 
people want to tell,
need to tell, help provide
 a platform for their voices,
their knowledge, their dances,
their music, their arts, 
their crafts.
Let them know that who 
they are and what they do
and what they know 
are all invaluable
and should be studied 
and shared widely.
If we're lucky and do our work
 thoroughly and compassionately,
the stories and culture 
Mrs. Gilliam The Barocco,
the Cayman Islands military
 veterans and others
will be told, heard, seen, 
presented, archived
and perhaps most 
importantly, understood.
Let's make sure that these 
stories are not erased.
Thank you.  
[applause]
I'm so sorry.
Well, I totally do.
Do you guys -- I mean.
Or we could just chat 
informally afterwards.
It's all good.
I'm sorry. 
I should have –– I got it.
>> Thank you, Marilyn. 
That was wonderful.
Towards the end, you
 mentioned the sad news
about Western Kentucky's
 graduate program.
So is the American 
Folklore Society
taking any kind of action 
with either Western Kentucky
or with the larger?
>> Marilyn M. White: There are 
a number of things
that we've done, 
some of which have,
if I can do it this way, been
 kind of like behind the scenes.
One of the things I'll tell you
and I mentioned this last night,
I think without
when we had dinner,
without going into any details,
there are a number of things
 that AFS that the board does
that sometimes that Jessica,
 as the executive director
and that I do that I 
did with Norma
when she was past 
president that I'm doing––
that we're doing now
 with Amy Skillman
that's behind the scenes that
 you might never hear about.
So one of the things--
we have board 
meetings twice a year.
During the annual meeting,
right before the 
meeting actually starts
and one is in the spring.
And for both of those
 meetings, we had an agenda
and it got shot to pieces
 because of issues.
And the key issue last fall
 at the annual meeting
in Tulsa, in fact, was talking
 about Western Kentucky.
We were dealing with
 a different issue
at the spring 
board meeting.
But there are some things that
we're doing in so many respects.
It's a done deal, 
but it's not official
yet that the program is done.
But again, to my mind, 
unless universities,
they need a different model.
And God, I've been 
talking about this forever.
Universities aren't
businesses in the sense that,
you know, 
"business is a business".
And yet a lot of times, it's
 relying on the corporate model.
And sometimes what that means
is there's certain 
kinds of programs that
one, things are part 
of what the university is,
part of the very definition
 of what a university is.
Philosophy, for example,
 a friend of mine
has been talking about
 what's going on
at West Virginia University,
wiping out world
 languages and literatures.
I mean, considering 
Lord, this is 2023
and we are so 
interconnected throughout,
you know, the world––
how can a program 
like that be wiped out?
But, you know, if you've 
got a particular model in mind,
what's the bottom line? 
What's financially sustainable?
Then that means more money is
going to go in other directions.
And so that's why 
I told you about
at the very beginning about, 
you know, our discipline,
why our "our origin 
story is so fascinating"
because, I mean, you've got to
go some interesting kinds of
 places to wind up where we are.
But we're so passionate 
about what we do
because it's basically 
almost anything
and everything that we do.
AFS used to do these
 fabulous T-shirts.
And one of the ones
 I've got a couple of them
and one of the ones 
is a takeoff on
the Got Milk commercial
 and it's got law.
The other one is folklore
 right here, right now.
So wherever––
Sorry, I should 
probably be here.
So that wherever you are, there
is a way of this is folklore.
>> That might be a good 
way to conclude.
[applause]