Author: April B

          On Friday, April 12th, 2024 from 4:30- 5:30 pm in Corey Union’s function room, I went to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s lecture on her book “Braiding Sweetgrass”. I really enjoyed her lecture, and learned a lot about her background and where her ideas for the book came from. I liked how she started off with an introduction on herself, speaking in a different language at first was a very interesting and fun way of starting off her lecture. I think by her sharing her own background, she added a personal touch to her lecture, and made it seem like less of a lecture and more of her just talking to us. She then talked about the Nagaan ge bezhig emkwaan flag (meaning the dish with one spoon treaty belt), which was an agreement between the two confederacies that shared the same homeland, agreeing to keep the “bowl” clean and full without suffering. This idea of keeping the same “bowl” clean and full was a way of sharing and bringing the community together, focusing on keeping their shared homeland clean and respected. Instead of constantly taking from the Earth, they were being asked to protect and care for it, which was a main focal point of Robin Kimmerer’s lecture. This was one of my favorite parts of the lecture because it was a way to connect and bring everyone together, even if they were different in other aspects of their life, they all shared one thing in common, their homeland. 

           Kimmerer then went on to speak about her actual book, “Braiding Sweetgrass”. She talked about the connection between braiding sweetgrass and a girl’s mother braiding her daughter’s hair. In each of these the person braiding is caring for the other person. For example, the mother is caring for her daughter by braiding her hair, so by us braiding the Earth, we are showing how we care and can protect the Earth. Which is why her book is titled this, because of how she learned and was taught to care for the Earth, and because she wanted to show everyone else how they could too protect and care for Earth. She then went on to explain her college life, taking us through her disappointment with her advisor meeting after learning she didn’t feel like she quite fit into her major. Kimmerer talked of being a botanist, which means she cared for plants, and spoke about her confliction within learning about this in her major. She asked us three questions that she had been thinking about when she tried describing her love of plants; why is this world so beautiful? Why plants make medicine? And why plants bend for baskets? And although I do not know the answer to these questions, I found them very fascinating. Lastly, I would like to end with a quote that Robin Wall Kimmerer shared with us that has stuck with me since her lecture, “it is not land that is broken, but our relationship to land”. 

           I went to the event presented by Provost Ann McClellan on February 29th, 2024 from 6:00 pm- 7:00 pm, in the Old Main Colloquium. The main message and purpose of this presentation was to teach the listeners about the history and influence of media Sherlock Holmes had/has on different genres in films, books and tv shows. Ann McClellan discussed the direct impact Sherlock Holmes as a predominant white male has had on Broadway (musicals and plays), silent films, American jazz, graphic novels, dystopian fiction and fan fiction, which are some examples of genres she used when discussing the past vs present. 

           Ann McClellan started off her presentation with background information on Sherlock Holmes’ character. His history of being the most portrayed character with a mostly white fandom, called the Baker Street Irregulars. After learning about the history of the character, Ann McClellan jumped into how Sherlock Holmes was affected through Broadway musicals. “In Dahomey”, a musical from 1903, was a play that had the first African American “Sherlock Holmes” (masked as a character called Shylock in the play), Bert Williams. She also discussed heavily the ideas of Blackface and how it was used. Bert Williams, although being an African American male, actually used Blackface when performing “In Dahomey”, he used white around his mouth area to make his facial expressions heightened. Williams, among other African American actors who also used Blackface, felt that if white actors could use Blackface and make money off of pretending to be another race, they should be able to do the same. Ann McClellan then moved on to a silent film from 1918, “A Black Sherlock Holmes”. This film reconciles with white characters as African American actors. They took the character Sherlock Holmes and made it into a story following a non white detective, assumed to be Sherlock Holmes. The character was identifiable as Sherlock Holmes because of the iconic hat he wore, which matched the one described and characterized with Sherlock Holmes. And because of the book he read in the opening scene, a guide on how to detect. Ann McClellan also discussed the ties of the colorblind casting issue surrounding this film, among others. I think both of these examples from the entertainment industry showed just how bias people are, even when it comes to fictional characters. 

           Ann McClellan then went on to the music industry, specifically jazz music. She talked about the heavy influence Sherlock Holmes had on jazz music, different bands catered their music towards this fictional character in order to appease to the hype from the public. One song she played for us was “Dr Watson and Mr. Holmes” from 1934, she also showed pictures of different members of bands and soloists who would dress up as Sherlock Holmes (or a detective with the iconic hat, which led people to assume they were dressing up as this character), and played clips of singers having Sherlock Holmes somewhere in their song (either by word or through description). Ann McClellan lastly discussed the popularity of Sherlock Holmes through books. The first fiction novel “The Hound of Justice” from 2019 was a detective book with heavy female representation. This was just one of the many novels written surrounding detectives with a mystery story. She then turned the presentation towards fanfiction using the website Archive of Our Own. She went into explicit detail about the website itself, sharing that it was primarily used for fans to write stories about fictional characters from their own perspective. Ann McClellan gave statistics about with Sherlock Holmes fanfiction written and catagrized with tags like #SherlockHolmes. The statistics read that Sherlock Holmes was written as a non white detective in only fifteen stories out of hundreds of thousands of stories. She ended her presentation with stating that just recently there has been movement towards Sherlock Holmes being differently raced other than white, and that is one of the high takeaways I got from this presentation. Both of these examples are also excellent examples of the biases people still have, even to this day.