Category: Uncategorized

As I look back over the motley collection of artifacts I have assembled for the Plague Year archive, I have come to realize their importance, not merely for the preservation of various materials from this spring, but as in some ways representative of my restrictions and abilities during the pandemic. My mother is a health care worker in a clinic where every patient has a compromised immune system, so I have not entered a building apart from my home for almost two months now. I do not have documents about how my friends are dealing with the disease because college students are going to school across time zones and it is difficult to find times to connect. The documents I have collected, in part, represent my interests and concerns during Covid-19, but they also represent my limitations and my loss of connection with the physical world, or at least to the people in that world. 

 I am experiencing this pandemic at home in Juneau, AK, where so far, we have been lucky to escape the worst effects of the virus. We learned yesterday of the 10th death in the state, the first death in several weeks as the Governor has been slowly reopening. While we have certainly had an easier time with the virus itself, watching the demise of the oil industry and tourism, the two largest industries in the state, has felt a bit like a lucid dream as we fall off a precipice. This is certainly a price I believe we are all willing to pay to protect our communities and I have heard little vocal resistance, but my fears for the future impacts of this pandemic, and my concerns for education, have certainly influenced my interest in documenting how children and students are being impacted. This summer, high school students would have begun working their first jobs as tour guides or fishermen, while younger children would often be left with grandparents while parents worked during the busiest season of the year. Instead, students who were generally brought up to avoid screens (as I recall my elementary school had a total of two computers) are being told to do their schoolwork with inadequate access to devices and increasingly spotty internet access. From my observations out my window it seems that most of them have given up amidst the first signs of spring, and have traded social studies for mud pies in the ditch and bicycle rides. This prompted me to look at the ways in which schools and curriculums are adapting to try to teach students amidst the distractions of quarantine. I intended this to be a broad sampling of the nation’s policies, but I have found that they have begun to cluster around the small towns of the Northwest, those places that, like Juneau, are facing low virus levels at the moment, but steep economic crises from boom and bust economies and problems of isolation. 

I grew up with the repeated avowal that ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Teachers and neighbors, elders and aunties, family and friends all have a part in teaching and supporting every child and the breakdown of those relationships are both isolating and worrying for the future. Yet the children running past my window are also heartening in their resilience, looking for ways to overcome their situation, and learning to ride a two-wheeler while they are at it. Of course it is important that these students are missing fundamental time in schools when they should be learning social studies, but as some communities’ distance-learning plans are beginning to grasp, at the moment, caring for your community may just be the most important civics lesson these children can learn.

As we continue to progress through this unusual term, I find myself thinking more frequently and more deeply about how this time will be remembered. As historians, we all have an understanding of the urgency that accompanies preservation and remembrance, but often it is difficult to bring that sense of urgency out of its theoretical location and into the material world of our daily practices and considerations. Any discussion that seeks to engage with “how historians will remember this moment” must foreground personal reflection, one’s own lived experiences, one’s own experiences as a historian. We are all historians; we look to the past for lessons. All too often, however, we forget to learn lessons from the present. We forget that, as the architects of a contemporary archive, we are responsible for making this moment coherent outside of our current context. We forget that the difficulties inherent to historical study are mediated through the work of archiving, and can be ameliorated by that same labor.

We must consider those things that have become commonplace, have become embedded in our prevailing assumptions about life in the era of COVID-19, and work to ensure that these concerns, anxieties, pleasures, and constraints are communicated through our processes of collection. In other words, the fact that I have effectively forgotten about the presidential election for the past month is noteworthy; we ought to find places in the archive for such subliminal alterations in the human psyche – these are necessary for making sense of the present, for making sense of the past. In many ways, consciousness dictates context; the facts of the past are only “authentic” or “true” insofar as they reflect the subjectivities of historical actors. To put it plainly, our experiences of this pandemic comprise the pandemic. As a moment in human history, COVID-19 can only be understood through the lens of human agency and human consciousness. 

We must also think of what disciplines our archival practices. The fact that we cannot be within six feet of one another is not merely a peculiarity of our current moment that is worth remembering; it is a momentous particularity that fundamentally shapes our ability to archive, to dialogue, to remember. These considerations are obvious now, but it won’t be long until they become disentangled with our collective common sense; historians of the future, including us, will not read the archive with an understanding of our current spatial concerns. They may not understand that the dearth of in-person interviews in the archive, for example, is not merely an absence but a historical fact in and of itself.

There is no thesis statement to my concerns, but for these reasons it is important that we stay vigilant in our collection processes, that we write lengthier descriptions and provide more context for our contributions, that we check our assumptions and deconstruct them in the space of the archive. The political implications of both history and emergency are currently in a dangerous entanglement; remembering is more important than ever.