The following is an excerpt of an interview with community-based artist and folklorist Dr. Ashley Minner Jones about her 2024 Community Collections Grant project, Beyond Baltimore Street: Living Lumbee Legacies. The interview is part of the Of the People blog series featuring awardees of the American Folklife Center’s Community Collections Grant program. Read more about the Community Collections Grants program here.
First, a hearty congratulations to you on the Community Collections Grant, Ashley! Let’s start with the interwoven historical, cultural, and geographical context of your project, Beyond Baltimore Street: Living Lumbee Legacies, which focuses on the longstanding Lumbee community in – as claimed on its many public benches – “The Greatest City in America.” What and who is at the heart of Beyond Baltimore Street?
Thanks Michelle! At the heart of Beyond Baltimore Street are Lumbee elders who moved from our tribal homeland in North Carolina to Baltimore as young people, in the mid-twentieth century, for work and a better quality of life. Literally thousands settled along and around East Baltimore Street in an area that bridges the neighborhoods of Upper Fells Point and Washington Hill, establishing what would become a vibrant urban American Indian community. They affectionately referred to it as their “reservation” in its heyday.
Though little-known, this community is significant. It became an organizing hub for Indians throughout the Mid-Atlantic and a model for urban Indian communities everywhere. In the decades since, due to a complex set of factors ranging from upward mobility to civil unrest, and to Urban Renewal and gentrification, this area was transformed, and most Indian people moved away. Recent generations never experienced the reservation as such. Today, even most Baltimoreans are surprised to learn it ever existed, but this is changing.
Beyond Baltimore Street is an oral history and photo documentary project that celebrates the fascinating everyday lives of those elders who manage to remain in community with one another despite the loss of their reservation. One of the reasons their lives are so noteworthy is that they are transplants from one very specific place—the Lumbee tribal homeland—and they enmeshed themselves in another very specific place—East Baltimore—and they act accordingly. Their perception of the world is uniquely colored by their experiences of farming under segregation in tribal territory as youths and their contributions to Baltimore industry as adults. They speak Lumbee English with East Baltimore turns of phrase. They drink half-and-half (in Baltimore, half lemonade and half iced tea) with their Carolina fried chicken. They have adapted their gardening to back yards and small community plots from acreages of fields at “home” (Lumbee shorthand for our tribal homeland in North Carolina). Their clothing, their home interiors, their leisure activities—everything about them reflects that they are of these two places. They are the progenitors of a whole new culture that has been inherited and riffed upon by the generations of Baltimore Lumbee that descend from them.
I know you’ve been instrumental for decades, as an artist and folklorist, in putting Baltimore’s Lumbee community on the map – figuratively and literally. So, how did this project come about?
I don’t know if I could take credit for that. But for almost a decade now, I have been collaborating with about 40 elders of our community and a whole creative team to produce reconstructions of the Baltimore reservation in the forms of a print guide, a website (baltimorereservation.com), a walking tour, mobile walking tour apps, a photo exhibition, a new public archival collection, and a forthcoming book. Our methods have included oral history, archival research, mapping, drawing, walking and more. It cannot be overstated that this work, which has gained local, national, and international attention, has only been made possible through collaboration with the elders who hold the cultural memory of our erased geographic community and all clues for searching the documentary record in institutional holdings.
Yet since the work began, the world has entered and not exited a deadly pandemic. During this time, many of the elders reached their 80s and 12 with whom I have personally known and loved and collaborated have passed away. I thought a Community Collections Grant would be a great and timely way to resource an honoring, recognition, and preservation of not only the lives these folks have lived, but the lives they are living right now.
Click on over to read the full interview with Dr. Minner Jones on her Beyond Baltimore Street project here.
