York was William Clark’s slave. According to historical documents, he was large and athletic. He played an integral role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, once saving Clark’s life, yet he is largely absent from accounts of that famous journey. In fact, York is hardly known at all in contemporary public memory. His conspicuous absence marks an intersection between history, race, and ethnicity, signals the legacies of slavery that still plague American culture, and underscores the politics of public memory. Like so many other African Americans, York is an invisible hero in American history. His absence is an elegant metaphor for what is at stake in remembrance.

The York Center will encourage students to become involved in the very practices of remembrance that fashion traditions, mold ethnic identities, and influence race relations on a local, national, and international level.  This includes everything from how politicians use popular memories of past wars to either justify or condemn the war in Iraq to how local activists and politicians struggle to fund memorials for ethnic minorities. The center will open to students the world of public memory and encourage them to critically engage memorial texts, including history textbooks, autobiographies, biographies, eulogies, monuments, museums, the list goes on. Curiously, at the same time that these objects have an immense amount of influence on contemporary politics (in terms of influencing local and national identity) they are also taken for granted as politically inert by most citizens. One objective of this center, then, is to encourage students to re-politicize the artifacts of public memory by beginning to ask critical questions about what these objects mean, who created them, and how they influence public culture.

A second objective for the Center is to establish a space for interdisciplinary research between scholars at Lewis and Clark and other universities. A critical mass of scholars working in the area of public memory already exists on this campus, but they have no designated place to gather and exchange ideas. These scholars lack a space to develop collaborative projects that could potentially evolve into large research programs generating conferences, journal articles, edited volumes, and books—all of which would enhance the prestige of this university and position Lewis and Clark as a leader in interdisciplinary research.

The Center’s third objective is to house an archive of resources for lesson planning, course development, and student research projects. Several professors are already using public memory and ethnic studies concepts in their classes to engage their students. The center would offer those professors an opportunity to systematically develop complete courses related to public memory. The Center would also offer instructors at Lewis and Clark and teachers in the local area resources, sample syllabi, and sample lessons for teaching issues of public memory in the classroom. Finally, the Center would provide students working on related projects resources for generating ideas and producing informed and critical projects.

Although the York Center is still in its infancy, it already has a number of exciting programs planned for 2007. Below is a brief list of short term and long term objectives, but for more information please see the links to "The York Memorial Project," "Heroes of Color," and "Conference 2007" on the left hand side of the page.

Short Term Objectives:

1. To build a program with Roosevelt high school (which is already in the works and will be initiated in Spring 2007) entitled “Heroes of Color.” This program begins with Roosevelt students visiting the Lewis & Clark campus, after which L&C students go to Roosevelt and work with the high school students to develop presentations about different important people of color largely forgotten in American history. The program ends with a “shadowing” program in which interested Roosevelt students shadow L&C student for part of a day, giving them a real taste of the world of higher education.
2. To begin a lecture series for the university and local community on issues of ethnicity and the politics of public memory. The goal is to begin with local speakers that can discuss issues immediately relevant to the local community. The drive to raise funds for a memorial to York on campus would be a natural topic with which to begin the series. Please feel free to seek out more information on the York Memorial Project by clicking the tab above.
3. To develop and implement a small bi-annual conference in collaboration with Syracuse University on public memory and ethnicity that would raise the scholarly visibility and profile of Lewis & Clark and would be aimed at producing several university press book publications. The first of these is planned to take place in the Fall of 2007.

Long Term Objectives:

1. To promote diversity on the Lewis and Clark campus. Diversity and multicultural education is a priority at Lewis and Clark. The York Center is a natural outgrowth and a concrete sign of Lewis and Clark’s dedication to diversity. Indeed, the York Center signifies Lewis and Clark College’s own willingness to investigate the lore of its namesake and begin the process of critically questioning how the past is handed down and what its political and social ramifications are in the present.
2. To establish relationships with the local community and with local political organizations pertaining to public memory. This would include investigating permanent sites of memory such as monuments and museums, but also getting involved and analyzing relevant social movements active in contemporary politics (i.e., the Reparations movement, the Holocaust and the middle east crisis, the building of new memorials, or the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day).
3. To foster interdisciplinary research among different departments who are interested in issues of public memory. At present, scholars in Communication, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Political Science have all conducted research related to public memory and ethnicity. This campus thus has a critical mass of scholars interested in these topics, but lacks a center that would facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. Such facilitation would be a primary objective of the center.
4. To create links between the undergraduate, graduate, and law schools at Lewis & Clark.