Seeking Circles of Dialogue and Accountability

Abstract

Seeking Circles of Dialogue and Accountability Christine DeLucia (bio) HISTORIANS' work is an "ethical enterprise" involving foundational considerations of justice and accountability to past and present communities. Sharon Block frames these stakes for "doing history" in this incisive reflection on the methods and goals of early Americanists.1 In revisiting Rachel Davis and her social worlds, Block models one approach to an ethical practice of engagement with the past and its ongoing meanings. Her piece exemplifies relational approaches to scholarship that extend beyond academic boundaries and calls for substantive commitments to these processes among practitioners of early American history. On one level, the resulting narrative recontextualizes Rachel's devastating experiences with sexual violence in light of newly accessible information and revised interpretive frames. On another, it excavates structures of power and caretaking inherent in knowledge production and the possibilities—and challenges—of seeking to interact more intentionally with multiple communities invested in these stories. This is a compelling inaugural entry in the "Methods and Practices" section of the William and Mary Quarterly. It takes on nothing less than the necessity of "remaking [the historical profession's] methods and values."2 In articulating these issues through the microhistories of Rachel's networks, centuries ago and today, Block emphasizes that she walks richly cultivated fields. Always attentive to genealogies, she cites and enters into fruitful dialogue with hard-fought-for interventions by African American, Indigenous, feminist, LGBTQ2S, and other scholars and practitioners who [End Page 685] contend with the American historical profession's epistemologies and exercises of authority. Among the questions she surfaces (to paraphrase): What does it mean to approach historical study through restorative processes? What forms of greater justice are possible—but still unrealized—through recovery-oriented research and storytelling? Can people occupying academic roles develop accountable, reciprocal relations with communities that are grounded in respect and mutuality rather than hierarchy and extraction? One of the piece's essential contributions is a discussion of how to situate the interpersonal sexual violence that Rachel Davis experienced at the hands of a fellow colonizer. This intimate gendered harm affected Rachel in ways both knowable and not. It occurred in contexts of larger societal violences enacted by settler colonizers and enslavers upon Indigenous and African American people. As Block explains, "My renewed and ongoing focus on Rachel has helped me think about the task of tracking Black and Indigenous victims of sexual violence who may have left far fewer, if any, archival traces beyond rarely recorded moments of sexual victimization."3 Whose experiences with harrowing or even fatal sexual violence attain attention, care, visibility, and calls for redress by scholars and actors well beyond academia? Critically understanding Euro-colonial lives, including those of women who endured traumatic violations, means acknowledging Black and Indigenous lives that have been severely impacted by the systems and structures that enabled Euro-colonial development and power. Block invites extended conversations on these issues when she draws upon critical archive studies methods to discuss digital resources such as the website Find a Grave.4 This graveyard database—a crowdsourced, freely accessible online archive—is a valuable tool for certain kinds of genealogical and historical research. It allowed Block, sparked by information from a descendant and genealogist who had learned of a new entry for a Rachel [Davis] Coon in a graveyard in the twenty-third ward of Northeast Philadelphia, to locate and interpret with greater accuracy the final transits of Rachel's life. "Surrounded by the graves of her extended family," Rachel remained connected with relations who likely shaped the decisions about where and how she was commemorated.5 The Presbyterian Church–affiliated graveyard seems to have remained relatively intact over time, rather than being disturbed by the building of a highway or otherwise obliterated. By contrast, the burial grounds created and honored by many African American and Indigenous communities have been (and continue to be) damaged, plundered, or outright destroyed in the course of American "development," and legible records of people and places either were not maintained in the first place or have also been undermined. [End Page 686] Reading about this new turn to the story, I began to think about the graveyard's proximity to sites...