Yep, excellent. Babe, good morning. Next session will be in English. So if you need interpretation, you can pick up on translation device. It would be interpreted into Spanish. So it is my pleasure to introduce to all of you, Professor Dan Hicks. He's a professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford. He's also a fellow of St. Cross College at Oxford. And also, Professor Hicks is a creator at the Peat Rivers Museum, which according to its website, the museum displays archaeological and demographic materials from all parts of the world. Professor Hicks has published eight different books and numerous articles on the topic of colonial heritage. Last year in 2020, he published the book that has been already mentioned, the British museums, the Benin bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution, a book that has had a big impact on the debate on restitution. I guess that the book can be understood, you can correct me, as a manifesto to turn museums inside of conscience with a simple message, return all that was taken during colonial times. More or less, this could be the message of the book. And so again, we are very pleased to have Professor Hicks for delivering the opening lecture of today's conference. His presentation today is also entitled The British Museum as the book. So, then the floor is yours and afterwards we will have some time for questions. Wonderful. Okay. Many thanks. It's wonderful to be here and absolutely wonderful also to be not on zoom. And so we have to do the tech and we can't remember how to use the PowerPoint and so on. It's absolutely wonderful to be here in person. So I'm going to talk I think for about half an hour or so, because I think it's important that we also open this up for conversation and I think in the writing of the book, one thing I didn't ever, I guess I hoped for but I didn't expect was how it lands in a very different different locations around the world in Africa in North America and of course, importantly, this is a European conversation, you know, as well. So I think in order just to nuance what was said in the introduction, I think the book is about giving back when asked. It isn't about emptying out our museums. It isn't an attack upon museums in a lot of ways. It's a book which is based on my experience over the past 15 years. As curator here at the Pit Rivers, for those of you who can't imagine the Pit Rivers, here it is. And it was founded in 1884. It is a university museum. It's one of the four of the museums of the University of Oxford. And in many ways I guess the book started and I wanted this talk really to start with that observation that those of us who work in a museum context, those who are who are curators have a have a role which in many ways is about seeking to keep things the same. And we have to make sure that the iron work isn't eaten away by rust and that the textiles aren't eaten away by moths. Sometimes we've experienced a sort of a mission, a mission creep, whereby we have have imagined that our role is also to stop the world around us from changing. Here at the Pit Rivers, you know, actually, the world around us has changed. And that means that we have to listen to voices outside of our own authority outside of the usual model of us being the experts. We see curation as co-curation. We have to start to think about a museum space where we care more for people than we do for things. So the first point in order just to finish the first point, you know, here is the position from which this book was written and I think to state my positionality and my privilege, you know, which of course as a curator in this context is my role as my maleness, my whiteness, my role as an elite institution, my access to knowledge about objects is maybe also a massive sort of part of the privilege. But too often, we think that simply to state the privilege is enough. To say here's where I'm speaking from, actually it can reinforce the very power structures, which at this point we have to begin to dismantle. So, more than anything, the work of restitution is about how can we state our locatedness, positionality and so the privilege while undermining it. Because if this work isn't hurting, if this work isn't, if something isn't being given up, then we're not really, you know, we are getting this right. So the museum is one which was arranged according to a particular theory. Here is the diagram from the 1870s that sums up what that theory was, which is in many ways a diagram of the evolution of the wooden stick. These are the theories of weapons that all come from a single culture from Aboriginal Australia. They were assembled by the man after whom the museum is named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pit Rivers, and he drew this diagram based on a series of items, all of which are which we can locate in the museum today that are real objects. And he arranged these items moving out from the centre. As you can see, on the right hand side, there's a series of shields at the bottom, there are lances, there are boomerangs and so forth. And he organised these items in order to make the points that objects can be said in some ways to evolve. Is there a problem? No. Okay, go ahead. Okay, we'll just take a moment. Yeah, okay, I can carry on. I don't need the images. So, if you look at the heart of that image, if we think about that idea that you can order objects in that way in an evolutionary way, he had no sense of the relative chronology of these items, of how old they really were, because he'd acquired them in London at the dealerships and from soldiers and so on. And in some ways also he acquired them from the Museum of the Royal Armouries and the Museum of the USI, the United Services Institute, which is now Rusey, which is a right wing military think tank, but in the 1860s and 1770s it had a museum. And so these museums at the Royal Armouries and at the USI were filled with all the weapons that have been taken in the previous sort of two centuries or so, from those against which the English had fought. And they had been held on to in order to seek to understand that weaponry actually better. So here we have a, in some ways, a very simple 19th century improvement narrative, that idea that objects over time change. But I think we need to think about it in two different ways as well. One is that this is a, is an idea of how things evolve, the cultures evolve that is based on weapons. There's a violence inherent already to how the thinking about artifacts is working. But also, of course, fundamentally the notion of sort of cultural evolution was intimately bound up with notions of a cultural supremacy notions that actually at the heart of of empire was the idea, you know, of a technological of a material superiority, that yes we can see in weapons, we can see on the battlefield, but also we can see in in all these other parts of how objects are made, histories of objects. So maybe if I was talking to you sort of 10 years ago even a little bit longer maybe I would have said that Augustus Pitt Rivers was on the right side of anthropological arguments at this point. He said that human diversity was based not on the biological. He wasn't an argue, he didn't argue for different species of human. He said we need to understand sort of sort of sort of a difference in between different people's viewers based upon different histories of objects, histories of the material culture. And so I would have said that I think now I would start with the observation that we see from France Fanon, you know in his essay in 1950s on on culture and racism, where he made the point that's what he called vulgar racism emerged in the 19th century and a different based on alteration on sorts of on the the the the biological ideas of nature. Really soon though that ideology was accompanied by something far more hard to grasp for us I think in the present day, which is a cultural racism. So in the UK in the 1940s after we beat the fascists. One of the first things that happened in the pit rivers. Next door to the pit rivers in the Natural History Museum was the racist displays of human skulls that told the racist lie that there are different types of human were removed. So next door in the pit rivers, the, actually the displays of sorts of cultural objects, which were there in order to tell precisely the same narrative. It's a narrative over supremacy it's a narrative. As we see here that has a violence inherent to it they were untouched we didn't see them for what they were we didn't recognize the hurt that they were doing. They were able to advance this sorry. How do I. There we go. So for me as a curator at the pit rivers, there was a key moment that happened in the, in the autumn of 2015. The most must fall ox, oxford movement center social media message that said that the pit rivers Museum is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford. So I haven't at that point I've been working there about eight years at that point I had never thought of it that way it had never occurred to me. The violence of the past could be there in the present every day that we open our doors, that we could be hurting people that we could be not only hurting the people who came into the museum but also the many who would never walk into the museum because they know what it is. They understand what they are what it is. So in the next sort of sort of minutes I want to talk to you about how the rose must fall oxford movement emerged. You know and how I think that helps us understand the situation that we find ourselves in in the museum's world. The rose must fall movement emerged in Cape Town in early 2015 and this was an intergenerational moment at which students at the University of Cape Town, who were born, you know actually after the end of apartheid in 1994. They were, they were 19 years old they were, they were, they were 20 years old, and they still experienced racism, you know, in their in their everyday lives at an institutional level, you know at the university and then the, at the heart of the university at the centre of that academy, there was an image of roads, Cecil roads, the mass murderer, the diamond minor, the, the architect arguably of what would, you know, evolve into apartheid, the, you know, his sort of really the corporate colonialism which he engaged in with the South Africa company and what's now is in Broadway and South Africa was central in how we think about and understand race and racism in the present. But his image, this artwork at the heart of the academy was part of what hadn't been removed what was still there. So there's an innovation there then that ideologies of racism used art and culture to make their world a vision last. So in the fall of 2015, when the roads scholarships led to Zimbabwean and to South African students who had seen that those those sort of protests have been part of that movement. So when they arrived in Oxford, in the foot, you know, in October of 2015, suddenly they found that Oxford also has a set of roads. And what does that mean for Oxford as an institution and so the movement the Rosemars fall lots of movement started to point out the ways in which empire was built into the naming of the libraries at all souls college the country named after a 17th century Caribbean slave trader than the the architecture of the old India Institute and obviously roads himself as well. But at the heart of it and I think this is the point at which when people are outside your music, your music and are undertaking a protest, you have really to start to listen to what they're saying and to understand it, and it rivers, which was absolutely at the heart of that campaign. It wasn't the weapons on the upper gallery that were actually being being sort of highlighted it was the case of the court art from what is now Nigeria and so the Benin case. I want now to tell you about that case and about how many other objects that there are elsewhere in the world from that event. And so the Benin artworks that are in Spain as well as in the UK as well as in the other countries, Berlin, and so forth are the product of an expedition and military attack that was very much part of the same corporate colonialism that we saw in the war in the case of the South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, but this was the this was the agency of the Royal Niger Company, and also the Niger Coast protectorate remember looting has this particular relationship not to sort of colonies, as much as to protectorate as much to these zones on the outskirts, the edges of empire. So in a Spanish context when people say, Well, we didn't really have much land in Africa that sort of misses the point, which is that so much of this activity was, you know, at the margins was about the military's engagement it was about the militarism. So this was the most iconic but only one of a whole series of expeditions that were undertaken by the, the series of the European powers to remove King's chiefs other people that were in the way of the the attempts to expand in in the world to become Nigeria, the rubber industry and the the the industry over the over oil, a palm oil. So the palm oil industry is about the history of margarine the sort of rubber industry is about the history of the tires for the bicycles. But at Oxford. Don's would have been cycling around. So in this attack upon an ancient kingdom. You know, a long sort of royal line that reached back in time in an unbroken lineage. Earlier than Elizabeth the first. This was one of the great urban civilizations of this area of West Africa. You know, and it was one that had this, this absolutely unknown sort of sacred royal artistic tradition that was revealed as a part of the sacking of the city. So in order just to give you a sense of what objects were taken the more than 10,000 objects that were looted at that time. I guess most iconic are the plaques the relief plaques that told the history of each of the Obers the Kings over time. And so we have the Royal Court the interactions with the Portuguese and so forth. So we know there are more than 1200 of those that are identified that were taken at that point. Here are a number of them on the left hand side in London. But on the right hand side here is the case of the pit rivers that underlines the sheer diversity of other arts works and objects that were taken. And in the top there's a hole out of out of which these sorts of ivory tusks the carved ivory tusks that again with the unique iconography that we see on the right hand side there is a document of the history of the Royal Court of the each of the achievements of the each of the achievements of the Obers. There are also other sculptures in a bronze such as at the top left hand side the hornblower or the leopard. And then a host of other sources sort of examples of ivory works such as such as the sort of hip ornament mask that we see in the bottom left hand side. So the whole host of items made of coal work made of ivory made of other materials especially bronze. So, here's an image. Here's a rare photograph of one of the alters sort of actually on which these Royal sacred items were put. The removal of artwork at this point wasn't just a side effect of a military attack it was a military tactic. The removal of of sort of sovereignty was at the heart of what the what was attempted to be done because the oboe was in the way as I have said of the of the rubber industry of the expansion of sort of your trade in those ways. So, what about the destruction of the traditional religions and about the long standing dispossession of culture. So within weeks, these items were were actually in London in Oxford, Berlin on display. You know they were on display, not sort of randomly in, you know anthropology museums, they were displayed in the British Museum alongside ancient Egypt. So the message couldn't be sort of more obvious we have blown you back, you know into the bronze age your culture is dead, we're going to display your living culture as if it was archaeological. So that use of the museum is not something whereby the soldiers went in and artworks were carefully taken and they were preserved in the museum as we're often told. This looting was a was a totally chaotic free for all, where more than 200 soldiers and sailors and administrators simply took what they could. So the items found their way onto the open market very soon. Some were held on to by families and were passed down from one. So the son or the daughter and they then sort of enter into the art market over the course of the 20th century and that actually role of the art market is something again that reinscribes this corporate violence that we see right from the outset. One of the things about the taking of artworks was it happened hand in hand with the taking of photographs in the book I sort of talk about the violence of the image and the violence of the work that is done in the taking of the photographs and think of this instance simply as sort of that image on the right of the taking of artworks but we need to remember how bound up this was with the physical destruction of the city. So it's a sacred royal landscape destroyed. And in 1899 when the first of the Hague conventions, you know that restricted what one was able to do in war. So many of the things that happened in the Benin attack of only two years earlier, we're in there. So the banning of the destruction of villages in which innocent people are living, the banning of the desecration of a religious site, the banning of looting the banning even of the use of the filed down bullets that the British used, you know in their machine guns in to maximize the physical damage because it turns out that that 1884 wasn't only the year in which the pit rivers was founded 1884 was also the year of the Berlin Congress. So in the European nations started the, the, what we often euphemistically in English called the scramble for Africa, which is a term that makes it sound as if this is just a bunch of sorts of European Boy Scouts who are elbowing away to get here or there and it serves to entirely remove any sense of the scale of African loss African deaths. But 1884 was also the year of the invention of the maxim, which was the machine gun that made this sheer level of violence sort of enter a new phase so think back to the diagram of the weapons and the evolution of the weapons and then think about the machine gun. So fundamentally the technological superiority the theory of material culture finds itself on the battlefield and those items from the battlefield find their way into the museum very quickly. And that is actually complicit. That's, that's, that's the point that was the realization for me, you know, from having heard the voices from our Africa and their colleagues who were outside the museum for further those must fall movement One of the really important context I think for this meeting for this audience is how the fallism movement, the movement to remove the statues of colonialists that are built into the built environment, you know, outdoors into our cities has exactly like the restitution movement has been an African led movement that reaches back for decades. So the fallism movement we just need to think about Algeria in the 1960s we need to think about the long standing source of issues in America and so on over over the Confederate statues these are not ideas that come out of nowhere they weren't just here. They, there has been an awareness that the ideology of supremacy was sort of built into the interculture in these ways for a long time, so to for restitution. So here's an image of over. Here is an image of Oprah Kenz were the second, who was early as 1938 was receiving returned goods that were taken actually in the expedition. Here's where the coal worker clowns and also, and also the coal road. So the restitution movement in the UK. It's a particularly important point for the, for the 100 year anniversary of the Benin attack in 1997. And there were campaigns outside what was then the Museum of mankind, which of course is now folded back into the British Museum. And interestingly, that moment at the 100 year anniversary is having a having having an echo now. You know as we, as we approach the 125th anniversary of the attack. Next year. I'm going to tell you about all the, all the made up words and the theoretical sides of the book. But let me just tell you one thing that's a part of that, which was my sense that as an anthropologist and archeologist and art historian. So many of the basic theoretical ideas, framings ways of thinking, and even the vocabulary is that I would naturally reach for simply were inadequate in this context so one example would be there is no more familiar idiom. The more culture studies may be than the notion of the life history of the object, the biography of a thing as it moves from one context into another it gains an extra set of meanings. Here in this context that seems completely wrong there wasn't anything added when they these objects were taken in the in these acts of violence and displayed in London. They were moved. So in the book I use a shield and Ben Bay's accounts of the necropolitical, which is, which is his own critique or reworking of the Foucaultian notion of the biopolitical, the sense that in institutions for Foucault like hospitals or there are regimes of the politics of life well actually and Ben Bay says in this day and age when Africans are dying and those from the Middle East, who are displaced are dying every year in the Mediterranean as we seek to maintain the boundaries of a fortress Europe. We need a politics of who live, who gets to live and who dies and necropolitics, well maybe for objects we need something similar so that sense of the necrographic rather than the, the, the, the notion of the biographical was one example of how just we need to try to reframe or invert or flip our sorts of ideas that we use. And so just to wrap up, what does this mean how can we learn from the Rosemars fall movement but also from the right from, you know, from this wider ongoing anti racist and civil rights movement that we see internationally right now. Well I would say my colleague, Nick mezzo's work, and his book that you can download online, which he calls the appearance of black lives matter. He's a visual activist he talks about sort of different sort of regimes of visuality here not in the context of what happened last year, or even in 2018 but in the context of the racist murders of Eric Ghana and also Michael Brown from 2014 to 2017 and Nick makes one completely but totally devastating observation, which is that it was a shift in our regimes of visuality. It was a shift in our modes of seeing that made the moment the ongoing moment of the politics of the black lives matter movement happen. Because it was the dash cam footage and the cell phone footage that made visible anti black violence that's been happening for centuries. This is, this is a politics and a set of sorts of possibilities that comes out of seeing, and of the right to look the right to see. And after that, in the context of the racist murder of George Floyd, the comments by a turn by by the minute by the Minnesota Attorney General in April this year who was speaking at the point of the verdict on George Floyd's murder. And I wouldn't call today's verdict justice because justice implies true restoration, but it is accountability, and accountability is a crucial first step towards something like your social justice. For museums, what does this mean well my answer in the actually in the book, you know is to begin to list where are the Benin bronzes and it turns out there's even some I'm afraid in Spain. It turns out that over 150 institutions around the world hold these things the sheer violence of that act in in in 1897 ripples down the ages. There's an updated version of this with some corrections in the paperback edition that's out now. And of course that list risks making some mistakes it risks talking about other people's collections. But that's what we need and I think in in part that that sort of transparency. That's set of seeing in those ways is what has started through this long standing campaign from Nigeria to see the return to the announcements we've seen from the Germans and other actually they just signed the MOU yesterday. So the decisions from, you know from the University of Aberdeen from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, from, you know from the National Museum Island we're still waiting for a Spanish institution to make such an announcement, but the times of London when when that announcement came came from from the University of Aberdeen. The Times of London altered their editorial line, and they said this was the right thing to do and for the UK. That's a massive thing that a right wing newspaper of that kind would have made that point. So I'm going to wrap up there. You know I think I just need to end. I think by saying that for a lot of people returning objects is a distraction from the real work of anti racism, sort of ideas over art and culture over the museum itself in order to create something, some sort of ongoing enduring propaganda. The work of the museum is to keep things the same that was used actually in the proto fascist 1890s, you know as a way to make the violence last. So every day we open our doors, you know, you know, sort of onto displays where the demand of the sacred or royal objects has not yet been met. And you re-inscribe that violence this isn't as I said at the beginning about sort of sort of emptying out our museums it isn't about returning everything it's about giving back when asked it's about the fact that if you have something stolen that you didn't yourself steal that doesn't mean it's not stolen. So mentally, we have I think to sort of use this moment which is there's a, you know, there's a real window of opportunity for us to remake world culture museums we've never needed something like a world culture museum more than we do in this moment. These are the cultural spaces for anthropology and archaeology and art. These are locations where we're able to celebrate and understand ways of making ways of seeing ways of a being that are outside of our conventional Eurocentric lens. So as long as they justification for empire and white supremacy, then we're never going to allow these museums to be what they could be, we're going to keep using them as a mode to keep some people out of culture and some people in. One of the sort of motos of the book is that as the border is to the nation state, so the museum is to empire. These are 19th century technologies, the border and the museum that are used to tell us that there are different sorts of people. We're able to categorize them in different ways we need to find other ways of thinking about the museum in those ways so I'm going to finish there. Thank you so much. Thank you very much Dan for your very clear presentation. It's always helpful to follow presentation with concrete examples and you've been doing this very clearly. We now have time for questions from the audience. Professor will be answering. Good morning. Good morning. Okay, I hope you can hear me. I have a question regarding the impact or the response both on your book but also on your discourse on the return of objects from the museums and this is something that we are really looking into from here because of this very week. We were celebrating the 12th Columbus Day, which led to quite a discussion of also some statements from right wing parties and not necessarily just right wing parties, but probably stemming from some whiteness frailty that sometimes relate here into Spanish or Catalan frailty where this type of discussion on the return of objects led to polarization and quite a significant divide.  Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. It's a really important issue. And so I'm really happy that you've raised it. So yes, I mean I think the accusation that an openness to to restitution is either an attack upon museums or a sign of weakness reminds us that we're talking here about machines for cultural whiteness for the production of cultural whiteness. Of course I mean I have essentially been accused in some parts of the right wing press in the UK of being a source of race traitor, because if whiteness is a product of a certain set of cultural devices. You know, then, as soon as you start to undermine those, then some something really worrying for the light for the far right starts to happen, but we also expose how those notions of supremacy are built right into into the heart of our institutions, absolutely into the heart of our museums and our universities. So most of us that work in the museums though of course we've been here before. So in the 1990s, there were arguments that the restitution of human remains in terms of indigenous communities and you know ancestral human remains, or indeed the return of Nazi loot. So the return of Holocaust spoliation. These were seen as absolutely controversial.  But, but importantly the Washington principles of 1998 shifted the owners it shifted the burden of responsibility for knowing what what is in the collections from the, the, the claimants over to the institution. So that's what's now happening I think for African cultural restitution and we need to actually continually remind people that we're not, you know that this isn't the work of activists. You know, in some cases it is, it is listening to the communities who are outside our institutions and are shouting that they want to return they want to change. But we are doing our job. This is a normal part of the professional practice of how we work in museums when did we start with the idea that the museum is a is a prison. The museum is an end point that a museum is where objects go to die. You know there have been restitutions for many years up until the 1960s. And I think Benedict Savoie's new book, which at the moment is only in a German it's called Africa's Africa's camp, um, Zeina couldn't stop because struggle for her art. She underlines absolutely centrally how so many of the legal restraint and the myths that hold us back from returning from the return of objects were invented. You know in the 1960s in the, in the years after, after independence, you know, sort of after and so after African independence where there was an awareness there was a worry that items were going to be asked for to be returned. So the Germans and the French and the British were talking to each other about how to avoid these, you know these things happening. So yeah, I mean we will hear from some that this is either we're being fragile or we're or we're being or we're making an attack on museums, but we need to hold our nerve, you know in the museum in, you know, all of those of us that work in museums, so that we can allow our ethical practice, you know, to evolve. Any further questions? No, it's not working. No, sorry, it's not working. Well thank you very much for your presentation. I found the opportunity to read your book and I found it an interesting necessary book to advance this discourse when it comes to recitation. But my question is maybe more of a technical answer, because we absolutely agree that we need to return the objects that have been looted. But in the Savoia report, I'd like to know what's your take on the reversal of the proof of burden. The fact that any object that cannot be proven that it has been illicitly acquired must be recited. So I'd like to know what's your view on that because it seems clear that anything that has been illicitly claimed, either stolen or looted, needs to be recited. And I would understand that you would support, in the case of the Benin bronzes, before even there were enforced laws that would limit plundering in the event of a war, because I think before that, plundering in the event of war was even suggested, recommended before it was legitimized from a legal standpoint. So I'd like to know your view on this, on the reversal of the proof of burden. Okay, thank you so much. It's a really important issue. So yeah, I mean I think in terms of legal, in terms of the notion that it was legal to steal or to loot, I think we need first off to recognize that there are legal dimensions to African societies as well. That's the, you know, so when the French, you know, Ministry of Culture says that the returns that Macron has overseen to Madagascar and to Benin and to Senegal do not in any way sort of compromise the important principle of inalienability of objects owned by the French that completely misses the idea of the fact that these items were inalienable also for the African societies from which they were taken. So first off we need to think about, actually I mean what are we counting as law here. And I think the second thing is we need to be aware that looting, yeah, I mean objects have always moved from A to B, right? This is not a movement that's about some obsession that every object should be where it was made and everything goes back to where it sort of began. That isn't the question at all. Looting became something very specific. It became an action at a scale, at an industrial scale, in terms of the military action that was entirely different to anything that had gone sort of earlier. And it was bound up with ideologies of race and ideologies over cultural supremacy, and that phase of the Anthropology Museum that we have faced up to when it comes to racism in physical anthropology, and we have not faced up to when it comes to cultural anthropology. So we have to say that actually the systematic removal of items which were sacred and royal from African sort of entities, African cultures, you know, of course, that's an entity that's a set of actions that are very different from other contexts. It's a case by case approach. And I think thirdly, we have to say that this isn't about sending back, it's about the giving back of items when asked. And yes, I mean there are some nation states, some royal courts in Africa and so on who are demanding items to be returned, there are others who are not. And so we simply and of course we know from the restitution of ancestral human remains from Holocaust context from very different historical context of Holocaust sort of loot that these things take time that restitution is not an overnight thing where you just empty out the museum. And so it's about the building of the relationship sits about being, it's about going at a certain pace. That's why the book talks about a decade of returns the idea this over the course of the 2020s, we will learn how to do restitution the many paths. Actually that restitution can take. Sometimes it's about signing over legal ownership and we don't have to overly emphasize the physical movement of the object. Sometimes it's other roots. Sometimes restitution is also about reparation. Sometimes it's about sort of memory, or sort of post memory. Sometimes it's about reimagining anthropology museums as really source source of urgent public spaces for reckoning with the histories of empire, but returning objects when asked, has to be the first sort of point of all of this. So I hope that that goes some way to answer your, your important question. I have a question from someone who's following us online. She's Professor Clement in the list. Maybe you know, yes. Yes. She'll be taking part in this afternoon session and she just sent us a question for you through the chat. I have a question to Dan Higgs. If museums have to give something up. Then how can the Pete Rivers Museum, as a colonial museum, continue to operate on the public through the effect of bloating and trauma, and not closing its doors as a monument to slavery and exploitation. Absolutely. Well, thanks for that. Hello, Clementine. And so I look forward to seeing you later, I hope. So yeah, I think if I understand the question, right, it's should we shut down the pit rivers. I mean, I, personally, am certainly very interested in the notion of naming the pit rivers. I'm certainly very interested in the physical dismantling of what in the book, I call the white infrastructure of colonial museums. So whether we simply have no need for anthropology museums in the 21st century. Actually, I don't think that as I was saying earlier. You know, actually, I think we've never needed something like a world culture museum more than we do right now. So I think simply to sort of shut the doors. Yeah, I don't know what would we do next what would what would happen next. So, you know, I think for me. There were there were ways of dismantling there are ways of reimagining the museum as a site of conscience. So, so much I mean what I do agree with is that we need to do something that's at the very least a metaphorically like the shutting of the door we need to do something like some major break with what anthropology sort of institutions have have been because the predicament that the anthropology museum finds itself in is, is I think fundamentally the same predicament that anthropology as a discipline finds itself in. So if we need anthropology and archaeology in some form, then we need the public space that those disciplines have made. So that's about reimagining the pit rivers in different ways, I don't know, but I am an advocate for us to retain and to, and to reimagine and transform. You know, World Culture Museums as the public spaces of anthropology. We have one more question from the audience but quickly please raise your hand. Yeah, just one thing. These objects were taken from Benin not being museum artifacts or museum artworks, but with restitution, their role is completely altered. And because of their setting in here and not in there, they have become museum artifacts have there been any proposal on what to do with the objects there. Are they to be displayed to turn them into museum objects or regardless of what might be their previous functionality. Okay, yeah, it's a really important issue.  In the context of ancestral human remains. We do not say when we return those, you know, to First Nations or Native Americans, or to marry groups that they have to display those music, you know, those ancestors in the museum, actually normally they are destroyed they are buried in the very different historical circumstances of of Holocaust roots. The arguments were put in the 90s that if you return these items these artworks, you know, to their rightful owners well, what if they sell them what if they're not available. They're actually to see for the public. Well, yes, I mean they're their objects they can do what they want with them. So I think it's incredibly important that we don't interest ourselves in and we don't put conditions for return that you need to build a museum that you need to have the museum working exactly like a Western Museum. You know, all those things because so often those arguments are simply put to hold up the work of restitution to sort of make it not happen. At this time, certainly in the case of Benin, there is a really important museum project that is going ahead with the, the architects of David RJ. There's there's a lot of excitement in Edo state over the return of these these important cultural sacred world works, which will of course be able to inspire, not only in terms of art and culture but design identity fashion. All sorts of things the these these artworks are able to inspire locally. You know if they're able, if they're able to be seen. So the old arguments that Africans simply needed to get on an airplane if they wanted to see their own culture was already looking pretty shaky with the changing visa regimes that we've seen in Europe and in North America over the past 30 years. After COVID after lockdowns where we really start to wonder with environmental change, are we ever really going to see the millions and millions of people who who actually visit these hyper concentrations of sort of world culture in the so called or the self announced universal museums. Actually, localism is amazingly important as well. So I do think we're seeing the model of what a museum can be reimagined on. I think we're seeing an African sort of model I think all of the you know so many of the best ideas and some thinking about sort of what a museum can be is being is actually a coming from across the continent of Africa. And I think we will see a whole host of different models for how we can think about a museum being led from African colleagues. So I hope that goes some way to answering your question. I have one more question from the audience and very shortly please. Yeah. Sorry. But I see that your proposal is to go far beyond the idea of who possesses what in that sense I believe we have many more possibilities now that we used to have 20 years ago. We have digital possibilities to to collect all the information and to spread this knowledge back to the places. So as to restore not only of course the possibility of having the object, but of having the possibility of getting the whole context of the knowledge he provides. And then this is obvious of course. My question is, what steps have been taken up till now, for example, at the British Museum or other museums, you know, or other creators you deal with. And the budget. This is the second part of the question the budget we should assign to this sort of projects to be very huge. So this is a person one of the hindrances. Okay, well if I understood right, it's a question about the role of digital in this. And I think just to answer very quickly. Fundamentally we learned from Sarsav Ra from the Sarsav Ra reports. That's a key idea that's been missing from our discourse has to be introduced and at the time that Sarsav Ra came out I was, I was a visiting professor at the Musee de Cabe Ron Lee. And some of my colleagues were totally shocked that this idea was introduced into the debate, which is the idea of the consent. And they said, what is the this language of sexual violence, what is this sort of doing in the museum space. Fundamentally consent is important when it comes to understanding what was taken. It's crucial when it comes to ideas over digital or copies or the idea that you scan and print something and make a copy these are not our objects in many cases. And so, fundamentally, handing over agency seeding that authority and that control, ensuring consent on all sides that has has to be at the heart of a new ethics and what's actually in the Sarsav Ra report is called a relational ethics for how we work in museums. Okay, I'm here. Thank you, Professor Hicks for your presentation questions, answering your question, the questions of the audience. We'll have a quick break and we'll be back at half past 11. Thank you very much.


Thank you guys so much for being here to listen to this presentation. I'm gonna give I'm excited to be here. It's always a great opportunity to have to Speak to people about something you're passionate about and also to speak to people that have an interest in this kind of thing I'm here today talking about Alice's garden. It's a two-acre community garden in the north side of Milwaukee I'm gonna get into a little bit about that as we move forward So My name is fat my mod Since I'm gonna be talking to you guys about Historical perspectives and a program that we run About that. I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about my own history. I was born in Denver, Colorado And when I was about in third grade my family moved back to Ethiopia We're from Ethiopia, which is in East Africa and Yemen, which is in the Middle East And my family moved back there when the war was over and I was lived there through high school and a lot of my experiences of moving from eastern Africa to the United States sort of informed my passion in life and informed sort of the questions that I would ask myself academically and That was how is it that you know this country that has a population that's 95 percent agriculture based And is considered one of the genetic bread baskets of the world in terms of seed diversity Comes to represent the face of starvation to people all across the world So that informed me academically But what I realized as I went along was that It's great and all to analyze things and understand the reasoning reasons and causes But as I was working with small farmers it became very clear to me that I needed to be a very good far small farmer One to not romanticize traditional forms of knowledge but second to be able to offer other small farmers something when I would be interviewing them and So that's how my path came to farming So what I do is Alice's garden my role is I'm the urban farm manager. That's my title And what that means is that I help different families there with any sort of cropping questions They have and I also facilitate a lot of the programs that we're going to talk about My other role is I'm also a small farmer. I farm three and a half acres of vegetables with my partner John And we sell it directly to restaurants and then at farmers markets So I do both those things and This presentation today what I'd like to do is sort of talk to you guys about the history of the garden Because that's important to understand how we're able to teach our other programs like the field hands and foodways program And then I'd like to talk to you guys about field hands and foodways, which is the specific program I'm going to tell you about that highlights different history and Before jumping into that program, I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about what field hands and foodways means So the history of the garden Alice's garden like I said is two acres and it's located in northern Milwaukee in a very busy area Um It's a very historical setting So in Milwaukee Before 1967 any person of color couldn't live north of north Avenue All people of color had to live within a confined area that had about a 10 mile radius There's no silver lining to that but one thing about it is that it created a very vibrant black community So if you wanted a carpenter you had to get one within your community if you wanted to bank you had to do it there but what happened when Housing desegregation happened which became a federal policy Was that they decided they wanted to build a highway and that highway was going to cut right through that neighborhood And so they decided to build that there was a lot of opposition for different reasons And they began the process of building it, but then they decided they weren't going to build it So what that did was it left a lot of vacant land in that? neighborhood and you can kind of see here where the highway cut through and it wasn't until recently that They started to remove sort of the the parts that that they put in for the highway and replace it with surface streets But all around it created vacant lots analysis garden is One of those areas that was a vacant lot, and I'm sure you guys can all imagine and know what happens when you have vacant spaces Especially in places where there are economic issues It created a lot of vagrancy and whatnot so the idea behind Alice's garden is you know you put something Beautiful somewhere, and it makes it helps the community Kind of take ownership for what's going on in their neighborhoods Before 1967 Alice's garden actually for a long time was owned by a man named deacon brown in the late 1800s and he owned 40 acres that was all around that north Avenue area and deacon brown was an abolitionist so as slaves were trying to leave and move from places such as St. Louis and whatnot they were coming up through Wisconsin and going to Canada and the first Slave that was able to escape her name was Carolyn quarrels She was 16 years old and she was dropped off in a sugar barrel at deacon brown's home So there were a lot of people that perhaps had a desire to be abolitionist, but hadn't yet had the opportunity So he picked her up in the sugar barrel and then helped her make her passage to Canada An interesting thing about Wisconsin is that Wisconsin never signed the anti-fugitive slave act Which means that if a slave comes into your state you're required by law To return them back to their origin, but even though they didn't sign that it's still highly lucrative So there's a lot of slave catchers so you can go and look up her story You know they were hot on her trail and she eventually made it there. So right where we're located, you know, there's There's a little monument that sort of commemorates that passage that she made and started the whole Underground Railroad movement in Milwaukee I Also want to tell you guys that if you have any questions while I'm talking or if you would like me to Elaborate on something. I'm saying just raise your hand and I have no problem Answering it. So one thing I wanted to do was Play a video for you guys if I'm able to pull it up Okay, so this video is a video that Was recently made and it sort of talks about urban Farming in Milwaukee, I think it'll give you kind of a good view of what Alice's garden looks like It sits on land that Really was the vibrant African-American community in the city of Milwaukee 50 years ago If you look around us, there's nothing but vacant land here to the north and to the west It is so important that we reclaim the empty spots of the city and literally plant new life the philosophy for me with Alice's is I use Community gardening as the carrot And to claim a new lifestyle or a renewed lifestyle of healthy living and understanding urban agriculture as a means to support your family and to reclaim the wholeness and goodness in farming That kale looks beautiful This garden plot and the plot behind me represents a lot of what is grown here at Alice's collard greens kale eggplant corn okra sweet potatoes herbs The kale and collard greens here. Don't just represent The gardeners it also represents the economic viability that a city can claim through farming Because everything you see here and there are sold not only at farmer farmers markets But we also provide fresh produce to two local restaurants And so the young people who are growing this food in our young farmers program along with learning how to grow Fresh produce they also have developed a marketing plan and they have to develop a whole price Catalog for all of their vendors whether they be the farmers market whether it is local restaurants or the local corner stores But the broader spectrum of what we do is helping people to understand in this city that is so hit by Unemployment in neighborhoods like this and throughout the city that you can actually grow food Not just for yourself, but for others and have a living for yourself This is where we have yoga in the garden represents for me one of our biggest victories here at Alice's garden and so just a field of sweet potatoes in an urban Community that is African-American represents a sign of hope to every elder and every family who comes in here and simply recognizes this leaf and says I'm you know and and says I never thought we could grow sweet potatoes in Milwaukee For us it really is about economic sustainability for families for communities and for neighborhoods because of the incredible work of organizations such as Alice's garden the Fondie food center Walnut Way we have begun to impact The food that is available here in the city of Milwaukee and particularly in this neighborhood Okay, so that kind of let you visually see what Alice's garden looks like, but what is it? So it's a two-acre community garden We have about 95 different plots there different families that garden there and each family has About a 15 by 12 plot and some families have double plots Every gardener there gets a key to the gate and then there are sheds located throughout that you might have seen Where there are tools in there and the only rule is that when you leave you lock it? And then we have a lot of different areas where we have different programs. So one of my favorite things about sort of Education through gardening is that a garden provides you with a reproducible space It's not a finite thing. You're working with in a sense So as long as I have energy, there's a lot of different things I can do with that same space and that's what we do there and One important thing is that you know? Maybe some of you are just you know our farmers and have farmland and that's what you do And and I'm also a farmer but one of the amazing things about programs like this that are in an urban setting is that it Connects and reconnects people to sort of where their food comes from The toil that goes into it gives them that understanding so I run a program during the summer where I had About 15 young people from the ages of 14 to 21 and then we sell at the farmers markets on Saturdays And they're always cracking me up because they're so offended by the prices. We're selling stuff for you know They're just like oh my god We're gonna sell this bunch of carrots for two dollars like we got to sell it for more You know and and I understand that and that's a real you know issue that we have obviously is farmers Especially sustainable farmers is that you know? There's there's a real devaluing of our food in the system where a lot of things are sort of You know brought down in price because they're amended with corn and soy and what not So some of the programs we have they're listed here. We have a program called reclaiming and nourishing family tradition So once a week we do some sort of educational thing whether it's making herbal, you know beauty products to Making pesto or how you would can or dehydrate something or teaching the basics of organic gardening a lot of people think that if you're Organic gardening it means that you don't do anything to your to your vegetables But it's really about finish figuring out non-synthetic alternative methods of Controlling pests And also how you can use other crops to trap crop and whatnot We do raised beds there So it's also understanding sort of the logic behind mostly growing your soil because as farmers We we grow our soil and not so much directed at growing one thing We have a program for junior master gardeners There's an elementary school across the street and throughout the city young kids come twice a week and you know We do small gardening activities with them one of my favorite programs is called the healthy corner store initiative Like we talked about um the area that the garden is located in You know has a lot of economic issues Wisconsin is you know leading the nation in the disparity of income between African-Americans and Other communities so one thing that people will say is that you know over there. It's a food desert It's not so much about the term you use but certainly there's a lot of difficulties with accessing fresh food and That leads to this misconception that you know people don't want to eat fresh food And they would never even really want to garden and the reality behind it is that? People do want to eat fresh food. There's just certain kinds of fresh food They want to eat not everybody wants to eat kale, you know the organic farmer kale stickers They're great, but not every community necessarily wants to eat that so sort of getting feedback and figuring out what people want and what we've done is with our young people we grow on our plots and We found the venues where people do sell their food and a lot a lot of the places that they're accessing food Is that the healthy corner stores? So we've partnered up with them to figure out how to make displays and and then get feedback from consumers about what they want and So like last year the gentleman who was speaking before me was talking about heirloom tomatoes Those didn't go over so well. They did kind of scare people And they just weren't interested in it But one thing that people were really interested in was green tomatoes, you know, they just couldn't get enough and I was like Great, we can do green tomatoes all day long, you know in Wisconsin. It's a lot easier for us in the summer And then we have all sorts of other programs We have a healthy moms healthy kids program We have a new program this year called making sense of the garden and making sense of the garden is for visually impaired people and we try to figure out ways to experience the garden and Vegetables and soil using our different senses so Here's a picture of some of the young people from Brown Street Academy, which is an elementary school across the street. They're clearing this land and Here we did a three sisters planting after that of doing Squash Beans and corn and that allowed us to sort of talk about also, you know Native American planting methods and different stories that went along with there that made it interesting to them But also informative This is a young lady named sojourner. She's making beauty products and Teaching a bunch of women who came out for that day for the event For a weekly event How to do that? She was making chapstick using honey and lavender and things like that these are people from the vision forward group and This time they were doing yoga So that was a feel one and then the following week we were doing taste so all of our grounds there You know, it's either family plots We have programs going on but we have one space that has grass as you saw in the video and that space is where we have Twice a week free yoga classes and twice a week free dance classes And you might wonder like how do you do all these programs, you know? Venus who you saw in the video and who should have been here with me today She has a lot of energy. I would say is one way we do it But also we use our community resources There's a lot of people that have knowledge that want to be able to participate and give back and so it's sort of Comes through that so like our yoga teacher. She has a plot in the garden and we give her that plot for free and she teaches twice a week and and It makes her more connected to the things going on there. These are some of the youth that were in My young people's program. It's called garden mosaics Like I said, you know, we we do a lot of education with them a lot of history Spend a lot of time just dealing with being a teenager It's probably sort of the hardest of all my jobs even then working with the young kids It can be working with them and more I treat it as a work experience when I work with them So it's like what are your impediments to coming to work on time every day? And how can we deal with that? You know a lot of the young people? I will say they're not that excited to be working outside and doing physical labor and I don't come from this school of thought that you know Everyone should have a garden in their front yard and everyone should garden because Not everyone wants to do it, you know, I want to do it I'm excited about it, but I can understand that not everyone wants to do it But with young people it's kind of like well you got to do it and then you can decide you got to experience it And I think it's really important because for example not a single young person in my program this year had ever eaten a Beat, you know and let alone like sort of what they eat They had no idea that you know beets grow in the ground and That corn grows up. Just no idea. So Even if just that a little bit They understand how those things happen. I think there's sort of a lot of problems in The younger generation now and sort of urban environments of having any idea of where food comes from so You know sort of doing a lesson about that poultry and what what kinds of meat does that mean? You know that the butcher didn't just make it in the back there You know and that it came from somewhere so imparting that and Ultimately with them, you know, all I want them to understand at the end of the day is that when they eat so much seems out of Control to them in their lives, but just if they can understand that every time they're eating food they're making a choice some kind of choice and and I know that a lot of times it doesn't sink in for them then but over time Hopefully it does and you know a garden is certainly a good spot for healing and sort of Relaxing and listening to the sounds of nature, which I think is good for them. It's good for me It makes it easier to handle them at times So I'm here today to talk to you guys about a program that we have called field hands and food ways I'll read this to you and then we'll go ahead and just break it down and how we do it and what it means So it's an agricultural historical and cultural based learning opportunity for young people and community families to celebrate the farming food preparation and Folkways of African Americans and Africans throughout the desire diaspora the program is a demonstration garden project including a master's kitchen garden a slave allotment plot and three recreation areas in addition Field hands and food ways honors the historical setting of Alice's garden so kind of already talked about a lot of that and then Field hands and food ways also celebrates a great migration of Africans Americans from the south to the north and the hopes and traditions They carried with them so You know like I told you guys the area that we're located in is Historical and it was the first site of the underground railroad But a lot of African Americans settled in that area Wisconsin specifically So it's estimated that about six million African Americans migrated from the south to the north during the periods of Before World War two one, you know beginning of World War one and then World War two and that's sort of a long history But it's often a Something that's not historic and acknowledged and for a lot of them It was like moving from one place to a completely different country And they brought their foods with them, you know because before those times all African Americans were in the south, right? so What we're going to be talking about at this point is sort of The field hands what that meant as African Americans became slaves in the Americas and then the food ways that they Brought with them. So we know that between 1650 and 1860 Approximately 15 million people were enslaved and that's counting the people that actually made it right to the Americas because There are a lot of people that died on the voyage in the US a lot of them came in through South Carolina was a major Area, but as you can see more in the southeast and then you know, Brazil is one of the main places that a lot of Slaves went to so what did it mean to be a field hand, right? A lot of Africans when they came here were required to work in the fields, right and It meant 18-hour days. You were expected to pick upwards of 200 pounds of cotton in the beginning when slaves came They the main industries were sugar, right and then later it went on to tobacco But we lost a lot of the market in sort of Europe and whatnot with the American Revolution and With the cotton gin we start we started to go towards cotton and Then a lot of and then one main thing that a lot of people don't know about is that we also grow a lot of rice And they also grew indigo and it goes a dye That comes from India. That's like a blue dye that was used We're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but let's just say that in 1805 the slave trade was abolished That means that you know, you were no longer allowed to bring slaves across Atlantic, but You could still have slavery moving and a lot of it did move towards Texas and New Orleans and some people would say that that was sort of some of the worst times for slaves because that's when a lot of Families were separated and sold separately and whatnot In 1883, you know president Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation Which freed all slaves, but it wasn't until 1885 that we had the ban on Slavery, okay, so how do we teach of what? Sorry, we're oh, yeah, sorry Okay, sorry, you're right. Um, thank you So how do we do this? We have a demonstration area. It's about it's a little less than a quarter acre and In that area like I talked to you about at right at the beginning of the field hands and foodways Peace we have different signs that leads you through And it demonstrates what a plantation would have looked like with the master's kitchen garden and then slave allotments Um, a lot of people don't you know, how did slaves eat, right? This talks about that so slaves often got their food in three ways it was either provision procured or produced, okay, so If they were allowed at some plantations They were allowed to have their own plots and they grew their own food in those plots and usually in those plots the foods They grew were highly specific foods to Things that they brought with them from Africa sometimes You know the masters would give them some of the things that were not wanted and then the third way was that they foraged for their food So you can see here This is a demonstration of what the master's kitchen garden would have been and in the master's kitchen garden It's only specific foods that were grown there Because there was sort of a segregation in what was considered That they wanted to eat and what the slaves could eat and that informs our foodways as we go on So, you know, it was more like things that like eggplant Lattice Beets those were the kinds of things that would be in a master's kitchen garden and then the slave garden which is also called the huck patch had things like cabbage cow peas okra as you got further south and Sometimes it had corn so they also were informed And corn mainly came you know through their exchanges with Native Americans so We'll get back to them So when they came they brought a lot of foods with them that were Indigenous to Africa at that point they brought it in a lot of different ways one way is that when Slave ships went there They had to get enough food on this ship to bring back all of the people with them and the crew and whatnot So there was a lot of food that was on the ship that later some of the slaves would plant some of those foods are sesame seed Okra black-eyed peas and rice I just want to tell you that I'm highlighting specifically the foods that they brought with them here but there was also a lot of exchange with foods from the Americas also going to Africa and Example with of that would be corn right that was something that was from the Americas Rice is an important crop because now today in the US we produce at least 12% of the world trade right? Missouri is one of the biggest producers of rice as well as well as California, Texas Etc. So rice is interesting It's it's an interesting story because with rice they've specifically Picked slaves that were rice growers along the Sierra Leone Area in Africa and it costed a lot more to get those slaves But it's important to know because when slaves were brought here They were skilled in certain types of growing and that's why they were sought out and then taken to certain regions that Could accommodate that type of growing so even today a lot of the people that brought were brought and Unformed the ways we grew rice, which was a very hard job including, you know building a lot of ditches for irrigation weaving these Traditional types of things for fanning it and they were in the sea islands and southern Carolina and Georgia and the those people are often Not as supervised because of the type of work or because they were in the sea islands By their overseers and particularly after the Civil War and those people Because they all you know during slavery oftentimes slaves were separated if you were in similar ethnic groups It was effective to separate people So that they commit speak similar languages But in this instance because they wanted all of these people from the rice growing regions They all spoke the same languages had similar traditions and were not as supervised so they were kind of left and they still exist there and They've come to identify themselves as gullah people and I don't know if you've heard about them But they're still on the sea islands. They've identified themselves as sort of their own Indigenous group there they have their own language that has a lot of loanwords from African languages So We'll move on the next thing is that you know How did a lot of this food move into sort of the the foods that we eat today well, you know African Americans were Cooks first in the big house right under slavery So even if there was sort of this reticence to accept certain types of foods that were native to them It slowly came to infuse the foods that people ate Later on they were all often cooks in the armies particularly during the Civil War they became pioneers as people were moving west and Later more in the 60s, you know up until the 60s They were the people that were cooking in the houses They were sort of the hands that did a lot of the work in the homes A lot of that food came with the Underground Railroad As people, you know We're making their way out of slavery and then finally as a lot of people moved from The south to the north they brought a lot of their food traditions with them So how do we how do we teach people about this? Well, you know like I said we have that demonstration garden that helps we have a program called iron pots and wooden spoons So once a week we cook stuff with things that we grow on the vegetable into a single pot because that's often how people cook them and You know, you can think of all sorts of dishes like jambalaya or any single pot dishes that we're familiar with now But there's a lot more of those. So we do that once a week we Once a week, we have an African drummer that comes in he drums with the young people Can see him? Okay, so What are the lessons sort of we've learned through this program one is that you know Certainly talking about slavery is a sensitive topic, right? It's a sensitive topic you know, there's a lot of elder people in and In our community that you know, we're around when there was sharecropping it's a sensitive topic for them It's a sensitive topic for them to come back to the land But just because it's a sensitive topic doesn't mean that we have to throw out the whole sort of history That came into What we kind of consider the United States the foods we eat and how we grow it It's just figuring out how you do that and sort of give credence to to where we got their sources of knowledge a Visual is good, right when people come in and I can say this is what It would have looked like on a plantation. This is what it would have looked like for slaves to grow This is what they would have grown for the masters. It's it's not a political conversation it's just a representation of history right there, right and I'm sure you can all understand that, you know being able to look at things growing in that sense helps you to remember it and And engage you in that way It's helpful because it uses knowledge in our community. So There was a picture there that I skipped through but our oldest garden gardener his name is mr. Wilson and You guys saw Venus talking about the sweet potatoes in the video, right? People don't really grow so much sweet potatoes in Wisconsin. I think maybe you guys grow up more here, but It was my first year growing sweet potatoes at all and it was the first year for a lot of my young people But it allowed us to engage with mr. Wilson who had grown up in the South and he was able to teach us how to do it It was meaningful for us. We got to learn it from someone who's so good at it naturally does it It was meaningful for him because he got to see that we valued his knowledge and That we wanted him there and that we wanted to spend that time with him Again, you know opens up conversation about those things in the past it acknowledges that that past and it writes a history about it It's cross-generational We're able to engage with all sorts of different people in the garden and their experiences And lastly one of my favorite things is that it can be utilized in all of our programs, you know If you're there for Whatever if you're there for vision forward or you're there for reclaiming nursing family traditions You walk through that area. You see it. It becomes a part of your conversation Anyone can come to the drumming anyone can come eat with us at our single pot events so I Think it's good in that sense And that is the end of my slideshow I know that I gave you guys a lot of information If you have any questions, please ask me for me, I feel like I Didn't want to only tell you about the program today But I sort of wanted to tell you about the meaning and The history of those things so that you can walk away being as informed as I hope that the program does for people as well Yeah Actually we just this year Right now a couple weeks ago Incorporated ourselves as an independent nonprofit We get a lot of grants from a lot of different places There's only one, you know, there's the director Venus Williams and then there's me the urban farm manager We mostly take all of the funding we have and just put it back in programs We don't really spend money on overhead so much the community garden. It's it's different in the sense that Every there's different quadrants and they all have water access So one of the things that their people's rental So the rental there is it's $25 for a year. It's $50 if you have a double plot and that goes towards paying the our water bill But I mean, I don't know if you mean like specific numbers But our funding model is that we're mostly grant funded in that sense But we're trying to be more sustainable Which I think is a goal for any nonprofit, right? I have a farm I'm trying to employ young people coming out of different programs like this for me. I'm completely For a profit. I've always believed in that because I want to show that you can be a sustainable Organic vegetable farmer it seems You know, maybe I'm optimistic But I think I think you can like I have this other job because certainly most organic vegetable farmers Someone's got to have another job in in your partnership if you're two or three-way partnership So yeah, we keep our low our overhead really low we constantly try to come up with new programs and We try to utilize the people that are in the community and you know, whatever that means the community isn't just a certain zip code The community is the people that come and want to participate So we have no rule about zip codes for who can come and get a plot there at all It's very diverse setting that only really benefits the community We will give priority when we have a waiting list to people in the neighborhood certainly but but that's the best thing about food right when you walk around at Alice's garden and You go, you know You get to see a history of someone's culture and things about their culture that maybe you wouldn't pick up Just talking to them by looking at their food So, you know, we have some Arab gardeners when you go to their plot you see totally different things that their family sent them from Lebanon or Wherever and that they grow their different squashes or often when I go to the to the little plots of The mung farmers have their I don't often know what what how do I identify a lot of the things, you know But I learn a lot from that the climates of their area Why they mostly grew that type of thing and that forms you about history if you're interested in it do we um partnerships and you know all sorts of ways of You know doing like Workshops or forums or things like that We hold them in high esteem. They we do similar things to them So we're all sort of doing the same thing which is you know trying to bring Accessible food at a good price to people. That's non-synthetic pesticides and and fertilizers Our our partner agency before we became an independent nonprofit. It's called the Center for Resilient Cities and They also work with growing power as well. So You know, we're all in the same same boat together. There's also another place called Walnut Way Which is about Four blocks from Alice's Garden. They have a completely different model. Which is pretty awesome. They they went in and you know There's a whole block there and there was all these vacant lots on the block So they built gardens in the vacant lots, right? And then they bought one of the houses there That had been foreclosed renovated it made it this cool community space and they try to bring together this idea of Property property values making your house More energy efficient all those things that affect housing as well as raising the value of the homes in that area By growing crops and having people more engaged in that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of Growing power is great. There's also a lot of different organizations in Milwaukee that are sort of burgeoning now Choose them from certain areas, I'd never heard that No, no, you that's a great question and I think that you you understood it. I think Yeah So she was asking she you said that she said she'd never heard that you know that they went specifically To areas in Africa and brought them researching what they were capable of to come and work here Is that right? Just have Well the system, you know, it's good question the system of slavery was pretty highly thought out It lasted for hundreds of years, you know and to perpetuate that kind of system and then to make it become the economic backbone of a whole Continent to continents because really South America as well, you know There's definitely a lot of research in how you did that and because people invested so much in their slaves, right? That was property. There's a lot thought put into what kind of slave you were gonna have what they were gonna be good for It's certainly true, you know like Africans were very skilled farmers some Some Africans were prized for the regions they came from because of their physical build their physical build alone, right? In different areas of Africa people can look very different But here, you know rice is one of the main ones in terms of cropping where they were willing to pay a lot Higher price for the slave because they were able to do that growing rice is a very hard thing So yeah, yeah, and and I just like to say that one of the things about about this program and Talking about it is that there really isn't a lot of research about sort of the foodways themselves, you know I just recently got an ethno botany book about The the stuff Africans brought in and it's like there's so many other things like castor oil and a lot of like Herbal remedies they brought with them But it's something that's becoming more and more developed and something this is the only program of that kind right now And there's a lot of people sort of looking at it to see how successful it is and like I said I think a part of it is that it's a sensitive topic for people on either side of the conversation But but it's happening so That's a good question, I appreciate that question the way Okay, so her question was you know seems like the garden is established now How did you get to that point? So what happened was that that empty land? At first was taken over by the University of Wisconsin extension program, and it's actually named Alice me Taylor Which Alice's garden is named after was the director the only Woman and African-American director of the extension at that time and the history that we're talking about In the early 80s and so when they took it over it was kind of more farm-scale stuff happening It didn't seem like a lot of people were interested there was about Four among families and two African-American farmers, and they were kind of farming the two acres so Demetrius Brown, he's the extension officer and He brought in Venus Williams her name. She's the director my colleague and It's also his wife, and he was like she does a lot of youth work And he brought her in and he's like can you get a little you know youth program going and she she was like Yeah, I can do that. This was about seven years ago She's like but I also feel like there's a lot of adult things that needs to happen here the way that she successfully brought people into it and sort of Overcame this misconception that people in that community wouldn't want a garden was just grass roots knocking on people's door Telling them what was going on And that's really how she did it and it took about you know We're just kind of finally being established in our infrastructure getting all of our land covered really selling vegetables at the farmers market So So that's how I would say just knocking on doors One thing that people often will say to me, you know, oh you work in that neighborhood like you're just gonna park your car There like ridiculous things right or they'll come to visit and it's this really beautiful place and they'll say oh My god, how do people not steal all this stuff right because it's just surrounded by sort of this metal fence and People don't jump the fence and still stuff They really don't and the only times all of the gardeners They're familiar with each other now because we do stuff on a weekly basis So they'll sort of know if someone's in someone else's pot or whatnot But in in in times like I was driving here and someone had called me I was sitting in the car and they're like, uh, you know, you are you the farm manager there? I see so many vegetables that are just rotting and you know These people are just gonna let them rot in their garden Can I can I go in and take it and I'm always like God you guys are so good at calling at the end of the season You know, but our rule is that you know If some even if it looks like it's rotting in someone's pot they put the work in it They did that from the beginning. So I'm gonna assume they know what they're doing Even if it's sort of going back to the garden and the whole point is just to say that There have been times where someone will walk in, you know, and the gates open and I just try not to scare them you know, it's an opportunity to Bring somebody in instead of seeing it as a negative interaction. They're coming to steal. They're coming to steal food You know, I'll generally sort of be like, what are you doing? Like, what are you looking for? Maybe I can give you something for my plot, but that's not the appropriate thing to do If you want to come volunteer, you can I can totally give you vegetables at the end of this week We have a potluck on this day just come and if you want to have a plot next year, you can, you know Um, so I think that a lot of the negative interactions people would judge We kind of see as more of an opportunity to engage people How do people mark their plots? I mean, are they just a little tag with their name or can they be creative and do what they want or Um, well, we you know, really I mark the Plots and sometimes I have to remark it because people Push back but the way we do it is um, you know, we have those I don't know if you saw in the picture. You can see it See those wooden Like beam things See that how there's those wooden, um I don't know what you call it, but it's like a long thick law And it's usually about two of those for one side and one Going horizontal. So I mark them for them People can do whatever they want. There's some people that will be like this is the Jackson family plot or some people will put up a little You know sign or something Butterfly or whatever, you know, they're free to do Whatever that they want in their plot You know, we have no rules about sort of what you can Grow or not grow as long as it's something that you can legally grow, you know And and we encourage that diversity we get a lot of you know Donations for seeds and plants and stuff throughout the year that we're able to Offer our gardeners. Um, I I had space in a greenhouse this year So I was able to grow a lot of stuff and sell it to them at super discounted price mainly heirloom Vegetables and and that's cool because you know, I hopefully get them into that a lot of the gardeners there Like I said, there's a lot of elder gardeners and they do a lot of seed saving Um, like I said for me where I'm from that's one of the things that I'm working on is seed saving in Ethiopia And it's so cool to be around older people That that just do it naturally. It's not this big scientific lab project. They're just like, you know Does it pollinate like this? This is the kind of plant you're dealing with we need to save the seeds You know, so a lot of them do that so our only rule about um About plots is if you abandon it the whole season Um, which happens a lot, right at the beginning of the season people think that They're just gonna garden so much and they'll come out one two days and then you don't see them, you know Um, is that if you abandon it? You just have to get back on the waiting list for the next year You're not banned. You just got to get back on the list It was a waste of sort of space that a lot of people would like to have Okay, there's no other questions


Hello and welcome to this session in which we will discuss basis for inherited property. What is inherited property is a form of a gift, although we cover gift property separately, that gift is coming from someone who already passed away. Somebody passed away and left you an asset. What is the general rule when that happens? In general, the basis of an inherited property equal to the fair market value of that property at the date of the decedent's death. So the day that the person passed away, we look at the fair market value and usually that's your basis. The date of death is also referred to as the primary valuation date, abbreviated PVD, the primary valuation date. Now do you have to use the primary valuation date in the end? Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company farhatlectures.com. Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today, no obligation, no credit card required. The answer is no. There's an exception to the primary valuation date. If the executor or the administrator of the estate simply put the person in charge of distributing the asset, usually a lawyer or someone who's trusted, they may elect to use what's called alternative valuation date or AVD. Only if, so notice the rule here, this is what we need to emphasize on, we need to emphasize on the exception, only if the use of that date lowers the value of the gross estate and the value of the estate tax liability. You might be saying, hold on a second, when that be against the logic of the government, because the government wants to collect money, why would you want them to choose the lower valuation date? I will talk toward the end why they prefer this method, but this is the only way you can use the AVD. If choosing the AVD, it lowers the gross estate, it lowers how much value in the estate, and as a result, it lowers the tax liability. So when the alternative valuation date is used, the basis from the inherited property equal to the property fair value at the earlier of the six months after the death or the distribution date. So if we don't use the PVD and we use the AVD, we look from the date of death, six months from the date of death. This is the date of death, date of death. Then if we distributed the assets here and we want to use the AVD, the fair value will be on the AVD. Otherwise, if we waited till six months, it will be after six months for the date of death. The inherited property is always treated as long-term properties. You don't have to worry whether it's short-term or long-term like gifted property, and the reason is hopefully logical. Gifted property, you can plan, you can plan when to give the gift, but you cannot plan when you die. Therefore, it's always treated as long-term property. Therefore, the subsequent disposition of that property by its hair results in recognition of a long-term either a gain or a loss. Let's take a look at an example or a couple examples to illustrate these concepts. On April 14th, Jerry inherited a property valued at 25,000 from his decedent father, Ronald. Ronald acquired the property on February 3rd, 20X1 for 21,200. Believe it or not, we really don't care about how much his father got the property for. Ronald died on January 3rd, 20X2 when the property had a fair value of 23,000. On July 3rd, which is, well, if we go from January 3rd to July 3rd, six months later, the property had a value of 26,000. Let's answer a few questions about the scenario. Determines Jerry's basis for the inherited property if the primary valuation date is used. What is the primary valuation date? Is the date of death? The date of death is January 3rd, 20X2, when the property had a value of 23,000. Therefore, if the PVD is used, Jerry's basis would equal to 23,000. Let's take a look at this scenario. Determine Jerry's basis for the inherited property if the executor elects to use the alternative valuation date. If the executor elects to use this alternative valuation date, Jerry's basis for the property would equal to the fair market value at the earlier of six months after the date of death, and this question will be July 3rd, as I showed you earlier, or the distribution date, which happens to be April 14th, 20X2. Given that the property was distributed within less than six months from the date of death, Jerry's basis would equal to the fair market value of the distribution date, which is 25,000. Now, it's very important to highlight that the decedent basis for property is irrelevant. Notice here, we don't care about Ronald's basis. It's just basically distracting information. Also, Jerry would recognize a long-term gain or loss for the subsequent disposition of the property, regardless of the date on which the disposition occurred whenever he sells it. Now, bear in mind that the date of death the fair market value of the property is 23,000. Now, technically, we cannot use the 25,000 because it increases the estate, but we'll look at this scenario in the next session. I just want to show you how you would choose the alternative valuation date. Let's take a look at this example illustrating, in a real example, in a more realistic situation, the alternative valuation date. Celine inherited all her mother's properties with has a total adjusted basis of 1,220,000 and a fair value on the date of death of 3.5 million. Six months after the date of death, the property had a fair value of 3.7 million. Well, let's see what we have. Is the executor of the estate allowed to elect the alternative valuation date provided that the distribution, remember, the distribution occurred eight months following the date of death. So the distribution did not happen until eight months after the death. So eight months after the death. So this is date of death. This is six months and this is eight months. Okay. Is the executor allowed to do so? Well, the executor of the estate may elect to use the AVD alternative valuation date only if the use of the AVD lowers the value of the gross estate. Well, guess what? That's not the case. Six months later, the AVD is the earlier of six months or the following the death or the distribution date, which is the distribution date cannot be counted because it's not earlier. In this question, it's six months after the death. Can they select this? Well, they cannot. At the date of death, the fair value of the property was 3.5 million. And after six months, that amount increased to 3.7. So the executor cannot elect this date. They cannot elect the alternative valuation date. They have to elect the primary valuation date, which happens to be 3.5 million. Once again, why? Why would the government don't want you to be taxed on the 3.7 million? Well, for one reason is the estate tax. To be taxed on the estate tax, you have to have really high income, not high income, high gross value, which is you would learn about this later on. So 3.7 million will not even be taxed altogether. So what the government will prefer, the government will prefer that the asset goes to Celine and Celine eventually pays the pays the pays the taxes, which is Celine is the beneficiary. And that's that's why they prefer this. They prefer the many pays the taxes later on.