Publication Date

January 16, 2025

Perspectives Section

Features

AHA Topic

Research & Publications, Teaching & Learning, Undergraduate Education

Geographic

  • United States

Thematic

Environmental, State & Local (US), Teaching Methods

This essay is part of “What Is Scholarship Today?

Connecting and listening to practitioners in place has proven to be one of the most effective ways to bridge disciplines, build trust, and further my goals as a local historian in Bellingham, Washington. Through these relationships, I introduce students to the diverse communities who are working and caring for our city, especially its waterfront on Bellingham Bay. It’s my hope that this scholarship offers a model for how to establish protective relationships between people and institutions, inviting vulnerable communities to set the parameters for documenting and sharing unrecognized local histories.

A woman in a jacket and knit hat speaks to a group of students in front of a waterway and bridge.

Anna Booker speaks with students on the Bellingham waterfront in 2019. Anita Harker

I began my career at an environmental consulting firm researching land use history. When I began teaching at a community college, I knew I wanted to apply those skills to my introductory regional and oral history courses. I wanted to continue sharing local histories with the public in imaginative and engaging ways, and I wanted students to learn how to locate sources from archival collections, public agencies, and historical societies. It wasn’t clear to me how that would look, and yet, steadily, I have incorporated pedagogy that awakens students’ curiosity about their surroundings by investigating past environmental efforts and inviting them to use historical thinking to document waterfront revitalization.

Bellingham is a port city where the industrial and resource-based waterfront is being redefined. The waterfront was built first on pilings, and then on top of fill, much of it on waste from the pulp and timber mills that came to dominate the area through the 19th century and well into the 20th. The city is now redeveloping this area with a new park, road, light industry, and housing. The ongoing coordinated effort to clean up contamination and restore the natural habitat, while maintaining a working waterfront, inspired my first effort to merge research, teaching, and the digital humanities. In 2016, a grant enabled two of my students to create a visualization of Bellingham’s 150-year evolution by overlaying historical maps showing the tidal flats as they existed for most of human history with plat maps and surveys conveying how the shoreline was reshaped and filled. The Bellingham Working Waterfront project was unveiled at SeaFeast, an annual celebration of Bellingham’s maritime heritage. A captivated audience heard the story of our waterfront’s transformation from the city’s backyard—the place where we would dump things and bury them—to downtown’s welcoming entry.

It’s been a long and messy process—and we’re still experiencing it. But the takeaway for my students, and the community, has been that civic engagement takes time. It requires empathy for the people who lived through it. One student created a revealing map that showed salmon hatchery tanks, located at the mouth of the creek that runs through town, as part of a sewage treatment plant and the city dump until the 1970s. Today, we see the removal of concrete culverts, streambank revegetation, and construction of a public park with wood pulp digesters repurposed as artwork. After interviewing her grandma, who had worked at what was once the biggest salmon cannery in the world (now the location of a popular beach), my student explained to our class in her final presentation that the creation of the map was an opportunity to recognize her own experience as part of history.

More recently, my delving into place-based, experiential learning led to the development of a community-based participatory history of Lummi Aquaculture. Over two years, in collaboration with historian Daniel Chard at Western Washington University, the Lummi Cultural Commission, and the Northwest Indian College (NWIC) Internal Review Board, we created a 45-page lesson plan that explores archival sources about the construction of North America’s largest human-made sea pond for shellfish cultivation. Interpreted and told from the perspective of Lummi elders, the lesson includes the building of a technical fisheries school that evolved into what is now NWIC, the only tribal college in the Pacific Northwest. For students, the emotional impact comes from hearing directly from Lummi elders and reading primary sources about Indigenous communities, frequently framed as existing only in the past, revitalizing traditional food sources and management practices. On a personal note, my work with Lummi elders has reinforced my belief in the transformative potential of research conducted through sustained, evolving relationships.

A black-and-white postcard of a group of bathers on the beach in Bellingham Bay is the only image on my course home page. Taken in 1924, it captures a rare sunny day in the Pacific Northwest, with bare-chested kids frolicking and posing for the camera, in what we now know was highly contaminated water. This image reminds me that the past is messy just like the present. Researching that complexity with my students, documenting unrecognized local histories, is how I have come to love a people and a place.

Anna Booker is a local historian and instructor at Whatcom Community College.

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