The Lewis and Clark celebration currently showering down on Charlottesville gives a mostly rosy account of the “discovery” of the American West by Thomas Jefferson’s intrepid explorers. But, as they say, history is written by the winners. Corey D. B. Walker’s job is to give a voice to history’s underdogs.
“One thing that I’m interested in following out of this is how native or indigenous cultures impact the stories that are told about Lewis and Clark,” says Walker, director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge, a new branch of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at UVA founded in November. “If we take their stories and perspectives seriously, I think we’d have a very different idea of what the West meant. We’d even have to go as far as to question the idea of ‘Jefferson’s West.’ By having that title it’s as if Jefferson has some claim to these areas, as if they don’t mean anything without connecting them to Jefferson, when in actuality there’s a vibrant world pre-existing him.”
Through his center, Walker wants to study similar instances of historical (and contemporary) conflicts over race, gender and other cultural issues. And according to Walker, there’s plenty to explore.
“This is a unique opportunity,” says Walker, who earned a Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary in 2001. “In this area you have a major research university, an area that was home to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, as well as a large enslaved population and a plethora of indigenous groups.
“So it becomes a cultural site for researching the context of the development of the American nation. That’s crucial when considering who we are as Americans,” Walker says.
Of particular interest to Walker are the contradictions implicit in several of the fathers of American democracy being slave owners. One of the center’s initial projects, “Mapping Monticello’s Diaspora,” has Walker and his associates rethinking Jefferson’s estate by removing it from its familiar historical context. He wants to examine “Monticello as a place, as Jefferson’s retreat, but also as a labor camp, one of the top slave plantations in Central Virginia. Examine it in terms of slavery and the ideas of freedom being born in Central Virginia,” he says. “We need to look at this place as being the home of American democracy, but it is a complicated site.”
Such ethical probing is but part of the mission of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge. The research institute has already participated with the Albemarle Historical Society on a genealogy seminar. Walker plans to tackle modern-day local issues too, including health and environmental issues, and their implications on race, gender and ethnicity in Central Virginia.
“We’re looking at things through an interdisciplinary lens with regards to our historic projects,” Walker says, “but leveraging that historical knowledge with contemporary issues.” One project, for instance, compares how African-Americans were treated by the health-care industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the way the booming Hispanic population is navigating the system in Central Virginia now, he says.
The center’s 26 faculty fellows and numerous associates range from academics to lay scholars, like Bob Vernon, a local historian specializing in colonial America and early African-American history. “We’re looking for people with great knowledge in and around the area,” Walker says. “We look at these lay scholars as integral parts in our research model, and look for others who have insights into the projects we wish to develop.”
Walker has insights into Central Virginia himself. Born in Norfolk, he lived in Charlottesville from 1993 to 1997, when he worked at State Farm Insurance and served as an assistant minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church and did an internship at First Baptist Church on Park Street. He even briefly considered running for a Delegate’s seat in the 58th District. He hasn’t ruled out running for office in the future.
For now, though, he’s concentrating on his new position at UVA . “The greatest hope we have for the center is it will transform relationships of knowledge and power,” Walker says. “We want to change the concept of scholarship to incorporate new research methods and different questions that include voices not normally included in academia.”