Welcome!
Welcome to the online archive of Advocacy for Nature Preservation in Michigan! This archive aims to make more available the stories of those who have tirelessly worked to ensure that future generations of people have spaces to enjoy nature and that the organisms that we share this world with have spaces to thrive.
This archive shares the stories of three individuals and one organization that made significant contributions to the preservation of land. Their stories are told through photographs, newspaper clippings, texts, pamphlets, and more.
Materials
Materials presented in this archive were collected from the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. Our group explored different ways of finding our materials within the Bentley.
The Genevieve Gillette materials were found through the Conservation and Environmentalism subject guide that was found on the Bentley’s website. Several boxes made up the Gillette collection, so boxes were picked based on the presence of photographs and biographical information.
The Joseph L. Sax materials were also found using the Conservation and Environmentalism subject guide made available by the Bentley. The Sax papers are an extensive collection, but using the collection's finding aid, boxes were chosen based on their subject matter. Specifically, topics relating to Sax's work on the Michigan Environmental Protection Act and other Michigan-specific legal matters were prioritized. These boxes were comprised mostly of correspondence and newspaper clippings, as well as some legal materials.
The West Michigan Environmental Actions Council materials were also found through the Bentley’s Conservation and Environmentalism subject guide. Five boxes of meeting notes, pictures, and educational materials were looked through and gathered to represent the effectiveness and thoroughness of information provided by WMEAC programs. Accomplishments of these programs were also documented, and used as examples of WMEAC’s educational and thus environmental impacts.
The Ken Sikkema material was found through the Michigan Environmental Council (MEC) subject guide on the Bentley’s website. There was a plethora of information on the MEC and its programs, accomplishments, and goals throughout its life, but the first boxes contained information about its creation and Ken Sikkema, one of the two people, along with Grant Trigger, credited for the creation of the MEC. The materials found in these boxes were mostly documents and meeting notes but the occasional picture and newspaper clipping were also found.
Primary Users
Our primary user groups for this archive are activists and local historians. We believe that our archive can act as inspiration for activists in nature preservation. The people and organizations showcased in our archive demonstrate what can be done when hard work and determination is applied towards nature preservation. For local historians, the stories of these people and organizations can be used to enrich the history of the parks, preserves, and surrounding areas, giving greater context to visitors of parks and residents of those areas.
Perspectives
Although our online archive is thorough, it is certainly not an exhaustive narrative of the people and groups involved in land preservation. For starters, the earliest land preservation that is recorded in our archive is in the 1920s. No voices are present from before this time. While two of the individuals and the organization are still active, stories included in our archive are from the early to late 1900s. This causes our archive to be temporally bound, which may be a result of what is available at the Bentley.
All of the individuals that are showcased in our archive are white; our archive does not include voices from black, indigenous, or other groups that have undoubtedly had impacts on nature preservation in Michigan. The absence of these voices may be due to their lack of representation in the Bentley or a result of limited research done by our group.
In addition, we have not explored the stories of those who have stood in opposition to any of the work done by those on display in our archive. For example, there was local opposition to the government purchasing the land for what is now Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. There are also examples of corporate opposition. Although we may disagree with some of these points of view, it may still be relevant to include them in a future online archive so that it can be shown that there will always be opposition towards “good work”.
Societal Contributions
Our archive has been designed as an informational archive that can be used to teach our target audience about notable figures and groups in Michigan’s conservation history. Our archive can inspire the next generation of environmentalists in Michigan by learning about those who came before and what they did to achieve their goals and protect Michigan’s natural habitats. In the case of the individuals and organizations in our archive, these include pursuing education and scholarship, forming councils and coalitions, and working with local and state government.
For those who may be interested in doing archival research of their own, this is only a sample of the Bentley’s collection of records having to do with environmentalism in Michigan. Through styling our archive in the form of biographies, we were able to synthesis the related but varied records and create something that is more accessible and less intimidating to the general public, who may be unfamiliar with what archives are and how to use them. This can bring awareness to the usability of archives and the types of information held in them, as well as the ways in which they can be used by non-researchers to learn about their local or regional history.
Archival Concepts and Practices
Although we did try to keep much of the archive and materials in an original order. We did end up going against the principle of provenance idea that “archives "must be kept carefully separate" and not mixed with the archives of other creators, or placed into artificial arrangements based on chronology, geography, or subject” (Muller et al) as we found that much of our material and the people and organizations, we were writing about overlapped and connected to each other. Especially in the case of Ken Sikkema and the West Michigan Environmental Action Council. In the case of Genevive Gillette her personal history is not one many know. The information surrounding her is often biased because it is reflecting a particular world-view, that of white men, and is constructed to meet specific purposes. (Duff and Harris, 2002) It was noted that even though a member of our group had been to multiple of the state parks Gillette helped preserve and create, she had never heard her name or of her contributions before this archive. Playing into the idea that most archives still lack the full engagement with a feminist praxis that is aimed at more than attaining better representation of women in archives. (Cifor et al, 2017)