This durational performance was designed to draw attention to the multitude of people who have occupied this land before us. We tend to focus on history that is within living memory, failing to remember the legions who have gone before. And yet what we know of the world today has been imprinted and altered by them.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PERFORMANCE
During the 59 hours of the performance, which took place over six days, I read accounts of deaths in the 19th century that occurred in Benton County, Arkansas, which is the site of The Momentary. I chose texts that were first-person accounts, including stories that had been passed down in families. It was important to me that I had not read the material in advance, so that I was discovering them for the first time during the performance along with the audience.
I was situated in a narrow gallery off the main galleries on the first floor of the Museum. The floor of my space was deep in Arkansas rocks. It also contained a table, chair and lamp. A door at the end of the gallery connected to an (initially) empty courtyard with a chair.
The audience watched the performance from above me, on a platform along one side of the gallery that also extended outdoors to overlook the courtyard. I was interested in the audience having the perspective of looking down at the performance. I thought of it as looking down into the earth, into the grave.
Mounted in two rows on the wall of the audience’s platform both inside and out, were more than 14,000 names of people whose obituaries appeared in the Arkansas Gazette between 1819 and 1879.
The performance could be considered an act of research, of learning. I focused on primary materials that were first person accounts from the 19th century. I wanted the immediacy of people’s experiences, their observations and thoughts in the moment. It was with the expectation that the audience and I would take that information and analyze and interpret it ourselves, from the perspective of our time.
I didn’t always know the references that were made in the readings – the pronunciation of the names of people or towns, what the initials of the local organizations stood for, or the illnesses from which people died, for which old names were used. I asked the audience to help me. Sometimes they knew, but often they used their cell phones to find the information. That was particularly useful for the identity of the local churches, for the description of secret societies, and especially in identifying the diseases whose common names from that era are no longer in use.
DAY ONE
I began my six days by examining my environment, a landscape of Arkansas rocks from the grounds of The Momentary. Almost immediately I found fossils – the first bodies in the land. This foundation of rocks exposed the sweeping changes that have taken place in the landscape of the region. Fossils of marine animals revealed that an ocean covered the land millions of years ago, long before the Indigenous people arrived more than 13,000 years ago. European explorers only arrived to this area of Northwest Arkansas about 500 years ago, and White settlers less than 200 years ago.
The first texts that I read were descriptions of the hardships and deaths that occurred during the 1830s on the Trail of Tears, when the US government forced Southeast Indigenous peoples to abandon their homes and land to resettle in Indian Territory. These oral histories, recorded in 1937, were recounted by the children and grandchildren of those who had been in the forced removal. These accounts are in the University of Oklahoma Western History Collections-Trail of Tears. The real number of men, women and children who traveled and the numbers who died along the Trail of Tears is not known. Even today there are divergent estimates of the numbers who made the journey. (Please see several audience responses to this first day in additional texts below.)
I then read biographical sketches of the earliest White settlers in Benton County, who had started arriving in 1839. They had written these accounts themselves, to be included in Goodspeed’s 1889 History of Northwest Arkansas. The men describe the extensive tracts of land they acquired to build farms, wood sawmills, and grain mill, extracting their wealth from the land. Within a few decades of their arrival, virgin forests were cut down to build and heat homes and to make way for farming. Wildlife was killed for food or because it threatened livestock, quickly causing many species to disappear from that region.
DAY TWO
I went on to read an account of the Civil War in Benton County. Written (and published before the war was over) by William Baxter, a minister living in Fayetteville during the war, he described the pillaging and burning of towns and farms in the region by both armies. (Please see excerpt in additional texts below.) He wrote of the battles that took place in that area in which hundreds of soldiers died and were buried on the battlefields, as well as the challenges of caring for the wounded. Given that the dead were buried directly on the battlefields or in mass graves near temporary hospitals, and that no comprehensive record of names were kept, meant that families on both sides of the war were never officially informed of what became of their sons and husbands and fathers. The real number of men who died in the Civil War is still in dispute. Recent estimates based on an evaluation of the US census reports from the years after the war suggest that the number of dead has been severely underestimated.
DAY THREE THROUGH SIX
Beginning on the third day, I began to read aloud obituaries of Benton County residents who had died. The collection from which I read begins in 1884 and were transcribed from the local newspapers. Barbara P. Easley began compiling them in 1925, assisted by her sister Verla P. McAnelly, but they were not published until 1994.
Over the 41 hours of the last four days of the performance, I read accounts of 676 people who had died between 1884 to 1894. I didn’t even reach the end of the century.
It was immediately clear that material is missing from this collection. Three of the first 10 years have no entries, as presumably no copies of the newspapers from those years had survived. As I read aloud it also became more and more evident that the newspapers were not reporting all the deaths. I had expected a more thorough accounting, given that newspapers were the primary source of news. But there were disproportionally fewer women and children, and even fewer African American or Indigenous people. It became clear that the newspapers contained an incomplete record of deaths. But I guess that the fact that there were many more obituaries of White men is not surprising, as it is still true today. Likewise, it was evident that members of families with more wealth and political power were given more extensive obituaries.
Of those 676 obituaries that I read, 309 were of White men, 1 of an African American man, and several accounts of disputes with Indigenous people where 9 men died. 180 were obituaries of White women, 2 of African American women, and none of Indigenous women. 175 were obituaries of children, 174 of them White, 1 African American child, and none of Indigenous children.
The obituaries often focused on the last days or hours, and particularly on the moment of death, with details of how the person died. Sometimes the descriptions are horrific, and particularly so when you realize how rudimentary the medical care was at that time. It is not easy to read multiple accounts of children dying when their clothing caught fire, young women dying in childbirth, men dismembered by trains and in sawmills, men and women and children alike dying of consumption (tuberculosis), or la grippe (the flu), or hydrophobia/fear of water (rabies).
In those vignettes many of the details of daily living are revealed. We have forgotten the risk of open fires on a hearth for cooking and heat. We have forgotten how arduous it is to wash clothing in an open kettle over a fire. We no longer need to go outdoors in all weather to draw water from a well. We rarely travel by foot, or even by horse. Families were large, often with ten to fifteen children, though many did not survive past childhood.
Almost without exception, the writer of the obituaries also sought to assure the reader that the dying person calmly accepted their fate, exhibiting a strong Christian faith and belief in an afterlife. But invariably the sorrow of the family and friends is also described. The desire for ‘The Good Death’ was prevalent in that era, with the belief that the faith and acceptance that a person exhibited in their final moments revealed their spiritual state, and therefore the likelihood of meeting them again in heaven. It explains both the focus on each person’s dying as well as the affirmations of their Christian faith.
Reading these obituaries, I could not help but mourn that person’s death, and feel again that unconceivable and irreversible transition from living to dead, expected or not. Only unfinished conversations and plans remain. The grief that people felt then was no different from what we feel today when someone close to us dies.
The accumulation of somber obituaries was alleviated by conversations with the audience about the material that I was reading. I also relied on the audience to use their cell phones to look up and read out loud the meaning of words that were familiar in the 19th century, but not now. They looked up the diseases that were named in the accounts to discover their current names. They looked up churches and their orientations, secret and fraternal organizations, and political events. We used the internet to help us understand the references in the obituaries.
When the death notices became too hard for me to continue reading, I carried rocks into the courtyard, laying them down into rows and mounds, lines and patterns. I carefully chose the rocks that I laid down, matching them to the people whose obituaries I had read. And then I sat in a chair to silently contemplate the myriad deaths I had read about, and the changing landscape in front of me.
The impact of the White settlers on this region has been significant, as they ‘conquered’ the land and ‘tamed’ the wilderness. The influx of more settlers has only accelerated since 1839. We continue to see the landscape transform, as former farmland is taken over to build sprawling housing developments, more offices and larger Walmart warehouses.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The performance is not finished. So many of the deaths in the 19th century are unaccounted for, graves unmarked, with no notices published anywhere. I have only scratched the surface – there are hundreds of names that are missing, and probably thousands in reality. It would require much deeper research to find them. Where are records of the Indigenous people who lived there, and how did they honor and remember their dead? Where is the information about the enslaved people of Benton County? Where were they buried when they died? How did the families of Civil War soldiers honor those who never came back? Where are the records of the freed African Americans who stayed in the area? Meanwhile, there are still more than 1700 unread obituaries through the year 1900 in Easley’s compilation, that I didn’t have a chance to read. It would take an additional 100+ hours just to finish those. I feel as if I have failed all these people, leaving them in obscurity.
The day after the performance we walked to the Bentonville Cemetery. I found graves of some of the people whose obituaries I had read the day before (see additional texts below). Each person had felt so immediate, so recently alive when I read about their deaths. But their gravestones were more than a hundred years old, aged and weathered and covered with lichen. I had the strange sensation of being in two different centuries simultaneously. It was as if reading the words aloud had resurrected the people briefly, only for them to sink back into the earth and disappear again.
It has taken me an unexpectedly long time to resurface to my life in 2022. The psychic impact of reading these accounts of so many different deaths went deeper than I had anticipated.
BACKGROUND AND PREPARATIONS
I made a site visit to The Momentary, in Bentonville, Arkansas, in May 2022, to determine what I might do for a performance. It was the first time that I had been in Arkansas. While I had done some reading about Arkansas and Bentonville in advance, I used this visit to explore the museums, the town and the area, and to talk to people.
A Divided Landscape, the exhibition on view at the Momentary, which was co-curated by Neville Wakefield and Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, was particularly thought-provoking. It featured the work of seven contemporary artists as well as drawings and paintings from the early American collection at Crystal Bridges Museum. The wall text said, “Artists have long employed mythic imagery- towering mountains, placid rivers, and sunlit plains – to illustrate the vast expanses and striking scenery of the American landscape. In the nineteenth century, European settlers portrayed the frontier region as a new Eden: a blank canvas largely devoid of inhabitants and unspoiled by encroaching industrialization. However, these romantic visions often erased the presence and history of Indigenous peoples and the realities of settler colonialism.”
The gallery that was available for me to use for my performance was adjacent to this exhibition, and the exhibition would still be up during the scheduled dates of my performance. I decided to make a work that could be considered in conversation with the exhibition. Nevertheless, I struggled to find actions and materials that made sense. It wasn’t until the end of my visit that I stumbled on the idea, and even then, it didn’t come to me until many hours later. I had visited the Bentonville Public Library, and had come upon Barbara Easley’s series, Obituaries of Benton County, Arkansas. There were eleven volumes, from 1884 through 1933. She had transcribed obituaries from the surviving area newspapers of those years.
I decided to read the obituaries as the performance, but I wanted to find material about the people who had lived and died in Benton County earlier in the century. I embarked on a four-month crash course to learn the 19th century history of Benton County, Arkansas, reading books and doing online research. (Please see bibliography of materials used in additional texts below.)
I arrived a week early to talk with people and visit more local sites, including the Museum of Native American History and Pea Ridge National Park. In reality, I needed much more time for research, and especially more time in Arkansas. I barely scratched the surface. There are many more bodies in the land.
The Momentary’s curator, Cynthia Post Hunt, was instrumental in the realization of this project. She, working with staff at The Momentary, took care of so many details seemingly effortlessly. Cynthia’s experience as both a curator and a performance artist meant that she was a perfect sounding board at crucial points in the process of developing the performance. I cannot thank her enough.
Thanks also to Charlotte Buchanan-Yale and Jazlyn Sanderson at the Museum of Native American History, Ken Lockhart at the Pea Ridge National Military Park, Bethany Springer at the University of Arkansas, and Jared Scott Pebworth of the Arkansas Archeological Survey at the University of Arkansas, who generously took time to answer my questions and direct me to additional information.
