Tulane University is fortunate to be located in its unique home of New Orleans. Really, it is difficult to imagine the university being anywhere else. The city shapes the university, and the university shapes the city.

Nowhere is that relationship closer than with New Orleans public schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the public school system was like just about every other system across the country: a locally-elected board governed the schools, teachers were unionized and had tenure, and students mostly went to schools in their own neighborhoods.

After the storm, that old way disappeared. The state took over governance of almost all schools and turned them into charter schools, run by private non-profits. New Orleans Public Schools regained local control in 2019, but this was not a return to the past. Rather, New Orleans is now the only all-charter school district in the country.

Tulane was involved in these reforms from the beginning. After the storm, then-Tulane president Scott Cowen led the mayor-appointed committee that solicited community input and made recommendations, and he continues to lead the Cowen Institute at Tulane in monitoring and analyzing progress and developing innovative programs. Expanding on these efforts, the university recruited me to come to Tulane to found the Education Research Alliance (ERA) for New Orleans. In 2014, we started by forming our advisory board, which is comprised of local education leaders with widely varying views about the reforms—from teacher unions to the state department of education. However, these groups all agree on one thing: the school reform debate should be informed by objective, rigorous, and useful evidence.

What have we found in our studies? Schools are complicated places with multifaceted goals. But there have been some productive outcomes in the 14 years since the reforms started:

• The New Orleans school reforms significantly increased commonly-measured student outcomes: the average student in New Orleans moved from the 22nd percentile nationally to the 37th percentile, while high school graduation rates, college entry, and college graduation increased by 10-30 percent each.
• The reforms reduced almost every type of achievement gap by race, income, and special education status.
• Most parents of children attending the new schools, as well as voters, generally believe the reforms improved schools.

However, not all developments have been so positive:

• While student performance has improved compared with the pre-reform era, it is hard to celebrate being at the 37th percentile nationally.
• Our surveys of students suggest that the quality of teaching in New Orleans schools is also below the national average. This may be related to the relatively low levels of teacher experience and certification and high turnover.
• The reforms shifted funds out of the classroom to cover increased costs of administration and transportation.

And perhaps most importantly, the process of creating the reforms left out New Orleans’ local, mostly African American community. The process disenfranchised African Americans, creating a deep, lasting wound that the reformers have struggled to heal. This exclusion from the process may have also had educational consequences: though achievement gaps declined, our student surveys find that African American students have a less positive experience than white students in school.

While the reforms remain controversial, such rapid success on key academic metrics has put New Orleans educators in high demand for leadership positions and consulting jobs elsewhere. Some of the new non-profits and for-profits have spread their wings to other cities. In these respects, the Tulane-New Orleans relationship parallels what Stanford did with the technology sector in the San Francisco area. New Orleans is now akin to the Silicon Valley of school reform.

Our role at ERA-New Orleans has been to ask the tough questions and communicate our answers—positive and negative—to the community. We have influenced schooling decisions by shaping our understanding of schools and student experiences. References to our reports can be seen not only in the media, but also in school professional development sessions, school board meetings, and community discussions about education. Our reports have also received attention around the world—in addition to more than 100 references in national and international media, we have discussed our work with education ministers and parliamentary delegations from four continents.

ERA-New Orleans is continuing to evolve and find new ways for our research to make a difference for New Orleans children. We are working to transform our organization into a true research-practice partnership, where members of our advisory board, which includes the city’s public school district, can vote on research questions and quickly receive analyses that will help inform policy decisions.

As in Silicon Valley, the relationship between universities and their cities can be transformative. For ERA-New Orleans, my hope is to continue giving back to the city’s schools and students for decades to come. We must learn from what transpired in our past so that we, as a community, can make informed decisions about the character of the schools we want for our children.

In a 1958 interview for DownBeat Magazine, New Orleans' Mahalia Jackson told writer Studs Terkel, “We shouldn’t forget our roots, our history.” Jackson, one of the most significant artists in twentieth-century American culture and music, couldn't have been more accurate. It is the history of New Orleans, which involves cultural, intellectual, architectural, and sociological innovations, that has influenced both the historical narrative and current developments of life in the U.S. And the Hogan Jazz Archive, housed within Tulane University’s Special Collections, helps to tell these important stories to students, community members, and researchers around the world. The Hogan is a leading resource in the study of New Orleans music, its musicians, practitioners, and participants, and has been since its founding in 1958 as the Archive of New Orleans Jazz. Through the stories contained within its collections, users gain a greater understanding of New Orleans’ contributions and its global implications.

Archives maintain and make accessible rare, non-circulating items, including correspondence, photographs, sound, moving image materials, business papers, and more. These records are important because the objects and information contained within preserve and share histories of people, places, and events.

Most recently, as curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, I’ve been thrilled to serve as a project manager for two major grant awards that Tulane University Special Collections recently received from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). These awards will support the digitizing and accessibility efforts of collections that will interest scholars of U.S. political science, women’s studies, African American history and cultural studies, media and communications, musicology, and New Orleans history, among other disciplines.

Through generous support from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program, Tulane University Special Collections is preserving and digitizing 25 recordings from the collection of New Orleans broadcast pioneer Vernon Winslow, popularly known as Dr. Daddy-O. Winslow, credited as the first Black radio disc jockey to host his own full-length radio show in New Orleans, began his on-air career in 1949 when Jax Brewery embraced his style and scripts for the “Jivin’ with Jax” show. The 78 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm acetates selected for digitization include material used in broadcasts aired between 1949 and 1958, including live remotes; personalized promo announcements for New Orleans bars, music clubs, and the renowned J&M Recording Studio; and interviews with legendary artists such as Roy Brown, Duke Ellington, Avery “Kid” Howard, and Little Esther Phillips. Once digitized, the recordings will be accessible to the public online through Tulane’s Digital Library.

In addition to the GRAMMY Museum grant, CLIR awarded Tulane University Special Collections a Recordings at Risk Grant to support “Tell the Real Story of Me: Mahalia Jackson and Black Gospel Quartets in the South” in 2019. The project will preserve and give access to original recorded interviews with Jackson, not only heralded internationally as “The Queen of Gospel,” but also recognized as a Civil Rights Movement activist and an influential figure in Black American culture. Interviews conducted from 1967-1974 by Jackson’s biographer Laurraine Goreau also include primary accounts of Jackson by entertainers Ella Fitzgerald, John Hammond, Della Reese, and Dinah Shore; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) co-founder Reverend Ralph Abernathy; television host Ed Sullivan; gospel stars J. Robert Bradley, Thomas A. Dorsey, Sallie Martin, and Albertina Walker; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Turkel, among other influential figures.

The CLIR grant award will also help to preserve and provide access to interviews with Black gospel quartet singers and practitioners, serving as an oral history of the regional Black gospel quartet music scene that both predated and assisted Jackson’s international success. In interviews conducted from 1981-1986 by scholar and Tulane University Special Collections library associate Lynn Abbott, gospel performers like Mary Thames Coleman, Reverend Paul Exkano, and Bessie Griffin; local blues and rhythm & blues heroes such as Chuck Carbo and Snooks Eaglin; and other obscure and familiar artists explain the development of Black gospel quartets in New Orleans.

These two oral history digitization projects, in addition to all future Tulane University Special Collections initiatives, will continue the mission to not only document and tell stories about our history via archives but also to make collections accessible to all. Through these collections, researchers can discover alternative perspectives, overlooked stories, and new multidisciplinary approaches to reviewing and learning the people, places, and culture of New Orleans and the surrounding region. And, as a result, never forgetting our history.

Displacement, family separation, indefinite detention, and uncertainty regarding the present and the future—these are the conditions faced by contemporary asylum seekers and other migrants hoping to enter the U.S. They also characterize the experiences of some 30,0000 men, women, and children of European and Japanese descent who were interned in U.S.-operated detention facilities between 1941-1946 under the Latin American Enemy Alien Control Program. As a primary port of entry for named alien enemies deported to the U.S., and the site of an internment facility in the Algiers neighborhood, New Orleans played an important role in this little-known aspect of WWII history.

While more than 100,000 persons of Japanese descent in the U.S., two thirds of whom were American citizens, were detained during WWII domestically, another internment effort reached into fifteen neighboring republics in efforts to bolster hemispheric security during wartime. With the help of the FBI, Latin American officials named, apprehended, and detained noncitizens who had arrived in Central and South America throughout the early 20th century from areas that by 1941 had come under Nazi or fascist control. Though only about one in ten detainees were active Nazis or pro-Fascists, the “dangerous alien enemies” were deported to camps in the U.S. Many of these individuals arrived in the Port of New Orleans aboard military vessels en route to camps in other states. A small percentage, including an unlikely contingent of sixty Jewish refugees, were held at Camp Algiers, an immigrant quarantine station on New Orleans’ West Bank, about three miles from the French Quarter.

What lessons regarding U.S.-Latin American relations and immigration debates does this slice of New Orleans history offer us today? The episode illustrates Latin America's own importance as a historical haven for a wide variety of immigrants and refugees, and warns us of the dangers of blanket categorizations of any group of persons on the basis of country of origin, religion, or race. As the Crescent City takes stock of its first three hundred years and looks ahead to the next century, understanding its role in receiving detained enemy aliens from Latin America during WWII can equip its citizens to better address the contemporary challenge of providing a "gateway" to the Americas for other seekers of refuge and opportunity.

Did you know that as a seven-year-old boy, Louis Armstrong was taken in by the Karnofskys, a New Orleans family of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania? They helped him purchase his first cornet, and for the rest of his life, Armstrong wore a necklace with a Jewish Star on it as a reminder of their kindness. This story, while not typical of the Southern Jewish experience, opens the door to new ways of thinking about Southern history. Once opened, you may be surprised by what you find.

The history of the South is rich in culture, contribution, conflict, and cooperation that comes with exploring the often-overlooked history of various immigrant groups who came South—strangers in a strange land, if you will. In an effort to tell a more comprehensive story of New Orleans, the Gulf South, and the U.S., the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience will open in New Orleans in early 2021. Located just blocks away from the National WWII Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center, the museum is poised to become an important educational facility, a heartfelt testament to the legacy of Judaism in the South, and a vibrant center for cultural exploration and understanding.

The Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience will be the only museum in the country to explore the history and culture of Jews across the South, from Virginia to Texas, Arkansas to Florida, in big cities and small towns. It’s a history that goes back in places to Colonial times, but one that is both dynamic and enduring, mirroring—and bumping up against—the history of regional, national, and world events. During the Revolutionary War, Mordecai Sheftall, an Orthodox Jew of Savannah, Georgia, became the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Colonial forces. He helped defend the city from British invasion, lent a considerable sum to the American cause, and served time as a British prisoner of war. By 1900, Jewish communities thrived throughout the South, with more than 125,000 Jews living in hundreds of cities and towns. As merchants, they helped the South recover from the Civil War. As civic leaders, they served as mayors, aldermen, and judges. All the time, they made choices about how to fit in as Southerners and when to stand out as Jews. It is those choices that give these stories their universal appeal and offer us lasting lessons.

The museum’s board of directors chose New Orleans as our home based on the city’s vibrant tourism economy, its rich Jewish history, and the presence of Tulane University, with its sizeable Jewish student population and impressive Department of Jewish Studies. Partnering with Tulane’s Center for Public Service, the museum has so far worked with nine student interns cataloging artifacts, researching documents, and preparing for the museum’s opening. Once open, the museum will continue to offer Tulane students real-world experience in the museum field. And together with the School of Liberal Arts Department of Jewish Studies, the museum also hopes to implement student research projects on Jewish history across the South.

Beyond focusing a light on part of the South’s lesser-known history, the museum aims to expand visitors’ understanding of what it means to be Southern, what it means to be a Jew, and ultimately, what it means to be an American. The lessons of tolerance, strength in diversity, and community that shine through the Southern Jewish story are universal lessons—not lessons to be forced onto people, but lessons to be experienced and shared in engaging and approachable ways.

This prayer book from 1843 was donated by John Green III of Lafayette, LA, and belonged to his uncle, Jacob “Jac” Hirsh. Jac’s mother’s side of the family immigrated from Alsace, France, to Donaldsonville, LA, in the mid-1800s. Jac’s father’s side of the family emigrated from Frankfurt, Germany, to Donaldsonville. The prayer book (in French and Hebrew) contains family records from both sides of the family.

The museum’s unique collection of artifacts—from Judaica brought by immigrants to Ardmore, Oklahoma, to dry goods store ledgers from Shaw, Mississippi, and a wedding dress worn at a Jewish wedding in New Orleans in the 1880s—provide the building blocks of three galleries of interactive exhibits. Non-Jewish visitors will learn the basics of Judaism in a special exhibit designed to explore Jewish beliefs, life cycle events, and holidays. Children will get to choose what they would pack if they were moving to another country and if they only had one suitcase. All visitors can explore Jewish history state-by-state on a wall-sized interactive touch screen. Visitors to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, will leave not only understanding something about Southern Jews and Judaism but may also gain more understanding about themselves and their own experiences as strangers in a strange land. So, as we say at MSJE, “Shalom. Make yourself at home.”

When we discuss the history of New Orleans, we often touch upon the common thread of human geography: where and how we have occupied this deltaic metropolis, and what those historical settlement patterns imply for future prosperity and sustainability—or alternately, hardship and risk.

Key to understanding New Orleans’ human geography is that adjective, “deltaic.” This region is a prime example of a river-dominated (fluvial) delta, in which the Mississippi’s enormous deposition of sediment overwhelmed the ability of Gulf currents to sweep it away. This explains why lower Louisiana, unlike adjacent coasts, protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico, and why the landscape rose only a dozen or so feet above the sea, with the highest areas (natural levees) occurring exclusively along current or former river banks. Smaller amounts of finer alluvium, meanwhile, settled farther back, becoming swamplands, while the thinnest deposits formed a marshy coastal fringe.

Being a fluvial delta means that freshwater is an intrinsic part of the soil body, and that renewed inputs of freshwater and sediment are needed to prevent this river-dominated delta from becoming sea-dominated, and subsiding into the Gulf of Mexico.

Enter humans into this equation, and the only long-term agricultural settlement opportunities for indigenous populations were on the higher natural levees. Coastal environs, rich in estuarine resources, were used only conditionally; when high water came, Natives relocated accordingly.

French, Spanish, and American engineers, on the other hand, set out to subdue the delta unconditionally—by building engineered structures such as levees and drainage canals to control water and make the land permanently habitable. But because that task was enormous and the technology rudimentary, early New Orleanians had little choice but to build New Orleans exclusively on the natural levees. How they sorted themselves thereupon brings us to the topic of human geography—specifically, residential settlement patterns by class, ethnicity, and race.

In terms of class, empowered families in early-1800s New Orleans tended to occupy the urban core, namely the upper French Quarter and the Faubourg St. Mary (today’s CBD). Why? Lack of mechanized transportation made inner-city living convenient, prestigious, and expensive, whereas life in the banlieues (outskirts) was quite the opposite. The pattern is an old one— “[European] city centres were inhabited by the well-to-do, while the outer districts were the areas for the poorer segments of the population”—and it carried over to New World cities. Encircling this empowered nucleus were middle- and working-class faubourgs, while farther out in the upper and lower banlieues and along wharves, canals, and the backswamp, were muddy, village-like developments of humble abodes to which gravitated lower-class and indigent families.

Overlaying these class patterns in antebellum (1803–1861) New Orleans was a broader ethnic geography. On the downtown side lived a predominantly French-speaking and Catholic demographic known as “the Creoles,” a pan-racial ethnicity unified by local nativity (having been born here), despite a three-tier division of castes, comprising free white, gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and enslaved black.

On the upper side of the city were found mostly English-speaking people of Anglo-American ethnicity, generally Protestant in faith and recently arrived from points north. They were known as “the Americans,” and while their uptown neighborhoods had fewer numbers of people of African ancestry, a higher percentage of them were enslaved compared to downtown.

Creoles and Americans competed economically and politically, and struggled to assimilate culturally. Immigrants to this complex multilingual society were caught amidst this rivalry, and formed uneasy alliances with either side depending on where they settled. During the 1820s to 1850s, laborer families mostly from Ireland and Germany arrived by the thousands and settled throughout the upper banlieue along the river (today’s Irish Channel), around the turning basins of the New Basin and Old Basin canals, and in the lower faubourgs of the Third District (“Little Saxony”). At the same time, immigrants from the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Atlantic realms (including French, Spanish, Italians, Haitians, Cubans, Mexicans, and Brazilians) usually settled among the Creoles, finding commonalities in their faith and generally Latin culture.

Those in bondage mostly worked as domestics or clerks, else were “leased out” on urban projects. At night they dwelled in proximity to their masters, in attached quarters or adjacent lodges. Ironically, this so-called “back-alley pattern” created a more heterogeneous racial geography in New Orleans than we see today.

A particularly brutal aspect of life in the antebellum city entailed the temporary yet constant flow of victims of the domestic slave trade, which from 1808 to 1861 sent hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the upper South and onto lower-South cotton and sugar cane plantations. Archival sources show that over a thousand people on average were sold annually in New Orleans in this era, with 4,435 purchases in 1830 alone (both figures are likely undercounts). Here too there was legislated geography: the City Council in 1829 passed an ordinance prohibiting the exposition and lodging of to-be-sold slaves in the urban core, while permitting it in adjacent faubourgs, for reasons of public image and health. By the late 1850s, over 35 slave depots, yards, pens, booths, or auction sites operated in New Orleans, which many historians readily identify as the nation’s premier slave marketplace.

Those people of color who were free, meanwhile, tended to settle in the lower Creole neighborhoods, particularly in rear precincts alongside working-class whites and immigrants. Here, elevation was lower, land cheaper, amenities fewer, nuisances more common, and environmental risks greater. This would become a recurring theme in New Orleans geography: whereas empowered families predominated the higher, opportunity-rich “front” of town, others were often literally marginalized to the “back” of town, near the swamp. Yet it is important to point out these spatial generalities abounded in exceptions, and it was not uncommon to find working-class families, white or of color, living adjacently to prosperous families, or for commerce and light industry to occur within steps of gardened mansions.

Four historical moments would radically transform settlement geographies in subsequent generations. One was mechanized transportation, starting with urban railways in the 1830s, which by the 1890s had grown into an expansive electrified streetcar system. These new methods of transport enabled wealthier people to move outwardly into the former banlieues, starting with the Garden District in the mid-1800s and continuing farther Uptown and along Esplanade Avenue to Bayou St. John by century’s end.

Concurrently, after the Civil War, emancipated African Americans emigrated to the city by the thousands, only to find mounting segregationist fervor and de-facto relegation to back-of-town spaces like today’s Central City. For decades to come, white-supremacist forces would exert ever-greater pressure on African American populations to live in certain areas and not in others. Rarely were the resulting black settlements without urban nuisances or environment risks.

Thirdly, the post-war and turn-of-the-century era witnessed changes in the geography of immigration. Irish and German arrivals declined, while those from Southern and Eastern Europe increased, including Sicilians, Croatians, Greeks, and Orthodox Jewish Poles and Russians. Small numbers of people of Asian and other origins also arrived, and as a whole, these cohorts would settle in a more clustered belt immediately surrounding the now-gritty urban core. This was the era, well into the 1900s, when New Orleans developed discernable ethnic enclaves with nicknames like “Little Palermo” (lower French Quarter), “Chinatown” (1100 Tulane Avenue), “the Jewish neighborhood” on Dryades Street (now Oretha Castle Haley), and “the Greek neighborhood” on North Dorgenois, not to mention the older “Irish Channel,” “Little Saxony,” the “Creole Seventh Ward,” and of course, “the French quarters.”

Finally, it was in this same turn-of-the-century era that the technology became available to drain the backswamp. Designed in the 1890s and fully functioning by the 1910s, the municipal drainage system lowered the water table, dried out lakeside lands, and enabled urbanization in Gentilly and Lakeview. White middle-class populations eagerly moved into these new auto-friendly subdivisions, as authorities sidestepped judicial rulings against explicitly discriminatory zoning ordinances by allowing the private real estate sector to create segregated neighborhoods through tactics such as racist deed covenants and redlining. The late 1930s also saw the first federal housing programs, which reduced the formerly heterogeneous racial geography of the city by segregating working-class occupants into white-only and black-only super-block “projects.”

White-only subdivisions in Lakeview and Gentilly imparted a twist to the old front-of-town/back-of-town pattern, which tended to position poorer black populations on lower ground. Now, white populations increasingly occupied the lowest and fastest-sinking soils, having been drained of their ground water. But confidence in levees and drainage technology seemingly neutralized these topographic concerns in the minds of most people, even as flood risk mounted—on account of urban sprawl, sinking soils, canal excavation in the east and West Bank, oil and gas extraction region-wide, and the deprivation of freshwater and new sediment by the levees along the Mississippi. Lower Louisiana starting in the 1930s would begin to lose upwards of 2,000 square miles of coastal wetlands, putting New Orleans at ever-greater geophysical risk.

The decline of de jure segregation during the 1950s–1960s may have brought the races closer together in the workplace and public facilities, but it occasioned the opposite in residential settlement patterns. White flight, followed by a broader middle-class exodus, made formerly diverse working-class neighborhoods mostly poor and black by the late 1900s. Fleeing families resettled westward and across the river in Jefferson Parish, eastward to St. Bernard Parish, and, after the construction of hurricane-protection levees, to the “suburb within the city” known today as New Orleans East. That area underwent a dramatic racial changeover during the 1980s, such that by the 2000s, the New Orleans metropolis comprised a predominately African American eastern half; a more white western half; a previously divested but now gentrifying urban core; and an increasing suburbanization of working-class and impoverished households (along with what were once euphemistically described as “inner-city problems”). It was in this era that greater New Orleans began spawning exurbs in places like Mandeville, Covington, and Slidell, complete with their own office parks and white-collar economic sectors.

The Hurricane Katrina deluge of 2005 and subsequent recovery efforts jostled and shifted regional human geographies, but did not fundamentally change them. Most socio-spatial patterns and controversies today, on the occasion of New Orleans’ 300th anniversary, derive from decisions, opportunities, relegations, and exclusions that were centuries in the making.

Across New Orleans, locals and visitors alike are posing an imperative question: how can we learn from New Orleans culture without taking advantage of it?

Within the School of Liberal Arts, faculty and staff support New Orleans culture bearers by teaching understandings of New Orleans’ roots. Through coursework, lectures by faculty and community members, and a wide variety of public programs, the school addresses how individuals can responsibly engage with the city’s history and culture rather than treating it as an inexhaustible natural resource to extract for pleasure or profit. Denise Frazier, a Latin Americanist, Tulane Liberal Arts alumna, and performance artist, is the Assistant Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (NOCGS), a center within Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts. Frazier and NOCGS Executive Director Rebecca Snedeker return to the question of responsible engagement often when developing their programs and events, which are designed with Tulane students, international and local scholars and artists, and New Orleans community members in mind. As Frazier explains, “Forging reciprocal partnerships, providing just compensation for culture bearers, and making space for uncensored truth-telling all help foster equitable relationships and create opportunities for presenters to shine.”

NOCGS operates under the belief that the more one understands where they are, the more they are able to participate in our democracy and collective destiny. Focusing primarily on the culture and environment of the Gulf South region stretching from Texas to Florida, NOCGS organizes public programs that highlight the cultural manifestations of this area by focusing on the inclusion of less commonly heard voices. For example, NOCGS co-hosts the concert series L’Union Creole with local nonprofits the Neighborhood Story Project and the Preservation Hall Foundation. Together, the three organizations have hosted family-friendly concerts by local musicians on Sunday evenings, a historic time for local musicians to gather and practice together. The evenings begin with an interview with each member of the band, which, as Frazier describes, “helps educate audiences about the person playing, and the roots of the instrument and music they’re playing.”

“Culture isn’t something that you do on the side,” says Frazier. “By encouraging attention not only to the historical and contemporary practices of this region, but to futuristic trends as well, NOCGS hopes to support our audience members’ abilities to understand why things are the way they are, so they can find a greater appreciation for the area’s rituals and cycles and how these relate to our geographies.” In March 2021 (postponed for a year), NOCGS will host the third iteration of the Annual Indigenous Symposium. The theme of the symposium is “Being Native Today: Indigenous Identities in the Gulf South,” and the program will focus on the cultural and ecological realities of Native American life in this region. Scholars, artists, and activists will explore Native identity and life today—how southeastern tribes relate identity to land and the federal government, and how racial exclusion and inclusion complicate stereotypical views of Indigenous communities. Sessions will explore issues such as how race-mixing within Indigenous communities has impacted who identifies as Native and which tribes receive federal recognition, as well as how federal recognition relates to questions surrounding funding, migration, and climate change. The final panel of each Indigenous Symposium offers a platform for Tulane students and faculty across several schools to present their research, prompting a university-wide reflection on the ethics of Tulane’s collaborations with tribes. “The symposium, a space for contemplation,” as Frazier describes, “is emblematic of the center’s programming and invites individuals to consider the region’s music, culinary and artistic traditions, inhabitants, archaeology, geology, and more.”

In another effort to support interdisciplinary learning, NOCGS often pairs individuals in the region together in conversation or through special programs. As Frazier explains, by examining subjects from various perspectives— a strategy that lies at the heart of a liberal arts education—we can learn so much more. Recognizing the erasure of women’s stories from musical, political, and civil rights histories, two years ago NOCGS launched Women in Movement, a dynamic public programming series that foregrounds the socio-political and cultural work of African-descended women in the Gulf South. With support from the Newcomb College Institute, Skau Art and Music Fund, and Nola4Women, NOCGS hosts one event each semester. The latest program in the series, “African American Women Affecting the Arts in New Orleans,” included a panel of five African-descended women who lead arts organizations, centers, and companies who met to discuss the nuanced work of supporting culture-bearers. Now in its second year, Women in Movement continues to take on different platforms, such as workshops on reproductive justice and maternal health to city outings on a party bus tracing the history of New Orleans bounce music. These engaging programs become a portal between Tulane University and New Orleans to reconsider women as cultural producers and creators, not to mention funders, logistical leaders, and activists.

NOCGS’s programs remind us that as New Orleans and the Gulf South are undergoing continual transformation, learning about the deep history of the region’s environment and culture allow us to engage with one another and our surroundings more responsibly. NOCGS continues to encourage Tulanians and community members alike to “de-program” what we think we know about any culture, and to offer immersive educational settings—virtual for now, of course—where we face dynamic realities together.

"Take the bus! Believe it or not, there are other routes besides the streetcar that go to the Quarter. The version of New Orleans that is sold to the tourists is valuable and true enough but it is just that, a limited, easy-to-consume version of a much more complex society. The bus is a movable sidewalk where you can hear strangers talk and pass by the houses that do not appear in the postcards, even though they are equally beautiful. It is efficient; sometimes it’s messy, but if you don’t like messy go somewhere else."