Every once in a while, someone asks why our arts organization is involved in local
history. It’s a fair question. Aren’t we supposed to be putting on concerts, hanging
paintings, producing plays, teaching art classes and generally encouraging people
to sing, dance, paint, act and do beautiful things? Well, yes. But there’s that other
word in our name: culture.
We are Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture, and culture is an enormous umbrella. It
includes art and music, certainly, but also food, architecture, traditions,
celebrations, language, neighborhoods, family stories and the places where
important things happened. Culture is what a community creates, inherits,
remembers and passes along, which makes history very much our business.
That’s why we have developed close relationships with organizations dedicated to
preserving and sharing our region’s history. I am an appointed member of the
Yuba County Historic Resources Commission, and YSAC serves as its fiscal sponsor.
That sounds terribly bureaucratic, but it is actually pretty important.
The Commission is made up of volunteers who care deeply about Yuba County history.
By providing an organizational and financial umbrella, we can help the
Commission receive funding, undertake projects and create programs that might
otherwise be difficult for an all-volunteer organization to manage. We also
provide meeting space, venues for lectures and presentations, along with
marketing support. It’s a pretty good partnership.
One example is the upcoming Dannebrouge Mine Tour in Browns Valley. The
mine dates to the mid-1850s and was part of the hard-rock quartz mining industry
that followed the first frenzy of placer mining during the Gold Rush. There is
something very different about standing at an actual mine site and imagining the
people who worked there generations ago. Suddenly history isn’t a chapter in a
book. It’s a place.
The same idea is behind our participation in Doors Open California, a statewide
program of the California Preservation Foundation. This year, Yuba County’s
featured locations include the historic Packard Library in Marysville and the
Arboga Assembly Center, two places with very different stories but equally
important connections to our past.
And this is where history and art begin to overlap. An historic building is
architecture. An old photograph is visual art and documentation. A diary is
literature. A traditional song is music. A quilt can be both craft and historical
record. A mural can tell the story of a neighborhood. Theater can bring historical
characters back to life. Even an old neon sign can tell us something about who we
were and how our communities once looked. History isn’t just a collection of
dates. It’s storytelling. And storytelling is one of the oldest art forms humans
have.
Yuba County has an extraordinary history that includes the indigenous Maidu
people, Gold Rush settlements, agriculture, military history, Japanese American
incarceration, historic architecture and generations of multi-cultural families who
built lives here. Some stories are well known. Others are in danger of
disappearing. We spend a lot of time in the arts talking about creating something
new. But culture also requires us to protect what came before, because someday
what we are doing right now will be history too. Somebody ought to leave them a
good story.
And speaking of history, this week marks the 25th anniversary of September 11,
2001. I was living in Washington, D.C., that morning, sitting in my office about 30
minutes from the Pentagon and watching the unimaginable events unfold in real
time. Twenty-five years later, September 11 itself has become history for a
generation too young to remember it. For those of us who do remember, it
remains something more immediate. Perhaps that is another reason preserving
history matters. Eventually even our most vivid memories must be entrusted to
others. Remembering is part of culture, too.
