So That Our Stories Might Outlive the Coming Hurricane Seasons

by Jade Woods, SEHN Board member

I come from a family of fighters. My great-great-great-grandfather fought for the Union in the Civil War, and my mother’s parents fought to integrate the Louisiana school system in the 1960s and 1970s. My father’s parents battled environmental hazards and pollution to make their community a safer place to live. In my lifetime, I have seen my mother advocate for the health of her patients as a physician and my father for his clients as a public defender. In their totality, my family has gifted me with a rich—and somewhat daunting— heritage of advocacy work, yet I still had my own path to justice-focused work.

As I complete the first year of my graduate program in Library and Information Sciences, I reflect on the fact that my path in advocacy began as a teenager when I learned about Black history and the discrimination my family has experienced over centuries. In learning about slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and how my family survived it all, I became captivated by history and by stories of justice prevailing. It was then that I realized that what tied me to my past were the meticulously kept records that my relatives have kept in folders and dusty file cabinets. I learned about my great-great-great-grandmother through the typewritten transcription of an interview she sat for. I met my great-grandfather through worn black-and-white photographs on my grandmother’s hearth. By looking through a digital archive, I uncovered more about how a different ancestor founded a local school for Black children. In all of these experiences, the throughline was that someone decided my family’s history was worth preserving; I would never have known these stories otherwise. I saw clearly then that I wanted to be someone who preserved stories.

With raging debates around artificial intelligence, the precarity of digital media, repatriation of artifacts, and young people’s access to literature, librarians are and will continue to be at the forefront of discourses about the meaning of information and who can access it. I cannot think of a more important time to study the way knowledge is stored and restored, presented and represented. Just as crucially, in the time of an impending climate crisis that threatens Louisiana, I cannot think of anything I would rather do than learn how to preserve the heritage and cultural relics of this place, so that our stories might outlive the coming hurricane seasons. With these reflections, a future as a librarian or archivist feels like a natural continuation of my commitments to equity and advocacy. 

In the future, my goal is to work as an archivist or librarian doing cultural preservation work. I hope my career will bring me into contact with information that deserves to be archived and shared and that I will have the skills to do it justice. I want to become an archivist because I believe teaching others how to access knowledge is a pivotal role to play in society. I want to create spaces to learn, research, create, and remember. As Louisiana continues to stand on the frontline of the climate crisis in the United States, I hope to also join the incredible people who are finding creative, community-driven solutions to weather the storms that are coming.