The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation announces Ashley Minner as a RWD Fellow

Ashley Minner, a community-based artist, scholar, and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina has been named a 2021 RWD Fellow. Minner will spend her fellowship term completing critical work on the project, Mapping East Baltimore’s Reservation.

Officially since 2005, Minner has been documenting the past and living heritage of the Lumbee American Indian community of East Baltimore, which migrated from the U.S. South (primarily North Carolina) to the Upper Fells Point and Washington Hill neighborhoods as part of the industrial boom of the mid-20th century. Once, a streetscape of primarily Lumbee-and-intertribally-owned and stewarded business, churches, centers, and cafes filled this area—also known as Baltimore’s “reservation.” Urban renewal in the 1970s decimated most of the physical markers of this community. Minner’s project aims to capture and archive this important period of Lumbee (as well as American Indian and Baltimore) cultural legacy.

Minner’s work over the next several months includes organizing a community archiving day at the Baltimore American Indian Center, continuing to interview Lumbee elders, producing a print map of the historic neighborhood, managing the design and launch of both an app and a new website dedicated to this project, and continuing to co-develop a shared stewardship agreement for the new “Ashley Minner Collection” housed in the Maryland Folklife Archives of the Albin O. Kuhn Library at University of Maryland Baltimore County, where all of these materials will also live.

“As a place-based foundation, we are particularly interested in agency, voice, and different models of expertise and experience that shape the city of Baltimore, impacting our shared future. Ashley’s project provides an important opportunity to learn about the significant—but often overlooked—and ongoing contributions of American Indian people to Baltimore,” says Jane Brown, President and CEO of the Foundation, “We’re excited to support Ashley’s project, and look forward to the significant contribution it will make to our understanding of the city.”

The Foundation is honored to support this project as a way of recognizing some of the many voices and histories that must be acknowledged when describing who helped to shape the city we now know as Baltimore.

To learn more about Ashley Minner and her work on this project, check out this list of recent press:

• UMBC professor uncovers, documents history of East Baltimore's Lumbee Indian community (Baltimore Sun)

• A Native American Community in Baltimore Reclaims Its History (Smithsonian Magazine)

• "An Absence That Marks A Presence": Mapping Baltimore's Historic Lumbee Community (On the Record, 88.1 WYPR)

• Reclaiming the archives: Lumbee scholars find their people and bring them home (The Conversation)

• A quest to reconstruct Baltimore’s American Indian ‘reservation’ (The Conversation)