Photo taken with my Blackberry. Not bad for a phone.
A couple weeks ago we hosted a colloquium for the Heritage Branch of the New Brunswick Department of Culture, Wellness and Sport to explore how young people think about heritage. It was an all day event with young people aged 20 to 30 from across the province.
Over the past couple days I’ve been going over my notes from it in preparation to write the report. One theme is clearly dominant: our heritage is dynamic.
Heritage was many things to the participants – history, culture, identity, relationships, food, and the environment, for example. All these things can be encapsulated by the idea of Heritage as a story we tell about ourselves. There are important chapters to this story that have occurred throughout the province’s history. The rise of bilingualism, architecture and music were mentioned often.
This story has also been fragmented and fraught with tension: French/English; Urban/Rural; Protestant/Catholic; First Nation/Everyone else. Moreover, there’s a global story being told that young New Brunswickers want to be more a part of.
Many people see heritage as the past, leading to conflicts between those who want to preserve heritage, and those who prefer progress. But the young people at the colloquium didn’t see it so starkly. To them heritage was an evolving story. It was best expressed by someone from Fredericton who said rather matter of factly, “we need a new heritage.” Someone else talked about a “future heritage.”
This “new heritage” is inclusive, connected and forward looking. It celebrates one’s identity proudly, while continuously seeking to maximize the sum of one’s many changing identities – Anglophone, francophone, mother, daughter, soft-ware developer, Coldplay fan, farmer, coffee connoisseur, Canadian, New Brunswicker, Monctonian, global citizen.
It is heritage as an open source concept.
1 comments:
Good connection between heritage and open source. Culture and heritage are continuously co-created and are both becoming and passing in a non-stop flow, though the rate of that change appears to change - sometimes rapid, sometimes slow.
If you haven't seen it already, the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is a very interesting place where the Mayor is trying to re-vision the place where creativity can grow from what has been lost. See here: http://www.15104.cc/ and then also in the new issue of Rolling Stone in the article "The Mayor of Hell" which is worth reading and unearths some of the resistance that has come with the attempts to change the community.
I want to learn more about it and follow what is happening in the town and the surrounding county. Hamilton has some of that feel in certain areas so I'm curious and interested as a new Hamiltonian.
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