Education

Created in 2003, the SlackWater Center at St. Mary’s College of Maryland is an interdisciplinary program which brings students, faculty, and members of the community together in a collaborative examination of the “environmental and cultural” changes occurring in St. Mary’s and surrounding counties.

Funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Maryland Traditions (a joint project sponsored by the Maryland Historical Trust and the Maryland State Arts Council), SlackWater was originally conceived by Andrea Hammer, a former English professor at St. Mary’s College and the center’s first executive director.

“Andrea felt that was a great metaphor for what’s going on in southern Maryland,” says Julia A. King, SlackWater’s current director and an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s. “For years, we have been a sleepy rural community—for centuries, really—[and now] we’re one of the fastest-growing regions because of things like BRAC [and] the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.”

The influx of population, to a certain extent, King notes, has created pressure on the area. “That’s not necessarily bad or good pressure,” she explains. “It’s just pressure, and we’re changing.”

The role of SlackWater, King says, is “to look at history and historical situations, to try to have this conversation that involves faculty, that involves students, and that involves the community on what’s happening to us, where we think we are going, and how we can draw on our history to help shape the direction of where we are going.”

Offered as a course in cultural journalism, students who participate in the SlackWater project collect and study data and analyze and interpret a particular issue or theme facing southern Maryland. Topics have included the effects of the tobacco buyout on farmers; oysters, watermen, and the ecological state of the bay; and an exploration into the meaning of the word “rural” as the regional landscape changes.

Students also go out into the field, conducting interviews and collecting oral histories from members of the community. To date, the SlackWater Center has catalogued and archived more than 300 oral-history narratives, including tapes and transcripts.

“It’s been done very professionally, so people who come after us decades—or maybe even a hundred years—from now can go and use those resources to hear the stories and the words of the people who lived here,” King says.

The culmination of the project is SlackWater: A Journal on Environmental and Cultural Change in Southern Maryland’s Tidewater, a bi-annual publication of oral histories, essays, and photography. Volume VI: The 60s and 70s was released last spring.

“That was a major period when the tides changed down here, so to speak,” says King. “Slot machines went out. Governor Tawes really modernized the region and brought us into the 20th century, and part of that was desegregation.”

“The sixties is this kind of perfect time period to look at because, right now, we have Barack Obama constantly being compared to either JFK or Martin Luther King, and trying to make sense of the war in Iraq, we’re looking back to Vietnam,” says Zach Pajak, a senior English major at St. Mary’s College and SlackWater’s student editor.

“But looking at this kind of small community of St. Mary’s, there’s this huge—to go with the ‘slack water’ metaphor—there’s this huge ebb and flow of the older generation wanting to maintain the past, and the younger generation going to the future.”

Pajak adds, “In piecing together all these stories and all these oral histories, there’s going to be this sort of constant tension between past, present, and future, and putting that story together, I think, can send the reader on a really interesting sort of journey.”

For more information about the SlackWater Center and journal, visit www.smcm.edu/slackwater.