"This Is a Drama. You Are Characters": The Tourist as Fugitive Slave in Conner Prairie's "Follow the North Star"

The performance of history is not usually held up as a legitimate mode of historiography [. . .]. But performance can demonstrate aspects of and ideas about history that are less possible in print. It can encourage considerations of the gestural, the emotional, the aural, the visual, and the physical in ways beyond print's ability to evoke or understand them.

—Charlotte Canning, "Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography"

Conner Prairie is a 1,400-acre living museum depicting nineteenth-century Indiana, located twenty-five minutes north of downtown Indianapolis. It bills itself as "one of the nation's most authentic living history museums." "When you visit [1836] Prairietown," the museum's orientation slide show tells visitors, "you actually go back in time." Conner Prairie has recently developed a new programmatic curriculum, "Live the Prairie," which extensively incorporates second-person interpretation. Second-person is an emergent kind of living history activity in which museumgoers get to try out being partof the past environment (by performing chores or playing period games), instead of merely visitingit. Most living museums employ costumed staff to offer interpretations, either in the first person by portraying historical characters, or in the third by acting as docents who describe the site to visitors in a modern-day voice. A major part of Conner Prairie's new second-person curriculum is its "Follow the North Star" program, in which daytime visitors return to the museum at night and step into the roles of fugitive black slaves seeking freedom in the North.¹ Several times a night in April and November, forty Conner Prairie staff members, performing slave owners, bounty hunters, helpful Quakers, etc., lead small groups of participants from point to point through a simulated threatening environment, seeking to teach the history of slavery in Indiana in the nineteenth century.²

While most major US living museums (e.g., Plimoth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village [Massachusetts], Colonial Williamsburg [Virginia], Living History Farms [Iowa]) are making strides in the area of second-person interpretation techniques, these are generally limited to routine activities like plowing, participating in a musket drill, or churning butter, none of which involves playing a character. "Follow the North Star" differs from these programs in that it encourages participants to take on roles themselves. Each participant is assigned an identity, given a general scenario with some amount of room for decision making, engaged in dialogue throughout the performance, and told his or her fate at the conclusion. I participated in this program in April 2004. My fellow group members and I were repeatedly forced to our knees by slave drivers and called "monkeys" and other slurs. We were accused by resentful malefactors of trying to steal jobs from "good, white people" in the North. We were reprimanded by those who sought to hide us in their homes if we lifted our eyes, lest we be tempted to steal their property. We were indoctrinated into a system of codes and signs, which helped us find our way as we groped through dark, unfamiliar terrain in search of a candle in a window or listened for a coded greeting. In this extreme second-person interpretive activity, our bodies surrogated for those of our historical subjects, eliciting profound reactions and emotions. However, this mode of performative historiography also entails a considerable amount of slippage. In many ways, bodily experience can do a much better job than visual or textual communication in connecting twenty-first-century individuals with the material existences of their counterparts in the past, and indeed even in connecting with each other across cultural and ideological lines. In other ways, though, it can be more difficult to find a perceived match between past and present bodies. Instances of race and ethnicity, especially when it comes to the history of slavery, elicit some particular dilemmas. That proves to be the case with "Follow the North Star." While the main characters in the re-enactment are black slaves, most staff and participants in "Follow the North Star" are white.³

Issues of responsible representation of identity and...