Informal
Interpretation at Sites of Conscience
Part 1 of 4: The National Park Service Mandate
National Park Service
Director’s Orders
6. Personal and Non-Personal Services
6.1 Personal Services
Personal
services are those in which staffs... facilitate opportunities for emotional
and intellectual connections between the resources and the visitors.
By their nature,
Sites of Conscience are rife with emotion and create emotional
dichotomies. The National
Park Service (NPS) mandate (see above) for these sites is to provide a venue
where visitors can experience and confront these potentially volatile
emotions. Sites of
Conscience exist as recognition of a historical event wherein one group of
people inflicted an injustice on another group of people. Historically, the
perpetrators of the injustice created an institutionalized system of
rationalizations and intellectual exemptions to justify their actions and
defend their belief systems. The
victims of the injustice received and often continue to carry the emotional
injury and trauma as a result of that injustice. The designation of a Site of Conscience carries an implicit
recognition that: 1) an injury and trauma was created from the perpetrated act;
and 2) the perpetrated act was an injustice. This dual recognition usually represents a de facto judgment
against, and reversal of, the institutionalized belief system that created the
injustice. Too many visitors, this
reversal of institutional beliefs is a greater affront than the initial
injustice. Sites of Conscience are
sites of contention. The
diametrically opposed perspectives implicit in Sites of Conscience create
unique challenges for evaluating visitor’s needs and facilitating opportunities
to create NPS mandated emotional and intellectual connections to the site.
All visitors to Sites
of Conscience experience a degree of injury, whether that injury results from
the trauma of the injustice, empathy for the victims of the injustice, guilt
over perceived culpability in perpetrating the injustice, or the emotional
injury and trauma that results from questioning and accusing the motivations
and actions of an institutionalized belief system that the visitor may still be
part of. With a mandate to facilitate
an emotional connection with the site, it is critical for the staff at Sites of
Conscience to realize that the nature of this connection will most likely be an
injury. Director’s Order #6 Section 6.1.2 further clarifies the
role of informal interpretation:
“[a]n
informal visitor contact is an encounter between a visitor and an interpreter
in which the objectives are defined by the visitor’s needs.”
If the commonality of
the visitors to a Site of Conscience is an emotional injury, then the common
“need” of the visitor is for healing.
Healing emotional
injury and trauma requires a complex, cyclical process involving: 1) recognizing the emotional response;
2) acknowledging that the response is rooted in emotional injury and trauma; 3)
understanding the origins of that injury.
Sites of Conscience provide the venue and informal interpretation can
provide the facilitation for healing.
Most visitors to Sites of Conscience have already acknowledged that they
have an emotional response to the event.
It is, in fact, this emotional response that draws these visitors to the
site in the first place. The physical visit to the site establishes the
connection between emotional injury and cause. The interpretive materials and interactions at the site
provide the intellectual understanding of how and why the injury happened. The role of informal interpretation at
Sites of Conscience is to facilitate this process. A first visit a Site of Conscience may be emotionally
overwhelming for a visitor attempting to understand the source of their
injury. Subsequent visits continue
to provide an emotional response, each one slightly different and with new
understanding and awareness. Each
subsequent visit provides the visitor with the opportunity to touch and verify
that the injury was and continues to be real and to bring new awareness into
the source of the injury. This is
the cyclical nature of healing.
There are several
pitfalls for the interpreter at a Site of Conscience that may interfere with
visitors’ making the emotional and intellectual connections with the site that
they need to work through their individual processes of healing. These pitfalls include: empathy, level
of emotional comfort, personal belief systems, and forgiveness.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
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