By Lauryn Jelsema, Culture Editor
Stage set-up for Morrison’s presentation – Photo by Savannah Hammock
The second HerStory of the semester was held this past Thursday, March 5, in the lower level of The Moose.
The HerStory speaker series is a monthly event hosted in partnership with the CDI&E and the Jane Hibbard Idema Women’s and Gender Studies Center. This month’s event was particularly special because it took place during Women’s History Month.
This month’s guest speaker was Public History Professional Jennifer Morrison. Morrison is connected to Aquinas College through her past work as the school’s archivist. She has also worked as an archivist at Davenport University.
After taking the stage and being introduced by Esperenza Garcia, the CDI&E’s Student Engagement Coordinator, Morrison admitted that when she was initially asked to speak, she thought she was meant to cover her career and her experiences in her academic field. However, she learned that past speakers often talked about her life, so, being a history professional, she decided to turn her talk into an oral history.
Morrison is originally from Luddington, Michigan, and she began her presentation by showing pictures of herself, her immediate family, and her grandparents from the time they lived in the area.
“I was very close with my grandparents on my mom’s side,” said Morrison. When talking about her grandparents, she reminisced about their old house in Luddington and how she remembered a library nook with an oversized desk.
“I loved to retreat in there, and look at their books,” Morrison said. She recalled that many of the books were by the author Thor Heyerdahl, containing information on the statues of Easter Island.
“I was amazed and interested in the fact that there were people who lived so long ago who were capable of such amazing things,” Morrison said. She joked that she read Reader’s Digest books about the Aztecs and the Incas at the same time she had Barbie dolls.
Ruminating on her grandparents, Morrison said that her Grandmother was a storyteller, and taught her about her family tree through oral history, which was a contributing factor in how she chose to share her story for the event.
When Morrison turned 15, her mother re-married an U.S. Airman and relocated to England, where she would finish out high school on a AirForce base. She looked back on her time in London fondly.
“I got to see all these historical sights with my own little geek eyes,” said Morrison. One of those sights was Uffington White Horse, a 360-foot prehistoric, abstract, chalk-cut in the shape of a horse, dating back to some time between 1380 and 550 BC. There is a myth that if one stands on the eye of the horse and makes a wish, it will come true. When Morrison visited the monument, well aware of the myth, she stood on the eye and made a wish that she might be able to come back to the same spot and have some sort of job working in history. Which, evidently, became true.
Morrison’s grandparents visited her while she was residing in London. When it came time for them to go back to the states, she decided to travel back to Luddington with them and stay permanently.
Upon arriving back in Michigan, Morrison went to West Shore Community College in Scottsville, where she earned an associate degree in liberal arts. From there, she worked in public history for a while at Mason County’s Historic White Pine Village as a candle-dipper. The village is a historical preservation site meant to offer an insight into Morrison’s hometown of Luddington in the late 19th and early 20th-century.
After gaining some professional experience with history, Morrison went on to attend Western Michigan University and obtained her Bachelor’s in public history. She continued in the academic field of public history and moved on to Bowling Green State University in Ohio to complete her Master’s. She wrote her thesis on the complicated history between the US and Native Americans.
Her first job out of college was the education coordinator for Charlton Park. Morrison was responsible for programs with school children and special events. She said that the job taught her how to craft a narrative of history to place her listeners, primarily school children, within the history itself and create an immersive experience, however, she soon wanted to move on professionally.
“I wanted to advance in my career,” said Morrison. She soon got married and moved to Grand Rapids, where she found a job in the local history department for the city’s public library. She worked a half-time position there for 15 years while juggling other side jobs in order to make ends meet.
One of the side jobs was a business she created with her husband, where they recorded people’s oral histories, which lasted only a few years.
Morrison then became the archivist for Davenport University while still working half-time at the Grand Rapids Public Library. After 9 years at the university, she was offered another half-time position as the archivist for Aquinas College. She accepted the position and worked at AQ from 2012 to 2019.
Morrison visiting the Grand Rapids Archives in 2015 – Photo by Jennifer Morrison
“I loved the campus and the old buildings, I loved the staff at the library, I loved sharing what I knew about this career with students,” said Morrison.
As of 6 months ago, Morrison took on a new job as an Archives and Records Associate at MillerKnoll, an American furniture company.
Morrison noted that her career history is not how she imagined it would be, like author Heyerdahl’s was.
“Part of the problem is that we live in a society that doesn’t value its own history,” said Morrison. “While there are other people out there who care too much about history and want to keep information for themselves.”
Morrison claimed that it is not a lack of history that causes people to take down exhibits and webpages, but an intense focus on history with the intention of telling a very specific story, subtly referencing the Trump administration’s work of taking down information from the Library of Congress’ website and removing slavery exhibits in Philadelphia.
Though Morrison believes her current job to be her last, she is not finished with her story.
Morrison recently published a book titled The Open Mausoleum Door. She got the idea after visiting a local cemetery with her niece, and after heading to the public library to research what they had looked at that day. Morrison became obsessed with one of the mausoleums they saw, and began to write a book about a family she had never met.
She initially found a local publisher and recruited two Aquinas undergraduates to help her edit her manuscripts. However, the company quietly went out of business, and Morrison was never alerted; she only later found out through a press release.
Morrison did not relent in her efforts to get her book out into the world and ended up self-publishing through Schuler’s Books, an independent bookstore located in Grand Rapids.
The Open Mausoleum Door is available for purchase at Schuler’s Books and on Amazon.
Morrison has also been learning Norwegian through online language courses, building a story map of the homes of her family members in Luddington, and has taken up writing once again.
When the presentation had come to a close, and it was time for questions from the audience, Morrison was asked about the significance of women’s history, due to her talk landing in the month of March.
“Very simply, we are half the population, and if you’re not telling our story, you’re not telling the whole story. Human history is a collaboration. If you only have part of the story, you don’t have truth,” said Morrison.
The next Herstory is scheduled for April 2, with guest speaker Fallon Lee, who serves as Senior Director of Crisis Intervention Services at the YWCA of West Central Michigan.
The Saint 