Presentation given by Dr. Jolvan Morris during SSU's Fall 2014 Scholar in Residence Program.

1. Coastal Citizenship: Considering
Culture in Conservation
A Case Study from Harris Neck, GA (USA)
Jolvan Morris
NOAA Living Marine Resources Cooperative Science Center
Savannah State University
Distinguished Lecture Series
Fall 2014

2. Georgia’s cultural landscape
The Gullah/Geechee people of the
Low Country and the Sea Islands
are a distinctive people
• Only African American
population in the US
recognized as a nation
Gullah Geechee Nation 2014
• Tradition that depends on both
maritime and land resources
The history of the Sea Islands is
intertwined with considerations of
race, ethnicity, and class.
• Tight-knit barrier island
communities established by
Freedmen after the Civil War

3. Harris Neck in context
• 1942
2,687 acres of land taken
for use during WWII
• 1962
Department of Interior
establishes Wildlife refuge
• Sense of Place
• Being African American and
Gullah/Geechee
• Maritime
Occupations and
Subsistence fishing
• Environmental
Justice
movement

4. How do we move toward a more comprehensive
understanding of the human-dimension of
conservation issues?
LINKING RESEARCH, PRACTICE AND RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT TO THE REALITY OF HARRIS NECK
RESIDENTS

5. The Role of Traditional Knowledge (TK)
• Local knowledge and cultural memory are crucial for the
conservation of biodiversity because both serve as
repositories of alternative choices that keep cultural and
biological diversity flourishing
Nazarea 2006
• Giving voice to those underserved by history

6. Reconciling TK with “hard science”
• Recent interest and
implementation
• Highly debated
• Legitimacy, Validity,
Authenticity
• Identifying Experts
Fairhead & Leach 1996, Espeland & Stevens
1998, Nazarea 2006
As HS scholars, researchers,
and professionals it is
important that we
remember that our
perspective is a privileged
one.
• TK is scientific knowledge
that is not objective or
context-free

7. Data and Method
Qualitative Data collected over a six-month period
• Participant observation at community meetings
• Literature Searches
• Stakeholder Surveys
• Semi-structured interviews and Oral histories
Digital audio
recordings
• Zoom Handy
Recorder H2
Transcription
• ~four hours of
transcription time
for each hour of
interview
• 10 hours of audio
collected to date
Coding
• 4 coders
• NVivo 10
• According to
major and sub-topic
areas

8. Oral Histories
Participants
• 9 individuals (7 men, 2 women)
• African-American
• Snowball and Gate-keeper recruitment techniques
• Elders with knowledge of life on Harris Neck before and after
1942

9. Pastor Timmons
…his business was very successful…and it grew to the
point where he had to build a bigger factory and oysters
back in that time was a very, very, very, very lucrative
business to be into and it was eaten by so many…still
are…he uh… he had I think it was 12 boats,
12 of the community resident picking
for him,… and about 16 of the females
shucking…16 to 20… and that was in the smaller
factory. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Tummer, from
Savannah was his distributor he would come
down and …from Savannah and they
would load the gallons of oysters into Mr.
Tummer old truck and he would ice them down and head
back to Savannah, where he’d distribute them all
over the Southeastern…part of Georgia.
Well, as I said that grew…that grew and he built the bigger
factory which employed about 34 shuckers and I think it
was like 26 or 27 pickers. These gentlemen were
very, very skillful oyster pickers
Business and Economics of
Fishing
• Processor
employment
• Business organization
• Gender roles
• Selling the catch

10. If you stand up, you should be able to see
a cedar tree…
My granddad was a great preserver; the
oyster shells that came out of the factory after the girls
shuck the oyster out of them, they would put back in the
boats and they would carry them to different areas and
spread them out along those banks so that they
would…spats would attach themselves to
those shells, and new oysters would come
forth. The finest kind and that was the method
when we came up they taught us how to
do the same thing. They taught us to do that as
well as going up on the banks and taking the little oysters
and spreading them all over the bank so that they would
have room to grow…
…this is where about twenty-six boats would come
up. The dock was out here, they would tie their
boats up to the dock and one by one they
would unload into the big bin. They
would lift that bin up, it would go into…up on a
little rail and by that rail they would push them
into the oyster house where they would be put out
onto the floor and they would a shovel to put them
up on the oyster shelf for the ladies to shuck. And
like I was saying, it was about forty-five…head of
women working the factory and
made a good living during the
winter time to help sustain the
family financially and that went on
like I said until ’33 when Majona moved in.
Business and Economics of Fishing
• Fish processing
• Processor employment
• Earnings, revenue,
profitability
Social and Cultural Characteristics
• Gender roles
• Training to be a fisherman
Fisheries Management
• Conservation measures
Tiger Bluff

11. Mr. Dunham
…my daddy was a boat builder as well as
a fisherman and every day I would go out…and it
seemed like it was every day and I would do whatever
Daddy was doing or whatever he asked me to do, I did it.
And he taught me how to make the nets.
So then you have your shrimp net, and
you have what’s called a mullet net. That’s
just a different… another fish they have. Your mullet net,
and then your cast net…it’s another form of net that you
use to catch mullet and all the different kinds of fishes.
And I learned that and I learned how to build it, to make
the net and whatever it was that we had to make. And I
stayed home and then Daddy died in ’49
and I was not home very much after that,
you know I just stayed and come and go. But we had
our property not too far from where our
house was, just outside of the gate so to
speak and then Daddy bought some land there and we
just…he stayed there and I would go back home to see him
and check on to see how he was doing and so on and so
forth. But I did whatever we had to do and my son
learned the trade and others have learned the trade
and it has really paid off for us, even until today.
We did not have a leveler. A leveler tells you
when the boat is level and when it is not. But he’d use
a bullet, and a bullet is a piece of lead that had a piece of
string on the end of it and in the bow of the boat it was
maybe about ten, twelve, maybe about twelve…fourteen
inches that the bows came up; and he’d take a nail and put
at the end of that bow and in the back of the boat, the back
part of it he had some pieces of board and he made sure that
that board was level the best he could. But the purpose
of that bullet up at the top, it tells whether the
boat was listing…the boat was listing to the right or to the
left.
Gear and Fishing Technology
• Boats
• Cast nets
• Gill nets
Social and Cultural Characteristics
• Training to build boats
• Values
• Place attachment
• Ownership

12. Mrs. Evelyn
…Yeah, later we made some more kinda nets to catch them
in, but we were…the children were
breadwinners too, you know…the father… and
the children had to go school one time. We didn’t get to
school as much as our parents would desire us to because
we had to help with the food and the field work. Mama
didn’t let us go in the field; papa would
take the boys, and the girls would stay
in the house with mother learning how to clean house,
wash, cook, iron. The boys go in the field and make the
crop and stuff and when the harvest is made, Mama took
the girls and we picked the peas, shelled the peas, picked the
corn, and shell the corn…sent it to the market to grind to
make grits and meal and stuff, but all of us
worked.
Social and Cultural
Characteristics
• Family roles
• Gender roles
• Education
• Values

13. …I feel like I’m a survivor. I think
that one thing I knew that Harris
Neck did for me, made me a
provider… I can suffer…
…but I think going to church and my pastor there, they
don’t know yet today what they did for me. They
made me who I am, helped me be who I
am. If it wasn’t for them, I believe I would grow up just
mean…hateful…
…when I looked back at my home in flames
and her crying and trying to hold my
momma back so she wouldn’t try to get there
I wouldn’t wish that on my meanest
enemy…but sometimes I make myself think
about it so I’ll know the difference between love
and hate, because that kind of stuff I went through, I could have
easily grow up, grown up right now like I’m talking to you, I
could be telling you, calling names, hate, I cant stand them…I
cant stand this, but thank God I can love them…
Social and Cultural
Characteristics
• Religion
• Social Stratification
Gould Cemetery

14. Research, Practice, and Management
What happens when a story is imposed upon a
community?
• Participatory research
• De-professionalized intellectuals in practice
• Enhance the validity of those stories through authentic engagement
Harris 2001

15. Research, Practice, and Management
Balancing TEK in Resource Management
Contextual
Realities
“Hard Science”
Expectations
Past &
Current Uses
Management
Systems
Factual
Observations
Worldview
Culture &
Identity
Ethics &
Values
The six faces of traditional knowledge
according to Houde 2007.

16. Discussion
• Addressing
environmental conflict
with cultural
competence
• Informed proactive
approaches to navigate
stakeholder conflicts
• Perception matters
• Risk Communication
• Stakeholder Voice
• Building social capital
• Understanding
stakeholder decisions
to exit/enter/remain in
particular maritime
professions
Experience
Identity
Emotion
Individual
Behavior
Social
Movement
Interlinked Concepts in TEK and Memory
work according to Nazarea 2006

17. Acknowledgements
Members of the Harris Neck Community who continue to
participate in and support this work
NOAA Living Marine Resources
Cooperative Science Center
Otis Johnson
Dionne Hoskins
Nikki Rech
Marine Science Faculty and Students
Asa H Gordon Library

18. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!
morrisjt@savannahstate.edu
912-358-3287
MSCI 7855 Special Topics:
Environmental Risk Communications
Risk communication is the assisted dialog
among individual, communities, and
organizations responsible for/affected by
environmental issues. We will explore risk
communication from the scientific
perspective, but also from psychological,
social, and cultural perspectives.

19. References
Espeland, W.N. and M. L. Stevens.(1998). Commensuration as a social process. Annual
Review of Sociology 24: 313-343.
Fairhead, J. and M. Leach.(1996). Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology
of a Savanna Mosaic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, R.P. (2001). Hidden Voices: Linking Research, Practice and Policy to the Everyday
Realities of Rural People. Southern Rural Sociology 17: 1-11.
Houde, N. (2007). The Six Faces of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Challenges and
Opportunities for Canadian Co-Management Arrangements.
Nazarea, V.D. (2006). Local Knowledge and Memory in Biodiversity Conservation. Annual
Review of Applied Anthropology 35: 317-335.