LOUISIANA ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS ASSOCIATION
2026 LAMA Annual Meeting & Conference
Friday, October 16, 2026
Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans
Theme: "Rediscovering Louisiana: Re-engagement and Exploration in Louisiana’s Archives"
Promoting active exploration and renewed interest in archival collections as vital sources
for Louisiana’s diverse history and cultural legacy.
9:20 - 10:20 am
Cultivating Memory in Louisiana’s Carceral Landscape
Alexis Martin, Kennedi Johnson, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Daryl Waters
Freedom to Grow (FTG) and the Visiting Room Project (TVRP) are two community archives based in New Orleans, Louisiana that document incarceration in the state of Louisiana. TVRP focuses on publicly engaging its archive of oral histories from people impacted by death by incarceration sentences – also known as life without parole – at the Angola and the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. FTG is abolitionist-driven initiative at the intersection of art, land-based healing justice, community empowerment that is actively building the Resurrection Archives – an archive that documents the legacies of organizing, survival, and resistance on the land now known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Both archives center those who are directly impacted by incarceration in the shaping of their respective work around memory and incarceration in the state. Moderated by Freedom to Grow’s Executive Director Alexis Martin and the Visiting Room Project’s Program Manager Kennedi Johnson, this session will feature system-impacted narrators and collaborators from TVRP and FTG in a conversation around strategies, struggles, and lessons in ethically building and sustaining community archives that center formerly and currently incarcerated people.
10:25 - 11:25 am
Documenting Heritage: Using Archives for Dual Citizenship
Amy DeNisco, Amy Simon
Affiliated Institutions
City Archives & Special Collections at New Orleans Public Library; Diocese of Baton Rouge Archives & Records Center
Abstract
Dual-citizenship applications are driving an increase in requests for researchers looking to Louisiana Archives for records pertaining to their ancestors. Join two archivists – one from religious archives and one from municipal archives - to discuss the kinds of records available at each institution, and how we are helping researchers to locate those records. We will address some of the challenges that we've faced, and how we are working through them to make these records accessible to all who need them.
11:30 - 11:50 am
From Dust Collectors to “Proclaimed and Proud”
Dr. Kent W. Peacock
In 2025, a longtime supporter of the Creole Heritage Center (CHC) at Northwestern State University gifted it their collection of 12 original government proclamations and letters from the 1990s that recognized Louisiana Creoles as a distinct ethnic group existing across the United States and deserving of appreciation. The CHC used this opportunity as the jolt it needed to take on digitizing its existing collection of 18 other proclamations from the 1990s and 2000s and use Omeka.net to develop its first ever digital exhibit. The CHC chose to do so for many reasons, but particularly as these two collections were not confined to Louisiana, instead they came from multiple states and spoke to Louisiana Creoles’ (and thus Louisiana’s) influence beyond the state’s boundaries. This session is a case study on how a minimal staff (of 2) with limited training in archival preservation and exhibit design was able to face the (previously) daunting tasks of collection processing, digitization, and exhibit creation. It also tells the story of how reinterpretation – or reevaluating what items get interpreted – can lead to the (re)discovery of items and a past many had forgotten or never known – while also being able to indulge an influential and respected donor.
11:50 am - 12:10 pm
Heritage Language Learning in the Archives: A Reencounter with Hispanic Louisiana at the Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library and Research Center
Diana Soto-Olson, Teresa Clifton
Affiliated Institutions
The Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library and Research Center at Tulane University, and Latin American Studies Department at Loyola University
Abstract
In addition to its better-known collections of Latin American books and archives, the Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library and Research Center at Tulane is one of several collections that documents and stewards the cultural history of Spanish-speaking communities of Louisiana. This presentation offers a case study of a collaborative effort to use the archives to ground identity construction in language courses for heritage speakers of Spanish at Loyola University. Employing object-based and communicative pedagogies, the courses plumbed the Doris Stone LAL’s archives for items that trace Louisiana’s Hispanic history over two centuries to curate experiences of local encounter and cultivate placemaking. Elaborating on practical considerations of language teaching methods and theoretical considerations of cultural identity construction (Hall), this presentation contributes to the emerging discussion regarding the use of historic archives in language teaching (Stein). For heritage language teaching in particular, the aim is to encourage curricular design that includes the curation of archival interactive sessions documenting topics related to the heritage language and the local presence of the diasporic communities from which heritage students come from. Archives can support language acquisition through meaning making and they can also support the symbolic construction of identity by providing imaginary coherence to bolster, expand, and problematize historic memory and the symbolic presence of the heritage language in the city's culture and physical space.
12:10 - 12:30 pm
Becoming Louisiana
Tanya Anderson, Dan Lewis, Anna Schittone
The Archives Services Program Supervisors from the Louisiana State Archives would like to present at lightning talk about our 2026 speaker series, Becoming Louisiana. This series is marching through the history of the various ethnic groups that have settled Louisiana one month at a time. We have collaborated with our sister organization, Louisiana’s Old State Capitol, to host this monthly event. We have been fortunate enough to have a renowned expert member from each ethnic group come to speak and educate the public in our auditorium. For this collaborative program, we each play a role in promoting deeper learning about Louisiana’s underrepresented groups. Conservation Services and Reference Services collaborate to display archival holdings and books relating to the people group of the month. We carefully research our own holdings, examine the state of the documents, and prepare them for viewing. We are also proud and honored to partner with the Archivist from our local Catholic Diocese for temporary borrowing of items of theirs to display. Our Collections Management team videos the speaker and makes the talks available to the public online. Of course, Collections Management and Reference Services then also work to ensure container lists and inventories are as up-to-date as possible and provide access to researchers that show interest and visit our Research Library. Through these events, we are able to draw in more members to our Friends group, rediscover and uncover overlooked archival materials, and ultimately emphasize the value of the historic ethnic melting pot that is our state.
1:30 - 2:00 pm
Innovative Archives and Student Engagement - Case Studies from Racial History Projects at Centenary College of Louisiana and Tulane University
Chris Brown, Cecile Yezou
This session highlights racial history projects at Centenary College of Louisiana and Tulane University, through which both schools are pursuing innovative archival engagement with the help of student colleagues. Centenary College launched the course “Archival Explorations” in summer 2021 to study the institution’s racial history and the contributions of people of color from the college’s founding in 1825 to the present. The course guides undergraduate students through original research and creative projects, which are then presented to the public and transferred to the college archives. This work has led to discovering thousands of relevant documents across multiple archival repositories, recovering institutional history, and collecting oral history interviews. In addition, the student projects have helped Centenary highlight a more inclusive and honest history during other events. The Tulane University History Project, started in 2023, is an institutional effort to look into the school’s history and relationship with slavery, race and segregation, from the founding of the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834, to the present. Because of the large scope of the project, we are conducting research in multiple archives, working with community members to create an oral history archive of race at Tulane, and assisting a long-time community member organize their archive. As a small team, student colleagues are an invaluable part of the project, and they assist us on all fronts mentioned above, while also working on an independent, student-led project that seeks to creatively engage archival sources centering student experiences.
2:00 - 2:30 pm
History in Their Hands: Education Outreach at Amistad Research Center
Genesis Ranel, Melissa Smith
This summer Amistad Research Center re-launched our 6th-12th grade education outreach program Amistad on the Go! This curriculum was initially designed to teach students African American history using primary sources. With our re-launch we are teaching 6th-12th graders to be junior archivists through our collections. With engaging lessons focusing on topics like the history of New Orleans Bounce, Sports & Civil Rights, and the Amistad Case students will be exposed not just to critical thinking and historical analysis, but also archival skills such as meta data writing, finding aid and database navigation, and digital humanities. Amistad on the Go! is a free virtual curriculum that removes typical access barriers to our center, such as location and travel costs by bringing digital surrogates directly to the classroom. In addition to our curriculum, we are hosting a teacher training institute in partnership with Dr. Bryan Carter (University of Arizona, Digital Humanities Center) to train educators on utilizing Amistad on the Go! materials with digital humanities educational tools.
This presentation will share the Amistad on the Go! project, including development, future outreach and expansion plans, and project funding. We hope that by sharing this project we can partner with other archives and institutions to expand the content offered or assist other institutions in creating similar outreach programs.
2:34 - 3:35 pm
Mapping the Past: Georeferencing Archival Records from 19th Century Louisiana
Sarah Waits, Elizabeth Williams
Affiliated Institutions
Archdiocese of New Orleans; Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies UNO
Abstract
This panel presentation will highlight a research project that adds traditional archival research to HistoryForge, a crowdsourced web database. HistoryForge, designed by The History Center in Tompkins County, New York, links this archival data to the modern grid through georeferenced historical map layers, creating place-based and person-based records that can be amended by users over time. The end result is available to the public at no cost. Locating marginalized people in the official historical record is a constant problem, and finding enslaved people prior to emancipation is especially difficult. Most researchers are very familiar with the paucity of records prior to the 1870 US Census. However, in Louisiana, sacramental records from the Catholic Church catalog the names of thousands of enslaved individuals from the 18th and 19th centuries. These records of baptisms, marriages, and burials provide an excellent and often underutilized resource for historical research. By using the funeral records from rural parishes, including St. Thomas Church in Pointe-a-la-Hache, Louisiana, as well as Pension Records, United States Census Records, and Freedmen’s Bureau records for Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, we can physically locate individuals. The burial records provide key biographical data, and the civil records can corroborate this data and pinpoint an individual to a particular plantation or town. When those physical locations are logged into HistoryForge as metadata, we can connect individuals to a particular location over time. This combination of sources allows for a compilation of datasets that not only trace individuals and their family histories through the years, but also provides a broader snapshot of settlement and movement patterns during the second half of the nineteenth century. In time, it can be a resource for their descendants.
