I have been thinking a lot about movement in recent months. This summer, I moved from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to Tacoma, Washington to begin my new job as University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Pacific Lutheran University. PLU was founded by Norwegian immigrants in 1890 and the University remains closely linked in many ways to that Scandinavian heritage, even as the student body grows more diverse each year (in the 2018-19 academic year, 45% of students self-identify as students of color).

Among the holdings now under my stewardship is the Scandinavian Immigrant Experience (SIE) Collection. Largely the result of the work of Janet E. Rasmussen for her book New Land, New Lives: Scandinavian Immigrants in the Pacific Northwest, the collection is centered around 282 oral history interviews Rasmussen and her students conducted with Scandinavians who emigrated between 1900 and 1930, immediately or eventually settling in the Pacific Northwest.

Founder and first president of Pacific Lutheran University, Reverend Bjug Harstad, with family, 1895. Harstad immigrated to the United States from Norway in 1861.

Slind family passport photograph. The family emigrated from Norway in 1922. The oral history of the eldest daughter, Christine Slind Emerson, is part of the SIE Collection.

According to Rasmussen, more than 150,000 Scandinavians settled in the area between 1890 and 1910. By 1910, they made up over 20% of Washington state’s foreign-born population. These oral histories provide an intimate look into the personal experiences of the individuals behind these numbers. While no two interviews are alike, they all touch on the topics of what brought them to the US, their experience acclimating to their new home, and the work they found. Existing at the intersection of immigrant, local, and labor history, the SIE Collection can inform a range of research topics. Also included in the collection are diaries, correspondence, family photographs, and other items that provide evidence of their journey west along with newspapers circulated within Scandinavian communities in and around Tacoma.

My own journey west coincided with increased media attention to the detention and separation of immigrant families under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy wound their way through the legal system and calls for the abolishment of ICE gained traction.

My new home, Tacoma, is the site of one of the largest of ICE’s detention centers (the Northwest Detention Center, NWDC). Operated by the GEO Group, Inc., a for-profit prison company that receives $32 million a year from the federal government for immigrant detention, the facility can house 1,575 detainees and up to 200 people, many of them seeking asylum, are transferred monthly from the US-Mexico border. In July, 170 NWDC detainees staged a three day hunger strike to protest the separation of immigrant families. Other hunger strikes have taken place at the facility in recent years to draw attention to issues like insufficient healthcare and lengthy hearing delays. In 2017, Washington State sued the GEO Group over their “long standing failure to adequately pay detainees for their work.” The company’s practice has been to pay $1.00 per day for labor necessary to NWDC operations.

ICE, created in 2003, is the arm of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for enforcement and removal operations. In fiscal year 2017, ICE made 143,470 arrests and 226,119 removals. As of November 2017, ICE reported the average daily population in its detention centers across the country as 39,322 people (with 71% being held in facilities operated by private companies). Since 2010, 74 people have died while in ICE custody and 1,448 allegations of sexual abuse were reported between 2012 and 2018.

Sven Fredrickson (middle, standing) with family (left) and working on construction of the Oklahoma City courthouse (right). Sven emigrated from Sweden in 1923 and worked in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and Arkansas before eventually settling in the Puget Sound area. His oral history is part of the SIE Collection.

The Stavangerfjord, 1929, the ship on which Torvald Opsal crossed the Atlantic at the age of 18 when emigrating from Norway. His oral history is part of the SIE Collection.

In the current political climate, I, like many others, have questioned my work and its broader social implications. What are my responsibilities not just as an archivist but as a citizen, a community member, and a part of the higher education system? I feel a particular obligation to rethink my pedagogy, as I am often tasked with introducing students to archives for the first time. Archival instruction can be about so much more than the show and tell. These are opportunities for us to introduce students to research values and skills aimed at seeking truth and justice rather than focused on a particular academic exercise. How can I engage students by connecting local holdings to the broader issues they see on campus or hear about in the news? How can I discuss archival absences and what they mean for the historical record? How can I illustrate the potential power of archives to hold institutions accountable?

By using the SIE Collection as a starting point, students can engage in discussions about immigration more broadly. How has immigration policy in the US impacted historically marginalized groups? How does the experience of those arriving in the US today differ from what is documented in the SIE Collection? What factors drew Scandinavian immigrants to the US and what factors impact migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees today? How did white settlers and immigrants shape Washington and displace indigenous populations?  Drawing upon primary sources to inform and enhance a current news topic allows students to see the archives as a valuable resource as they engage in the research process for both academic and non-academic purposes.

Beginning in 2017, the National Archives and Records Administration faced backlash when it was revealed that the agency gave preliminary permission to ICE to classify 11 item categories as “temporary” including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement, and deaths of detainees in their custody. I have begun incorporating this controversy into instruction sessions as a way to encourage discussion about the power of archives and our collective responsibility to demand their transparency and accountability. After asking students to share their expectations about where archives exist, what they hold, and who their users might be, the following questions help guide discussion:

• ICE has been in the news, both locally and nationally, this year. What do you know about that agency?
• What kinds of records do you think they create?
• Do you think it is important for those records to be preserved?
• Who might use those records?
   

I then describe the proposed schedule changes and how public pressure was effectively applied. Not only does this example challenge their expectations, it frames archives as resources that can be growing and changing and immediately relevant. But, like the institutions in which they exist, they can be flawed, biased, and designed to perpetuate conventional power structures.

Anna Trammell recently began as the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Previously, she was an archivist at the University of Illinois Archives Research Center/Student Life and Culture Archives.