View recording of this event on YouTube: Lane County History Museum

History Pub presents “I, Too, Am Eugene” featuring Mark Harris:

Monday, November 9
7:00–9:00 PM
Live via Zoom (RSVP Only)

Spaces to view this event are limited. Please use the form below to RSVP by November 9, 5:00 PM, and we’ll contact you with event details including information on how to join us via Zoom. (Information submitted in the form below will only be used by event organizers for the purpose of the November 9 event.) This event is cosponsored by the University of Oregon Department of History, Lane County History Museum, and Viking Braggot Company.

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I Too, Am Eugene

In 1997 Cheri Turpin created I Too, Am Eugene, a local multicultural history project. She meant multicultural in the sense that multicultural means non-white multiracial. In Mark’s professional career of mental health promotion and substance use disorder prevention, treatment, and recovery, multicultural is defined to be inclusive of race, multiple genders, class, drugs of choice, cultural recovery modality, health disparities, etc.

We acknowledge that most often multicultural is a code word for Black/African-American. The histories of this state, county, and city make them perfect learning laboratories to study systemic racism from the inside, and create innovations.

About the Speaker

Mark Harris, is a maroon griot, an African-American/Indigenous, healer, historian, storyteller, diplomat, musician, and poet. Maroon is a pre-Contact indigenous term in the Taino language, applied to the free African presence on this continent dating back nearly 3 millennia. Simply put: pyramid builders, “kick it” with other pyramid builders. The tradition of creating free complex urban, multiracial and multicultural societies, predates, discovery, colonization and the creation of the American “experiment”.

Cheri Turpin and Mark Harris, at Wiley Griffon Historical Monument, Eugene Masonic Cemetary

I Too, Am Eugene, in taking its name from a poem, from two-spirited Black Indigenous poet Langston Hughes, is simply following a tradition of attempting to tell all our stories, that may have been hidden, to enable greater freedom.

Mark Harris has taken the I Too, Am Eugene sections relevant to Black History, and applied them op-eds in the Eugene Weekly, Register Guard, award-winning KLCC 89.7 FM commentary, in Lane Community College’s Rites of Passage, LCC’s Ethnic Studies, LCC’s Black Student Union, University of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies, and various other projects underway.