Changing Interpretations

MONTHS AGO, AS COLLEAGUES AND I

were planning this issue, I was excited to research a story about a successful author from the 1920s with deep Michigan ties. However, as I dove into his collection, I became increasingly uncomfortable.

For example, in several archived documents, the author maintained he graduated from the University of Michigan, even though he never did. He boasted that he held the record for a bicycle mileage record, which was also false. His biography hinted that, even though he wrote about places through first-person accounts as if he’d been there, he often had never set foot in those locations. It’s likely he also fabricated “facts” around one of his most popular magazine articles. I shelved the story in favor of doing more

research, which is why I’m not naming the author here in these notes. Primary sources like those found at the Bentley and other archives are evidence in the historical record—while stories like the kind in this magazine are one way of interpreting that evidence. And interpretation can be a tricky thing. The challenges of interpretation can be found throughout this issue, including our story about the University of Michigan’s abortion counseling services in the early (Top) The 2022 1970s, when abortion was illegal in the Kalayaan gather- state before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe ing, the largest v. Wade decision. Filipino American Documents show how U-M staffers counevent in Michigan, seled women with unwanted pregnanincluded members cies by guiding them toward safe, vetted of a U-M initiative clinics in New York state, where abortion to decolonize Phil- was legal. Archived papers illustrate how ippine collections lawyers, clergy, and University leadership across campus. wrestled with whether this interpretation (Left) Two unnamed Filipino girls posing in of the law was best the way to serve women as they navigated a complicated space. (No word on whether U-M will once again offer ferns, possibly such counseling services now that Roe v. unwillingly, illusWade has been overturned.) trate the need In our features, you’ll find a story about for reparative a painting that came to the Bentley in scholarship. 2013, and which may have been mislabeled because neither the archive nor the donor knew its cultural context or significance. The painting is part of a larger discussion about the archive’s numerous collections from the Philippines, many of which contain harmful and racist material. In the past, collectors of such materials may have been heralded as globe-trotting heroes. But, today, new archival efforts to decolonize and reexamine these collections (and the people who created them) are changing the lens on this kind of interpretation.

The Bentley’s former director, Terry McDonald, always said that the interpretation of history—of what’s in the archive and beyond—changes as a result of the present, not the past. “The interpretation of the past by one generation is replaced by that of another,” he wrote in 2021. “And that could, does, and probably should happen again and again.”

The stories in this magazine about the materials at the Bentley, and our interpretation of what they might mean, continue to change as well.