Heritage Communities and Human Rights: A Case Study from Catoctin Furnace, Maryland

ABSTRACT The village of Catoctin Furnace, located in rural Maryland, in the United States, houses an early iron furnace site. Operational by 1776, its workforce in the early years was almost entirely enslaved African and African American people. A local non-profit, the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc. (CFHS), on the board of which one of the authors serves, has made the search for a descendant community of these enslaved and freed Black workers a principal focus, while also preserving the heritage of European labourers and trying to foster economic and cultural activity in the village. So far, no living, direct descendant of a person who was enslaved at Catoctin Furnace has been identified, meaning the site can be considered ‘orphan heritage’. Looking at the site through the lenses of orphan heritage and ‘fictive kinship’ provides an alternative analytical framework which may be usefully applied at other sites. This case study helps us understand the notion of ‘rights-based approaches’ and how site managers can handle the sometimes clashing needs and desires of different groups while balancing their respective rights to heritage and to other human rights, as well as the use of artistic modes of interpretation in democratising access to the past.


Introduction
An oral history interview conducted in 2019 was progressing well, with the narrator providing details about his youth growing up in Catoctin Furnace, working on the family farm, and attending the one-room village school. Discussing recent work undertaken by the historical society, the subject of the Catoctin Furnace African American cemetery entered the conversation. The 87-year-old narrator stated that he had not heard of the cemetery until a few years before, when the historical society began a re-analysis of remains recovered during archaeological investigations. He continued, 'I saw World War II German soldiers [prisoners of war] before I saw a Black man. There were no Black people in the area.' 1 The interviewer found this confession stunning but not surprising, given the legacy of erasure and obscuration of the enslaved and free Black labour force at the furnace. Here was yet another example of the tragedy of slavery writ large: namely, the erasure of the Black population and collective heritage from the area, manifest in the lack of an identified descendant community.
Thinking about rights-based approaches (RBA) in tandem with the concept of orphan heritage at Catoctin Furnace provides an opportunity to explore an alternative analytical framework for studying sites of forced labour and other human rights abuses, which may be applied to Catoctin Furnace as well as to other 'orphaned' or 'contested' heritage sites worldwide. It can also help us understand the notion of RBA in heritage. The key philosophy underlying RBA to heritage centres on the idea that all people have a right to remember, celebrate, use, and perpetuate their heritage, although such claims to heritage can clash and cause conflict. This article examines how a site can handle the sometimes clashing needs and desires of different stakeholder and descendant groups while respecting the right to heritage and how sites in search of their 'direct' descendant communities can support the right to heritage of communities who feel a connection via 'fictive kinship'. 2 Further, we explore the use of artistic modes of interpretation in democratising access to the past when a direct descendant community is scattered or unidentified. After a brief introduction to the site and a statement of methodology and positionality, the concepts of rights-based heritage and orphan heritage will be reviewed in terms of their applicability to sites related to the heritage of slavery in the United States. The article will then present various aspects of Catoctin Furnace's interpretation and research through the lenses of these heritage theories.

Historical Context and Methods
The Catoctin Iron Works was founded in 1776 at the base of the Catoctin Mountains in northern Frederick County, Maryland, in the US. The village of Catoctin Furnace is situated at the base of the east slope of Catoctin Mountain, where iron ore and limestone deposits are close to the surface. The prevailing narrative history of Catoctin Furnace is well documented: from 1776 to 1903 it was the site of an iron-making community, one which demonstrated the triumphs and tragedies of US industrial growth. Its founding during the American Revolution by the already well-connected Johnson brothers (respectively, an attorney, a banker, a politician, a London ship merchant, and an ironmaster) brought the family vast wealth and prosperity. Joshua Johnson's daughter, born Louisa Catherine Johnson, became the First Lady of the US as the wife of President John Quincy Adams. Joshua's brother, Thomas, became the first governor of the state of Maryland in 1777 and was a representative to the Maryland Convention that ratified the federal Constitution of the United States in 1788. Even as he was endeavouring towards freedom from Great Britain, Baker Thomas was the owner of the largest number of enslaved persons in Frederick County, Maryland.
At the middle of the nineteenth century, the furnace flourished as a self-contained iron-making community, with worker houses, a chapel, a sawmill, a grist mill, a company store, farms, an ore railroad, and three furnace stacks with peak production of 40 tons of pig iron per day. By the twentieth century the furnace could not keep up with the growth of large corporations that could produce iron more efficiently, and it ceased operation in 1903. Initially, enslaved workers provided at least half of the labour at the furnace and surrounding farms and homes of the furnace owners. It was only in the mid-1830s that use of enslaved labour started declining, to be replaced by immigrant workers from Europe. Thus, African and African American enslaved individuals played a vital role in supplying armaments for the American Revolution, fuelling industrial growth in the fledgling nation, and creating vast wealth for the furnace owners and their families.
Although some historians have investigated the topic of slavery in early American iron furnaces, 3 the role that Africans and African Americans, both enslaved and free, played in the early development of US industry remains understudied and under-acknowledged in US popular history, memory, heritage sites, museums, and heritage narratives. In recent years, much ground-breaking scholarly work has been conducted on the heritage of slavery at sites of captivity and violence, such as plantations 4 and urban landscapes such as slave markets, 5 among others. There has also been heated debate and analysis over how white slave-owners and defenders of slavery, such as Confederate generals, should be remembered and commemoratedor whether they deserve to be remembered at all. 6 Sometimes, such as in the case of gynaecologist J. Marion Sims, who operated inhumanely on enslaved women in the course of his research, there has been a movement to instead remember and commemorate the enslaved people who suffered for the cause of 'discoveries' such as his. 7 As Catoctin Furnace is a site that may bring to light the hitherto suppressed stories of African and African American skilled workers, especially considering its connections to the Johnson family, commemoration and heritage projects at the site thus hold potential to radically expand US conceptions of the daily lives and contributions of the enslaved in early US history, as well as, through facilitating RBA, complicating notions of whose stories are 'worth' telling.
The false perception of Catoctin Furnace as a white community of unchanged European heritage from the time of the Revolution was embraced as an origin story by twentieth-century residents, particularly during the American Bicentennial of 1976. This understanding began to change in the late 1970s, when an archaeological survey in advance of construction for a new highway alignment located a cemetery (18FR323), previously lost to history, containing the remains of African American furnace workers. The site was initially identified by residents as an 'Indian' burial ground, but acknowledgement of the role of Africans in the iron industry at Catoctin slowly evolved. The nascent preservation movement within and about the village had included the establishment, in 1973, of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc. (CFHS) among a group of village residents and neighbours from the surrounding area. The organisation, on the board of which one of the authors of this text now serves, rallied around the purchase and restoration of a log worker's house built in circa 1810 and began what is now a nearly five-decade preservation movement within the village. Indeed, in their fight against the destruction of the village in hopes of preserving the right to live in homes where the same families had lived for generations and preserving lifeways, we can identify an early embrace of RBA.
As the founding members of CFHS aged and died in the first decade of the twentyfirst century, the work of the historical society transferred to their children and grandchildren. The revitalised group immediately began a research program focused on rediscovery of the role of Africans and African Americans, enslaved and freed, at Catoctin Furnace. Much was known about the owners of the complex, but a narrative centred on the Africans and African Americans at the furnace did not exist. This became a primary focus of CFHS, along with a search for their descendant community, a tragic and glaring omission in the interpretation and understanding of the industrial complex so far. The motivation for these shifts included a desire for the site to be recognised as relevant in the wider community and to create economic viability through the heritage tourism sector.
The site's managers and stakeholders seek to balance the needs and desires of the temporally and geographically immediate community, on the one hand, with the responsibility that they have taken on to preserve and disseminate the memory of enslaved ironworkers to the world, on the other. This is evidenced on a formal level by their membership in the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience as well as the various partnerships they have entered into with research institutions around the US in order to learn and share as much as possible about this population of early US industrial workers. While the community of genealogical descendants, scattered as they are across the country and perhaps the globe, has yet to be definitively identified, when the matter is viewed through the theoretical lens of 'fictive kinship' 8 a wide swathe of the global African and African American community could consider themselves and be considered by others as inheritors of the legacy of ironwork at Catoctin Furnace. Yet the oppression and violence that this community was subjected to by the Johnson family and others cannot be ignored, either; in fact, acknowledging and communicating this violence, as well as the ways in which the enslaved and free populations fought to maintain their personhood and dignity, can be considered part of broader movements in US society that seek to tell a more accurate version of the country's history in tandem with more wide-reaching social justice and equality movements. In these ways, too, the programs of CFHS can be considered part of broader RBA to interpreting the legacies of power, labour, and mobility in the US.
Original research into the past workers of Catoctin Furnace has been ongoing since CFHS was founded. In the past decade, especially, basic research and data-grounded interpretation for public presentation included the previously ignored contributions of African Americans in the furnace industry. Reconstructing the history of the furnace's enslaved labourers and recognising their contributions to the Catoctin Furnace community became an essential part of reaching out to the African American community in Maryland and further afield. This outreach has been undertaken in order to vigorously invite, connect, and involve these communities in the interpretation and active presentation of history at Catoctin Furnace, in the surrounding region, and at other early industrial complexes in America, thus restoring a previously orphaned legacy.
We believe the programs undertaken at Catoctin Furnace can be viewed as an experimental template for new methods of engagement, with resultant potential for other heritage sites. The site is already a National Register Historic District, one of only two recognised Underground Railroad Network to Freedom sites in Frederick County, and the only International Coalition of Sites of Conscience location in the county, and future recognitionsuch as designation as part of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples initiative and/or National Historic Landmark statusis part of the historical society's strategic plan. Can the village become a conciliatory space that facilitates therapeutic encounters with a traumatic past while building economic opportunity and social consciousness for all? A selection of these factors and CFHS programs will be considered through various theoretical lenses, especially those pertaining to RBA. Knowledge transfer as a form of reparation is one inherent goal of the society, as is its dissemination as a form of prescriptive literature.
Various research methods were used at different times throughout the 8+ year period of activity summarised here, including detailed historical research, archaeology, participant observation, oral history interviews, and intimate knowledge of the village and its history. For this article, we have focused on a theoretical review of a portion of CFHS programs and their wider ramifications as they relate to human rights. In terms of positionality, the authors are both white women, the daughter and granddaughter of two founders of the CFHS; between us, we have years of experience in archaeology, museum curation, visitor relations/outreach, and academic research. We acknowledge that we have benefited and continue to benefit from the effects of systemic and institutionalised racism. We regard the work of re-analysing and reinterpreting the narrative of the village, with the guiding mission to reconnect with the descendant community of the enslaved and invite them to shape commemoration of their past, as a form of reparations in which we use our professional expertise to amplify the voices of the marginalised and facilitate community-led connections to the past.

Theoretical Background
Catoctin Furnace is a perfect case study for thinking through and understanding the concept of RBA to heritage at a site of former enslavement and violence. RBA are used in many sectors, especially development and aid. According to Thomas, 'The rights-based approach (RBA) to development can be defined as integrating the protection, promotion and fulfillment of human rights explicitly as the objective of development policy and programming'. 9 In the words of the 'short introduction' to the ICOMOS 10 document on RBA: Efforts to integrate rights-based approach thinking with conservation doctrine is about enabling individuals and local communities, with special focus on bottom-up processes. The aims are capacity building, awareness raising, empowerment, conflict resolution, and to support informed participation and management '. 11 Previous work on RBA 12 has covered topics as varied as the application of RBA to interpretation and preservation at World Heritage sites around the globe 13 and the issues that can arise when different conceptions of heritage and rights conflict. 14 In the words of Logan, 'However, the paradigm has shifted so that cultural heritage in both its formation and protection is now best seen as cultural practice and, like other forms of cultural practice, only understandable in the broad context of economic, social and political factors.' 15 In other words, the past is always political and contingent; at sites such as Catoctin Furnace, the current circumstances and beliefs of varied descendant communities must be considered when designing programming that utilises RBA.
Prior to ICOMOS's 2014 adoption of the RBA document, the idea of a 'right to heritage' could be viewed as having originated in Article 27 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights ('Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits'); 16 subsequent conventions had attempted to better define, among other aspects, the relationship between the rights of an individual and the rights of a group. 17 Since 1948, there has been a concurrent upswell of formerly and/or currently enslaved, colonised, and/or repressed groups advocating for the right to remember and participate in their own heritage freely. In this case study, these issues are reflected in efforts to interpret and publicise one village's heritage of slavery and industry alongside the heritage of later European workers.
It must also be noted that the right to some types of heritage, in some places, is explicitly disavowed by community members and sometimes legally forbidden (e.g., the ban on displaying Nazi symbols in contemporary Germany). In the US, this is visible in the tension surrounding the long-standing embrace of Confederate heritage by white Americans, particularly in the South. While some of these enthusiasts may truly believe in the 'two noble causes' rhetoric surrounding the American Civil War (i.e., the idea that both sides were fighting nobly for their beliefs), the fact remains that maintaining the institution of slavery was a major reason for the Confederacy's secession and war-waging. 18 Further, Confederate symbols are often used at white supremacist rallies, leading many to associate this heritage with a contemporary racist and violent political stance. 19 Especially in the last seven years, activists and communities both in the US and worldwide have heavily protested memorialisation of Confederate military leaders, prominent slaveholders/slave traders, and colonialists, among others, 20 while also advocating for the stories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to be treated as worthy of remembrance, preferably in ways that allow communities to interact with and tell their own stories. 21 Especially in light of Catoctin Furnace's physical proximity to the Ku Klux Klan stronghold in Rocky Ridge (discussed below) and the many Confederate flags displayed on houses in the area, the right to learn about and interact with the stories of enslaved industrial workers represents an inherently political movement spanning the 'right to remember' as well as the 'right to life, liberty, and security of the person' 22in this case, fighting to remember the lives of the enslaved while also living free from the threat of racist harassment, discrimination, and violence. This may be seen to conflict with the right to remember of those who claim Confederate heritage as their own, but one could argue that the hateful and violent rhetoric that often surrounds public displays of Confederate affinity violates other individuals' Article 3 rights and so invalidates that claim to heritage. This demonstrates the ongoing, global struggle to balance the individual right to heritage with other individual human rights outlined in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.
In light of these developments, the situation at Catoctin Furnace thus provides an opportunity to examine two aspects of the issue of RBA to heritage: the rights of the local community, who live in the immediate vicinity of the site and are mostly descended from the European immigrant workers, to celebrate what they perceive as their heritage and to derive economic as well as cultural benefit from visitorship to the site, as well as attempts by CFHS members and their collaborators across the country and globe to bring the heritage of the enslaved and free African and African American workers to the attention of the local and wider publics.
One example of a potentially healing and reparative heritage theory is 'orphan heritage'. Price defines orphan heritage as one in which ownership and location are separated, with World War I sites as primary examples. 23 African American communities are also often not tied to a distinct origin place due to the condition of diaspora and, at least in the case of Catoctin Furnace, by the lack of an identified descendant community. During a discussion of the concept of orphan heritage, a historical society member who is African American suggested that she felt orphaned from herself. In her view, slavery orphaned the enslaved and their descendants from themselves, removing agency and personhood. Another iteration of orphan heritage at Catoctin Furnace concerns the current white residents. While they might be interested in the heritage of the furnace, they have little connection with its origins and earliest labour. Yet Price's idea of orphan heritage also needs to be addressed in terms of how it may apply to sites where a community's heritage has been orphaned due to slavery or other types of repression. In his formulation: The most likely reason for the separation of ownership of heritage and ownership of location is war, and the aftermath of war. This can produce further conflict as the owners of the location become actively antagonistic towards the orphaned heritage, engaging in the destruction of the material; or it can simply mean that the owners of the location are passively disinterested and so enact no control in the way of codes of behaviour, policies of management, or protective legislation. 24 As many scholars of Black history and heritage, including those enumerated above, have demonstrated, there is no shortage of instances in which US institutions and individuals have been actively antagonistic towards or passively disinterested in the stories of Black Americans, let alone such stories told in their own voices. However, the manner in which the African American history and heritage of Catoctin Furnace came to be orphaned is different from Price's case studies in crucial ways. As mentioned above, systemic racism in the US has long contributed to the active suppression of African American history and heritage; 25 this destruction is not simply based on the outcome of a single violent conflict. Further, the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black Americans from their own family genealogies is a direct result of institutionalised family separation during slavery; therefore, many Black communities find deep value in 'fictive kinship' as well as in family relationships based on direct descent. 26 The next sections therefore explore strategies through which the site's stakeholders use history, heritage, and art to empower Black visitors, especially those who currently live in the surrounding area but cannot identify their individual ancestors, to feel a sense of fictive kinship so that, eventually, the heritage of Catoctin Furnace's enslaved workers is no longer orphaned. This may prove useful to site stakeholders worldwide working with communities who have similarly been disenfranchised of their heritage and are aiming to repair that harm.
Challenges in convincing local stakeholders that this history is worth preserving and communicating occur, as most society members and village residents are descendants of the later-arriving European immigrant workers and would prefer more of an emphasis on that heritage. The CFHS board and members are committed to performing 'small acts of repair' 27 by also turning the spotlight onto these overlooked and economically and socially marginalised European workers, but this commitment requires constant diplomacy, listening, and perseverance. Further, the village is economically depressed, so CFHS strives to ensure that activities benefit current resident stakeholders financially and culturally. The challenge consists of balancing the desires and needs of the local community with those of visitors and interested stakeholders, in the hope of helping develop best practices for orphan heritage at a site with human rights aspects. For this, it is useful to incorporate RBA theory regarding 'rights holders' and 'duty bearers'. In the words of Gready, 'Advocates of a rights-based approach attempt to alter relationships with their constituencies, constructing such individuals and groups as rights holders and their own agencies as duty bearers'. 28 In this sense, CFHS may be seen as the duty bearer for Catoctin Furnace's interpretation and preservation, but a duty bearer beholden to and working in tandem with the different groups of rights holders who claim the site as their heritage.

(Re)Presenting Slavery: Conflict and Balance in the Village
In preparation for the annual 'Spring in the Village' event in 2018, a new African American member of the historical society asked a member blacksmith to make her some shackles. She wanted to interpret the life of an enslaved washerwoman during the event and to wear a shackle that demonstrated that she was not to be trusted and had previously attempted to seek her freedom. The blacksmith was initially very uncomfortable with this request, but, as he began forging the shackles, he considered the likelihood that an enslaved blacksmith at Catoctin would have been forced to make shackles for himself, his family members, and/or his friends, and he began to feel the importance of the process both for himself and for the member willing to undertake this difficult interpretive task.
As soon as word circulated that someone would be wearing shackles during the annual Spring in the Village event, distraught historical society members voiced concerns such as: 'families with children will be there to enjoy a spring day, and they will not want to see someone in shackles', 'we keep saying how important authenticity is, and how do we know there were ever shackles used at Catoctin Furnace?', and 'if shackles haven't been found archaeologically, then we cannot allow them in the interpretation'. White members were very vocal in their opinion that a visible manifestation of slavery was not appropriate and would in fact ruin the event and visitors' experience. While acknowledging the objections, CFHS board members persevered in support of the interpretation. On the event day, the African American interpreter stayed on the front porch of the main historical house, washing clothes and hanging them on the fence. Her shackles were front and centre, visible to every visitor as well to motorists driving through the village. People tried not to stare, and some were visibly uncomfortable.
This episode demonstrates the confrontation between the two visions of Catoctin Furnace's past. A member who wished to represent the lived experience of enslaved labourers at the furnace was opposed by other members who did not wish this 'traditional' celebration of village crafts and heritage to include a confronting visual of unfreedom. The issue was further confounded by the question of historical accuracy: was it proven that anyone at Catoctin Furnace had been forced to wear shackles? The issue of art as a conveyor of historical 'truth' will be further explored below, but, in this case, the interpreter was using a widely recognised and viscerally emotional symbol of slavery to tie the experience of the enslaved at Catoctin Furnace to wider narratives of US slavery, speaking to a truth beyond the specificities of whether a certain item ever existed at this particular site. Further, in illustrating a type of physical bondage that certainly was inflicted during slavery writ large, the shackles can be seen as speaking to the truth of the experiences of the broader African American community, thus extending Catoctin Furnace's fictive kin community to an ever-larger audience. Although RBA suggest that each group has a right to celebrate their heritage as they see fit, in this case CFHS leadership decided that the depiction of slavery at the site desired by some members of the community served broader goals of social justice and reparation, and that, although its inclusion would upset an idyllic depiction of the past that other village descendants preferred, it was important to allow the performance to go forward. This exemplifies the types of dilemmas institutions face when balancing different rights to heritage against each other.
It is important to note that 1995 and 1997 newspaper articles document that nearby Rocky Ridge was the home of Roger Kelly, the 'imperial wizard of the invisible empire' of the Ku Klux Klan, and that a house on Kelly's Store Road in Catoctin Furnace was the home of Donald Toms, who was also associated with the Klan. 29 The inclusion of an interpretation of slavery as part of the Spring in the Village event broke a barrier: it began, in a small but significant way, a loosening of the European immigrant lock on historical interpretation in the village, activating acknowledgment of the dark heritage of Catoctin Furnace instead. Until then, the absence of personal and collective memory of African American history at Catoctin Furnace had obscured that past.
Multiple programs undertaken by CFHS are providing new methods for engagement, as enumerated in the next section. They form an evolving and innovative collection of activist and participatory approaches to heritage management and heritage inclusion that can be replicated, instrumentalised, and incorporated in other settings with the goal of appropriately acknowledging and honouring historically marginalised groups. At Catoctin, this is aimed at both the current residents and the descendants of those wronged by the site in both the past and the present. 30 While CFHS has not collected research data to gauge the impact of individual methods of engagement, anecdotal feedback from visitors to the Museum of the Ironworker and events such as the Maryland Iron Festival have provided valuable results. One recent example is a newspaper article that included an interview with an African American visitor (who has since become a member of the historical society) who, when asked about the emotions she felt being at Catoctin Furnace, said she was proud of the work: 'It's actually a source of pride uncovering the good work that [the enslaved ironworkers] did'. 31 Other visitors have opined about the effectiveness of the programming, utilising the museum's visitor register to record their feelings and observations.
Exploring questions about the effects of these efforts is paramount. Can the program help foster a fictive kinship in lieu of, and to expand, the possibility of discovering a direct descendant community, perhaps 'un-orphaning' previously orphan heritage? Can multiple social, cultural, political, and economic narratives operate at once, and can human rights that at first glance seem to conflict be brought into an equitable harmony? The incorporation of social justice, seizing of intellectual power and of control of the dialogue by the previously excluded and overlooked population, and determination of the African American descendant community to exercise agency over the narrative are all elements of this reparative endeavour. Ultimately, the experiences at Catoctin Furnace should help participants, including visitors, students, descendants, and CFHS members, locate their perspectives and places in the work to be done for racial justice by learning to tell inclusive stories, recognising realities, and connecting commonalities as part of 'American' identity.
Laurajane Smith has suggested that heritage sites and museums provide an 'affective experience', where people go to feel, not just to learn or have an educational experience. 32 Gokcigdem suggests that museums can dedicate themselves to the creation of experiences which promote empathy and affective concern as a way to strengthen society and heal broken social fabric. 33 Specifically, she proposes ways in which museums can create transformative learning experiences to benefit society through positive behaviour change, caring mindsets, and compassionate worldviews that value all humanity. 34 In South Africa, however, Gachago and others found that deep-rooted 'knowledge in the blood' 35 was responsible for preventing engagement by their students across differences and limiting empathic responses to difficult experiences shared through digital storytelling. 36 The authors postulate that the opportunity for active empathy in a museum setting may be similarly limited by the 'complexities of an affective engagement with other people's stories' and that it is difficult to move beyond the personal. 37 Australia's 'Living Memory' video recording module invites a visitor to contribute personal stories but requires a fixed emotive theme of feeling rather than facts. 38 Undertaken at three museum and heritage spaces, its affective approach promoted meaningful engagement and greater inclusiveness of diverse stories; however, the results also demonstrated that storytelling can produce a surprising counter-narrative, even within seemingly safe and conventional topics. 39 The challenges of a 'new engagement' in Catoctin Furnace, informed by education-based and museum practices, also reveal the effectiveness of emotion as a tool for engaging visitors. The critical question is: can in-person museum exhibits and the arts foster an affective experience that teaches human rights from human wrongs and even goes some way to repairing past and present wrongs? Catoctin Furnace is emblematic of the ongoing tragedy of slavery in that the primary heritage narrative previously eradicated the lives and legacy of the African American population and resulted in the erasure of any collective memory of their contribution. However, the ancestors of the village's current residents were labourers in the sweated trades, not the furnace owners and managers. In many ways the current community is very similar to other marginalised communities in the US, which perceive that they have been left behind and forgotten in the twenty-first century. Economically, some residents are barely above poverty level, and there has been significant opioid addiction, as is unfortunately the case in poverty-stricken areas across the US. It has become apparent that the historical society must provide economic opportunities and hope for village residents as well.
We argue that the lessons learned and applied at Catoctin Furnace can be replicated in other museums to create strong programs that incorporate a heavily involved local community as well as a broader regional, national, or even international community. Such programs can help sustain heritage resources and ensure such resources remain relevant to society. While these forms of participatory heritage will likely be more time-consuming for museums, and perhaps even more expensive in the short term, they provide significant intangible benefits in the long term, not least facilitating the right to celebrate a heritage and history that have been deliberately oppressed.

New Methods of Engagement: Bridging Archaeology, History, and Art
The new methods of engagement at Catoctin Furnace create a visitor experience that includes significant points of African American heritage, reconstructing the history of all of the furnace's labourers and recognising their contributions to the furnace and the village. We reach out to contemporary African American communities and invite them to become involved in the interpretation and presentation of history and heritage at Catoctin Furnace, in Central Maryland, and at other early industrial complexes in the US.
Costumed living history events at archaeological sites may seem to be an unfortunate 'Disneyfication' of heritage. However, the careful incorporation of living history characters, such as the interpretation of a shackled washerwoman, profiled above, provides a platform to expand well-researched and meaningful site interpretation to a wider audience. The key is control of the narrative and an insistence on authenticity. 'Spirits of the Furnace', a guided night-time walk through the furnace village, is rooted in detailed historical research and presents an accurate retelling of actual village events. When the event began more than 18 years ago, the characters were all Anglo-American. Working with Silver Oak students, who attend a residential program for at-risk youth, the 'Spirits' programme was revamped to incorporate enslaved African characters in various scenes. These include the burial of a fellow enslaved worker who received no medical attention and died after a runaway wagon accident, a butler in the Ironmaster's Mansion directing 39 Ibid., 298-300. the other servants in dinner preparation, and a freedom seeker brought back to Catoctin following his escape to Pennsylvania. The research and the historically accurate portrayal of these incidents within the lives of furnace workers and village residents have been very rewarding for the actors, visitors, and historical society members and volunteers. The information gleaned by the students and the lessons built into the living history interpretation at Catoctin have changed the narrative forever.
Another new method of engagement at Catoctin Furnace is the exploration of civically inflected art, specifically poetry, as a methodology for reaching a larger and more diverse audience. Catoctin SlaveSpeak, written by Elayne Bond Hyman, is a collection of narrative poems in the voices of enslaved Africans who were imported from Africa to work at Catoctin Furnace. 40 They are based on archaeological and forensic anthropological evidence resulting from the excavations undertaken in the late 1970s. The author spent many hours 'walking the earth, visiting the cemetery, studying archaeological and forensic evidence, engaging in quiet listening, and acknowledging intuitive knowing'. 41 Her narrative poems are an inspiring and compelling part of the rediscovery of the lost legacy of African Americans in Catoctin Furnace. A rare example of poetry of and about the archaeological and interpretive process, Catoctin SlaveSpeak can enhance and expand the reach, support, and impact of the historical society.
In a related example, the arts are incorporated within the curriculum of the Australian Independent Schools Victoria (ISV) education system with the goal that artistic expression will serve as civic inspiration and engagement. In 'Art as Civic Inspiration', Perkins argues that such encounters with art need to create more than the impact of imbibing the work (what he calls the 'landing pad'). 42 The encounter needs to be a starting point for discussion, reflection, and exploration (the 'launching pad'). 43 Because poetry can engage affect and emotion, it can be a launching pad for interpretation, including the archaeological. Writing about spoken-word performances and slam poetry, Wells and DeLeon note that these forms of presentation are highly effective at invoking specific responses through 'the engagement of the audience who, through emotional connection, become participants more than a [sic] spectators […] This communication between performer and audience connects them at a personal level and allows audience members to internalize the arguments expressed'. 44 A third strategy CFHS has adopted recently is the release of research results through more popular contexts. Until 2020, CFHS produced most of its research at the formal level, as research papers at various professional symposia and articles published in the peer-reviewed publications of a variety of professional disciplines. The formal context is the recognised seat of validation for knowledge in our rationalist society. It is a national and sometimes international forum, which can also reach researchers in related or complementary fields. Its primary disadvantages are the high threshold of training required to access the information in such papers and removal of emotion or affect from the data presented, a convention strongly enforced in academic contexts and reinforced by the use of specific technical language in its presentation. To counteract the first disadvantage, CFHS has made a concerted effort to also release research results through media such as newspaper articles, newsletters, websites, trailside panels and tourist pamphlets, and community partnerships. The advantage of these popular contexts is that they reach a more diverse audience, although that audience is usually more restricted geographically and demographically. The primary disadvantage is that, as decades of research have shown, such presentations have limited control over the actual knowledge absorbed by the recipients, who have their own agency. 45 In short, even vernacular presentation rarely invokes critical engagement from the participants, often provides easily forgotten or ignored changes to their understanding of the subject, and rarely motivates them to change their worldview by incorporating the new information. It is difficult for formal and popular or common communications to evoke an emotional, and perhaps mind-changing, response by leading visitors to contemplate the human rights issues at stake in their own community's past or through 'prosthetic memory', in which unrelated individuals come to feel connected to another past and develop empathy for the suffering of others through emotional engagement. 46 In contrast, information consistently presented at the individual or interactive level can evoke specifically desired feelings and associations, the way the soundtrack of a movie helps to shape the viewer's reception of a filmed exchange or sequence. Presentations with deliberately crafted affect, such as poetry, work at the level of the individual, through emotional impact, often providing more motivation for critical thought than the dry facts presented in an academic paper or the generalised sense of 'other' provided in printed pamphlets or wayside panels. This has clear ramifications for those managing sites worldwide who may find using emotional, artistic approaches helpful tools to allow previously marginalised communities to express their own heritage as well as to educate about the past with an eye to human rights issues.
To illustrate this point, the same data from Catoctin Furnace are presented here in three formsformal, popular, and affective: Slavebones crunched with iron chains slavemarrow feeds us now.' 49 The inclusion of poetry in the reinterpretation of the cemetery was not planned or obvious for CFHS. It began with a visit by a group of the historical society's members to the Smithsonian Institution, which houses the remains of those exhumed from the Catoctin Furnace African American cemetery. The group included Elayne Bond Hyman, a retired Presbyterian minister who identifies as a mixed-blood woman of Native and African descent from East Coast tidewater and woodland tribes (Chickahominy, Nottaway, and Tuscarora). During the visit, Bond Hyman said a prayer over the remains and later recounted that the experience included what she interpreted as a request for the buried workers' story to be told. Her connection continued as she visited the cemetery site and felt compelled to write about specific people described within the archaeological record. We believe that the power of poetry to express the archaeological process is present in Bond Hyman's poem 'The Greatful Dead', and that it is an example of poetry as a launching pad for triggering empathy and a possible orientation towards righting human rights abuses of the past and present: By calling out our names at the sound of the chapel bell we are remembered. By keeping watch over the earth, our sacred place, we are honored. By studying our bones, dug up and reassembled, we are made human. By reciting our stories, spoken in the language of poetry, we are resurrected. Many generations who come upon us will know we are full of greatness! 50 With the addition of civically inflected poetry, CFHS releases its research into three important contexts: the formal or academic context, the common or popular context, and the individual or interactive context. Poetry and spoken-word performances strengthen outreach in the latter context through arts events which inspire the individual to engage with the history on an emotional level and to thus critically examine both the interpretation CFHS provides and their own subconsciously held cultural beliefs about the history. Commissioning a poet who feels a deep connection to the site's heritage of slavery to author a poem addressing some aspects of the data uncovered and present it in an interactive and, above all, affective channel, is meant to engage the empathy of the audience and motivate them to think critically about both the history and the present interpretation of that history. This allows those who feel a connection to all types of heritage at Catoctin Furnace to develop a sense of empathy, based in emotion, that may well change their views about the importance of fighting for the human rights of those marginalised right nowthough this is not a given, as discussed above. Such poetry can provide a fuller story of archaeological and historical interpretation, based in a re-opened connection to a past that the author should always have had the right to 49 Bond Hyman (n 40) excerpt from 'Testimony of the Trees' 6. © Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc, all rights reserved. 50 Ibid., 'The Greatful Dead' 22. © Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc, all rights reserved. access; thus, it also helps rectify the previous deliberate orphaning of that heritage through denying a community access to it. This artistic, emotional, and poetic enrichment can be a model for a changing conversation to reach an expanded audience and broaden the rights-based effect of public archaeology.

Conclusion
In 2019, during the discussion period after a presentation one of the authors made about work at Catoctin Furnace, an audience member asked why she, a white, middle-aged woman, was doing this work. Before she could answer, another audience member said that the research and its dissemination were a form of knowledge transfer as reparations. The effects of enslavement on the African American population in the US have been intergenerational, and attempting to reverse them will be as well. A growing body of literature makes moral, historical, legal, and economic arguments for Black reparations. Reparations would be an acknowledgment of the harms of slavery, a restitution of resources that have long been denied to people affected by slavery over generations, and a type of partial closure to profound injustices that the country has long neglected. One aspect of reparations would be the restoration of the right of Black Americans to learn about and value their pastin other words, the restoration of their right to their heritage. What CFHS and its partners engage in every day can therefore be viewed as not just RBA, but a small step towards righting past wrongs and returning previously orphaned heritage to kin, whether genealogical or fictive.
At Catoctin Furnace, the research and interpretation activities are reconnecting the furnace's enslaved labourers with a descendant community, reconnecting young people to the past, reconnecting with a population who feels they are being left behind economically and societally, and helping the historical society gain confidence and agency as a keeper of collective memory. The potential of our new methods of engagement lies in their potential for connecting individuals to the critical contributions made by collective ancestors to the young US and helping them realise that they, too, have a role and contribution to make today. We hope that these lessons can be applied to other sites, so that individuals become involved in hands-on community engagement activities that strengthen the interpretation and presentation of history and contribute to the successful management of cultural sites.
In sum, the situation at Catoctin Furnace reveals a delicate balancing act in which stakeholders, managers, and community members must engage if they aim to not only preserve the past for the past's sake but utilise the past in the interests of furthering contemporary missions of social justice, equality, and equity. This speaks directly to the mission of RBA and explicates methods through which sites with multiple pasts and multiple stakeholders, some of whom may hold conflicting views of the past and how it should be remembered, can develop research and programming that respects everyone while seeking to repair historic and contemporary injustices. In order to honour the legacies of all of Catoctin Furnace's workers and inhabitants, the historical society and the community must tell all sides of the story, including those that might be considered shameful or uncomfortable by some stakeholders. Through current programming and events, the immediately local community, with their genealogical and cultural ties to the second wave of furnace workers, have the opportunity to remember and honour their cultural legacies, such as foodways and crafts, while gleaning economic benefits from the increased number of visitors who come to Catoctin Furnace since its rebirth as a true 'heritage site'. 51 In this way, CFHS is building the foundation for both genealogical and fictive kin descendants to discover their links to Catoctin Furnace, inviting people to reclaim the heritage to which ICOMOS has stated, through the RBA document, they have a right to enjoy and perpetuate. This becomes an especially human-rights-oriented action when the village's surrounding, heavily conservative cultural context is considered. In that spirit, CFHS also encourages artistic interventions on and interactions with the past in order to discover new dimensions of the truth of lived experience on the site and as part of the experience of marginalised communities across the US. The site's programming can be viewed as an experimental model for reconciling different heritage-based claims to a site and mobilising them for goals that respect the right to heritage as well as the rights to 'life, liberty, and security of the person'. Despite the challenges involved when any disparate group of people gets together, the example of Catoctin Furnace shows that it is possible for different groups to share their claim on the past and work towards a collaborative community that challenges and widens received meanings of what it is to belong.
for Industrial Archeology; Maryland Humanities; Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area; Maryland Heritage Areas Authority; First Energy Foundation; and Woodsboro Bank. Support for writing the article was also provided by the project 'Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena', which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 853385).