Volume 18, Number 1, Fall 2007

Exploring Local Culture in Tustin
4-H’ers Learn About Culture Close to Home Through FOLKPATTERNS

LuAnne Kozma

If you gave a local cultural tour of your community, what would you share? What people, places and traditions make your community culturally unique?

4-H teens and leaders at the Global and Cultural Education workshop at Kettunen Center in April 2007 learned firsthand how to document local culture using the techniques of the FOLKPATTERNS project. The northern Michigan community of Tustin in Osceola County is the home of the 4-H leader training facility, Kettunen Center. For decades, 4-H youth, volunteer leaders and staff have gathered at Kettunen Center for training and fellowship. What better way to document local culture and traditions than to start with Tustin?

The group made the short trek to town and met with people in their homes and places of work. They visited a sawmill, a cedar fan carver, the local grocery store where jerky and sausage are made, a three-generation hardware store, the Pine River Museum and a sampling of local farmsteads.

Interviews with local people are at the heart of any documentation effort.

“We actually were able to ask each person questions and they were all friendly and willing to share information with us,” said one teen. “I was impressed by the amount of pride in his or her trade each person possessed. The emphasis at each place was on family connection. Each person mentioned either learning their trade, inheriting their business from a relative or being positively influenced by a relative.”

The local history museum was packed with artifacts important to the community, and serves as a portal to the life ways, traditions, occupations, history and interests of the people who have called Tustin home over the years.

“I was the most fascinated by our stop at the Pine River Museum in Tustin,” said one participant. “Seeing tangible pieces of history that members of the community donated made everything else we heard about real.”

Six hours, six taped interviews and 600 digital photographs later, the group headed back to Kettunen Center to download and organize the information. Participants put together a visual presentation for everyone attending the workshop, complete with sampling some of the local cuisine of Powell Grocery’s meat specialties—smoked jerky, various kinds of sausages and meat spreads and a local favorite, Swedish potato sausage.

Participants contributed their photographs, captions and descriptions of their experiences for a Cultural Tour of Tustin Web site. You can take the tour by visiting http://museum.msu.edu/s-program/folkpatterns/models/tustin/index.htm. The next time you attend a workshop at Kettunen Center, be sure to sample the local culture.

In Michigan 4-H, this opportunity is everywhere and anywhere we live. Every community has local traditions and heritage to explore and document. Discovering these traditions in your own families and communities connects kids to their own heritage and community life and the multicultural world in which we live. To learn how to start your own Local Culture Tour, contact me at the MSU Museum at kozma@msu.edu.