Historical Recovery: Building a Practice of Narrative Return

Join The Third Place and Maine MILL for the next installment of Finding Place: Maine’s Black Presence Then and Now,

How can recovering and amplifying community histories deepen our sense of place, belonging, and connection to one another?

Drawing on the recent Interco(a)stal project, Meadow Dibble, Executive Director of Atlantic Black Box, explores new possibilities for engaging researchers, artists, and everyday people in uncovering and sharing the layered histories of the place we now call Maine, the Dawnland.

Meadow will be joined by Andrea Francis of Bomazeen Land Trust and Adilah Muhammad of The Third Place to expand on the concept of narrative return and what it means to recover, reclaim, and share historical narratives in collaboration with communities most impacted by colonization and slavery.

Together, they will reflect on how community-centered historical engagement can move beyond simply telling a more complete history to create opportunities for relationship-building, shared understanding, and meaningful collaboration. Their conversation will consider how narrative return can invite new communities into historical exploration, strengthen connections between institutions and the people they serve, and transform not only what we know about a place, but how we understand our relationship to it and to one another.

About Meadow Dibble

Meadow Dibble, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of Atlantic Black Box, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching and recovering New England’s connections to slavery and the global economy it helped sustain, while engaging communities in historical truth-telling, public memory, and racial justice. A writer, organizer, and public memory advocate, Meadow facilitates conversations and community-based initiatives that foster historical understanding, healing, and reconciliation. She previously served as a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and co-led Maine’s Place Justice initiative, which explored the relationship between place, historical memory, and racial justice.

www.atlanticblackbox.com

About Andrea Francis

Andrea (she/her) is a citizen of the Mi'kmaq Nation and the Elsipogtog First Nation. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Bomazeen Land Trust. Andrea hopes that her work with Bomazeen will promote connections that are inherent in Wabanaki health, land, and food sovereignty.

www.bomazeenlandtrust.org

About Adilah Muhammad

Adilah Muhammad is the Founder and Executive Director of The Third Place, a cross-sector network connecting Black professionals, students, and entrepreneurs to social, career, and economic opportunities. Prior to founding The Third Place, she worked as an independent strategic planning and research consultant, specializing in organizational development for ethnic and community-based organizations.

www.thethirdplace.me

This event is free and open to the general public.

A light refreshments will be provided.

About Finding Place

Finding Place: Maine’s Black Presence Then and Now was created to bring together historical research, storytelling, scholarship, and performance to make Maine’s Black history more visible and accessible in Lewiston-Auburn, ME. The project examines Black contributions to Maine’s maritime, economic, cultural, and community life while creating space for public learning and conversation across generations and communities.

The series launched at Bates College with Antonio Rocha’s Waves of Tears, Winds of Hope, which used performance and storytelling to illuminate Black presence within Maine’s maritime history. Finding Place continues throughout the fall with historians, scholars, artists, and community researchers whose work connects Maine’s past with questions of community, belonging, labor, memory, and place today.

Our intention: Belonging is shaped not only by where we live today, but often by whether we can see ourselves in the history of the place we call home. We seek to amplify these histories as a means of cultivating deeper connections and belonging to Maine as place – an oft overlooked strategy for recruitment and retention in predominantly white geographies.