Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting

January 15, 2022, 9:00-Noon

The Land and Spirit of St. Croix Recorded in Maps and Dance

Welcome

Elizabeth Rezende, President of Society of Virgin Islands Historians

State of the Society and Introduction of Officers, Members 9:00-9:45

Agenda

Presentations:

William Cleveland, PhD, Public and Non-Profit Administration Program, University of

Milwaukee, WI

St. Croix Sugar Industry Traced through Variations of the Map Created

Originally by Jens Michelsen Beck

Questions and Answers 9:50-10:35

Break 10:40-11:00

Cynthia Oliver, PhD, Associate Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of

Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL Performance-

Questions and Answers 11:05-11:50

Acknowledgments and Closing Remarks: President Rezende

We wish to acknowledge the Rotary Mid-Island and Liz Goggins for her IT support and

Fritzgerald Boezm, Jr., VI Port Authority.

Detail of mural at the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport by the students of the S.M.A.R.T. summer art program, 2012, under Cynthia Hatfield and Sunita Banwahree. Reproduced image courtesy of the Virgin Islands Port Authority.

About the Speakers

William Cleveland lived on St. Croix from 1987-1991. In 1988, as an assignment for Dr. Arnold Highfields's History of the Virgin Islands class at the University of Virgin Islands, he completed the first-known modern reconnaissance of all the windmill ruins on St. Croix. He used Beck’s map and a GPS system for spotting these architectural gems.

He then returned in 2020 to dust off the 30-year old research that was never published. He and a group of volunteers, including SVIH members, re-visited some of the sites. Cleveland plans to set up a 600 page data base of St. Croix windmills, accessible on the Internet.

Cleveland, after having earned his PhD in 2016, moved to Milwaukee where he teaches and works in digital media consulting and serves as a “Dead Cat Herder.” William.cleveland@gmail.com

Cynthia Oliver, who was born in New York and reared in St. Croix, danced throughout her school career with the Caribbean Dance Company. She holds a PhD from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She is a performance studies scholar and choreographer who has explored the range of the metaphysical Afro-Caribbean belief and reality, race and language of fashion, death and mourning to madness.

At Illinois, she was chair of the Gender and Women Studies Department. Most recently she has receive the 2021 Doris Duke Charitable Foundation award and the 2021 United States Fellow award as a performance- dance scholar. In 2009, she wrote Queen of the Virgins, published by the University Press of Mississippi, in which she explored the long- tradition of recognizing women as heads of their communities and selecting and honoring her as a queen. In today’s festivities, young women compete for an annual festival and carnival Queens. coliver@illinois.edu