Traces of a Heritage

The movie Traces of the Trade: Stories of the Deep North was touching and inspiring. It was touching because of their personal journey that was not an easy one. They were met with negative attitudes on both side of the color line, but they still continued forward toward their goal of understanding. 140 people that Katrina Brown sent out a letter to never replied to her, which shows that those people did not want to be a part of something she viewed as needing to be done. In Ghana, they meet an African woman who said that she hoped she would not meet any white people at the ceremony. The DeWolf descendents did not feel comfortable in Ghana, but I do not think they felt entirely comfortable in Rhode Island. When Katrina and the others started their journey, they started something that changed who they were.

While Katrina learns about Captain Mark Anthony DeWolf, the viewer is learning also. There were several aspects of his involvement in the slave trade that I have not seen before in most stories of the slave trade. The movie says that the slave trade was illegal for some time while Mark Anthony DeWolf was practicing it. An emphasis was placed on the view that everyone in town was involved in, and depended, on the slave trade. Multiple people said this, and although I believe them, it seemed a little like rationalization. Another fact brought up was that three generations of DeWolf took part in slave trading. Katrina says that was hard for her to hear, because she thought that someone would of realized what they were doing was wrong.

I think one of the things that I took away from this movie was a message to explore your own heritage. Katrina and the others took the iniative to go to an uncomfortable place with in themselves and challenge what they believed. It was not an easy process for them, and I think that questioning your self-identity is never an easy process, but I think it must be done. Another issue presented in the film is reparations. I do not think the film is giving the answer of performing reparations, whiping the slate clean for those with families that were involved with the slave trade, and forgetting the past. What Katrina is suggesting is that reparations is a good start for starting to undo the damage that the DeWolf family had caused. Reparations will not fix everything that is causing oppression for African-Americans, but it is a start.