Four University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) master’s students are currently working with U-M’s Detroit River Story Lab to highlight the history of the Detroit River and surrounding communities. 

“The river is the lifeblood of Detroit. The more I learn [about the river], the more important I’ve learned it is [to the city],” said Natasha Vatalaro, a SEAS master’s student and Detroit native. 

David Porter, U-M professor of English and comparative literature, became aware of the significant number of community organizations in the Detroit River region that were actively working on centering the river as a site for community-based storytelling and was inspired to launch the Story Lab. 

“We hope to show how an institution like the University of Michigan can leverage our resources in support of community-based efforts in narrative place making,” he said. “We build stages for communities to elevate and amplify the place-based stories that are important to them.”

The Detroit River Story Lab’s projects span three overlapping components of narrative infrastructure: place-based education, community heritage and nonprofit journalism. In each of these areas, the Story Lab works alongside partner organizations to help gather, contextualize, and share river-related stories in ways that align with community priorities and activate riverside locations as sites of connection, stewardship and healing.

“It is essential to tell place-based stories to ground people to place and history,” said Ashley Jankowski, a SEAS master’s student.

SEAS master’s student Naomi Cutler noted there is an inherent connection between the Story Lab and SEAS because of the mutual interdisciplinary focus. 

“SEAS students are interested in outdoor education, which is a big part of the Story Lab,” she said. “We also like research based in the real world.” 

 According to Porter, a good number of stories about the river that local Detroit communities find important have to do with narratives of environmental degradation and restoration. 

“We highlight that in our education, journalism and historical narratives,” he said. “My impression has been that a good number of students from SEAS recognize that the community dimension of the work they want to do [in the environmental field] are all about narrative infrastructure.”

Updating signage at the Historic Fort Wayne

SEAS master’s student Skyler Leslie is currently working with the Story Lab to update the signage at the Historic Fort Wayne, located on the bank of the Detroit River and just 10 miles from where she grew up. 

Leslie estimates the signs at the Fort have not been changed since the early 1990s.

“It is not that the signs are not accurate. It is that the themes highlighted via the signs do not give a full picture of the history of the site,” she said. 

In addition to the Fort’s military history, the site has an Indigenous burial mound located on the grounds, and the site played a role in the Underground Railroad, according to Leslie. 

“We are trying to peel back layers of history at the site and make it a community asset. People want to engage with the history that they have experienced themselves,” she said. “We want to uplift more local aspects of history: issues that have to do with race, border crossing, Indigenous histories and Latinx histories.” 

Leslie hopes that the updated signs will support public education around the history of the site, and recontextualize the many different layers of history. 

Digital cartography

Cutler also is working on a project for the Story Lab related to the layers of history at the Detroit River, through a digital cartography project. Her online map has interactive layers where users can look at different historical maps of the river across time. 

Cutler says that to understand the environment, it is important to understand the history of a site—past, present and future.

“I hope this project inspires people to be excited about the history of Detroit and how [the river] has changed over time, since it has gone through so many ups and downs and phases,” she said. 

Environmental justice and curriculum development

Vatalaro’s projects focus on environmental justice history research, curriculum development and how the Detroit River area has changed over time. For her research, Vatalaro examined historical environmental justice movements in Detroit to understand how to fight injustices around the river in the future. 

“I found a lot of environmental racism and injustice, but also recently there has been a lot of community justice work to have a seat at the table,” she said. “There is still a long way to go in Detroit. I see more injustice than justice.” 

She said it is important to look at historical environmental justice success stories to have a roadmap for communities fighting for justice. 

“By telling these stories of environmental injustices, communities can see how to organize and come together in a movement that is mirrored by a historical movement,” she said. 

Vatalaro used this research in her Gala open-learning course curriculum that she created for high school students in the Detroit area to help them learn about the environmental injustices and climate issues the Detroit River is facing. 

“My project focuses on how we can tell a story about resilience and the fight against climate change,” she said. 

This course has modules focusing on environmental policy, injustices, and carbon emissions related to the Detroit River, which includes an interactive GIS map created by another Detroit River Story Lab researcher, Gene Estrada. Students can click on map tiles to see the emissions statistics for specific communities along the river. 

“I introduced GIS as a tool for data analysis in the course because I didn't know GIS existed until a few years into undergrad,” she said. “I want students to think about more possibilities that they hadn't considered for research in environmental studies and how we can use GIS to evaluate past and future carbon emissions.” 

Vatalaro said that she believes climate change can feel overwhelming because it is such a huge problem, but sharing these stories and understanding what people are doing about it, both historically and right now, are powerful tools to enact change. 

“Especially for students that are just coming into their own, I want this course to help them connect with what they can do and move away from the feeling of paralysis that climate change can bring,” she said. “They can make a difference.”

Hyperlocal storytelling

Jankowski also focused her Story Lab project on education. While U-M lacks a journalism major, she believes that U-M’s academic assets could be leveraged to develop a novel partnership between classrooms and local news organizations in a way that advances hyperlocal storytelling in a low-cost, high-impact manner, while giving students opportunities to share their research and knowledge with new audiences. She is working on a self-contained, adaptable Canvas module that is currently being piloted in two interdisciplinary U-M classes. This module exposes students to a fundamental element of journalism: pitching. 

According to Jankowski, the module’s series of instructional content and mini assignments help students with all academic backgrounds translate their in-class, place-based research and writing into pitches for Detroit-focused stories. These pitches will be sent to editors at Bridge Detroit and Planet Detroit for review and possible publication in their respective outlets.

“The purpose of pitches is to help take stories out of the classroom that fill gaps [of stories not being told] at the community level,” Jankowski said. “The best stories come from place-based lived experiences.”

According to Jankowski, hyper local storytelling elevates knowledge and solutions in a way that does not occur from top-down planning efforts. 

“There is a power of words and knowledge that you have around the places that you call home,” she said. “By building that power, you can develop solutions that work and are tailored to your community.”