The international exhibit Trials, Tragedy & Resilience officially opened on Montserrat on Friday, March 9, 2018 at the National Museum in Little Bay.
Trials, Tragedy & Resilience is an exhibit recognizing and celebrating Montserrat’s rich cultural heritage on the 250th anniversary of the attempted St. Patrick’s Day slave uprising on 17 March 1768.
In attendance for the opening ceremony was Hon. Deputy Premier Delmaude Ryan, historian Sir Howard Fergus, Hon. Leader of the Opposition Easton Farrell-Taylor and Hon. Member of Parliament Claude Hogan.
Executive Director of the Montserrat National Trust which has responsibility for the national museum and is a co-sponsor of the exhibition, said much of the work completed for was through the generous support of the National ICT Council’s ICT Fund. They used their grant to restore and archive documents from churches, land registry and other offices.
Photos of the exhibits are not allowed. However, they tell the story of the 1768 uprising primarily from the view point of the slave masters and other whites who lived on Montserrat during that period. Documents shared include legal and newspaper accounts of what happened on St Patrick’s Day in 1768 and the subsequent killings and court cases.
The histories presented here commemorate the resilience that Montserratians have displayed over time in their responses to difficult conditions imposed by slavery, colonialism, resource scarcity, and catastrophic natural disasters.
The exhibit will be running concurrently at the National Museum on Montserrat, the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Department of Archaeology and Sustainable Heritage at Aarhus University in Denmark. The exhibit is co-sponsored by these institutions and the Montserrat National Trust.
The exhibition will run locally until March 19th and at the other institutions until April 20, 2018.
