BREWER, Maine (WABI) – The history of Juneteenth was celebrated on Tuesday at Brewer’s Northern Light Health Cianchette Building.
While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, all slaves in the former Confederate states were not freed until June 19th, 1865. This day marks Juneteenth.
Northern Light Health’s Vice President of Medical Education Darmita Wilson has been celebrating the holiday with her colleagues for the past two years.
“My family’s been celebrating Juneteenth for over 100 years,” describes Wilson.
With posterboards chronicling the history and significance behind Juneteenth, Wilson also featured family photos and timelines of her relatives and their relation to Juneteenth and the Civil Rights Movement.
Wilson, along with two friends from D.C., also prepared an amazing array of cultural foods for everyone to sample and learn the significance of the recipes.
“They are my great grandmother’s recipes. My great grandmother had verbal recipes only, she had not written anything down,” Wilson recounts her experience learning how to prepare the plates.
While Northern Light Health Manager of Marketing and Communications Emily Tadlock is from the south and grew up eating staples like collard greens, shrimp and grits, and hush puppies, she says Tuesday’s happenings allowed her to understand the meaning behind the meals: “I ate hush puppies in particular, my entire life, but I had no idea that the cornmeal that is used for hush puppies was used to actually hush puppies so that slaves could get away. History is lessons, lessons learned, and so learning about history, learning about other people’s cultures gives us a chance to empathize with people and also not repeat our mistakes.”
Juneteenth was nationally recognized in 2021, but Northern Light Health has been commemorating the holiday for years prior.
Northern Light Health CEO Tim Dentry emphasizes the importance of diversity, equality and inclusion, which he says contributes to the hospital’s “culture of care.”
“We’re not invisible to the fact that there are challenges out there and some people have different levels and kinds of biases,” says Dentry. “So, this makes our workforce, our family we call the Northern Light family, more tuned into that and more aware of what our colleagues might be going through.”
While in clinical settings, Juneteenth is just one reminder of the ways in which cultural and historical awareness make the healthcare experience better for both patients and providers.
For Wilson, however, the meaning of the holiday that is known as the U.S.’s “second independence day” represents something much more personal that she can share with those around her.
“For me, Juneteenth is just a reminder of my family bond,” Wilson says. “It connects me to my grandma, my great grandma and her mother. So, it’s really exciting to be able to share them, to be open and honest about the conversations that we need to have about diversity and what it looks like and share the things that are more common than diverse. And even in that diversity, finding some kind of common ground so we have mutual understanding about what’s going on in the world.”
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