630 Te Journal of American History December 2018 less straightforward than perhaps previously thought—mirroring the dynamic nature of Wampanoag culture itself. Alexandra Peck Brown University  Providence, Rhode Island doi: 10.1093/jahist/jay284 “Follow the North Star: A Participatory Museum Experience,” Conner Prairie, Fishers, Ind. http://www.connerprairie.org/things-to-do/events/follow-the-north-star. Permanent program, began 1998. Norman Burns, Connor Prairie president and chief executive ofcer. Inspired by a reenactment at a Young Men’s Christian Association camp in Ohio in the mid-1990s, staf at the living history museum Conner Prairie, just north of Indianapo- lis, developed their own Underground Railroad program. Since 1998 more than ninety thousand people, many of them students, have taken part in “Follow the North Star.” For about ninety minutes, visitors become a group of fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad in central Indiana in 1836, heading North to freedom in Canada. Created by Eli Lilly in 1934, Connor Prairie covers nearly one thousand wooded acres today and features attractions such as Indiana’s oldest brick house, a Civil War Journey, and the Lenape Indian Camp. “Follow the North Star” is ofered each year in April and November. Up to forty actors and staf are involved on a “200-acre stage.” In contrast to most of the other programs the museum ofers, “Follow the North Star” requires visitors to be at least twelve years old. General visitors can take part in the evenings, while student groups participate in the daytime. Te award-winning program is advertised as “a powerful experience that generates empathy,” an “immersive experience” through which “participants gain emotional un- derstanding of the complex challenges that confronted escaped slaves” and “experience in some small way the fear, uncertainty and hopefulness” of the Underground Railroad. Po- sitioned somewhere between “participatory museum theater experience” and frst-person interpretation, the program hopes to use emotional and physical experience to activate visitor learning. A group of four international public historians (Tomas Cauvin, Joan Cummins, Da- vid Dean, and Andreas Etges) took part in an evening program in April 2017. Describing Our Experience Te program took place after dark on a briskly cold evening. We were part of a small group in the last time slot of the evening, 9:15 p.m. Besides the four of us, a father and his teenage son, two women, and a solo adult visitor took part. After presenting our timed tickets in the visitor’s center, we proceeded to the orien- tation theater, where we viewed a narrated slide show that used stock images to discuss slavery. We were to take on the role of enslaved people brought into Indiana. Our owner, on discovering Indiana was a free state, intended to sell us back south to Kentucky. We Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/105/3/630/5247960 by guest on 21 February 2019