Women to Know: Lake Highlands native Merrion Frederick preserves refugees’ stories

How does a freckle-faced redhead from Lake Highlands become an ardent advocate for refugees from impoverished areas of southern Asia and across the globe?

“Honestly,” Merrion Dale Frederick says, “it was less a straight line and more a gradual convergence.”

After Frederick graduated from Lake Highlands High School in 2013 and Texas A&M University in 2017, she focused on earning a master’s degree in linguistics at the University of North Texas (UNT).

“I was fascinated by the ways language shapes identity,” she explains. “How the words a community uses to describe themselves, their history and their relationships carry so much more than their dictionary definitions.”

Frederick began working at UNT’s Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL), an archive for endangered and under-resourced languages. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), more than 220 languages have vanished from India alone in recent decades due to political violence, natural disasters, socioeconomic pressures, urbanization, political marginalization and globalization. Almost 200 more are at risk across the broader region.

“Interacting with communities whose languages — and with them entire ways of knowing the world — were at risk of disappearing gave me a firsthand view of what it means when a community loses control over its own records and stories,” she says. “From there, it felt very natural to ask the same questions about refugee communities.”

Frederick calls her work at CoRSAL a turning point. While interacting closely with refugees, she witnessed the difficulty they encounter in keeping critical documents safe as they struggle to navigate resettlement and prove who they are. She partnered with Dr. Ana Roeschley, a respected UNT professor and childhood refugee from Bosnia, to create Our Refugee Stories Archive (ORSA). Roeschley arrived in America without a birth certificate, so she has firsthand experience with the constant documentary burdens and frustrations refugees face. ORSA is a repository to house their critical records, including passports, birth certificates, marriage certificates, citizenship papers and diplomas. ORSA also stores treasured photos, family videos and personal diaries, among other prized keepsakes.

“Interacting with communities whose languages — and with them entire ways of knowing the world — were at risk of disappearing gave me a firsthand view of what it means when a community loses control over its own records and stories,” she says. “From there, it felt very natural to ask the same questions about refugee communities.”

More than 122 million refugees throughout the world have been uprooted and forcibly displaced from their homes and their personal archives, and the ORSA project aims to help ensure no document or photo is ever lost again.

Community-centered archiving relies on authentic, trusting relationships, and Frederick admits building trust wasn’t easy. She was often perceived as an outsider within the refugee communities she longed to serve.

“I think that challenge is actually one of the most important things to be honest about,” she says. “Refugee communities have very good reasons to be cautious about outside institutions showing up and encouraging them to share information about their experiences. There’s a long history of researchers and organizations treating vulnerable communities as subjects to be studied rather than partners to work with.”

“Sustained relationships are necessary,” she explains, “because trust isn’t something you establish once at a first meeting — it’s built over time. ORSA’s whole model is built around that idea. We actively involve community members in the design process, in shaping what the ORSA looks like and how it serves them. That’s not ‘efficient’ in the short term, but it’s the only way to build something that actually belongs to the community it’s meant to serve.”

ORSA doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar home — it lives online as a digital archive. There are expenses though, and the creators experienced a crisis last year when an executive order terminated their funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency which supports libraries and archives across the country. Luckily, a later court ruling reinstated their grant. Today, they’ve expanded beyond the role of traditional archive to become a comprehensive information hub.

Frederick is now completing her Ph.D. in Information Science, and she’s earned the Theodore Calvin Pease Award from the Society of American Archivists. She’s opened a private consulting practice with Roeschley to build customized archives and digital asset management systems for institutions and individuals.

When she’s not preserving critical documents for the world’s refugees, Frederick spends her Saturday mornings at the St. Michael’s Farmer’s Market near Preston Center. Her husband Ross has a booth there, and together, they sell his homemade chow-chow.

“He learned firsthand from the master in his tiny South Louisiana hometown of Breaux Bridge, where people are incredibly competitive about their recipes,” she laughs. “He also makes the perfect pepper jelly and other seasonal rotating jams. Ross is so talented and has done so much to support me in all of my pursuits. It has been fun to be able to support him in this and watch him introduce the magic of South Louisiana cuisine to new people every week.”