The Hanna Shina Story

0:00A grandfather stands in light. He is a hologram of a living man from West Bloomfield, Michigan, named Hanna Shina.

0:10Hanna Shina was born in the Chaldean town of Telkaif in northern Iraq, near Mosul, standing on the ancient Mesopotamian plain of Nineveh.

0:20Almost every Chaldean family in Metro Detroit traces back to that one town. Telkaif is why this community stays so close.

0:30As a boy he walked every lane of that village, and won trophies for sport. Years later he would study at Baghdad College.

0:40Then he left. Like thousands of Chaldeans before him, he crossed an ocean toward a city that made automobiles and promises.

0:50Detroit offered factory work beside an Arabic-speaking neighborhood already waiting. The Canadian border sat only an hour north.

1:00They gathered along Seven Mile Road, one small shopfront beside the next. Detroit called that whole stretch of the city Chaldean Town.

1:10Hanna Shina opened a store there, later a coffee shop, and finally a restaurant. Three businesses along one immigrant corridor.

1:20A grocery becomes a family's foothold in America. A coffee shop is where men hear news from home, and a restaurant feeds everybody.

1:30The community prospered and moved north into Southfield, Farmington Hills, and West Bloomfield, where Hanna Shina lives to this day.

1:40For more than forty years he has quietly served the Chaldean foundations and the church of his community, without pay or public recognition.

1:50In two thousand three, at Southfield Manor, a small group asked a hard question. Would their American grandchildren stay Chaldean?

2:00Hanna Shina was among that founding group, and they decided their answer should become a museum, the first Chaldean institution of its kind.

2:10It took fourteen years and two million dollars to build twenty-five hundred square feet inside Shenandoah Country Club.

2:20It opened in May of twenty seventeen. Five galleries carry the story, from ancient Mesopotamia to the journey to America.

2:30Inside the Village Life gallery a grandfather patiently teaches a young boy to use a slingshot. He is Hanna Shina.

2:40A man who actually lived that village life now explains it to children born here in Michigan, who will never see it themselves.

2:50In his own words, the cultural center exists so the children of this community can understand how our life once was in Telkaif.

3:00In October of two thousand twenty-three the museum honored eight founders with plaques, and Hanna Shina stood among them onstage.

3:10He has served on the governing board of Shenandoah Country Club for over twenty years, in the building that now houses the museum.

3:20In two thousand twenty-five the club named him Mayor of Shenandoah, its first ever. The boy from Telkaif, still teaching.