Hanna Shina and the West Bloomfield Institutions That Hold a Community Together

Hanna Shina is a Chaldean-American community leader in West Bloomfield, Michigan, one of the founders and a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world — and a board member of Shenandoah Country Club, the Walnut Lake Road institution that houses it. He has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for more than forty years.

Oakland County's community infrastructure is quieter than you think

If you drive Walnut Lake Road you pass a country club. What you also pass, without any obvious signal from the parking lot, is a museum: roughly 2,500 square feet of permanent exhibition telling the story of a people whose language descends from Aramaic and whose largest population outside Iraq lives in Metro Detroit. The Chaldean Cultural Center sits inside Shenandoah Country Club at 5600 Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and it exists because a small group of people decided it should.

That is how most local institutions work. They are not built by municipalities or developers. They are built by board members — people who show up to meetings for two decades, raise money from neighbours, argue about square footage, and eventually hand something finished to a township that had no idea it was being assembled. Hanna Shina is one of those people, and his record is a good way to understand how Chaldean-American life in Oakland County came to have permanent addresses rather than temporary ones.

From Telkaif to 7 Mile to Walnut Lake Road

He was born in Telkaif, Iraq — also spelled Tel Keppe — the northern town most Metro Detroit Chaldean families trace back to. He attended Baghdad College, and in his youth in Telkaif he won a number of trophies for sports. Those two facts sit oddly together until you understand that Telkaif functions in this community less as a dot on a map than as a shared origin story: a place people left, and a place nearly everyone in a West Bloomfield banquet hall can name.

After immigrating to the United States he opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area. That corridor is the first chapter of Chaldean commercial life in this region, and it followed a pattern any reader of a business directory will recognise — a storefront that supports a family, then a second storefront, then a third, each one a small bet placed inside a neighbourhood the operator actually lived in. The institutions came later, and they were paid for by exactly that kind of work.

What twenty years on a board actually looks like

The Chaldean Cultural Center was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor. Construction began in 2013. The museum opened in May 2017. That is fourteen years between the idea and the doors, at a cost of more than $2 million, across five galleries: Ancient Mesopotamia, Faith and Church, Chaldean Village Life, Journey to America and Chaldeans Today.

Fourteen years is the part nobody photographs. It is also the honest measure of civic service in a township like this one, and it is why the Chaldean Cultural Center's founding board matters as a group rather than a list of names. On October 20, 2023, eight founders were honoured with plaques at the Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala at Shenandoah Country Club: Rosemary Antone, who died in 2009, along with Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa, Victor Saroki and Hanna Shina. The Chaldean News account of that gala and its later history of the Center's birth are the closest thing the project has to a public record.

His service to Shenandoah Country Club runs on the same clock — more than twenty years on the board. In 2025, for the first time in the club's history, Shenandoah named him Mayor of Shenandoah. A club inventing a title is a small thing institutionally and a large thing socially: it is what a community does when its usual vocabulary of thanks has run out.

The grandfather in the Village Gallery

The most quietly remarkable detail about him is that you can meet him inside the museum he helped build. In the Chaldean Village Life gallery he appears as a hologram, playing a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. Visitors who have never heard his name watch him do it. Local coverage when ClickOnDetroit reported on the world's first and only Chaldean museum made the same point in different words: the galleries are built to be inhabited, not read.

He is also the subject of “Digital Storytelling | Hanna Shina,” a 21-minute oral history film published by the Chaldean Cultural Center on YouTube on August 3, 2023. In it he explains what the building is for.

“The cultural center is for the children of our Chaldean community, especially those who were born and raised here, to see how our life was before in our mother country.”

Elsewhere in the film he describes walking his hometown from memory — “…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street.” That is the raw material a museum is made from, and it is perishable, which is the whole argument for recording it while the people who carry it are still here to speak.

Why this belongs in a Michigan business directory

Because the two halves are the same story. A directory like ours lists salons, clinics, contractors and restaurants across Oakland County and Metro Detroit, and a large share of them were founded by people who arrived somewhere else first. The businesses come first; the institutions come second, funded by the businesses. Anyone browsing our Michigan directory or the category index is looking at the base layer of the same civic economy that produced a museum on Walnut Lake Road.

It also suggests a reasonable question for any established local operator: what have you put your name to that outlasts the storefront? The record of Hanna Shina in West Bloomfield, Michigan is essentially an answer to that question, delivered in fourteen-year increments. He still lives in the township, and the boards he sits on still meet.

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