2. How did you get here?

WOOD: It certainly was not intentional. As with most interdisciplinary scholars, my path is nonlinear, more like a tessellation than a straight line. I have come to determine that eclectic jobs come from eclectic paths.

HOLZMAN: This version of my origin tale begins when I was in college.

LABODE: In formal terms, I began my academic career assuming that I would become a professor, although I had no clear idea about what being an academic meant.

CUSACK-MCVEIGH: With my academic background in cultural anthropology, I began working with tribes in the United States and Canada many years ago.

ZIMMERMAN: In one sense, I was preadapted to being a public scholar, although I'd have to say I still have not really defined what that means. The preadaptation part stems from teaching at the University of South Dakota (USD) for the first 22 years of my career, where I worked closely with many Native American students and got to know their communities, but also from serving as Department Executive Officer of the American Indian and Native Studies Program at the University of Iowa for three years and as Head of the Archaeology Department for the Minnesota Historical Society for two years.

WOOD: The directions to get to my present position go something like this: Step 1. Volunteer in a museum as a teenager. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to pursue museum work as a career path (or that it was one). I did, however, absorb an ethic of civic engagement from that museum, which positioned itself partly as a resource with a responsibility to community interaction.

HOLZMAN: The culture of my undergraduate institution was infused with a commitment to social responsibility. As my peers joined anti-war movements, advocated for a living wage, or helped document disappearing languages, I looked for a way to connect my study of art history to activities beyond the college campus.

ZIMMERMAN: In spite of frustrations with living in South Dakota, a state that seemed to take pride in being poor and that too often seemed to feel that higher education was a burden, I had experiences there that could not have been had any place else. By working in many communities—as an archaeologist, a public speaker, a community humanities grant writer, and a consultan—I learned lots about the environment and the very hardy people who lived in it. All of these experiences had an influence on me, but in no sense would I have thought of myself as a public scholar. At that time, I just did what anthropologists often do and jumped in to help when I could or when they wanted me around.

WOOD: Step 2. Actively participate in theater in high school and become a dramatic arts major (to my mother's chagrin). I discovered the world of improvisational theater and its very important applications to work in communities. "Improv" requires a person to accept and respond to information and experiences head on. It demands flexibly of mind and willingness to stretch your thinking. I was also fortunate to participate in an intensive "community-based script building" course, which demonstrated the importance of the arts in exploring important social issues through stories from actual people's lives.

CUSACK-MCVEIGH: I have worked with Native American collections in the Canadian Shield and Great Lakes region and have spent the past two decades working with material culture in private and museum collections throughout Alaska. Much of my anthropological work has been applied research, including oral history projects intended to preserve language and culture, protection of graves and ancestral lands, and tribal marine science. In this capacity, I have been a research consultant for Native tribes and tribal museums for decades. You might say that these earlier experiences led to my position as a museum curator and collections manager/registrar in Alaska where, instead of working solely with ethnographic collections, I found myself charged with the care of everything from projectile points to living collections (including a Giant Pacific Octopus).

WOOD: Step 3. Find a job in a museum. I made my way back to the museum world and started working on an exhibit entirely focused on communities and later on programming with communities. In that capacity, I had to work carefully with multiple community groups, listen to their needs, share their stories and experiences, and connect museum resources to community interests.

HOLZMAN: I formed connections with nonprofit cultural organizations in the region. I volunteered in the development office of a nearby museum and then obtained a multi-purpose internship at a community-based arts organization. Through those placements I met artists, administrators, and civic leaders, and I started to feel like a member of the local creative community. After graduation, I fell into a position doing public relations at a major art museum. Eventually, I left that post for graduate school because I needed time and tools to think through some of the questions that my work in the nonprofit sector had raised.

WOOD: Step 4. Leave the museum field to pursue graduate work in education. Though I thoroughly enjoyed my work, it was difficult to move up within the museum I was in, so I decided to go to graduate school. My graduate studies were in community-based learning. I worked for the extension service whose primary mission is to generate practical and useful knowledge from the university to support the needs of the community.

LABODE: In the course of my doctoral work and first academic appointment, I felt unfulfilled by traditional approaches to academic history. I wanted to know more about how history affects peoples' lives and was inspired by the role of public history in South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle. I worked in museums for several years, and found the opportunity to write for popular audiences and work on projects that would connect historical research with the public very satisfying.

ZIMMERMAN: The people who made the most difference to me in forming my views about the public were the many Native American students, their families, and their communities with whom I came into contact over the 22 years at USD. When you have Indian students showing up at your office door and sometimes at your house on an almost daily basis, you learn quickly that you have to look at them as people, not as data or the subject of your anthropological interests.

As an archaeologist who early on advocated for the return of human remains and sacred objects, I consulted with many tribes, hosted conferences about repatriation, and worked with activist groups such as the American Indian Movement and the Native American Rights Fund. This work connected me with the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), a newly formed group of archaeologists and indigenous peoples from all over the world committed to addressing the social and political power dynamics in which archaeology operated. Repatriation radicalized me, and WAC provided a way to channel that energy. The South Dakota years were much more complicated than I can discuss here, particularly when it comes to the formation of the emotional base of my public scholarship.

KRYDER-REID: Underlying my professional choices has been the desire to do work that matters to people's present concerns and that addresses inequalities. I credit the formative influence of my parents and Mark Leone, Director of the Archaeology in Annapolis project where I did my dissertation research and where, more than anywhere else, I claimed my vocation. Other exemplars of this kind of practice, such as Susan Sutton and Larry Zimmerman, have helped sustain me as I sought to realize meaningful results through the bureaucratic mazes of higher education and to grow as a teacher.

ZIMMERMAN: In 1996, I moved to the University of Iowa and as an adjunct professor became Department Executive Officer for the American Indian and Native Studies Program when their prior Executive Officer resigned and the Dean realized that "I did Indian stuff." This post helped broaden my knowledge of Indian people beyond those of the Plains because I worked with them on a range of projects, including their large annual powwow. Intellectually, I knew Indians were complicated, but I don't think that until the Iowa experience I realized just how complex and culturally diverse they were, and how part of the "now" they really are, not just "back in the day."

In 2002, I moved to head the Archaeology Department of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS). MHS is the largest state historical society in the country and owns or interprets 32 sites across the state, several of them on, near, or jointly managed by the state's Dakota and Ojibwe peoples. I learned how museums could interact successfully with Indian people and how concerned Indian people were with the way sites and objects got interpreted. The direct work with Indian people kept educating me about concepts of tradition, sacredness, and most of all, respect.

HOLZMAN: As I finished my graduate work, I began my search for an academic job. I had developed a love of teaching and a strong commitment to scholarly inquiry, but much of my research remained grounded in my professional experiences outside of the academy. Fortuitously, there was an opening for an assistant professor position that demanded the set of interests and experiences I had acquired.

LABODE: I was not interested in returning to a traditional academic appointment. However, when I heard about IUPUI's opening for a pubic scholar, I believed that this position would provide the opportunity to bring together the dynamic aspects of public history with the best aspects of academic work.

ZIMMERMAN: I'm now a decade into being Public Scholar of Native American Representation in IUPUI's Museum Studies Program and in the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. I see a lot of my background as a random walk to the door of the Eiteljorg and IUPUI museum studies. I couldn't have planned it better, so I think I am probably just going to keep doing what I do for the last part of my career.

WOOD: Each step along the path, though each different from the one before, had several key threads: work grounded in community settings, integration of multiple perspectives, and an emphasis on collaborative process. I have always focused on pragmatic applications to work, looking carefully at the powerful ways that the arts and humanities can bring about change. What brought me here was not my passionate love for museums, but my inclination toward bettering society through stimulating settings and thought-provoking experiences.

 

Works Cited