Sabbatical as Disruption by ANNA PETERSON, Associate Professor of History
the next day holds, let alone the next month or year. It has fundamentally altered our ability to live our lives as we once did.
COURTESY OF PREUS LIBRARY, LUTHER COLLEGE
It stands to reason that the pandemic affected my sabbatical as well. During my year away from campus, I had planned to continue delving into the archival research I had already conducted on the Bethany Indian Mission. Started in 1884 outside Wittenberg, Wisconsin by Luther alumnus and recent immigrant from Norway, Even Johnson Homme, the Mission offered religious and secular instruction to Native American tribes in Wisconsin, mainly Anna Peterson Oneida and Ho-Chunk, until 1955. For my Nena Amundson project to the circumstances created by the (2018-2020), I had worked alongside pandemic. While I still participated two students to collect and catalog in one academic conference virtually, the Mission’s many and various the others I had wanted to attend were records. But I hadn’t had time to postponed indefinitely. Chicago was in really process, both practically and lockdown and the thought of visiting intellectually, the records’ contents. with elders in Wittenberg seemed othMy sabbatical was the perfect time erworldly. Instead, I hunkered down in to do so. I intended to spend the Decorah in my home office. To say that bulk of the fall semester reading, this was a welcome retreat and respite transcribing, and summarizing from the demands of the outside world the sources. Then in the spring, I would be a lie. My proverbial ivory planned to analyze the materials, tower was breached time and again by writing two publishable journal a four (and then five)-year-old whose articles. Along the way, I hoped concept of “work” was most informed to conduct additional research in by her experience cutting pickles at Wittenberg and at the Newberry the local Montessori preschool, which Library in Chicago. As this is my would be closed unexpectedly for weeks, first research into Native Amerinot once but twice, during the fall of can history, I also wanted to gain 2020. Add in a lengthy quarantine or additional insight and perspectwo, a husband doing his best to work tive into that field by traveling to remotely, a baby who joined our family academic conferences, listening in December 2020, and two cats, and and learning from others’ research you have an environment that is lessas well as getting feedback on my than-conducive to the life of the mind. own. I thought I might not recover if I read Perhaps most obviously, I needed one more meme about Shakespeare to cancel these travel plans due writing King Lear while quarantining
Souvenir pamphlet from the Bethany Indian Mission (1921)
Fall 2021/Agora
17
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
F
ew of us welcome disruption in our carefully planned and curated lives. The ability to reflect on the past and plan for the future is one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity. We like to know what is coming, and we like to believe we have some kind of control over the trajectory of our days, months, and lifetimes. In most cases we plan for tomorrow with the circumstances of today in mind as though the context in which we live, as well as our notions of ourselves, is static. As a historian, I should know better. But I don’t. I too like the notion of certainty, of stasis, of the idea that I can somehow manage my way to a particular outcome. Nothing has wrought havoc on this collective way of seeing and being in the world more than this past year. The Covid-19 pandemic has upended and uprooted all attempts to anticipate what
