Anna Peterson

Sabbatical as Disruption

by ANNA PETERSON, Associate Professor of History

Few 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 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.

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 Oneida and Ho-Chunk, until 1955. For my Nena Amundson project (2018-2020), I had worked alongside two students to collect and catalog the Mission’s many and various records. But I hadn’t had time to really process, both practically and intellectually, the records’ contents.

My sabbatical was the perfect time to do so. I intended to spend the bulk of the fall semester reading, transcribing, and summarizing the sources. Then in the spring, I planned to analyze the materials, writing two publishable journal articles. Along the way, I hoped to conduct additional research in

Wittenberg and at the Newberry

Library in Chicago. As this is my first research into Native American history, I also wanted to gain additional insight and perspective into that field by traveling to academic conferences, listening and learning from others’ research as well as getting feedback on my own.

Perhaps most obviously, I needed to cancel these travel plans due to the circumstances created by the pandemic. While I still participated in one academic conference virtually, the others I had wanted to attend were postponed indefinitely. Chicago was in lockdown and the thought of visiting with elders in Wittenberg seemed otherworldly. Instead, I hunkered down in Decorah in my home office. To say that this was a welcome retreat and respite from the demands of the outside world would be a lie. My proverbial ivory tower was breached time and again by a four (and then five)-year-old whose concept of “work” was most informed by her experience cutting pickles at the local Montessori preschool, which would be closed unexpectedly for weeks, not once but twice, during the fall of 2020. Add in a lengthy quarantine or two, a husband doing his best to work remotely, a baby who joined our family in December 2020, and two cats, and you have an environment that is lessthan-conducive to the life of the mind. I thought I might not recover if I read one more meme about Shakespeare writing King Lear while quarantining Souvenir pamphlet from the Bethany Indian Mission (1921)

Anna Peterson COURTESY OF PREUS LIBRARY, LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Fourth grade students with their teacher at the Bethany Indian Mission summer school (1954)

COURTESY OF THE ELCA ARCHIVES, ELK GROVE, ILLINOIS

during the Black Plague. Thanks for the added pressure, internet. But looking back, it was ridiculous of me to have expected anything less of my sabbatical. Not only because “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” as poet Robert Burns wrote in 1786, but also because the sabbatical itself is intended to be a disruption. The modern sabbatical can be traced, in part, back to a practice outlined in Leviticus 25: 3-5: “For six years you shall plow your field, for six years you shall prune your vine and gather its produce. But in the seventh year the land is to have its rest, a sabbatical year for Yahweh. You must not sow your field or prune your vine or harvest your ungathered corn or gather grapes from your untrimmed vine. It is to be a year of rest for the land.” Your work was to be interrupted. You were instructed to stop your normal activities in service of a larger purpose. The rest was not necessarily to be yours, but rather the land’s. What exactly you were supposed to do instead of your normal routine is unclear. College and university administrators carried threads of this ancient practice into their establishment of academic sabbaticals in the 1880s and 1890s. They adopted the timing of the ancient sabbaticals, instituting periods of leave after six years of employment. Like the ancient Israelites, modern administrators, too, did not believe the primary goal of a sabbatical should be to benefit the person taking it. As Dartmouth’s Committee on Sabbatical Leave cautioned in 1922, “The purpose of the sabbatical leave is to render the recipient more useful to the college…[They] are in nowise to be regarded as increased vacation periods….” Any personal regeneration that occurred was to be in service to the larger mission of the college. But just as in the past, the exact activities one was supposed to partake in during the leave of absence from the college was, and is, nebulous. The main premise continues to be the interruption of regular work patterns and activities. No matter what, I was going to encounter disruption on my sabbatical. The idea that sabbatical proposals and plans will be brought to fruition exactly as outlined goes against the nature of life in all its unpredictability, and it goes against the purpose of the sabbatical as originally designed thousands of years ago. I am confident that anyone who has ever taken a sabbatical knows this intimately. Perhaps some of you are reading this and thinking “Of course, Anna. Of course.” I see it now, but the extreme unpredictability of the pandemic obscured this truth from me. The pandemic became a scapegoat of sorts for why I didn’t do what I had thought I would do during this past year. It hid this reality of the sabbatical from me: The point is not to do. The point is to stop doing what you have been doing. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t achieve anything on my sabbatical. I found one of the greatest things about the sabbatical and the pandemic to be the way aspects of time slowed down. I had ample minutes, hours, days and months to let my thinking about my research percolate. I digested information in ways previously unknown to me. My fall was indeed full of reading and transcribing and thinking with plenty of pregnant pauses in between. I found that when I sat down this spring to write an article on the nine students the superintendent of the Bethany Indian Mission, Reverend Ernest Sihler, helped send to college, that I had largely already written the piece in my head. The spaces the sabbatical had created and the pandemic had fostered had borne a different fruit than the ones I had harvested in the past, a kind that I never could have predicted.

Records of the 1893 confirmation class at the Bethany Indian Mission

COURTESY OF LUTHER SEMINARY ARCHIVES