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| Tom at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois last Wednesday |
Last week, we packed up the Jeep and headed out to:
1. Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. The snow line was about 50 miles north of Madison, Wisconsin. On the Augustana campus, the daffodils and magnolias bloomed, the birds sang, and a soft breeze blew.
Quad-Cities Online has a nice write-up here of our visit. BTW, if you're a fan of Southwest Indian art, Augustana is home to the breathtaking Olson-Brandelle Collection.
2. The University of Iowa, host of this year's meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society, was even more Spring-y. Our Wisconsin clothes were too heavy for the 80-degree weather.
We were part of a session on "Innovative Ethnographies". Our talk was about a favorite chapter from Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor. The chapter details a peyote ceremony at the Shoshone-Bannock Reservation in Idaho. As with all peyote meetings, this one dealt with the immediate concerns of the community. In 1969 this centered around the Vietnam War and its effect on the family of a Shoshone draftee.
It was fun to connect with an audience of many levels of interest in Native American culture and difficult to put back on the heavy clothes, get back in the Jeep to head back north.
