Sweet Home Chicago

I apologize for the dearth of blog posts in recent days, but this week has been nothing less than a blur of hurried flights, professional commitments, and loss of sleep.

As some of you are aware, I abandoned my permanent residence at the end of February in exchange for life on the road. Since most of my research takes me to places far outside of Oklahoma, I decided to relinquish my apartment, place all my earthly belongings in storage, and live out of hotels and the spare rooms of family and friends. I know what you’re thinking; sounds exciting. Well, let me tell you the first thing I learned about living this way--you run out of clean underwear and socks a lot quicker than you think. Commitments required my return to Oklahoma City this week, where I’ve been living out of a local hotel—I feel like a stranger in a city that I’ve come to call home.

I returned to OKC earlier in the week to speak at the Spanish Cove retirement home in Yukon, Oklahoma. Yukon is a relatively small western suburb of the city—and where I normally live when a full-time resident of the Sooner State. It’s part old rural Oklahoma—local furniture stores still sell wagon wheels as interior decorations—and part modern suburbia. It also happens to be the birthplace of Garth Brooks and proudly boasts his name on water towers, city signs, and a stretch of North 11^th Street that has been renamed Garth Brooks Boulevard (home of Walmart, Target, Staples, and Lowes).

Each year the Oklahoma Humanities Council sponsors a program called “Let’s Talk About it Oklahoma.” It’s essentially a community book club. At the beginning of each fall and spring, local coordinators choose one of several themed programs and then invite scholars to lead public lectures and discussions on each of the books. This year, the Yukon public library picked a theme on early Presidential politics. As a local Yukonian/Yukonite/Yukon—something, they asked me to provide a public lecture and lead discussions on Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx. Most of the participants are elderly members of the community, which best explains the Yukon public library’s decision to host the lecture at the local retirement home. I’m not normally nervous about speaking in public, but this time was different. How would an elderly, rural Oklahoman audience respond to my interpretation of Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the modern Republican party’s abuse of Jefferson? My fears were short-lived, as the audience of about 45 seniors tore apart Ellis’s apologetic account of the third president. The discussions were lively and reminded me why I continue to present public lectures—despite my experience a few years ago, when I was duped into speaking for a chapter of the Confederate Veterans of America in the back room of a Denny’s (my honorarium: a Grand Slam Breakfast). But, that’s a different story.

On Wednesday, I switched gears and hopped a 6:00am flight to Chicago. If a small coffee shop in Bowling Green, Ohio marks the beginning of my academic career (see my first blog post), then Chicago and the Newberry Library represents a moment of maturation on my larger intellectual journey. When I arrived at Purdue University in August of 2002, my research primarily focused on white settlement in the lower Great Lakes. Encouraged by faculty at Purdue to explore the larger consequences of settler-colonialism, especially through the work of American Indian Studies scholars, I enrolled in a semester-long seminar being sponsored by the CIC American Indian Studies Consortium and held in conjunction with the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian Studies. The CIC AISC represented the collective efforts of the Big Ten schools, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois-Chicago to bring together students, scholars, and independent researchers.

It so happened that the seminar was led by Susan Sleeper-Smith—PhD advisor to my good friend, Joe Genetin-Pilawa, at Michigan State University. Joe and I had attended Bowling Green State University together as undergraduates in the 1990s. In fact, I often joke that despite the advice and concern of friends and family who incessantly inquired—what the hell are you going to do with a history degree—we both ended up getting PhD’s and tenure track jobs. We both took Susan Sleeper-Smith’s seminar in 2003 and held fellowships at the Newberry Library during our PhD studies. On Wednesday, he was one of two scholars presenting as part of the D’Arcy McNickle Center’s American Indian Studies Seminar. I used the seminar as an opportunity (and excuse) to revisit the Newberry Library and see old friends. The seminar was engaging and intellectually stimulating.

For my undergraduate students, seminars at the Newberry Library are far from lectures or classes. Instead, scholars and researchers apply to take part in these workshops, where some of the brightest minds in the Chicago area come together to critique and discuss their work. The “presenters” supply the library with a research paper (perhaps 20 pages or so) and the D’Arcy McNickle Center circulates those to attendees prior to the seminar. The “presenter” is asked to contextualize their work in a brief 5-10 minute overview and then the twenty or so attendees spend the following hour and a half asking questions, providing suggestions, and generally discussing the papers. It’s an absolutely amazing experience for both the presenters and the attendees. Watch out: I’m thinking about conducting classes in this way sometime in the future.

Afterward, I had the great privilege of going out to dinner with Joe Genetin-Pilawa and Rachel Buff, who traveled down from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee to attend the seminar. Both Joe and I had been students of Rachel Buff when she taught at Bowling Green State University at the beginning of her career, but I had not seen her since leaving BGSU almost a decade ago. It was nice catching up and I look forward to ongoing conversations (as well as the writing group that spurred from our dinner).

I’ve spent a lot of time in Chicago over the past decade and often feel at home there, but I’m not sure why. I could care less about the Magnificent Mile; I could care less about local museums and parks; I could care less about the Sears Tower (other than I refuse to call it anything else); and I could less about Chicago sports (okay, I kind of care about the Cubs). So why do I feel so attached to the Windy City? Perhaps, it’s because each time I travel there I’m engaged in larger intellectual pursuits, like I was this past Wednesday. Living life on the road raises questions about the meaning of home. As a transient, I have many homes. If home is where the heart is, then Oklahoma is home. If home is where family is, then Ohio might be home. But, if home is where the mind is, then perhaps Chicago is home.