The most obvious benefit to Penn students is an opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations. As a result, students generally have no contact with the people they are studying. Because many have never met a Native American, they are prone to thinking of Indians as being extinct. By getting students to look at archival materials from an indigenous perspective, they learn to think about such basic terms as “American,” “history,” “literature,” “intelligence,” and “writing” in new ways. Even if the students do not major in American Indian studies, the intellectual experience of understanding a very different cultural epistemology and ontology is inherently valuable.

From a pedagogical perspective, the students learn research skills in archives that will serve them well no matter what their chose careers. In my experience, most undergraduates do not have the opportunity to work with archival or museum collections. Many students seem to enjoy the courses more once they have been to the American Philosophical Society and seen Thomas Jefferson’s hand written draft of the Declaration of Independence or held a drum owned by Sitting Bull in their hands. It makes history and culture come alive in a way that textbooks rarely achieve. I find that it requires a lot of preliminary work—selecting and skimming documents, scanning photographs, etc.—to prepare a class for doing research in the archives. This semester my students will be going through hundreds of pages of oral history transcripts about an Ojibwe Medicine Man to try to match them to historical documents and photographs in order to make them more useful to the community where the recordings were originally made more than 75 years ago. I find that the students’ work is more thoughtful and more inspired when they realize that their work will be shared with community members, rather than writing a paper that will be read by one person. Me.