A group of Augustana College professors, alumni, and community members is revisiting the institution's history in a new book entitled "Called to Reckon: Replacing History and Reclaiming Mission at a Midwestern College."
The multidisciplinary essay collection, published last month, deconstructs eras of Augustana College and looks ahead to how higher education can survive in the 21st century.
“I think we were drawing from our various fields in history or in geography, religion, and it was really an organic process,” said Scandinavian Studies Associate Professor Safstrom who contributed to the book which draws on archival research and interviews with students, faculty, staff, administrators and community members. . “[T]hings that haven't been covered in the past histories of the college. We started out by reading what had been written.”
“The book is organized at the beginning. Chapters are delving into the history and looking at some of these places of gaps or silences, and giving voice to those topics. And then the last couple of chapters are pointing towards some of these usable pasts, the resources that we've identified in our history,” Safstrom said.
History Professor Jane Simonsen edited the collection and authored the book’s first chapter, focused on the indigenous nations that lived in the region centuries before European settlers arrived and took over the land.
“A lot of people think of Indian removal, think of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but it happened as well here. And so the public lands are opened up, and the people that we think of as the pioneers in the area were also the white settlers who acquired that land. And I think for me, learning that familiar history just reminds us once again that history does give us an obligation to learn more about the land,” Simonsen said in an interview with WVIK.
Simonsen highlighted numerous figures who tackled this misrepresentation of history, including one Augustana seminary student. Vine Deloria Jr. was born among the Yankton Dakota near Standing Rock Reservation. Simonsen points out that this reservation was the outcome of America’s ethnic cleansing campaign, forcibly removing the indigenous people from their land in 1858. Deloria attended the Augustana Theological Seminary in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
That includes a passage from Deloria’s 1969 book “Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto”: “For me, at least, Christianity has been a sham to cover the white man’s shortcomings. Yet I had spent four years in a seminary finding out for myself where Christianity had fallen short,” Deloria wrote.
Simonsen adds that Deloria Jr. was invited to give the commencement address at Augustana in 1971 and to receive an honorary degree. At this time, he had earned a law degree from the University of Colorado.
Simonsen included parts of his speech, titled “The System Today,” in which Deloria told students that the social, political, and economic frameworks that craft relationships between individuals and groups –“does not automatically produce justice. Only active intelligent citizens produce justice.”
In his book, “We Talk, You Listen”, published a year prior to his commencement address, Deloria would go on to suggest that people reinvest in “tribalism.” — where decisions are made communally, with neighbors sharing resources and finding points of connection between communities.
In a later chapter of the volume, “Toward a Pedagogy of Accompaniment: Transformative Community, Spiritual Formation, and Augustana’s Useable Past,” Professor Safstrom discusses how the college’s beginnings in Lutheran mission and identity have shaped its expansion throughout Augustana’s history.
“We particularly come from a Swedish and Lutheran origin story, or actually Scandinavian in Lutheran because there were Norwegians also involved in the beginning or founding,” Safstrom said. “That's kind of interesting to think about how are these ethnic identities playing out and how is this institution going to serve second and third generation immigrants? That was surprisingly relevant, I think, when we get into it, we think about today, who are our students? Our students are coming from maybe one background or one cultural identity and have one foot in one world and one foot in another, and they're bilocating. They're in two spaces. What can Augustana do today to help students move between identities and places?”
The book’s synopsis states in part: “Called to Reckon weaves together issues of race, indigeneity, sexuality, religion, and belonging, linking past conflicts to present-day challenges. The essays examine the “town and gown” dynamic, exploring tensions between the college and its more diverse surrounding community. Other contributors recount key moments in the growing presence and power of Black students on campus from 1925 to 1975, placed in the context of African and African American history. A chapter documents the history of Latinos/x Unidos, while another essay demonstrates how queer members of the Augustana community helped reshape the campus in the post-Stonewall era.”
Additional writers include former Augustana President Steven Bahls; Alumni Robert Burke; Rock Island County Assistant Public Defender Lizandra Gozmez-Ramirez; Assistant Vice Chancellor for DEI at the University of Denver Lauren Hammond-Ford; Augustana Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Sarah Lashley; Augustana Professor of Religion Jason Mahn; former Augustana Assistant Special Collections Librarian Harrison Phillis; former Augustana Vice-President of DEI Monica Smith; Augustana Associate Professor of Geography Christopher Strunk; and current Augustana College President Andrea Talentino.
The book is available from the publisher, Southern Illinois University Press, as well as Amazon, and in the college’s library, both in print and as an E-Book.
“This book is a conversation that we're having among ourselves at the college to invest in these questions and relationships, but it's also an invitation to the Quad City area community to come in this way and get familiar with this institution, [which] we've been neighbors for so long,” Safstrom said.
WVIK’s full interview with Professor Safstrom and Simonsen, recorded on March 13th, is attached to this story.
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