Living My Big Smithsonian Dream

Living My Big Smithsonian Dream

Tomasz Wicherkiewicz, Poznań/Poland

As a teenager, I had really big dreams. Most of them were related to various cognitive ways of gaining more knowledge about the world’s diversity… For a boy who grew up in a communist country behind the Iron Curtain (communism in Poland collapsed when I was already 22), ‘the world’ and ‘diversity’ were quite abstract ideas. Our accessible world extended to the borders of Poland, rarely to some other countries of the ‘Soviet block’(Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc.) The ways to get beyond were also quite limited – in my case, everything started with collecting stamps and the National Geographic magazine. Yes, a 1946 post-stamp from the US and a 1980s copy of the magazine were my first encounters with the... Smithsonian Institution. Ever since then, the Smithsonian Institution has become one of my synonyms for global cognitive diversity.

My next encounter with SI happened when preparing my MA thesis about the scholarly output of the Polish deportee Bronisław Piłsudski and his studies on the aborigines of Sakhalin at the turn of the 19^th century. During my research query, in 1989, I discovered that some of Piłsudski’s collections, including unique wax cylinders with recordings of the Ainu, Nivhgu, and Orok languages and folklore, were preserved in the SI collections in Washington, DC. This is how my half-abstract temple of world knowledge and diversity turned into a concrete (re)source of data. How could I have assumed that 30 years later I would be able to meet the best specialist in DC in the anthropology of the peoples of the Siberian north and East, Igor Krupnik!?

My childhood dream became a reality in 2015, when during a summer vacation in the United States and in DC, I dedicated a whole day to visits to the Smithsonian National Museums: of the American Indian, of American History and - of Natural History, just to discover bitterly that one day at the Smithsonian is like a drop in the sea of museal knowledge paradise. How could I have assumed that... 5 years later I would be able to enter all of them as... SI fellow researcher?!

The miracle happened in 2018, when our project COLING - Minority Languages, Major Opportunities. Collaborative Research, Community Engagement, and Innovative Educational Tools were accepted and funded by the European Union under its Horizon 2020 RISE scheme. And one of the project partners was... Smithsonian Institution; no wonder that I knew immediately where I wanted to spend most of my COLING secondment: All roads lead to… Washington, DC.

I stayed in DC for 5 months, between 1. October 2019 and 3. March 2020, with short pauses when traveling to some other academic centers in the US. I hadn’t known many details about the Recovering Voices program before, but during my stay at the National Museum of Natural History I was able not only to learn more, but also to experience more of the diversified profile and activities of the program, as well as my fantastic colleagues. Gwyneira Isaac, Emily Cain, Laura Sharp, plus another COLING fellow, Jesse van Amelsfoort, from the Netherlands.

My most profound memories related to this program include a remarkable workshop on basketry, its anthropological and ethnolinguistic dimensions, with members of the Odawa, Penobscot, Akwesasne Mohawk nations – among them were Kelly Church and Cherish Parrish, whose astonishing works I could admire later at the SAAM Renwick Gallery exhibition Heart of Our People: Native Women Artists; or Renee Wasson Dillard, Jennifer Neptune, and Sheila Kanieson Rnsom, who also shared HERstories Through Basketmaking. At the very end of my stay in DC, I could also actively participate in the Mother Tongue Film Festival 2020, which uniquely combined the emotions of the arts with my own linguistic discoveries and so knowledgeable encounters with Amalia Cordova and Joshua A. Bell.

I did my best to share my knowledge and experience with the Smithsonian community, too. In November 2019 and February 2020, thanks to the invitation by Mary Linn, I had a pleasure to lecture on languages and their communities of Kashubian, Wymysiöeryś, Latgalian and Latvian at the SI Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies.

I returned from Washington to Poznań on a very special day – 4. March 2020, which is officially considered the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic in Poland. All COVID-19 developments (actually, ‘-20’ and ‘-21’ as well) developments have somehow influenced my memories and plans for the next assignment (s) in the US.

Thus, I hope that my big Smithsonian dream will return in 2022, as I am again planning to spend a couple of winter and summer weeks with amazing colleagues at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

My big Smithsonian dream has actually exceeded itself and the dreaming teenager, as in November 2021, with great pride, I received a 4-year appointment as a Research Associate with the NMNH. Seriously amazing!