Whitman College Magazine Winter 2022

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
Exploring the History
of Belonging
ANTHROPOLOGIST EUNICE BLAVASCUNAS’ RESEARCH AND
TEACHING ARE ROOTED IN CULTURE, PLACE AND JUSTICE
BY TARA ROBERTS
Białowieza, Poland, and Joseph,
Oregon, are more than 5,000 miles apart.
Białowieza is surrounded by primeval
forest, a mix of deciduous swamps and
evergreen groves. Joseph is tucked among
the vast stands of pine, spruce and fir in the
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.
In Poland, communities remain marked
by the traumas of World War II and ethnic
violence between Poles and Belarusians.
At the same time, marginalized Oregonians
face legacies of settler colonialism, racial
exclusion and broken treaties.
These two distinct forested settings
unite in the research and teaching of
Eunice Blavascunas, associate professor of
anthropology and environmental studies at
Whitman College.
Both are complex ecosystems, biologically
and culturally. Residents wrestle with
questions about logging, jobs, endangered
species and how to pursue justice given
these complex pasts.
“The borderlands of eastern Poland and
what’s happening in eastern Washington or
eastern Oregon are very far apart, but there
are ways in which we see similar processes
of who belongs in a landscape,” Blavascunas
says. “What is that history of belonging?”
Blavascunas is a cultural anthropologist
who studies land and conservation conflicts
in relation to parks and protected areas and
has spent more than 20 years researching
and writing about Eastern Europe.
Her 2020 book, “Foresters, Borders,
and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s
Last Primeval Forest” (Indiana University
Press), is the result of her decades of
research about the people and culture of the
Białowieza Forest.
In the spring of 2022, Blavascunas will
turn her attention to the Western United
States with the introduction of a special
class. She and other Whitman professors
will lead an immersive field course that
takes students to Joseph and other locations
across the Inland Northwest. “Land Water
Justice: Envisioning the Next West” will
connect students with westerners who are
both enmeshed in experiences of racial and
climate injustice and seeking solutions.
‘COMPLEX AND MESSY’
Fittingly, Blavascunas began her career with
the U.S. Forest Service. As a college student,
she was fascinated by revolutions in Eastern
Europe and learned about the Białowieza
Forest from Polish foresters she met while
working on the Olympic Peninsula.
She received grants to conduct research
in Białowieza throughout her time earning
a master’s in geography at the University of
Texas at Austin and a doctorate in cultural
anthropology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz.
In 2015, she returned to the Pacific
Northwest and began her professorship
at Whitman. Her commitment to crossdiscipline
scholarship was an ideal fit
for Whitman’s Environmental Studies
Program, which requires students to take
courses in the natural sciences, social
sciences and humanities.
“I think environmental studies is one of
the only fields that really asks you to try to
hold all of those things, and it shows you
how complex and messy that is,” she says.
And the interplay across those disciplines
does lead to complex, and sometimes
challenging, conversations, Blavascunas
says—but it’s critical to conducting research
that not only sounds the alarm about
environmental problems, but also leads
to action.
ENVISIONING THE ‘NEXT WEST’
“Land Water Justice,” a tuition-free course,
is part of the Pacific Northwest Just
Futures Institute for Racial and Climate
Justice, a multi-university partnership
funded by a $4.5 million Andrew W.
14 / WHITMAN MAGAZINE