Whitman College Magazine Winter 2022

“No place is without
a human narrative
about its past.”
— Eunice Blavascunas, from her book
Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles:
The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest
Mellon Foundation grant. Phil Brick,
Whitman’s Miles C. Moore Professor
of Political Science, and Stan Thayne, a
visiting assistant professor of anthropology
and religion, will join Blavascunas in
teaching the course.
Students will meet with community
partners, including Indigenous, Black
and Latinx leaders who are doing on-theground
work related to climate and
racial justice. The students will create
podcasts from their conversations, which
Blavascunas says will allow them to learn
to deeply listen to people’s stories and
meaningfully retell them with consideration
for who the stories belong to.
In the process, they’ll explore how what
they learn could transform the region into
the ‘Next West,’ a place that remembers its
past, for better or worse, while imagining a
just future.
In Joseph, for example, they will learn
about the town’s namesake, Chief Joseph,
and the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland
project’s efforts to return land to the tribe.
They’ll also be collaborating with Gwen
Trice, founder of the Maxville Heritage
Interpretive Center, which tells the stories
of African American families who lived in
Maxville—once a 1920s and ’30s timber
town, now a ghost town.
“I see my role in this course not in the
traditional professorial sense of I am using
my expertise on a subject matter, but rather
as an animator and a facilitator between
students and community partners, community
partners who are doing the grounded
and challenging work of being people of
color and living in majority white rural
areas,” Blavascunas says.
FORGING AHEAD
Though her field course will focus on the
Pacific Northwest, Blavascunas’ research
remains unbounded by region or discipline.
She’s exploring topics such as the
effects of “rewilding” animals in Europe
and in North America, the impacts of a
dredging project near Chernobyl, and
how people across the globe think about
the movements of wild animals and their
kinship to them.
Blavascunas seeks to reach beyond an
audience of scholars and show people—
whether in an ancient Polish forest, the
mountains of the Inland Northwest or the
campus of Whitman College—that another
world is possible.
Matters of
the place.
Eunice
Blavascunas
helps her
students
explore issues
related to
environmental
and racial
justice.
KIM FETROW ’96 OF KIM FETROW PHOTOGRAPHY
WINTER 2022 / 15