This idea inspired Fawaz to write The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, his award-winning 2016 book on how comic-book superheroes of the 1960s and ’70s illustrated new forms of social belonging while wrestling with political questions raised by the civil rights movement, gay liberation, and second-wave feminism. He says mutant superheroes living on society’s margins — and more conventional characters exploring these margins, like those in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City — have helped readers see themselves in people who don’t share their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or cultural background.

“Series like The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men provided readers an exceptionally diverse range of new characters and creative worlds, but most importantly, modeled what it might look like for those characters to bridge divides of race, species, kin, and kind for their mutual flourishing and the good of the world,” he argues in “The Difference a Mutant Makes,” an essay on the Los Angeles Review of Books culture blog.

A quest to promote intergalactic peace and justice fuels the divide-bridging process for many superheroes. It drives them to interact, negotiate differences, and take action together. It’s also one of the things that drew Fawaz to them, first as a reader and later as a scholar.

Origin Stories

Fawaz’s meet-cute with superhero comics involves a teleporting elf, a fighter who extracts her bones to use as weapons, and an acrobat sporting a prehensile tail. They appear on the splashy pink cover of X-Men’s 80th issue, which beckons readers with the promise of “a team reunited … a dream reborn!”

The year was 1998, and the place was Orange County, California. Fawaz was primed for transformation when he spotted that unforgettable scene on a shop shelf.

“Here I am, this gay, Middle Eastern middle-schooler living in a predominantly white area and experiencing a ridiculous amount of bullying,” Fawaz says, recalling his instant kinship with the motley crew of mutants. Though disempowerment shaped his everyday life, he identified intensely with one of the series’ most powerful characters: Storm.

“We didn’t have many obvious similarities — I’m not a woman, I’m not Kenyan, and I can’t control the weather, unfortunately — but I saw tiny pieces of myself in her,” he recalls.

Fawaz and Storm both learned how differences can make a group stronger. As his attachment to X-Men grew, Fawaz noticed how the entire series wrestled with thorny questions about diversity and nonconformity. It also inspired readers to grapple with these questions in their own lives. When Fawaz forged his path into academia, he zeroed in on these transformative processes.

“That ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else — someone in entirely different circumstances — is a fundamental part of being human,” he says. “We each have our own way of exercising this ability, and I think that’s beautiful.”

Students often ask Fawaz to explain the meaning of a story they’re reading. He uses this moment to discuss the power of interpretation: how readers’ experiences of a story influence its meaning in innumerable ways. What we bring to the story also matters, including our values and culture, our memories and personality traits, even what’s happening around us when we’re reading.

The imaginative space where interpretation takes place is Fawaz’s favorite intellectual playground. In his academic life, he examines how people find meaning through the lenses of feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and literary criticism, among others.

Fawaz wants to know how popular culture can help us find alternative ways of expressing who we are, including gender and sexuality. Stories, in other words, are a tool for self-liberation as well as societal transformation.

Our Possible Futures

Fawaz began exploring such ideas during his undergraduate career at the University of California– Berkeley and at George Washington University, where he earned his doctoral degree in American Studies in 2012. He settled at UW–Madison a year later and has been collecting accolades ever since, including the Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award in 2019, the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Award in 2020, and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship and named professorship in 2022.

Fawaz has received numerous honors beyond UW–Madison, too. The New Mutants won an award for best first-book manuscript from the Center for LGBTQ Studies, as well as praise from academics, comics creators, and literary titans. One of those titans is Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Díaz appreciates how Fawaz uses comics — a marginalized medium — to discuss marginalized identities.

“For a long time, comics were viewed as disposable and meritless, and it is precisely in these types of cultural creations that one finds a culture’s political unconscious writ large,” he says. “Comics are the funhouse four-color mirror that reveals our society’s true face. To peer into such mirrors and not get lost requires a scholar of uncommon insight, rigor, wit, and generosity.”

Díaz says The New Mutants reveals something essential about Americans’ relationship with difference.

“Fawaz understands that our fantasies of the Other — racial, sexual, physical, gendered — are the secret fuel that powers so much popular culture. To trace these shifting, contested visions in, say, comics is to make visible our strange past and our possible futures.”

The Element of Surprise

Excelling at this kind of close reading is a bit like having x-ray vision: Fawaz sees fascinating things that have remained hidden to other readers. He uses this gift in a novel way in Queer Forms, which hit bookstores in September.

The book shows how America’s understanding of gender and sexuality has expanded to include many types of nonconformity. Fawaz supports his argument with examples from pop culture, including Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a set of stories exploring friendship and LGBTQ life in 1970s San Francisco.

Though Maupin’s stories evolved into nine novels and a ’90s miniseries that stoked a firestorm at PBS, they began as a humble 1976 serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Millions of readers grew curious about LGBTQ culture as they invested in the characters and their soap-opera adventures. Fawaz interviewed nearly 30 of these early fans, discovering how Tales shaped their relationships, actions, and identities.

He found that they were constantly in dialogue with others about what they were reading. Maupin’s narrative surprises were irresistible to nearly everyone, regardless of their station in life, and the conversations opened hearts and minds.

As Fawaz explained in a campus talk last spring, reading and other aesthetic experiences can offer a host of surprises that “catapult us into new and enlarged states of perception.” These effects can radiate through social circles, pushing people to ponder their assumptions about others.

Fawaz points to one interviewee’s account of helping her family make sense of the unfamiliar concepts in Tales of the City.

“This person and her parents had daily phone calls about these stories for two years,” he says. “She described a slow and steady transformation of her parents’ thinking, especially how her dad started out homophobic but changed along the way.”

Coming Out of the Closet

Fawaz says readers who knew little about LGBTQ culture often gravitated toward Tales’ Mary Ann, whose journey from wide-eyed Midwestern transplant to worldly woman about town is a driving force in the story. Through her, many readers learned what “coming out of the closet” meant — and what it could mean to them, no matter what their sexual orientation happened to be.

Coming out in the 1970s was “a revolutionary act performed repeatedly to reproduce and normalize queerness,” according to Fawaz, yet Tales of the City also presents it as a practice straight people could use to “forge bonds across difference.” Characters come out as all sorts of things as the story unfolds: proud gay man, transgender matriarch, and LGBTQ ally, to name a few.

The series even begins with Mary Ann declaring her devotion to something she “shouldn’t” love: San Francisco, the place her parents associate with hippies and murderers. When she announces her decision to stay there instead of returning to Cleveland, she comes out as a free-spirited adult eager to make her own decisions. She embraces how she’s different from the person her parents expect her to be.

At 28 Barbary Lane, where the landlady tapes a psychoactive welcome gift to each new tenant’s door, Mary Ann’s friends challenge her to shed her inhibitions, unleash her imagination, and find the humor in life’s inherent messiness. They also help her see herself in new ways.

Her entry into this chosen family mirrors Fawaz’s first encounter with the X-Men, which he lovingly describes in The New Mutants: “I sat by the family pool, [then] carefully opened the dazzling holographic cover; what I discovered there has kept me dreaming and made life far, far less lonely ever since.” •

Most nights find Wright, an associate clinical professor at UW Law School, working on his second thriller, a follow-up to his smash debut, The Coyotes of Carthage, a screwball dive into the bleak world of dark-money politics. No less an authority than bestselling legal-thriller writer John Grisham calls Wright “a major new voice.”

Down in his basement, sitting at a wood desk strewn with papers and empty bottles of unsweetened tea, Wright faces the wall with two screens in front of him (one for research, one for writing). Music pounds. Sam Cooke, Aretha, Master KG, Outkast, the Chicks. More often than not, the same song roars over and over and over and over again.

“For me, writing is a loud experience,” says Wright, who also lectures in the UW Program in Creative Writing, where he earned his MFA. “Part of the way I know I’m doing okay is that you sort of zoom out on the music. You’re not really listening to the lyrics. You lose track of time. You’re mesmerized with whatever’s on the screen.”

Author Lorrie Moore, Wright’s former UW writing instructor, is a bit in awe of him. “He works hard and stays up late,” she says. “He laughs and makes you laugh. He is blessed/cursed with a quick, high-energy brain.”

Wright is a towering presence, both intellectually and physically, thanks to his six-foot-two height. Besides his UW degree, he has a bachelor’s in economics and history and a master’s in environmental economics from Duke as well as a law degree from Washington University. He even found time to get a master’s from Johns Hopkins’s writing program while doing a five-year stint as a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. When Wright applied to the UW’s program, he wrote, “I have the perfect job. For someone, but not me.”

His sly wit snakes through every page of The Coyotes of Carthage. When asked to describe himself, he conjures up a cinematic vision, pointing out his freckles, hair that’s a little wild, and his “exceptionally big head,” which requires him to wear “special big-headed glasses.”

Besides teaching in two programs, Wright is the former codirector of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted people. Thanks in part to his efforts, four men were freed.

Wright continues to meet clients in Wisconsin’s maximum-security prisons with law students in his clinic. “I sometimes describe it as being like Scooby-Doo,” he says. “A bunch of students and I get in a van, and we go and try to solve murders around the state.”

Experiences like these inform Wright’s fiction. His Department of Justice work, for example, had him trekking to rural areas to try voting rights cases. While passing time in places like Bolivar County, Mississippi, he befriended local politicians — “masters of their communities,” as he calls them. And the down-and-dirty secrets he learned about small-town elections reveal themselves throughout The Coyotes of Carthage.

Swamp Creature

The novel tells the tale of Dre Ross, a sleazy, 30-something, African American political consultant in Washington, DC. A former small-time drug dealer raised by a bipolar schizophrenic mother, he slept in alleys and did hard time in juvenile prison for a savage assault he didn’t commit.

This down-and-out swamp creature has been given his last chance: Go to backwater Carthage, South Carolina. Dupe its flag-waving voters into approving a ballot initiative that will sell public land to a mining company. Never mind that its toxic runoff will kill tourism, poison the water supply, and basically destroy the place. The dirty trickster whips up websites for phony front groups such as the Council of Christian Commerce and the Society for American Freedom. He runs dishonest ads and polls. He launches nasty online attacks.

Dre, writes Wright, “wonders at what point he lost control.” Whether he means of the campaign, his sanity, his decency, or all three goes unsaid. Lest a reader think Dre only has it in for white people, he is an equal-opportunity abuser who “admits that for his people he might have done more harm than good.”

Sour wisdom from the dark-money world — and Wright’s rural journeys — peppers Dre’s thoughts. “Elections are about getting voters to hate others.” “God bless social media. Good for pictures; terrible for truth.”

“Steve has a real heart to his work,” says novelist Judith Claire Mitchell, who formerly taught in the UW creative writing program. “There’s an emotional openness that balances the cynicism. His main character in Coyotes is very openly wounded. His heart is broken, and that’s not hidden.”

Critics loved the book for the way it combines the alienation of Catch-22’s Joseph Heller with Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo ethos and the wacky imagery of a Coen brothers movie. “Riveting,” with a “tick-tock pace and knockout prose,” cheered the Washington Post. “Darkly funny and bleakly honest,” gushed Salon. “Crackerjack debut,” raved USA Today, which put Wright on its list of “100 Black Novelists You Should Read.”

“Writing,” says Wright, “is the art of keeping people paying attention.”

Like most first-time novelists, he took a long time to finish The Coyotes of Carthage — four and a half years. He came home from work and would “eat something, walk the dogs, and write — and that was my life.” When he gave the supposedly final manuscript to friends to read, they hated it. Too intellectual, too grim, they said.

During those years Wright had started visiting prisons. “The darkness of that world — the horrific crimes, the awfulness of the wrong person going to jail, and the possibility that the real person who did it was out there and causing more harm — entered the novel, and it became very different from what I wanted it to be,” he says. “I don’t know if I was using it as therapy.”

When told he should cut it from 140,000 to 70,000 words, Wright says, “I was pretty sad, but you stand up. You brush yourself off, and then you go at it, and in the end, I’m still quite proud of it. But it’s obviously a very different book than I thought I had finished four years ago.”

First novels are notoriously autobiographical, but Wright’s upbringing bears no resemblance to Dre’s. When asked what traits he has in common with his ruthless, haunted antihero, Wright jokes, “I think in the book I describe him as exceptionally good-looking.” He quickly confesses that he shares Dre’s “cynicism and acerbic responses. I can be a bit of a smart aleck.”

A Family of Eccentrics

The son of a computer scientist mother and a father who was an army doctor, Wright grew up obsessed with storytelling. He loved the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which allowed preteen readers to control plots by deciding which way stories would turn.

He wrote his own Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and fan fiction and remains an avid devotee of Star Trek and Star Wars. His dog, Ahsoka, a black Lab/Great Pyrenees mix, is named after a Star Wars character mentored by the virtuous young Anakin Skywalker (before he became Darth Vader).

“He tries to show her all the ways in the world to be good, with the irony being he ends up the worst person in the world,” Wright says, adding, “Now that’s not at all my relationship with my dog.”

His two sisters and parents were also Trekkies. “I’ll be honest,” he says, “I come from a family of eccentrics.”

He had a globetrotting childhood, growing up in Nashville, Spokane, Oakland, and on military bases in West Germany and Alaska. “There’s nothing like being an American overseas, especially during the Cold War, to make you love and admire your country.”

Having been in spit-polish schools on military bases, Wright got the shock of his young life in Augusta, Georgia, where he endured his junior and senior high school years. With uncharacteristic understatement, he says, “That experience was formative.” Westside High School introduced him to a community where education was inseparable from race, Christianity, and traditional notions of patriotism.

Once, when he stayed silent for a football game prayer and merely bowed his head, teammates razzed him. A teacher yelled at a student for failing to show respect for the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance. Students isolated themselves by race at lunch, and admission to Advanced Placement classes seemed to Wright to have a cap on Black students.

“Race is one of those things we continue to try to figure out,” he says. “Obviously, over the arc of our country, we’ve made tremendous progress, but especially as a Black civil rights lawyer who represents Black men in the criminal justice system, [I see] we clearly have a long way to go.

“A lot of the conversations we have about even discussing race in our schools deal with people’s discomfort with having conversations about our past and how that implicates our present. My hope is that we can get better at having those conversations. Hopefully, that will lead to better policy in health care, criminal justice, poverty — things I’ve dedicated my life to dealing with.”

Part of the key to Wright’s success is his easygoing nature, which allows him to feel at home in varied settings.

“He has no problem being plunked down in a room with conservatives or liberals, or with people who aren’t interested in politics or who are very interested in politics,” says his former Department of Justice colleague Robert Popper, who is now senior counsel at the right-leaning group Judicial Watch. “He likes to laugh with and, frankly, at them all.”

Back in his days as a rural trial lawyer, Wright became friends with a lot of politicians he would not necessarily vote for. “But I thought they were very good people, and it wasn’t the end of the world,” he says.

This ability to see all sides of people and situations clearly has benefits for Wright’s work as both a novelist and a law school professor.

No Easy Answers

Wright takes his law students behind bars in the Wisconsin towns of Waupun, Stanley, and Green Bay.

He struggles to describe the smell of a maximum-security prison. A “giant antiseptic bleach” scent provides the top note. Underneath lurk odors of men who haven’t showered because of guard shortages. “I think it’s the smell of misery,” Wright says.

Before the students go in, he gives them a talking to.

“This is something you’re going to remember the rest of your life,” he tells them, keeping tabs on their moods. “I’m always mindful of their energy and the tone, because there’s just objectively sadness in a prison, and for some students, it’s scary.

“Prisons are by design intimidating. You walk through one hall. A door closes behind you, the barred door opens in front of you, and you walk down another hall. Just the sound of it. The clicking of bars behind you and the clicking of doors ahead of you. The whole aesthetic. You’re occasionally given a tour, and we’ve been to solitary wings. There are guys in there just screaming for their lives.”

Nevertheless, Wright encourages his students to retain a sense of humor.

“You can still have moments of levity and moments of laughter,” he says. “I want them to learn, but I want them to have fun. I don’t see how you can have fun without laughing every once in a while.”

Most of his students have very strong feelings about the criminal justice system. Some hate police and believe no one should go to jail. Some think police can do no wrong, and there are no innocent people in jail. “They tend to be a little simplistic at both extremes,” says Wright.

“Part of what I hope to do is to create some complexity, to explain to students that oftentimes there aren’t a lot of easy answers, that there are different stakeholders, and that all people — including the police, suspects, and victims — are not all just one thing.”

Spoken like a true novelist. •

Herrera: “For decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged.”

Yoshiko Herrera was earning her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union faced dissolution. After a study-abroad visit to Eastern Europe in 1990 and a peek behind the crumbling Iron Curtain, Herrera switched academic tracks to study the “different world” she saw and the ethnic, national, and social groups within it. Now she’s an expert in Russian politics and a professor of political science at the UW, and the war in Ukraine has given her yet another post-Soviet conflict to study. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Herrera has done countless interviews for local and national news outlets to explain Russian president Vladimir Putin’s destructive actions and why she believes Ukrainians’ resolve for statehood will eventually prevail.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, you called Putin’s actions an “incredible miscalculation.” What did Putin miscalculate?

It’s a miscalculation based on a profound misunderstanding of Ukraine and a significant underestimation of the international reaction in terms of sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The lack of respect for sovereignty and nationhood in Ukraine led Putin and his military advisers to not seriously examine the situation, including assessing Ukraine’s likely resolve, military capabilities, and lack of support for a Russian occupation. Because the 2014 Crimea invasion was such a shock for Ukraine, Ukrainians realized the danger to their state and nation, and they largely got over some of their historic differences and built a more inclusive sense of Ukrainian national identity that’s not just based on ethnic or linguistic traits.

What are the consequences that Putin, and Russia more broadly, have faced?

Even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO per se, it is going to remain strongly anti-Russian, which is the opposite of what Putin wanted. Plus, Finland and Sweden are now on track to join NATO. And every other country in Europe has been put on alert that Russia is a dangerous country, and they need to treat it as such. In many ways the results for Russia have been disastrous. Regardless of the outcome of the war, for decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged. Ironically, a military defeat of Russia and Putin may be the best hope that Russia has to improve its prospects. But I want to emphasize the war has been a terrible, unprovoked, humanitarian and economic catastrophe for Ukraine.

How do you see this war ending? Do you expect to see peace anytime soon?

Right now, nobody really knows how long this can last. Unfortunately, I think both sides are very committed to fighting, so I don’t really see the prospect of a ceasefire or any negotiated settlement anytime soon. Ukrainians will not give up their state. The only question is to what extent they will be able to beat back Russian forces. On the Russian side, we see that there is no limit to Putin’s cruelty.

What do you believe is the United States’ role in this conflict?

Number one is in the coordination of international economic sanctions, especially with Europe, against Russia. There is more to be done on energy sanctions, and the U.S. should keep pressing on further secondary sanctions. Even though sanctions are not going to have an immediate effect on the war, they are going to weaken Russian state capacity and capabilities over the next few months or year.

Second is military support and weapons supply, and the U.S. is doing a lot, but Ukraine needs more help on this, and the U.S. should lead the way. There are a lot of reasons why Western governments might not be advertising everything they’re doing — I tend to be of the view that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we are not aware of — but the military support from the West is absolutely critical to helping Ukraine win.

Humanitarian support for people in Ukraine, as well as displaced people, is important. There is also a major role for Europe and the U.S. in terms of supporting the rebuilding process in Ukraine. The world needs to hold Russia to account in terms of war crimes.

How should the United States navigate future relations with Russia?

As long as Putin is in power, we have to deal with a threatening, malevolent, untrustworthy government. There is no building trust with an untrustworthy regime, and hence the U.S. and Europe will have to act accordingly. One thing that is likely to change is that there has to be a long-term reconsideration of energy policy generally to [take] into account both the environment and these national security issues. Given the Russian threat, it is more important than ever that the U.S. have a coordinated national security policy with a reliable executive in the Oval Office.

Initially, the archaeologists thought it was a relatively young canoe — an artifact of the 1800s or a Boy Scouts project from the 1950s. The revelation of its true age took their breath away: the vessel was 1,200 years old, built around 800 CE by early ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

News of the canoe’s discovery and recovery made waves that traveled the world, but the impact is felt most strongly at its source. For some, the vessel is a tangible reminder of a history frequently forgotten in the wake of watersports and watercolor Terrace sunsets. For others, it affirms a truth as old as the ancient lake herself, one that reflects on her glassy surface and rests in her cloudy depths.

“Madison is the water,” says Molli Pauliot x’94, MA’20, PhDx’23, a cultural anthropology student and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s Buffalo clan. It was the water that sustained this area’s earliest residents, and it’s the water that has drawn everyone since.

Water has memory — sometimes so vivid that it freezes a moment in the form of a dugout canoe. Lake Mendota is speaking. A great many people are eager to hear what she has to say.

“I think I found something”: The first glimpse of the canoe in Lake Mendota. Wisconsin Historical Society

A Whisper Underwater

June 11, 2021, was a perfect summer day in Madison: the weather was warm, and Mendota was beautiful. For Tamara Thomsen ’91, MS’93, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, these were prime conditions to do no work at all. Equipped with diver propulsion vehicles — underwater scooters — Thomsen and Mallory Dragt ’20 set out to a popular dive spot off the lake’s southwest shore.

“I have been to [this dive site] probably a hundred times, and thousands of divers have been there, too,” says Thomsen. “We were going to scooter around and chase fish, and then pick up trash.”

Halfway into their joyride, Dragt signaled to Thomsen that it was time to circle back to the boat. But Thomsen was focused on a log sticking out of the lake’s wall. In the rare clarity of Mendota’s June waters, the log resembled the dugout canoes she had spent recent years studying around the state. She counted the minutes it took to scooter back to the boat in hopes of finding the canoe again later that day, this time not as a recreational diver, but as an archaeologist.

Amy Rosebrough MA’96, PhD’10 was working from home when she got a call from Thomsen, her colleague at the historical society.

“I think I found something,” Thomsen said.

Rosebrough is a terrestrial archaeologist in the State Historic Preservation Office and an expert on the Indigenous peoples who lived in Wisconsin and surrounding areas during the Late Woodland period, which lasted from 500 CE through 1200 CE. A self-described “landlubbing archaeologist,” she wasn’t about to suit up and dive in with Thomsen, but on a day like this, she couldn’t refuse an opportunity to sit on the boat and offer her expertise.

Back in the water, Thomsen located the canoe again, recorded its coordinates, and investigated its condition. She fanned around the edges of the wood, expecting to find a fragment, only to discover the vessel almost entirely intact. She resurfaced to share photos with Rosebrough before returning to retrieve the “weird, colorful rocks” she reported finding nearby.

“We put them in a row and looked them over, and I thought, well, this is very, very strange because they’re not round, they’re not tumbled, and they’re not smooth like you would see if they were dropped by a glacier,” Rosebrough says. “But I couldn’t, at that point, figure out what on earth they were.”

Thomsen returned the rocks, measured the canoe, and reburied their discovery. That evening, Rosebrough realized that the rocks were net sinkers, tools thought to be used by Late Woodland fishermen. Intrigue quickly became excitement. What memories would Mendota reveal?

Resurfacing

The Wisconsin Historical Society was between state archaeologists in June 2021, so further inquiry into the canoe’s origins was put on hold until the arrival of Jim Skibo. Skibo was a professor of archaeology at Illinois State University for 27 years before coming to the historical society.

When he learned of a story resting at the bottom of Lake Mendota, he committed to telling it. Thomsen retrieved a hair-sized sample of the wood from the canoe to send out for radiocarbon dating.

“When Jim announced what it was, I almost fell on the floor,” Rosebrough says. “From that time period, we have things made out of stone. If the preservation’s really good, we’ve got a bone tool or two. We’ve got pottery, but even that is usually broken into tiny little pieces, so we were making history based on scraps and impressions and the occasional mound.”

But Mendota, a meticulous conservator, kept this piece of history safe: packed tightly into the lake bed, the wooden canoe evaded sunlight, invasive species, and centuries of other vessels and visitors.

“This is a chance to touch a piece of history that should, by all accounts, have turned into dust a couple of decades after it was abandoned,” Rosebrough says.

On November 2, 2021, after months of careful planning and practicing, Thomsen, Skibo, maritime archaeologist Caitlin Zant, and a group made up of experienced volunteers and divers from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office executed a maneuver never before performed by the historical society when they excavated the canoe from the lake. The process took hours, during which a crowd amassed on the shore where Rosebrough was communicating with the team out on the water and fielding questions from curious onlookers and media outlets.

The canoe — the oldest intact vessel ever recovered from Wisconsin waters — emerged to applause, cheers, and tears before being carted away to the State Archive Preservation Facility. The recovery made headlines from CNN to the BBC. The canoe itself harbors many more stories to tell.

Ancestral Footprint

To appreciate the canoe’s stories, you have to know the people who made it. While Lake Mendota’s present-day shores may be the most populated they’ve ever been, the vast majority of her history has been spent in the company of the Ho-Chunk Nation, who have called these waters home since time immemorial.

“We’ve been in Madison as long as we’ve been Ho-Chunk, and the Ho-Chunk have been there since before it was Madison,” says Casey Brown x’04, public relations officer of the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Bear clan.

According to Brown, the tribe’s oral histories indicate that the Ho-Chunk first entered the world at the Red Banks (near present-day Green Bay). From there, they spread throughout the Midwest, from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan. Archaeologists refer to them as the Late Woodland people or the Effigy Moundbuilders after the animal- and spirit-shaped burial mounds with which they sculpted the landscape. To the modern Ho-Chunk Nation, they’re simply centuries-removed kin who established the tribe’s ancestral footprint in the Madison area: Teejop, or “Four Lakes,” a region whose beauty lies in its waters, and whose waters spring from stories. One Ho-Chunk account of the Four Lakes’ origins tells of Man’una, or “Earthmaker,” who was traveling through the region when he stopped to rest. He filled his kettle with spring water, caa (deer meat), and roots, and set it atop a fire to cook when he heard a sound in the woods. He left to investigate, thinking it might be his friend Bear. When he returned, the kettle was on its side and the water flowed into depressions in the earth, forming the Four Lakes.

Another Ho-Chunk story tells of a man who once fell so deeply in love with a water spirit that he turned into a fish to follow her, carving out the Four Lakes in a pursuit that culminated in the creation of the largest one, Wąąkšikhomįk, or “Where the Man Lies.” To this day, mounds that resemble water spirits can be located just off Mendota’s shores.

The presence of mounds in the area indicates a landscape that allowed for exploration and education, its residents’ basic needs having been readily met by their environment. These early Ho-Chunk were expert navigators, engineers, and astronomers, learning from the land and sky and innovating with the abundant resources.

The mounds themselves are teachers to this day, not only educating people about their builders, but also serving their original purpose by indicating directions and reflecting cosmic phenomena such as solstices.

“The entire Four Lakes area is essentially a university,” Brown says. “Even before the UW was there, the Ho-Chunk were using it as a teaching tool.”

And it continues to be. The Ho-Chunk Nation worked closely with the historical society throughout the canoe retrieval process, and they’ll continue to be involved in helping the canoe tell its story. After all, it’s their story, too.

Mendota’s Oldest Companions

As the leading expert on the ancestral Ho-Chunk who resided on Mendota’s shores during the Late Woodland period, Rosebrough knows more than most Western academics about their customs, technology, and ways of life. With the discovery of the canoe, she also has the most questions.

In the summer, the early, seminomadic Ho-Chunk lived in small villages along lakeshores and riverbanks and grew gardens of sunflowers, squash, goosefoot, and little barley. In the winter, they spread out to preserve resources and the environment. Hunting was integral to their sustenance; archaeologists have recovered arrow and spear points, skinning knives, and hide scrapers, along with remnants of bird and deer bone at many village sites. The importance of fishing was an educated guess.

“We’ve assumed that they were fishing and working on the lakes because the pottery is decorated with the impressions of fabric and cordage and, in some cases, nets,” Rosebrough says. Along with a small collection of harpoons and bits of fish bone at village sites, the canoe and its net sinkers are concrete evidence of fishing in these communities, which raises more questions. Were they fishing onshore or offshore? In deep water, where the big catches lurked? With nets alone, or are there hooks yet to be found?

Inquiries into fishing are just the start. According to Rosebrough, the historical society already has stone tools believed to be axes dating back nearly 10,000 years. By comparing the tools to the markings on the canoe, archaeologists can determine if these implements, once thought to be used for cutting down trees, were actually used for canoe-building.

Rosebrough is also interested in exploring the vessel’s capability for travel. Archaeological evidence suggests that early Ho-Chunk traded with the Cahokians, Indigenous peoples who lived just across the Mississippi River from present-day Saint Louis. The Cahokians were almost certainly traveling up the river to reach the northern tribes — could this canoe have traversed rough waters like the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to reach distant civilizations before meeting its end in Lake Mendota?

Wisconsin’s First Shipwreck

Wisconsin is distinguished by its more than 800 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. The state flag, first adopted in 1863, features a sailor and an anchor, nods to Wisconsin’s early shipyards and nautical industries, the remnants of which lie at the bottom of lakes and rivers and occasionally wash ashore or startle anglers before revealing details of historic shipbuilding in the Midwest. But Wisconsin’s maritime history far predates its flag.

Thomsen is an expert in Wisconsin shipwrecks and spends a great deal of her time documenting and protecting these historic elements. With the canoe, she may have found the very first.

“When Euro-Americans are here and ships go down, we call them a shipwreck. When canoes go down and are found, we call them an artifact,” Skibo says. “But this was a shipwreck.”

Most Indigenous dugout canoes found in Wisconsin were recovered from shallow waters because it was common for early fishermen to cache their canoes offshore in the fall — to commit them to the water’s memory — and recover them in the spring. This canoe was found in 27 feet of water, far from the shores on which it would have been stowed.

The state of the canoe also points toward maritime mishap. Of the minimal damage the canoe has sustained, its oldest flaw may have also been its demise: a heel-sized hole in one end. Wood contains knots that stubbornly refuse to warp with the wood around them, causing them to become weak and fall out. While many recovered canoes show signs of patchwork and repairs, this one’s hole remains.

“Archeologists love touching individual moments: the fingerprint impressed into the pot, the footprint in the floor of a dirt-floored house,” Rosebrough says. “We have a moment here where somebody was either in that canoe or had stashed their net and gear in that canoe, and it went down.”

Like the side-wheel steamers Thomsen traces back to 19th- and 20th-century shipyards, the canoe offers insight into the building techniques of its makers. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory on the UW campus determined that the canoe is made of white oak, a hard and watertight wood native to southern Wisconsin and known to the Ho-Chunk, to whom it is sacred, as caašgegura. Dark soot inside the hull and markings from stone tools suggest the use of burning and scraping to create the vessel. According to Thomsen, wear on the bottom of the canoe can indicate which ends might have been the bow and the stern. Studying its construction can also help archaeologists track the progression of canoe-building through time and across tribes.

“This canoe would be great, like a pickup truck,” Skibo says. It may not have been built for speed or agility, but it could carry a couple of fishermen out to their nets and tote the cargo home — until it didn’t.

To test this theory, Skibo partnered with Lennon Rodgers, director of the UW Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab, to investigate the canoe’s structural integrity. Rodgers’s 3-D scans of the canoe have yielded detailed digital and physical models that will be used to test its flotation and satisfy Rosebrough’s curiosity about its maritime capabilities. They can also help determine whether a dislodged knot could truly be the culprit in its ruin.

The likelihood of shipwreck also raised the question of whether the canoe might indicate a burial, which would have stopped the excavation in its tracks. Wisconsin State Statute 157.70 prevents the disturbance of human remains of any kind and assigns immediate ownership of discovered burials or funerary objects to the respective tribes. Review of culturally specific burial practices and careful dredging of the area around the canoe ruled out this possibility. Still, the canoe’s location and condition create emotional ties that transcend centuries and generate wonder about the person whose vessel went under one day.

“Were they panicking? Were they upset? Were they looking at shore going, ‘Dang it, I didn’t want to get wet today’?” Rosebrough asks. “To reach back and start to think about one individual on one day — one moment of one day — we can empathize with them as another human being.”

The canoe rests in a custom-built vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility. Bryce Richter

People of the Mother Tongue

For some, these ties through time run deeper than the shared experience of a watercraft lost to the lake.

While the Ho-Chunk are the region’s longest-standing residents, their numbers have fluctuated over thousands of years after repeated attempts to eradicate them. According to Rosebrough, disease and intertribal wars instigated by the arrival of French fur traders in the 17th century decimated the Ho-Chunk population. The tribe’s oral histories indicate that, at one point, there were only 50 adult Ho-Chunk men. Later, federal policy displaced the Ho-Chunk from their ancestral lands and allowed for the destruction of mounds and other earthworks.

“When you’re colonizing people, you take over their most beautiful sites, their most sacred sites, and you put your site on top of it,” Pauliot says. “That’s why the capital’s in Madison.”

Perhaps the most recent and haunting attempt at eliminating Indigenous influence was the rise of residential schools. The Ho-Chunk language provided the foundation for many Siouan languages throughout the American Midwest and West; the tribe is known as the “People of the Loud Voice,” “People of the Sacred Voice,” or “People of the Mother Tongue.” After generations of cultural undoing in residential schools, the speakers of the “mother tongue” — those who taught language and its culturally preservative capabilities to others — are few.

Oral histories, the intangible and invaluable records of time from which the Ho-Chunk derive their sense of identity and connection with the past, do not die with the language, but they will suffer immensely from its absence.

“That’s why historic preservation is so important,” Brown says. “It is almost a form of protest, [us] just being alive.”

What is a canoe, then, to those who need no evidence of their own existence and who rely not on things, but on stories?

“It’s just another part of our culture,” says Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer with the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Deer clan. “We don’t need to see items brought out of the water just to reassert that we are here.”

Bryce Richter

For the Ho-Chunk, history and culture are not lying at the bottom of Lake Mendota; they’re taking place on and around it. They keep their ways alive through the continuation of skills, values, and practices that have existed even longer than the canoe. This, Brown says, is how a nation survives.

One way they have done this is by building a canoe themselves. Prior to the discovery in Lake Mendota, Quackenbush gathered a group of Ho-Chunk youth to make their own dugout canoe out of a cottonwood tree. The team spent months burning, scraping, and sawing the log and, this past June, embarked on a weeklong journey through the Four Lakes region in their completed vessel, which included a stop along the Yahara River to visit the new canoe’s oldest known ancestor. Even as language is lost, water remembers.

“We’re going to show these kids what it means to be Ho-Chunk,” Brown says. “This is Ho-Chunk land. This is where you’re supposed to be. They have a 1,000-year-old canoe, but your people have been here, and they’re still going to be here.”

Reflecting on previous canoe-building experiences, Brown recalls that a vessel is imbued with the spirits of its creators. Submerged in busy waters, the ancient vessel found in Lake Mendota had every reason to disappear in the 1,000-plus years since it sank. It should have disintegrated into the lake bed, splintered apart, broken into bits under the churning of boat motors, or been eaten by zebra mussels — and yet. The People of the Mother Tongue had the first word, and they will certainly have the last.

Dehydrating History

Lake Mendota is not done speaking. Since the retrieval of the dugout canoe, two more have been located near the site of the first. These vessels were found in fragments and will remain in their final resting place, though radiocarbon-dating will reveal their respective ages.

The discovery of the additional canoes in such proximity challenges the theory of shipwreck: in addition to dating the new canoes, Skibo is currently working to determine the location of ancient shorelines — some of the research that has yet to be conducted on this most-studied lake. Perhaps these canoes weren’t sunk, but were simply forgotten.

Today, the original canoe is back in water, this time in a rubber-lined vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility on Madison’s east side, just down shore from its resting place of over a millennium. It’s one year into a three-year preservation process involving a purified-water bath, UV-lights, and, eventually, polyethylene glycol, or PEG.

When removed from the environment that kept it safe through thousands of years, the canoe was held together only by the water in its cells. By gradually adding PEG to the solution in which the canoe rests, the preservative will replace the water in its cells before it’s freeze-dried to remove any excess water the PEG didn’t reach.

It’s up to us to preserve its memory now. •

The canoe arrives at the State Archive Preservation Facility. Wisconsin Historical Society

Archaeological finds are rarely in want of attention. After centuries spent in the quiet stillness of the depths of the earth, they often end up under glass cases in museum exhibits, starring in television specials and documentaries, or (ahem) gracing magazine stories.

This is how the world at large comes to know these relics: in their best light and at their most flattering angles. A fortunate few get to share in the moment of discovery. In the case of the canoe pictured in our story, it was a fortunate alumna who stumbled — or swam — upon it at the bottom of Lake Mendota.

Perhaps that’s part of the beauty in our story: you get to see the canoe just as she did, before it was dug up, cleaned off, and preserved. This photograph has never before been published, and it captures a moment that otherwise can’t be shared, the moment in which an archaeologist confirmed that what could have easily been mistaken for a log was actually a vessel lost to time. When the photo was taken, the age of the canoe was still anyone’s guess. For me, the image captures the thrill of discovery and the solemnity of being in the presence of something both familiar and mysterious — something with the potential to make history.

Take an extra moment with the photo. Notice the stones nestled in the far end of the canoe (and then learn what they are in our story). This scene can’t be staged or re-created in a studio. It’s not every day that history reveals itself, but when it does, seize the opportunity to get a good look.

Mildred crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in a doctoral program in Germany when she was 26, just as Hitler was rising to power. Appalled by the Nazi leader’s popularity, Mildred and Arvid began holding meetings in their Berlin apartment to discuss strategies of opposition. During the 1930s, their small, scrappy group intersected with three other resistance groups. By 1940, it was the largest underground resistance network in Berlin. In 1942, the Gestapo tracked them down. Arvid was hanged and Mildred was beheaded, the only American woman executed on Hitler’s direct order.

Mildred’s great-grandniece Rebecca Donner conducted extensive research, drawing on family records and archival documents in four countries — Germany, England, Russia, and the United States — to create a compelling chronicle of courageous resistance. Mildred tried to thwart Hitler by every means possible, recruiting Germans into the resistance, producing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, helping Jews escape Germany, and becoming a spy in an effort to defeat one of the greatest evils of the 20th century.

National Archives and Records Administration

Donner’s book, which she describes as a fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story, has won numerous literary awards and is now out in paperback. We have excerpted a section that depicts Mildred and Arvid’s time at the UW and their move to Germany after their marriage.

From the book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, published by Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Hachette Books. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Donner.

IT IS SEPTEMBER 1, 1932.
In exactly seven years, the Second World War will begin.

This morning, by comparison, is not noteworthy. For Mildred it begins, we may imagine, like any other morning as she rises from a simple, wood-frame bed to draw back the curtains, letting in the light. Because the apartment has wide windows, there is plenty of it, even in the dead of winter, when the air in Berlin seems grainy, the texture and hue of chalk. A narrow hallway leads to the main room, where Mildred drifts from window to window, drawing back curtains. Bookcases crammed with well-loved books line the walls. Oil paintings of dense forests bring rich splashes of gold and emerald to an otherwise modestly furnished room. Here is a sofa with wooden armrests. Here are two tattered rugs. A sturdy round table, two sturdy chairs. Floor planks show their wear, pitted in places, and creak under Mildred’s feet as she moves to the far corner of the room, where a white porcelain stove stands, its thick pipe stretching to the ceiling. Sometimes there’s coal, sometimes there’s not. Today, perhaps, there is. Mildred stokes the coal lumps with an iron rod, bringing up fresh sparks. The water in the kettle she sets on the stove is enough for two cups of coffee, one for her, one for Arvid.

It’s by force of habit that she does this. She is alone, though not for long. Arvid will return from his trip to Russia soon, in time for her birthday. She will be 30 — is it possible? — in just over two weeks.

Breakfast is simple, usually nothing more than a hunk of bread swiped with whatever’s on hand — jam, butter, mustard, she’s not particular. At the center of the table, she likes to put a flower or two in a glass of water. Tulips in spring, lilacs in summer, alpine roses in the fall, honeysuckle in winter. Sometimes the flowers are from her students. Sometimes they’re from Arvid.

Arvid is a romantic. It’s a side others don’t see. Others see a man who wears round, owlish spectacles and rarely leaves the house without a necktie. (Behind closed doors, he happily yanks it off.) Others see a man who spends hours on end at his desk. (But Arvid loves nothing more than to amble around a mountain on a Sunday afternoon, letting his thoughts wander, inhaling the tart, bracing air.) And though it’s true that Arvid is a man who loves the certitude of cold, hard facts, his head is stuffed with poetry. He was made to read Goethe as a boy and can now, at 31, recite long verses from memory, murmuring them into her ear.

They met at the University of Wisconsin, when Arvid wandered into the wrong lecture hall. He’d wanted to watch Professor John Commons deliver a lecture on American labor unions, but the person at the lectern wasn’t Commons. It was Mildred, then a 25-year-old graduate student. The topic of her lecture was American literature, and he stayed until the end. Then he approached the lectern and introduced himself.

She’d gotten a BA in humanities and started her master’s. He had a law degree and was on his way to getting a PhD in philosophy. After these preliminaries were out of the way, Arvid told her — with a sweet, tenderhearted formality that pierced her to the core — that his family home was in Jena, a small university town along the Saale River in Germany. He spoke English awkwardly, though earnestly. How different he was from the Midwestern boys at the UW, boys who tackled each other in cornfields and on football fields, boys who bragged about all the money they’d make with their degrees, boys who vied for Mildred’s attention with boisterous jokes — Har-dee-har-har! — that weren’t at all funny, at least not to her, although you were supposed to smile anyway, smile and blush and flip your hand and say, Oh, you’re such an egg.

The second time they saw each other, Arvid brought her a fistful of wildflowers. He’d picked them himself. “A great bunch of thick, white odorous flowers mingled with purple bells,” Mildred wrote later, remembering every detail.

Courtesy of the Donner Family

It was morning — a “beautiful” one. Arvid stood on the porch of the two-story house where Mildred rented a room. The house was near campus, owned by a professor who lived there with his wife and their two children. The wife peeked through the curtains, absorbing the sight of blue-eyed Arvid and his wildflowers. She’d taken a keen interest in Mildred’s private life. As Mildred worked doggedly on her master’s degree, the professor’s wife may have believed the younger woman could benefit from a little motherly guidance, mindful that the wrong man could lead her astray. Or maybe she was just nosy. At last she closed the curtains and nodded her frank approval. “Men from the North Sea,” she said, “make very good husbands.”

A husband — good or otherwise — was not what Mildred was looking for. Not now. She was still reeling from a heart-wrenching breakup with an anthropology major from Kansas City named Harry, but she stepped onto the porch anyway, shutting the door behind her. Arvid gave her the wildflowers and expressed his hope that Mildred was having a good morning. He labored to soften his German accent, and she realized that he’d practiced what he was about to say many times before coming to her door. He wanted to take her canoeing — on Lake Mendota, he said, “the greatest of all the lakes.”

His shy gallantry.

All right, she told him, with a shy smile of her own. She would join him in a canoe.

Six months later, on a Saturday, they said their vows under an improvised bower on a ramshackle dairy farm.

Arvid Harnack and Mildred Fish Harnack met on the UW campus and married soon afterward. They then moved to Germany, Arvid’s home country, just as Hitler was rising to power. Courtesy of the Donner family

Arvid returned to Germany to finish his PhD. Mildred would join him soon; Goucher College in Baltimore had hired her to teach English literature for the 1928–29 term. While they were apart, they wrote long letters. They described the books they were reading, their plans for the future. They would both become professors and teach in German universities, and perhaps American universities too. Mildred ended her letters with a drawing of a sun. Arvid ended his letters with the same sun.

THERE ARE MOMENTS — this morning may be one of them — when she misses Arvid with a force that takes her breath away. Right now, he’s probably eating breakfast too, seated at a table in Moscow with a group whose very name is a mouthful: Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, or Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy. (Mildred prefers to refer to the group by its less cumbersome acronym, ARPLAN.) Its members include economists, political scientists, literary critics, politicians, and playwrights, among them self-avowed right-wing ultranationalists and die-hard Communists. In other circumstances, these strange bedfellows might not have shaken hands, much less sat around a breakfast table, but Arvid is optimistic; they may disagree about methodology, but they are united in their aim.

Germany is in crisis. Something must be done. By studying what appears to be a novel economic solution to the Soviet Union’s woes, Arvid hopes to discover a remedy for the crisis in his own country. Arvid is secretary of ARPLAN. He receives no pay for this work, but his compassion for the poor in Germany and his desire to devise a new economic model to address this problem drive him to his desk day and night.

There are two desks in the apartment. Arvid’s is a great expanse of carved wood that once belonged to his father. The other desk, equally imposing, was once his maternal grandfather’s — Arvid calls him Grossvater Reichau. This is Mildred’s desk now. A big slab of mahogany. Lectures, articles, translations — she writes them all in longhand, filling page after page before turning to the typewriter.

It’s here, at Grossvater Reichau’s great slab of a desk, that Mildred stokes her own outsize dreams. One day she will be a great literary scholar; she will write magnificent books. The desk imparts heft and weight and stability, qualities that are entirely foreign to Mildred. She has no family heirlooms of her own. Whatever slim sticks of furniture had cluttered the small, drafty rooms of her childhood she has long since left behind.

MILDRED DOESN’T LINGER LONG over breakfast. A final swallow of coffee and she’s on her feet again, setting the cup and saucer in the sink, brushing crumbs from her lips. Dirty dishes will accumulate there for days before she notices them, a teetering tower of plates and cups and cutlery. There are always better things to do than the dishes.

She’s still wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and long, boiled-wool stockings knit by her mother, who bundled them up in a trim package that took two months to make its way from a transatlantic steamer ship to her front door. Her feet skim the creaking floorboards — the heel of one stocking is wearing thin — as she walks to a wide window and opens it. The air, crisp as a cold apple, invigorates her. She flings off her bathrobe.

She begins a series of exercises now, following directions from a book she bought for a few pfennigs. “Most of the exercises aim to strengthen the muscles of the abdomen,” she wrote to her mother last year, scribbling a hasty assurance that she and Arvid will have children “as soon as we can.” The routine — leg lifts and sit-ups and backbends — takes 20 minutes. She’s slender as a dancer, but she’s more earnest than graceful as she flails her arms, kicks her legs. Her nightgown bunches. Her stockinged feet on the wood floor skid and slip.

After exercising, she bathes quickly, using lard soap, and gets dressed.

Though today isn’t significant in the grand stretch of history, to Mildred it’s an important milestone. Today she begins a new teaching job at the Berliner Städtisches Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene — the Berlin Night School for Adults — nicknamed the BAG. There, she’ll come into contact with a fresh crop of German students, and she’s energized by the possibilities. They will be different from the students she taught at the University of Berlin — poorer, predominantly working class, mostly unemployed. Precisely the type of person the Nazi Party has been relentlessly targeting with propaganda.

See her now, striding out the front door with her leather satchel, descending four flights of stairs to the sidewalk. See her walking toward the U-Bahn station, swinging the satchel. In the eyes of her neighbors, she’s an American graduate student, nothing more. •

The rest of the book describes the couple’s resistance work in suspenseful detail, as well as documenting their tragic capture and death.

Eagleburger performed heroically during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War. UW Archives S17568

One day while Lawrence Eagleburger ’52, MS’57 was working on a master’s degree in political science, he spied a poster on a campus bulletin board promoting the Foreign Service Examination.

“I took it, passed it, took the oral exam, and passed that,” said Eagleburger. “Up until then, I had never even thought of the Foreign Service.”

That exam started a widely respected diplomatic career that spanned more than 40 years, culminating with a 42-day stint as secretary of state at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term and making him the first Foreign Service officer to hold that post.

A quick-witted Milwaukee native, he rose to become the top aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was known for his skill in managing international crises in Europe and the Balkans, where his seven years of work earned him the nickname “Lawrence of Macedonia.”

Eagleburger was so valued by Kissinger that he was sent to carry out secret diplomacy with the Cubans to test whether relations could be reestablished. He was also dispatched to other hot spots: China after the Tiananmen Square uprising, and Panama after the 1989 U.S. invasion.

He had three sons, all named Lawrence. “It was ego,” Eagleburger said. “And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system.”

Though Eagleburger was a Republican, his diplomatic skill earned him an appointment by Democratic president Jimmy Carter as ambassador to Yugoslavia. President Ronald Reagan appointed him as assistant secretary for European affairs under Alexander Haig Jr., and he rose to undersecretary for political affairs.

After Eagleburger’s death in 2011, President George H. W. Bush recalled that his performance was “heroic” in the 1991 Gulf War. “During one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles … we sent Larry to preserve our coalition,” he said.

hooks wrestled with the issues of race, feminism, and love: “I am passionate about everything in my life — first and foremost, passionate about ideas.” UW Archives S17568

She rose at 4 or 5 a.m. each morning, prayed and meditated, and then tried to read a nonfiction book every day. This intellectual and author prepared like an athlete as she wrestled with the issues of race, feminism, and love.

bell hooks MA’76, a well-known social critic, wrote the first of her more than 30 books at age 19, and she was a provocateur ever after.

“I think of public intellectuals as very different, because I think that they’re airing their work for that public engagement,” she told the New York Times. “Really, in all the years of my writing that was not my intention. It was to produce theory that people could use.”

hooks — whose given name was Gloria Jean Watkins but who adopted the lowercase pseudonym from her great-grandmother — wrote that first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, as an undergraduate at Stanford University before coming to UW–Madison for a master’s in English literature followed by a PhD at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

In that acclaimed work, hooks said that sisterhood must encompass growth and change. “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist, and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization,” she wrote.

hooks said she worried about what she called censorship of the imagination: “When I look at my career as a thinker and a writer, what is so amazing is that I have a dissenting voice and that I was able to come into corporate publishing and bring that dissenting voice with me.”

She was known to criticize often-admired African American figures including Spike Lee and Beyoncé, and she wrote about the nature of love, bringing a fervor to her work.

“I am passionate about everything in my life — first and foremost, passionate about ideas,” she said. “And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society — not because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical-thinking society.”

McInnes: Linguistic justice would mean that every Indigenous child has at least the right to learn their own language. Bryce Richter

A new campus initiative is fostering awareness about the first languages spoken in Wisconsin.

Enwejig (pronounced ain-WAY-young) Indigenous Language Advocates is a group of professors, graduate students, and other campus partners who are committed to the preservation and promotion of Indigenous languages. Enwejig is an Ojibwe word meaning “those who speak.” Paramount of the group’s many goals is bringing linguistic justice to languages that have named nearly every corner of the state, but whose speakers are few.

“Under 500-some years of colonization, not only has there been a hope that Indigenous languages would disappear, but there has been active work to destroy and to outlaw those languages,” says Brian McInnes, an enrolled member of the Ojibwe nation, descendant of the Wisconsin Potawatomi tribe, and associate professor of civil society and community studies and American Indian studies at the UW. “Linguistic justice would mean that every Indigenous child has at least the right to learn their own language.”

Enwejig’s efforts encompass myriad facets of language revitalization, both on campus and across the state. Their programs include Project ENABLE, which incorporates Diné Bízaad — the language of the Navajo people — into the study of biological concepts; Nisinoon, a cross-linguistic database of words that compose the Algonquian languages; Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums, a partnership with the Information School (iSchool); and increased signage in Indigenous languages around campus.

According to McInnes, this work on the UW campus, which occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, can serve as a starting point for reckoning with a fraught past.

“When we try to think of truth and reconciliation, [we think about] our history — but what can be our future?” McInnes says. “Sometimes we don’t have a starting place, [but] this is something we can do: the restoration of Indigenous languages, the sign-posting of Indigenous terminologies and expressions and ideas, and the learning and use of those things by our campus community.”

For Enwejig, a hopeful future includes degree programs built around Indigenous languages so that students can take this work across the country.

“We have a dream of ensuring that our tribal language is the first language of our community,” McInnes says, “that the notions and the philosophies and the wisdom within our tribal languages enrich who we are as a people, how we do things, how we relate to each other, and how we are defined on the earth.”

Umami is also integral to Beth Nguyen’s beef stroganoff recipe, the subject of her recent Bon Appétit essay, “I Thought Beef Stroganoff Was for Fancy People, Until I Made It My Own.”

“My secret ingredient is the same one every Vietnamese person has: a tiny bit of fish sauce, for depth and umami,” the award-winning author and UW–Madison English professor explains in the piece. Umami helps link the place of her birth (Saigon during the Vietnam War) to the place of her upbringing (the Midwest during the 1980s).

Despite its deliciousness, umami wasn’t recognized by the Western world for nearly a century after Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemistry professor, proposed the concept in 1908. American scientists insisted there were only four legitimate flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Meanwhile, families accustomed to hamburgers and TV dinners rarely discovered foods like pho, which were written off as unappealingly foreign.

Nguyen remembers how scents of Vietnamese cooking had her white friends heading for the hills during her childhood. The experience made her ponder her identity. As a Vietnamese refugee in a predominantly white part of Michigan, she was steeped in her elders’ way of life and shaped by their responses to their new environment. She watched as they rejected some aspects of the culture while embracing others, wondering what to reject and embrace herself. Plus, there were many mysteries to solve when visiting white people, from how to use a steak knife to who can sit at the head of the table.

Nguyen describes this predicament in her beef stroganoff essay: “I had to get used to friends calling my grandmother’s food weird, smelly, and gross. They’d run away from her stir-fries and pho, back home to the meatloaves and tuna casseroles we thought were weird, smelly, and gross. But their food was everywhere and ours hadn’t yet been mainstreamed or appropriated, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what American was supposed to mean.”

Throughout her quest to find the answer, Nguyen turned to books, especially those in the public library’s English literature section. With each page of Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, she read her way out of Grand Rapids. But what she read herself into wasn’t entirely satisfying. Later, in her own acclaimed books— two novels, a memoir, and an upcoming essay collection — she sought to understand why.

“I Can Relate” Moments

An epiphany arrived around age 14, when Nguyen realized she was too Asian for the Regency-era England of Pride and Prejudice — yet still drawn to it.

“I have nothing in common with the characters or [author] Jane Austen. It’s a foreign landscape for me, but somehow it’s relatable,” Nguyen says.

Finding something to relate to, however small, is a skill many minorities have honed because they’ve had to, she explains: “People of color are trained to read the literature of white people, and to read ourselves into it. Only recently have white people started reading themselves into literature that’s not about them.”

Nguyen’s two novels are fine examples of that progress. Short Girls, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, follows two Vietnamese American sisters as they struggle to connect with each other and come to terms with themselves. Her 2014 novel, Pioneer Girl, features a Vietnamese American’s attempt to prove that her family’s history is intertwined with that of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie. A white reader is likely to feel foreign in this milieu, encouraging empathy and perspective-taking. Those tiny “I can relate” moments can help people who couldn’t be more different build common ground. Plus, feeling like an outsider is uncomfortable — something majority populations don’t often encounter in everyday life.

As a child, Nguyen tried to figure out what American was supposed to mean. Courtesy of Beth Nguyen

As a white person, I feel anxiety and shame while reading about the racism Nguyen experienced. I witnessed some of the situations she describes in my own 1980s childhood, and I’m not sure how I responded. I’m better at identifying racism today, and I’m dedicated to fighting it, but I still struggle. Sometimes I respond at the wrong time. Sometimes I use the wrong words. Sometimes I’m too focused on myself. It can get messy, but I keep trying, and reading helps.

Though these feelings hurt, they’re tolerable thanks to Nguyen’s skillful storytelling. Her prose is laced with rewards for the reader, including humor and ’80s pop-culture references. Like umami, it’s both powerful and delectable.

Blending in (or Not)

Though umami is found in some of white America’s favorite foods — tomatoes and parmesan cheese, to name two — it’s often dubbed exotic, perhaps because an Asian person pioneered the idea. For instance, on its website, Real Simple notes that umami is “funny-sounding.” Translation: it must sound amusingly foreign to native English speakers.

For Nguyen, comments like this can feel personal. “Funny-sounding” is one of the more benign remarks people have made about her legal name, Bich Minh Nguyen. In her New Yorker essay “America Ruined My Name for Me,” she explains that “a name like Bich (pronounced ‘Bic’) didn’t just make me stand out — it made me miserably visible.” As a child, the more Nguyen tried to blend in, the more she seemed to stand out. She noticed differences everywhere. How other families worshipped tidiness — and an unfamiliar god she was supposed to know personally. How they expected her to have “good manners” her own family hadn’t taught her. How her classmates broadcast their status through their lunches, upstaging her squashed sandwiches with thermoses of SpaghettiOs. She worried about being weird, smelly, and gross — and if others told her she was, she accepted it.

“For a long time, I went along with what other people told me to do, whether they were white or Asian,” Nguyen explains. “I felt I didn’t even have the agency or power to decide what my name is. It took me three decades and ethnic studies classes to figure that out, and to give myself permission to go by a different name.”

Nguyen also had to grant herself permission to write 2007’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner as a memoir. She trained in fiction and poetry in the University of Michigan’s MFA program, so she assumed it was fiction when she began it. Over time, the tale felt too true for that approach.

“I realized I wasn’t using fiction for its imaginative process but for a disguise. I had to give myself permission to write the real story,” she says.

Nguyen had to be willing to stand out, and stand out she did, winning a PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Since then, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner has appeared on reading lists for high school English classes and college ethnic studies courses, the kind that helped Nguyen find words for many of her childhood experiences. The book also helped her land teaching positions at Purdue, the University of San Francisco, and most recently UW–Madison, where she and husband Porter Shreve joined the creative writing faculty in 2019.

According to Jeehyun Lim, an Asian American literature expert at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Nguyen is a master of balancing the general and the specific.

“The way she recognizes huge questions makes her writing really good,” Lim says. “But everything is anchored in individual circumstances, which prevents generalized proclamations and creates memorable moments for the reader.”

Unsurprisingly, some of the most memorable moments in Nguyen’s work are her own memories of food.

Into the Unknown

In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Nguyen uses food as a marker of her childhood trials and tribulations. Each chapter is named after a food or food-centric activity, inviting readers to connect some of their own memories of eating to the story being told.

“A memoir is an attempt to understand something rather than just chronicle it, so Stealing Buddha’s Dinner needed a different kind of form, something that wasn’t chronological. That’s why I chose chapter headings like ‘Pringles,’ ” she says. “One of my earliest food memories is of eating Pringles. I feel this strange amazement when I think about the metaphorical weight of something so processed, so packaged, so American.”

Pringles help Nguyen describe her family’s journey from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Arkansas to the strange surroundings of western Michigan. Similarly, umami-rich salt pork represents her efforts to identify with Caucasian literary heroines, especially those from Wilder’s Little House series. As Nguyen puts it, “I thought that if I could know inside and out how my heroines lived and what they ate and what they loved … [then] I could be them, too.”

Instead of trying to be Laura or Rose from Little House, Nguyen gives these characters a new story in Pioneer Girl. But the tale primarily belongs to Lee Lien, a Little House fan struggling to find work after completing her dissertation. She moves back home, subjecting herself to her mother’s constant criticism and soul-crushing work at her family’s restaurant.

Lee shares many qualities with Nguyen: she’s from a Vietnamese refugee family that settled in the Midwest, her household is multigenerational, and she looks to a beloved grandparent for comfort. Lee lost her father to drowning while Nguyen’s disappeared when her family migrated, a topic she’ll explore in her forthcoming essay collection, Owner of a Lonely Heart.

One day, Lee and her brother find a brooch that bears an uncanny resemblance to a pin described in Wilder’s novel These Happy Golden Years. Before long, Lee embarks on a quest to determine if Wilder’s daughter, journalist Rose Wilder Lane, befriended her grandfather in Saigon years ago.

Lee isn’t plowing fields or building log cabins, but she realizes she is blazing a trail of her own. She persists despite difficult conditions, including pressure to help run her family’s café. Though historians like Frederick Jackson Turner 1884, MA1888 declared the frontier gone by the 1890s, modern immigrants are pioneers in many respects, daring to venture into the unknown. Hardships are a rite of passage, and over time, immigrants can call the place they’ve settled their own.

This analogy is far from perfect, and so were pioneers. Many killed Native Americans or forced them to give up their sacred lands. Racism tarnishes the Little House books — and many readers’ fond memories of them. In Pioneer Girl, Lee must come to terms with these facts and distance herself from the Wilder women she’d admired for so long.

“Lee realizes that she is not the same as Laura or Rose, because if she transported herself back in time, she’d be closer to the position of a Native American,” says the critic Lim. “This novel generates a lot of food for thought when it comes to the history of settler colonialism and where Asian Americans fit into that history.”

Nguyen says she felt deeply disturbed when rereading the Little House books as an adult.

“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books were deliberately given to immigrants as an introduction to American life and ideals, so I grew up reading them without context or explanation. When I read them again as an adult, I saw how problematic they are in terms of race and the treatment of indigenous peoples. These books were legends, and they had a great deal of influence for decades.”

“I want to hear stories from people who are honest about their mistakes and the ways their minds are evolving.”

Thankfully, attitudes are shifting. If pioneering includes violence and racism, then it shouldn’t be a goal for immigrants or anyone else. But what should?

Warts-and-All Storytelling

Honesty, says Nguyen. Vulnerable, warts-and-all storytelling from as many voices as possible.

“I want to hear stories from people who are honest about their mistakes and the ways their minds are evolving. I want them to say what is true to them, not what other people tell them they should say,” she explains.

Nguyen is pleased to see a wider range of voices than ever before in the publishing world. She says this empowers readers to tell their own stories and reminds them that they should, not only for themselves but for others.

“Every time we read about something unfamiliar to us, that writing becomes a door or a window,” she says. “It leads us to the next place.”

And if we’re lucky, that place might have a bowl of pho in the kitchen. •