February 2024
Linda Haverty Rugg is a professor in Berkeley’s Scandinavian Department. She has taught OLLI courses on Ingmar Bergman, crime fiction, saga literature, eco criticism, and Mark Twain. She is also a recipient of OLLI’s “Distinguished Teaching Award.”
First, on behalf of long-time OLLI members who will be ecstatic to learn you're teaching with us this spring … welcome back to OLLI!
That’s very kind. Thank you! I took a long sabbatical from OLLI because I was serving full-time in the University administration. The pace of work made it hard for me to do anything else. I’m very happy to be back teaching at OLLI.
Are you teaching on campus again, too?
I’m teaching a Bergman class to undergraduates right now, as well as a graduate seminar. I’ve taught Bergman to OLLI members, too, and the experiences are quite different.
How so?
For the undergraduates, Bergman is new to them so I have to create a foundation of context. For my OLLI students, they’ll come into a Bergman course — or any of my OLLI courses — with an amazing depth of experience and knowledge. They're as intellectually curious and excited about new ideas as the undergraduates, but they also have life histories that you can draw on when you're teaching. That’s part of what makes being in the OLLI classroom so stimulating.
Tell us about your upcoming course. There’s a Scandinavian angle like some of your earlier OLLI courses, but with a twist.
The course is based on research that I started more than a decade ago. I’ve kept the embers alive even during the period I was in the administration.
It’s a different area for me. I'm a modernist by training, which means the earliest stuff I’ve worked on has been in the 1850s. I’ve never gone back as far as the 18th century. Until now.
What sparked the interest?
I've been addicted to art museums ever since I was a kid. I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, and we didn't have major art museums nearby. As an adult, they became a passion of mine. Whenever I’m in a new city, I always go to the art museum.
Back in 2011, I was in Philadelphia for a conference — a place I'd never been to before. So, of course, I had to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum. If you’ve never been you’d recognize it from the Rocky films.
Is it where he’s running up the stairs?
That’s the place. It's funny because the museum has a statue of Rocky at the bottom of the stairs to the left. This is by far the most important attraction at the museum. Everyone has their picture taken with Rocky. But I digress.
Anyway, I'm very dutiful when I go into museums. I look at everything regardless of whether I’m interested in the displays or not. In Philadelphia, unsurprisingly, they’re big on American colonial art, which, as I see it, consists mostly of boring portraits of well-to-do burghers with their kids and dogs.
Lots of silk and velvet.
Exactly. So I was dutifully walking along when all of a sudden I spotted these two portraits side-by-side that stopped me in my tracks. They were of two Native American men. I was like, “What is this?”
They were painted in a striking and dignified way. They were obviously statesmen. It was just so startling to see them in this gallery alongside the usual cast of characters. Then I looked at the placard next to them and read the painter’s name: “Gustavus Hesselius: American born in Sweden. 1735.”
And you were off to the races.
I was! There were just so many questions immediately. What was a Swede doing born in America? He would have been born around 1700, right? How did he get there? Why was he painting these guys? Who had commissioned this and why? I knew that there had been a Swedish colony, New Sweden, but it had been 100 years earlier. Was this related to New Sweden? Was there still a Swedish presence?
I started to look into Gustavus who, unfortunately, wrote almost nothing. But then I learned he had a brother, a pastor who’d been assigned to come over to America, because there were still Swedish congregations here. They came to America together.
So these two paintings of these tribal leaders — Tishcohan and Lapowinsa — started this whole adventure of research. I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia, in assorted archives, in Sweden, in museums, learning as much as I could about the brothers and their relationship to Native Americans.
Thus was born “Two Brothers in a Wood: Colonial Swedes and Native Americans in North America.”
It’s a course I’m excited to teach. It’s about colonial Swedes and their encounters with Native American people, about what happens to these two brothers and the men depicted in the paintings, about what it means to leave your country and to become settler colonists. It’s a multi-layered story that I hope people will find interesting.
Your research coincided with your involvement with the campus’s Native American repatriation project. Did one inform the other?
A bit. When I was in Sweden on sabbatical and doing research on this project, a good friend wrote to me and said, “Hey, there's this job in the research office. I really think that there should be a humanist in there. You should apply for the position.”
I didn't really even know what the research office did, because they don't work with humanists very much. Anyway, I applied. One of the questions that came up in my second interview was, “What do you know about Native American repatriation?” I said, “Well, you should give it back.” I mean, what is there to discuss? First of all, it’s a law. Second of all, it’s the right thing to do.
I got the job, and was the deputy on the campus repatriation project for a number of years. I worked closely with Native Americans on it. Repatriation was a big challenge and remains a big challenge.
I understand you’re a Moth StorySLAM winner. First, congratulations! I’m a big Moth fan. Second, when did you start doing that?
I started going to the StorySLAM at Freight & Salvage a number of years ago, and would put my name in the hat. With Moth, you only get to tell your story if they choose you, which can be a little discouraging because you're supposed to be prepared and speak to a theme. Eventually, though, my name was pulled. I told a couple stories at the Berkeley Moth, and one time I won. It was fun.
Sounds like you’re a storyteller at heart.
I love telling stories, and I love listening to stories. My dad was from the Ozarks, which is very much a storytelling culture. I adore the rhythm of storytelling and of relating to people in that way. Everybody has amazing stories. All people do.