MSU Scholar Profiles
Ellen Cushman
Ellen Cushman, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University, knows about the ups and downs of engagement work only too well. She led her students through three semesters of the Multimedia Writing course in an effort to create a new interactive multimedia resource for the Cherokee Nation’s website.
The project aimed to build an educational component into the Cherokee Nation’s website which receives about 6000 visitors a day. The assembled first-hand accounts, historical photographs, video and audio files demonstrate how the 1887 Dawes Act (National Allotment Act) forced the Cherokee people to abandon community-maintained lands and ways of living decades after the Trail of Tears in 1838-39. This project sheds light on a less-researched period of history, so Cushman feels honored to be able to contribute through her research and teaching to the Cherokee community.
However, the tribe’s web delivery priorities suddenly changed in March of 2007, when an amendment to the Cherokee Nation’s constitution revoked the tribal citizenship of the descendants of black slaves, who were owned by citizens of the Cherokee Nation during the Antebellum Period. While court cases are still pending, attempts have been made to withdraw funding from the Cherokee Nation, so the issue has taken precedence over Cushman’s project. “Community groups are spread thin,” notes Cushman, and she believes that engagement projects can be more easily “pointed at a particular problem-solving as needs arise.”
On the other hand, Cushman appreciates the opportunities provided by her department, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. Being able to include her activist ethnographic research in her course curriculum allows her to “teach students to cross disciplines easily.” But she also realizes that a drive to sustain projects often does not meet the needs of the community. “I would like to see exigency-based work equally visible and equally valued,” she argues. “Needs and goals change dramatically and engagement projects should endorse greater community responsibility. While sustainability may at times be a goal at the institutional and scholarly level, we have to remain flexible enough to do needs-based work within the ebb and flow of everyday problems."
Cushman taught history in the Cherokee Nation's Johnson O'Malley Program Youth Leadership Institute in Summer 2007, and she has recently been asked to be a member of the Sequoyan Commission until December, 2011. As a comissioner, she will conduct research, organize the yearly scholarly conference of the Cherokee Nation and report regularly to the Principal Chief. In Lansing, she created the People’s Writing Workshop to provide weekly one-on-one assistance with English writing and conversation at the downtown Lansing Public Library. The workshops were staffed by MSU students preparing to become English teachers.
At MSU, she examines the intersection of community literacies, culture, and new media. The creation of digital writing and interactive web spaces, Cushman admits, can pose threats of “overshooting the capabilities of the community member or technology becoming obsolete.” But she believes in “dialogue and risk-taking” and, above all, in “the democratic process of everyday teaching and learning in our neighborhoods.”
Cushman is currently working on her two books: Native American History for Beginners, which she co-authors with Thomas Holm and illustrates as well, as well as a book on media, Cherokee culture and identity. For more information about her interest and work, please visit Ellen Cushman's website.
