“The best thing about working with any culture is that it’s not about you. You are a vessel that carries it for your community and for future generations” – Lora Pennington

As a student, I spend much of my time researching, looking at phenomena from a removed stance, an academic gaze. For many fields, this works perfectly fine. The academic distance one might feel from a subject often allows for a clearer view of said subject. However, as a mixed-race Rusyn who is oriented towards the progress of all her cultural communities, I was finding myself using this removed strategy when I was doing work with Carpatho-Rusyn studies and other cultural topics. Rather than clearing my view as to what is important with these topics using the academic gaze, I found my vision growing hazier and hazier until I was eventually lost, feeling out of touch with my own culture. I felt unable to engage with any Carpatho-Rusyn cultural identity through writing or any other medium.

In the Spring of 2022, I presented a paper on the maintenance of Carpatho-Rusyn folklore in the Rusyn-American psyche. I was also granted an opportunity to attend a Carpatho-Rusyn research workshop where I met many other young Rusyn scholars from around the world.

Despite all of these amazing accomplishments I had made in the Spring of 2022, it was a rough academic year due to pressures in my academic life. By the beginning of June, I found myself disillusioned with all forms of academia. I had grown tired of the power structures that are bound to exist in academic spheres. Power structures that only placed the value of the work I was doing in accordance to the degree it pleased those in a higher academic position and if it aligned with their own personal worldview. By the beginning of June, I was in a vehicle halfway across the country, making a conscious effort to distance myself from the east coast and the academic establishment it had grown to represent in my head over the past year.

“I’m done,” I said to my partner from the passenger seat, looking over the plains of North Dakota, “if they think they own what I say, I will no longer give them a single word”.

During that trip, I visited the other side of my family in Washington state. I made an effort to immerse myself in the Coast Salish culture as much as I could while I was there. I helped my mentor and auntie Lora, whose quote I mentioned earlier, with her mother’s traditional funeral service. I also attended the First Salmon Ceremony, which celebrates the coming of new life and abundance. Celebrations of an end, as well as a new beginning. For the first time in a while, I had felt connected to something larger than myself, which now, I realize is what cultural activism and nation-building/sustaining is truly about: a shared sense of connection to a community larger than oneself. It is worthwhile to make an authentic connection to your community rather than trying to be “the biggest person in the room, stomping on everybody else” as my Auntie Lora would say.

Cycles of life and death tend to repeat themselves and soon after I returned from Washington I was placed once more into a sequence of events that would mark the beginning of something: a wedding. And the ending of something: a funeral. Except for this time, it involved my Rusyn-American family and their traditions. My mother was getting married to my stepfather, and while the wedding itself was non-traditional, I was tasked with organizing the traditional Rusyn wedding dance in which the bride dances with everyone in exchange for small amounts of money before guests and family members join the larger circle.

I felt the same feelings of belonging watching all my family engage with their culture as I did while attending the Salish ceremonies in Washington. I was approached by multiple members of my family and community afterward, who were glad I had insisted to my mother that the dance be performed. Of these people who approached me afterward was my mother’s aunt, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away only a week later. Her funeral was a traditional one, which took place at the Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox church my family had attended since arriving in America in the early 1920s. Although I consider myself an atheist, it felt once more as if I was joining something larger as I was now in the place so many of my ancestors had been in before. At that moment I decided I would start writing about and engaging with my Carpatho-Rusyn culture once again. But this time it would not just be for me, it would not be for academic approval or to gain prestige. It would be for all the Carpatho Rusyns in my family and my community, all the future generations. It would be centered around a feeling of togetherness with others in our nation. A feeling through all my academic pursuits I had seemed to forget. I started doing the Carpatho Rusyn things I loved once more. I made a vest in the style of my Great grandmother’s village, I cooked the Carpatho-Rusyn food that always gave me strength and happiness, I listened to folk songs as I cleaned my small college apartment in an attempt to feel less lonesome. Eventually, I came to a point when I was propositioned to write on Carpatho-Rusyn topics once again and found my words to be unbound.

As Carpatho Rusyn-Americans, our ancestors came to this country to achieve a life better than what was possible where they came from at the time they left. As they came here, they learned the ways of their adopted homeland. Rugged individualism and hyper-competition, in some ways, replaced the synergistic, agrarian village systems many of them left. While our communities in the New World often tried to maintain a sense of togetherness through living close to other Rusyns who often came from the same village or region, many descendants who participate in Rusyn studies are still blinded by a very western, very individualistic view of academic greatness. It is tempting to believe one person might be the voice of the Rusyn nation, and it may be our American self-centeredness that wishes that one voice just might be ours. But a nation is a colorful, complex embroidery, with many viewpoints and voices.

It might be easy for Rusyn scholars to look upon those who choose a more simple Carpatho-Rusyn existence, one immersed in a small community, with contempt, calling them self-hating and underachieving. However, to view one’s Rusyn-ness through a value lens of how far people can climb the hierarchies that have traditionally erased our people’s culture is a far more dismal fate that will alienate many of our people. A nation is not only made up of scholars and artists but of the vast amounts of farmers and laborers who are any nation’s majority.  As I returned back to my hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania this past weekend, in a needed break from the drone of University and to celebrate my 22nd birthday, I enjoyed the familiar warm discussions always provided by my Rusyn family and attended my hometown’s annual Slavic Fest. Here I discussed heritage, culture, sewing, and cooking with a few matriarchs whose ancestors came from neighboring villages to my own family.

My mother remarked on the similarities of those women to her own grandmother. That night we listened to music, ate Rusyn food, drank Slivo, and were fully a part of our Rusyn-ness. For once my vision was clear with no academic distance required. I also thought back to those I met while at the Summer Workshop I attended in May. Even though I and the other scholars hailed from many different countries, talking to each other was easy, despite the language barrier. Our shared Rusyn-ness was at the core of these interactions, our connection to something greater. 

As I write this I think of the writings of Alexander Duchnovych, who was trained in the Magyar academic discipline before returning to his people and his culture. “For the first time I was among Rusyns, and discovered that I too, am a Rusyn”, he wrote.

I do not need to be the biggest person in the room, I simply need to be in the room with my people.