Regna Darnell

Regna Darnell Interview

0:00 - 0:35
Interview takes place on February 25th, 2017. Mark Turin interviewing Regna Darnell, a professor at the University of Western Ontario located in London Ontario where the interview is taking place in her home.

0:35 - 3:00
Born July 1943 in Cleveland Ohio and grew up in the suburbs. She speaks about her adoption which her family was open about. Her father was of German and Irish and her mother’s family was of German and Scottish descent, with little extended family.

3:00 - 5:30
Was adopted at birth during the middle WII, and did not have any siblings. Also speaks about her childhood, which she remembers as uneventful and her love of reading.

5:30 - 6:44
Talks about her parents support in her academic pursuits, they viewed it as necessary in case she ever needed to support herself. Her high school English teacher also encouraged her to read “strange books”.

6:44 - 7:50
During the summer holidays her family spent time on the Lake Erie Islands, she spent a lot of time daydreaming, reading books outside, and walking with the dog.

7:50 - 8:29
Kept in touch with very few people from her childhood, she got along okay with people but says she did not really have a social life. Was a part of girl scouts in high school and later was a part of city scouting which she felt was better for her because of her reputation as a “smart girl”, it allowed her to be herself without the constraints of being a girl in a midwestern public town in the late 50’s.

8:29 - 9:29
Her parents took it for granted that she would attend university, her father did track and her mother attended a school called Southern Seminary for four months after graduating high school.

9:29 - 10:19
Her family attended a Methodist Church with no particular valence, they attended church every Sunday and as a child, she attended Sunday school. Later she decided she was not interested in the beliefs of the church because she perceived them as hypocritical. When she attended college she was introduced to Quaker Philadelphia which resonated with her more.

10:19 -  11:13
Speaks about her family's structure, her mother stayed at home and did domestic work while her father worked to support the family. As a child she was not included in any sort of decision making processes in the family.

11:13 - 17:23
In order to decide where to go to university her family spent time touring different schools and she specifically wanted to go to an all-girls school. She planned to be an English major but the school made everyone take freshman composition, the course that she enjoyed the most was Anthropology. She completed a double major in medieval English and Anthropology.

17:23 - 20:04
When talking about her academic influences she tells a story about taking geology for her science requirement, and the teacher instilled in her that fields are always evolving and that ideas matter and she has viewed that as an ideal.

20:04 - 22:43
Speaks about there was a diversity in what scholarship they were reading and the academic work, and as an undergraduate she did not study linguistics. Furthermore she speaks to reading British and American anthropological literature but they did not spend time reading ethno-science works during her undergrad.

22:42 -  27:25
When she came to the end of her end of her undergrad she had to choose between studying English or Anthropology in graduate school, and decided upon continuing with Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Later in graduate school while she did work with linguistic Anthropology she focused on history of Anthropology.

27:25 - 30:27
Her landlady, a biochemist, was influential in her life, teaching her how to cook and introducing her to science colleagues.

30:27 - 34:15
She got married after her junior year of school, this was during the Vietnam period. The marriage ended by the time she finished graduate school but she kept the name of her first husband because she published under it.

34:15 - 39:53
For her Master’s thesis she wanted to stay away from doing a book report, specifically her thesis was an archival exploration of Daniel Garrison Brinton’s work. Her department requested she publish her research as a book so later she revisited it. When she sought employment she searched for a job that involved field work.

39:53 - 41:27
She was Dell Hymes’ research assistant for approximately 20 hours a week, and through this experience she learned how to manage a professional career and was able to build a professional network. Also, she spoke to the challenges of attending a larger university and the feeling of isolation she encountered.  

41:27 - 44:01
She spoke about being an outlier because she did not do a fieldwork based dissertation. After receiving her PHD in 1969 she entered the workforce, and got her first job at the University of  Alberta and decided to study the Cree people.

44:01 - 46:30
She speaks about the culture shock of moving to Edmonton. She was hired to be a Linguistic Anthropologist, and taught those courses for 21 years from 2nd year classes to graduate seminars.

46:30 - 48:08
Was introduced to some Cree people by a colleague she previously knew from Philadelphia, and became involved with language acquisition, worked with a kindergarten class, and over the years increasingly worked with people wanting to run language classes in communities.

48:08 - 52:08
She speaks about the differences between Canadian and American Anthropology. Furthermore, she speaks about the department and funding.

52:08 - 54:21
Her first ethnographic work focused on language and language acquisition, starting with a kindergarten class. She also speaks to how some of those early relationships between herself and Indigenous people became lifelong, but because of her youth many of the elders she worked with passed away by the time she left U of A.

54:21 - 57:07
She rarely used technology, like tape recorders, often she says they got in the way for her “communicative approach” to her work by listening to the interactions around her that she was invited to participate in. Furthermore, she says that this type of fieldwork came naturally to her.

57:07 - 58:21
Because of her gender and age she speaks to experiencing chauvinism at her appointment, consequently most of her friends were Indigenous women or students.  

58:21 - 1:04:07
She resided in Edmonton for a while then moved to an acreage in 1975 with her family. She goes on to talk about work she conducted with her second husband and the importance of variety in her work and studying different languages. Her husband Anthony Vanek, was also a professor at the U of A where they met and learnt a lot about publishing, editing, and book production from her husband's work.


1:04:07 - 1:08:06
With her husband she had four children, and speaks about how she is the source of the maternity leave policy at U of A, and the accommodations she negotiated for herself in order to balance being pregnant and working. In her department she was the only woman with her set of personal circumstances.

1:08:06 - 1:12:13
Her adopted grandmother helped with raising her children. Grandma was from an area where she (Regna) had previously worked and they ended up teaching collaboratively together. The students were able to learn a great deal about Cree culture from Grandma, even though it was not officially listed as part of the curriculum.

1:12:13 - 1:17:52
She talks about even though everyone in her department was friendly she did not engage with them outside of work, and did not find them intellectually stimulating, leading her to find her intellectual community at conferences. She goes on to talk about specific academics who influenced her. In regards to publishing, she talks about being a night owl and how when everyone was settled down she would find the time to write.

1:17:52 - 1:21:10
Speaks about her early contributions to the field, she published her dissertation in various revised journals. She also published papers from the work she did with her husband on Doukhobor Russian, and on multiculturalism/bilingualism which she found was excluded Indigenous languages since the government only considered French and English.

1:21:10 - 1:24:06
Her children did not grow up speaking other languages than English, she and her husband only shared English and Grandma’s daughter did not want her own children to learn Cree so grandma did not teach others. Regna considers herself a Canadian, but not in the same way as someone who grew up in Canada.

1:24:06 - 1:29:10
She did not have any administrative responsibilities at U of A, but she did develop the Cree language course. This partly because of her husband's difficulties with his own department and being busy with four children. After her husband was no longer employed at the university he ran a journal. Later they ended their marriage due to difficulties arising from his loss of employment.  While she did not develop materials for the  Native Studies program she did for her own course materials using semantic domain approach, so they could talk about hunting, cuisine, kinship etc.

1:29:10 - 1:32:34
She speaks about how she would have co-authored works with the Indigenous people she worked with but it was not a category in academia at the time, but she acknowledged them in her work and their contributions. She also speaks broadly about the process of collaboratively working with others and knowing when they need her specific help.  

1:32:34 - 1:36:22
She met Gyorgy, her third husband, met soon after she separated from her second husband and a year after his wife passed away. She also talks about his upbringing, life before they met, his work, and his relationship to her children.

1:36:22 - 1:44:01
She speaks about how her academic interests/pursuits turned to be more global through her and her husband’s interests and her husband’s appointment abroad with the UNDP and their experience as expats.

1:44:01 - 1:46:09
While she was in Africa she used the time to do her own work and read and she spent time with the children going to the beach and the market.

1:46:09 - 1:49:45
Besides from her passion for cooking she also relied upon her ethical stance as a Quaker to ground herself when she was living in Pennsylvania but there wasn’t a Quaker meeting in Alberta so the family started going to an Anglican church. While she says she’s currently a practicing Anglican she says her way of practicing it is idiosyncratic, she enjoys the community she gains from it outside of work.

1:49:45 - 1:53:24
After 21 years at Edmonton she took a job at the University of Western Ontario in London Ontario and field work impacted her decision, they offered her a substantial raise, and she was concerned about the impacts of living in Alberta would have on her children. She was hired as the department chair at Western, and stayed in that position for three years.

1:53:24 - 1:55:01
London Ontario is multi-ethnic but she talks about how old London is very British and “waspy” particularly her neighborhood.

1:55:01 - 2:00:40
Her academic friends that she met through conferences made life easier coming into her new position, and started field work immediately with a colleague. The department of anthropology underwent some changes causing some people to leave. Later she got involved with Women’s Studies program, and the university had some uneasiness with it becoming a department, and the support of women at the university allowed it to become a department.

2:00:40 - 2:05:09
At her time in Western she built a great deal, including the First Nations program. She’s happy living in Ontario, her family resides there and she gets to see five of her six grandchildren regularly.

2:05:09 - 2:09:48
As well as being a department chair, founding director of the First Nations Studies Program she also served on the BOG, and the faculty association. She first got involved because at first the women’s network she was involved with wanted a woman to serve on the faculty association and they later unionized. She went to the BOG because she was concerned about decision making processes and were not listening to the concerns of the faculty association.

2:09:48 - 2:11:32
She says she is too much of a “wild card” to be an ideal administrator, and she was more interested in serving/helping her students and colleagues. Furthermore, she says that she’s been an administrator at times because things needed to get done and/or she felt strongly about how they should be done.

2:11:32 - 2:24:52
In regards to the hedgehog and the fox, she thinks of herself as more of a fox because of how she bounds about, but over the last decade or so she says she also has a lot of hedgehog in her as well because of her stability of interests. In regards to her life in London she has gotten involved in ecosystem health, and how Indigenous knowledge might package those concept differently than the biomedical model. From there she started to work with public health and utilized Indigenous knowledge to examine the effects of pollution etc.  

2:24:54 - 2:27:19
The council she would give her former/current students is that we are at a point of change, so we need to think in terms of nonlinear patterning.  

2:27:19 - 2:30:52
In closing she says that in the interview they did not really get the chance to discuss her editing that she now conducts.