When Ruth Olson retires next month, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures will lose far more than an associate director.
The center will say goodbye to an administrator, a grant writer, a teacher, a mentor, a partnership creator, a tour guide, a wrangler of fourth graders and a visionary staff member who lives out the mission to preserve and share the cultures of the Upper Midwest.
Olson’s relationship with the center predates its official founding. Back in 2000, Joe Salmons, the Lester W.J. “Smoky” Seifert Professor of Language Sciences, and James Leary, now an emeritus professor of folklore and Scandinavian Studies, co-founded a multi-disciplinary center to work with organizations, communities, the public and students to highlight the unique languages and cultural traditions of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and parts of Iowa, Illinois, the Dakotas and Canada.
Salmons and Leary hired Olson, who’d grown up in rural northwestern Wisconsin and earned a PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, to prepare a proposal for the center to be one of the new National Endowment for the Humanities-funded regional humanities centers, and plans for launching the project.
“Basically, as soon as Jim and I started work on the center, we were able to hire Ruth, and that was the single key event for the future success of the center,” Salmons says. “A whole bunch of us have been working since then to build the center, but the whole way since then, Ruth has been the one in the trenches every day, leading the work.”
While the federal funding turned out to be less than was first expected when the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture opened in 2001, Olson says, “We’re Wisconsinites, so what we did was make do.” With support from the university and the College of Letters & Science, plus faculty in American Indian Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and what are now the departments of German, Nordic and Slavic and Planning and Landscape Architecture, the center started on a very economical path — one that’s helped it thrive, even as other regional centers have closed.
“It’s really hard to do it all, but it’s really important,” says Olson, who has worn many hats at the center, and wouldn’t have it any other way. “I have the whole picture. When I write a grant proposal, it’s real. I know exactly how the funds will be used. It’s holistic.”
That pitch-in-where-you’re-needed mentality has been a part of Olson all her life. She was raised on the Danbury, Wisconsin, dairy farm that her grandfather started after moving to the United States from Sweden as a teenager. Along with an inclination for hard work and collaboration, Olson grew up with an appreciation for storytelling, thanks to her father’s talents.
That interest led Olson to earn a bachelor’s degree in English from UW-Eau Claire and a master’s in writing, with an emphasis on poetry, from Washington University before finding her way to folklore.
“I was interested in poetry and literature,” she says. “But what I really liked best were the stories about our everyday lives and interactions. That’s folklore.”
What I really liked best were the stories about our everyday lives and interactions. That’s folklore.
Through her work at the center, she’s had the chance to share her passion for folklore and culture with college students in university courses, as well as with many other groups. She frequently offered her expertise to teachers and adult learners, often through the Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture network that she co-founded.
But a highlight of Olson’s career was hosting cultural tours for teachers and students, particularly fourth graders who were studying their local communities.
During the 2002-03 school year, Olson helped guide students from Randall Elementary School through an immersion into Hmong culture. They visited Hmong communities in seven Wisconsin cities — Madison, Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Green Bay, La Crosse, Eau Claire and Wausau — to study history, traditions and daily life. They delved into dance, food and culture and even observed a Hmong funeral.
“Ruth traveled with the kids to all these cities, not only giving the bus driver directions, making sure events and presentations went off smoothly, interviewing and tape recording members of various Hmong communities, but also helping to make meals, keep the peace on the bus, settle excited kids at night as the whole crew bedded down in sleeping bags on the floors of churches and Hmong Mutual Assistance Associations across the state,” says Leary.
Olson also partnered with the Madison Children’s Museum, the Wisconsin Arts Board and Hmong community leaders across the state as the museum created the Hmong at Heart touring exhibition. These kinds of collaborations have made all the hard work especially meaningful to Olson.
“Sometimes when people think of the Wisconsin Idea, they think of it as delivering goods to others,” she says. “But it’s a two-way street.”
The center’s community curator Anna Rue, who will step into Olson’s role next month, says the way Olson approaches these partnerships has had tremendous impact.
“Her ability to connect deeply and meaningfully with teachers, community members, tradition bearers and students has a way of magnifying small, ordinary moments into transformative ones,” she says. “It’s not always the case that a consummate humanist with the time-management skills of an air traffic controller provides the leadership for community-based initiatives, but with Ruth Olson you get it all.”
While Olson knows it will be hard to walk away from this work, she has plans to stay busy in retirement. She’ll come back to the university for lectures and events, volunteer with the Literacy Network and Dane County Humane Society and take a Swedish folk painting workshop with her four older sisters who have been waiting for her to retire.
And she will finally have time to pursue an interest that’s sat on the sidelines for years. She’ll begin writing murder mysteries set in — where else? — Wisconsin.