LLyn De Danaan Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

DeDanaanLLyn

Title

LLyn De Danaan Oral History Interview

Date

4 August 2017

Creator

LLyn De Danaan

Contributor

Nancy Koppelman

extracted text

LLyn De Danaan
Interviewed by Nancy Koppelman
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 4, 2017
FINAL
Begin Part 1 of 2 of LLyn De Danaan on 8-4-17
Koppelman: I am with LLyn De Danaan on August 4, 2017 for our first interview. Hi, LLyn.
De Danaan: Hi.
Koppelman: Hi. When we talked at my house a few days ago, one of the things that you started telling
me about was where you grew up, your background in Ohio, etc. I wonder if you could just say a few
words about that?
De Danaan: Okay. Actually, there are three key places in Ohio where I spent my childhood. One, during
the World War II period, when I was with my mother and grandmother, living in Marion, Ohio. And
then, when my father returned from the South Pacific—he was in the Army, a sergeant—we moved to
what was then called Fairborn, I think—maybe it’s still called Fairborn—to a kind of right off-base
military housing-type thing called Hebble Homes. We lived there while my father and mother were
building the house in Beavercreek, where we moved when I was in the fourth grade. Beavercreek was
where I stayed until I graduated from high school.
But a lot of the time during that period, most of my relatives were in southeastern Ohio, around
Wellston, Jackson County and McArthur. We went there, oh my gosh, it feels like every weekend we
made the trip by car down to visit relatives. And we visited every single relative. So my ties—because
we didn’t live where family was, we lived in an Air Force base, and that’s where my father worked as an
aircraft electrician. Civilian. He was always a civilian. Mother worked as a doctor’s receptionist most of
the time that I was growing up.
Koppelman: How many siblings did you have?
De Danaan: One brother, seven years younger. Judo. He’s known as Judo. His name is Lee Donavan
Patterson. Yes.
Koppelman: But Judo?
De Danaan: Judo. Everybody knows him as Judo. Judo lives on the Rogue River, and he had three
daughters, and they all live in Seattle, and they all have spouses and children. And they are my closest
family.
1

Koppelman: Oh, wow. So you’ve got a lot of this family nearby.
De Danaan: I’ve got a lot of family in Seattle. Because he moved before I came to work at Evergreen. I
was at the University of Washington, which we’ll talk about. But I helped him, and supported him, in
getting a CO status during Vietnam. So, he moved to Seattle to work off his CO at Harborview Medical
Center, in the ER. Orderly. And married, and then, the story goes on from there. So, I have a lot of
relatives, but they’re all West Coast relatives. I stay in touch with my cousins in Ohio—in fact, I was just
there last month for a funeral—because the attachment to Ohio, the stories about Wellston and
Jackson, and Grandma Pat, and all that, I’m very, very attached, you might say, to having that
connection. And those are all cousins, first cousins once-removed, first cousins twice-removed. And
they’re sort of scattered around the country. But I still have Pete, and a few others, in Ohio that I like to
stay in touch with.
Koppelman: That’s great.
De Danaan: So, that was growing up.
Koppelman: And you went to college in Ohio, too.
De Danaan: I did. And I’ll say one more thing about Beavercreek, in that it was in Greene County,
where Antioch College is, and two historically black colleges are there, Xenia, Ohio. It’s a great history. I
didn’t know as much growing up as I wish I had, but it was important.
Education was important to my family. My aunt, my father’s sister, had a master’s degree in
Latin. Several others in the family had graduated from Ohio University. My grandfather was an
attorney. Education, not from my mother and father so much—they only finished high school—but
from the previous generation. Particularly, from my mother’s mother, I got a lot of push to be a welleducated person, and to go to school.
Koppelman: And you took the push.
De Danaan: I took the push. And, as I say, it’s important. My mother and father, I don’t think they
really cared whether I went to college, so I was always on scholarships, or I worked and saved money.
They didn’t contribute very much at all to that. And that’s okay. It just wasn’t where they were in their
lives. They didn’t have that much money. On the other hand, I think I’m a little proud that I took care of
all the expenses myself.
Koppelman: Absolutely. I can completely appreciate that. I was in the same boat, so I know what you
mean.

2

De Danaan: I went to Ohio University the first year. I was the editor of the school paper, and then I
worked for the Xenia Daily Gazette as a cub reporter, and loved it. I got to do all kinds of feature
articles. I’d race around Greene County in a car, [laughter] and cover Little League baseball games.
I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. That was my thing. So, I went to Ohio University,
which had a good journalism school. But I had already done so much work—which now seems silly to
say, but it felt like it at the time. I was bored in the classes. And O.U. is a party school, so I just…
Koppelman: What year was that when you started at O.U.?
De Danaan: Fall of 1960. I was 17, and then turned 18 that fall. We were a teetotaler household, by
the way. And I got to O.U., and I was no longer a teetotaler. [laughing] It was known then—I don’t
know what its reputation is now, but it was an interesting year that I somehow survived without failing.
Then, my mother and father found some evidence, shall we say, of my misdeeds. Took me into a back
bedroom, sat me down, and told me I wouldn’t be going back.
Well, of course, I could have gone back, because I was of age, but I didn’t know anything like
that. So, I went to work for Gentile Air Force Base as a clerk-typist. I worked and saved all my money
that summer, because I thought what I was going to have to do is go to work, move out of the house,
and find my own way. And they relented, and said I could go to Ohio State, which it was still in my mind.
[laughing] But I remember, I found a rooming house, and I lived with a very old woman, very far north
of the campus. I didn’t know anyone. It was 180 degrees different from my social real self that I had
allowed to come out at O.U. So, I was really in solitary confinement. I finally got moved into a rooming
house for the last part of the year, and that was good.
And I was so down on myself about not having lived—it was always from the parents. “You’re
not living up to your potential.” So, I thought, okay. I took 21 hours a quarter, which was the max you
could take.
Koppelman: Wow.
De Danaan: And I took classical Greek as part of my self-punishment. My god! I had so much
homework every night, it was like a year of hell. But, I was in the anthropology department, and
discovered anthropology.
Koppelman: Tell me a little bit about that. How did you discover anthropology?
De Danaan: I was reading all summer long when I wasn’t clerk-typing, [laughing] which was a joke. But
anyway, I read, and I just kept reading books, and I just stumbled on the word in a book. I looked it up,
and I said, “This is it.” Because I was interested in history, I was interested in literature, I was interested

3

in folklore studies, I was interested in art. I didn’t know what to do, and I thought, oh, my god, I can do
it all. [laughing]
So, I went to Ohio State, and I marched into the department chair’s office, Leo Estel, and I said,
“I want to be an anthropologist. What do I have to do?” [laughing]
Koppelman: And then, you did it.
De Danaan: He gave me a list of books to read. He was smoking a big cigar, and painting pictures of
women in the Caribbean that he had spent the summer with. Oh, my god. [laughter] But my mentor
was Erika Bourguignon, whom I met that first year at Ohio State. She was a fabulous, fabulous person.
Brilliant woman, as were several other people in the department. But Erika Bourguignon, she was it.
She was my mentor then.
I applied to go to the Peace Corps, mainly to just get away from my parents. Also, I thought, I
can’t be an anthropologist unless I’ve been someplace other than Beavercreek and Columbus. So, I
went for two years to Southeast Asia. I lived pretty much alone there, too. You see how I am. It all
stems from these experiences. I lived in Sarawak, which was still a British Crown colony, for the first
several months that I lived there. And then, it became part of Malaysia. That was definitely a turning
point. I mean, my life has been completely directed by that.
But all through that time, Dr. Bourguignon was corresponding with me. She had already started
her trance and spirit possession project, through the National Institutes of Mental Health. She would
give me things to observe, and ask me questions. We had an exchange. And, when I came back to Ohio
State, I got into the honors program, and my honors thesis was based upon my basically field work in
Borneo.
Koppelman: That’s great.
De Danaan: That was Ohio State, and that’s where I met Betsy Diffendal. She was working on the
trance and spirit project possession project. She had transferred from Antioch. Oh, gosh, that was just a
great—
Koppelman: You were still an undergraduate then? You and Betsy both?
De Danaan: Oh, yeah. She got her BA the year before I got mine. And that’s when she told you the
story about working for the social service agency in Columbus. She went to work. I was still a student.
She got Phi Beta Kappa, and I didn’t even know what it was. I got it the next year, and I was like, really?
I mean, I was so naïve about this stuff, because I didn’t have parents with an academic background.
Nobody was saying, “You must go and do this.” They were just saying, “You must fulfill your potential,”
[laughing] whatever that might be!
4

Anyway, I was very happy that I met her. She was honestly the one who said, “You need to fill
out applications for graduate school.” It wasn’t really kind of in my—I think I would have been happy to
stay in Ohio and do other things. But, once I was on the line, and getting the support and the
encouragement from other people, too, then I knew I wanted to—well, I applied several places, but I
really wanted to come to Washington, mainly because it seemed like it was an interesting, good, healthy
place to live. I’d never been out here.
The other choice would have been Cornell. I worked at the Sarawak Museum in Borneo, and
while I was doing my other Peace Corps duties, I would go and work in the museum. There was a quite
famous man there at the time named Tom Harrison. Tom Harrison ran the museum, and he had . . . I
don’t know if you’d call it retirement, but anyway, he ended up at Cornell in their Southeast Asian
program. He really wanted me to come there and join him.
So, that was the other choice. But there was a guy named Peter Wilson at UW, who had just
done field work in Malaysia. So, there it was. I came to UW; it was a lifestyle choice more than
anything. I really didn’t think I was going to be cut out to be an academic, in the truest sense of the
word. There was nothing on the radar at that point that I knew about, about Evergreen. But when it
came on the radar—
Koppelman: It wasn’t on the radar yet. It was the planning stages.
De Danaan: Yes, it was. That would have been—I graduated in 1966 from Ohio State.
Koppelman: I think you said you got your MA at the University of Washington in 1970?
De Danaan: Yes, someplace around in there. I got the master’s degree, and then went right into the
Ph.D. program, so I don’t remember exactly how that worked out.
Koppelman: You started at Evergreen in ’71, the first year.
De Danaan: Yeah.
Koppelman: Remind me how you got connected to Evergreen.
De Danaan: Of course, I heard about it. At that time, I had a very dear friend in the department, Karen
James, and I knew her—I had come to really love the Northwest, and I really wanted to stay in the
Northwest. But, at the same time, we were having—I don’t know, there was a lot of upheaval. Of
course, we were all involved in the antiwar movement, and marching. There was bombing on the
campus. The post office on University Ave was bombed. I wasn’t in SDS, but I knew people who were.
It was very disruptive. Then, two of my senior professors were brought up before the American
Anthropological Association ethics committee because they had been doing counterinsurgency work in
Southeast Asia during the war. Everything was a mess.
5

And then, there was also a move to re-look at college education, and how people taught.
Teaching as a subversive activity came out about that year. A lot of us were in the department who
were also teaching, as graduate students, were really up in arms. We had all kinds of meetings. So,
there was so much turmoil.
Koppelman: Remind me where the Bellevue Community College teaching fits into it.
De Danaan: That was during this same period. I’m still a student. It seems like I was a student for
longer than I was, because I had lots of different jobs. Anyway, I worked for Bellevue Community
College while I was a Ph.D. student. That was down in the Central Area at Herzl Synagogue was where
we met, not the Bellevue Community College. It was a program where the credit generation was
coming through Bellevue.
Koppelman: It was Anthropology 101?
De Danaan: Yeah, but I had to teach other things, too. I had, I think it was, three different courses. I
don’t remember. There were things that were more related to my community development
background than to anthropology. But that’s where I learned to teach.
Koppelman: One thing I remember you saying—because I wrote it down—is that you learned how to
teach there.
De Danaan: I did.
Koppelman: I wonder if you could tell that story.
De Danaan: I had had some, I would say, very good teachers, very compelling teachers. But it was like
Mel Jacobs at the University of Washington; Erika Bourguignon at Ohio State. I had some really good
teachers, but although there were a couple of seminars that really [snaps fingers] worked for me, mostly
what I observed, by anthropologists who I worked with, were people who had their stacks of notes, and
stood up in front, and read or talked from those notes.
So, when I went in to teach this class at Bellevue, or, at New Careers, I stood in front of a
classroom of basically–everyone would have been older than I. Everyone was African American. There
were men and women. Mostly, the women were people who had been on Aid for Dependent Children
for a while. Most of the men were people who had been in prison for a while. So, the idea of the
program was to give them entry-level jobs in the social service system at the same time as they are
earning college credit. It was set up, I think, every other day. They’d be on the job, and then they’d
come to the college for the classes. And they had a full college load. I wasn’t the only teacher. They
had a full college load. All had homework. That’s another—when we come back to that, I got fired.

6

Koppelman: Well, one thing you told me about that, before you got fired, was that when you were
teaching with your notes, it wasn’t working.
De Danaan: Yeah, so we’ll go back to that. I’m standing in front of this classroom, and after about the
third week, with all my brilliant notes and things to say about Anthropology 101, everybody was
slumped down behind their desks. I could hardly see their faces. And people were madly passing hot
links and popcorn and potato chips and everything. And I looked, and after the third week, I said, “This
is not of any interest to you at all, is it?” So, I basically got rid of the notes. I said, “How are we going to
make this more interesting to you?”
I’m sure what I did—I can’t remember this exactly—I think I brought in some possible
alternative books. One was Tally’s Corner. It’s a study of African-American streetcorner men in
Washington, D.C. Valentine, that’s the author’s name. This was a book that was getting a lot of notice.
It was pretty brand-new. I don’t know if it was brand-new, but it wasn’t very old. We all read that
together, and that made the difference. People argued with his hypotheses. People argued with his
findings. People said, “He doesn’t understand this. He doesn’t get this.” It was really fun. But, in doing
that, we looked at how anthropology is done, how field work, why he is making these assertions. How
has he framed all of this? We didn’t use that word then.
I think I told you the story of watching the classic anthropologic films that were shown in
classrooms at the time, like Dead Birds and The Hunters. And a whole different perspective—the point
of view, the angle of approach to those films, from people I was working with—was completely different
from anything I’d ever experienced in a classroom. Questions nobody, including myself, had ever
thought to ask.
Koppelman: What sorts of questions?
De Danaan: The question I told you was people wanted to know, how did they do their hair that way, in
Dead Birds? It was like, yeah, this is a question of aesthetics. A bunch of white students from the
suburbs in classes I’d been in weren’t interested in how these folks thought aesthetically, in terms of
body decoration, and why, and how, and all these things. There was a lot of interest in kinship and
marriage. Lots of interest in that. And a lot of comparison of that. “Well, we do it this way, and they do
it—hmm, and I wonder how that came to be?”
So it was a way of teaching. It was participatory. It was teaching from the point of view of the
students, and not assuming a point of view. It was not assuming what the important questions were for
the classroom. And it was great. I loved it. And I really do feel that I learned to teach from that
experience.
7

Koppelman: And that was right on the cusp of Evergreen, wasn’t it?
De Danaan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have gone from there to . . . I think I was . . . well, in the
summers, I was with a team that was living in farm labor camps in Yakima. I know I was out in one of
the orchards during the day when the call came from Evergreen at night. So, there were other things
that happened during that.
Koppelman: How did they find you, or how did you find them?
De Danaan: Our senior professor was Harold Amos. We had a department of community development
at the University of Washington then, and the head of that was an anthropologist. He had asked
graduates students in anthropology to work in the Yakima Valley on these projects. I was staying at a
farm labor camp that had a phone, and they fetched me.
Koppelman: Do you think he knew about Evergreen, and he was helping you do the work?
De Danaan: No, no, no. I would have applied for Evergreen, and was told that I got the job. That’s what
I’m saying, that immediately before Evergreen was that.
Koppelman: You came the year after the planning year, and the first year that students were here, so
can you talk a little bit about what it was it like when you first came to town? What were your
impressions of the people and the place?
De Danaan: The town or the college?
Koppelman: The college.
De Danaan: Well, let’s back up a little bit. Before we came to campus—of course, I came to campus for
interviews and so forth—we went to Pac Forest, all of us, the first-year faculty and the planning faculty.
That’s where we all first met each other, and started to talk together. I think I told you about some of
the interview parties. Ugh. The interview process was weird, but we don’t need to go into that. But
Merv Cadwallader wanted me, so I was there. And we went to Pac Forest, and that’s when we realized,
because whoever was doing registration then, said, “Well, we’ve got too many upper-division, junior,
senior students. We need to form another program.”
That’s when I met with my team for the first time. Because we were a new team, and there
were no women coordinators, suddenly, I was the first woman coordinator of a program, with these
guys—Richard Ryan, Richard Alexander, Ted Gerstel and Steve Herman. That’s where we met, at Pac
Forest. I don’t remember when that was, but we had several months. It must have been in the spring,
and then through the summer, we were planning our program.
Koppelman: Yeah, of 1971.

8

De Danaan: I had been in Olympia in the past, so I’ll tell you one story of Olympia before I moved here.
Because, when I worked out of Portland State, doing community development, I traveled with a guy
named Robie—I can’t think of his last name; African-American, and that’s significant for the story—and
one other guy sometimes, a white guy. But we were called trainers, and we went to small towns all over
Washington and Oregon doing community development training with community organizations out of
the community, who were being supported by the Office of Economic Opportunity—the war on poverty.
It was an interesting period, because the government was actually paying people to organize poor
people. That’s the short way of saying it. It was incredible.
We would go from town to town to town, and we had a packaged dog-and-pony show to talk
about how to do community organization. We’d do roleplays, and we’d do problem-solving. We did all
kinds of stuff. So, Robie and I were a team. Now, this is 1969-70, something like that, and it was not
that usual in this area, in many of these small towns, to see a black man and a white woman traveling
together, going into hotels together, eating their dinner, having drinks together. That’s what we did. If
anybody asked our relationship, he would always say, “This is my sister.” Because he wanted to mess up
their minds even more.
So, Olympia. We came to Olympia to do one of these things. And it was our habit that, after
our long days of work, we would go with the trainees to a pub, or a cocktail lounge, and we’d drink and
hoot and holler together. There was this place called—it’s where the State Library is now—there was a
place called like the Triangle, or the Corner. I don’t know if the bar is still there, but there was a bar
there. That was all countryside still, but close to Olympia.
We went out there. I remember there were pinball machines. There were a whole lot of allwhite women, me, Robie. We were drinking beer, and we would get up and dance, and we were having
a ball. Jukebox. And there were these guys in cowboy hats, and one of them sidled over. He didn’t look
directly at any of us. He kind of went like this and he said, “There’s some people over there”—
Koppelman: He’s looking up?
De Danaan: Yeah. He’s trying to talk to Robie and to me, but he’s not looking at us, because he doesn’t
want them to know he’s telling us. He said, “You know, there’s some trouble brewing. You’d better get
out of here, because there’s some people who don’t like what they’re seeing.” They were all men, with
cowboy hats on.
Robie said, “Okay, we’re going now. But give me your purse,” he said to me. I would, of course,
just trust him. Whatever. We said, “Goodnight.” We head for the car. He’s got my purse. Of course, I
didn’t know what was going on. We got in the car, and Robie said, “I had my jacket off, because we
9

were dancing. They know that I didn’t have a gun on my body, because they saw my jacket was off. But
they didn’t know what was in your purse.”
That was another turning point. These were these moments where, okay, I’d done a lot already,
by that time, in my life. I’d been in war zones, for Chrissake. But learning about race in Olympia,
Washington. That was it. So that’s what I came to Olympia with in my gut and my head, was this is a
place that can be dangerous.
What happened was, because my brother had stayed in Seattle, by that time, he had married
and he had a baby, my niece, Kalli. I knew all of his friends, and they all moved to Olympia and enrolled
in Evergreen, so I had all of these friends. [laughing] So I had this little cadre of buddies from Seattle,
including my dear niece, little thing.
At first, I tried living on my own, but it was hard. It was really hard. And I didn’t like it. But I
loved working with the students. But about halfway through the year, I moved in with my brother out
on Sleater-Kinney. [chuckles] Before the band. I lived out there for a while, and then, got this house
that I think I mentioned to you. Ida Domme, Naomi Greenberg and I lived together in a big house in
Olympia.
Through Ida Domme, I met Joye Hardiman, whom I recruited. I’m trying to think who else.
Loowah Smith was at our house all the time. Anyway, it was a crazy household. Maxine Mimms would
come by almost every night after work, and we’d all sit up and do all kinds of stuff. [laughter]
Koppelman: One thing that you talked about when you talked about that first program, and I took
notes, you said that Richard Alexander, in particular, was really supportive of your work, and that you
taught as equals.
De Danaan: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Koppelman: And that there was something very special about that team. That’s quite an experience to
have in your first year.
De Danaan: Yes, and I emphasized that because there were people who thought—particularly
women—Rick could be a little intimidating, or maybe very intimidating. Tall. Big voice. But my
experience—I was friendly with his wife, and I still—I don’t see her, but I know where she is, and I know
what’s going on with her. Richard Bryan. Steve Herman, some people particularly would say things
about Steve, because he didn’t like dealing with bureaucracy. He’d get behind his door in his office, and
he wouldn’t open it if somebody was trying to get him to do something. [laughter] So, you’d hear these
stories about these guys, later on. But my experience was absolutely fantastic. We taught well

10

together. We had great faculty seminars; in fact, I would say, the best faculty seminars I had, the ones
that actually talked about the book.
Koppelman: Talk a little bit about why faculty seminars were so great. Because this is a practice that’s
fallen by the wayside, to some degree.
De Danaan: I know. I know!
Koppelman: Not with every team—not in my teams—but in a lot of teams. I wondered if you could talk
about the thinking behind that a little bit, and what you appreciated about it.
De Danaan: Yes. What the idea of the faculty seminar was—and I don’t know if this came with people
like Merv, where people had been doing these kinds of programs. You do know that the college, it was
never Mervin’s intention that it be all coordinated study programs. That was never the intention. It
went way overboard right away. Anyway, so I don’t know if the faculty seminar came from that original
model, but it certainly was there in our model for the first year.
The idea was that we were an interdisciplinary team, teaching around a theme. We’re teaching
something called Human Behavior, and we have a biologist, we have a mathematician, we have—
literature, I think, is Richard’s background, we have an anthropologist and we have a psychologist
teaching together. So, we have different perspectives on human behavior. We bring something
different to it from what we know, what we’ve studied. So, we had to, together, develop a list of books
that we thought would be good seminar material for students, but that we may individually not know
that book, or that topic, very well.
The idea would be that we would read a book a week. It was assigned to the students; it was
assigned to ourselves. We, as faculty, would sit together, and discuss that book, in detail. If one of us
needed help with some of the concepts, we would work that through in faculty seminar. We would get
to know the book really well, and we would have pre-discussed that book before we went into a
seminar with our students.
Koppelman: Especially when it was a book that wasn’t in your field, you’d get to go back to school, in a
sense.
De Danaan: You’d get to go back to school, and you’d get to see how your perspective meshes with
these other perspectives, or doesn’t. It was terrific. I know we read Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook.
That’s the only book that’s popping out at me, and that’s funny that I even remember that. Sometimes
we had big differences. I remember Ted and I, two or three times during the year—and this was a yearlong program—we set up a debate format, and we debated in front of the students.
Koppelman: That’s great.
11

De Danaan: I don’t think we ever did this, but the one thing that I’ve done in other programs, was that
the faculty seminar was actually a fishbowl, so that the students saw the faculty having this seminar. It
was really good work, and it was really fabulous conversation.
Koppelman: So, you taught for two years, it sounds like.
De Danaan: Yeah.
Koppelman: And then, you became a dean.
De Danaan: Yeah.
Koppelman: How did that come about that you became a dean?
De Danaan: That’s one of the things I was going to tell you about, so I’ll tell you now. I liked Merv
Cadwallader a lot, and Merv had these afternoon sherries, with just a few people. So, we had
Disappearing Task Forces [DTFs], which were out there in public. But he had this little work group that
was advising him that was not public, and those were the afternoon sherries.
Koppelman: Who was in that group?
De Danaan: I don’t know who else, but I was. So, in a way, I feel like I was being kind of groomed for
moving in. I can’t remember when the heck Ed Kormondy became Provost. He was Provost during the
time that I was a dean, but I think this would have been the second year of the college, when he also
established a kind of underground advisory group. I know Peggy Dickinson was part of it. I was part of
it. Nobody else supposedly knew this. There were maybe five of us. It had to be the second year. How
interesting. So, was Ed Provost then?
Koppelman: One thing that’s interesting to me about that, too—I was just writing to someone about
this today, and we talked about it when you and me and Betsy and Maxine talked—that there are all
these meetings, and things that go on in front of the scenes that are the scenes. But the stuff that goes
on behind the scenes is really important.
De Danaan: And that’s why I wanted to tell you about it, because I thought, well, I had no business
saying, “Oh, those people behind closed doors,” because I was one of them.
The one with Ed was really, really creative. What he wanted was a think tank. Somebody had a
van parked out in the parking lot of the college, and we would go out into that van and drink, and come
up with all these crazy thoughts and ideas, and bring them to Ed. We were working for him, but it was
not to be told to anybody. But he was more creative. He really wanted visions, and visionary ideas, to
come out that he could help with, that he could implement. Merv’s was much more problem-solving
immediate things that are going on—how do we deal with this?
Koppelman: It sounds like a fertile partnership, those two perspectives, because you need both.
12

De Danaan: Oh, it was. These were really interesting. So, yes, so we had the behind-the-closed-doors
things going on, for sure. I just don’t know when Ed came in, but I’m thinking who I know who was
meeting in the van. And those people were not around very long.
One of them, I had to fire—I was the first dean to fire anybody of the faculty—and that was
[chuckles] was Charlie Lyons and Delgado. That was really hard. They were friends of mine. But there
were things that—well, you probably know this, but there was this sort of open door to try to get some
diversity on that first- and second-year faculty. So, people with BAs were hired. And then, the deans
would turn around and say, “Well, you’re not up to snuff,” basically. When you look at it from the
perspective now, it’s like, oh, let’s hire this guy who we know is going to fail, but it’ll look good for us
while he’s here. There was some of that going on. That was very, very hard. I think that was my first
year in what I had to do.
Koppelman: That’s interesting, because there’s always this tension between the nuts-and-bolts
administrative needs, and then the image of the place. There’s always this ideal of the image you want
to be . . .
De Danaan: Oh, gosh, yeah.
Koppelman: . . . and it often comes into conflict with the nuts and bolts part of things.
De Danaan: You’re right. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about the dogs on campus.
Koppelman: Tell me about the dogs.
De Danaan: Oh, oh! Well, among our big issues the first two or three years, one was that the dogs were
in the seminars. [laughter] And I told you that I had to have a big piece of cardboard over my door, and
I put an opening on it. Well, that’s because we didn’t have any doors. We met our seminars offcampus, because the campus wasn’t finished. And I had this door, but at the same time . . . there were
two things I remember that were funny issues.
One was, the students didn’t like that the custodians were in their regular clothing—like the
women who were vacuuming—because it felt like it was their mother who was in the building. So, they
had to go to uniforms, and I’m not sure exactly, but that was in the first year or two.
The other thing was that dogs were everywhere. [laughing] So, this gets out into the
newspaper. Well, everything was getting into the newspaper. We were being looked at like this: we
were all supposed to be these radical bombers that they’d been collected together on a campus, and we
all had this horrible hair, and all this stuff. And on top of it, there’s dogs all over this building built with
taxpayer money, there’s dogs. So, the dogs had to be banned from the buildings. Eventually, they built
the little pound or whatever, so that they could be contained.
13

Something I learned much later was that Dick Nichols was the guy who was in charge of PR. He
was a local guy. I think he’s still around. Anyway, he was a local guy, so he knew the local sensitivities.
It turned out that under his entire regime, every photograph was scrutinized to see whether there was a
dog in the picture. Not one picture went out from The Evergreen State College with a dog in the picture
anywhere.
Koppelman: Thank you, Dick Nichols.
De Danaan: I just found that out by accident. I just thought, isn’t that . . . So, yes, making the image,
making the public image, was extremely important to the people—
Koppelman: Did it feel like an uphill climb a lot of the time?
De Danaan: Oh my gosh! It was horrible. No, no, there were lots of rotten things happening. It was
true that people wanted to close us down, and it was true that we had to work hard—what we were
working hard to do, some of us faculty, I would say, and people like Charlie McCann, and people like
Ed—we were trying to find this place where we could do what we set out to do proudly, and say it out
loud, and do what we’re doing, and not get us closed down.
For example, I had to be dragged out to go talk in the community. I would go with Charlie
Teske, and we would go out, and we would go all over Olympia and give talks to clubs and community
groups, and talk about what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, and why. There was a lot of PR
involved with our jobs.
So, yes, it was very stressful. Very, very stressful. That’s another reason why starting that Ajax
Compact—that isn’t why I started it with Mary, but it certainly didn’t hurt to have some of these
prominent women in town, who are in Junior League or whatever, also taking classes at Evergreen.
Koppelman: Describe that project a little bit, because I don’t think it was described in the other
interview.
De Danaan: Okay.
Koppelman: And you were a dean when you started this?
De Danaan: Yes, I was a dean. I think Maxine is the one who said that somebody had stood up, the
President or the Provost, in the second or third year of my being a dean, and said, “There are 15
important projects, and we have been involved in all of them.” I mean, we were just multi-tasking all
over the place.
This one was Mary—can’t think of her last name—lived on Cooper Point. Upper-middle class.
Morehead! Mary Morehead. Fancy dresser. Good, smart woman. Maybe that was Ajax. Anyway,
somehow she was taking a class with Maxine, or through Maxine, maybe on contract. She was the one
14

who proposed this idea. She said, “We’ve really got to find a way, because people like me are scared to
come on this campus, because we think it’s radical; everyone’s young; they’ll look at us like we’re their
mothers. We just are uncomfortable, but we know you’re doing good things. And a lot of us haven’t
finished our college degrees.”
So, this was her idea. Maxine sent her to me, and we discussed the plan, and the idea. Of
course, one of the things that was great then, as a dean, so Mary came to me. Oh! I was saying that one
of the great things about being a dean then was I had a budget. I loved having this budget, so I could say
yes to this, or I could fund this, or I could do whatever. So, Mary said, “Let’s do this.”
There’s a little funny side story to this in that she [chuckles], by mistake—she’d made up these
postcards to send all over Olympia. She took it to the printing office. They, by mistake, printed both
sides of the card. The one side of the card had postage on it. You know those old postcards? Well, she
thought, oh, thought she, that Evergreen must have its own shop, bulk postage. So she just went on
ahead and addressed them. Not the FBI. What is it? It’s one of the federal agencies. These men
arrived in suits on campus. Oh my god! It was really, really, really bad. No, no, this was scary. They
arrived at her house first, and said they were going to confiscate her house and her car.
Koppelman: Because?
De Danaan: Misuse of federal postage. And they were serious. They were not playing. This really was
a big thing. So, she brought them to campus, and she took them to the mail room and into the print
shop. [laughter] She said, “Well, they did it. I didn’t do it. I didn’t know!”
They said, “Well, who’s in charge?” Well, when Ed Kormondy left town, he would put me as
acting Provost. So I was the highest-ranking person on campus that day! [laughing] And they brought
me down to these guys. I mean, you may not believe this, but I really can do it when I need to do it.
Koppelman: Oh, I’m sure you can.
De Danaan: Oh, and I was good. I was pulling all my stuff together, and so, very calmly, we sat down,
and said, “Let us discuss this. What exactly happened?” But that was not the end of it. It did go
through several iterations, and Ed had to have these meetings with them. But the upshot—if that’s the
right word—was we did start the program. They got the postcards. [laughing]
Koppelman: How did you come up with the name?
De Danaan: Now, that’s a good one. I know it was Mary, but I just can't remember. I think it was Ajax
cleanser, and a compact that you used to . ..
Koppelman: . . . put powder on your face?

15

De Danaan: Yes! I think it was something that she thought would be attractive to women who were
stuck in their homes, but would like to get a college education.
Koppelman: Okay, why not!
De Danaan: I think that was it. They changed it after a few years. It was a four-unit course or
something, because it was supposed to be helping them get on. I did that while I was a dean. I also
taught that first class. And we had, boy, I want to say 30 people in that first class, and they were great—
Coke Funkhouser, who has passed away, but she had the bookstore downtown. Hannah Spielholz. Oh,
gosh, I don’t know. There were a lot of women, and they were all probably in their upper thirties,
forties. And most of them went on ahead and graduated.
Koppelman: That’s so great.
De Danaan: Yeah, it was a good program. Several other women faculty took over for the next few
years, and that kept running for a while.
Koppelman: That was probably, at the time, for those women, I’ll bet a lot of those women were like
you when they grew up. No one expected them to go to college, and they didn’t go.
De Danaan: That’s right.
Koppelman: So it was probably really quite an unusual opportunity for them.
De Danaan: Yeah. My recollection is that they were mostly married, and that they maybe had been in
college, but married and never finished, and now was their chance. Now, we had a college, a state
college, in Olympia that would allow them to have the time to go back. It was very exciting stuff. It was
really fun. Eventually, of course, none of us went to jail, and Mary didn’t lose her house, but it was a
very tense day.
Koppelman: What else do you remember from being a dean? Any other highlight?
De Danaan: Can you pause that?
Koppelman: Yeah.
End Part 1 of 2 of LLyn De Danaan on 8-4-17
Begin Part 2 of 2 of LLyn De Danaan on 8-4-17
Koppelman: I was asking you more about when you were a dean, and you brought that photograph out,
and told me that’s you as a dean. So I’m wondering, when you look at that photograph, what does it
remind you of? What does it make you think of? How old were you in this picture, LLyn?
De Danaan: That’s a good question. Thirty-two? This is 1974, it says.
Koppelman: So, looking at your 32-year-old you . . .?

16

De Danaan: I’m trying to see what Craig wrote on this. This is not a digital photograph, so I think he’s
recorded something about how he made the photograph, or how he printed it. It reminds me of several
things. First of all, while I was a dean, I had a giant poster of a 747 cockpit on my wall.
Koppelman: Why was that?
De Danaan: Control. And all the dials, and all the things that keep control up. I was very conscious.
Koppelman: You felt yourself in a cockpit, in a certain way?
De Danaan: Yeah, I had to keep a lot of things going. Then, it reminds me that I had—those are Louisa
Pulsifer baskets there. The summer before I came to Evergreen, my friend, Karen James, and Bruce
Miller Subiyay and I—Skokomish—had done a project with two elder Skokomish basket makers. That
was very much part of my life then, working with Karen, working with Bruce, working with the
Skokomish. So, I was already, even before I had gone to work with the Puyallup in 1991, I was doing
some work with Native Americans, even though I hadn’t studied Puget Sound Native American history
and culture. But that was very much a part of my life, my personal life, was around doing that kind of
work.
I don’t think that we put anything on tape about who was deans with me, right?
Koppelman: No, we haven’t, so why don’t you tell me?
De Danaan: Rudy Martin and Willie Parson and I all became deans together. At first, I was called the
assistant dean. And within about six months, I said, “I’m doing exactly what you’re doing. I’m not going
to be an assistant dean.” I just said, “I’m changing the title. Nobody knows what they’re doing anyway
about these titles. [laughing] And we were all rotating in from the faculty then, so all three of us—
Koppelman: That’s still the way it is.
De Danaan: That’s still—but don’t you have some people that were hired from outside?
Koppelman: We only had one person who was ever hired from outside.
De Danaan: Was that Barbara Leigh Smith.
Koppelman: No, that was Jose Gomez. I think Barbara taught for one year, and then she became a
dean, and she never taught again. I’m pretty sure that’s right.
De Danaan: Okay. I had thought there was other people. That’s good, because that was the way we
started. In fact, the year before, it was Oscar Soule who had been dean for a year, and he had come out
of the faculty.
So, the three of us came in together, and it was pretty unusual. There was literature even at the
time about what was happening to white women and African Americans in academic administration. It
was difficult. People were happy to get you in these positions for the affirmative action look of it. We
17

didn’t even talk about diversity then; we talked about affirmative action. So, the three of us were there,
but we were so stressed, and so closely scrutinized.
I think I told you the story the other day that the women would come at me. Really nasty stuff,
and demands. “Why aren’t you doing this?’ and “Why aren’t you doing this?” I don’t know all of what
Willie and Rudy had to encounter.
My memory is weak in terms of who the white man was. There was a white man, always. There
was supposed to be four deans, and it seems like they would rotate in. I don’t know if that was official,
or if that’s just—I said the word the other day, the “overseer,” because that’s kind of like what it felt
like. Sometimes Charlie Teske would be there, sometimes Byron Youtz, I think. I don’t know. But we
had the main desk jobs, and we three were in it.
I loved working with Willie. I really loved it. And then, I taught with him later on the Tacoma
campus, one of the best teaching experiences I ever had.
Koppelman: Willie was a biologist?
De Danaan: Biologist. Really fabulous teacher, and such a sensitive, grounded person. I didn’t get
along as well with Rudy. It was nothing overt, but he, for example, wanted me to be an assistant dean.
[laughing] I always felt that there was this sexism thing going on with him, and kind of an, oh, I hate to
say this, but kind of taking credit for stuff that I would do, and nobody else knew that I had done it, so it
was like, ooh, I can’t bring it up. Then there was a thing of him deciding he had to protect my sexual
identify. That was kind of a mess, because it was just like—
Koppelman: Were you in the closet?
De Danaan: No.
Koppelman: I didn’t think so.
De Danaan: No, I wasn’t.
Koppelman: So what was he protecting?
De Danaan: Because he was homophobic, I think. I think that he was nervous about stuff. There is an
incident that I’ll never forget, I guess, because I’m still remembering it. Don Martin, who’s a friend of
mine in the gay community—he’s on the thing I gave you—he was a student. He, with his friends,
started the Gay Resource Center for men.
Koppelman: I’ve got that. That was in 1973 that the Gay Resource Center opened?
De Danaan: Yeah. That’s when I became a dean.
Koppelman: You said it was one of the first student organizations of that kind in the state.

18

De Danaan: Yeah, I think so. Whatever it says on there is right, because Caroline and I worked really
hard, and with Don, to get these dates and things right.
Don was an activist, and this was the time of a lot of national activity in terms of gay-lesbian.
What happened was one of the programs lost a faculty member. I can’t begin to say how, but they lost
a faculty member, and they had to make a new hire into the year. The students put up the name of a
man named Chuck Harbaugh, who was a gay man. Now, we would not have known that, except for the
fact that there had been a big celebration/rally on campus, with speech giving, I think probably put on
by the Gay Resource Center, and Chuck had spoken there. Chuck was kind of shocking in the things he
had to say. [laughing] I mean, it shocked my sensibility to hear him, and I did hear him. But, he was put
up by the students to fill this position. Some students.
As deans, looking at his credentials, his background, what was needed to fill out the disciplines
in his program, he didn’t have it, so we didn’t hire him. But the Gay Resource Center really took us on.
They wanted to take me on, because I was pretty much the hiring dean. Before I knew it, there were
these meetings being held without me present that Rudy had called, like over a weekend or something.
I don’t remember the details. But I really felt like, okay, I should have been there talking about this
issue. This is not okay.
Koppelman: This raises a question that is sort of in between some of the things that you’re saying. Like
when they said they wanted you to be the assistant dean, and you realized, after six months, well, I’m
doing just what you do, and we don’t know what these labels mean anyway. That gets at a really
interesting piece, to me, of Evergreen history, which is all of Charlies “noes,” right? No grades. No
departments. Blah blah blah. None of those trappings of authority. And yet, in order to function as an
institution, there has to be someone in the cockpit. Someone’s got to have that consciousness of the
dials and everything else.
De Danaan: Yeah.
Koppelman: I think the college still has this kind of schizophrenia about its own identity, and its own
structure, really. Do we need people in positions of authority? Do we need people in the cockpit, or do
we need to get rid of all the cockpits altogether? I just wonder, looking back, for you—because it’s
interesting that that was going on in the first couple years.
De Danaan: Oh, yeah!
Koppelman: And it’s still going on now, in a lot of ways, just this sort of anti-authority ethic that’s pretty
unusual. Every other friend I have who was an academic, who was a member of the department, just

19

concedes the need for a certain kind of hierarchy. That’s it. You just don’t even question it. And all we
do is question it at Evergreen.
De Danaan: Yeah.
Koppelman: So, looking back, I think it’s really interesting that you said that you had that picture of a
cockpit in your office. Because part of what you’re describing—in the story about Rudy, for example—is
people looking to find ways to have power in a place where it’s very anti-authority.
De Danaan: Oh, the faculty meetings were quite exciting in those days, too.
Koppelman: And yet, it sounds like you were not uncomfortable with that, maybe partly because you
grew up around military people or something?
De Danaan: No, it wouldn’t be the military. No.
Koppelman: What do you think that is?
De Danaan: My dad was so anti all of that. He didn’t like officers, he didn’t like any of the privileges
they had.
Koppelman: Why do you think you were so comfortable in the cockpit? Or, so willing to just say, “Yeah,
this is what I’m doing,” and just take it on?
De Danaan: That’s a really, really good question.
Koppelman: Because you’re very matter-of-fact about it, LLyn, when you talk about it. You just sort of
say, “Well, yeah, this is what’s needed.” It’s kind of like, oh, the recipe calls for garlic. I’d better make
sure I have some.
De Danaan: It’s true. People laughed about something I said one time that was overheard; that some
male came to my door when I was a dean, some fellow—I don’t remember who it was—who was
whining at me. He said, “Well, I don’t know how you can say that.” And I said to me him, out loud,
“Because I have the power.” And people overheard that, and that got repeated all over the place, and
laughed about. But nobody said, “You don’t.”
I don’t know why. I don’t know where that came from. That’s a really interesting thing to think
about. But it’s true. But we gave ourselves permission, by that rotation thing, to have somebody who
was organizing the mess. I guess that would be part of it, was that we gave ourselves permission to do
that, with the understanding that I’m here for three years. That’s it. And I’m going to do what I can.
We were all temporary at that point. We all had the three-year contracts.
Koppelman: That’s still the way it is. It’s temporary, but people can be there for eight years now, two
four-year contracts.

20

DeDanaan: So, I don’t know. That’s a very interesting question. I was comfortable with it, but it was
extremely stressful, more than I probably know. But I have been in a military zone—maybe that’s what
you’re referring to—when I was in the Peace Corps, I had to make all the decisions myself. There was a
slit trench outside of my house. I was the only Peace Corps volunteer in my district for most of the time
I was there. I was 12 miles from the Indonesian border, and every day, the Indonesians said they were
going to invade. I went drinking with guys in the bazaar—British troops, mainly—who went out and got
their heads cut off by Indonesians the next day.
I don’t know. I think I had some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, which I still have, but
which included some kind of a hard shell that said, it’s like, yeah, this has got to be done.
Koppelman: I know what you mean. This can’t be possibly as bad as what I’ve already been through.
De Danaan: No.
Koppelman: Yeah, I know just what you mean.
De Danaan: I don’t know, but I think that was pretty close to when I had done all that. And I had
worked at other jobs. I had worked outside of academics. Like I told you, I’d been fired three times by
assholes, seriously—one guy was at Puget Sound Governmental Conference, the woman at Bellevue
Community College, and the asshole at Portland State—because I had stood up to these people. And
they didn’t like it. Like I told you the other day, I was ready to be fired at any time, so I’m going to do
what I think is right and helpful. I guess. I don’t know.
Koppelman: Well, you had gumption, that’s for sure.
De Danaan: Maybe gumption, that’s it. One of the things I was proudest of during that time, first of all,
that all the women would come together and help me. We would have meetings off campus, and they
really did come to my support and aid when I’d get into some kind of box, or trouble, or couldn’t figure
out what to do.
I don’t remember what the issue was, but I remember it was a lot of back and forth and back
and forth, and me having to come forward to the faculty and do this, that and the other. I got a note
from Richard Jones, who was on the faculty. The guy that wouldn’t even look at me when I was getting
interviewed at this party. “I have my anthropologist,” he said. He wouldn’t even look at me. But he
wrote me a letter, and he said, “When I hear the word ‘integrity,’ I’ll always think of you.”
Koppelman: Wow. That’s saying a lot.
De Danaan: And I thought, boy, okay, I’m doing my job then. That was important for me to hear. It was
not easy. It was not easy for any women. It was not easy for any people of color in those jobs.

21

I can tell you, one time there was a meeting of—was that the Board of Trustees? Who were all
those white men? Anyway, there was something that I was having to negotiate, and I was very aware
that in those days, it was still unusual for a woman to look a man in the eye. Because it got read as
defiance, conflict, or flirtation. Those were just body signals. And I kept looking at these guys,
consciously. I would always look them in the eye. And I just, yes!
Koppelman: You knew just what you were doing.
De Danaan: I knew enough to make it work, apparently. But it had its toll. I had a very rough last—the
third year, about halfway through, I had what they didn’t know was Meniere’s. They didn’t know it was
Meniere’s then. I started to get these dizzy spells, and I was a mess. Everybody thought I had cracked
up psychologically. I did, too, because I didn’t know what it was.
Koppelman: It was really very taxing to be in that position.
De Danaan: Yes.
Koppelman: It was exhilarating, but it was really taxing.
De Danaan: Yes. Willie—I don’t know if it was right away—he got the hell off of that campus, and went
to the Tacoma campus.
Koppelman: He was still in Olympia in ’83, because he was my teacher in ’83. But maybe he was going
back and forth then.
De Danaan: He might have been going back and forth, because we didn’t have like permanent people
up there. But that became his go-to place, because of the stress.
Koppelman: And then, when you stopped being a dean, in 1977, and you started being a regular
faculty, and you were faculty from then on, what were some of the highlights? You talked a little bit
about the MIT program, and about the solo arts program.
De Danaan: Start with Visual Anthropology, because that was good. Sally and I taught Visual
Anthropology for a while.
Koppelman: Sally Cloninger.
De Danaan: Yeah, maybe three years, I don’t know for sure, and it may have not been in a row. But
that was really good to teach, and we were good collaborators. We did some work together, and then
she got a Fulbright to go to Malaysia, and I went with her. That’s where I did my dissertation research.
But we also made a film together. We did what we talked about; we made a really nice film. It took her
years to go back to it, and finish it, but I think it’s really a nice job. I did a lot of fieldwork there. So, yes,
Visual Anthropology. Then I think I told you when I came back from Kuala Lumpur that I talked
introductory, whatever the—
22

Koppelman: It was an arts program.
De Danaan: It was the first-year arts entry-level program. By that time, they had changed all these
structures. They went into divisions, and this and that. That must have been under Barbara Smith.
Things changed.
Koppelman: It might have been. What year was that?
De Danaan: I was at ’77, so she came in, let’s see, yeah, she came in next. Because by the late ‘70s . . .
Koppelman: Because there were specialty areas.
De Danaan: Specialty areas. That’s what I’m talking about. Because the late ‘70s, when Sally and I were
working together, we got Barbara Smith, because she was a dean, and we did this Wild Water Women
trip, which was on the Rogue River, because my brother was a guide and had a company. That was part
of our bringing the faculty women and faculty staff together to do things.
We brought Barbara in as one of the three planners. The three of us were in charge of it all. So,
I think specialty areas came in through Barbara, or with Barbara, at that point. So, by ’83, let’s say,
when I was doing that arts thing, there were not only specialty areas, but there were kind of entry-level
programs, or things that were thought of as entry level. And that’s what I was doing then. It was a good
year. It was fun.
Koppelman: Did being a dean change your approach to teaching at all?
De Danaan: No. Actually, I don’t think it did. It just felt like a whole other world, of administration,
decision-making.
Koppelman: Here’s where the question comes form. My understanding—and when I look at this
picture of you, LLyn—this is a picture of someone who is no bullshit, with a very sober point of view.
[laughter]
De Danaan: That’s probably pretty true.
Koppelman: And probably someone who’s hearing about a lot of different kinds of problems, and
difficulties, and having to iron things out, and make things work for students and everything.
De Danaan: Yes! Oh, yes. Now I’m thinking of some other examples.
Koppelman: What I’m getting at is, after seeing that sort of underbelly as a dean, then you go back, and
you’re a teacher. You know the kinds of problems that you don’t want to be contributing to.
De Danaan: Well, I guess that’s true. I’m not sure that I had that in my mind.
Koppelman: Consciously.

23

De Danaan: Yeah. I don’t remember . . . well, partly because of the shift to the specialty areas. I
remember I used to go to the art specialty area meetings, and I thought they were bullshit. So, yeah, I
think I kind of, in a way, dropped out of anything that had to do with administrative crap.
Let me see if I can think of some things that I got involved in, in an important way. I suppose it
would have been, I don’t know, all those conversations about . . . what are they called? . . . all the sexual
harassment stuff.
Koppelman: I remember when all that was going on.
De Danaan: Yeah, all the sexual harassment. The meetings, the meetings with the faculty, and the guys
that didn’t want any rules for anything. I remember going to the—but a lot of times, I wouldn’t go to
meetings. I just didn’t go to faculty meetings.
Koppelman: You just got burned out from being a dean?
De Danaan: Yeah. And there were certain male voices that one heard over and over and over. I just
felt like, compared to the first couple of years of the college, it wasn’t the same anymore. It really
wasn’t. There was so much more contentiousness. The first couple years, we worked hard on things
like course equivalencies, and whether we should be offering contracts. There was a lot of startup
questions that were—but we really seemed to collaborate on these things. And we were nicer to each
other. And then, things started to get—I will not name names, but I remember I was teaching with a
woman, and I was just shocked at the level of ability to believe the worst things about some of our male
colleagues, and to be willing to take that forward, with no—yes, I like proof, I like evidence, I like being
able to talk out loud, not behind people’s backs. And things like that really hurt me. I really just didn’t
want to be around that stuff.
Koppelman: One of the things you’re describing, too, it’s really interesting how, in the first couple of
years, when you’re generating something . . .
De Danaan: Yes, yes.
Koppelman: . . . and all your energies are going into that creative filling in, making something from
nothing, basically.
De Danaan: That’s right.
Koppelman: But then, once you have your something, then people’s characters come out. They bring
their stuff to the table.
De Danaan: And new people came, who did not necessarily share all of the same values. I mean, I felt
that, I think, more through the ‘80s than I did through the ‘70s. I think we still pretty much had our first

24

hundred—you know, 50 this year, 50 this year—and then the people who came in while I was a dean.
And then, there started to be some shift. I don’t know. There was really a different tone, in many ways.
Koppelman: You were the hiring dean, so in those early years—right now, the way hiring works is it’s
this very politicized process, where people sort of compete for the fields that they think we need to hire
in.
De Danaan: Yes, I know.
Koppelman: Is that different than it was?
De Danaan: Oh, yes, absolutely. The last time I participated in that—I forget what my area was; it was
where all those social science types were—it was just impossible. We had lost, basically, all the real
anthropologists. I hesitate to say “real” anthropologists, but people were calling themselves
anthropologist that had cultural studies degrees, folklore degrees, whatever. But my discipline is very
specific, in terms of what it represents. We had lost all but one.
Koppelman: I think Rita Pougiales was the only one left.
De Danaan: Rita. Rita! And Rita, bless her soul, her degree is anthropology and education. She had not
done the kind of cross-cultural stuff that is the hallmark of us. I mean, I think a lot of people now have
it, and I have to get off my high horse. But still, at that point, I was arguing for somebody, and there was
no way that that was going to rise to the top, even though it is the most interdisciplinary—in the first
few years of the college, it was the perfect background to have, to be able to move about in
interdisciplinary studies. And it was gone. It was just gone. It was that perspective was gone.
Koppelman: Well, we have hired two anthropologists since then.
De Danaan: I know. Actually, one of them is biological, isn’t she?
Koppelman: No. We have Eric Stein, who does medical anthropology.
De Danaan: Good, that’s a good field.
Koppelman: And we have Karen Gaul, who does sustainability.
De Danaan: Oh, Karen Gaul! Yes? But there is a biological anthropologist, too.
Heather Heying. I’ve never met her, but in print, it says she’s a biological anthropologist.
Koppelman: Yeah, I think you’re right.
De Danaan: But they’re almost the same field. I don’t know how that came about. But anyway, that’s
neither here nor there.
To go back to what was happening with the increasing specialization, I think, now that I’m
putting myself back in that place. It felt to me like increasing specialization, increasing hiring being
determined within these areas. It just felt like, no, this is not good. I’d rather have a department.
25

Koppelman: That’s the question. Did we replicate the kind of politics of departments, but without
calling them departments?
De Danaan: Yeah, I think so.
Koppelman: The same territoriality and jockeying for positions.
De Danaan: Looking for money, money, money. Yeah. I think so, too. That’s what my recollection of
the last two years that I was involved in anything, and I just didn’t like it. I remember Joye Hardiman
and I talked one time about faculty meetings, and we said, “Well, the thing to do is to not let them
forget you. So you have to put in an appearance every once in a while. You can just go in and go out,
but make sure you’re seen.” [laughter] No, I was pretty much not able to put up with that kind of stuff.
Koppelman: How long did that last? Did it last your whole career?
De Danaan: Well, it wasn’t until probably after mid-‘80s. I don’t remember. And then, in the early ‘90s,
I started working with the Puyallup off campus, out of my own ability to multi-task. Apparently, I can do
two or three things at once, because it seems like I’m telling you lots of stories where things are
overlapping.
I do want to tell you how we did the hiring the first year, because when I say “hiring team,” that
needs to be fleshed out a little bit. What it was, was that was my desk assignment, among others, and
then there were things where we overlapped. Willie was doing budget, for example. We all did
curriculum together, and selected and placed people.
My job, as best I can remember, I got all the files that were left over from previous hiring. There
had been hundreds of applications coming in, sometimes 100 a week, and they still were. I want to say
Grace Woodruff was my administrative assistant. Not a program secretary, an administrative assistant.
Grace Woodruff is, and was, a saint. I don’t know if she’s still living, but her daughter is Judy Woodruff.
She kept my day books, and my telephone calls, and my this, and my that, and my memos, and my this.
She kept me so organized, and so beautifully organized. She was an amazing, wonderful, wonderful
woman.
We had all these files. Now, it wasn’t my job to necessarily go back through all those, although I
did read a lot of them. And that’s why I know some of the stuff that had been written in them that, in a
few years, would have been completely illegal for people to even ask the kind of questions they were
being asked. Just horrible things said and written. We also had—by the first year?—anyway, we had an
affirmative action policy, or will, some way, for the 50 percent women. I don’t remember if we had an
idea about people of color, but they certainly were my idea, and I’m sure that that was in the air
somewhere, that we need to increase that.
26

So, my job was to actually go through all the letters that we received every week, and look for
people that might fill the bill.
Koppelman: Be a match for the college?
De Danaan: Be a match with the college, not with a discipline. What we were kind of looking for is
people that had two or three areas of strength, so they could be spread around. Susan Aurand is a very
good example. She was one that I went to interview at Ohio State when she was still there. She spoke
French, studied French literature. She had strength enough in the language area, and she was a visual
artist, painter as well as a sculptor. I forget what else. But she looked good. She was young. We were
weak in the arts, generally.
That would be a person whose file I would put in this file. I’d go through, and I’d look for people
like that, and I’d find them. And then, I would write letters. This was before I went to the deans.
Koppelman: You know what’s so interesting about that, LLyn? I just have to tell you that the criteria
that you’re describing are just not the main criteria anymore.
De Danaan: No, I’m sure not.
Koppelman: Because you hire a position, say, in US history, and everyone has to have a degree in US
history.
De Danaan: I know. No, weren’t doing that at all.
Koppelman: They’re not looking for that versatility.
De Danaan: We were not looking for specific degrees. And we weren’t even, still, looking to whether
they had a terminal degree. That was not the number one.
Now, I know we had the cultural diversity in mind, because I remember—okay, so then I would
ask them to build a file; that we might be interested in you, so build a file. Building a file included essays
from students—evaluations; a personal essay to talk about how they believed they were; and then, of
course, resume, and etc. I remember I would always look through those resumes, and their essays, to
see if they’d had any cross-cultural experiences. I know I did that very deliberating. And who are these
students, and where are they coming from, and how are they perceiving?
So, we had at least those. And then, any faculty could come in and read the files. I think there
was one more culling, but I can’t remember what that would have been. Because by the time I went to
the deans, I pretty much had a slate of candidates, and then we made the decisions together.
So, I had a lot of power—excuse the word—because I’m the one who’s looking at this, all the
way through the line. And reading the essays, and reading the resumes, and, in some instances, saying,

27

“Okay, I need to take a trip so that I can interview four or five.” That would be when I was trying to
cultivate and recruit somebody. Like Joye. I had met Joye once. I wanted her to apply.
Koppelman: She was in Buffalo?
De Danaan: She was in Buffalo, so I made a trip that included her, but interviewed probably 10 or 15
people on the East Coast during that trip. Before me, Merv would—that’s how he met Maxine. I said,
“You’ve got to get Maxine.” He went back East on a trip to interview different people, and met her. So
then, we would have a stronger reason to invite them to campus for an on-campus interview, once we
got to that point.
It was a multi-step process. I didn’t literally make the hire, but I took everybody through the
process, and when we got to the last stage, it was the deans. The last year I was in, we actually did have
a hiring faculty DTF that I took the files to, and they then read all of these things.
Oh my god, I’m just remembering this one file. I promise I won’t get into more detail, but I
remember this one guy who was a candidate in the arts. His main art was he’d get tongues of cows, and
wrap them, and hang them from trees. [laughing] Those were the slides he sent! So, I was always
having to watch my own personal taste versus, is this okay? People in the arts, do they like this stuff? Is
this a good thing? Anyway, there were a lot of—
Koppelman: They don’t do things like this in Ohio!
De Danaan: Oh my god! There were so many funny things like that. So I was really always trying to
monitor my prejudices, and really be open to things that I may not understand at all. So, those three
years, we got a lot of good people in.
Koppelman: When you think back to the years of teaching that you did, what stands out for you?
You’ve talked about a bunch of programs, and when we talked before, you talked a bunch about
intellectual friendships; you talked about your work with the Puyallup Tribe, which started in the ‘90s,
right?
De Danaan: In ’91. That was the shellfish case.
Koppelman: You also talked about the MIT program. One other thing I was hoping you’d talk about at
some point—and you gave me this wonderful “Historic Highlights of Olympia Lesbian Gay History,”
which is a great document. It really is. It’s incredible.
De Danaan: I think there’s actually another page.
Koppelman: I think I left the other page at home by mistake, but I do have it. But when I look at this,
and I begin to see the slow unfolding of a presence, it’s really amazing.

28

De Danaan: Yeah, it is. Because, see, these are very Evergreen-related. Rita Mae Brown, for example,
in 1975, I just wrote her a letter, and I said, “Would you come and speak at Evergreen?” [chuckles] And
she did. That was one.
Children of the ‘70s, that’s the one where Chuck Harbaugh spoke, and that’s the one that Don
Martin was very involved in. Of course, he started the Gay Resource Center.
And then, Tides of Change was sponsored by Evergreen Women’s Center, and there were all
kinds of women—Mary Fitzgerald, Kathryn Ford, Sue Bell. They were initiating all kinds of lesbian
entertainment presences. That’s mid-‘70s. Women’s Music Festival, Tides of Change, Olympia Food Coop. Oh, then and all the women construction companies, a lot of them were Evergreen students. Oh, I
forgot about this. Women’s softball team, a gay and straight team, spearheaded by Katy Steele. Oh my
god. “No hugging in the dugout.”
Koppelman: What year was that?
De Danaan: That’s mid-‘70s. These are all in that early period. Collective households were all over the
place, and they’re listed there. The Rainbow Restaurant downtown.
Koppelman: I remember the Rainbow. Do you remember the Lesbian Fun Society?
De Danaan: Of course.
Koppelman: When did that start?
De Danaan: A little later. I think it’s on here.
Koppelman: Because I was a student when that started, I think. And I have to tell you that Evergreen
was not a fun place to be a straight woman in 1983, and I was really jealous of the Lesbian Fun Society,
because there was no fun happening on the straight side.
De Danaan: There was no fun. You know, it’s either on here . . . well, of course, the Lesbian Gay Film
Festival started in, it says ’87. That was Marge Brown. It’s probably . . . there it is. It says 1990s, Lesbian
Fun Society and Halloween Dances. “If it’s not fun, we don’t do it.” There’s not a specific year of that
starting, but that’s on there, too. And a lot of that was being initiated out of the college. Marge Brown
starting the film festival, absolutely dynamite. Kathryn Ford has done so much. So, it’s a good history.
Koppelman: Well, this has become such a central piece of Evergreen history. I don’t know if it’s this
way at every college, but Evergreen has a tremendous presence of LGBT people now, much more than it
was even 10 years ago. It’s a very different place on that level. In many ways, it’s kind of a great thing,
because what’s happening, to me, is that it’s almost like sexual politics is decentralized, but a kind of
awareness of sexual difference is centralized. That’s really different, you know? And there are some
things about it that are really great, because people are much more open than they were.
29

De Danaan: Well, our whole society has changed, hasn’t it?
Koppelman: That’s true.
De Danaan: After Evergreen, I was on the Pride Foundation board locally, helping give out scholarships
and stuff. After about 2001, I wasn’t on campus full-time, so my education with a lot of like pronoun
stuff came through Pride Foundation, and being in the community, because I have spent a lot of time in
the Olympia community.
Koppelman: What was it like for you to see those kinds of changes? This came up when we were
talking to Betsy and Maxine, too. For example, pronoun use is a really very loaded issue now. What I
recall when I was a student, and even when I was in graduate school, and when I came back as a
teacher, it was a non-issue. So it’s a pretty recent issue, and I’m just wondering how that grabs you?
Because when we were talking about it with the four of us, it was clear that there’s a kind of
generational difference.
De Danaan: Well, Betsy is not accustomed to those conversations. As I said, I learned about this in
Pride, when we would always sit around the table, and go around the table and say, “What pronoun do
you use, do I use?” I identify now as queer, or pangender. I know that I don’t fit into the categories that
I used to be having open to me to label myself.
Koppelman: When did that happen, in your memory, that shift where now you can see that the labels
were much more rigid before . . .
De Danaan: Oh, yeah.
Koppelman: . . . and that word, queer, opens up . . .? Is that the ‘90s, do you think?
De Danaan: No. Because the first time, I think I told you, the Riot Girls, some of them were in my
seminar when I taught with Anne Fischel. I just didn’t get it. I was like attracted to it all. And it’s funny,
because I had even a girlfriend earlier than that who was way out there, very punky, and very what we
would call queer now, or I think she would call herself. Just wild. She’d wear black slips all over town
and everything. But we didn’t talk about things like the pronoun uses, or the definite things. So I was
first exposed to the thinking about it with the Riot Girls, and in that seminar.
Koppelman: That was the early ‘90s?
De Danaan: I don’t know when that was.
Koppelman: I think it was the early ‘90s.
De Danaan: Anne Fischel and I were teaching, and I don’t remember what we were teaching. It wasn’t
supposed to be film, but it turned out being film. Because that’s why everybody signed up for that
program! [laughing] I was so bleeding mad. I guess they signed up because they wanted filmmaking
30

with Anne. It was supposed to be an interdisciplinary program, and nobody wanted to be in my seminar
doing anything I was doing. [laughter] Anyway, it was a funny period. But that was that first kind of . . .
and that was when a lot of that other stuff, that male, you know, men that were being accused of—that
was that same period.
Koppelman: The sexual harassment period.
De Danaan: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff going on. Everyone was on edge all the time. I would say that
it would be, when I got involved with Pride Foundation after 2001, that I got more involved. I had time
to think about it, and to understand some of the issues. Certainly, I knew a transgender person when I
was an undergraduate at Ohio State. That was nothing new to me. My god, if you travel in other parts
of the world, I’ve known all kinds of people who were pangender, or switching. Just amazing stuff. I
love it. I’ve always loved it, because I’m always attracted. I’ve always been attracted to extremes, in
terms of self-representation, in terms of identity. So it isn’t a scary thing to me. I don’t know if that
sounds even politically correct, but that’s—
Koppelman: It’s interesting, because what I hear when you say it, the words that come to mind are sort
of old-fashioned words, actually. Love and appreciation of human variety, and just interest, curiosity,
empathy, like-mindedness.
De Danaan: Well, yeah. Sally and I taught a couple of times, I don’t know if they were courses or
programs, in which we had people—we cross-dressed, we came into class cross-dressed. I was a male,
she was like in a blonde wig. They didn’t know who we were when we came in. I, in several of my
programs, would have students go out and cross-dress, and go to the Capital Mall and report back, as
part of their experimentation with gender. We were doing that. We weren’t doing it in the context of
maybe the way politics are thought of now, but—
Koppelman: But you didn’t have a whole theoretical infrastructure.
De Danaan: No. We were more interested in the people experience the fact that these are
constructions. The constructions of these roles, and by this, that and the other, we are able to move in
and out of these spaces.
Koppelman: That’s really different, because one of the things, I think, to a certain degree, that’s
happening now is a kind of re-essentializing project. One of the things that I wonder—I’m thinking
about how you have that going on at Evergreen, but you also have, strangely enough, from the
beginning, this sort of Great Books thread, too.
De Danaan: Yes, yes.

31

Koppelman: And the kind of traditional humanities education, philosophy and all that sort of thing
about the human condition.
De Danaan: That’s right.
Koppelman: And I know there was a specialty area called the Human Condition. I just wonder if there
was some interesting cross-fertilization going on between—not directly, but maybe indirectly, because
you have to work together. You’re all thrown together into the same boat.
De Danaan: But by the time Sally and I were doing stuff like that, it was okay for us to create our own
program, and be on the edge.
Koppelman: Oh, yeah, and there’s still plenty of that.
De Danaan: Yeah, I know, so I don’t know how to answer. I’m not even sure I understand. It’s like, I
don’t think either one of us ever taught in a Great Books program.
Koppelman: What I mean is that the . . . how can I put it? . . . the bearing that you have toward
extremes, as you said, seems to me like the bearing of a kind of old-school humanities person, in a funny
kind of way. “I love it.” That’s what you said. “I love it.”
De Danaan: Yeah, I do.
Koppelman: And that’s really different than “I want to pick it apart and deconstruct it and figure out”—
even though that’s part of what you do.
De Danaan: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no.
Koppelman: But the dominant thing coming from you is attraction.
De Danaan: I want the people to experience all there is to experience as a human being. That’s what I
do. That’s what I try to do. And that’s true, I think, when I teach, it’s more about let us experience all
we can as human beings. And that includes reading. Oh my god, I’m having so much fun. I’m on a
Margaret Atwood jag now, and I’m reading.
Koppelman: Oh, she’s amazing.
De Danaan: Boy, does she see it. Before that, I did Louise Erdrich. I tend to read everything I can find
by a certain author, so then I can compare, and I can see how they use language and stuff. So, yes, you
bring in this stuff. That’s what we would do in the first couple years of our programming is you find a
book that is just great, and in some way relates to this theme. But mainly, it teaches everything you
need to know about how to be a human. And you can have fun with it, and play with it. Yeah?
Koppelman: Oh, one hopes.
De Danaan: One hopes, yeah, yeah.
Koppelman: I hope that that’s still an ethic that the college has, about teaching about human beings.
32

De Danaan: Oh, I do, too.
Koppelman: I’m going to pause for just a second. Okay, so we are back at it. So, LLyn, you’re going to
talk a little bit about Yvonne Peterson, who’s a colleague of yours, who you met, who you said, when we
talked before, you said you learned more from her than anyone about teaching.
De Danaan: Yeah. I already said on the tape, I talked about my friend, Karen James, who I was in
graduate school with at the University of Washington. Karen, part of her growing up was in Union,
Washington, near the Skokomish reservation, so she had a lot of Skokomish friends. And we did some
work together. Actually, I was the camera person for work on basket film that’s been used; people of it
has been used, it’s still in circulation—of two women basket makers on the Skokomish. Karen’s lifework
was really working with Native Americans, mainly Skokomish, and some S’Kallam work, often for
courtroom work.
I met Yvonne Peterson through Karen before Evergreen. Yvonne said some wonderful things
that Karen’s memorial last year, things that I didn’t realize that Karen had really helped Yvonne through
school, and through hard times when she was teaching first year in Shelton High School, and how much
she relied on Karen for support. So, I met Yvonne, and then she came to work at Evergreen, and I was
delighted. I didn’t know her that well.
Koppelman: Do you remember what year that was?
De Danaan: No, I don’t. I’m sorry, I really don’t know.
Koppelman: It must have been pretty early, though. It must have been late ‘70s or something.
De Danaan: Maybe so. I just don’t remember. But when we started—we worked together in three
capacities. One was as colleagues before it was a master in teaching, it was just teaching . . .
Koppelman: . . . teaching certification.
De Danaan: . . . certification. We did maybe a couple iterations of that together. Then, we did the
Master in Teaching program a couple of times. And the second time, it was working with Pam Bridges
an African-American teacher from public schools; Raul . . . his last name?
Koppelman: Nakasone?
De Danaan: Yes, yes, and myself. So there were four of us. And we got to do that program in Tacoma,
with a very diverse group of students. Every time I worked with Yvonne, I learned something more
about teaching. I think some pretty profound things about teaching. Yvonne won’t answer questions.
And I have a compulsion—
Koppelman: You mean when students ask questions?

33

De Danaan: Yeah. I mean, not any question, like “When are we meeting next?” But she really knows
how to allow the time and the space for a student to figure out what the answer is. That, to me, is one
of the most important things that you can know about being a teacher. And students get angry, so
angry, and I have seen them get angry with her.
Actually, I wrote an article about this. This was about the Tacoma campus, but it was about
what happens when white students feel decentered in a diverse classroom, and how they’ll try to grab
the white faculty member out in the parking lot and complain, thinking you’ll take their side. It’s
actually in Women’s Studies Quarterly, because it was so significant to watch this dynamic. Same thing
would happen with the Yvonne classes. The white students would try to grab [gurgle]. So, interesting.
This is a real phenomenon. She just always made something present in a classroom that had to be
there, should be there. Partly, it was that she would bring out your name. Names are important.
Names have to be present. We have to be using names. Partly, it was just quiet and patience with the
questions. Partly, it was her kind of wry smile and grin, waiting.
Koppelman: She was also—I remember her well when I was a student—a very warm, friendly person.
De Danaan: Yes. She is just terrific. I just adore her. So, we taught in the Teaching Program and in the
Master in Teaching program together, and that second, that Master in Teaching program in Tacoma—it
was over a two-year period, of course—and we were driving up and down the highway, and it was just
dynamite. Many, many of those students have been very successful teachers.
I think I said this to you the other day. We didn’t have any money for gas, or there was no extra
funding. Part of the time we were on the Tacoma campus, and part of the time we were in the
basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Church across the street, and the choir practicing upstairs.
In fact, we had a student—Joan Davis—who would go up to choir practice, and then come back down.
[laughter] I mean, it was a fabulous experience, I think, for all of us.
The other thing is I started working for the Puyallup Tribe in 1991—I believe that’s when the
shellfish case—and so I had to do a lot of work, and a lot of preparation for that, and a lot of reading,
and preparing reports, and then going to court. I was not accustomed to using archives. That’s not the
kind of anthropology I had done. So, I had to learn how to use archives, and how to document. And I
had to read everything I could find that the Anthropological Association put out about how to be an
expert witness, how to work with judges, how to work with attorneys. So, I was educating myself, and
being educated by Judy Wright, who was the Puyallup person who had their history archives and so
forth. She would be pulling things out for me to look at. But, of course, that was another place where
you had to learn how to balance things, because I am not an advocate for the Puyallup. They give me
34

questions that they want answered in the courtroom, and I have to say, “If I don’t find the answer you
want, too bad. This is what I’m doing.”
Koppelman: Integrity.
De Danaan: “I have to have this position, and this ability, to do my work.” So, that’s what I did. And,
because of the Master in Teaching program—that was still the Teaching Program—I was going out
observing student teachers in the classroom, and I could not believe how Native American history was
being taught—well, it wasn’t being taught. It was having students make teepees, for Chrissake! Just
stupid stuff. It was horrible. And once history started, i.e., after treaty time, when the state becomes a
state, that’s history, and Native Americans were never mentioned again. I said, “We’ve got to change
this.”
Coincidently, Magda Costantino had come to work at the college—she was positioned at the
college; —and I knew that she didn’t know, excuse me, what to do exactly with this job. And I marched
in there, and I said, “I have an idea for a curriculum that I would like to write, and you could produce it.
And you could be of a great service.”
We went forward from there. Denny Hurtado, who was Skokomish, Indian education at the
OSPI. So that became the little core. Those two got very close, so they could take lots of projects
forward. I wrote the Encounters curriculum. That was the first one. Yvonne and I went all over the
state of Washington, teaching teachers how to use the Encounters curriculum. Then, Denny wanted
Point No Point, so that was done. I did the Point No Point Treaty.
Then he wanted a K-4 reading curriculum, original reading curriculum. I said, “I can’t do that.
You need to start—we need to start—getting Native American educators involved in this work.” They
brought in teachers from all over the state, and they got money to do the K-4 reading curriculum.
Tested it. It’s in use all over the place.
The next one was the treaty, the sovereignty [Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in
Washington State]. And by that time, whoever was Superintendent of Public Instruction, said, “We have
to have a sovereignty curriculum.” And also, there started to be some bills in state legislation that this
stuff has to be taught. So Denny got a big advisory committee together for that. Got somebody working
with all the materials that are available. That’s online. That’s being used all the time.
Koppelman: That’s really path-breaking work that was done by Evergreen for the state. It’s huge.
De Danaan: That’s exactly right. It was Magda. It wasn’t Evergreen specifically, it was Magda being
given a house there, and then, through that, people like me, Yvonne, then Denny. But usually it was

35

money out of Magda’s budget, because even the State Superintendent didn’t give money much to
Denny.
But this is a very important thing. They were recognized by the state history society
[Washington State Historical Society] for that work. I was recognized. I have a plaque that says I am a
cultural something, I don’t know. It’s in the house here somewhere.
Koppelman: You are a cultural something, without a doubt.
De Danaan: I’m a cultural something. [laughter] But that was good. So Yvonne has been a wonderful
person to know personally, and to work with. Very important to me. As was all the work with the
Puyallup, and I loved all that work.
Koppelman: When you talk about your time at Evergreen, you thrive in discussing it.
De Danaan: I do, don’t I? Yeah, I liked it all.
Koppelman: It’s obvious.
De Danaan: I have no regrets, that’s for sure. It was a good ride. It’s still a good ride. You know what
I’m doing now, right? You know what book I’m working on? I wrote the book about Katie Gayle, which
is the oyster woman on Oyster Bay, here. And that came out of all of that work. I mean, I was prepared
to meet Katie Gayle. Now I’m working on the life story of Mary Riddle, who was the first Native
American woman pilot. She was from Willapa Bay, and a member of the Quinault Tribe. I’m right in the
middle of that. That’s good stuff, too. Good stories.
Koppelman: That’s great. You’ve got a million good stories.
De Danaan: I’ve got stories.
Koppelman: And we might have to do this again.
De Danaan: Well, once you mess with and digest all this, you’ll know whether it has to be done again.
[laughter]
End Part 2 of 2 of LLyn De Danaan on 8-4-17

36



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

DeDanaanLLyn_20170804_Transcript.pdf